Your Brain on Money - Its Role in Biology, History, Life & Society with Kabir Sehgal

In this episode we discuss how you can create success by mashing two seemingly unrelated ideas together, why energy is the currency of the biological world (and how that impacts the evolution of money within our society), we go deep into understanding money and its role in our lives, and we look at why you should investigate your own biases about money with Kabir Sehgal.

Kabir is a former a vice president in emerging markets at JP Morgan. He is the new york times and wall street journal bestselling author of the book Coined and has served as a speechwriter for the John Kerry presidential campaign, having been featured in Fortune, The Harvard Business Review, and other publications. Kabir is a CNBC contributor as well as a grammy winning producer, composer, and Jazz musician.

We discuss:

• Creating an opera about the financial crisis

• How you can create success by mashing two seemingly unrelated ideas together

• The idea of lateral combination vs incremental growth and how it amplifies possibility

• What is Money?

• Unit of Value

  1. Instrument of Exchange

  2. Counting mechanism

• Why Kabir defines money as a symbol of value

• The neurological triggers associated with money

• How a trip to the Galapagos islands transformed the way Kabir thought about money

• The “biology of exchange” and how money expresses something deeply biological and rooted in evolution

• Why energy is the currency of the biological world (and how that impacts the evolution of money within our society)

• The rich history of money

• Looking at financial decisions through brain scans and MRIs

• How talking about money can change the electrical conductivity of your skin

• Fascinating research data about how money impacts

• How making money creates a brain state almost identical to cocaine addicts

• What does research show makes men more excited - dead bodies, naked women, or money?

• How your genetic composition impacts your psychology of money

• How twin studies demonstrate people’s genetic preference for certain financial behaviors and risk profiles

• The anthropology of debt

• The history of bartering and how social debt was actually the first currency

• Think of money as a measurement of debt

• What’s the difference between currency and money?

• What does Genghis Khan have to do with the history of money?

• What are Native American potlatches and what do they tell us about tipping behavior?

• What is Soft Money, what is Hard Money, and what are the differences?

• Does the weather impact your financial decisions?

• What is the Soul of Money?

• Misquoting Jesus?

• Do Jesus and the Hindu scriptures offer the same financial advice?

• Understanding money and its role in our lives

• Why you should start with investigating your own biases about money

Thank you so much for listening!

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SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Jazzocracy: Jazz, Democracy, and the Creation of a New American Mythology by Kabir Sehgal

• [Book] Coined: The Rich Life of Money and How Its History Has Shaped Us by Kabir Sehgal

• [Book] Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright

• [Bio] Brian Knutson

• [Wikipedia] Nixon in China

• [Musical] Hamilton on Broadway

• [SoS Episode] Trading Your House For A Tulip, Your Love Life, And What It All Has To Do With Making Better Financial Decisions with Dr. Daniel Crosby

• [Book] Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

• [Personal Site] Kabir Sehgal

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind in what makes peak performance tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss how you can create success by mashing two seemingly unrelated ideas together. Why energy is the currency of the biological world and how that impacts the evolution of money within our society. We go deep into understanding money and its role in our lives and we look at why you should investigate your own biases about money with Kabir Sehgal

The science of success continues to grow with more with more than 875,000 downloads. Listeners in over 100 countries, hitting number one new noteworthy and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this incredible information?” A lot of our listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge you get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to podcast, and more.

Because of that, we created an epic resource just for you. A detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, It’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.

In our previous episode, we discussed the fundamental principles of GameTtheory, we correctly guess the answers to SAT questions without ever knowing what the questions were, we looked at how to use Game Theory in practical ways and went deep on how a college professor and his student started a beverage company, sold a billion bottles of tea and competed against Coke, Nestle, and other major players to become incredibly successful with our guest Barry Nalebuff.

If you want to learn how to apply the lessons of Game Theory to being successful in your life, definitely listen to that episode.

[0:02:25.7] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Kabir Sehgal, Kabir is a former Vice President in emerging market at JP Morgan. He’s a New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of the book Coined and has served as a speech writer for John Carry during his presidential campaign. He’s been featured on Fortune, the Harvard business review, many other publications. He’s also a regular contributor to CNBC as well as a Grammy winning, producer, composer, and jazz musician. 

Kabir, welcome to the science of success.

[0:02:53.3] KS: Thank you so much for having me. Really a pleasure to be here.

[0:02:56.2] MB: Well, we’re super excited to have you on today. For listeners who may not be familiar with you, kind of fill in some gaps in that background and tell us a little bit about yourself.

[0:03:05.5] KS: You covered a lot of it. I guess I just find myself mostly as a writer and that’s writing words and writing music and creating content. For me, that’s taken me to write several books, you talked about my first book, Coined, history of money, but I’ve written about jazz and I’ve written I think up to seven books now. Children’s books as well. 

That’s one of my passions is writing and also, writing music. I’ve just finished writing my first musical opera on the financial debt crisis. So I try to be inter-disciplinary in my topics and also my approach but the one commonality is trying to express myself through the written, and spoken, and performed word.

[0:03:50.4] MB: That’s fascinating, it kind of reminds me a little bit of, and I’m sure you’ve thought of the comparison but almost Hamilton-esque in the sense of like combining this two totally different mediums. But an opera about the financial crisis sounds really interesting.

[0:04:02.9] KS: Yeah, you know, the thing is, when you want to create a real unique idea, you could have a lot of success by sort of mashing up two different disciplines together. If I were going to write an opera, I could write an opera today of things you’ve heard before.

But why not take it in a completely new direction and you know, that’s why the opera in Nixon in China did so well because they took a story about Richard Nixon going to China and turning that into music. Something unexpected and so this idea, there’s like incremental ideas of like staying within one profession or one discipline and like incrementing the idea or improving a product five, 10%.

When you take one discipline and mash it up with another discipline, you start to get all these different combinations that you didn’t think of before and it creates and it sort of amplifies possibility. You also create a new aesthetic, you create a new brand, you create a new way of looking at the world. It might seem weird, but it definitely gives you the many more permutations of invention and innovation.

[0:05:10.6] MB: It’s fascinating, I love that advice and as somebody who has been so creative across seemingly kind of disparate, non-related fields, I think that’s some deep wisdom to share with our listeners, I love it.

I’m curious, I’d love to kind of dig in a little bit and talk about some of the kind of the core concepts and lessons from Coined.

[0:05:30.9] KS: Sure.

[0:05:32.5] MB: One of the first things I’d love to kind of get your thoughts on, just really simply you know, I think people have a lot of preconceptions about this, but what is money?

[0:05:41.2] KS: That’s a good question. The typical definition of money that comes from economic theory and economists is that money is three things. Money is a unit of value, it’s an instrument of exchange, and is used for counting things.

Unit of value, instrument of exchange, and basically a way for counting a value and I have always found that to be sort of a very limiting definition of money. Yeah, if you define it, a unit of value is something that you count, a store value is something that captures money, an instrument of exchange, we transact.

But money could be more than that thing. Money to me, and I define it in my book, is really a symbol of value. Because anything that represents value has sort of a neurological trigger in our brain and that means that a potato can function as money or some type of currency.

If there is an invasion by aliens into the earth and there’s some kind of rare metal that they bring in and it becomes valuable, that new metal will take on monetary value. So anything that simulates sort of the reward circuitry of the brain, and we can get into that, that to me is what money is, a symbol of value and I think probably the economist and the most well described with Milton Friedman is, you know, whatever society determines should be money will be money. 

You can go back to caveman days or you can go today, whatever the people deem to be money will be money. So it’s very user defined and today, what is money? The definition of money of changing and it always will be changing because our minds are changing and, you know, our brains are plastic, the neurological wirings are changing. It will continue to change as use cases change.

[0:07:23.9] MB: I definitely want to dig into kind of the psychology and some of the rewards circuitry around money but before we do, I’d love to — and I think this is a kind of a natural segue into that. Tell me a little bit about the phrase you talk about, “the biology of exchange” and how you kind of, in the book you start with the really kind of physical, biological components of it and even the journey you took to Galapagos islands and other things, I’d love to kind of weave that into how our brains think about money.

[0:07:52.3] KS: Sure, well you know, I started writing this book with the history of money and you could think about, if you’re going to write a book on the history of money, where will you start? Most books will start in, I guess, Mesopotamia or the beginning of human civilization, sort of Neolithic era of 10,000 years ago or maybe even the great rift valley in Africa.

I was like, “Money expresses something deeply survival based and evolutionary.” I started thinking about it and sure enough, I said, “I think there’s a biological component of why we use money.” In order to dramatize this point, I went to the Galapagos islands because that’s where Charles Darwin, that’s where he came up or was inspired to come up with this theory of natural selection, the evolution of my natural selection.

So I get to the Galapagos, go and hang out with some friends who are marine biologist and what do we do? We go diving into the water and all of a sudden there’s this sea turtle that comes up to me and there are some wrasse fish, this little fish that are going up next to it’s fin and they’re cleaning the turtle, ingesting these parasites. What becomes clear is, this is an exchange going on.

The turtle’s getting cleaned and in exchange, the fish are ingesting or getting the calories they need to survive, the parasites. This is obviously an example of symbiosis and the turtle and the fish is not the only example. This, of course throughout the Galapagos, different stages of the ecosystem, you see a symbiosis.

You see transfers and the first type of currency, the natural currency, the currency of the biological world is energy. Energy, energy, energy. When this starts to get mapped on the history of humanity, you start to see the first types of currency is the first types of things that come traded as a currency or some kind of value is food products.

You look at salts or barley or butter and these are items that give us the calories we need to survive that we take this things and we ingest it and it gives us basically a survival mechanism. Even today, you can say, “Well, you know, that’s a far cry but you know, what do we use money on today? Well, we use money to acquire the resources, namely the food and the energy products that we need to survive. We literally need bread to get bread.” 

So it’s been abstracted away because over thousands of years, but its original purpose, money was an instrument to acquire the needs to survive and there are genetic implications, there’s biological implications and a lot of supporting evidence from neuroscientist that show that there’s actually this energy concept is actually the evolutionary historians that are looking at, indeed, it wasn’t until the brain expanded and we got symbolic thought that money as we knew it was invented. But at its core, money is really an evolutionary product and that’s why I went to the Galapagos, to dramatized that accounts.

[0:10:58.2] MB: After going to the Galapagos, where was the next place on your journey, the next destination that kind of follow the history of money?

[0:11:06.2] KS: That’s a good question. I think for me, it was getting together with a neuroeconomist, because when I started realizing that there was a biological input, there’s input for money and why we use it, I wanted to talk to someone who knew about this. So I met with Dr. Brian Knutson at Stanford University who is one of our leading neuro economist, sort of like an emerging discipline of brains scientists that look at financial decisions. Largely through MRI and brain scans. 

Neuroscience is really sort of like, as they say, 90% neuroscience, 10% economics and hopefully that will change so more economist aren’t factoring in brain insights but you know, we talked about when I say the word money, like your audience, when it hears, when your audience listen to the word money, there may be an actual increase in the skin conductance, the electrical current going through your skin, just at the thought of making money or hearing the word money.

So there’s a biological change, there is a study that shows that, well, if you take money and count it — in China, they did the study where people counting large denomination bills and then they took their fingers and put it in hot scolding water and the people that counted the money reported feeling less pain than the people they were counting blank pieces of paper and then putting their fingers in hot scolding water.

This way, that money sort of dulls your senses. I went to Brian Knutson, this neuroscientist and we talked about, “Hey, is there a biological, neurological reason for this?” He says, "Absolutely there is, there’s a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens and it’s deep within sort of evolutionary part of the brain, the limbic system of the brain and it fires incessantly at the thought of money. 

He’s done brain science studies and others have done studies that have proven this out, there is a study at Harvard that showed that people who were high on cocaine looking at their brain scan, their nucleus accumbens is firing incessantly. It looks the same as when someone’s about to make money. The brain scan of a coke addict and someone about to make money, the brain scans look almost indistinguishable. 

But Dr. Knutson then, he looked at heterosexual men and he showed them pictures of dead bodies and naked women and money. What got the most excitement out of men was thinking about making money more than getting together with a girl. It just shows you that we’re deeply wired for this thing, to make money, because you realize that we needed to survive. Because survival, you know, is prerequisite to reproduction. 

That was the next step of my journey was understanding the genetic components and having a neuroscientist and reading through the neuroscientific literature to realize, wow, there is actually hard wiring in the brain for money and things that function like money.

[0:13:58.2] MB: Really interesting. The research studies are so intriguing, especially the one about the cocaine finding is fascinating. So I’m curious, what are some of the other kind of components of the psychology of money?

[0:14:12.3] KS: Well, a lot of it comes to your genetic composition too. People don’t often think about it but you know, there is a group of studies called gene studies, twin studies that they take identical twins who have the same genotype, they have the same genes and they separate them over long periods of time and then they ask these twins to make an asset allocation decision.

You want to put your money in stocks, bonds, or cash? They found that twins, even if they’ve been separated for a long period of time, identical twins that they invest and they part their money in similar proportions. That your genetics can in fact influence your financial spending decisions. Dr. Knutson and others, they’ve worked looking at your credit score actually and they found that there is one type of gene, it’s called the COMT gene and there’s two variants of it and it’s evenly dispersed within the population these two types of alleles.

They find that if you have one variant, you’re more likely to be risk averse to put more money in bonds, in cash and to have kind of a decent credit score. If you have the other allele, you’re more likely to be risk seeking, put more money in stocks and higher performing assets but also risk your assets, and to have a lower credit score.

They found that over time, among the sample that they were tracking that there’s one varying to the gene could explain about 97 points on your credit score and that’s about 20% of your credit score. It just shows you that, you know, when you’re making your financial decisions, that often times, it can be your genes and manifesting themselves, the decisions are being — what you’re buying is being manifested by genetic impulses. 

I tread carefully here because look, you can obviously try and thwart your genes, you’re not destined to be doomed by your genes and you can get educated and if you’re not very good in handling your money, you can definitely get classes and so forth. But there is something to be said that if you’re not good with money, you can maybe blame your parents and say you know, my parents made me do it because it’s their genepool after all. There’s definitely genetic reasons and impetus to how we spend.

[0:16:31.5] MB: I’m curious, another concept that you talk about and I know is kind of one of the next steps on this understanding of money that you talk about in Coined is the idea of the anthropology of debt. I’d love for you to share that story.

[0:16:44.0] KS: Sure, so most histories of money going back to Adam Smith and Aristotle, they say that money was invented through barter, right? We’ve all heard this that there is this land and someone had apples, another person had bananas and they were trying to trade with each other, so they decided to barter and then all this bartering started going on. Eventually money was invented out of this bartering, as a way to replace barter. That whole idea of bartering led to money has been with us in economic literature for thousands of years.

Anthropologist have gone back and they’ve studied it and they said, “Well wait a second, this is actually not the case that societies — there’s almost never been a society that functions on barter as the principle of a means of exchange. In fact, it’s usually debt, social debt.” Because you know, bartering is what you do with someone when you're not going to see again, someone comes into your village and go, “Hey okay, let’s trade something and get something of value for each other and because we want to make sure we have a fair trade.”

If I know you, you’re part of my family, you’re part of my tribe or the neighboring society and we have a lingering relationship then let’s just do the transaction on debt. Like, you’ll owe me one. Okay. This whole idea of social debt is really one of the first and probably most ubiquitous currencies in the world, you think back to Neolithic times that if you’re a caveman and you catch some game and you bring it to the feeding station and you’re going to invite your friends because if you don’t invite your friends, the day will come when you’ll be hungry and then they’re not going to repay you. You won’t be repaid because you didn’t really offer to reciprocate or invite them. 

So think about this caveman, inviting you a feeding session, it’s basically like a forward derivatives contract today that, “Look, you’re going to owe me in the future at some time and I’m not sure what the value’s going to be but we’ll figure it out later.” That’s kind of what a forward derivative contract is when it’s traded on the market on Wall street today. When you look at the first types of currencies in the world, it’s actually not coins or paper. It’s, in ancient Mesopotamia, the record show that its loan documents, clay tablets that were denominating loan and silver and barley. Basically saying, “you owe this person X, you owe this person Y”.

That’s the first type of sort of monetary instrument that gets invented as credit and debt. There was some great writers who talked about this that when you think about distance, you think about a mile as a measurement of distance, you think about an inch as a measurement of distance. Start thinking about money as a measurement of debt. Money is a measurement of a way to capture and understand how much debt is in the world because debt is the way, even today when you think about how our monitory system works with fractional reserve banking is basically we’re taking a one dollar or due credit multiplying it through our society into $99.

When you ask about the anthropology of debt, it’s really re-equating ourselves with what money really is which is a measurement of debt.

[0:19:53.0] MB: What’s the difference between currency and money?

[0:19:57.9] KS: Well, currency, if you break it down, currency comes from a word “carer” in Italian which means like to flow and currency is, I like to say, a broader use of money. Anything can function as a currency, right? Like I was saying before, there’s different types of currency, there is social currency, there is financial currency, there is different types of monetary currency. I think that’s like if you're thinking about a scientific term, the mother genus, if you will, will be currency. Money tends to be a financial type of currency. 

The word money comes from the roman goddess Juno Moneta and who is the goddess that was sort of supposed to look after the treasury and after the gauls came in and sacked Rome or that treasury, Moneta means “to warn” in Italian. That name, over the many years has stuck money. To answer your question, currency is like a broader look at money and how I look at money through the book is really looking at currency throughout the world and money is definitely the financial child of the word currency.

[0:21:08.6] MB: Tell us about your visit to Mongolia and why you went there?

[0:21:14.7] KS: Mongolia is a fascinating place. I went there, again, to dramatize the history of money and because I was intrigued that paper money and a lot of monetary concepts that we think of is very western, really started in the east and the Mongolians get sort of a bad rap for Genghis Khan and he is a brutal dictator but they’re also parts of his empire, they’re quite modern. 

Genghis Khan, he basically unified and the Mongols unified so much of the orients and the west and he had a lot of modern innovations. Like he brought modern postal system, he setup a postal system. There was a freedom of religion and so forth. He also precipitated, that was really the beginning of paper money as we know it and really, it was Kubla Khan, he was like, “Basically, I want to invade China.”

He went to the Southern Song dynasty and he fell that kingdom and he took over the Chinese empire, essentially. He realized right away that he needed to use something to unify his lands and he needed something to create a value throughout this land. So he issued paper money and paper money was initially backed by silk and I think essentially silk and silver. The great Marco Polo writes about Kubla Khan as the Khan prints money out of the barks of trees. 

Then, they started spending so much money, they started running out of silver and silk so Kubla Khan does something he decides to cut that link between money and metal and he issues these Edicts saying that, “If you do not use my money, you’ll be put to death, I will kill you.” He also issues Edicts that say essentially that, “If you counterfeit this money, I will also kill you.” You start to see that money is really backed by fear of the kingdom or the Khan in this case and force. 

So this money starts to circulate and throughout this part of China, throughout the Mongol empire, which was quite vast and over time, they started printing more of it, there was a monetary crisis which led to inflation and then an inflation turned into a full-fledged economic collapse. Then there was a plague and all this other healthcare problems, that part of the Mongol empire fell and now I went to Karakorum, Mongolia which is the seat of the ancient Mongol empire. 

There’s nothing there anymore except for some ruins and it just shows you that civilizations could come and go and one of the most important decisions that any civilization, any society can make is what will function as money but also making prudent financial decisions to make sure that they’re not living beyond their means. Because if you do, you could go the way of that part of the Mongol empire or any country that’s really fallen and disappear because of their economic misfortunes.

[0:24:20.7] MB: Very interesting that the Mongols are essentially one of the creators of fiat currency.

[0:24:26.5] KS: Right, yeah. A lot of people lay claim to it. Some people say the Tang dynasty in China, which was 9th century AD, they invented paper money but money didn’t really function and flourish until the Mongols. Then you have sort of the checking system that came about in the Munecian times. Money’s really been a global, an incremental innovation and almost every country has adapted it for their own use case and so many different things have functioned as money throughout thousands of years in human history.

[0:24:57.7] MB: Another facet of the kind of anthropology of money, you talk about tipping and what tipping behavior can say about us, nut you also share the story of a Native American potlatch. I’d love to hear that story. 

[0:25:11.6] KS: A Native American potlatch is a practice when a tribe or a group of tribes will invite everyone to a ceremony and you hold a potlatch during a very special occasion. So let’s say there’s a new chief or a new king or a new queen or someone is getting married and the practice is you line up everyone and everyone sits in order according to their status and there’s singing and there’s dancing and there’s a lot of food and then at the end, there’s a gift giveaway and everyone starts getting gifts. 

So the king or the queen or the chief or whoever will start giving gifts to everyone who’s been invited and your gift, the type of gift and the expense of the gift is based on your status within the tribe. So if you get something amazing, if you get a nice piece of meat for example that means you’re respected. If you get something that is not so good, it might be that you’re too junior or you don’t have much respect and so a potlatch became a way of using currency or giving currency, giving something of value as a way to reinforce status within the community. 

So overtime these potlatches became competitive. It became very competitive where other tribes will come and they would invite a neighboring tribe and they will hold a potlatch and they would give so much of their wealth as a way to shame their guests saying, “Oh I’m giving you so much of my wealth I can afford to give you all this wealth because I am so rich.” 

So essentially they are big timing each other and so the potlatch became a very competitive thing and this has implications even to today but I should say that in Native American tribes, Native American community gifts are not something that you keep. Gifts are something that you keep on passing to other people and this term “Indian Giver” in the West Americans, we may see it as a negative thing. You know Louis and Clark when they did their travels across America, they would give gifts in their trade with Native Americans. 

But then the Native Americans would give the gifts that they had just received to other people or they would give the gift back to Louis and Clark and the early settlers and this was really bizarre. Why are they giving their gifts away? A gifts are meant to be appreciated. But in Native American communities, if you just hold onto a gift, it loses its spirit of being a gift. You have to keep on giving it and that giving and receiving defines social rules within the community and it’s something that we do. 

I saw some poll recently and around holiday season that a large sloth of Americans are embarrassed by saying and admitting that they are re-gifting something but a large sloth of Americans also do re-gift. So we all do it, a lot of us do it so that shows you what a potlatch is and how gifting is so endemic to the idea of money and how even today this idea of re-gifting helps define where you are in the social community. Not only in Native American communities but also in our day to day lives as well. 

[0:28:12.0] MB: Have you ever read the book Nonzero by Robert Wright? 

[0:28:15.6] KS: No. Tell me about it. 

[0:28:16.6] MB: I think you’d really like it. It’s a book about he essentially uses and combines Game Theory and social anthropology to describe the evolution of human societies and it’s a really, really good read and we’ll include it in the show notes as well for listeners who want to check it out. But he talks a little bit about potlatches and I think he even goes there were some tribes where the tradition became so extreme that they would burn all the gifts. It will be like who can burn more stuff as a demonstration of how wealthy they were and how powerful they were that they could torch copious amounts of food and supplies and all kinds of stuff. 

[0:28:52.8] KS: Wow, how perverse you know? It’s absurd but at the same time revelatory about what a society values and wants to express about itself. 

[0:29:02.7] MB: So what is the difference between the concept of soft money and the concept of hard money and what are both of those? 

[0:29:09.7] KS: Soft money I define as — Well, let me start over. I’ll stick a first pin looking at hard money. Hard money is money that’s backed by a commodity or a metal. We often think about gold as being a hard money that the gold standard that it used to be that the dollar or the pound was redeemable by some amount of gold currency, by some amount of gold that there is a special room somewhere that you go and exchange your money and get an adequate amount or an equal amount of hard currency. 

And so, I define hard money as just that, metal back to money and in some cases, you can call it proto money. Anything that has some sort of intrinsic worth like meat, or salt, or barley. All of these things like coffee beans, this things service having value to human that you can eat it, you can consume it, they are instantly valuable. These are different types of hard currencies. Soft money is the opposite of that, which is an article of faith, it’s paper. 

It’s basically saying this piece of paper is basically an IOU from the government and it’s not necessary an IOU for gold. In fact it’s really an IOU saying that this is a legal tender for all debts private and public and so people say that the US government military or the US government is the backing of the US dollar but it really is the faith in our institution, it’s the faith in our government that the dollar will be backed by our government to come to the rescue much like it did during the great financial crisis in 2008-2009.

So increasingly we are in a soft money world and some people say we need to get back to a hard money world where there is the gold standard and so forth but I would say that getting back to a gold standard would be very deflationary for the economy. In fact Winston Churchill when he was the head of the ex-checker in Britain he said it was the worst mistake of his political life to try to get back to the gold standard in the same rate at which Britain left because there was a massive amount like 50% deflation in unemployment and millions are going out of work because they are trying to go back to this gold standard. 

Whereas I always use a thought experiment that let’s say there is a financial crisis in America and you are the president of the United States and you have two options. The first option is you can inflate and issue more soft money and sort of paper over the problems and hope that you can stimulate a way through government spending problems or you can do very little or do nothing. Say, “Oh we cannot issue any more money. We’re going to have deflation.” 

Well one is interventionist and one is not and you probably don’t want to be a politician who’s looking like he’s not doing anything or being very hard lined and that’s why you always have this policy of interventionism and you always have this policy of spending of soft money and that’s why soft money is so ubiquitous in the world because it’s a silent tax on all of us that the government can rob us very slowly with the value of money. The dollar has lost 81% of it’s value on a purchasing price pair parity level over the last 30 or 40 years. Soft money is with us, it’s not going anywhere anytime soon and I think we are stuck with it. 

[0:32:41.6] MB: In many ways that is the modern version of what Kubla Khan began. 

[0:32:46.4] KS: Yeah, exactly. There is a history of money and I talk about it in my book that the history of political leaders that have sought to use soft money and every problem there had been consequences for that. Kubla Khan would be one, you could look at John Law in the early 1716 to 1720 in France, you could look at Benjamin Franklin who wanted more bank notes issued, Abraham Lincoln, these are all people that took us away from hard money. Franklin Roosevelt, Richard Nixon. So there’s many core leaders that have pushed us in the direction of soft money for thousands of years.

[0:33:30.3] MB: The most interesting description or criticism of the gold standard that I have ever heard is the idea that essentially the expansion of credit in an economy that’s tied to the gold standard is not determined by for thought or economic policy. It’s solely determined by random fluctuation of rocks that are pulled from the ground.

[0:33:50.6] KS: Right, I think Warren Buffet has a great line that we dig up metal from these holes in the ground and put them in other holes in the ground and into our vault so we can store them and any Martian looking at us will be like, “Why do you do this?” And so somewhere, you get back to the evolutionary thought. If somewhere the idea of shinny metals and values, those neurons fire together maybe it is something that attracted us, that maybe early primates were attracted to something that had shinny luster and that it was valuable because there’s very little use case for gold. 

Other than preventing fires, it’s a resistance but there is very little use case for gold other than ornamentation and it’s been short of a principle of value for us and it’s hard to explain why that happened other than we were just naturally attracted to it. 

[0:34:45.9] MB: Buffet also has a great criticism of gold as a “asset class” where he says, “If you had all the gold in the world, you can’t do anything with it,” right? Which is what you were saying but he compares it to an asset that’s actually income producing. Like if you had a factory, you can make things and sell them and it returns capital whereas gold just sits there. It doesn’t produce anything. It’s not a productive asset. It’s just a rock. 

[0:35:11.0] KS: Right, exactly. That’s what it is. He’s a wise man. 

[0:35:15.8] MB: He is a wise man. Changing gears, I’m curious you’ve talked about how does weather impact people’s financial behavior? 

[0:35:24.1] KS: So weather manifest itself and through a financial decisions. You can see it in stock market returns. Going back to 80 years ago, we have data on weather patterns. We also have data on stock market returns and so the researchers looked at trading patterns for the largest markets, New York, Tokyo, Hong Kong and London and they looked again at the data and they found that sure enough that on sunny days the markets performed and annualized 25% or something like that versus cloudy days which is like 12%. 

And so it shows you that one type of business barometer or market barometer is the weather and I had a client of mine and my clients manage billions of dollars and I never had a client say, “You know it could be the sun made me buy that stock.” But often times we’re not really aware of what is shaping our financial decisions and this can be found on a very micro level too. Ask any waiter, and you asked about tipping before, but ask any waiter and they will say that when you seat people outside on a sunny day versus a cloudy day or versus seeing them inside, when you seat them outside on a sunny day, people are in a better mood. 

People are in a better frame of mind and this study was replicated I think over a couple dozen cities and they found that waiters sure enough would get more money when they’re guest were seated outside on a sunny day. So again, there is genetics, there is biology, there is weather factors that shape our financial decisions even when you are not thinking about money, you’re thinking about money. 

[0:37:06.4] MB: In the book you talk about the soul of money. What does that mean? 

[0:37:10.6] KS: I think the way you use money can also may determine the fate of your soul, which is a loaded comment I know but that’s how if you are a believer in the scriptures whether it’s the tree Abraham religions or also to Hinduism, that’s what the scripture says. I went to Al Qaeda and I went to the home for the dying investiture and Mother Theresa and there I found a young teenage and he told me that he was there because of what the scripture teaches, the gospel teaches. 

When I was his age, I was focused on other things. I wasn’t focused on helping lepers and so I went back and read the scriptures and sure enough that the gospel is pretty clear. In the book of Mathew there are eight parables and in eight of the ten parables Jesus is talking about money or wealth, how to use money. He talks about money so often it always makes you feel uncomfortable. Jesus is always giving financial lessons of what to do with money and not to squander it and make sure that your valuing thing that are everlasting. 

Even on the Sermon on the Mount he says, “Lay up your treasures in heaven and not on earth,” and then he goes on to say something very precarious that people had been trying to work out for generations, theologians have been arguing about this. He says essentially, and I don’t want misquote Jesus but he says essentially that the eye of the body, do not darken the eye of your body and then he goes on to talk about money again. 

And the question is like, “What is He talking about with this idea of the lamp and darkening your eye?” Theologians have believed that he was talking about greed. He is talking about greed because greed is something that you cannot see in yourself. You see it in other people and greed is something that darkens your eye meaning that, again, you can’t see it. You can always say, “Oh someone else is making more money or someone else is a better reputation, or someone else has more social media followers.” 

But in fact, there’s a pastor who talks about this who’s been hearing confessionals for 25 years. He says, “You know, I’ve never ever had someone come into the confessional and said, “Forgive me father I have sinned, I am too greedy.” He says, “It just doesn’t happen.” People aren’t concerned about how much money they have but Jesus is putting forward a test that if you want to follow me sell all of your possessions and follow me, detach from money and that’s not something we want to hear because it’s not practical. It’s very difficult. 

If we live according to the scriptures then how you use money at least can be a determinant on the fate of our souls and if we lived and how we use money can determine our character. So I ended my journey, and I wrote about this in my book, at a temple in India and learning about what Hinduism says about money and I thought the advice in Hinduism to be the most practical and nuanced out of the time I spend looking at religion and money. 

Because in Hinduism there is a few goals, that fighting four goals to life. One of the goals is called Artha, which means wealth. It is your job, it is your duty in life to make Artha, to make money because you’ve got to take care of your family, you’ve got to take care of your friends and people are going to look at you for that, Artha. But there’ll come a time in your life when you realize that chasing money and chasing status, you realize it will leave you a little empty inside and that’s when you prepare for the end goal of Hinduism, which is called Moksha or liberation. 

Which is, “Okay I have attained these things. I’ve done it ethically. I’ve got all of these resources. I’ve made money. I made a name for myself and now it’s time to detach from these things,” that is to correspond to periods of your life. So if you are young and you’re listening to this podcast and you’re trying to learn the tips of the Science of Success and try to succeed, that’s awesome. Do it, make Artha, make your money, make your status but as you get older 70’s, 80’s, 90’s and you start to think about leaving the world, you can start relinquishing these things and sart realizing that it’s okay to renounce these things and leave things to other people. 

This can also correspond to period every day which is in the morning you are making money. You are making a name so you decide to go into work but at night you detach from these things and it’s with finding some balance or some harmony in your life and it just shows you that it’s good to go out and make the money but also realize the Moksha or liberation from it’s also determination. It would also focus you on this idea of the soul of money meaning that how you use money arguably, again according to the Scriptures can determine the faith of your soul. 

[0:41:46.4] MB: So for listeners who want some practical actionable steps that they can take to implement some of these findings about money and the history of money, what are some ideas or strategies that you’d recommend for them or what’s maybe one piece, one simple piece of homework that you would give to them?

[0:42:04.1] KS: That’s a good question, I think my book wasn’t so much about how to make money. It was about understanding money and its role in our lives and with your focus on psychology and the science of success, one of the probably easiest places to look if you are in biases and cognitive biases of how we use money, so there’s all kinds of biases. If you hadn’t read Daniel Kahneman’s work Thinking Fast and Slow, but a lot of people have documented these biases. 

One of them is called the availability bias that the more often you can think of something you start to inflate the probability of actually happening. A good case of this is my father, he plays the lottery every week and I say, “Okay why do you play the lottery every week?” He says, “Oh I see it on the news and I could win. I could be there holding that big check,” and I said, “Well you haven’t seen the millions of other people that lost,” and so he’s trying to get to inflate the probability of it actually happening. 

So I would say that if you are looking to try to get smarter or how you use money, start of thinking the biases that you live by. A practical one is if you hear about a stock idea or they hear about a new company you want to invest in, give it three months and let it cool off a little bit. That company is not going to go away. The stocks are still going to be there and because you are familiar with that information, you start to really get excited about it. You start to make an emotional decision. 

I would say start to institute time constraints. Anytime you hear about something you want to buy, put a month. Put two months before you actually buy it because them you are actually cool to the decision and if you still want to do it, then you’ll do it but you’ll be making such an emotional and perhaps irrational decision immediately. 

[0:43:42.4] MB: Where can listeners find you, your books, and your music online? 

[0:43:47.3] KS: You can find me at www.kabir.cc. 

[0:43:53.0] MB: Awesome. Well, we’ll make sure to include that in the show notes so that everybody can find the books and listen to some of your music and explore these topics more deeply. 

Well, Kabir thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been a fascinating conversation and we really appreciate having you on here. 

[0:44:10.1] KS: My pleasure, great to be with you. 

[0:44:12.0] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes because that helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt how do you organize and remember all these information?” Because of that, we created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners and you can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email list. 

If you want to get all of this incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about, and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at scienceofsuccess.co, just hit the show notes button at the top. Thanks again and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

How a Game Theory Expert Sold One Billion Bottles of Tea & What He Learned On The Journey with Barry Nalebuff

In this episode we discuss the fundamental principles of game theory, we correctly guess the answers to SAT questions - without every knowing what the question was! We look at how to use game theory in practical ways, and go deep on how a college professor and his student started a beverage company, sold a billion bottles of tea, and competed against Coke, Nestle, and other major players to become incredibly successful with our guest Barry Nalebuff.

Barry is a Professor of Economics and Management at Yale School of Management. A graduate of MIT, a Rhodes Scholar and Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, Barry earned his doctorate at Oxford University. Barry is the author of several books, an expert in game theory which he applies to business strategy, and the co-founder of Honest Tea which has been named one of America’s fastest Growing Companies

We discuss:

• What is Game Theory?

• What are the fundamental principles of game theory?

• The difference between ego-centric and being alo-centric

• How do you design a system that avoids death spirals?

• Everything in life is a game

• Barry grills me on game theory with a fascinating example

• We crush through some SAT questions and find the correct answer - without every knowing the question!

• We use a simple game to understand Nash equilibrium and how that explains third world development challenges and corruption

• What is the prisoner’s dilemma and how does it apply to the real world?

• How global warming demonstrates a multi-person prisoner’s dilemma

• The concept of “signaling” in game theory and how Michale Spence won a noble prize studying it

• A real-world example of how signaling can be used to change outcomes getting hired

• How to use game theory to negotiate and create the best possible outcomes

• A concrete example of how to "divide the pie” and reach a fair and “principled” conclusion in a negotiation

• Why it's important to figure out what the pie is before you determine how to split it

• How a professor and his student pooled their resources, started a beverage company, sold a billion bottles of tea, and competed against coke, nestle, and other major players

• The concept of “declining marginal utility” and how that shaped the founding of Honest Tea

• We explain why a function is maximized when its derivative is zero

• The “Babysitter Theorem” and why it was critical to Honest Tea’s success

• How Barry and Seth used the Lean Startup approach to launch Honest Tea

• Would it make sense for Pepsi to release a perfect replica of Coke?

• Barry’s advice for aspiring entrepreneurs

• Be radically different

  • Solve a challenging problem

  • Succeed without being copied

• How Honest Tea prevented their business model from being copied and knocked off

• And much more

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Coursera Lecture] Negotiating Online

• [Bio] Michael Spence

• [Book] Mission in a Bottle by Seth Goldman, Barry Nalebuff, and Sungyoon Choi

• [Movie] A Beautiful Mind (2001)

• [Book Site] Mission in a Bottle

• [Bio] Barry J. Nalebuff

Episode Transcript

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

[0:00:12.7] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study, and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss the fundamental principles of game theory. We correctly guessed the answers to SAT questions without ever knowing what the questions are. We look at how to use game theory in practical ways, and we go deep on how a college professor and his student started a beverage company, sold a billion bottles of tea, and competed against Coke, Nestle, and other major players to become incredibly successful, with our guest, Barry Nalebuff.

The Science of Success continues to grow with more than 800,000 downloads, listeners in over 100 countries, hitting number one in New and Noteworthy, and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this incredible information?” A lot of our listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to awesome podcast, and more.

Because of that, we’ve created an epic resource just for you; a detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, it’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.

In our previous episode, we discussed why dieting actually predicts weight gain over the long run. How you can build a health style of habits that accumulates small advantages and create a healthy lifestyle overtime. How habit loops are formed and how you can leverage neuroscience to create habits that stick. The concept of mindful eating and how it can transform your relationship to the meals that you eat, and more with our guest, Darya Rose. If you want to build a healthy lifestyle, listen to that episode. 

[0:02:36.9] MB: Today, we have another amazing guest on the show, Dr. Barry Nalebuff. Barry is a professor of economics and management at the Yale School of Management. He’s a graduate of MIT, a Road Scholar, and a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. He earned his doctorate at Oxford University. He’s the author of several books, an expert in game theory, which he applies to business strategy, and he’s the cofounder of Honest Tea, which has been named one of America’s fastest growing companies. 

Barry, welcome to The Science of Success.

[0:03:06.2] BN: Thanks for having me.

[0:03:07.4] MB: We’re very excited to have you on here. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and your story, tell us a little bit about your background. 

[0:03:14.8] BN: You gave me a nice intro. For many years, I couldn’t seem to hold a job, so I taught at Harvard, Princeton, and now, Yale. I’ve been here, I think, 27 years, so it’s home. I teach in the School of Management. My subjects are negotiation, innovation, strategy, and game theory. 

[0:03:34.5] MB: Game theory is something that I’m fascinated with. I love strategy and games and it’s something that I love reading about and thinking about. Actually, the original introduction I had to you and your writing was the old school book, Thinking Strategically, that you wrote with Avinash Dixit, and I’ve really enjoyed that. I’m curious, for listeners who may not know much about game theory, how would you describe sort of what game theory is and sort of the basics of game theory. 

[0:04:01.1] BN: Sure. It’s the science of interaction. You start with a simpler problem, called decision theory, and that is you make a decision and you think about how that will interact with nature. When an engineer builds a bridge, they think about tensile strength of steel, the load factor on a bridge, but you don’t have to think about how the bridge is going to respond to your actions. 

In contrast, when a strategist or a general takes a particular action, they have to think about how the other side will respond. What is their objective? What are they trying to accomplish? Only by taking into account the other side do you have a chance of being success. Normally, people tend to be egocentric, that is they’re focused on themselves. Game theory is all about being allocentric, understanding the perspective of others. 

[0:04:50.6] MB: Very interesting. Where does that tie into kind of the idea of strategic behavior?

[0:04:56.8] BN: Your strategy is both about predicting how other people respond to what you do, but also about shaping what it is that they’re going to do. If you think about the current healthcare debate, everybody would like to have a situation where people without preexisting conditions can just get insurance whenever they want, but the challenge is that if they can buy insurance anytime, then they’ll say, “Well, I’ll just wait until I need insurance, and then I’ll get it,” and then the problem is only the sickest people will go and buy insurance. That means that the cost of the insurance is going to be incredibly high and you get into what sometimes is called the death spiral. 

[inaudible 0:05:35.3] is how do you go and design a system which gives people incentives to sign up even when they’re not don’t currently need it. One tactic, like with the stick, which is we’re going to impose a tax penalty on you if you don’t sign up. The other view could be a carrot, which is if you do sign up, we’ll guarantee that you can continue to sign up and you can get continuous coverage and you can’t be denied insurance going forward so long as you’ve been continuously covered.

[0:06:05.9] MB: I think that’s a great real world example. I’m curious, for somebody who’s listening and thinking, “Game theory kind of sounds interesting, but why does it matter to my life, or why it is important?” Why do you think it’s so critical to study and learn and understand game theory?

[0:06:22.2] BN: Right. I think pretty much everything we do in life is a game. It’s not always called that way. Whether it’d be negotiating with your children, your spouse, or raise at work, to understand how competitors respond to you in a market place. So since you’re playing a game, you might as well play it well and understand, really, what’s going on. Game theory is everything in my view. It’s everywhere. I thought if you don’t mind, actually, I’d give you a little example that we could have some fun with. 

[0:06:51.8] MB: Yeah, that sounds great.

[0:06:53.7] BN: Here is a question I’ve taken from the SAT, and I’d like your — It’s a real question. I didn’t make this up. I’d like you to tell us what the right answer is. Here are the choices; A is merits, B is disadvantages, C is rewards, D is jargon, and E is problems.

[0:07:12.6] MB: All right. What’s the question?

[0:07:14.6] BN: Oh! No, I wasn’t going to tell you the question. You see, I think, by using game theory, you can actually figure out the right answer. Let’s imagine for a moment, you’re the person writing the test. What is your objective in this? 

I think there are a couple of objectives. One; you don’t want everybody to get the right answer. You don’t want everybody to get the wrong answer. You want to be able to spread people out. Two; you want to make sure there’s only one possible correct answer, ‘cause if there are two right answers, you’re going to have to go and re-grade the exam, and it will be a nightmare. Three; you never want somebody to get the right answer to the wrong logic. Okay?

Now, you understand the perspective of the person writing the test and your choices are merits, disadvantages, rewards, jargon, and problems. 

[0:08:02.7] MB: All right. Going back to my SAT days, and I definitely should have had another cup of coffee this morning. I’m looking at it and the one to me that seems to jump out and be the least like the other four, or five, is jargon. It seems totally disconnected to the others. 

[0:08:17.6] BN: Okay. That could be a good thing, or a bad thing, because if it’s just all by itself, then maybe it doesn’t have any good decoys. Let’s go and figure out if we can use any specific principles here; merits, disadvantages, rewards, jargon, and problems. I’ll get you started a little bit. I would say that disadvantages and problems are pretty similar to each other. 

[0:08:41.8] MB: I agree. 

[0:08:43.2] BN: And so if one is right, it’s kind of hard to imagine that the other would be wrong, that somebody could make a  good case that the other word would also be an appropriate choice. My view is that two of them knock each other out. Are you with me on that?

[0:08:57.7] MB: Yeah, let’s go with that. 

[0:09:00.3] BN: Now you are left with merits, rewards, and jargon. 

[0:09:04.6] MB: I think there’s definitely a distinction between — There’s obviously a distinction between merits and rewards, but they both have to me sort of this almost like positive connotation, whereas jargon just seems completely out on an island. 

[0:09:18.4] BN: The island part is dangerous, because it could be no decoys, but the question is how close are merits and rewards? Are they sufficiently close that somebody could make a valid argument that they would both work? I think the answer is yes, actually. 

Here is the first part of the question. It says, “Each occupation has its own.” You could see how both merits and rewards work for that and it’d be pretty hard to distinguish between the two as you go on. I think those cancel each other out and you’re left with jargon. 

The whole question is actually, “Each occupation has its own blank; bankers, lawyers, computer professionals, for example, all use among themselves language which outsiders have difficulty following.” You can see that jargon is the right answer.  

[0:10:06.6] MB: Ta-da!  

[0:10:07.6] BN: Okay? Now, as you understand it, let’s try one last one, because you’ve got the principle; accurate, popular, erroneous, widespread, and ineffectual. Accurate, popular, erroneous, widespread, and ineffectual. 

[0:10:25.1] MB: All right. I’m writing these down; accurate, popular, erroneous, widespread, and ineffectual.

[0:10:30.9] BN: Correct. 

[0:10:32.0] MB: Let’s see, popular and widespread obviously kind of synonymous. 

[0:10:36.6] BN: They cancel each other out. Great. Now, we’re left with accurate, erroneous, and ineffectual.  

[0:10:41.7] MB: Accurate and erroneous are kind of opposites. I think, ineffectual —  

[0:10:45.6] BN: They are indeed antonyms. That’s correct. 

[0:10:48.1] MB: Antonyms. There we go. We’re getting our vocab words in. I think that, to me, erroneous and ineffectual could do have sort of similar connotations. I’d probably — I don’t know. I don’t know —  

[0:11:00.0] BN: Let’s pause for a moment. Accurate and erroneous, because they’re opposites, actually are each great decoys with the other. That is, if a person reads a sentence backwards, or misunderstands the meaning of the word and flips it, they would choose the other one by mistake, but nobody could claim that that was the correct answer. 

That suggest that accurate and erroneous are our most likely candidates here.  Now, we have to figure out is there a good decoy for one of them. 

[0:11:28.3] MB: It feels to me like ineffectual could be  a decoy for erroneous. 

[0:11:33.0] BN: The question is if one was correct, but you really argue the other one is not correct. 

[0:11:38.5] MB: I think it’d be challenging. 

[0:11:40.1] BN: I don’t know. Actually, you could be correct. You could be accurate, but also ineffectual. My example here is totally spot on, but I don’t seem to be having the effect I want, and so I could be ineffectual in this example that I’m using even if I’m not erroneous.  

[0:11:54.9] MB: Good point.  

[0:11:55.7] BN: To me, the words actually are that there’s open water between the meetings as supposed to popular and widespread, where I think you can really make the case that there’s not open water there. To me, ineffectual is a good decoy, but a far enough decoy away that it really there isn’t both a right answer for erroneous. In fact, the question whether some people who think only the poor and less educated people use slang, but this idea is erroneous. 

Anyway, my point in this is that it’s actually possible by understanding how the test maker is trying to achieve — The test maker’s objective. You can figure out what’s the right answer without even reading the question. Of course, it’s easier to do the problems reading the questions. You understand what the other side is trying to achieve, then you can accomplish what it is that you’re trying to achieve. That’s the essence of game theory. 

[0:12:50.2] MB: That’s a great demonstration, and it’s really fascinating. I think it does an amazing job of kind of highlighting the point that just by understanding the other party and their incentives in the way that they think you can get a tremendous amount of information.  

[0:13:05.0] BN: That’s the idea. 

[0:13:06.3] MB: I’m curious, what are some of the kind of core mental models or concepts that come out of game theory? 

[0:13:13.4] BN: One of the most important is the idea of equilibrium, and this goes back to John Nash who won a Nobel Prize, had a movie done about him, A Beautiful Mind, starring Russell Crowe. This is the question of, “How do I figure out what the other side is going to do when they are trying to figure out what it is that I’m going to do?” That’s a challenge because, essentially, it can’t be I’m responding to your actual actions, I have to respond to what I think you’re going to be doing while you’re thinking about what it is that I’m going to be doing. 

Here is another simple game that we can play. If the two of us pick the same number, we’ll have a third party, your producer, each pay us that amount of money. We have to pick a number between 1 and 10. If we don’t pick the same number, we both get zero. Do you understand the game so far?

[0:14:09.9] MB: Absolutely.

[0:14:11.2] BN: All right. I think seven is really a lucky number. I like seven. I heard a lot of people — I understand pick seven. Of course, you could pick any other number. Now, you can see that there’s a little bit of a paradox that you have to choose. Which is we both pick 10, we both get more money. You might be saying, “Although I’d like to pick 10, I’m a little worried that Barry is going to pick seven. Barry might have to pick seven, cause he’s afraid that Matt is going to pick seven because he thinks Barry is going to pick seven.” We both end up worse off, or maybe we don’t even coordinate, I end up picking seven, and you pick 10, and we both get zero. 

One of the challenges that exists with Nash equilibrium is that it can be more than one and we may fail to find it, and this simple example, and she goes a long way towards explaining why we have development issues in many Third World Countries. We could like to be in a situation where nobody pays bribes and nobody asks for bribes. We want to get rid of corruption, but if I believe that the official is going to want a bribe, and I don’t pay the bribe, then I won’t get my new passport, I won’t get my new driver’s license, then I will have to offer the bribe, the person will end up taking it and we end up in a situation where the economy get stuck in this corrupt equilibrium and doesn’t advance as quickly as it might.

You can’t just change by having one person change them. I’d go from 7 to 10 and the other person doesn’t flip, it doesn’t help either. You have to have this coordinated move, and that’s not so easy to do.

[0:15:50.9] MB: That’s a beautiful demonstration going from a very simple game to an extremely concrete real world application. I’d be curious, could you explain — Another one I know is very popular and kind of the cornerstones of game theory; The Prisoner’s Dilemma. For listeners who may not know what that is, or maybe have heard it but don’t really understand it, I’d love to hear your kind of explanation of it and then maybe if you can think of one, perhaps a real world instance of the The Prisoner’s Dilemma as well.

[0:16:18.4] BN: Yeah, I sometimes shy away from it, not because it isn’t [inaudible 0:16:22.7] example, but because people end up thinking that’s all there is to game theory, is the idea of the The Prisoner’s Dilemma, and anyone who has seen a detective movie knows the drill. Two prisoners are interviews in separate cells and each one is told that if they can confess and they’re the first to confess, they’ll get a lighter sentence, maybe even get the turn state’s evidence. Whereas if they both confess, there’s a whole lot less value in those confessions, and so it doesn’t work out so well for them. On the other hand, if neither confesses, they may actually get a life sentence, or not even convicted. 

The problem is that if you’re colleague in crime doesn’t confess, it turns out that the leniency you are shown is a good — It really makes it worthwhile for you to confess. Similarly, if the arrival of your fellow criminal does confess — Oh my God! You surely better, because otherwise they can have the book thrown at you. 

Whatever happens, it’s in your interest to confess, and then when both sides confess, they don’t do so well compared to the situation where neither confesses. By the way, we use this not just for criminals, but also in antitrust enforcement, in corporate crime. If it turns out there’s been a conspiracy or an antitrust and one company comes forward, they end up often getting amnesty as a result. If you know that if you are rival — If your coconspirator has this incentive to come forward and be a whistle blower, then you may decide you have to do that too, because you’ll be left having the books thrown at you.  

It’s used in many context, and sometimes we think of this as a bad thing if you’re a prisoner, but it’s a good thing if you are the law enforcement. Then, the question — Go ahead.

[0:18:10.2] MB: Continue please. 

[0:18:11.9] BN: Then, the question is how do you get out of it? It could be that, “Well, okay. I’m going to meet up with you in jail. If I do that and you confessed, or other prisoners will say, “Wait a second. This guy was a rat. He confessed,” and they’re going to punish you quite severely in prison for that. That’s a good enough deterrent. 

If we’re actually coming across people again and again and we have the ability to punish them in the future for what they did in that confession, then that’s how the mob often prevents people from churning. What’s true and what’s possible in a single interaction much more is possible when you run into the same people again and again. 

We can also think of a multi-person prisoner’s dilemmas, and you can think of global warming often in that circumstance, which is it’s in my own interest to drive a car, to fly in an airplane, to heat my house, to use an air-conditioner, and if other people are all doing that and the planet is going to go and heat up, well, I can’t stop it, so I might as well enjoy life now. If nobody else is going to do it, then it doesn’t really hurt for me to go ahead and expend a little bit more carbon. 

In some sense, whatever anybody else does, I want to be a little bit more of a carbon user. Then, when everybody acts that way, we end up putting way too much carbon in the atmosphere and we globally suffer the consequences. Each individual has an incentive to do something that’s not good when it’s done collectively.

[0:19:50.1] MB: Is that the same instance of the concept of the tragedy of the commons, or is there a distinction there in this multi-person prisoner’s dilemma?

[0:19:57.5] BN: Nope. Strategies of the commons is pretty much the multi-person dilemma, and it’s one reason why people believe ole for government regulation, which is that we think of the invisible hand, Adam Smith, sort of prizes guide people to do the right things, but sometimes those prizes are unfair, because you’re not correctly charged anything when you take this action, putting carbon in the environment. If you don’t have a prize mechanism, there’s no sense in which what the way people will play these games will necessarily be good for themselves or for society as a whole.  

[0:20:34.1] MB: Another concept from game theory that I’ve heard you talk about before is the idea of signaling. Can you talk a little bit about that and kind of explain that? 

[0:20:41.1] BN: Sure. Michael Spence won a Nobel Prize for his work on Signaling, and it’s a little embarrassing to me, because part of the theory of signaling is that you go to get a degree, not for the stuff that we teach you, although we’ll teach you about signaling theory, but for what it says to the rest of the world. 

Let me give you an example with my MBA students. Imagine that you are a smart woman and you want to convince your employer that you are really going to be there and make a commitment to this company. The employer is sexist and, perhaps even illegally, is thinking about discriminating against women, because they’re worried they’re going to leave, have kids, and start a family. Therefore, this person doesn’t want to make the investment in the employee that they would make if they knew this person would be staying on. 

Now, the employee says to the firm, “Okay. Look, I’m really — I’m committed. I’m the kind of person who will stay here through thick and thin.” The problem is anyone can say that and it doesn’t mean anything. How do you take an action which conveys you’re the type of person who really means that as supposed to just saying it? 

One way of doing that is going and getting an MBA. You go and you spend $120,000 in tuition. You spend two years of your life listening to professors like me and you’re able to endure that. Why would you have done that and then leave labor force right away? You can say, “Look, I took these actions that only makes sense if in fact I am planning to be here for the next 20 years, next 15 years.” 

A lot of people who will say that they are committed to this company to being a professional, but you could look at the actions that I’ve taken and show that I’m not that average person, I’m really the one who is going to go and make this happen. 

A nice example, I think, from Steve Levitt, Freakonomics, is a dentist who’s getting a little on in the years and wants to convince patients that he or she is not about to retire goes and buys a new furniture for the office, like, “Look, if I was going to retire in the next six months, I would have just let that [inaudible 0:23:01.4] kinda hangout there a little bit longer, but it didn’t make sense for me to redecorate the office, buy a new furniture, a new equipment if I was about to hang out my shingle.” Anybody can say they’re going to be staying on, but the fact that I have made this investment suggest I’m really going to be around for a little bit longer.

[0:23:21.2] MB: One of the other concepts that you’ve talked about in the past is the idea of using principled arguments in negotiation and kind of the concept of dividing up the pie. I’d love to explore that idea briefly. 

[0:23:34.5] BN: Sure. I’ll put a little plug in. I’ve created a free online negotiation course at Coursera, coursera.org, and you can learn all of it there, but here’s the preview; a lot of people think that negotiation is about who can yell louder, and shake my hand, do this deal, five, four, three, two, one, shake my hand now, say yes. It’s sort of how Dwight negotiates in the office. That’s not a principled approach. 

I want to say, “What type of arguments can you make that might persuade other people about what is appropriate, what is fair?” I spent a lot of time thinking about what is the pie? Why are we having a particular negotiation? I can use a simple example, if you’d like. We have A and B, two parties who have nine to divide up. In the sense that if they can reach an agreement, there’s a pie of size nine that they can share. 

Now, in order to figure out what will happen, I also have to say what they should do — What they will do if they can’t reach an agreement. Let’s say A can get one on his own, and B get two on her own. If they reach an agreement, A and B together can get nine. If not, A can walk away with one and B can walk away with two. Now, the question is how do we divide up the nine?

What most people say is that B is, in some sense, twice as strong as A, and so B should get six and A should get three. That if B can get twice as much if they don’t reach an agreement. Perhaps B should get twice as much if they do. My view is we fundamentally misunderstand power and proportionality, and the right way of thinking about this is that A and B without an agreement can collectively get three; A gets one, B gets two, so collectively they get three. If they reach an agreement, they can get nine. There’s an extra six they can get by reaching an agreement. Who is more important for that agreement? A or B? My answer to that is they’re equally important. If A walks away, that six disappears. If B walks away, that six disappears. 

That means A and B are equally important to that six, so you should divide it three and three, so A will get four and B will get five. That is the principle, which is figure out what the pie is. Figure out what the two of you are able to create by working together, rather than not reach an agreement, and split those gains. 

[0:26:21.0] MB: I love that example, and I think it’s a great way to look at it, because if you think about sort of 50-50 split off the bat, it’s not quite equitable than if you think about a two-thirds, one-third split, it’s not quite equitable, but really looking at all of the different outcomes and what the parties can achieve on their own versus what they can create together. I think you’ve achieved the most sort of fair, and I guess as you would say, principles split of the proceeds. 

[0:26:46.6] BN: The argument doesn’t depend on which side you’re taking, and I think that that aspect of, “I can make that argument for either side,” is a critical component of what it means to be fair and reasonable. 

[0:26:58.7] MB: I think that’s a great segue to dig into Honest Tea, which we haven’t talked about yet. Obviously, you’re an expert in game theory, but on top of that, you and one of your students actually founded one of the fastest growing companies in America, a beverage company that has been incredibly successful. I’d love to just kinda here this story —    

[0:27:18.8] BN: We just sold our billionth bottle. 

[0:27:20.2] MB: Congratulations.  

[0:27:20.6] BN: [inaudible 0:27:21.2] McDonald’s signs up there, “Billions and billions served.” 

[0:27:25.4] MB: That’s amazing. That’s really cool. It’s so fascinating. I’d love to hear the story of how a professor and a student start a beverage company and go up and compete against the likes of Coke and Nestle and other giants in that space. 

[0:27:39.7] BN: You think it’d be a recipe for a disaster in the sense that neither of us had much experience in terms of starting a company, starting a beverage company, but we had some ideas. In fact, we had issues like, on our side, passion, we had luck, and we had economic theory. I’ll emphasize the economic theory, because that’s my job. 

One of the key lessons we say in economics is declining marginal utility. If you liked — The first scoop of ice cream is really good, the second is okay, and by the time you’re in the 10th scoop, it’s like, “I’m kinda full now. I’m not so interested in having a little more ice cream.” 

Same thing in terms of whether it’d be shirts, or shoes — Well, maybe not shoes. For most things, as you have more and more of them, the incremental value of the next one is less and less interesting. I think that’s true for sugar. You add a little bit of sugar to a beverage, it takes away the bitterness. The next, add some flavor, and each incremental one is less and less good, but it carries the same number of calories. 

It didn’t make any sense to us that all the beverages out there were either zero calories and often very sweet with diet, or 140 calories and basically turned into a liquid candy. Why wasn’t there a normal beverage with one or two teaspoons of sugar? We figured out that weren’t alone and wanting to have something like that. With that inspiration and insight, we thought we could just make a tea that tasted like tea and to use an old fashion recipe, kind of fire, water, and leaves, and not much else. That was the start of Hones Tea. 

[0:29:32.3] MB: I think it’s really interesting, and you talked about the concept of declining marginal utility. I don’t know if you still do it or not, but you used to actually put a curve on the bottles that demonstrated kind of the tradeoff between calories and flavor in terms of sugar content.  

[0:29:49.2] BN: I think that label may now be a historical item, although only pretty recently, it was on the Green Dragon Tea. This, again, is a case where only real wonks could get the inside line, but in calculus, we learn that the derivative of a function is — The function is maximized where its derivative is zero. What that means in normal person speak is that when you’re doing something and you’re right at the optimum, when you’re doing it as best as possible, if you make a small change, you had a little bit more, a little bit less, it has almost no impact on the result.
 
In particular, imagine that you came up with a recipe, which maximized the flavor based on how much sugar was in there. That one, the blind taste test. Now, we cut back the sugar 10%. Essentially, since the case was optimized, cutting back the sugar by 10% will have almost no impact in terms of what people think for the flavor, but it will cut back the calories by 10%. That is a direct linear result.
 
What’s interesting is the product, which wins the blind taste test, is not actually the best product in the market. Another way of thinking about this is a blind taste test. If you’d like your eyes are closed and your mouth is open. If I want to flip that, we’d have a test where your eyes are open and your mouth is closed. What is that? That’s a test where you go and read the label. The ideal label, if you like, has zero calories in it and nothing artificial. The problem is that doesn’t always taste so great. 

For the same reason that I wouldn’t want the product to win the eyes-open-mouth-closed test, I don’t want the product to win the eyes-closed-mouth-open test. Where I think the right test is is there something in-between the two where you read the label and you taste the product. That’s going to lead you to something which is less sweet than wins the blind taste test; and more sweet than someone that wins the eyes-open-mouth-shut test. So to speak, that’s a sweet spot that Honest Tea lives in.

[0:31:56.7] MB: Another theory you’ve talked about that that helped inform the start-up of Honest Tea was the idea of the babysitter theorem. Will you talk a little bit about that?

[0:32:04.5] BN: Yeah, the babysitter theorem. The basic idea here is that nobody goes and hires and babysitter to eat at McDonald’s. It’s going to cost you 50 bucks for the babysitter, 10 bucks for McDonald’s. Now, you should’ve said, “Wait a second. I just spent $50 to go to McDonald’s? That makes no senses at all.”

What is the larger — You might spend $50 to go out and get a fancy dinner at a white-tablecloth restaurant. The idea is if you have to spend a lot of money to get out the door, you’re going to go and do something of high quality, not low quality. To apply that result to Honest Tea, in our case, the babysitter is the bottle, the label, the cap.

If we were to fill up a bottle just with air, but put on the cap and the label, it could cost us $0.60 to get out the door. If you’re going to spend that much money on packaging, you might as well spend a little bit more on ingredients. 

The other guy who’s out there were spending a penny or so on tea, a couple more cents on high-fructose corn syrup. We think if we spend a nickel on tea, people can actually tell the difference. It’s going to raise the price maybe from $1 to $1.10. If you’re already spending your dollar, you might as well spend a buck-10 and get something truly amazing in terms of quality. The babysitter theorem helped us get there. 

[0:33:32.3] MB: Being a professor and a student, how did you take this idea and go from concept to purchase order and then, from a purchase order to product on shelves?

[0:33:46.5] BN: It’s a long story, which we tell in our book called Mission in a Bottle. That’s another plug [inaudible 0:33:53.7] I’m allowed. That’s where we had a huge amount of passion. Seth is brilliant. He’s tireless. He is inspiring. We started out using the Lean Startup approach, which in this case meant making tea in our kitchen. Taking an old snaffle bottle and washing off the label. Using rubber cement to glue on a hand-printed label, filling up the bottle with the tea that we had made, putting thee cap on back our self and bring it to a buyer at Whole Foods, who fortunately liked the way the product tasted and he ordered in a truckload. Then, we had a couple of months to figure out how to make it. 

If we couldn’t have sold it to the buyer at Whole Foods, that was our complete target customer, then we would have realized that we hadn’t truly understood the market that we thought we’d understood. 

[0:34:41.1] MB: For the listeners out there, we will definitely include in the show notes Mission in a Bottle. We’ll include the negotiating course on Coursera and links to everything else we’ve talked about. That stuff will all be in the website. Everybody can make sure to check that out. 

[0:34:54.2] BN: I’ll take you back again to one last bit. Imagine — We’ll stick in the beverage world. Imagine for a moment you get to be the CEO of — I don’t know. Pepsi-Coke, and you have the opportunity to get Coca-Cola’s secret formula. It’s not an ethical issue. It’s not a legal issue. What would you do with that if you had it?  

[0:35:16.7] MB: That’s a good question. Do you produce it or not? I don’t know. 

[0:35:21.5] BN: Yeah, that is the question. I’ll give you one shot and then I’ll flip the cards . 

[0:35:27.8] MB: All right. Fair enough. I would say — This almost happened with the fiasco with new Coke back in the 90s and it was a disaster for Coke and they ended up completely reversing course. I think you probably — I think it’d make sense to produce it in some way or another whether it’s under the same label or not. If nothing else just to try to kinda knock ‘em down a peg.  

[0:35:50.0] BN: Let’s say that you did that, and now there’s sort of another thing out, they taste just like Coca-Cola, separate from whether or not the taste of Coke is really what matters the most or is it really its association with being America and the brand. If that happened, that’s likely to bring the price of Coca-Cola down, because they’re now going to have to compete more aggressively against this perfect substitute, this generic version of coke that’s really more than generic, it’s a perfect replica. 

When the price of Coca-Cola comes down, what is that going to do to the folks at Pepsi?  

[0:36:21.8] MB: Lower their prices.  

[0:36:24.2] BN: It’s going to probably force them to respond with lower prices. The last thing you want to do is make the world of Coca-Cola more competitive, because that is going to come back and bite you. By playing out the moves and countermoves, you can see that, actually, the best thing to do along with probably the ethical and legal thing, is to throwaway that recipe and never look at it.  

[0:36:48.9] MB: That makes a lot of sense. In many ways, it’s kind of the same concept behind cartels like OPEC that would prefer to keep prices at a certain level in order to maintain all of their margins.  

[0:37:01.0] BN: Sure. They are actually doing what would be illegal in United States in terms of restricting output. Here, there’s a question of, “Do I want to go and make a perfect copy of what my rival is making in the market? I may not even be able to, but if I could, the answer is I probably don’t, because that forces my rival to be in a more competitive situation. If my rival’s prices come down, then mine will probably come down too.” That’s not colluding by not doing it. There’s no requirement that I go and force my rival into a greater competitive environment. In fact, I generally want to differentiate my products from a rival rather than copy them. 

People’s first instinct is often, “Ho-ho! I got it. I can really screw the rival. I can feed them up. I can trash them. Let me go and do it.” It’s a little bit of a game theory insight. You realized that unlikely to actually help you in the long run.

[0:37:57.8] MB: That’s a great lesson and, again, shows game theory is not something that just exists in textbooks with something that’s incredibly applicable to all kinds of different fields of our lives. I’m curious, what would be a piece of advice you’d have for somebody who’s listening who might be kind of an inspiring entrepreneur that wants to follow, in one way or another, kind of the footsteps of you and Seth and what you’ve done with Honest Tea? 

[0:38:24.9] BN: Find something that truly makes a difference. In economics, we sometimes say that if you’re just 10% better, or 1% better, the whole world will come to you, but it turns out that’s not true. You have to be radically different and better in order for folks to care and pay attention. I think that’s a starting point. That also is a reason to have a passion. 

I think there are two aspects you need to have a successful business. One is you have to have the solution to a great problem. That’s what most people focus on. You also have to figure out why you’re going to continue to succeed even after the world knows about what you’ve done. That is why won’t others copy you, or having copied you, why that you’ll still succeed after they’ve copied you? That’s an often harder challenge. The problem is that most good ideas are good ideas for somebody else. They’re not good ideas for you. Work on that as well when you’re trying to come up with your great entrepreneurial idea. 

[0:39:30.8] MB: What prevented Honest Tea from being copied?  

[0:39:33.7] BN: Let me take a step back. Before doing Honest Tea, I thought about mixing orange juice and club soda. I do that myself. I think it’s a great drink. If you’d like, it’s an organic, all natural soda that’s half the calories of oranges. You could sell it and it would have half the cost of making orange juice and sell for the same price. Better margins. It’s all good. 

The problem is that if we had made that, I think you’d be test marketing for Tropicana. If they could come in, perfectly will copy what it is that we’ve done, and I would be a bitter professor saying that others had stolen my idea. For 10 years, I didn’t do anything on this, because I was afraid that in the end it will be copied and you [inaudible 0:40:17.4] succeed, we wouldn’t have known anything in the long run. 

The nice thing about tea is that the way in which we are making it, literally, boiling water and putting in tea leaves, it was not something that the big players, whether in the time it’d be Nestle, or Snapple. Arizona were doing — They’re using syrup and concentrates and powders. Our more artisanal way of doing things was a little hard for them to copy in what they’re up to. 

It was also the case that they would suffer some cognitive dissonance, which is if we’re saying what they’re making as liquid candy, then it’s hard for them to also go and make a product which isn’t so sweet, because their customers are expecting stuff that’s really sweet. They’d had to say to their customers, “Look. If you like our regular product, now you’re probably not going to like this, and so don’t drink this.” That’s not so easy for them to say. That does mean in the end, that folks won’t copy you, but it means it will slow them down and allow us to have more a foothold than build up a brand which we’re able to do. 

[0:41:27.4] MB: What is one kind of simple actionable piece of homework that you would give to somebody listening that wants to take a first step towards implementing or learning more about what we’ve talked about today?  

[0:41:39.5] BN: Other than buying Mission in a Bottle, I’d say go and make your prototype. The best market research I think is will I able to pay for it? I’ll give you one quick example of some students of mine wanted to make and sell organic cotton shirts. How could you figure out if there’s a market for that? I think you could show them pictures. You could tell the story. What you could also do is go to a custom tailor and have the person make you organic cotton shirt. Then, you could show the person, they could look at it, they could hold it, they could touch it, and they could say, “Okay. Yeah, I’d buy that.” You’d say, “Great. Write me a check.”

Then, you know that it’s a real piece of demand, not just a hypothetical piece of demand. I may not have to have thousands of pieces of inventory, but having one piece of inventory makes a project look so much more real and will allow you to truly gauge demand in a much better way.  

[0:42:38.4] MB: It’s a great piece of advice and something that’s so critical. It’s very easy for people to say, “Oh, yeah. That sounds like a great idea.” Unless they’re willing to put hard dollars on the line and actually support it, that’s where the rubber meets the road. 

Where can people find you and Mission in a Bottle and all of your other books online? 

[0:42:58.9] BN: Well, missioninabottle.net, [inaudible 0:43:00.9] a little preview there, barrynalebuff.com have links to everything. The Coursera Course has the free online negotiation. That’d get you pretty well started, I’d say. Of course, Amazon, pretty much has everything. 

[0:43:16.3] MB: We’ll make sure to have all of those included in the show notes. Barry, thank you so much for being on the show. It’s been a fascinating conversation. I enjoyed having the tables turned and testing my SAT test taking abilities and my game theory knowledge. Thank you so much for coming on here and sharing all your wisdom. 

[0:43:33.4] BN: Thanks for being a good sport and for having me. I appreciate it. It was fun.  

[0:43:37.3] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email, my email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email.

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

The Neuroscience Behind Building a Sustainable Healthy Lifestyle with Foodist Darya Rose

In this episode we discuss why dieting actually predicts weight gain over the long run, how you can build a “healthstyle” of habits that can accumulate small advantages and create a healthy lifestyle over time, how “habit loops” are formed and how you can leverage neuroscience to create habits that stick, the concept of Mindful Eating and how it can transform your relationship to the meals you eat, and more with our guest Darya Rose. 

Darya Rose is a neuroscience Ph.D and the author of the book Foodist: Using Real Food and Real Science to Lose Weight Without Dieting. Darya is the creator of Summer Tomato a blog where she teaches others to form healthy food habits by combining neuroscience, mindfulness and nutrition. She has been featured on the Today Show, Oprah, Time Magazine, and was recently named one of the 100 Most Influential People In Health and Fitness.

• How Darya dug into the science behind healthy lifestyles and what she discovered

• How everything Darya learned about health and nutrition was wrong

• How Darya defines “dieting” (and why that’s so important)

• Why dieting actually predicts weight gain over the long run

• How your current relationship with food impacts your long term health (and how you can shift it)

• What the “biggest loser” gets wrong about dieting and weight gain

• Why dieting is “torture” and is “set up so that you cant’ win”

• The psychology behind why dieters often regain weight

• What it means to “moralize” your food choices and why you should avoid it

• Why you should lose weight more slowly

• How “dieting” can confuse your hormones and negatively impact your satiety cues

• You are the sum of your habits

• How do you build a “healthstyle” of habits that can accumulate small advantages and create a healthy lifestyle over time

• How “habit loops” are formed and how you can leverage neuroscience to create habits that stick

• Why growth mindset is essential to changing your habits and living a healthy lifestyle

• The critical importance of rewards in building habits (and the different types of rewards)

• Rewards must be internal and innately linked to whatever you’re doing

• “Home court habits” that you need to develop to live in a healthy place and stay there sustainably

• Why you should eat your veggies!

• Why Darya says that "Sitting is the new smoking"

• The importance of sleep and maintaining your circadian rhythms to building a healthy lifestyle

• Why Mindfulness is a critical part of a healthy diet

• Mindful Eating and how it can transform your relationship to the meals you eat

• The definition of “mindfulness” - being aware of your present physical experience, thoughts, & feelings (emotional feelings in the body) and being AWARE that those are happening without judgement

• Why you should focus on chewing your food more and eating more slowly

• How to battle junk food cravings

• The importance of real food, how do define it, and how to find it

• The 80/20 principle and how it applies to healthy living

• Create a habit journal and recognize how the things you are doing often

• And more!

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Website] Summer Tomato

• [Book] Foodist: Using Real Food and Real Science to Lose Weight Without Dieting by Darya Pino Rose

• [Podcast] Foodist

• [Challenge] The 5-Day Mindful Meal Challenge

Episode Transcript

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

[0:00:12.7] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss why dieting actually predicts weight gain over the long run. How you can build a health style of habits that can accumulate small advantages and create a healthy lifestyle overtime. How habit loops are formed and how you can leverage neuroscience to create habits that stick. The concept of mindful eating and how you can use it to transform your relationship to the meals that you eat, and much more with our guest, Darya Rose.

The Science of Success continues to grow with more than 850,000 downloads, listeners in over 100 countries, hitting number one in New and Noteworthy, and more. I get listener emails and comments all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this incredible information?” A lot of our listeners are curious how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to awesome podcast, and more.

Because of that, we’ve created an epic resource just for you; a detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, it’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.

In our previous episode, we discussed why you can’t outthink your emotions, the relationship between trauma and our mind-body connection. How to start listening to your emotions, the power of hypnosis, and how to drop into your body to experience what you’re truly feeling with Rene Brent. If you want to really tap into your emotions, listen to that episode. 

[0:02:33.7] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Dr. Darya Rose. Darya is a neuroscience Ph.D. and the author of the book Foodist: Using Real Food and Real Science to Lose Weight Without Dieting. She’s also the creator of Summer Tomato, a blog where she teaches others to form healthy food habits by combining neuroscience, mindfulness, and nutrition. She’s been featured on the Today Show, Oprah, Time Magazine, and has recently named one of the hundred most influential people in health and fitness. 

Darya, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:01.7] DR: Thank you. It’s great to be here.

[0:03:03.2] MB: We’re very excited to have you on. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and your story, tell us a little bit about yourself. 

[0:03:09.2] DR: Oh, I’m such a geek. Basically, I grew up in Southern California during sort of the Baywatch era in the 90s, and my mother was a chronic dieter, and I just thought that that’s how women were supposed to live. I started dieting at age 11. I didn’t have a weight problem, I just was doing what my mom did, which was having chocolate milkshakes for breakfast that are supposed to make you lose weight, which is awesome if you’re an 11-year-old, but it started a bad cycle. Where I went through, basically, every diet under the sun; low fat, low carb, cabbage soup, grapefruit, you name it. Eventually, I started running marathons. 

In the other part of my life, I went to college, studied molecular biology and neuroscience and then went on to get my Ph.D. in neuroscience and this whole process took 15 years. At some point, I’m like — I feel when most people think about health and weight loss, they think that if they had more will power, they’d be better at it. I’m like one of those type-A people with really strong will power and I would do the diet, and I would do them for years, and I would do them well, and they would work for a little while, but I was so unhappy. 

Eventually, I was just, “I’m doing everything right. I’m doing everything the authorities and every realm are telling me to do, and I’m still miserable, and I still don’t have the results I want. I’m still unhappy with my body.” I decided that — I was on a second year in my Ph.D. program and at this point I could actually read a scientific paper and understand it, which is hard to do. It takes a lot of training to get there. I just was like, “I’m going to solve this problem, and I’m going to stop reading the glossy magazines, and the diet books, and I’m going to read science.” 

I would spend my nights and weekends reading everything I could get my hands on. At first, I was looking for the perfect diet. Eventually, I realized that dieting doesn’t work, that everything I had tried with, actually, the reason I was struggling, dieting is actually a better way to gain weight than to lose weight. That what I really need to do is stop all that nonsense. Focus just on real food and building tiny habits around sort of good, normal, healthy things that my grandma would tell me to do, and that would work. 

I didn’t really believe it at first, because it just sounded too good to be true, but I tried it and my life completely changed. I was not hungry for the first time in my life. I enjoyed food for the first time in my life. Even while being happy, I slowly lost weight. Over the course of the year, I ended up oozing — Gosh! I hit my goal weight and then I went something five or seven pounds below that. I was so shocked by how everything I learned was wrong and how easy and wonderful it was to do the right thing. I was like, “I have to tell people about this.” I started a blog and wrote a book.

[0:05:56.7] MB: I’d love to kind of hear — You talked or you touched briefly on the idea that dieting actually can predict weight gain. I’d love to hear a little bit more about that and maybe talk about some of the data that demonstrates why dieting isn’t that effective as a strategy. Also, just for listeners who could have sort of some different concepts about this, how do you define the concept of dieting?

[0:06:19.7] DR: Great question. I define dieting as a restrictive limit on your food intake. It usually involves some exercise as well, but not always. For me — Just to be clear, and this is actually a really subtle point that is often missed in the dieting industry. You can lose weight on any diet temporarily. They work temporarily, but I don’t want that. I don’t want to just do something for a little while and then look good in one picture and then be done with it. I want to solve this problem. 

When I talk about success, I’m talking about long term success. One of the first — By long term, I mean two, three years. One of the first pieces of information in found when I was researching this stuff was that over — I think it was the study that really blew my mind. It was something like over a three-year period, having dieted during that period were the predictor of weight gain than weight loss. They, and they were actually worse off than people who never dieted at all. It was actually net bad to diet. 

It’s a shocking thing to hear. I’ve been dieting my entire life. Basically, everyone believes that if you want to lose weight and get healthy, you have to stop eating fat, or stop eating carbs, or whatever, and that’s just not true. It’s crazy.

[0:07:38.9] MB: In some ways, this is kind of the distinction between the concept of diet as the noun versus dieting, the action as a verb, and there’s a big difference in terms of having sort of a healthy diet versus pursuing dieting as an activity that’s kind of a fab driven thing that doesn’t necessarily produce real sustainable results. 

[0:07:58.0] DR: Yeah, absolutely. Actually, that distinction is so incredibly frustrating to me that I came up with a new word called health style, which for me that means it’s a combination of focusing on your health, but also creating a lifestyle for yourself. It’s more individualized and it’s also more of something that you do always, rather than something you’re doing temporarily.

[0:08:23.5] MB: How would you describe the average person, or maybe the average American’s relationship with food today?

[0:08:31.1] DR: The average American. Who’s that? I think that most people have — Actually, kind of a messed up. When I say most people, I’m talking about what I see in the media and what I hear when I talk to people about health. I see two things. I see a sort of rejection of the idea of restriction by a large group of people. They’re like, “You know what? Screw it. I love food too much.” That they’ll take that to a really unhealthy level, where it’s just like anything goes all the time.

On the other side, I see if this belief that if you want to have a result different than that, it requires a tremendous amount of suffering. Whether that’s denying yourself things you want, forcing yourself to eat bland, boring things you don’t like, forcing yourself. The Biggest Loser is a great example. The way that show is, it’s like people who — They start out just not caring at all and just really having this issue where they hadn’t really dealt with it in a longtime. Then, deciding to do something about it and going to the entire opposite extreme where they’re working out seven hours a day and eating 1,100 calories when they should be eating three or four times that for their body size and just creating this super — It breaks my heart. It’s like such a broken way of dealing with a problem.

That’s why I do what I do, is because I find that I know that doesn’t work. There’s data that it doesn’t work. On top of it, it’s torture. It’s a torturous way to live. It sort of set up so that you can’t win. You’re either miserable, because you’re starving and not doing anything you like, or you’re miserable because you’re obese. Those are the choices. I say, “Screw that.”

[0:10:17.6] MB: How would you think about the kind of distinction, I know this is a concept you’ve talked about in the past, between the dieter’s brain and the normal brain?

[0:10:28.6] DR: That’s a really a good question. There are a lot of reasons that dieting is more likely to, long term, cause weight gain. There’re issues of metabolism and stuff and that everybody kind of talks about that. One of the big things that people don’t talk about as often is the psychology that comes from restricting yourself a lot. For instance, somebody who has dieted tends to have a moralization of their food. There are foods that are good and foods that are bad. If you eat the good food, then you are good. If you eat the bad foods, then you are bad. 

When you would go ahead and eat — Basically, you could eat good all day long. In psychology, what happens is, eventually, that takes will power. If you’re eating morally, if you’re moralizing your food choices and you’re trying to be good, that takes will power. 

That’s funny. Actually, when you think of food that way, it actually even undermines your true liking of the food. You might actually like the food you’re eating, but if you’re doing it to be good, you still are using up will power to do it. What happens at some point, you get tired, you get stressed. Your will power breaks down. If you’re a dieter and you’ve been doing this, what happens is you swing the other way, it’s like a rebound effect, and you tend to binge, or eat a lot of foods that are fat, or whatever. We’ll rationalize, it’s like, “Oh, I deserved it. I was good. Now, I get to do what I want.” 

It becomes a mental habit on somebody who’s a dieter, and so it’s very difficult at that point to renegotiate your relationship with food and it can be a really big problem and it’s something that needs to be unlearned. That’s one of the reasons that dieting, in particular, can set you up to eat worse in the long run in some sense.

[0:12:22.4] MB: One of the main reasons dieting can backfire is the idea of this ego depletion, or zapping, or tapping your will power. 

[0:12:30.3] DR: Right, exactly.

[0:12:31.3] MB: I know you’ve also talked about it. Actually, I love to explore just briefly so listeners can kind of understand the metabolic response to dieting, and I know there’s been research that’s come out looking at, I think, things like The Biggest Loser and how your body kind of rebounds from calorie restriction like that. I’d love to hear a little bit about that if you can kind of explain that piece of the science as well.

[0:12:53.4] DR: I wish — We don’t really know yet. One of the — In the case of The Biggest Loser where — These people were put through really, really intense starvation, essentially. They were — God! I read somewhere that it was 3,500 calorie per day deficit, calorie deficit. That’s so much more they were burning than eating, which is so insane. That is so insane. 

They were working out a lot, but when you’re working out that much, it’s really difficult to build muscle if you’re also starving. Generally, your metabolism is it’s determined by your muscle mass and also your hormones. It’s hard to say exactly why in their case the metabolism ended up in such a negative place where it did. Basically, even if they gained weight, their metabolism didn’t rebound. They still had the metabolism of somebody who weighed less. People that weight more tend to have a higher metabolism. These people, they weighed a lot, they had a high metabolism. They lost a lot of weight. Their metabolism went down accordingly, but then when they regained the weight, their metabolism didn’t rebound with the weight. It’s basically a cycle where they would gain even more weight, because their metabolism was slower even though they’re bigger. I don’t think science has a good answer for that. 

A bit part of it is that, generally, if you’re not eating enough, you’re not going to be able to maintain your muscle mass when you lose weight. If you lose your muscle mass, your metabolism is going to slow down. One of the things I recommend is just losing weight slower and doing it in a way where you aren’t forcing your body to burn muscle in order to lose weight. 

[0:14:39.7] MB: That makes a lot of sense. Building up your base metabolic rate is a great way to create a more sustainable long term healthy body as supposed to these crash and binge diet strategies. One of the other things you’ve talked about is how dieting can also impact our — I’ll probably say this word wrong, but our satiety queues. I’m not exactly sure if that’s how you say it. Could you kind of explain that concept and share that idea?

[0:15:08.3] DR: Yeah. The way that your body knows when to sleep, when to eat, when to rest, when to be active is through a series of hormones that as a group we — Or as a phenomenon, we refer to it as circadian rhythms. Basically, there are hormones that tell you, “Oh, it’s time to wake up.” This is what jetlag comes from, it’s like your body has as clock and if you throw it off, it gets really confused. It’s best to eat and sleep and things at the same time. 

If you’re not following those queues and you’re not eating when you’re hungry, you’re not sleeping when you should be sleeping, if you’re all over the place, it makes it very difficult for your body to know what it wants. When your body doesn’t know what it wants, your brain is confused and so you can sort of be hungry all the time, because there’re no queues that it can follow to know better. 

You can train yourself so that you — When you train yourself to ignore when you’re hungry, it also means you ignore when you’re full. It can be very difficult to recalibrate that. It’s something that takes — You have to relearn how to do that if you’ve been dieting a longtime. Yeah, you’re setting yourself up to undo any possible chance you have of natural self-food regulation. You have to relearn it if you’ve been dieting for a long time. Just a bummer.

[0:16:40.8] MB: We’ve looked at a couple of the ways that dieting is sort of ineffective and doesn’t really help us achieve long term health. I’m curious — You touched on it earlier. What’s kind of the alternative, or what’s the strategy that you recommend if pursuing dieting isn’t really going to be an effective way to lose weight and be health?

[0:16:59.7] DR: Excellent question. In my research, when I was reading all these papers and I was learning that everything I had been doing for 15 years was a better way to gain weight than to lose it, I was like, obviously, disheartened and frustrated. Then, I had another question. I was like, “Okay. Not everyone has this problem. Not all humans have this problem that I have. I’m particularly crazy.” 

I was wondering what is it that people who are naturally been or have always been thin, what do they do? What do they eat? It turns out they never diet. Most of them have very simple rules that they have in their own brain to just keep them sort of inline. They focus on real food. They don’t worry about macronutrients, carbs, fat, whatever, and they  just sort of do little trials to figure out what works for them and they just live that way. Those are all habits. 

This is a very different approach, because habits don’t require will power. Habits are things that they’re like little loops that you create in your brain that happen automatically in response to some sort of trigger. Whether that trigger be something in your environment, like you see something on TV, or it’s the time of day, or something like that, or internal trigger, like, “I just work up in the morning, my circadian rhythms are telling me I’m hungry,” type of thing. 

When you can take habits, and if you have enough of them that build health; eating vegetables, getting regular activity, physical activity, sleeping well, eating mindfully, eating at certain times of day. Then, you can build up — This is exactly what a health style is. I think your heath style is all those habits, all those little habits that add up to a health or unhealthy person.

What’s cool is you can just tackle these one at a time, and each one of them is so much easier than starving yourself or never eating sugar again, or something really hardcore that most diets will do and recommend. It allows you to find little tiny things you love. Also, you can personalize it. If you’re not the type of person who likes the gym, let’s say, which is a lot of people. Maybe you like hiking, or maybe you like swimming, or maybe you like playing basketball with your friends. There are a lot of other things you can do to have all those habits add up to work for you. 

What’s awesome is habits, the way they form in your brain, the way the little automatic loops form, is that you have to — It’s paired with a reward. The way it works is there’s the trigger, whatever is telling you to do some action. Then, there’s the action. Then, there’s a reward associate with that action. If your brain makes that connection, it’s like, “Whoa! Cool,” and that reward will sort of reach back and — This is why it’s a loop. It reached back and reinforces that rigger so that the next time you get that trigger, your brain is like, “Yeah, let’s do that again.” Until, eventually, that just becomes automatic, like autopilot.

With health habits, that’s what you want. That’s really good. The key there and how this is totally fundamentally different dieting is that you have to like it. It has to be something you like. Otherwise, it won’t become a habit and you won’t be able to take will power out of the equation. 

It’s a total reframe around how to approach your health, because instead of thinking, “What do I have to do? Which torturous thing do I have to subject myself to today, or this moment?” Instead, you think, “You know what? I never liked exercising before for X, Y, Z reasons. I’m going to try something different, because I know I like that, and hopefully make it stick.” You have to create this world where you actually like the things you do. 

What’s amazing is even this whole process itself becomes a loop, because once you start realizing how much you like certain things or you start building healthy habits, you start to feel better. Then, you really like those habits. Then, you start to see results in the mirror and then you really like those habits. Instead of this sort of negative loop of failure, it’s like this positive loop of success and joy. It’s so different. 

I describe it, and it sounds amazing, but I can’t even tell you how life changing this is, especially if you’ve done the dieting thing. It’s like such a transformative way to live and experience your health and your body and food. It’s just so amazing. 

[0:21:33.1] DR: I think it’s a great concept, the idea that we should transition from health kind of being — Or this health style as you call it, being something that we should do or feel obligated to do into something that we want to do. It’s kind of being pulled and drawn towards it instead of pushing the boulder uphill. 

I’m curious, I can almost heart listeners asking. For example, somebody who — Let’s just use broccoli as an example. Somebody doesn’t like broccoli, or whatever. How do you build that habit? How do you train yourself to like healthy lifestyles if you are sort of in a place now where you don’t like working out and you don’t like eating kale, and you don’t like all of these things that — How do you train yourself to become somebody who likes those certain things?

[0:22:22.3] DR: Really good question. Yeah, this all sounds amazing in theory and the devil is in the details for sure. There are a lot of answers to that question, and I take many approaches for people. I like the example of broccoli. You don’t like broccoli. Fine. There is many things that I would tell someone if they just were, “I don’t like broccoli. I can’t do this.” 

I would say, “First of all, there is a lot of vegetables. Are there any you like at all?” Most people have a few that they like in certain ways, and that’s great. I tell them to start there. Start adding things that you like that are good. By good, I mean whole foods, unprocessed foods, and real foods is actually what I like to call them. One of the things that’s interesting is that people don’t actually realize — Most people don’t even taste their food. Most people eat on autopilot. 

While a lot of people that haven’t started on this journey yet, they think they don’t like kind of food. Most people, once they approach it with a growth mindset, which is the idea that this is something I can learn to like, or learn to do, they end up completely falling in love with real food and wondering how they ever liked all those other things that they used to eat. I’ve talked to thousands of people who have had that experience. 

On the one hand, I would say, “Just start with what you like and build on that,” to “approach this with a growth mindset.” One of the things that was revolutionary from myself, personally — I started in the exact same place, by the way. All I ate was processed food and I didn’t really understand — I didn’t know to cool. I didn’t know how to do any of that stuff. One of the things I discovered — I was lucky and I happened to live in San Francisco at the time and they have these amazing restaurants and amazing farmers markets and I didn’t understand why, at certain restaurants, the food was so good, because I grew up in a suburb eating chain restaurants. 

I learned — Because this is the culture in San Francisco. I learned that the reason is because they focus a lot on ingredients. Specifically, they buy seasonal ingredients that are grown from farmers who really care. They actually care, a carrot is not a carrot is not a carrot. Carrots grow in season from heirloom varieties that were built, or that were bred for taste rather than transport taste completely different than sort of the stuff I grew up eating from the grocery store.

When you start to understand that, “Oh, I hated brussels sprouts when I was a kid, but that’s because my parents were serving over boiled frozen ones that were totally out of season.” You try a different one and you realize it’s like a completely different experience. Then, you go from, “Oh! I just don’t like vegetables,” to “Oh! I only like seasonal vegetables,” or “I’m fund of — I like root vegetables more than I like leafy greens today. Maybe in the winter, when leafy greens are more sweet and less bitter I’d like those.” 

That is bringing a certain growth mindset to the idea of changing your habits. Also, a certain amount of knowledge and skill, the knowledge being that like you have to know what it’s in season, and that’s something you can learn. That’s something you can adopt and learn and work on. It does certainly help to be able to cook and create to be able to transform foods from raw ingredients into something you enjoy eating as well. It’s another factor. 

There are a lot of ways to approach building habits, and it’s not about forcing yourself to do anything. It’s about being creative to learn how to love this stuff. I’ve seen so many people do it. So many people do it. Most of them — People don’t go back from this stuff. It’s that good. It’s not like you do it for a little while and you’re like, “That habits kind of fizzled out.” No. This really sticks, because it’s so life changing. 

[0:26:18.2] MB: I know you talked about rewards kind of being one of the key pillars of forming a habit loop. Can you give me a specific example of how pursuing kind of some of these healthy habits can create rewards that, let’s say, somebody who’s listening who their average meal of pizza and beer, something like that, gives them a lot of happiness. How can they create some rewards that will really anchor in this habits and what do those rewards look like?

[0:26:45.2] DR: Great question. There are rewards — Very simplistically. They come in two forms. There are rewards that are sort of external to your psyche. Let’s say you work really hard at something and then you get a price, like money, or a vacation, or something. Those work for some activities, but they do not work for forming habits. External rewards are not good. Don’t tell yourself, “If I eat this broccoli, I’m going to put $5 in my vacation travel plan,” or whatever. You have to have the reward be internal and innately linked to whatever activity you’re doing.

An example is, yeah, you have to enjoy the taste of the food you’re eating, or you have to feel really good after eating it, that helps too. It’s funny though, we tend to have a lot of assumptions, put it that way, around what is rewarding and the reason we do things. The reason for that is because we feel — We feel a certain way, and then our brains rationalize and make up a reason for it. Often times, those reasons are wrong. 

For example, your pizza and beer example. You might think that you love pizza and beer because it tastes so good, and that might be true. However, if you ate pizza and beer for every meal, you would start to feel like crap and you wouldn’t want to eat that all the time. That’s one thing. We tend to lie to ourselves and believe that we would if we let ourselves eat whatever we want. That’s usually not true. 

Another thing is context and the environment you’re eating and your mental state is essential in your perception of your experience. It could be that the reason you think you love pizza and beer so much is because you always have it with your friends on Thursday night football when you watch it with them and you have a good experience and it’s not necessarily the food. The food is fun and that can be a part of it, but it could just be that that experience is so valuable for you that trying to force yourself to eat like a salad or something instead if just silly, but it’s not necessarily because the pizza is so good. It’s because you don’t want to ruin that experience of camaraderie with your friends. 

You sort of have to be willing to step back a little bit about your assumptions about why you do things and what you want and really question and test, even, those assumptions. You can do little experiments on your own to see what the rewards really are, and they’re not always the first thing you think. Often times, we eat because we think we’re craving chocolate in the middle of the day. Really, we just need a break from work because we’ve been focusing really hard for three hours and it’s been a long day. You may tell yourself, “I need to go to the cafeteria and get a snack or something.” Really, you just need a little break.

You can do little experiments to test that, but if the — Then, you can discover what the reward for whatever habit you have actually is. Another thing that comes up a lot is the difference between good habits and bad habits. This is a way to both break not so healthy habits and build healthier habits, is really truly understanding what your triggers are and what your reward is. 

[0:30:10.8] MB: You’ve touched on a few of these and kind of mentioned it, but I’m curious, what are the core healthy habits that you recommend people work on incorporating into their lives so that they can move towards this health style, this healthy lifestyle?

[0:30:26.3] DR: Yeah, great question. I call these home court habits, and these are sort of the habits that you need — The set of habits you need to sort of get yourself personally to a health place and stay there. I want to start with the caveat that everyone is different. Not everything works for everyone and everybody has to learn how to make these things work for them. I can give you some broad habits that often — I’ve talked to thousands of people about this stuff and what often works for people. 

Eating more vegetables is really a big one. Vegetables are incredibly healthy, they keep you from getting — I think, they keep you from getting sick. As much, they keep you feeling good. They obviously are low calorie, high nutrient density, and it’s a positive. It’s something you can do more of. It’s not that hard. Eating more vegetables is a big one. 

The next thing that kind of comes from that is what do you cut out then if you’re eating more of something? I recommend people, if you’re going to make cuts in things, to choose process foods. Processed grains, like flour, processed sugar, processed meat, processed oils. Those are all places that you can cut back on, but I would focus mainly on eating more vegetables. 

Learning to cook is a big one, because cooking, it gives you so much control over what you eat and also whether or not you like it, being able to actually make something that taste good. This is actually one of the biggest habits — The most impactful habits. One of the most impactful habits someone can have. It’s a tough one, because a lot of us didn’t learn to cook growing up, which is why I created a program around it. 

Yeah, cooking is a big one. You need to have some sort of physical activity, and being sedentary is really counterproductive. It’s quite unhealthy. It’s been recently shown to be as bad as long term smoking, actually, long term sitting. It doesn’t have to be crazy. I definitely recommend strength training for looking great. It makes you look great and it does help build your metabolism up, like we talked about earlier. Even just walking 10,000 steps a day, or something around there, can have a big impact. What else? 

For me, big habit is I need to have a grocery store, or a farmers market where I can get high quality vegetables, because if I can’t get high quality vegetables, I don’t want to cook, because cooking is no fun when it doesn’t taste as good or the vegetables are low quality. For me, that’s a big one. Other people don’t care as much. They’re perfectly happy to just cook whatever. 

Sleep is a big one. If you are exhausted and tired, you’re not going to have the energy to cook. You’re not going to have the energy to get activity, physical activity. Sleep is a big one. I’m trying to think if there’s anything else. 

One that doesn’t get talked about actually is maintaining your — Just thinking about a little more about your circadian rhythms; trying to go to bed at the same time each day, trying to wake up at about the same time each day, trying to eat at approximately the same time and not all over the place. It’s much easier to work with your body than work against your body. The more things you have working on your side, the easier it will be. 

Another big one that doesn’t get talked about a lot either is mindfulness. This can sound like a little hippie, or a little woo-woo, but it’s actually incredibly powerful. One of the reasons is what I mentioned earlier, it’s hard — Most of us just go through our entire day on autopilot. We get trigged. We do stuff. We don’t even really think about why. We don’t really — We have this illusion of freewill, but most of us are just plowing through our day being triggered and just doing things and not being very conscious of it at all. That’s especially true of your eating habits, and your eating decisions. Most of us don’t make those very consciously.

Mindfulness gives you a tool to do that, to pay attention to your thoughts, pay attention to your feelings, pay attention to your experience and your perception and not judge it and just be aware of what’s going on. Because if you’re aware of it, of what’s happening, then you have a chance to change it if you’re not. 

People wonder why they have bad habits, and maybe you’re stress eating, or emotional eating, or has something to do with something your mom said when you were a kid, or something, and they think breaking that habit isn’t possible, but it will be. It’s very, very hard to change something like that if you don’t actually know what’s going on and you don’t know what your brain is really trying to get.

I encourage people to practice mindful eating and, generally, mindfulness, mindful practices in their own lives to develop that skill, because it’s really is a skill that you need to have to make this sort of progress if you want to break really difficult habits and things like emotional eating and things like that. Yeah, those are the home court habits that I talk to people the most about and that I find that people have the most life-changing results with that they can incorporate some smattering of those habits.

[0:35:30.3] MB: We’ve definitely talked a lot about meditation on the show previously, and are huge fans of it. How would you define specifically mindfulness, because I know it’s relate but not necessarily kind of exactly the same. Specifically, what do you mean by the phrase mindful eating?

[0:35:46.9] DR: Yeah, this is tricky. The way I personally — I’ve done a lot of work on this. I was a dieter, and dieters do not eat mindfully. Dieters eat fast when they eat, because there is guilt and shame around it. You’ve spent so much of your life starving. When you do let yourself eat, you start of go really fast and just dig into it. I had a lot of difficulty with this particular habit, but I had read so much about the benefits of it. It helps you enjoy your food more. It helps you eat less naturally. It helps you make better decisions. Just all sorts of things that you want. We want these things.

Gosh! Is it hard to develop this habit. I’ve been working on it for — I had been working on it for five years before I really feel like I got a handle on how to do it. I also went into a meditation retreat, silent meditation retreat for 10 days. After all these attempts, I finally have — I have my own working definition of what mindfulness is. 

I think of it as being aware of the present moment, and that includes your physical experience, whatever you see, touch small, taste, whatever. Your thoughts; whatever your thinking in words. Your thoughts tend to manifest in words in your brain. Silently, obviously, but when you think to yourself things, maybe you tend to use words. Then, feelings, which is usually a sensation in your body, maybe attention or rush of adrenalin or some heat in your body, or some tension and some part of your muscles, or something. Just simply being aware that those are happening. It’s really hard to do, because what happens is when you get a thought, or you get a feeling, the feeling almost is immediately translated into a thought, and you want to follow it, like, “That’s an interesting thought. I wonder why that is,” blah-blah-blah and you get hooked on the thought. 

The practice of mindfulness, for me, is being aware that that happens, and when you recognize it being, like, “Oh, I’m stuck in that thought,” and going back to paying attention to not what’s in your head, but your present experience, and just doing that over and over again as a practice so that you are aware when you get pulled into a loop, get pulled into some sort of trigger. Really hard to do.

It’s also really difficult, particularly difficult around food. We tend to practice mindfulness during meditation. That’s what we’re told to do often. Meditation is hard, because it’s hard for people to just sit still, because they need to practice meditation. In some ways, it’s easier, because you know what you’re supposed to be doing, you’re just supposed to be sitting there. 

Eating is more active, right? Your eyes are open. You have to physically feed yourself. You have the experience of eating the taste, the texture, the flavor, the smells and paying attention to all that at once is difficult. Also, on top of it, a lot of us have so much mental baggage around — An emotional baggage around food, and body image, and all these stuff. It’s a challenge. 

Actually, if anybody is interested in mindful eating, I actually just recently started something called The Mindful Meal Challenge, it’s like a five day challenge and it’s free on Summer Tomato, if anybody wants to check it out to practice this. It’s fun to start with eating, actually, because it’s something we all do three times a day, at least, and it’s so integral to our experience and our health. That just taking some time to learn about how to do it and what it actually feels like to do it and realizing how hard it is and how if you just sort of vaguely try to eat mindfully, you’re just trying to be mindful. You’re almost inevitably going to fail, because there are so much distraction built into our brains.

It’s a really cool thing if you can do it. I do highly recommend practicing, setting aside time in your day to practice. Whether it’s during food, or meditation, or anything like that, or even your shower, just mindfully showering. Just to have that time to observe what your brain does on its own, because I think you’ll find — Most of us find our brains are totally nuts. They’re so undisciplined and so scatter brained. Being aware of what you tend to do is very illuminating. 

[0:40:08.2] MB: I know this kind of ties into the idea of mindfulness, but how do we battle things like a craving for junk food? 

[0:40:16.4] DR: Interesting. A craving is a trigger and a feeling. It’s a feeling that’s been triggered from something. Step one is being aware of it, and rather than just anxious, going to the pantry and eat a bag of cookies. That is not what you want to do first. You first want to be able to be, “I feel a craving.” That’s what it is and have a name for it, recognize it that it’s a feeling. 

The second thing is you don’t want to battle it. You can’t control your feelings. They don’t obey the rules of physics like a physical object does. What happens if you try to just make it go away or you try to ignore it, is it — First of all, it won’t go away, it will manifest in some other weird way and you will continue to experience this again and again and eventually you’ll break down. 

A better way to approach a craving is to just take a minute, take a deep breath, close your eyes and feel it. Just feel what it feels like. Locate it in your body. Usually, there’s a place in your body. You can locate attention, or maybe your heart is raising a little bit, of maybe you get a tingly somewhere, or maybe — Who knows? There are a lot of different ways. You get a little sweaty, or something. There’s a lot of physiological ways our bodies respond to feelings. Just feel it. 

Instantly, you’re probably going to want to judge it as negative and recognize that your brain wants to do that and just go back to the feeling, go back to experiencing it, like, “Is it in my chest? Is it in my arms? Is it in my fingers? Is it in my jaw?” Just focus on just taking a deep breath and breathing into that feeling and just trying to be okay with it. 

If at some point you decide you still want to proceed with your binge or whatever, that’s okay too. don’t beat yourself up for it, because it’s hard to break something like that that’s been trained and conditioned for a long time. The first step is pausing, and being aware of what’s actually happening. Usually, there’s a reason, and that’s something you can look into or think about in another time of your day. What is it that’s tripping you? Is it stress? Is it body image issues that your mother created when you’re a teenager? Is it an identity think, you like you feel like you have to be somebody for — Something for somebody and you feel like you’re failing? What is it? 

Understanding that, usually, if it’s an unhealthy craving, if it’s an emotional eating type of thing, realizing that it’s something that’s understandable and not feeling like it’s something you have to fight, but something you need to understand. I think that’s a big step. 

Also, cravings can also be nutritional. That’s another thing. For example, for years, I didn’t eat carbs, forever. Then, I would start of go off the diet, or when I went back to certain more normal, I had sugar cravings all the time. One thing I realized — Or one thing that happened to me was when I started eating more real foods that contain carbohydrates that I wouldn’t let myself eat before. For example, rice, or potatoes, or something like that. When I allowed myself to eat those, my sugar cravings completely disappeared. I didn’t think my body just wanted some more nutrition. There was a nutritional component that was missing there. 

Step one is making sure you have good nutrition. Step two is really understanding what’s triggering you, if it’s an emotional habit, emotional eating habit, and accepting it for what it is, not fighting it. Maybe work on addressing the original issue and maybe not try to treat it so much with food eventually. It’s hard. It’s a hard thing to do.

[0:44:04.8] MB: I know we’ve talked about it a little bit and you’ve used the term a couple of times. I’m curious, how do you define or think about kind of the idea of “real food” and what is that and how can listeners distinguish between that and, I guess, whatever the opposite of real food is?

[0:44:20.3] DR: Processed food. Yeah. I think of real food as anything that obviously comes from nature. Plants grow out of the ground. Fish swim in the sea. Birds — I guess, chickens don’t really fly, but an animal product. Those are all read food. Processed foods are foods that, often, they start as real foods, but then they’re processed into oblivion. One of my favorite examples is a flake, like a corn flake. 

Corn is a real food, but when you look at a cornflake, it didn’t grow on a tree. You know what I mean? It’s brought out of the ground looking like a flake. That means it’s been processed. If you can picture how it was created and it didn’t involved a factory, then you’re on the right track. 

[0:45:02.8] MB: Perfect. I think that’s a simple and kind of easy heuristic to use. I’m already categorizing things in my mind.

[0:45:09.4] DR: By the way, I’m not militant about any of these stuff. It’s like you can processed foods. I do. I eat pizza, and I eat sugar, and I eat all sorts of things. One of the critical things to understand is that you just don’t want those to be your main habits. You want your main habits. It’s kind of like the 80-20 principle. You want breakfast, lunch, and dinner, especially on weekdays. That’s something you do all the time. You want to those to be based on real foods. A lot of vegetables and real foods. 

If it’s brunch on your birthday, or whatever, go have whatever you want. Have the most on French toast. If you’re, most of the time, eating real foods, you can totally make room for those processed treats, or whatever you want, especially if you love them, or your evening pizza and beer night with your football buddies. It’s fine. 

I just wanted to bring that up, because it’s not about never eating anything. In fact, saying that anything in your life is off limits is generally a bad move, because it’s going to result in one of those psychological rebounds. You don’t want to be using will power, just craft the things that matter the most, your daily habits, from real foods. 

[0:46:22.4] MB: I think that’s a great point, and it’s not about sort of a strict elimination of X, Y, or Z, it’s more about kind of the weighted average of your activities should skew towards things that are real food and things kind of support a healthy lifestyle, but not to the extent that you are tapping your will power and creating suffering in your life and avoiding all the things that make you happy and make you enjoy your experiences. 

[0:46:49.2] DR: Yeah, exactly. 

[0:46:50.4] MB: What’s kind of one piece of homework that you would give to somebody who’s listening to this interview as kind of a concrete starting place for them to implement some of these ideas? 

[0:47:00.7] DR: One of the things that I recommend for a lot of people who are just getting started is to keep a little habit journal. We’re specifically talking about food and physical activity, because a lot of the times, like I was saying, we don’t really know what we’re doing all the time. We’re just not aware of it. Recognizing the things that you do often. 

Again, the things that you do not that often don’t matter so much. The things that you do often is you could sometimes find the biggest wins in there. You can sometimes find, “Oh my gosh! I eat a muffin every day for a snack after lunch, and that is 600 calories.” If you added up, 600 calories after lunch every single day at work, that’s 3,000 extra calories a week. That’s more than an entire extra day of food. 

You don’t even necessarily want the muffin, you just kind of want to take a break from work and want to socialize with your friends, grab an orange, or an apple, and cut that down to an extra 800 calories a week. That can be a huge win. You’ll lose 10 pounds in a couple of months doing a swap like that. Sometimes, it’s that simple to identify that, or just eat more vegetables. I always encourage everybody to eat more vegetables. 

[0:48:13.3] MB: Where can people find you, and your book, and your blog online? 

[0:48:17.6] DR: Yeah, come over to summertomato.com, and that’s where you can find pretty much everything. My book is called Foodist, my podcast is called Foodist. If you’re interested in getting started, like I said, the mindful meal challenge that I recently launched is a great intro to — And it’s free just to this whole world, and it’s fun, and people really enjoy it and it’s five days, so it’s not that hard.

[0:48:39.6] MB: Awesome. We’ll make sure to include links to Summer Tomato, links to Foodist, both the book and the podcast and the Mindful Meal Challenge in the show notes.  

[0:48:47.5] DR: Thank you so much. 

[0:48:48.6] MB: Awesome. Darya, thank you for coming on the show, it’s been a fascinating conversation and I’ve really enjoyed hearing your wisdom and learning all these different concepts. 

[0:48:57.1] DR: Absolutely. I appreciate your thoughtful questions. 

[0:49:00.2] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email.

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, because that helps more and more people discover The Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners, You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email list. 

If you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we’ve talked about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes at scienceofsuccess.co. Just hit the show notes button at the top. 

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

How To Listen To Your Emotions, Recover From Trauma, and Control Your Brain Waves with Rene Brent

In this episode, we discuss why you can’t out-think your emotions, the relationship between trauma and our mind/body connection, how to start listening to your emotions, the power of hypnosis, and how to drop into your body to experience what you’re truly feeling with Rene Brent.

Rene is a Certified Clinical and Transpersonal Hypnotherapist. She is the Director and Instructor of the Externship Program at the Orlando Florida Institute of Hypnotherapy. She’s also the bestselling author of How Big is Your But: Discover How To Let Go Of Blocks And Move Forward In Your Life.

We discuss:

• How working as a trauma nurse deepened Rene’s understanding of the mind/body connection

• How our thoughts control our body chemistry and physical reactions

• What is hypnosis and how does it work?

• How Rene approaches hypnosis from a science-based perspective and how hypnosis impacts your brain waves

• The difference between alpha brain waves and beta brain waves

• The relationship between hypnosis and flow states

• How we can get caught in conscious thought loops that prevent us from experiencing our emotions

• What happens when we consciously suppress our subconscious thoughts and feelings?

• How the subconscious mind bubbles up and tries to get you to listen

• How being very busy with your external life can prevent you from looking at your internal life

• True joy only exists when you start experiencing emotions and listening to your subconscious mind

• You cannot out-think your emotions, positive thinking doesn't work when you’re in a survival state

• How something that happens in childhood can imprint a false belief that can impact you for your entire life

• Communication is not what you said, its what the other person heard

• How do you listen more effectively to your subconscious mind?

• How to push a pause button and pattern interrupt in the subconscious brain

• Why you cannot heal something until you bring it up from the subconscious mind

• The power of breathing and breath exercises

• Anxiety is not an emotion, its a symptom of fear

• Emotions amplify when we push them down, they release when we allow them to happen

• While you may not have words for your emotions, your physical body is your emotional GPS

• The “felt sense” of emotion and how you feel it in your body

• When you drop into your body, you’re actually dropping into your subconscious mind

• If the heart is quiet and you pay attention, the mind will be still

• The pattern of how events create beliefs, beliefs create emotions, and emotions create symptoms

• How targeting the subconscious mind rapidly speeds up interventions

• The power of forgiveness and working with your inner child

• How negative self-talk is counter productive

• Why SLEEP is the fundamental pillar of psycholigcal wellbeing

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Website] Rene Brent Hypnosis

• [Book] How Big Is Your BUT? by Rene Brent

• [Book Site] Practice Happy Now

Episode Transcript

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

[0:00:12.6] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss why you can’t outthink your emotions, the relationship between trauma and your mind-body connection, how to start listening to your emotions, the power of hypnosis, and how to drop into your body to experience what you’re truly feeling with Rene Brent. 

The Science of Success continues to grow with more than 800,000 downloads, listeners in over 100 countries, hitting number one in New and Noteworthy, and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this incredible information?” A lot of our listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to awesome podcast, and more.

Because of that, we’ve created an epic resource just for you; a detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, it’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.

In our previous episode, we discussed what to do if you feel like you’re having a midlife crisis every two years, the importance of staying grounded while you make big changes in your life, how to pivot your career and take smart risks, how to discover your strengths and the right way to make big, exciting changes in your career with Jenny Blake? If you’re thinking about changing your career or making a pivot, listen to that episode.

[0:02:19.1] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Rene Brent. Rene is a certified clinical and transpersonal hypnotherapist. She’s the director and instructor of the Externship Program at the Orlando, Florida Institute of Hypnotherapy. She’s also the bestselling author of How Big Is Your Butt?: Discover How To Let Go Of Blocks And Move Forward In Your Life. 
Rene, welcome to The Science of Success.  

[0:02:41.1] RB: Thank you Matt. I’m happy to be here. Great day.

[0:02:44.1] MB: We’re very excited to have you on. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and some of your work, tell us a little bit about yourself and share your story.  

[0:02:51.7] RB: Certainly. I am been a registered nurse for over 25 years, and I used to think in nursing that the body control the mind. How we felt physically affected the mind. I started to see in nursing and in the trauma room, I was a trauma nurse, that if I could connect with somebody and help them have that human connection with me at the front of the bed if they just had a car accident, motorcycle accident, whatever, if I could do that, then they felt better, the vital signs were better, and they were more connected. That intrigued me.

Then, I got divorced and I wanted a new career and had some experience with healing and hypnotherapy and off I went and never looked back. It was the best decision, because now I understand truly that the mind, our thoughts, control the chemistry and our reaction to us physically. That is a very intriguing for me as a clinical hypnotherapist to help people with the mind-body connection. 

[0:03:47.1] MB: What is the difference between a hypnotist and a hypnotherapist?

[0:03:51.4] RB: Good question. A hypnotist usually has about 50 to 100 hours of training, someone who can do hypnosis can put someone into the state of hypnosis, which is not that difficult. It’s really a change in a brain wave. A hypnotherapist is someone who can put someone in the state of hypnosis, but actually allow them to get to their truth. A hypnotherapist — I do not tell people how to feel or think. Everyone, every single person has what they need within them, but they’re blocked by a conscious reality sometimes. 

To be able to get into the state of hypnosis and allow someone to awareness of their truth, then they can start releasing blocks. You have to be aware of blocks and false beliefs in order to change them, and hypnosis is a beautiful way to bypass the conscious mind, get to the boss, which is the subconscious mind and make those changes. I just people the opportunity and also within protocol to help them kind of guide them loosely to healing and a place of forgiveness and understanding, acceptance, and really change how they perceive life at the end of some sessions. It’s pretty remarkable.  

[0:04:59.1] MB: Tell me a little bit more about hypnosis itself. How does it work and how does it bypass these sort of conscious watchdog and get to the root of many of these subconscious issues?

[0:05:10.7] RB: Yes. Hypnosis, like I said, is just a change in a brainwave, and I really approach from this platform of science. That’s why I’m so excited to be on your show, Matt, because this is my world, is the science of the mind and what’s going on, and hypnosis is woo-woo. What I do is not obscure, it’s based in science and brainwaves and perceptions of a child and how we access information. 

I put someone into the state of hypnosis, it’s not that difficult. We go in and out of hypnosis all day long. We’re in a beta wavelength, which is human, which is survival. That’s 5%. That’s conscious mind. 95% is a subconscious mind and the way to access that is dropping into an alpha wave. We do that when we’re driving in a car, when we’re in a shower, we’re just hypnotized by the sounds of the waves on a beach when we’re really connected to that. That is hypnosis, and it’s not that hard to get into and that’s what I help people do. 

There, that’s when we’re really — People think hypnosis puts you to sleep, Matt, but it really wakes — It wakes you up. You’re in your truth, that aha moment. It’s life-changing foe people. I tell people I have the best job in the world, because I get a front row seat. I get to help people explore their truth and change it and change the reality and release those — My book, How Big Is Your But, those big buts that block them and they’re not even aware of that. Really crucial to change is getting in to the subconscious mind in an altered brain wave. 

[0:06:42.7] MB: That’s really fascinating. The idea that we dip in and out of hypnosis in sort of our day-to-day experience is something I’d never really thought of. You mentioned driving is an example. Another one that I think is really relevant for me personally is I love to play video games, and sometimes I feel like I can be playing a game and it’s almost like I’ve blacked out for 20 minutes and I’ll be like, “What just happened?” 

[0:07:02.7] RB: Exactly. When it’s four in the morning and you don’t know where the rest of the day went and you haven’t eaten for 10 hours because you’ve been playing this game, you have absolutely been hypnotized, when you have an alter in time lapse. My clients, I’ll do in a session for an hour and a half and they really could swear that they were in for 15, 20 minutes. That’s a good indication of hypnosis, absolutely.

[0:07:26.1] MB: Is there a relationship at all between hypnosis and flow states? I think of that, because in many ways I’ve always felt like when you have that, that sensation that time has passed by and you didn’t really understand it. In many ways, that’s connected with the idea of flow. 

[0:07:41.7] RB: Yes. Really, when you’re living in your passion and you’re living in your flow, then you’re living in your heart. You’re living in your truth, which is the subconscious mind. You can naturally go into that. I’ve never worked harder in my life, but I am so passionate. That’s why I tell people if you’re living in your passion, but you have days where you’re struggling, where you’re like, “Oh my God! Why am I doing this? What’s going on? I can’t do anything.” 

Hold on to the why you started it in the first place. If you’re in school or a new career, hold on to the why, the end game, because that will keep you in your flow. That will keep in your subconscious state and keep you out of a conscious mind that’s so analytical, it’s so judgmental. You’re absolutely right, being in your flow is being in a relaxed, living from the heart, actually. 

[0:08:31.2] MB: I love to dig into that, that concept, this sort of dichotomy between the analytical mind and how emotions are often kind of stored in our body and how we can get really caught up in thought patterns that prevent us from truly experiencing our emotions. I know that’s something you’ve done a ton of work on. Tell me a little bit about that, that whole concept.

[0:08:52.5] RB: That’s basically the work that I do with my clients. Our subconscious mind, 95%, the boss, when you want to get something done, you go to the boss, right? So it makes sense to drop in to this state and do the work. It holds our emotions, our beliefs, our memories, it holds all of that, and it’s always trying to talk to us, Matt. The subconscious mind’s job is to move us away from pain and towards pleasure. 

It wants us to heal. It has a lot of jobs and it’s always trying to communicate, and it comes up, and we’re not taught how to manage the subconscious mind, by the way. That’s a real problem for people, because it comes up and we push it down with, “No. I got to do this. I got to get this job done. I got to take this test. I got to do these things,” and you’re like, “No,” and you push it down and you push it down. 

If you spend a lifetime of not having awareness of the subconscious mind or not listening to it, it will show up to you, because it starts as a whisper and then it starts louder and louder and it’s screaming at you, and it could be screaming at you in lots of ways, which is maladaptive behaviors, addiction, weight gain, overuse of drugs and alcohol, porn, all of these things, it will show up and it’s trying to get you to listen. 

I tell people when they walk in my office, “You know what? I want you to think that behavior. I want you to think that 50-pound weight gain, because it got you in the office. When you’re stuck and you don’t know why, your subconscious mind is just dug its heels down and said, “No. You are going to listen to me now.” 

I love it when young people in their 20s come to see me, because if you could learn this in teens and — I also see children who have a lot of anxiety. If I can get someone between the age of 18 and 30 and they can change their patterns and start listening to the subconscious mind, then you’ve created a lifetime of ease. The majority of my clients are in their 50s, when they’ve had three marriages, they’ve had addiction, they’ve had health problems. I love teaching people this early, and it’s crucial to pay attention and just learn — It’s not that difficult to learn the skills to do it, and that’s one of the reasons why I do what I do, why I speak publicly, why I wrote the book, because I want to teach people mainstream. It doesn’t have to be woo-woo. Mainstream, how to learn some techniques to just listen through the day, and you’ll sleep better, you’ll eat better. It’s pretty incredible how life shifts when you do that.

[0:11:15.4] MB: I think it’s fascinating, and I’ve definitely experienced this in my own life, that if you consciously try to sort of suppress or avoid your emotions and your subconscious, it will bubble up, it will kind of manifest itself in all kinds of different ways. I think it’s so important to really understand and kind of start the journey, because it’s not sort of a one second awareness, but really begin the journey of understanding of how listening to your emotions and experiencing them can help you much more effectively deal with those kind of maladaptive behaviors that you talked about. 

[0:11:49.1] RB: They’re not going away. You can have a life — For instance, for me, I had some extreme false beliefs through my childhood and I found a way to move through them, push them aside, and have outsourced things that help me feel better. I was married for 20 years, I had three children, I was busy volunteering and working as a nurse. Kept very busy on the external, but I wasn’t listening to the internal. Then, I got divorced from a 20-year marriage, and all that was ripped away. It really unsettled me, and I was forced to look at it. 

I know what it’s like to push it down and be happy. When you close your heart, you don’t cry all your tears, but you don’t laugh all your laughter. Only through joy exist, Matt, when you can start paying attention to your subconscious mind. You don’t have to be in your emotions all the time, nobody is. There are three things you can do with emotions. You can shove them down and they’re going to show up in your body or your life somewhere. The second one is you can scream or cry or road rage, is about this. It’s never about what it’s about. It will show up. Nobody gets out and shoots somebody because they pulled them in front of them or they were going five miles beneath the speed limit. It’s about something else.

The third one is you can learn to allow. I teach people every day to open your heart and learn to allow without being caught up in the emotions. That is the key to success. You cannot overthink or outthink this stuff. Positive thinking doesn’t work when you’re in a survival state. The only thing you can do is survive as a human, and your body doesn’t know the difference between you’re running from a lion, or you have a job that you hate, or you’re overwhelmed with home life. You must drop into an altered state to be able to really shift that for yourself. 

I said a lot there, so go where you want with it. 

[0:13:41.6] MB: Yeah, you did. There are so many good points, and I want to dig in to a couple of them. One of the ones that I think is really important — We actually talked about this on a recent episode, is the idea that the example you used with road rage. It’s never about that particular moment of anger, or rage, or unhappiness, it’s much more about this deep-seated emotional environment that causes that to happen to begin with. I think that’s such a critical point that so many people miss, and there’s two sort of things that that makes me think of. 

One is the idea that everybody is kind of fighting a battle that you know nothing about, and that whole quote and that concept that helps sort of cultivate compassion. The other is that when people are sort of rude to you or mean to you, in many instances, it’s often not a reflection of you in any way, it’s often just a reflection of kind of their internal emotional situation spilling out into their experiences and events in their daily lives.  

[0:14:36.8] RB: Absolutely. This is absolutely the result of false beliefs. When we’re younger than 10 years old, Matt, our subconscious and conscious mind is open. Anything that’s said or done to us can be encoded as truth, and it doesn’t have to be drama or trauma, it could be as simple as a teacher who laughed at you when you got up and misspelled a word or did a thing on the board. It could be — I had a woman who had a beautiful life by anyone’s standards, but she woke up every morning unhappy, and sad, and she didn’t understand that she came to see me, and we regressed to the first time she felt these things, and hypnosis. 

She went to third grade and she was standing outside of a room with her best friends, and they decided that day that she was not good enough to be in their group, and they made fun of her. Encoded, stamped into her in that moment was that she’s not good enough, that she’s not a part of. She carried that pattern for the rest of her life, but didn’t have an awareness of it. 

False beliefs, we filter our perception of the world through that every day. If you have a belief that you’re not good enough, that you’re ugly, or that you’re not lovable, anything that someone says to it, a boss, a partner, a friend, someone in a grocery store, if they say something to you, it’s going to through that filter and it’s changing what you’re hearing. 

If a boss says to you, “You know what? I really want you to look at this number. I really want you to just take another look at that, what you handed in to me.” If you feel like you’re not good enough or stupid, it’s filtering through that. You’re hearing a completely different message, “My boss hates me. They think that I’m stupid.” That’s not what the boss was saying. It changes, and it causes this turmoil within us without us even knowing it. It’s very important to understand those false beliefs and the perception and pay attention to what we’re hearing. 

I do work with couples and I tell them, “If someone’s reacting to you, it doesn’t make sense with what you thought you were saying.” You’re married, right Matt? 

[0:16:38.2] MB: I am. 

[0:16:39.2] RB: Yeah, so you understand this. You could say something to your wife and she has a completely different reaction than what you expected. 

[0:16:45.9] MB: Absolutely. 

[0:16:46.3] RB: I want you to ask her, “What did you hear me say?” Communication is not what you say. It’s what the person hears. This is true communication. Ask her, what did you hear me say? She maybe hearing something completely different. That’s when you start talking about it, when you clarify what you meant, because everyone is doing this everyday with anything that is said or done to them.

[0:17:08.4] MB: I love that question, “What did you hear me say?” It’s a great way to kind of pierce through the filter and see what kind of came out the other side and how someone interpreted your actions. 

[0:17:19.1] RB: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.  

[0:17:19.9] MB: Before we dig into kind of filters and false beliefs and limiting beliefs, which I want to go into, I want to zoom back out or kind of talk about something we talked about a little earlier, which is how do we kind of cultivate the ability to listen more effectively to our subconscious mind? 

[0:17:37.4] RB: Certainly. Learning some techniques to push a pause button if you’re feeling overwhelmed, anxious, fearful, angry, just be able to push a pause button, because pushing a pause button, pattern interrupts in the brain, allows you to just stop for a minute and then regroup. When you regroup, you can get in touch with what was really going on with you. Then, you can have the truth talk, “What’s really going on with me? Is that the truth?” Then, you can start those. 

In my book, each chapter I have, each one build on the other where I have techniques where you could start listening to the subconscious mind pretty effectively. You cannot heal it till you bring it up from the subconscious mind. For instance, if someone is feeling completely overwhelmed, what they can do is breathing. I know breathing is so — I don’t know. Popular, or it’s a tag line, but it’s really important, and I teach people why to breathe. 

When we’re feeling uncomfortable, or we’re feeling fearful, or anxious — Anxiety, by the way, is just a symptom of fear, and it’s a chemistry of the body that’s anxiety. It’s not an emotion. When you’re feeling that in your body, the physical symptoms, because every emotion has a physical reaction. When you’re feeling that, we tend to breathe shallow. It’s part of the fight, flight, or freeze. We freeze. We think that if we breathe shallow and we just stay put for a minute, that things are going to go away, and they’re not. We’re just going to get hit by it harder. 

If you’re breathing shallow through the day, I want to encourage people to take a big breath in, really breathe in and then exhale, and when you do that, you’re actually holding it for a few seconds, you’re pressing slightly on a vagus nerve right at the diaphragm. When you do that, you allow this beautiful surge of chemicals and your parasympathetic nervous system to kind of come and check and balance. You can shift things pretty quickly by taking a few breaths when you’re feeling that way, and that’s a good way step to pattern interrupting.  

[0:19:39.1] MB: On the concept of learning to allow, how do we cultivate that as a reaction as supposed to either ignoring, kind of showing our emotions down, or just letting them simmer into anger, or crying, or whatever it might be?  

[0:19:55.0] RB: We’re all allowing, one way or the other — And we’re not allowing by using alcohol, drugs, whatever, to suppress. To learn to allow is dropping into an altered state of hypnosis into an alpha wave, which could be deep breathing, doing a countdown, getting some meditation that you like. I have two free ones on my website, or Headspace is a great thing to do, and get in the habit of taking about 5, 10 minutes a day to just drop into this day and say, “What’s going on with me right now?” Not allowing it to amplify. 

If you’re feeling angry, take those breaths and drop into say, “What’s really going on with me?” I teach techniques, like tapping. I don’t know if you’ve heard of EFT, or tapping, it’s a good way for people to just start understanding. I do meditations, like opening the heart, or teach people to drop in and connect to higher perspective. The real change to listening is teaching yourself quickly how to drop into an alpha wave, and it’s not hard to do. Breathing, count-downing, learn how to do self-hypnosis, all hypnosis is self-hypnosis. 

When you’re feeling something, you’re saying, “Man! I’m really angry right now.” Just acknowledge it. Don’t try to push it down. Don’t blame it on someone. Take accountability for it, “Right now, I am feeling angry.” “Man! That really hurt my feelings. I’m feeling very sad.” When we learn to allow and acknowledge emotions, thy begin to release. They amplify when we push them down. They release when we allow. Just by saying, “What’s going on with me right?” “Oh! I’m feeling sad.” Just that will make people feel better. 

People feel better just in 20 minutes of talking to me on the couch, because I don’t tell them how to feel. I just give them an opportunity to express how they feel. Just acknowledging it and then saying, “Okay. I’m feeling angry. I’m ready to release it. What’s really going on with me?” Then, dropping into an altered state. Was that clear enough for you?

[0:21:58.1] MB: No, that’s great. I think that makes a lot of sense. I think those are some really valuable tactics to kind of drop into your body a little bit. Personally, I’m very kind of cerebral person, and one of the things I’ve been working a lot on is trying to cultivate that body awareness. This is something I’m really fascinated with. 

[0:22:15.9] RB: Sure. Let me tell you about body awareness, and not everybody has emotional words. Not everyone wants to acknowledge that they’re sad, or afraid, or angry. Some people just don’t have that ability to acknowledge that. I have people that can’t give me motional words. What you always have, always, is your physical body. Your physical body is your emotional GPS. Emotions show up, because you have an emotion, you have a chemical response, and it reacts in the body. Then, you have a reaction in the body, and then it validates the thought. Then, you’re in a mind merry-go-round. 

You know when you’re angry in one little — This happens in couples sometimes. When you’re angry, then you have a chemical response and your body start to tense up, then you think of other things that made you angry, and then you’re like, “Yeah! You did that.” Then, you go round and round and round. Before you know it, you’re completely off topic and you’re rageful. It’s because of the chemical response to it. 

When we’re feeling emotion, there is something called the felt sense, feeling the sensation of emotion, energy in motion. It shows up usually somewhere between your chin and your lower abdomen. When you’re angry, or upset, or anxious, or fearful, Matt, where do you feel it in your body? 

[0:23:31.1] MB: That’s something I’ve been thinking about, and after reading your material and watching a couple of interviews, I started to kind of develop some awareness of that. I think, typically, it’s kind of almost like right below my rib cage is where I think I typically feel it. Sometimes in my lower back, maybe. It’s something that I — As I said, I’m still trying to understand and cultivate this ability. It’s something I’m really curious about and want to learn more about.

[0:23:57.4] RB: I teach people, when you drop into that sensation, you’re actually dropping into the subconscious mind, because now you’re allowing. If you’re feeling this thing in your lower rib cage, what you do is take the breaths and then you put your hand right where you feel it, drop into the sensation of it. Don’t judge it, just drop into it and say, “If there was an emotion attached to this, what would it be?” It might be fear, it might be anger, whatever. Don’t question it. You’ll hear the word.

The subconscious mind is excited, because you’re listening to it. You’re dropping into this sensation, so you’re going to feel better already. When you drop into that sensation right there and just say, “Oh! This feels like fear. Okay, so what’s going on with me?” Then when you breathe, you’ll start hearing, “I’m afraid I’m going to fail,” or “I’m afraid that I’m not going to be loved,” or “I’m afraid they’re going to leave me.” You will hear those things. Then, that’s when you start arguing for your truth. The truth is that I am smart and I can do this. The truth is I am lovable, I am capable, I can create this life that I want, but you have to drop in and understand what’s going on for you. 

If you do not have a word that shows up for you, there’s something you can do that I teach in the book called Release the Piece. Christian Mickelsen created this and I have adopted it for myself. I love it, because it’s a way to allow without acknowledging what’s actually going on with you. If you have that feeling in your ribcage or your lower back, Matt, I want you to just put your hand on it. No word comes up. You have no emotional word for it. That’s okay. Send that emotion, that feeling, that sensation — I know this sound really corny, especially for your audience, but it works. Send it acceptance and love. That’s all you do. No judgment about what it is, why you don’t have a word for it, anything. Just send it acceptance and love and it will release. 

Often, it shifts. I tell people to follow it, and it will go from their stomach, to their heart, or to their neck, and then it will let. It will release, because what you’re doing is allowing to backdoor away to allow emotion through the sensation, because the sensation is your emotional GPS in the subconscious mind. 

[0:26:11.4] MB: I love that. I think it’s amazing, and I’m definitely going to practice all of these exercises next time I feel something or kind of feel  a little bit off. I can’t wait to put in some of these ideas into practice.  

[0:26:23.4] RB: Yeah. If people do that through the day, when you feel it coming up and not showing, it doesn’t take long, 30 seconds, and I can help someone release it. You can learn that, absolutely. Everyone who’s listening can release that. When you do that through the day, then the evenings are going to be better for you. You’re going to eat better. You’re going to take better care of your body. You’re going to sleep better. Absolutely, sleep better. Then, you’re going to create this pattern of acknowledgement, but also peace. The mind is a reflection of the heart, Matt. The heart is quiet, and you pay attention to it, the mind will be still and you will be able to focus and reach your goals and create the success that you want. 

[0:27:04.0] MB: I’d love to dig into kind of the relationship between — This is getting into more kind of the idea of these false beliefs and the filters that we have that explain — That we use to interpret reality. I’d love to get into the relationship between beliefs, and emotions, and external events, and how those are all kind of connected and how we form these filters that shape our understandings of reality.

[0:27:27.4] RB: Absolutely, and this is the basis of the work. I’m an instructor, like you said, of hypnotherapy, so I teach this to my students through the school. There is a pattern. It’s events and emotions. Really, it’s relationships, because it’s not just one event, it’s a relationship. Its events and relationship that usually happen younger than 10 that occur that create beliefs. Beliefs create emotions, and emotions create symptoms. It doesn’t matter how old you are, so let me say that again. Events or relationships younger than 10 — Like I said, it doesn’t have to be drama or trauma. I have people that say, “But I had an amazing life. I had an amazing child hood. My parents were incredible. I had everything that I wanted.” “Okay. Let’s look into that deeper.” 

Maybe there was a sibling who is really good at a sport, and everybody went to the games, and the parents thought they were creating this incredible environment of family and together, but the perception of the child was, “Maybe, I’m not good enough, because I’m not out there on the field.” You understand what I’m saying?” It doesn’t have to be the big thing, it’s the perception of the child in the moment. 

Event, relationship lead us to false beliefs. Sometimes they can lead to amazing beliefs. It doesn’t always have to be false. If you had a parent who told you, “You are fabulous, and amazing, and so lovable,” then that’s what you’re going to carry with you. Events, relationships, beliefs, false beliefs, usually is what I deal with, emotions, because if you believe that you’re worthless, you get believe you’re going to have anger, or sadness, or hurt about that. Then, that causes symptoms. Why does it cost symptoms? Because a subconscious mind’s job is to move us away from pain towards pleasure. It’s going to do what it can. 

If you discover that at 11 years old, if you ate French fries, or a doughnut, and it made you feel better, you’re creating that pattern. Now, you have eating issues as you’ve grown older, or you realized when you were 15 that all the pain would go away when you drank a beer, then that could be something that you just use as your ability to release emotion. 

People come to me for symptoms all the time. People say to me, “What do you deal with?” Majority, I deal with anxiety and addiction, but I deal with all kinds of things. It’s just a symptom. I have no judgment about someone walks in with me. I know that behind all of it is emotions, and beliefs, and relationships, or events younger than 10.

[0:29:53.2] MB: For somebody who’s suffering from some of these kind of these false beliefs, how do we start to discover them and how do we work to kind of transform them? 

[0:30:05.2] RB: You don’t necessarily need to see a hypnotherapist. I’m a hypnotherapist, that’s my modem of — If you go to regular therapy, you better have someone who’s going to help you drop into the subconscious mind, or you’re taking two or three years to get to one issue, because the conscious mind is going to — You’re going to spin around in it, and if you get to the subconscious mind, you’re lucky. It takes a lot of repetition to do that. 

Find a way to drop into the subconscious mind. I tell people — I can do this on the couch for a session. I tell people, “Are you feeling that when you’re talking about that you’re angry with your boss, or you feel like you’re not respected in your life. Where do you feel that?” “In my chest.” “Okay. Drop into that chest. What does it feel like?” “It feels like sadness.” “Okay. Now, what does that remind you of?” They usually go back to the first time they did it very quickly. 

I encourage people to go, find that inner child, take some deep breaths, relax your mind, go find that inner child who’s feeling that hurt, or that sadness, or that fear and ask that child, “What do you need?” I have a whole chapter on forgiveness. It’s about really forgiving yourself, or others, and moving forward. If you don’t have forgiveness, if you’re in that moment — Because, every day, that false belief, you’re re-remembering that hurt, or you’re remembering that situation, or that relationship, and that regret every day. It’s about acknowledging it. 

Drop into the sensation and find your inner child, and they’re holding the belief, and tell that inner child, “What do you need from me?” When people do this, it’s so beautiful, Matt, because when you can connect to that child who’s hurting, that’s who’s having the behavior. That’s who’s struggling. It’s not the adult. The adult knows they want to do this, they want to have this career. They want to have this relationship, but when they’re not finding it, when it’s mismatched, it’s because the inner child is waiting for you to come back. When you connect to that inner child truly and say, “No. The truth is you are lovable. You are not that situation. You are not what that person said. You are so much more.” The only person that can heal that inner child is the adult ego, and it’s so, so important. I love doing that kind of work. I love people who just untether themselves from it. 

Because when you can heal that little child, that inner child with love and acceptance and forgiveness, guess what goes away? All the symptoms. This is the basis of my work with addiction. When you’re feeling worthless and your inner child is screaming at you and you feel unlovable, the only thing you have to do is opiates or alcohol, you’re going to do it. When you heal the inner child and they feel strong, and they feel lovable, and they know their strength and it matches the adults, man, the addiction behavior goes, because you know you’re valuable. You’re going to want to take great care of yourself. You know that you can create this life. 

[0:33:00.3] MB: So much wisdom in there, and I think it’s fascinating that these experiences that we have before — In many cases, even that we can’t even remember consciously. Tremendous power in shaping who we are 10, 20, 30, 40 years down the road. If you don’t really meaningfully investigate some of these issues, these can be patterns that end up defining your life in a major way.

[0:33:26.5] RB: They can. If you have a pattern, or you feel stuck, or you procrastinate, or you sabotage and you don’t know why, the answer is in your subconscious mind, absolutely, for sure. I know from my own experience, I was left from my childhood. I had an alcoholic mother, and I never felt safe, and she did the best that she could, and I have forgiveness in my heart for her. She’s passed now, but I understood that it left me with unlovable, unwanted, and not valued. I covered that up through external things. If your value is in a job, or a car, or whatever, a girlfriend, or a relationship, and it goes away and you’re so hurt and it doesn’t match what just happened, you need to take a look at what buttons it’s pushing. 

For me, I was devastated by the end of the relationship. One day, I found myself in my closet and I was just hugging, crying, and hugging myself, and I was like, “Oh my God! I used to do this when I was a child. I would go hide in the closet and just tell myself, “You’re okay. You’re okay.” I understood the connection, and I understood — Anyone can get over an end of a relationship, it wasn’t easy, but you can do it. 

What I was really hurting over was that the band aid had been taken away from my false beliefs, unlovable, all those things. When I healed that little girl and I understood that we didn’t have to be in the closet anymore, that we could go out and be proud and know our value, everything changed around my relationship with my X-husband, and I understood him, I saw him clearly. I saw my accountability and end of the relationship. I have to tell you, now, I look back with wisdom. Thank God, because I wouldn’t have this life. I wouldn’t have this career. I wouldn’t have the love in my life that I do if I just stayed in that and pretended like everything was okay. 

[0:35:18.2] MB: What do you think —  I know we’ve talked about a lot of these kind of methodologies, but what do you think the core thing was, or the few things were that allowed you to heal that inner child. As you said, once you kind of rip off the band aid, it can be really scary emotionally. I’m very curious, what do you think kind of helped you heal those issues?

[0:35:37.9] RB: When you’re going through an emotional trauma like a divorce, a near death, death of someone close to you, you are open emotionally subconsciously. Everything feels very raw to you. That’s a good time to do traditional therapy, in my opinion. That’s what I did. Then, I started feeling better. I started closing off. Then, I switch therapists to someone who is better at getting me into the subconscious mind. Then, I remembered the work that I had done in hypnotherapy. It took me a while to get there. Sometimes we don’t have awareness when we feel overwhelmed. I decided I was going to be a hypnotherapist. I wanted to help people, and I did my own work in hypnotherapy. I stayed in the subconscious mind. 

The thing about doing hypnosis and hypnotherapy is you go right into the subconscious mind, and it happens pretty quickly. My clients’ three to five sessions have a really good understanding and have some tools to be able to manage the rest of their life, so it can happen pretty quickly. Of course, I’m a hypnotherapist, I’m going to tell people that hypnotherapy is incredible. It’s not woo-woo. You have to get someone who’s educated. In my school, they have over 500 hours of training. If you’re going to go to someone to do this kind of work, make sure they have the expertise. Make sure that they can put you in hypnosis. Also, when you’re in there, do the work that you need.  

[0:36:55.1] MB: I’m curious about another topic that you’ve touched on in the past, which is the idea of these kind of I am stories. I know that’s tied into our filters and our false beliefs, but I’d love to hear a little bit about that. 

[0:37:06.6] RB: I am is your belief system about yourself, and it is the false beliefs. We can change our I am story, but we just have to be aware of it. We don’t know what we’re saying about ourselves. If consciously, you’re staying, “I am fabulous. I am so capable. I’m a winner,” but your heart, you’re getting that feeling in your chest, it’s not congruent. When you’re not congruent, then it’s impossible. A mind in conflict, Matt, will very seldom reach its goal or success. 

Be aware of thezI am story. If you have a negative self-talker in your brain, then you need to get a hold to that, because it’s filtering. It’s the I am. That’s telling you the truth, and it’s got the highest intention for you, but it’s affecting you every day physically, because it’s sending all those chemicals. 

One of the first things I do with the I am story first is teach people how to go into an altered state. You can learn to do it on your own. Then, listen to what your truth is and argue for your truth, but you must argue with that inner critique. There’s a chapter called Cracking the Ego Code, where I teach people about the inner critique, the inner child, and the adult ego. You just learn some simple skills and you start arguing with it. You don’t allow it. 

You would never allow someone to speak to you the way we’d speak to ourselves inside our heads, never ever. We would be violent against them. We allow it for ourselves. It doesn’t makes sense. 

[0:38:33.5] MB: I think that’s a great point, which is that, and many times our self-talk is so harsh and critical and yet we would never speak to a friend that way, we’d never speak to a loved one that way. We’d never would allow anyone else to talk to us that way. Yet, that’s often how we speak to ourselves. It’s fascinating that something that most people are sort of almost unaware of that that’s even taking place.  

[0:38:56.4] RB: That inner critique has the highest intention for you. Usually, it is a sub-personality of the ego state. Usually, any behavior that we have as a sub-personality of the ego state, it usually has the highest intention. The subconscious mind does not want to harm you, it wants to help you. 

I’ve had clients who were heroin addicts. The part of them that was the addiction was that they would rather see them dead than live through the pain. That highest intention was to help, but it doesn’t work in their life and their world. If you have a behavior of that negative self-talk, it’s trying to remind you to be the best that you can be. It thinks, and if it criticizes you that you’re going to make changes. It’s not the truth. 

We are run in an old program. I tell people, “You’re not going to run the same computer program for 20 years. Why would you do that in your mind?” When you go to that part of you — I love doing parts therapy. I do it all the time. I love it, because when you understand that it is the highest intention of keeping you happy or finding success, but you change the behavior, you stop that internal battle, you hear a supportive voice every day, people’s lives just fly. They just untether themselves and they just soar. 

I love that. I love hearing about the successes of my clients when they tell me, “You know, when I started being nicer to me, then I stopped filtering through that I am this, or I am that, I only heard, “I am capable. My best is good enough, and if there are areas in my life I want to improve, I’ll do that with self-love and self-acceptance,” then they were able to focus easier, because they’re not in survival. They were able to accomplish their goals. They meet incredible people in their life. Stop addictive behavior. It’s fantastic. 

[0:40:42.5] MB: I’d love to did in a little bit — And we may have already kind of covered this, but to talk about kind of mental additions and addictive behaviors. I know we touched on that earlier. I’d love to kind of get your thoughts on why those happen and how we can help overcome them. 

[0:40:58.0] RB: Certainly. Like I said, the subconscious mind, it’s job is to move you away from pain towards pleasure. If you have this internal battle of feeling worthless, or unlovable, or not good enough all day long, whether you acknowledge it or not, it’s showing up for you. You’re re-remembering all of these through the day, and the subconscious mind will grab on to what it knows. 

If it knows alcohol, if it knows porn, if it knows cigarettes, if it knows food, that’s what it’s going to do. It wants you to feel better. It doesn’t think about the past or the future, it just in the now. It wants you to feel better now. That’s why addictive urges just come on to people and they just like, “You know what? I had that cigarette. I had that drink. I was smoking pot. I was — Whatever. Before I even knew it.” That’s how powerful the subconscious mind is. 

When you move through the day and start acknowledging how you’re feeling and you work with the inner child and you release those false beliefs of worthless and not valuable, it’s very hard to stay clean and sober, or to release an addictive behavior when you believe you’re worthless, or not good enough, or not capable. It’s about getting to that. Then, learning your tools through the day, pattern interrupting this stuff, and have a plan. You have to have a plan. If you don’t, you’re going to move right into the behavior before you know it. 

You learn your techniques, you spend your time — I tell people every morning, this is a great way to do this, is every morning before you open your eyes, you’re already in a hypnotic state. Like I said, it’s a change in a brain wave from alpha, to theta, to delta. Delta is sleep. Every day you go into an altered state to go to sleep and every morning when you come out of sleep. I set my alarm 10 minutes before I’m supposed to wake up — Or 20. I spend that moment imagining my day and how I want it to go, only positive. 

I’ve already set myself up chemically and emotionally and in thought, because I’m in an altered state already. It’s a great opportunity to do that. I have a plan. I don’t have an addictive personality. Sugar is probably my thing, and I think that’s — That everybody in the world, the country, for sure, sugar. I have a plan of how I want to respond to decisions I want to make about sugar that day. I give myself permission to create that, and it’s so much easier for me to stay in that moment. 

Also, feel the joy. When you do positive visualization, you can’t just put the thought out there, “I’m going to be a success,” because if you do that with fear, it runs away from you.” I know I’m going off topic, because I could talk about this all day long. Give yourself the opportunity through the day, would be the biggest technique that I would talk to people, to allow emotion, acknowledge that felt sense and have a plan for anything that shows up for you.

[0:43:53.4] MB: What does it mean to you to practice happy? I know that’s a term you use in the book. I’m curious to kind of give listeners a framework to think about going forward. What does that mean to you?

[0:44:03.8] RB: Sure. I’m a happiness hunter, and the idea of practice happy, when you know about the science of the mind and the body, and neuroplasticity, you know that we train our brain. How we fire it, we wire it that way. Some people who are just trying to survive, it’s our natural instinct to survive. Sometimes we have to remember the negative. If negative things have happened to us, we never want to feel like that, so we’re always scanning for it. 

When you’re scanning for it, you know people who are very negative about everything and they don’t even see it, because they’re in survival mode all the time. Now, they got this negative, negative, negative. We learned this from ages where we had to remember what the cave bear looked like, and smelled like, and felt like, so it stays on the forefront of our thoughts. Negative, negative, negative, now we’ve trained our neurons to scan that way. Happiness is not going to come and sit in your lap. You must hunt for it. You must go find it. The way to do that is if you — Awareness, conscious awareness, is bring it to your forefront. If you see a negative thought, you flip it around. If you continue to do that even if it’s just, “You know what? I woke up this morning,” or, “Okay. I didn’t get fired.” Whatever it is, “I have $20 in the bank. Last week, I only had five.” Whatever it is, find something positive, because now you’re retraining the neurons. When you do that, you practice the state of happy, you’re retraining your neurons, and all the research shows beautiful research, neuroplasticity, proving what I do, is that you can retrain it. You can literally change your mind in three to four weeks, but you must practice it. 

That’s why I have bands, and shirts, and it’s part of my book chapter, because we can take back our happiness. You have to know your version of happiness. You have to have awareness, but you can practice is. You can be a but buster, and you could be a happiness hunter all day long, and it shifts to your perception. If you continue to do that, then, eventually, you’re just going to be that way.

[0:46:08.4] MB: We’re talked about a bunch of different kind of strategies and interventions to help people, or for people who are suffering. I’m curious, what’s kind of one starting place, or one sort of simple piece of homework that you would give to somebody listening to this interview that wants to kind of take a concrete step down this path? 

[0:46:27.0] RB: I would say to them — People tell me I can’t meditate, I can’t go into hypnosis. Everyone can do it. Learn a technique. Do Headspace. Go to my website, practicehappynow.com, download a meditation for sleep, or to meet higher-self, to hear that positive perspective again. Find a way to drop yourself into altered state and then start arguing for your truth. Learn some techniques to allow, like I said, the emotions, or the felt sense in your body. If you start doing that and you gain awareness, but you must do it in an altered state. You must do it in alpha wave. You can’t outthink this. You must get in touch with your heart, and then your mind will follow. 

Find something that works for you. Do the morning thing when you wake up, just start with that. That’s a good one. Do that. Also, if you’re not sleeping, then, sure, download my sleep meditation. It just takes you in a natural state. If you’re not sleeping, then you’re automatically going to be in survival state, which is beta or high beta. Your body is the priority as a human. If you’re not sleeping, you just put yourself chemically into a survival state. We must sleep. You’ll have so much more effective life. You’ll have so much success if you sleep, very, very important. If you’re not sleeping, then start with that, for sure, and exercising a little bit will send those chemicals moving your body. You don’t have to do a big workout, but you got to move your body and release those chemicals. I think that would be a good start. You don’t have to go straight into inner child work, just gain awareness. This is why I wrote the book, because it’s an introduction of people to learn and manage a subconscious mind. 

[0:48:09.0] MB: Where can listeners — And I think you just mentioned it, but where can listeners find you and find the book online? 

[0:48:15.9] RB: Of course, I’m on Amazon. How Big Is Your But is on Amazon. I’m so proud it’s an international bestseller now, six months going, so I’m super proud and happy, because that means people are getting the message. It’s great to say I’m an international bestseller, but people are getting the message, and I’m getting the emails about how it’s affecting them. 

Go to practicehappynow.com, download the meditations. If you’re interested in the book, there’s a couple of chapters there for you if you want to just start looking at it. That’s fine. Also, go to renebrenthypnosis.com, and podcasts like this, and check me out. I’m all over the place. I love to speak to people. I speak all over the country. Just find me. 

If you’re a listener, has a specific question for me, please email me. Please email me and ask, because I love helping people get started. If they have a specific question, I would love to hear from anybody. Really, that’s why I do what I do, Matt. 

[0:49:13.0] MB: You don’t have to share, but is there an email that you’d want them to send it to that you’re willing to kind of put on the episode?

[0:49:18.1] RB: Of course — No, my email is fine, it’s rene@practicehappynow.com, or renebrenthypnosis.com, either one. Just send me a note, text me, I love it. I’m open.

[0:49:30.9] MB: Awesome. Rene, thank you so much. This has been a fascinating conversation, and I’ve really enjoyed kind of hearing your story and learning information. I think there are some very practical kind of mind-body interventions to cultivate body awareness, and I’m very excited to implement many of these ideas. Thank you very much for being on the show. 

[0:49:49.6] RB: Oh! You’re so welcome, and let me know how it goes. 

[0:49:52.7] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email.

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes, because that helps more and more people discover The Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners, You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to scienceofsuccess.co, and  joining our email list. 

If you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we’ve talked about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes at scienceofsuccess.co. Just hit the show notes button at the top. 

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

Find Your Dream Job, Pivot Your Career, and Take Smart Risks with Jenny Blake

In this episode we discuss what to do if you feel like you’re having a mid-life crisis every two years, the importance of staying grounded while you make big changes in your life, how to pivot your career and take “smart risks,” how to discover your strengths, and the right way to make big, exciting changes in your career with Jenny Blake.

Jenny Blake is a bestselling author, career and business strategist. Jenny began in the startup world and went on to work in Training and Career Development at Google before pivoting to pursue her own projects full time. She’s the author of Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One: and has been featured on TED, CNBC, Forbes, US World & News, and more!

We discuss: 

• What to do if you feel like you’re having a mid-life crisis every two years

• The importance of learning, growing, and making an impact

• How to find “pivot points” in your life and what to do when you find them

• The importance of staying grounded while you pivot and while you make big changes in your life

• The 4 stages of pivoting & how to take "smart risks”

• The comfort zone, the panic zone, and the stagnation zone

• The critical importance of finding your strengths

• Exercises that help you truly find your strengths

• The risk of “self assessment” strength tests and what you can do to find your strengths more effectively

• The critical importance of bolstering your bench

• “Frentors” and how they can create accountability and help you achieve your goals

• How finding people who are a few steps ahead of you can help you

• The “perpetual newbie state” and the critical importance of learning and growing

• Think of your career like a smartphone, not a ladder

• Why you don’t have to know what direction you’re heading in next, but you can try many directions and double down on the ones that are working the best

• The importance of "10% projects” and how you can find them either within your career or in entirely new spaces

• The “15 for 30” challenge and how you can transform your options

• Why you should revel in what others reject

• How someone else’s grunt work can be your area of genius

• The “3 Es” of Testing a new idea and how they can help you pick the right direction to move in

• How you can “flip failure”

• How defining failure can help you overcome the fear of it

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One by Jenny Blake

• [Website] Pivot Method

• [Book Site] StrengthsFinder

• [Personal Site] Jenny Blake

• [Website] Pivot Coaching

• [Website] RescueTime

• [Website] The Momentum Crew

• [Website] 16 Personalities - Free Personality Test

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind in what makes peak performance tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss what to do if you feel like you’re having a midlife crisis every two years. The importance of staying grounded while you make big changes in your life. How to pivot your career and take smart risks, how to discover your strengths and the right way to make big, exciting changes in your career with Jenny Blake.

The science of success continues to grow with more with more than 800,000 downloads. Listeners in over 100 countries, hitting number one in New and Noteworthy and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this incredible information?” A lot of our listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge you get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to podcast and more.

Because of that, we created an epic resource just for you. A detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, It’s a guide we created called  How to Organize and Remember Everything All you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.

In our previous episode, we talked about emotional intelligence. What is emotional intelligence and why does it matter so much? We looked at how science demonstrates that emotional intelligence matters far more than your IQ and what you can do to develop and improve your EQ as well as how to build the muscle of focus, and much more with Dr. Daniel Goldman. If you want to improve your emotional intelligence, which is highly important, listen to that episode.

[0:02:24.4] MB: Today, we have another amazing guest on the show, Jenny Blake. Jenny is a bestselling author, career and business strategist, she began in the startup world and went on to work in training and career development at Google before pivoting to pursue her own projects full-time. She’s the author of pivot, the only move that matters is your next one and has been featured on Ted, CNBC, Forbes, US world and News and much more.

Jenny, welcome to the science of success.

[0:02:49.0] JB: Matt, thank you so much for having me, it’s great to be here.

[0:02:52.7] MB: Well we’re very excited to have you on here. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and the book, tell us a little bit about kind of your background and your story?

[0:02:59.8] JB: Although I have worked in various forms of career development for the last 10 years, the book really came from feeling like I was going through a quarter life or midlife crises every two years. I remember leaving college early to work at a startup, as you mentioned, after two years, hit a plateau, moved over to Google, almost left Google within two years and ended up pivoting internally to coaching and career development and when I left Google, this is now almost six years ago, but I remember thinking, that was the hardest career decision I probably ever have to make. 

People thought I was crazy. I joked that it was like breaking up with Brad Pitt. “You really think can do better than Google? Why on earth would you try and start your own business let alone moving from san Francisco to New York, the most expensive city in the country at that time? I thought that was tough and I rode the adrenaline of trying to do my own thing for the first year and a half and then once again, hit this pivot point where I wasn’t sure what was next. This time I didn’t have a steady paycheck to fund that exploration. 

As my bank account balance dwindled, pretty much down to zero. I felt like there has got to be a better way and there’s either something really wrong with me that I am destined to never be happy. I mean, if I wasn’t happy at Google where would I be? If I couldn’t make it on my own, what’s left? The other hypothesis was that this midlife, quarter life crisis feeling is actually accelerating and that because of all the changes in our economy with technology and automation and outsourcing, we’re all going to have to get better at it.

As I started to do research and try and solve this for myself, I realized that the latter is really the case. It was only when I started to double down on what had been working for me that I kind of pulled myself out of the business, whirlwind of what’s next and I ended up tripling my income that year and hit six figures I have since.

I kind of saw close-up the mistake that so many of us make when it comes to our career and we put pressure on ourselves. We feel bad, we often take it personally when we hit pivot points but so often a product of our success more than anything else.

That’s what inspired the book and now I have to say, having launched the book, I’m at another pivot point, who knows what’s next but I feel much calmer and clearer amidst that uncertainty, which was really the goal the whole time because none of us can predict the future but I would love for everybody listening to this to feel calmer in the face of that uncertainty.

[0:05:32.5] MB: I’d love to dig into the point you made about kind of having a midlife crisis every couple of years. That’s something that I feel like a lot of millennials, especially, deal with and I’m curious kind of to hear your thoughts on it.

[0:05:44.6] JB: There’s so much shame and blame in the media on millennials. Like, “Oh those millennials, they can’t stay put, they’re job hoppers.” I think that it’s a whole generation and by the way, not just limited to millennials. It’s everybody who is looking and saying, “If I’m not engaged at my work and if I’m not making an impact and I’m not learning and growing then I’m going to be out of a job pretty soon.”

But those kinds of the jobs that are sustainable anymore. I don’t believe that it’s just one generation who Is just entitled to have whatever they want. I think that millennials have seen how tough the job market is and saw many parents and family members get laid off in 2008 and re-orged and now, both sides of the equation. Millennials are asking and again, even people turning 65 are saying, I’m not ready to retire.

You know, work, I want work to have meaning and I call them in the book, not growth individuals, these are people who money is important but it is certainly not everything and when their needs were being, for growth are being met, they turn toward making an impact and so people of all ages and all stages and all bank account balances are saying, how can I learn and grow? How can I truly make an impact? That’s what I want to spend my time doing.

We’re such a huge container for our lives, that’s such a huge part of where we spend our time. I’m all for people. Pivoting to continue learning and growing and making sure that there is a place for them in the world and so of course, there’s this tiny percentage of people who are truly entitled and I also think that can happen at any age but for the most part, I mean, companies are not so loyal anymore either. 

Everybody’s having to adjust to this new landscape where yeah, every few years, by the way, not all pivots have to be huge drastic career changes. Pivot, the way that I wrote the book, this four stage method for mapping what’s next, it can even be within one’s existing role or business but it’s a way to unpack what’s already working, what success looks like and then how to run small experiments to get there.

[0:07:47.8] MB:You talked about the idea of a pivot point? What exactly is a pivot point?

[0:07:51.9] JB: I define a pivot point as that recognition that you’re ready for change. Sometimes it starts as a small whisper to something in your gut saying, “I think there’s more out there for you,” and it can be kind of scary to first hear that call. If we don’t pay attention, the signs get louder and louder and often will manifest physically.

I have a friend who is getting panic attacks every time she got off the subway on her way to work. A pivot point is, the reason I kind of hijack to the term pivot from Silicon Valley because I really wanted something that was judgment neutral and gender neutral that a pivot point is not… it doesn’t have to be a crisis you know? Up till now, that’s the only language that we’ve really had for that existential searching of who am I and what do I really want and what’s next?

I want to move it out of the crisis zone because it is happening more often and so pivot point is a way to just describe, “Okay, I’ve kind of outgrown whatever it is that I was doing previously. There’s nothing wrong with that?”There’s nothing wrong with you.

Now, it’s just a matter of looking how can you shift very methodically from that point into a new related direction or into growing again within your current role or business.

[0:09:09.0] MB: You touched on the — or you mentioned a four stage method that you described in the book, I’d love to kind of break out each of those components and talk about them.

[0:09:18.2] JB: Sure, yeah. The metaphor that came to me and this was really when I was figuring out how the heck I was going to pay rent, in two weeks, this was when all my money had kind of run dry is that of a basketball player. When a basketball player stops dribbling, they ground down in their plant foot and then they scan for passing options with their pivot foot.

The mistake I had been making was running around the basketball court like a crazy person, there was nothing grounding me, there was nothing holding me in place. I was so focused on what I didn’t want, what I didn’t know, what I didn’t have, what wasn’t working. None of that propelled me forward. 

So, like the basketball player, the first stage is planned. What’s already working, what are your known variables? What are your biggest strengths, what are your values and what does success look like a year from now, even if you don‘t know exact specifics, how do you want to feel every day?

What is your ideal average day look like? Who would you love to be surrounded by? What kind of impact do you want to be making? These are questions that you can start to unravel. Again, even if you don’t know all the specifics, now, from that grounded place, it’s much more effective and efficient when you move into scanning.

The scan stage is about people’s skills and projects that are based on what you already identified and planned, what’s already working. From then, from there, the third stage, pilot is like passing the ball around the court, seeing where you have the best opportunity to make a shot and a good career pilot will help you answer three E’s.

One, do I enjoy this new area, two, can I become an expert at it? And three, is there room to expand in the market? A pilot is a Google people often hear about the 10 and 20% projects. There really 110, 120%, they’re kind of tacked on to whatever we were already doing but those were things that we were passionate about, have an interest in wanted to experiment with and if those pilots were successful, they often for many people turned into full time roles within the company.

You can repeat that plot process, plant skin pilot over and over for months if not years, be perfectly satisfied and then every now and then, there’s the fourth stage launch which is about going all in on a new direction.

If you’re going to move teams at work or quit your job and move to a new company or start your own business, that’s the launch moment and ideally, pivot is about reducing risk until you get to that pint. Nowhere in the book do I say take great leaps, leap of faith, this isn’t about that, pivot is for people who are more pragmatic and it’s not to say that people haven’t done great things when making what I call 180’s like if I had quit Google to become a full time yoga teacher, that’s more of a 180. 

The pivot method is really a way to reduce risk and learn through those small experiments, doubling back on your strengths, continuing that loop until you feel really clear and clear enough in your launch decision. Because we can never remove all uncertainty and that’s what makes those big moves very exciting. We can feel more clear and confident going into them.

[0:12:26.1] MB: I think the mistake that so many people make is taking this giant leaps or thinking that it’s necessary to kind of take this huge leap without you risking it first.

[0:12:37.4] JB: Yeah, absolutely. In the book, every time I use the word risk, I put the word “smart” in front of it, smart risks. Because, when we try and pivot too sharply, too drastically from where we are right now, that’s what tends to send us in to what I call the panic zone.

We have our comfort zone, stretch zone and panic zone and if we’re really not making any change, stagnation zone. Where people tend to get tripped up is they pick moves or next steps that are in their panic zone. They end up feeling paralyzed and it’s a feeling of a lot of compare and despair or not taking action, analysis paralysis, these terms you’ve probably all heard before. 

That’s the signal that there’s too much risk. How can you break your next steps down — even exploratory steps —  much smaller so that you actually feel, even if there’s still little edgy, they’re within your stretch zones. They feel doable and so keep breaking them down until yeah, it’s no longer that untested risk, like you mentioned.

[0:13:39.4] MB: All the different stages obviously has a lot to kind of unpack, I’d love to start maybe some of the early stages. One of the ideas you talk about is starting from your strengths, I’d love to explore that.

[0:13:51.5] JB: This is the foundation of so much positive psychology movement, there’s the book, Strength Finder 2.0 and assessment that goes with it. I can only just say for me that as a solopreneur, self-employed, it just didn’t work when I was looking too far outside myself or too far down the road.

At projects that would have taken six months to get off the ground. I needed to, in order to get myself out of the pickle I was in, I needed to really look at what was already working in that moment and what my strengths were.

This is my second book, my first book, Life After College, came out in 2011. I had a book, I had speaking engagements, I had a coaching clients and I had been ignoring a lot of those strengths because I was not wanting to talk about life after college for the rest of my career or life after Google, I become known on podcast as the girl who left things. I didn’t know what I was going toward. 

It wasn’t until I started to call my former coaching clients and say, what are you looking for help with? What can I create for you? I had an idea for a program called Brilliance Barter, which was kind of a group private community mastermind, giving and receiving feedback and those previous clients who had already hired me in the past were instrumental in giving feedback.

Now it’s the program called Momentum, it has shifted, but launching that is what helped me regain traction. That came from people who had already hired me and things I was already good at. That then gave me the freedom and the pivot runway to take on longer term projects like writing a book, which took three years from start to finish.

[0:15:33.5] MB: For somebody who is listening and may not have a good idea. How do we find our strengths?

[0:15:40.0] JB: I do recommend that book, Strength Finder 2.0, I would also look at, it sounds cliché and you probably all heard it before but truly, what you like to do as a kid and in the book, I have an exercise that breaks it down into a table of if you can remember or ask your parents, let’s say, preschool to five or six or seven years old. Then let’s say eight years old to middle school. Okay, then what did you like in high school?

Because the games and projects will probably have shifted and obviously grown in sophistication but there are common threads throughout. For example, I used to play business a lot as a kid and I used to play school. My poor younger brother, I would make him worksheets and wanted him to teach him what I was learning and want him to feel like get ahead of his class based on what I was learning. 

That’s not much different than what I do now. Speaking, I read a ton of books and then I make worksheets and templates that I post online and make it in to the book to help people figure things out and I think everybody can reverse engineer their own strengths and also, when do you feel the most in the zone? Within your current work, even if it’s only 10% of the time, when does time fly? What do people most often come to you for advice on? That’s often very instructive too, whether personally or professionally. That’s just what they come to you for but what they end up leaving with beyond what they sought you out for.

Sometimes let’s say people will come to me for advice and I give advice but then they’ll often say, “Thank you, I always feel so optimistic after I talk to you.” Or they’ll says some adjective that I might not have thought of was a strength and so, be an observer in your own life over this next weeks and months and it will start to come together. It’s not that you have to know everything but you can start to take those clues and then figure out, “Okay, what would feel really exciting? What experiments could I setup that don’t involve betting the farm, that don’t involve me trying to make a drastic move but it’s just maybe even taking a class that’s interesting?”

[0:17:52.3] MB: I love the advice to talk to other people and kind of get their perspective because the thing that I found and I’ve taken a lot of these strength finders and all the stuff. I feel like self-assessments always kind of miss a piece of the puzzle and when you get the perspective of someone else or maybe multiple other people, they can shine a light on things that you don’t even realize that you’re good at.

[0:18:13.0] JB: Yeah, absolutely. Definitely.

[0:18:14.7] MB: Another concept that you touch on is the idea of bolstering your bench. Tell me a little bit about that?

[0:18:19.9] JB: This is the people side of the equation and even the term networking kind of gives people hives. I know people don’t like it and so, what the bolster your bench section of the book is really about, how can you create a supportive network that feels good, it’s not about networking but what are the people’s strategies that have worked for me and for others?

A bit one is debunking the idea that you need to have a mentor. I find that very awkward but try and ask a stranger, “Will you be my mentor?” Often people will offer, if they want to play that role for you. I’m a big proponent of “friendtors”, people who are at your level, who you can setup shared accountability with and shared support. It’s okay if they don’t know more than you, it’s about checking in, sharing wins, setting up regular calls. 

A friend and I do 30, 30, 30 calls. We catch up for 30 minutes and then we’ll do 30 minutes of brainstorming for his business and then 30 minutes for mine. Another friend and I have, accountability email threads. We just start an email threat at the beginning of the month and we check in about what our goals are and what we’re getting done as we go.

Then there’s another technique I talked about in the book drafting, which is about finding people who are a few steps ahead in whatever it is that you want to do. Either shadowing or apprenticing or if your skills are at such a level, you can say, “If you have any overflow work that you can’t handle, I’d be happy to help out.”

Finding people who you can learn from, think about the Tour de France or birds flying in formation where they’re kind of in the lead and so you get reduced tail wind but you can still — there’s still benefit to both of you, it’s not about leeching off of another person but there’s benefit to both of you about being in the same ecosystem. You can draft behind people you’ve never met. 

Everybody who is listening to your podcast, Matt, it’s a form of drafting, of learning from other people even from afar. Through podcast and books and I’ve learned so much from people who I may never meet in real life and some of that is very brass tax, tactical business stuff and other’s people I admire who it doesn’t seem like their work relates to mine but then there are clues.

For example, Amy Schumer. You know, I don’t ever see myself being a standup comedian but there are things about her and her style and her work ethic and her projects that really resonate. What can I learn? What can I unpack from that?

[0:20:52.8] MB: I’m curious, what did you learn from Amy Schumer?

[0:20:55.7] JB: Well, humor is important to me. When I’m speaking, I do always like to make people life and I realize that I feel the best when I can come down from a talk and I’ve like, not just inspired people and hopefully empower them and given them practical tips but made them laugh a little bit.

I love Amy Schumer’s honesty. I love how just authentic she is of telling it like it is and kind of revealing herself for the service of shared laughter and understanding. Even though I’m not a comedian, it’s also important to me to just be open, be vulnerable, really say what’s up.

I think Truth with a capital T is very helpful for people to hear and it’s the people that I’m the most drawn to. Then I just respect her work ethic, she is a hustler, she’s producing so much, so it’s been really fun to see her career just rise and thrive.

[0:21:54.5] MB: On the subject of learning, which you touched on a little bit, one of the things you mentioned is the idea of learning how to learn and we talked a little bit about kind of the importance of reading and I think everybody listening to the show knows how important it is to read widely and study and learn from other people but I’m curious when you kind of talk about the idea of learning how to learn, what does that mean to you?

[0:22:15.5] JB: This is about what Kevin Kelly, he’s the cofounder of Wired and I interviewed him for my Pivot podcast. He calls it the “perpetual newbie state” that there’s no end to learning. Some would say are purpose on this planet is to learn and grow that’s why we’re here.

Especially now with how rapidly the economy is changing in technology, we do best to be in a perpetual newbie state where we don’t know what’s coming down the pike and so to learn how to learn, to really be open to learning new things and be willing to apply yourself to learning new things, to be willing to be bad at something for a while until you get the hang of it is really critical. This is a key skill to stay relevant and to stay engaged. 

He shares the example of even our phones when new update gets pushed, we don’t always know exactly how to use it and we have to relearn, even we think we know, “Oh yeah, I know how to use my phone.” But the apps change their interface very regularly with the OS upgrades pretty regularly. Even that is a dynamic entity now. Much more so than it ever has been in the past.

[0:23:25.7] MB: One of the interesting things about kind of the idea of focusing on learning new things, I think this is actually something Kevin might have talked about in the past is kind of how do you strike that balance between focusing in on what you're already good at and really leveraging that to thrive versus carving out time and energy to improve in areas or learn new things. How do you balance those two things?

[0:23:50.5] JB: I think just like you said, it’s not all or nothing and doesn’t have to be one or the other. I’m really big on thinking of your career like a smart phone, not a ladder. It’s not this linear thing where you just climb from step to step. Your smart phone, your education and your upbringing is your out of the box model and then it’s up to you to download apps for different skills, experiences, interests.

Some of our apps are big ones like our day job or running my own business but then within that, there are all this smaller apps, things I’m learning and doing, podcasting for me was an app that I thought, “Oh okay, I’ll just do this as a side project to make the book more dynamic so when the book comes out, people can also hear audio interviews.” 

It turned out, I started in a really scrappy way, just recording using my iPhone headphones and uploading to Sound Cloud. It wasn’t an iTunes for a year that I was doing it. Then I realized, “I really love this.” It’s so joyful to get to talk to some of my author heroes and experiment with this format and going back to something I love to do as a kid, I was always making video broadcasts, I liked doing things like that and so it was so joyful and I taught myself Garage Band, I taught myself audio editing.

By no means is it perfect but that’s not the goal, I really try and just get things out even if it’s an 80% good enough state and because of how much fun I was having, I started investing more and more into it. That’s part of how to know, how to spend one’s time is you don’t upfront but if you think about pilots to switch metaphors for a moment like race horses at the Kentucky derby, you just kind of say go and you see which one of your pilots pulls out ahead.

Podcasting was one that pulled out ahead for me and I had no idea but then once you see that, you feel it happening with that sense of joy and excitement and motivation, then you can look, “Okay, well how can I grow even further in this area?”

[0:25:46.8] MB: I think that’s really the fundamental genius of this whole framework is kind of the idea that instead of taking this massive leaps of faith, you can put out a lot of feelers and kind of small projects and from there, really find which ones are working the best and then double down on those or triple down on those and really invest in them.

[0:26:07.9] JB: Yeah, exactly. Then again, taking the pressure off that we’re supposed to know this upfront. I think a lot of people feel hesitant that, “Oh no, I’m looking for something new,” and you don’t know what it is and then we immediately beat ourselves up. I know I did.

I felt I wasted a lot of time wondering, “Am I delusional, is the jig up? Am I done with entrepreneurship, were all the people who told me I was crazy, were they right and was my inner critic right that because I don’t know what’s next, I shouldn’t be doing this?” Really, it was just a matter of separating those two things.

It’s okay that you’re at a pivot point and then not to know what’s next. To be in the phase of setting up several experiments and then looking, okay, which one’s going to circle back to and double down on?

[0:26:56.1] MB: You talk about kind of carving out a portion of your time for this new test projects. I’d love to explore that idea a little bit more.

[0:27:04.5] JB: Yeah, what would be most helpful?

[0:27:06.4] MB: I guess just kind of digging in to the concept of for somebody let’s say that’s in a full-time job right now, how much time should they be spending or how are they going to figure out how to allocate their time in terms of this kind of test projects versus their existing day job?

[0:27:24.4] JB: Yeah, well within a day job is two options. One is you start experimenting with something on the side or two, as you pitch a 10% project at work. When I was at Google, when I was very fairly in the company, I started an office book club. Once again, I love books and I love interesting conversation about this books, that was really fun and it had nothing to do with my job. Kind of, I was on a training team so it was helpful for us to be well read. That was really fun and I didn’t need it to be anything more than that. 

Sometimes we expect our “day job” to provide this ultimate fulfillment and self-actualization and maybe it’s good enough and if you just add one little app or 10% sort of team or interest thing that you do at work, that’s good enough. I also did coach training on nights and weekends in 2008. Later, when a career development team was formed, there was not one at the time that I did that. My manager didn’t want to approve it at first and I really fought for it. 

But a year later when a career development team was formed, I was perfectly positioned to move on to it because I had downloaded that app of coach training. On my own time. I had also started a 10% team with a  group of other people wanting to make drop in coaching as widely available to Googlers as on the side. Drop in coaching to talk about thing that are really important. 

Now, that program, Career Guru, is still around 10 years later, it grew into something where there’s a full time person managing it, my friend Becky and it’s on the cover of my book. Who could have known that that 10% project would have evolved into what it is now. For people who don’t want to do something like that at work then it’s about just not making it all or nothing, once again, as far as your time.

I’ve been really amazed by the progress I can make when I dedicate 15 minutes today to something or one hour a week. When I was working full-time and working on my blog and book on the side, I was often only able to carve out about three to four hours every Sunday afternoon because I was too tired during the week and that was it. I started the Life After College blog in 2005 and it’s still around today.

It’s now 11 years later just from making it work on the side and I’ve done writing the second book, Pivot, you would think it’s easier on being self-employed. But actually it was a challenge because I still had to pay the bills. This time I didn’t — although I technically had more time and more freedom to allocate my time. I really had to stay focused on earning income. 

It’s not like I had just free reign that gloriously sit and drink tea and write all day. Actually, in the end, I think those creative constraints help us be more motivated and more productive with the time that we do have. My book really got done — I use Rescue Time, the extension for the computer and when I looked backwards, really, on average, it got done with about an hour a day of work. 

Now a lot of days I wasn’t able to touch it at all. Some days it was just 20 minutes in the morning and then in some weekends I would power through and do two 10 hour days. But those weren’t as often as one might think. So I would encourage everybody listening, do your own 15 — I call it 15 for 30 challenge. 15 minutes a day for 30 days and you will be so shocked at how much you actually end up accomplishing at the end of that time.

[0:30:52.8] MB: I think that’s a great piece of advice, and again, it doesn’t have to be something major. It can be really simple just 15 minutes a day and, you know, after a month’s work, you can really put together something fascinating.

One of the things you touched on is the concept of reveling and what other reject. I’d love to explore that.

[0:31:10.7] JB: Yeah, this is about the story, someone named Amy who was doing social media and PR in her company. No, she wasn’t doing social media but it was a public relations company and nobody wanted the social media accounts, working with bloggers and so she said, “I’ll do it.”

As we all no know, blogging, Instagram, Twitter, these things have become so huge as far as media strategy and so she was then quickly promoted because she took on this work that nobody wanted. I think it can be really interesting to know that somebody else’s grunt work is your zone of genius.

I’ll give an example. My coworker Becky, anyone who has done Myers Briggs, you’ll know the last letter of a Myers Briggs profiles either a J or a P. P’s tend to be more spontaneous, free roaming, they thrive on deadlines, J’s are super organized, they love to do lists, they are very structured. It’s usually really good if a J and a P can partner up. Because the P’s can be a pretty creative and far ranging and the J’s help create structures. 

My coworker Becky and I, we’ve worked together since the one who is still at Google and she just calls me her J, and I say in the back of the book, I love being the J to her P. When we were doing projects together, I love being the one to create the notes or create the work, the model that we’re going to use. Ways in my brain works about conceptualizing complex things, her just doesn’t do. The work that she doesn’t like, I love and it’s like candy to me to get to do. If you can find those things that other people reject but you’re secretly great at. That’s a really good thing.

Yeah, for me, I love spreadsheets and templates, who knew? I create spreadsheets for complex things kind of life questions and I’ll create models. That’s a really nuanced way to think about strengths, but I encourage you to kind of look for those hidden pockets and just even on a macro level to know that the works someone else hates is going to be the work you love. Keep looking or those pockets.

[0:33:24.9] MB: Let’s dig into the concept of the three E’s that you talked about earlier. You touched on it briefly, but I’m curious, what are those and how did those apply to what we’ve been talking about?

[0:33:35.1] JB: The three E’s are linear testing a new direction or a pilot, do you enjoy it, can you become an expert at it and is there room to expand either within your company or within the marketplace? Think about a pilot, it’s like a test episode of a TV show. It’s one episode meant to help a network assess whether they should pick it up for the full series or not. 

In order for you to know what these experiments, if they’re working or not, it’s the three E’s that are going to help you assess. When I did coach training, did I enjoy it? 100%. I loved it. Nothing made me become more alive. I had been doing AdWords product training and I really enjoyed the aspect of working with people but I didn’t want to talk about how to place analytics tracking code for the rest of my career. I loved it. 

Could I become an expert at it? We never really know but is this something you’re naturally good at and drawn to and how is it going so far? It took me years to really find my sea legs as a coach, but it was always felt worth doing and worth investing in. Then expansion; is there room to expand? Again, it’s not that you have to know 100% but yes, there were opportunities for me to do coaching and pitch coaching and create coaching programs within Google and then when I pivoted, when I left Google, I was doing coaching and career development within the company and then pivoted to do it in my own business.

Coaching has been the most steady “bridge income” that I’ve had since. So in almost six years of running my business, the one thing that has most consistently paid the bills is one-on-one coaching. Clearly there was room, both within the broader marketplace but me personally in my career in my business, to do even more of that. It’s not to say that I only want to do coaching. It’s one of many apps on my phone amidst speaking and my private Momentum community and the podcast and the books. It’s certainly a fulfilling one. 

That’s always what I’m trying to understand and if you’re an entrepreneur or even a side hustler, it’s fun to just be piloting different streams of income or pricing models. For so long I tried to run my business like an online marketer. This people had seen really successful doing online courses and programs and while I love facilitating, I hated the launch process. I changed my business model because of it, because of how I felt running those experiments.
 
[0:36:03.0] MB: You talk about the idea and the book of flipping failure. I’d love to dig into that.

[0:36:07.9] JB: Yeah, a lot of people are afraid to pivot because there is this fear of failure, “What if I fail?” Really. Ask yourself, “What does failure mean to you?” I’m not saying that like a rhetorical question, there’s no such thing. What does it mean? For some people failure is, “I make the wrong move and I regret it.” Or, “I make a move or I quit my job and then I run out of money and then I have to go find another job.”

If you follow most failure scenarios, they’re never a failure. Decisions are data, they always move us forward, nobody I interviewed regretted their launch decision, regretted their pivot even when it didn’t work out as planned, even when they had to pivot again a year or two later.

So many people got pivoted, things changed that were beyond their control and still, for high net growth individuals, we pretty much almost always see this for the blessings in disguise that they are, that, “I’m actually so glad this happened, I learned so much,” and so if we start to unpack failure and then whatever remnants of your fear of failure are left and are real, you can create contingency plans and worst case scenario plans for. 

If it really is that, you know, you lose all your money and your destitute and you have to move back home. Okay, well are you willing to move back home and if not, what benchmarks would you put in place to correct course before that has to happen? In doing that, we separate what are just internal concerns versus external kind of process based steps that we can actually take. 

So internal concerns of I’m not cut out for this, “I’m too young, I’m too old, I’m too dumb, I’m too smart.” I mean, I’ve heard them all myself and those we can usually keep going, acknowledge the fear. Career change in general tends to bring up a lot of fear because it seems to threaten our ability to provide for our self in our most basic needs on Maslow’s hierarchy food, clothing and shelter. But if we can just say, “Okay, I guess, I’m afraid, yes I am feeling insecure, yes, I’m unsure,” and keep taking those small steps forward anyway, that’s success. 

[0:38:19.4] MB: One of the things you mentioned there is the idea of people kind of getting pivoted, which I’m assuming means sort of the world changes despite the fact that you didn’t necessarily want the change. I think that’s another really important point of this whole kind of methodology is that in many cases, often yes, millennials or people who want to kind of explore new opportunities can benefit from this and being proactive about it. But oftentimes, the world is changing very rapidly and learning the skill set and this framework can be incredibly valuable in the face of so much rapid change.

[0:38:54.5] JB: Definitely. Again, just not take it personally that I saw so many people who their company got acquired and then they were fired or then the company collapsed. There is just so much going on although in those moments, if you get pivoted, it’s not a choice that you proactively made, of course, it’s very shocking. So just allowing that, having self-compassion that it’s okay that this happened and processing. But then, you know, once you have done some processing to really say okay, where can I go from here?

One of my favorite coaching exercises is, if you were the main character in a movie, why is this scene, this moment happening right now in this exact way to you? Why are this exact people involved, this exact timing? What are you meant to learn and do differently on the other side or to get to the other side?

If we see ourselves, that’s such an empowering question because it’s like life isn’t just happening to me. So many self-help gurus use this line but “life isn’t happening to me, it’s happening for me”. How can you see those moments of unexpected change as actually in your best interest and for your highest evolution and learning and growth.

[0:40:09.0] MB: For someone who is listening and wants to concretely implement some of this ideas, what’s kind of one piece of homework you would give for listeners to get started?

[0:40:16.9] JB: based on everything we talked about, what jumped out for you? What little sparks of interest are excitement were there? What are you wildly curious about? And even if it’s nothing that I specifically said, just one idea that it jogged or sparked for you.

The two questions I love to ask as far as really getting practical are what’s one small step you can take this week and what one next step would make the biggest impact? Often, those are two different things. But the one little tiny thing that you can do right after you stop listening to this podcast and then one thing that would really make a big impact.

If bonus, the vision, the one year vision is one of the most helpful parts of a pivot and the one so many people skip. Really sit with what does success look like a year from now? Get down all the known variables that you can even if there are still plenty of unknowns left. That’s going to be your guiding light and motivate you when you hit bumps in the road.

[0:41:17.3] MB: Where can people find you and the book online?

[0:41:21.0] JB: That’s at pivotmethod.com and I have a podcast called The Pivot Podcast. I also have a blog at jennyblake.me and from there, they’ll point you everywhere, Momentum from the Pivot Method website, if you go to /toolkit, there’s a ton of free resources, /momentum is the private community that I mentioned, and then for anybody who wants private one-on-one pivot coaching, I have an amazing team of six pivot coaches and we do two session jump starts. So you can sign up with any of them to just get two sessions in with email in between and really kind of light the fire under your next move.

[0:41:57.7] MB: Well Jenny, thank you so much for being on the show. I know listeners are really going to get a lot out of this and I think it’s a really important framework for anybody who is thinking about “what’s my next move, what direction do I want to go in?” This is a great methodology and one that is very worthwhile to implement.

[0:42:13.9] JB: Awesome. Thank you so much, Matt, for having me and big thanks to everybody for who’s here listening.

[0:42:19.3] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. I you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsucces.co. I would love to hear from you, and I read and respond to every listener email. 

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. 

You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email list. If you want to get all this incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we’ve talked about, and much more, be sure to check out our show notes at scienceofsuccess.co. Just hit the “show notes” button at the top. Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of The Science of Success.

How To Master Emotional Intelligence & Why Your IQ Won’t Make You Successful with Dr. Daniel Goleman

In this episode, we talk about Emotional Intelligence. What is emotional intelligence and why does it matter so much? How the science demonstrates that emotional intelligence matters far more than IQ, how you can develop and improve your “EQ”, how to build the muscle of focus, and much more with Dr. Daniel Goleman.

Daniel is a co-founder of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. He currently co-directs the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University. He is the international best-selling author of several books including Primal Leadership, Focus, and Emotional Intelligence which has been translated into over 40 languages.

WE DISCUSS:

• What is emotional intelligence and why does it matter so much?

• The 4 pillars of emotional intelligence

• Is IQ or EQ more important, which correlates more with success?

• Why IQ is more of a threshold, and EQ scales more with people’s actual results in the world

• How the science of “competence modeling” demonstrates that emotional intelligence matters far more than IQ, the more successful you become

• Which of the four pillars of EQ do people struggle with the most?

• The 3 varieties of empathy - cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathic concern

• The mental exercises you can do to strengthen certain brain circuitry required to build emotional intelligence

• How to cultivate and strengthen emotional self control

• What the science say about ways to strengthen the prefrontal cortex around controlling your amygdala

• The mind is a muscle and basic repetition strengthens your circuitry

• The hard science behind how to cultivate a positive outlook

• The ventilation fallacy and why venting your anger is actually bad for you

• The more you rehearse an emotion, the stronger the underlying brain circuitry becomes

• The incredible power of seeing your thoughts as thoughts and nothing more

• How to step back and assess your thoughts by asking “Is this helpful?"

• The power of distraction to shift your thoughts away from anxiety and depression

• How Dr. Goleman defines FOCUS and why it's so important

• How focus and attention are muscles and cultivating them can help strengthen your underlying brain circuitry

• The difference between rumination and reflection - and why reflection is so important

• How a Power Nap can restore your brain

• How to restore your attention and focus when you find yourself at wit’s end and cannot focus anymore

• What is PRIMAL Leadership and why is it so important?

• Why the crucial competencies you need to develop EQ and emotional intelligence are all learned abilities

• How to give positive feedback and constructive criticism - the right way and the wrong way - don’t attack the PERSON - don’t trigger the negative circuitry, trigger a positive outlook

• Why managing your own negative emotions is the FIRST STEP towards cultivating emotional intelligence

• Step back from your thoughts and ask yourself - is this useful? Cultivate self-awareness

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Working with Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

• [Book] Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ by Daniel Goleman

• [Book] Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin E. P. Seligman

• [Profile] Culture of Empathy - Tania Singer

• [Profile] Max Planck Institute - Tania Singer

• [Review Paper] Competencies and Competency Model by Nitin Vazirani

• [Profile] David McClelland and Competencies

• [Website] Crucial Competence Suite for Leaders, Coaches, and Organizations

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performance tick with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we talk about emotional intelligence. What is emotional intelligence and why does it matter so much? How the science demonstrates that emotional intelligence, matters far more than your IQ and how you can develop and improve your EQ, how to build the muscles of focus, and much more with Dr. Daniel Goleman. 

The Science of Success continues to grow with more with more than 800,000 downloads. Listeners in over 100 countries, hitting number one in New and Noteworthy, and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this incredible information?” A lot of our listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge you get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to podcast, and more.

Because of that, we created an epic resource just for you. A detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely free by texting the world “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, it’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.

In our previous episode, we dove into evolutionary psychology and looked at how biases happen programmed into your mind by millions of years of evolution. We examined why our guest condemns the concept of empathy, how the science demonstrates that empathy has no correlation with doing good in the world, and how empathy can often create disastrous social outcomes, and much more with our guest Dr. Paul Bloom. 

It’s a very controversial episode. I highly recommend checking it out. He might challenge some of your beliefs and assumptions about how we make decisions.

[0:02:30.7] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Daniel Goleman. Daniel is the co-founder of the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. He currently codirects the Consortium for Research on Emotional Intelligence in Organizations at Rutgers University. He is the international bestselling author of several books including, Primal Leadership, Focus, and Emotional Intelligence, which has been translated into over 40 languages.

Daniel, welcome to the science of success.

[0:02:57.0] DG: Mat, it’s a pleasure to be with you.

[0:02:59.1] MB: Well thank you so much for being on here. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and your story, share a little bit about your background.

[0:03:07.7] DG: You know, I’m a psychologist. I’ve got a PhD in the field. I became a science journalist and started covering psychology and in 1990 when I was working at the New York Times I saw an article, in a rather obscure journals, so obscure it doesn’t exist. It was called Emotional Intelligence and I thought, that is a dynamite concept because first of all, it sounds like an oxymoron, emotions and intelligence, but it means we can be intelligent about our emotions. 

I used that as my ’95 book, Emotional Intelligence, as a framework for talking about what’s going on in the brain and why emotional intelligence matters so much in your professional life, your personal life and I’ve been doing work, as you mentioned, on that ever since.

[0:03:53.0] MB: For listeners who may not kind of be familiar with the concept of emotional intelligence or maybe they’ve heard it and think of it as kind of a buzz word, how would you kind of define the concept of emotional intelligence?

[0:04:04.3] DG: Sure, it has become a kind of popular meme, you know, EQ, that guy has no EQ or he’s pretty high in EQ. People kind of know what it means. It’s actually, the technical definition, there’s four parts of emotional intelligence in my model. The first is self-awareness, knowing what you’re feeling and why you feel it, how it’s affecting your performance, knowing your strengths and weaknesses. Knowing how other people see you, that’s a big one. 

Then there is self-management, managing your upsetting emotions so you could focus on what you're doing, your task at hand, having a drive to achieve, and setting goals and working toward those goals. What I’m talking about now or what I call competencies. They’re base on self-management but what we call crucial competencies; abilities that are learned and learnable that we find differentiate outstanding performers from average. Another is having a positive outlook and finally adaptability, being able to change as demands change. Those are all competencies under self-management. 

The third part of emotional intelligence is social awareness. Being able to read other people, empathy, knowing what they feel without them telling you. People don’t tell us in words; they tell us a tone of voice, I tell this in body language and so on. Can you pick that up? That’s empathy, it’s really important in any relationship whether it’s your private life or your work life. Another is a different level of competence. It’s organizational awareness. Reading the emotional currents in an organization, knowing who to go to, to get a key decision made, what the network of influence is. 

The fourth ability and forth domain of emotional intelligence is managing your relationships. It’s being able to influence people. Another competence here is being a good coach and mentor to people who are coming up the ladder behind you. Being able to manage conflict, leadership that inspires and teamwork. That’s what we actually mean by emotional intelligence.

[0:06:09.4] MB: You know, talking about the differences between IQ and EQ. How do each of this sort of skill sets translate into how successful people are? Is one a larger driver than the other? Which one has the highest…

[0:06:24.0] DG: Yes, that’s a great question Mat. The answer is it depends. When you’re in school during your school years, IQ was what matters. Academic achievement is correlated very highly with IQ but something they’ll never tell you in school, which is once you get into the work sphere, you're on your career, it matters less and less and less the higher you go. The reason is this: if you want to become an MBA, if you want to be an executive, if you want to be a physician, it doesn’t matter. There’s a certain level of cognitive complexity, you’ve got to be able to digest and understand in order to do your job. That’s the IQ side. 

Here is where the paradox starts. Once you’re in the field, everyone else who has made in the field is about as smart as you are. So IQ loses its predictive power and who is going to excel, who is going to stand out. This is where emotional intelligence matters. How you handle your own emotions, how you manage yourself, those abilities like getting disturbing emotions under control, staying focused, working towards your goals. That matters much more now or being able to get along with people, work on a team, to lead people. 

The EQ abilities differentiate the higher you go in your career and when you look at top management positions, C-level leaders, there’s a methodology called competence modeling. It takes this crucial competencies and others like them and looks at which ones distinguish people in our organization in terms of their actual business performance, organizational performance and it shows that emotional intelligence competencies, this crucial competencies are what matter far more than IQ.

People who are at the top level, you hire people who are programmers, who accountants, who have those IQ skills. What you're doing is managing people and that’s an emotional intelligence ability.

[0:08:22.9] MB: Out of those four different components, which one do you see or what does kind of the research bare out in terms of what do people most often struggle with?

[0:08:32.1] DG: Well, empathy turns out to be a very big challenge for a lot of people. Particularly, interestingly, people who are outstanding individual performers like, you know, say you’re really amazing at writing code. Well, programmers get a lot of mileage by being smart programmers, their IQ abilities. The problem is when they get promoted to be a team leader or an executive of any kind, that’s where you need empathy.

Because, empathy is what greases the relationship, it’s the lubricant. It’s what makes the part, it’s what makes you understand how to put things to this guy so he’ll understand it. Or, you know, I’m losing attention over here or actually being a caring leader turns out to have a lot of power in terms of loyalty, in terms of people giving their best, that’s another aspect of empathy. If you don’t have empathy, it really hurts you as you go higher and higher on the ladder and become a leader of more and more people. In my experience, it’s empathy that is the one crucial competence people struggle with the most.

[0:09:39.2] MB: How do people who struggle with empathy, how can the kind of overcome that or how can they cultivate the ability to be more empathetic?

[0:09:47.5] DG: Well, there’s actually lot of research along these lines. It turns out the three varieties of empathy, and it depends which one you need to strengthen. There’s cognitive empathy, which means I understand how you think, I understand how you see the world, I can take your perspective.

Technically I know your mental models. I know the terms or the concepts in which you divide up your world. This lets me communicate with you very effectively. I know how to put things to you so you’ll understand it. That’s one kind of empathy.

Second kind of empathy is emotional empathy, and this draws on a completely different set of brain circuitry. Emotional empathy is when you have a feeling, I pick it up inside myself and there are dedicated neuronal circuits for a kind of emotional brain to brain radar that do this and this lets you have rapport, this lets you have chemistry with the person. You understand instantly how they feel. 


But there is a third kind of empathy that you see in the leaders love to work for, and that’s called empathic concern. Not only do I know how you think and how you feel, I actually care about you. I’m going to have your back, I’m going to give you feedback that’s going to help you — and help us by the way — and in other words, that’s the kind of leader ship that people want but it takes that third kind of empathy. 

So if you want to develop that, it turns out their mental exercises you can do that strengthen that very brain circuitry. I think that’s going to become more and more common in HR in the future as coaches and so on try to help people with empathy, you’re going to see more and more of that mental training.

[0:11:25.4] MB: What are some of those exercises could you either sort of describe them or maybe even give an example that somebody listening might be able to perform? 

[0:11:31.8] DG: Well, one is repeating to yourself the idea that you actually care about the people in your life. It sounds so simple but it actually has a neural impact. You think of the people that have been kind to you in your life. Well that’s easy, and you hope that they’ll be happy, safe, secure, you know, healthy, have wellbeing. You wish that for yourself, that’s easy.

Then you wish it for people that you love. People in your family, whatever, your friends, and then for strangers or people at work, you can bring to mind specific people or a general category and finally, for everybody. That’s a classical method of cultivating this kind of concern and care.

It turns out, there’s research coming out of the Max Planck institute in Germany, it’s like their MIT and they find it if people do this consistently like a few minutes a day. It thickens the brain circuitry for this particular kind of empathy and people become more caring, become more concerned. It comes spontaneously; you can’t really fake this stuff, it has to come from inside. 

[0:12:45.7] MB: What about cognitive empathy? Are there things we can do to cultivate or improve our ability to understand how people think?

[0:12:52.7] DG: Yes of course. You know, it’s very straight forward. You can have someone who would be open with you, let you know how they think about things but you want to tell them first, “Here’s how I think you see that,” and then check it against how they actually see it and what this does is tune you into another person’s perspective because that’s what you’re doing and then you can start to pick it up for example from the language they use, the terms they used, the attitudes they expressed. All of those are clues to someone’s mental models. 

The emotional empathy, Mat, if you’re going to ask about that, that can be strengthened by actually talking to a person about how they feel and the things they feel most strongly about. That’s the kind of conversation you can only have with your spouse, your partner, your best buddy, whoever it is but someone who could be very open with you. It’s really about sharing feelings. It might sound corny but it actually is a methodology that strengthens the relevant brain circuitry. 

In mental cognitive empathy, your strengthening of part of the neocortex. In emotional empathy, your strengthening a part of the limbic system, the emotional system. And empathic concern, your strengthening of circuitry we actually share with all mammals, it’s the parental care taking circuitry. It’s the circuitry that is active when you love your kid.

[0:14:20.8] MB: It’s so interesting that this is very much, it sounds on the surface you hear the phrase “emotional intelligence” and think that it’s kind of fluffy. But in reality, this is very much rooted in science and neuroscience and the kind of neurobiology of your brain itself.

[0:14:39.5] DG: Oh absolutely. When I’m talking about self-awareness and self-management, there’s specific brain circuitry involved, and we know what it is. It’s the prefrontal cortex which is the brain’s executive center just behind the forehead and its connections down to the emotional brain, which is between the ears, particularly the amygdala, which is the trigger point for the flight or fight or freeze response.

If you’re someone who gets angry and overwhelmed and, you know, really yells the people and then later wishes you hadn’t, it means that you have poor emotional self-control, which is one of those crucial competencies. The way to strengthen that is to remember to stop and think before you act. Because you need to widen that window that is there always but usually we ignore it when we’re losing it. 

If you’re getting hijacked by your amygdala, you’re going to say something, do something that’s going to not be effective. You are going to regret it later. The stronger the circuitry to your prefrontal cortex, the more you can have a gap. Some say that the definition of maturity is widening the gap between impulse and action and that’s what’s going on at the brain level under all of these self-awareness and self-regulation competencies. 

The two that involve slightly other circuitry are just goal orientation, striving toward a goal and keeping it in mind and overcoming obstacles, and keep going, that’s one important thing. Another is a positive outlook, no matter what happens, you’re going to see the silver lining and keep going, you’re going to see the bright side. Those are motivational and they involve circuitry in the left side of the prefrontal cortex, which is where you experience positive emotions.

We know exactly what’s going on the brain underlying the emotional intelligence clusters and competencies. When it comes to relationship management, you’re mostly talking about the emotional centers in the brain and the radar that they have for picking up another person’s brain. But it becomes more and more complex is you’d get into things say like conflict management, which involves a lot of different moves.

[0:16:49.0] MB: I’m very curious, what does the science say about ways to strengthen our prefrontal cortex, especially around the ability to sort of control your amygdala? 

[0:17:02.3] DG: You know, one of the things I’ve been involved with for long time is called social emotional learning, which brings the emotional intelligence competencies. I talk about all the crucial competencies. All the domains. Self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship management in the schools. 

One of the things they do in schools actually would help anybody. I’ve seen this in schools I visited, it’s a poster, it’s a stoplight. It says, “When you’re getting upset, remember the stop light. Red light, stop calm down and think before you act.” That’s really the three steps that you need. Stop, don’t do the first thing that your impulses tell you to, calm down and think before you act. Yellow light, think of a range of ways you might respond and green light, pick the best one and try it out.

Well, you don’t have to be a fourth grader to use the stop light. Those steps work at any point in life. So if you wanted to strengthen the circuitry for self-control, you have to practice, the brain and the mind are muscles and their basic repetitions that strengthen circuitry. So here, the circuitry you’re strengthening is the “don’t act on the impulse, pause, think of a better way to act and try it out”. So those are four simple steps. If you do that, every time you find yourself getting upset, you’re going to be strengthening the prefrontal circuitry.

[0:18:33.1] MB: I’d also love to talk about the concept of a positive outlook, kind of within the realm of self-management. For someone who may not have a positive outlook or, you know, is generally kind of negative or down about things, how would you suggest reframing or sort of building a more positive approach to things?

[0:18:54.0] DG: There’s a psychologist at Penn, Martin Seligman who is kind of state of the art in this, he wrote a book called learned optimism and what he did is develop a program for teaching anyone, particularly people who by the way are prone to depression because the thing they lack is this ability to see the bright side of events. They only see that the bad side, the dark side.

So he started with people who were depressed and helped them realize, first of all, you don’t have to believe your thoughts. That’s a very powerful thought itself. What it means is you can look at your own thinking and decide, “Is that a thought that helps me or is it not?” Because people who are pessimistic have a litany in their stream of thought, which is that things are going to be bad. “I can’t do it. That’s always going to be like this.” Kinds of thoughts that make someone pessimistic and eventually depressed. 

Seligman says, challenge those thoughts. You know, when you get the thought, “I’m not good enough for this or they don’t like me,” or whatever it may be, take time to argue with that. But this is also a basic move in what’s called cognitive therapy and it’s been found to all kinds of research, they are very powerful on impact. First of all, don’t automatically believe negative thoughts. Second, question and challenge them and third, when you find that positive frame on it, go with that, keep reminding yourself of that.

Sometimes people actually write cue cards that they take out and remind themselves of when they’re starting to have a particular familiar negative train of thought. Those are very good message. The book is Learned Optimism, Martin Seligman.

[0:20:38.5] MB: Thanks for that recommendation and we’ll make sure to include that in the show notes for listeners who want to check that out. Changing gears. I’d love to dig in to the concept of the ventilation fallacy. Could you talk a little bit about that?

[0:20:51.3] DG: The ventilation fallacy is this idea that it’s really good for you to get your anger out when you're mad at people and the research shows, paradoxically, is if you constantly ventilate, you get better and better at ventilating and you strengthen the circuitry for ventilating and you become an impulsive, angry, enraged person. That does not help you. You really want to manage your anger. 

You can be selective, you can be very strong and assertive when you need to be but it doesn’t actually help to be angry. If you’re angry, that’s more than is needed and what it does is trigger anger in other people. So you don’t get people to do what you want, you get people who are oppositional and defiant against you because you’ve gotten them angry.

Really, what you want to do is be assertive. Assertive means, “Hey, we need you to do this because when you do that, it messes up in this way. So here’s how you can do that and here’s how it will help you.” That’s a much more effective way of giving feedback than just yelling at somebody and saying, “Oh my god, you’re an idiot or whatever it is.” You probably would say something harsher if you’re really angry, but you get the idea. 

[0:22:01.0] MB: So that’s specifically within the context of anger. I’m curious, how does that same approach fall within the context of depression and sadness? Is ventilation a better strategy in that case or what is the most effective strategy to do something? 

[0:22:15.3] DG: No, ventilation doesn’t help with any negative emotion because it essentially is rehearsing that emotion. The more you rehearse a behavioral sequence or an emotional sequence, the stronger the underlying brain circuitry becomes. So it becomes more common, more frequent in how to respond to situations. What you want to do is intentionally oppose it and modify it in a positive direction, whether it’s depression, or anger, anxiety whatever it is. 

[0:22:43.3] MB: And what are some of the ways that, let’s say somebody is suffering from anxiety, may be able to intentionally oppose those kind of thought patterns? 

[0:22:52.3] DG: Well, one of the first steps, which I actually Seligman doesn’t have but I talk about and focus, for example, in my book is mindfulness. Which mindfulness is stepping back and letting you see your thought as a thought. So you might have an anxiety provoking thought, “This thing’s going to come up and I won’t be any good, or I’m going to give a talk and I’m no good at talks.” That is an anxiety provoking thought itself. 

Or you may have a depression provoking thought like, “I’m just no good. I’ll never be any good.” Or you may have an anger provoking thought like, “This guy is an idiot and all I can do is yell at him.” Whatever it may be, you want to step back from those thoughts so that you can assess them. “Is this helpful? Do I want to go down this route?” So I think that is across the border for stop and I think that the way you’d handle any of those varieties of negativity is essentially the same as I outlined with the Seligman approach. 

[0:23:56.8] MB: You’ve also talked about how distraction or distracting ourselves and shifting our focus can be a useful strategy. Could you talk a little bit about that? 

[0:24:07.3] DG: One of the ways to manage anxiety is to focus on something else. In other words, get your mind off that anxious train of thought and it could be something funny. Or it could be just meditating on your breath, focusing on your breath. Whatever will help you. It’s different from person to person, but if you find that thing, that’s a very effective way to calm anxiety. 

On the other hand, you don’t want to be in a state where you’re supposed to be focusing on one thing and your mind is wondering off. That’s a different situation. So it’s not a distraction, it’s always a plus but in certain situations it can be an antidote. 

[0:24:50.2] MB: I think that’s a good segue into digging a little bit to the concept of focus, which is also the title of one of your previous books. Tell me how do you define the concept of focus and why is it so critical? 

[0:25:03.7] DG: By focus I mean attention and attention is the doorway through which everything else happens. Memory, high performance, performance of any kind. In sports, for example, people who test poorly on concentration, which is a key barometer, attention, do very poorly in the next season. People who at work can’t pay attention do poorly in whatever it is they’re supposed to do. 

So focus is the key, it’s the hidden ingredient in success and I’ve got some audios that help people that are instructions in different kinds of focus, different ways to improve your focus and if that’s been a problem for anyone, I’d recommend doing that, whether it’s mine or someone else’s. But you have to understand attention, as I said, the mind is a muscle and attention and bringing your mind back to what you’re supposed to be focusing on is the basic repetitions. 

So it’s the equivalent of going to a gym and doing a lot of reps with a weight, every time you try to focus on one thing and your mind wonders off and you bring it back, your actually to strength and the underlying brain circuitry for concentration and focus and the more focused people are in any domain of performance, the better they’ll be. 

[0:26:23.6] MB: You’ve talked about the difference between rumination and reflection and how that relates to the concept of focus. I’d love to hear you explain that dichotomy. 

[0:26:33.2] DG: Rumination is when you have trains of thought that make you more worried. You think about this big challenge coming up at work and all you could think about is how you’re going to screw it up. That’s an anxiety provoking train of thought. However, reflection means you’re thinking about this challenge coming up and you’re coming up with some solutions, some things you can do, some steps you can take. That’s very positive kind of mental work. So rumination gets you nowhere, it just increases your anxiety maybe your depression. But reflection helps you find solutions. 

[0:27:10.3] MB: So it’s the focus on finding solutions itself that really turns reflection into a much more productive thought pattern. 

[0:27:19.0] DG: Yes, I would say that it’s a positive kind of focus and rumination is a negative kind of focus. 

[0:27:24.6] MB: What about the importance of rest as part of an ability to cultivate attention and focus? 

[0:27:32.8] DG: Well if you’re finding that your attention is lagging and your mind is wondering, it may mean that you are not getting enough sleep or enough rest. There are people and research that really supports idea for example of a power nap restores the brain and it reboots you for the rest of the day and also, people swear by seven or eight hours of sleep at night and she can manage it into your schedule but if you can’t get that much sleep and you find that you are losing it during the day, then a nap is actually a very quick magical way to restore your mind. 

[0:28:08.3] MB: And believe you touched on in the book, the concept of attention restoration theory. Could you explain that a little bit? 

[0:28:14.7] DG: Well attention restoration theory basically says that the brain, which runs on glucose, a kind of sugar can run out of it before over exerting the brain. There’s a lot of work situations that will do this and the sign of that is that you just can’t keep your focus. Your mind wonders, you just can’t process things as well and that’s when restoration theory says you should take a walk, a walk in the park, walk in nature even better. But drop what you’re doing and just let yourself have some relaxed time. Get out of the situation and then come back to it and be refreshed, to gives your mind time to restore. 

[0:28:57.9] MB: And is that inter related to the concept of will power and the notion of ego depletion? 

[0:29:05.2] DG: Well ego depletion and will power operate on the same principles that the circuitry underlying the ability to keep going, keep going, force of will, also can run out of steam, run out of gas. There again, it’s good to take a break, restore yourself and come back. 

[0:29:26.1] MB: I’d love to take the concept of emotional intelligence, the ideas of focus that we’ve been talking about and segue it into discussing one of your recent books, which is called Primal Leadership. I love to understand what does that term mean and why did you decide to call it Primal Leadership? 

[0:29:43.9] DG: Well we had a big argument about that as you can imagine because primal is a kind of provocative word but what we’re trying to get at is the fact that there is the emotional level to leadership — this is the primal level — that if you leave it out you’re not going to be effective as a leader. This is why, as I said, emotional intelligence matters more and more, the more leadership positions you take on and the higher you go in an organization, the more people you’re leading. 

You need to feel the pulse of the people, you need to know how to talk to them, you need to know how to inspire them, how to motivate, how to keep them on course, how to give them positive feedback that will be effective to help to get them to want to give their best, and that’s the emotional challenge. It’s not a cognitive challenge. 

[0:30:32.9] MB: I think that’s a great point, which is that it’s not a cognitive challenge, it’s an emotional challenge. Such a great way to phrase that and it really crystalizes the fact that, as we discussed earlier in the conversation, brain power can only solve so many of these problems. What you really need to cultivate is the ability to understand people, empathize with them and learn how to influence them if you want to be successful as a leader and within really any organization. 

[0:31:01.1] DG: Exactly, very well put Matt, and I would add that the ability to do that, that we learn in life. We don’t learn it in school. We learn it on teams, you learn it playing with kids, you learn it in relationships, you learn it in the work place. It’s an alternate curriculum. It’s not the academic curriculum, you will never learn it in MBA program, but it’s what’s going to make or break a career as you get into a leadership position or just a member of the team. 

That’s why I feel the crucial competencies are so important because you can have strengths in some and limits in others and it’s important to know where your limit are so you can build on those. You may be really good at managing yourself. You may not be so good at empathy or influence or inspiring people. But as you get into a position where you are leading a team or whatever it may be, those become more and more important and you need emotional intelligence to improve those. 

[0:32:03.9] MB: You touched on the concept of the crucial competencies. What are those and how would you define them? 

[0:32:09.8] DG: Well after I wrote the book Emotional Intelligence, I wrote a book called Working with Emotional Intelligence and I realize that my own graduate school work had been in what’s called competence modelling. This was developed by one of the big developers was David McClelland, my main professor at Harvard and the competence is a learned and learnable ability that makes you outstanding in your work. 

So the competencies, some of them I mentioned; the drive to achieve or having a positive outlook or adaptability, being good at influencing people or coach and mentor conflict management, inspiring people, teamwork, these are learned abilities. There was a study done at one of the Big Pharma companies, Johnson & Johnson where they had someone who’s just outstanding star team leader and they asked her, “Well when did you become good at this?” 

And then she said, “Well I realized that this was important. I had some talent when I was in middle school.” She had moved to a new town, she didn’t know other kids, she thought she could meet friends by joining the field hockey club. She wasn’t so good at field hockey but she was really good at teaching new kids how to play the game. 

They made her the assistant coach and she had one position after another like that up to being head of teams at a huge company, and that was the ability she learned and she learned it in life and it’s true of each one of these competencies and no one is good at all of them. But you need to be good at six or more to be an outstanding leader or to be outstanding in any field. 

[0:33:50.0] MB: I think it’s such a critical point as well that these are not innate skills that you’re either born with or not. These are all learned abilities that the research and the data demonstrates you can learn and there are specific methodologies and strategies that you can implement in order to learn these and train yourself to become effective at this whole slew of very important competencies. 

[0:34:12.8] DG: Well, Matt, I think that’s the key point and I find that so encouraging that it’s not that you’re either born with it or you’re not. It’s really did you learn it yet? If not, you still can. You can learn it and strengthen it at any point in life.

[0:34:29.5] MB: And you’ve got a new project that you have been working on that involves these crucial competencies, correct? 

[0:34:35.4] DG: Yes, it’s the Crucial Competency Project with More Than Sound and what we’re doing is focusing on the competencies one by one and explaining them in more depth. We’re talking, for example, coaches, who are field executives cultivate one or another. Actually each of the 12, we’re going to run through them. We’re also coming out with a program for how you can strengthen each one. 

Because, for example, in the workplace people are sometimes told, “Well you know, you need to work on empathy.” Or, “You need to work on emotional self-management.” Or positive outlook, whatever it is they don’t tell you necessarily how to do that. So we are trying to give folks the specifics, the mechanics, how can you improve this in yourself on your own? 

[0:35:27.8] MB: And we’ll make sure to include in the show notes a link to that resource for listeners who want to check that out and are curious about how to cultivate and learn about those different competencies.

[0:35:38.5] DG: I think that’s really great and by the way, it’s not just yourself. You may have workmates, you may have friends, you may be a leader who knows someone needs that so it’s something you also could recommend to other people. 

[0:35:53.1] MB: That’s a great point. I’m curious, one of the other topics that you touched on is how to give other people feedback or constructive criticism. I know that can often be a very touchy subject and I am curious how do you recommend dealing with that issue? 

[0:36:07.8] DG: Well there are two basic approaches to feedback. One is critical, which tends to dismiss the person as being like this forever, which is very demoralizing. In fact, we have FMRI studies that show people who get that kind of research, it activates their circuitry for negative feeling, for upset. In other words, you put someone in a bad mood, you don’t help them. So you don’t want to do that. You really want to have a friendly approach, a positive approach. 

“I’m going to help you get better at this,” and the first thing you need to do is say, “You know you’re so good at such and such and I noticed that when you did this.” and you want to be very specific, “It didn’t work out so let’s think about how you can get better at that.” In other words you are not attacking the person. The critical negative approach makes the person feel that they’re just no good at this and it triggers the negative circuitry.

What you want to do is trigger a very positive outlook so the person feels energized and that they can learn how to do this better and maybe you’re in a position to help them learn and suggest some ways but in other words, you are not ruling them out. You are saying, “Hey you’re a valuable person on this team and we want you to get better at this. Here’s some ways you can do it.” I think that approach is much more motivating and in fact, the brain measure shows it does activate positive circuitry. 

[0:37:38.5] MB: So for listeners who want to take some of these ideas, maybe take a very simple first step in developing or cultivating their emotional intelligence, what’s one simple piece of homework you would give them as a first step? 

[0:37:52.6] DG: Well I would say that the first step is to manage your own negative emotions and that may be negative thinking, it may be impulsive anger. Whatever it is, widen that gap between impulse and action. If it’s at the mental level, step back from your thoughts and ask yourself, “Is this useful?” I think that’s fundamental. Those are acts of self-awareness. 

Self-awareness turns out to be the base foundational competency in all the crucial competencies. People who are high in self-awareness tend to be high in 10 or so emotional intelligence competencies. People who are low on it tend to have very few competencies. This is the basic homework.

[0:38:44.7] MB: I don’t think you can say enough about how important self-awareness is and it’s so funny to see, you know, you can see people who have struggled for years and then as soon as they start to cultivate self-awareness and kind of get out in their own way in many ways, you can see rapid transformations in the way that people behave in their lives.

[0:39:03.7] DG: Exactly. Matt, think about the opposite way. People who have low self-awareness, don’t realize they need to do any work.

[0:39:10.8] MB: Exactly. They don’t realize they’re making mistakes. It’s a self-fulfilling cycle in many ways. It can be very…

[0:39:16.8] DG: Exactly. You got it.

[0:39:18.4] MB: Well, where can people find you and your books and the Crucial Competency Project online, for listeners who want to access that?

[0:39:27.3] DG: Yeah, the best place to go is morethansound.net. It’s all there.

[0:39:33.3] MB: Perfect. We will make sure to include that in the show notes for everybody to be able to check out. Well Daniel, this has been a fascinating conversation. I wanted to thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of your wisdom about emotional intelligence. It’s been great to…

[0:39:47.3] DG: Mat, it’s been a real pleasure. Thank you so much.

[0:39:49.5] MB: All right, well thank you very much.

[0:39:51.1] DG: Take care.

[00:39:03.2] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say “hi”, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I’d would love to hear from you, and I read and respond to every listener email. 

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email list.

If you want to get all of this incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at scienceofsuccess.co, just hit the show notes button at the top. Thanks again and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success. 

Are Babies Racist? Is Empathy Bad for Society? And More with Dr. Paul Bloom

In this episode we start with a dive into evolutionary psychology and how biases have been programmed into you by millions of years of evolution, look at why our guest condemns the concept of Empathy, how the science demonstrates that empathy has no correlation with doing good in the world, how empathy creates disastrous outcomes, and more with our guest Dr. Paul Bloom

Dr. Paul Bloom is a Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University and received his PhD from MIT. Paul is the coeditor of the journal Behavior and Brain Sciences and author of several books including Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil, and most recently Against Empathy: The Case For Rational Compassion.

• We dig into Paul’s research on babies and their innate sense of right and wrong

• A surprising and extremely powerful source of bias that babies innately have

• The in-group vs out-group and how babies slice up and divide the world

• How dividing a group by coin flips can create serious behavioral biases towards your own group

• Evolutionary psychology and how biases have been programmed into you by millions of years of evolution

• The morality of evolution and how kindness evolved

• How people, from an evolutionary point of view, think about strangers

• The definition of empathy and how Paul defines it

• Why Paul criticizes the concept of empathy

• Why feeling the feelings of others is a really lousy moral guide

• Why the science shows that empathy has no correlation with how much good people do in the world

• What happens when soccer fans see someone shocked and how theyre brains respond completely differently if its a fan of their team vs their opponents team

• How our natural empathy response is riddled with extreme bias

• How empathy creates disastrous political outcomes

• The "Willy Horton incident" and how the empathic response resulted in more rapes and murders

• Why Paul says controversially that mass shootings are objectively less than a rounding error

• Why being against empathy doesnt mean we should turn into cold blooded monsters

• The distinction between empathy and compasion and why its so critical

• How buddhist philosophy lead Paul to move away from empathy and towards compassion

• Why its so critical to be aware of your biases before you can shift them and overcome them

• Why we are more than just our biases and limitations

• Pauls vision for the human future and how an awareness of our biases is critical to build a future where rational and logical thinking can move us to a better future

• And more!

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion by Paul Bloom

• [Book] Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil by Paul Bloom

• [Twitter] Paul Bloom

• [Yale Bio] Paul Bloom

• [Article] Empathy and compassion by Tania Singer and Olga M. Klimecki

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study, and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind in what makes peak performance tick with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we start with a dive into evolutionary psychology and how biases have been programmed into you by millions of years of evolution. We look at why our guest condemns the concept of empathy, how science demonstrates that empathy has no correlation with doing good in the world. How empathy creates disastrous outcomes and more with our guest Dr. Paul Bloom. 

The Science of Success continues to grow with more with more than 780,000 downloads, listeners in over 200 countries, hitting number one in New and Noteworthy, and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this incredible information?” A lot of our listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge you get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to awesome podcasts, and more.

Because of that, we created an epic resource just for you. A detailed guide called How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely free by texting the world “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, It’s a guide we created called How To Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or go to our website, scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.

In our previous episode, we discussed the paradox of happiness, why pursuing it makes you less happy, and what you can do about it. We dug into the research about what really makes people happy. We broke down happiness into its essential components and discussed how to cultivate it, and much more with our guest Tal Ben Shahar. If you want to live a happier life, listen to that episode.

[0:02:20.8] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Paul Bloom. Paul is a professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University and received his PhD form MIT. He is the co-editor of the journal Behavior and Brain Sciences and the author of several books including Just Babies, The Origins of Good and Evil, and most recently, Against Empathy: The case for rational compassion. 

Paul, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:45.1] PB: Hey, thanks for having me on.

[0:02:46.9] MB: Well we’re very excited to have you on here. For listeners who may not be familiar with you, tell us a little bit about your background and your story.

[0:02:54.3] PB: I’m Canadian, born in Montreal. For a long time I thought I’d become a clinical psychologist and treat children. My brother’s autistic, which is why I got into psychology, but I began to become increasingly entranced with broader philosophical questions and experimental research.

Now, I’m a professor at Yale University in New Haven, I study babies, I study adults, I study toddlers in between, and in between doing experimental research, I write books and articles for a popular audience.

[0:03:22.4] MB: I’d love to begin by diving into some of the research that you’ve done on babies, which I find really fascinating. Would you share kind of some of those findings?

[0:03:29.6] PB: Yeah, absolutely. This is work done in collaboration with my colleagues at Yale, particularly Karen Wynn who is my wife and collaborator. She runs this infant lab and we do all sorts of experiments on babies looking at their social understanding, their physical understanding, and recently about their moral understanding; their understanding of right and wrong. 

This might seem crazy to talk about a six month old having a moral understanding but we discovered some really cool things. For instance, you can show babies a one act play where there’s somebody trying to do something like trying to get up a hill. Then a good guy comes and gently nudges our character up the hill. Then another guy comes, a bad guy, and shoves him down. If I was to ask you, show you the film, and you can look at online on my webpage, if you looked at the film you’d say, “Well, yeah, one guy’s a nice guy, the other guy’s a jerk.” 

So we wanted to see what babies felt about this. You can’t ask babies, they can’t tell you but they do all sorts of things. We found out that babies prefer to reach for the good guy than for the bad guy. They prefer to give treats to the good guy or versus the bad guy. They prefer to take away treats from the bad guy over the good guy. That’s just one example. We’ve done many experiments of this sort and it finds that babies long before their first birthday have some sort of understanding of right and wrong. 

Other studies find that babies have some sort of compassion. They like to help others, they like to support others. One body of my research explores the moral powers of the baby. At the same time though, the morality we have inborn with us, the product of evolution is in some ways very limited. Babies don’t have a natural compassion for strangers, they are insensitive to sort of moral insights like the wrongness of slavery or racism and sexism.

After writing my baby book, Just Babies, and after thinking about this issues, I began to struggle with the question of what makes us different from babies and what makes a person a good person? That led to a lot of my work now on empathy and the emotions.

[0:05:37.4] MB: So, do babies have a kind of initial or in-born prejudices and biases?

[0:05:43.5] PB: They do and they don’t. It’s not like a baby is born and, you know, doesn’t like black people, or doesn’t like gay people, or Asian people. Babies don’t have any specific biases but they are very quick to develop them. Very early on, for instance, babies prefer to look at people who look like those that they’re raised with.

A baby who is raised with all white people will prefer to look at white people, all black people look at black people. In one study involving Ethiopians in Israel, babies get to look at white people and black people, those babies don’t show any preference.

It’s not just sort of looking and you can say, “Well who cares about what babies like to look at?” Later on, these preferences manifest themselves in all sorts of biases like who they prefer to interact with, who they prefer to give toys to. Some of the best work has looked at a really surprising source of bias that’s extremely powerful. More powerful than gender, more powerful than race, and it’s language.

Very early on, as young as you can test, babies prefer people who speak the same language that they do and they prefer to interact with them, they prefer to make friends with them. Even a slight accent pisses babies off and they prefer to go for somebody who doesn’t have the accent. Of course you see the same sort of biases in adults. Although for adults, It’s more complicated, adults view some accents better than others. 

But one reason why we believe that language is so important for the baby is that language is a wonderful queue to social group and if somebody speaks a different language than you or even a different accent, it’s an excellent indicator they’re not from your community. Because babies are extremely prone to split the world up into “in group” versus “out group”, they look towards language as a way to do it.

[0:07:27.3] MB: Tell me a little bit more about the kind of in group, out group distinction and how babies draw that?

[0:07:33.7] PB: Well, the question could be asked about babies and could be asked about you and me. There’s no human who is perfectly impartial from one group to another. There’s nobody who loves their own child to exactly the same extent that they love someone else’s child. There’s no one who doesn’t feel more of a connection to their friends and their lovers and their family than to strangers. We split the world up to “in group” and “out group” and that way, we split it up into countries, we split it up into ethnicities and to clubs.

One of the findings from baby studies is that babies are extremely willing to do so. They come in predisposed to break the world into us versus them. You can demonstrate that in the most minimal ways. One experiment that’s been done with adults, has recently been extended to kids. You just randomly put them up. You say, you guys, for adults who say, “Let’s flip a coin. Heads go in this corner, tails go in this corner.” It’s utterly random, it’s obvious it’s random, for kids, you hand out different colored gloves and it turns out, even this ridiculously small manipulation ends us splitting people up has a powerful effect. 

We prefer our own group even if it’s just a heads group or the tails group. The yellow gloves or the blue gloves group. We like to give them more and we are happier punishing the other group. One of the aspects of human nature which I think is caused, maybe the most trouble is present from the very get go.

[0:09:02.9] MB: I think there’s a study that you’ve talked about in the past revolving around kind of babies and graham crackers or something like that. I’d love for you to share that research example.

[0:09:12.0] PB: This is some work done by Karen Wynn. You do a study where babies get to choose between two things they like and I think — I forget exactly. I think they’re graham crackers versus cheerios. Babies, you know, like one versus other, whatever. They choose one. Then they want someone else to make a choice and the weird thing that you wouldn’t have expected as babies are very sensitive to what the other person does.

They like when somebody chooses the same thing that they do and they get annoyed when somebody doesn’t. In some of the studies, they get so annoyed when somebody chooses something different. I choose graham crackers, you choose cheerios, they get so annoyed that they want to see that person punished.

And Karen in her work sees this as a sort of grounds for ideological conflict later on where as adults, we can get enraged when someone makes different choices from us. Now, when the stakes are very high, like going to war or abortion laws or whatever, that’s kind of understandable. But even when the stakes are ridiculously low, we freak out. This too I think is part of our initial equipment.

[0:10:22.0] MB: For listeners who may not have as good of an understanding of kind of the concept of evolutionary psychology and how this biases sort of get programmed into us via evolution, I’d love for you to just kind of explain that concept.

[0:10:36.0] PB: Well, just like our bodies, our brains are the products of natural selection. What this means is, the fact that we think the way we do that we have to taste and motivations and desires that we have is to a large extent because our ancestors who did this reproduced more than those that didn’t.

This is pretty obvious for some things. It’s kind of a no brainer why people like sex. People like sex because their ancestors who didn’t like sex or would rather copulate with a rock or a tree didn’t produce offspring while their ancestors that did like sex did considerably better at producing offspring, it’s why we love our children. 

If you didn’t love your children, if you ate your children, well, your children won’t do too well in life. It’s why we prefer to drink water than to eat mud, a lot of our taste and desires at the low level make perfect sense for a creature that’s been evolved through survival and reproduction. This pertains to morality as well. It was one thought before the time of Darwin, that evolution is sort of red and tooth and claw; evolution is a relentlessly selfish force, making us care only for ourselves. We know and Darwin knew that his is nonsense. 

Evolution makes us kind because creatures who are kind in certain special ways, like favoring their family over their friends, engaging in long term alliances and mutual benefit. Animals like that do better than animals that don’t. If you and I were in the Savannah and you cooperated with people and helped them out and took care of your family and all I cared about was myself, well your genes would do better than mine. 

Evolution has shaped our morality as well but this is kind of a tragic part because from an evolutionary point of view, who gives a damn about strangers? Strangers are nothing. Strangers are at best potential threats and so the fact that we right now recognize that we owe a moral obligation to the strangers, we can’t kill them, we can even help them under some circumstances.

Suggest that we’ve used our intelligence to transcend evolution. Of course we do this all the time, we evolve perceptual systems that allow us to look over the world and see trees and water and so on. But through science, we understand what we’re really seeing are objects that are composed of tiny particles and fields of energy.

Similarly, we have a sort of stone age morality that’s evolved through evolution but we’re also smart enough to transcend it. The user are capacity for introspection and for generalization and logic. To realize that some of our innate morality’s unfair and capricious and that we could do better.

[0:13:19.5] MB: I think that really dove tails into your somewhat controversial view on the concept of empathy. Before we kind of dive into that, I’d love to understand, how do you define the concept of empathy?

[0:13:32.3] PB: Yeah, that’s a good question because people see the title of my book Against Empathy and they freak out. I have a collection of emails like you wouldn’t believe. I think it’s because it has different meanings. One of the issues.

Some people use empathy just to mean everything good. We should have more empathy means we should be kind, we should be loving, we should be moral and I have no objection to that. Other people use empathy in a narrower sense, having an understanding. I don’t have an objection to that either.

Although, understanding other people is morally neutral. You do need to understand other people to make the world a better place. You also need to understand other people if you’re going to seduce them or calm them or torture them or bully them.

The sort of empathy I’m interested in is putting yourself in someone else’s shoes. Seeing the world as they do, feeling their pain and a lot of people have argued, this is really fundamental to morality. Empathy serves as a spotlight that zooms us in on people and makes them matter. What I argue in my book is that this is mistaken.

That empathy has all sorts of terrible effects. It makes us biased because we empathize with those who look like us and who are attractive and who belong to our group over others. It’s innumerate because empathy makes us value the one over the many, and at least capricious and arbitrary and often cruel acts. A lot of violence is prompted by empathy for a victim. At least the stupid policy decisions. It’s because of empathy that governments and populations care more about a little girl stuck in a well than they do about a crisis like climate change.

Even in personal relationships, empathy can mess you up. An example I like to think about, because it’s from my own life is that if my teenage son comes up to me and he’s freaking out because he hasn’t done his homework and it’s due tomorrow and he’s very anxious. I’m not being a good father if I feel empathy from, I feel his anxiety and I share his anxiety and get anxious myself. I’m best as a parent if I have some distance, if it’s a, “Dude, calm down, let’s take a break, let’s go for a walk,” and I love him and I understand him but I don’t feel what he feels. 

I think it’s the same for friendships, it’s the same for romantic relationships. If I’m really depressed, I don’t want my wife to see me and get depressed herself. I want her to try to cheer me up and try to make my life better. What we want from people and what makes it a better world isn’t echoing their feelings. It’s responding lovingly and intelligently to them.

[0:16:06.5] MB: Your definition is empathy is essentially the feeling of sharing the emotions or kind of actually feeling the pain or whatever someone else is feeling as opposed to this sort of broader understanding that might encompass compassion and other things that are sort of, could be defined as distinct from looking at it from kind of the psychology literature.

[0:16:29.1] PB: That’s exactly right. I’m using it the way a lot of people in the field use it. I’m not the language police. I’m totally comfortable with empathy anyway they want. Some people use empathy to fold together all sorts of things, some that are good, some that are bad. 

The point of my book, the point of my argument isn’t about how to use the words. It’s about how we should live our lives and the case I make is that feeling the feelings of others, whatever you choose to call it is a really lousy moral guide, it leads to messy policy, it leads to bad relationships and we’re so much better when we try to understand people, when we care for people, when we care about people but we don’t feel their pain.

[0:17:14.7] MB: When people hear your stance about empathy, what are some of the kind of typical reactions?

[0:17:21.3] PB: I’ve been making this argument for a while and I’ve gotten some great responses, some very intelligent responses. People will argue that maybe empathy isn’t perfect but without it, we couldn’t be moral people if we didn’t feel other’s suffering, we’d never be motivated to help them.

People argue that those without empathy are cruel people, they’re psychopaths, they’re monsters, people argue that children start off being empathic and then compassion and other things and learn from it, it’s an important start and there’s many other arguments and I think it turns out that all of them are mistaken. I think for instance, there’s a lot of evidence that you could be kind to somebody and care about them and you can also want to make it a better world in general without feeling empathy.

It turns out there’s been a lot of research where you measure people’s empathy and then you see, how does that connect with what kind of good person they are? The answer is, it doesn’t. If I wanted to know whether you’re going to try to rob me or kill me or even just you know, talk badly about me. Your score on empathy test will tell me very little, actually, pretty much nothing.

The real predictors of bad behavior in people are a kind of malicious nature and lack of self-control. Empathy in whatever sense, feeling the pain of others, understanding others seems to play no role at all in good behavior or bad behavior.

[0:18:49.6] MB: That’s the finding that’s backed up by a lot of science right? It’s not just kind of conjecture.

[0:18:54.6] PB: Absolutely. There is an industry involving testing people’s empathy and looking at the relationships between their behavior, there’s a lot of research where you put people in FMRI scanners and you look at the brain responses, reflecting to empathy.

One of the cool findings for instance is, you know, there’s this metaphor I think made most famous by Bill Clinton where you say I feel your pain. It turns out, we literally feel other people’s pain. If I was to watch you get stabbed in the hand and my brain was wired up to an FMRI machine, it would reveal that parts of my brain would light up, that would be pretty much the same parts that would light up if my own hand was being stabbed.

There’s a lot of research on this. The research shows what I’ve been saying, the research shows that the individual measures of empathy don’t predict good behavior, bad behavior, they show that the neural measures of empathy are tremendously biased. This brings us back to the in group, out group work we were talking about before.

They did a study in Europe where they tested European soccer fans, you’re sitting there, your brain is all being measured and you want somebody else being shocked and half the people are told, “You see this guy being shocked? He’s a fan of your soccer team.” Turns out, when you do this, people say, they feel high empathy and their brain’s reflective. Parts of the brains light up that correspond to empathy.

Then, in another group, they’re told exactly the same thing but they’re told, “See this guy? He’s a fan of another soccer team.” You do that, the neural correlates of empathy shut down, you don’t feel empathy and in fact, you watch him be shocked, you feel a bit of pleasure. The studies confirm what we knew from other sources which is how incredibly biased empathy can be.

[0:20:39.2] MB: I’d love to dig in a little bit more to kind of the bias effects on empathy and you know, things like racial bias et cetera and how they can impact or how empathy can kind of negatively create outcomes.

[0:20:51.6] PB: There’s bias in a couple of ways, there’s sort of a natural bias we carry with us. One study looked at people’s empathic reactions to suffering of those they found disgusting, like homeless people or drug addicts. It turns out, the empathy is just silent. If someone grosses you out, you don’t feel their pain at all, you don’t feel anything for them.

Others studies find that attractiveness plays a real role. If there’s an attractive eight year old girl, a pretty little eight year old girl and she’s in pain, you freak out, you feel great empathy. Someone less attractive, someone maybe a bit scary, no empathy at all.

Our natural empathic responses are biased and similarly, empathy can be moved around by politicians, by rhetoricians, by people who want to make a moral point, to try to get you to feel empathy for this person or that person. Sometimes it’s done for causes you might think of as good, like when you direct a lot of concern and focus on the drowned Syrian child.

Where you say, “Look, you used to feel great empathy for his family and the suffering must have gone through. So let’s use that to motivate some good policy.” But often, empathy is directed to get you to hate people. If I want to get you to support attacking some other country or expelling some group from the United States. One excellent way to do so is to tell you about this group’s victims and get you to feel empathy for them.

It’s an observation as old as the Adam Smith in the 1700’s, which is when you watch somebody suffer, you feel empathy for them, you feel commensurate rage for those who have caused that suffering. This is no secret among those who want to motivate cruelty and violence.

[0:22:30.9] MB: You touched on a number of examples in the past of ways that empathy can negatively impact public policy. I’d love to hear the story of, I think it’s Willy Horton, or some of the other examples that you’ve shared previously about how kind of one story of empathy can lead us to make what ends up being a really terrible decision.

[0:22:52.4] PB: There catalytic examples of this, you might say that right now, going through the politics that we’re reeling with at this very moment; bailing out a company because you feel bad for its workers may have great short term effects for the workers and then sort of scratch your empathic itch but have horrible long term effects in the future.

Let’s go to the Willy Horton case. The Willy Horton case from the 1980’s, it came up during the presidential election between the competition, between Michael Dukakis and his republican opponent and what came out was, when Dukakis was governor, he had a furlough program and then the furlough program where prisoners are released for a little while, someone named Willy Horton was released. 

Willy Horton went out and did some terrible things; he raped somebody, he assaulted somebody and Willy Horton was a large and threatening African American. So his opponents put pictures of Willy Horton everywhere. As soon as this incident happened, furlough program was shut down. Dukakis was condemned to apologize for it over and over again while people were stoked up by the terrible things that this man had done. 

Now, it turns out that this for a little program by most measures made the world a better place. That is, even including the crimes that were done by prisoners released and furloughed, the fact that the furlough program exists led to less crime overall and so a rational person would say, “Well let’s do the numbers, apparently the furlough program is doing good.” But that’s not how we think. That’s not how the mind works. With the mind, we are swayed by these sympathetic cases. 

Our empathy is triggered and so we end up doing acts like shutting down the furlough program that in the end cause more harm than good. I mean another example just to get you thinking about is a hypothetical example where imagine there is a vaccine program and a little girl gets very sick. We’d probably shut down the program even if a dozen people are saved by the program each year because you could empathize with the suffering of a little girl who gets sick and her family and everything. 

But you can’t empathize the suffering of people who would have got sick but didn’t. Empathy works in the here and now. It feeds off real cases of suffering and ignores other considerations or take a third example, which is an example I begin my book with, which is school shootings, mass shootings. I begin my book with the story of Sandy Hook Elementary School in New Town, this horrific mass murder of 20 children and I point out that this causes an enormous amount of focus and concern. 

And many people would view it as the biggest policy problem we have but it also turns out that when it comes to murders, to homicides in the United States, mass shootings take up about 0.1% of them. What that means is if you could snap your fingers and make it so that there would never be a mass shooting in the United States again, nobody would notice. It would be indistinguishable from random noise and so these are cases where a good, wise, compassionate policy maker says: 

“I’m going to ignore the pull of my emotions. Particularly I’m going to ignore my racists bias, I’m going to ignore these things that really cause my tears to flow and ask myself the hard question of how to make the world a better place,” and I think these are cases where empathy leads us astray. I think there’s individual cases, there’s cases of charitable giving, there’s a lot of people who give to charity and I used to be one of them and still am to some extent. 

Where I give to things for some sentimental reasons, for the cuteness of the picture, for personal connections and this is a lousy way to do it. When we give to charity we shouldn’t be trying to give ourselves a warm glow or happy buzz. We should be trying to make the world a better place and so I’d like to see a shift away from empathy based decisions towards decisions that are based on reason. 

[0:26:43.0] MB: And, you know, it’s funny, the example that you give at the beginning of the book about mass shootings and I think it was 500 deaths from that in the last 10 years or I don’t remember the exact stats, but that made me think of another instance. I was watching the news the other day and they were arguing about terrorism and they threw out the stat of how many people have died from terrorism in the United States in the last 10 or 15 years and it was 150 people. 

I mean it was a staggeringly low number when you think about the fact that it’s such a huge focal point and that example and the Willie Horton example for me, of course when I picked up the book I think I had the reaction to everybody. It was like, “Why is this guy against empathy?” and the more I start understanding that and those concepts of how this one vivid story, which can really mislead us into making what are objectively worst decisions for our society. It was pretty fascinating. 

[0:27:43.2] PB: I find these stories very moving in how they illustrate in how we can go wrong and it’s not that we should blame empathy for everything. There’s all sorts of other things going on here. For the Willie Horton case, certainly racism played a huge role. I think even if empathy was stripped from our heads, powerful stories will always move us but the argument I make in my book is empathy is so vulnerable to these biases. Empathy always searches for the one. 

It always zooms us in on the one person. It ignores the many, it ignores hypotheticals, it ignores statistics and so it misguides us over what’s important or what matters and it leads to lousy policy and this brings us back to our earlier discussions of definitions of empathy, which is the solution isn’t that we should become cold blooded monsters. The solution is that we should still feel for people, feel real kindness and concern and compassion for people, but we should try to rid ourselves of the habit that we have of zooming in on individuals. 

And so towards the end of my book, I discuss the distinction between empathy and compassion, between feeling the pain of others — empathy — versus just wanting to help them — compassion. I even talk about some fascinating work on meditation and meditative practices which both illustrate the distinction. They get people to do empathy training, they get people to do compassion training, they find all sorts of differences. 

But also, they showed it as possible to make yourself somewhat less empathic but also kinder, which I think would be an indispensable skill for all of us. But particularly people like doctors and nurses and first responders and police and firefighters, people who deal with emotional and difficult situations. The best of them can shut down empathic responses while still caring for other people. 

[0:29:38.2] MB: I’d love to dig into that a little bit more, the distinction between empathy and compassion and we’ve actually had a previous episode where we went deep on the concept of compassion and distinguished it from empathy. In that episode, we touched a little bit on the idea of the main negative thing about empathy, was the idea of empathy burnout and how you can become overwhelmed with trying to bear the cross of feel the emotions of the suffering of others and if you instead focus on how to help them, you can be more proactive. But I would love to hear a little bit more about your take on the distinction between those two things. 

[0:30:11.9] PB: So my take is exactly that take where I got into it actually by reading a bit of Buddhist philosophy. There’s a lot of Buddhist philosophy which asks the question of, “How are you to be a good person,” and how a Buddhist philosopher’s distinguish between what they call sentimental compassion and great compassion and sentimental compassion is what we’ve been talking about as empathy. It’s feeling other people’s pain and feeling other people’s suffering. 

The Buddhist scholars say, “Don’t do this. It might give you a short term buzz but in the long run, it’s bad for you. It will burn you out, it will exhaust you”. People, the term burnout I think is from the 70’s but hundreds of years ago people worry about this. So the alternative is great compassion, which I’m just calling compassion, which is caring about people, loving them but not feeling their pain and the cool thing is that this great compassion seems to be pleasant, invigorating, energizing. 

It makes you a better person but it also makes you a happier person and so a lot of contemporary meditative practice uses — it’s called loving kindness meditation. It uses these techniques to motivate people to be better people and one argument is that they work so well because the meditative practice dampens your empathic responses and a lot of what I’ve been talking about now is theology and philosophy and so on but there’s real evidence for this. 

There’s some wonderful work done by the neuroscientist, Tanya Singer in collaboration with the biologist and Buddhist monk, Mathew Ricard, where they put people in scanners and they have them meditate in different ways, exercised their empathy or exercised their compassion and they find all sorts of different responses and what they find is inevitably you were just much better feeling compassionate. 

[0:31:56.2] MB: I’m curious, you touched on earlier and I’m starting to think about how can somebody listening start to implement this in their lives? What is a concept of a warm glow altruist? 

[0:32:08.9] PB: I’m not sure where the phrase came from but it was discussed by the philosopher Peter Singer where he talks about how some people give to charity and he says, some people give to charity, what they do is they have some money and they spread it around to all different charities.” They give a little bit to Ox fam and a bit to Save the Whales and a bit to their local arts community and a bit to their high school football team and they won’t give that much anytime. 

They spread it around and this is either consciously or unconsciously, a wonderful tactic to feel good about yourself. Each of the different charities you give, you had a little dopamine blast of feel good. But Singer points out, if you want to feel good you’ve come across a great technique. If you want to make the world a better place, if you really want to help people, do it differently. If you really want to help people, figure out where your money and your resources could do the most good and put them there. 

Ignore pictures of adorable babies, but what you should do is go online and see what people say with these charity. Does the charity tests it outcomes? Is it effective? Try to figure out how to make the world a better place and this applies even beyond money. I have a friend of mine who is a wealthy Yale professor and she would go work in a homeless shelter and there’s nothing wrong with that. That makes the world a better place but the problem was she was doing this instead of giving money. 

And the truth is with her salary she could have given a lot more money to do a lot more good than her time at the homeless shelter, which could have done by anybody and that sounds, I know I’ve talked to people, that sounds really cold. It sounds cold and unromantic and what about the warm feelings of connection and so on? And my response is it depends on what you want. If you want to feel good about yourself like a special person, a real helper, get a real connection and make yourself a man of the people and all that stuff, well there’s all sorts of things you do. Be a warm glow giver. 

But if you want to really help people, do something different. So it depends on your goals. My feeling is and I am an endless optimist about human nature is that most people really care about other people who want to make the world a better place and if you remind them, if you prompt them. If you get them to recognize that their emotional pulls are a poor guide to their behavior, they will work hard in doing better. I know I have.

[0:34:35.3] MB: And I think that that to me was the crux of this argument and helped me really understand it, which is what you just said, that your emotional pulls often mislead you and that if we zoom out from the spotlight of getting really caught up and the emotions and the vividness and the story, we can make what are objectively more rational, more statistically relevant and important interventions as opposed to getting caught up in this emotional whirlwind. 

[0:35:10.7] PB: That’s a perfect summary of my argument and you know some people could be skeptical. You asked about responses to my ideas and one response I often get is, “Well maybe you’re right but what are we going to do about it? We’re always going to captured by our emotions and our gut feelings.” 

But again, I’m more optimistic and I give an analogy to racism which is we’re naturally racists. There’s a thousand studies showing we’re biased to favor our own. Even in cases where we really don’t want to and don’t think we are, but does that mean we have to throw up our hands and say we’re stuck with it? Not at all. 

There’s all sorts of ways we can circumvent and avoid our racism. We can engage in practices that diminish it. We could set up technical means within our society like blind reviewing or quota systems that — and they are very different ideas what they share is they take the decision out of our hands. They avoid our biases. If you want to be a good person, you should be aware of your biases, both your moral biases but also your rational biases and so on and then think hard about how to override them. 

[0:36:17.4] MB: I think that’s a great point as well which is that in order to move beyond these biases, we first have to cultivate an awareness of them and in many ways, the dialogue around this can often cut off the conversation before we really get to the point of acknowledging and accepting that biases do exists. 

[0:36:39.4] PB: That’s right. So to some extent I think the great contribution of psychology to modern times has been making us aware of our biases and limitations. Where some psychologist go wrong, I think, is that they jump to the conclusion that we are nothing more than our biases and limitations and I think instead there’s a duality that we’ve been talking about. We are biased, we are limited, we are swayed by irrational things but we’re also smart enough to know it. 

We can use our intelligence and our self-control and our desire to make a real difference to try to override the more emotional parts of ourselves and we’re just talking here about making decisions, making moral decisions and moral actions. I have nothing against empathy in general. Empathy is a wonderful source of pleasure, of intimacy, it’s part of sex, it’s part of sports, it’s part of reading a novel or watching a movie. It’s just as a moral guide, it’s a sort of thing that we should really distrust. 

[0:37:38.9] MB: You know for a man who is against empathy, I think you have a very uplifting view of the direction of the human future and I think that’s a great way to think about it in the sense of, I think you are totally right that many psychologists think that we get almost too far to the other extreme in saying, “We can’t overcome any of these biases.” But I really like your uplifting perspective that we have to be aware and know that these biases are real but we also have the logic and the reason and the ability to move beyond them and build a better future. 

[0:38:13.0] PB: Yeah, I mean you could see it. You could see the intellectual history not just of psychology but how people talk in newspapers and in blogs and online and how we think about ourselves where there was a time of enlightenment where we thought of ourselves as perfectly rational beings, for the most part, the age of reason. 

And then it swung and where we are now is basically many of my colleagues will say, “People are idiots. We’re just incredibly limited, we’re just so foolish in so many ways,” and one of the many goals in my book is to try to push that pendulum back a bit to acknowledge all of these limitations but also to have this optimistic view that puts a lot of focus on our reason. 

After all, we wouldn’t be having this conversation about our biases. We wouldn’t know there were biases unless we had this other more powerful, more rationale capacity. 

[0:39:07.6] MB: So for somebody who is listening and wants to concretely implement the concepts we’ve been talking about in their lives, what’s one simple piece of homework that you would give them as a starting place? 

[0:39:21.2] PB: Well one thing, which we touched upon a few times here is meditative practice, which is something that I am working on myself. But I think there is a more general answer, which is — and this is an answer regarding all of our biases, which is when you are very calm and not caught up in anything look at your life and look at your decisions and try to contemplate the extent to which you’re being held swayed by irrational biases. 

And then if you think you are, if you think for instance that some of your actions are short sighted or too empathic or racist or something like that and you don’t like it, you could work to combat it and you could work to combat it in clever ways. I have a friend of mine he gives the simplest example; he wants to give to charity but he knows that when it comes when he’s asked to give to charity he says, “Well I have other personal ways I could use the money. I could go out for a drink or whatever.” 

He feels bad about this. He doesn’t feel that this is the right way to live but he can’t fight it. So at one point he said, “Look here’s what I should do” and he set up automatic deductions on his paycheck. Very easy to do so now, he could still change his mind. He could shut it down but now he doesn’t have to decide whether to help, he doesn’t decide whether not to help. He changed what the baseline is. 

It’s sort of the moral equivalent if you’re on a diet of not keeping giant bags of M&M’s in your house. The moral equivalent if you’re trying to give up smoking, don’t go to a bar where everybody is smoking. We could be smart enough to recognize, “I am going to fall into this trap,” but to then think and plan ahead so that the trap could be circumvented and that in very general terms is, I think, how we can help defeat those aspects of ourselves that we believe should be defeated. 

[0:41:12.2] MB: For listeners who want to learn more, where can people find you and your books online? 

[0:41:17.9] PB: I have an academic website, which you could find by just typing in Paul Bloom Yale. But I’m mostly on Twitter these days. I’m just one word paulbloom@yale and I endlessly tweet about these issues, about academic gossip, about politics and some excellent bad jokes. So that’s where I recommend people to go to. 

[0:41:37.9] MB: Well Paul, thank you so much for sharing this insights. This has been a fascinating conversation and I think on the surface, it seems very controversial to be opposed to empathy. But I think peeling back the hood a little bit there’s a lot of merit to this framework and your understanding of reality and I think the acknowledgement that we have biases but also the rational optimism that we can work through them and build a better future is something that’s really inspiring. So thank you so much for being on the show and for sharing this wisdom. 

[0:42:09.3] PB: Thank you so much for having me on. This has been a wonderful conversation. 

[0:42:12.8] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners, if you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email. 

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes because that helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt how do you organize and remember all these information?” Because of that, we created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. 

You can get it by texting the word “smarter”, to the number 44222 or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email list. If you want to get all this incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes at scienceofsuccess.co. Just hit the show notes button at the top. 

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

The Paradox of Happiness - Why Pursuing It Makes You Less Happy & What You Can Do About It with Dr. Tal Ben Shahar

In this episode we discuss the paradox of happiness - why pursuing it makes you less happy, and what you can do about it, we dig into the research about what really makes people happy, we break down happiness into its essential components and discuss how to cultivate it, we look at the interaction between stress and recovery and why most people look at it the wrong way, why active acceptance and surrender is critical to processing and dealing with negative emotions and much more with Dr. Tal Ben Shahar.

Dr. Tal Ben Shahar created the most popular course in Harvard University’s history, he is the best-selling author of several books including The Pursuit of Perfect, Happier, Choose The Life You Want, Even Happier. He’s also the co-founder and chief learning officer of The Wholebeing Institute, Potentialife, Maytiv, and Happier.TV.

We discuss:

• What science shows is the The #1 Predictor of Happiness

• How the direct pursuit of happiness can actually prevent you from being happy and makes you less happy

• One of the most robust findings in the field of psychology research is about what creates happiness

• The paradox of happiness - why pursuing it makes you less happy, and what you can do about it

• Why the expectation that you should be happy all the time is a barrier to your own happiness

• The “hamburger model” and how it can transform the way that you live your life

• The lens that we can use to understand all of our “happy” experiences

• How Tal defines “happiness” as the intersection of meaning and pleasure

• We discuss what The BEST predictor of your future behavior is

• Why awareness is a critical first step to cultivating happiness

• We dig into the research about what really makes people happy

• Why money has very little to do with happiness (according to the research)

• The vital importance of cultivating healthy relationships

• We discuss the blue zones where people live the longest in the world and why these people live longer than anyone else

• The critical importance of physical exercise on your psychological wellbeing

• How to trigger a release of the “feel good” chemicals in your brain (norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin)

• How happiness helps you be healthier, more creative, gives you more energy, and makes you more productive

• Strategies for indirectly pursuing happiness

• We break down happiness into its essential components and discuss how to cultivate it

• The only 2 types of people who do not experience painful emotions (are you one of them?)

• What happens when we try to suppress negative emotions

• How experiencing and accepting negative emotions can paradoxically improve your happiness

• Why active acceptance and surrender is critical to processing and dealing with negative emotions

• How perfectionism can create self sabotage and unhappiness

• The critical distinction between healthy perfectionism and unhealthy perfectionism

• The vital importance of accepting criticism and how refusing to accept criticism hamstrings you

• Adaptive vs maladaptive perfectionism and why its important to know the difference

• (Once again) Meditation and how important it is

• The interaction between stress and recovery and why most people look at it the wrong way

• Why stress isn’t bad and in fact can be very good for - but with a very important caveat

• How the concept of weight lifting can help us better understand and manage stress in our lives

• How recovery is vital to your productivity, health, and happiness

• How long periods of recovery are an investment in your future growth

• The power of breath and how it is an incredibly impactful mind/body intervention to reduce stress and anxiety

• The vital importance of rituals and how you should build them into your day

• “We first make our habits, then our habits make us.”

• We walk through Tal’s powerful daily ritual and how you can harness it to change your day

• How self forgiveness and self compassion can transform your life and emotional experience

• And much more!!

If you want to live a happier life - listen to this episode! 

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Wikipedia Article] The Grant Study

• [Book] Sleeping with Your Smartphone by Leslie A. Perlow

• [Book] Choose the Life You Want by Tal Ben-Shahar PhD

• [Book] Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment by Tal Ben-Shahar PhD

• [Book] The Pursuit of Perfect by Tal Ben-Shahar PhD

• [Book] The Blue Zones, Second Edition by Dan Buettner

• [Book] The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson

• [Website] talbenshahar.com

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study, and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performance tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss the paradox of happiness, why pursuing it makes you less happy and what you can do about it. We dig into the research about what really makes people happy. We breakdown happiness into its essential components and discuss how to cultivate it. We look at the interaction between stress and recovery and why most people think about it the wrong way. We also look at why active acceptance and surrender is critical to processing and dealing with the negative emotions, as well as much more with Tal Ben Shahar. 

The science of success continues to grow with more with more than 775,000 downloads. Listeners in over 200 countries, hitting number one in New and Noteworthy, and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this incredible information?” A lot of our listeners are curious how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge you get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to awesome podcast, and more.

Because of that, we created an epic resource just for you. A detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free by texting the world “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, It’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.

I’ve also gotten a bunch of listener emails recently asking me, “Hey, can you provide a link to the books that you guys talked about. Can you give me a transcript of the episode?” All this stuff. I wanted to let everyone know, if you haven’t checked them out, be sure to check out our show notes. It’s got everything we talked about in every episode including this episode and all of our previous episodes. You can get all of our show notes at scienceofsuccess.co. Just click the show notes button at the top.

In our previous episode, we went deep in the concept of free will. We looked at the question of whether or not freewill exists, we examined how quantum physics impacts the existence of freewill, we also looked at the neuroscience behind the concept of freewill, and looked at whether conscious decision making exists at all or whether our decisions arise completely within the subconscious, with Dr. Alfred Mele. If you want to deeply understand freewill, listen to that episode.

[0:03:01.1] MB: Today, we have another amazing guest on the show, Tal Ben Shahar. Tal created the most popular course in Harvard University’s history. He’s the bestselling author of several books including, The Pursuit of Perfect, Happier, Choose the Life You Want, Even Happier. He’s also the cofounder and chief learning officer of the Whole Being Institute, Potential Life, Maytiv and Happier TV.

Tal, welcome to The Science of Success.

[0:03:26.1] TBS: Thank you, Matt. Great to be here.

[0:03:28.8] MB: Well we’re very excited to have you on here. For listeners who may not be familiar with you, tell us a little bit about your background and your story.

[0:03:36.6] TBS: I actually started off my college career as a computer science major. I was at Harvard at the time and I found myself in my second year doing very well academically, doing well in sports, athletics, I played Squash, doing well socially and yet being very unhappy. It didn’t make sense to me because looking at my life from the outside, things looked great but from the inside, it didn’t feel that way.

I remember waking up one very cold Boston morning, going to my academic adviser and telling her that I’m switching course and she said, “What to?” I said, “Well, I’m leaving computer science and moving over to philosophy and psychology,” and she said, “Why?” I said, “Because I have two questions. First question is, why aren’t I happy? Second question is, how can I become happier?” It’s with these two questions that I then went on to get my undergraduate as well as graduate degrees, all the time focusing how can I help myself, individuals, couples, organizations, lead happier lives.

[0:04:40.5] MB: One of the concepts that you’ve shared in the past is, and you’ve described a couple of different ways, but one of them is kind of this idea of hamburger model and the four different archetypes. I’d love for you to sort of describe that and share that with our listeners.

[0:04:52.6] TBS: Sure. One of the first things that I realized when I started to study philosophy and psychology was that I was actually living life in a very far from an optimal way. I was living a life that was actually making me unhappy. I remember one day going to the hamburger joint and looking at my burger and realizing that there’s a great deal we can learn from hamburgers. 

For example, there is the very tasty and unhealthy burger, which many of us love to eat and then feel guilty about, there is the vegetarian burger that perhaps is very healthy but that is not very tasty. Then there is the burger that is neither tasty nor healthy. And then we have the ideal burger; that is the burger that is both healthy and tasty. I thought about these four kinds of burgers as being parallel to four ways, four different ways of living our lives.

The unhealthy and the tasty burger would be that of the hedonist, a person who thinks about their immediate pleasure but don’t think of their long term wellbeing. That’s not happiness; that’s perhaps short term wellbeing but it’s not happiness. Then there is the burger that like the vegetarian burger, which is you know, healthy but not tasty. That’s about thinking of the future but not enjoying the present, not enjoying the moment. 

Then there is the third burger, which is neither tasty nor healthy and that, you know, we’re all sometimes in a rut, having bad experiences, not really feeling like we’re going anywhere. That’s the worst of all burgers and finally there is what I’ve come to call “the happiness burger”, the healthy and tasty. That’s when we’re having experiences that are both pleasurable, enjoyable, and are also good for us for the long term.

In many ways, we can look at all happy experiences through this lens. For example, if I’m working at a place where I’m enjoying my work, or I experience pleasure and it’s meaningful to me, it’s important, I can see a long term trajectory in a happy workplace. Or if I’m in a relationship or I’m enjoying the time I spend with my partner and we’re building a life together. There’s also future benefit. The relationship is a healthy relationship. Well, that’s the happy relationship. 

Almost every experience we can situation in one of the four hamburger types. Again, the unhealthy and tasty, the healthy and not tasty, the not healthy and not tasty and finally the happiness burger, which is both healthy and tasty. What we want to do is as much as possible, live our lives in that fourth archetype. It’s not possible to be there all the time, but it’s certainly possible to be there more of the time. The more time we spend there, the happier we are.

[0:08:00.0] MB: I’d love to dig into how do we spend more time in that kind of fourth archetype, the happiness archetype? Maybe before we dip into that, how do you define happiness?

[0:08:11.7] TBS: Based on that model, I define happiness as a combination between meaning and pleasure, or between future benefits and present benefit. You see, there are many people who define happiness as just an ongoing experience of pleasure but don’t really think about the meaning part, about the future part.

Then there are other people who say, “Well no, this is all about hedonism and what happiness really is, is about having a sense of meaning and purpose, a long term benefit.” Well, neither definitions are sufficient. As I see it, and again, there is a lot of empirical data backing this up. What happiness is about, the good life is about the ability to bring the two together. To bring the present benefit, the pleasure component and the future benefits, the meaning component.

[0:09:02.6] MB: How do we spend more time in that happiness quadrant?

[0:09:07.2] TBS: The first thing is awareness. The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. If I’m able to identify times in my life when I was leading a happy life, when I was having happy experiences, in other words, when I was doing things that were both meaningful and pleasurable. Then I can simply ask myself, “Okay, so how can I have more of it? What did my partner and I do when we experienced the happy periods in our lives? What did I do at work or what work was I engaged in that brought a sense of meaning and pleasure to my life?” Then, the question is, “How can I have more of it?” 

So first of all, it’s awareness and then the willingness and the desire to replicate the good experiences. That’s one way of bringing more happiness to my life. There are other ways; so we know for example, what are the kind of things that bring us more meaning and pleasure in life? One of those things, for instance, relationships, the number one predictor of happiness is quality time we spend with people we care about and who care about us. Of course, not all relationships contribute to happiness, they’re also toxic relationships. 

But if you look at the happiest people in the world, the thing that defines their lives are relationships and what kind of relationships? That varies you know? For some people, it’s deep intimate friendships, for other people it’s the romantic relationships, for others, it’s family, for some, it’s all of the above. Whatever the kind of relationship is, this is the defining characteristic of the happiest people we know of.

[0:10:53.9] MB: That’s a finding that’s found again and again in the research right? That’s not just kind of an opinion, that’s something that’s very validated from the science itself?

[0:11:03.4] TBS: Absolutely. Let me give you just a couple of examples. The first interesting line of research looks at the happiness levels of nations. The question was, what are the happiest countries in the world? There are various organizations from the UN to gallop that asks this question. The countries that consistently appear in the top 10 of the list are countries like Denmark and Australia and Columbia and Israel. Holland, Costa Rica. 

You know, when you look at this countries, some of them you would expect to be there. Yeah, Australia of course, the kind of life that we believe that most Australians lead is a happy life. A lot of sports and activity and they seem like a happy bunch. Denmark, yes, understandable. But Israel and Columbia? These two countries consistently appear at the top of the happiest nations in the world list and if you wouldn’t expect that, both Columbia and Israel have their fair share of challenges.

The question is, “Why these countries and not others? Why this countries and not countries like the US or Germany or the UK or Singapore or Korea or Japan? Why?” The first thing that we know is that well, money has very little to do with it. Yes, if countries are poor, they’re unlikely to be happy countries. The population there is likely to be unhappy where there is poverty. But beyond the basic levels, beyond the basic levels of income, when there is enough food and basic shelter, additional money turns out not to make a difference to happiness levels, which explains why the wealthiest countries in the world are not the happiest countries in the world. 

What does make a difference? Relationships. In all the countries that I mentioned before, whether it’s Denmark or Israel or Australia or Columbia, there is a real emphasis on cultivating an intimate, healthy social network. Now, what does that look like? Well, in countries like Columbia, for example, family is high on the value list. In Israel, same thing, friendships as well. In countries like Denmark. Social relationships are emphasized. You know that in Denmark for example, 93% of the population — that’s almost everyone — 93% of the population are members of social clubs. 

Whether it’s their active members of social clubs, it could be their church or their sports club or whatever it is. Relationships are a priority. This is one line of research that points the importance of relationships. Another one is the by now, very well-known Harvard study, which looked at Harvard graduates, over a period of… well, for the past more than 70 years. Most of them are no longer alive, and also looked at an equal number of men from poor neighborhoods and what they looked for was who were the people who were the happiest among them? The single factor that came out, close supportive social relationships. The number one predictor of happiness.

[0:14:37.8] MB: That’s amazing. It’s fascinating that whether you’re looking at kind of individual experiences or nations as a whole, you see the same kind of conclusion born out in the data.

[0:14:49.9] TBS: Yes, this is one of the most robust findings in the field and by the way, it’s not just happiness, it’s also very much associated with health. People’s immune systems are actually a lot stronger when they enjoy healthy social support.

[0:15:08.1] MB: I think there’s a book called Blue Zones that came out a couple of years ago that delved into this kind of areas around the globe where people lived the longest and one of the major factors there, as well, was supportive social networks.

[0:15:20.7] TBS: Yes, very often we see high correlation between happiness levels and health. For example, we know that people who are optimistic on average live eight to nine years longer than people who are pessimistic. Of course, optimism is closely associated with happiness and what we see in the blue zones are relatively happy people and very healthy people and why are they happier? Well, there’s some interesting findings. One of them absolutely strong, social support, whether it’s friendships or families, sometimes both. 

The other things that we see in the blue zones that are also associated with happiness is they’re physically active. They don’t have gyms in those places and again, these places are places such as Sardinia and Italy, or Loma Linda just outside of Los Angeles. Or a place in Costa Rica, or Okinawa in Japan, or a Greek island. What’s unique about these places is that they’re physically active, they don’t have gyms necessarily, but they walk a lot or they work the fields. This is another thing that’s associated with both health and happiness.

There’s some fascinating research here beyond the blue zones about physical exercise. For example, regular physical extra size for as little as 30 minutes three times a week. That’s not that much. 30 minutes, three times a week and in terms of its impact in our psychological wellbeing, it’s equal to our most powerful psychiatric medication in dealing with anxiety, or depression, it also helps a great deal with attention deficit disorder.

Not to mention the great benefits for physical health for against the chronic disease and so on. Now, the reason why physical exercise works so well is because what it does, it releases certain chemicals such and norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine. These are your feel good chemicals in the brain and it functions in exactly the same way as our antidepressants do. I should add, without side effects or without negative side effects. 

This doesn’t mean that we can get rid of all the psychiatric medication or encourage those who are on them to stop and, not at all. Many people who takes psychiatric medication, really need it and very often they need it just in order to get out of the house and begin to exercise. The important thing to realize here is that physical exercise is very important, not just for our physical wellbeing, also for our psychological wellbeing.

[0:18:06.1] MB: I think exercise is so critical and, you know, I’m a huge fan of doing cardio multiple times a week and not at all for the health benefits, purely for the psychological reasons and I kind of view the health benefits as almost a positive side effect of what I consider sort of primarily a psychological intervention.

[0:18:28.1] TBS: Yes exactly. I often say to my students that even though I know a lot about positive psychology and I know the techniques and the tools and obviously I apply them to my life as well. If physical exercise was taken away from me, I don’t think I would be able to lead a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life. I think that is a central component, certainly for me, of happiness.

[0:18:56.8] MB: What causes people to fall out of the happiness quadrant?

[0:19:01.9] TBS: There are a few things; one of the things actually that paradoxically takes people out of happiness is their direct pursuit of happiness. Interestingly, there is research showing that people whose primary goal is to be happy, they end up being less happy. They end up being frustrated and they experience more painful emotions. The problem there is that you know, in the one hand, if you directly pursue happiness, you become less happy but on the other hand, we know how important happiness is. The benefits to happiness are not simply in that it feels good to feel good. 

People who increase their levels of happiness are as I mentioned earlier are healthier, they’re also more creative, my likely to think outside the box, they are better partners, better team players in the workplace, they have more energy, they get more done, they’re more productive. There are numerous benefits to happiness beyond the fact that we all want to feel good. We have a problem that on the one hand we know happiness is good but on the other hand, we know if we pursue happiness, it actually makes us less happy.

So what do we do about that? The way to resolve the seeming contradiction or this impasse is to pursue happiness indirectly. What does this mean? It means that we look at the ingredients of happiness, the components that lead to happiness, for example, if I know that relationships lead you happiness, well, then one of the objectives that I can set for myself is to cultivate healthy relationships.

To spend an extra hour a week with my BFF. To think more about, “How I can improve my relationship with my partner?” Or whatever it is. To pursue relationships. If I pursue relationships, that will indirectly lead to more happiness or to think about, how can I exercise more or better? What kind of exercise contribute to my wellbeing? For some people, dance is the best form of exercise, for other people, it’s the meditative nature of swimming. Find and persist. We know that another thing that contributes to happiness is a sense of meaning and purpose. How can I find or how can I engage in things that for me provide a sense of meaning and purpose. I’m not pursuing happiness directly.

What I’m doing is I’m engaging in those activities or implementing those ideas that I know will contribute to happiness. Because just saying, I want to be happier and I’m going to pursue happiness. That’s too abstract and it actually just leads to frustration rather than happiness. That’s why it’s important to study the field in order to breakdown happiness into its essential components. 

One way to understand it is to look at happiness as the sunlight. To look at the sunlight is difficult, it’s even unhealthy, not possible for a long time. However, if I break down the sunlight then I get the spectrum of colors. that I can look at. That I can savor and enjoy and benefit from. It’s breaking down that sunlight into its components to breaking down happiness into its components and pursuing those.

[0:22:44.9] MB: I’ve heard you talk about before that upon hearing that you lecture and have written extensively about happiness. People often ask you, “Are you happy all the time?” I’d love to hear kind of your answer to that and how you think about that.

[0:23:00.8] TBS: Sure. Another barrier to happiness is the expectation that we will be, or even can be happy all the time. So I remember when I was teaching my first class in positive psychology, was having lunch in one of the undergraduate dorms at Harvard when a student came over and asked me if he can join me for lunch and I said, “Sure,” and he said to me, “You know Tal, my roommates are taking your class,” and I said, “Great.” Then he said to me, “You know Tal? Now that you’re teaching a class on happiness, you’ve got to be careful.” I said, “Why?” He said, “Tal, you’ve got to watch out.” He said, “Why?” He said, “Because Tal, if I see you unhappy, I’ll tell my roommates.”

Now, suggesting that of course I ought to be happy all the time, given that I’m teaching a class on happiness. I told my students the next day in class, “The last thing in the world I want you to believe is that I experience constant happiness or that you, by the end of the year will always be happy. Because there are only two kinds of people who do not experience painful emotions like sadness or anxiety or anger or envy or disappointment, two kinds of people who do not experience painful emotions. The first kind are the psychopaths. The second kind are dead people. 

You know, I told my class and I told this to myself as well. The fact that we experience painful emotions, it’s actually a good sign, it means that we’re not psychopaths and we’re alive. It’s a good place to start; we can really build on that and in fact, when we do not allow ourselves to experience the full gamut of human emotions including anger and sadness and envy and anxiety. If we don’t allow ourselves to experience these emotions, these emotions actually strengthen, they fortify and they become more dominant. 

It’s when I give myself what I’ve come to call the permission to be human when I allow myself to experience the full range of human emotions. That’s when I open myself up. A, to these emotions, leaving my system and B, opening myself up to also more pleasurable emotions such as joy, happiness, love and so on.

Paradoxically, it’s when I do not give myself the permission to experience anxiety and anger and sadness, that’s when I experience more anxiety, anger and sadness. When I give myself the permission to experience these emotions, that’s when I more likely to experience happiness.

[0:25:44.7] MB: I’d love to dig in to that a little bit more and the kind of “what happens when someone tries to suppress their negative emotions?”.

[0:25:53.5] TBS: Let’s do a quick experiment. If you’re listening to this interview, do this experiment. For the next 10 seconds, do not think of a pink elephant. Five more seconds not to think of a pink elephant. Now, I bet you, almost everyone listening thought of the pink elephant. Why? Because when we try to suppress a natural phenomenon such as visualizing the word that we’re hearing, that phenomenon only intensifies. Just like we can’t suppress the seeing or thinking of a pink elephant. We cannot suppress the experience of painful emotions. When I tell myself, “Do not experience anxiety, do not experience anger, then anger and anxiety will only intensify, will grow. 

In contrast, when I simply give myself the permission to experience these emotions. Okay, I’m anxious, okay, I’m angry. Wow, I’m not a psychopath and I’m human. These emotions actually lose their hold on me and they flow right through me and when they flow right through me, when this set of emotion flows right through me, it means that other emotions such as joy and pleasure can also flow freely through me. 

[0:27:18.1] MB: And correct me if I’m wrong, but is this kind of the same concept that you talk about of active acceptance? 

[0:27:24.5] TBS: Yes. So when I talk about “acceptance and permission to be human” I don’t mean passively accepting these emotions. In other words, I don’t mean “Okay well I’m just angry, or anxious, or sad, so I’m going to do nothing just vegetate in front of the TV.” No, what I’m talking about is accepting these emotions, experiencing them and then asking myself, “Okay what can I do now in order to feel better?” But only after I’ve accepted and experience these emotions. 

Now how long do I accept and experience them for? Well that depends. If, for example, I’ve just lost someone who’s dear to me, well then I need a fair amount of time to just be sad, to just cry, to just talk about the painful emotions. If I just got a poor grade on an exam, well I need some time but less time than I would if I’ve lost someone dear to me. So it’s contextual. 

But some time is always necessary to experience the emotion and then to ask, “What can I do now? And “what can I do now?” could be, “Well maybe I should go for a run” or go out and dance with my friends or watch TV but that is the second step after the first step, which is full acceptance, full surrender to the emotions, whatever they are. 

[0:28:45.7] MB: I like the inclusion of surrender in there as well and I think this is something that I’ve personally — a lesson that I’ve personally learned really deeply over the last year or two is when you accept these emotions instead of fighting them and trying to bury them or hide them, it’s really powerful how much better you feel and how much more effectively you can deal with them. 

[0:29:09.0] TBS: Yes. So the idea of surrender, when people especially in the west, when we talk about the word surrender or surrendering to emotions we immediately see it as associated with giving up of course and that is by necessity something which is bad, which is necessary. You know we’re all about “never giving up” and “giving the good fight” and “stand up straight” and that’s not always the right approach. Yeah, maybe it’s the right approach when we were playing a sport or when we have a real challenge at work, but it’s not the right approach when we are facing emotional difficulties. 

When we’re facing emotional difficulties sometimes the opposite is what we need to do. It’s not to try harder, it’s actually to let go. It’s not to stand up straight, it could be just to lie down. It’s not to fight, it’s rather to surrender and these sound better or more helpful responses to difficult emotional experiences. 

[0:30:17.2] MB: I’d love to segue into talking about perfectionism, and I know that’s something that you’ve written a lot about. It’s very related to these topics. Tell me a little bit about your take on perfectionism. 

[0:30:30.5] TBS: Right, so perfectionism essentially is unhealthy fear of failure and unhealthy extreme sometimes obsessive fear of failure that permeates those areas in our lives that are most important to us. So, if I can give a personal example, when I was a professional Squash player losing a game was an absolute disaster or even having a practice session which was not perfect, that was an absolute disaster. Or later on, it was when I was a student, perfectionism permeated my academic experience, at least for the first two years. 

When I started to study psychology, very quickly I realized first of all that I was a perfectionist and secondly, the consequences of perfectionism. We were all unhappy when we failed. It doesn’t feel good to fail, but there are very different kinds of responses. One response, the perfectionist response, “This is awful, this is terrible. Now I’m never going to succeed again. I’m a complete failure.” 

The healthier approach is, “Okay, I failed. It’s not pleasant, not fun, but what can I learn from it? How can I move forward? How can I go ahead?” What’s the upside of failure? If you listen to many of the most successful people in the world, they would tell you that the most helpful experiences that they had over the years were experiences of failure, when they learned from it and grew as a result and that’s the much healthier approach to failure. 

Now when I talk about failure I mean it in the broad sense. Also while we can look at a painful emotion as a form of failure because the perfectionist, one form of perfectionist, is the person who wants to have a perfect, unbroken chain of pleasurable, positive emotions. Now that of course is not possible, and then when the perfectionist experiences a painful emotion, that immediately is a disaster and he enters or she enters a downward spiral of self-criticism, very often self-hate, and of course unhappiness as a result. 

[0:32:45.9] MB: So for somebody that is caught in one of those cycles or has very unrealistic expectations about their happiness and their well-being, how do they deal with that or how do they break out of that cycle? 

[0:33:01.8] TBS: Yeah, so there are a few ways. The first is really understanding what perfectionism is and distinguishing between healthy perfectionism and unhealthy perfectionism. So often when people are asked interviews, “So, tell me your shortcomings?” And very often what people say, “Oh I’m a perfectionist,” and of course, they talk about it as a shortcoming. But actually what they mean is, “Well you can trust me. I get things done really well. I make sure. I’m a responsible person. I make sure things are bent perfectly.”

So they’re saying it as a short coming, as a problem but actually they mean it as something that they’re somewhat proud of and being responsible and being hardworking and being persistent and reliable, these are positive traits by and large. So there is this part of perfectionism, which is not bad, which is actually good but there’s another part of perfectionism, which is harmful. Which is harmful to first of all happiness but second also to creativity, to relationships. 

Because if I’m a perfectionist I cannot hear criticism and if you cannot hear criticism and you’re not open to other people, I mean intimate relationships are almost impossible and there is very little learning when there is perfectionism because there is a reluctance to admit imperfections, to admit that, “I don’t know.” So there are two kinds of perfectionism, what psychologist call the “adaptive” and the “maladaptive” perfectionism. So first thing is to be able to understand, what kind of perfectionism do I want to get rid of or do I want to make less dominant in my life? 

Second, the ways you make it less dominant, less pervasive is paradoxically by failing more. You see, one of the reasons why perfectionist are so afraid of failure is because they have elevated failure to a larger than life status and they don’t fail much and then in their minds failure becomes this potential catastrophe. Whereas if we fail a lot by putting ourselves in the line time and time again, after a while we see, “You know, the world didn’t come to an end after this failure and neither after this failure.” 

And in a sense, we get used to failing. We begin to get used to being imperfect and overtime, we become more comfortable failing. So that’s one way. Another way which indirectly helps a great deal is actually meditation. Because what is meditation? Meditation is learning to be present, learning to be here and now and when I’m present to an experience, to any experience, whether it’s the experience of sadness or the experience of failure, it becomes less difficult to tolerate. I learn to live with it and then I realize, “Hey that is actually not that bad not only is it not that bad, I actually learned a lot by being present to this experience, so there’s no need to fear it happening again,” and I become less of a perfectionist then. 

[0:36:09.6] MB: I’d love to explore the interplay between stress and recovery and I’d love to get your thoughts on that. 

[0:36:17.5] TBS: Sure, so one of the things that over the last few years have become very clear through the research is that for years and decades, psychologists, professionals as well as lay people have looked at stress in the wrong way. If you ask most people, conventional wisdom today would tell you that “stress is bad”, that what we need to do is eliminate stress, get rid of it or at the very least minimize it in our lives because it’s associated with chronic disease, with happiness, with depression and anxiety, you name it; stress is the culprit. 

Well, it actually turns out that not only is stress not the culprit, that actually stress potentially is good for us. How come? Look at this analogy: You go to the gym and you lift weights, what are you doing with your muscles? You’re stressing your muscles, now is that a bad thing? Of course not. You lift weights and you become stronger. You stress your muscles two days later and you become even stronger and on and on and you become fitter, stronger, healthier, happier. Stress is not a bad thing actually. It’s potentially a good thing. 

When do the problems begin at the gym? The problems in the gym begin when you lift weights and a minute later, you lift more weights and then you increase the weightage and the following day you go in and again, you push yourself again and again and again. That’s when the problems begin. That’s when you get injured. That’s when you get weaker rather than stronger. The problem therefore, when it comes to stress, is that we don’t have enough recovery. In the gym when you have enough recovery, you get stronger through the stress. 

The same happens on the psychological level not just on the physiological level. On the psychological level, we can deal with stress. We’re good at it. We were created whether it’s by God or evolution, we were created to be able to deal with stress. The problem is that we don’t have enough recovery today. You know the difference between 5,000 years ago or even 50 years ago and today is that in the past there was much more time, many more opportunities for recovery. Today there isn’t because we’re on most of the time. 

You know, there’s a wonderful book by a Harvard professor, Leslie Perlow called Sleeping With Your Smartphone. It has become our most intimate companion and we’re on it constantly, we’re available constantly. Instead of switching off, instead of taking time for recovery. Whether it’s a meal with our friends or family or whether it’s going to the gym or whether it’s just going for a walk in the streets, or even better, the woods, these forms of recovery are so very important for us to reset the system in a sense and just like we need recovery in the gym, we need recovery in life.  And the stress today, the problem with stress today is that people don’t have enough time to recover. If they do have time to recover, that stress can only make us strong, happier, and healthier. 

[0:39:26.7] MB: How do we build or find more time for recovery? 

[0:39:30.7] TBS: Unfortunately we can’t find more time. We have finite amounts of time but what we can do is put time aside for what we think is really important and recovery is really important and it’s not giving up time. Recovery is a form of investment. So when I invest, if I invest money, yes I’m in the sense giving up money but I’m giving up money for the sake of future gain so that I have more of it in the future and in the same way with the recovery. Yes, I’m putting some time aside for recovery when I am not working, for instance. But I am actually getting much more in return because in the time after I recover, I will be a lot more productive, a lot more creative and of course happier. 

So recovery is a good investment and recovery, again, is something, whether it’s 15 minutes of meditation or an hour in the gym or just hanging out for a couple of hours with friends and recovery is also a good night sleep. A lot of research on the importance of sleep for well-being and for cognitive functioning, it could be a day or two off over the weekend and recovery can be the vacation, the week or four week holiday once or twice a year. So all these forms of recovery are great forms of investment. I get much more in return. 

[0:40:56.3] MB: I’d love to talk about — we’ve examined a couple of the different mind-body interventions that deal with anxiety and stress. We’ve talk about exercise and how important that is, we’ve touched briefly on meditation. One of the other things you’ve talked about is the power of breathing and I’d love to hear some of your insights. 

[0:41:15.5] TBS: Sure. So there is, again, a lot of work, a lot of research on breathing and the nice thing about it is that it’s always there for us literally from the moment we were born until the moment we die and we need to make better use of this thing that’s right under our very noses and what does it mean to make use of breathing? Because we breathe naturally and again, we always do it. But there are helpful and unhelpful forms of breathing. 

So for instance, when stress levels rise and when we don’t have enough recovery, our breathing actually becomes shorter and shallower. We don’t take a deep breathe in. Now it’s very easy to simply decide, to set our alarm clock or smartphone to remind us, say every two hours to take three or four or five deep breaths, which you spend 10 minutes first thing in the morning just breathing in deeply and focusing on the breathe going in and out and we’re benefiting then from both breathing and it’s a form of meditation as well. 

Now what is proper breathing? It’s really like what a baby would breathe. When you watch a baby breathing, you see their belly go up and down. This is called belly breath, and engaging in belly breathing, again, three to four deep breathes every hour or two and then maybe a couple of minutes in the morning and a couple of minutes more in the evening, that can go a long way as a form of recovery, as a form of taking in sufficient oxygen as a form of changing our experience from the fight or flight response. 

A stressful response to what Herbert Benson from Harvard Medical School calls “The Relaxation Response” and again, it doesn’t take much. It’s a very simple intervention that’s with us all the time. I, as a ritual, engaging in deep breathing a few times a day and that has done wonders to my overall experience of wellbeing. 

[0:43:28.8] MB: I’d love to touch on rituals, you just mentioned that. What are some of the rituals that you found daily that have really helped you cultivate wellbeing and happiness? 

[0:43:40.1] TBS: Yes, first of all maybe I can just say a couple of words about the importance of rituals. Because many people think that if they understand something, so for example, I understand the importance of exercise or I understand the importance of breathing or the importance of relationships, well then that’s enough to bring about change. I’ve had the “aha moment” I was convinced by a study and a research and now I’m ready to live happily ever after. 

Well unfortunately that’s not the case. Knowing what’s good for us doesn’t mean that we’re doing what’s good for us and doing is necessary for bring about the real change. Rather than relying on knowing or understanding, what we must rely on to bring about lasting change are rituals, are habits. You know, John Dryden, the British philosopher/poet once wrote: “We first make our habits and then our habits make us,” and it’s important to make habits to create rituals that will contribute to our wellbeing. 

So let me share you some of the rituals, some of the daily or weekly rituals that I have. One of them is physical exercise, three times a week on particular days, particular times I exercise. For me it’s usually a stationary bike or swimming. Three days a week I do yoga. Every morning when I get up, I spend between 10 and 12 minutes deep breathing while reminding myself of the things that I want to be reminded. 

For example, I remind myself — and this is all written down. I remind myself to be present. I remind myself to bring more playfulness to my work, to my family. I remind myself to contribute, to help others and cultivate healthy relationship. I remind myself to be patient and finally, I remind myself to give myself the permission to be human, to be humble about myself, my life, my expectations. 

Now these things, I remind myself of everyday. They are already second nature, I’ve formed neural pathways in my brain around these ideas that I believe are so important for a happy, healthy, and fulfilling life. It’s only by engaging a ritual around them that they can become second nature, they can be assimilated, internalized and finally another ritual that I have before going to bed is expressing gratitude for at least five things in my life.

[0:46:25.7] MB: That’s such a great exposition about rituals and I love that quote, “We first make our habits and then our habits make us.” That’s really powerful. I’d love to dig in to the concept, and this goes back a little bit to kind of when we were talking about perfectionism and the permission to be human. I’d love to talk about self-forgiveness. Can you share some of your thoughts about that?

[0:46:49.9] TBS: Sure. The Dali Lama, when he came to the west for the first time, interviewed many western scientists, psychologist, practitioners, theoreticians. One of the most surprising things that he found was that compassion, the word for compassion in the west stands for compassion towards other people. He said, in Tibetan, the word for compassionate is Sewe. Sewe is equally about compassion toward others and towards one’s self. We’re very hard with ourselves, that has to do a lot with perfectionism or is a cause of perfectionism.

We’re not forgiving, we don’t give ourselves the permission to experience painful emotions or to fail, to be human. Unfortunately, that’s a cause of a great deal of unhappiness. There’s no one who is perfect and no one ever was or ever will be. The sooner we accept that, the better, the more forgiving we are of our imperfections or of our failures, the happier, and paradoxically, the more successful we’ll be in the long term. 

[0:48:02.2] MB: For somebody who has been listening and wants to have kind of a concrete starting place to implement some of the ideas that we’ve talked about today, what’s sort of one simple piece of homework that you would give to one of our listeners?

[0:48:16.4] TBS: What I would do first, we are potentially the best teachers that we have. What I would do is, I would sit down and I would write, I would write about my best experiences from the past, “When was I at my happiest?” From those stories that I write down, I would extract what I consider the essentials. Keep in mind all the things that you heard about permission to be human and about relationships and about exercise and about expressing gratitude and try and extract the essentials.

In other words, do research on yourself, or rather what I distinguish between research and search. Research is very often about other people. Search is within one’s self.

[0:49:08.3] MB: For people who want to learn more about you, where can people find you and your books online?

[0:49:13.0] TBS: Well, my books are on Amazon or you can go onto my website, www.talbenshahar.com.

[0:49:22.4] MB: Well Tal, thank you so much, this has been a fascinating conversation and I know I’ve taken away a ton of insights and I think the listeners are really going to enjoy this. We just wanted to say, thank you so much for being on the show. 

[0:49:37.0] TBS: Thank you Matt for the opportunity.

[00:39:03.2] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing form listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I would love to hear from you, and I read and respond to every listener email.

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover The Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking, “MAtt, how do you organize and remember all this information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all  of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email  list. 

If you want to get all of this incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about, and much more, be sure to check out our show notes at scienceofsuccess.co. Just hit the “snow notes button at the top. Thanks again and we’ll see you on the next episode of The Science of Success. 

Do Neuroscience and Quantum Physics Disprove the Existence of Free Will? With Dr. Alfred Mele

In this episode we go DEEP on free will. Does free will exist? How does quantum physics impact the existence of free will?  We look at the neuroscience behind the concept of free will, and look at whether conscious decision-making exists at all or all of our decisions arise within the subconscious with Dr. Alfred Mele.

Dr. Alfred Mele is a Professor of Philosophy at Florida State University. He is also the Director of the Philosophy and Science of Self-Control Project and previous director of the Big Questions in Free Will Project (2010-2013). Mele is the author of over 200 articles and ten books including “Free Will & Luck”, “Self Deception Unmasked,” and “Free: Why Science Hasn’t Disproved Free Will."

• We do deep on the definition of Free Will and what it means

• Do you have free will?

• Dr. Mele’s “gas station” model of Free will and what it means

• What is “deep openness” and does it underpin the existence of free will?

• The concept of determinism and whether or not it is compatible with the idea of free will

• How quantum physics shapes the physical reality of free will

• Philosophical concept of dualism and how it interacts with the existence of free will

• Does your environment impact your ability to have “free will” and make independent decisions?

• Does science leaves open the possibility for free will to exist?

• We go deep into the actual neuroscience experiments that test whether or not we have free will

• We get into the millisecond readings of EEGs that show how the brain’s decision making works to determine whether or not our decisions are truly free

• We explore type 2 readiness potential and why its so critical to understanding whether or not we have free will

• Where the evidence lands in terms of the neuroscience of free will

• Does your unconscious rule your mind or can you consciously make free decisions?

• Does your environment and upbringing predetermine your decisions?

• Does moral responsibility exist in a world without free will?

• How do we handle questions of moral responsibility if free will doesn’t exist?

• How do people behave when they dont believe they have free will?

• Why 94% of University Professors rated themselves as above average professors

• Why 25% of High School Students rated themselves in the top 1% of their ability to get along with others

• We discuss the concept of Self Deception and how to combat it

• And much more!

If you’ve always wondered about Free Will - listen to this episode! 

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Free: Why Science Hasn't Disproved Free Will by Alfred R. Mele

• [Interview Series] Big Questions in Free Will

• [FSU Bio] Alfred Mele

• [Article] Libet Experiments

• [Article] Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain

• [Video] The Libet Experiment: Is Free Will Just an Illusion?

• [Article] Patrick Haggard

• [Article] Human volition: towards a neuroscience of will by Patrick Haggard

• [Article] The value of believing in free will: encouraging a belief in determinism increases cheating.

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind in what makes peak performance tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we go deep on free will. Does free will exist? How does quantum physics impact the existence of free will? We look at the neuro science behind the concept of free will and look at whether conscious decision making exists at all or if all of our decisions arise from within the subconscious with Dr. Alfred Mele. When I say we go deep on this episode, fair warning to our listeners, it’s easy to get lost in the weeds on this one but there are some fascinating takeaways. 

The science of success continues to grow with more with more than 750,000 downloads. Listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one new noteworthy, and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this incredible information?” A lot of our listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge you get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to podcast, and more.

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In our previous episode, we discussed how you can tap into your subconscious mind and reprogram it, the eight step process for overcoming anxiety and conquering your fears, how to stop a panic attack in real time, how to get deeper sleep, the power of hypnosis and much more with Justin Stenstrum. If you want to conquer fear and anxiety, listen to that episode.

[0:02:21.8] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Al Mele. Al is a professor of philosophy at Florida State University. He’s the director of philosophy in science of self-control project. The previous director of the big questions and free will project. He is also the author of over 200 articles and 10 books including Free Will and Luck, Self-Deception Unmasked, and Free: Why science hasn’t disproved free will. 

Al, welcome to the science of success.

[0:02:50.0] AM: Thanks.

[0:02:50.6] MB: We’re super excited to have you on the show today. For listeners who may not be familiar with you, tell us a little bit kind of about yourself, your story, and fill in some gaps from that bio that I wrote.

[0:03:01.1] AM: Let’s see. I was an undergrad first at Kalamazoo college for a year, it was a little too preppy for me I guess so I went back to Detroit where I’m from and went to Wayne State University as an undergrad. That’s where I got interested in philosophy. Then for grad school, I moved down to the University of Michigan. 

I wrote my dissertation on Aristotle’s theory of human motivation, and my first job which I had for 21 years was at Davidson college in North Carolina, a wonderful place and I moved to Florida State University in 2000.

[0:03:38.5] MB: One of the topics that you’re obviously a big kind of expert in, you’ve written a lot about, talked a lot about is freewill, which is something that I find to be really fascinating. How do you define the concept of freewill?

[0:03:50.6] AM: Well, that itself is a disputed matter, what I have done, especially in my book Free, a book for the general public, is to offer three different ways of thinking about what are the expression “free will” means. I use a gas station model. We have regular gas, and mid-grade gas, and premium gas. We could think of three different grades of freewill. 

At the regular level, what would be sufficient for making a free decision for example or we could say “exercise in freewill in making a decision” is just that the person is sane and rational, well informed, not deceived, not compelled by anything or anyone and makes a decision on basis of good information. That would be an up for regular freewill. 

Then to move on to the next level, the mid-grade level, what you need is this certain kind of openness. I call it “deep openness” and one way to think about it anyway is, you need to be able to have decided otherwise holding the entire past of the universe and all the laws of nature fixed. How do you picture that? Well, maybe you can imagine rolling back time a bit and then rolling it forward to the moment of decision and on this rewind, the person makes a different decision than he made the first time.

Maybe the first time he decided to have dinner at McDonalds and the next time he decided to have dinner at Chez Pierre and everything else was the same up until that time. For it to be like that, the laws that govern relevant brain activity would have to be, we say “probabilistic” as opposed to exceptionalist. There would have to be real indeterminism in the brain. For the mid-grade freewill, then you add that deep openness to the mix that I described sanity, rationality, well informedness and so on. 

Then you bump up to mid-grade freewill. Then, the third conception I offer and it’s out there in the world, it’s far from being the dominant conception. Adds something else to that mix and what is added is some sort of soul or immaterial mind. Something that really transcends the natural order. Some people think you need that in order to have freewill.

That’s a conception of freewill I don’t say a lot about in anything I’ve written but it is out there in the world, as I said.

[0:06:37.6] MB: I’d love to hear a little bit more kind of about the concept of deep openness and how that relates to indeterminism or determinism.

[0:06:46.0] AM: Yeah, you know, you might wonder, well why do some people require deep openness for free will? It’s because they’re thinking that in order for a decision to be free, just to focus on decisions for now, you need to have been able to do otherwise than make that decision. Then, they need to think about what it is to be able to do otherwise. In this mid-grade way of thinking, what it is that the whole world up until then and all the laws of nature left opened alternative possibilities, other ways you could have decided. 

Now, how is that going to be? How is it going to be left open? Well, only if the way the world works actually includes this kind of openness and the openness needs to be in the brain. Maybe another way to get at it is by thinking about what’s called determinism. Now, there’s a whole school of philosophy and a dominant school in this area, according to which determinism is compatible with freewill.

Now, what some people mean by determinism, I can tell is well whatever that thing is, that renders freewill impossible, whatever that thing is that precludes freewill. Obviously, compatibilists aren’t thinking of determinism in that way because then they couldn’t be compatibilists.

Here’s the way to think about determinism, this is the most common way in the freewill literature and it’s the way it’s thought about in physics too. A universe is deterministic if a complete description of all the laws of nature and a complete description of the universe at any given time entails all other truths about the universe so that if you have a super intelligence who knew all the laws of nature and knew the state of the universe at any time.

That person could deduce from that knowledge, everything that whatever happened. The deep openness people are saying, if a universe is like that, there can’t be freewill in it. In order for there to be freewill, those complete lists of the laws and of a description of the universe at a time, have to leave open different possibilities for decision makers.

[0:09:15.5] MB: Is that where sort of quantum physics potentially kind of keeps the door open from sort of a purely physical and deterministic standpoint for the possibility that sort of because the quantum world itself is indeterminant, the possibility for free will remains?

[0:09:32.9] AM: Yes, it does. I mean, what you would need to do then is to have the thought that quantum indeterminacy isn’t only out there outside of our heads in that part of the world, it’s also in that part of the world that is us and our brains.

What you would need is something like quantum indeterminacy in the brain.

[0:09:57.4] MB: I think these concepts are interrelated, tell me about the difference between kind of the dualistic conception of freewill and the more naturalistic conception of it.

[0:10:07.1] AM: Yeah, so when philosophers talk about dualism, it’s usually what’s called substance dualism that they have in mind and substance dualism is the idea that there are two different kinds of thing in the world or two different kinds of entity in the world.

There are all the physical things including our bodies and then there is a different kind of thing that isn’t physical. It’s soul or a mind, a nonphysical mind. Dualistic conceptions of freewill would be at that premium level in the freewill gas station.

[0:10:47.1] MB: What about a more sort of naturalistic conception of freewill in the sense of our biology and our environment impacts whether or not we’re sort of truly free and independent decision makers?

[0:10:59.9] AM: Right. Both of the first two kinds of freewill are naturalistic. The regular kind is naturalistic, it just depends on this natural things that I mentioned, sanity, rationality being uncompelled, un-coerced, well informed and so on and the mid-grade freewill, at least on my conception of it, is also naturalistic. It doesn’t depend on anything nonphysical. One thing it does depend on is that the laws that govern brain activity are not, some people say, deterministic or exception less. It depends on their being probabilistic. 

Now, you can try to mix something that isn’t really naturalistic into that second conception of free will but that’s not my way of doing it. Oh, and by the way, I have written now an 11th book that will be out in the spring, they’re saying April or May. Again by Oxford University Press and it’s aspects of agency and the main task in that book, though not the only task is to motivate this mid-grade conception of freewill and to try to solve the main theoretical problems for it.

[0:12:18.4] MB: Within that book, what is your take on kind of the idea that are we able to have — this is kind of awkwardly phrased, but are we able to have decided otherwise or does our environment sort of prime us to really make decisions in a way that we already would have made them?

[0:12:38.6] AM: Yeah, that’s a good question. The way I think of freewill on any of this conceptions really is that although we are strongly influenced by upbringing, learning history environment, et cetera, there is some room left for freedom. So it’s not as though there are all those forces out there and then they just somehow go through us and generate decisions, we’re actively involved in some of the decision making. On the mid-grade conception of freewill, sometimes that active involvement is such that we could have decided otherwise than we did holding everything else fixed. 

Now, there is no powerful evidence that the brain is indeterministic in that way but there is also no powerful evidence that the brain is deterministic in that way, where determinism is understood in the sense I explained earlier. Science, as far as I can see, leaves open the mid-grade freewill. Science doesn’t strongly support it, but it doesn’t also strongly go against it. It’s a wide open possibility.

[0:13:55.7] MB: We’ve examined sort of the three major models of freewill and we’ve kind of started touching on whether or not they exist. I’m curious, where do you land on each of those models and whether or not we have freewill?

[0:14:10.5] AM: Okay good. The first kind of freewill, the regular kind, I’m very confident that we have and if you think of the conditions again, all you have to do is ask yourself whether you and other people in your opinion ever satisfy those conditions. Again, these are just sufficient conditions. I’m not saying they’re even required for freewill, but if you satisfy them, you have all you need. 

Sane; are and I sane? Well, yes. Rational? Largely so. Well informed? Sometimes. Undeceived? Sometimes. Do we make decisions sometimes on the basis of good information? Yes, we do. We can tell that those decisions were good sometimes too because things play out the way we planned and we and others benefit from our decisions. We achieve our goals. So, regular freewill I have no doubt about, it exists. 

The mid-grade, I don’t know. As I mentioned, I think it’s wide open scientifically but I don’t know that the brain works in the way it would need to work in order for us to have that deep openness and this is something I think we won’t know for a very long time. To know it, we’d have to be able to do brain physics at a level at which we can’t do it now. Maybe later, maybe there will be a time.

The third kind of freewill really does depend on something supernatural. I’m an evidence-driven person and I can’t say there’s good evidence for these supernatural powers that we would need in order to have the third kind of freewill.

[0:15:56.5] MB: Now, you’re obviously a philosopher but you’ve done a lot of research and studied deeply the neuroscience are around freewill. What does the science say in terms of the existence of freewill?

[0:16:08.7] AM: Well, it’s often said that the science shows that there is no freewill but to explain why it doesn’t, I can describe an early experiment that got this ball rolling in the neuroscience literature and then explain why it doesn’t show that there is no freewill. Actually, I can describe this experiment for you in probably three minutes. 

The subject’s task was to flex their risk whenever they wanted and then after they flexed, they were supposed to report where the spot or hand was on a very fast clock when they first felt the urge to flex right then. They’re hooked up to two machines so EEG ratings are taken from the scalp and that gives you a measurement of changes in electrical conductivity on the scalp and then measurements were taken from the wrist muscle. 

When subjects were regularly reminded to be spontaneous, that it’s not to think about when to flex and not to plan in advance when to do it, you got an EEG ramp up about 550 milliseconds, a little more than half a second before muscle motion. But the average time of first reported awareness of the intention or urge or whatever to flex right then was just 200 milliseconds, two tenths of a second before muscle motion. 

The scientist who did this work, Benjamin Libet said, “Well look what’s going on is that minus 550 milliseconds, the brain is deciding and the person doesn’t become conscious of the decision for about another third of a second.” Then he said, “Well look, if decisions are unconscious then they’re not free. They need to be conscious in order to be free,” and then he generalized from his judgment about this case of decision making to all cases and claimed that all decisions are made unconsciously so no decisions are free. These are decisions to do things in particular. 

That experiment really got the ball rolling. It was much discussed in the mid-1980’s, it was done a little bit earlier than then but there was a famous behavioral and brain science paper published in 1985 by Libet. Then interest sort of died out for a while and then it was all brought back by Patrick Haggard, a neuroscientist in London, who did newer Libet style experiments with better technology, also EEG. Then other scientists subsequently did studies like this using FMRI, which measures changes in blood flow in the brain or depth electrodes with epilepsy patients. 

In this case, sometimes epilepsy patients have a condition so bad that it can’t properly be treated by drugs and they opt for surgery. Part of the skull is removed to do diagnostics and if they like, they can participate in neuroscience experiments. Some experiments were done with epilepsy patients using depth electrodes or electrode grids directly on the brain. You get readings directly form the brain, which are much more accurate than EEG.

All this studies have been claimed by some people at least, to show that there is no freewill because the studies claim to show that decisions in them, in those studies are made unconsciously and therefore not freely. If you go back to Libet, you do have a question, what happens at minus 550 milliseconds? Is that when a decision to flex right then is made or is something else going on? Once you ask that question, you should ask, well how long does it take a decision to do something now with your hand to cause muscle motion in the hand? Does it take a little over a half a second or does it take some other amount of time? 

You know, there are ways to get evidence about that. For one thing, you could look for or do them yourself if you have a lab. Look for reaction time studies in which people are watching a clock that would make it pretty similar to Libet’s experiment. In reaction time studies, subjects know what they’re supposed to do when they get a go signal and what they’re supposed to do is do that thing right away.  So you could do reaction time study where you say, “Hey look, when this clock face changes from white to red, what I want you to do is to flex right then. Or when you hear a tone, while you’re watching the clock, I want you to flex as soon as you can after the tone.”

Now, studies like this have been done and in some of them, the mean time between the sounding of the go signal and muscle motion is 231 milliseconds. But if the way it works is, you hear the tone and hearing it or detecting it generates an intention to do the action, which then generates muscle motion, the intention to do that action right then is going to arise after 231 milliseconds before muscle motion.

That indicates that the time at which the intention to do the thing now, I call this proximal intentions, arises is much closer to the time of muscle motion than Libet thought and in fact, it’s very close to the average time of first reported awareness, around 200 milliseconds.

Another study that was done recently and this is a study that’s actually better than one that I suggested in my book, Effective Intentions, because the technology now is better. You tell people, “Either press the left button or the right button and it’s going to be up to you but I don’t want you to decide which one to press until you get a signal and treat that signal as a decide signal.” It says, “Okay, go ahead and decide now and then do it.” 

Now, that signal Libet was detecting from the EEG is called the type two readiness potential. So it’s got a certain shape. I could draw it for you if we had video. He was measuring from a lot of the brain. You can also do lateralized readiness potential. You measure from the left side of the brain or you measure from the right side of the brain and in the case of hand motions, of course, the left side of the brain controls the right hand. The right side of the brain controls the left hand. 

In this study that I’m talking about now that use lateralized readiness potentials. What they discovered is that there was no difference in the EEG before the tone in cases in which people pressed the left button and cases in which they pressed the right button. That’s evidence that a decision hadn’t yet ben made because if it had it would have shown up in the EEG and the meantime between the go signal and muscle motion was about a 150 milliseconds, which indicates that decisions to do things now don’t arise until about a 150 milliseconds before muscle motion when we’re talking about hand movements anyway.

But then, that too goes very strongly against Libet’s argument that he has shown that brains in his studies are making decisions unconsciously, it looks like the decisions aren’t made until about 150 milliseconds before muscle motion and that’s well within the time of average reported awareness of the urge or decision or intention or whatever. So this kind of problem arises for all of the neuroscience studies that have been claimed to show that there’s no freewill because our decisions are made unconsciously.

[0:24:09.3] MB: To kind of sum this up or explain it in a way that listeners can really simply grasp, the research or much of the neuroscience, people like Libet and some Haggard and some of the others, showed that, or at least their initial finding was that when people said they made a decision, the 500 milliseconds before that, their subconscious was doing something that may have been the decision.

Explain to me why that’s not necessarily an accurate representation of kind of how people think?

[0:24:39.6] AM: Well, I think just to keep it really short and simple, our evidence indicates that even in the experiments like this, the actual decisions or intentions arise much closer to muscle motion than Libet, Haggard, and so on thought and the reason they thought this decisions or intentions were unconscious is they thought they were popping up over half a second before muscle motion. But the evidence actually indicates that they pop up much later, about 150 milliseconds before muscle motion. That’s around the time people say they were aware of their decisions or intentions. 

So if you treat those awareness reports seriously, what you should be thinking is, “Oh, this decisions and intentions are consciously made.” But if their consciously made, the whole argument for no freewill goes away. Because the argument rested on the plane that the decisions and intentions in these studies were unconsciously made.

[0:25:42.9] MB: What was Libet picking up that was happening 500 milliseconds before somebody moved their hand?

[0:25:48.5] AM: I think preparation to move. These subjects only had one thing to do really and it was flex their wrist from time to time and then try to keep track of where the spot was on the clock when they became aware of their urge to do it. So after a while if you haven’t flexed for a while, you’re going to be getting ready to do it even if you haven’t decided exactly when you’re going to do it and that getting ready will show up in the EEG. Actually, if we were to do an EEG experiment where you know what I’m going to do, when I get a go signal like you know that I’m going to flex my right wrist. 

When you see the go signal you’re going to show some EEG and it won’t be as powerful as mine, the ramp won’t be as high but it will be similar in shape and what does that indicate? Well you’re expecting something to happen and somehow you’re reacting to it in a certain way, a certain measurable way. Well, I was once a subject to the Libet style experiment, I guess it was 11 years ago now and I knew that sooner or later, I was going to be flexing because in these studies you have to do this at least 40 times what you did back then to get data that you could use. 

And so, I figured I was preparing from time to time for a flex pretty soon without yet having decided exactly when that would happen and that preparation will show up in the EEG. So the short version is, I think what Libet detected is a part of a process that sooner or later would result in an intention to do the thing right then. Oh, you know I should add one more thing because sometimes as I go on about this, people wonder, “Well aren’t brain events of which you’re ultimately unconscious among the causes of your decisions or intentions anyway?” and I say, “Yes definitely they are.”

I can’t imagine decisions and intentions that aren’t caused by brain events, or at least I have the very hard time getting my mind around that. So there is of course a brain process going on that’s going to result in a decision or intention in these studies but the question is are those decisions or intentions made unconsciously? And the answer is, they don’t have good evidence that they are and in fact the evidence seems to indicate that they are made consciously. 

You might wonder, “Why does it matter if they are made consciously if they’re caused by brain events?” Well, it mattered to Libet and Wagner and Haggard and so on because their argument was, because they are made unconsciously, they are not made freely. 

[0:28:41.2] MB: So one of the distinctions here that I am curious about that I see you delineating is the difference between conscious and unconscious decision making and how that impacts the definition of free will but side stepping the question of, “Well then what impacts our conscious decision making and do we have control of that?” Right? And that’s where we give back into the loop of the discussion about deep openness and determinism in terms of infinite regression of questions about, “How many things could have impacted my conscious thought that I don’t have control over and how does that determine whether or not I have free will?”

[0:29:18.4] AM: Okay, good. Now in these experiments that I’m talking about, as you can tell, what the subjects are doing is randomly picking. They’re randomly picking the time to begin flexing and Libet studies and in studies where they press one button or the other many different times, they’re randomly picking which button to press this time and then reporting it when they became aware of their urges or intentions to do it. 

Now human beings have automating tie breaking mechanisms that are really very useful in lots of situations. So you go into a supermarket and you have your shopping list and maybe you have a 16 ounce jar of Planter’s peanuts on your shopping list and you get to the Planter’s peanut display and you see hundreds of jars all the same and you just reach out and pick one. So there no conscious thought that goes into which one to pick. It’s an arbitrary picking, you’re lucky that you have an automatic tie breaking mechanism, otherwise you’d be stuck there clueless about what to do. 

So those pickings are driven by brain events. We don’t really know ourselves as agents why we’d pick exactly the jar we picked. There are some theories about why we do. It has to do with the dominant hand and how high your eyes are and where the stuff is in the display. So there, there is no real place for conscious reasoning about what to do. But now switch over to another domain like the work place and so maybe you have a really good job and somebody offers you a job that looks like it might be better. 

And maybe you live in a place you really like and this other job is in a place that isn’t so nice, in your opinion, and now things are complicated and you’re thinking about where your family is and so on and you try to weigh up factors so that you can make the best decision for you and people you care about. Now here, a lot of thinking goes into it and of course you are influenced by your upbringing, your environment, what you care about and so on. But in the end, you’re going to make a decision and it might well be a rational decision. 

So decisions like this are really not much like the decisions being studied in these neuroscience experiments. Here the influence on you is enormous of things, but that doesn’t mean that there’s no place left for you to exert an influence on how your life goes. So I think maybe some people think if you have free will then you’re just not influenced by anything when you make decisions, and I don’t think of freewill any way like that. Of course, we’re part of the world we’re influenced by all kinds of things and I think that’s quite compatible with free will. 

[0:32:17.8] MB: And I think that’s the idea that trips me up in the conception of the existence of free will, thinking more about these bigger decisions. I guess what you’re saying is the notion of having a “totally independent decision” is really impossible and doesn’t exist but perhaps despite all of the factors influencing us, our environment, our upbringing, the subconscious biases, tendencies, we can make decisions despite all of those influences that are still, to some degree, free. 

[0:32:50.9] AM: Yeah, that’s the idea. So we could say “still to some degree free”. In fact that’s perfect. Or “still to some degree up to us”. As I mentioned, I have a very naturalistic conception of freewill. There’s nothing magical or spooky in it. One way to think about it might be in sort of a courtroom context and we might think, “Well is this guy guilty of this crime?” and you might think, “Well he’s sane and rational. Nobody forced him to do it,” and so on. 

“Yes, he is,” you might say. “But if he didn’t do it freely then how could he be responsible? How could he be guilty?” And so if you think of free will in that kind of context, it doesn’t seem all that magical at all. It’s just part of ordinary life and that would at least put us at the regular level of free will. We don’t want courts to try to decide whether people have deep openness. That’s a difficult theoretical and scientific question. Or another way to bring free will down to earth is to tie it to a moral responsibility. 

And moral responsibility really is a matter of deserving some credit from a moral point of view for a good thing you do or some blame from a moral point of view for a bad thing you do and we might ask ourselves, “So do people ever deserve a little moral credit or do they ever deserve a little moral blame at least?” So we ask, “Are they sane and rational and so on. Could they help what they did?” And when we come to an answer, we might think, “Oh sure. They sometimes deserve moral credit, sometimes moral blame.” 

Then your next question might be, “So, does deserving moral credit and deserving moral blame depend on free will?” A very natural answer to that question is, “Yes.” Well natural in the sense that it is very common. So you might think, “Oh no free will, then no moral responsibility, then no deserved credit or blame,” and if you think about freewill from that perspective sort of the real world, down to earth, just moral credit and moral blame, you might be thinking, “So free will doesn’t require anything magical or mystical or supernatural.” 

[0:35:12.8] MB: In the vein of moral responsibility, I’d love to hear about the studies showing how people’s perception of whether or not they have free will can impact how they behave. 

[0:35:24.3] AM: Oh yeah. Now these are interesting studies and we funded some with the big questions and free will project too. So if you diminish people’s confidence and freewill with certain manipulations, their behavior gets worse. Let me tell you about one of those studies. The first one that was done that I know of any way was done by Kathleen Voss and Jonathan Schooler and they divided their subject group into three groups. 

One group read passages saying “there’s no free will”. Another group read passages saying “there is free will” and the third group read neutral passages and then their next task was to take a math quiz and they were told that the programmers messed up so that if they didn’t press the space bar right after the question showed up then the answer would show up right on the screen, in which way of course they could cheat and the group that read the “no free will” passages cheated significantly more often than the other two groups. 

The other two groups behaved essentially the same which is evidence that belief in free will is a default belief for default assumption. They did a version of this in which subjects were paid a dollar for every correct answer. So by cheating you’re stealing and the people who read the “no free will” passages then stole more often than the other people. My friend and colleague at Florida State, Roy Baumeister published a study a year later in which the design was similar. 

He had though just two groups, one group read “no free will” passages and the other group read neutral passages and then their next task was to serve snacks to people who were about to walk into the room and they were told two things about these people. They have to eat everything you put on their plate and they all really hate spicy food, and the group that read the “no free will” passages doled out way more of the spicy salsa option than the other group did. 

You might wonder, “Well what’s going on there?” And maybe tacitly these subjects are thinking, “Hey no free will, you can’t blame me. I guess I’ll go for it,” and so they had an urge to do something a bit aggressive and they did it. So there, decrease in confidence in free will is causing aggressive behavior, making it more likely in any case. 

Then there are studies done where people take a survey indicating how high their level of belief in free will is and then there are other measures like happiness measure, success measures, and so on — how satisfied they are at their job, how well they do at their job — and it turns out belief in freewill is correlated with positive things, success, happiness, long term relationships and so on. So at least believing in it is a useful thing. That’s what the evidence points, but I also think that we don’t have any good evidence to show that we shouldn’t believe in. 

[0:38:33.3] MB: I wonder what it says about the existence of free will that are belief in free will or not can substantially change our behavior. 

[0:38:41.6] AM: I don’t think you can infer directly from that that we do have free will. I mean what it indicates is that a belief in free will is useful and then too, you really want to know what these people are believing in when they’re believing in free will. So you want to know what they mean by free will too. I actually did a study myself a very simple survey style study to test the hypothesis that most people think that freewill requires souls or immaterial minds. 

I’ll tell you how the study was set up; I had some control conditions I’ll leave them out because that makes it more complicated, and I’ll tell you what the main result was. So what I did was to present naïve subjects — we’ll call them subject with no background in this area — with the following story: 

“It’s a certain year in the future and scientist have finally discovered that everything is physical, nothing is non-physical so decisions and intentions are brain events and they’re caused by other brain events which are caused by other events all the way back. John Jones saw a $20 bill fall out of the pocket of the person in front of him, he thought about returning it but he decided to keep it. Did John have free will at the time?” 

That was one of the questions I asked anyway and 75% of people said yes. So what they’re saying, given that they understood the simple story, which I’m confident they did is that even though there is nothing non-physical or spiritual in John’s universe, he had free will when he made his decision. 

So this is evidence, and there’s a lot of evidence for this actually, that a view of freewill that requires something supernatural of this kind is a minority view not a majority view and it’s evidence that the majority of people think of free will in a naturalistic kind of way. A kind of way I’ve been trying to persuade you is a reasonable way to think about it.

[0:40:49.1] MB: Let’s change gears completely. I’d love to dig in a little bit about the concept of self-deception. You wrote the book Self-Deception Unmasked, tell me a little bit about that?

[0:40:59.8] AM: Yeah, okay I’ll start with the old puzzle that drove early literature on self-control. What the old puzzle was, was based on a two person model of deception. So if I’m going to deceive you into believing some proposition P to believe that P is true, let’s say like that I own a Cadillac. So what I’ve got, I know that that proposition isn’t true and then I adopt a strategy to get you to believe that it is true. Like I’d go outside, find a Cadillac, have somebody take a picture of me looking like I’m about to go in and drive it. 

Okay, but now imagine that we move all of this into one head. We think, “Oh we should model self-deception on interpersonal deception.” So now we have me say trying to deceive myself into believing that I own a Cadillac. Well how the heck am I going to do it? I know that I don’t, I could come up with a strategy, but how will it work given that I know that I don’t? So one thing that I did in that book Self-Deception Unmasked and in earlier work too, journal articles, was to argue that that really isn’t the model we should use for trying to figure out what self-deception means. 

One way to go is you look at stock examples of self-deception and these stock examples include things like this: “There’s a man who overtime is getting more and more evidence that his wife is having an affair but he just doesn’t believe that she is and neighbors and friends can all tell, given the same evidence he’s got really, but he doesn’t believe.” So that would be one kind of case. Or, “There are parents who are getting a lot of evidence that their 13 or 14 year old kid is using illegal drugs but the parents just don’t believe it. Somehow they block out the evidence, they believe the other way.”

So those are stock examples of self-deception. One question to ask is, “Well, does that require that the person really knows the truth and then gets himself to believe the opposite?” No, I don’t think so and I think what’s going on in cases like this is what I call motivationally biased false believing. So what they’d like to be true is that wife isn’t having an affair, the kid isn’t using drugs and because they’d like that to be true, they focus more on evidence that is in support of their belief and they pretty much ignore, for the most part, evidence that goes against it. 

Here, what I did because I don’t like this just to be pure theory. It’s supposed to be an explanation of how something happens, what I did was to look at the psychological work on belief formation and it turns out there’s lots of evidence that what you’d like to be true has an influence on what you believe is true and there are ways to see how it happens. There’s the confirmation bias for example. 

So if you are testing a hypothesis, you’re more likely to notice evidence that confirms it than evidence that goes against it. So if the husband is testing the hypothesis that his wife is faithful as she always has been, he’s going to be much more likely to notice evidence for it than to notice evidence against it and the same thing with the parents and the young teenager. 

[0:44:30.0] MB: So how do we combat or notice self-deception in ourselves? 

[0:44:34.4] AM: Well I think one way to combat it is to try to force one self to be vigilant about things that are important to one and once we know about the confirmation bias, we can get ourselves to test the opposite hypothesis, the one that we would not like to be true and see what happens then. I think the more we know about how we work and our biases, the better able we will be to do away with the biases and to make more rational decisions and have more rational beliefs. 

Here’s more evidence of self-deception; I report this early on in Self-Deception Unmasked. So there was a study on university professors done and the question was, “How good are you as a professor, how good are you at your job?” And 94% of the professors rated themselves as above average for professors and of course if average is about 50, it can’t be anything like 94% of people who are above average. 

In a study of over a million high school students, one question was, “Rate yourself in ability to get along with others.” And all of them rated themselves above average in getting along with others, which is impossible of course and amazingly, 25% of the high school students rated themselves as in the top 1% of ability to get along with others. So what’s going on there? 

Well, they’d like it to be true, the professors that they’re better than average and the students that they’re really good at getting along with others and that causes them, when they see the question, to focus on evidence of the truth of what they’d like to be true and not pay much attention to contrary evidence and so we get this powerful statistical evidence of self-deception.

[0:46:28.8] MB: For somebody that’s listening to this podcast, what’s one piece of homework that you would give them? 

[0:46:34.8] AM: Oh, well if they’re interested in free will and they’re not a specialist in the area, I would recommend reading my little book, Free. It’s really very short, it’s easy to read, it’s Free: Why science hasn’t disprove free will, and I kept it simple and straight forward and I hope interesting. What happened really at that point was my dad who’s 92 now kept telling me — so he was 90 back then — “Why don’t you write something I can read and enjoy?” Because my writing tends to be technical. 

And I said, “Okay dad, I’ll do it,” and with him in view — he’s a retired mailman — I wrote this book and then we had many conversations. He lives in Michigan, I live in Florida so most of him on the phone, sometimes in person about the book and he understood it very well and I think of the book as a public service, given that we keep seeing headlines online that scientist have shown that there is no freewill given that it’s not true that they have shown it and given that the news that there’s no free will seems to have bad effects on people, I see that little book as a public service of mine. I like thinking I’m public spirited and so that I would recommend to people interested in free will. 

[0:47:54.4] MB: And where can people find you and the book online? 

[0:47:57.7] AM: If they just Google my name, they will find my homepage. They should Google “Alfred Mele” though not Al Mele because if it’s Al Mele, it’s going to be Italian desserts and maybe me too, and there’s a link to the Oxford University Press page on all of my books published with them or they could just go to Amazon.com and type in the title of any of my books, or type in my name.

[0:48:25.6] MB: Well Al, this has been a fascinating conversation and definitely leaves me thinking a lot of things about free will and I think there’s a lot of stuff that I really need to do some thinking on my own about all of these different concepts. It’s so fascinating. I just wanted to say, thank you very much for being on the Science of Success.

[0:48:43.4] AM: Oh thank you and you know one more thing I should mention is there’s a PBS documentary on my big questions in Free Will Project. It’s in the Closer to Truth Series. It’s online now, I don’t know how long they’re going to keep it online but if people were to Google “big questions in free will” I’m pretty sure that will show up. 

[0:49:03.5] MB: Great, well we’ll include all of that stuff in the show notes which you can just get at scienceofsuccess.co, so all the studies we’ve talked about, the documentary, the book and everything will all be linked up there for anybody that’s listening. 

[0:49:15.3] AM: Sounds good. 

[0:49:17.1] MB: All right, well thank you very much. We really appreciated having you on the show. 

[0:49:20.0] AM: Thank you. 

[0:49:21.0] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say “hi”, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I would love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email. 

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt how do you organize and remember all these information?” Because of that, we created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners.

You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email list. If you want to get all this incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talked about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at scienceofsuccess.co, hit the show notes button at the top. 

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

How to Crush Fear, Overcome Anxiety, and Reprogram Your Life For Success with Justin Stenstrom

In this episode we discuss the 8 step process for overcoming anxiety and conquering your fears, how to stop a panic attack in real time, how you can tap into your subconscious mind and reprogram it, how to get deeper sleep, the power of hypnosis, and much more with Justin Stenstrom.

Justin is a nationally acclaimed life coach, author, entrepreneur, and speaker. He is the founder of EliteManMagazine.com, the host of the Elite Man Podcast. Justin’s work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Lifehacker, Maxim, and several other publications. 

We discuss:

• How Justin overcame major depression, anxiety, and panic attacks to achieve his dreams

• How Justin went from 3-4 panic attacks per week, suicidal thoughts, to living a healthy and happy life

• Why Justin views his struggle with depression and anxiety was a blessing in disguise

• Justin’s 8 step process to overcome anxiety and conquer your fears:

  • #1 - Realize that you’re not going crazy and there are a lot of solutions

  • #2 - Do a combination of meditation, yoga, hypnosis

  • #3 - Live in the present, future focus builds up a lot of anxiety, living in the past creates depression

  • #4 Exercise 4-5x per week, backed by substantial research

  • #5 Improve your sleep

  • #6 Improve your diet

  • #7 Take the right supplements

  • #8 Use the 3 step technique to crush panic attacks

• The incredible 3 step process for dealing with a panic attack right now

• How hypnosis can be an incredibly powerful intervention for dealing with anxiety and how you can hypnotize yourself

• Why hypnosis is so powerful, because it speaks directly to your subconscious mind

• How to tap into your subconscious mind and reprogram it

• The “trance” state between sleep and waking

• Practical tips for cultivating a healthy and deep sleep environment

• How to condition your mind for deeper sleep

• Why Cell phones and TV before bed are one of the worst things you can do

• How to stop yourself from hitting the snooze button

• The ideal temperature to sleep

• Why having a midnight snack might be really good for you

• Should you wake up in the middle of the night and work?

• Dietary interventions to deal with depression

• “This is how you ride a roller coaster”

• The power of facing your fears head on and exposing them for what they are

• Why you should challenge your fears and ask for more of it

If you want to crush anxiety and fear, listen to this episode!

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [CDs & Vinyl List] "Mindfit Hypnosis: Dr Andrew Dobson"

• [Program] Panic Away Program by Barry McDonagh

• [Vitamins] Now Foods Magnesium Citrate

• [Vitamins] Life Extension Magnesium Vegetarian Capsules

• [SOS Episode] Improving Sleep, Giving Up Alcohol, and Reading a Book a Day with James Swanwick

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee, and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study, and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss how you can tap into your subconscious mind and reprogram it, the eight-step process for overcoming anxiety and conquering your fears, how to stop a panic attack in real time, how to get deeper sleep, the power of hypnosis, and much more with Justin Stenstrom.

The Science of Success continues to grow, with more than 750,000 downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one New & Noteworthy, and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this incredible information?” A lot of our listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to awesome podcasts, and more.

Because of that, we created an epic resource just for you. A detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely free by texting the world “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, it’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. All you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.

In our previous episode, we discussed pride and why it may not be the deadly sin that it’s often cracked up to be, we dug into how research defines pride, examined the critical distinction between self-esteem and narcissism, the deep importance of being able to accept criticism, and looked at the difference between strategies of dominance and strategies of prestige with Dr. Jessica Tracy. If you want to explore this deadly sin, listen to that episode. 


[0:2:17.8] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Justin Stenstrom. Justin is a nationally acclaimed life coach, author, entrepreneur, and speaker. He’s the founder of elitemanmagazine.com, the host of the Elite Man podcast. At Elite Man, Justin focuses on helping men become better, more fulfilled versions of themselves in every aspect of their lives, from dating, to relationships, to finding success in business. Justin’s work has been featured in the Huffington Post, Lifehacker, Maxim, and many other publications. Justin, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:48.1] JS: Matt, thanks so much for having me on. I’m excited.

[0:02:49.6] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and kind of know about you, tell us a little bit about your background?

[0:02:56.7] JS: Yeah, you kind of gave the bullet point run-down sort of what I do. I help guys out on the site, Elite Man Magazine, I help them from pretty much everything under the sun, whether that’s dating, relationship advice, business advice, health, fitness, even fashion. We bring on like fashion experts and stuff to talk about men’s style.

Pretty much any manly sort of issue or topic that comes up, we try to give the best advice to guys and just kind of steer them in the right direction. This all happened for me, I mean, this is kind of my backbone of what I love doing. I’ve been in love with self-help and sort of this whole self-help world for the past 10 years, and it started with my journey of overcoming major depression, anxiety, and panic attack issues.

It took me a couple of years to get over that, but once I figured that out, the sky was the limit. I started really tackling all sorts of problems in my life, whether that was social skills, building relationships, connecting with and meeting and dating women, and different things like that, and I really started to kind of get good at those things.

From there, I began helping other people, other guys in particular, who were going through the same problems. Shortly after that, I had my first blog, and then the Elite Man Magazine concept came right after that.

[0:04:14.6] MB: Tell me a little bit about Elite Man. What is it about, and what kind of drove you to creative?

[0:04:21.4] JS: The inspiration to create it really just came from my own personal struggles, as I mentioned. Having those sort of deep-seated problems with anxiety, and getting three to four panic attacks a week, and depressed to the point where I was like suicidal. I had suicidal thoughts constantly. It came from actually a lot of pain and hardship in my life that had built up for a number of years. 

Also, the point in my life, this is back when I was about 17, 18 years old. Where a lot of the time, people of that age, teenagers are having fun. They’re going out, they’re hanging out with their friends, they’re going to parties, they’re going to homecoming dances and all that stuff, and I was sitting at home every single day like going crazy because I had nothing to do, and I was totally depressed because I had literally no one to talk to.

It came with problems with my dating life, which was a huge thing. I didn’t even kiss a girl until I was like 18 years old. I didn’t hook up with a girl till like, after high school, and you know, all these problems that I had in my life, as much as it sucked at the time, as horrible as it was to live through all these experiences at the time, looking back now, it was actually a blessing in disguise. Because it was like sort of the lynch pin to putting me on this journey.

Basically, a wakeup call to say, “You know, Justin, you’ve got to figure things out, and really fix your life, and fix these problems,” and from that point forward, I’ve never looked back and just wanted to keep growing and bettering myself, and then, obviously, helping others do the same.

[0:05:48.3] MB: I think that’s a struggle that many of our listeners have dealt with, and I’ve definitely dealt with anxiety in my own life. I’d love to hear a little bit more about your struggle and how you ultimately overcame the depression and anxiety to become somebody who is healthy, and happy, and well-functioning in society.

[0:06:08.3] JS: Yeah, absolutely man. I typically have about eight steps. Sometimes I cover a little more, a little less, but eight steps that I use to conquer my fears and anxiety. If you want, I can kind of run through them quickly, and if you want to maybe touch on a couple of specific ones, we can sort of delve into them a little more in depth. Does that sound good, man?

[0:06:28.0] MB: Yeah, that sounds perfect.

[0:06:29.9] JS: Okay cool. I’ll just kind of run right through them. The first step is realize that you’re not going crazy and that there’s a lot of solutions. Not just one, but potentially millions, thousands, whatever. There’s so many different solutions out there to your problems. This can be specific for something like anxiety or fears, or anything else in general. A lot of the time, people underestimate the fact that there’s so many solutions out there, and a lot of the time they don’t realize that there actually is so many ways to figuring out what’s happening to them.

That’s step number one, is realize that you’re not going crazy, and we’re talking specifically with the anxiety here, or your fears or panic attacks, whichever. They’re kind of interchangeable. Realize you’re not going crazy, and that there is many solutions out there. That’s step number one. 

Number two is, do a combination, or even just one, of these three things. The three things are meditation, yoga, and hypnosis. In particular, I like to use hypnosis as — I mean, meditation and yoga, the research on that is incredible. You can look up so many different research papers and studies on the efficacy of this things, but in particular, I like hypnosis. That’s what I use to help me overcome my panic attacks of getting them three to four times — it’s one of the biggest things I used, was self-hypnosis, actually.

Step number three is living in the present moment. I’m a big Eckhart Tolle fan. A lot of the time, people who have anxiety, who will get panic attacks, they often project themselves into the future. They worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow, or the next week, or a couple of years from now. This builds up a lot of anxiety and stress in their minds. 

Also, on the contrary, living in the past worrying about or regretting things, I should say, that you’ve done or maybe missed out on, or things that you think you should have done or should have had, that leads to a lot of depression. Living in what’s happening right now is the solution to both. You just live with what’s in front of you, what’s going on right now. It keeps you constantly aware of what’s happening and not falling into that trap of going too far in the future or thinking about the past.

Number four is kind of an obvious one, but it’s exercising. Four to five times a week is typically the standard I recommend to a lot of clients I have, and people who want to just kind of have an overall better feeling. Exercise, the research on that obviously is incredible, too. The IO chemical changes in your body, and the neurotransmitters, and the hormones, and all that stuff just get the way they’re supposed to be when you exercise frequently. 

As human beings, our ancestors, for hundreds of thousands of years were constantly moving around, working throughout the day, maybe they weren’t picking up dumbbells and curling them, but they were constantly active. In our 2016, 2017 lives today, Matt, we’re so opposite of this. We’re so sedentary, sitting around, I even fall into this trap sometimes. I got to remind myself, we’re so sedentary, not doing enough to physically move around. That’s number four. 

Number five is improving your sleep. Most people do best between seven to nine hours of sleep. Unfortunately, most people get nowhere near that amount on average throughout the week. It’s really important to improve your sleep. Again, this will help you with your hormone levels, your melatonin, your serotonin, some of the other neurotransmitters that can often lead to problems with anxiety. That’s number five. 

Number six is improving your diet. Getting the good fats, good proteins, good carbs into your system. In particular, fats like fish oil. The studies on fish oil for depression, anxiety, I mean, that’s a game changer in and of itself, but improving your carb intake, and lowering things like starchy carbs, like your bagels, your rice, your pasta, etcetera, and then of course like good proteins, lean protein, lean steak, chicken, eggs, etcetera. 

Step number seven is taking supplements when necessary. Magnesium, B complex, vitamin D, valerian root, niacin, which is one of the specific forms of B complex, these are all proven to dramatically improve your stress levels. Actually, even taking one of these, like a magnesium supplement, can by itself help you overcome anxiety problems, and I mean, that’s really powerful and also very safe. These are all really safe alternatives to say, antidepressant medication, or anti-anxiety medications. 

The eighth step, and this is one of the most important steps as well, is a little technique, a three-step technique I borrowed from a book called Panic Away by a guy named, he has a pseudo name. His name was Joe Barry, but I think he goes by the name of Barry McDonagh or something like that.

It’s just like this little 30-page e-book I read about 10 years ago, and the quick little three-step process is for anyone who is getting a panic attack, you typically want to run away from it. You want to hide from it, suppress it, or ignore it. In this process, this technique, step number one, you do nothing at all. You don’t react at all. You just kind of sit back and observe what’s happening. You sit back and observe the fear, the panic symptoms you’re having. Just kind of take it all in and don’t react. 

Step number two is actually welcoming the panic in. You welcome the fear in that you’re having, you have this dialogue in your head, you literally say like, “Welcome back fear,” or “Welcome back panic,” or “Welcome back tightness in my chest,” or sweaty palms, typically the sensations you’re getting when you’re having a panic attack. You start welcoming all these things back. 

The third step is, you call for more of it. You literally say in your head, “Give me more of this panic. Give me more of this fear. Give me more of these panic attacks, this tightness in my chest, this shortness of breath, the sweaty palms, the shaky legs,” whatever the sensations or feelings that you’re having, you literally ask for more of it.

This is such an empowering, yet counterintuitive approach to handling a panic attack or anxiety. What happens within a few minutes, Matt, is that the panic literally just dissipates. It completely goes away within a few moments, because what you’re doing is you’re pretty much exposing the panic, sort of the irrational fears that you’re having, for what it is. And that’s what it is, it’s just totally an irrational concoction in your mind of something that you’re projecting to happen in the future.

You’re basically putting up to the light, and what happens when you put it up to the light? It goes away and it reveals itself really as nothing, FDR himself said it best, “There’s nothing to fear but fear itself,” and using this technique is one of the most empowering things I’ve ever done.

Those are the eight steps kind of in a nutshell, but if you want to kind of dive in to any one of them, let me know many.

[0:12:54.4] MB: Yeah, no, I’d love to dial in to a number of these, actually. There’s so many different things I want to touch on, so we’ll just start kind of at the beginning. I’d love to hear more about hypnosis. I really haven’t heard much about that as sort of an intervention for anxiety. I’m really curious to learn about how that’s been effective for you. Also, specifically, I’d love to dig in to self-hypnosis and kind of what that is, and maybe how to practice it.

[0:13:20.1] JS: Love it man. Hypnosis is actually one of my favorite things to talk about, so I’m glad you brought that one up. I like to use this analogy, I’ll talk about hypnosis, but I want to quickly give an analogy of how it can work and why it’s effective.

Say you have this child, six, seven, eight years old or whatever. He’s going to school, he’s getting bullied, he’s getting called all kinds of mean names. He’s getting called fat, ugly, a loser, etcetera. All these just nasty things, and he’s getting picked on and bullied all the time. His environment is obviously a very negative environment. His stimulus to his brain, to his mind is very negative. All the inputs that are coming in to his brain are negative. What’s going to happen at this point? 

He’s going to have negative outputs. He’s going to have a low self-esteem. He’s going to think poorly about himself, he’s going to think he’s a loser, he’s going to probably develop some sort of anxiety problem, depression problem. Obviously, the best thing would be to take this child and remove him from that negative environment and place him into a different environment.

Sometimes that doesn’t help, sometimes it helps, but other times it’s not enough, and what’s happening when he’s getting all these stimuli from his environment is it’s going directly to a subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is the part of your mind — it’s actually the most powerful part of your mind. You have your conscious mind and your subconscious mind. The subconscious mind is the most powerful part of your mind, and it controls your feelings, it controls your emotions, it controls your bodily rhythms like your heartbeat, your blood pressure, things that you can’t consciously control, that’s what your subconscious mind controls. 

This child’s subconscious mind has all this negative input, as I mentioned. His output is then going to be negative as well. Like I said, he’s going to have anxiety, low self-esteem, low confidence, etcetera, and you can’t consciously control this. You can’t just say, “Johnny, eight-year old Johnny,” who is getting bullied, just snap your fingers and you know, say, “you’re going to be happy,” and you’re going to be happy all of the sudden. Or snap your fingers and you’re not going to be anxious anymore and you’re going to lose all your fears.

You can’t just consciously do that, but what you can do is use something, a technique like hypnosis or something similar to it where you can then tap in to that subconscious mind and actually reprogram it. It’s very effective for things like reprogramming your feelings, and your emotions, and you do this by getting into a very super relaxed state of mind where you’re very calm, very peaceful, and completely without worry and without stress.

For me, I was listening to a hypnosis CD by a guy — there’s so many out there, but the guy I listen to in particular was a guy named Dr. Andrew Dobson, and he had CD’s and they’re only like 25, 30 minutes usually, but I was listening to a CD, and it takes you through this sort of hypnotic induction where you’re getting into a super relaxed state of mind. 

Then he takes you into trance, what they call it in the hypnosis world, where you’re just like, it’s almost like a state in between consciousness and in between sleep. If you’re fully conscious, it’s not working. If you’re sleeping, it’s not working. It’s in that in between state where you’re kind of aware of what’s happening, but you’re not really thinking about it.

You get into this state of mind, this hypnotic state of mind, and all of the sudden for the next 20, 25 minutes, the hypnotist on the CD, or whether it’s in person, too, because you could do that, is feeding you positive affirmations. These positive affirmations, like I said, aren’t just like you consciously saying like, “I want to be happy.”

It’s hitting the part of your brain, that subconscious part of your brain, of your mind, that you can’t control. It’s working, because it’s sort of reprogramming and reconditioning your mind to feel good again. It’s going to say things like, “You’re grateful for everything you have. You’re happy, you’re healthy, you have a great family,” or “You release all your problems with worry and stress,” and the anxiety that creeps up now slowly sort of drifts away from your body and your mind. 

It doesn’t work right away, but over a certain period of time. Like a couple of weeks, usually about three or four weeks for it to really kick in, and these changes over time are going to be really effective. Something like hypnosis, like I said, is great for problems like anxiety, depression, it works wonders for people who want to quit smoking, lose weight, have better eating habits, all sorts of things like that. It’s very effective for them. For me, it was really effective for ending my panic attacks and also decreasing my overall stress and anxiety.

[0:17:42.7] MB: In that kind of three to four week period where you’re listening to a hypnosis CD, what’s the frequency that you’re doing that? Is it daily, is it twice a week, how often are you doing it?

[0:17:54.7] JS: Yeah, I was doing it daily, and I recommend anyone who is looking to try it, do it daily as well. They say two to three times a week you can kind of get away with, but I really suggest doing it daily. It worked for me, works for a lot of my clients who I recommend it to. Like I said, it’s really only like a 20, 25, maybe 30-minute commitment, and I think first thing in the morning. You just get up, add that to your daily routine first thing in the morning. It’s like 30 minutes, boom, and then you’re done with it. Do it every single day. You’re going to see some serious changes after about three, four weeks.

[0:18:23.6] MB: That’s really fascinating, and it reminds me a little bit of some of the ways that you can kind of reprogram limiting beliefs in your subconscious, kind of speaking and tapping directly into the subconscious and sending it communications that sort of bypass the conscious mind. That’s something that’s really fascinating, and I’m very happy that you brought it up, because like I said, I really haven’t heard much about it at all in this context, and it’s something that I think is really fascinating.

Going down the list, I’d love to dig in to sleep. Tell me about — we’ve talked a little bit in the past about on the show about blue blocking glasses, and the importance of things like that, but I’d love to hear your prescription for how to create more effective sleep. How to sleep better and how listeners can sort of practically implement some ideas to get better sleep?

[0:19:09.3] JS: Yeah, actually I recently got those blue blocking glasses. Not the Swannie’s or whatever. I had James Swanwick on my show recently as well. I didn’t buy the Swannie’s, but the other kind of cheaper one on Amazon. I kind of hate to throw James the bus because he has a great product, but the other ones I got for like, 15 bucks, and I think they’re pretty cool. I think those work really well because the science behind that, the blocking blue light thing is really cool. Like the blue light keeps you up, keeps you like more alert. If you can take that out, and a lot of us kind of do a lot of work and stuff as the night goes on, and I think if you can take that blue light out, it does sort of relax your mind. That’s one of the ways to do it. Removing artificial light as much as possible before sleep. 

A couple of things that I recommend though, one is, make sure you do nothing on your bed other than having sex and going to sleep. It’s really kind of an important one, but it’s also a tough one to do, because a lot of people want to sort of do work on their bed, or they want to sit up and watch TV for hours on their bed. They want to play games, or they want to be on their cell phone. 

Those are things that you sort of get into this condition, and you condition your brain and your mind and all sorts of things you do. That’s kind of just how we are as human beings. We’re always conditioning, retraining, reprograming ourselves, but you want to program your brain to have sort of the healthy, daily routine of doing something that’s going to benefit you, and to do this, you really have to cut out all the junk. You have to cut it all the other stuff you're doing. 

When you go to bed, train your mind, sort of like an NLP technique like anchoring. Anchoring yourself when you go into bed to know that it’s either sex, and then you’re rolling over and going to sleep, or it’s literally, you’re just laying down and you’re going to sleep and that’s it. It’s really important to do that, because when you start to do all these other things, you're conditioning, your training, you’re anchoring your mind to not want to be asleep, or maybe to be alert when you got to bed, even, which is pretty much the worst thing you can do. That’s really like step number one for that. 

The other thing is, as I mentioned too, cellphone usage and TV usage prior to bed is one of the worst things you can do. Whether that’s blue light, or whether that’s honestly just looking at things that may excite you, or entice you, or get your mind thinking, those are things that you really don’t want to do. Even reading a book. I mean, from time to time I read a book, and I think it’s actually kind of good, because it will put me to sleep if it’s like a fiction book. But if it’s something like self-help or like deep work, or like something really thought provoking, I won’t read it, because it’s going to sort of put the wheels in gear in my brain, and it’s going to get me excited. It’s going to keep me up a lot longer than I want to be.

I make sure, in particular, I cut out all cell phone usage, cut out TV usage, those are the things that are going to stimulate my brain, stimulate my mind, and get the wheels turning in my head. I make sure I cut that out about an hour and a half, two hours before I go to bed, and I set my alarm way in advance so I don’t have to worry about going back and resetting it, or looking through my phone, I pop it up, and all of the sudden I have a couple of emails on there I have to read, or a couple of texts.

The other big thing, too, is making sure your phone is on silent, and actually I recommend putting it away from your bed, so when you have that alarm and it goes off, you actually have to physically get out of bed. Which is another thing, is hitting that snooze button, and hitting it like 10 times, where you’re kind of delaying your sleep, but you’re not really sleeping good, but you're kind of just delaying it, and it’s kind of like messing it up. You get into that habit of thinking like, I slept 30 minutes longer, but it really wasn’t 30 minutes.Iit was like 30 crappy minutes that really didn’t do much for you, and only made you tired and, you know, drowsy, kind of dragging when you got up.

Putting the phone on silent, make sure you do that, I mean, that’s a big one. Kind of an obvious one, but if you’re having your phone vibrate or make sounds in the middle of the night, that’s obviously going to disturb your sleep. Unfortunately, a lot of people don’t do that, but putting it on silent, putting it away from the bed, making sure you stay away from it for an hour and a half, two hours before you go to bed.

Another thing I like to do is I have blackout curtains in my room, I’m kind of a night owl, which means I stay up a little later than I should, but I do kind of make it up and I get up a little later too during the day. I’m not an early bird, I never have been, I probably never will be, as much as I want to be. I have these blackout curtains that turn my room dark, and that’s the best way we sleep is having that room as dark as possible. So I have that, I recommend that, too, for anyone who has a third shift, or someone like me who maybe stays up a little later, like one, two in the morning.

The other thing is making sure the temperature’s right. 69, 70 degrees is like perfect temperature for sleep. It’s not too hot where you’re going to be rolling around, sweating, it’s not too cold where you’re going to be shivering. 69 is probably like the ideal temp to shoot for, and then the other thing is, if you live in a noisy apartment complex or you have potentially noisy neighbors, or maybe the outside, you live next to a highway or a busy street, you want to maybe think about getting something like a white noise machine.

This is basically like a sound conditioning machine, that trains you to just hearing this sort of fan-like sound in the background and getting used to that. It takes a couple of nights, like two, three nights to get used to, but once you get used to that, all outside sounds seems to like go away. I’ve been using that for probably eight, nine years now, too. That’s done wonders for my sleep, because it’s trained me to just focus on the background sound of that white noise and really not disturb my sleep from outside sounds and, you know, my environment. Those are a few tips. I hope it helped you a little bit.

[0:24:36.2] MB: I think those are great tips, you know, I personally implemented a number those, including blackout shades, and trying to have some sort of white noise that kind of helps drown out other sound effects. I’m curious, you may not have sort of a prescription for this, but I’m curious. I don’t have any trouble falling asleep, but sometimes, I’ll wake up at like three in the morning and my mind will just be like, racing. I can’t — it takes me like 45 minutes to fall back asleep. Have you ever had that experience, and if so, do you think — would any of this strategies be effective for that, or have you found anything that is effective for that?

[0:25:08.7] JS: Yeah, that definitely does happen to me too from time to time. There’s a couple of different ways to look at it. Every once in a while, I’ll get that, and I’ll be like hungry, and that’s I think the reason I get up or something.

As much as I hate to do it, sometimes I’ll just get up and I’ll have like a little snack, just to make sure my stomach’s not talking to me, and my stomach and my insides aren’t hurting. I’ll have a little snack, and then believe it or not, this actually helps me go back to sleep. As much as, you know, all the fitness guys listening are — the personal trainers out there will say you know, never eat whatever in the middle of your sleep or at night, late at night. 

I’ve done this a few times. I do it from time to time, and it actually helps me go to sleep, because it kind of just like relaxes me again and I don’t have to worry about being hungry. That’s one of the ways to look at it, or potentially having something like tea and some honey, kind of relaxing your chest, and your throat, and etcetera. Something like that, maybe chamomile tea, which is supposedly good for sleep. 

The other thing though that I also do, on the contrary, and this kind of totally goes against everything I’ve said. A couple of those times where I’ve been woken up in the middle of the night and my thoughts are racing, or I have like, my brain is just kind of very active and just thinking about all sorts of things. A few of those times, I’ve actually just said, “You know what? Screw it. I’m obviously not going back to sleep, I’ve tried for half hour, an hour, whatever.” 

I’m rolling around, I’ll actually just get up and I’ll do some work. I’ll get up and literally like, go off my bed, and go over in the other room, and open up my computer, and just start working. A few of the times, believe it or not, I’ve actually done some of the best work I have ever done. I don’t know if it was like, meant to be or whatever. I was woken up in that moment, and my mind had some idea in it, and I just put that to work and whatever. 

I think what I ended up writing my second book, I ended up writing like three chapters in a row or something in one of those nights. A couple of the other times, actually, I did work for a little bit and then I got tired again doing work, so I went back to sleep. So you can handle it in a couple of different ways, really depending on what you want to do. 

But the thing that I want to say is the couple of times I have done this, I don’t necessarily think it’s the worst thing in the world, or such a horrible thing, because once in a while you get up and your mind is racing and you have all these ideas you can’t put to sleep. Sometimes putting those things in action is maybe meant to be. Maybe you were meant to be at that moment so why not act on it? 

[0:27:29.7] MB: That’s really interesting, and I think it dove tails your advice of treating your bed as a place where you condition your mind for sleep. I’ve heard the advice before, that essentially when you wake up in the middle of the night, you can’t fall back asleep after, let’s say 20 or 30 minutes, you should get up, because otherwise you’re messing with that programming and you’re treating your bed as a place that you do things other than sleep in. 

But the midnight snack advice is actually fascinating, and I may try that the next time this happens to me, because what I’ve personally noticed is I have two or three days a week I will get up really early, at 5 AM, and go to the gym and train, and I will have a protein shake when I do that. So I am priming my body on some days to eat super early in the morning, and then the day when I am trying to sleep in a little bit longer, I will wake up at 5 AM and be like, “Where is my protein?” So maybe having a little midnight snack can be a solution for something like that. 

[0:28:22.1] JS: Yeah, for sure man. 

[0:28:23.9] MB: So that dove tails a little bit. I’d love to get a few pointers in terms of dietary interventions to deal with things that you’ve touched on. The importance of fish oil and some other supplements. I’d love to hear your thoughts about ways to improve your diet, and maybe some of the science and the research behind why these dietary interventions potentially can help with things like anxiety and depression. 

[0:28:46.6] JS: Yeah, absolutely man. Typically, what you’re putting into your body, this goes back to, as well, the inputs from the mind, the subconscious mind controls all. If you have negative inputs throughout the day to your subconscious mind, your outputs are going to be negative. Going back to that example with poor Johnny getting bullied, the same thing goes with your diet. What you put into your body is exactly what you are going to have for your output. 

Your inputs are going to be your outputs. The Greek philosopher Hippocrates said, “Let thy food be thy medicine and thy medicine be thy food.” Literally, he knew thousands of years ago the power of food. If you put the right amounts of food, or the right types of food into your body, it will heal you. It will make you feel better. It will give you energy. It will lift up your mood in every possible way and make you optimal as a human being. 

On the contrary, if you feed it junk, if you feed it garbage, if you feed it McDonald’s, if you feed it Burger King, Wendy’s, all this junk and crap out there that is so prevalent in America and some of the other more advanced countries in the world, unfortunately, what you’re going to have is a lot of crap and negative output as well. 

It’s just going to bring down your mood. It’s going to mess up the neurotransmitters in your brain. Your serotonin might drop, your testosterone may drop, your cortisol will go up, the stress hormone, which dictates a lot of these things that we’re talking about here, like your anxiety levels, the fat storage in your body, even sleep, too, by the way. If you don’t get enough sleep, your cortisone levels go up, your melatonin levels get out of whack, you start to store fat, your HGH, your hormone production, your human growth hormone gets out of whack as well. 

You have less of that, and so you start to store more fat, and then you store more fat and this fat creates different problems as well, and just adds up and snowballs ,and the more you eat, the more junk you’re putting into your body, the more crappy fats from that double cheeseburger at McDonalds, or the poor quality protein that burger has in it, or all the carbs from the bread, all those things that you are putting into your body just adds up and snowball effects. 

It just gets worse and worse and worse. The more you do it, the worse you’re going to be. The worse your body reacts to it, then your body starts to develop all these negative habits, and starts to store fat, and store more fat, and they say it’s harder to lose fat once you start to put it on than it is to stay in shape. So it’s better to keep that off and not get into that position in the first place. 

Literally, when you’re eating, you’re literally taking your body and breaking it down. From your brain, to your heart, to the rest of the organs in your body. Your liver, even your muscles, and then of course, fat around your midsection. All that stuff, it literally breaks down overtime, and the way to optimize it is to have, as I mentioned before, good fats, good protein, and good carbs. Typically, I recommend, I have a background in personal training, I like to keep it very simple, and I always recommended about 50% carbs, 30% protein and 20% fat. 

The carbs, again, these are fibrous carbs. Kale, broccoli, cabbage, and avoiding as much as possible starchy carbs. The useless carbs that your body can’t take in and actually be productive with. So avoiding the pasta, the bagel, the rice, the bread, all that stuff as much as possible. Avoiding that, you’re going to see a lot better results, and that’s carbs. Protein, again, chicken, lean steak, fish, fish is huge. I live on tuna, tuna is one of my favorite snacks. 

Greek yogurts are great for you, and the fats, the fish oils of the world, the omega-3s, the olive oil, the coconut oil, all those things are incredible for your brain. Your brain is built primarily of fatty acids and fatty tissue. The more you can supply it with fatty acids, you’re basically just giving it gas in your gas tank, and of course your brain controls your entire body. I mean, we’re talking about it a lot in this episode, your brain is the primary controller of everything you feel and all your emotions. 

If you can basically just give it and provide it the resources, the energy that it needs to function optimally, you’re going to be much better off. By doing that, the Omega-3s, we’re getting that balance of Omega-3, Omega-6, Omega-9. We do take Omega-6, and Omega-9 from the normal diet we have in western society. That’s why it’s good to optimize and supplement with things like Omega-3, to get the ratio back into balance. 

Innately, just by itself, Omega-6, Omega-9 is not bad for you, but the fact that we have way too much of it, like way too much of anything will kill you. Even way too much water you can overdose and die from. Way too much Omega-6, Omega-9 will kill you. It will break down your body slowly overtime, and that’s what a lot of people do. So optimizing that Omega-3 and getting the ratio, the balance back to normal is typically the best way to go. 

So supplementing with things like fish oil, krill oil, taking coconut oil, even having that on a spread or cooking with it is great, and doing that every day, like I said, will do wonders for your brain and your body.

[0:34:00.8] MB: One of the supplements that you mentioned was magnesium, and I have heard a number of different sources, everybody from body builders on down, talk about magnesium and why it’s an important supplement. The struggle that I’ve had is, and I don’t know if you have ever had this with taking it, but every time I’ve taken a magnesium supplement, it makes me extremely nauseous. I don’t know if you’ve ever had that experience or have any particular guidance in terms of how to overcome that. 

[0:34:26.2] JS: Yeah, I haven’t had that personally. Do you know by chance what brand it was, and also what form it was? 

[0:34:34.0] MB: I don’t know the brand, but I remember it was a big pill that was a dry-ish pill, if that makes sense. It wasn’t like a gel cap or anything. It was a solid, vitamin-looking pill. 

[0:34:43.7] JS: I know what you mean. Typically, what I’ll recommend it, and magnesium, actually one of the things that it’s actually good for, which I thought you were going to say, is it’s good for constipation. So anyone who’s having constipation, it loosens up the bowels and you can actually go to the bathroom if you’re constipated. So it’s a really good constipation relief supplement. The nausea, though, could be anything from poor quality brand, which there’s so many out there. 

If you go into your local grocery store, or even like a GNC supplement store, I always do not recommend going to. As much as they’re mainstream and popular, they typically have horrible quality supplements, some of the worst ones out there. It could have been anything from the supplement brand, or potentially it could have been the form of the magnesium. Which the worst form of magnesium, and actually, unfortunately, the most popular form of magnesium is magnesium oxide. 

If I had to guess, I would say the pill you took was probably a magnesium oxide. I could be wrong on that, but I guess I think the majority of them are oxides. The form you want to take, there’s a few different ones, but the best one or one of the best ones is magnesium citrate, and this is a lot easier for your stomach to handle. It’s also a lot easier for it to go down. 

A couple of brands to potentially think about getting, maybe next time for some of your listeners, the NOW brand is actually a really good quality brand. Life Extensions is a really good one, and there’s some of the other ones out there, like independent ones like Raw. Raw Foods is a good supplement brand, but there’s a few independent organic brands out there that are less mainstream than some of your GNC brands, or your Vitamin World, or Puritan’s Pride brands.
Those are the ones that are typically in the grocery store, and those are the worst ones you can take. 

So it was probably either the brand or the form that you took it in. Also, another thing to keep in mind, too, is the capsule in general. Capsule or a liquid will be a lot better for you, and a lot easier and more absorbable than say, a hard, big, stuffed-up pill. Like they condense down and add all these other additives to make it hold its form. So a capsule, where it’s basically, you can open up the capsule and that’s the contents of your pill, that’s usually the best way to go. A capsule or even a liquid as opposed to a hard, big pill, and also the form or the brand. You want to stay away from those grocery store mainstream brands. 

[0:37:13.8] MB: I’d love to move down the list and talk a little bit about the three-step technique you’ve talked about dealing with panic attacks. I love the advice of instead of resisting it, inviting it in, and one of the things that I found really relevant for myself in terms of dealing with anxiety or stress is the idea of, and this is a corny phrase I came up with myself, but it’s “Don’t flee it, feel it,” which is like, instead of running away from this feeling and being like, “Make it stop. I don’t want to feel like this,” just feel it and be with your body and experience it. 

I’ve had a very similar kind of experience, where, when I do that, my body experiences the stressful emotion and then it just flows away. But I’d love to hear a little bit more about that technique and how you stumbled upon it. 

[0:38:04.6] JS: Yeah man. So I stumbled upon it, the funny thing is that I read this little e-book, this short e-book, it was one of the first things that I came across when I was trying to figure out how to get over my panic attacks, but the approach in it was just so counterintuitive, and it seems so crazy that I just brushed it off and put it on back of the bookshelf, so to speak, I mean it’s an e-book. 

For the next five or six months, I didn’t even think about it until I’d tried so many other things that didn’t work. And then one day, I’m in the middle of having a panic attack, and I was like, “You know what? There was that other thing, why not? Screw it, I’m going to try this out,” and lo and behold, it actually worked. So I stumbled upon it, like I said, and I didn’t think it was going to work. I tried it, and from that point forward, my life changed as far as facing different fears, not being scared of doing different things that I’ve been scared of in the past, and I like to always use this example. 

Shortly after this, maybe about a year or so after I’ve gotten over my panic attacks, gotten over my anxiety, I started hanging out with this friend of mine. This is a real-life example of using this panic attack approach to ending any sort of fear. I was hanging around with this buddy of mine, we’re going to this roller coaster park. This Six Flags theme park in Massachusetts, where I’m from, Massachusetts, and my buddy’s name is Bobby. 

I tell Bobby before we go, “I just want to go there, hang around, walk around, talk to some girls,” I’m single at the time, “and then just have fun. I’m not going to do anything, I’m not going on any rides.” I hate roller coasters. For the entirety of my life, every single time I went on a roller coaster, I got immediately sick for the next hour and a half, and was throwing up profusely, and I just absolutely hated them. I made it very clear to Bobby I was not going to go on a roller coaster. Long story short, Bobby was this daredevil type of guy. He jumps out of planes, he rides motorcycles 180 miles an hour, he goes to all the craziest roller coasters in the world, he’s just the definition of a nut case daredevil, and he has no fears at all. 

So long story short, we’re at the theme park, and fast forward about 30 minutes, and besides being a complete daredevil, Bobby also happens to be incredibly persuasive. So fast forward about 30 minutes, and I find myself unfortunately sitting next to Bobby on a roller coaster. It’s not just any roller coaster, Matt, it’s the worst one there. It’s like the Bizzaro One that goes, I don’t know, 100 miles an hour and drops 300 feet after the first couple of seconds. Sitting next to Bobby, I look over at him, and he’s putting his hands up, he’s yelling, he’s swearing, he’s acting like a complete jerk.

I look over at him, I’m like, “Bobby, at least calm down man. We’re both about to die, at least save us some dignity before we both die.” He didn’t mean it to be profound or anything, but he kind of looked over at me and said, “Justin, this is how you ride them. This is what you have to do.” 

Like I said, I don’t know if it was because I was sort of in this transitional period of my life and I just overcome anxiety, depression about a year before. That day I just said, you know what? I’m going to try it, and so I started doing what Bobby was doing. I put my hands up, I started yelling, I started screaming, started swearing and acting like a complete fool, and we take off in the ride. We get to the top, that first big drop, and we come flying down that first drop, and I kick my hands up, I keep yelling, keep swearing, keep screaming, and lo and behold, for the first time in my life, I actually enjoyed it.

I actually enjoyed the moment, and for the rest of the ride, the rest of the two minute ride, we’re going up and down, all sorts of loops, and upside down turns and twists. I’m yelling, I’m screaming, I’m laughing, I’m having a great time, and I get off the ride and I say, “You know Bobby, let’s go again.” We ended up going on every single ride, every single roller coaster in that park, like five times that day.

You know, for the first time in my life, I actually knew how to ride roller coasters, and it wasn’t until little afterwards that I realized what had happened, and what had happened was I faced my fears head on. I just totally exposed it for what it was, which was a concoction in my mind of all this projecting of what could potentially happen, and all these negative things that might go wrong.

I exposed it for what it was, took it on, challenged it, basically asked for more of it, and this fear completely went away. From that day forward, I knew how to ride roller coasters, how to have a good time doing it.

[0:42:33.6] MB: That’s a great story, and a great allegory for how to deal with fear more broadly. For somebody who is listening that wants to kind of concretely implement some of the things we’ve been talking about, what’s one simple piece of homework that you would give for them as kind of a place to start?

[0:42:49.0] JS: It could be really any one of the steps that we mentioned, but I think maybe the one, the easiest one to implement right now is to live in the present moment. Don’t worry about what’s going to happen tomorrow. Don’t worry about worrying about the past, or regretting things you missed out on, or things you could have done, or things you wish you’d done. Just living what’s happening right now. Enjoy life for what it is. Enjoy the moment, enjoy what you have right now.

A lot of the time, even I fall for this trap sometimes. A lot of the times, we forget all the great things we have. Anyone who is listening to this podcast, you’re a lot more lucky and you should be a lot more grateful than you probably are. If you’re listening to a podcast, you’re probably not in a third world country. You probably have electricity, heat, hot water, food, shelter, you have all this basic necessities and essentials that we take for granted every single day.

Worrying about losing out on that job promotion, or worrying about a girl that didn’t text you back, or worrying about a potential business failure happening in a couple of months, or next week, or tomorrow, or regretting things you missed out on in the past. That’s all just negative self-talk and negative things that are leading to an unhappy and unfulfilled life. If you can just live in what’s happening right now and appreciate some of the things you have, you’re going to be a lot better off.

[0:44:08.7] MB: Where can people find you online?

[0:44:10.7] JS: You can check out either my website, elitemanmagazine.com, or my personal website, justinstenstrom.com.

[0:44:17.8] MB: Awesome. Well Justin, this has been a fascinating conversation, and some great really practical advice. I love the eight-step process, I love kind of digging in to a number of those different steps. We’ll include everything you talked about in the show notes, we’ll include links to your website, and links to Elite Man. I just wanted to say thank you so much, it’s been a fascinating conversation.

[0:44:35.8] JS: Matt, thanks so much for having me man. I really appreciate it.

[0:44:39.1] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy, and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. 

I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I would love to hear from you, and I read and respond to every listener email. 

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I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this information?” Because of that, we created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting “smarter” to the number 42222, or by going to scienceofsuccess.co, and joining our email list.

If you want to get all this incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at scienceofsuccess.co, just hit the show notes button at the top. Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success. 

Pride: Why The Deadliest Sin Could Hold the Secret to Your Success with Dr. Jessica Tracy

In this episode we discuss PRIDE – and why it may not be the deadly sin that it’s often cracked up to be. We dig into how the research defines pride, examine the critical distinction between self esteem and narcissism, the deep importance of being able to accept criticism, and look at the difference between strategies of dominance and strategies of prestige with Dr. Jessica Tracy. 

Jessica is a professor of psychology at the University of BC where she also directs the Emotion and Self Lab. She is the author of Take Pride: Why The Deadliest Sin Holds the Secret to Human Success. She has published over 80 journal articles, book chapters, edited volumes, and reviews, and her groundbreaking work on pride has been covered by hundreds of media outlets, including ABC’s Good Morning America, NPR’s All Things Considered, the New York Times, the Economist, and Scientific American.

• How Jessica defines Pride in a way that may shock you

• How pride can also be positive

• The two different kinds of pride experiences

• How one type of pride is linked to tons of positive outcomes (and the other has severe downsides)

• The critical distinction between self esteem and narcissism

• The truth about what narciststs and hubristic people feel deep down

• We dig into research studies show about how people with narcissism deal with criticism

• The critical importance of being able to take criticism

• Why not being able to take criticism is a huge red flag for hubristic pride

• We discuss Paul Eckman’s research on the universality of emotions

• The expansive and visually apparent physical display of Pride and how you can recognize it

• The fascinating finding from studying blind olympians and how they demonstrate pride

• How pride can be a huge positive motivator to make you want to succeed

• We dig into a number of specific research examples from Dr. Tracy’s research

• How your emotions are “adaptive” and what that means

• The adaptive benefits of pride and how it helps you achieve status

• The critical difference between prestige and dominance

• We discuss whether a strategy of dominance or a strategy of prestige is more effective in creating the results you want

• Would you rather be loved or feared? (we answer that)

• We discuss President Donald Trump and how his strategy of dominance caught many people by surprise and serve as a fascinating real life case study of Dr. Tracy’s research

• We discuss the concept of “self conscious emotions”, what they are, and why they are important

• We discuss some of Dr. Tracy's research about shame

• Why its better to be guilty than ashamed

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Take Pride: Why the Deadliest Sin Holds the Secret to Human Success by Jessica Tracy

• [Bio] Jessica L. Tracy, Ph.D.

• [Website] UBC Emotion & Self Lab

• [Book] Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance by Angela Duckworth

• [Book] The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee, and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study, and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss pride, why it may not be the deadly sin it’s often cracked up to be, we dig into how research defines pride, examine the critical distinction between self-esteem and narcissism, the deep importance of being able to accept criticism, and look at the difference between strategies of dominance and strategies of prestige with Dr. Jessica Tracy.

The Science of Success continues to grow, with more than 725,000 downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one New and Noteworthy, and more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this incredible information?” 

A lot of our listeners are curious about how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge you get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to podcast and more. Because of that, we created an epic resource just for you. A detailed guide called “How to Organize and Remember Everything.” You can get it completely free by texting the world “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, it’s a guide we created called “How to Organize and Remember Everything.” All you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.

In our previous episode, we discussed what Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and others consider to be the single greatest threat to humanity, why death is not a binary event that makes you transition from being alive or dead at a specific moment in time, we asked if you would spend a thousand dollars on a chance to live forever, we looked at the biology behind cryogenics, vitrification, and putting your body on biological pause, and explored why poverty, climate change, war, and all of our problems melt away in the face of one extremely important issue with our guest Tim Urban from Wait but Why. If you love exploring relevant, highly fascinating scientific topics, listen to that episode. 

[0:02:25.0] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Dr. Jessica Tracy. Jessica is a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia, where she also directs the Emotion and Self lab. She’s the author of Take Pride: Why the Deadliest Sin Holds the Secret to Human Success, she’s published over 80 journal articles, book chapters, edited volumes and reviews, and her ground-breaking work on Pride has been covered in hundreds of media outlets, including Good Morning America, NPR, New York Times, The Economist, and The Scientific American.

Jess, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:56.7] JT: Thank you so much, thanks for having me.

[0:02:57.7] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on here. For listeners who might not be familiar with you and some of your work, tell us a little bit about yourself.

[0:03:04.9] JT: Sure. I’m a researcher, a psychology researcher at the University of British Columbia. I teach psychology, but mainly what I do is do research, and most of my research is on emotions. The emotions that I kind of specialize in are the emotions that we call self-conscious emotions. These are emotions that are all about how we feel about ourselves. They typically include shame, guilt and pride. Pride is the one that I’ve really done the most research on.

[0:03:28.2] MB: Very exciting. Tell me a little bit, sort of what is pride? I know a lot of people have misconceptions or maybe don’t really understand it, obviously not to the degree that you do, but when people think of pride, they might not necessarily think of what you talk about. How do you define pride?

[0:03:45.1] JT: Yeah. Pride is, in its simplest terms, it’s the emotion that we feel when we feel good about ourselves. That can mean we feel good about ourselves for having accomplished something really big and really important, or even something small but that we worked hard for, or it could be that we feel good about ourselves because we just kind of are reflecting back and feel like, “Hey, you know, I’m pretty awesome. I’m really great.”

Those are two slightly different feelings, and we can talk about that, that pride is not one kind of simple thing, it’s two different things, and it’s most straightforward sense, it’s basically these positive feelings about one’s self.

[0:04:18.0] MB: When many people think of pride, it’s a deadly sin, pride cometh before a fall, all of that kind of stuff. Is pride something that’s negative?

[0:04:26.7] JT: Yeah, this is kind of the big issue that I was sort of implying, that pride can be negative, but it’s also positive. So what we found is that there are actually two different kinds of pride experiences. This is a really big important finding, because I think the failure to distinguish between these two prides has led to all kinds of confusion in many different ways.

On the one hand, we have the kind of pride that is all about feelings of self-confidence and self-worth. It is typically found in response to a hard-earned accomplishment, when you really work for something that’s important to you, and you achieve it, and then you feel good about yourself as a result. We call that authentic pride, and that’s because it’s based on an authentic sense of self. You’re sort of reflecting on who you are, and the hard work you put in a realistic manner. 

That kind of pride is linked to all kinds of good outcomes. When you feel that kind of pride, it typically makes you want to keep on working hard. People who tend to feel it tend to be good people. They care about others, they care about their society, they want to help others, and they’re high in sort of achievement motivation. 

But there is this other kind of pride as well. That’s the kind of pride that we feel when it’s not just that we feel good about ourselves, but that we feel like we’re really great, and even better than everyone else. This is the kind of pride that like arrogance, egotism, conceitedness, and we call this kind of pride hubristic pride. The word hubris, of course, comes from the Greeks, who talk about hubris in pretty much these terms. People who had hubris, according to the Greeks, were people who basically believed they were kind of like gods more than humans. That’s a little bit what hubristic pride is. It really is this almost godlike feeling, very self grandizing. 

That kind of pride, we found, is linked to a lot of problematic outcomes. People who tend to feel it tend to be aggressive, they’re sort of manipulative of others, they take advantage of others in order to accomplish their own ends, or they’re sort of selfish and as a result, they have a number of psychological problems, they tend to succumb to depression and anxiety, they have trouble making close friends, they’re disliked by others around them. 

There’s really a big distinction, these really are two different experiences in many ways, and yet in English, we refer to them with that same word, pride.

[0:06:23.2] MB: Tell me a little bit more about the distinction between authentic pride and hubristic pride, and why haven’t people kind of grasped that distinction before?

[0:06:32.8] JT: One reason that I think people haven’t grasped it, I guess I would say is because both prides do involve positive feelings about their self. It’s not that one is pride and one is anger. They’re not two totally different emotions. They are both this good feeling about the self. I think it’s pretty easy to say well, one’s just an extreme version, right?

You feel a little bit of pride, that’s authentic pride, you feel a lot of pride, that’s hubristic pride. That’s really not what it is. I think, you know, that’s an easy mistake to make, but there really is actually more of a qualitative, not just a quantitative difference between these two kinds of pride. One way to understand it from a psychological perspective is to think about the difference between self-esteem and narcissism.

Psychologists talk about self-esteem as this really great thing. We want our kids to have high self-esteem, and lots of studies have looked at high self-esteem and shown that basically, it’s really pretty much everything good that psychologists study. If there’s a good personality trait, or good behavior, or good social behavior, it’s linked to high self-esteem.

Narcissism, which is another topic that psychologists have studied for quite a while, is linked to all kinds of bad behaviors. Narcissists tend to be aggressive, they take advantage of others, they do all the things that I was saying before characterize people who feel a lot of hubristic pride. That’s because narcissism, unlike self-esteem, isn’t a genuine good feeling about the self, it’s not based on a realistic self-appraisal, it’s based on a more exaggerated sense of self. 

That’s exactly what hubristic pride is. Hubristic pride is the emotion that fuels narcissism, and it occurs not when we’re kind of looking realistically at ourselves, and what we’ve done, and our accomplishments; but rather when we’re sort of taking this biased view of ourselves. This sort of inflated view of ourselves, where we really are motivated to see ourselves in the best possible light.

One thing I argue in my book is that the reason for this motivation is because deep down, people who are feeling hubristic pride really aren’t feeling good about themselves at all. You’ve got this kind of almost ironic process that happens, where when people, some people, feel bad about themselves, feel shame, those feelings are so painful to experience, rather than consciously accept them, they sort of burry them. They repress them, they pretend they’re not there, they try to avoid them.

One way of doing that, or one way to help do that, is to instead experience the opposite, right? You feel threatened in some way, someone maybe criticizes you, and instead of thinking god, I feel horrible about myself, you bury that. Instead, you say, “You know what? He’s an idiot. I’m the one who is great, I know everything, I’m better than everyone else. I’m going to show him,” and that’s what people who are narcissistic tend to do, and that seems to be a behavior associated with hubristic pride.

[0:08:57.2] MB: So deep down, many people who exhibit kind of narcissistic behavior, or as you call it, hubristic pride, they don’t feel good about themselves, and in many ways it’s sort of a manifestation of a lack of self-confidence and self-esteem?

[0:09:11.1] JT: Yeah, that’s exactly right. This is a fairly controversial idea. Some people who study narcissism say that’s not the case, narcissists just think they’re really great, and the reason that they get aggressive when other people challenge them is because it kind of annoys them to have other people challenge them when they know that they’re really great.

My view is that it doesn’t make a lot of sense, you know? You can sort of think about it logically. If you think you’re great and you have total confidence in that, you're not sort of underneath it all questioning that or feeling insecure about it. Someone comes along and challenges you in some way, and typically, in research studies, the way this is done is you’re asked to write a short essay about a topic that you may or may not have strong feelings about.

Spend five minutes or so on it, and you’re just doing it for some course credits. It’s really not something you’re deeply invested in anyway. You then submit the essay to who you think is another student, you get it back, and you find that the essay’s been sort of torn apart. This other student has written red marks all over it telling you how terrible they think it is.

You could imagine yourself in a situation, and again, if you’re someone who has a real genuine sense of confidence in yourself, you probably would respond to those criticisms by thinking, “Well, you know, I spent five minutes on that essay, it’s really not something I care about, this is no big deal.” Or maybe you think, “You know, I think my essay was pretty good. This guy, he doesn’t know what he’s doing. That’s fine, he can say what he thinks, and I’ll continue with my opinion.”

What the narcissist does is instead say, “That guy, I hate him.” He lashes out at that guy, and so studies show that narcissists will go to great lengths to punish the person who just gave them this negative feedback. They’ll blast them with loud noise, they’ll dose them with really spicy hot sauce. Whatever opportunity researchers essentially give them to punish these people, they’ll take it, and so my view is that we really can only explain that kind of extreme aggressive behavior in the situation by suggesting that well, underneath those feelings of confidence is really the opposite. It’s something else that the person is really desperately defending against.

[0:10:59.1] MB: That’s fascinating. You know, one of the things we’ve talked a lot about on the show is kind of the idea of accepting criticism, and being really open about feedback, and kind of understanding your own limitations. It seems like something that people who struggle with hubristic pride really can’t do is accept criticism.

[0:11:16.9] JT: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. That’s a huge limitation, and I think it’s one of the big findings about narcissism in general. It seems to be the case for hubristic pride that criticism is a real weak point, that it’s not acceptable to be attacked. These people can’t handle it.

I think that’s actually one reason to think about the distinction between authentic and hubristic pride, because if you can focus on authentic pride, your genuine accomplishments, the things you worked hard for, and have a realistic sense of self-confidence when based on what you actually did, rather than this artificial self-grandized perception that’s all about defending these unconscious feelings of insecurity, then you can accept criticism. 

Then you can hear this negative feedback and say, “You know what? They’re right. I could do better,” or “They’re wrong. I think I did a really good job, and I disagree with this person,” but kind of take it either way and not get upset about it, and not get too upset about it. I think that’s a really, obviously, important thing to do for people in almost any work you meet.

[0:12:08.4] MB: I’d love to hear a little bit about some of your research background, and maybe starting with looking at pride displays, and some of the research you’ve done around Olympic athletes, and going to Burkina Faso, and all of those different stories.

[0:12:21.7] JT: Sure, yeah. When I started my research on pride, it was about 2003, and at the time, really, it’s fair to say pretty much no one had studied pride. There were sort of hints of it here and there, some developmental psychologists, people who study children had looked at pride and kids, but there really wasn’t a lot in the adults. 

There’s a whole bunch of historical reasons for that, but one of the big factors is that emotion research really took off in the 1970’s and 80’s. When Paul Ekman famously traveled around the world and found that people everywhere recognize and show facial expressions and emotions in the same way. This is a really kind of ground breaking finding.

He very famously went to Papua New Guinea and studied people who were members of this small tribe, who have never seen a westerner before in their lives, and he showed them emotional expressions from the west and they identified them in the same way that westerners did. This was a big deal because it suggested emotions are universal, right?

If people all over the world identify emotion expressions in the same way, that has to mean that expressions aren’t something that each culture creates individually in its own way. Instead, it has to mean that emotions are a part of our human nature. They’re something we evolve to experience and display. That was a really kind of ground breaking finding at that time. 

That was really great, but the downside of it was that Ekman studied and found evidence for the universality for only a very small set of six emotions. These six emotions, you know, you probably can maybe guess what they are, but anger, fear, sadness, disgust, happiness, and surprise. They do seem to be universal. They have these universal facial expressions, and they’re important in many ways, and sort of have all kinds of adaptive functions for humans.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t other emotions out there as well that might also be adaptive and important. Yet, what people took from Ekman’s research is that actually, no, only these six emotions, only these six that have these universal facial expressions. Those are really the only kind of important emotions worthy of studying, fundamental to the human species. 

When I started and got interested in pride in the early 2000’s, there really hadn’t been much done. Partly for this reason, it occurred to me that, you know, perhaps pride does have a universal nonverbal display. The thing about Ekman’s research was that it was really restricted to the face. He was very focused on finding the emotions that people show in their faces.

Pride, you can’t show it just from the face. If you look what a facial expression of pride looks like, you won’t be able to tell it from happiness. It looks essentially the same. However, when people feel pride, they do something distinctive with their nonverbal behaviors, it’s just that what they do involves their body as well as the face. You can think about this, right?

People who feel pride, yes, they smile, but they also tilt their heads upwards a little bit. They push out their chests, they pull back their shoulders, they basically make themselves expansive in various ways. Sometimes they raise their arms above their head and put their hands in fists. It’s really an expansive, very visually apparent display. We thought, “Well, you know, if we can show that display is also recognized as pride, or it’s recognized reliably by people all over the world, then that might mean that pride, much like these other six emotions, is a fundamental part of human nature.” 

To do that, we basically began by having people pose expressions that we thought mapped on to what we expected pride to look like, and we tested whether other people recognized them, and we started just in California, where I was in grad school, and then we took it to Europe, and then eventually to Burkina Faso, as you mentioned.

We traveled to this country in west Africa, we were able to do studies with the help of a collaborator there, with people who very much had almost no exposure to really any culture outside their own, certainly to anyone in the west. These were people living in what anthropologists call a small-scale traditional society, basically living off the land in much the same way as their ancestors had for really for millennia.

They lived in mud huts with no plumbing or electricity, in the rural countryside of this country that’s incredibly poor. Burkina Faso is typically ranked as the second or third poorest country in the world, as a result of which, they have really no access to anything outside of their own country. There’s no media, at the time, there was no internet in these rural villages. Sometimes in the cities you can find it, but certainly not where we were doing our research. No magazines. Really no way for these people to have somehow seen a western pride expression, right? It’s hard to tell a story about how that could have happened.

When we showed them pride expressions posed by people form the US, we found that they recognized them. You know, they recognized them, and they were able to say, “Yeah, that’s pride.” That’s really good evidence that this expression isn’t something that’s unique to American culture, but rather something that’s universal, that is part of our nature, because again, it’s hard to explain how these people on the other side of the world would recognize this expression in the same way if it were not for the fact that humans as a species recognize the emotion this way, because we evolved to do that. We evolved to recognize the pride expression.

[0:17:01.6] MB: You also studied blind Olympians, right? They demonstrated the same expression.

[0:17:06.5] JT: Yeah, the Burkina Faso study was nice because we looked at recognition, but you know, recognition’s just kind of one side of demonstrating a universal expression. You also want to know people actually show this expression when they’re feeling pride. To do that, we looked at Olympians, these were Judo athletes in the 2004 Olympic games, and we just looked, we coded their behaviors after every match in that Olympics. We did that, we actually were fortunate to have photos taken by an official Judo Federation photographer.

They were really high-quality photos, very up close to these people, this guy was right on the mat with them, and there were moment by moment shots of every behavior these people engaged in while experiencing what’s probably the most intense pride of their lives if they won their match. We simply tested whether the behaviors these people showed, in fact, mapped on to this recognizable pride expression that we found to be recognized by people all over the world.

Sure enough, it did, and we found no differences by culture, so we looked at athletes and countries all over the world, and basically, no matter what country they were from, they tended to respond to the success experience by displaying pride. Then we looked at blind athletes. We looked at the Paralympics, where you have people who were blind, including people who were congenitally blind, meaning they were born blind and they’ve never been able to see. 

The reason that’s really important is because here we have a group of people who literally could not have learned to display pride from watching others, right? They’ve literally never seen a pride expression. The athletes in countries all over the world probably had seen other people show pride. They’re professional athletes participating at the Olympic level, they’re obviously exposed to lots of cultures. For these blind athletes, that’s just not the case. 

When we looked at how this people responded to success, we saw exactly the same thing. Just like athletes from countries all over the world who had sight, the congenitally blind athletes also responded to winning an Olympic match by displaying these pride behaviors.

[0:18:48.1] MB: Humans display pride in a similar way across many different cultures. Does that vary for displays of authentic pride versus hubristic pride?

[0:18:57.6] JT: That’s a great question, and it’s something that we’ve really kind of tried to look into in a number of different ways. The short story is no. Both authentic and hubristic pride are associated with the same inaudible expressions. The expansive posture, the little bit of a smile, the arms extended out form the body. People will see that and will sometimes call it authentic pride, sometimes call it hubristic pride, and really can’t reliably distinguish between the two.

Now, if we give them a little bit extra information, if we tell them something about the person showing pride, like for example, “This guy is known to be kind of arrogant. He thinks he’s really great,” then they’ll say, “Okay, that’s hubristic pride.” With context, they can make this distinction, but without it, we fail to find any clear sort of pattern, which I think is surprising in many ways, and I don’t want to say the story’s over there. I think future studies might find the distinction, but that seems to be what we found so far.

[0:19:46.4] MB: We talked about some of the downsides of narcissism and hubristic pride. What are some of the benefits of authentic pride?

[0:19:53.2] JT: Well, authentic pride is in large part what motivates us to want to succeed. Basically, authentic pride is what we feel when we’ve worked hard for a particular success, and it is essentially our mind’s signal for telling us that we are doing the right thing. 

That is to say, we’re doing what we need to do to become the kind of person we want to be, which really means the kind of person our society wants us to be, because we all evolved to want to have this sense of self that we feel good about. Because doing so makes sure that you essentially stay included with our society, that people don’t reject us, and we gain status in our societies. Authentic pride is essentially the emotional signal that tells us we’re on track for doing that.

What that means is, authentic pride is incredibly rewarding. It’s one of the most pleasurable emotional experiences. We all really want to feel it, because it’s not just that we’re happy, it’s that we feel good about ourselves, right? We desperately want to feel good about ourselves, that’s just how we evolved to be.

As a result of that, we are very much motivated to want to attain authentic pride, and that desire is what pushes us to achieve in all kinds of ways. We had one interesting study, I think, that showed this, where we looked at undergraduate student’s responses to their performance on the exam. This is a real exam they took in their class, and we took a look at how well they did, and then we ask them to tell us how much pride they felt in response. Then we ask them a few weeks later, “Okay, are you going to study the same or differently for your next exam,” and then we looked at how well they did on that next exam.

It was interesting, because we thought, “Okay, the people who did well on that first exam, they’re going to tell us they felt a lot of authentic pride as a result, and then those pride feelings are going to motivate them to work even harder for the next exam, and they’re going to be even better.”

That wasn’t actually what we found. The people who did well, they did feel authentic pride, as we expected, but they didn’t change their work habits for the next exam. In fact, what they said is, “You know, I worked hard for the last exam, I did well, I feel good, I’m going to work the same way.” It’s sort of like, these are people who are performing at a really high level. They don’t actually need to change their behavior, and it’s probably more adaptive that they don’t change their behavior, and in fact, when they don’t, they still end up doing quite well on the next exam.

What was really neat, though, was that the people who didn’t do so well on that first exam, the students who sort of underperformed, many of those students told us they felt a lack of authentic pride in their performance. They essentially did not feel authentic pride in their performance. That lack of authentic pride, that is the absence of those feelings those people who told us about, that led them to tell us a few weeks later, “I am going to change my behaviors. I’m going to study differently for the next exam,” and those changed behaviors in turn led to an improved performance on the subsequent exam.

We were able to trace that improvement in their performance directly back to those missing feelings about authentic pride. It’s a bit of a complicated story, but the short version is, when people don’t do well, and people are missing that feeling of success and are able to recognize, “Hey, I’m not feeling that sense of confidence and self-worth that I want to,” that absence can actually directly motivate a change of behavior, which leads to improved performance.

[0:22:46.0] MB: The drive for authentic pride is what creates that motivation?

[0:22:51.0] JT: That’s exactly right. Yeah.

[0:22:52.3] MB: Earlier, you kind of briefly touched on the concept of emotions being adaptive. For somebody who is listening and doesn’t kind of understand what that means, could you contextualize that, and I think, sort of specifically within talking about pride?

[0:23:05.4] JT: Yeah, absolutely. It’s a good question in any case, because psychologists use the word “adaptive” in lots of different ways, which can be really confusing. Sometimes by adaptive people mean it’s good for you, it’s good for your mental health, and that’s actually not what I meant.

What I mean when I say adaptive is that it’s something that we as a species evolved to do or to have, because it increases our fitness. Fitness has a very specific meaning from an evolutionary perspective. It essentially just means increases your gene’s chances of replicating.

Basically, things that are adaptive are things that make it more likely that you're going to survive and reproduce, or survive long enough to reproduce. From that perspective, the reason pride is adaptive is because it helps us get status. The way that it does that, interestingly enough, varies for the two kinds of pride. This is where I think things get really interesting.

Because form a sort of a mental health perspective, authentic pride is adaptive and hubristic pride isn’t. Like I said, it can lead to all kinds of psychological dysfunctions and poor relationships. From an evolutionary perspective, both prides are adaptive, because they both help us get status, but they do it through very different pathways.

Authentic pride basically motivates us to achieve, as I just kind of explained, and as a result of that, it helps us get a kind of status that we call prestige. Prestige is essentially the kind of status that’s based on earned respect. Prestigious leaders are people who have achieved a great deal, they’re smart, they’re wise, they have various abilities that everyone else admires, and as a result of that, people look up to them and people willingly choose to defer to them, right? The group sort of thinks, “This guy knows what he’s doing. If I follow him, it’s going to be good for me, it’s going to be good for everyone. I’m going to learn a lot and everyone will benefit.” 

That’s one way of getting status. There is another way of getting status as well, and this is what we call dominance. Dominant leaders are people who don’t necessarily contribute anything of value to the group, they’re not big achievers, they’re not people who have special competencies or skills, but they’re people who have control over some resource that everyone else in the group thinks is valuable.

For example, perhaps they’re particularly wealthy, or perhaps they’re just big and strong. They wield their control over that resource in their really manipulative and aggressive way, essentially threatening and intimidating other people, and forcing them to give them the power that they feel they want.

You can think of a dominant leader, sort of the boss who threatens his employees, right? “If you don’t do what I say, I’m going to fire you.” People give that boss power, right? Employees will do whatever the boss says, they’ll defer to him, but they don’t want to. They don’t’ respect him. They’re not giving him the power because they’re willingly choosing to, they’re doing it because they feel that they have no choice at all, and we found in some studies that both dominance and prestige are effective ways of getting social influence. Both of these tactics actually work in terms of getting ahead. They’re both going to be adaptive strategies, but one, prestige, seems to be really particularly facilitated by authentic pride, whereas dominance is facilitated by hubristic pride. 

The reason for that is because hubristic pride, again, is an emotion that makes people feel like they’re better than everyone else, makes them willing to engage in aggressiveness and manipulation, basically topics that are required in order to take advantage of others, to advance their needs and desires, and basically puts people in a mental state that’s almost exactly what you would want in order to attain dominance, right? In order to sort of takeover, take control, be aggressive, and really just dominate others and force them to give you the power that you’re looking for.

[0:26:16.9] MB: The data shows that both paths can potentially be ways to achieve status and achieve what you want to achieve.

[0:26:24.3] JT: That’s right. We did a study in which we look at this, where we had undergraduates come to our lab and work together to complete a task, and they basically had to work together for about 20 minutes on this task. We did this because it’s sort of an ideal way to allow hierarchies to naturally form. Whenever you get a small group of humans together and don’t assign a leader, leaders kind of naturally emerge, right? Someone just takes charge, other people fall in line.

It’s just sort of how it works in our species. We wanted to know, well, how does this happen? What determines who gets control over the group? They did the task, and then afterwards we had everyone in the group rate everyone else in terms of how dominant and prestigious they were, how much they looked up to each person, and how much they were basically afraid of each person, and also how influential everyone was. Who really had influence over the group, and we also measured how influential everyone was by having outside observers watch videos that we had taken.

We recorded these interactions on video, had outside observers watch the videos, and then they told us who they thought the most influential people in the group were. That’s a useful way of kind of getting beyond just people in the group who now have come to know these people and have relationships. They’re going to be a little bit biased, and then actual influence in terms of the task itself. Who actually determined how the task played out? Who made the decisions about what the group was going to do for the task?

What we found was that the people in the group who were rated by their peers in that group as highly dominant were just as likely to get influence over the group as were the people who were rated by their peers as highly prestigious. In fact, there was actually no difference in terms of how effective dominance was as a strategy compared to prestige. Both were equally effective in terms of being rated as highly influential by your peers, being rated as highly influential by outside observers, and in terms of actually getting influence in terms of determining the outcomes on that task. 

That suggests that even though, you know, people — dominant leaders, those people, we don’t like them. That’s what we found, in fact. The people who worked in these groups who told us they did not like the people who are dominant, they actually said they were afraid of them, but it’s still an effective way of getting power, right? Even though we don’t like these people, we give them power because we’re sort of afraid not to.

[0:28:21.6] MB: Despite the fact that they didn’t like the dominant leaders, they still followed them, listened to them and did what they want.

[0:28:29.0] JT: That’s exactly right, yeah.

[0:28:29.9] MB: It kind of makes me think of the old saying, you know, would you rather be loved or feared? It seems like the research demonstrates either one might work.

[0:28:37.5] JT: Yeah. Unfortunately, right. It sort of turns out either one might work. Now, that said, if you think about it that way, well, either one works, but one gets you power and love. People really like prestigious people. They respect them. They look up to them, and they also give them power.

The other gets you power, but tremendous hate. If you have the choice, you know, there’s sort of no reason to go for dominance over prestige if you have the option, right? If you can contribute something of value to the group, if you can be a nice person, if you can be helpful to others and still get power that way, that’s the better way to go. Simply because, you know, it’s not fun to be disliked. There’s all kinds of negative psychological consequences that I mentioned before.

The hubristic pride, and that comes with dominance as well. The thing about dominance is because they’re not liked, their staying power is going to be fairly limited. People will follow them and do what they say as long as they feel threatened or intimidated by them. As soon as they don’t, when a dominant loses his power for one reason or another. Perhaps, as it comes into question, or you can think of, you know, chimpanzees, the alpha male is no longer as strong as he once was, when that happens, that person’s going to lose all power.

In fact, perhaps even be exiled from the group, right? You see coalitions can form to overtake a dominant leader, because no one likes this person and everyone wants to get rid of him. In contrast, if you’re prestigious leader, even if for some reason you no longer have your power for whatever reason, perhaps you’re not as wise as you once were, your skills deteriorate, people will still find a place in the society for you because you retain your love, right? People really like you, and so they won’t kick you out of the group, even if you’re not as powerful as you once were.

[0:30:06.0] MB: Doesn’t some of the research show that dominance in some context was actually more effective than prestige? 

[0:30:13.2] JT: Yes, so that’s this other study that we did more recently. So what we did there is we had groups work together again, and we assigned a leader in each case. We just randomly said one person in the group is going to be the leader, and we had them complete a bunch of different tasks together, and then afterwards, we looked at how well they did in all the tasks and we had everyone rate their leader on dominance and prestige again.

Our question was, “Who’s going to do better on this task, the groups that are led by someone who happens to be really high in prestige, or the groups that are led by someone who happens to be really high in dominance?” and we thought the prestigious leader was going to win the day. Everyone liked that experience better, they enjoyed it, and they would do better on the task, and that’s not what happened. 

The groups led by a prestigious leader did do better on one particular kind of task. It was a task that required creative, out of the box thinking. So it’s called the brick test. Basically, people have to come up with as many creative uses for a brick as they can. It really is this exercise in spit-balling, feeling open, being comfortable with yourself and with your group, and it’s a fun exercise, and so a prestigious leader is actually very good at getting people to generate a lot of really creative answers in the brick test. 

But the other three tasks that we gave them, which required more analytical thinking, reaching one right answer on a complicated logical test, for all of those tasks, groups actually did better if they were led by someone who is high in dominance. That really surprised us, and I think it’s very — potentially has really important implications in driving these corporations and what kind of leader we want for different tasks. 

However, one caveat that I think is important to bear in mind, is because we randomly designed the leader in these cases, we the researchers said, “You’re going to be the leader,” that’s a situation where someone whose natural disposition is prone to prestige might not feel comfortable taking charge in the way that’s often necessary to reach a clear decision. 

There’s a time when you can try for consensus for a long time, but eventually someone’s going to have to make the call and come to the conclusion. When you put someone who is high in prestige in charge, they might not feel comfortable doing that, and I don’t know that’s the case in the real world, when leaders who are high in prestige know that they are at that position because they deserve it, because they earned it, right? They worked hard to get there, and in those cases, it’s possible that people would be more willing to say, “Okay, I tried for consensus, but now it’s time and I’m going to make the call.” 

Which I think is what dominant leaders were doing in our study, because people who are prone to that kind of personality, I think, don’t have a problem doing that. Who cares about if I deserve being here? I’m the leader, I’m going to make the decision. 

[0:32:28.9] MB: So without delving into the actual politics of it, a strategy of dominance that’s caught many people by surprise, and someone you’ve talked about in the past, is Donald Trump. I’d love to hear your thoughts about that. 

[0:32:40.1] JT: Yeah. Well, Trump is a great example of someone who has an extreme amount of hubristic pride. I used him in the book as an example of this, because he really just, throughout his life and his career, has had no problem being so explicit about how great he thinks he is. That’s fairly unusual to see that level of hubristic pride, and typically, even people who have a lot of hubristic pride often know there’s ways in which they’re supposed to cut it down, or show humility, or tame it back, basically, and Donald Trump has almost never done that. 

So he’s a really nice example of that, and it’s been purely interesting to watch him in politics in the past couple of years, because he really has used the dominant strategy to get ahead, and what I mean by that is he wields his power in this incredibly aggressive manner. He attacks extremely vehemently anyone who criticizes him. So the studies I was talking about before, where people who are hubristic blast noise when they are criticized, that’s like Trump on Twitter. 

If anyone criticizes him, he lashes out, and just incredibly angrily, and it’s been really effective. People are afraid to attack him. So I think the large reason why he won the primary election is because he attacked all of the other candidates so harshly that many of them backed down, and more importantly, republican activists who wanted to criticize him and perhaps support someone else couldn’t, because the repetitional costs were too strong. 

He was attacking these people to the point where their reputations were being destroyed through social media, and they had to no choice but to back down to protect themselves, and so this is really how dominance works. People are afraid to take on a dominant leader. In the case of Trump, I think it’s because he’s very effective at using aggression and at the same time, gaining the support of a lot of people who see him as the tough guy who’s going to be on their side. 

And then other politicians have really been afraid of angering those people, of angering his mob of supporters, who see him as the guy who’s going to fight for them, and so then he created this situation where there’s really no way for these people to take on Trump without risking angering the people whose support they feel they need. 

[0:34:33.8] MB: It’s a fascinating and relevant real-life case study in some of the topics we’re talking about. Changing directions completely, at the beginning of the interview you touched on the concept of self-conscious emotions. I’d love to learn a little bit more about that and what those entail. 

[0:34:49.6] JT: Sure, so self-conscious emotions are a special category of emotions that we experience as humans, and we don’t think any other animal experiences. There’s evidence that other animals have dominance and submission, and certainly that’s a precursor of pride and shame, that’s probably evolutionary origins of pride and shame. The lion, dominance and submission, we’ve seen it in other primates, but we humans are the only ones who really experience these self-conscious emotions, because we are the only ones who have a fully complex sense of self. 

So humans are the species that basically can think about who we are, can hold that in our minds, and then evaluate it. We can think about “What kind of person do I want to be, and is who I am today, is that getting closer to the kind of closer to the person I want to be, or is it getting farther away? Do I feel good about the things I’ve done today, or do I not feel good about those things? Do I feel I need to change who I am right now?” These are really important cognitive processes, and we really do see them only in humans, and the emotions that we feel when we make these evaluations, those are the self-conscious emotions. 

[0:35:45.1] MB: And I know you haven’t researched it in nearly as much detail, but I’d be very curious to hear about some of the research you’ve done with shame, and what your thoughts are about shame. 

[0:35:54.9] JT: Yes, shame is, in many ways, the antithesis of pride, and I think it’s a really important thing. Whereas pride is motivating, both because we feel it, we want to feel it more because we like it, there are studies that show when we think about how much pride we’ll feel from doing something good, like resisting temptation, that gets us to be more likely to do that good thing. If we think about pride, we’ll resist temptation more. 

Shame is not motivating in this way. There’s very little evidence to suggest that shame actually motivates people to change their behavior for the good. There’s evidence that suggests that when people feel ashamed they want to be different, they wish they had a different self, they really don’t like themselves. Shame is this horrible negative global feeling about the self, but it’s almost demotivating, because we feel so bad about our self in such a global way, we feel powerless and hopeless, and shame typically makes people want to hide and run away from their problems and escape them rather than try to approach then and do better. 

So we actually have one study where we looked at recovering alcoholics. These are people who are newly sober, trying to sober up, and they came to our lab and we had them talk about the last time that they had a drink. We had them do this while they were on video, and so this is a really intense shame moment for these people. This is often defined when they’d bottom out, the moment that led to them to seek sobriety, and then we say goodbye to them, and then we have them come back to our lab about four or five months later just to see how they’re doing. 

It’s really interesting, because what we find is in that the first time they come in, they talk about the last time they drank. We code their non-verbal behaviors while they’re talking about their drink for displays of shame, and displays of shame basically look like the opposite of displays of pride. Head is tilted down, posture is constricted and narrowed, they are hiding themselves away, and what we find is that the more shame these people show when talking about the last time they drank, the more likely they are to relapse when they come back four months later. 

That is to say, the more likely it is that they’ve now had a drink or several drinks, and in fact, the amount of shame they show while talking about their last drink actually predicts the number of drinks they had consumed. So essentially, how bad the relapse is. So that’s a neat evidence that suggests that if we feel shame about something about ourselves, that’s not going to help us get over that thing. It’s actually going to potentially do the reverse and make us go ahead and do more of that bad thing, and I think that’s because we sort of think, “I feel terrible about myself. This is who I am, but there’s no getting out of it, so I might as well embrace it and just be this person.” 

[0:38:10.1] MB: So how can we deal more effectively with shame?

[0:38:13.5] JT: I think the best solution to shame is to try to instead feel guilt. Lots of research suggests that guilt is the much more adaptive negative self-conscious emotion, because instead of being about the entire global self “I’m a bad person,” it’s much more focused on a specific bad thing that happened. So when we feel shame, we feel “I’m horrible,” but when we feel guilt, we feel “I did a bad thing. I messed up. I forgot something. I didn’t study hard for the exam,” and so there’s a solution there. 

Rather than sort of the whole self being the thing that’s incriminated, it’s just one behavior that is problematic, and so you can change that behavior. You can say, “Okay, I’m going to study harder next time. I’m going to work more on this. I’m going to change what I did,” and studies do show that, in fact, guilt is motivating. It motivates people to fix the situation, to apologize if they hurt someone, and to basically try to do better in the future. 

So that is really the best way to do it, and really the only way to do that is when something goes wrong, not to attribute it to who you are as a person globally, but rather to something more specific that you did. 

[0:39:11.3] MB: I think that’s a really important distinction, and one that — we won’t go down this rabbit hole — but ties into, in many ways, some of the things we talked about many times on the podcast, which is the idea of the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset, and the notion of you can always change yourself. A related question, how do we cultivate authentic pride? 

[0:39:31.7] JT: Well I think the best thing to do in terms of thinking about how to cultivate authentic pride is to think about the kind of person you want to be. I think this is a really interesting point that we often don’t do. We often are just living our lives day to day, getting by, everything is fine, not really thinking about whether we are becoming or doing the things that we need to do to become the kind of person that we really want to be. 

To develop the sense of self that’s most important to us, to have that need that we can feel good about, and often if we do, what we realize is we’re not, but typically, more often what happens is we just feel like something is missing in our lives. In my book, I tell the story of Dean Karnazes, who’s this ultra-marathon runner who spent most of his life in a business career, and he was doing really well. He had one success after another, he had a happy marriage, all was fine, and then the moment he turned 30, he just had this overwhelming sense that his life was not going the way that he wanted it to. 

That he wasn’t satisfied with the person that he was, and he couldn’t figure out what was wrong, but that night, he went out drinking with his friends to celebrate his birthday. His wife went home early, and this woman started flirting with him, and he realized he was close to possibly ruining his life flirting with an attractive stranger, and he just started running and running, all the way to his house in San Francisco, about 30 miles down the coast to Half Moon Bay in California. 

This is someone who used to be a runner when he was in high school, but he hadn’t run in I think 10 or 15 years at that point. So you can imagine how he felt the next day, but what he realized during this amazing run was that that’s what he wanted to be doing. That he was someone who his sense of self was based on pushing himself physically to extreme levels, and that’s really what he needed to be doing with his life, and so he made that a priority and he started by on the weekends running. 

Running nonstop, and started to do 24-hour runs, which is hard to believe, but they exist. Hundred-mile runs and eventually, he turned his whole life around and actually was able to give up his business career and parlay the running career into a profitable enterprise, and that’s not something everyone can do, but I do think figuring out who you are and what kind of person you want to be and what things you can do to best become that person, that’s really the answer to trying to achieve authentic pride. 

[0:41:33.6] MB: What’s one piece of homework that you would give to somebody who’s listening to this episode? 

[0:41:38.1] JT: Homework, that’s interesting. I guess I would say, like I said, think about if there’s something missing in your life in terms of attaining a sense of self-satisfaction. You can think about it as pride, but I think pride is tough. We often don’t like to talk about ourselves, just feeling proud of ourselves, because we get it confused with hubristic pride. So just think about satisfaction. What are you satisfied by in your life? Maybe it’s work. Maybe you’re bored at work and you’re not mastering things. 

You’re not having opportunities to master new things, or maybe work is fine, but you don’t have an opportunity to be creative in your life, and you’re someone who really craves a creative outlet. Or maybe like Dean Karnazes, you want to physically punish yourself, or physically challenge yourself, I should say, and train for a marathon. I think thinking about that kind of thing can open up new windows, new avenues to think about things that people can do to start feeling more of a sense of authentic pride in their lives. 

Again, it doesn’t have to be a career switch. It can be career switch, it can be picking up a hobby on the weekend, taking a photography class, helping out others, coaching your kid’s soccer team, there’s lots of different ways, I think, to get these feelings, but the first thing to do is to probably think about what’s missing? What am I not doing? What am I lacking in my life? 

[0:42:40.2] MB: So we touched on the top of your new book, Take Pride: Why the Deadliest Sin Holds the Secret to Human Success. I’m curious, obviously, listeners who want to dig into this topic, that’s a great place to start, but what are some other resources you’d recommend for people who want to dig in and do some more research about this? 

[0:42:56.8] JT: Well, I mean, it depends on what level the research is. The book is a good broad overview of all the work that I’ve done on pride, and that others have done, and then related topics on the things that we’ve been talking about, like sense of self, and identity, and evolutionary science. That’s one way to go, but if you want a more in-depth look, on my website all my research papers are available there. So anyone who’s interested can go to my website and check that out under publications. 

You can download papers or take a look if you want the more scientific version of that kind of stuff, and then if you are interested in this topic more broadly of how to use psychology, or finding some social and emotional psychology to achieve in various ways, I think Angela Duckworth’s new book is a great version of that. She talks about grit, and I think grit is very much related to authentic pride. So that’s a book that people might be interested in seeking out. 

For evolutionary science, more general, I always recommend Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. It’s a bit of an older book, but it’s a fantastic book, and I think still the best book out there in terms of just generally understanding what is evolutionary psychology, how did our minds evolve and why, and it’s really a readable take on that, so I’d recommend that. 

[0:43:58.1] MB: And where can people find you and the book online? 

[0:44:00.9] JT: Sure. If you go to UBC, that’s University of British Columbia, so ubc-emotionlab.ca/take-pride, that will get you right to the book’s page, but if you just go to ubc-emotionlab.ca, you can see all of my work and the kinds of stuff that we do in my lab. 

[0:44:17.4] MB: Well Jessica, this has been a fascinating conversation. Very surprising take on what many people consider a negative attribute, so it’s been really interesting to hear about your research and some of the really cool conclusions about authentic pride and prestige. So thank you very much for being on the Science of Success. 

[0:44:35.5] JT: You’re welcome. Thanks so much for having me. 

[0:44:37.3] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. 
If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I’d love to hear from you, and I read and respond to every listener email. 

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt how do you organize and remember all this information?” Because of that, we created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners called “How to Organize and Remember Everything.” You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email list. 

If you want to get all of this incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. Just go to scienceofsuccess.co, hit the show notes button at the top, you can get everything, and we have show notes for all of our previous episodes. If you’re missing links, information, research studies, book recommendations from a previous episode or this episode, be sure to check out our show notes at scienceofsuccess.co. Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

Artificial Intelligence, Cryogenics, & Procrastination with Wait But Why’s Tim Urban

In this episode we discuss what Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking all consider the single greatest threat to humanity, why “death” is not binary event that makes you transition from being alive or dead at a specific moment in time, we ask if you would spend $1000 on a chance to live forever, we look at the biology behind cryogenics, vitrification, and putting your body on biological pause, and we explore why poverty, climate change, war, and all our problems melt away in the face of one massively important issue with our guest Tim Urban. 

Tim Urban is the creator of Wait But Why and has become one of the most popular writers on the internet with fans such as Maria Popova, Sam Harris, and Elon Musk.

His content has become so popular that according to Fast Company he has “captured a level of reader engagement that even the new-media giants would be envious of” with an average of over 1.5 million unique readers visiting and engaging on Wait But Why each month. 

We discuss:

• Tim’s story and how he got started with Wait But Why

• How Tim writes about everything from the human condition, to the universe, the future and huge technology trends

• How Tim becomes a mini-expert in tons of different fields

• How Tim overcomes massive procrastination to achieve his goals

• The interplay between “The Rational Decision-Maker”, “The Instant Gratification Monkey” and "The Panic Monster”

• The vital importance of "important but not urgent" activities

• Tim’s struggle with perfectionism

• The importance of creating accountability to overcome procrastination

• What Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking all consider the single greatest threat to humanity

• Why Artificial Intelligence is the single most defining issue facing humanity

• Are you smarter than a computer?

• The difference between “narrow” artificial intelligence, “general” artificial intelligence and artificial “superinteliigence"

• What happens when artificial intelligence develops the ability to improve itself?

• Why the AI revolution is inevitable and will take place within the next 20-40 years

• Why poverty, climate change, war, and all our problems melt away in the face of artificial superinteligence

• The battle between instant gratification and long term planning - how it relates to procrastination and AI

• Why the notion that cryonics is the act of “freezing” “dead people”is fundamentally wrong on several levels

• Why “death” is not binary event that instantly transitions you from being alive or dead at a specific moment in time

• The biology behind cryogenics, vitrification, and putting your body on biological pause

• Would you spend $1000/year for a chance to live forever?

• “The truth is, involuntary death sucks”

• The body is just a physical object that can be upgraded and replaced

• And much more!

If you love exploring relevant and highly fascinating scientific topics - listen to this episode! 

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Website] Wait But Why

• [TedTalk] Inside the Mind of a Master Procrastinator

• [Article] The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence by Tim Urban

• [Article] Why Cryonics Makes Sense by Tim Urban

• [Fable] The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant by Nick Bostrom

• [Youtube Video] Nick Bostrom's -The Fable of the Dragon Tyrant

• [Encyclopedia of Philosophy] Pascal's Wager about God

• [Website] Alcor Life Extension Foundation

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee, and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study, and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss what Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, and others consider the single greatest threat to humanity, why death is not a binary event that makes you transition from being alive or dead at a specific moment in time, we ask if you could spend a thousand dollars on a chance to live forever, would you take it? We look at the biology behind cryogenics, vitrification, and putting your body on biological pause. We explore why poverty, climate change, war, and all other problems melt away in the face of this one massive issue with our guest, Tim Urban.

The Science of Success continues to grow, with more than 725,000 downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one New and Noteworthy, and more. A ton of our listeners are curious about how to organize and remember everything, how to keep track of all this amazing information. I get tons of listener emails asking me, “Matt, how do you organize yourself? How do you keep track of all the incredible knowledge you get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to podcasts, and more?”

Because of that, we created an amazing free resource for you, and you can get it completely free by texting the world “smarter” to the number 44222. It’s a free guide called, How to Organize and Remember Everything. Again, to get it, all you have to do is text the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.

In our previous episode, we discussed whether time speeds up as we get older, why your life story only makes sense looking in reverse, whether or not brain games actually work, the importance of proactive learning instead of passive learning, why psychology confirms all your worst fears about studying and getting smarter, and much more with a special two-guest interview featuring Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke. If you want to master your mind, listen to that episode.

[0:02:33.9] MB: Today we have another incredible guest on the show, Tim Urban. Tim is the creator of one of my favorite blogs, Wait But Why. He’s become one of the most popular writers on the internet with fans including Maria Papova, Sam Harris, and Elon Musk. Tim combines long-form content, humor, and stick figures to explain the world’s most interesting concepts, including SpaceX, AI, procrastination, and we’re going to dig in to a number of these. 

His content has become so popular that, according to Fast Company, he’s captured a level of reader engagement that even new media giants would be envious of. With an average of over 1.5 million unique readers visiting and engaging on Wait But Why every month. Tim, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:11.5] TU: Thanks Matt, thanks for having me.

[0:03:14.1] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on here. For listeners who may not be familiar with you, tell us a little bit about yourself and your story.

[0:03:21.1] TU: Yeah, I started blogging — actually, I started blogging a long time ago. I started 2005 with a blog that I was kind of doing on the side. I always kept it to something I did on the side, but I really liked it, and it was in about mid 2013 that I decided to start a new blog and go full-time, and kind of see what would happen, and you know, I always kind of wished on the other blog I could see what would happen if I could just work on a post all week.

This was a chance to do that, and I started that in 2013 and to partner, and in the last three and a half years it’s kind of basically what I’ve been doing, is full-time blogging about all different kinds of things.

[0:04:02.6] MB: What is Wait But Why, and why did you decide to start it?

[0:04:08.6] TU: Yeah, well, Wait But Why, what it has become is a long-form stick-figure illustrated blog about everything from kind of the human condition, and kind of human psychology, to the questions of the universe, and the future, and the big things going on in tech, and kind of whatever I’m interested in.

I feel like what I just said is like, a list of things that a lot of people are kind of interested in all those things, and so am I. I just kind of write about all those things. The post go really in-depth, I’ll spend sometimes over a month working on a post, sometimes they get really long, and I really kind of enjoy the liberty that I have as an independent blogger to just go in as much depth as I want without having to worry about limitations on either time or words.

That’s what it is. When I started it, I didn’t say, “I want to do a long-form blog.” I didn’t really know exactly what it was going to be. I did know I wanted to write about a lot of different kinds of things, and I did know that, you know, that I wanted to do high quality things, because so much of what I saw on the internet was clearly done for clicks, done for volume, it was put out by a site that was trying to put on a lot of stuff, and I saw where the priorities were. They weren’t on, “We want this to be the best piece that we can do.” 

That wasn’t really the focus on anything, most things I was reading online. I said that was the thing that I wanted to do different, is that I wanted to focus on not on volume, not even on consistency, but just on trying to do quality of product. That was kind of the core initial principle, and then I wanted to have fun. I didn’t want to try to figure out what I could write about that would get an audience, I wanted to make sure that if I was going to do this for a long time, I ended up doing something I really liked. I wanted to kind of — it was an outlet for my curiosity, and I wanted it to stay that way, and I wanted to kind of enjoy myself as I was doing it. That was the core idea, and it’s kind of become what it has become, and that happened as I went.

[0:06:19.1] MB: Before we dig into a couple of my favorite topics that you’ve covered on the blog, I’d love to share with our listeners a little bit about your TED Talk, and the themes of procrastination. We talk a lot about psychology and personal improvement on the show, so I’d be really curious for you to share the story of the TED Talk, and the message, and talk a little bit about procrastination.

[0:06:43.1] TU: Yeah, I always say I’m not really an expert on anything I write about, because if I wanted to be an expert on something, I would have to make that the one thing I wrote about, basically. I’d have to spend a bunch of years reading about it, and that’s not — that’s for some people but not really me. I get ADD’d about topics and want to move on after I’ve been in one for a while, and I’m curious about so many things that I want to skip around and I want to do a bunch of different things.

Which means I have become what I call a mini expert on things as I go. Procrastination is an exception, that I am an expert on being a procrastinator. That’s one thing I feel like I understand. I’m not an expert on the deep psychology of it necessarily, or that’s the work of a psychologist, but I am an expert on what it feels like to go through this problem, and to live with it, and to struggle with it, and to try a bunch of things that don’t work to fix it, and I think that made me very qualified to really write about what goes on in the head of a procrastinator.

What it feels like, and why it’s so hard, and so that started as a blogpost and ended up also being the subject of a TED Talk that I did. What I did for that is I kind of just sat back when I first wrote the post, and I just thought about what actually goes on in the literal, like, in the second, the exact second when I’m trying to do something, and I know I should be doing one thing, and then I go and actually do something else.

What is going on in that moment? I came to the conclusion that there’s two characters in my brain. There’s literally two motivations going on, and one of them, which I call the rational decision maker, is this adult, the adult in my brain, and just says, “Well, we should do this now, so that later we can do this.” The decision maker wants to have fun, like anyone else, but he just gets that there needs to be a balance. He can think long-term, he can see the big picture, and gets that if we do this now then we can do this later, if you don’t do this now then later’s going to be bad and we won’t be - very simple concept. 

Then there’s this other character, the child in my brain. The child doesn’t think long-term, lives entirely in the present moment, and I call that child the instant gratification monkey, because it really is like a remnant of our animal past. We are in the animal present, we are currently animals, and this is the very primitive part of our brain that simply wants to eat, reproduce, and conserve energy.

We need both of these characters, because we are like weird species, we are an animal that needs to keep the animal alive and keep the animal satisfied, but we’re also this weirdly rational animal that has this like, super-higher being of consciousness that has all these big long-term plans. We live in this very complex, advanced civilization that requires this rational center of our brain.

They’re living together. It’s like two very — it’s like two very shitty roommates. It’s like Ernie and Burt are like, bad roommates, it’s like that. Or, it’s like a really dysfunctional single parent household with an only child and one parent, and they don’t — I realize that in that moment, the adult will say something — and everyone’s got both characters. The thing that makes someone a procrastinator is that when they disagree, which is a lot, a non-procrastinator, the adult, is able to say, “Not now, monkey. sorry. I know you don’t want to do this, but we have to,” and the monkey relents, or gets overpowered, or just knows its place and this point doesn’t even try that hard. The procrastinator’s brain, it goes the other way. The power is not in the right place. The adult says this, the kid says, “I don’t want to do that,” and grabs the wheel and starts driving.

The adult just kind of like helplessly stands there. It’s a power balance between these two characters. So that’s the core of the post, and the core of something I’ve struggle with for a long time. You seem like a crazy person, but it’s actually just that you have this kind of like, unhealthy relationship in the two characters, where the parent isn’t able to control the kid, he’s always mad at the kid, the kid probably doesn’t like the parent very much, and I don’t know whether…

Where I’m not an expert is like, the core psychology. Like a psychologist might say, “That’s when your growth was stunted at some age in this one area, and it was stunted because your parents did XY and Z.” I don’t know that, I don’t know why my power balance is off, but I know what is happening, and it’s that my power balance there is off. 

Then the other part of the post and the talk is that I say, “So then how does any procrastinator get anything done? If the power balance is off, and anytime something hard needs to happen the monkey grabs the wheel, why isn’t that always just the problem?” And the answer is that there’s one other character in the brain, which I call the panic monster, which is a character that’s dormant most of the time and you don’t notice it, but then, when the deadline gets close, or when you’re in danger of public embarrassment or something like that, suddenly he wakes up and starts screaming. 

That’s the one thing the monkey’s scared of. The monkey’s not scared of the rational decision maker, but this child in your brain is terrified of the panic monster and will run away, and then the rational decision maker, in those moments, can kind of grab the wheel and finally, with no monkey there, can go and do your work, do whatever you need to do. A really bad procrastinator situation, the only time they get something done is panic, and the reason that’s dangerous is not just because panic isn’t fun or healthy, it’s not going to produce your best work, but something much darker than that and deeper than that, which is the panic monster only shows up in situations when there’s a deadline.

That’s fine when you’re in school, maybe, or if you have a certain job that’s very deadline heavy, but most situations in the real world, after school ends, unfortunately don’t have deadlines. So things like careers and the arts, your entrepreneurial careers, or something maybe — anything you want to — or being at work in a job with a boss, but somewhere where you want to spend some of your time on self-improvement.

Long term self-improvement, actually, you know, learning more, getting better. There’s no deadlines on those things, and the panic monster doesn’t wake up for those things, and of course, like all the stuff that makes people happy outside of work. Learning a new instrument, or going into the gym getting healthier, working on your relationship, or just yeah, taking care of your health, or cooking really good meals, getting better at something.

All these things that kind of make life rich. There’s no deadlines on those, and without the panic monster, if they’re hard, the monkey’s usually going to not let you do them, and you don’t have anyone to help you. Procrastinators, they often — people see them as people who they cram the last minute and you have a bad relationship with deadlines. Actually, the much sadder thing, and the thing that affects way more people, I think, very quietly and behind the scenes is this kind of concept of long-term procrastination. This situation where there’s no panic monster to help, and the procrastinator just kind of has this problem forever, and it just sits there and kind of eats away at them, and no one else even really knows about it often. 

It’s kind of like their own personal struggle, and they have huge regrets later, and they end up doing a lot of what you could think of as kind of — really urgent, but not important stuff, and there’s a lot of that in life. Emails, and your errands, and pick your kids up, or you have to go out to dinner with your friend, and you do that stuff, because those things have little deadlines. The urgent stuff. So often, the urgent stuff isn’t what’s important.

I mean, important stuff isn’t urgent most of the time, especially big life things. I want to change my job, that kind of thing is not ever going to be like, “I have to do that by Tuesday,” that doesn’t exist. You could skip a Tuesday and do it Wednesday, or Thursday, or never. They spend a lot of time doing that stuff, and they spend almost no time doing the important stuff that’s not urgent, which, like I said, is usually the really big things in life. The things that will end up on your gravestone. The things that you’ll be on your death bed really proud of. 

That kind of stuff is really often not urgent, and without a panic monster, the procrastinator can really kind of miss out on that stuff in life, and so that’s what like - procrastinators need to think about is like, not just “Am I bad with deadlines,” but “Is there important, but not urgent, stuff in my life that if I really look at this honestly, I’m just not doing, because I’m not good at doing stuff when there’s not external pressure.” I think a lot of people can answer that question and say yes, there is, and it’s bothering me.

[0:15:29.9] MB: As a self-proclaimed procrastinator, how do you overcome that challenge?

[0:15:34.9] TU: A lot of times I don’t. A lot of times I continue to have this be my core struggle, like yesterday, when I have been working on this one blog post for a long time now, and I’m dying to just get it going. A lot of readers are emailing me and wondering what the hell’s going on, and I’m very frustrated with my pace on this, so I think, okay. I sit down all day yesterday to work, I should just be writing, working. I’ve done so much research already, already outlined it, and what I did is this is like a monkey clever tactic. 

The rational decision making person isn’t so weak that he’s going to let the monkey sit around and watch TV all day. I don’t do that kind of procrastination usually. What I did do is I read articles that were relevant, I researched all day, even though I’ve already done plenty of research for a blog post. I’m not writing a book on this, I don’t need to do more research, and I did anyway, because my perfectionism kicked in, which is some — the monkey kind of like takes it. He can kind of use other characters in your brain, for like, you know, assistance, or uses my perfectionist guy all the time. Yeah, perfectionism kicked it, I said, “Oh, now I need to read this, oh, now there’s a hyper link in that article, we have to read that.” 

The rational decision maker is screaming, saying, “Stop it! This doesn’t matter! This is not important for the long-term goals here, reading the 65th and 66th articles here.” That’s classic. I still definitely have — I still definitely struggle. That said, I have written a lot on Wait But Why. I’ve written probably almost a hundred pretty long blogposts in three years, that’s a lot.

That’s equivalent of many books of writing. I managed to conquer some things, but I think it’s mostly the fact that at the beginning, as I said, Wait But Why was started by me and a partner, my partner is my friend and business partner who runs kind of this other business that two of us started in 2007, and he is running that for both of us while I’m writing Wait But Why and starting this kind of what could be a media platform, what could be  a brand, or could just be a cool project, but I’m starting it for both of us. 

I had kind of a couple of things. I had pressure from the fact that I was letting someone else down, not just myself, if I didn’t work on this early on. That helped, that was external pressure, and then there were readers pretty quickly. I got lucky in that situation, where the readers happened pretty quickly, quicker than I thought they would, but there was an audience and it built up pretty early on in the life of Wait But Why, which for me is huge, because suddenly, that is kind of a panic monster.

It’s not a full one, like a hard deadline. The panic monster’s volume of his scream never gets to like a full peak volume, but he is always kind of there, because you have readers and they’re going to go away. That hard-earned readership is going to give up on you. They have plenty of other options on the internet, they’ll just get up and they’ll forget about you if you don’t write.

I kind of had some external pressure, some panic monsters going on, and that’s part of why I did that, so I would say that that’s — what I did is kind of an interim step a procrastinator can take. It was really important to me to do something like Wait But Why. I’m really happy and gratified that I have done it.

I think it’s like it’s a great thing for me to have done this, but I don’t think that I did it by solving that procrastination problem, I think I did it by creating panic monsters in my life, which is kind of a Band-Aid. It’s getting you through the next step without solving the problem, and its a problem. As far as the problem, I’m still working on it really hard, and I hope to one day come back and write another post about — it’s called, “How I Beat Procrastination.” That’s going to be a fun post to write, and I’m not anywhere near ready to write that yet.

[0:19:15.5] MB: In many ways it sounds like accountability and kind of creating some external pressure is one of the effective strategies that you’ve used in the past?

[0:19:24.0] TU: Yes, it is an effective strategy, but it’s not a sustainable long-term strategy, I don’t think. It could be, it’s just not great. It’s not — the really good long term strategy will be learning how to just have the adult have the power.

When there’s something hard to do, that I don’t want to do, that the adult has to say, “Well, it’s time to do it anyway, and we’re just going to do it even though there’s no deadline, even though it’s kind of amorphous and you don’t really know how to really do it. Just get working on it, and be efficient about that,” and there’s some days I see that. It’s not like I can’t ever do it, but not as much as I would like.

I’ve done kind of, like I said, a Band-Aid solution, which is build external pressure. There’s - some people have it because they have a boss, and they have a schedule they’re on, and they have to. If you don’t, that’s really dangerous for a procrastinator, and you have to — if you haven’t solved your long-term problem, you’ll have to figure out how to build external pressure into your life so that you’re forced to make progress, because otherwise it’s going to make you really unhappy.

[0:20:35.4] MB: I’d love to change directions a little bit and get into some of the topics that you’ve covered on the blog. One of my absolute favorite posts, or I guess series of posts that you did was a two-part series about artificial intelligence.

That, I highly recommend anybody listening to go and read that, because there’s no way we could cover everything in there just in this interview, but I’d love for you to kind of share at a very high level, some of the core findings that you had when you wrote those articles, and kind of the core themes of them.

[0:21:04.6] TU: Yeah, that’s definitely one of the craziest topics I dove into. Since I have started writing I, it’s kind of when you get into that topic, every other topic kind of melts away in importance in your head, because this is like, imagine if there was a bunch of monkeys on the earth only. There’s no humans or anything, and they’re trying to do a bunch of things. They’re trying to figure out better ways to crack the coconuts, and better ways to build nests in trees, and they’re fighting with other monkey tribes.

They’re dealing with all those things, and they seem like all these dire issues. Then some monkeys are going about and they’re saying, “We’re doing something new over here, we’re building this thing called humans.” It’s also an interesting project. We know from looking at that, that’s not a normal project, that’s not one of the projects, that is a project that’s going to define every part of their existence. It’s going to define all the other projects. 

It can build humans that want to help them, the humans will easily solve all their problems. They could have a grocery store just for monkeys with every possible food they need. It’s not about cracking the coconut, now they can have any kind of food they have ever wanted - if the humans are working for them. If the humans aren’t working for them, humans could kill them all very easily without any — they could cage them, they could poison their food, they could tranquilize gun them, they could shoot them, they could taze them. They could have bombs.

There’s absolutely no match if the humans aren’t on their side, or it could be somewhere in the middle where the humans kind of ignore them, do their own thing. Sometimes the monkeys are in the way, and then the humans hurt them in order to fix that, or sometimes the humans find compassion for the monkeys and want to help. Some of them want to help and they can be a great help, but either way, building humans would be the most significant thing that the entire species of ape have ever done by far. 

That’s what we’re doing. We’re building our version of humans. We’re building something far smarter than we are, and the thing that confuses people is they say, “Well, you know, my computer’s already smarter than me. It can hold more information, it has better memory, it’s faster. My calculator can multiply 10 digit numbers way faster. Computers are already smarter,” and the answer’s no, they’re not. What they are is they’re more intelligent in a very narrow sense, in a very specific sense. Whatever the computer’s specific job is, it’s better than humans at that job, but humans have this amazing capacity for breadth. 

We have this incredible diverse intelligence that can — we have wisdom, we have social skills, we have creativity, we can learn from experience, we have reasoning, we have all this general reason. We’re smart in a way that no computer is or ever has been, not even close. There’s never been a smart computer, if you want to define it like that. You can accurately define that as general intelligence.

There’s never been a computer that had anything close to what we have, general intelligence. What computers have is narrow intelligence. We have a lot of artificial, narrow intelligence on the planet that’s really great at one thing. What humans are working on right now, and the thing the post was about, was not Siri, and Pandora, and all of this artificial narrow intelligence, it was about the concept of building AGI. Artificial General Intelligence, and what that will be like.

It’s not an easy thing to get there. I went through a bunch of different ways we’re trying to do it and the challenges on the hardware side and on the software side. Our own brain is a mystery to us, it’s extremely complex. Some people think it’s the most complex object in the known universe. Trying to replicate what it can do is not easy. We’re trying to do that, but the thing is, first of all, that alone would change everything. If there was a computer that actually could just talk to you like a person, and the computer could look at any situation and just kind of give you advice, or think about it with you and have its own ideas and plans about any part of your life.

That’s completely unheard of, but the thing about it that’s really intense is that it’s not going to just — once we get there, a lot of the way that we’re trying to build this is by building computers that can improve themselves, like they can make itself smarter through — it will be good at researching AI, and coding, and changing its own architecture, its own coding to make itself smarter, that’s why a lot of people think we’re going to get to this.

What’s going to happen when it gets there, it’s going to keep making itself smarter, and it’s going to be able to do that more and more as it gets smarter. You’re going to have something that’s the intelligence of a normal human, and it will be as good as a computer scientist as kind of a normal human, other than the fact that they can work 24 hours a day, never forgets anything, and can sync up with other computers so they can have all the same information.

You know, it will be pretty good. Suddenly it gets itself to be Einstein’s level of intelligence, which we think is a huge difference from the average human, but actually, in the big scheme of things, there’s very small difference on the intelligence scale between the smartest and the dumbest human. Very small.

Now, we have a computer that’s as smart as Einstein. Now, it’s a really good computer scientist, and before you know it, it makes itself smarter than any human’s ever been, and now it starts just leaping up in intelligence, and it can be like, once we get there, whether that’s in 20 years or 40 years or 60 years, people think it’s around, that’s kind of the ballpark area where they think we can get to general intelligence. It might be a month from that point, or maybe a week, or maybe an hour when suddenly the computer that has hit general intelligence has hit something else. What we call artificial super intelligence.

Something that, if Einstein had an IQ of 200 or whatever, just say. An average person’s IQ is maybe 110 or something. We’re talking about the computer’s IQ is now at like 50,000. Unheard of. Things we don’t even understand. Just like a monkey can’t get what a human even can do. Monkey doesn’t even know that we do what we do. It can’t even get that, even if we try to explain all the things humans do.

Not only can they not do those things, it can’t really understand even that we’re doing it. It doesn’t even have that level of capacity. That’s the kind of thing we’re talking about. Now we have this thing on the planet that can use things that seem like magic to us, that are so amazing, not only can we not do it, but we literally can’t even understand what it’s doing.

If it sat down and spoke in perfect English to us and it tried to explain, it can’t. Our brains are not capable of even understanding what it’s working on. That’s such an intense concept, that again, everything else melts away. We talk about climate change, poverty, war, these things are huge problems. Nothing compared to the problem we’re going to have if super intelligence is not either on our side in the exact way we need it to be.

And, those problems are no problem at all if the AI wants to help us fix them, and it’s going to be like a monkey smashing its hand into a padlock a thousand times, when a human can just walk over and undo it. There would be no problem for an AI to fix all of our problems if it wants to, or we could very well go extinct in the next 100 years, because AI does something we don’t want. The mistake that people make is they anthropomorphize, meaning they apply human values and characteristics to something that’s not human and never will be. 

So they think, “Oh it’s going to be evil.” I don’t know if you’re watching Westworld, but they’ve got that. The AI is going to want, it’s going to feel bad about itself, it’s going to want to be the intern, that’s something that human does. But it’s much more like is a human might build a house because it wants to build a house, and it builds on top of an anthill, and it kills all the ants in the anthill by doing it. That human doesn’t hate the ants. Humans aren’t like, “Yes, now I am king of all the ants,” no. The human is just doing it’s thing, and the ants happened to be in the way. 

So the scary thing is that when the AI is that smart, it has an unbelievable amount of power. And that power, even just a bit, it could elbow the human race off the table by accident with that power. It’s like, if we’re in the way of something it wants to do, and we haven’t very specifically programmed it to value human life, then it’s an unprecedented amount of power on this planet, and we don’t know what’s going to happen with that. That’s just a huge question mark, so yeah that’s that topic. 

[0:29:19.6] MB: You know, the funny thing is it’s really interesting, because if you look at like Elon Musk and Bill Gates, all of these people who are in the forefront of technology, you hear them off in the distance being like, “Hey guys, this AI think is really big.” No one is really paying attention to it, and I’ve heard that a number of times and thought, “Okay, whatever. What are these guys really talking about?” and your series of articles really brought the life for me the massive stakes and the consequences. 

And there’s a couple of pieces of it that I’d really love to dig into. One of the things that you touched on is the idea that all these other challenges that we’re facing, all these things that seem like major risks or challenges, global warming, or climate change, poverty, economic displacement, war, there’s this binary outcome when artificial intelligence happens, right? 

And we can talk about the science, and you’ve done a ton of research and talk about the science behind this is very, very valid, that it’s not really a question of if we’re going to have artificial super intelligence. It’s inevitable at some point, and when that inevitably gets created, there’s a binary outcome. It’s either the AI solves all of our problems forever, or we get completely wiped off the planet and humanity goes extinct.

[0:30:37.1] TU: Yeah, it kind of is. It’s one notch more complicated in that even the good side is tricky. When we think it solves all of our problems, well, who is determining what our problems are? ISIS thinks it knows what problems are, and what right and wrong is. ISIS thinks solving all of our problems means killing all infidels and creating a caliphate that rules the earth, so that’s it’s idea. Even within the US, with fairly likeminded people, you have people on opposite sides of the aisle, with different ideologies, who all say, “Well I think,” so in a very broad sense, yes. 

The big problems you are talking about it can solve, but it has to be created by people who have similar values to you that successfully program the AI to have those values. To understand those values, or it’s going to be a problem, because you can imagine how many different humans and different parts of the planet with different motivations and different values are going to want to make sure the AI does what they think are the right things, so it’s very tricky. 

It’s not an easy scenario to picture where everything goes right for everybody, so there is that. But yes, it is pretty binary whether, in general, this is a force for great good, at least to someone, or this is a destructive force like nothing we’ve ever seen. A destructive force like an asteroid was to the dinosaurs. It has that kind of potential. 

What’s funny is these two topics we’ve talked about so far, procrastination and AI, they have a lot in common, and that’s what Elon, and Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates, and a lot of these people who tried to warn us about AI, Nick Bostrom, what they say sounds a lot like the rational decision maker of humanity saying, “Hey, let’s do this slowly and carefully, or not at all maybe, since we’re thinking really long-term. We’re playing with fire here.” 

They think we’re kind of a bunch of kids playing with a bomb, and what humanity is doing I is kind of the same thing humanity does when it comes to getting ourselves in climate change trouble, which is it’s humanity being controlled by its instant gratification monkey. Climate change is a full instant gratification monkey thing. It’s species only being able to see two feet in front of its face, trying to do stuff that’s going to make it money in the next 10 years at any given point, and not worrying about the big picture, and AI says the same thing. 

If these entrepreneurs and these developers who are just working feverishly on this thing to change the world, they probably have good motivation, most of them, but it’s still slightly instant gratification motivation, where there’s some major potential long-term consequences, and it’s just not the thing that they seem to be focusing on. They’re saying, “Build, build, build, let’s do it!” 

So I feel like the same thing that makes humans problematic, this battle in our brain between the long-term thinking adult and the instant gratification, this wanting child, which from my case comes up with procrastination. For other people, it comes up in eating unhealthy, and not being faithful in a relationship, and many other ways that this battle in our brain manifests itself. I think it’s also, humanity as a whole is dealing with the same battle, and I think that AI might be the most important example of where that now is going on, and in this case for better or for worse, hopefully not for worse, the side that is trying to build is not thinking too much about the long-term stuff. 

There’s a lot more of them out there right now, and so I have my fingers crossed here thinking like, “I hope somehow these goes well, because it seems to be happening, and the people making, I am not sure they’re thinking about human extinction. They’re thinking about their particular app, and how developing a little bit better AI for that app can make them a lot richer. It can make their app a lot better and can make a bigger impact in the world.” 

And then someone else in a different part of the world was working on their software, and they’re coming up with breakthroughs and AI for their software, and together as a species we are moving collectively down this road that’s going to end up with artificial super intelligence, but we’re all doing it in an instant gratification way. So I do think that this bit is kind of a child-adult battle. It’s the story of us, and the story of our time, and the story of the future, and for better or worse. 

[0:35:11.2] MB: And AI is such an important topic. I highly recommend anybody listening that really wants to dig in on this, as we said, some of the smartest thinkers on the planet right now consider this to be one of the most important topics. Read both of the Wait But Why posts about artificial intelligence, and we will make sure to include those in the show notes so that you can take a look, but I highly recommend, everybody that I talk to that this topic comes up even remotely, I send them the articles and I say, “You need to read this immediately.” 

I’d love to pivot a little bit and talk about another topic that’s controversial, which is cryonics. You’ve written about that, or many people refer to it as cryogenics, which I think you talked about is a misnomer, but I’d love for you to share some of your thoughts and experiences around that. 

[0:35:53.2] TU: Yeah, cryonics, cryogenics is a branch of physics that deals with really cold temperatures. A branch of science. So it’s like anything that has to do with cold temperatures of metal or rock, or embryos. We call it frozen embryos, or artificial organs, a big topic. Cryonics is a specific thing that deals with - what people who don’t know what it is, they call it freezing a human after they die to try to bring them back to life later, which sounds rightly insane. 

When I would hear about that, I’d say, “Okay, that’s obviously, nutsy people. People who can’t accept death, and just are desperate, and are trying some crazy thing that obviously won’t work.” Then I learned a lot more about it, and I understood how wrong my conception of it was. I learned a lot. I spent two weeks doing nothing but reading about cryonics, and I learned that a bunch of conceptions are wrong. So first of all, people say it’s freezing dead people. 

So the first thing is the word freezing is wrong. If you freeze a human, the liquid in their bodies, which is most of our body is, turns to ice, which crystalizes, which it actually, A, it expands to 9% bigger than it’s normal volume. B, it crystalizes and the crystals themselves splash through cell membranes, and it completely irreparably damage the cells. You cannot freeze a human without killing a human permanently.

What cryonics does is it vitrifies a human. Vitrifies means, it’s the same thing we do with embryos and organs, transplanted organs, and so the concept of glass is not a solid in the normal sense. Glass does not form an organized crystalline structure when it’s in its solid state. Glass looks like a liquid, and then it’s just a jumble of atoms and molecules, and like liquid, they just aren’t moving. That’s the only difference, they’re not moving. They’re too discus, they cannot move. 

So that’s what they do to a human. Well, let me come back to that, actually, because I want to talk about the dead part first. So freezing dead people, let’s talk about the word dead, then we’ll come back to freezing. So here’s the big part about cryonics, is that the reason we get confused about why someone could ever try to bring back a dead person is that we think about the word dead as a binary thing. Someone that’s living, and then you could pinpoint the exact second that they die. 

And once they’re dead, they’re dead as anyone who’s ever been dead, and you’re either alive or dead at any given point. That’s not true. Cryonicists see death not as a moment, but as a process, and if you really look at the science, they’re the smart ones about this. They’re correct in that 50 years ago, if someone is walking down the street and they collapse and their heart is not beating and they’re not breathing, they can be declared dead. 

That’s it, nothing to do, your heart stopped beating. They’re not breathing, it’s over, and they’d be taken to the funeral home and that’s the end of it. Today, with more technology, if that same thing happens, they wouldn’t be declared dead. They’d be rushed to the hospital - someone will give them CPR, and then they’d be rushed to the hospital and use the defibrillator, and many other more advanced techniques to try to bring them back, or not even bring them back, to keep them alive because they’re not dead. 

And so when that happens, and that person ends up walking out of the hospital later that day, we don’t say, “Oh you were dead and you came back,” we say, “Thank God you didn’t die.” So what that shows is that the person 50 years ago who fell over in the street, they weren’t dead. They were hopeless. They were unable to be saved with the technology of the time. That’s a big difference. So a cryonicists says today when someone dies, when they die of cancer, when they die of a stroke, many things that we die of, they say, “That person is not dead. That person is unable to be saved with 2016 technology.” 

The hospitals today can’t save them now. If there was a hospital across the city, if someone in the hospital is dying, and there’s a hospital across the city that has a tool that can save them, but this hospital doesn’t, everyone agrees we would get an ambulance and rush them to that hospital to try to save them. What cryonics is trying to do is rush someone to a hospital in the future that can save them, because the hospitals in the future probably will be able to. 

I strongly bet that in a hundred years or 50 years, most of the things that when someone dies in a hospital today of, would not be a death sentence anymore, and so if someone is rushed into a hospital in the future, they do that by putting them on biological pause. The reason a frozen embryo can be frozen for a long time is that it’s not actually frozen. It doesn’t die in that state, because biology, officially, it’s proven many times, can sustain the concept of being vitrified. 

They cool the embryo or the organ to such a cold state that, without changing a structure, without freezing the liquid, the atoms can no longer move anywhere. Now how do they do that? Well how do you vitrify a human? You pump anti-freeze into the blood stream, so that now you can bring the temperature down well below freezing, and you still won’t get freezing of the liquid. It will just slow and slow and slow until all activity stops. There’s not any atom in the human body that can move. It’s just paused, exactly the way it was. 

With an organ, we know how to do that, and we know how to un-vitrify it and bring it back, and have the organ work in a real living thing. With an embryo, there are people walking around the earth today that at some point were frozen, were vitrified embryos. So this works. Now, it’s more complex with the human brain. We have not yet figured out how to do that. Cryonicists are very honest about that. They say, “We don’t know if this will work. We don’t know if this will ever work, and we don’t know when if it does, but we think there’s good scientific reason to believe that this is plausible, especially to the scientists of the future.” 

Who knows what the human species of the future would be able to do? Probably pretty incredible things. Our society would be unbelievable to someone in the 1800’s, so why wouldn’t the future society be just as unbelievable to us? Why wouldn’t they be able to take a vitrified brain and say, “Yeah, we do know how to un-pause this brain and have it work.” It’s not that big of a stretch. It’s not that crazy. So essentially, that’s why cryonics is. If you sign up, then it depends on how you die. If you die in an accident, you’re going to have a very hard time. No one is going to be there at that moment, and it is a battle of time there. 

So ideally, you die in a predictable way on a death bed on a hospital somewhere, and if you’re signed up for cryonics with your annual membership fee, and by the way, people think - another myth is they think it’s for rich people. Actually, most people can afford this. So I am currently now signed up for cryonics. My bill, my annual bill is about a thousand bucks a year total. That pays for my membership fee, and I get a very cheap life insurance plan that is just for the purpose of paying. It’s made out to the cryonics company, Alcor. 

So whenever I die, that money will go to pay for the final part of the payment. A thousand a year. I mean I spend a thousand a year on so much shit. I spend that on cable. I spend it on coffee, I spend it on taxis, and other things I don’t care about that aren’t important. This seems worth it. Even if people say, “What if Alcor is a scam?” I don’t think it is. My sense, after reading about it and talking to the head of Alcor, I really actually don’t think it is. It’s a non-profit run by passionate cryonicists who are all signed up themselves. 

But you know what? Yeah, maybe it’s a scam, A. B, maybe this whole thing never works, sure. For a thousand bucks a year, even if there’s a 1% chance of this working, I’ll take my chances, because the alternative is a zero percent chance, as an atheist. If you’re religious, different story here. If you believe there’s an afterlife, a different story, but for an atheist or someone who doesn’t believe strongly in an afterlife, your alternative is closing your eyes upon death and that’s the end of you forever. 

And when you sign up for cryonics, you get to have the awesomeness that a religious person doesn’t get in their life. You get to your deathbed and you say, “You’ll never know. I might wake up. I might blink right now and then wake up in a new place,” and for me, just having that whole biz is almost worth the money. It’s like I’ll give my vitrified brain to future humanity. See what you can do, and it gives me some hope that maybe you won’t feel the passage of time. 

It will be like a blink, and you’ll wake up, and you’ll be in some future year, and ideally, the idea is they bring you back. They can cure whatever it is that killed you, but also rejuvenate you, because the human body and brain is just a physical object. It’s just cells. It’s not that complicated. The species gets good enough with nanotechnology, and don’t forget, artificial intelligence can help? 

It might be very well that you wake up with a new fresh body. A young body, they rejuvenate your brain. This is not out of the realm of possibility, and that’s all I care about. Just give me a shot. For a thousand bucks a year, it gives me a shot. So that’s the idea, and the final thing I’ll say is people’s instincts, because death is this hideous thing that’s in all of our faces and Nick Bostrom, this philosopher I like, compares death to a dragon that we all just accept. Yes, every year 60 million people have to go to the dragon. 

Don’t ever question the dragon, and it’s not even that. It’s good that they go to. It’s like we ended up in a Stockholm syndrome hostage situation, where we’re convinced that this is a good thing because there’s no way we can help it, so we try to make the best. The truth is death sucks or no, death doesn’t suck. Involuntary death sucks. If someone wants to bow out at 90, cryonics isn’t going to stop that. If we can live a lot longer than 90, someone will have the option to bow out. 

Death when you’re not ready is what sucks. When you really, really wish you could still be living. When your family still needs you or whatever. No one ever thinks that’s good, when humans just die at 40, or 33 with was the average lifespan 200 years ago. I guarantee you there are all kinds of people when doctors were saying, “I think we can get humans to live up to 70 and 80 on average one day,” there were people saying, “Oh why are you such a narcissist, wanting all this life,” you know? “Isn’t death the lot of man? Just accept it.” No. 

But now, we all live up to 80 or 90, or the average lifespan is in the 70’s on the planet. No one is saying, “Oh, well we’re such narcissists for wanting to live to fight through cancer at the age of 60, so maybe I can live until 80.” Everyone thinks that’s a brave person doing that. We think, of course, it’s great to try to live until 80. As soon as cryonics and other developments allow us to live to 150, 200, 250 and again, that sounds crazy. 

But not when you can replace your organs with truly great artificial organs, or you rejuvenate your brain cells. All we are is an object. If you can fix it, then there’s no reason that that number can go way up. As soon as you can do that, you know people aren’t going to look back and say, “Oh, this is so vain to want to live this long.” They’re going to say, “Great! This is so great that we now can live this long, and it’s so sad that people used to just die all the time in their 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s, before they’re ready.” 

Or they were ready because they’ve convinced themselves through some mind game that this is a good thing and that they’re ready to go, when the truth is, if they’ve could have lived longer they’d probably would have had a totally different mindset. So that’s my long story about cryonics. I just think the more you learn about it, the more you’re like, “Wait, this is a total no brainer and it’s amazing,” but before you learn about it, it sounds insane and icky and who wants to be frozen? Everything just sounds terrible about it, and a huge waste of money, and a scam, and crazy, and all of that, and then as soon as you learn about it, it seems like the only option.

[0:47:48.0] MB: You know, the funny thing, or the most interesting thing about cryonics is, as you pointed out, is other than the financial cost, there’s really no downside. If it doesn’t work, you’re in the same boat as if you’ve never done it, but if it works, it’s a massive upside for you, and so it’s almost like the golden wager.

[0:48:06.7] TU: Exactly, Pascal’s wager. Why not? Literally, the alternative is getting eaten away by bacteria underground. Does that sound awesome to you? Or being cremated, that sounds great to you? You either have a zero percent chance of something cool happening after the moment of your death bed, or you have some chance, and some cryonicist think it’s not a 1% chance. It’s a 50% chance. Another one thinks maybe it’s a 5%, but either way, yeah. 

A thousand bucks a year, I can’t think of anything I am spending a thousand bucks on currently in a year that is a better use of that money. People say, “Oh that’s a lot of money.” It’s not when you think about the things that you spend three bucks a day on, so yeah. You just start paying for it. You adjust your lifestyle to not having that thousand dollars a year, and you move on. You’re just living the same life, not thinking about that expense anymore, because it’s just built in. 

Now you have this hope, what a cool thing. That’s my full pitch to why everyone should look into this at least. By the way, the Alcor website - Alcor is like one of the two major companies that currently does this. I wouldn’t be surprised, by the way, my life insurance claim is currently made out to Alcor. I wouldn’t be surprised if I switch it over to like, in 20 years, and like Google or some company like Google has now created like the best cryonics facility in the world. I’m just going to switch then. If something that I think is more reputable comes along, I’ll switch. 

At the moment, Alcor is the most reputable. What I was going to say is, the Alcor website has a great FAQ. It’s long, thorough, well-written FAQ, clearly by scientists, which is heartening to me to say this, by very smart, reasonable people who are not salesy, they’re not trying to sell you anything other than being just trying to be upfront. It has a ton more info there. I hope that any listeners who are intrigued by this do it so that we can all hang out in 2400 together, see how cool the phones are then, and other things. There’s going to be a lot of things that are really cool in 2400, and I want to see them.

[0:50:05.8] MB: This has been such a fascinating sample of just some of the topics that you cover on Wait But Why. There’s so much more that I want to ask you about, and I wish we could dig deeper on — we may have to do another interview. There’s just so many interesting topics, but for listeners who are curious about these things.

As I said, Tim has written blog posts that are super detailed, very research minded, rooted in science about both of these topics, and we’ll include all that stuff in the show notes, as well as the Alcor website, everything else.

Tim, before you go, where can people find you and the blog online?

[0:50:37.9] TU: Yeah, everything I do is basically on waitbutwhy.com. That’s just where I put all my blog posts, everything I’m doing for the last two years basically is sitting on that site. That’s the answer. Then I would try and encourage people who like what I do to subscribe to the email list. 

Subscribing to email lists is icky, and I don’t like doing it, and I’m sure you don’t either, but this is a very unannoying one, where we just kind of send out a post when it’s done and that’s it. Only thing the email list is for. Otherwise, because posts happen so sporadically, it’s hard to remember to check the site, and it’s not like something where we let you know when it’s going to go up, so the email’s the best way to kind of just stay in touch, and I promise I won’t annoy you.

[0:51:23.9] MB: Well Tim, this has been a fascinating conversation, and topics that I’m really interested in, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing these insights.

[0:51:32.7] TU: Yeah, thanks so much for having me, this was fun.

[0:51:34.9] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners, If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email, my email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co 

I would love to hear from you, and I read and respond to every listener email. The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this information?” Because of that, we created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by word “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email list. If you want to get all this incredible info, links, transcripts, everything we talked about on this show and much more, go to our show notes page at scienceofsuccess.co, hit the show notes button at the top, you’ll get everything for this episode, and you can find information on all of our previous episodes.

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

The Hard Truth About Psychology, Learning New Skills, & Making Mistakes with Dr. Art Markman & Dr. Bob Duke

In this episode we discuss whether time speeds up as we get older, why your life story only makes sense looking in reverse, whether or not brain games actually work, the importance of proactive learning instead of passive learning, why psychology confirms all your worst fears about studying and getting smarter – and much more with a special TWO GUEST interview featuring Dr. Art Markman & Dr. Bob Duke!

Dr. Art Markman is a Professor of Psychology and Marketing at the University of Texas and Founding Director of the Program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations.

Dr. Bob Duke is a Professor and Head of Music and Human Learning at The University of Texas at Austin, He also directs the psychology of learning program at the Colburn Conservatory of Music in Los Angeles.  
Together they co-host the NPR radio show Two Guys on Your Head and recently co-authored the book Brain Briefs.

We discuss:

• Does time speed up as you get older?

• Why your brain pays less and less attention to things that don’t change

• How you underestimate the power of new experiences to have a positive impact on you

• Brains are efficient, and efficient is another word of lazy

• Why your brain wants to keep doing what it did last time

• How Dyson vacuums were created (and what sawmills have to do with it)

• The importance of learning things that seem like they “don’t matter” right now

• The downside of a linear and close-minded path of achievement

• Why “everyone they know who is successful knows A LOT about A LOT of things” and you can’t know ahead of time what key information will make you successful

• Why you shouldn’t edit your life story in the forward direction (and what that means)

• Is your memory doomed to fail?

• Why one of the worst things you can do for your memory is to worry about your memory!

• Do brain games actually work?

• How do you engage the mind a way that develops thinking?

• The difference between reading and writing and how they impact your brain

• The importance of proactive learning instead of passive learning

• What the data says about regret and how to deal with it

• How learning is effortful when it actually works, and why without effort, there is very little learning

• Is it true that we only use 10% of our brains?

• Your brain is 3% of your body weight, but uses 25% of your daily energy supply

• Does listening to Mozart make you smarter?

• Why we can’t get something for nothing (and why you should stop looking for “get smart quick schemes”)

• Why psychology confirms all your worst fears about studying and getting smarter

• How curiosity is vital to your thinking ability

• Why its OK to get stuff wrong, as long as you repair your error

• Why every bit of skilled performance that you see has a deep reservoir of hard work hidden behind it

• The critical importance of perception and self awareness in growing and improving

• Why you are worst at judging your performance when you are bad (isn’t this one true!)

• Why “expert performers” are really good at identifying all of their flaws

• How to cultivate self awareness of your flaws in a way thats non-threatening to you and your ego

• Mistakes are not the problem, but denying them is

• The critical importance of sleep

• How sleep clears toxins out of your brain, helps you form better memories, learn more, etc

• Think about what has brought you joy, what brings you joy, and schedule those things into your life regularly

If you want to master your mind - listen to this episode! 

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Brain Briefs by Art Markman and Bob Duke PhD

• [Podcast] Two Guys on Your Head

• [Book] Smart Thinking by Art Markham

• [Book] Smart Change by Art Markham

• [Book] Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performance tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss whether time speeds up as we get older. Why your life story only makes sense looking in reverse. Whether or not brain games actually work. The importance of proactive learning instead of passive learning. Why psychology confirms all your worst fears about studying and getting smarter, and much more with a special two guest interview featuring Dr. Art Markman and Dr. Bob Duke.

The Science of Success continues to grow with more than 700,000 downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one in New Noteworthy, and more. A lot of our listeners are curious about how to organize and remember all this information. I get tons of listener emails and comments asking me how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to podcast and much more.

Because of that, we created an awesome resource for you and you can get it completely free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. It’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. Again, to get it, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.

In our previous episode, we discuss the daily practice that works to develop self-love, how fear is often the signpost for what we most need to do next, the lessons from a 550 mile pilgrimage through Spain, how seeking too much knowledge can be often counterproductive and much more with our guest Kamal Ravikant. If you want to be inspired starting out this new year, listen to that episode.

[0:02:07.2] MB: Today, on The Science of Success, we have a special episode. Two guests at once. We have Dr. Bob Duke who is a professor and the head of music in human learning at the University of Texas in Austin. He also directs the psychology of learning program at the Colburn conservatory of music in Los Angeles. 

We also have Dr. Art Markman who is a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas and the founding director of the program in the human dimensions of organizations. Together, they cohost the NPR radio show, Two Guys On Your Head and recently coauthored the book Brain Briefs. Gentlement, welcome to The Science of Success.

[0:02:39.2] AM: Thanks a lot for having us.

[0:02:40.3] MB: Well we’re very excited to have both of you guys on here. For our guests who may not be familiar, can you each kind of introduce yourselves and say hi and tell us a little bit about yourself?

[0:02:49.1] AM: Sure, I’ll go first. Yeah, I’m Art Markman, I am a professor of psychology, I study the way people think so I’m interested in reasoning and decision making and motivation and for me, in addition to writing lots of papers that get read by 30 of my closest colleagues, it occurred to me not so long ago that almost everybody I know has a mind, almost nobody knows how that mind works.

I try to spend a lot of my time, in addition to doing research, to bringing insights from the field of cognitive science outward to other people in the hope that they might use that information to live their lives differently and probably better.

[0:03:25.3] BD: I’m Bob Duke and as you said, Matt, I’m a professor of music and human learning here at the University of Texas. Throughout my career, I’ve been studying learning and memory, not only in the context of music making but in other context as well. It’s always been of interest of mine because I work with a lot of people who are preparing to be teachers, what are the mechanisms by which people develop skills for memories, refine your skills over time.

Art and I had had several informal interactions over the years before we actually got started doing the radio show and it’s been now I guess going on four years now, right Art? It’s been a wonderful collaboration that it’s been a great deal of fun to be a part of.

[0:04:03.4] MB: Well, you guys have so many fascinating topics that you’ve written about and talked about. I’d love to start out you know, the way that the book, Brain Briefs, is kind of structured, you have all this amazing questions and you kind of go into answering a bunch of them. I’d love to start out and kind of go through a few of this questions that I found really interesting and kind of get your take on it and share some of those insights with our audience. One of the first that I found really fascinating was, does time speed up as we get older?

[0:04:30.5] AM: The older you get, the more that you begin to worry about that. But since Bob’s the older one, I’ll let him share his experience on this first.

[0:04:37.6] BD: Well the short answer is, yes. Of course what we mean by that, it doesn’t actually speed up but certainly our perceptions of the passes of time change as we age and there are a couple of explanations for that that I’ll let Art tell you about. But one of the things that’s sort of interesting about that is that when you look back into your past right?

Our perceptions of what we recall, what we remember change over time for reasons that have to do not only with an aging brain but also with just the proportion of experiences that we’ve accumulated over the course of many years of a lifetime. 

[0:05:09.6] AM: Obviously one thing that makes time feel like it’s sped up is that the older you get, the more experiences you’ve already had relative to what you’re going through right now. A year of your life when you’re six years old is an enormous proportion of your life, whereas a year of your life when you say 50 is a much smaller proportion compared to what you’ve experienced. But in addition to that, as you get older, your life tends to become more routine. You tend to rely on things that you’ve done before and as a result, you don’t lay down lots of new landmarks in your life the way you do when you’re younger.

When you’re younger you have your first time on a bicycle, your first time going to school, your first time getting in a fight on a schoolyard, or whatever it is. When you get older, you tend to do the same stuff over and over again and then when you look back on it, it’s hard to separate out all of the events, which does have the happy fact that if you continue to create lots of new experiences for yourself, like say by starting to do a radio show or something like that, then you have the opportunity to slow time down a little bit.

[0:06:13.3] BD: Yeah and I think one of the things that’s embedded in what Art’s talking about is how much our brains in their efficiencies pay less and less attention to things that don’t change. One of the ways that that routine issue that Art was talking about affects what happens to our memories is that our brain recognizes that there’s no real reason to keep reforming this memory because it’s just like the memory that’s already in there. 

I think all of us have probably experienced driving to work or driving home from the office and, you know, having many things on our mind and getting home and not remembering the trip. Well, that’s an example of how our minds can be other places when things become highly routinized.

[0:06:54.2] AM: Which, by the way, isn’t a terrible thing since the last thing you’d want to do is to clutter your mind with all the details of your daily commute. But it does make the time seem a little bit shorter when you look back on it.

[0:07:04.6] MB: I find it so fascinating and I think the idea that it’s sort of a proportion of your life right? Like you said, if you’re a six year old, on year is a massive portion of your life, whereas the older you get, a year is sort of incrementally less and less of your total life experience.

[0:07:19.0] BD: Thanks for the reminder.

[0:07:23.7] MB: You know, one of the things that you said I found really fascinating is the idea of landmarks, and how our memories are formed by unique new experiences. I once heard an example of a dinner party and someone was saying, “How can you make a dinner party more memorable?” And they said, “Instead of having everybody sit in the same room and listen to the same music for four hours, change the room you’re in and change the vibe, change the music every hour.” So Instead of having kind of one memory that your brain lumps together, you suddenly have four distinct memories that feel longer even though it’s the same amount of time.

[0:07:53.3] AM: Yeah, that sort of thing is great and I think, by extension, I think people should be a little bit mindful of trying on some new experiences, trying out some new things in order to create those landmarks in your daily life so that it’s not just remembering the dinner party, it’s also remembering October.

[0:08:13.7] MB: That touches on something, this is not a question from Brain Briefs but something I know you’ve talked about, which is kind of the importance of openness to new experiences. I’d love to hear a little bit about that and why it’s so relevant.

[0:08:24.0] BD: Yeah. Well, you know, I mean. In most of our lives, this is a good thing to follow up on, what you just asked about the passage of time. Our brains make memories when there are things to pay attention to that we need to pay attention to. The more predictable our lives are from day to day, the less our brains need to pay attention because we know what’s going to happen and it pretty much happens the way we expected it to.

There’s not much to really think about or to lay down memories for. When you create new experiences for yourself, and Art mentioned this a couple of minutes ago about aging. When you create new experiences as you age, you’re creating more memories that make your life seem more full and more interesting and more engaging.

I think often, we underestimate how much new experiences actually can do for us for our mood or sense of wellbeing and everything, but we have to acknowledge the fact that many people are not so open to new experiences. They like routines and they like to know what’s coming up. In everybody’s life, the challenge is to find a balance, a personal balance for you about how much newness, how many new experiences do you want in a given span of time, and how much do you want to rely on the predictable things that you know are going to happen every day? 

I think if anybody examines our own life, I mean, certainly for me, there are routines that I have in my day that I like very much, the fact that those are routines. But having the job that I have and the job that Art has, we get to experience a lot of new things in any given week and that also makes our lives seem that much more energized and vital.

[0:09:55.1] AM: The thing is, you have to remember that, as Bob likes to say, brains are efficient and he usually follows that up by pointing out that efficient is another word for lazy, which means that brains really want to keep doing what they did last time. So one of the reasons why they’re such a strong driver to keep doing the comfortable and familiar thing is because it actually feels good in the moment to do that. 

You know it’s going to happen, you know how it works and so you settle into this routine and as a result, you’re often a little bit hesitant to engage in some new thing because it seems like an awful lot of work and so we often don’t do those things. We actually do in the book, talk a little bit about openness in the first chapter because, you know, Bob and I as he said are privileged to be in careers where we have the opportunity to do all sorts of new and interest sting things. 

Nonetheless, when our producer Rebecca Macenroy asked us, “Hey, would you guys like a show on the radio?” Which is something we had never really considered before. We sort of stared at each other at first. I think our initial reaction was, “What? That seems a lot of work.” But then our openness to experience kicked in and we thought, “Yeah, sure, why not?” We ended up doing this brand new thing that neither of us had ever envisioned for ourselves and it’s turned out to be a wonderful part of our lives.

I think that that first hesitant reaction is one we often give in to. But by not giving in to that and trying that new thing, we create all sorts of opportunities that we didn’t envision in advance.

[0:11:26.0] MB: In a previous talk that you guys have given, I think you shared an example of Dyson vacuums.

[0:11:32.1] AM: Yeah.

[0:11:32.8] MB: I’d like to hear that story.

[0:11:33.1] AM: Sure. So James Dyson, he was an interesting guy and one of the things about him that was so interesting was that he just learned a lot of stuff about a lot of stuff without regard for why it might be valuable later. One of the things he learned about was sawmills, which most of us don’t have much experience with saw mills. 

My personal experiences usually in cartoons, right? Saw blade, log, body on the log. A real sawmill has no bodies on the log in general but definitely logs in saw blades and a lot of saw dust. What he learned about them was that the way they get rid of all that sawdust is by sucking it out of the air and then using a giant contraption called an industrial cyclone to pull the sawdust out of the air. 

Now, he learned about this without any real sense of “wow, this is going to be important to me later”. Until one day he was contemplating how to make vacuum cleaners work more effectively and in particular, how to keep the bag of a vacuum from filling up and getting its pores clogged in ways that lessen its efficiency and he realized that you could take the industrial cyclone that a sawmill uses and build a small home version of it and put it into a vacuum cleaner and that that would actually change the need for a bag in a vacuum.

I think what’s most important about that is we live in an era, educationally, in which we are told what to learn in our education system and then we’re told, “Learn this stuff in particular because it’s going to be on the exam,” which leads to my least favorite question as a professor, which is when students come up to me and say, “Will this be on the exam?”

After years of struggling with that question, it occurred to me that the proper answer to students is when they say, “Will this be on the exam?” I say, “Yes but it might not be my exam,” because you never know when that piece of information you learn is going to turn out to be valuable.

[0:13:24.4] BD: That really speaks to, I think the way many people think about planning out their lives and what’s going to happen and I think there’s become an unfortunate trend in certainly achievement oriented people in American culture that the thing to do is to plan out this linear trend, “I’m going to get this degree and I’m going to do this internship and then I’m going to go to graduate school and then I’m going to get this job.”

All of those plans are built around the idea that “I know now, exactly what I’m going to need to do and need to learn and need to be able to do 10 years from now”. That is a fiction, right? Everyone we know and I do mean everyone who is really successful at what they do knows a lot, as Art said, about a lot of things that when they learn them, really, there was no indication that that would be one of the central things that would allow them to be successful.

So the questions that people think about whether they’re college students or even younger students or young adults who are just starting out in their life and thinking, well what kind of things do I need to know to be able to be successful in this thing. Well there’s certainly is a package of stuff that’s important for you to be able to function. But beyond that, the people who really excel, the people who have all the features that employers and admirers claim to want — they’re creative, they’re insightful, they’re good problem solvers — didn’t get there through a linear path of activities and learning experiences.

They got their through some circuitous path going through some things that seem to be pointless at the time, other things that didn’t seem to be particularly interesting, other things that were fascinating but maybe weren’t going to be useful and then ended up being useful. I think the openness to experience idea really is about that issue, about exploring things that you might be curious about that might be interesting to you. That might be enlightening in some way even without the guarantee that in the long run it’s going to be useful.

[0:15:17.0] AM: Just to follow up on Bob’s point for a second. One of the things that’s really important is, I think a lot of people tend to edit their life story in the forward direction. Meaning, they have this idea of what their life is going to be like and then they seek experiences that are consistent with that idea of where their life is going and they avoid experiences that don’t seem to fit the narrative that they’re creating.

The problem is that when you look at the life stories of successful people, that life story generally only makes sense when you look back on it. In the forward direction, it’s pretty chaotic. They tried all sorts of things, some of which worked out, some of which didn’t, some of which turned out to be important, some of which didn’t and in the moment, it was often very difficult to determine what the pivotal pieces of learning were, what the pivotal experiences were. Yet they were just open to trying those things, knowing that some number of us were going to turn out to be valuable in the future.

[0:16:10.8] MB: I think that’s such a powerful insight and something that I think you guys did such a good job explaining and really impacting for the listeners. In the vein of something you touched on a little bit earlier, the idea of the brains kind of efficiency or laziness, another question that you asked in the book is, “Is our memory doomed to fail?” And I’m really curious what you think about that.

[0:16:30.8] AM: Bob, do you remember when we wrote about that?

[0:16:32.3] BD: I can’t remember a thing. I don’t know. I mean, the short answer to this, this is how you turn something, little ideas into a book, you have a short answer and then you talk about it for the next six pages. But I mean, the short answer is, well, our memories are doomed to decline in terms of the retrievability of things in our memory. 

My favorite thing in art says, I see we’re both saying each other’s lines on this podcast is that you know what? By the time you reach your new 20’s, your brain starts the long and slow decline, that’s the bad news. The good news is that the decline is long and slow. Even though there are certain diseases and injuries and other kinds of things that lead to rapid declines in memory and cognitive function.

For a typical human being who is relatively healthy, that decline is so slow that it’s mostly imperceptible even though, as we get older because we’re attuned to the idea that our memories are likely to fail, we are on heightened alert to notice every instance when we can’t find our keys or I can’t remember somebody’s name or whatever happens to be when in fact, those are things that are probably have been a part of our lives for many years it’s just as we’re getting older, they seem to loom larger in our perception.

[0:17:46.4] BD: yeah, the fact is, we’ve been forgetting things our entire lives and we don’t start worrying about that forgetting until we get older because we believe that that is now a sign of an impending cognitive apocalypse and I always like to point out, I have three kids and when they were younger, they would constantly forget stuff, they’d forget to do homework, they’d forget to take out the trash, they would forget all sorts of stuff and I like to say that at no point did any one of them ever say, “Wow, I just had a senior and high school moment.”

Then you get older, you turned 50 or whatever age it turns out to be for you and you forget something and now you think well it’s over. It turns out that one of the worst things you can do for your memory as you get older is to worry about your memory. What the studies show is that older adults who are worried that their memory is getting worse perform worse on memory tests than people who are getting older and don’t worry about their memory getting worse.

You can even induce that in a study, you can induce that worry about your memory and see that effect. What this means is, relax. The fact is yeah, look, studies show that if you want to know where somebody’s cognitive peak is, that long, slow cognitive decline means that in your 20’s, you process information fastest and you remember new things the quickest. In terms of what makes you really smart, because that has to do with what you know, you’ve accumulated lots of knowledge over the course of your life. 

So the people who are actually acting most intelligently, tend to be people in their 60’s and 70’s because they have a huge base of experience and knowledge that they can draw from. Yeah, there might be a couple of things here and there that they have forgotten but that huge store of knowledge actually gives them an advantage over younger people. In many ways, younger people need to be faster because they don’t know as much.

[0:19:33.1] MB: The processing power itself kind of slows down a little bit but the benefits of the accumulated wisdom and knowledge, essentially outweigh that slowdown for a number of years?

[0:19:43.0] BD: Particularly for people who remain mentally active, right? We know very clearly that the more new things you continue to learn throughout your life and the more new things you experience, the longer the deficits in memory that begin the accrue are held at bay. They don’t become noticeable to you because the way we retrieve memories from our memory store is by ways of all of the things that each memory is connected to, right? 

So the more interconnections you have among the things in your head, the easier it is to retrieve them. If you’re experiencing new things, one of the things that that’s prompting your brain to do is to create new connections among things that may be related in ways that when you learn them 10 years ago, you didn’t really recognize that relationship and now you do.

As Art was saying, the advantage of older adults, and being one I’m happy to claim this advantage is that not only do I have a lot of stuff in my memory but that stuff is organized in a way that lets me access it in ways that are very advantageous. We talk often about why would you have people memorize a lot of things when you’ve got an encyclopedia, a map of the earth in your pocket, in your phone? You can retrieve all kinds of information from the phone. 

But the issue with that is, you can only work with so many things at a time in your so called working memory, your processing part of your memory. The more time it takes you to get the stuff, you’re going to stick in your working memory, the slower you are. If you’ve already memorized some things and you’re pulling out information that’s already in your memory, I’m sure it’s clearer how much more efficient that would be then have to start typing on a keyboard or on a phone to go and find something out.

[0:21:24.1] AM: The other thing is, the brain has so many great ways of accessing that information based on the similarity between the situation you’re in right now and stuff that you’ve learned before. Whereas if you’re trying to find that information on the computer, you have to find the right question to ask. Had Google existed in the late 1970’s when Dyson was thinking about trying to remove the bag from the vacuum, if he had been able to Google “how do you get rid of the bag in a vacuum cleaner”, he would have gotten a whole bunch of websites and probably educational videos about how to change the bag in your vacuum.

But at no point would any of those sites have said, “Oh and by the way, consider replacing that bag with an industrial cyclone.” You got to have that knowledge in your head if you’re going to do really interesting stuff.

[0:22:10.9] MB: One of the things, I’m a huge fan of Charlie Monger and we talk about him a lot on the podcast, and he talks about the idea of kind of mental models and organizing your memories and your knowledge in a kind of a coherent lattice work that this easily accessible. I think that’s such a great point.

[0:22:27.2] AM: Yeah.

[0:22:27.5] BD: Yeah.

[0:22:28.3] MB: On the ideas of sort of remaining mentally active, one of the questions that you guys touched on, it’s something I’m really curious about is do brain games work?

[0:22:37.0] AM: Shortest chapter in the book.

[0:22:40.2] BD: Well if work means, do they help you learn to play brain games? Absolutely they work. Whether they do anything beyond that, there’s not a lot of evidence that that’s the case.

[0:22:52.7] AM: It turns out that brain games tend to focus on very specific tasks and well intentioned at first, right? I think the idea was that we know for example that this concept that Bob was talking about a working memory, the amount of stuff you can hold in mind, is related to performance on all kinds of tests of intelligence and things like that.

There was a real interesting question of, if we could expand your working memory capacity, would that in fact make you smarter? But it turns out that there isn’t really a compelling way of changing the brain’s architecture in a way that increases that working memory capacity in a way that creates general intelligence.

As Bob was saying, what you learn when you play these brain games is how to play the game. But you may as well, if you’re going to practice something, you may as well practice something that you may actually encounter again later outside of the context of sitting on your phone or your computer.

[0:23:49.5] BD: Yeah. You know, for anybody who enjoys brain games just for the fun of the game, well then great. They should play whatever things they want to download. I’m an Angry Birds fan but nobody claimed that that was a brain game, right? If you think about what really engages the mind in a way that develops thinking, it’s not just responding to other things, but it’s creating new things on your own. 

People who read have a different experience than people who write because writing requires a different set of activities in your brain than reading, watching a good video, whatever it happens to be, which mostly receptive kinds of responses were. We know that brains are trying to figure out what they need to do. If you’re engaged in something where you’re receiving input from somewhere else, it really doesn’t matter what you do, this stream of input keeps coming and whatever, well then, there’s not really a lot for your brain to be engaged in.

But if you happen to generate something on your own, it engages not only the parts of your brain that have to control whatever motor activity or whatever has to do the stuff but it also requires you to draw from different parts of your memory. That might not even have been connected before because of the nature of the task you’re trying to accomplish.

I’ll let Art talk about this too, but one that springs to mind is that Art as an adult had always wanted to play the saxophone and rather than waiting until his family was surrounding him on his death bed, saying whispering, “I wished I played, I always wanted to play the saxophone.” He actually went out and learned to play the saxophone.

I’ll let him talk about that experience a little bit.

[0:25:24.5] AM: Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right, you know? As Bob points out, it’s really important to engage in activity. In fact, B.F. Skinner who is one of the grand daddies of behavior of psychology kind of gets a bad rap in modern times because there were limitations to behaviorism. But one of his fundamental insights was that in order for the brain to learn something, you don’t just expose yourself to information, you also engage in activity. 

Activity was a fundamental part of the learning process that he was working on and I think that that’s something that’s actually gotten lost a little bit. As Bob was saying, I think it is really important for us to continue to do that throughout our lives and so when I was in my mid-30’s and was thinking about stuff I would have always liked to do and I had read some research on regret, actually. The research on regret shows that if you ask a bunch of college sophomores, what they regret, it’s almost exclusively dumb stuff they did like getting drunk at a party. But if you ask older adults, people in their 70’s, 80’s and 90’s what they regret, it’s almost exclusively stuff they didn’t do.

One of the reasons that that data point is so important is because we all have a remarkable mental capacity for time travel where we can project ourselves to the end of our lives and then look back and ask, “Is there something I would regret not having done?” For me, one of those things was I had never learned to play the saxophone and so in my mid 30’s, I got up one day and said, “All right,” I went out and found a teacher and bought a saxophone and said the fairly realistic goal that in 10 years I wouldn’t suck. That’s worked out okay. I’m in Austin and I’m in a band, which almost obligatory if you live in Texas.

[0:27:03.5] MB: As a corollary to kind of thinking about brain games and by the way, actually before I say this, I love the point that you guys made about the critical importance of active learning and not just sitting there passively. Whether it’s watching YouTube or reading or whatever it might be but really, engaging your brain in the learning process.

I’m curious, writing as you guys touched on is obviously kind of one potential way to do that. But for somebody that’s maybe outside of school that’s graduated, that’s in the working world, what are some ways that we can kind of actively learn and really engage with information instead of just being passive consumers of it?

[0:27:38.0] AM: I think, if you’re in a community that’s large enough, that there are various clubs and where people who share a given interest can go and engage together in something. It doesn’t have to be necessarily an intellectual only task or even a musical task. There are many community choirs that people can sing in, if music is what you’re in to and what you’d like to do. Some people take up a new sport. They learn, if they never played handball they learn to play handball or they learn some other skill that requires some effort and one of the things that Art and I talk about a lot is that learning is effortful if it works. 

If you don’t feel like you are putting much effort into something, you’re probably not learning much as you might think you are or as much as you are intending to. I think if you are engaging in something that makes you happy like for Art playing the saxophone, well then the effort is well-spent because you feel like, “My God an hour ago I couldn’t do this and I’ve been practicing for an hour and now I can do this. That’s a pretty cool thing and it’s enjoyable because I like music and I like playing the saxophone,” and when you contrast that to a brain game as you say, “God my score an hour ago was X and my score now is X plus whatever value. Okay and what?”

[0:28:55.6] AM: “I’m going to call mom!” 

[0:28:58.9] BD: Yeah, right. 

[0:28:59.8] AM: I think that is absolutely right and the fact is that technology provides all sorts of opportunities for people to be more active in a way that they learn. So 25 years ago if you wanted to practice your writing you might keep a journal but for many people just keeping a journal or writing something that you kept to yourself wouldn’t necessarily feel that rewarding. Now you can go in the internet and have a Google blogger’s site set up in eight minutes. 

And then you can start writing and putting it out there for people to see and so there are all of these opportunities to engage with material that you think is important and interesting to write about it and while you may have the opportunity to educate or influence others with that, you are also solidifying your own knowledge by engaging with it in that active way. So I think there’s just more avenues for doing that that don’t require just sitting and playing little games. 

[0:29:54.9] MB: So changing directions a little bit, I’m curious, one of the other topics that you guys talk about is the idea that we “only use 10% of our brains”. I’d love to hear your insights on that. 

[0:30:06.4] AM: Yeah, well that is one of the great myths that’s out there and as a cognitive psychologist, probably the question I get asked most frequently in some form or another and so one of the things we wanted to do is to understand where that sentiment came from because of course the brain, we actually use all of our brain all of the time. It’s an extraordinarily energy hungry organ. It’s about 3% of the human body weight, it uses 20 to 25% of someone’s daily energy supply. And that’s really the amount of energy that’s required just to keep the lights on. 

The physiological processes that are required to keep the brain active are very expensive from an energy standpoint which is why most beings in the planet don’t have large brains relative to their body size. So where does this myth come from? And it may come from one of two places. One is that early neuroscientist when they were exploring the brain found that only a small mass of the cells in the brain are neurons. 

The ones that actively carry signals and most of them are support staff, glial cells and other things like that support what the brain is doing. And so you could argue well only about 10% of the cells in the brain are the ones that are actively engaged in the thinking process and a lot of the rest of it is cells that are working behind the scenes, but another issue has to do with brain capacity.

One of the amazing things about the human brain is that we’re continually able to learn stuff and the brain doesn’t get full. There isn’t some day at which you try to learn some new thing and your brain says, “Sorry can’t do that, can’t learn anything else,” and so a number of writers, from William James on forward, have made the point that we may very well only use a small fraction of our capacity for thinking and so that 10% number may reflect that also. 

[0:31:55.8] MB: Another question that I thought was interesting out of the book is, “Does listening to Mozart make us smarter?”

[0:32:02.8] BD: So wouldn’t that be lovely if it did? I’d be so smart, I listen to Mozart all the time. Like many things in the sciences, and Art and I talk about this in many different contexts, somebody publishes an article that is caught by the media and portrayed in a way that it’s not quite as circumspect as it should be. And then it just takes off and in 1997, I think it was this article came out almost 20 years ago now that these psychologist in California had people listen to Mozart and then take a special reasoning test, which is one dimension of IQ. And the people who listen to Mozart got higher scores than people who didn’t, it sort of became the Mozart Effect. 

Now the term “Mozart Effect” is copyrighted and people publish things that they sell for babies and all this kind of stuff and actually when you look critically at the data, there’s no evidence that listening to Mozart really does anything that doing a lot of other things would do. There was one study that I don’t think is ever published but this guy put this up online. He had people stare at a moving computer screen saver and their scores went up as much as they did listening to Mozart. So a lot of it has to do with… 

[0:33:12.7] AM: The flying coaster effect. 

[0:33:14.1] BD: Yeah, right. Exactly. So a lot of this has to do with arousal and attention and what we know basically if you’re going to stimulate somebody such that they might do perform better on some cognitive task, for people who don’t like Mozart, if you make them listen to Mozart they’re not going to perform better. They’ll probably perform worse. So what people actually are responding to are ways to heightened arousal and heightened attention. 

You would understand how that would be evolutionarily a smart thing for brains to do, right? When you’re aroused in some way, you’re a little more attentive, you’re thinking a little more faster. I mean all those things that allow us to navigate the world are in play here but like many things that sound too good to be true, this is too good to be true. 

[0:33:57.9] AM: And I want to follow up on one thing because if you juxtapose playing brain games and listening to Mozart you also get this other piece, which is a lot of times, we want to find ways of getting something for nothing, right? We all know from school that in order to get a good grade on a test, you have to read the textbook and answer some questions and study and study early off and we know that but what we keep hoping is that there’s an easier way. That if we could only put the book under the pillow or let it play while we’re asleep or listen to Mozart or play this fun video game, then that would obviate the need to do the hard work that’s required to learn stuff. 

And what I tell any student that I teach in a cognitive psychology class is that psychology confirms all of your worst fears about studying. You have to do the work and while it may, at the front end, seem unappealing to have to take that big book down and slog through it that is in fact what you have to do in order to learn stuff. You have to actually do the work and face the knowledge, there really isn’t a shortcut but man, wouldn’t it be great if there were? And that’s I think what a lot of people respond to when they see effects like that. 

[0:35:10.4] MB: And that’s something we’ve had previous psychologist on the show that have talked about the exact same phenomenon, which is that maybe instead of “get rich quick schemes” people are constantly looking for this kind of “get smart quick schemes” and the reality is the way to become smarter, the way to become a better decision maker is to just put in the work and it’s a long journey. It’s a challenging journey, but at the end of the day it’s one that’s really worthwhile. 

[0:35:31.9] BD: I think Matt what leads people to be attracted by the ideas of brain games or whatever other thing that have offers some promise of getting you smarter or more creative or whatever is that when people say this to somebody, we have to put in the work. A lot of people are asking, “What the hell does that mean? Work at what? What do I do?” and I think when you look at people who are generally adept at dealing with the circumstances that they confront in their lives, those people tend to be generally curious people, right? 

They wonder about things. They say, “Well, why is that like that and why does that thing take so much more time than this other thing does?” Or whatever happens to be that they are considering at the moment, and that kind of curiosity is enlivening in terms of your memory, in terms of your perception, in terms of your general thinking ability. Because you’re asking a lot of questions and what brains are willing to expand the effort to do is solve a problem and so by creating little problems for yourself, even just asking the question, “Well why is that?” Well now you’ve got a problem to solve and that ongoing problem solving is beneficial to your thinking overtime. 

[0:36:37.1] AM: But this actually raises another point that we talk about in the book a little bit but it seems relevant here, which is we have a very strange relationship with errors and failure. We don’t like to not know stuff. We don’t like to not know how to do stuff and if you think about our education system, one of the things that it teaches us is mistake minimization. The way you get good grades in school is by getting stuff right. Not by getting something wrong and then repairing your error, which is actually what makes you smart in the long run. 

And so this is a real problem because what it means is that a lot of people are a little bit afraid of really digging into some new thing because they don’t like that feeling of being in this nether region in which they are aware that there’s this thing they don’t know anything about but they don’t know it yet. And I think one of the things you have to do if you’re going to really broaden that base of experience and do the work you need to do to be smarter is to be willing to tolerate both the knowledge that, “Hey, here’s something I know I don’t know and I’m going to work for a long period of time to repair that gap.”

[0:37:43.1] MB: And I am a tremendous fan of Carol Dweck, and the book Mindset and the whole distinction between the fixed and the growth mindset, I think it’s so important to accept and embrace your mistakes and to try to move your ego out of the way whenever you’re thinking about your own mistakes. 

[0:37:57.7] BD: I absolutely agree with you, Matt. I’m also a Carol Dweck fan but the thing is schools don’t make that easy, right? Because I know of very few instances where not getting things right provides you with opportunities to correct what you’ve done and actually get credit for the correction, you know what I mean? Usually what schools cultivate, as Art was saying a minute ago, is get it right when you get asked or when the paper comes due or whatever happens to be. 

I think Art and I have the privilege of working at a major research university and so we get paid our exorbitant salaries to be confused most of the time. I mean we are trying to solve problems that no one has solved before and answer questions that nobody has answered before and it’s confusing and we get a lot of stuff wrong. But without the opportunity to try and fail and then retry and maybe retry many times after that, it’s impossible to make any intellectual progress.

[0:38:51.8] AM: Carol Dweck is great. Carol and I were colleagues together for a while at Columbia before she went off to Stanford and I came down here to Texas and I completely agree that that mindset of being willing to try things that may fail is so important, particularly because when we evaluate the skilled performance of other people, we discount all of the work that they’ve done. So when people hear your podcast or when they read a book that they really enjoy, they are seeing a final product of something. 

They are not seeing all of the work that went into creating that. They are not seeing all of the attempts that didn’t go as well. They’re not reading the first drafts of the pros. Bob has the privilege, the way we wrote this book in general is I like to fill blank pages, Bob likes to edit and so it was a match made in heaven. One of the things that that means is that Bob got to read a tremendous amount of half-baked pros that ultimately became what came out in the book but nobody else gets to see that and I think that it’s important for people to realize that almost every bit of skilled performance that you see required a tremendous amount of work and effort and revision and practice to get there and then that is the critical insight underlying the mindset work that Carol Dweck works on. 

[0:40:14.9] MB: So I’d love to segue into something that you talked about in the very beginning Bob that relates to this, which is that you said your expertise is helping people develop skills and thinking about how they form memories and how they refine their skills overtime. I’d love to dig into that a little bit and some of the major lessons you’ve learned about how we can become more skilled, how we can really focus in on refining our skills overtime. 

[0:40:38.1] BD: Yeah, one of the things that is central to this whole idea of becoming more skillful is you have to become more perceptive about what you were doing. A lot of people who were practicing a skill, whatever the skill happens to be who aren’t noticing the somewhat smaller features of what they’re doing, really has no opportunity to improve and anybody who watches somebody teach a really good lesson or take a really good lesson, what you see is what really excellent teachers do is they help people know what to pay attention to. 

And that’s what’s a big part of the teaching is telling them what to do, right? Because when we develop skills, it’s not because someone told us to do something and now we do it. I mean would that it were that easy, right? But the part of our brain where skill memories are activated and where they went off is not something you can tell verbally or consciously to say, “Okay, do this now.” You have to just do it and as we were talking about a few minutes ago, in doing it you’re going to make some errors and you’re going to have to make adjustments. That are even below being able to control consciously. 

I mean Art plays the saxophone, the saxophone is one of the most inherently out of tune instruments, in terms of the way it’s built, of the wind family. I mean it is terribly out of tune. So if a saxophonist is going to play a scale in tune and all the notes are going to be in tuned, the saxophonist has to make all kinds of adjustments to the tension in their mouth and the placement of their tongue and the speed of the air and there’s no way to tell somebody, “Now this is where your tongue comes up a little bit, and this is where you squeeze a little bit with your arbiter.” 

There’s no way to do that. What you do is you listen to the sounds that you are making and somehow your body figures out through trial and error what kinds of things you need to do to play the scale in tune but that’s not going to happen if somebody doesn’t hear what an in-tuned scale sounds like and recognizes the discrepancies between the scale and playing now and the in tuned scale. So that’s a real challenge. 

I think a lot of people who see or if you are a golf fan. I am not a golfer but I bet that if you really love golf and you watch pros or you watch these videos that help you become better, one of the things that really, when you watch a great teacher whether you’re a pitching coach or a gold pro or whatever happens to be and you say, “What are they talking about the most?” They are getting the students to notice more about what they’re doing. Because if you don’t know really clearly what the goal is you’re trying to accomplish and recognize the discrepancies between what you’re doing now and what you’re trying to do. Well then the likelihood of improving at what you’re doing is really, really low. 

[0:43:06.5] AM: And what we know from a lot of studies is that the lower your level of performance in an area, the worse you are at judging your own performance. So that the least good performers are the ones who most over-estimate how good they are at whatever it was they just did and one of the things, and Bob talks about this a lot, one of the things that expert performers are really good at is identifying all of the flaws in what they just did so that they can improve them. And I think it’s just that self-monitoring ability is so crucial for improving your skills because you can’t fix and area you are not aware of. 

[0:43:44.8] BD: Yeah, exactly. 

[0:43:46.8] MB: That phrase, that line, is so important. “You can’t fix an area you are not aware of” and I think many times a lot of it comes from this kind of framework of mistake minimization that people are taught in school and elsewhere. There is such an almost subconscious incentive to bury your mistakes. To hide from your mistakes, to pretend like, “Oh I didn’t make any mistakes.” What are some ways that people can cultivate that self-awareness of their flaws in a way that is non-threatening to them? 

[0:44:10.9] BD: One of the most important things to do is to hang out with other people who acknowledge their flaws and you see this in industries. My favorite example is, and I talk about this a lot is the FAA. The airline industry you would think that if ever an industry wanted to hide it’s flaws it would be the aviation industry because if you scared people into thinking that aviation was unsafe then people wouldn’t stick themselves in a metal tube and allow themselves to be hurled through the air at hundreds of miles an hour. 

In fact, if you are a member of the aviation industry and you make an error, if you report that error through the system the FAA has developed within 24 hours and your error was not the result of breaking the law like coming to work drunk, then that error can’t influence your status with the company you work for. You can’t be fired, you can’t be reprimanded for that error and the reason for that is because the FAA actually takes all of those mistakes and catalogs them and uses that to figure out what changes in procedures, what changes in maintenance schedules are needed to keep aviation safe, which is why airplane flight is as safe as it is. 

The reason that this works is because the entire industry has decided that single mistakes are not the problem. The cascade of errors that leads to catastrophic failure is the problem and I think that by extension, whenever you spend time with a community of people who are willing to acknowledge their mistakes, it makes you much more comfortable in doing that yourself and I think that that’s just absolutely crucial for allowing yourself to continue to improve in all of the things you do.

[0:45:52.6] MB: I’d love to segue into a different topic just for a moment. You’ve talked about the importance of sleep. I’d love to hear your thoughts about why it’s critical to sleep and why sometimes doing things like pulling all-nighters is often not the most effective strategy. 

[0:46:07.4] AM: So we live in a chronically under-slept society in which people think that sleep is something that they’ll do when they’re dead. And it turns out that you spend about a third of your life asleep which means that it must play some important function and it really does. The brain is actually extraordinary active while you’re sleeping and it’s doing several different things. 
One of the things that brain is doing during sleep is actually clearing toxins out of the brain that build up over the course of the day partly just through the things that build up from using energy. And partly from other toxins that may come in through other activities people engage in. But on top of that, the brain is actually actively helping you to remember and to forget while you are asleep. So one of the stages of sleep actually helps with your skill learning. So if you’re learning to play a musical instrument and you practice a scale over and over, you get a little better while you’re practicing and then you get more better when you sleep. It actually smooth’s out the performance, the motor performance. 

In addition to that there are other stages of sleep that influence what’s called memory consolidation, that is it actually helps to burn in some of the most important memories. So if you study for a test before you go to sleep then after you wake up you have better memory than if you study for that test and then stay awake for the same amount of time. So sleep ends up having a big influence there as well and not only does it help you to remember, it also helps you to forget some of the less desirable things. 

So details of your day that were somewhat mundane tend to be lost while you are asleep and the emotional impact, particularly the negative emotional impact of things that happen to you will fade as you sleep and that’s important. Because we all know, we all have things happen to us where somebody gets really angry at somebody else for something they did and in the moment they’re really angry but overtime and in part because of sleep you begin to disengage your memory for the event from the emotional content of that event. Which is part of what enables you to get on with your life and to do other things with those people who may have done something to bother you. 

[0:48:22.9] MB: What is one piece of homework that you would give to people who are listening to this episode?

[0:48:27.6] AM: Bob you got some homework for people? 

[0:48:29.1] BD: I do and you know, I think I would spend a few minutes speaking about what are the things that I experienced, I have experienced in the past that bring me joy and I would schedule those into my week. I think a lot of people do a lot of drudgery that they think, “Well I’ll get this over with and then a week from now, a month from now, this summer or whenever they are thinking about it, I’ll schedule in a little happiness here,” and I think it’s important to schedule happiness into every day. 

That’s easier for some people than others because some people’s lives are easier than others. They have more privileges, they have more opportunities for choice, those kinds of things. But I think irrespective of your life circumstances, to be able to put yourself in situations where you think, even if it’s for five minutes, “I will have a conversation with a friend that I haven’t spoken to in a while or I’m going to take a walk,” or whatever it is that brings you some feeling of happiness and joy that that should be a part of every day.

[0:49:27.9] AM: Yeah and I’m going to add one thing to that, which is I think that as another piece of homework, find somebody you haven’t talked to in a while and ask them to talk in some amount of detail about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it and learn from the people around you. Learning doesn’t have to be drudgery. It doesn’t have to involve sitting in front of a big book and struggling through it. 

We learn a tremendous amount because we’re such social species from the people around us and taking the time to really sit down and have a great conversation with somebody and understand the way they think about things, can be a really valuable learning experience and at the same time also be a joyous one and I think having more of those conversations is a great thing to do. 

[0:50:10.6] MB: Where can people find the two of you and the book online?

[0:50:14.9] AM: I’m the designated self-promotion person in this duo. So the podcast we do, the radio show is called Two Guys On Your Head. It can be found wherever podcasts are found, so iTunes, Stitcher. You can go to twoguysonyourhead.org. If you’re on the Austin, Texas area of course we’re on KUT Radio in Austin and you can also find our book Brain Briefs, pretty much wherever books are sold except that our publisher is a division of Barnes & Nobles. So it’s not available as a Kindle book. The hard cover is available on Amazon, but they refused to make a Kindle so the seven nook readers have access to it. 

[0:50:53.5] MB: Well Art, Bob, I just want to say thank you so much for being on the show. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation and I know the listeners are going to get a ton out of all the incredible insights that both of you shared. 

[0:51:04.5] BD: Well thanks Matt, it’s been a real pleasure. Thanks for inviting us on. 

[0:51:07.3] AM: Yeah, this was great. Thank you. 

[0:51:09.4] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover The Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt how do you organize and remember all this information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or by go to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email list. 

If you want to get all the incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talked about in the show and much more, be sure to check out our show notes page. You can get it on our website, scienceofsuccess.co. Just hit the show notes button at the top. We have show notes for this episode and all of our previous episodes. 

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

The Power of Storytelling, Loving Yourself, and Using Fear as Your Compass with Kamal Ravikant

In this episode we discuss the Daily Practice that works to develop self-love, how fear is often the signpost for what we most need to do next, lessons from a 550 mile pilgrimage through Spain, how seeking too much knowledge can be counter productive, and much more with our guest Kamal Ravikant.

Kamal has worked with some of the best minds in Silicon Valley, hiked to one of the highest point in the Himalayas, mediated with tibetan monks, earned a US army infantry patch, and walked 550 miles across Spain. Kamal is the best selling author of several books including Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It and most recently Rebirth: A Fable of Love, Forgiveness, and Following Your Heart. 

We discuss:

• How a 550 mile pilgrimage through Spain transformed Kamal's life and taught him many powerful lessons

• How everyone who is great goes through some kind of fall before they truly rise and start to shine

• The Daily Practice that works to develop self love

• How Kamal leveraged neuroplasticity to pull himself out of a deep depression

• How Kamal spends 10 mins per day to develop real self love

• Why you have to work every day consistently to love yourself

• The BEST piece of advice Kamal has ever received in his life

• "Life is from the inside out” and how that wisdom transforms everything

• Why practice means you have to do it frequently

• Why loving yourself is the opposite of being egotistical and selfish

• The paradigm shift of life happening to you vs life is happening for you

• "Rejection is God’s Protection"

• The difference between “success” vs “success and fulfillment”

• If something scares you, there is magic on the other side

• How are fears from within are often a signal where we need to go, what we need to do next

• You have to take a jump first, and then you sprout wings

• Why we can’t overcome fear, but we can use it to our advantage

• Why gaining knowledge doesn't make you better, but applying it does

• How seeking too much knowledge can be counterproductive

• How Kamal re-evaluated his definition of success and realized that we are the effort not the outcome

• Why Kamal decided to write a fictional self-help book and how stories can help you learn

• The amazing power of forgiveness, and why self forgiveness is so important

• Why you should ask "If I loved myself, would I do this?"

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] The Bhagavad Gita (Easwaran's Classics of Indian Spirituality) by Eknath Easwaran

• [Book] Rebirth: A Fable of Love, Forgiveness, and Following Your Heart by Kamal Ravikant

• [Book] Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends On It by Kamal Ravikant

• [Book] Live Your Truth by Kamal Ravikant

• [Blog] Founder Zen

• [Youtube] Love and Entrepreneurship by A-Fest

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee, and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study, and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick, with the focus on always having our discussions rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss the daily practice that works to develop self-love, how fear is often the sign post for what we most need to do next, the lessons from a 550-mile pilgrimage through Spain, how seeking too much knowledge can often be counterproductive, and much more with our guest, Kamal Ravikant. 

The Science of Success continues to grow, with more than 700,000 downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one New and Noteworthy, and more. A lot of our listeners are curious about how to organize and remember all this information. I get tons of listener emails and comments asking me, “Matt, how do you keep track of all the incredible knowledge you get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts and listening to awesome podcasts?” 

Because of that, we created an awesome and completely free resource for all of our listeners. You can get it for free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. It’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. Again, all you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter” to 44222, or you can go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.

In our previous episode, we discussed why you should not follow your passion. The two biggest pitfalls people struggle with trying to build careers they love. The incredible importance of deep work, why deep work is so valuable and how we can cultivate it, as well as how you can structure your lifestyle to attain autonomy and mastery with Cal Newport. If you want some tools and strategies to start your new year off right, listen to that episode.

[0:02:08.8] MB: Today, we have another incredible guest on the show, Kamal Ravikant. Kamal has worked with some of the best minds in Silicon Valley. Not only that, he’s hiked to one of the highest points in the Himalayas, meditated with Tibetan monks, earned a US Army infantry patch, walked 550 miles across Spain, and much more. However, all of this is overshadowed by his mission in life, which is to teach others to love themselves and find the best from within, and see the joy and beauty in the world.

Kamal is the bestselling author of several books, including Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It, Live Your Truth, and is the author of the upcoming book, Rebirth: A Fable of Love, Forgiveness, and Following Your Heart. Kamal, welcome to The Science of Success.

[0:02:45.1] KR: Thanks for having me. That’s quite an intro man. I mean, that’s quite a mission. I never committed to a mission, I’m just a guy who is like trying to figure himself out, he just happens to share it in his books, but thank you. I like the sound of that — mission.

[0:02:58.5] MB: Well, you’re welcome to borrow that one. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and kind of your story, I’d love to kind of share that with them.

[0:03:06.0] KR: Yeah sure, I’m a former startup guy in Silicon Valley, and I obviously was in the US Army, and I’ve just kind of like you know, done my own thing. Backpacked across the world and those kind of things, but I think the thing that I believe I was put in this planet for was to write books, and to write from the heart, which is something I’ve done for a very long time, without ever getting published. With lots of rejection letters.

Eventually, them getting better and better, and in the end, I self-published a little book on Amazon in 2012, based on my experience of 2011 when everything fell apart and I fell apart with it, and how I got out of it by working on my inner self. The book’s called Love Yourself Like Your Life Depends on It.

That little book that I put out, within a month, with no marketing, because I literally hid underneath the table after I put it out. I was terrified I’d destroyed my career in Silicon Valley. Instead, it was the number one self-help book in Amazon within a month, and has gone on to be one of the bestselling books on Amazon four years in a row. 

It just kind of changed my life. The power of just really taking what I have lived, what I’ve learned deep within myself, not theory, not from reading others, just what came from within and put it out there to the world. It just showed me just how magical that can be, and how the world responds in spades.

After that, I followed with the book called Live your Truth. It was more meditative and less prescriptive than Love Yourself, more designed to help someone come up with their own truths, and now Rebirth, which is this novel I’ve been working on for a long time and I’m very excited about it, because I put so much of what I learned in life in it. That’s a bit of my path, and here we are.

Day job, I run a venture fund and invest in startups and entrepreneurs. Between that and writing, pretty full-time.

[0:04:44.9] MB: Yeah, that’s quite a busy schedule. I’d love to share the story of kind of how you wrote Love Yourself like your life depends on it, and kind of the startup you had that failed, and how that kind of led to creating that book.

[0:04:58.0] KR: Yeah, it’s funny, I was on a TV show a couple of years ago. I was talking about this, this is because of Love Yourself, and I was talking with the host, and he’s interviewed like, heads of state and so forth. He was a very successful guy.

Between the break we were talking about something we both noticed, which is that everyone we know in our life that we consider great, went through some sort of a fall. It’s like almost like, you have to go hit bottom to realize what you’re made of, and then you rise and that’s where you really start to shine.

I think for me, what happened was with my last company that I built, it self-funded for several years, and it was doing really well, and it blew up and I lost everything. In the process, I kind of lost myself too, and I was really sick, and depressed, and suicidal, until one night I decided I couldn’t take it anymore. I got up and I made a vow to myself that I would actually just focus on loving myself. That’s it. That’s the only thing I would do.

Don’t ask me where that vow came from. It was like one of those moments where you get out of bed and it’s like, I’m going to get out of this or I’m going to try trying. Then, I set out to figure out how to do it, and I was sick and by myself anyway, so I just worked inside my head. What worked, I went deeper, what didn’t. I threw aside. I mean, I had no preconceptions of what was theory or not, I only cared about what would work. I needed to save myself.

Within a month, I was completely in a different place by doing this, and out of that process, I developed a practice of what was working that I would do daily, and my life just got better and better. Eventually, I would tell people about it, they would do it, it would work for them, so eventually enough people were like, “Listen, just write this down. You need to share this.”

I did, more to shut them up and not have to tell the story again and again. I worked very hard on that book to really fundamentally just make it about the simple things that work. Take out all the fluff and put that book out. That’s the story behind the book.
 
[0:06:44.4] MB: What is the daily practice that you developed?

[0:06:48.0] KR: The daily practice is a combination, actually. The reason why I wrote it in a book rather than a blog post is because it’s not just a formula. It’s also the feeling around the formula, thinking around the formula, which is why it’s in a book. There’s chapters that deal with fear, and chapters that deal with other things that come up, and just doing the formula.

The formula itself is basically, I start with a very basic thing of just neuroplasticity. As you know, neurons that fire together wire together. Using that in a concept of light and emotion, and really creating a certain kind of feeling within myself using a particular thought pattern of loving myself and then a meditation. I started doing like a seven-minute meditation purely based on those principles.

Then, the same thing by looking at myself in the mirror and doing that, and ultimately, when I was better and I was out in life, and dealing with people in their — people’s negativity, as  you come across in life. Certain things I would ask myself that would snap me out of engaging with the negativity and keep me in the state that I worked so hard to build, which is very important.

It’s very easy to get become reactive and get sucked in by life. You know, honestly, I still do. I notice when I’m doing the practice hard, consistently, I don’t. But when I get lazy, because I do, and I get slowed down, I get caught up in life and work and so forth. My life starts to show it, and so I go back on it. Practice fundamentally is a mental loop, it’s a meditation, it’s the same kind of mental loop and meditation combined by using a mirror and your eyes, and then fundamentally, questions you ask yourself. 

They’re very simple, it’s not like you got to spend the entire day doing them. I spend maybe 10 minutes a day doing it max. It’s like going to the gym. The fundamental thing I learned and I think that I shared in the book was that listen, you know, everyone says love yourself, your mom says that to you. There’s nothing new about it. The only thing is I came up with a systematic process that I used on myself, and it worked.

It’s like going to the gym, it’s like eating healthy. If you want to be fit, you got to go to the gym regularly. You’ve got to eat healthy consistently, you may have days off, or you don’t, but over time, consistently. Otherwise your life will show. Same thing if you want to become a person who is fundamentally just walking around with the sense of self-love with themselves. We have to work on it consistently.

I don’t know why our minds have this pattern of going towards the negative, but they do. Would I rather try to figure out why it’s negative? I say screw it, I don’t care. This is how it is, let me focus on how to get to the positive.

[0:09:11.6] MB: I think that’s so important, and you know, we often have this evolutionary bias that’s been programmed into our brains to think about the threats in our environment and survival all the time. You weren’t evolved necessarily to be happy and fulfilled, you were evolved to reach a reproductive age.

[0:09:27.4] KR: Survive.

[0:09:28.1] MB: Yeah, exactly.

[0:09:29.1] KR: Survive or reproduce, right? Every twig snapping was danger, yet modern society, you know, a twig snapping could be like someone leaving an online comment, or a bad tweet, or election result, or anything, you know? We’re not designed for the modern world. I think we have to actively work on our inner self. 

Like the best piece of advice I ever got in my life, which ultimately I based everything on was this one sentence: Life is from the inside out. What I decided was when I was in the bottom that I was only going to work on the inside, and you know what? It transformed everything. When you’re working — and something I fundamentally believe in now — when you work on the inside, as the inside shifts, the outside shifts.

It’s like direct one-to-one correlation. It’s like, stuff that I couldn’t even predict that would happen. One could say, “Okay, if you’ve become better inside, you take better actions, you’re a better person.” Yes, true, all that happens, but then things also happen that you have no control over, for your benefit. That, I don’t know why it happens, but it does. It’s consistently happened for me every time I do the practice. Notice I call it a practice you know? It’s gym practice, it’s football practice, whatever. It’s practice. You do it consistently.

[0:10:41.7] MB: That’s the key point is that it’s not something you can just do once or twice to kind of snap out of a funk, or a depression, or whatever it is. It’s something that is important to do every single day, ideally, but if life gets super busy multiple times a week on a regular basis....

[0:10:56.6] KR: Yeah, I mean, ideally, daily. Like for me life just zings when it’s daily. It’s starts to slide a little bit when it’s not. Of course, over time it also shifts you inner state. I’ve never been as down as it was back then. Things happen, like people die. I’ve had friends die, you know? That’s life. You can’t — and you should feel, you should get sad. If you don’t, there’s something wrong, but yet this practice has become my foundation.

This core thing about loving myself has become my foundation. Think about it, there’s worse foundations to have, you know? Than loving yourself. If you’re truly loving yourself, everything you know, ultimately works yourself out. One of the things I believe is like, we have to start within first, on ourselves first, because that’s actually, it naturally, then ripples over into our relationships and our life. Versus if we try to — I think a lot of you know, like modern society to love someone, it actually comes out of — it’s a place of insecurity.

That’s not love. Love is wanting the best for someone whether they’re with you or not. Let me tell you, it’s hard for me as well, right? If you love yourself, truly it’s far easier to love others. It’s a very interesting correlation there.

[0:12:02.8] MB: I’d love to kind of dig in and understand how you define loving yourself, because I think it’s something that I think you and I and many listeners may kind of intuitively grasp it, but I can definitely see somebody listening to this and thinking, you know, that seems kind of egotistical or selfish, and I don’t think it’s that at all.

[0:12:18.3] KR: You know, it’s actually interesting. Someone pointed that out to me once, and I thought about it, and I thought, “Okay, here’s what’s egotistical and selfish. Hating yourself. Because that’s being self-absorbed, just saying negative things to yourself. That is selfish.”
Because you know what? It makes you worse, and it makes your relationships worse, it makes the world worse. That is the ultimate selfish thing I can do. 

Loving yourself actually is the most positive thing you can do, because it’s not narcissistic. It’s not looking in the mirror and saying I’m so beautiful, and it’s not like — there’s no narcissism in it. It’s actually feeling love. Feeling love, which is probably the most beautiful emotion that exists. Every great song, every great poem, there’s a reason why over history, all this has been written about it, because it is the truest emotion. 

If we’re going for the one true thing that really every human has within, that actually — love for a child, love for our parent, love for our significant other has caused such great actions in human history, you know? Sacrifice. Imagine sacrificing for yourself versus like all the sacrificing for others.

By the way, sacrificing for yourself is called self-discipline, which only results in good things. For someone listening, someone sent me an email once and said you know, I’m skeptic about this. I’m like dude, if you’re actually taking the time to email me, it means that you're not where you want to be in your life. Otherwise, you wouldn’t be bothering. You’d be too busy living your life. Why don’t you just try this? Why don’t you try it and see, and worst case, turns out you were right all along, you had lost nothing. You’re still miserable. Or, it could actually work and you’re better off. 

I don’t really understand too much when someone says they don’t get the whole love yourself thing. I’m like, you know, I think if you were ever a baby, you know what love is. We may have lost touch with it, but it’s in us, and it’s truly like the fundamental human emotion that ultimately we all crave and we need. If we start from a place of giving that to our selves, so we’re not coming from an empty place, life has to be far better.

[0:14:14.7] MB: That reminds me of something else that you’ve talked about that I think is a really powerful concept, which is the idea that life is not happening to you, but it’s happening for you.

[0:14:23.3] KR: Yeah, that’s actually something I’ve noticed with people that I found to be significantly successful and happy or fulfilled. That’s why I work in Silicon Valley, and now because of my books, the kind of people I get to meet, I know quite a few insanely successful people, but I don’t know that many successful and fulfilled, or successful and consistently happy people. The ones who have that are the ones who basically — everything in life is basically an experience where they have to grow and learn, and use for their personal growth.

It’s not like they don’t get sidelined by life when you have that attitude. I came across a few months ago, there’s actually — in one of Rooney’s poems he says that. There’s nothing, this isn not anything new under the sun. These are fundamental human truths that people have been figuring out since we’ve been around.

Imagine like, living from that place. Everything that’s happening is actually for your benefit. Cheryl Richardson has become a dear friend, she’s a very successful self-help author, and she said to me once, I got through a breakup and I was sad about it, she said, “You know? Try looking at it this way: rejection is God’s protection.” I mean, if you think about that, because if someone, if things end with someone, we as human beings don’t know what’s way down the road. You know, it could be magical now, it could be the worst thing that ever happened to you 10 years from now, right?

If it ended now, it could actually be a great gift. If you start looking at it as everything is happening for my benefit from that place, it makes life a lot simpler, and it actually makes us happier. Call it a simple mental hack, it works.

[0:15:51.2] MB: Yeah, that’s so powerful. I love that phrase. Rejection is god’s protection. I think many times, looking back on my life, there’s so many things that I desperately wanted or wished would happen, and the fact that they didn’t happen was the best thing that could have happened to me.

[0:16:04.8] KR: Yeah, look. I was writing for over a decade. Obsessively, you know, teaching myself, reading the great authors at night after work, and on the weekends just writing, rewriting. You know, sending out material, getting rejection letters, and the rejections hurt. I remember I would be depressed for a week or two, and then I would think, “Okay, I’m going to be a better writer,” and I would work harder the next round and get more rejection letters.

You know what that gave me? Over a decade, I became a way better writer because of that. That allowed me to be the kind of writer who could write Love Yourself and take his ego out of the way and just write only every word that mattered and cut everything else out. If I hadn’t got those rejections for a decade, I wouldn’t have written Love Yourself. If I had gotten like, published early on, I’d be writing this really clever drivel. It’s very easy to write clever stuff. I mean, I do it all the time, and then I throw it in the trash, because I know now how to write pure from the heart, but that took a lot of time and a lot of work to get to that place. That was all because of the rejections.

[0:17:00.0] MB: You touched on earlier kind of the difference or the distinction between someone who is successful and someone who is fulfilled. Could you explain that distinction?

[0:17:07.6] KR: I always make this distinction of someone who is successful AND fulfilled. Fulfilled, right? A couple of things I’ve noticed with that. One of the key things is their attitude tends to be that everything that’s happening is actually for their benefit. They work it out, they’ll handle it, they’ll figure it out, they’ll be in a better place because of it.

Success and fulfilment. I think, in that case, I think fulfillment for me is when you’re really living your life in a way that your life is an expression of you. The true you, what you’re putting out in the world, where you’re being, if you’re walking the earth, being you, and putting out to the world a real you. That is natural fulfillment. 

It’s actually a beautiful way to be. Now having success from that place is more amazing. You’ll never have any issues with that success, because it’s just you being you. The real you, not the ego, not the scared person, just you, the gifts you got. I would say like, of all the things I’ve done, startups, building companies, venture capital, all these things. The thing that I found most fulfilling, even though it’s also the hardest work I’ve done, is writing and putting these books out. It is by far the most fulfilling thing I’ve ever done in my life. Blows everything else away. Because it’s a pure expression of me.

[0:18:20.1] MB: One of the things you’ve talked about is the idea that if something scares you, there’s magic on the other side.

[0:18:26.1] KR: Yeah.

[0:18:26.7] MB: I’d love for you to kind of explain that.

[0:18:28.4] KR: That’s just a rule I’ve developed for myself. It’s just a personal rule, and one, whenever I live, just results in magic. Like, for example. I was terrified of putting the Love Yourself out to the world, I was petrified. I wrote it, and I remember, just being like, I was just as likely to just trash it than I was to publish it, right? It was actually crossing that fear that actually changed my life, transformed my life.

I’ve noticed other things. If there’s like, they’re really scared, you know, okay, if you’re scared of throwing yourself in front of a truck, yes, that’s a legitimate fear, but like most of our fears that come from within, they’re actually, I think, often a signal of where to go rather than where to run away from. It’s kind of funny how that works.

I think in our gut, we’ve learned to listen to in a very weird way as humans, but like this fear of going and asking that girl out. What’s the worst that can happen? Eventually, you could meet the girl of your dreams. Publishing the book where I’m going to be a laughing stock in Silicon Valley. Everyone’s going to be like, “What the hell, dude? You’re writing this book about loving yourself, with this strange cover, and now you’re doing like, mantras in your head?” I thought I would never be able to raise a dollar for a company again. By doing it, it changed my life. So many CEO’s I’ve met told me how it’s transformed their lives and made them better. That was a huge thing.

It’s almost like I look at life as a cliff. These things in life, it’s a cliff you're standing on and we’re waiting to jump, and we think, you know, we’re going to jump after our wings grow. The irony is that they never will. We have to actually jump somewhere along the way. While we’re falling is when they grow, because it’s like life tests us. I think life gives us more than we could ever ask for, but we have to step up. It’s life that requires us or of us. I think that’s a fine deal.
 
[0:20:06.2] MB: I love the phrase that you use that you have to take a leap before you can sprout the wings.

[0:20:10.9] KR: Yeah, Startup Lab, you talk about like, building a startup is like building a plane while you’re falling off a cliff. This is just, you do without knowing what you’re doing. You’ve just got the peace to jump, and you’re trying to build a plane to fly before you hit the ground.

What I’ve learned is just overall in life, like in anything, the great things come from taking risks. Real risks. Not like, stupid risks, but the real risks from our heart that there will always be fear. I don’t think we can overcome fear, honestly. What we can do is we could look at it from a different way. I was like, that’s a signal, that’s a beacon.

Because a beacon, let me go there. You’ll still feel fear, you know, what’s courage? You know, the classic definition of courage, feel the fear but do it anyway. That’s all that is, I think if you look at life that way, you’re going to start jumping off more cliffs, and having more wings, and more magical experiences.

[0:20:56.9] MB: It’s such an important point that fear can be an indicator. I think one of my favorite kind of quotes around that is the idea of what we fear most is what we most need to do.

[0:21:05.7] KR: I didn’t know that, but I love it. It’s so true man, all these things that the poets and writers and philosophers said for us, how many centuries, they say the same thing. Time to actually just, you know, we can either learn from our own experience by making the mistakes. or we can actually really pay attention and just do it. I’m a big believer in rather than just go to every seminar, reading every book, it’s not gaining knowledge that makes us better. It’s actually applying knowledge that makes us better. 

Even more than that, there’s too much knowledge out there that we try to apply, and it will never go anywhere. So just pick one specific thing that feels right for you and go all in. For me, it was loving myself, I went out all in. Writing, went all in. You know, when you go all in, I’m not saying it’s easy along the way, but it actually shifts things and it transforms your life. It’s like, it’s not knowledge that matters, practical application of specific knowledge that matters.

[0:21:55.6] MB: It’s amazing how much wisdom, both sort of from a productivity, effectiveness standpoint, but also from a spiritual standpoint. If you look back thousands of years ago, if you look at stoicism of the Romans, you look at Buddhism, these lessons are timeless, and people have been sharing them for millennia, but so many people in many cases live the vast majority of their entire lives without ever even kind of opening their eyes to a lot of these really fundamental truths.

[0:22:23.1] KR: Yeah. I mean, fortunately, we live in a time now but all this knowledge is very readily available. It’s getting around. I think one can get caught up in just seeking the knowledge, right? I think seeking the knowledge is fine, until you hit something that feels right, and then just do it. We can always do more later, but just pick one thing and just do it.

It’s like startups, right? You can’t build multiple startups at a time. You can’t. There’s very few human beings who can do that. Same thing. If you want to work on your inner self, find the one thing and just do it consistently. Make it a practice.

[0:22:54.7] MB: One of the other topics that you talk about that I really like is the idea that we are the effort, not the outcome. I’d love for you to kind of share that concept.

[0:23:02.3] KR: Yeah, that came actually out about, I had to reevaluate my definition of success, because my definition of success used to be what company I built, how much money I made, and then when I lost everything I realized, “Well, why did I fail? Did I fail because I didn’t work hard?” No, I worked harder than anybody I knew. Was it because I didn’t work smart? No, I built something very special that very few people have pulled off. Yet I failed, and why? You know, it was just a matter of market forces, wrong partners, classic stuff in business, and that kind of stuff, one is not responsible for. All I could do is just be the person I bring to the table. 

Funny enough, last year I got to read the Gita, and the Gita’s core lesson is the same. You are — I can’t remember how to say, you are basically — you have a right to your actions, but not the fruit of your actions. If you just focus on what you’re doing, what you bring to the table versus the reward, the rewards take care of themselves, and your sense of self, your confidence and being comfortable in who you’re being is not the result, because the result is dependent on so many different things. 

The irony is you do that enough, you will have fantastic results and you’ll be happier, you’ll be more content in the process. I think a lot of anxiety and misery comes from imagining negative circumstances versus just focusing on what can we do, what do we bring to the table, because that’s the only thing they have control over anyway, right? 

[0:24:21.8] MB: Very true. It’s funny because that lesson it can come from so many different places. Even something as simple as, I am an avid poker player, and in poker it’s all about making the right decision, and then being agnostic to the outcome, because you can’t control where the cards fall. 

[0:24:36.9] KR: Yeah, perfect. That’s a great analogy. You’ll be a calmer poker player, a better poker player for doing that. 

[0:24:45.5] MB: Absolutely. Well I’d love to transition and talk a little bit more about your upcoming book Rebirth. On the show kind of hard-nosed, non-fiction readers, typically, and I was curious about the book because I think you called it a fable of love, forgiveness and following your heart, and it’s based loosely on some of your personal experiences, but obviously has some sort of fiction elements. I’d love to hear what inspired you to write it. 

[0:25:11.8] KR: Because I had the story to tell. Also, one of the things I think is that fundamentally as human beings we learn best through stories. Like look, sitting around campfires, telling stories, kids run around telling stories, and I remember reading a theory of evolution once on what sets us apart from Neanderthals was the fact that we could communicate in a way, and create stories and tales that allowed us to gather together versus they could never gather. 

They were always scattered, and we were gathered in higher numbers. I think stories fundamentally make us human. That’s how we pass along wisdom and knowledge. I want to take so many different things I have learned personally from my life, and seeing people’s lives that I think I really admire, and put them in a story. In a classic journey where I layer them in, and the themes keep on coming and going, and there’s resolution, so that by the time someone’s done reading it, these things have nationally been went well into their psyche. 

So they’d naturally have learned about this concept of knowledge, and hopefully some of the practical ways to live these concepts, which is why I set out to do this. Trust me, it’s way harder to write than non-fiction. My God, it was the hardest thing I have ever done creating all these characters with all these different dialogues, and you can’t make dialogue exposition where someone is giving a lecture. Human beings don’t operate that way, so to create this journey of this guy walking through Spain, and the people he meets along the way, and their conversations and how he transformed. 

The goal is to also for the reader to suddenly transform and learn these lessons. So that’s why I set out to do this. It’s not exactly a classic fiction. It’s not your classic non-fiction either. I think it’s a hybrid, and I think what I wanted to do, this served it best, which is why I set about to do it. 

[0:26:54.9] MB: I think it’s amazing, because a lot of the themes in there are sort of subtly woven into the dialogue and the main character’s experiences, and being someone who reads — probably 95% of what I read is non-fiction, I really enjoyed how those lessons — it’s funny, because in a way fiction almost teaches them more effectively, and so I think that’s based on the power of storytelling to really anchor some of these themes. 

[0:27:20.1] KR: Yeah, there’s something very special about it. It also gave me such great admiration for writers that all they do is tell and write fiction. It’s, my God, the level of work that goes in is insane. I think my next book is going to be non-fiction, you know? I need a break. It’s a very special day. Today was when the publisher sent me the hard cover. I got to hold the hard cover for the first time in my hands, the final, for the final copy. 

All this work, to see it come out, to see this out in bookstores and everywhere, and obviously in online places like Amazon, Barnes & Nobles and so forth, and to see your work in the world that you’ve given your all to, it’s the best feeling. It is the best feeling. So look, I gave it my best. That’s all I can do, right? The rest is up to the book. I gave it my best, I’m going to talk about it and market it, but in the end, it’s up to the book to fly and touch people. 

If you touch people, they will share it, which is exactly what happened with Love Yourself. That book went viral. It’s insane. It goes everywhere, and that’s the power of just sharing what you know, whatever your medium is. 

[0:28:26.3] MB: So the book, for listeners who may not know, the book is about — well you can probably tell it better than I can. 

[0:28:31.8] KR: No, I’d like to hear it from you. 

[0:28:33.4] MB: Well, I was going to say it’s about a pilgrimage across Spain, basically. It’s a lot more than that, but it’s the vehicle that tells some of the other pieces of the story. That’s loosely based on an actual pilgrimage you took, right? 

[0:28:45.4] KR: Correct. I did that when I was about 25 or 26, and I’m not religious at all, and in fact, most of the people I met at the pilgrimage weren’t religious either, but it is something by walking. This pilgrimage has been around since the 11th century. It’s called the Camino de Santiago, and there’s something about walking in the same footsteps of people who have done it for so many centuries. You’re just another one, and as you go through and walk through wheat fields, and vineyards, and cities, and mountains, and deserts, and forests, you shift. 

And the people you meet along the way, the conversations you have, by the time you start to – by the time you end, whatever you need to resolve gets resolved. It’s kind of like how that works. It’s very interesting. There’s a reason I guess why many cultures have a concept of a pilgrimage. So a pilgrimage is the perfect vehicle to share these lessons. I took these experiences I have lived and wrote the story in a way so I could weave the lessons into that vehicle. 

[0:29:37.6] MB: So what prompted you initially to choose — I guess when I was reading I was like, why Spain and why a pilgrimage? 

[0:29:45.2] KR: For the story or my life? 

[0:29:46.4] MB: No, in your real life, when you initially decided. 

[0:29:48.5] KR: You want the truth? 

[0:29:49.3] MB: Yeah. 

[0:29:49.8] KR: I was in Italy visiting a friend from college, and we were at this beautiful Italian woman’s house and we were very drunk on grappa that her grandmother made, and I was trying to impress her, and she told me about this pilgrimage and I said I would walk it. So I came up with the idea when I was really, really drunk trying to impress a beautiful Italian woman. The next day when I woke up I was like, “Well that was interesting, but it seems cool. Let me just go do it for a few days.” So I went off and I did it, and ended up doing the whole thing. But the whole thing started off being drunk trying to impress a woman, which was pretty much where all a lot of great male stories start. 

[0:30:22.9] MB: That’s really funny. That reminds me and I’m trying to remember, I think there’s some psychologist who’s written a lot about the idea that basically, all kind of technology and human innovation is essentially an elaborate giant mating ritual. 

[0:30:36.6] KR: It really is. It’s us peacocks doing our dance literally. It’s funny, there’s a lot of truth to it. 

[0:30:42.4] MB: So from that actual journey, what were some of the biggest learnings or takeaways that you had from it?

[0:30:48.7] KR: Actually that journey, taught me that — I learned a lot about forgiveness in some conversations I had, which is actually one of the core themes in this book as well, because I think forgiveness is such an important thing in our lives, forgiveness and self-forgiveness. If you want to talk about being free, I don’t think we can be free until we fully either forgive or forgive ourselves. Forgive who we hold, otherwise we are just carrying this psychological baggage. 

So that was one of the key things I learned, and that’s one of the key lessons woven in this book. What else did I learn? I mean, that was the main thing, honestly, because I’ve done it. I’ve climbed mountains. I was in the Army and stuff, so it wasn’t like I learned how to walk across the country or anything like that, and what’s interesting is it’s quite easy to do. People walk in their 70’s and 80’s, and you’re in Spain. You are not walking the Appalachia trail. 

Another thing was just the people you meet. So the thing with travelling and doing something like that, especially because people come from all over the world to do it, so you meet interesting people. Very interesting people from all over the world that you share with each other stories of their lives, and you can’t help but grow because of that. They can’t help but grow because of that. It’s basically a very nice encapsulated micro-chasm of just personal growth. I would highly recommend anyone to do something like that. 

[0:32:03.3] MB: And I think you say, and I might be paraphrasing in the book, but you become part of the Camino and it becomes part of you. 

[0:32:09.4] KR: Yeah, I think it’s like when you do anything like that, you become a part of it and yeah, for example the Camino, not only have people changed your life, you’re changing other people’s lives. You all become part of that same journey for each other. It’s never a one-way street. You all become part of this one constant flow of people that have over the centuries done it, and changed, and gone onto live better lives. It’s a beautiful thing. 

[0:32:32.6] MB: I’d love to dig into forgiveness a little bit, and I think the book does an amazing job of dealing with it. The main character both is having to forgive himself, and also is forgiving his father. I thought it was really fascinating. I’d love to get your thoughts on how do we cultivate, I guess let’s start with self-forgiveness. 

[0:32:52.1] KR: Self-forgiveness, ultimately, I actually wrote a piece about this I’m going to put out. It’s another practice that I’ve done that works. You see the theme there, right? It’s practice. I think self-forgiveness ultimately is just recognizing you’re human. Look up human definition at any dictionary, it doesn’t say equals perfect, right? What does it mean to be human? That we learn, and we do, and we try. We keep on trying. We’re these amazing special creatures that keep on falling and getting up. 

We keep on moving forward, and eventually become better and better because of it. I think that’s just the human journey. Realizing that this is part of the human journey. Our mistakes are part of it, there is no way around it. So if we realize that, it’s easier to forgive ourselves, to have that kind of compassion for ourselves versus holding ourselves to this. I am very guilty of that. I am hard on myself until I realized, all you can do is you’re doing the best you can at that time. Now, do the best you can at this time. That’s all we can do. That’s the only contract, and it makes it way easier to forgive yourself when you look at life that way. 

[0:33:53.0] MB: And there’s a really powerful passage on the book that I’m going to read here, when Ahmed, who’s the main character, is thinking about his father, which ties into what you just talked about. He says, “He was not a saint or a monster, just human. With all his faults, dreams, hopes and desires, a human being.” I think that perfectly encapsulates that, and for me, I feel like that was a powerful passage in the sense that it just really simply captured the fact that we are all human. Despite the flaws and errors and the mistakes that we make and others make, behind that there’s something that you can always find a way to forgive somebody. 

[0:34:32.9] KR: Yeah, and forgiving doesn’t mean forget and go run right back. Forgiving just means making that fundamental shift of understanding inside yourself. Ultimately, it’s all from within. Forgiveness helps you more than anyone else. Forgiveness is just basically a burning inside you that you just need to let go off and it goes away. 

It’s all within, that’s the irony. Like to forgive someone else is to actually just helping yourself. I know we all have to go through a journey of forgiveness. Sometimes it takes a while. Like, Ahmed has to go walk this pilgrimage, the lessons he’s got to learn, which lead him to forgiveness, and I think we all do that in our own way and that’s all fine. It’s the human condition, it’s the human journey. 

[0:35:10.2] MB: The beautiful part about that is that the research, then, the science in psychology shows that forgiveness is incredibly powerful, and not only is it associated with brain states that are more beneficial to thinking and having more cognitive ability, but they are also associated with longevity, happiness, all kinds of outcomes. Forgiveness is not just woo-woo. It’s actually really scientifically validated and incredibly powerful. 

[0:35:37.1] KR: I totally agree. These emotional states inside of us, they create the mind-body connection. At this point, if someone doesn’t know it, they must be hiding under a rock somewhere. It’s true. You can look at data, you can look at your own life, and if you do it for yourself, ultimately, the people around you in the world is better. So there’s nothing selfish about it. One has to work on themselves first and work on forgiveness and self-love. The very core things that matter. 

[0:36:00.7] MB: One of the other lessons from the book that emerges as you’re reading it is this phrase that Ahmed learns from, I think a French woman that he encounters. I might be messing that up, but it’s basically the question of, “If I loved myself, would I do this?” 

[0:36:17.0] KR: Right. It says, “If I loved myself, what would I do?” Yeah, and that incorporates the stuff that I learned in loving myself into the book. I mean how could I not, right? It’s such a core lesson, but then he uses that simple question to actually guide him forward in the journey, which is just a metaphor for guiding yourself in life, and a place for making these decisions, and what I found very powerful when I came up with that question for myself was I never said “because I love myself” or “when I love myself.” 

I said, “If I love myself,” so let’s go from there. If I love myself what’s the action I would take? It’s that simple, anyone can answer that question. Otherwise, we’ll get stuck in, “Well I don’t love myself yet,” or so forth. So that “if” statement is very powerful, and it’s actually very freeing. 

[0:37:00.8] MB: Yeah, I think the “if” is what makes that statement so powerful. It takes your mind off the hook from dealing with whether or not you feel like you love yourself, etcetera, and it opens a new pathway of possibility for thinking about and cultivating self-love. 

[0:37:18.1] KR: Yeah, and I think that “if” thing is part of the practice that I was locked in my room coming up with. That actually really helped me a lot, because I didn’t start off like that. I hated myself. I didn’t believe in the word love, I laughed at that. Now really, I am the guy who say, “Oh I love this pasta,” or whatever. I started from the opposite place, and if anyone can end up with it, it shocks me that where I’ve ended up, the way I feel about it now, but starting from an “if” place gave me the freedom, because there was no having to prove anything. If. Okay, if I did, what would I do? Well, I would do this, so why don’t I do this? It’s that’s simple.

[0:37:54.9] MB: The funny thing about the power of the word if, and we’ve talked about this in previous episodes of the show, where we dig into limiting beliefs and how to overcome them, and using “if” statements like that are a great way to trick your subconscious and sidestep the resistance that you feel to imagining new possibilities and blowing apart some of your limits. So it’s really powerful, and a great tool, and it’s something that is so simple, but that simple turn of phrase can have a massive impact. 

[0:38:23.5] KR: Yeah. I think I remember I was on Facebook, and I heard someone had quoted Tony Robbins. He said, “The quality of your life matters more than the quality of your cushions.” Aha, okay I get it. I’m doing that with this cushion, and it’s a transformative question that one just asks themselves and their actions. It will transform your life. That alone, that simple one alone. 

[0:38:43.4] MB: And in Rebirth, in many ways, Ahmed goes through the process of changing some of the questions that he’s asking, about why is he suffering to what can he do about it? I think that transition is really powerful in terms of internalizing that lesson when you read that story. 

[0:39:02.2] KR: Yeah, that’s the beauty of writing fiction. You can show the growth and show lessons of growth. That is what makes storytelling special. 

[0:39:09.5] MB: It’s funny, I said it a little bit earlier, but as a non-fiction reader, I went in very skeptical of “what is this going to be about, and what am I going to get out of it,” and I was amazed how much I took from it, and how relevant it was to some of the struggles that I’ve dealt with within my life, and some of the challenges that I’ve had, and it was really powerful for me to read the book, even though it was a fictional story that didn’t seem like it had any sort of relevance to what I was thinking about. 

[0:39:36.3] KR: That’s beautiful. Thank you. That was what I was going for, thank you so much. 

[0:39:40.6] MB: So for somebody who’s listening to us and wants to take a first step or some kind of action to implement some of these ideas, what is one simple piece of homework that you would give them? 

[0:39:52.1] KR: Well, let’s just stay with what we were talking about, that simple question. Start asking yourself that in your actions like, for example, in simple things such as eating, or working out versus not working out, or interacting with someone, and in negative versus a positive state. If I love myself, and when I say love, I mean truly love, like the way you love a parent, or a baby, or even a puppy, like the way the puppy loves you. True love for yourself. If I truly love myself, what would I do? Answer that question, and then go live from that place. That alone. I think your life will be amazing just like that, you know? 

[0:40:28.3] MB: Simple, but not always easy advice. 

[0:40:30.3] KR: Of course. It’s an advice, it’s a work. No one that I have met in my life who’s ever done anything of value or significance has ever not put in the work, and I think truly the thing that we should work on the most is ourselves, because when we are better the world is better, our life is better, everything is just better because of the classic ripple effect. 

So yeah, not easy, but not necessarily that hard either. You don’t have to burn any sage, you don’t have to do any like, go walk across the country. Just ask this question, and throughout actions in the day. Ask yourself twice a day. That’s two more times your actions will be better rather than before they would have been, you know? 

[0:41:10.0] MB: So for listeners who want to learn more or find some of these resources, where can they find you and the book online? 

[0:41:16.4] KR: Well, they can find everything, I have set up a special page for the book. People can learn more about it. It’s rebirthfable.com, and they can just go there and learn more about it and see where it’s available, and it’s going to be everywhere starting January 3rd. Yeah that’s the best way. I figured that’s a simple enough URL for people to remember, and this also captures the book: Rebirth Fable. 

It is a fable, because I want it to be like a journey that transforms a reader just as it transformed the main character. I don’t like reading drama and all of that, and in the end, you’re just tightly wound up and stressed. So I wanted this to be something that creates a shift inside and fables do that. So just go to rebirthfable.com and check it out, and I hope you enjoy it. 

[0:42:03.0] MB: I just wanted to say thank you so much for being on the show, Kamal, and the book. It was really impactful for me, as I said before we started recording, I was brought to tears at a few pieces of the book, and I thought it was really, really powerful. So for listeners out there who are thinking about it, I highly recommend checking it out. It’s a great book and it shares some really valuable lessons. So thank you again for being on the show. It’s been an honor to have you on here and we really enjoyed it.

[0:42:27.3] KR: Oh, the honor is mine, really. I’m so lucky I get to share myself with the world through experiences like this. So truly, thank you. 

[0:42:36.2] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I would love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. 

I get tons of listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this information?” Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222, or go into scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email list. 

If you want to get all of this incredible information, links, transcripts, everything, we talked about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at our website scienceofsuccess.co. Just hit the show notes button at the top. You’ll get everything we talked about in this episode, and if there’s previous episodes that you enjoyed, you can get all the show notes from those episodes as well. Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success.

The 2016 Recap - Lessons from FBI Hostage Negotiators, Game Theory Experts, Neuroscientists, Expert Poker Players, Entrepreneurs, And More

In this episode we sit down and discuss everything we’ve learned in the last year of doing The Science of Success, review some of our favorite lessons and episodes, and talk about all the incredible insights we’ve discovered and share some of the biggest common themes that have emerged from a year of interviews with amazing guests ranging from FBI Hostage Negotiators, Game Theory Experts, Neuroscientists, World Class Poker Players, Amazing Entrepreneurs  and much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance by Josh Waitzkin

• Michael Mauboussin on Tesla's Growth

• [SOS Episodes] The Weapons of Influence Series

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

• [SOS Episode] How You Can Predict The Future Better Than World-Famous Experts - The Art & Science of Risk with Dan Gardner

• [SOS Episode] Uncover the Root of Your Pain, How to Smash Perfectionism, Love Yourself, and Live a Richer Life with Megan Bruneau

• [SOS Episode] The Science of Power - How to Acquire It, What Makes You Lose it with Dr. Dacher Keltner

• [SOS Episode] The Surprising Truth Research Reveals About What Motivates You with Dr. Dan Ariely

• [SOS Episode] Influence Anyone With Secret Lessons Learned From The World’s Top Hostage Negotiators with Former FBI Negotiator Chris Voss

• [SOS Episode] How to Overcome Trauma, Mental Health Struggles, and Learning Issues to Achieve World Changing Results with Dr. Gail Saltz

• [SOS Episode] Master Your Mental Game Like a World Champion with Performance Coach Jared Tendler

• [SOS Episode] How to Master the Superpower that Builds All Other Powers with Dr. Rick Hanson

• [SOS Episode] The Psychology Behind Making Better Decisions with Global Financial Strategist Michael J. Mauboussin

• [SOS Episode] How To Stop Living Your Life On Autopilot, Take Control, and Build a Toolbox of Mental Models to Understand Reality with Farnam Street’s Shane Parrish

• [SOS Episode] How to Get Rocket Fuel for Your Success, Bend Reality, and Achieve Happiness, With Vishen Lakhiani, Founder of Mindvalley

• [SOS Episode] How To Break Free From Depression & Anxiety By Changing Your Brain Chemistry with Neuroscientist Dr. Alex Korb

• [SOS Episode] The Neuroscience Behind Einstein and Isaac Newton’s Biggest Breakthroughs

• [SOS Episode] The Surprising Data-Backed Truth About Achievement with Business Psychology Expert Peter Shallard

• [SOS Episode] The Biological Limits of the Human Mind

• [SOS Episode] The Reality of Perception

• [SOS Episode] Limiting Beliefs

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I'm your host Matt Bodner. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we sit down and discuss everything we've learned in the last year of doing The Science of Success, review some of our favorite lessons and episodes, talk about the incredible insights we've discovered, and share some of the biggest common themes that have emerged from a year of interviews with amazing guests ranging from FBI hostage negotiators to game theory experts, neuroscientists, world class poker players, successful entrepreneurs, and much more. 

The Science of Success continues to grow with nearly 700,000 downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one New Noteworthy, and more. A ton of our listeners email me and ask, "Matt, how do you organize and remember all this incredible information? Information I get from reading books, listening to podcasts, interviewing incredible experts, how do I keep track of all of it?" Because of that, we've created an amazing free resource for all of our listeners. It’s called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free by simply texting the world “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Again, it's a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. Listeners are absolutely loving this. We get emails all the time of people telling us how great this resource is and how much it's helping them stay organized and keep track of everything that they learn. Again, you can get it for free by texting “smarter” to the number 44222 or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and putting in your email. 

In our previous episode, we discussed why you should not follow your passion, the two biggest pitfalls people struggle with trying to build a career they love, the incredible importance of deep work, why deep work is so valuable, and how we can cultivate it. As well as, how you can structure your lifestyle to attain autonomy and mastery, with Cal Newport. If you want some serious fuel to crush your New Year's resolutions, listen to that episode.


[00:02:22] MB: Are you excited?

[00:02:23] AF: I'm very excited. I'm really excited to talk to the audience, man. I mean, I'm behind-the-scenes here but unless you're a guest you probably have no idea who I am, or reporter, you might not know him too. 

[00:02:32] MB: That's true. So the man speaking to you today, the other voice on the microphone who's with me here in person, is actually the producer of the show. His name is Austin Fable and Austin is kind of the wizard behind the scenes with The Science of Success, and he helps us with everything. The show would not run or really be what it is today without Austin's help and Austin's influence. He helps us find guests, he helps us do a lot of the research and prep, he helps get all the interview set up. He's really been instrumental in helping make The Science of Success what it is today.

This episode's going to be a little bit different and that's why it's airing kind of off track. You're still going to get a weekly interview that's going to be totally awesome, but this is actually going to be a conversation between me and Austin. I wanted to kind of introduce him to you guys and it's going to be a recap of the show. So The Science of Success has been around for a little more than a year. We launched in November of 2015? 

[00:03:23] AF: November 3rd, 2015.

[00:03:24] MB: Nice. Yes, and so we'll count that as one year. So we're going to do a recap. We're going to talk about everything that's happened on the show, we're going to talk about some of our favorite guests, we're going to talk about some of our favorite lessons. But yeah, this is going to be a little bit different and so we hope that you enjoy this conversation. With that, Austin, why don't you say hello to everybody?

[00:03:44] AF: Well, first of all Matt, thanks for the very kind intro. I appreciate all of that. It's really nice to be on the mic talking to the audience. I guess just a little bit about how I got involved. So you and I do some work together outside of The Science of Success, but before coming on as producer, I was actually a big fan. So I've been listening weekly like a lot of other people and kind of taking some of these notes. You and I had read a lot of things, like "Influence" by Cialdini in the past. 

So it's speaking a lot of the same language and it wasn't until the meditation episode, actually, that really kind of got me. It really hit home with me. First thing that I actually put into practice in my daily routine, and that's kind of what got me interested enough to reach out to you about helping. 

[00:04:23] MB: Tell us the story of what happened when you heard the meditation episode.

[00:04:26] AF: So, meditation episode airs, I've always — similar to your story, I know I've had weird brief moments in my life where I've just sat down and been with my thoughts. But I've never really had any sort of structure with it, and they're very few and far between, right? Like years. So I'm driving down the road on I40 here in Nashville on the way to my dad's house and I'm listening to the episode on meditation and just kind of the impact it had for you. The method by Vishen Lakhiani and other guests we've had on. I almost pulled the car over. I mean, it was insane. 

Going through the scientific benefits of forgiveness and gratitude that I'd never even thought of. It kind of blew me away. So I get back and I'm sitting there, and I get to my dad's house and I'm telling him all about meditation and things that he doesn't really know much about. He's like, "Well, that's great. That's cool." So, the next morning I decide I get up really early and I sit down, I can't do lotus position because of my knees, but I followed your Spotify playlist and I just sat there and I went through the framework, beginning with connectedness and then going into gratitude and forgiveness.

It was just amazing how sitting there, I find myself smiling when I'm thinking of gratitude, because it's all the things that I take for granted every day that I don't think about. Gratitude comes from within, so beginning with who you are as a person. Like, "I'm glad I know right from wrong. I'm glad that I feel certain ways. I'm glad that I was raised properly. And then you go into things like your health, and then you always end with things like, "I'm glad I have a car. I'm glad I have a house. I'm glad I have a nice wife, a dog, all those good things. 

But the biggest one for me, Matt, was forgiveness because it was tough. Because I have traditionally really buried a lot of things and they come up at the worst times, right? You know what I mean? I might have a grudge with somebody and they run into you at the mall and I've completely forgot about it. But now that I've seen you I'm like, "Gah, it's that guy."

[00:06:14] MB: Yeah. It's really funny because I think one of the things we wanted to talk about on this episode is what are some of the big themes we've learned this year? And from interviewing everybody from bloggers to the founder of Life is Good, to game theory experts, people who are neuroscientists, PhD's, all kinds of crazy guests and forgiveness is a theme that has showed up again, and again, and again in a lot of different episodes. It's something that took — like, it really was a struggle for me, and still is to some degree, to forgive people. Because I'm naturally, my family and thinking about — I remember my grandmother was like notorious for holding grudges and if you crossed her the wrong way, you were just done. You know what I mean? 

So, it runs in my family and I was very much kind of a very bitter grudge-holding person before I started down this path of learning all this stuff. So it still takes time for me sometimes to kind of practice forgiveness and something that, I mean, the science is in. It's not really disputable that forgiveness is really, really beneficial. But it's definitely something that takes a lot of work for me personally at least, to put into practice.

[00:07:22] AF: Well and it's one of those things also, were you're not doing it for the person you're forgiving, right? You're doing it for yourself. Because...

[00:07:27] MB: Absolutely.

[00:07:29] AF: For me it's, you know, I've got a certain people I held grudges against for a long time and I mean they don't know I'm holding this grudge. The only one impacted by this is me and it's not ever — no one ever thinks like, "Oh yes. I hate this person. That's such a great feeling," normally. But when you can sit down and you can really put some thought in a quiet room or with headphones in and music and really think about these things that just kind of erk you and they don't really matter and kind of let them go, it's amazing. 

And so then, to kind of round out my story, I began making meditation a daily practice of mine after listening to the episode and that's kind of how I got looped in. And for me, kind of like you mentioned your grandmother, I've always been really afraid of this phrase like "being inside your head", right? People say this all the time like, "Oh I'm getting too far in my head." That usually means you're overthinking something. You're making something negative, you're thinking of all the bad outcomes, and now I like to liken your brain as sort of like a room.  

I can walk into this room and I never want to sit in here because I hate the way the furniture is laid out, I don't like where the T.V. is. Well, I can move the T.V., I can move the chairs into it, and until you really get inside your head in a positive way with the intention of making change you don't realize it but you're your brain's a room. If you don't like the way it's laid out, change it.  

[00:08:36] MB: I like that analogy and that's — I've never actually thought about it that way. You know it's funny though because I feel like, I mean obviously I think we both practice meditation and all that kind of stuff. For me, I still feel like naturally I'm a very sort of cerebral person and one of the things that I've taken away from a number of guests this year is kind of how to cultivate more like body awareness. And I had this really interesting insight a couple, maybe like a week or two ago, and it was this idea that like — and I still feel like, if there's some sort of balance between "being in my head" and "being in my body". I'm like 95% in my head, to the point and I think it was actually Megan Bruneau has a really good quote that I'm going to paraphrase it. 

But she basically said something like, for people who are perfectionists, and you know again, her definition of perfectionism is not what you would sort of traditionally think of and I think I fell into that definition in many ways and got a lot out of that episode. But anyway she says, for people who are sort of perfectionists like they are they're constantly trying to get away from feeling anything, right? Like, as soon as you start to feel something in your body you tap into these kind of mental addictions, whether it's your phone, or like answering email, or working really hard, or whatever, to do anything so that you don't have to feel. 

And that phrase really kind of resonated with me and I think like what I finally realized is, instead of what I had sort of thought of as body awareness prior to that was like this very mentally driven thing of like "what does my body feel? Like what does that mean, and is that okay?" I kind of switch it to like — I kind of had this light switch flip on that was like, to me, body awareness is just feel what your body is feeling. That's it. There's no, like don't analyze it. Don't ask what it's feeling. It's just like, kind of go into your body and just be like, "Okay, what's happening?" And that act of feeling it alone, really helps deal with a lot of those kind of — a lot of that stress, a lot of those emotions that, at least for me especially, like I sort of bury under the surface and don't want to deal with.  

[00:10:28] AF: Well that's a really interesting point because, I mean you mentioned like perfectionism that ties into kind of — you're almost fighting your emotions, right? You're so busy analyzing and being like, "Why do I feel this way?" But you're not actually experiencing it. 

[00:10:39] MB: Yeah.  

[00:10:40] AF: And how you learn how to be better of something? By doing it. So how do you better deal with sadness, deal with anger, deal with even positive emotions like happiness and not be too overjoyed and do something without thinking? You do it by experiencing them and not trying to figure out why they are what they are but like, learning that like, "Okay, I'm angry. How can I use this in a positive way?" Or like, "I'm sad maybe I need to get through this in order to get to the other side." 

[00:11:01] MB: Yeah.

[00:11:01] AF: She also has a really interesting quote, "Life's a song." You're not waiting to get to the end of the song. You don't put on your favorite tune sitting there waiting for it to end. You get on it to listen to it, and I think emotions are obviously a huge part of life and if you don't listen to your emotions you're really kind of missing the song. 

[00:11:16] MB: I'm trying to remember which, and maybe it was — gosh, I'm trying to remember which guest said it, but the only people who don't experience pain and suffering, and actually I think it's a guest who hasn't aired and isn't going to air until after this episode. So I'm not going to reveal who it was.

[00:11:32] AF: Oh! Stick around.

[00:11:32] MB: But it's an upcoming episode that's really, really good. Basically the only people who don't feel suffering, pain, anxiety, negative emotions are psychopaths and dead people. So as long as you're not one of those two camps.

[00:11:46] AF: I don't think you want to be either. 

[00:11:47] MB: It's a good thing to be feeling these native emotions. It's part of the experience of being alive.

[00:11:52] AF: Yeah, and to round this out into kind of one of the overarching themes I know we've seen, every guest, like you have Jared Tendler on and he teaches you about how to stop choking, right? Like, how can you keep your brain from sort of shutting off and then affecting your performance? And then you also go into more like mental models and emotions and every single guest seems to have one thing that's in common phrased in one way or another, and that's understanding these emotions is the first level to controling them. 

Whether you're trying to become a better poker player, or golfer. Or whether or not you're just trying to live a happier life, or you're trying to give your customers what they want and not be reactive. I mean it all seems to come from this understanding and ultimately embracing of who you are and your different emotions. 


[00:12:34] MB: Yeah and I mean I think we touch on that.  I mean there are many guests that have touched on that piece and I think in the meditation episode we talked about the idea that you have to recognize — well, you know, we also talk about this in the episode about limiting beliefs and the interview with Catherine Plano where we went deeper on that. You have to be able to see a limiting belief before you can fight it, before you can remove it, right? And simply the same thing, like you have to be able to see the thought process as Jared Tendler talked about of how you choke before you can intervene and stop it. 

And the only way, I mean maybe not the only way, but the only real way that I found to be able to meaningfully develop an awareness of your thought process is with a practice like meditation, right? And cultivating that ability to sort of catch your thoughts and say, "Okay, whoa. What was that phrase that I just said to myself?" You know what I mean? And these thoughts just flitter by sometimes. But if you can just catch onto them you can kind of see like, "Whoa, there's a lot more here subconsciously that I'm not dealing with." 

[00:13:33] AF: And correct me if I'm wrong, but I mean a lot of those thoughts, if you're not there to catch them,  I mean they go almost unnoticed.

[00:13:39] MB: Yeah, oh yeah they definitely go unnoticed. 

[00:13:40] AF: But that impact is definitely not unnoticed.

[00:13:42] MB: Yeah. I mean, that's totally true and limiting beliefs, for instance, like a limiting belief about being able to do something or not, you know whatever the limiting belief is, there's so many ways it can manifest in your life. But that can easily just be lurking below the surface and preventing you at a conscious level from sort of taking the action you need to take, right? And because you kind of just, you feel this resistance to it or you feel like it's not achievable or whatever and a lot of times in these just brief moments you'll catch a glimpse of some kind of belief under the surface that's like, "Oh, that's the reason that I haven't been doing this thing I really need to do. It's because I feel like I can't or you know my relationship with my parents like somehow shifted the way I feel about this particular issue." 

And actually, a really good instance of that, which is actually not on our show but I was on the Positive Psychology Podcast and did an interview. The host, I basically like broke down. She had like this limiting belief about money and I like, in real time, like had a conversation with her for like fifteen minutes and broke down like what the belief was and like went — you know I forget who it is, but basically it's just like you keep asking, "Why?" over and over again, right? Ask why, and then ask why, and then ask why again. You know, you keep asking why until you get to like the deepest fundamental issue of why something. Why you feel like you can't, or why you haven't done something, really. 

[00:14:58] AF: The root it's often like 20 steps past what you thought it might be, and when you get there you're just like, "Oh my God, if I had just forgiven myself for over-drafting my card in college and my dad getting mad at me, then I probably wouldn't be freaking out about this."

[00:15:09] MB: Yeah, literally. And so her thing was like, she didn't want to sell because Kristen, the host of Positive Psychology Podcast, she didn't want to sell because her dad was a salesman and wasn't very successful and she thought of him as like kind of like a skeezy, like sleazy sales guy. She still love her father and had a good relationship with him, but just those, I guess, childhood experiences of dealing with that had somehow kind of tainted her ability to ask people for money, basically and that was holding her back from quitting her job and moving kind of full-time into the world of positive psychology, which is something she's obviously really interested in.

[00:15:44] AF: And been very successful. I mean, The Positive Psychology Podcast is pretty big. It's funny because they're all over the place. That's a really common one is the sales. People have such a mental block when it comes to a lot of these things and a lot of it comes from past experiences with sales people or people that you might have admired are coming off the wrong way. But really, at the end of the day, when you think about it, I mean this is your job. Like people are — salespeople, what do you expect to do? Sell. I mean it's not like you're approaching someone. 

[00:16:09] MB: Well, there's also — there are ways you can sell with more integrity, right? 

[00:16:13] AF: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:16:14] MB: You can ask people for money in a way that's not skeezy and like causes people to be like, "Whoa, what's wrong with you?"

[00:16:22] AF: Will provide value to theme. 

[00:16:23] MB: Yeah. Understand their needs and help them solve the problem, right? And there are a bunch of books about that. You know, we don't really talk a lot about sales on the show but...

[00:16:30] AF: But one thing that's really, really interesting too is, you mentioned it, it's like how you come off to other people, right? And that goes back to perspectives. Your example in an earlier episode even it's like someone cuts you off in a car, and you're like, "Oh my God who is this guy?" Perceptions skews the perspective.

[00:16:44] MB: Yeah the reality of perception. That was one of our early episodes. 

[00:16:45] AF: And it's like, "This guy is a jerk. He just cut me off. He's going too fast. What the heck?" Well this guy might be on the way to see his mother on her deathbed and he's freaking out, and I didn't know that.  Likewise, you know, just to back back to sales example, but if I pick up — if I call you and you're like, "Stop calling me I hate you. You're the worst person in the world." It might be because you're having a really bad day and it's not anything to add to your limiting beliefs.

[00:17:07] MB: Oh I think this is something I've definitely internalized a lot through many of the conversations we've had on the show, which is there's kind of two pieces of this puzzle. One is the, you know, I forget the exact quote but it's basically like "everybody is fighting a battle that you know nothing about", right?

[00:17:20] AF: I love that quote.

[00:17:21] MB: And it's easy to kind of hear that be like, "Okay, sure." But when you really think about that, like you have no idea what someone's struggles have been, you have no idea what they've dealt with, you know, what's stressing them out in that moment and kind of causing them to behave the way that they're behaving, right? And so ideally sort of helps kind of create empathy or compassion or understanding for why they're behaving that way.  

The other piece of that is the idea that sort of in many, I feel like in almost every instance, like when somebody is really rude or angry, it's not about you. It's all about them, right? Then I found this, and again, being somebody who earlier in my life was very kind of like vengeful and bitter person.

[00:17:59] AF: Are you going to tell the story about the guy? 

[00:18:01] MB: What guy? 

[00:18:01] AF: The guy you found who you were like, "On X day I'm going to find."

[00:18:04] MB: No, no, no. That was a buddy of mine. But no, we're not going to tell that story. Sorry listeners. Don't edit that out. It's a reflection of what's going on with them, right? And one of the most powerful ways to defuse somebody who's being really nasty to you in one way or another, and — oh there's a really good point about this too that I want to talk about. But the best way to defuse somebody harassing you are attacking you verbally or whatever, that I found just like is such a — it just diffuses the situation in many ways, at least for me, is just be like, "You seem like a really angry person and I wish for you happiness and blessings for the rest of your life," right?  

[00:18:42] AF: Wow.

[00:18:42] MB: Because all of the frustration, when somebody is really mean to you, that's their inside world spilling out into the into the external world. It has nothing to do with you and has everything to do with kind of whatever demons are haunting them. So that's a really good way to kind of encapsulate the second or the third piece of this, which is like it's really easy to be compassionate to somebody or think kindly of somebody when they're nice to you, right? The way you actually build the muscle of compassion is to be really nice and compassionate to people when they're mean to you.

[00:19:18] AF: I think that's huge. What's the quote from Gandhi? 

[00:19:21] MB: Oh, yeah, "Forgiveness is for the strong. The weak cannot forgive." 

[00:19:25] AF: I think that's huge, and it kind of goes in the same vein here as I think it's — it's not necessarily weakness, but if you wear your heart on your sleeve enough to where you're externalizing these personal feelings and you're projecting them onto other people, I think that's something that can always be fostered like a strength. But that's a sign of needing to work on these sorts of skills and really take the whole world into perspective, not just what's happening to you. 

[00:19:49] MB: It's funny because we've come back to forgiveness, even though we were talking about twenty minutes ago. It just shows how interrelated many of these themes are.

[00:19:58] AF: And they are and that's the great thing about a lot of these guests. You know, we give the listeners things that they can do to make their lives better and it's interesting to see how all of these different experts from different fields, there's always one or two or three things that really are of the crux of what...

[00:20:15] MB: Yeah, I mean, I'd say we both kind of put together just a short list of what we thought some of the biggest themes from this year were. Gut it's amazing how you can be interviewing an F.B.I. hostage negotiator and the next day you're interviewing a neuroscientist and they're talking about like very similar themes, right? Or you're interviewing somebody like Rick Hansen, who's a psychologist who's a deep expert in Buddhism.  I mean that episode is such a fascinating interview. 

But I'd love to, you know, we've talked a lot about kind of this forgiveness component and meditation. I'd love to to dig into some of the other themes and kind of overarching lessons. Austin, what else for you stood out as some of the biggest takeaways from Science of Success in 2016? 

[00:20:54] AF: Oh man. There's been so many of them. You know, something I really love, obviously the Weapons of Influence series I'm a huge fan of. I think that's very easily practicable and then just one note about what you just said that reminded me of Chris Voss with the mirror thing. It's like, once you expose these things, you notice them.  

[00:21:11] MB: It's totally true.

[00:21:12] AF: I watch — I listen to podcasts and I listen to the reporters on T.V. and I'm like, "My god is Miriam," and it always works out really well. But a couple of my favorite kind of overarching themes we've seen and we don't have to go through all three of them, but to me there really really three of them. It's like, Weapons of Influence encapsulates a lot of them. Because the biases are things that we see over and over and over again that we tell ourselves, that we tell all the people, that we project. And there are also mental models that I really like. Kind of going ahead and saying, "When X happens, I respond Y. And I respond Y because I know Y has a positive outcome for me. 

The other one I see that's very interesting is sort of this — and it kind of goes into the whole selflessness and taking yourself out of the equation. But it's like your ego, right? It's kind of, you know, Michael Mauboussin talked about it. Great guest. It's kind of like removing yourself from the situation. He calls it "using the outside view".  And it's kind of like when I come to you Matt, and I'm like, "Oh, you know, X is happening in my life and just don't know how to deal with it. Like, this is the toughest scenario in the world." And you might look at me, and you're like, "No man. You do like X, Y, Z. Things are going to be totally fine." But for me, it's almost impossible to figure out. So it's like by removing yourself from it, you can look at it from the outside view and really get a black and white sense of what's going on. 

[00:22:20] MB: Yeah I mean I think that the outside view in many ways ties into all three of those kind of concepts and I think the the really interesting point about the outside view is like, it lets you really clearly kind of eliminate your bias from the situation, right? When you think about you know everybody thinks every situation they're in is kind of a unique snowflake of a struggle or challenge or whatever it is.  And the outside view, which for listeners who don't know what we're talking about we say that, and we go really deep on it in the interview with Michael Madison. But the outside view basically is this idea that you should look at, instead of just looking at your particular situation, you should look at every situation of somebody like that that you can find kind of data for, right? 

And so there's a really good example that I like and we give a couple examples in the Michael Mauboussin interview, but there's a really good example that like that actually Mauboussin wrote in a research piece, which we'll include in the in the show notes a long with this. But it talks about Tesla and it basically says, you know, he looks at this projection that Elon Musk made, that Tesla was going to grow it X percent a year or whatever and he basically says, "Okay, like let's look at the last fifty years of companies that had a revenue of you know a billion dollars or more.  How many of those companies in this universe, you know, grew at thirty percent a year for a ten year period, right? 

And he looks at every industry whatever every single company and there's never been a company in history that's grown at that rate right. Or whatever, and I don't know the exact numbers but the research study kind of goes into it but it's really interesting and basically shows you like, okay, well like you can build a model and look at those numbers and say, "Yeah, we can grow 30% a year for ten years and if we sold this many cars, that's how you get there. But if you look at every company that's ever existed like, no company that's that size has ever grown at that rate and sustained it for that period of time.  That's kind of using the outside view to sort of understand your situation instead of saying, "Oh, I'm a beautiful unique snowflake that the only person ever dealt with this issue." Instead look at like, what's the universe of people or companies or whatever that have dealt with this and how is it panned out?  And you get a much more predictive kind of analysis of that. 

I think the Dan Gardner episode is another one that gets really deep into — and his book, Super Forecasting, gets really deep into a lot of the tools that you can use, or mental models, right? Which has absolutely been one of the themes from this year, to improve and sort of sharpen your thinking in a way to make it a lot more effective and to make it, your thinking specifically around prediction, a lot more effective and he goes super deep into that.  So if you want to learn how to predict the future, or at least predict it way more effectively than most of the talking heads you see on T.V. and most of the kind of world renowned experts. 

[00:24:53] AF: Which is shocking, right? I mean it's really interesting stuff how if you neglect these mental models you're like, I guess these forces of the universe try these things with an unchanged time.  If you neglect those it'll bite you in the butt.

[00:25:07] MB: That's a really good point, the idea of being unchanged through time. And that's something we talked about in the interview with Shane Parrish, right? Yeah, author of Farnam Street, which is one of my favorite blogs of all time and he has an amazing — all across that website they have a ton of amazing resources about mental models and he has pages on pages of where he kind of breaks down he goes through a bunch of different mental models.  

[00:25:28] AF: So why don't you explain what a mental model is, really, for those who might not have seen the episode. Because it's something I'm actively working on doing right now, which is why I'm really interesting to get into this a little bit. But it's essentially, and correct me if I'm wrong, but it's like, "Okay, I'm experiencing X. Let me step away and look through my list of toolkits, or my toolkit with mental models," and you kind of figure out a framework on how to best attack it. 

[00:25:47] MB: Yeah that's definitely a piece of it. I'd say that there's kind of another component and I may actually pause for a second and pull up the actual definition of it. Or I might be able to just do it right now.

[00:25:56] AF: You can go onto like Munger and all those successful people in the world that follow these things.

[00:26:00] MB: Yeah. So long time listeners will definitely know, and actually — well there's two pieces here. Let me go back to the idea that you shared, which is kind of things that are unchanged through time, and then I'll explain mental models. So the idea that Shane Parrish talks about in that interview is like, instead of focusing on learning kind of the tactics and the things that are constantly changing, like reading the latest hot business book that's like "ten things you can do right now to like get more sales".

[00:26:27] AF: Clickbait.

[00:26:27] MB: Right. Yeah, and reading articles and stuff like that, that's all really irrelevant information. You know, if it's not going to be relevant in the next three to five years, or the next ten years, or really the next like twenty five or thirty years, why are you learning that information, right? And so Shane Parrish does a really good job of describing this and explaining it. But it's essentially the idea that if you're going to spend time learning stuff, which I think everybody listening to this is spending some time at least learning something.

[00:26:51] AF: Bravo to you all.

[00:26:52] MB: Yes, yes. But if you're going to spend time learning stuff, why would you learn information that's going to be sort of transient, when instead you could learn information that's timeless? What does that mean? What kind of information is timeless? So there's lots of information that's timeless and we go super deep into it. But things like physics, things like biology. You know, some of the core underpinnings of psychology, economics. Like these are trends that are changing in the next three to five years. 

Yes, there are new discoveries and things like that, but the core principles of these all of these major fields are sort of largely unchanging through time and so if you can master the fundamental pillars that underpin most of the major disciplines of knowledge, and we just talked about some of them — history, psychology, physics, biology, things like that — you can build an understanding of reality that is so much deeper and so much richer and lets you really, really kind of understand what's happening in the world and what causes things to happen, especially the things you either want to happen or the things you don't want to happen and you can just be much, much more effective. We go super deep on that with both Shane Parrish and Mauboussin. 

But that concept is the concept of mental models, right? Those principles from all those major disciplines are essentially all different kind of mental models, and Charlie Munger is kind of the pioneer of this idea who really popularized the concept of mental models and the concept of what he calls "worldly wisdom". And Munger is, for those who don't know and longtime listeners will know that I'm a big fan of Charlie Munger and talk a lot about him. But Munger is Warren Buffett's business partner, he's a billionaire, he's super successful, and he talks a lot about this idea, which is basically if you were to master that you know what he calls is like the ten most important ideas from the 101 course of every discipline of knowledge, those are all mental models that you can use to better understand reality and better achieve the goals you want to achieve. 

Simple examples that we've talked about on the show, every single episode that we did in the six part Weapons of Influence Series, right? Each one of those episodes is a mental model, right? We did reciprocation bias, commitment consistency, social proof, authority bias. Every one of those is a specific instance of a mental model that helps you better understand reality.

[00:29:02] AF: And I think that's, I mean, that's really, really key here, right? So the point we made is, you now, we see so many of these really unexpected parallels between like a physicist and a hostage negotiator, and that's because there's these things that don't change. 

[00:29:14] MB: Yes, exactly.

[00:29:14] AF: Like physics. Hostage negotiation; it's not really — I mean, it is about hostage negotiation, but what it really is about is understanding the position that someone else is in when they feel threatened or in a high stakes scenario, and that's never going to change. People always have different reactions, you know, get emotional during certain situations and these things are just, like you said, the best rule is like, you could take a 101 course on everything. That's the basis of what you need to know. That's what won't change. 

[00:29:40] MB: And one piece of it too is like, you kind of talk about the idea of looking up the answers. That and the beauty of websites like Shane Parrish's blog, Farnam Street, is that they have these kind of a laundry lists of mental models. But the end game is actually to learn all these mental models and sort of internalize them on two different analogies for this. One is Charlie Munger calls it a latticework of mental models, where you basically have these these understanding of reality. 

You know, things like authority bias, or things like social proof and you array them in your mind in a way that they're internalized and so when you encounter a particular situation where a particular bias is kind of called forth or like is taking place, you can intuitively recognize it, right? And we were talking earlier about mirroring right? Once you've learned the mirroring mental model, it's really easy to see it and use it and I use it all the time and I was in a meeting literally yesterday meeting somebody at a coffee shop and I was modeling everything they're doing, and I'm modeling you right now and you just noticed it.  

But it's really funny that once you've internalize them they become even more powerful, and so the endgame, the goal is, how do I consistently build a, what Elon Musk calls — and this is kind of the other understanding — a tree of knowledge, right? You start with the trunk, which is the really big ideas that govern reality, and then you move out to the branches, and then you move out to you know the smaller branches and then leaves where you hang like little piece of knowledge, and if you array the knowledge in a coherent way like that, you can internalize and recall it and it makes you be able to think and analyze and make decisions way more effectively. 

At the end of the day, one of the biggest and I've talked at length about this, but one of the biggest things that you can do to improve your life is to improve the ability to make better decisions. 

[00:31:30] AF: Absolutely. 

[00:31:30] MB: Right? And I mean that's what this show's fundamentally about, is to help you make better decisions and to get more information so that you can make better decisions. But then you know, that in many ways is kind of like the end game application of Shane Parrish's concept that you should focus on things that don't change over time. The more energy you invest in your ability to make better decisions today, it's like compound interest for knowledge, right? 

It cascades through everything for the rest of your life and every single, you know, all of the energy that you invest in making better decisions today carries over to tomorrow and then if you add a little bit more, it carries over to the next day, right? And it gets to the point where you can really efficiently both understand what's actually happening, see through the biases that are causing a lot of people to misunderstand the situation or not really be able to handle it, and you can make a really effective decision. 

All the time and energy you invest in that carries forward through everything that you're doing, right? In your personal life, and your work life. Like any anything that you're working on, those dividends kind of keep on accruing in a compounded way. 

[00:32:29] AF: It's by far the best thing that you can invest time, effort, or money into, is figuring out how to make better decisions. And there's a lot of information out there, right? There's so much information on how to do it, but really when you come back to these mental models, this is the foundation, as you said. This is the trunk.  Without the trunk, the leaves no matter. 

[00:32:48] MB: Yeah exactly. I mean, and that's what the show's about, fundamentally, is it's about us finding people who we think can help us and you make better decisions, right? Which is me being a part of the show. It's so it's great because we're learning along with you guys. I mean, it's not like we have all the answers and we're delegating them down from a mountain top. We're learning this with everyone as we listen, which is great. 

[00:33:08] MB: It's totally true. It is really funny, w e talked about and I don't we don't have to keep kind of talking about this, but we talked about the Megan Bruneau episode, which to me, I was like just blown away by some of the stuff that she said in that episode and like I've listened to it multiple times and sent it to, you know, some family members and other people and I was like, "Look this was really impactful for me, you know and I know that I'm sitting there doing the interview and like there while it's happening I'm like, "Man, this is like I'm not learning a lot." 

In some instances you know we will definitely bring a guest on the show that we're both familiar with and kind of want to share their message with you. But in some instances, you know, we kind of know the guest is but we might not really — I have no idea sort of what fruit the interview is going to bear and I think we've both had moments after the interview where we were kind of like looking at each other like, "Wow, that was awesome. I can't believe I just learned all this stuff." So we're along on the journey with everybody that's listening. 

[00:34:00] AF: And it's really cool too because, you know, you can read everything they have you can understand the message. But until you're actually speaking to the person, like the human being, you get a lot more out of it and you learn things like where they became inspired. Where they learned these things. How they managed to apply it to their own lives and a lot of times you really get the underlying stories that really neat. Like potential spoiler alert, we had Kamal Ravikant on the podcast recently and you learn the stories and the experiences behind what he writes, which you can read everything that he's written and still get the message but it's just a whole other level to be like, "Wow, you're a human being actually." And it's very cool. 


[00:34:36] MB: And I think, you know the other piece of that too is a lot of times when you're you know when you're reading a book or whatever else, you can kind of get the idea but you're like, "Well, what about this thing that kind of they don't really address?" And the beauty of being able to actually ask them is you can really dig in and be like, "Yeah I get your main point, but like have you thought about X?" And they're like, "Yeah I did think about that, and like here's," — you know?

[00:34:57] AF: It's neat to see their thought process. Because it's like, "You know, I mentioned that. What's your take on it?" And then they kind of go into theirs and you get a whole different perspective. So we've got a couple things; we've got mental models, we've obviously got the outside of you kind of removing your ego. Then emotions, which is kind of its own jar of cookies, like Pandora's Box. 

[00:35:13] MB: Yeah, it's so much stuff.

[00:35:14] AF: How to control them, how to use them, how to...

[00:35:17] MB: One of my...

[00:35:17] AF: ...push them down if you need to at times. 

[00:35:19] MB: One of my favorite episodes that we did about emotion, and it's funny because the title doesn't say anything about emotion, but my wife actually made a comment about this. But the Dacher Keltner episode was so good, about emotional, you know, understanding your emotions and the title, which is The Science of Power, right? Doesn't really talk about that at all, which is part of the challenge of these titles as we get one sentence to convey like so much more than that. 

[00:35:44] AF: Well, one thing for the audience they might not know is if they haven't listened to it is that Dacher actually consulted on the movie Inside Out, which is like all about emotions, if you haven't seen it. I know we've seen it. I cannot recommend that movie enough. You'll laugh, you'll cry. But behind all the Pixar and the animation, it really is a very interesting way of looking at your emotions as almost people and characters and how they influence each other and compound on one another. Maybe even in some instance, lead others.  

[00:36:11] MB: One of the things my wife said to me about that interview, because I make her listen to many of the episodes. No, she likes listening to them. But she's going to hear this and be like, "I listen to your episodes." She was kind of listening to the first half and she didn't really care much about acquiring power I guess. But then she listened to the second half and she's like, "That was a totally different interview, and it was amazing," and I was like, "Yeah. I mean he's he was a fascinating guest." But yeah, the second half we got really deep on kind of the whole emotional piece of it. 

[00:36:41] AF: Yeah. Which is huge, and honestly it's not what you would think, and that's another great thing about the show is a lot of times you find out that what you might just see on the surface isn't even half of the story.

[00:36:51] MB: And I think one of the biggest lessons for me, and we've seen this theme recur with a number of guests including the interview we did with Peter Shallard, including Cal Newport and several others and this definitely applies to the acquisition of wisdom and kind of building a framework of mental models. There's no such thing as kind of a get rich quick scheme. Or there's no such thing as as you know for your mind, right? There's no such thing as kind of a get smart quick scheme. 

There's no way that you can short circuit a lot of this stuff like it just takes time. It just takes hard, deep work. It just takes energy and focus and that to me was was one of the recurring themes that I think we've seen in a number of different interviews that I've really internalized and it's something that I've learned in my life many times. There's no shortcuts to real wisdom, and there's no shortcuts to the knowledge, right? You really have to put in the work and you have to put in the time and effort and you have to think about it, and you have to use deliberate practice, right? Which is something we've talked about a lot on the show too, and there's no way around that.

[00:37:51] AF: No, and I remember actually when Peter came on, of course you and I both know Peter. Great guy. His advice was like, "Well, I'm sorry to your listeners but like the truth is really unsexy. I mean the whole thing is you need to be accountable and actually get things done," and then same thing with Cal the other day, who was a fascinating guest, it's that you know — like you said, there's no easy way around it and the most value comes from things that are going to be hard. But because they're hard the majority of people never attempt them, which in turn makes those skills valuable. 

So you might be able to sit there and think, "Oh, well if I can do this, this is pretty easy. I'll do that. I'm getting some work done. I'm going to feel good about myself." Well, that might be fine every now and again, but to really make yourself valuable to really understand these mental models and ultimately acquire skills that are going to help you move through life, you really have to sit down and you have to take the time to learn them. And like I just said, it's the fact that 90% of the people won't do that, that makes you the top 10%.  

[00:38:43] MB: Yeah exactly.

[00:38:44] AF: Which is...

[00:38:45] MB: And I mean for people who are listening to this right now, you know, I guarantee you not everybody who's listening is going to go out and really concretely apply this stuff and really learn and build that kind of deep mastery. 

[00:38:55] AF: We hope they do.

[00:38:56] MB: Yeah I hope you do, because you will reap tremendous rewards from it. But for those of you who don't, in many ways, thank you. Because the people who do, do reap huge rewards from if. You know what I mean? 

[00:39:07] AF: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:39:07] MB: And Cal talks a lot about that in deep work and we go into that a lot in his episode about the fact that this ability to sort of concentrate and create really high leverage output is something that is increasingly rare because of things like social media, because of the 24/7 constant kind of connectedness. But it's also increasingly valuable, right? And that compounds together to make it something that is really worthwhile to pursue. 

[00:39:33] AF: Well, it's interesting. To go back to your analogy of the tree is like people are always hung up on what's cool right now. What's that new kind of sexy relevant thing and those are the leaves, right? But because people are always looking at the leaves, they don't notice that what's holding them up, which is ultimately the most successful thing in the world. It's the trunk.

[00:39:50] MB: And the leaves from the leaves change of the seasons, right? 

[00:39:55] AF: Oh, there we go. 

[00:39:55] MB: I just thought of that, and I mean that goes back to the same thing is, focus on timeless knowledge, right? Why would you invest time and energy learning something that's going to be irrelevant in two years? 

[00:40:05] AF: Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. The social media aspect that's really interesting. Cal Newport, I mean he's not shy about at all. He's never, nor will he ever have a social media account and there are people that are like, you know, "Matt, I've got to have an Instagram page for my business, otherwise no one's going to know who we are." Well, Cal's a great example of an author and speaker who is very sought after, has great wisdom, yet like you're not going to find on Facebook. You're not going to find him on Instagram, Twitter. You can find his e-mail address online, but pretty much e-mail is about as digital as he gets.

[00:40:35] MB: Yeah.


[00:40:37] AF: So, we've got mental models. We've got kind of the outside view of things. We have emotions and then we also have decision making and achieving goals. Ane one of the things we really pride ourselves on the show is tactics. Things that you can actually do. What are some of your favorite tactics that you've seen through the past year? Things that you actually implement on almost a granular level that have really kind of stuck with you?

[00:40:57] MB: That's really interesting. That's a great question. You know the things that I feel like some of the best kind of tactics and strategies, and you know that's kind of why — and it's not every interview, but most interviews I try to ask the guest like, "What's one simple thing that somebody listening can do right now?" You know I mean? Or, start today? And one of my favorite tactics is actually something that, it wasn't from a guest interview but if we did the interview on the neuroscience behind Einstein and Isaac Newton's biggest breakthroughs, right? 

[00:41:26] AF: I love that. 

[00:41:26] MB: This is actually from Josh Waitzkin, the chess champion and world champion martial artist, author of the book Art of Learning, which is an amazing book. You know he talks about this kind of daily architecture around the idea of journaling, you know? And we've had a number of guests recommend some kind of form of journaling as a methodology for improving your thought process, improving your decision making and to me that's a super powerful thing and it's kind of the idea and we go in-depth on this methodology. We go into that in depth on the episode where we talk about the neuroscience of how Einstein and Isaac Newton got to their biggest breakthroughs. 

But the way that that happens is through planting a seed in your subconscious and then stepping away from the problem, right? And the easiest way to do this is ask yourself a question of something you're struggling with at the end of the day, you know at the end of your workday. Take some time off, decompress, sleep, wake up, potentially sort of meditate if that's part of your daily ritual, and then before you check your email before you check your text messages before you get kind of bombarded with all of the things that are going to sap your attention. 

Which Cal Newport did a really good job of talking about the content of attention residue and how if you check, even if you just glance over your e-mail, for the next 30 minutes, a piece of your cognitive brainpower is dedicated to processing what happened in that e-mail inbox and you're not getting your full mental processing power, and it takes like 20 to 30 minutes for you to reset back to that. So before you check any of that stuff you want to just do sort of a journaling session on that idea and say, okay like whatever problem or question you pose to yourself, just journal about it for 15, 20, maybe 30 minutes and that's how you really create meaningful and new insights.  

[00:43:04] AF: So I love the idea of stepping away, which is very counterintuitive to solving your problems. But as relevant or as immediate as this morning, so we're sitting here, we're putting some notes together for the show, and I'm trying to think of points I want to bring up and things that connect. And I'm sitting there meditating first thing in the morning and I'm not even really focusing on this at all, like my notes. But it comes to me while I'm sitting there. I'm kind of like, "Oh, these two things align," and then it's very cliché, but think about why you always hear people, "Well I have my best ideas in the shower." 

It's like, "Well, why is that?" It's because your subconscious is holding onto these problems. It's not like when you step away from the computer, or you step away from the paper they're gone. You know, they're in your brain. Your brain is still churning, whether you know or not.  

[00:43:43] MB: Yeah and that's how neuroscience sort of defines and describes the creative process and we go deep into it in that episode. But that to me was kind of one of the biggest actionable takeaways in terms of structuring kind of a daily ritual around that. What about you, Austin? What were some of the biggest things that you took away? 

[00:44:01] AF: There are so many of them, but I've got to tell you, I have a little soft spot for Chris Voss and the stuff that he...

[00:44:08] MB: He's the man. 

[00:44:09] AF: ...brought in. Not only is he the kind of guy I think you could have a beer with, but he had some really actionable things and I've always been really into influence. I know we're both big fans of the Weapons of Influence and then also one of my favorite books is How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie. And those are like, it comes back to things that never change. Actively listening to someone.

[00:44:28] MB: Yeah. I mean, when was that book written? 

[00:44:30] AF: It was back in the twenty's I think. 

[00:44:31] MB: Yeah. 

[00:44:32] AF: But it's still like a top seller, it still makes it's way into like Amazon top hundred books every now and again, I think.  But it's just things that don't change, right? Like listening to someone, actively listening to someone because there's a difference. But for Vos it was just neat to me because it's — those were all things that you can implement almost in your daily life. Like mirroring. Like you were just mirroring me now, and now I'm kind of like looking at you like, "Is he mirroring my hands over here?" But it's just not only that, but it also comes into things like how and why questions, which I love too. Because they really against the root of what they're asking, right? 

[00:45:04] MB: How questions are great. so powerful.

[00:45:05] AF: And it's cool because I'm really not listening to you and I'm really not actively there unless I'm asking these sorts of questions and really taking the time to actively listen. So for me, you know, he brings up the example that's like, "We want $2 million dollars and we're going to release this hostage." And he's like, "Okay yeah that's a that's a great demand, but like how am I going to do that, Matt? How am I going to get a chopper with $2 million dollars here? Like what do you think we should do?" And not only then am I like now on your side and the guys like, "Oh, well I don't know, Chris. I thought you had that handled." And you're like, "No, I don't think so." 

But then you force, not only does it frame us on the same team like, "Oh yeah, we need to get that $2 million dollars in a helicopter. How do we do it?" And they're kind of now in your shoes and they're sort of on your team working with you. Same thing about why, and I love this too. It's like if you're in a negotiation, you come to me and you're like, "Austin, we're going to give you 30 days to hit this target and if you hit this target we're going to give you X." And I'm like, "Well, what is it about 30 days?" And then that might cause you to be like, "Well you know we've got this big thing happening on January 1, and so we need you to have it done in 30 days." So now I understand more about why you need it done in 30 days and what your motivations are. 

[00:46:09] MB: And there's a bunch of psychology research that shows this is a mental model essentially. But when you just give people a reason, even if it's not — like you can literally make up a reason. If you just say why or you say, "Because X, Y, Z," people are more likely to comply with whatever you want them to do.

[00:46:28] AF: And that was an influence, wasn't it?

[00:46:30] MB: Yeah. 

[00:46:30] AF: It's literally, the studies are astounding that if you just put "because" in. I could be like, "Matt, do you mind do the dishes because I want to watch this T.V. show?" And just because I — and that's not a good excuse at all not to do the dishes, but like because I put "because" in the sentence...

[00:46:44] MB: I feel more obligated.

[00:46:44] AF: You're like, "Well, he's got something else going on." So now I'm off the hook, on doing the dishes. That was really big for me, is the how and why and it's something that I immediately was able to do just even having coffee with someone, like you mentioned, and it's like, "You know how are we going to get this done?" It definitely not only diffuses a hostile situation a little bit and kind of brings you together, but it gives you a deeper understanding of where they're coming from, which kind of sneakily gives you the information that you might want and kind of gives you the upper hand. 


[00:47:11] MB: Yeah I mean, I think — and the Chris Voss episode is so packed full of knowledge. But one of the most relevant tools for negotiation that I took away from that is just that the focus on trying to understand what the other person wants and needs, and that is such a critical thing. Whenever I'm in any sort of negotiation or working on a deal, or whatever it might be, my focus is always around the idea of seeking — you know I spend, it's kind of the old thing about Abe Lincoln's sharpening an axe. But I spend the majority of my time just trying to understand the other party and then very little time after that, if you have a really deep understanding of what they want and what they need, it's really easy to kind of see what the overlaps are.

[00:47:52] AF: Yeah, absolutely. 

[00:47:54] MB: One of the other themes that really stuck out to me and was most impactful was kind of the idea of self acceptance, and that I think that and sort of self compassion, self forgiveness. You know we've had a couple episodes that kind of talk about this. The Megan Bruneau episode was really good on that. I think Rick Hansen kind of gets into that and the upcoming — spoiler alert. The upcoming Kamal Ravikant episode, which we've already recorded, was amazing and all of those kind of really touch on that concept, which was something that I really got a lot out of.

[00:48:26] AF: And that kind of, to bring it all the way back to the beginning of a conversation, but forgiveness especially in meditation, and we were trying to practice forgiveness actively. Forgiving yourself is the last step.

[00:48:39] MB: It's really the first step. 

[00:48:41] AF: Well, it's the hardest step for sure.

[00:48:42] MB: It's the hardest step. There's no question about that. 

[00:48:44] AF: People always say, "You are your hardest critic." And a lot of times you might not meet your own expectations and being able to step in and be like, "You know what? I didn't put my best foot forward there, but I'm going to move forward and next time I'm going to do X," is a really good way of kind of accepting the scenario for what it is, and then forgiving yourself as well.  

[00:49:04] MB: Neuroplasticity was another one that that I thought was really kind of an interesting theme that came up again and again in interviews and for listeners who don't know what that is, neuroplasticity is basically the science of how your brain can be physically changed by your thought patterns and one of the core kind of components of that is the idea that this substance called a myelin, which sort of forms around your neural connections. The more you have a thought pattern again, and again, and again these myelin connections build up thicker and thicker, and that makes the connections like run kind of more smoothly and more strongly.

[00:49:37] AF: It's like oil for your car. 

[00:49:38] MB: Yeah exactly, and so the more you have recurring thought patterns, the more you build these self reinforcing neural networks that make those thought patterns strong. But what that means is that you can literally reshape the physical structure of your brain with your thoughts and with mind-body interventions like meditation. I thought that was just a fascinating take away and the way that really concretely get's applied is in dealing with things like anxiety and depression. And we've had a couple interviews that have kind of gone into some of the science behind that. 

The interview with Dr Alex Korb where, he's a neuroscientist that's studied deeply, specifically kind of the physical brain structure around people who have depression and anxiety and he talks a lot about how, and gives very specific instances of how you can use the science of neuroplasticity to remap your brain. The other interview that goes really deep on that, which was an amazing conversation, was the interview with Rick Hanson. He's such a sharp guy and the title of that interview, again, is kind of one of those titles that doesn't nearly give away all of what we talk about. It's such a rich and detailed conversation. 

He goes from you know quoting the Buddha to talking about ego and all kinds of really interesting stuff. The definition of the self, like it goes really deep down the rabbit hole.

[00:51:01] AF: Well, what's interesting about like remapping your brain, your brain is kind of like a muscle. Like you said, you can kind of rewire it to think differently and our brains, and correct me — and I want you to speak to the audience about this. But your brain is kind of hardwired to make you suffer.  

[00:51:13] MB: Yeah, in many ways and I mean that's one of the talking points, I think, in the Rick Hanson episode. You know, your brain and this is actually — we're going all the way back to the very first episode of the podcast, which if you guys haven't listened to, it's actually not a bad episode. It's not one with a guest. It's just me rambling on, but it's called The Biological Limits of the Human Mind, and basically what that means is your brain was designed via the process of evolution for one very specific outcome, and that was for you to survive to a reproductive age, right? 

Your brain doesn't care about happiness, it doesn't care about you sort of living life and enjoying yourself. The only thing your brain cares about is getting you to a reproductive age so that you can reproduce, right? And so in many ways the evolutionary environment that our brains were designed in over millions of years is completely different from the world that we live in today and that disconnect creates all kinds of suffering and all kinds of unhappiness.  

[00:52:11] AF: Well it's like back in the day, Kamal even touched on it. But it's like a snapping twig was something that would like freak out your brain abnormally there to kind of be like, "Oh, is there a tiger over there? do I need to run?" But we really don't have that anymore. So it kind of puts your brain in a weird sort of hyper alert but sensitive state. 

[00:52:28] MB: Yeah I mean, we're always looking for threats to our survival, right? From an evolutionary standpoint that makes sense because the way evolution works, and I really — like I think everyone sort of thinks that they understand kind of how evolution functions. But until I read this book probably 10 or 15 years ago called Nonzero by Robert Wright, which we've actually touched on in a previous interview. I don't remember which guest it was, but we had a guest who recommended that as one of their favorite books and I think that book is the single best book that I've ever read that describes two things. 

It describes kind of the fundamentals of how game theory works, ironically. Well, when you hear about what it's about it's kind of strange. But, it describes how evolution functions and the book Nonzero, it's called The Logic of human destiny and basically what Robert Wright does is go through the entire evolution of human society. From hunter-gatherer tribes, all the way up through the Internet, and analyzes using game theory as the tool to analyze it and looking specifically around the concept of non-zero sum interactions, how game theory sort of shaped and impacted human civilization, which is a fascinating read. He is really funny, and serious one of my favorite books of all time. But anyway.

[00:53:41] AF: Sorry, I don't want to interrupt.

[00:53:41] MB: No, no. Keep going.

[00:53:42] AF: Alright, so we talked about remapping your brain, right? Like, re-hardwiring your brain. Meditation increases grey matter in the brain. You can keep the nerves sharper, so what are the benefits of this? Like if I do this...

[00:53:54] MB: Before we get into that, the finishing point on the whole thing about Nonzero, which is an amazing book, and you know that like completely Blew apart sort of the way that I understood evolution and before reading that I didn't understand it all. And the way that it functions, like people think that evolution, which is also often called "survival of the fittest" and we talked about this actually in the interview with Dacher Keltner a lot, which is kind of tying all this back in. But people think that evolution is is this thing of like these, you know, whoever's like big and tough and strong is the one who always wins, and that's not what it means. 

Literally all that it means is, think of it as like an accidental process, right?  It's whoever happens to survive to reproductive age and happens to reproduce passes on the genes that enable them to do that, right? It doesn't have any sort of motivation. It doesn't have any sort of like driving guide that's trying to take it to a particular destination. It's literally just whatever combination of genes and traits got this organism to a reproductive age and got it to reproduce, those exact genes and traits by the nature of the fact that it made it to that point and did reproduce, are the ones that get reproduced. Right? 

So if you if you really deeply understand that kind of apply it to humans, we were evolved to be happy. We weren't evolved to be, you know, to take over the planet even or to build societies or to combat social ills or whatever. The only thing we were evolved for was to make it to the age of like 25 or 30-ish and have children and the people who happened to do that the most, happened to pass on their genes, and those are the genes that we got. That was a huge like rant, but... 

[00:55:29] AF: No, but that's very interesting is it goes back in and something you touched on, survival of the fittest. I mean, Dacher talks a lot about that and it's not necessarily like the one who can overpower everyone else.  It's not like, if I'm bigger, stronger, and faster than you, and that definitely plays a part in it, don't get me wrong. But a lot of how we gain power is by contributing to society. 

[00:55:45] MB: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:55:46] AF: Those genes, by contributing you become more well liked and thus you're more part of the community, and as a community you're more likely to survive. So those genes end up getting passed along as well. And of course the whole, you know, the traditional thought of it like the strongest, the fastest is definitely not off. But there's also the component of contributing back to society, being a productive member of the tribe that you're a part of.  

[00:56:06] MB: Yeah and I mean again, if you think about that from an evolutionary standpoint it literally means the people who happen to be in a tribal society where they helped and cooperated with each other. Those people were more likely than the people who were inviting and killing each other, to reach a reproductive age. And thus they're more likely to have children that pass on those same traits, right? And so that's how altruism kind of got bred into our genetic makeup, and that's there's actually another book called The Moral Animal, by the same guy, Robert Wright, who wrote Nonezero that delves into that. 

But we've talked enough about that whole kind of theme, but it's really fascinating and it goes all the way back to the very first episode of the show where we went deep on how evolution has constrained your brain and move.  You know we explain these topics in kind of go deeper into it and the Dacher Keltner interview also, gets really deep on that. 

[00:56:54] AF: So, back to the whole remapping your brain, all of that. So what are the benefits? Our brain is obviously hardwired for a world that we don't live in anymore. That we're not really forced to be a part of anymore, and that's the traditional hunter-gatherer survival sort of way.  So by remapping the brain, how can we like level up our lives and live in this society better?  

[00:57:14] MB: Yeah, well I mean I think the most obvious intervention, and the two or three interviews we have that talk about this, are for people who are struggling and suffering, right? With things like anxiety, things like depression, which are brain states that can either sort of come about or that sort of manifest themselves.  You can literally change the physical structure of your brain to remap it so that you can get out of that state of suffering. So I think that's the simplest and easiest application. More broadly, in the meditation episode of the show notes page that specifically, we have so much. There's like 20 studies that are cited there about how meditation adds grey matter to your brain in areas about cognitive processing and decision making and all kinds of stuff. 

So I mean I think it's the simplest way to apply neuroplasticity is if you're in pain or suffering, you're dealing with something like depression or anxiety, you can help to restructure your brain and remap it so that you don't suffer from those things. And the larger benefit is, for people who practice the kind of mind-body interventions like meditation, that can reshape the brain then build gray matter in the prefrontal cortex and other areas of the brain. It helps you be more calm, it helps you be more rational, it helps you be a better thinker, it gives you more cognitive processing power. 

[00:58:27] AF: Absolutely, which are things I think everybody could benefit from having.

[00:58:30] MB: Alright, well that covers many of our favorite kind of themes, lessons, some of some of the best interviews, and some of the insights we personally kind of got out of all of the incredible conversations that we've had over the last year on the show. You know, I think to kind of wrap up I'd love to just talk about for a second like how much the show has grown in the last year, you know?

[00:58:51] AF: It's been a crazy ride.

[00:58:51] MB: Yeah, it's been a pretty wild 2016. You know, I mean we're up to, I don't even know?

[00:58:56] AF: Almost 700,000.

[00:58:58] MB: Yeah. It's going to be close to 700,000 by the end of the year, and it's been pretty amazing kind of getting there. You know we hit number one New and Noteworthy and we've kind of just continued to fortunately land incredible guests to be on the show and had the amazing privilege of kind of talking to them.

[00:59:14] AF: Yeah, and it's really cool, like we touched on earlier, I mean these are — we're learning with you guys. Like, we're learning with these listeners. It's not like we're the ones doling out this knowledge. We're just as excited for some of these guests as you all are.

[00:59:25] MB: Yeah, absolutely. Maybe more excited.

[00:59:28] AF: True.

[00:59:28] MB: But yeah. I mean I think, to start out, obviously we'd love to to thank all of the amazing guests that we've had on the show. You know, everybody who — we can't name names because there are too many of them. But like just every single guest we've got on has shared incredible wisdom, insights. There has just been so many really fascinating people, really interesting conversations and it's been amazing to have the privilege of talking to these incredible people.

[00:59:52] AF: And so many learnings. 

[00:59:54] MB: Yeah.

[00:59:55] AF: I mean, that's really our goal here in the show is to help you guys and to help you all learn and then ultimately make better decisions, take control of your emotions, develop these mental models so that you all can live happier, more fulfilled lives. 

[01:00:04] MB: Exactly and I mean those are some of the major — you know, it's funny because those of the major themes that come out of all these conversations and we don't necessarily select guests around those ideas. It's just these are sort of some of the core, fundamental ideas that don't change through time, that keep reoccurring across so many diverse conversations. The reality is, none of this could be possible or would be happening without the listeners, without every one of you and you know we get these amazing emails and stories and it's so great and I really, really appreciate it. 

You know, hearing from everybody, and I read and respond to every single person who writes in and it means a lot to us to hear from you and it means the world to us that you listen to the show and we've just been humbled and amazed at the traction the show's had and we're so thankful to every single person who's downloaded and listened to an episode, who's left us a review on iTunes, who's joined our email list. All of those things, and we just hope that you get some kind of value out of this and that it's helping you be happier, be more productive, live a better life, make better decisions. Whatever it is for you that you really want to do, we hope that we can in some small way help you with that.

[01:01:17] AF: Sure, and we welcome your comments your questions if you have something you want to mail in. So don't be shy to say hello.

[01:01:24] MB: Yeah.  

[01:01:25] AF: Or share with us something you might be dealing with.

[01:01:26] MB: Yeah, and as I said, I say this on every episode, but my e-mail is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I'd love to hear from you if you do want to email in. You know, one of the things that we'd love to see or hear about is, what do you want to see more of? What you want to see in 2017? You know, this was kind of an experimental episode. Did you like this conversation? Do you want more kind of nontraditional, sort of not necessarily interview-esque episodes? 

This is your show and you guys you guys are why we create all this content, so tell us what you want and we listen. You know, we've had multiple guests on that were recommendations or suggestions from listeners and we went out and sought them out and interviewed them.

[01:02:10] AF: Sure, and on the production front as well, you can always email me too. It's just austin@scienceofsuccess.co.

[01:02:14] MS: Yeah, especially anybody who has any media opportunities. 

[01:02:21] AF: You know one thing else I'd like to hear, like on a real point, is if you put one of these lessons or mental models or one of these tactics in practice, like I'd love to hear some success stories. If you have a meeting that you just killed it because you were mirroring, and now you're getting ready to play golf with the guy, I'd love to hear it too.

[01:02:35] MS: Yeah, absolutely. We love to hear all kinds of stuff like that. Cool, well I think that kind of wraps up this episode. Like we said at the start, this is just a very informal conversation. We just wanted to sort of talk about some of the big takeaways we had from the show this year and we hope that you've enjoyed it.

[01:02:53] AF: Absolutely. Well, it's good to be on. It's nice to be in the mic.

[01:02:57] MB: Yeah guys, Austin's coming out from behind the curtain, sharing his wisdom.

[01:03:00] AF: The wizard of Oz.

[01:03:01] MB: Dropping some knowledge.

[01:03:02] AF: But once again, thanks so much to all of our listeners. 

[01:03:05] MB: Thanks. You guys are the ones that really make this happen. 


[01:03:08] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

This episode was a little different from our normal episodes. If this was something you enjoyed, if you liked the discussion, the back and forth, the conversation between me and Austin, let us know and we can do more episodes like this. We can have more conversations, we can discuss some of the themes from the podcast. You know, this was something new and we wanted to see what listeners thought of it. So if it's something you really enjoyed, if you got a lot out of this episode, please email us and let us know.

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please, leave us a review and subscribe on iTunes. It helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. I get a ton is listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this information?” Because of that, we created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Or by going to scienceofsucess.co and joining our email list. 

If you want to get all this incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talked about on this episode and much more, go to our show notes page. It's at scienceofsuccess.co, hit the show notes button at the top. WE discussed a ton of information in this episode. All of it's available in the show notes page. I highly recommend that you check it out.  

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

Why You Shouldn’t Follow Your Passion & The Rare Value of Deep Work with Cal Newport

In this episode we discuss why you should not follow your passion, the two biggest pitfalls people struggle with trying to build a career they love, the incredible importance of DEEP WORK, why deep work is so valuable and how we can cultivate it, as well as how you can structure your lifestyle to attain autonomy and mastery with Cal Newport.

Cal is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at Georgetown University, He previously earned his Ph.D. from MIT in 2009. Cal has authored several bestselling books including “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” and “Deep Work” both of which have received deep praise from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, and many more. 

If you’re looking for some guidance as you plan your new year, listen to this episode! 

We discuss:

• Why following your passion is bad advice

• The 2 fundamental flaws of the idea that you should follow your passion

• There’s a huge difference between what makes you enjoy a hobby and what makes you enjoy a profession

• The core components of having a happy professional life

• If we don't follow our passions, how do we end up with a job we are passionate about?

• The simple, but not easy, path to having a passionate career

• Importance of building up rare and valuable skills by pursuing an apprecenticeship phase

• How to cultivate skills to attain leverage to get the autonomy and mastery that will make your work meaningful

• The right question you should ask if you are unsatisfied with your job

• The 2 biggest pitfalls people run into trying to find and build a career they are passionate about

• Why you need career capital and how to cultivate it

• There are many many paths you can take that could lead to a passionate career

• We go deep on the concept of DEEP WORK

• We discuss why deep work is increasingly both valuable and rare

• How you can produce at an elite level while working fewer total hours

• How Deep Work is a meta skill that fuels other skills

• Attention residue and how it can crush your cognitive ability

• Why Deep work requires zero distraction. A single glance at an inbox or social media account can disrupt an entire deep work session

• The importance of scheduling deep work far in advance on your calendar

• Why everyone is an artist, and how that changes what work you should focus on

• The danger of focuses on “taxes and paint”

• Deep work is a SKILL not a HABIT and it gets better with practice

• How to stretch your ability to concrete

• Lifestyle changes you can implement that create the foundation for deep focus and deep work

• How to break the cycle of addiction to novel stimuli

• Why you should schedule all your deep work on your calendar ahead of time

• Exercises that you can implement right now to train your concentration

• Why Cal recommends that you should embrace boredom

• Your deep mental addiction to new stimulus and how you can break it

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant and Sheryl Sandberg

• [Book] Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success by Adam M. Grant

• [Website] calnewport.com

• [Book] Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World by Cal Newport

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success with your host Matt Bodner. Welcome to the Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind in what makes peak performers tick with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss why you should not follow your passion. The two biggest pitfalls people struggle with trying to build a career they love. The incredible importance of deep work, why deep work is so valuable, and how we can cultivate it, as well as how you can structure your lifestyle to obtain autonomy and mastery with Cal Newport. 

The Science of Success continues to grow with nearly 700,000 downloads. Listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one New Noteworthy and more. A lot of our listeners are curious about how to organize and remember everything. I get tons of listener emails and comments asking me how I keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to podcast, and much more.

Because of that, we created an awesome resource for you and you can get it completely free by texting the world “smarter” to the number 44222. It’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. Again, you can get it completely for free by just texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. 

Listeners are loving this guide, I get emails all the time people telling me how much this has helped them organize their information and keep track of all the incredible things they learn from this show and all the other things in their lives that they’re doing to improve themselves. Again, you can get it by texting “smarter” to 44222 or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and putting in your email. 

In our previous episode, we discussed the incredible power of kindness, showed how kindness triggers the helper’s high and causes dopamine and oxytocin to flow through your brain. Looked at study data from a 136 countries showing the science behind why kindness is so powerful. We walked through several concrete examples you can use right now to take action and be kind to someone today, and much more, with John Wang. If you want to take small, immediate action to make the world a better place today, listen to that episode now.


[0:02:31.5] MB: Today, we have another amazing guest on the show, Cal Newport. Cal is an associate professor of computer science, at Georgetown University. He previously earned his PhD. from MIT in 2009. He’s authored several bestselling books including So Good They Can’t Ignore You and Deep Work. Both of which have received incredible praise form the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist and much more. 

Cal, welcome to the science of success.

[0:02:53.7] CN: Hi Matt, thanks for having me on.

[0:02:54.6] MB: We’re so excited to have you on here today. Before we dig in to some of the topics that you’ve written about, for listeners who may not be familiar, tell us a little bit about you?

[0:03:02.9] CN: My day job is I’m a computer science professor. I study sort of the mathematics behind the algorithms that run a lot of the computer systems at the heart of our digital life today and then my sort of side gig, as you might call it, is to actually write books and that’s where I tackle these type of issues around this technologies affect our life and how people can thrive and succeed in this sort of new world.

[0:03:26.0] MB: In one of your earlier books, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, you talk about the concept of sort of pursuing mastery versus pursuing your passion and finding your passion. I’d love to kind of share that with the listeners and for those who haven’t read it, sort of explain to them kind of the core premise of that book.

[0:03:40.6] CN: Yeah, the core idea, which is an idea that got me in some trouble and I like that is that follow your passion is bad advice. That if your goal it to end up passionate about what you do for a living, that advice that you should follow your passion is probably going to reduce the probability that you end up succeeding with the goal. That that career advice that we’re told almost ubiquitously, at least in recent American career conversations and culture, is actually way too simplistic and quite flawed and doesn’t capture the more complicated and more interesting reality of how people actually build careers that are satisfying, that are motivating, that generated a true source of passion.

[0:04:16.0] MB: Why do you say that it’s bad advice to follow your passion?

[0:04:19.5] CN: Well, this idea that you should follow your passion is dependent on two core assumptions being true for it to work. The first assumption that has to be true for this advice to actually make sense is the idea that most people have an identifiable, preexisting passion that they can then use as a foundation for career choices. If you don’t have this clear passion that exist in advance, the advice makes no sense because there’s no passion to follow. 

And it turns out we don’t have a lot of evidence that his is really common, especially for younger people. We don’t have a lot of evidence that most people should be expected, to be hard wired with an identifiable passion that’s somehow relevant to the jobs that happen to be available in the 21st century knowledge economy. That first premise is required for this advice to be true, it’s something that doesn’t necessarily hold up.

The second premise that has to be true, the second assumption that has to be true for this advice to make sense is that if you really like something and then you do that thing for your job then you will really like your job, that sort of passion or interest in a subject will transfer over to a professional engagement in the subject and again we don’t have a lot of evidence that that’s true either. It’s one of these syllogisms that kind of makes intuitive sense when you first hear it, “Oh yeah, I really love this so if I’m kind of doing that for my job, I’ll really love my job.” 

But we don’t actually have a lot of evidence that that’s true. In fact, think about all the clichéd stories we hear about the passionate amateur photographer, or the passionate amateur baker who ends up miserable when they open a professional photography studio or a bakery. Those type of stories alone tells us that what leads people to be satisfied in their work is much more complicated. 

So with those assumptions destabilized, this idea that “oh just figure out what your passion is and do it for your job, and you’ll love your job” goes from seeming like self-evident, great advice to instead being something that seems simplistic and not supported. I think we need to move on to something that’s a little bit more sophisticated if we’re serious about actually crafting meaningful careers.

[0:06:01.5] MB: You know, the second assumption especially kind of rings so true to me that that’s fundamentally flawed. One of my favorite things, one of my favorite kind of hobbies is to play video games. And you know, if I thought about it, if I was forced to play those 12 hours a day and I had to do that in order to kind of earn an income, I think eventually you kind of reach a place where you sort of resent what used to be something that you’re really passionate about and really enjoyed.

[0:06:23.7] CN: Yeah, that’s absolutely true. Because there’s a big difference between what makes you enjoy an activity that you do in your leisure time and what makes people enjoy a profession. What makes you enjoy an activity in your leisure time is its’ own sort of thing, but we have a lot of research on what leads people to find motivation, passion or satisfaction in professional endeavors and it has nothing to do with matching that activity to preexisting interest.

The things we know matter in the professional world is for example, a sense of autonomy. You control what you do, how you do it, when you do it. A sense of mastery is also important. You’re good at what you do, you have a craft that you’re respected for. A sense of impact on the world is very important. A sense of connection to other people on things that matter. These types of traits are what consistently lead people to say, “I’m passionate about what I’ll do,” and you’ll notice that none of those traits have anything to do with you match the job to some sort of preexisting, intrinsic trait you had before you chose the job.

Again, this idea that we’re wired to do something and if you get a job that matches it, you’ll really like that job, it makes sense, it’s intuitive, it’s easy but it really couldn’t be further from the sort of the reality, the psychology of how people actually develop this passionate motivations for their professional endeavors.

[0:07:32.2] MB: I’d love to dig a little bit more into that and kind of the idea of instead of following our passions, I’d love to explore kind of the concepts that you said, what can we do to end up with a job that we’re passionate about?

[0:07:42.1] CN: Once you understand, okay, the types of traits that lead people to love their work or things like autonomy, like mastery, like impact, like relationships and connections, the question then is, “What is the most effective and time efficient way to get those traits in your career?” Now we have a much more specific question that we can actually tackle more technically. If you study this, you study people who have succeeded in obtaining those traits and building passion in their career, you see there are many ways that people get there. 

There’s one path in particular that comes up the most often and is probably the most consistently replicate-able and it’s a pretty simple path, though it’s hard to execute, and it basically says, “Skills are your currency.” Those types of traits that make your job great, the type of traits that make people love their work are rare and valuable. If you want them in your career, no one cares that you want them, it’s not enough to say, “That would be great, how can I get them?” You have to have something valuable to offer in return in a job market that’s almost always going to be rare and valuable skills.

So the most consistent path to building passion your career is to go through an aggressive and intense apprenticeship phase, where you are trying to build up rare and valuable skills, things that are unambiguously valued by the marketplace. Step two is you then use those skills as your currency or as your leverage to obtain in your work, these highly desirable traits that lead people to great satisfaction; the autonomy, the impact, the mastery, the connection with other people and so on. 

So it’s really this kind of two step process. You build skills and then you invest those skills to try to gain more control of your career and steer it towards this traits that we know you really enjoy. So if someone says, “I really don’t like my work,” the right question is not, “Well, let’s do some introspection and see if this is your true passion. If not, you need to switch your job.” The right question is, “Well how much rare and valuable skills do you have? How valuable are you to your field of your marketplace?” 

If your answer is “a lot”, then go out and use that stuff as leverage and if the answer is, “Well, I’m not really that valuable, I don’t have any rare and valuable skills,” then the right answer is not “Switch your job and follow your passion.” It’s, “Well we got to build up that capital quick, we need to get you good at what you do, we need to get you some leverage and authority in the job market place as quickly as possible.” So it’s really a focus on not what does this job or the world offer me, it’s instead a focus on what am I offering to the job, what am I offering to the world of value?

[0:09:52.1] MB: I think that’s such a critical distinction and you hit the nail in the head in the sense that people are often asking the completely wrong question. Sitting there thinking, “Well what about this job that I’m not passionate about, should I be changing?” When in reality, what they really should focus on is, “What can I do to better serve this job so that I can then build leverage and create a job that will give me autonomy and mastery and the things that truly lead to a living and passionate life?”

[0:10:15.6] CN: Yeah, and the hard part about it, the reason why a lot of people fall short is that there is two pitfalls in actually executing the strategy and a lot of people who are sort of aspirational to have a really meaningful job falling to at least one of these two pitfalls. The first pitfall is trying to make a move to get these great traits in your life before you have the skills, or what I sometimes call the “career capital”, to back it up. If you say, “Okay, I want autonomy in my life I want a ton of mastery and connection and impact,” and you’re 21 years old, you have no particular skills built up and you quite your job and go start an ill faded online business venture or some such, without anything to back it up.

Well you say, “If I was really successful at this, I’d have all these traits,” that’s a pitfall. You haven’t built the skill yet, you haven’t built the career capital. On the other hand, something you see just as commonly, is people who build up a lot of really rare skills or invaluable skills but they never step back and use it as leverage. We have how many sort of miserable workaholic lawyers you know for example who are actually incredibly valuable to the world and to the job market place. They have this very valuable skills they built up, but they never stepped back and used them as leverage. They’re good without actually using that to build a good job.

So I think what’s hard about it is avoiding both pitfalls. It’s first of all making sure you have enough skill to actually have real leverage before making the big changes. But then two, when you get there, having the courage to actually pull the trigger on that and use the skills and take them out for a spin and so if you can navigate both those pitfalls then I think you have a pretty consistent path to passion.

[0:11:41.2] MB: So for somebody who is listening now that feels stuck in a job that they kind of feel like they’re not passionate about, your advice would be focus first on developing a truly valuable skill set before you think about kind of getting to the next step of building the pillars of what actually, create a passion and career?

[0:11:58.1] CN: Yeah, that’s right. There are two things you have to have, you have the career capital, which is again my metaphor for these rare and valuable skills; the more skills you have, the more career capital you have. You have to make good investments on the capital once you have it. Those are the two questions you have to ask if you're unhappy in a position, “What are my career capital stores look like and am I ready to be making investments?”

If you have good career capital, you need to start thinking about investments, which is, “How do I use my skills as leverage to change my situation in the way that resonates?” If you don’t have good career capital skill stores, the question is, “What can I do to build those up as quickly as possible?” Now of course, I’ll give you the caveat; it’s not the case that every person can be passionate in every job, but I think the threshold is much lower than we like to think. We like to think right now in our current culture conversation that there’s one job in which you can be passionate. That’s what I think is nonsense. 

I think for most people, there’s many different paths in which if they build and invest career capital, they could be very passionate. That being said, there’s obviously some that aren’t going to be, right? If there’s a job where you hate the people, you’re not going to be able to go passion in that no matter how much per capital you get. If there’s a job that is doing something that is actively against your values. You’re not going to be happy in that no matter how much career capital you have. 

If you have a job in an industry that is not going to allow you to invest career capital, they say, “I don’t care how good you get, this is the path you have to follow and you have no flexibility. There is no investment that you can make in your skills to change things.” You’re probably not going to be able to build passion in it. So not every job is going to be a source of passion but many jobs will. 

So you first kind of want to do this filtering, “Hey, is this a position where if I got really good and use that skill as leverage, I could see a lot of opportunities for me to build compelling paths?” If the answer is yes, that’s good enough. Now you can buckle down and execute this strategy, which is assess your career capital stores, get them large and then start making investments.

[0:13:45.3] MB: So we’ve talked a lot about building skills and developing career capital, I’d love to transition into talking about a skill that you’ve written extensively about, which is deep work. I’d love to kind of begin with how do you define deep work?

[0:13:57.9] CN: Deep work, which is a concept that came in part out of this conversation we just had, sort of a reaction to people asking, “How do I build up career capital really fast?” It is a very specific activity, which is when you’re focusing without distraction for a long period of time on a cognitively demanding task. So you’re giving something hard, your full, completely unbroken mental attention. If you’re doing that, you are executing deep work.

[0:14:23.0] MB: You write about the idea that deep work is both rare and valuable, tell us a little bit about that?

[0:14:27.6] CN: What’s interesting about this activity of deep work in our current moment is that, I think there’s a strong argument to be made that is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. That is, the better you are at performing deep work, the more intense levels of concentration you can obtain, the more time you’re able to spend in these states of concentration, the more valuable you’re going to be to the economy, especially in the knowledge sector.

The term the economists used was “deep work is like the killer app for the knowledge economy”. At the same time, it’s becoming more rare. People are becoming worse at performing deep work. People’s ability to concentrate is diminishing, people’s tolerance or scheduling ability to actually have long bits of unbroken time is also rapidly going away. So we have an economic mismatch. 

A skill that is becoming more valuable at exactly the same time that it’s actually becoming more rare, which any economist will tell you, means that it’s going to be really, really valued in the marketplace. So I see it as an opportunity that if you’re one of the few to systematically cultivate your ability to do deep work, you’re going to have huge value in the marketplace just like if you’re back in the early 1980’s and getting out ahead of I’m going to really learn computer programming and advanced level.

You’d have a lot of value in the marketplace. You’d be out in front of a trend. I think deep work is that sort of killer app of our current moment. That those who systematically train that skill can take advantage of that economic mismatch and find themselves with a whole bunch of career capital in the marketplace.

[0:15:50.5] MB: So, the implications of this are that for the fact that it’s both increasingly rare and increasingly valuable, it’s something that’s going to become really in demand and people who focus on kind of developing this ability to focus on deep work are going to be rewarded substantially?

[0:16:07.4] CN: Yeah, I believe that to be true. 

[0:16:08.8] MB: So for a listener who kind of thinks about this and says, “Oh, you know, he’s kind of a luddite, he doesn’t really get the importance of social media and staying connected and being plugged in to everything,” how would you respond to somebody like that?

[0:16:20.5] CN: The marketplace is pretty simple. It rewards things that are rare and valuable. If you can do something that people value and not a lot of people can do it, it will reward you. If you can’t, it won’t. There really is no shortcut around it. There really is no way to take something that’s kind of fun and easily replicatable and if you just do a lot of it that it’s going to somehow make you very valuable to the marketplace. 

This, for example, is my issue with social media as being seen as some sort of key to your career. Being on social media, doing hash tags, retweeting things, putting things on the Facebook wall is fundamentally and easily replicatable, low value activity. There is no hard earned skill involved in doing that and you can wave around a lot of terms like network effect and connectivity and serendipity and connection and opportunity.

But it doesn’t change the underlying fact that it’s just an easily replicatable, low value activity and that cannot be the foundation of the marketplace really rewarding you. My observation, especially when I was researching So Good They Can’t Ignore You, I was going out there in all sorts of different industries, all sorts of different fields, to find people who were very passionate about their work who were at the top of their game is that the way they got there is that they built up, systematically and deliberately, a craft or a skill that was very valuable.

As they built up the skill, there is plenty of opportunities, a lot of interesting things happened in their life, they were connected to interesting people, a lot of things came across to trans them. That was not the issue. The hard part was building up the skill and if being on social media is getting in the way of doing that, you have the equation entirely backwards.

Rare and valuable skills is what’s rewarded. Building a craft, applying a craft, that’s what the market wants to see. that’s the foundation of a life of passion and meaning and satisfaction and anything else, it could be fun, it could be diverting, but it’s not going to be at the core of that success.

[0:18:02.9] MB: I’d love to dig into some of the data about why deep work is so valuable.

[0:18:08.2] CN: There’s really two big reasons why deep work has this growing value, the first reason has to do with learning complicated things. So in order to learn something that’s new or complicated, you have to enter a state of deliberate practice. A state in which you’re giving intense concentration to the task at hand because we now know from decades of psychology research that to learn something new, you essentially have to stretch your comfort level with that information just like you would have to stretch your muscle past where it’s comfortable to actually get muscle growth.

That’s a state of deep work. So the better you are at concentrating intensely and maintaining intense concentration, the easier it will be for you to master cognitively demanded or complicated to do things. Now, the ability to quickly adapt and learn complicated new things is crucial in the increasingly competitive knowledge economy. If you can’t keep up with the new systems and ideas, you're going to fall behind. So that’s one where deep work is really becoming more valuable. 

The other is, it helps you produce higher quality work in less time. The amount you produce per hour spent in deep work and the quality of what you produce can be significantly more than if you’re working in a more fragmented state or a state with lots of just checks of inboxes and phones. So if you’re very comfortable concentrating intensely on something, giving something your full or cognitive attention for long periods of time with no distraction, you can produce at an elite level. 

This too is becoming very valuable in the increasingly competitive knowledge economy because if you’re not producing at an elite level and whatever field you happen to be in, you’re going to be at increased danger of being automated, outsourced, or replaced. So deep work is like this meta skill. The meta skill that fuels the more concrete skills that are necessary to stay on the right part of the sort of growing my modal divide in our increasingly competitive knowledge economy, if you want to be on the winning side of this increasing divide, you’ve got to be able to pick up parts quickly, you’ve got to be able to produce an elite level. The better you are deep worked, the more you prioritize it, the better you're going to be at those two things, which we know are going to be crucial to staying ahead.
 
[0:19:58.5] MB: So the idea that you can produce higher quality work in less time, is deep work the kind of thing that you need to be working for 12, 15 hours a day, totally concentrated? Or can it work in shorter bursts?

[0:20:10.6] CN: 90 minutes is about the lower limit where you’re going to start to get a lot of use out of deep work. The reason is that what deep work helps combat is an effect called attention residue, which says when you shift your attention to another target and then back to your original piece of focus, that new target can leave a residue in your head that actually reduces your cognitive performance for a non-trivial amount of time before it clears out.

This is especially true for sort of open loop style targets. So if you shift real quickly and see an email in your email inbox or you know you need to answer and it’s semi-urgent but you don’t want to answer it right now and then you shift back to the hard thing you're trying to do, that’s going to be a sort of a very strong layer of attention residue which is going to, we now know from studies, is going to really significantly decrease your cognitive performance. Your brain is going to be operating at a lower level. You’ll produce less and it’s going to take you longer to produce things and this can take a while to clear out. 

So if you aside 90 minutes for deep work, for example, you might spend the first 20 or 30 kind of clearing out every last vestige of that attention residue and then the next 60 minutes you’re really operating at a high level and actually getting some things done. That attention residue effect, however, is also why deep work requires by definition zero distraction. A glance to an inbox, a glance at a social media feed invalidates that period of work is being deep work, it’s no longer deep work and the reason is, as we know, those quick glances can have an impact for 15, 20 minutes. 

So if you’re glancing like most knowledge workers do, you say, “No, I’m single tasking. I’m just trying to write this thing, I’m giving it my full attention and I’m only just glancing at my inbox every 10 minutes just to make sure nothing important is in there or just glancing at Twitter just to give my brain a little bit of a break,” You’re essentially keeping yourself in a sustained state of reduced cognitive performance. 

It’s like taking an antineurotropic. A drug that’s optimized to make your mind worse or perform at a lower level. So that does it all to keep work, you're not going to get the benefits of high level production. For those reasons, you need at least 90 minutes to do deep work but certainly 15 hours. You absolutely have to be completely distraction free for a period of time to actually count this step and get the true benefits of that.

[0:22:12.0] MB: Personally, how much time do you schedule either sort of daily or weekly for deep work and how do you escape all of the kind of the myriad of distractions, everything from phone notifications, to emails, to colleagues coming down the hallway and asking you a question?

[0:22:27.5] CN: I spend two and a half to three days in a five day work week doing deep work on a typical week. The way I make that happen is I actually schedule my deep work on my calendar about one month in advance. So it’s on their far enough in advance, that time will be protected before people start asking, “Hey, can you do a meeting, can you jump on a call, can you do an interview?” So I know that time is protected but before people are going to start requesting for that time. 

I used to just try to schedule it the week of, but the problem is, by the time you actually got to the week, you would have agreed to a lot of things, each of which is reasonable by itself but spread out enough that you have no unfragmented pieces left in your schedule. So I like to do at least one or two full deep work days where it’s essentially that’s all I’m doing and maybe get another half day of deep work in there as well.

When I’m doing deep work, I’m doing deep work. If someone tries to contact me, they don’t get through to me until I’m done with the deep work and if someone’s like, “Hey, I couldn’t get through to you.” It’s like, “Yeah, I was in a thing and now I’m not. Now I can get back in touch with you.” That’s okay. It could be annoying for some people who are used to working in this sort of reactive way where everyone’s available all the time and you can have these back and forth conversations, too bad.

I guess if that’s your work flow that you require this sort of ad hoc, on demand communication with everyone you work with, you’re not going to work well with me. That’s how I do it. I protect it very seriously. I see it at the core of succeeding on what I do and it makes other things clear. How do I schedule meetings, how do I schedule this other things? Well, if today is not set aside for deep work then it’s fair game for that. So I have plenty of time still available for meetings or for interviews like we’re doing right now or for calls or coffee. I’m not cut off from the world, but it’s a clear division for me. This is when I’m doing deep work, this day is open game for other types of things.

[0:24:06.1] MB: I’d love to look at some sort of successful people who have used deep work and some examples that you talk about in the book of kind of people who leveraged deep work to produce incredible outcomes. Are there any particular stories from the book that jump out at you as kind of some of your favorites?

[0:24:20.6] CN: Well one of my favorites, because it’s kind of close to what I do, is the work habits of the professor and author Adam Grant. He’s a business professor at Wharton but your audience probably knows him from his more popular books like Give and Take and Originals is his current book. The thing about Adam is, in addition to being a very successful and bestselling writer, he’s also a very successful academic.

He became a full professor at a very young age and was the youngest full professor at Wharton and one of the youngest full professors in the history of Wharton. If you wonder how did he do this, how did he become the youngest full professor at the best business school in the country, l at the same time he’s also this bestselling writer? It turns out if you ask him that deep work is at the core of his strategy that he leverages deep work and by doing so is able to produce a lot more than his peers. In particular what he does is at the high granularity level, that’s sort of the high level, he puts all of his courses into one semester. 

So instead of teaching some in the fall and some in the spring, he puts all of his courses typically in the fall. When he’s in the fall, he says, “I’m teaching, I’m there, my door is open, I’m focusing on my classes, my students can come in.” He’s won best teacher award at least once at Wharton, which is very hard to do so it works fine. Then that means the spring and summer that follows can be dedicated much more purely to working on his research, which is the key obviously to success at a school like Wharton.

Within those research periods, what he then does is he’ll put aside periods of time that will be multi days in length where he’ll go deep with zero distraction on whatever the cognitive task is required to make progress on his current research projects. So, “I’m going to go deep, I’m going to figure out this data or I’m just going to write the whole paper. One, two, three, maybe four days in a row.”

During those periods, he puts an out of office responder on his email so that his colleagues will see it as if he’s overseas. “Look, I’m out of office until Thursday, I’ll get back to you then.” So he’s completely unreachable and he just goes deep when he’s working on his research. Now if you actually count up the total number of hours that Adam Grant spends in those sessions working on research, I don’t think it would be more than what sort of his average peer spends on research year round at a competitive or comparable elite business institution. Yet, if you look at Adam Grant’s CV, he’s publishing almost the factor of two more peer view journal articles in the typical professor at a typical elite business university. This is how he became a full professor at such a young age. 

So what’s happening is, because he’s prioritizing deep work, long sessions of completely undistracted time, he is producing more quality and more output per hour spent working? In the same number of hours that one of his peers works, he is producing almost twice as many papers and because he’s focusing on deep work, he wants to concentrate intensely, he protects his ability to concentrate, he does it for long periods of time. He’s getting a lot more out of his time.

[0:27:02.3] MB: The kind of opposite of deep work, you talk about the concept of shallow work. How would you define that?

[0:27:07.8] CN: I just define shallow work to be anything that’s not deep work. So if it doesn’t match the definition of deep work, it is shallow work. There is nothing intrinsically bad with shallow work and obviously almost every job requires different degrees of shallow work just for your position to operate. You don’t do shallow work, you’re going to lose your job. But I think it’s important to make a distinction between deep work and shallow work because they’re not the same thing.
So it’s not just enough to say, “I’m busy. I’m working all the time.” The real question is how much your work is keep work versus shallow work because the right way to look at it is if you work for someone else, shallow work is what’s going to keep you from getting fired, deep work is what’s going to get you promoted. So if you’re busy, that means nothing if what you’re mainly doing is shallow work because you’re actually not doing a type of stuff that’s going to get you ahead. 

If you run your own business, it’s the same sort of idea. Shallow work might be what keeps you from going bankrupt in the next few months, but deep work is what’s going to 10X your revenue over the next year. So the distinction is important not because shallow is pejorative or shallow work is bad, but it’s because you have to treat both type of efforts differently and recognize that shallow work might be necessary but deep work is the whole ball game in terms of moving ahead.

It’s where you master new skills, it’s where you produce those skills in elite level to produce things that are valuable. The stuff that gets you noticed, the stuff that gets you promoted, the stuff that gets your company to grow. So the question is not how busy you are, how much work you're doing. The question is, how much deep work are you able to do in your typical week, because that’s really what’s going to move the needle.

[0:28:29.3] MB: In many ways, that seems very aligned to me, of kind of the concept of urgency versus importance and the idea of that in many cases the kind of not urgent but important items are often the biggest, most high leveraged items that can have the most substantial impact on your life and in your career.

[0:28:46.2] CN: Yeah, it’s the same type of idea that’s come up before. This is actually just getting more specific about what the actual work activities feel like. For an artist, this is obvious. An artist knows the time he or she spends at the canvas is the time that matters, right? Producing art, trying to produce better art, that creative struggle is everything in terms of the artists success. And the other stuff, like doing their taxes or sitting with the catalogs and order new paints and canvass, it’s obviously something, though a necessary evil, is something that they know clearly, “This not helping my career. If I spent all day doing my taxes and ordering new paints and easels I’m not going to get anywhere.”

The reality in the competitive knowledge economy is essentially everyone’s an artist and so you really have to worry how much time am I actually spending struggling with a blank canvass and how much time I’m spending in doing my taxes and ordering the paints? And I think for a huge segment of the knowledge economy, people are spending all of their time on a proverbial taxes and paint ordering side of things. 

Email, meetings, PowerPoint, social media post, engaging with people in social media, that’s all the equivalent of the artist doing their taxes and ordering new paints and brushes. You’ve got to do it at some, but it’s the time that you spend at the canvass the only time that’s actually going to help you produce value, succeed, to grow, to make money, all the stuff that you actually care about. 

[0:29:59.9] MB: And I think you use a phrase in the book where you talk about the comfort of the artificial busyness of shallow work of sitting in your inbox and firing off emails. When in reality, that’s not really creating a lot of value. 

[0:30:11.6] CN: Yeah, it’s not rare and valuable. Anyone can CC an email, anyone can reply to an email, everyone does it. There is over a trillion sent each year. There’s no way that sending emails is going to ultimately lead you to more value or producing more advancements in your career or in your company’s growth. It’s producing things that are valuable require a sort of sustained, intense concentration and the knowledge economy, your brain is the tool you have.  

So using that at a high level is absolutely the biggest return activity you can do and I think our cultural conversation has veered away from this too much and we really love secondary benefits. “Well but if I connect with this person on Facebook and then it could turn out down the road that they become a client and that client becomes a big source of revenue,” and then from that observation suddenly you are spending 99% of your time on Facebook connecting to people, doing things on Facebook and not actually producing things of value. 

I think that focus on secondary benefits is a real issue because their value is being way over emphasized and it way under emphasizes the value of actually producing stuff that requires skill and that pushed your brain to it’s limit. That’s 90% of the whole thing. That’s the whole ballgame in some sense. There’s no amount of seeking out the secondary effects of connectivity and networking and communication and opportunities and all these sort of things. None of that is going to even hold a candle to the value that is produced by doing things that are rare and valuable. Honing your skill, applying your skill that produce things that are valuable. 

So I think we’re in this moment right now where inspired by advances and network technology that we’ve adopted a lot of that terminology in the business world and we are focusing way too much attention on the importance of connections and serendipity and out there selling your services and letting people know what you are and not nearly enough attention on the thing that we’ve known for millennial of skilled labor, like the core to success and satisfaction, which is actually honing the skill and applying it to the produce things that people care about. No amount of social media posting in the world can compensate for “I don’t really have something to offer that is all that rare in value”. 

[0:32:09.1] MB: For somebody who’s listening that is caught up in the world of shallow work and busyness, is it possible for them to train themselves to transition to a world of deep work? 

[0:32:21.3] CN: It is possible and I think the keyword is “train”, because this is something that people often get wrong. People often think about deep work as a habit like flossing their teeth. Something they know how to do is they need to make more time to do it. They’re like, “I should probably turn off my devices more. Do some detoxing, spend more time doing deep work.” The reality is that deep work is a skill much more like playing the guitar. It’s something that gets better with practice, and if you haven’t been practicing it pretty seriously you’re not going to be very good at it. 

So if you take the average American knowledge worker who spends very little time in a state of intense concentration and you whisk them away and you put them in a Faraday cage in a cave somewhere where no electronic signal can possibly penetrate it and you give them, “Here, you’re going to do this one hard thing and you have no possibility of distraction. You’re going to be here all day.” They would probably struggle and probably not produce much because they haven’t actually developed their ability to do deep work. Just like if you took someone off the street and put them on stage with a guitar and said, “Okay play a concert,” they would struggle to do that too because they haven’t practiced the guitar yet. They don’t have any skill at it. 

That distinction is important to make because a lot of people who don’t recognize that dabble with deep work and then it doesn’t go well. It’s uncomfortable. They don’t like it, their attention is fragmented and they say, “I must not be a deep work person,” and they give up on it all together. But if you recognize that it’s a skill that you have to train, then you say, “Well yeah, of course this is uncomfortable and didn’t go well, I’m new to it. How do I get better?” So a long preface to my answer, but you’re asking the right question when you say, “How do you transition or train into deep work?”

And I can tell you the very high level there’s two things involved. One is the active efforts you can do to actively stretch your ability to concentrate. So there’s actual activities you can do such as Pomodoros focused on intense focus. You start at a small amount of time and gradually move them up productive meditation or you go on walks and try to hold a single problem in your head and make progress on it and so on. 

There’s also passive things you have to do, which is changes you make to your lifestyle the sort of set the foundation where it’s possible for you to develop a deep focus ability. So just like if you wanted to be a professional athlete, let’s say you want to be a professional triathlete, there’d be active things you do. Particular training runs, training rides, training swims you do to increase your athletic ability. But there would also be changes you did to your lifestyle so that you would be more generally fit. You would eat well, you would get a lot of sleep, you won’t smoke, for example. 

The same split holds we’re getting better at deep work. The active stuff is important but so is the passive stuff and to me that means restructuring your lifestyle in particular so that you don’t live in this constant exposure to novel stimuli. You have to structure your lifestyle such that you’re bored more often and that you break the cycle of addiction that at the slightest hint of boredom you whip out a phone or a computer screen to get yourself bathed in some sort of quick novel stimuli so you’re not bored for a moment. 

If you do that, if you’re bathing yourselves in this distractions, your keeping these addictions going. It’s like drinking milkshakes or smoking if you’re the professional athlete. It’s the things that you are doing outside of work are making it much harder to succeed with the sort of active things you’re trying to do inside work. So you’ve got to train your ability to do deep work. It’s going to require active activities to stretch your ability but it’s also going to require passive activities, changes to your lifestyle that set the foundation for it to be possible for you to use your brain at a high level. 

[0:35:26.9] MB: What are a few of those active activities? I know you mentioned Pomodoro, what are some of the things for somebody who’s listening that wants to start training their concentration? 

[0:35:35.9] CN: Yeah, so a couple of things I would suggest. One, start scheduling some times on your calendar for doing this deep work training. Don’t just count on the time being right, don’t just count on being, “Hey, I think I don’t have too much to do and I’m in the mood to concentrate.” Don’t count on that. Schedule it in your calendar. At first it doesn’t have to be much. Do two or three hours a week, one or two sessions, put on your calendar, treat it like a meeting or appointment. 

So if someone tries to schedule something during that time, treat it like you have a doctor’s appointment, “Oh, I have a thing from one to 3:30, but we could do it after that or before it.” People already understand the semantics of appointments and schedules and they’ll respect that. Two, during those times you can do a variety of different exercises. The Pomodoro thing is important. The key thing there is increasing the amount of time and during the Pomodoro itself, giving as intense concentration as you can on what you’re doing. 

A key caveat is that even a slightest glance of at inbox means that Pomodoro doesn’t count. That was a failed deep work session and so what you want to see is that you’re having consistent success with a given timeframe. That you are able to do Pomodoros of that duration that are non-failed with no glancing at distraction and which you also kept your concentration high. Once you are regularly succeeding at a given time interval, then add 10 or 15 minutes to it. 

So you might want to start with 20 minutes. If you’re new to it, it might take you a couple of weeks to get comfortable with that and then you go to 30, then you go to 45 and so on. Productive meditation I mentioned, that’s about you go for a walk and you try to hold a single professional challenge in your brain and make progress on it, just in your head. The meditation pieces are referenced to mindfulness meditation, which says if you notice your attention wondering off the problem you are trying to solve, which it will do, you just notice it and bring it back. Notice it and bring it back. It’s pull ups for your brain. Do it for three weeks, you will be surprised by how much more steadier you are able to keep your concentration. 

The final thing I will mention is essentially any activity, whether it’s professional or not, that requires sustained concentration and that you get immediate negative feedback if you are concentration slips, is also like calisthenics for your brain. So playing a musical instrument, playing a skilled sport, playing a skilled board game or card game, anything where you have to really concentrate and if you let your attention slip, you’re going to miss your chord on the guitar or miss the pass in the touch football game, or make a bad bet in the poker game, that’s also training. 

You are training, you are giving your mind practice with focus on something hard, and if you slip your concentration at all, you are going to know about it. So those are three examples of many that I think could actually just like pushups, like pull ups, like going for sprints but for your brain you can see pretty quick improvements to your abilities to sustain concentration. 

[0:38:11.3] MB: So potentially something like a video game could actually be a tool that could help you maintain concentration if it really draws you in and creates a lot of focus? 

[0:38:20.1] CN: Yeah, even a video game could be, right? If it was a cognitively demanding game and you get clear feedback, which you often you do in these games, right? If your attention slips bad things happen. You get killed or your ship crashes or — you can tell I don’t play video games but absolutely. So all of those things can help you actually train your ability to concentrate. 

[0:38:36.5] MB: You touched on the idea of cultivating or embracing boredom. I love to dig into that a little bit more. 

[0:38:40.5] CN: Yeah, so this comes back to this general cognitive fitness idea that you have to set the general background capability for your brain to succeed and perform at a high level and to me, embracing boredom is the cognitive equivalent of living a generally healthy lifestyle in the world of sports and what I mean by embracing boredom is that you need on a regular basis every single day occasions where you’re bored, you would like to see other stimuli and you don’t. So you don’t look at your phone, you don't look at the computer screen you just keep doing what you’re doing and you’re bored. 

Why this is important is that if you don’t do this, your brain will build up this addiction in which it demands and expects stimuli at the slightest hint of boredom. The reason I care about that is because deep work is boring. At least in the technical definition of the term of being an absence of novel stimuli, if you’re focusing on one thing for a long period of time, it’s not novel after the first 15 to 20 minutes. 

So if your brain has learned, it gets a shiny treat when it gets bored when the stimuli gets boring, it’s not going to tolerate deep work. It’s not going to keep its focus on something. It’s just going to refuse. It’s just going to say, “Well, wait a second, we get a cigarette every 15 minutes. Where’s my cigarette? No, I am not going to concentrate on this, give me my tweet or internet break,” and so you have to break that addiction. 

You have to break that addiction if you’re going to succeed with using your brain at the elite level and the best way to do it to give yourself plenty of opportunities to be bored during the day, then your brain loses this association that it always gets stimuli. So it doesn’t necessarily mean that you get rid of your technology. What it means it that your technology no longer gets to be ubiquitous in your life. If, for example, you really like Facebook then great but say when are you going to use Facebook. 

“I really like it and tonight at seven I’m going to go on it and I’m going to check out on what’s going on, I’m going to check up on people, check in on my groups but until I get there, I don’t check it.” If you really like Twitter say, “Okay I’m going to put aside some time in the day to go through my Twitter feed and see what’s going on and check in with people and tweet some stuff,” that’s fine but it is not a background ubiquitous activity. 

If you like web surfing or MLB Trade room or some type of thing that keeps people like me occupied these days, that’s fine but there’s a particular time in which you do it. So it’s not necessarily embracing boredom about rejecting technology but about rejecting the premise that it gets to be ubiquitous presence in your life and say, “I will decide when I’m going to use technology just like I don’t keep a TV with me at all times during the day and turn it on at the slightest hint of boredom. It’s a completely reasonable thing to do and it has very positive consequences. 

[0:41:00.5] MB: Yeah, I think that is something so important and it’s so easy to get trapped in a mental addiction of, “Oh I need to look at my phone. I need to click the newest thing on Reddit. I need to see who’s messaging me.” It’s so easy to, you know, your brain really develops an addiction to these new shiny objects and I think taking a detox from that is something that would benefit everybody. 

[0:41:21.2] CN: Yeah and the key thing here is it’s not about occasionally taking a break from it. In fact I switched the script there. Because imagine we’re talking about losing weight and imagine I said, “Okay, here’s the key. The reason you’re gaining weight is because you are eating all this terrible food and you are not exercising enough. So here’s my plan, you’re going to take one day a week and on that day, you’re going to eat healthy and you’re going to exercise.” 

People say, “Okay, I’m still going to gain weight,” right? It’s like six days out of seven I’m eating crappily and not exercising. It’s the same thing with the addiction of the stimuli. If you say, “Well, every once in a while I want to put away my technology. I’ll take the Sabbath, on Saturday and not use my technology.” That’s not going to cure the problem. You have to flip it and you have to say, “I’m occasionally take breaks from not having all of these stimuli to expose myself to it.” 

So I don’t like the detox term or the digital Sabbath term because it means your standard state is exposing yourself to these addictive stimuli and then you occasionally take a break. That’s not going to change digital addiction any more than taking one day a week to eat healthily is going to change weight gain. It really needs to be your default state is one in which you are not exposing yourself to the stimuli and then like sweets or drinking whisky or something like that, it’s a scheduled activity you do occasionally. It’s the thing that you occasionally do not the thing you occasionally take a break from. 

[0:42:32.0] MB: Putting in that context makes it so clear that it’s so easy to delude ourselves and think it’s okay to constantly be in these mental addiction loops. But when you put it in the context of food and dieting, it becomes fairly obvious that it really is a transition that almost everybody listening would benefit from making. 

[0:42:49.6] CN: Yeah and once you see it that way, I think it becomes a lot more clear but it’s very hard to see these things when they’re new and I think this is the issue. The addiction is strong and I’ve noticed this, it’s the same thing you see when people have addictions in other parts of their lives when you start to push back on it, you sometimes get defensiveness and “it’s not about this, it’s about that” and it’s exactly the reaction I often get when I’ll say like I did recently in the New York Times column, “Hey, I don’t think social media is helping your career as much as you think it is. More people should quit.” 

A lot of people got upset and it reminded me a lot about, you are telling the smoker, “I don’t know if you should be really smoking the cigarettes.” They’re like, “Ah, it’s about this and that and liberty and freedom,” and really it’s “don’t take away my cigarettes”. The same thing happened when I said, “I haven’t seen a lot of evidence that this is helping people’s careers as much as they say it is, and I know the distraction is hurting it, so I really think a lot more people should quit.” 

I got a lot of pushback but very little of the pushback was, “Let me tell you particularly where you’re wrong. Here are the ways in which this is massively helping my career and massively helping other people’s careers.” It was more just sort of “You don’t understand social media and it’s the future and you’ll never know and people are on it and I know this guy who got a book deal,” and it was this frenzy of anger and response. That’s typical with an addiction. I think we should be more scared of this stuff than we are. We’re not going to leave technology behind. I’m a computer scientist for god sakes, but I think we can absolutely say, “I get to determine how I use it and not the other way around”. 

[0:44:07.5] MB: The crux of this argument in many ways is that we’re going through sort of economic transition and a technical transition and we’re still learning how to adapt to it. What groups do you think will be the biggest beneficiaries from this transition and the rising importance of deep work? 

[0:44:26.6] CN: Well certainly people who have embraced deep work is going to be the group that benefits. Now are you asking for where we are going to see like what types of groups are we going to see that split the deepers and non deep happens sort of more pronounced or first? 

[0:44:39.5] MB: Yeah, for sure. 

[0:44:40.6] CN: Yeah, well I don’t know for sure. It’s very hard to predict economic trends but there’s a couple of places where we are going to see this divide happen quickly and I think one of those is going to be in the world of computer programming and software development. Right now, there is not a major emphasis on protecting and cultivating people’s ability to do deep work, especially computer programmers, which are essentially brains your hiring to do this highly skilled thing at the highest possible level they can do it. 

My prediction is we’re going to see a split in the next 10 years or so where there’s going to be a leading edge of companies that really aggressively start to prioritize deep work. Forget open offices and we’re starting to see now. Like Fog Creek Software is really good about this. They build these individual offices that are optimized to increase your ability to concentrate but I think we’re going to see more companies like that. 

And maybe some of the big Silicon Valley companies will make the first shift where they’ll say, “Forget open offices, it’s going to be incredibly quiet private offices, and you know what? Maybe our programmer shouldn’t have email addresses. We can hire someone for your team to handle all incoming messages and they can tell you once a day what you need to know. I don’t want that distraction and forget Slack. I certainly don’t want my programmer with a Slack thing going, right? 

That’s like buying a piece of expensive factory equipment and running it at 10% of it’s capacity because it makes your life a little easier. And a couple of companies I think in that place first are going to make the shift first because you really see, in computer programming in particular, giant differences in ROI depending on how skilled the output is. Really great code is really much better than okay code in terms of the value of the software. That’s where I think we’re going to see this split first. There will be some small companies and followed by a couple of big companies that really push towards more of a deep work-centric approach. 

Suddenly, they’re going to have a much easier time hiring people. They’re going to become much more productive. They’re going to produce more innovative software. They’re going to do so in smaller teams and then there’s going to be this tipping point where 10 years after that, everyone in that industry is going to be better. So that’s the bell weather I am looking through right now is where we’re first going to see some people get huge advantages by embracing these ideas. 

[0:46:36.8] MB: What roles or positions do you think might kind of be the exception to deep work hypothesis? 

[0:46:42.6] CN: Basically any role where honing and applying a cognitively demanding craft is not at the core of the value that you offer. So there’s a bunch of different things that fall into this category. There are a lot of, for example, entry level jobs that fall into this category where you are not hired — right out of college we hire you, you’re an assistant for this group or something like that. You are not hired for a hard one skill that they want you to apply to produce craft. You are there to make everyone else’s life easier. 

So that’s a case where long periods of time spent in deep concentration is actually not bringing any value. However, if you are in one of those positions you should be trying to build up rare and valuable skills on your own time so they can move out of that as quickly as possible. I think high level management positions, it’s debatable the value with deep work. I’ve argued, for example, in the book that CEO’s of large companies are better understood as decision engines.

The right way to understand the role of a CEO in a valuable company is that they have a lot of experience so they have a large base of experience but also they have a consistent vision for the company and then other people bring them decisions, should we do this or should we do that? And based on those experience and that consistent vision they make decisions and that’s probably a more effective use of their time than them actually trying to do the deep work behind the decisions by themselves or spend 10 hours thinking deeply on a consistent basis. 

Also of course, I think people that are in primarily communication oriented roles. I mean if you’re in sales, you’re schedule is going to be fragmented in the sense that it actually calls and touches and contacts the core. Now you can do that deeply in the sense of, “I want to do this as well as possible and really study up on sale success,” but you’re not going to have long periods of unbroken time. There’s other areas as well. There’s a lot of people who do social media professionally. 

All they do all day is social media on behalf of brands. I mean obviously it’s a position in which you’re best serving people by actually just being on social media communicating with people to go on these tools. So there’s certainly jobs where deep work doesn’t help but I think it’s much more rare than people imagine and essentially, the key question is, is the biggest value you can offer to yourself or your organization you applying a hard one craft that produce things that are rare and valuable? If the answer is yes then the more deep work you do, the better. 

[0:48:52.0] MB: What’s one piece of homework that you would give our listeners to implement some of the ideas we’ve talked about today? 

[0:48:57.1] CN: I always tell people to do two things. The first is to drop on your calendar for the next few weeks, those deep work blocks I talked about. Make it like a doctor’s appointment, protect them and just get some practice, two to three hours a week doing deep work. Two, make some passive lifestyle changes and I think one of the most important easiest changes you can make is start scheduling the time that you’re going to spend receiving entertainment or distraction from the internet. 

Maybe at first you are scheduling a lot of time for that, fine. But have some autonomy over it and start scheduling when you’re going to look at social media, when you’re going to look at the internet, when you’re going to stream entertainment and start to gain some control about when you do that, when you don’t. So make that lifestyle change, drop two to three to four hours of deep work into your weekly schedule in your calendar. 

Do that for a month, I think you will lay a good preliminary foundation from which first of all to judge whether you really do want to get serious about deep work and two, you are well suited to actually act on that decision if you decide yes. 

[0:49:50.9] MB: And where can people find you and your books online? 

[0:49:54.5] CN: So I have a website, calnewport.com and you can find about the books there. Also I blog on there about a lot of these ideas. So if you want to explore some of these ideas, you can there. The books themselves are available anywhere books are sold, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and so on. The one place you won’t find me is on social media because I’ve never had an account. 

[0:50:13.6] MB: Well that makes sense. Well, Cal, thank you so much for coming on here and sharing your wisdom. This was a fascinating conversation and I think listeners who really apply deep work will see huge dividends from focusing on it. 

[0:50:25.7] CN: Well thanks, Matt. I really enjoyed the opportunity to talk about it. 

[0:50:28.3] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the science of success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. I get a ton is listeners asking, “Matt how do you organize and remember all this information?” Because of that, we created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Or by going to scienceofsucess.co and joining our email list. 

If you want to get all of these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talked about on this show and much more, you can get all of our show notes at the website, scienceofsuccess.co. Just hit the show notes button at the top. You can also get show notes for all of our previous episodes. If you haven’t been checking that out, there’s a ton of amazing resources on there. I highly recommend getting our show notes and checking them out. 

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

How One Simple Act Could Massively Transform Your Brain Chemistry Today - The Power of Kindness with John Wang

In this episode we discuss the incredible power of kindness, show how kindness triggers “the helpers high” and causes dopamine and oxytocin to flow through your brain, look at study data from 136 countries showing science behind why kindness is so powerful, we walk through several concrete examples you can use RIGHT NOW to take action and be kind to someone today, and much more with John Wang.

John Wang has spent the past several years researching the scientifically proven benefits that being kind to others has on our own lives. Making us not only happier, but healthier, and even more attractive! John is also the founder of The One Kindness Challenge which transformed a personal experience into a mission to spread the healing powers of kindness. Through unique accessories called kindness bands, The One Kindness Challenge seeks to remind us to commit at least one act of kindness each day and to help spread the message of kindness wherever we go. 

• How John’s personal challenge transformed into a mission

• John’s Lessons learned from taking homeless people out to lunch for a year

• How John’s visit to Nepal after the Nepalese earthquake changed his life

• The evolutionary purpose of Kindness

• Why people aren’t kind often enough

• Johns experience from practicing radical honesty for an entire year

• What is the one kindness challenge?

• We walk through the feelings and experiences of a moment of kindness

• Kindness is triggered by the Vagus Nerve

• How kindness triggers “the helpers high” and causes dopamine and oxytocin to flow through your brain

• Even the smallest acts can trigger the same effect as large acts of kindness

• Consistency in kindness it he MOST important thing

• 21 day challenge will transform your life

• Why kindness is more important now than ever

• How one Uber ride can change your life

• Its not about the words its about making a connection

• How social media has replaced real connection with fake connections

• How a single smile could transform someone’s life

• We dig deep into the science behind kindness

• How study data from 136 countries showcased the incredible power of kindness

• We walk through several concrete examples you can use RIGHT NOW to take action and be kind to someone TODAY

• John shares some incredibly inspiring stories from his own life about sharing and creating kindness

• Research data showing how kindness literally makes you live longer

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Website] One Kindness Challenge

• [Website] One Kindness Challenge - Kindness Ideas

• [Book] Radical Honesty: How to Transform Your Life by Telling the Truth by Brad Blanton

• [Video] "Unsung Hero" (Official HD) : TVC Thai Life Insurance 2014

• [Video] Stealing Can Be Forgiven, Thai Commercial

• [Video] Free Hugs Campaign

• [Video] Denali

• [Book] Why Kindness is Good For You by Dr. David Hamilton PhD

Research Links

• Prosocial Spending and Happiness: Using Money To Benefit Others Pays Off - Students were given $5 or $20 and some told to spend it on themselves and others told to spend on others. Those who spent on others actually ended up being happier and the more they spent on others the happier they were. This research also held up across countries, even poor countries.

• From Chronic Pain Patient to Peer: Benefits and Risks of Volunteering - Study examines the effect volunteering had on chronic pain patients. They found after volunteering they reported less pain and also feelings of depression went down.

• Psychological Differences in Elderly Volunteers vs. Non-Volunteers - Volunteer workers over age sixty-five were compared to retired elderly who did not engage in any type of work activity. Volunteers were found to have significantly higher degree of life satisfaction, stronger will to live, and fewer symptoms of depression, anxiety, and somatization.

• Reactions To Random Acts Of Kindness - We gave 122 people a flower. We did not find significant differences in reactions to kindness by age of the receiver. However, we did find that women responded more positively to kindness than did men. Also people tended to respond more positively to kindness when the giver was white regardless of the race of the receiver.

• Sex Differences in Mate Preferences: Evolutionary Hypothesis Tested in 37 Countries - Study shows that being kind actually does make you more attractive and this was found across cultures.

• Volunteer Work and Well-Being - This study shows that volunteers actually reported feeling more satisfied and have greater life satisfaction and self-esteem.

• Volunteering and depression: the role of psychological and social resources in different age groups - There are a number of reasons why volunteering might yield mental health benefits, especially to older people. Volunteer work improves access to social and psychological resources, which are known to counter negative moods such as depression and anxiety. Analysis of three waves of data from the Americans' Changing Lives data set (1986, 1989, 1994) reveals that volunteering does lower depression levels for those over 65, while prolonged exposure to volunteering benefits both populations.

• Volunteering Is Associated With Delayed Mortality In Older People

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee, and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study, and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss the incredible power of kindness, show how kindness triggers the helpers high and causes dopamine and oxytocin to flow through your brain, look at study data from 136 countries showing the science behind why kindness is so powerful. We walk through several concrete examples you can use right now to take action to be kind to someone today, and much more, with John Wang. 

The Science of Success continues to grow, with more than 685,000 downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one New and Noteworthy, and more. A lot of our listeners are curious about how to organize and remember all the information that we talk about on this show. I get tons of listener emails asking me, “Matt, how do you keep track of all of this incredible knowledge that you get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to podcasts and more?” 

Because of that, I’ve created an awesome resource for you. It’s called, “How to organize and remember everything.” You can get it completely for free, all you have to do is text the word “smarter” to the number, 44222. It’s a guide, again, we created called, “How to organize and remember everything.” Listeners love it, I get emails all the time from people telling me how great it is, and how it’s helped them organize all the incredible information they get from this show, and all the other things in their lives they used to improve themselves.  Again, you can get it completely for free. All you have to do is to text the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email. 

In our previous episode, we discussed the errors people make in their reasoning and how to correct them. We explained a number of statistical principles to help sharpen your thinking and make you a better decision maker. We looked at why every $1 spent on a Scared Straight program creates $400 in additional cost to the criminal justice system. We talked about the illusion of objectivity, why you should not rely on your intuition, and much more, with Dr. Richard Nisbett. If you want to make better decisions and build a tool kit to do that, listen to that episode. 

[0:02:30.2] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, John Wang. John has spent the past several years researching the scientifically proven benefits that being kind to others has in our own lives, making us not only happier, but healthier and even more attractive. He’s also the founder of the One Kindness Challenge, which transformed a personal experience into a mission to spread the healing power of kindness. We’re going to dig more into that, but John, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:02:53.1] JW: Thanks Matt, I appreciate that. 

[0:02:55.0] MB: Well, we’re super excited to have you on here. For listeners who may not be familiar with you or the One Kindness Challenge, tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us your story. 

[0:03:02.3] JW: Well man, every single year I try to take on a little personal challenge for myself. So like, one year, I did radical honesty, which is you have to go and tell only the truth. You can’t lie, not even lies of omission, and ever since that one year, I got addicted to seeing how I could push my personal experience in life, which gave a new perspective on how I view the world. 

One other year following that is that I started taking people I was meeting on the street, especially homeless people, out for lunch. So every single day, if I see somebody who’s homeless, I would just say, “Hey buddy, can I take you out to lunch and then chat with you about your story?” And then we’d chat over lunch, and they were telling me what their life journey has been, and it was mind blowing. A lot of these people have such rich stories and histories. 

So this year, I was kind of without a story, and I realized that I didn’t really have missions myself. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I reached a point in my life where I was pretty happy and comfortable with what I wanted, but I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to take on, what the next challenge was. Now I travel a lot, so I’ve been to over 40 different countries. Travelling around the world, I saw a lot of different cultures, but earlier this year, I was in Nepal. 

I don’t know if everyone is aware, but Nepal has just gone through one of the worst natural disasters of an earthquake over the last year and it has done some really tremendous damage to the country. But when I was there and I was seeing that even though there was a lot of changes that these people have had suffered through, infrastructure, some of the stuff wasn’t working, they were having electric shortages, they were having shortages of gasoline and stuff like that, I found that the people there were probably some of the most giving and warm people I have ever met. 

I mean, people were going out of their way to try to add to our lives and help us in any way. At one point, I was coming back from this little hike, and we’re stranded on the street, and I had three different cars stop and ask if they could give us a ride. I was blown away. I was like, “You guys have gasoline shortages, so why are you trying to give this random stranger rides?” and they were just saying, “Well, because it’s just a thing that you do and it adds to your life.” 

So that philosophy really stuck around with me. So I came back to North America, and I was just going about my day, and I was just realizing that it was the winter time and I was having low days, and I was just low on energy and stuff like that. One day I was driving up out of an event, and I was with a friend, and on the street I saw this guy that I’ve known. I wasn’t very close with him, but I have met him at a couple of events, I met him at a couple of parties. 

I pulled over and I said, “Hey buddy, where are you going? Do you need to go somewhere? Let me give you a ride,” and he said, “Well yeah, I need to get groceries. I could walk.” I was like, “No, hop in. I’m going to drive you to get groceries,” and so he hopped in, and it was at 1 AM, so we had to drive all around downtown Vancouver looking for a grocery store that’s open 24 hours, but we found a place, and we hopped in to the grocery store. 

We walked around, and we chatted and we laughed, we got to bond a little bit, and at the end of it, he was so thankful. He was like, “Look man, I really appreciate this. I was going to just take a walk over, and that would have added another hour to my evening. So I just want to say I really appreciate what you’ve done,” and I was like, “No worries,” because at that moment I felt so incredibly happy. It was this random bizarre thing, I was having a low day. I was having this tired day and I was like, “Man I feel really great!” I feel like stoked, I feel excited. I was enthusiastic.

So I came back home and I was like, “Is there a reason for this?” Because I was always a little bit of a psychology and science nerd, so I’m like, “There’s got to be studies about this.”  So I [unintelligible] and did a Google on kindness and how it makes us feel, like, where is that coming from. As it turns out, there’s been tons of studies done, but we just have been terrible at talking about it. As it turns out, kindness isn’t just a thing that you do for other people. It is directly tied into how it makes us feel, and we’re going to talk about this later on, but there’s an evolutionary purpose to why it is that kindness is one of the strongest driving forces in making us happier and I just thought that was really cool.

 So after the event, I was like, “Well dude, I’ve got to get this out there. I’ve got to get other people doing this, and feeling like this all the time, because if just this one little act could make me feel so much happier, and so much more energized, and so much more passionate, what will happen to the world if we get thousands of people doing this?” So anyway, that’s how the One Kindness movement started, and we went and started doing research on how we could best remind people, because I mean, honestly, I think most people want to be kind. 

I think it’s not really a surprise to say kindness makes us feel good. Everybody knows that, but we just didn’t know why. We just didn’t know how it made us feel, exactly what the process was, what exact chemicals are going through our brain, what is that trigger that makes you feel the hit of dopamine and see that rise in your oxytocin levels? The biggest reason why we don’t do it often is usually because we don’t get reminded of it enough. 

And that was the second part of it. Well okay, we need something to create a psychological anchor, and in the past, I did a little bit of research into NLP and how anchors work, and I was like, “Wow, well why don’t we merge that together? Why don’t we create something that can create a physical reminder that, whenever we looked at, it would remind us of how we felt, and it will remind us of why we do this, and even more powerfully, it will remind other people of why we do this. 

So the band, basically, if you want to take a look at it, and you can check out designs of the band, it’s on our website, which is onekindness.org. It’s just a simple wristlet, like a bracelet, and then there’s a little part where you can flip it over, and once you flip it over, you could see our logo. So every single morning, you start by wearing the bracelet on one side, which says One Kindness, which just reminds you go out there and do one kindness, one act of kindness. 

Because really, it is a daily consistent act that build ups, and after you do your one act of kindness you flip the band around, and then you see the logo, and it just reminds you that you have done it. Other people see it, and they’re like, “You’ve done it!” They remind you of that, and you get to inspire the people around you to do more of that. Isn’t that cool? 

[0:09:11.5] MB: That’s awesome. I mean, that’s some fascinating challenges that you’ve put yourself through. I mean, everything from radical honestly to taking homeless people out to lunch for a year, that must have been really, really insightful, and I can see how that inspired the journey towards the One Kindness Challenge. 

[0:09:26.9] JW: Yeah, radical honesty was a fun experience, I will say. It was a difficult experience. I mean, not to say that I’m not an honest person most of the time. I am, and I try to be, but you’d be surprised at how often we tell these nice little pleasant lies that kind of, it’s a way just to make our day a little bit easier. If somebody asks you, “Hey, how are you doing?” and we go, “Great,” even if you’re having a crappy day, and we think well, what’s wrong with that? 

We don’t want other people to get involved, we don’t want to start a huge conversation. That makes a lot of sense, but as it turns out, a lot of dishonesty actually creates a sense of disconnection from people. So if you ever get a chance to check out the book Radical Honesty. It’s by a brilliant psychologist. His name is Robert Blanton, and he started a movement about radical honesty, but we’ll get into that some other day, because I think today we’ll just talk about kindness.

[0:10:22.0] MB: Definitely. So you touched on and talked a little bit about the band. Just to reiterate, what is the One Kindness Challenge itself? 

[0:10:28.9] JW: It’s actually a really simple thing. Now at the end of the day, like I said, we all want to do kind things. We all realize the power behind kindness, but it’s easy to forget, even right here with us right now. You could think of a time where you’ve done an act of kindness, it could be recently, or it could be from a little while back ago, and I want you to picture that. Picture what it is that you’ve done, or picture what it is that you’ve been seeing somebody else do, and how that made you feel, how that experience felt. 

Like, just take a moment, just really immerse yourself in that memory and how did that make you feel? What are the feelings that you’re going through? What are the experiences that you’re going through in your body? And in that moment, even just now when you are remembering it, when you are picturing yourself there now, what you’re experiencing could be one of a few things. Maybe you are experiencing some level of warmth. Like warmth that is starting up at your chest area, and it could be feeling like this calmness, this serenity and happiness. 

So what is happening there is that your kindness is actually triggered by this thing called the vagus nerve, which is right at base of our brainstem, and the vagus nerve basically controls things like your digestive track and your body functions, but more importantly, it controls your heart and your heartrate. So this has been linked in a lot of ways, the Vegas Nerve to empathy, and feelings of sympathy and empathy, which is why a lot of times when we see somebody doing act of kindness, you get that same feeling as if when you were doing it yourself. 

If you have ever watched those videos, you can go into these great series of videos that are made by a Thai insurance company, and one of the videos has this guy just going around doing these daily simple acts of kindness, and he’s just going around helping people do things like water plants, and helping old ladies cross the street, helping street vendors, giving some money away to somebody who’s perhaps living on the street and not as fortunate as he is, and he’s not a rich man or anything like that. He’s no Bill Gates, he’s no Elon Musk, or some great philanthropist, he’s just some guy trying to make people’s lives better. Every time I watch that video, I get that same feeling. I want to tear up. I just feel like this amazing sense of joy and everything like that. 

So what I’m experiencing, what you’re experiencing in that moment when you’re watching that and feeling that, and remembering that, is that you’re getting a hit of dopamine. You’re getting this hit of oxytocin in your body, where that level is going up, and you’re feeling what scientist have now called “The Helper’s High”. It actually is kind of a high, because you really do get this thrill from it. So our goal with the movement is very, very simple. 

We’re trying to get as many people doing a daily act of kindness, and like I said, it doesn’t matter if you’re doing a massive act like, “Oh, I’m going to go out and help build a shelter, build a hospital down in Peru,” or if you are doing something extremely simple, which is just like, “I am going to open a door for somebody, I’m going to help that lady in the parking lot with her groceries. I’m going to go up at someone and say, ‘Hey listen, I just want to say I really appreciate you and what you’ve done.’” 

Or you might write a note of thank you to my old high school teacher, or my old friend who once helped me and I never got to really express that. All of those count as acts of kindness, and the funny thing about that is that, as it turns out in these studies, there’s not a massive difference between the size of the work that we do, but there is a massive difference in the consistency. 

Which is to say, if you do one act, like let’s say you do one massive act in one day, and then you don’t do anything again for six months, the effect of that is not anywhere near as powerful as if you were to do, let’s say, 21 days of these smaller acts, which is why we tell the people who are part of our movement, we say, “Look, you could participate in this, we hope you participate in it forever, just what an amazing thing you’ll be doing in the world, but at the very least, try it for 21 days. Do it once a day for 21 days, and see how it makes you feel.” 

I can guarantee you, it will change your life. It would change the way you see the world. It would change the way people look at you, which is another thing that we talked about, which is actually kindness makes you look more attractive to the opposite sex, and to other people, which is great, but it would change your lifestyle. It would change how you feel. So our goal is to try to get a million acts of kindness out there, because it’s very clear that right now, we need to more kindness in this world more than ever. 

Whatever your politics is, whatever your background or culture or history is, I think it’s pretty clear that right now the world is going through some changes that, let’s just say, there may be more to this, right? People are becoming a little bit more disconnected. People are becoming a little bit more distant from each other. So we need to build that back into our societies. So that’s what the movement is about, We’re trying to get people to go out there and do 21 acts of kindness at the very minimum, and just watch their lives change. 

[0:15:24.7] MB: You know the insurance company commercial that you mentioned, which we’ll include in the show notes, is amazing. The first time I watched it, there’s a moment where some of the seeds that he planted, I don’t want to spoil it, but it starts to show, to bear fruit, I guess, and I literary broke down bawling and crying. It was such a powerful video, so I definitely recommend everybody listening to check that video out. It takes three minutes, and you’ll definitely get a huge emotional reaction and a hit of oxytocin, dopamine, etcetera, but I think you made a really good point.

[0:15:56.6] JW: I think it was you who told me about the video, Matt. I actually think it was. We were on a call before, and you were going and were like, “Oh, you’ve got to go check out this video,” and you’re absolutely right. I started to bawl. I am not a person who gets emotional very easily. I’m not a person who cries very easily, but man, when I saw the video I definitely started tearing up. 

[0:16:16.5] MB: Yeah, it’s super powerful, but for listeners who want to check it out, it will be in the show notes and you can find it there and watch it. I think you made another really good point as well, which is that regardless of the current political climate and everything else, even with just the advent of the internet and the way that people consume information today, we’re so much more solo and cut off from other people in many ways. 

You know, being a millennial myself, when I want to order food, I would rather interact with a phone than go interact with a person, you know what I mean? And so finding a way to reach out and connect with people, I think, is really, really powerful.

[0:16:49.5] JW: I completely agree with you, and I am exactly like that. I’ve got all of these ordering apps, and if you take a look at what made Uber very popular in a lot of ways, it’s not just the fact that it’s a convenient way to get a taxi. It’s also the fact that now there’s a way that we can just enter the address, and we could pretty much just hop in the car, never say a word, and then arrive, and then hop out of the car and just be like, “Yeah, thanks.” 

[0:17:12.6] MB: Sorry, I didn’t mean to cut you, I was going to say the funny thing about Uber is it’s funny, because it definitely taps into that dynamic. I’ve had so many interesting experiences with Uber drivers, where if you just engage them, you can peer into their lives and have some really fascinating moments of connection in a 10-minute car ride. So you can flip the script a little bit, and if you want to, it’s a really cool opportunity to meet people that are totally outside of your sphere of influence, or the way that you normally live your life. 

[0:17:39.7] JW: I absolutely agree with you. It’s one of those things that’s easy for you to make a connection with somebody, and note that that’s what I always really emphasize. That it’s not just about saying hi. It’s not about the word, it’s about making a connection, and we’re really lacking at that right now in society, because we have Snapchat, we have Facebook. I have, I think, over a dozen different messaging apps on my phone. I don’t even know why I have so many. 

I’m like, “I have this one.” I’m pretty sure that at a certain point, I’m going to start having more connectivity services than I have real friends that I hang out with, and there’s something not right about that, but we’ve replaced real connection with this kind of false image of connection. We replaced going up to somebody and saying like, “Wow, I saw the picture of your trip. That was amazing! Tell me about what the trip was like,” with Facebook likes and Instagram hearts. We’ve turned into this O-connection society, which is a tragedy, because there’s so much to be had in making that human connection, that we never know how much power that is. We’re becoming more and more disbanded. We’re becoming more and more lonely, but there is so much power in reconnecting. 

You know, in the 1970’s, there was once a man who walked onto the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, and then he crawled over the ledge where there is a railing, and he sits there and he thought for a moment, and he jumped. He plummeted 220 feet or so, hit the water, and didn’t make it. 

His psychologist, who with the help of the medical team afterwards, basically went to his apartment to try to find out what had happened. His psychologist’s name is Dr. Motto, and they went into the guy’s house, and they went up to his desk and his bureau, and on his bureau was this note, and all it said on there was, “I’m going to the Golden Bridge today. If one person smiles at me along the way, I will not jump.” And it was such a harrowing moment. 

The psychologist, later on, had an interview with the New Yorker, was recounting this experience as it’s something that’s so small, that was all he was looking for. I’m not saying that that’s the only thing that that person needed, and I am not saying that all the people who are going through depression or difficulties, that’s all it takes to get them out of it. Certainly, I don’t want to diminish the experiences and the difficulties that they’re going through. 

But day to day life, from what most of us are looking for, is not a massive thing. We don’t necessarily want to have 15,000 best friends, but on a day to day basis, we just want that human connection. That’s what we are. We are humans, we’re social creatures. We started off as social creatures, and we still are social creatures, and technology has started to replace real connection with messages, and Instagram likes, and all these things that aren’t real human-to-human emotions. 

And that affects our physiology, that affects our psychology at a very deep level, because that is what we are, evolutionarily speaking, accustomed to, and we’ve had that taken away from us, right? Which is a tragedy in this day and age. I was recently at a conference called Socialite, which is a gathering of all these people who are talking about various things that make the world a better place, and talking about things like entrepreneurship and businesses that have these social elements built in. 

For example, Tom Shoes is a great example of this. They have this thing that they do where if you buy a pair of shoes, they would give away a pair of shoes to somebody who is needy, and I was very fortunate to have been invited to be the opening speaker there, and we talked about the One Kindness movement, and the project, and how were going to get a million acts of kindness out there in the world, and get all these people, hundreds of thousands of people to do daily acts of kindness, and seeing what the effect would be. 

The crowd was absolutely phenomenal, that they were excited about the idea, and what was really cool with that, after I gave the talk, people are coming up to me and they were telling me about all their stories, and they’re telling me about all their experiences, and how they felt after they heard it, and I was like, “You know what? Do me a favor. Go out there, go do your acts of kindness, and after you’ve done them, send me a message if you experienced something of a change.” 

And you would not believe the messages I got back. You would not believe people’s stories. There’s one story of somebody who went to a nearby café, bought a cup of coffee and she started this thing where you start a coffee chain. Basically, buy a coffee for someone else. She was going in there, she’s like, “I’m going to start a coffee chain. I’m going to buy a cup of coffee for the person behind me,” and you can do that. Almost all cafés will let you do this. “I’m going to buy a cup of coffee, and I want to buy a cookie for the person behind me, for the next person who comes in.” They’re usually really happy to do this, because it’s a fun cool way — I remember, I think, recently there was one big one that lasted for days. It was like — people, like hundreds of people, are coming in buying something, and then buying something else for the person behind them.

It just like, a part of the movement like that. This woman was like, she walked to the barista and she said, “Hey listen, I want to start this thing,” and they’re you know, really happy to oblige when she said, “I also just want to say, you know, I really appreciate the work that you do. You might not have heard this enough, but I really appreciate that you’re here, and you’re making my life better, and you’re making the lives of other people better.”

The barista apparently just started to tear up, like, “I haven’t heard something like that in a long time, so thank you.” Just like that, they have this amazing human connection, right? The science behind it is fascinating though. The science behind kindness is really fascinating. For example, I’ll talk about one publication over at Harvard, you can go and check it out, I’ll ask Mat here to give you guys a link here.

Harvard published a study done by three different scholars, Elizabeth Dunn, Lara Achnen, hoping I’m pronouncing them correctly, and Michael Norgen. They went on and did a study, basically, about trying to see how spending, what they call “pro-social spending,” which is spending on, not just yourself, but other people, have an impact on you the giver, right? We all know that giving it to somebody else, the person who receives it loves it, but what is the difference in how it makes us feel?

What they did was pretty interesting. They approached a bunch of people, and then they broke up in two groups. For the first group, they were given $20, and they were told, go and spend this $20 on yourself. Go buy yourself something you want. They measured their happiness levels before and after. For the second group, they gave them the same amount of money, here’s 20 bucks, go out there and spend it on somebody else. The only thing is it can’t be somebody who can reciprocate. You can’t just give it to your friend to like, “Yo, I’m going to buy you a meal today, but tomorrow you go buy a meal back,” right? You have to give it to somebody else who you think you’re going to make their life better. 

A lot of these people, all the participants are university students, they’re not very well off. The 20 bucks is, I mean, the time I was in the university, it’s a few beers, right? It’s something that can make a difference. They went out there, and they were expecting, because one of the professors or one of the researchers was part of Harvard business school, of course, they kind of have this hypothesis that personal spending will bring back greater joy. 

When they came back, they found that not only was it not true that that personal spending, when you spend money on yourself, will give you more joy, the group that came back with having spent money on other people found a massive increase of happiness. They were coming back reporting significant increases to their happiness. They’re like okay, apparently spending money on other people can be an effective root at creating your own happiness, at hitting those particular chemicals. 

That’s pretty interesting, but then they thought about and they said, “Well, what if we’re doing this, and just the fact that $20 is not a big deal? What if people aren’t feeling the essence of loss,” because we talk about things like loss of virtue, we talk about things like fear of loss all the time, what if $20 is just not that big of a deal? They said, “What if we up that amount to something significant like a thousand dollars?” They went back to the university and they said, you know, “Can we have like, a million dollars to give away to people?” and the university is like, “No.” What they did was, well, you know, okay, what if we take a look at countries in which $20 have the same spending powers?

That’s what they did. They went out and they examined the correlations between charitable giving and happiness in over 136 countries, which is ridiculous. In particular, they would go to these third world countries in, you know, Asia and Africa, and they would go and talk to the people there, and they would bring in participants and they will be like, well here’s, which over there had about the spending power of, I think they did the calculation, something around $800, which is massive, basically.

It has the spending power of basically buying food for them for almost several weeks, if not a whole month. A lot of these people didn’t have enough food to cover their own basic needs. This should be significant now, we should see a decrease in the amount of happiness, because they’re giving away food that they actually need to survive, right? What was interesting was that, in this one, for the group that were tasked to give away this amount of money, and I think that they also have them like, buy treats, or like, give away little bags of food, and snacks, and other things that could really make a difference in their own lives.

That group came back reporting massive, absolutely off the charts changes in their happiness levels. They were fascinated. They were blown away. Why is this change so massive? I mean, shouldn’t you be feeling that same thing that we talked about? We talked about things like you know, level. We talk about things like gain theory.

We talked about things that were — people don’t like watching other people have more stuff in general. Why are they feeling this? As it turns out, there were talks of participants and the participants would say things like, you know, “Look, it’s been years since I’ve ever been able to make somebody’s life like that better. To get that opportunity was huge for me,” and they loved it. They loved that feeling of helping, and they loved wanting to feel that helper’s high that we were just talking about.

It’s really incredible, and there’s been studies done that show the same thing across different age groups. I have a study where scientists have brought in children, and they were tasked — and we’re talking, like really young little kids, really adorable little kids, five to seven years old. They were told that you’re going to come in, and we’re going to have a photographer take some pictures of you, but when they came in they’re like, “The photographer’s not here yet, so why don’t you sit here and have a little snack.” They will be given two different places, and plates had this whole thing covering it. In front of the two kids, they would raise the two covers at the same time, and one of the kid’s plate, there will be food, there will be a sandwich.

Then in the other kid’s plate, there will be nothing. They wanted to see what the kids would do, because we know kids, and I’ve been around kids a bunch of times, and I have like nieces and nephews and stuff like that. Kids can sometimes be kind of jerks, right? There’s nothing wrong with that, but kids can be kind of selfish sometimes, right? They were kind of surprised to see that idea that we’ve had, like kids can be kind of selfish sometimes, is really not something that we see at ages of three to five years old, or even two to four years old.

It’s something that we kind of learn later on, and it’s an interesting phenomenon. Because with the younger kids, they found, there’s a higher rate where the kids would just pick up the food that they have, tear the sandwich in half, and then put one half on the other kid’s plate. Again, this is without any instruction, this is without any kind of prompting or anything like that. They just naturally wanted to give. I think that tells us a lot about the way our instincts are. They even did studies where they would examine what the actions and instincts of toddlers, literally one to two years old, that can barely walk the age that they were measuring, one year old.

They will find that even at that age, kids are natural — their natural instinct is to help other people. It’s an interesting phenomenon that it’s something that we almost forget the older we get. It’s something that we almost get taught to let go of the older we get.

[0:29:30.0] MB: It’s so fascinating that you know, at the same — obviously the research behind this is really compelling, and it’s science-based, but at the same time, its’ such a simple thing that one kind of almost minuscule act of kindness can create a ripple where, like the coffee chain you're talking about, where you don’t even understand, really, the full impact that you might have just by smiling at somebody, or just by saying thank you, or holding the door for them. Something that to you almost seems insignificant, it can create a wave of kindness that goes beyond what you can even potentially imagine.

[0:30:03.6] JW: Yeah, absolutely. In ourselves and in others. Because we don’t know what it is that the other person is going through, right? We don’t know what the other person is experiencing. Something as simple as just smiling at somebody, you know? Walking down the street. I had a friend who once was having a bad day, and decided to just sort of take him on — this was back when we were in a university, and he was just like, you know, I wonder how many people are going through what I’m going through?

He started walking around campus and he just — it was exam season, when everybody was stressed out. He started walking around campus and he would go up to random people, just walking, having their day, and he would go up to them and ask, “Hey, are you okay? You look like you’re about to cry.”

The first person he talked to and asked that question started to cry. He was like, “My god, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to trigger that.” The other person was like, “No, thank you. I really appreciate that. I am really stressed out and I really appreciate you asking that.” He was like, “Well, is this just the students?” This is not really that scientific, he wasn’t doing this as a part of a study, nothing like the studies that we’re just talking about.

This is a little bit anecdotal, but then he started to do this on a regular basis where he would start going up to people and asking, “Are you okay? You look like you’re having a tough day.” We would think that would be a kind of rude thing to say to somebody, but you know, he wanted to take that chance to see if he can make somebody else’s say better, and he was just constantly coming back and telling us how you encounter somebody who was actually going through something really tough, and we always put on this brave face, and we try to take it on ourselves. We try to take it on independently, because we’re taught to do that.

But you know, a simple thing like a smile, just “Hey, listen, I appreciate what you're doing here,” and like, “Hey, I really like your scarf. I just want to tell you that your eyes light up the room for me.” These little things that we’ve become so afraid to break that social gap to say, social wall to say, can have a tremendous difference in other people’s lives, right?

[0:31:54.7] MB: That kind of segues in to what are some of the — we’ve talked about a couple of really simple examples. What are some of the other things that somebody listening right now who says, “Okay, I’m fired up, I want to be kind. I want to kind of do a random act of kindness. or find a stranger and do something.” What are some kind of really simple ideas or actions that they can take in terms of ways to jump start that are things they can specifically do?

[0:32:17.0] JW: That’s a great question. You know, we actually, if you go to our website, which is again onekindness.org, or onekindnesschallenge.com, it goes the same page. We actually have a list of that, of things that you can do. Small acts of kindness, medium acts of kindness, major acts of kindness, and the reason for that is because a lot of times we tested the number one question we get that which is, what is this something that I can do?

I’ll give you a few examples here, but if somebody was listening, if you’re interested, you can go check out the website, and there’s a place where you could put in your email and all we do is we send you one thing you can do that day. There’s no spam, I promise we’re not selling anything, so if we just get a little idea of this is one kindness idea for the day. These are things that you can do. For example, leave a note thanking someone who you appreciate. This is something that takes no time. Literally no time. Just sit down, it takes you maybe 30 seconds, just grab a piece of paper and write down one person who you can thank. I’ll bet you can think of someone right now.

Just say, “Listen, hey, I just want to thank you very much,” and you could either give it to them as a note, because we don’t do paper anymore, we’re so used to this text messages, but they don’t have the same impact. But write a little note for them, put it in an envelope, and just give it to them. Or if you don’t want to do that, you feel that person is too far away and you don’t want to mail them something, take a picture of that note with your phone and send that picture to them. This is huge, there’s some kind of thing, I don’t know what it is, but there’s something that’s really nice about seeing that somebody has taken the time to go through the old school and archaic methods of pen and paper to write a note, and they will see that and it becomes fulfilled.

Another thing you can do is just, let’s say if you’re at work or you’re at school, whatever it is. Bring over — like, Halloween just passed not too long ago, but you know, go and get some Halloween-sized candy, right? You can get it at any Costco, or any shopping center, really. Just pass it on, “Here, have this candy,” or when you're walking by a parking meter and you see someone’s parking meter, and you see someone’s parking meter has run out or something like that, or something needs change, give them some change. 

This is probably the biggest one. A lot of people say, “I give change to people every day. I don’t feel better. I’m usually putting that out,” but yeah, there’s a difference, because you’re not making a connection with that person. If you're going to give homeless people some change, usually I recommend buying them a sandwich or something like that. They’re hungry, but especially because sometimes you know, there’s people who are struggling with it alcoholism, for example. 

Aside from giving them help, aside from giving them food, or money, or whatever it is, have a conversation with them. Just ask, “Hey, how are you doing? How has it been going, what has your day been like?” and just connect with them. That on its own has sometimes massive impact. I would love to tell a story about that, we have time for that, Matt?

[0:34:55.1] MB: Absolutely, I’d love to hear the story.

[0:34:57.2] JW: Okay, a few weeks ago, I went out with girlfriends, and we just — it was getting cold over here in Vancouver, and we decided that we’re just going to just give out some socks and gloves to some homeless people. In this area in Vancouver called the Downtown East Side, which is basically Vancouver’s sort of area of, let’s say, like tent city, basically. There’s a lot of homeless people there. There’s a lot of people who are going through issues, substance abuse, and drug use, and like that.

We just thought, you know, it’s getting cold, right? Winter is coming. We wanted to give away some socks to warm them up a little bit. We’re having a great time, we’re giving away these things, and there was this — in our group, there was just something like seven or eight of us, and there’s three kids who would come along. They’re about, you know, ages between about let’s say, 10 to 13, and it was somebody, a part of our group, one of our friends had brought her nieces and nephews, because she thought it would be a nice teachable moment.

We came across this particular woman and she was very clearly cold. She was shivering while she was walking up to us, right? She was wearing this thin cardigan, she didn’t have any socks on, and then she was carrying this little bag of candy. It was — I sort of remember it was this mangled Sour Patch kids candy, and she was eating them. I assumed that she was eating them because she wanted the sugar, because sugar kind of boosts your serotonin levels as well.

She was walking up to us and I said, “Hey, listen, would you like some socks? Looks like you’re a little cold,” and she’s like, “Sure!” She thanked us and we gave her some socks, a hat, and some gloves. She was appreciative, but she was kind of like, “Yeah, thanks.” Then she just turned to the kids who were there with us, and she reached out her hand which was carrying this bag of candy, and she takes the kids and she said, “Hey kids, would you like some candy?”

The kids, without a moment of hesitation, reached out, grabbed the candy, each popped in their mouth, at which point all of the adults in the group were just going like, we had this moment of panic. We’re on the downtown side, there was a lot of diseases and drug use, and we’re just concerned that something may — food God, like whatever could happen, right?

You don’t take candy from a stranger like that. You know, in our moment of judgment and panic, the woman who just gave away candy kind of looked at the three kids and said, “You know, for the past two months, every day I eat this candy, and I’ve been trying to give it to people, but nobody would ever take a piece. Thank you for taking a piece of my candy today, you guys have made my night.”

She had this massive smile on her face. It was this — she looked like a different person. She wasn’t nearly as happy when she was taking the gloves that we were giving her, she was just so happy that she got to give, right? Think about that. All she did was she offered a piece of candy, but in that moment, that changed in her happiness massively. This is what I’m saying, is that if you’re going to give out some change to homeless people or something like that, don’t just drop some change and walk away. 

Take a moment, ask, “Hey, how are you doing?” Connect with them, they’re human beings, right? Connect to them as human beings. So many people we’re meeting were telling me like, you know, back when I was doing these challenges of taking out homeless people to lunch, one of the biggest things I was constantly hearing was it’s incredible how you can go through an entire day without a single person acknowledging you as a human being.

Without a single person stopping to make eye contact even, without a single person who isn’t trying to pretend that you don’t exist, right? Even something like that is an act of kindness. That’s a small act, right? Buy coffee, or offer to make a coffee run. If you’re going up, if you’re going to go grab a cup of coffee somewhere and there’s somebody around you, you should be asking them, “Hey buddy, can I get you some?”

Especially if they’re a friend, right? “Hey, listen, I’m going down to grab a coffee, you want something?” Right? Or, “I’m going to the vending machine, you want anything,” right? If you want to go a little bit further, take a look around your home. Do you have books that you don’t need? Take them to a local library. Even better, take them — you have toys at home or something like that? Take them to a local children’s hospital.

They need those things, right? If you have a chance to drive for somebody, you have a car, offer to pick someone up or drop someone off. Yeah, it’s going to add another 10 minutes to your commute, but isn’t 10 minutes worth your happiness? Isn’t it worth like, your health? That’s the other thing, when you get a chance to talk a lot about this, there’s so many studies. If you get a chance, go pick up a book, it’s called — it’s not my book or anything like that, I don’t get anything from it, it’s just a really cool book. It’s called Why Kindness is Good for You. It’s written by Dr. David Hamilton, and in it is just massive lists of study after study, talking about how kindness literally makes you live longer.

They did a study with seniors, and they found that seniors who volunteered or did daily acts of kindness had a 40% chance of surviving longer than the exact, their peers who weren’t doing something like that. Studies have showed that a lesser depression, gives cortisol, which is your stress hormone, and it improves your heart rate, it lowers your blood pressure.

It’s a list that goes on and on and on. There is just endless studies that show how much physical benefit there is to kindness. The science behind it is just absolutely astounding, to a point where I’m constantly asking why are we not doing this all the time? Why are you not doing this all the time, right? As a society so obsessed with selfishness when, honestly, kindness is the most selfish thing you could really do, right?

[0:40:12.4] MB: It’s pretty amazing, and it’s so compelling. I mean, the stories themselves are inspiring, but the data is so resounding in favor of being kind to people, and we’ll definitely include that book in the show notes as well. I’m curious, for somebody who is listening right now, and I know we’ve given a lot of different examples and resources for them to check out. What is kind of one starting place, one piece of homework that you would give them?

[0:40:33.2] JW: Well, the one thing I will say is, I mean, we have these bands, we have these bracelets, and I will say, if you want a bracelet, we are going to start having them available. We’ve just been in the early stages right now, so we’ve been usually working with organizations to give their organization tools to these things. If you’re part of an organization with your school, and you want to contact us, and you want to get a bunch of these bracelets, and you want to bring One Kindness as a movement to your organization, please do.

We’ll also start having the ability to sort of order them independently sometime soon. Hopefully in the next couple of months, but really, the one big things is, honestly, right now, if you don’t have reminder bracelets, and the reminder bracelet is key, because you want to be able to anchor that feeling into your life, into your habits, right?

If you don’t have something like that right now, honestly, anything, a rubber band, or simply do this thing where like you wear a rubber band on your left wrist, and then at some point go do an act of kindness, then slip the rubber band to the right. Right? If you want to get those kindness ideas in your inbox, go sign up for the inbox thing. Like I said, we’re not selling this out, there’s not going to be anything that’s not just kindness ideas, and then challenge somebody to do it, because there’s such a social element to it.

You know, start just telling your friend, “Okay, listen, I’m starting a kindness challenge. For the next 21 days, I’m going to be doing a kind act every single day. I want you to join me on this.” Tag them on social media, right? Send them a message on social media. The more people that are going to join you, the stronger what you get out of it actually becomes, because now you’ve got a tribe of people around you all doing the same thing.

Again, if you want, you know, the actual bracelets, they’re nice looking ones, send us a message and we’ll see if we can get some to you.

[0:42:01.3] MB: Well John, this has been amazing. I love your mission, I love what you guys are doing, and I’m really excited about this. I hope that listeners will take this seriously and check it out, you know, sort of perform an act of kindness and see what it means to you and what it feels like. I know that I’m definitely going to do a kindness challenge, and I’m going to challenge everybody at the Science of Success to do one as well. I just wanted to say thank you again, this has been an amazing conversation.

[0:42:23.7] JW: It’s absolutely my pleasure, and thank you for having me on, Matt. This has been such great time, and I really loved chatting about this.

[0:42:30.1] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love to hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say “hi”, shoot me an email. My email address is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email.

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this information?” Because of that we created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it for free by texting the word “smarter” to 44222, or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email list. If you want to get all this incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talk about on the show, all the research data and much more, you can go to our show notes, which is at our website, scienceofsuccess.co, hit the show notes button at the top. You can get all the resources we discussed on the show today and any of our previous episodes. 

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

Making Better Decisions, The Sophomore Jinx, & The Illusion of Objectivity with Dr. Richard Nisbett

In this episode we discuss the errors people make in their reasoning and how to correct them, we explain a number of statistical principles to help sharpen your thinking and make you a better decision maker, why every $1 spent on a “scared straight” program creates $400 of cost for the criminal justice system, the illusion of objectivity, why you should NOT rely on your intuition and much more with Dr. Richard Nisbett. 

Dr. Richard Nisbett is a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. He has been awarded the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychology Association, the William James Fellow Award for Distinguished Scientific Achievements, and the Donald T. Campbell Award for Distinguished Research in Social Psychology, among others. He is the author of the recent book Mindware, as well as The Geography of Thought, Think Differently, and Intelligence and How To Get It.

• The errors people make in their reasoning and how to correct them

• How to apply the lessons of statistics to making better decisions

• Is your intelligence fixed and unchangeable?

• How the industrial revolution massively transformed the way people think

• We discuss the skills, not on an IQ test, that you must have to be able to function effectively in today’s age

• Why job interviews are totally useless and have almost no correlation to job performance

• How misunderstanding the law of large numbers can lead you to make huge mistakes

• Why does the rookie of the year almost always have a worse performance the following year?

• Understanding regression to the mean and how it creates extremely counterintuitive conclusions

• Why Performance = Skill + Luck

• Why deterministic thinking can drastically mislead you in finding the root cause of a phenomena

• We explain a number of statistical principles to help sharpen your thinking and make you a better decision maker

• The concept of "base rates" and how they can transform how you think about reality

• We walk through a number of concrete examples of how misunderstanding statistics can cause people to make terrible decisions

• If you’re like most people, then like most people, you think you’re not like most people (but you are)

• Why every $1 spent on a “scared straight” program creates $400 of cost in criminal and incarceration costs

• Why the “head start” program is a massive failure and what we could have done about it

• How you can use the experimental method to make data driven experiments in your life

• The illusion of objectivity - Why you should NOT rely on your intuition

• How we massively distort our perception of reality and why our perceptual apparatus can easily mislead us

• How many of the structures we use to understand the world are highly error prone

• Why we are amazing at pattern detection but horrible at "covariation detection”

• Why the traditional rorschach test is bogus and doesn't actually produce any results

• Why you are likely are “horrendously miscalibrated” in your assessments of people’s personalities

If you want to make better decisions - listen to this episode! 

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life by Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray

• [Scholarly Article] Objectivity in the Eye of the Beholder by Emily Pronin, Lee Ross, and Thomas Gilovich

• [Book] The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail--but Some Don't by Nate Silver

• [Book] How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg

• [Book] Thought and Knowledge: An Introduction to Critical Thinking (Volume 2) by Diane F. Halpern

• [Book] Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

Charlie Munger Resources:

• [Book] Poor Charlie's Almanack by Peter D. Kaufman, Ed Wexler, Warren E. Buffett, and Charles T. Munger

• [SOS Episode] How To Stop Living Your Life On Autopilot, Take Control, and Build a Toolbox of Mental Models to Understand Reality with Farnam Street’s Shane Parrish

• [SOS Episode] The Psychology Behind Making Better Decisions with Global Financial Strategist Michael J. Mauboussin

• [Farnam Street Blog] Creating a Latticework of Mental Models: An Introduction

• [Safal Niveshak article] Mental Models

• [Lattice Work article] Charlie Munger on Elementary Wisdom and Mental Models by Brian Hertzog

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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


[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee, and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study, and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.


In this episode, we discuss the errors people make and their reasoning in how to correct them. We explain a number of statistical principles to help you sharpen your thinking and make you a better decision maker. We look at why every $1 spent on a Scared Straight program creates $400 in additional cost of the criminal justice system. We talk about the illusion of objectivity and why you should not rely on your intuition. and much more with Dr. Richard Nisbett. 


The Science of Success continues to grow with more than 675,000 downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries hitting number one in New and Noteworthy and more. A lot of our listeners are curious how I organize and remember all this information. I get tons of emails and comments asking me how to keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, listening to a ton of podcasts, and much more. 


Because of that, we’ve created an amazing free resource for you. You can get it completely free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. It’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. Listeners are loving it. We’re getting emails all the time about people telling us how this has changed our lives, how this has helped them stay more organized and keep track of all of the stuff that they’re learning. Again, you can get it completely free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and putting in your email. 


In our previous episode, we discussed the radical mismatch between your intuitive sense of risk and the actual risks you face. We looked at why most experts and forecasters are less accurate than dart throwing monkeys. We talked about how to simply and easily dramatically reduce your risk for the most major dangers in your life. We explored the results from the Good Judgment Project, which is a study of more than 20,000 forecast and we talk about super forecasters, what they are and how they beat prediction markets, intelligence analysts that had classified information and software algorithms to make the best possible forecasts and much more with Dan Gardner. 


If you’re thinking about planning for next year and you want to be able to predict the future better, listen to that episode. 


[00:02:46.4] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Richard Nisbett. Richard is a professor of psychology at the university of Michigan. He’s been awarded the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychology Association, The William James Fellow award for distinguished scientific achievements, and the Donald T. Campbell award for distinguished research in social psychology among others. He’s the author of the recent book, Mindware, as well as well as The Geography of Thought, Think Differently, and Intelligence and How to Get It. 


Richard, welcome to the Science of Success.


[0:03:16.0] RN: Thanks, glad to be here.


[0:03:17.3] MB: Well we’re very excited to have you on here today. So for listeners who may not be familiar, tell us a little bit about yourself?


[0:03:22.9] RN: Well, the thrust of my career has been studying reasoning and fairly early on, I got interested in studying the errors that people make in reasoning. And after I had been doing that for a while, I began to think, “Well, can I correct this errors?” And at the time — we’re talking now about the 70’s, early 80’s — psychologists were quite convinced that there really wasn’t much you could do to change the way people think, reasoning is done at a very concrete level, you can’t just insert abstract rules and expect that to affect reasoning.


So I bought that and I don’t know exactly why I decided to test it anyway, but I did. I started to see if I could make people be more rational, make better judgments and decisions by teaching them rules like the law of large numbers, the concept of regression, how to think probabilistically, microeconomic concepts like cost benefit analysis, and so on. I found, first of all, people do learn in college, and this is counter to prevailing there. They do learn some general rules that do improve the way they think, although it’s very spotty. Different majors are learning different things. 


So then I decided to see whether I could, myself, teach them this rules in a brief period of time and what I found was that I can teach this kinds of rules and 15 to 20 minutes and they stick with people at least for a few months after that. I know it because I call them in the guise of a survey researcher asking them their opinions about various things and I know if they use the rule that they should then that will come out in the answer. Sure enough, people do to a very significant extent retain those kinds of rules. So that gave rise to the book that I wrote which is brief, breezy descriptions of rules and concrete problems that they can be applied to.


[0:05:29.1] MB: I’d love to talk a little bit more about Mindware. Tell me what inspired you to write the book?


[0:05:34.1] RN: Well, it was this discovery that people are learning something about probabilistic concepts, statistical concepts, experimental methodology concepts, micro economic concepts, some philosophy and science concepts, logic, et cetera. They’re getting some of that in school, they’re not getting nearly as much as they could easily if professors just spent a little more time.


My joke about statistics courses is that they’re taught so as to prevent if at all possible, the escape of statistical concepts in everyday life. If professors of statistics just gave a few concrete examples, I now know that would make a huge difference. They probably would say, “Oh no, you know, we don’t have that kind of time. This material has to be gotten through.” That’s not the way to think about it because the concrete examples from everyday life actually feed back into an abstract understanding of the principles. So they actually could get their teaching done quicker if they gave more ordinary examples. So my book is trying to do that, “what your statistics teacher didn’t do for you, and if you haven’t had statistics, here are some very powerful concepts that will save you a lot of grief in life.”


[0:06:54.9] MB: I’m curious, are you familiar at all with Charlie Munger and his concept of the idea of mental models and sort of the notion of arraying mental models on a latticework of understanding in terms of kind of building a much richer toolset to understand reality?


[0:07:10.1] RN: I’m not, that sounds like something I should know about.


[0:07:12.6] MB: Definitely recommend checking him out. After the show, I’ll shoot you a few links, he’s amazing and we’ll throw some things in the show notes as well. But he is one of my favorite thinkers about kind of a very similar concept, which he calls mental models. Which is basically the idea of, in order to accurately understand reality, we have to master the fundamental principles of all the major disciplines that govern reality, everything from the physical sciences to statistics, mathematics, economics, especially psychology and kind of build a robust framework that incorporates all of those into truly understanding reality.


[0:07:44.2] RN: That sounds like a great idea.


[0:07:45.3] MB: It sounds like in many ways, that’s kind of the same path that you embarked down in terms of taking a lot of these concepts that get easily misunderstood and making them so that people can really grasp them in a simple and understandable way.


[0:07:57.0] RN: Exactly.


[0:07:59.0] MB: I’m curious, one of the things that I’ve heard you talk about in the past is how both the sort of industrial revolution and then the kind of information revolution changed the way that we need to think. I’d love to hear you kind of explain that concept.


[0:08:11.8] RN: I’d be delighted. I’d say 15 or 20 years ago, there was a book written by Charles Murry and Richard Hernstein, very famous at the time, called The Bell Curve. It’s all about intelligence, which basically says intelligence is basically fixed at birth. I mean it’s primarily a heritable thing, there’s not much you can do in the way of the environment to improve intelligence, or IQ. Oh and incidentally, some ethnic groups have lower IQ’s for genetic reasons than others.


Every single thing I just said is wrong, and a book I wrote called, Intelligence and How to Get It, shows how wrong all of that is. But I would also say that intelligence is broader than what you test on IQ tests. I began to be aware of it doing studies historically or studies with people who have had no formal education, no experience with the modern world, is that the industrial revolution absolutely changed the way people think. I mean, profoundly. 


Prior to the late 18th century, people were not really capable of thinking in abstractions, they were not capable of applying logical rules to thought, they were not capable of counter factual reasoning. This is not the way the world is, we both know, but suppose the world where that way, what would follow from that? That was impossible for them we know because we know people with so little education today are unable to do those thing. 


So the industrial revolution, it taught people the three R’s, reading and writing and arithmetic and then for free, we got all of these abstract reasoning skills. We continue to improve in those kinds of skills. Over the last 70 years, IQ has increased by more than a standard deviation. That’s like approximately from a hundred, where the average was a hundred 70 years ago, the average on that same test would turn out to be a 115, 16, 18 today.


That’s the difference between somebody that we would expect to graduate high school and maybe have a year or two of junior college, versus someone we would expect to surely finish a four year college and possibly go on to post-doctoral work. That’s the kind of difference that we get as a function of additional cultural changes, improvements in education, and so on. Even a lot of activities that are just, they’re not undertaken for instructional reasons but for fun.


I Love Lucy was a great TV show but it didn’t place many demands on your intellect. But I watched TV shows now, I can’t keep up with them. Who is that guy? What is he trying to achieve? That kind of entertainment is much more sophisticated today and of course we have computer games. Also we know that some of those are improving intellectual skills.


Okay, so that’s the history of IQ and some kinds of intelligence that are related to IQ. But we live in a new era, the information age and the IQ skills are still highly relevant, but there are a lot of skills that are not represented on IQ tests at all that you have to have in the new age to be smart enough to function in our age. I’ll give you one example. 


If I ask people to tell me what they think would be likely to happen if you looked at the boy births versus girl births per day in two hospitals in a given town, one with about 15 births per day and one with about 45 births per day and then you ask, “At which of this two hospitals do you think there would be more days in the year when 60% or more of the babies born were boys?” Now, half the people will tell you, it makes no difference and of the remainder about half will say it would be the larger hospital that would have more such days and about half say it would be the smaller hospital.


In actual fact, if you think about 15, well at 60%, that would be nine boys versus six girls. That doesn’t sound, you know, that’s the kind of thing that can happen frequently. If you had one more girl birth instead of boy then it would be eight-seven and you can’t do any better than that in coming close to 50/50, which we assume is the population value for percent of boys born. With 45 however, it’s really very unlikely. You’re now looking at 60% difference, which you would see only three or four times a year.


I mean, it’s because the larger your sample, the closer you come to the population value, if you have a very small sample, you can be way off. Suppose there were three births. You’re going to automatically be hugely off the population value. As long as you’re sampling randomly, which basically is the way to think about births, the more the cases you have, the more it’s going to resemble the population value. 


So that’s a useful kind of thing to know for that kind of numerical example and there’s lots that happens in the world that you’ll think about differently if you know it. But I apply the law of large numbers to the following kind of problem. I say to people, I have a friend who is an executive and he told me that the other day he interviewed someone who had great recommendations from his previous companies and he had a great record of performance.


But in the interview with the guy kind of seemed kind of lack luster, he didn’t have any very transient things to say about my friend’s business so he decided not to pursue the guy any further. If I say this people say, “Well, yeah okay, fine. What’s interesting about that? Happens all the time.” Well it does happen all the time, but it’s a huge mistake because it turns out that the interview correlates with subsequent performance in college, in graduate school, in medical school, in officer training school and every business profession that’s ever been examined to the  tune of 0.1.


That’s extremely low correlation. It’s enough to take you from picking the better of two candidates from 50/50, a coin toss up to about 53%. It’s a trivial gain and what’s horrendous about that is that typically the folder has a huge amount of information, a grade point average, previous performance, letters from people who have known the person for hundreds or thousands of hours. It’s a huge amount of evidence, that’s becoming much closer to the population value on average than you would ever get for an interview. 


So it’s a mistake actually to interview at all because the gain, if you could confine the judgment about the other person whether the higher the person or not. If you could confine the interview to its appropriate place which is essentially no more than a tie breaker, but we’re not capable of doing that. I’m not capable of doing that. When I interview people, I have this same illusion you know, “I really learned lot about this person’s intellect and personality,” and it’s baloney, I haven’t. 


But to make matters even worse for the interview, it isn’t even a sample of the population you’re after. It isn’t a sample of job performance or a school performance. It’s a sample of interview performance, and those are not at all the same thing we know, imperially. Some people, you know, extroverts are great at interviews and introverts are not so good. But you typically are hiring for skills other than a personality trait. So that would be a typical kind of way that I teach in the book.


I mean, here is a principle stated in some highly informal way and here are some concrete examples and I know for many of the things that are taught in the course, I know that this kind of instruction is powerful and backs the way people think. There are things in the book where I don’t know that, but I have pretty good idea that the principles are sufficiently similar psychologically that everything in the book I do believe can have a big impact on the way people think and the kind of thing that’s necessary for the information age. 


300 years ago we didn’t have the kind of information, we didn’t have the folder that we do now. But people need to be able to collect information, analyze information, analyze arguments based on information, persuade other people based on information, know how to generate reliable information from assessment or from interventions of various kinds. So you’re not information age smart if you don’t know the kinds of things that I’m talking about.


[0:17:11.9] MB: You know, one of my favorite examples of kind of misunderstanding sample size, I think an example that Kahneman uses talking about I believe it’s Kidney cancer rates. And, you know, he kind of starts out with this vignette about how rural counties have the lowest instances of kidney cancer rates and then he asks people to explain, “Okay, why is that the case?” And you know, they think to themselves, “Oh, you know, maybe it’s the fresh air, there’s not as much pollution. They’re spending more time outside, et cetera.” 


He goes, “Okay, also rural counties have the highest rates of kidney cancer,” right? Like different rural counties. The highest and lowest rates are both in rural counties, and then people figure out they make all this explanations to the same way when in reality, both instances are just statistical artifacts from the fact that they’re just small sample sizes and so they have bigger outliers in terms of the results for cancer rates.


[0:18:00.9] RN: That’s a great example. That one was new to me, I had not known about it before I read Danny’s book. But let me give you another example of something like that. I mean, if you ask people, you tell them a fact, “As you may or may not know, the rookie of the year in baseball, that is the best player is rarely the best player of the next year. This is sometimes called a sophomore jigs. How would you explain this phenomenon?” 


For people who had never had statistics, they will always go the causal route, the deterministic route. They will say, “Well, you know, maybe the pictures make the necessary adjustments or maybe the guy gets too cocky and he slacks off.” But actually the principle of statistical regression tells us that it’s almost inevitable that the person who’s best in a given year is not going to be best in the next year. You think about how did that person get to be the best baseball player the first year?


Well, certainly by virtually having a lot of talent, much more talent than the average person but everything else went right. Two, he got just the right coaching, first three or four games he played, he did it extremely well, built his confidence, he got engaged to the girl of his dreams. The next year, the great dice thrower in the sky gave him an elbow injury so he was out for quite a while and sorry to say, his girlfriend, his fiancé jolted him. So the point being, that around any observation that we make, we’re looking at something that’s been generated by what a measurement theorist would say is true score, God’s own understanding of what the facts of the matter are, plus error. There’s always error for absolutely everything. 


Now, for some things, it’s vanishingly small but there is always error associated with every observation and that kind of error is you roll the dice again for this good baseball player and you’re probably not going to get all aces. Everything’s not going to come up so great for this guy because a lot of performance that you’re observing is error. Another example would be I tell people, I have a friend, she’s a foodie but she’s discovered that when she goes back to her restaurant where she’s had a really excellent meal, subsequent meals are rarely as good, why is that? 


People will give you nothing but deterministic answers for that. They’ll say, “Oh well, maybe the chefs changed a lot or maybe her expectations got so high that nothing could satisfy them.” This is again another case of regression. I mean, extreme values are relatively rare. If you think of the bell curve, things are way out there on the bell, there are not many of them out there. So another way to think about it, to massage people’s intuitions about why you expect to not get such a great meal at a restaurant where you had a superb one before, think about this, do you think there are more restaurants in the world where you would get an excellent meal every time or more restaurants where you would get an excellent meal only some of the time?


Most people’s intuition there is it’s the second type. There are probably more restaurants where you would get an excellent meal just some of the time. Well if that’s the case, it has to be the case that if she has an excellent meal the first time, it’s not likely to be an excellent meal the next time because she’s probably sampled one of those restaurants where you can only get an excellent meal some of the time.


So the regression principle is crucial for understanding all kinds of things around us all the time. Extreme scores are rare. Expect extreme scores to regress to the mean. Think of the mean as some kind of magnet, dragging events from extreme and rare circumstances back to some central tendency, which is less extreme.


[0:21:54.7] MB: On the subject of regression to the mean, one of my favorite kind of mental models for understanding that is from a book called The Success Equation by Michael Mauboussin and he talks about envisioning that you have sort of two jars, one called luck and one called skill, which I think you would essentially call sort of true score and error. And any outcome you draw from the skill jar which is roughly a fixed quantity, and then you draw from the luck jar which is a random number, essentially and you add them together and that’s the result that you get. So any great streak is always a combination of essentially sort of tremendous skill with tremendous luck stacked on top of it.


[0:22:28.4] RN: Exactly, yeah. Great way of putting it.


[0:22:30.9] MB: I’d love to, actually before we do this, for listeners to kind of help them just understand this concept a little bit better, when you talk about sort of deterministic thinking or deterministic answers, can you kind of explain that concept and why it’s not always the appropriate way to think about things?


[0:22:45.5] RN: It’s never wrong to model some situations, think what’s going on causally with it. But it’s people who give causal answers for problems like the restaurant problem or the rookie of the year problem, they won’t give a cause and they won’t go down the causal analysis root if they’re familiar with statistics. For example, a single statistics course is enough to get people to say for the rookie of the year problem, “Well, maybe if it was by chance that he did so well.”


That’s right as far as it goes. People who have had two or three statistics courses will say, “Well look, that’s an extreme score, extreme scores are rare, there’s going to be regression back to the mean.” They just never go down the causal route. 


But if you don’t have the concept of statistical regression, what are you going to do? You don’t have anything else other than causal notions to draw on. A lot of statistical principles are ways of thinking about the world that don’t’ get you involved in the effortful business of causal analysis at all because you realize, “Look, this thing has to be true statistically. End of story.” Not that there aren’t — of course there are causal things going on but you wouldn’t be thinking about those things if you were aware of the regression principle.


[0:24:08.0] MB: One of the other statistical concepts that you talk about that I’m a big fan of and I think is under-utilized for explaining and understanding reality are base rates. I’d love to kind of hear your thoughts about that and maybe explain that in a way that listeners can really simply grasp it?


[0:24:23.5] RN: Right, well we often think about events using only the individuating information about that event, rather than thinking about the event as a type of event for which we may have base rate information that would tell us how to think about that particular case. That’s not a very clear way of putting it. So let me give a concrete example of the importance of using base rate and the kinds of things that can operate as base rate, should be thought of in that way.


If I ask undergraduates again who have no statistics, I tell them, “I want to tell you about somebody, his name is David L. He’s a high school senior, he’s going to college next year, one of two colleges which are close to his home, one is a state university where he has lots of friends and those friends like that school very much on both intellectual grounds and personal grounds. The other one is a private college where he also has several friends and they’re not really crazy about it. I don’t’ think they’re getting such a great education there and they don’t have that many friends. 


But David L goes to visit each of those schools for a day and he just doesn’t have a good feeling about that state university place. I mean, a couple of professors he wanted to talk to getting in the brush off, some students that he meets just don’t seem to be very interesting. But at that private college, a couple of professors actually take a personal interest and he meet some sort of really interesting kids at the other place. So which place do you think David L. should go to?”


You will never find an unwashed freshman who will tell you anything other than, “He’s got to go where his heart tells him to go, he’s not choosing for his friends, he’s choosing for himself.” But there’s two things wrong with that. One is sample size, I mean, think about it, you go to a place for a day, that’s a small sample. I mean, just by luck of the draw you get a professor who is rushed and doesn’t have time to talk to you or not interested in you, by the luck of the draw at someplace else, you get a professor who is more willing to. There’s just a lot of randomness to any information you’re going to get in such a small sample.


So if you understand the law of large numbers, you’re not going to make that judgment for David L. The other thing that’s important is understand the base rate because you can think of his friends views of these places, his friends’ experiences as providing a base rate for the experiences to be expected at each of these schools and again the law of large numbers plays in the understanding why you ought to be paying deep attention to the base rate.


They’ve got hundreds or a thousands of hours collectively, experience at this places and so you should use that base rate to decide what to do. People will say it’s resistance to that. They’ll say, “Well, you know, you’re asking me to do what other people are doing but you know, I have my own unique preferences and skills and songs and I don’t know that I should just slavishly follow other people are doing.”


The social psychologist, Dan Gilbert, has a great expression. He says, “If you’re like most people, then like most people, you think you’re not like most people, but you are.” The base rates for human beings apply to you for most things. I’ll give an example, I just saw a musical Hamilton. I have yet to hear of anybody who didn’t absolutely love that musical. I say, “I feel with great confidence, you’re going to like that musical, whoever the heck you are.”


They’ll say, “Well, I don’t like musicals.” Don’t tell me that, I don’t care whether you like musicals or not. I don’t particularly like musicals and I loved it. They’ll say, “You know, it’s hip hop music, I’m not crazy about hip hop music.” Well I’m certainly not crazy about hip hop music but I loved that thing. So you just have to pay attention to other people’s experiences, other people’s views as generating a base rate to be expected of your own experience and don’t try to collect little pieces of information like who is starring in the movie, to individuating information about this particular case. Think about what the base rate of opinion is of other people about that thing.


[0:28:38.2] MB: So essentially, many people get caught up in the trap of thinking only about their own unique situation in trying to gather as much data as they can when often times if you would just sort of zoom out and look at out of everyone who has ever been in this situation, what were the predominant outcomes and at what frequency, you can often make a much better decision.


[0:28:57.3] RN: Yeah, very well put.


[0:28:57.8] MB: As on the side, Hamilton is awesome. I haven’t seen it, but I do love the soundtrack. Anyway, changing gears. I’d love to dig into some of the, you know, we’ve talked a lot about many of the statistical concepts that you lay out in the book and can help people make better decisions. I’d love to dig in to some of the other ideas kind of from the scientific method or how we can apply scientific thinking to be better decision makers.


[0:29:19.4] RN: Great. So you;d like me to just examples of how we can make use of the experimental method?


[0:29:25.2] MB: Exactly.


[0:29:26.7] RN: Well, first of all, let me say that where it’s most important is public policy matters. On 9/11, 9,000 grief counselors descended on Manhattan to work with people and t hey did what seems very reasonable to me. They met with people in small groups, they asked people to tell about their experiences, about their emotional reactions and then they would assure people that their reactions are very common, there’s nothing strange or unusual about them and in the not too distant future, they’re going to be a lot better off.


Sounds like a great idea. Except that it isn’t. It actually makes people worse, and there are things that social psychologist have discovered to do for grieving people that make them better. So here’s this massive investment the society is put in to something that is not doing any good, it’s costly and it’s doing some harm.


Another example would be 20 years or so ago, a bunch of prisoners in New Jersey decided that maybe they could scare kids off from doing things that would put them in prison. So they brought junior high kids to present and they tell them how horrible it is, the food is terrible, it’s incredibly boring, you get up beat up all the time, sexual attacks, and so on. Again, that sounds like a great idea to me. You have a kid who is at risk for delinquency, I mean that might make them think twice about it. But in fact it actually makes kids more likely to become delinquents. 


Now, don’t ask me why, I don’t have an explanation, I don’t have to have an explanation, I just know what the data are. It’s now studies have been done, good experimental studies expose some kids to what’s called Scared Straight programs, don’t expose others and on average it seems to increase the likelihood of delinquency by about 13%. One estimate, looking at a meta-analysis of a number of studies that’s done, comes out with the conclusion that for every dollar spent on Scared Straight, you incur $400 of cost in terms of crimes committed and paying for incarceration. 


Well let’s take something really big, we’ve had with us for about 50 years the Head Start Program. We’ve spent $200 billion dollars on that to this point and we don’t know whether it does any good or not. We would know a few million dollars would have told us what kinds of early childhood programs are effective, if society were in a more experimenting mood. We do know that some forms of childcare are effective, they tend to be more ambitious and better carried out than most Head Start situations are. But it’s just people assume that it’s got to be a good idea, you take a bunch of kids in, you show them some intellectual tasks, you get them to cooperate with each other and probably some version of that’s correct, but we have no idea how close to that ideal our typical Head Start experience comes.


So at a societal level, we need vastly more experiments than we’re getting. People often — all of this cases, they’re obvious to people. They’re obvious to me too, but it’s a great burden being a social psychologist because unlike everybody else, I’m constantly getting my opinions about human behavior contradicted. I mean, I’ve designed experiment — I never do an experiment unless I know what’s going to happen. Why would I do an experiment if I didn’t know what was going to happen or have a pretty good idea of what would occur? I’m not just looking at things randomly, I think this is the way the world is, if I do this, this is what will happen and half the time I’m wrong.


So social psychologists are constantly having their noses rubbed in the fact that their guesses about human behavior, the way we model human behavior is way off, often, and the only substitute for that is to just do the experiment. Then at the individual level, there are all kinds of opportunities for experiments that would be informative. Am I better off if I have coffee in the morning or not? Does coffee make me more efficient or does it make me more jittery and unpleasant? The only way I’m going to know, the answer to that question is by doing a randomized controlled experiment. 


You come down in the morning and you flip a coin to decide whether I am going to have coffee or not? Otherwise you’re drinking coffee in a haphazard way. Oh, you know, I’m drinking it this morning because my husband made it for me or I didn’t have it this morning because I was in a rush. So there’s a huge amount of noise that you’re exposing yourself to and you can get pure signal if you just do the randomized experiment. Same thing for yoga, are you better off with yoga or not? Meditation or not? Flip the coin and meditate today or not. Or meditate for a month and then a month not. Or yoga for six months and yoga for six months not and see what the empirical questions are.


Social psychologist have an expression that they’re using, that they use to each other all the time and I think it should be an expression that’s everybody’s disposal, much more than it is, and that’s “it’s an empirical question.” I mean, instead of “I tell you my model of the world and you tell me your model of the world” and we’re talking about it and in the end, it’s an empirical question. Let’s look it up or if we don’t look it up, let’s do the experiment or if we can’t do the experiment, let’s admit that there is dueling models is not necessarily the way to get you any closer to the truth and when you can do an experiment easily, it’s foolish to just assume that your plausible model allows you to have an opinion about some matter.


[0:35:11.5] MB: I find it so interesting that our intuition’s often can be terribly misleading and in many cases, people who haven’t kind of studied psychology or statistics or any of these methodologies for more deeply understanding both, how the world works and how the human mind works just sort of lean on intuition or lean on their sort of, “I feel like this is the case so that seems like what’s true,” and oftentimes they can just be completely wrong.


[0:35:38.3] RN: Right. My friend, a social psychologist Lee Ross, has a very important concept that I would say it’s at the floor of anything I would want to say about information age reasoning and that is that we have an illusion of objectivity. As I experienced the world, I think I’m registering what’s out there and I’m not, not for anything. Not even for the visual things. Especially not for all things. What’s being recorded on my retina is not what I am using. That’s not the information I’m using to make a judgment about for example, distance or depth perception or estimations of size and it’s easy to show. 


I mean, perceptual psychologist make a living by showing how easy it is to create illusions and make us make a wrong judgment about some illustration or some physical setup in the world. That’s because our perceptual apparatus is not setup to render what the world is in some actual sense. It’s setup to be what’s useful so that we distort the visual processing centers, wildly distort the picture of some object in the service of size constancy. That is, we add a dose of perceptual analysis that will allow us to see an object that’s receding into the distance as being the same size object even though the way it strikes our retina is very different from what’s correct.


Our perceptual apparatus is a very complicated, layered set of mental operations that are designed to give us some correct view of the world. But those same processes can create illusions in some circumstances. So [inaudible] psychologists’ tools that we used to understand reality or things like schemas that has representations of common situations, stereotypes, heuristics, rules of thumb for reasoning and so on. All of these things are this highly error prone structures and processes are what we’re using to understand the world. We’re not registering, we’re interpreting it. We’re interpreting it moreover by structures and processes that we have no awareness of. 


So I think that’s helpful in all kinds of ways to recognize that we do have an illusion of objectivity or what philosophers called naïve realism. So if you understand that, it’s useful for humility. I probably shouldn’t be nearly as sure of my understanding of the world as I am most of the time because I’m using processes which can lead me astray, often.


[0:38:36.8] MB: Changing gears a little bit, I’d love to talk about fundamental attribution error and some of the work you’ve done about how situations versus sort of personalities can impact people’s behavior.


[0:38:48.8] RN: Right, well there’s a story that goes back to 1968 for the publication of a book by Walther Michelle. He’s the marshmallow guy that everybody knows about and he said, the book was about the power of assessment of personality traits to predict behavior. And his generalization was that if you’re trying to predict behavior in one situation, by virtue of knowing about behavior in some other situation, which could be described by the same trait, your correlation’s going to run about 0.1. That is, it’s trivial gain in accuracy of knowing how honest someone is going to be or how conscientious they’re going to be or how extroverted they’re going to be.


You can do better than that if you have a very good personality instrument questionnaire or reputation. Base rate in other words, comes from knowing a lot about many past experiences and applying that base rate to this particular circumstance that you're looking at. Those correlations can go as high as about 0.3. Still not to impressive. Doesn’t mean that people don’t have personalities or that personalities don’t affect their behavior. They do, but you have to have a heck of a lot of information and you’re predicting a heck of a lot of information. It takes lots and lots of observations to predict a battery of other observations. 


There you can get up to predictability at 0.8, 0.85. Now, why is that? Why is it that the predictability from one situation to another is so poor? Well, it has to do with error of various kinds. I mean, you're looking at a set — why did Joe give money to the United Fund? I say, “Well, he’s a generous guy.” Well, actually, his department chairman was going to know whether he gave money to the United Fund or not so he gave it. Why did Bill not give money? Well, because he happens to be that he has a bit of an opinion about one particular program by the United Fund that he’s very much opposed to. Not that he’s ungenerous or uncharitable. 


So situations are normally producing or normally responsible for behavior for much greater extent than we recognize and personality traits or other dispositions like skills or attitudes or needs are often contributing very little. I mean, the situation’s driving the buss. Most behavior, most of the time. So this was a bombshell actually. I mean because he was able to show that nobody’s clinical assessments or personality traits assessments were very accurate in predicting behavior. 


Some things — this wasn’t his original contribution but it all went into his book. Some things that clinicians thought were predictive were absolutely useless. To draw a person test predicts nothing you know? Clinicians were thinking to themselves, “Well, the person draws a person with funny eyes, that guy could be paranoid. Or draws somebody with a big head, well I may have worries about his intelligence. Or somebody draws a person with sexual organs. That person, there’s maybe some sexual adjustment issues.” 


All of which, undergraduates who have no clinical training at all will see in data even though it’s not there, you built the data sat so that none of this things are true but that’s what they’ll see. “Oh, funny eyes, paranoia. I see.” We’re just not that good at covariation detection. Actually we’re shockingly bad at most kinds of covariation detection, which is strange given how very good we are at pattern detection.


If there’s a pattern out there in the world, we can’t not see it. But if there’s a correlation of the given kind, most of the kinds of things, important things even that we really would like to have an accurate idea of, it’s just very hard to understand. They’re primarily determined by what the clinical psychologist actually is selling them. Can’t recall his name, first name offhand, showed, we called it “preparedness”. We’re prepared to see some kinds of association and we’re counter prepared for others. We’re prepared to see this association's, same thing is true for the Rorschach test.


The Rorschach test was given to hundreds of thousands of people costing untold millions of dollars to do these assessments. What is it that people see in these ink blots and what does that predict? No one for decades ever bothered to do the experiment here or to do the systematic observation to say, “Well, how well do these Rorschach signs, how well do they do in predicting behavior?” And it turns out The Rorschach is virtually useless. There’s one or two little things that it can predict, but it’s virtually useless.


So we see a behavior in one situation and we sort of take it for granted, we’ve learned something about a person’s personality traits and it’s easy to show and there are dozens of demonstrations and experiments showing that we are way over confident in our judgment about personality from judging, from looking at just one or two or three situations in which we’ve observed behavior.


There’s a law of large numbers issue here too. I mean, it’s just, you know, one behavior is not a very large sample but we don’t realize that, there are few arenas where we’re aware of the uncertainty of any observation. Interestingly, sports is an exception to that. People are really well calibrated on how much you can predict. Let’s say a basketball score at a particular game from basketball scores at another game. For how well you can predict spelling test performance by elementary school kids by virtue of knowing another spelling test performance.


For the abilities we’ve looked at, they tend to run about 0.5. I mean, from a serious good observation, one game or one test, they tend to run at about 0.5. So they’re informative but they’re certainly not the whole story. With people with any knowledge of sport, understand perfectly well, it’s captured beautifully my idea that on any given Sunday, any team in the NFL can defeat any other team in the NFL. That’s how much of a luck/error, that’s how much of a rule it plays in any given sports outcome. 


Despite the fact that people are quite good at understanding both how well you can predict an event from another event or a set of events from another large set of events, that doesn’t pour over at all onto our understanding of personality trait related behavior. You can show that people are horrendously mis-calibrated about how much information they think they’ve gotten from observing a person in one particular situation.


[0:45:50.8] MB: So obviously we’ve talked about the book and for people who want to dig into and really understand a lot of this kind of mental models or frameworks much more deeply, that’s a great place to start. What would some other resources be that you’d recommend listeners check out if they want to kind of dig in to some of these topics?


[0:46:05.7] RN: Well, I think Silver’s The Signal and The Noise, it’s about statistical concepts. It’s a beautiful information in age book. I mean, it tells you how you need to think about things, information that you haven’t collected yourself that somebody else has collected, how to make use of it, how to avoid making errors and determining it. There’s another lovely book by a mathematician called How Not to Be Wrong, and incidentally, he deals with a law of large numbers at length in his book just like I do in my book.


It’s very similar. I was kind of surprised that a mathematician would be thinking about so many everyday life situations in terms of the law of large numbers and have so many beautiful concrete examples of how we have to think given that all of our observations have errors surrounding them. I was surprised because I don’t’ see statisticians doing that sort of thing. 


Somebody who really wants to get serious about inferential rules in a very systematic way, formal definitions, I would recommend a book by Dian Halpern called Thought and Knowledge. It just march us through, it’s a similar to my book in a way. Although, she spends time on things that I don’t spend much time on. She talks a fair amount about some logical principals and some logistic schemas where I think that formal stuff is not actually something that people can make that much use of.


But some people would like to know about it anyway because there is some people are in jobs which require sometimes some kinds of logical formulations and it can be interesting, it can be fun to look at that stuff. Much of the territory she covers in that book, which is a critical thinking text basically, that’s what it’s intended for. There’s a lot of good stuff in there. So, you know, there is plenty and of course there is Danny Kahneman’s book, which is a near relative of my book. The title there of course is Thinking Fast and Slow.


[0:48:04.8] MB: Yup, great book. Huge fan of that book and Daniel Kahneman. So, where can people find you and the book online? Your book?


[0:48:12.3] RN: Well, it’s on Amazon and it’s in various versions; print, kindle and audible.


[0:48:19.4] MB: Great. Richard, thank you so much for being on the show, it’s been a fascinating conversation, we really explained a lot of this concepts that can seem kind of daunting at first but are really critical component to building a deep understanding of how the world works and how your mind works and how we can make better decisions. So, thank you so much for being a guest on the Science of Success. We’ve really enjoyed having you on here.


[0:48:42.7] RN: Thank you 


[00:48:42.2] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I would love to hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email address is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I would love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email


The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this information?” Because of that we created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. It’s called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it for free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email list. 


If you want to get all the incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we talked about in this episode and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. Go to scienceofsuccess.co, hit the show notes button at the top. We’re going to have everything that we talked about on this episode. If there was a previous episode that you loved, you can get the show notes for every episode that we’ve done. Just go to scienceofsucces.co, hit the show notes button at the top, and you can find everything. 


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

How You Can Predict The Future Better Than World-Famous Experts - The Art & Science of Risk with Dan Gardner

In this episode we discuss the radical mismatch between your intuitive sense of risk and the actual risks you face. We look at why most experts and forecasters are less accurate than dart throwing monkeys. We talk about how to simply and easily dramatically reduce your risk of most major dangers in your life. We explore the results from the “good judgment project” study of more than 20,000 forecasts. We talk about what superforecasters are and how they beat prediction markets, intelligence analysts with classified information, and software algorithms to make the best possible forecasts and MUCH more with Dan Gardner.

Dan Gardner is a New York Times best-selling author and a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. His latest book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, which he co-authored with Philip Tetlock. Superforecasting was chosen as one of the best books of 2015 by The Economist, Bloomberg, and Amazon. Dan is also the author of Future Babble and Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear and previously worked as a policy advisor to the Premier of Ontario and a journalist with the Ottawa Citizen. 

• How and why people make flawed judgments about risk

• The radical mismatch between our intuitive sense of risk and the actual risks we face

• Why we are the safest, healthiest, wealthiest people to live on planet earth (and we don't realize it)

• Why we focus on vivid, dramatic risks, and ignore the real dangers in our lives

• How to simply and easily dramatically reduce your risk of most major dangers in your life

• The power of “meta cognition,” what it is, and why it’s so important

• Lessons you can learn from the mega successful investor George Soros

• Why most forecasters are less accurate than monkeys throwing darts

• The difference between foxes and hedgehogs (and why you never want to be one of them)

• The inverse correlation between fame and prediction accuracy

• What cancer diagnosis shows about how averse people are to uncertainty

• The universal principles of good judgement

• The importance of intellectual humility and intellectual curiosity

• Why certainty is an illusion and nothing is ever certain

• Why everything is a question of degrees of maybe (probabilistic thinking)

• The results from the “good judgement project” study of more than 20,000 forecasts

• What superforecasters are and how they beat prediction markets, intelligence analysts with classified information, and software algorithms to make the best possible forecasts

• The differences between these “superforecasters” and regular forecasters

• The importance of being “actively open minded"

• Why you should unpack smaller questions & looking things like base rates

• How to use “fermi estimates” to solve tough and challenging problems

• Why the growth mindset had a huge impact on positive ability to forecast

Need to do some planning for next year? Listen to this episode!

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [SOS episode] Fixed Versus Growth Mindsets

• [Book] Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck

• [Book] Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Dan Gardner and Philip E. Tetlock

• [Book] Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to the Science of Success with your host, Matt Bodnar


[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee, and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study, and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performance tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.


In this episode, we discuss the radical mismatch between your intuitive sense of risk and the actual risks you face. We look at why most experts and forecasters are less accurate than dart-throwing monkeys. We talk about how to simply and dramatically reduce the risk of most of the major dangers in your life. We explore the results from the Good Judgment Project, which is a study of more than 20,000 forecasts. We talk about what super forecasters are, how they beat prediction markets, how they beat intelligence analysts with classified information and software algorithms to make the best possible forecasts, and much more with Dan Gardner.


The Science of Success continues to grow, with more than 650,000 downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one New & Noteworthy, and more. A lot of our listeners are curious how to organize and remember all this information. I get listener emails all the time asking me. “Matt, how do you keep track of everything? How do you keep track of these interviews, podcasts, books that you read, studies that you read, all this incredible information?” I’ve developed a system from reading hundreds of books, from doing all this research, from interviewing these incredible experts, and I put it all in a free pdf that you can get.


All you have to do is text the word smarter to the number 44222. It’s a free guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. Listeners are loving this guide. I get emails every day from people talking about how this has helped them transform their lives and keep themselves more organized. You can get it completely for free, all you have to do is to text the word smarter to the number 44222 or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email.


In our previous episode, we discussed why the happiness movement has done us a disservice and sometimes actually makes things worse. How perfectionism creates an illusion of control and distorts your reality. How to become aware of the critical inner voice at the root of your pain and unhealthy habits, and the incredible power of self-compassion, and much more with Megan Bruneau. If you’re struggling with difficult emotions, if you want to become happier, if you have a battle with perfectionism, listen to that episode.


[0:02:48.7] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Dan Gardner. Dan is a New York Times bestselling author, and a senior fellow at the University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs. His latest book is Super Forecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, which he coauthored with Philip Tetlock. Super Forecasting was chosen as one of the best books of 2015 by The Economist, Bloomberg, and Amazon. Dan’s also the author of Future Babble, and Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear.


He also previously worked as a policy adviser to the Premiere of Ontario, and as a journalist for the Ottawa Citizen. Dan, welcome to the Science of Success.


[0:03:23.7] DG: Hello.


[0:03:24.6] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on here today. For listeners who might not be familiar with you, tell us a little bit about you and your background?


[0:03:32.1] DG: Yeah, sure. I sort of had a bit of an eclectic background. Initially after law school, I went and worked in politics, and then I got into journalism and did a whole bunch of work in journalism, and then I happened to catch a lecture one year by a man who is a pioneer in the field of risk perception psychology, Paul Slovak, and that lecture really opened my eyes. Made me connect a lot of dots. I started to think about psychology, I started to study psychology heavily, and that’s sort of been the course of my career ever since. 


It’s really been an interesting experience, because when you change your understanding of how people think, how they perceive, how they decide, you change your understanding of people generally, and it was a real water shed in my life.


[0:04:21.4] MB: What is risk perception psychology, I’m really curious?


[0:04:24.5] DG: Basically, it’s a field of psychology that goes back to the 1970’s, when as you may know, there was large and growing controversy about the safety of nuclear power. The nuclear engineers would say, “Look at our data, it’s okay, it’s safe, don’t worry about it”, and the public was worried about it regardless. It didn’t matter how many numbers they were shown, they got more and more worried. That was the point in which psychologists got involved to say, “Well, how do people make these judgments about risk? If they’re not making it on the basis of available data. How are they making these judgments? Why are they so much more worried than the nuclear engineer say they should be?” 


The bottom line on that is that risk perception is in large part intuitive, it’s felt. If you feel that something is a threat, you’ll take it seriously. If you don’t feel that, you won’t. Generally speaking, that applies to any risk. Sometimes that works, sometimes our intuitive understanding of risk, or intuitive sense of risk, is very accurate and will keep us out of danger, and sometimes it is horribly inaccurate. It will not help us whatsoever. 


Simple example is after 9/11. Of course, we all saw the jet fly into the tower. We saw what happened afterward, and all sorts of folks became terrified of flying, thinking that they will be the next victims of deadly hijackings. They still had to get around, so what did they do? Well, they started driving instead, because that didn’t feel like a threat. Well guess what? Driving is in fact considerably riskier than flying.


As a result of this mass shift from flying to driving, by some estimates, as many as 1,500 people died who would not otherwise have died. That’s a great example of how our intuitive perception of risk can steer us in fact into greater danger.


[0:06:23.5] MB: That’s something that I find really fascinating, and especially I feel like people who constantly watch the news or get caught up in stories about terrorism, or mass shootings, or whatever it might be, kind of miss the point that, I think as you’ve said in the past, today we’re actually some of the healthiest and safest people to ever live on planet Earth.


[0:06:42.1] DG: Yeah, I mean that’s just an indisputable fact. We are some of the healthiest and safest people — and wealthiest too, if you want to throw that one in — to ever live, and yet we sure don’t talk or act like it. That’s really pretty unfortunate. Number one, we’re not sort of appreciating the bounty which has been befallen upon us, but also it means that we’re — in large part, we’re missing the real risks very often when we think about what we should worry about and what we shouldn’t worry about.


You’re quite right, we worry about the big dramatic, the vivid risks like terrorist attacks, even though any quick glance in the statistics will tell you that as an individual, are you likely to be killed in a terrorist attack? Almost certainly not. But simultaneously, we ignore the real risks. Sitting on the couch, watching television, eating junk food doesn’t feel like a threat, but if you do it day after day, month after month, year after year? Yeah, it is a real threat, and that’s why there’s some pretty undramatic advice that I always give people.


I always say basically, if you eat a reasonable diet, don’t smoke, obey all traffic rules, get some exercise, you have basically dramatically reduced your risk to all the major killers in modern life. That’s not a terribly exciting message. It’s not exactly great for grabbing headlines.


[0:08:07.0] MB: You know, it’s funny. Often times, the best advice is the most simple and obvious.


[0:08:12.2] DG: Yeah, I mean this is one of those areas where that is absolutely true, but the problem of course is again, it goes back to how do we judge risks? And as I say, sitting on your couch, watching television, eating junk food, it does not feel like a threat, because of our risk perception psychology. Where does that come from? It comes from where the brain evolves, the environment in which it evolves. It evolved in a world completely unlike the world in which we live and so there is this radical mismatch between our intuitive sense of risk and the world in which we live.


The things that we should kind of be worried about, like not getting enough exercise, like eating too much salt, like smoking, those things don’t feel like threats. Meantime, those things that do feel like major threats, the terrorist attack that you see on television or whatever, they aren’t so much. That’s why it’s so absolutely critical that people think carefully about risk judgments.
To ask themselves hard questions. Does this really make sense? Is there really evidence to support this? Don’t let your gut drive the decision.


[0:09:24.6] MB: When thinking about some of these major risks for somebody who is listening now, instead of following kind of their gut instinct, what you’re recommending is think a little bit more deeply about it.


[0:09:33.9] DG: Absolutely. Introspection is absolutely essential, and this is actually a point which I think comes out of psychology in general, comes out of decision making in general. When you ask who are the people who make good judgments and what do they have in common? I would suggest to you that there is at least a couple of points that are universal, and at the top of that list is introspection. 


People who have good judgment tend to think a lot about their thinking. Psychologist call that meta cognition. They think about their thinking. They tend to be sorts of people that say, “Okay, this is what I think. Here’s my conclusion, but does it really make sense? Is it really supported by evidence? Am I looking at the evidence in an unbiased fashion? Have I overlooked other possible explanations?” As I say, when you look at people with good judgment, you find that they have that introspection in space.


My favorite illustration that is George Soros. George Soros is — of course today is controversial, because of politics, but just forget that. Remember that George Soros in the 1950’s to the 1980’s was an incredibly successful investor. Particularly during the 1970’s. That was impressive, because of course that was a terrible time to be an investor, and yet he was very successful during that time. The interesting thing is, when George Soros was asked, “George, why are you so good?” And when you’ve made billions and billions of dollars, you’re perfectly entitled to say it’s because I’m smarter than all you people.


He never said anything at all like that. His answer was always the same thing. He always said, “I am absolutely aware that I am going to make mistakes, and so I’m constantly looking at my own thinking to try to find the mistakes that I know must be there, and as a result, I catch and correct more of my mistakes than does the other guy.” It’s that sort of a very intellectually humble message which he says is the source of his success and frankly, I think you can, as I say, I think you can find that sort of deep introspection in every single person who has demonstrable good judgment.


[0:11:40.1] MB: On the topic of good judgment, I think that’s a good segue into kind of the whole discussion about forecasting. Let’s start out — I’d love to hear the story or kind of the analogy of monkeys throwing darts. Tell me about that?


[0:11:54.1] DG: Yeah, we call that “unfortunate punchline” by coauthor Philip Tetlock. He’s a very imminent psychologist, and — recently at the university of California of Berkley, now at the University of Pennsylvania, the Wharton School of Business. Phil, back in the 1980’s, became interested in expert political judgments. You have very smart people who are observing world affairs, and they say, “Okay, I think I understand it, and I think I know what’s going to happen next.”


They make the forecast. Phil decided, “Well, are they any good?” When you look at the available evidence, what you quickly realize is while lots of people have lots of opinions about expert forecast, that’s all they are. They hadn’t been properly scientifically tested. So Phil said to himself, well how should they be tested? How can we do this? He developed a methodology for testing the accuracy of expert forecasts, and then he launched what was at the time one of the biggest research programs on expert political forecasting ever undertaken.


He had over 280 experts, people like economists, political scientists, journalists, intelligence analysts. He had those folks make a huge number of predictions about geo-political events over many different timeframes, and then he waited for time to pass so that he could judge the accuracy of the forecast. Then he brought together all the data, and crunched all the data, and boiled it all down, and there are vast numbers of findings that came out of this enormous research, which was published in a book called Expert Political Judgment in 2005.


One conclusion that came out of this research was that the average expert was about as accurate as random guessing, or if you want to be pejorative, the average expert was about as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee. Some people really latched on to that conclusion, they really enjoyed that. These are the sorts of people who like to sneer at so called experts. There are other people who like to say that it’s impossible to predict the future, and they always cite this as being evidence of that — demonstrably fallacious conclusion.


This is one of those instances where statisticians like to warn people that averages are often useful and insightful, but sometimes they obscure things, and this is one of those classic illustrations where the average actually obscured the reality. The really interesting finding from Phil’s research was not that the average expert was about as accurate as a dart-throwing chimpanzee. It was that there were two statistically distinguishable groups of experts.


One group did much worse than the dart-throwing chimpanzee, which is pretty incredible when you think about it. The other group had real predictive insight. They did better than random guessing. It was still modest predictive insight; they made lots of errors, but they clearly had real foresight. The really interesting question from Phil’s original research was what distinguishes the two types of experts? What makes one type of expert a disaster, and what makes the other type of experts somebody with real foresight?


He looked at all sorts of the factors that you think might be relevant. Did they have PHD’s, did they have access to classified information, whether they were left wing or right wing, optimistic or pessimistic, and he showed that none of these factors made a difference. Ultimately, what made the difference was the style of thinking. The two types of forecastors had two very different styles of thinking.


To sum this up, Phil used a metaphor which has been used in many different contexts. Foxes and hedgehogs, because there’s a scrap of Ancient Greek poetry in which the Ancient Greek poet says, “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The one type of expert style of thinking is to have one big idea, that’s the hedgehog. The hedgehog has one big idea, and here that means they have one analytical tool. They have one lens, one way of looking at reality, and they think that that is sort of the secret decoder ring of the universe. 


So they use it over and over again to tell them what is going on. To make forecasta. That sort of expert, they like to keep their analysis simple, they don’t like to clutter it up with a whole bunch of different perspectives and information. They like to push the analyst until it delivers a nice clear answer, and of course if you deliberate — if you push the analysist until it lures a clear answer, you’re more often than not, you’re going to be very confident in your conclusion. You’re going to be more likely to say that something is certain or that something is impossible. 


The other type of expert is the fox, and as the ancient Greek poet says it, the fox knows many things. What that means in this context is, the fox doesn’t have one big analytical idea, the fox will use multiple analytical ideas. In this case the fox may use one idea, and in another case, the fox makes a different idea. Foxes are also very comfortable with going and consulting other views. Here I have my analysis, I come to a conclusion, but you have an analysis, I want to hear your analysis.


If you’ve got a different way of thinking at different analysis, a different method, then I definitely want to hear that. They want to hear from multiple information sources. They want to hear different perspectives, and they drag those perspectives together and try to make sense of all these separate sources of information and different perspectives.


Now, if you do that, you will necessarily end up with an analysis that is not so elegant as the hedgehog’s analysis. It will be complex and it will be uncertain, right? You’ll probably end up with more situations where you have — say you have seven factors that point in one direction, or five factors that point in another direction, and then you’ll say well, you know, on balance, I think it’s maybe 65% it will happen.


They’ll be more likely to say that sort of thing than they will be to say it’s certain to happen or it’s impossible, right? They end up being much less confident than the hedgehogs. Well, the conclusion of Phil’s research was that the hedgehogs were disastrous when it came to making accurate forecasts. As I said, they were less accurate than the dart throwing chimpanzee.


The foxes had the style of thinking that was more likely to produce an accurate forecast, but here’s the punchline. The real punchline from Phil’s research is that he also showed there was an inverse correlation between fame and accuracy. Meaning, the more famous the expert was, the less accurate his forecasting was, which sounds absolutely perverse when you think about it, because of course you would think that the media would flock to the accurate forecast or ignore the inaccurate forecaster.


In fact, it makes perfect sense because remember that the hedgehog tells you a simple, clear story that comes to a definite conclusion. It will happen or it won’t happen. A confident conclusion, whereas the fox expert says, “Well, there are some factors pointing at one direction, and other factors pointing in another direction. There’s a lot of uncertainty here, but I think it’s more likely than not that it will happen.


If you know anything about the psychology of uncertainty, we really just don’t like uncertainty, right? When you go to an expert and you get that fox-like answer that says well, balance of probabilities, that’s psychologically unsatisfying, whereas the hedgehog is giving you what you psychologically crave, which is a nice, simple clear story with a strong clear conclusion and as a result. We find that the media goes to exactly the type of expert who was most likely to be wrong.


That’s a really important and really unfortunate finding, and I wish it were as famous as Phil’s finding about the predictions being as likely to — as accurate as the dart throwing chimpanzee, because it is just so much more important. Unfortunately, there it is. That was through the culmination of Phil’s first enormous research program.


[0:20:05.7] MB: I think it’s such an important finding that the smartest people, “the most accurate forecasters”, as you call them, the foxes, are often kind of the most humble and the least confident and certain about what’s actually going to happen.


[0:20:18.3] DG: Yup. This is, again, if you were asking about sort of the universals of good judgment. One of the universals is a quality that I call intellectual humility. I emphasize intellectual humility because it’s not just humility. This isn’t somebody ringing his or her hands and saying I’m not worthy, I’m no good. By intellectual humility, I mean, it’s almost like a worldview in which you say look, reality is immense, complex fundamentally uncertain in many ways.


For us to understand even a little bit of it, let alone to predict what’s going to come next is a constant struggle. What’s more, we’re fallible people and people make mistakes, so I just know that I’m going to have to work really hard and I’m still going to make mistakes, but I can in fact slowly try to comprehend a little bit and try to do a little bit better. That attitude is absolutely fundamental for a couple of reasons.


Number one, it says you’re going to have to work really hard at this, right? Comprehending reality, let alone forecasting, is not easy. Expect to work hard if you want to do it well and accurately. Number two is, it encourages introspection, you remember I mentioned earlier, that introspection is universal among people’s good judgment. Well, if you’re intellectually humble and you know you're going to make mistakes, you’re going to be constantly thinking about your thinking so that you can try and find those errors, okay?


That is so that introspection flows naturally out of intellectual humility. The third element that comes, flows out of intellectual humility is this. If you have this idea that you know, the universe is vast and complex and we can never be sure, then you know that certainty is an illusion. You should not be chasing certainty because human beings just can’t manage that. What does that mean? That means, don’t think of making a forecast in terms of it will happen or it won’t happen. Don’t’ think in terms of it’s 100% or 0%.


Think in terms of one to 99%. It’s all a question of degrees of maybe right? The finer green you can distinguish between degrees, maybe the better. What I’ve just described is something called probabilistic thinking. It too is very fundamental to people with good judgment, and unfortunately, it’s very unnatural. It’s not how people normally think. In fact, how people normally think is — we sometimes call the three-setting mental dial. You know, you ask yourself, is this thing going to happen? And you say, it will happen or it won’t happen, or if you really force me to acknowledge uncertainty — because I really don’t like uncertainty — I will say maybe. That’s the third setting of my mental dial. 


There’s only those three crude settings, whereas probabilistic thinking says no. Throw out those two settings, it will happen or won’t happen, it’s all degrees of maybe. As I say, this is not natural. This is not how people ordinarily think, but people can learn to do it, and they can make it a habit. Scientists think as probabilistic thinkers, good scientists do anyway, and the super forecasters that we discovered in Phil’s second research program. People with demonstrably excellent forecasting skill, they are real probabilistic thinkers.


It is a habit with them. I mean, I spoke with one super forecaster and you know, just in a casual conversation I said, “Do you read? Do you read much?” He said, “I read lots”, and I said, “Well, do you read fiction or nonfiction? He said, “I read both”. I said, “Well, what proportion of the two would you say that you read?” He said, “It’s about 70/30.” Then he caught himself and thought carefully, and he said, “No, it’s closer to 65/35”, right? This is in a casual conversation. Normal people just don’t think with that degree of fine-grained maybeness.


People who learn to think in probabilistic terms, they can make it habitual, and they can think that carefully. By the way, the data is very clear that that is in fact one of the reasons why these super forecasters are super.


[0:24:38.5] MB: Before we dig into that, because I do want to talk about how we can kind of train ourselves to think more probabilistically, and how we can learn from some of these super forecasters. Touching back on the idea of why people dislike uncertainty so much. Can you share kind of the anecdote about cancer diagnosis?


[0:24:55.8] DG: Sure. Look, when I say that people dislike uncertainty, people, I get it, okay? I dislike uncertainty. I would prefer to have hard facts, it is or it isn’t. Okay, I don’t’ think they quite appreciate just how profoundly aversive uncertainty really is, psychologically aversive, it really is. Let me illustrate in fact with two illustrations. One is a scientific study that was conducted in Holland where they asked volunteers to experience electric shocks. and Some of the volunteers were told, “you are about to receive 20 strong electric shocks in a sequence”, and then they were wired up to be monitored for the physiological evidence of fear,, which is elevated heartrate, elevated respiration rate, perspiration of course.


Then other volunteers were told, you will receive 17 mild electric shocks randomly with three strong electric shocks and they too were monitored for the evidence of fear. Now objectively, the first group obviously received much more pain, much more painful shocks but guess who experienced more fear? It was the second group. Why? Because they never could know whether that next shock would be strong or mild. That uncertainty caused much more fear than the pain itself.


That sort of aversion to uncertainty is very powerful stuff, and you will see it in doctor’s offices. In fact, any doctor will tell you a version of the story I’m about to say. The patient comes in, the doctor has reason to suspect that the patient has cancer, tells the patient this, says, “But we can’t be sure. We have to do more tests, and then we’ll see.” They do the tests, and then the patient waits. And any person who has ever been through that will tell you that the waiting is hell. Then one day, you go back to the doctor’s office, you sit down and sometimes unfortunately, the doctor has to say, “I’m afraid to tell you that the tests confirm that you have cancer.”


Almost universally, what patients report feeling at that moment is relief. They feel better and they almost always say the same thing: “At least I know.” That’s how powerful uncertainty is, that the possibility of a bad thing happening can be a greater psychological burden on us than is the certainty that the bad thing is happening.


If that’s the case, if uncertainty is so horrible to us and we just want to get rid of it, it’s really no surprise then that we will turn to sources that promise to get rid of uncertainty, even when it’s not rational to do so.


[0:27:49.2] MB: Now let’s dig in to kind of the idea of super forecasting, and let’s start with what is a super forecaster?


[0:27:57.2] DG: Yeah, it’s a bit of a grandiose term, I have to admit. It actually has humble origins. A number of years ago, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the United States, that’s the office that oversees all the 16 intelligence agencies — including the CIA — in the United States. A number of officials in that office decided that they had to get more serious about analyzing the forecasting that the intelligence community does.


I don’t know if you’re aware, but the intelligence community actually spends a lot of its time not just spying, but also analyzing information to try and figure out what’s going to happen next. If Russia is saber-raffling, they’re going to make a forecast. Will Russia try to seize the Crimea? You know, they’ll try to make forecasts, but on all parts of geo-political events, including economic events like what’s going to happen at the Chinese economy in the fourth quarter, that sort of thing.


The officials within the ODNI decided that they had to get better at this. One of the ways that they decided they would get better at this is to sponsor what became called a forecasting tournament. What that meant was very simple. It sounds like a game, but it’s not a game. It’s an enormous research program, and what they did was they went to leading researchers and forecasting and they said, “You set up a team to make forecasts, and we’ll ask questions, and they’ll be the real world questions that we have to answer all the time. We’ll ask them in real time, so as they arise. If an insurrection breaks out in Syria, we’ll ask something about how that will proceed. So you have to forecast it, and then we’ll let time pass and then we will judge whether your forecasts are accurate or not. We’ll do this for lots and lots of questions and you guys, you researchers, you can use any methods you want, and then at the end of this process, we will be able to analyze the accuracy of all this forecast.


We will see which methods work, which methods don’t, and then try to learn how we can improve what we’re doing. Very sensible stuff, you would think. As I said, they went out to leading researchers, ultimately they ended up with five university based research teams in this forecasting tournament. One of the research teams was led by my coauthor Philip Tetlock, and that team was called the Good Judgment Project.


To give you an idea of the scale of this undertaking, the Good Judgment Project, which as I say was only one of five teams, it involved volunteers. They went out and they were recruited, and — through blogs and whatnot, and said, you know, basically, do you want to spend a little free time making geo-political forecasts, then sign up here.


They got huge numbers of volunteers. At any one time there were 2,800 to 3,000 people involved with the Good Judgment Project. Over the course of the four year tournament, there were more than 20,000 people involved. That gives you an idea of the scale of this and the bottom line result. There were many results that came out of this because as you can imagine, the data are luminous.


The bottom line result was one. The Good Judgment Project won hands down. Number two, the good judgment project discovered that there was a small percentage between 1% and 2% of the forecasters, the volunteer forecasters were truly excellent forecasters. They were consistently good, and I say consistently good because that’s very important to bear in mind. Anybody can get lucky once, or twice, or three times, but if you’re consistently good, you can be pretty sure that you’re looking at skill not luck.


To give you an idea of how good they were, well, at the start of the tournament, the ODNI set performance benchmarks which all the researchers thought were way too ambitious. Nobody could beat this. The super forecasters blew past the performance benchmarks. They beat prediction markets which economist would say shouldn’t be possible. They even beat intelligence analysts who had access to classified information.


Which is particularly amazing because remember, these are ordinary folks. These super forecasters, when they went to make their forecast, basically they had to use just whatever information they could dig up with Google. Yet they were able to beat even people who had access to all that juicy classified information. This is really impressive stuff and then the question is, well why are they so good?


We can quickly dispatch a number of things that you might think would explain this. Number one, you might think that they’re using some kind of arcane math, right? They’re using big data or algorithms, some craziness that ordinary folks can’t understand. No, they didn’t. In fact, to the extent of the youth math, they were a very numeric people by the way. They are very numeric people. I should emphasize that point.


They are well above average in numeracy. To the extent that they use math in making their judgments, it was like high school math, it was nothing particularly dramatic. Another thing that you might say would make the difference. Well, maybe they’re just geniuses, right? They’re just so off the charts intelligence that they’re just super. No, that’ snot the case either. They were tested for — they were given IQ tests, and again, they scored well above average. 


These are not just randomly selected folks off the street. But, they’re not sort of mental level geniuses, they’re not so incredibly intelligent that ordinary folks can’t relate to them. It’s very clear that conclusion that you can draw from this is basically, it’s less what they have than how they use it. The third element that you might think is specialist knowledge, right? You might think, well, okay, these are experts in some fields in the fields that they’re trying to forecast, and no, I can tell you categorically they were not experts in field.


They’re very informed people, right? These are people who agreed to make geo-political forecasts in their spare time. It’s no surprise that they’re smart, they followed the news, they follow international news, they’re interested in the stuff, they’re very informed but they’re not specialists. We know this for the very simple reason that they were asked about all sorts of different questions, and all sorts of different fields, and nobody’s an expert in every field.


So, they’re not any of those things so then, the question is, well what elevates them, what makes them different? I wish they were like one or two simple answers, a couple of clear, crisp bullet points that answers everything, but that’s not the case as so often the case, the reality is complex. There’s quite a list of things that make them different. Number one, they’re intellectually curious.


I think that’s very important, it’s no surprise. These are people who like to learn, they’re constantly picking up bits and pieces of information, and no surprise, when you spend a lot of time picking up this sort of information, eventually you will have quite a number of dots in your intellectual arsenal for you to connect.


Two, these are people who score very high in what psychologist call a need for cognition, which simply means that they like to think. They really enjoy thinking, they’re the kinds of people who do puzzles for fun and the harder the puzzle is, the more fun it is, which is very important because when you look at how they actually make their forecasts, its’ a lot of hard mental effort and so enjoying a hard mental effort sure helps.


Three, they’re actively open minded. This is another term form psychology. Open minded is pretty obvious, that means okay, I’ve got my perspective but I want to hear your perspective. I want to hear somebody else’s perspective. I want to hear different ways of thinking about this problem. Then they’re going to gather all these different perspectives together and try to synthesize them into their own view.


Now, that’s the open-minded part, but of course, there’s an old saying about open-mindedness. Don’t be so open minded that your brain falls out. Well, this folks, that’s the active part, the active open mindedness, and these folks were very active in their open mindedness. Meaning that as they’re listening to all this other perspectives and gathering these other perspectives, they’re thinking critically about them. They’re saying, does that really make sense? Is that actually supported by the evidence? Is that logical?


They’re doing that constantly when they draw these perspectives together and synthesize them into their own view, which again, I would emphasize, that sounds like a heck of a lot of work. It is. Unfortunately, as I said, they like hard thinking. Fundamentally also, they’re intellectually humble. I mentioned intellectual humility earlier. That is absolutely true here, and all the things that flow from that are true. You know, they’re hard mental workers, they’re deeply introspective people, they’re constantly looking at their thinking. Trying to find the mistakes, trying to correct it and improve it, and the probabilistic thinkers, that also flows form intellectual humility.


Another element I would also add is simply this, if you ask how do they actually approach a problem, how do they actually make a judgment? One of the critical differences between a super forecaster and most ordinary folks is, rather than simply vaguely mulling over information and stroking your chin until somehow an answer emerges somehow and you don’t know how. That’s a terrible way to make a forecast by the way.


What they do is that they methodically unpack the question. They take a big question, and they unpack it, and make a whole series of smaller questions, and then they unpack those and they make a series of smaller questions, and they methodically examine them. Each one, step by step by step. Again, this is a very laborious method, a lot of hard mental work goes into it, but it’s demonstrably effective. There’s a famous physicist named Enrico Fermi. One of the fathers of the atomic bomb, who became famous for his ability to estimate things accurately.


He actually taught this method. Fermi estimates basically involve unpacking questions so that you methodically tackle them one after the other after another. People who work in physics or engineering will be familiar with this. Fermi estimates are actually taught in those departments. In fact, engineers to engineers, this is almost second nature, this idea of unpacking the problem and methodically tackling it that way.


It’s probably not. This is a bit speculative, but it’s probably not a coincidence that a disproportionate number of the super forecasters have engineering backgrounds. Software engineers, computer programmers, whatever. People with engineering background sort of get this.


[0:38:35.2] MB: That was fascinating, and I think one of the most important things you said is that it’s not easy. It takes a lot of hard work to make effective decisions or in this particular context, effective forecasts. One of the things that I always say is that there’s no kind of get rich quick strategy to becoming a better thinker. It takes a lot of time, energy, reading, and introspection to really build kind of a robust thought process to improve your own ability to think and make better decisions.


[0:39:05.0] DG: That’s absolutely correct. It also touches on a further factor, which I didn’t mention, which is certainly one of the most important. Which is that these are people who have what psychologists call the growth mindset, which is that they believe that if they think hard, and they work hard, and they practice their forecasting skill, and they look at the results of their forecasts, and they think about how they got them right or how they got them wrong, and then they try again, that they will improve their forecasting skill. Just as you would improve any skill that you practice carefully with good feedback over time.


You might say, but isn’t that perfectly obvious? Doesn’t everybody understand that in order for you to improve a skill, you have to practice it, and the more you practice, the better it will get? Unfortunately, that’s just not true. There’s a psychologist named Carol Dwack who has done an enormous amount of researching skill, and she talks about two mindsets. One is the growth mindset that I just described, but the other mindset is the fixed mindset, which is basically the idea that we’re all born with abilities and talents and skills, and that’s all we’ve got.


If I try something and I fail, I’m not going to try it again, because I have demonstrated the limits of my abilities and it would be foolish of me to waste time trying to improve those abilities. That’s why it’s very critical — and we see this clearly in the super forecasters, they have very strong growth mindset, and more importantly, they put it into action. They were making their forecasts, they were doing post mortems, trying to figure out what went right, what went wrong and why. They were trying to improve on the next round, and they did, there was demonstrable improvement.


It’s very clear that underlying all of this is you have to have some belief in the ability to grow or you won’t engage in the hard work that’s necessary to grow.


[0:41:10.2] MB: Long time listeners on the show will know that on here, we’re huge fans of Carol Dwack and the book Mindset, and we actually have a whole episode on kind of the difference between the growth mindset and the fixed mindset.


[0:41:22.2] DG: Great.


[0:41:22.1] MB: Breaking out all those things. I’ll include links to both of those things in the show notes for people to kind of be able to dig down and really understand those concepts who may not have heard the previous episodes we have about that kind of stuff. Yeah, I totally agree, I’m a huge fan of the growth mindset and I think it’s critically important.


[0:41:39.8] DG: Yeah, there’s no question that in Phil Tetlock’s research, super forecasting research. The data very clearly demonstrate that.


[0:41:47.8] MB: For somebody who is listening, what are some sort of small concrete steps they could take right now to kind of implement some of the best practices of super forecasters to improve their own thinking?


[0:41:58.7] DG: Well, the first thing I would say is, adopt as an axiom, because of course as humans, we all have to have axioms in our thinking. Adopt as an axiom that nothing is certain, right? It’s easy to say that in the abstract, but it’s a lot harder to apply it in our lives, because if you stop and you think about your own thinking, you’ll begin to realize that you use the language of certainty constantly, which is normally fine.


I’m sure in this conversation, I’ve used certainly and that sort of saying, remember at a minimum that any time that you say certain or refer to certainty, there’s an asterisk. All of us, right? The asterisk means almost. Because in fact, in reality, literally nothing is certain. Not even death and taxes. Once you start to think in those terms, you make that an axiom. You can start to make it a habit to say, okay, it’s not certain, how likely is it? Think in terms of probability, and you know, it’s often said that the ability to distinguish between a 48% probability and a 52% probability or even a 45% and a 55% probability?


It sounds like a modest thing, but if you can do that concisely, that’s the difference between going bankrupt and making a fortune in certain environments, such as Las Vegas or Wall Street. Learning to think, to make it habitual to think in terms of probability is I think step number one.


[0:43:32.4] MB: For listeners who want to find you or the book, what’s the best place for people to find you online?


[0:43:38.3] DG: Probably dangardner.ca for Canada.


[0:43:45.7] MB: For listeners who might have missed it earlier, the book that we’re primarily been talking about is Super Forecasting. Highly recommend it, as you can tell form this interview. Dan is incredibly sharp about all these different topics. Dan, for somebody who’s listening, obviously, they should check out Super Forecasting. What are some other resources you’d recommend if they want to learn more about kind of how to make better decisions and how to make better forecasts?


[0:44:08.1] DG: That’s an easy question. The very first book — in fact, I would recommend it before my own books, which is something authors aren’t supposed to do, but here it goes. The very first books folks should read is Daniel Conman’s book, Thinking Fast and Slow. Conman is a course, the Nobel Prize winning psychologist, who is one of the symbol figures of our time, and fortunately, he finally got around to — not long after I read all of his papers and I learned the hard way — he finally got around to writing a popular book, and Thinking Fast and Slow is absolutely essential reading. Anybody who makes decisions in — whether it’s in business, or in government, or in the military, or anywhere eels, anybody who makes decisions that matter should read Thinking Fast and Slow.


[0:44:54.3] MB: I totally agree. It’s one of my favorite books, and I think one of the deepest, most information rich books about psychology that’s on the market today.


[0:45:03.1] DG: Absolutely.


[0:45:04.0] MB: Dan, this has been a great conversation, and filled with a lot of fascinating insights. Thank you very much for being on the show.


[0:45:11.9] DG: Thank you, it’s a lot of fun.


[0:45:13.4] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I would love to hear from you. Shoot me an email, send me your thoughts, kind words, comments, ideas, suggestions, your story, what the podcast means to you. Whatever it might be. I read and respond to every single email that I get from listeners. My email address is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. Shoot me an email, I would love to hear from you. 


The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. Lastly, as a thank you to you for being awesome listeners, I’m giving away a $100 Amazon gift card. All you have to do to be entered to win is to text the word smarter to the number 44222. Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success. 

Uncover the Root of Your Pain, How to Smash Perfectionism, Love Yourself, and Live a Richer Life with Megan Bruneau

In this episode we discuss why the “happiness” movement has done us a disservice and sometimes makes things worse, how perfectionism creates an illusion of control and distorts your reality, how to become aware of the critical inner voice at the root of your pain and unhealthy habits, the incredible power of self compassion, and much more with Megan Bruneau.

Megan Bruneau is a psychotherapist, wellness coach, writer, podcast host and creator of oneshrinksperspective.com After years of perfectionism-fueled depression, anxiety, and eating disorders, she discovered how to like herself, take risks, and find success without beating herself up to get there. 

• Why Megan advocates a holistic approach to mental health

• Why the “happiness” movement has done us a disservice and sometimes makes things worse

• How to become aware of the critical inner voice at the roof of your pain and unhealthy habits

• What your “secondary emotions" are and why its so important to pay close attention to them

• How you internalize self judgement from your childhood experiences

• You can have expectations about mood not just performance and that can create suffering

• The importance of giving yourself permission to feel feelings even when they are uncomfortable

• What your physiological symptoms look like when you experience a fight or flight response

• How to build tolerance and grow your “emotional muscle”

• The tools you can use (with a concrete example) to stop a downward spiral of anxiety

• Things you might do that actually make a negative emotional response worse

• The importance of making space for difficult feelings ( through mindfulness )

• How to have deep self compassion and treat yourself with kindness

• What exactly to say to yourself when you’re dealing with difficult emotions

• Why you should treat yourself like a dear friend who is suffering

• How the “self esteem” movement screwed you up and created many of your emotional challenges

• What happens when your self worth is dependent on being better than other people

• How Megan defines perfectionism (and why you might be a perfectionist without even realizing it)

• The critical importance of self compassion and how you can practice it

• The importance of understanding the concept of "common humanity"

• We define mindfulness and its core components, and discuss how to practice it

• Why painful feelings don't make you broken, but are a natural part of the human experience

• The huge downsides of having your self worth tied to your achievements

• Why your fear of difficult and uncomfortable emotions is the roof of your suffering

• The exact internal dialogue you should use if you constantly put too much pressure on yourself

• The massive danger of “globalizing” negative experiences

• Why giving up high expectations actually enhances your performance

• Why you should change for your focus from being productive to focusing on what’s meaningful

• How you can “become friends” with difficult emotions

• And MUCH more!

If you are frustrated, suffering, or struggling with uncomfortable emotions, listen to this episode!

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] The Compassionate Mind by Paul Gilbert PhD

• [Book] Self-Compassion: The Proven Power of Being Kind to Yourself by Kristin Neff

• [Website] One Shrink’s Perspective

• [Personal Site] meganbruneau.com

• [Book] When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times by Pema Chodron

• [Website] Mindful Self-Compassion, Christopher Germer, PhD

• [SOS Episode] How To Put Your Body In Relaxation Mode, Reduce Stress, and Develop Body Awareness with International Yoga Expert Tiffany Cruikshank

• [Amazon Author Search] Alan Watts Book Catalogue

• [Video] “You’re It” by Alan Watts

• [Video] The Dream of Life by Alan Watts

• [Video] We Are All Connected ft. Sagan, Feynman, deGrasse Tyson & Bill Nye

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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


[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success. I'm your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee, and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study, and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performers tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.


In this episode, we discuss why the happiness movement has done us a disservice and sometimes actually makes things worse. How perfectionism creates an illusion of control and distorts your reality, how to become aware of the critical inner voice at the root of your pain and unhealthy habits, and the incredible power of self-compassion and much more, with Megan Bruneau. The science of success continues to grow with more than 640,000 downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting them with new noteworthy and more. 


A lot of our listeners are curious about how to organize and remember all this information. I get tons of listener emails and comments saying, “Matt, you read so many books, you do so much research, how do you keep track of all this stuff?” We put together an incredible guide for anybody that’s listening, you can get it for totally for free that will help you organize and remember all of this incredible information. This is how I keep track of everything, it’s the personal system that I use and get it totally for free.


All you have to do is text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, it’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. I get emails all the time, listeners telling me how much they love this guide and how awesome it is. You can get it, all you have to do is text the word “smarter” to the number 44222 or you can go to scienceofsuccess.co, put in your email and we’ll send you the free guide today.


In our previous episode, we discussed lessons from 25 years of studying the evolution of human emotion, examined whether the Machiavellian concept of power still works, explored the surprising scientific data on how you can acquire power, and looked closely the foundations of enduring power from studies of military units on how to achieve and maintain power with Dr. Dacker Keltner. If you want to understand deeply how to acquire power and what makes you lose it, listen to that episode.


[0:02:35.1] MB: Today we have another exciting guest on the show, Megan Bruneau. Megan is a psychotherapist, wellness coach, writer, podcast host and the creator of oneshrinksperspective.com. After years of perfectionism fueled depression anxiety, eating disorders and more, she discovered how to like herself, take risks and find success without beating herself up to get there. 


Megan, welcome to the science of success.


[0:02:58.8] MB1: Thanks so much for having me Matt. I’m stoked to be here.


[0:03:01.2] MB: Well we’re very excited to have you on. So, for listeners who may not be familiar with you, tell us a little bit about yourself.


[0:03:06.9] MB1: Sure. Oh gosh, what do you want to know? Like you said, I’m a psychotherapist, I’m a wellness coach, a writer, podcast host, all of that and I have a real interest in helping people change the relationships to themselves so that they’re able to take the risks that they want and follow their dreams and that kind of thing. I have a background in personal training, nutrition, yoga, so I take like a really holistic approach to mental health but I’m not like anti-medication or anything like that. 


Yeah, I also have a real vested interest in helping people realize the utility in their emotions because I think we have the slight super pathologizing culture that we live in that tells people they shouldn’t feel sad or anxious or any of those sorts of things, and the happiness movement has really done us a disservice. My main purpose is for being out there or to help people learn how to like themselves more and make space for their difficult feelings and experiences.


[0:03:57.2] MB: So when you say “the happiness movement has done us a disservice”, tell me about that?


[0:04:01.3] MB1: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot in positive psychology and like the happiness industry that I think is very helpful for people, particularly a focus on self-growth and looking inward and things like that. However, there’s a lot around like positive thinking and choosing happy and you see a lot of this stuff out there on Instagram and hear people saying like, “Happiness is a choice.”


What that does is it actually makes people feel worse, especially if you’re dealing with depression or going through a rough time and even like the idea of gratitude while gratitude is a super effective intervention if used effectively. If you just kind of like are using it to invalidate what you’re going through and you’re like, “Oh, there’s children starving in Africa or this are first world problems, you don’t have any reasons to be upset.” What it does is it creates what we call secondary emotions.


We have primary emotions and we have secondary emotions and our primary emotions are basically the feelings that we feel that are super evolutionary. Like, they’re there for a reason. You feel loneliness because it will make you connect, you feel anxiety because it’s telling you to prepare for something or be vigilant or be on the lookout because you may be in danger. Sometimes we feel depression because we’re not living the life that we want to live and depression is telling us, we need to sort our shit out.


Really like every emotion has utility in it and a lot of this emotions are very uncomfortable and they’re meant to be that way because that’s motivating. We’re far more motivated to take action when we feel uncomfortable in order to alleviate that discomfort. This idea that we need to only feel comfortable emotions, such as like happiness and excitement and calm, what happens is when we start feeling this uncomfortable emotions which I thought is like primary evolutionary emotions, we then judge ourselves for feeling them.


So we’re like, “Oh my gosh, you're so weak or you’re pathetic or you’re being ingrate or you’re doing it wrong like you just can’t be happy like everyone else,” and then we create this layer of what as I said were called secondary emotions which come out of self-judgment and that might be shame or anxiety or anger for feeling sadness or shame or guilt or depression or whatever. So basically like, what this happiness movement has done is it’s created, in some cases for some a lot of people, another layer of emotions and another layer of suffering that comes out of judging ourselves for feeling anything that’s not happiness. Does that make sense?


[0:06:21.9] MB: That definitely make sense. I’m curious, tell me or dive a little bit more into the idea of self-judgment?


[0:06:27.9] MB1: Yeah, so I mean we all have our inner dialogue going on that really evaluates the stimuli in our lives. So like external stuff and the world that our day to day and everything and like moment to moment, but we have this real inner voice and this is not like, “Oh, you’re hearing voices in your head.” It’s just like, if you start to pay attention to it you’ll notice you have thoughts and that’s like an interpretation of your experience and we tend to internalize.


Usually we internalize the voices of our caregivers or for some people if they’re really bullied in high school or had like a really critical sibling. But usually we — the way that we relate to ourselves is kind of a compilation of how the people around us have related to us growing up. So for some of us we’re like really hyper judgmental around anything that we do and we’re super self-critical and this kind of gets into perfection, which I imagine we’ll talk about it at some point.


We judge ourselves for anything that we perceive to be not meeting our expectations and I think when we think about expectations we oftentimes think of performance, but we have expectations for ourselves around our mood as well. Our thoughts that we have. Just our day to day that doesn’t necessarily always involve performance. We judge ourselves for how we feel. So that’s sort of self-judgment in the context of judging ourselves for having a certain emotional experience or a certain thought. But we just tend to be like, I mean, I imagine many people listening to this can relate to being hyper self-critical and self-judgmental or have inward judgment.


[0:08:10.5] MB: I think you made a really important point and something that kind of gets lost a lot of the time, which is that it’s easy to think about sort of anxiety or performance anxiety especially in the context of sort of performing or achieving a result. But the under current there is that we also have expectations about what our mood should be and if that doesn’t happen then we can get into this sort of cycles of self-judgment and waves of secondary emotions.


[0:08:37.2] MB1: Totally, and that’s really performance anxiety, you know? It takes us out of being able to perform and just be in the moment and be in the flow of what we’re doing best because we’re so hyper focused on the experience we’re having and that’s the same thing with social anxiety too, or really any form of anxiety. But it’s like, you know, you go into a setting and let’s say you’re feeling a bit anxious because you don’t know anybody there and you know, you’re maybe feeling a bit self-conscious and that’s normal.


Human beings want to be accepted, we want to be liked. That’s very primal of us, because if you weren’t accepted in caveman days like you’re probably going to die, right? It’s really natural to have that desire to be accepted and to not be rejected and to feel self-conscious and kind of wonder like, “Oh, I want to make sure that I’m socially acting in a way that will be received well as opposed to being rejected or isolated.” But often times with social anxiety, what happens is then we’re aware of that anxiety and we’re like, “Oh my god, you’re feeling anxious, stop it. You have to go into this, you’re going to rock it, you own it. You’re super confident and you don’t feel confident and people can see that and your failure and everyone can tell what you’re thinking.” 


And we start to really spiral with some of this thoughts that are really focused around how we believe we should be presenting ourselves emotionally as well as outwardly. So when we can give ourselves permission to feel feelings and some of them being uncomfortable ones while still having an experience, while still going up there and giving the presentation, while still going to the party and talking or going on a date or going on a podcast or whatever, then it’s much less painful and distressful because we’re like, “Yeah, that’s cool, I’m making space for some of those feelings. Those are just there to help me.”


[0:10:21.9] MB: So if you get caught in kind of a spiral of thoughts like that, what are some things you can do to break out of it?


[0:10:28.3] MB1: I mean, I think it’s sort of a spectrum because if we get so caught that we’re feeling like we’re on the verge of a panic attack. In that case, it might be helpful to remove yourself from the situation and kind of reset, right? I mean if you’re feeling like you’re having real physical symptoms and anxiety and, you know, you’re like sweating like crazy and you just can’t — because what happens with anxiety is it’s like the fight or flight response, right? So our body prepares for fight or flight and so what that looks like physiologically is like core starts pumping through our system and all of our blood kind of drains out of our prefrontal cortex, which is where logic and decision making happens and it goes into our large muscle groups, getting prepared to fight or flee.


Our pupils dilate and our digestion shuts off and we’re getting prepared because we feel stress, right? If you feel like you're at a point where physiologically you’re beyond the point of being able to kind of practice mindfulness, which is what I imagine we’ll get into as well. Then I would say like, remove yourself from the situation if possible and like give yourself permission to kind of reset. You know? Do something and this is — maybe it will be helpful to work with an example. What comes to mind for you now, when you think about feeling like you would be spiraling and just be like super overwhelmed with those thoughts and feelings?


[0:11:41.2] MB: Yeah, one thing that sometimes creates anxiety for me is like — I have mild claustrophobia, so being on a plane sometimes, I get very anxious.


[0:11:52.3] MB1: Yeah, okay. So this is an interesting one because, I mean, we have to also be realistic with our options, right? You’re not going to open the emergency exit and jump out of the plane, that’s just not an option. Maybe it is, I like to think that it’s not because I hope that you can’t open those things like a random bystander can’t if they get really anxious. So we also have to look, “Okay, what’s realistic?” Right? You’re feeling really claustrophobic on the plane and actually, I mean, that might be a place to practice more of the mindfulness that I’ll get into.


It also might be like, “Okay, what can I do in this situation to help me feel more comfortable? Can I go to the bathroom? Can I listen to some music? Can I focus on my breath? Is there something that I can do that can help me just stop the kind of spiraling thoughts and feelings?” But however, being realistic they like, you are on that plane and from the moment it takes off until the moment it lands, you can’t get off.


So that’s an interesting example because often times like we can remove ourselves from a situation and sometimes, like I’m a big proponent of “do what serves you better”. So in some cases like in a person’s healing or recovery or introspection or self-growth period of their life, you might need to take yourself — like let’s say you’re trying to get used to riding the subway, right? It’s something that causes you a lot of anxiety so for someone like yourself with claustrophobia, maybe that’s a challenge at times. Like you’re riding during rush hour, that’s going to be super stressful.


Through mindfulness and getting to know your limits and stuff, there might be times where you’re like, “Okay, I’m going to ride two stops and then I’m getting off because that’s just like too distressful for me and I’m not trying to make myself suffer more than I need to. However I’m trying to — I’m growing my emotional muscles,” you know what I mean? It’s kind of like going to the gym, we want to build tolerance or this difficult emotions that if we don’t pay attention to them, we end up becoming slaves to them.


So if every time you go on the subway you felt anxiety and you listened to that anxiety and did exactly what it told you, and you’re like, “I’m like I’m getting off.” You’re never going to be able to ride the subway. I realized of kind of like taking your plane example to the subway but I just feel like that might be an easier one to sort of show the different options, is that cool?


[0:13:58.9] MB: Yeah, that’s totally fine.


[0:14:01.3] MB1: Okay cool. So, if every time you get on the subway, you get off the moment you feel anxiety, it’s like that’s cool. Maybe that’s what you need? But it’s also not going to necessarily help you develop comfort with a discomfort anxiety gives you, you know what I mean? So, you want to be able to kind of find this balance where you’re like okay, some days you might feel empowered to ride the subway two to three stops and eventually you’re riding at like five, 10, 15 and eventually riding it for hours and that’s awesome. But other days you know, it might be too distressful for you and you can get off.


There’s like this kind of balance between being like, “Okay, I’m feeling a difficult emotion right now,” and in your case of being on the plane, it’s like this claustrophobia but ultimately that’s anxiety. “Here are my options, I want to alleviate — I want to cope with that anxiety. My options are, I can either remove myself from the situation that’s causing me anxiety or causing me this difficult emotion or I can kind of put up my umbrella and like the storm of this emotion and still be in the storm but comfort myself enough that I can cope with it.” That’s where like self-compassion comes in and that’s where connection comes in and that’s where self-soothing comes in.


So the first step would be, “Okay, what choice do I want to make here? Do I want to choose to fully remove myself from the situation that’s causing me this emotion so I can just like alleviate the emotion entirely? Or do I have enough resilience and resources in this moment to stick it out and it’s not going to be like so distressful that I’m going to feel traumatized essentially? If that’s the case, if I want to make the choice to stay then what do I need?” So In your case of the plane example, like you don’t really have a choice, you are on that plane and you're just going to have to put up your umbrella and hope that you have an umbrella and what does that look like? 


Is that music? Is that the person next to you? It’s that focusing on your breath? Is that going to the bathroom? What’s your kind of way of coping with that? But then the example of like the subway, you have to make that  decision, “Okay, am I going to get off and not feel that anxiety because I’m off and that’s very relieving but I also know that that’s not going to help me on my path toward building my emotional tolerance muscles? Or am I going to pay attention to that anxiety that I’m feeling and make some space for it and remind myself that it’s going to pass, it’s not permanent and remind myself that it’s not going to kill me and focus on my breath and put on that music or again talk to the person next to me or again, count to 10 or whatever you’re in practice self-compassion, all of that sort of stuff?” 


I guess like coming back to your original question of what are the tools that a person can enact when they’re feeling like they’re spiraling, and they’re aware of that? The first step is obviously like this mindfulness of becoming aware of what you're experiencing and noticing like, “Okay, what is happening for me right now? Okay, I notice I’m spiraling.” Then being like, “Am I in this place of spiraling where I need to just shut it off and get the fuck out of here? Or can I sit with the spiraling to a certain extent and pay attention to it and ask myself what I need so that I don’t necessarily need to remove myself from the party or stop the presentation or leave the date or turn off the podcast mic,” or whatever. Does that make sense?


[0:17:11.0] MB: Yeah, I think that makes a lot of sense and the two things that I found super helpful in a situation like that where, you know, there was no way you can kind of leave is one kind of just really trying to practice kind of acceptance and accepting all the emotions and feelings that you’re having and the other one is something I know you’ve talked about, which is sort of the idea of impermanence and the sense that everything is temporary, all anxiety eventually subsides and so just sort of riding it out and accepting it as it is so that you can kind of eventually sort of move through it.


[0:17:44.8] MB1: Totally, I mean, we live in a world where we’re sold this message that everything is permanent and we need to reach this permanent state of whatever or of happiness or success and like that’s just not reality. That sells a lot of things because people think if they buy something and then they’re going to be happy or if they get married or if they buy the house or if they get the promotion or whatever and that’s just now how life works. I mean, life is like a series of experiences woven together and ultimately what it all comes back to is like the sensations that we feel.


Those are a result of our interpretations and our emotional experiences and when we can make peace with the fact that nothing is permanent, everything is impermanent, everything is constantly changing, it makes it — it’s actually, I mean, it’s painful on some levels because it’s like, “Oh, that’s too bad. I really wanted to just like grab happiness and hold onto it for the rest of my life.” But it’s also very liberating because we’re like, “Wow, any of this painful experiences that I make currently be going through or that I’m afraid of going through, those are going to pass as well.” It’s kind of the like “this too shall pass”.


In those moments, when we’re going through that storm of whatever the emotional experience is, we have things that we can do that can make it worse such as judging ourselves or pushing the emotion down or telling ourselves that we’re pathetic or whatever or telling ourselves it’s going to last forever and that’s like — there’s a Buddhist saying that like “pain times struggle equals suffering” and that’s when we create suffering. Life has pain in it, that’s just like what life is. It’s filled with grief and disappointment and loss and sadness and things not going the way that you want them to and like inevitably there are going to be painful emotions alongside all of the beautiful, wonderful really comfortable ones. When we judge ourselves for feeling those, we create additional suffering. So that’s kind of like the whole “pain times struggle equals suffering” thing. 


So if you think about you’re going out there into the emotional storm that you can’t avoid, you make things a lot worse by practicing self-judgment and all the things I mentioned and that’s kind of like being like, “Oh, I think I’m just going to like, I don’t’ know, take off all my clothes and like, I don’t know, roll around in the snow or something like that.” Like that probably would make the storm worse. However, there are certain things that you can do again such as like putting up that umbrella or putting on a jacket and mixing together a snowstorm and rain storm, whatever storm works for you; come up with your own metaphor. But basically through practicing self-compassion which is making space for the difficult feeling through mindfulness.


Reminding ourselves of like we’re human and, you know, emotions are a natural part of our experience and it doesn’t mean that we’re broken, it doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with us and many other people, millions of other people are feeling a very similar emotion or the same emotion at this time and that’s kind of what unites all of us and then also practicing self-kindness, which is essentially like saying to yourself what you would to a friend and one that is I advise clients to use and I use it with myself is starting your dialogue with yourself in a moment of distress with, “It’s understandable your feeling ____ because ____”. 


Something like, “Hey, it’s understandable that you’re feeling anxious right now. Because you want to perform well in this presentation, or like you want to give a good impression on this date or you know, you want to do well on this test or you want to do well in this interview or wherever the anxiety is coming from like it’s coming from a good place, it’s there to help you,” right? So just taking away that layer of judgment that comes from stoop feeling anxious you’re being so weak and actually being like, “Hey, it’s understandable you’re feeling anxious right now.” Validating your experience. 


So that’s kind of like one of the ways that we can make space for that emotion and be able to kind of like ride it out, but then also as you said, relying on this piece of impermanence it’s like, “I’m going to practice this self-compassion with the knowledge that the emotion will pass,” that’s a central positive self-compassion. Just makes it far less distressful and anxiety provoking to have a difficult emotional experience when we have all of this in mind.


[0:21:45.7] MB: So tell me a little bit more about kind of self-kindness and self-compassion and you mentioned something about the way you would treat a friend.


[0:21:53.0] MB1: Totally. So, self-compassion like the real guru’s, there are Paul Gilbert and Kristin Neff and like they’re amazing. Paul Gilbert has a book called The Compassionate Mind and Kristin Neff has one that’s just called Self-Compassion: Changing the way you relate to yourself, or something like that. They’re both like amazing, amazing resources for anyone who is interested in this further but basically what self-compassion is, it’s a few things, it’s sort of like the — first it’s kind of like the response to the self-esteem movement of the 90’s that really screwed a lot of us up. 


So basically what movement did, it was like, “Everyone gets a gold star, everyone, you’re the best. You're perfect.” And in reality, that’s not statistically possible because statistically we’re all average you know what I mean? Some of us are better singers than others, some of us are better tennis players than others. But at the end of the day, we’re all ultimately average and there’s no sort of like — no one’s more worthy than anyone else and for some people, that can be really terrifying especially for people who struggle with perfectionism, where their self-worth is very dependent on believing that they’re better than other people.


So what self-compassion is it’s sort of a response, we finally learn, “Oh my god, telling people that they’re perfect doesn’t work.” Because what it does, like when you tell your child that they’re perfect, they’re the best, they actually then, their self-esteem or their self-worth gets very tied to always believing they’re the best. Then they get on the real world where they realize they’re not the best and they’re like, “Oh my god, who am I? I’m worthless, I’m nothing, so long as I’m not the best,” you know?


Self-compassion is the answer to that. Self-compassion is like, “Hey, we’re all imperfect, you’re imperfect, I’m imperfect and that’s okay. We’re all kind of like fumbling along through life together and nobody really knows what the fuck they’re doing but like we’re trying and that’s cool, you’re allowed to be imperfect and that doesn’t make you not worthy or not lovable or not desirable or any of those sort of things.”


So that’s kind of like the underlying like, because a lot of people when they hear self-compassion or “self-love”, if you want to call it that, they think of it as being like, “I’m going to look in the mirror, I’m going to tell myself I’m the best,” and it’s like, no, it’s about sometimes looking in the mirror and being like, “You’re having a really rough day, that’s okay. Yeah, maybe you're not super on your game and that’s okay too.” There’s still like a desire for growth and learning and getting to know yourself better and being a better human. But the three, if you want to break self-compassion down, the three main kind of like action items that come out of it are mindfulness, self-kindness, and this idea of like common humanity. So, I’ll speak about each of those. 


Mindfulness, you probably heard of mindfulness before. Mindfulness is like a real buzz word this days and in some cases I think it’s being misinterpreted because there’s just such a focus on “just be in the present”. That is a big part of mindfulness but what often gets lost is like the central components of mindfulness are non-judgment and acceptance and just kind of like curiosity and observation of that current moment. So it’s not just about being present, it’s being present without judgment and with acceptance and that’s like, we can practice mindfulness toward the anxiety that we feel, the thought that we’re having, the bodily sensations that we’re experiencing or the pain that we’re feeling. What we perceive of around is like our current interpretation of the weather. We can practice mindfulness to kind of anything that like taps into any of our senses. 


Mindfulness is like the first place that self-compassion starts because mindfulness is essentially like being aware without judgement, with compassion, with acceptance and just really noticing what is happening with this sort of more like, almost as if you’re watching a movie, you’re not over identifying with it. So when you think about how we react to life, basically what happens is there’s a stimuli like there’s something that happens, some sort of situation and then we have this interpretation of what that is and often times that’s where the self-judgment comes in. Then we react. Often times we forget that there’s like the interpretation piece in the middle like we just have a situation and then we react. Something happens and we freak out. 


We don’t realize, well actually, there’s like this space in there that through practicing mindfulness and getting to know a little bit more about what that is and bringing more of it into your life. You actually get a lot more control over how you react to the world around you actually really empowers you to not necessarily have this unhealthy or unswerving reactions through emotions. Mindfulness is basically being like, “Okay, I notices I’m feeling something or I notice like a situation just happened and let me sit with that and just kind of like spend a moment acknowledging what’s going to be the best reaction here?” And then choosing how I want to react. It’s like something that’s where a lot of meditation is very helpful and yoga and focusing on your breath and just starting to really notice your thoughts without necessarily judging them or reacting or noticing your feelings. Because then that empowers you to actually make a decision, it’s more deserving for you.


So basically, mindfulness is this idea of, as I said, being aware and so you start to become aware of let’s say like this critical inner voice that is ultimately at the root of a lot of your pain or a lot of your unhealthy habits. So that’s like the first step there, you’ve got the mindfulness, you’re paying attention. Then, there’s this self-kindness piece, which is like, “What would I say to a friend in this situation? Am I going to tell a friend that they’re like a huge screw up and they’re never going to amount to anything and no one’s ever going to love them and they’re pathetic? Or would I tell a friend like my god, you’re so fat and ugly and no one’s going to love you and my god, I can’t believe you have cellulite, like you're a failure at life? Am I going to tell a friend the same things that I’m telling myself right now?” Probably not, right? 


Because most of us are former compassionate and understandable and flexible with other people than we are with ourselves. So there’s a mindfulness piece of recognizing like what’s going on, “How am I reacting to myself right now? What am I experiencing?” Then there’s the self-kindness piece and that’s where like the example I used of “this is understandable because ___” can be really helpful. Then this common humanity piece, which is like, “Hey, I’m not alone in this. We’re all in this together. Everyone goes through this sorts of experiences and feelings like heartbreak, disappointment, grief, loss, pain, frustration, envy, jealousy, rejection, anxiety, depression, disappointment.” 


I’m probably repeating myself now, but all of this painful feelings are just part of the human condition and part of what it is, be alive. It doesn’t make you broken that you’re feeling them, it makes you human and that’s like what unites us. So just really reminding yourself, “I’m not the only person going through this right now, this doesn’t not make me broken, this does not make me like a bad human or a failure or like crazy, or any of the kinds of pathologizing terms that we call ourselves when we experience something that we believe is not in line with that happiness movement that I talked about earlier.


So the common humanity piece is really helpful. Not for like being like, “Oh, everyone else feels this so therefore you shouldn’t be upset.” It’s more like, “Hey, you’re not broken, it’s cool, it’s okay to feel this way, like make space for it,” you know? Those are like the main — that’s what self-compassion is ultimately. Just to recap, it’s the mindfulness piece, it’s the self-kindness piece, it’s the common humanity piece and when you can kind of bring all of those into your experience or any painful experience, it is like that umbrella or that jacket in a storm that’s going to be really helpful for you in weathering it.


[0:29:06.8] MB: I’d love to dig in more on perfectionism, that’s something that we’ve had a lot of listeners email in and ask about and are very interested in and I love the definition that you use, which is the idea that you’re self-worth is dependent on being better than other people. Tell me more about that.


[0:29:25.3] MB1: Totally. So I define perfectionism as like having five characteristics and yeah, like I said, that’s sort of like self-worth being dependent on being better than other people. That’s definitely one of them and really how I define that one is, your self-worth is basically dependent on your achievements and your performance and outcomes and doing and productivity and how you look and inevitably because we judge our performance in comparison to other people, and comparison to what the “average performance” might be and that’s like our frame of reference then yeah, actually it is basically like being better than others. Being the best and so that’s a huge part of it. 


But there are also several other components that I think are really important and that we don’t always recognize when we think of perfectionism. There’s obviously like the fear of failure piece and that’s like a pretty classic one. But really what’s underneath that is like a fear of difficult emotions and, in my opinion, that’s really what’s at the root of all the problems in the world. We don’t know how to sit with our uncomfortable emotions and in our attempt to alleviate our emotional pain, we react impulsively or we react in like none-mindful ways. So basically it’s like yes, there’s the fear of the feelings that come along with failure, but there’s also just the fear of any uncomfortable emotion. A fear of like the emotions that come about with uncertainty, we’re feeling out of control. Because those are really uncomfortable experiences, however they’re very inevitable experiences in life.


So people who are highly perfectionistic tend to be incredibly like routine and want to make sure that they can predict exactly how something’s going to go, and that they feel this illusion of control in their behavior or their environment because the thought of feeling like anxiety or feeling out of control or feeling inadequacy or whatever other difficult emotions they’re struggling with is really, really terrifying. So they kind of create this box that they stay in and this sort of like illusion that they’ve got it all together with themselves, but what that comes out of is like not really taking risks or not putting themselves into situations where they might fail or where they might feel uncomfortable emotions.


It’s like this vicious cycle because there’s then the perception that they never really fail at anything or they never feel difficult emotions and they’re like succeeding but the reason they’re “succeeding” is because they’re not taking any risks that whatever allowed them to fail. So that whole — the fear of the difficult emotions is like a big one there. But then there are two other ones that are really indicative of perfectionism. One is this idea of the critical inner voice. So I mentioned that earlier, like just being super hard on ourselves and responding to ourselves in ways that we would never speak to a friend. 


That perpetuates all the other stuff because it’s like, “Oh well, if I know that if I fail in my eyes or I don’t meet expectations, then I’m going to respond to myself by being a huge asshole and basically abusing myself and I don’t have like the tools to cope with that pain, then I’m definitely not going to take risks. Because if I fail, the way that I cope with failure is by essentially like self-abuse.” Then final one is these unrealistically high expectations. Again, it’s like all such a vicious cycle because then you have this unrealistically high expectations that are very inflexible as well. It’s like, “I expect myself to perform at 100%.”


Let’s say you wake up and you’re like super sick or you get dumped or your mom’s in the hospital or they’re just like things going on in your life or you’re just like in a low mood, right? PMSing, and you still hold yourself to those unrealistically high expectations. So we almost set ourselves up for failure in doing that and so it’s like this really paralyzing, super anxiety provoking way of relating to yourself and to life because it’s like you have to walk this fine, fine line where if you take the wrong step, everything crumbles and that’s why often times people who relate to being perfectionistic, can identify with being like they think they’re super anal or they’re high strung or they just don’t know how to relax and it’s because like there’s so much riding on whatever their next step is because at any wrong turn, everything could crumble and they’ll feel so terrible about themselves. 


Just like recap those five things for anyone listening. Fear of failure, fear of uncomfortable feelings, unrealistically high expectations, critical inner voice, and then your self-worth being dependent on these outcomes and achievements which can often lead to people feeling as though they’re bipolar. I get a lot of clients come in and they’re like, “Pretty sure I’m bipolar. Yesterday I felt really great, I was super happy. I looked good and things were going well at work,” and then the next day they’re like, “Then today I’m having a fat day and you know, I got like rejected by this guy and got feedback on this presentation and they said I needed to work on this thing. I just basically feel like a failure of a human.” And it’s like, “Well that’s not being bipolar, that’s having your self-worth be very dependent on the outcomes and achievements piece. Those are the kind of five factors of perfectionism.


[0:34:48.2] MB: That’s incredible and so much of that stuff, I think, not only resonates with me but I think will really resonate with a lot of our listeners. I feel like in many cases, I put a lot of pressure on myself and I’m curious, kind of walk me through maybe sort of a really simple example of an internal dialogue that you would use to kind of back away from something like that.


[0:35:09.4] MB1: Sure, yeah, what’s some — can you give me an example of what would be a position in which you’d be putting pressure on yourself?


[0:35:14.4] MB: I mean I think all kinds of different things. I don’t know if I have a specific instance.


[0:35:18.2] MB1: Okay, well let’s think of what would be something that listeners would relate to? Okay, so I think as women, we put a lot of — and men too obviously, but we put a lot of pressure on ourselves for our appearance and definitely that might be like, in terms of like how we feel and everything like that and not feeling sexy but a lot of times like women and people who are very perfectionistic put a lot of pressure on themselves around weight and like reaching a certain kind of goal that they perceive to be, again, that kind of like answer to their pain or will make them finally good enough, or help them finally reach that place where they never feel anxiety anymore, you know?


Or it might be a way of maintaining this illusion of like kind of control and not having to deal with the anxiety that might say that they’re not good enough, you I know? So I think with that example, there’s like the pressure of this ultimate goal or a pressure to always be a certain way that unfortunately really contaminates the joy that we could possibly have in life because it takes us away, it takes us out of any moment where we could actually just be there and experience it, and enjoy it because we’re constantly thinking like, “Oh, you know, what am I — I have to make sure that I’m getting to the gym, I have to make sure that I’m exercising. Or I have to make sure that it’s like, you know, I stay with this really tight parameters of my expectations for myself or my appearance.” 


In that case like self-compassion can be so powerful because it’s this idea that’s like, “Hey, hold up, your self-worth is not dependent on a number on the scale and when you’re on your death bed, is it really going to be that important how much you weight when you were 28, or whatever? And is that what you look for in your friends and in your partners, like their physical appearance, is that what’s most important?” And kind of like tapping in more deeply into your values and things like that. Just essentially giving yourself permission to be imperfect. 


Now, that’s something where it’s like I guess the pressure piece is more around this ultimate goal, which is a more — like that’s kind of perfectionism in like a systemic sense I suppose. But then there’s also like the perfectionism where I think might be more related to what you were talking about, which is like a performance piece that’s like more like an individual experience. So let’s say it’s like giving a presentation. So we have this pressure on ourselves and our mind starts to tell us things like, “You are, you have to ace this presentation and if you screw up then that means that like you are a — you’re unhirable and like you are just like a waste of life and no one’s ever going to take you seriously and oh my god, then you're not going to be able to get a job and like then there’s going to — six months are going to go by and you’re going to be unemployed and you’re going to have a gap on your resume and then what’s going to happen and then nobody’s ever going to want to hire you and then you’re going to become homeless and then you're like going to die,” or whatever.


We have these kind of like spiralistic thinking of believing that if something doesn’t go as planned with this pressure that we’re putting on ourselves then the worst thing ever is going to happen. It’s interesting because often times we don’t actually even like reach the point of, “Oh, I’m going to be homeless.” There’s just this like intense anxiety and fear around what happens if it doesn’t go how I expect or hope it to go? It can be helpful in those situations where you’re feeling a lot of pressure around your performance, whether it is like the presentation or the interview or the date or whatever to be like, “Okay, instead of this visualization chip,” I mean, and don’t get me wrong, visualization can be helpful. 


But instead of being like, “This is going to go perfectly, 100% yeah, it’s going to go so well, I’m not going to screw up at all,” which actually can keep our anxiety quite high because it keeps us in that very tight place where we can’t screw up, it can be helpful to be like, “Hey, you know what? You’re probably going to jumble your words at some point, you know? There might be something you say that doesn’t make a ton of sense or maybe your face is going to go red or maybe your palms are going to sweat a little bit and like maybe you’re not going to — in fact, you’re definitely not going to meet your expectations in every way because you’re a human and there’s like no, you’re not a robot, there’s no way you can make this go perfectly. But that’s okay.” 


Being able to permit yourself a little bit of like wiggle room in terms of the performance itself, that’s one way that you’re going to make your expectations like more realistic and thus make the anxiety less overwhelming because really when you think about it, all of our painful emotions to a certain extent are come out of like the disparity between our expectations and our reality. If your expectations are super high, there’s more of a chance that like your reality is going to fall below those expectations and in that space is going to be like disappointment, rejection, shame, guilt, anxiety, frustration like all those sorts of things.


So when we can kind of like lower the expectations, not in the sense that you’re becoming complacent or you're not still expecting success from yourself. But when you can make them like a little bit more realistic and be like, “Hey, there’s little more wiggle room there for having like the odd jumble of your words here and there or the odd sort of like embarrassing comment or something because you’re human and like that’s going to happen, then it alleviates the possibility of such strong emotions as a result of not reaching those expectations and then it also alleviates like the anxiety that we feel when we are expecting ourselves to hit that unrealistically high place. I’m like having a moment right now myself where I’m like, “I don’t know if this is really making any sense? And I don’t know if it’s going to be helpful,” you know?


[0:41:08.7] MB: It’s making a ton of sense, I think it’s super helpful.


[0:41:11.9] MB1: Okay, that’s good to hear. But you know, it’s interesting because even as I’m saying all of that, in my mind, I’m like, “This is interesting, I’m saying these things, but I wonder if this is actually helpful to the listener?” And like, “Oh my gosh, I wonder what Matt’s thinking right now? Is he going to go — is he and his producer after this going to be talking about this being like, “Wow, that girl was out to lunch,” right? I still have my mind that tells me this sorts of things and of course it can be helpful to seek a little bit of assurance and be like, “Matt, do I sound crazy?”


But it’s also helpful to just be like, “You know what? If that is the case, it’s okay,” you know? “You did your best, not everything you’re going to say is going to make perfect sense and that’s all right,” right? I think, really the central kind of theme there is like permit yourself to be a human, permit yourself to make some errors, that’s okay. The other thing that we tend to do is we just do something called globalizing. So when we don’t meet our expectations, such as let’s say it’s like the presentation and one presentation or one interview goes poorly and then we’re like, “Oh my god, I’m so bad at public speaking, I should never do this again, I am like the worst, I’m just like, I’m not a public speaker, I’m not good at that.”


Because we had a really hard time with the experience of “failure” in our eyes and so in order to prevent ourselves from ever feeling it again, we’re like, “I’m just never going to do that again, I’m going to avoid those situations and I determined that I am bad at public speaking or bad at you know, speaking in front of audiences or bad at giving presentations so I’m never going to do it.” That’s like very unhelpful because it prevents us from ever having opportunities to grow and learn and practice which is like what we need to get better at things. 


But ultimately also, it’s not the truth. You have one negative experience where you don’t meet your expectations or like you really bomb something out of countless experiences where you probably rocked it. That’s not helpful to be like, “Og no, I now suck at this,” right? That’s something to keep in mind as well, alongside this whole “let yourself be human” thing, also remember like don’t make an interpretation that because you failed once, you are a failure you know? Because you bombed a presentation that you don’t know how to give presentations. Or because you had one bad date that you’re undatable, you know? 


I would say in terms of things that people can take away from this, trying to really keep in mind those two major things of being like, let yourself be a human rather than telling yourself everything’s going to go perfectly, actually tell yourself you know what? Things aren’t going to go perfectly. Aim for like 80% in every area of your life, just aim for 80% and be like, “Look, I got 20% wiggle room, that’s cool, 80% is awesome.” That’s going to help alleviate a lot of your anxiety and then also just constantly reminding yourself like one instance of “failure” in your eyes does not make you a failure at whatever you’re’ trying to do well.
 
[0:43:58.5] MB: So, I’m curious for somebody that kind of striving for achievement, excellence, wants to be at the top of their field, how do you strike a balance between that and kind of the idea of self-compassion and sort of being kind to yourself?


[0:44:14.1] MB1: Totally, I think that’s a great question and I think it’s something a lot of people struggle with when they’re starting to move away from perfectionism and be like, “Okay, hold on, if I’m not performing to be the best like how do I still make sure that I’m successful and how do I still make sure that I’m not going to end up like not getting out of bed and gaining 200 pounds and just like dropping out of school or not working or whatever?”


So I think the first thing to recognize is that like, a real characteristic of perfectionism is all or nothing thinking. So we tend to think like, “Oh my gosh, if I’m not killing myself, trying to strive for success, I’m going to become like what I completely have zero respect for, which is like this crazy lazy person who’s just like a free loader and has no desire to live their life and it’s just like a waste. So we have the all or nothing thinking when it comes to that. So the first thing to recognize is, look, if you start being a little bit more self-compassionate to yourself, it actually enhances your performance because what it does is it gives you, it empowers you to take risks and you need to take risks and step out of your comfort zone to grow and to get better and to succeed more. 


So self-compassion is actually a tool for success. It’s not a tool that’s going to just like — it’s not like self-pity and just telling yourself you don’t need to keep striving for growth and development. So first of all just changing a bit of your understanding around what self-compassion actually means. It’s really like there to enhance your performance rather than deplete it. But then also like coming back to your values, ultimately. Again, having our self-worth and why we’re on this earth being dependent on, I don’t know, some recognition that it’s also impermanent. 


No one else really cares about too much and we’re the ones who put the most pressure on ourselves to look a certain way and achieve a certain amount. Who are we really doing this for and why? And what is that going to bring us? And to starting to ask these bigger questions which you’re not going to answer in one sitting but it’s something to meditate on and something to think about more and be like, “Okay, do I want to continue to ride this rollercoaster of feeling good when everything is going well in my life but it being like a huge liability,” because you don’t have a lot of control and all these painful things in life are inevitable? Or do you want to come back to a more sustainable place of self-worth which would be like, “Let me take a look at my values,” and lead with values versus performance. 


Something that I was really huge for me was changing my perspective around what is productive, to viewing it as meaningful. When we think of, “Okay I have to be productive all the time,” there are only a few things that bin to the ball of productivity, right? Whereas if I can take a step back and be like, “Okay, I want my life to be meaningful.” Do I want my life to be productive? Why? So that when I die I can leave behind a bunch of papers that no one’s really going to read or I can feel really good about like the weight that I reached when I was X age? That it’s ultimately going to change because everything is impermanent. It really comes back to this idea of think about when I am on my death bed how do I want to look back on my life and what will have been important to me and what really does make me feel good moment to moment? 


Yes, achieving to a certain extent does that, but it’s also very fleeting and with perfectionism we achieve something but then we raise the bar higher because it’s never good enough because there’s this fear of letting ourselves bask in our successes or enjoyment. So for me personally, I really enjoy connecting and most humans do. Again, that’s a very primal instinct of ours is to connect and to have intimacy with people and I also really enjoy learning. I also really enjoy challenge but not because I want to achieve something. Because I love the process of creating and that’s where I get my meaning from. 


So I guess I’d encourage listeners to think, “What gives me a sense of meaning and purpose in life and can I lead with that as opposed to leading with a focus on outcomes and achievements?” And when you lead with that, it’s like you win every time. You’re always successful, because even if the company that you’re creating isn’t making the revenue you were hoping for, you know that your desire to build and create and help or have an impact or whatever it is that is a reason behind you starting this company, you’re still doing that. You’re still succeeding in all of those areas in terms of living with your values and leading with that. Yeah, maybe you’re not getting the revenue that you are hoping for. 


But at the end of the day, you’re still meeting your expectations in terms of living in line with your values and that’s how humans stay happy, is by feeling that sense of meaning and feeling like we’re here for a reason and feeling connected. And so I would encourage people to really start to peel away some of these onion layers and question some of their beliefs around what they’re here for. For me, a really formative moment was when I was 24 and I was finishing my masters and I was struggling pretty seriously with anorexia and I was very, very, very thin and I was with this guy and I had this world view that if I am successful and I am a certain weight, I can make sure that the world would not crumble around me and everything will be good and everything will be fine. 


And I was not in a happy place at all, but these excessive like overworking and overachieving and maintaining a very low weight were my ways of feeling good enough and that was my perfectionism. That was how it manifested and then the guy dumped me. He left me for someone who’s in his master program. It was the most devastating breaking open experience of my life and it literally took me two years to get over, but it was also the most transformative experience of my life because not only did I then learn how to deal with difficult emotions and “become friends with them”, I guess you could say. But it also turned upside down this world view of mine that was like that’s what’s important in life and that’s what people value in you and that’s the way to feel happy and that’s the way to feel good is to achieve and do this and do that. 


You know what? People aren’t going to love you more based on how much you achieve and if there are people who are doing that, those aren’t the people you want to surround yourself with. So come back to what do you value, what is important to you? When you’re on your death bed what do you want to have felt like you’ve experienced in this life? And do you want to hide behind the desk for the next 50 years and then die? Is that a good life to you? Maybe for some people it is, I don’t know? But I guess I would encourage people to really look at that. 


And the other thing, I know I have been talking for a long time, but the other thing that was really formative for me is Allen Watts’s perspective on viewing life not even viewing it as a journey because for some people it’s like, you know, view it as a journey and it’s all about the destination. Yeah, that’s great but let’s take it to the next step. He talks about viewing it as a song. You don’t listen to a song because you are waiting for it to end. You’re not trying to get to a destination point. You’re listening to it to have an experience. You want to have emotions evoked and sometimes songs make you feel crappy in a really healing way and sometimes they make you feel like — I mean, that’s why there’s so many kinds of music. 


And so try to think of your life as a song and if you can just experience all of it and be open to all of it and trust that there are different emotions that you’re going to experience and you’re there to pay attention to it and to be in it rather than to get somewhere, those were super performative experiences for me. So hopefully there’s something in there that your listeners can take from those pieces of advice around taking away the — I guess finding the balance between achieving yes and seeing what’s important, but why is it important and how can you find that balance where you can still experience life and feel happy?


[00:52:23.3] MB: You know it’s funny, I’m a huge fan of Allan Watts and he creeps into a surprising number of conversations we have here on the show. So I am really glad that you brought him up. That was an incredible explanation and some really good insights. For listeners who are curious and want to do some more homework on this, I know you mentioned two books already, what are some resources that you think would be good for them to check out?


[00:52:45.9] MB1: Yeah, for sure. Definitely those books that I mentioned. So it was The Compassionate Mind by Paul Gilbert and Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff and actually I think Self-Compassion by Kristin Neff is a probably more practical one for people if they want to choose one between the two and it’s more in lined like it’s a woman who’s written it. She talks about traditionally female experiences that we go through. But of course, I would love for you to check out my website, meganbruneau.com, there’s oneshrinksperspective.com, but also you can see more of my resources all compiled together at meganbruneau.com and there’s a lot that I have written on self-compassion and overcoming perfectionism and things like that. 


Really anything, a hugely formative book for me was When Things Fall Apart by Pema Chodron. That’s more of secular Buddhism and that’s actually where self-compassion comes out of. It’s more or a — and mindfulness and all of that. It all comes out of secular Buddhism so it’s a very different way of relating to the world, relating to your feelings, relating to life. And if someone is going through a difficult time right now who’s listening to this podcast, that book absolutely changed my life. But the amount of people for whom it has changed their lives, just go to Amazon and read the reviews. So I really encourage people to read that book. 


Chris Germer is another person who does a lot of work on this. Oh, what is his website? I think it’s mindfulofcompassion.com but I’m not 100% sure. Maybe I’ll get it back to you and you can put it in the show notes. But there are like, really just like anything in the realm of — you can just Google “self-compassion” and there are tons of sites that come up and just start to delve into this a little bit more deeply and download some audio meditations and stuff to your phone. Because a big part of self-compassion is actually becoming more in tune with our body and like feeling a sense of compassion from ourselves like physically. 


So it’s not just a mental thing and for many people who are perfectionistic, we are so detached from our bodies. Like we don’t even — we have no idea what we’re feeling because what we feel is uncomfortable, we do something to turn it off. So we either like distract through some form of addiction or whatever, or we avoid it by like removing ourselves from the situation that’s making us feel that way or just never going into a situation that makes us feel that way.


So a big part of self-compassion is also becoming more in touch with your body. Listening to some meditations and things that can help you get more in touch with like actually what you’re feeling physically can be really helpful and then also like yoga. I think everyone should do yoga. It’s just such a great way to reconnect with your body and to practice a lot of the work that you learn reading these books, to actually implement it because you can have all the theory and all in the world but if you're not actually implementing it and experiencing it, it’s not going to be that super beneficial and it’s not going to help you rewire your brain so that your brain defaults to self-compassion, as mine does now finally like several years later. But it comes through the practice of actually learning a new language. 


You will always have the language itself, criticism, you can go back to that if you want to but what we want to do is we want to help you learn how to default to self-compassion. In yoga you can start to practice being like, “Oh, this is interesting, I’m noticing I’m comparing myself to that person, they’re doing that pose better than I am. Or I notice I’m beating myself up because I can’t do this or I fell out of the pose. Or I notice that I’m like, being super, super competitive and you know, is that helpful for me? And what that’s like? And what emotions are going through it? Am I judging myself for being competitive?” 


Maybe I can make space for my sense of comparing and being competitive, but also take a step back and be like, “Is this helpful for me? Can I relate in a different way?” So I guess I would recommend, check with those resources but also bring some form of mindfulness meditation, movement practice into your life where you can actually start to get to know yourself better and how perfectionism and self-criticism acts on you and then start to actually put into practice a lot of the stuff that you may have heard today and that you will learn through reading these resources.


[0:56:39.0] MB: Well we will make sure to include all of those resources in the show notes at scienceofsuccess.co. One more time, where can people find you online?


[0:56:46.9] MB1: Yeah, check me out — so meganbruneau.com and then you can also find me like I’m on Instagram, I’m on Facebook, I’m on Twitter, I’m on YouTube. I’d love for you to send me an email if you have any questions or if you just want to reach out and say “hey” or reflect or whatever. It’s just megan.bruneau@gmail.com. Again, hopefully Matt can include this in the show notes. Yeah, so definitely reach out to me. I love hearing form people, it helps me come back to my values which is like “I think I’m on this earth to help”, you know?


It helps remind me that even though there are a lot of trolls out there who love to say really negative things, because that’s a part of this world as well, there are also people that appreciate it. I love those sort of warm fuzzies and stuff like that but I also want to help you on your journey in whatever way I can so if there’s a question you had or if there’s a resource you’re looking for, let me know and I’ll do my best to help guide you on your journey because we’re all in this together.


[0:57:44.2] MB: Well, Megan, thank you so much. This has been a fascinating conversation, full of actionable insights and some really great stuff. So we really appreciated having you on the show.


[0:57:53.1] MB1: It was awesome and it’s such a pleasure to be here Matt. Thank you so much for having me. 


[0:57:56.4] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the science of success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email address is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I would love to hear from you, and I read and respond to every listener email.


The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. Lastly, I get a ton of listeners asking, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this information?” Because that we created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to scienceofsucces.co and joining our email list. People love this guide. I get emails all the time, people telling me how much it’s changed their lives and how awesome it is. 


If you want to get all the incredible information that we talked about, links, transcripts, videos, everything that we mentioned in this interview, and much more, you can get all of our show notes at sciencesofsuccess.co. Just go to scienceofsuccess.co, hit the show notes button at the top. You can get show notes for this episode and any of our previous episodes as well. We have transcripts, the whole nine yards. Lastly I want to say thanks again and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success. 

The Science of Power - How to Acquire It, What Makes You Lose it with Dr. Dacher Keltner

In this episode we discuss lessons from 25 years of studying the evolution of human emotion, examine whether the Machiavellian concept of power still works, explore the surprising scientific data on how you can acquire power, and look closely at the foundation of enduring power from studies of military units on how to achieve and maintain power with Dr. Dacher Keltner.

Dr. Dacher Keltner is the founding director of the Greater Good Science Center and a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. He is also the author of The Power Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence and Born to Be Good, and a co-editor of The Compassionate Instinct.

• Lessons from 25 years of studying the evolution of human emotion

• What the hard science says about the powerful impact of gratitude

• Why you’re interpretation of “survival of the fittest” is totally wrong

• Why emotion is not something to “remove” or rid ourselves of

• How emotions guide social behaviors in many very important ways

• Does the Machveiallian conception of power still work?

• Studies in military organizations, schools, show about how to effectively wield power

• The surprising scientific data on how you can acquire and maintain power

• We discuss in depth if power is given or if power is seized

• What are the foundations of enduring power?

• importance of empathy and building strong social ties rather than serving your narrow self interest

• The power paradox and why the more powerful you get, the harder it is to stay powerful

• The importance of focusing on other people

• How do we create organizations and societies that prevent the abuses of power?

• We review and share resources for practical steps to implement all of these lessons

• The massive impact and power of touch to communicate emotions

• The shocking science of how half a second of touch can communicate almost every major emotion

• The hilarious gender differences in Dr. Keltner’s emotional touch research

• How to cultivate gratitude and awe

• The simple power of just saying thank you

• The new collaborative definition of power and how its radically different from what you may think of when you think of power

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] The Power of Paradox: How We Gain and Lose Influence by Dacher Keltner

• [Book] The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals by Charles Darwin

• [Book] Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny by Robert Wright

• [Article] Egalitarian Behavior and Reverse Dominance Hierarchy by Christopher Boehm

• [Harvard Business Review] Power Corrupts, But It Doesn’t Have To

• [Website] Greater Good Science Center

• [Greater Good Site] Science-based Practices for a Meaningful life

• [Movie] Inside Out

• [Movie] Up

• [Book] Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life by Dacher Keltner

• [Book] The Compassionate Instinct: The Science of Human Goodness by Dacher Keltner, Jason Marsh, and Jeremy Adam Smith

• [Website] Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory

• [Edx MOOC Course] The Science of Happiness by Dacher Keltner and Emiliana Simon-Thomas

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

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

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success. I'm your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee, and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study, and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performance tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss lessons from 25 years of studying the evolution of human emotion, examine whether the Machiavellian Concept of Power still works, explore the surprising scientific data on how you can acquire power, and look closely at the foundation of enduring power from studies of military units on how to achieve and maintain power with Dr. Dacher Keltner. 

The Science of Success continues to grow with more than 625,000 downloads, listeners in over 100 countries, hitting number one New and Noteworthy, and more. A lot of our listeners are curious about how to organize and remember everything. I get tons of listener emails and comments asking me, "How to keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing experts, and listening to podcasts and much more?"

Because of that, we’ve created an awesome resource for you. You can get it completely free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. It’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. To get it, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email. 

In our previous episode we discussed one of the most interesting results ever found in the psychological research of education, why pleasure maximization is a flawed model for human understanding, we went deep into a number of research examples, discussed the massive and counterintuitive difference between motivating top performers and bottom performers, and much more with Dr. Dan Ariely. If you want to understand the surprising truth that research reveals about what actually motivates you, listen to that episode.

[00:02:18] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Dr. Dacher Keltner. Dacher is the founding director of the Greater Good Science Center, a professor of psychology at UC Berkeley. He’s also the author of The Power Paradox: How we gain and lose influence and Born to be Good as well as the co-editor of the Compassion Instinct.

Dacher, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[00:02:40] DK: It’s great to be with you, Matt. 

[00:02:42] MB: We’re very excited to have you on here. So for our listeners who may not be familiar, tell us a little bit about your background. 

[00:02:49] DK: Sure, so I grew raised by a mom who is a literature professor and a dad who was an artist in sort of an alternative set of circumstances in the late 60’s and 70’s and then went to undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara, studied sociology and psychology and then Stanford for graduate school in social psychology. And then I think, you know, relevant to my scholarship, for 25 years I have been studying the evolution of human emotion and in particular emotions like compassion and awe and gratitude and laughter. 

And then relevant to the power paradox, I’ve really been interested in the nature of human hierarchies and how do we get power in different kinds of hierarchies? How do we keep our power? Why does power turns into sociopaths so regularly, as we see in the daily news? So those have been my two long standing interest and then I teach at UC Berkeley. I have a giant lab called the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab and then I run the Greater Good Science Center, among other things. 

[00:03:48] MB: So to get started, tell us a little bit before we delve into the Power Paradox, which I am very curious about, tell us about the biological and evolutionary origins of human emotion. 

[00:04:00] DK: I’ve been teaching human emotion at Berkeley for 20 years and there are podcasts that your listeners can listen to from iTunes and the like, and there’s this old idea in the philosophical literature that you see with people like David Hume and Charles Darwin and René Descartes that emotions drive our thought patterns and our reasoning and the way that we act in the world and philosophers like Martha Nussbaum have written about how emotions are core of the social fabric of human society. 

So the question, Matt, is how do you translate that broad thinking to laboratory science? And my works has really been inspired by Charles Darwin who wrote a really influential book on human emotion in 1872, The Expression of Emotion In Man and Animals where he really argued that, in terms of the biological origins of emotion, emotions are these basic ways in which we see the world, we interact with others and we’ve build up human society. Just to take one example, you take an emotion like gratitude, which my lab has studied in terms of touch and social benefits. 

When we feel gratitude and we express these emotion to other people it builds up trust and cooperation between non-kin, which in evolutionary framework is a fundamental component to strong, social communities. So we make the case in a lot of different kinds of studies that emotions are biological, they have specific systems in your body that are enabled by emotion. They help us connect to others and they really solve the most important problems of being part of human societies. 

[00:05:45] MB: And one of the most fascinating things about that concept is the idea that a lot of times people who don’t really have a deep understanding of evolution, sort of hear the phrase "survival of the fittest" and think of the big, strong, violent kind of people winning out but that’s not always the case, right?

[00:06:02] DK: Yeah, you know, thanks for asking that Matt. You know we are in the process right now in the evolutionary literature really witnessing I think what you might call a revolution, which is that 40 years ago, when people thought about evolution, when scientist use that framework to think about human behavior, it was really survival of the fittest, right? It was competition, and who’s stronger, and who’s more adversarial to get the advantage that really prevails in terms of gaining resources and reproductive opportunities. And really in the past 40 years, we’ve seen this emergence of really the "survival of the kindest" hypothesis, which is what I’ve called it in Born to be Good. 

What we’ve seen is, just to give you some illustrative findings like little kids as early as 18 months will help strangers accomplish tasks. That’s the work of Tomasello and Warneken. Around the world, Joseph Hendrich has shown people will share with strangers 40% of their resources when they don’t have to share at all. My lab has shown that we have genes in old parts of the mammalian brain that help us feel compassion and take care of vulnerable individuals. 

So I think what we’re seeing is survival of the fittest is really an outdated way of thinking about evolution. We’re a very social species, we’re collaborative species, although obviously we do other things, and there are these emotions like compassion and gratitude and awe that help us fold into strong social networks and work well together. 

[00:07:37] MB: One of the other really fascinating findings or things you talk about around emotion is a lot of times when people think of emotion they view it as sort of this thing we need to get rid of or we need to be these logical, rational robots but you also say that’s not always the correct way to think about it. 

[00:07:56] DK: Yeah, and this is such an old, I would even call it a bias, in our thinking about emotions, Matt. We think of emotions as destructive and dysfunctional and when we are really mad at our romantic partner or outraged at our family or ashamed of what we’ve done, we’d give anything to get rid of those emotions, right? But in fact, again, we’re starting to see a much different take on the functionality of human emotions in our social living, that emotions really guide thought processes in effective ways. 

So, my research has shown for example that feelings of compassion help you see how connected you are to other people. Emotions guide social behaviors in really important ways. So there’s a lot of research on gratitude, for example, that if I express gratitude to people who are in my group or the people that I work with, I will actually form stronger social ties within social networks that benefit me downstream. 

So there are a lot of shifts in how we think about emotions. They aren’t the kind of dysfunctional parts of the human mind, they’re really adaptive. You know, one of the ways that we can test this hypothesis is you can look at people who don’t feel a lot of emotion, who suffer forms of brain damage that harm parts of their frontal lobes that knock out the passions and they really don’t do well in getting along with other people. So I think there’s a movement afoot to rethink what the emotions are. 

[00:09:32] MB: And that idea combined with sort of a corollary from the point you just made about the survival of the fittest, sort of getting into the concept of the power. When many people think of power they think of this Machiavellian concept. Does that concept still work or is that something that is outdated?

[00:09:51] DK: Well, you know, I think it’s so interesting. I think the straightforward Machiavellian approach to power is really, as historians have written. You know, let’s remember Machiavelli wrote The Prince, published in 1532, during a period in Italy which was a very violate time, one of the most violent periods in human history. And the politics were, they'd make us blushed today about how horrifying they were. And the Machiavellian philosophy to power, which your listeners probably would intuitively grasp is, “use force, be feared, be deceptive, trick people. Make them think that you’re good natured when in fact you’re going to screw them over", right? 

It’s a force and fraud philosophy of power and studies show, if you’re going to negotiate with a really nasty person, you’ve got to have some Machiavellian-ism with you. If you are having a one-shot negotiations, probably be good to be a little bit Machiavellian. But in general, we’re seeing that in studies and organizations and in military units and schools, Machiavellians tend to actually not be respected by people around them, not be trusted by people around them, actually not gain power, not fuel like they’re powerful, in organizations they get paid less. 

So I think, you know, it’s an interesting historical question about, or observation that we’re really moving away from this force and fraud approach to power, notwithstanding our current politics, and we’re moving more towards collaborative power where we work together and empathize and collaborate to get things done. 

[00:11:35] MB: So this collaborative power, how would you define sort of the modern day or this new evolution of the concept of power?

[00:11:43] DK: You know, it’s really interesting. People have been looking at the nature of work and here I was really influenced by Robert Wright, who was a terrific writer, his book Non-Zero. 

[00:11:54] MB: I love that book, it’s one of my favorites. 

[00:11:55] DK: Yeah, it blew my mind, and Wright’s argument is that both in our biological evolution and then in our social evolution as we have become more complex societies from the Renaissance villages that Machiavelli was working in, we’ve become much more collaborative, right? For scientist or innovators to get work done, they’ve got to work with a lot of different kinds of people. When I go consult at Facebook or Google and I work with a team on a project, there are 10 people there. There are designers and engineers, and data analysts, and language specialists, and product managers, they all have these different specializations to get stuff done. 

For you and I to disseminate some of these ideas, we have multiple talents that we have to work together with to produce a podcast. So life is more collaborative, right? And we are very collaborative species and so what that means is, both early in our evolution in hunter-gatherer societies, it was really the collaborators who really gained respect and power. The individual who knew how to get good fish, or a good food source. or helped unite teams to fend off predators. 

And then today, what we’re starting to find is this collaborative approach to power where you cooperate, you empower others, you empathize, you build strong teams, actually yields and gains power for the individuals. So I wish, as a historian, they would have written more broadly about how we’re becoming a collaborative world and power policy that I think the data are there. 

[00:13:34] MB: So getting into the data a little bit, what does the science say? Again because one of the big things on this podcast, we like to be data driven. What does the science say about how to acquire power?

[00:13:46] DK: It’s so funny, Matt, I think a lot of people maybe a lot of your listeners like if you ask them, “All right, be honest, do you want to have power?” They'd feel a little bit uneasy or queasy, right? Like, "Oh, I don’t want to grab power," and in a new way that’s because we think of power as Machiavellian. But I really define power as your ability to advance the greater good, to alter states of people around you and make them do good work. And I think that fits a lot of different social scientific definitions of power that you could apply at the international level. 

So that begs the question of how we gain power, and this is where I was really surprised in writing The Power Paradox about how much we’ve learned to answer this question in the scientific literature. So we gained power, for example, by really listening carefully and really taking in the wisdom and thoughts of other people around you. Abraham Lincoln, in the historical accounts, was just a great practitioner of this art of just empathy, listening, hearing people well, gaining collective wisdom, actually gains you power. 

Another way we gain power is, to put it really simply, by being kind and pro-social. In hunter-gatherer societies, there’s a prize winning essay that summarizes who are the leaders in 48 hunter-gatherer societies living for 200,000 years in the conditions of our social evolution, that really in which our social structure started to take shape. And Christopher Baum observes, it’s really the person who is fair, impartial, humble, and kind, right?

So studies are starting to show, for example, in the competitive altruism literature that if I share, if I’m kind, if I express gratitude, for example in the work of Mike Norton in Harvard in social networks or organizations, people will respect me more. They'll give me status and I’ll have power and influence. So I think in a way, we’re returning slowly, with a lot of exceptions in the world, to our evolutionary roots of power being founded in kindness and empathy and being fair and humble. You seemed shocked. 

[00:16:08] MB: Oh definitely. I think it’s a very counter intuitive finding. If anything comes to mind, I’d love to maybe hear one or two examples from the research kind of about how you came to that conclusion. 

[00:16:19] DK: Yeah, so let me give you a couple of examples, and I think these are just scientific tidbits out there, because I’ve been speaking in really broad terms. So what studies find, for example, is that if you are able to read other people’s emotions well and in The Power Paradox, this book, I present a couple of fun tests of like reading emotions from people’s facial expressions or drawings of emotion. If I can empathize in that way, I actually rise in financial analysis firms, right? I gain more power. 


If I’m a school kid and I’m in seventh grade and I’m facing the Lord of the Flies politics on the playground and I know how to read people’s emotions well, just detecting emotions in their facial expressions, once again I gain social power. If I am working on a team — this is a recent study from MIT by Woolley and colleagues — I am working on a team, we've got to solve some hard problems and I’m listening carefully and asking good questions., really simple practices, my team does better and I gain power, right? 

So these are all specific examples of how, you know, this counterintuitive notion that being good to others actually gets me power. A final example of Adam Grant and Francesca Gina, if I am the manager and I am trying to get people to do things and I simply say, "Thank you," right? I express gratitude, those people are more productive and enhance my influence and power. So there are a lot of new findings that tell us that Machiavelli was wrong, that the pro-social tendencies are pathways to power. 

[00:18:01] MB: Is power something that’s given or something that’s taken? 

[00:18:05] DK: Well, you know, when you look back in history and you read the great historical counts of power, you look at what Hitler did, as a canonical example, and he killed his rival and he killed other rivals and usurped power and then built up his fascist state — by the way, which fell calamitously — and we have this vision or image and this really comes in a way out of Machiavelli that we grab power and you think about House of Cards or Godfather's popular portrayal of this, that’s an old notion. 

But I think that really in today’s 21st century where we are more interdependent, we are collaborating more, there are better means by which we scrutinize other people’s behavior. I mean nowadays, Matt, almost everything I do is rated in the Internet by Rate Your Professor and people commenting on what I’ve said, and this is true of most people. So what that means is that we’ve moved away from of the power grab view of how we get power to the fact that power is really given to us according to how well we advance other people’s interests. 

[00:19:22] MB: If power is given what are some of the ways that, you know, where does something enduring power come from? 

[00:19:30] DK: Yeah, well in a way this is the most important question right?, And there are studies that show that really can pinpoint, and I wrote about this in a piece for the Harvard Business Review, there are just certain things that if you do them you’ll gain respect and power in social groups, right? If you speak out and you offer some interesting ideas, and you ask great questions, you listen well, you show that you’ve got some pro social tendencies that are good for the group, things we've been talking about, you’ll get power. 

But I think, in a way, the deeper question for us is what you just asked. Which is, "How do I keep my power and status and respect with my work colleagues, or my community colleagues or if I am a part of a politically active group and how do I keep the respect in that group, or with my family?" Right? And what studies are showing is that what really matters in this realm is in a sense that you show that you cannot succumb to sort of indulgent self-interest and that you can stay committed to the group, right? You do things that continue to be good for the group. 

So studies of military unit show, for example, it’s really the individual who continues to work on behalf of others, show respect to others, express gratitude and sacrifice who really keeps power. Historical studies of US presidents where historians have rated, who are the great presidents with enduring legacy, show it’s really the individuals who had bold ideas like FDR or Abraham Lincoln, but who continue to practice empathy and building strong social ties rather than really serving their own narrow self-interest. So enduring power is really found in these virtues, if you will. These more pro-social tendencies. 

[00:21:35] MB: And the importance of focusing on empathy and building strong social ties, that really ties into the title of the book, which is The Power Paradox. Tell us a little bit about that concept and why it’s so hard to do that. 

[00:21:50] DK: Yeah, well this is where the trouble begins. It’s really once we feel powerful. So what we are starting to document in the lab is that if I am a really good practitioner of empathy, and listening, and engaging in other people like Abraham Lincoln was, I’ll gain a lot of power and we talked about that evidence. And, you know, then I was going out in the world and working in different organizational contexts and I would see this come to life. 

I worked with Pete Docter at Pixar, as a scientific consultant on the film Inside Out, and Pete literally makes movies that have made billions of dollars and I watched his artistic style and how he was with teams and he was almost like Abe Lincoln. You know, he was empathetic and curious with other people and always interested in what other people have to say about an artistic project and in Pixar, people speak of Pete, and he has had enduring power, in really the terms that Christopher Baum wrote about in terms of the leaders of our hunter-gatherer societies. 

He’s kind, he’s humble, interested in others, he’s really fair, he will go to bat for the things he really believed in, but he had this qualities and then I was doing this research about the abuses of power and what we find is really evidence of this power paradox. We get power by being good to other people, but then the seductions of feeling powerful, it almost feels like a drug rush, or a mania that you just feel omnipotent, it gets you into trouble. 

So we found, Matt, and you could probably think of a million good examples of this that, you know, “If I get a little bit of power in an experiment and I am working with two other people and I have power, I’ll eat more of the food we’re supposed to share, chocolate chip cookies, and I will eat with my mouth open and lips smacking and cookie crumbs falling all over my sweater,” right? I become impulsive. We did this well-known study that got a big buzz. 

That when drivers of cars approach a pedestrian zone and we put a young undergraduate at that edge of a pedestrian zone and he looked like he wanted to walk across it, you’re supposed to stop. Drivers of poor cars, the AMC Pacers and so forth always stop. Drivers of powerful fancy cars, Mercedes and BMW’s, blaze through the pedestrian zone 46% of the time. 

So we started to show, and this has been shown in dozens of labs, a little bit of power, promotion, success, making a lot of money. Suddenly, I am swearing at people, I’m greedy, I am engaging in sexually inappropriate behavior and that’s the power paradox of power is, we get it by being good and then it unleashes what is bad. 

[00:24:43] MB: And you touched on this a little bit talking about some of the foundations of enduring power, but what are some of the things we can do to prevent a slip into the dark side? 

[00:24:53] DK: You know, I think people, and I bet your audience, Matt, is very familiar with this. When they think about the work lives or the communities they’re in, they’ll start to realize, “Yeah, you know, it’s that individual where’s that spark that brings out the good in others, that lifts people up, that brings in value to the group that gets power," and that’s part of what we talk about and my goodness, there’s no shortage of evidence of how we abuse power, right? 

From people in churches, to Anthony Weiner, regrettably named and on. It’s just everywhere. So what do we do? How do we avoid this trap? And I think the scientific evidence suggests a couple of things. One is just be aware of your power, and we often underestimate our power. We often fail to realize that once we’re in a position of management, other people will look at this differently. They’ll feel worried about their judgment of them. They’ll sense the power dynamic and we have to remember our sense of power in different contexts, right?

When I work with my students, I make sure, in each interaction that I am mindful of the fact that they are probably a little worried about my authority and so forth and so I shift my behavior accordingly. I take a more modest approach, a more humble approach. I think the second thing, I think one of the most important things after just being aware of this state, and by the way, you’ve got to be aware of these urges of feeling powerful. Like everything is going really well, you feel invincible, that’s when you’re at your most vulnerable. 

A second thing that I think is really important is to really, in each interaction at work or at home, begin in focusing on other people. Really think about where they’re coming from, what’s on their mind, what’s their past been like and that really is the foundation of empathy and the pro-social tendencies like gratitude that really are a basis of enduring power. 

When I’m around people who really inspired others in leadership positions that quality really strikes me, right? That they’re really interested in other people. They’re curious, they remember what’s been happening in their personal lives, they know where they want to go in their future, in their work lives. So really make it a practice of just remembering where other people are at in your interactions. 

[00:27:25] MB: You’ve worked with some amazing companies, Google, Facebook, etcetera. How can some of these lessons potentially be applied to organizational dynamics? 

[00:27:35] DK: Being out here in Berkeley, you know, I’ve had this privilege in studying human emotion and it's kind of empowering. I have gotten calls from Google, and Twitter, and Facebook and worked at Facebook on these really complex projects for four and a half years on their protecting care team and over at Pixar and it really, this literature, when I teach this to leaders in different sectors, which I’ve done for 20 years, they know it right away, right?

They know how Machiavellian leaders really bring units down and they know how the abuses of power, at Enron or in branches of governments or the military units, really undermine the functioning of teams and organizations. So it really begs this question of like, “What do we do?” And I think that one of the things that we do is we remind leaders that leadership has privileges and responsibilities and a set of ethics that really accompany it. And you see this interest in empathy and respect and cultivating trust and the like in it and thinking about leadership, right? 

So that’s one thing that is really important. It's just that there was an older school of thought that leadership, and in a way it’s Machiavellian, leadership doesn’t need ethics just get things done whatever it takes. And I think we’re moving slowly away from that way of thinking. I think the second thing that a lot of people are interested in is how do you create cultures or social systems that avoid the abuses of power, right? How do you create an organizational unit that doesn’t have a leader who’s pushing people around with this Machiavellian approach? 

I think that there are things we can do. I think you, and I hear about this a lot in my teaching of leaders, you can really work on a culture of respect really and make it very prominent that we really need to speak civilly, we can’t swear at people, we need to be considered in our language. What we know scientifically is when there is really clear scrutiny and oversight and accountability of people in positions of leadership where their actions are commented upon by their teams, where they’re reviewed, where others are aware of them, you see fewer abuses of power. 

So what I always emphasize is, let’s take the responsibility of ethical leadership if we are lucky to have that position, and let’s think hard about our culture in ways that prevent the abuses of power. 

[00:30:16] MB: For somebody listening, how could they work on cultivating some of this kind of social intelligence that underpins, not only sort of healthy societies, but also maybe the acquisition of good power? 

[00:30:29] DK: Yeah, and I know and I hope that I haven’t sounded too abstract or scientific or, you know? But, Matt, that is the real serious question in all of these and what I would recommend is, first of all, I just wrote this piece at the Harvard Business Review on how to have and enjoy enduring power, through the things that we’ve been talking about, Matt. Like, listening really effectively, asking great questions, knowing how to express gratitude in a heartfelt sort of thoughtful way, how to be aware of power and powerlessness, how to practice kindness in different places. 

So I think that article which did really well, just offers a series of practical things to do and I do that a bit in The Power Paradox, this book, as well and then the second thing that I really encourage your large audience to do is to go to the Greater Good Science Center, and that’s greatergood.berkeley.edu. We’ve been working away at this for 15 years, and what it is, is we distill all of these ideas that are all tested by science and we distill it down into really straightforward practices that you can engage in, right? 

So if you want to handle a really stressful boss better, there are mindfulness practices and breathing practices that help you calm your stress response. If you want to express gratitude in a really powerful literary way, at The Greater Good Science Center, all for free, we write about how to say thank you. If you are in a really difficult conflict and it could undermine your power and your influence and the quality of your bonds, we have a lot of tools for showing forgiveness and saying you’re sorry. 

So, at that site, there are tons of practical recommendations that are really the foundation of this new model of collaborative and enduring power. They're all free!

[00:32:27] MB: Oh, perfect. Well, we'll make sure to include both of those in the show notes so that anybody listening can get those. Tell us a little bit more, you kind of touched on it, what is the Greater Good Science Center, and what led you to create that?

[00:32:39] DK: Yeah, thanks Matt. 15 years ago, and this was right in the wake of the terrorist attacks, 9/11, in a sense as we are today, we were jangled as a culture back then and we were like, "What's the world coming to? Who are we? How do we respond to this new world of threat, and so forth? Are we heading towards the apocalypse?" Some donors, the Hornadays, who are are alumni of UC Berkeley, coming out of their own personal tragedy of losing a daughter early in life at age 26, reached out to me and they said, "You know, we want to build something that makes as many people cooperative, kind, and peaceful as humanly possible." 

This was really before online magazines and podcasts and the like, and what we decided to do — and we hired somebody named Jason March coming out of a journalism school — is we decided to take this new science we've been talking about of cooperation, collaboration, and gratitude, and compassion, and empathy and the like, and translate that science to essays that people can read — like medical doctors, or lawyers, or school teachers — more recently, with Greater Good In Action, sort of give people practices. You know, "What can I do in a couple of minutes that makes me more empathetic?" And those are listed at ggia.berkeley.edu. 

Then over the past 15 years, we've been lucky to be able to give that away. To give away this new science, give away it's major discoveries, write about it in really appealing ways, that appeal to our 5 million readers. And now, sort of now that science is starting to test these practices, to sort of give away specific recommendations for cultivating gratitude, or empathy, or kindness. And that's our mission, and it's had a lot of influence in the educational realm, and medical realm, organizational work, and we hope it continues to grow.

[00:34:41] MB: Well I think it's a credible mission, and a great resource. So, I'm very excited for listeners to check it out.

[00:34:47] DK: So am I. Thank you.

[00:34:49] MB: Changing gears a little bit, I'd love to hear about your experience consulting on the film Inside Out.

[00:34:54] DK: It was mind blowing. So about six years ago, I had known the director Pete Docter who did the movie UP. Did you get to see UP? 

[00:35:05] MB: I have not seen UP actually. 

[00:35:07] DK: You have to see it. It's got one of the best portrayals of love that you'll ever see. So I have known Pete professionally, we'd been on some panels together 8-10 years ago. Pixar is over in Emeryville, which is next door neighbors to Berkeley, and one day he called me six years ago and he said, "Hey, you know, hey Dacher, this is Pete." And I was like, "Hey Pete," you know? And he's like, "Thinking about doing a movie about human emotion." And I was like, "Well, that's a great idea," and I'd been teaching emotion for 20 years. 

And he said, "And what I want to portray is how emotions," and we talked about this earlier, "they guide our thought processes and our memories and how we perceive the world in front of us. And then at the same time, as they shape inside our heads, emotions — through our expressions, and our tone of voice, and our body language — shape the outside world, how we interact with others — the inside-out notion." And I was like, "Pete, that's the entire thesis of the science of emotion, is they guide interior life and exterior life." And he said, "And I want to do it in an 11-year-old girl as she's going through a really hard time in life." And I was like, "Oh my god," you know? 

So what happened is about every six months or a year from the beginning of the development of this film where Pete was just working with his collaborator, Ronnie del Carmen, kind of sketching out the characters and the ideas until the very end when they're really working with their teams of animators and computer specialists and the like. I'd pop in, and I'd talk about the science of emotion, sometimes they'd ask me questions like, "Tell us about what happens to emotions when they stop? Like, where do they go?" 

Or, "What happens to emotional memories? Why do we forget so many emotional parts of our lives?" Or, "Are there things that happen to us early in life, core memories with friends or with our parents or maybe getting bullied at school, or what have you, that shape our mind for the rest of life?" So I would visit, just talk about science, answer questions over email, and then about six months before the film was released, they brought me in to see a screening and I literally started crying. I mean, I was blown away at how much depth that film captured in portraying the science and then what emotions do for the human psyche.

[00:37:39] MB: It's an incredibly power film and one that many, many people, it resonates really deeply with them.

[00:37:46] DK: Yeah.

[00:37:47] MB: And the science behind it is very, you know, totally valid and was kind of what you consulted on and helped really bring to life.

[00:37:55] DK: Yeah, you know, so they would ask me questions like, "Do early emotional experiences, like in Riley's character, these early images, the core memories with her friend or playing hockey or ice skating with her family, do they shape what our lives are like later? And yes they do. The scientific literature suggests it's the case. Here's a really relevant scientific literature; they asked me, "You know, we've got this idea," — and Pete had a daughter that really inspired the movie. I had daughters that were making me wonder about what they were going to sort of portray in the movie at the same age — "What happens do young girls as they head into the teen years, as Riley is in the movie? What happens to their emotional lives?" 

And I went to the scientific literature and I don't know if you have kids or not yet, Matt? But when girls hit 12-13, a 10-year-old girl is a really happy person, thriving, and joyful. And then as they hit the teen years, they, kind of that worry and anxiety and self-consciousness hits and they really drop in their positive emotions precipitously and the film really portrayed that, right? The emotional angst of the early teen years. They asked questions like, "Are people defined by core emotional tendencies or traits?" Right? And we had done studies and we'd looked at like, who are the really compassionate people, or the awe-prone people? 

I've done work on really angry kids, or fearful kids and there is a lot of data that suggest that who we are in our identities and how we think of ourselves is shaped by our temperamental tendencies towards specific emotions and that led to the thinking in the film of Joy being this defining emotion of Riley. I was blown away how seriously they took the science. In one moment, Pete Docter, he was in Russia promoting the film and he was going to have a conversation with a Russian neuroscientist with this giant audience in Russia. 

And he emailed me at 1 in the morning and he was like, "Tell me everything you know about dopamine and oxytocin and serotonin and cortisol," these neurochemicals that are involved in emotion. So I sent him chapters from my textbook and scientific papers. So they really were grounded in the science, but then they took their liberties too. 

[00:40:16] MB: So for someone that, let's say is sort of predominantly defined by an emotion like fear or anxiety, is that something that is kind of their destiny? Or is that something that's changeable?

[00:40:28] DK: That is not only one of the oldest questions that we ask about human nature, which is we are born with certain genetically-based tendencies, so how do we shift them? That not only relates to amazing new literatures called epigenetics, which is, we have these genetically-based tendencies but experience, your life with your family — were you born in a civil war? Are you born in an area of poverty where you don't get parks and opportunities to play — actually shapes the expression of genes.

That question is also personally relevant, which is, you know, I have a lot of anxious tendencies in my mom's side and have had a lot of periods in my life where people would say I have anxiety tendencies, and that is part of who we are. I think the evidence from genetic studies and identical twins and studies of rodents where you alter their genetic structure tells us it's probably 40% of who we are. But a big part of who we are, Matt, is what we do with it, right?

One of my motivations with the Greater Good Science Center is having experienced firsthand how volunteering — I work in the prisons and volunteer — kind of makes me feel stronger than my anxious tendencies. And I've learned firsthand that if I practice a little mindful breathing each day, I'm physically calmer. And I've learned firsthand if I go backpacking or get out in nature, I feel stronger. And so what we promote at the Greater Good Science Center is a practical answer to your question, which is, you may be born with an anxious genetic profile, but there is an enormous amount to do that brings you peace, and contentment, and wisdom in the face of that tendency and the data back it up.

[00:42:21] MB: So this is kind of a non sequitur question, but one of the pieces of research you've done that I found fascinating was about how we can communicate emotions just with touch. I'd love to kind of share some of that research and tell that story really briefly.

[00:42:38] DK: Thank you, thanks for asking that because the scientific literature has kind of looked at this research like, "Wow, that's weird." So I've studied human emotion for 25 years since I worked with Paul Ekman, and it got me to Inside Out. I studied the face, and voice, and body, and gesture, and eye contact, and the like. And one of the things that scientists had not studied is touch, right? How we, you know, when you pat somebody on the back or you give them a hug or your fist-bump, or chest-bump, or what have you, what can we communicate with brief patterns of touch?

We know touch is massively important in human social life. It's really the first bond, or the first medium by which babies connect to their parents, right? Is through touch and voice. And we know big parts of your brain process information about touch. So what we did in our first study with Matt Hertenstein at UC Berkeley is we brought people to the lab, one person comes to the lab, we hand them a list of emotions written on a piece of paper; gratitude, anger, compassion, love, sadness, sympathy. 

And then another person arrives, and they stick their arm through this big barrier that we built in the lab, and that first person now has to touch that arm for half a second to communicate all these different emotions, right? If I'm the second person, I get touched on the arm and I have to guess what emotion that person was trying to communicate. And what we find absolutely astounded me, which is where as chance guessing would be anywhere between 8 and 12% depending on the study, people can communicate compassion, gratitude, love, sympathy, anger, disgust, fear, sadness at seven or eight times the level of chance guessing, 60-70% of the time they get it right.

So what that tells us, Matt, is we have this amazing language of touch by which we can say we're sorry to somebody, we can express thanks, we can express affection, we can show frustration just with these very brief incidental patterns of touch. 

[00:44:50] MB: And one of my favorite findings from that was some of the gender differences in the research.

[00:44:56] DK: Oh no. I was hoping you wouldn't ask me about that. Yeah, you know, my student, Matt, came to me and he's like, "You know, Dach, we've got this great paper taking shape, but I need to tell you about these gender differences." I was like, "What?" He's like, "Well, when the woman tries to communicate anger to the male arm, he has no idea what she's doing." I was like, "Ah! That's terrible," you know? "And secondly, when the man tries to communicate compassion to the female, she can't really tell what he's doing. She gets very few right." 

And we replicated that, and I think this was just a classic heterosexual gender story, which is men have a little bit of trouble conveying sympathy, and women struggle a bit more in showing anger that a male can perceive. So it's a very telling set of findings that speaks volumes to our intimate lives. 

[00:45:50] MB: So what is one piece of homework that you would give somebody listening to this episode?

[00:45:55] DK: So first, I'd go to the Greater Good Science Center and if your listeners, Matt, are interested in this stuff, they're interested in the science of Inside Out or good power, or how do you handle stress? Or how do you cultivate gratitude or awe? Just go there and we have built it up over 15 years in a way that is tailored to each individual and what they're really interested in building. I think the thing that doing the science and writing these books and just teaching this stuff for 25 years has really taught me, and in a way it goes back to what you said, which is, "Let's move out of this cynical view of human beings, survival of the fittest, and let's look at people in the new light." 

And it's really hard today, in this political climate for example. But I think the piece of homework that I feel this work points to is for your listeners to really study people carefully and take delight in how good people can be and then figure out ways to make societies do a better job of cultivating those tendencies and bringing those things into your life more. And, you know, these are old ideas you find in the great ethical traditions and if we return to them today, you'll do okay.

[00:47:10] MB: And you touched on this already, but where can people find you online, one more time?

[00:47:14] DK: There are several things to do to find me online; greatergood.berkeley.edu, ggia.berkeley.edu. You can Google the Berkeley Social Interaction Lab for our scientific papers, and then if you really want to dig deep, you can take edX's free class, The Science of Happiness. So if you Google "edX, Science of Happiness", we've had over 400,000 people enrol for the class, and it covers a lot of what we're talking about today.

[00:47:44] MB: Well, we'll include all of those links in the show notes as well for everybody listening, so you'll be able to access all these amazing resources. Well Dacher, thank you so much for being on the Science of Success. This has been a fascinating conversation. I've learned a tremendous amount and I know that listeners are really going to get a lot out of this. 

[00:48:00] DK: Thank you so much, Matt. I really appreciated your questions.


[00:48:03] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say "hi", shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I would love to hear from you, and I read and respond to every single listener email.

The greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. I get a ton of listeners asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this information?" Because of that, we created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email list. 

If you want to get all the incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about and much more, you can get all of our show notes at scienceofsuccess.co. Just go to scienceofsuccess.co and hit the "show notes" button at the top. You will get the show notes for everything; links, articles, all the important stuff that we talked about, and episode transcripts. 

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

The Surprising Truth Research Reveals About What Motivates You with Dr. Dan Ariely

In this episode we discuss one of the most interesting results ever found in the psychological research of education, why pleasure maximization is a flawed model for human understanding, we go deep into a number of research examples, discuss the massive (and counterintuitive) difference between motivating top performers and bottom performers, and much more with Dr. Dan Ariely!

Dan Ariely is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at  Duke University and is the founder of The Center for Advanced Hindsight and also the co-founder of BEworks. Dan's talks on TED have been watched over 7.8 million times. He is the author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, both of which became New York Times best sellers, and he has a newly released book Payoff: The Hidden Logic That Shapes Our Motivations. 

• How being badly burned and spending 3 years in the hospital radically changed Dr. Dan Ariely's life

• How good intentions can go terribly wrong in changing behavior

• The two flawed models of motivation and why neither works

• I get interviewed by Dr Dan Ariely - he turns the mic on me and starts grilling me!

• The difference between momentary joy and lasting purpose

• Why motivation is not about YOU

• The critical importance of creating, meaning, improvement, and having an impact

• How money can demotivate and skew your motivation

• We get into the weeds on some fascinating experiments Dr. Dan Ariely has conducted about how money (doesn’t) motivate us

• Why bonuses don’t actually work

• The massive (and counter-intuitive) difference between motivating top performers and bottom performers

• Why it’s much better to analyze the BARRIERS to good performance and remove them

• One of the most interesting results ever found in the psychological research of education

• Why pleasure maximization is a flawed model for human understanding

• We dig into the the science of motivation itself

• The difference between social norms and market norms (and why it’s important)

• Why you would rather move a couch for free, than get paid $5 to do it

• Ideas for how we can use psychology to change America’s education system

• Why suicide rate among physicians are climbing rapidly

• The Crazy Day Care Story (and why its important)

• How effort and complexity create affinity for things you work on

• Why Dr. Dan Ariely and I both love legos!

• We go through half a dozen hilarious and very counter-intuitive findings from Dr. Dan Ariely's research

• We discuss the quest for symbolic immortality (and why it matters to you)

If you want to deeply understand how motivation really works - listen to this episode!

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Personal Site] danariely.com

• [Book] Payoff by Dan Ariely

• [TEDtalk Profile] Dan Ariely

• [TEDtalk] Are we in control of our own decisions? by Dan Ariely

• [Twitter] Dan Ariely

Episode Transcript

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

[00:00:12.4] MB: Welcome to The Science of Success. I’m your host, Matt Bodnar. I’m an entrepreneur and investor in Nashville, Tennessee, and I’m obsessed with the mindset of success and the psychology of performance. I’ve read hundreds of books, conducted countless hours of research and study, and I am going to take you on a journey into the human mind and what makes peak performance tick, with the focus on always having our discussion rooted in psychological research and scientific fact, not opinion.

In this episode, we discuss one of the most interesting results ever found in the psychological research of education. Why pleasure maximization is a flawed model for human understanding. We go deep into a number of specific research examples, discuss the massive and counterintuitive difference between motivating top performers and motivating bottom performers, and much more with our incredible special guest, Dr. Dan Ariely. The Science of Success continues to grow with more than 600,000 downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, hitting number one New and Noteworthy, and more. 

A lot of our listeners are curious about how to organize and remember everything. I get tons of listener emails and comments asking me how to keep track of all the incredible knowledge I get from reading hundreds of books, interviewing amazing guests and experts, and listening to tons of different podcasts. 

Because of that, we’ve created an awesome resource for you. You can get it completely free by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222. It’s a guide we created called How to Organize and Remember Everything. Again, to get it, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or you can go to scienceofsuccess.co and put in your email. 

In our previous episode, we discussed how our guest went from being wildly unsuccessful, sleeping in a used van, into launching a massive brand. The power of simple gratitude during the  

toughest challenges of our lives. The transformational super powers that can change your life, and the massive perspective shift you can gain from two simple words, with John Jacobs, the founder and chief creative optimist of Life is Good. If you want simple strategies to feel inspired and empowered, listen to that episode.

 [0:02:22.5] MB: Today, we have one of my favorite authors and an incredible psychology thinker on the show. Dr. Dan Ariely. Dan is the James B. Duke Professor of Psychology and Behavioral Economics at Duke University, and is the founder of the Center for Advanced Hindsight, and is also the cofounder of BEworks. Dan’s talks on TED have been watched over 7.8 million times. He’s the author of Predictably Irrational and the Upside of Irrationality, both of which have become New York Times bestsellers. He’s the author of the upcoming book Payoff: The Hidden Logic that Shapes our Motivations. Dan, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:58.6] DA: Lovely to join you.

[0:03:00.3] MB: We’re super excited to have you on here.

[0:03:02.3] DA: With these compliments you gave me in the beginning, I’m more and more excited, and I even though I know you give all your guests great compliments, I believe you, and I like you more now that you’ve given me such nice compliments.

[0:03:15.2] MB: It’s because I’ve read Predictably Irrational.

[0:03:16.6] DA: There you go.

[0:03:17.3] MB: For listeners who may not be familiar, tell us a little bit about your background?

[0:03:22.5] DA: In terms of kind of scientific life, it’s a strange introduction. I was badly burned when I was 18 and I spent- I was burned with about 70% of my body, and I spent about three years in hospital. Life in hospital gave me lots of insights about lots of things about life. I kind of put on to a bed for three years, just kind of observing life but not being part of it, and having 
burns, and scars, and challenges after that.

Beyond kind of just being in the hospital, it made me think about all kinds of aspects of life, and I became interested in experimental science. I became interested in kind of- a questioning and experimenting with our beliefs about all kinds of things in life. About placebos, and about the ways to remove bandages from burn patients, and the question of meaning, and the question of what gets us to continue.

When I started doing experiments, I discovered there’s a way to find out what’s really going on. Most of life, we have intuitions. Especially if you think about the workplace. Most of the things we know are not based on science. It’s very hard to do experiments about what really motivates people, and so because of that, we just function based on our intuitions. We have beliefs about them, but if our intuitions are wrong, maybe we’re setting up wrong incentives for ourselves, for other- we’re setting up wrong environment systems and so on.

I became interested in not just in unnecessary misery in hospital, but all kinds of ways in which we have wrong intuitions about the world. Out of good intentions, we’re actually setting up things in the wrong way, and trying to figure out what actually are the forces that change our behavior, and how can we structure the world in a way that is more compatible with our human nature.

[0:05:14.8] MB: That dovetails really nicely into the next question I had. Tell me a little bit about the complexity of motivation?

[0:05:22.5] DA: We think that people have kind of a pleasure principle, and we think people are just trying to maximize pleasure. That’s kind of one thought, and then we have another thought that says work is all about money, and all we need to do is to reengineer the payment system. It is shocking how much time people spend on trying to figure out exact bonuses, and how to pay people. There is a company in North Carolina recently that I met, that they have a 16-point rating system for employees, and then they give bonuses that are around $3,000 based on this point system. What happened is that somebody that gets 12.25 feels much worse compared to somebody who gets 12.5. The difference in money is very small, but they’re putting so much emphasis on it that people are just really miserable.

The two models people have for human life are trying to maximize pleasure, and then that work is unpleasant. That we don’t like work, and all we’re doing it for the money, but the people who we work for basically are trying to reengineer our lives so that we will work as hard as they want us to work. Like rats in the maze, they put money on our path. We just try to maximize money, and as we try to maximize money, we will do whatever they want us to do. Both of those things are basically wrong.

The first thing about pleasure is- actually, let me ask you. Think about your own life, and think about what are the kind of things that you’re most interested in, or most proud of, or that are representing kind of things that you are- you really want to accomplish. You have some examples?

[0:07:12.0] MB: Me personally?

[0:07:13.1] DA: Yeah.

[0:07:13.5] MB: I mean, we could talk about this podcast as a great example of something that is, for me, very mission driven, and something that I’m really passionate about, and kind of sprung totally by accident, and I’ve really enjoyed doing it.

[0:07:27.6] DA: Okay, let’s take this podcast and you’re saying that you’re enjoying it. Now this joy of doing it, my guess is that there are very few times where you’re doing the podcast and just burst out laughing. If we just thought about pleasure maximizing, you would do things like sitting on the beach, drinking mojitos, or watching some sitcom. That’s how we think about pleasure, getting a massage, or doing something like that.

What you actually choose to do for this podcast is to do things that you wouldn’t describe as pleasure from the outside, right? If an alien came and looked at how you work for this podcast, how you read, how you prepare, try to schedule different people, waking up early, going to sleep late, an alien would not say this is somebody who is just enjoying every moment. 

It’s because the joy that you’re getting is not the momentary joy that you would get from drinking beer or watching a sitcom, it’s a different kind of a joy. It’s a joy, and you mentioned the word 

purpose. It’s a word- it’s a joy that comes from a feeling that you’re doing something useful. This usefulness is really interesting. It’s not about you, it’s about the fact that other people get to listen, and get to think differently, and maybe get to do something differently, and you’re kind of getting a joy by thinking that you’re doing something to help other people do something in a better way.

All of those things don’t fit with the pleasure maximizing rule, because what you’re really maximizing is something very different in life. You’re maximizing a sense of meaning and a sense of control. You’re feeling your creating, you’re feeling you’re probably getting better over time, you’re improving, you’re feeling that you’re having an impact on other people and so on.

That’s the first thing that we need to recognize is that pleasure is a really complex thing. The most extreme example for this is- one of the most extreme examples is mountain climbing. When you read books of people who climb mountains, you would think they describe the thing that they like, but you know what? It’s just shocking. Because all these books describe nothing but pain. It is difficult, and painful, and frostbite, and injuries, and of course it’s a very dangerous sport as well. 

You read those descriptions and you would think, my goodness, these people made a mistake. They will go up to the top of the mountain, and they would recognize that this was a huge mistake with all the pain, and misery, and frostbite, and they will go down and they will say never again. You know what? They go down and then they do it again. Because it’s not just about pleasure as defined by momentary enjoyment, it’s about progress, and conquering, and meaning, and so on. 

That’s the first thing that we don’t understand correctly, what are we trying to maximize. Yes, pleasure and joy are part of the stuff that we try to maximize, but it’s certainly not all of it. Then the second thing is about payment.

People run companies, and they have all kinds of rules about how the divide the money, and how they pay people, and we have, of course, overtime, and we have benefits, and we have all kinds of things like that. People don’t understand how those things work. I’ll give you one example. This is an experiment, we did with a big hotel chain. This was with their call center, okay?

These are people on the phone, they make people call them, they try to settle disagreements, they try to sell people hotel rooms, all kinds of things like that. What’s nice from an experimental perspective is that people in call centers, you can measure what they do, you can measure what the call is about, you can measure how fast they were, you can measure how effective they are, you can measure how productive they are.

We have a measure of productivity, and then they get the bonus of about a third of their salary is based on how good they perform. Okay, that’s the setup. Now, we got data from this company and we looked at the data, and what we found was that it was the same people, basically almost 100%, the same people get the big bonuses every time. 

Matt, think about it for yourself for a second and say okay, if it’s the same people who get the big bonuses every time, why is it? What is causing some people to get bonuses and some not? What will be some hypothesis that you would come up with? Like what could be the cause for this?

[0:11:57.0] MB: It may be incorrect, but maybe the most straight forward hypothesis would be the idea that the best performers are getting the biggest bonuses.

[0:12:04.4] DA: Okay, that’s one theory, right? The good people are getting bonuses, the bad people are not. That’s great. What else could it be?

[0:12:11.8] MB: That the people who have sort of befriended the management the best get the best bonuses?

[0:12:16.8] DA: Okay, some kind of nepotism, yeah, that’s another possibility. You could also think that some people love money and some people don’t, and the people who love money would be more motivated, and people who don’t care so much about money wouldn’t work so much. You could also think that it’s random. That the first time people show up, they either randomly get the bonuses or not, and the people who get the bonuses learn how much- how wonderful they are, and they really want to keep them, so it changes their motivation and people who never get the bonus don’t care and basically never learn how wonderful bonuses are. 

Anyway, there’s lots of different theories that you can explain it. We asked that company for them to give us their data every weekend for us to analyze it, and for us to determine who will get their bonuses using our special algorithms. What kind of algorithms do you think we tried?

[0:13:07.6] MB: I have no idea.

[0:13:09.1] DA: We tried random. Okay now, just to be clear, we didn’t tell people that they were getting paid based on random algorithms, but you see, if you have a particular algorithm to determine bonuses, and you always use that algorithm, you can’t test what will happen if you use the different algorithm. We decide to do it randomly, and then we could compare what happened in all kinds of cases. We ran this experiment for six months, and we got the data every weekend. We calculated random bonuses, people got their bonuses on Monday. They were announced, and we went on for a while. 

We did lots and lots of analysis on this data, but one of the things we looked at was to see, when did the company have a higher return on investment? When they rewarded the top employees, or the bottom employees? What do you think?

[0:14:02.3] MB: I mean, it would seem like maybe rewarding the highest- the top employees would have the best bonus, but perhaps the counterintuitive answer is that rewarding the lowest performers gave the biggest overall boost.

[0:14:13.7] DA: That’s right. You know, given that you’re talking to me, you probably expect that it will be some counterintuitive result, but that’s exactly what we found. We found that the top employees did not change their performance when the bonuses went away, whereas the bottom employees improved their performance. 

Now, what’s happening here? For a bonus to work, you need two things. You need for people to want the bonus, and then you need for them to be able to act on their desire to improve their performance. What happened was at the top employees were kind of already at the top of their game, right? They were just- some people know how to talk on the phone, some people have figured out how to work well, some people, whatever the skills needed, some people just have it. Whether they acquired it or they had it in the beginning, and it doesn’t matter if they get the bonus or not.

I’m a university professor, if you paid me more or less, would I teach differently? I don’t even know, right? If you told me, “There’s a bonus coming up, do something differently.”, what would I do differently? I can drink more coffee, I can try to stay more hours awake, I can try and- but I don’t have a lot of ability to change my teaching. I’m already teaching to the best of my ability, what could I do differently? Whereas the people on the bottom part, they actually had a way to improve their performance, right? Those are people that could learn how to do things differently, they could try harder.

There was all kinds of things that they could- by the way, two things about this. The first thing is just to realize, sometimes when we do field experiments, our recommendations come directly from the field experiments. In this case, we did not recommend to anybody to start paying people randomly. In fact, paying people randomly is incredibly demotivating; it’s a terrible idea. We also didn’t recommend to that company to stop paying the top employees better, because you also want to retain them. 

What we told them is to say look, these top employees are just good solid performers. Bonuses don’t change their behavior. Why don’t you instead give them a promotion, and give them a higher fixed salary. They’ll end up getting the same amount of money, but let’s not call it a bonus. A bonus is something that also increase worry. It’s harder to plan on what you’re going to get. Certainty is lower. Why don’t you just give it to them, because it’s not changing their productivity. Give it to them in a fixed salary, they will be much better for it, and then you can take the bonuses and give it to the other people that actually need it as a role for motivation.

That’s the first thing. The bigger point though, is that when we think about motivation, a lot of people use money as a hammer. It’s a very blunt tool, right? You can always say, “Oh, people don’t perform, let’s just change their bonuses, or give them points, or do something like this”. The problem is it’s very blunt tool, and it’s much better to actually go first and analyze what is the real barrier to good performance.

When you understand what’s the barrier for good performance, then you can think about what to do. I’ll tell you one other story about this. At some point, there was a government of a different country, not of the US, that asked me to come and help them in creating incentives for teachers in schools. The Ministry of Finance in this country had an idea, and their idea was to take the 10% best teachers in every school and give them a bonus.

Take the 10% of best teachers, and forget for a second how you determine it, let’s just assume that there’s a good way to determine it, and the principle will determine it, and those 10% of the people would get a bonus. That was their approach to try and improve the quality of education in the school. When you think about it, at first blush, it sounds reasonable. But then you have to say okay, what is the theory that would suggest that this is a good solution? 

You basically have to say the following, you have to say “Teachers really want money. They’re not doing their best right now, because we’re not paying them enough. They would do their best if we only had the bonus.” That’s kind of assumption number one. Teachers are lazy, and they want money, and we need to put more money in so they would be more interested in working hard. 

Then the second thing you need to say is that all teachers will think that they could get the bonus. Because if only the top 10%, or only the top 20% think they could get the bonus, the rest of the people would not try harder. Everybody needs to believe that they could get the bonus, and not just on year one, but over time. You can ask yourself, how realistic are those assumptions? 

Let me tell you, this is just assumptions, here is something about data. One of the most interesting results ever in education was a result where they showed that one of the best ways to improve performance in schools is to give the top teachers time to teach the not so good teachers. Now think about that. What does that mean in terms of a model for performance? It’s not about not wanting, it’s not about not knowing. That model basically says, you know, some teachers have figured it out and some haven’t. The ones that haven’t figured it out; it’s not because they’re lazy, it’s not because they’re not interested. It’s because it’s very hard to figure out how to teach.

The feedback is random, sarcastic, delayed, we have very different mix of students, it’s hard to learn how to do it well. Let’s take the people who have kind of figured it out, and let them get to help, to help the other kids. By the way, this other country where the Ministry of Finance wants to give the top 10% of the teacher’s bonuses, what would happen if they did that? I don’t think they would improve the quality of education, but the one thing they would do is they would eliminate any interest from the good teachers to help the not so good teachers.

Because now, they would try to basically keep their- it will become a competitive sport, rather than a collaborative endeavor. The point is that when we pay people, it’s not just simple paying, but we need to think more broadly about what is really holding people back. Then we need to think about what’s the right compensation for that. Is it money, is it knowledge, is it a title? Is it the feeling of connection, is it a sense of progress, what is it? 

The science of motivation is actually incredibly interesting, because if you wrote the motivation equation, and you wrote a big M on the left, and you said equal, and then you write money of course is one of the things that motivates people, and maybe happiness. Then there’s a long list of things, and over time, we’re discovering more and more about the pride of creation, and the feeling of progress, and all of those elements that make our life so wonderful.
 
[0:21:21.9] MB: I love that concept, and the idea that it’s much better to sort of analyze and focus on removing the barriers to good performance, as supposed to just adding additional incentives.

[0:21:32.1] DA: Yeah, it’s easier, right? It’s easier to look- I mean, adding performances, adding motivation is good as well, but removing the things that are harming people seem like the first easy step to do.

[0:21:46.3] MB: I think the story of the teachers really drives that point home very concretely.

[0:21:50.5] DA: Yeah. By the way, with the No Child Left Behind, one of the things we found in many experiments that I describe in Predictably Irrational, but also in Payoff, is this thing about social norm and market norms. The finding there was that sometimes we can add money and actually detract from the motivation. One way to think about it is imagine I asked you to do me a favor, asked you to help me change the tire on my car for example.

How likely would you be to do it? Condition and another setup is I ask you to help me change the tire on my car, and I said I’ll pay you $5 for it. What will happen now to your motivation? When we  do experiments like this, we find that motivation actually goes down. When we get people to help us move sofas, or do boring things, or changing tires, we find that people are more willing to do it when we don’t pay them. When we offer a small amount of money, it actually decreases human motivation. The reason it decreases motivation is that when you just help somebody, you say, “I’m a good person.”

When you get $5, you don’t get the I’m a good person in the same way, the I’m the good person feeling goes away. Instead, you get the feeling this is a job, and you say to yourself, “I don’t like working for $5, that’s under valuing my time”. This is what’s called crowding out. Where you can add motivation to the motivation mix, but actually decrease the overall motivation. Sadly, this is one of the things we’ve done in the US with the No Child Left Behind policy.

Again, think about teachers. Teachers join this profession not because they’re trying to maximize their financial wellbeing. If somebody chose that profession to maximize their financial wellbeing, you wouldn’t let them teach your kids, because they clearly can’t calculate anything. They have a sense of mission, and they have a sense of contribution, and all kinds of other things like that. All of the sudden you tell them, by the way, if the kids in your class do very well, we’ll give you $400 additional at the end of the year, and if they don’t do well, we’ll take some things away from the school. All of those things are basically small potatoes, right?

On the individual level, and what happens, all of the sudden teachers are saying, “Really? That’s what I’m worth? This is all that you’re interested in? That’s what we’re all about?” As a consequence, they lose much of their motivation. Another thing, by the way, that happened with the No Child Left Behind policy is the loss of autonomy. 

Imagine a teacher that wants to teach different kids differently. Wants to teach different classes differently, and realizes that maybe this is a better time for math, and maybe we’ll postpone English a little bit, or do something else. Now, rather than having autonomy of what to do, they are kind of in a dictatorial positioning when they tell them exactly what they need to teach every day. They’re becoming automatons who are just kind of executing. How motivating is this? It’s terrible. 

Actually, I’m sorry, this is going to be a really sad episode, but I recently looked a little bit at physicians. You know that every year in the US, we have about 400 physicians who commit suicide? Physicians are reporting that the quality of their life is dramatically decreasing all the time. Why?

Because we take people who are committed to healing, and on one hand we trust them with sharp knives, and cutting our bodies open, but on the other hand, we don’t trust them with not filling paper work correctly, or overcharging us, all kinds of things. We’re drowning them in paper work and bureaucracy. We’re telling them that they can only see patients for 12 minutes, or 15 minutes, and we’re basically making them work like in a factory of patients where they have no judgment. There’s lots of medications that they want to prescribe, but the insurance company is not letting them. Or there are treatments that they wanted to give, but the procedure of doing so and getting permission is too cumbersome.

We’re talking away basically their autonomy, and we’re making them little medical robots, and we say that this is the constraint of your work. The more we constrain teachers, and doctors, and so on, the less joy they can find in the work. Of course, people who have the ability either leave, and the people who don’t leave are just very unhappy.

[0:26:38.2] MB: In the context of replacing social norms of the market norms, I think it’s Predictably Irrational where you tell the story of the daycare facility?

[0:26:47.0] DA: Yes.

[0:26:47.8] MB: Could you share that anecdote briefly?

[0:26:50.7] DA: Yeah, this was a story- it’s an experiment. Generally, what happens if you have kids, you know that you pick up your kids late from time to time, and you get a bad look from the teacher or the daycare center, and you feel guilty, and you say sorry, and you try very hard not to feel this bad again.

In this particular daycare center, they decide to- with the help of some economists, they decided to add a fine. If you’re late, we’ll charge you $5 per hour. What happened? People started being really late. Why? Because imagine it’s 3:00 in the afternoon, and you have to pick up your kid at 3:30, and before the fine was introduced, guilt would kind of get you to go there on time. But after they just say it’s $5 an hour, people said, “It’s $5 an hour, they can keep my kids for two hours”, right? It’s just babysitting. What happened was that guilt went away, and money was just a fine payment. 

Now, if they charge $100, right? What would happen? People would be on time, but they would also take their kids out of the daycare, because from time to time they would miss it anyway, and the fine will be too much. People will get really pissed off. What happened here was that the fine did not add to the feeling of feeling bad, it replaced it. There was another thing with that study is that when they took the fine away, you would say would guilt come back?

The answer was not until the following year. Once you take a social relationship that is based on respect, and guilt, and fear of reciprocity, and so on, and you make it into a transactional relationship in which I pay you by the hour, it’s hard to change the relationship back. It’s hard to go back into a relationship of caring, and mutual benefits, and long term vision, and so on.

[0:28:48.3] MB: You talked earlier about the idea of joy, and I want to dig in a little bit more on that. Tell me about sort of why we have such a deep attachment to some of our own ideas, and how we sort of source joy?

[0:29:01.7] DA: Yup, this is something we called the IKEA effect, after the Swedish furniture manufacturer. One of the things we kind of first observed in our own behavior was that- this was in my case, I have a chest of drawers for my kids that took me a really long time to assemble. The instructions were not very clear, I got parts in the wrong way, but even though it was many years ago, I still carry it with me when I move around the country. Not only that, I look at that piece of furniture in a slightly more favorable way than my other pieces of furniture, like we spent an afternoon together creating it.

The thought that we started- Mike Norton, Daniel Kahneman, and I started looking at was- does the fact that you put more effort into something actually get you to love it more? And the answer is yes. We did experiments with Lego, and Bionicles, and we did it with origami. What we found is that the more effort you put into something, and the less clear the instructions are, and the more complex it is, you might not enjoy the processes much, but you end up liking the outcome more.

Think about something, like a home cooked meal compared to one in which somebody delivers it. Yes, it’s more painful, and more difficult, and you put more effort into it, but the joy of it is higher at the end. People don’t understand this. This is not something we have a good intuition about. It’s not as if you say, “I understand if I’ll assemble this myself, I’ll like it more at the end” Then the other interesting thing is people don’t understand that other people don’t look at their own creation from the same perspective.

It’s not as if I create something, and I love it because I put so much effort into it, like one of my books, and then I think that everybody else should see how wonderful they are in the same way that I do. We kind of blinded to other people’s motivation, or their perspective. We think that everybody will see things in the same way that we do, but of course, other people see things from their own perspective and not from ours. 

The IKEA effect exists. We fall in love with what we do, we don’t understand that other people don’t see things in the same way. It’s an interesting force, because it’s a good force, and it’s a not so good force. It’s a good force because by loving what we do, we can spend many hours doing what we do, right? I do research in social science, we have economics, and I love what I do. It causes me to spend many hours in the office, and I work hard, and I care about what I do. It’s the joy of loving what I do is by doing it, I love it more, and it creates a virtuous cycle.

The potential downside is that we get blinded to reality. I think that’s what happens to a lot of startups, where people- not just startups, but in startups it’s kind of a good example, is people have an idea, they fall in love with their idea, they think that everybody else would love their ideas, they start working on it, they get some evidence that this is not really that popular with other people, that other people don’t love it as much as they do. But they are so strong in their beliefs of how wonderful it is that they reject other people’s…

They reject the data, and then sometimes they manage to- sometimes they burn all their money in the process and not get to it. Falling in love with our ideas, and our labor, and what we do is a blessing and a curse. It’s a blessing because it gets us to people and being motivated, it’s a curse because it gets us to be blinded to sometimes reality.

[0:33:00.7] MB: I loved the origami story in the book. I thought that was one of my favorite examples.

[0:33:05.6] DA: Yeah, have you ever played with origami?

[0:33:07.5] MB: No, I’m horribly untalented at that.

[0:33:10.4] DA: Yeah, you know what? It turns out it doesn’t matter because people in our experiments created terrible origami and nevertheless, they loved them very much. I think there is something about creating something. Here’s another thing. Matt, how old are you?

[0:33:27.2] MB: 29.

[0:33:28.2] DA: 29. You grew up kind of in the digital world. Think about things in your life and think about what have you created from start to finish, right? This is not a test, and it’s not blaming, but you know, people used to do more things. Like when I was a kid, we went to study pottery. We did woodwork. I’m almost 50, and we did all kinds of things, and then when we learned how to program, we wrote stupid little programs that did very silly things, or right now they look trivial, but we wrote the whole program. I remember that my first program that did addition.

I wrote the whole thing. As we move forward in life, we don’t create many things ourselves. This podcast is your creation, right? Of course, you get help from software, and all kinds of other things, but it’s your creation, and it’s yours from end to end. When I write a book, it’s from cover to cover. Yes, lots of people helped, but it’s my book. In life in general, we’re having less and less of an opportunity to create something ourselves from scratch, and when we do, we also have every easy substitutions. Instead of making a meal, we can buy something readymade. Instead of creating furniture, we can get something from IKEA. 

I think something is missing. I think that there is kind of a connection to the fruit of our labor that we’re missing, and even in software, right? When was the last time somebody could write the whole piece of software by themselves? No, now people become- software is so amazing, and so complex, and has so many libraries, and everybody’s writing a library, or part of a library, or part of the process.

It’s wonderful; it also doesn’t give people the full feeling that there is something that is just theirs. I think that the only area in life that is still kind of about an individual creation is probably art. Almost everything in art is about one person doing everything from start. Start to finish. Whereas in most other things, we just do parts of things rather than the whole thing.

[0:36:02.1] MB: You know it’s funny, because I definitely am kind of a digital native, and grew up with a lot of that, but when I was a very young child, the internet really wasn’t around. Legos are one of my favorite things, and I still sort of think back about that, and to some degree, almost crave that desire to construct and build all kinds of unique creations. I know you talk about Legos in the book as well.

[0:36:25.2] DA: Yeah, Legos are great, I mean, it does- somebody gives you the basic building blocks and you do the exact thing you want. Not exactly but you know, you try to do something, I agree with you that there’s something about craving those experiences of feeling that you have done something. I do Legos with my kids from time to time. When you work with just Legos, it’s a very different feeling that when you build a set with instructions.

When you have the Star Wars set of something and you have these instructions, the instructions are very complex, and you have some joy, because the piece you’re creating is beautiful, and the instructions, you manage to overcome the challenges of understanding the instructions. It does have some other joy to it.

It doesn’t feel that you’ve created it in the same way. You’ve kind of followed the instruction that somebody else gave you. Yes, very successfully, but it doesn’t feel that it’s yours in the same way. Think about kind of the hesitation before you break something apart, or you desire to build a piece of Lego, and keep it untouched for a while. When you do something from a set, you finished it. It’s over, you don’t want to keep it. But when you do something without instruction that is more you, now taking it apart is a bit more painful. You’re taking something away from yourself while doing so. It’s not just breaking a piece of Lego.

[0:37:57.5] MB: Changing gears slightly, but really kind of also getting into the meat of this to some degree, we talked about money and pleasure were not great models to sort of understand the concept of motivation. What are some of the deeper, more intangible emotional forces that do underpin motivation?
 
[0:38:15.7] DA: It’s not that money is not part of it. It is part of it, and it’s not as if joy is not part of it, but it is part of it. It’s just not the whole picture. There’s lots of things about motivation, and you could just kind of think about your own experiences to try to figure out what are some of the elements. Here is another example. I was in San Francisco not too long ago, and I met with a very nice startup, and after talking about what they were doing - which was very interesting - I asked them, how late do they stay in the office? They told me that the night before they stayed until 1:00 AM, and we talked about that.

Here is what happened. One of the people in the team needed to do something for a deadline, and they were the only people on the team that needed to stay until late. Everybody else in the team stayed with them. I talked to them and I said, “Look, how was the phone call when you called and told your significant other that you’re going to stay late in the office?” They said it was no problem, they said they called their significant other and they said, “You know, Hannah is behind the project, needs to stay over until late, and I’m staying with her to help her finish that project.” 

Then I asked them, “What would happen if it was your project that was late, and you had to stay late in the office. How would your significant other react to that?” And they all said that the significant other would have said something like, “This is terrible, you should have started on this early, this is unacceptable and you can’t do this.”

Here was a case where for their own project, they couldn’t have stayed late but staying late for a friend was more justified, in their own eyes, and their significant other’s eyes.

This is one examples that says that our caring about work is often about caring about the people that we work with. When we care more about the people that we work with, through them, we care more about work as well. Actually, I’ll give you one more story about this in a different domain. I do lots of experiments on dishonesty, where I tempt people to steal money from me,and I see how much money they steal, and under what conditions.

In one type of experiment we gave people a die. It’s a six-sided die, and we get people to roll the die, and we say, “Look, roll the die, and we’ll pay you whatever it comes up on. If it comes up on six, we’ll give you $6, $5, and so on.” We tell them, “You can get paid based on the top side of the die or the bottom. Top or bottom. You decide, but don’t tell us.” You get the dye, and I say, “Please think top or bottom”, you think your top or bottom, you roll the die, and let’s say it came up with five on the bottom and two on the top.

Now I say, “Okay, what did you pick?” Now, if you picked bottom, you say bottom, and you get $5. If you pick top, you have a dilemma. You say the truth, top, and get $2, or you change your mind, you say bottom, and you get $5. People do this 20 times, and every time they think to themselves top or bottom, they roll the die, they write down what it came up with, and then they say what they had chosen and so on. 

What we find when people do this 20 times is that people are extra lucky. Of course, I don’t mean lucky, I mean that people are cheating. Not cheating a lot, but cheating a little bit. Now, in this one experiment, we got people to sit next to their significant other. Matt, you’re married right? 

[0:41:49.4] MB: I am.

[0:41:50.5] DA: Okay, imagine that you’re rolling the die, and you’re writing down what the die came up and then what you chose, and your significant other is sitting right next to you. Your significant other doesn’t know what’s going on in your brain, if you chose up or down, but they see if you’re extra lucky or not. What do you think would happen? Would you cheat more, the same, less if they sit next to you?

[0:42:12.9] MB: I would assume people definitely cheat less. 

[0:42:14.1] DA: That’s what most people assume, but what we found in the experiment is people cheat more. Why do they cheat more? Let me tell you about another experiment, then I’ll come back to this. In other experiment, we do the same thing, but people don’t make the money for themselves. In one condition the money goes to them, in a second condition, they pick a charity and all the money they make go to that charity. 

What happened when the money goes to charity? People cheat more. But in that experiment, we also connected people to a lie detector, and we measured how good is the lie detector detecting dishonesty. When people lie for themselves, the lie detector detect this honesty quite well. Not perfectly, but quite well. When people lie for a charity, the lie detector doesn’t work. People cheat more but the lie detector doesn’t work. Why?

Because the lie detector works on the tension. I feel I want more money, but I feel about it, I want more money, but I feel bad about it. If the money goes to charity, we don’t feel bad about it. All of a sudden we feel good. This is, by the way, why politicians feel so comfortable lying so much, because they can convince themselves that it’s for our good, the good of the country.

Now, let’s go back to this experiment, you sit there, your significant other is sitting next to you. All of the sudden you think to yourself, you don’t think it consciously, but you’re basically saying, “I’m not just cheating for myself, I’m cheating for the whole family”, and with that, people become more free to cheat, and this is not just about the significant other. It’s also about for the good of the company, for people who work with you, all kinds of things like this is just a science.

All of this is to say that one of the many forces that motivate us is the caring we have for the company. That force works for good because we care more, it also sometimes have negative effect because we might cheat some more, and the caring for the people that we work with. Of course you know, we can go on and on about all kinds of other forces, but these are just some examples for the things that end up mattering a lot for our motivation.

[0:44:28.1] MB: One other concept that I loved from Payoff was the idea of symbolic immortality. Could you talk briefly about that concept? 

[0:44:34.2] DA: Sure. At some point, you die, and some people believe in the afterlife and let’s forget about those people for now. Let’s think about just the people who don’t believe in the afterlife. The question is, do people- even if they’re going to die, and they don’t believe that there’s anything after death, do they still care about how people would remember them, and do they still care about their inheritance, and- not financial, but their contribution and their impact.

We find that the answer is absolutely yes. In fact, that people who believe in the afterlife and don’t believe in the afterlife don’t- it doesn’t matter to what kind of things people are willing to do to be remembered in a good way. We’ve looked at things like funerals, and how people spend on that. We’ve looked at things like wills, and how people setup their wills. 

For example, people are trying in their wills to settle scores and to make amends. You’re dead already, why is it important, and why don’t you do it when you’re still alive? The afterlife- the fact that even after people die, we still care about our reputation, and how people think about us, and so on. I think it’s kind of the extreme case showing how not everything is about material goods, because you know, no matter what theory you have about the afterlife, whatever material goods you have don’t really matter once you die.

The fact that we care about how people remember us, think about us, what scores we have, what we’ve left, what will happen with our possessions. All of those, it’s an indicator of the kind of things that get us to be motivated. Not just as we get closer to death or dead, but throughout our lives.

[0:46:32.3] MB: Well Dan, I absolutely loved the book Payoff, and I know that listeners are really going to enjoy it. There are so many things that we didn’t get to talk about today from the book that I really enjoyed. I’m curious, where can people find you and the book online?

[0:46:46.9] DA: I have a website, danariely.com, and the book should be on Amazon, and Barnes and Noble, and all the usual suspects, and then on my website I have other information and videos, and so on.

[0:47:05.6] MB: Awesome. Again, the book is called Payoff: The Hidden Logic that Shapes our Motivations. Dan, thanks again, we loved having you on the Science of Success.

[0:47:13.8] DA: Thanks to you and it was great and looking forward to continuing this another time.

[0:47:19.3] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe bring us joy and fuel our mission to unleash human potential. I love hearing from listeners. If you wanna reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@scienceofsuccess.co. I would love to hear from you, and I read and respond to every listener email.

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend, either live or online. If you’ve enjoyed this episode, please, leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success. Lastly, I get a ton of listeners asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all this information? Because of that, we created an amazing free guide for all of our listeners. You can get it by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44222, or by going to scienceofsuccess.co and joining our email list. Thanks again, and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Science of Success. 

How Two Simple Words Can Massively Shift Your Perspective & Ten Superpowers to Transform Your World with Life is Good Founder John Jacobs

In this episode we discuss how our guest went from being “wildly unsuccessful”, sleeping in a used van, to launching a massive brand, the power of simple gratitude during the toughest challenges of our lives, the transformational superpowers that can change your life, the massive perspective shift you can grain from two simple words, and much more with John Jacobs.

John is the co-founder and chief creative optimist for Life is Good as well as the author of Life Is Good: The Book. He and his company have previously been featured on CNN, CNBC, Nightline, Today, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal,and much more.

• The ten superpowers that can change your life

• What drove John to find a way to combine art and business to launch an amazing company

• How Life is Good went from being “wildly unsuccessful”, sleeping in a used van, to launching a massive brand

• Why its often the people that face the biggest adversity and trauma that embrace the real meaning of “life is good"

• How Life is Good takes a stand against the negativity in the news media

• The incredible power of simple gratitude during the toughest challenges of our lives

• How to focus on optimism without ignoring the negative experiences in your life

• How the story of one person can transform your experience

• The Amazing story of how one act of hate created a wave of love

• How John embarks on his mission to “spread the power of optimism"

• Even when facing hardest adversity - you can consciously shift your mind to the positive and grow good instead of being consumed by the negative

• The incredible power of optimism and strategies to become more optimistic

• Why you should never say you “have to” do something (and what you should say instead)

• Incredible, simple perspective shift you can get by changing a SINGLE WORD when you find yourself complaining

• The Rule of “Yes, And,” how it can have a huge impact on your life & unleash your creativity

• The real depth behind the concept of “life is good”and why its OK to acknowledge the painful parts of your life

• The importance of taking a few moments to connect with someone

• Why fun is “part of the main course” and not your dessert

• How to find simple ways to weave joy into your life

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Life is Good Website] Hub of Optimism

• [Book] Life is Good: The Book by Bert and John Jacobs

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

[0:02:24.5 ] MB: Today we have another exciting guest on the show, John Jacobs. John is the cofounder and chief creative optimist for Life is Good. As well as the author of Life is Good, the book. He and his company had previously been featured on CNN, CNBC, Nightline, Today, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and much more.

John, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:46.9 ] JJ: Matt, thanks so much for having me and Life is Good.

[0:02:50.1 ] MB: We’re very excited to have you on here. So to kind of get started, I’m sure many listeners are familiar with the Life is Good brand, but maybe they don’t know your story. I’d love to kind of hear your story, your background and kind of how you got started.

[0:03:02.4 ] JJ: Sure, let’s see, my brother Bert and I were finishing up college in the early 90’s and we’re looking for a way to combine art and business. We always liked to draw, to write, to create but weren’t really sure what we’re going to do for careers and we saw T-shirts as an accessible way to combine those two things. We had done a little bit of T shirt design back in college. So we designed some shirts, we got out on the streets of Boston. We’re from Boston and still live in the city of Boston; love it.

At the time, we were getting out on high foot traffic areas and just hawking shirts in the street to people coming back from work, anywhere there’s a lot of people and we didn’t find much success early on. Had some fun trying to find the right combination of sayings or art that resonated with people, but I would say we were wildly unsuccessful in that first year and yet we loved — we still felt like in some ways, we’re in college mentally so we said, “Why don’t we buy a used van and start traveling around to college dorms and try selling our shirts in the dorms?”

So we did that, thanks to our brother Ed, we went to an auction, we were able to get a real cheap van and then we started going up and down the east coast and we’d map out this seven week road trips where we would show up at a different campus every night and have a few duffle bags and the back of the van was filled with T shirts and we would just run through the dorms, knocking door to door and asking people if they want to buy our shirts.

Again, we had a lot of fun but we did not have much financial success and we were kind of looking for that right combination. We took a lot of notes, we kept journals on the road so we had an in and an out column for money and we spent virtually nothing other than gas, just getting by and we’d sleep on top of the shirts in the back of the van at the end of the night. And we’d go down as far as Virginia, up as far as Maine and hit every school in the east coast and we ended up doing this for the better part of five years between ’90 and ’94.

The biggest thing that we learned, because we really hit a point where it was becoming clear we didn’t really have a business and we weren’t sustainable financially, we started doing some custom work like for landscape companies or softball teams or drawing cartoons for people, anything to make a little bit of money and we got enough to rent a dive apartment outside of Boston and that would be our home base when we got back from this road trips. Often times, we would throw a keg party when we got home for our friends and put up all our art on the walls and ask them for feedback.

It was kind of our first focus group before we knew what that term meant. One of the conversations we had that repeatedly on the road was about how the media seem to inundate people with negative information and no matter where we went, it seemed like people were talking about the latest disaster or tragedy, fires, murders, disasters and those things happened, a lot of bad things happened in the world but a lot of good things happened too.

We felt like the media wasn’t presenting a balance of those things. We wondered in our long conversations in the van, remember, this is before cellphone time, we had a lot of time to talk about anything and we wondered if we could create something that help people focus on the good that was kind of a rallying cry for optimists. That led to this one drawing of this face, he didn’t have a name at first but he just had a big smile, some sunglasses and a beret.

He was sort of a symbol of free thinking and we may not have the word yet but it’s a symbol of optimism and we have one of those parties when we got home from a long unsuccessful road trip in 1994 and our friends just kept writing notes around this one drawing and one woman wrote, “This guy’s got life figured out.” The next morning when we woke up, we looked at the wall, there was so many comments written either on the wall or little post it’s about this one drawing that we said, “We’ve got to do something with him.”

We kind of distilled all the comments down to this three words, “Life is Good” and those three words really changed our life forever and the very next week, we took our — we printed our firstLife is Good shirts, 48 of them and by the way Matt, I feel imbalanced talking for this long but you encouraged me to do so.

[0:07:51.3 ] MB: Keep on going.

[0:07:53.0 ] JJ: Okay, I’m almost going to breathe. But basically, we printed our first shirts, there were 48 of them, we took them to street fair at Cambridge mass, It really changed our life because we had been doing this street fairs and selling in dorms, hawking in the street for five years but we’d never seen a response like we got that day. The 48 leg is good shirts, were among maybe 15, 20 other designs on the table but that one pile just disappeared in less than an hour.

All different kinds of people from all different walks of life, we had Harley Davidson guy, we had a skateboarder kid, we got a school teacher. All these people, looking around and then picking up that one shirt and buying it from us and we were stunned, we were out of out of Life is Good shirts in an hour and we finally had what we had been looking for, we just didn’t really know what to do with it from that point.

[0:08:49.2 ] MB: You know, the point you made about negativity in the news, I think that’s something that’s so important and we’ve had a couple previous episodes on the show where we’ve talked about that and something I really believe in is just kind of finding a way to sort of tune that out or do something to sort of oppose the fact that when you turn on the TV, it’s a robbery, a fire, X, Y, Z people dying when in reality, there’s so much good in the world as well.

[0:09:15.1 ] JJ: Right. Actually there’s hard data that supports the idea that we’re living in a most peaceful time. You’d never know that if you turn on the news but it’s a fact and people are living longer than ever, there’s a lot of huge, healthy trends out there but unfortunately, the mansion or news media found the formula decades ago that if they scare people, people feel like they hear to watch to protect their lives, protective family. That’s a frustrating thing but we’re trying to do our small part to help people focus on positives.

We really believe that what you focus on grows and all of us have obstacles and opportunities in our lives every day. It’s really a choice we make in the morning, what we’re going to focus our energy on. It doesn’t mean we totally ignore the obstacles or the hardships or any of that. It’s just we’ve learned this lesson in a real deep way from our customers. I mentioned, we didn’t know what to do with this successful shirt when we finally had it, we ended up getting basically doing what we did in the dorms but transferring it to retail, we didn’t know how retail worked and how things got into stores.

But we just started knocking on retail doors and asking if they’d testLife is Good and slowly we got a few small mom and pop shops to do that, they were successful. I remember our first account calling for what you’d called “the reorder” and we had never heard that term before after five or six years in business. But eventually we got some momentum, people started spreading the word to other retailers, and next thing you know we had 10 accounts, a hundred accounts and we had accounts outside of New England and spreading across the country and we got sales reps and we’re learning the nuts and bolts of the business.

But the most impactful and powerful thing that happened was totally unexpected. Yes we got letters from people saying, “Hey, I love your hiking shirt, I love the shirt with this character Jake with his dog, I love my dog, I love gardening, I love doing yoga, playing guitar.” Those kind of letters we started getting but we also started getting letters just as many from people going through great adversity. People facing, losing loved ones, wrestling with cancer, going through chemo and they would say things like their hat helped them stay positive during chemotherapy or we all woreLife is Good shirts to the memorial service for my brother who is a very positive person.

Incredibly moving, letters and emails, we didn’t really know what to do with them as we try to figure out the business. We sort of put them in a drawer, it took us a few years to realize all we have to do is share this letters and they can lift people and we started doing it internally, cut companywide meetings and then eventually we post them on our website and as soon as we shared one story, 10 others would come in and a hundred others would come in because we realized they helped people feel less alone and more of empowered to take on and overcome their own adversity.

Again, I said it earlier but all of us face it whether it’s super dramatic or more day to day challenges. But we all need a lift from each other and one person’s story, particularly someone who has been through something really difficult, if they’re able to focus on gratitude as a foundation and I’m so lucky to have one friend to have a sandwich today to be breathing right now, to go outside, to have a little time with my dog like it’s incredible. We found that people that do face great adversity tend to have a deeper reservoir of gratitude and a real rock solid foundation that we can all learn from.

A lot has come out of those letters and really the direction of our company and the depth of the message have come from listening to our customers and that sort of set us on a certain path to create a kid’s foundation and try to help make life good for a lot of kids who are dealing with some major adversity in their lives.

[0:13:24.7 ] MB: I find it amazing that it’s often the people facing the toughest challenges that this message resonates so deeply with.

[0:13:33.4 ] JJ: That’s right. I think if someone were to see a shirt or hat or anything, those are the things where we’re most known for but if they could look at it and say well that’s easy for somebody to say the pictures of hiking or they might think the name is about sunny days and ice cream and freebies. In reality, we found that on the darkest days, that’s when optimism is most powerful and take the most extreme examples that we’ve encountered since we stated the company.

Yes we’ve had times with the economy has tanked when we’ve been at war, even like 9/11 or more recently again we’re based I Boston and we had the Boston marathon bombing in 2013. In both cases, I’ll just go back to 9/11 for a moment, we kind of froze for a few days because we had a really young company, we had a lot of momentum and this thing went down and we didn’t know if it was appropriate to be sending out boxes of shirts that said Life is Good because it didn’t really feel that way in the days after 9/11.

Then, a quiet woman in our warehouse at a companywide meeting raised her hand and said, why we can’t do a fund raiser to help the victims. We decided to do that and it was our first large scale fund raiser and it was simply putting the word out to our partners and to our team that 100% of the profits would help the victims. That shirt just took off so fast and we ended up raising over $200,000. At the time it was a lot for us and it happened really quickly and that was a great lesson for us that especially in the bad times, people need a light to gravitate toward, they need something positive to rally around.

That led to us creating the Life is Good festivals which were events, usually around some quirky theme like let’s break the world record for most lit jack o lanterns in one place one time. Let’s find the world’s greatest backyard athlete. Usually kind of a light fun theme to get people outdoors together but there was always a series underlying cause. Hey, there’s people out there that don’t find it so easy to see the glass half full to live their lives wide open and embrace newness because they’re dealing with poverty, violence, illness.

There’s a lot of kids that are dealing with that every day of their lives. It was a huge lesson for us to learn and then just to close that loop on the Boston marathon, we had a similar experience where we were, our offices at the time were two blocks from the finish line so we had a lot of our team out there cheering on the runners when the bombs went off, we had a teammate severely injured like shrapnel head to toe, we literally didn’t know if he was going to live to the next day and yet when we visited him the next day, in the hospital, the first thing he said was I’m grateful.

He had seen people killed, he had seen people a lot worse off than him. Most of his wounds healed over time and we were focused on making sure our team was healthy and we had counselors talking to people. Meanwhile, our customers were saying hey, guys, it’s time for another fund raiser shirt. Can you do one? We just spent a few days focused on our team internally and then we said, they’re absolutely right. We made a shirt that the prevalence saying in our city which is a tough old city is Boston strong which is a good saying about resilience but we felt we were witnessing something more than that.

We watched, first of all, EMT’s jumping in the middle of the chaos to save people, to help people and then you broaden the lenses a little bit, you saw runners running an extra mile to give blood. You saw people lending their cellphones, opening up their homes to strangers, you heard about doctors working 50 hour shifts of surgery to help the victims, it was like one act of whatever you want to call it.

Hatred or confusion from two people and that was what the news kept focusing on, they wanted to keep showing the bomb going off and the victims and we’re saying there’s something much bigger happening here and all this love poured in from around Boston and then well beyond Boston, around the world helping, it was compassion coming in from everywhere and the shirt we ended up making simply said Boston on the front with a little heart and one of the O’s on the back, it said, there’s nothing stronger than love.

That shirt we put on our website, we said, we told people 100% of the profits will go to the Boston one fund for the victims and their families and that shirt ending in a matter of five or six weeks sold more than we’ve ever sold of any shirt and we ended up raising over half a million dollars for the one fund. For us, we were proud of how resilient our city was and how quickly we got back to being who we are and trying and move on from this terrible incident but we’ve been more proud, the world’s choice to focus not on hate but on love that they witnessed in the aftermath of the marathon bombing.

[0:19:03.7 ] MB: That’s an incredible story and it’s inspiring that you have served this one act of hatred and violence and it created almost a wave of love and from so many different people.

[0:19:15.7 ] JJ: That’s right.

[0:19:17.9 ] MB: So in the same vein as that, what is the sort of driving purpose of Life is Good?

[0:19:24.6 ] JJ: Our mission is to spread the power of optimism and we really have learned, first, we have to give credit to our mom, Joan Jacobs. She was the number one inspiration for our brand and we grew up in a chaotic little house with eight people, my brother Bert and I are the youngest siblings and we were lucky in a lot of ways because we’re tight family but we definitely dealt with some adversity and some strain and a big part of that was our dad who was an avid outdoorsman, very hands on guy that worked in a machine shop and our mom was more running the circus at home overseeing the six kids and doing all the stuff that a lot of moms did in the 60’s and 70’s and just running the household and they both were in a very serious car accident when Bert and I were in grade school.

Fortunately our mom who had seatbelt on, she just broke her shoulder and she healed. Our dad wasn’t as lucky and he lost the use of his right arm, that new disability for him, his physical limitations, combined with the financial pressure of trying to feed a family of eight, it really led to frustration every day and a lot of yelling in the house and it made for really tense atmosphere at home and yet when we looked back, we think of our mom who was always singing, telling jokes, telling stories, laughing and one thing she would do at the dinner table that really helped us a lot in retrospect, she’d look around at each kid and say, “Tell me something that happened today,” and as simple as that sounds, it changed the energy in the house.

And instead of complaining about anything a kid might complain about; assignment, a teacher, a peer. Instead, we were finding some absurd or positive or funny nugget from the day, just sharing that one thing and it created momentum in the dining room in the house and like I said, it changed the energy in the house and we didn’t probably realize it till we’re 20’s but that was a conscious decision she was making every day, not get pulled in to some of the heavier stuff that was happening in our house and focus our energy on the good.

That helped us give us a bit of a foundation and then the real big one was getting this letters and emails from people that really underscored this notion that even when you’re facing the hardest adversity, there is a way to consciously shift your mind toward the positives and to kind of grow that good in your life instead of getting consumed by the negative and we all know people that are able to do both of those things and meaning well — you know what I mean. It really led to a foundational philosophy for our company that all of us have a choice when we wake up in the morning to focus as I said earlier on obstacles or opportunities.

We just believed that a lot more good comes out of focusing most of our energy on the opportunities and growing those. We’ve seen it come to fruition in our own lives and even more compelling is the stories we received that prove that even if you’re in the worst possible situation, this kind of philosophy gives you a much better chance to get through it and to prosper and to be happy and fulfilled in your life.

[0:23:06.8 ] MB: I think this is a great opportunity to dig in to some of the lessons from Life is Good the book. I know the book talks about sort of 10 super powers that anybody can tap into with optimism obviously being one of the biggest and most important. Tell me a little bit more about that?

[0:23:23.2 ] JJ: Sure. Well we believe that the 10 super powers really came about over time we kept picking up this recurring messages from our customers about what’s most important to them and it ended up being what most companies might call their 10 core values but we think super powers are a lot more fun to say and we feel like unlike bullet speed or herculean strength or X-ray vision, these are super powers accessible to all of us and optimism really enables us as human beings to access this super powers on a daily basis, these are things like authenticity, creativity, gratitude, love, humor.

All of these things when combined lead us to living a more happy and fulfilling life and the book, we ended up devoting one chapter each to a super power and found a way to weave the stories of our customers as well as our own story, as well as a lot of fun top 10 list sand quotes, a lot of playful imagery and some of our best graphics and photos. It’s all combined in there but the real heart of the book is these 10 super powers and really how individuals can bring them to life and sort of tap their power in their everyday life. Each chapter ends with tips for how to access these powers and how to bring them to life on a daily basis.

So it started by request from our publisher, National Geographic. The request was, “Can we do a business book?” And the more we talked about it, we weren’t as excited about that because we feel like a lot of businesses start in the garage or basement and yeah, our origin story is fun but we want to go a lot deeper and as soon as we started talking about the super powers, we knew this is what the basis of the book should be and this is something that we feel like is the most powerful thing we’ve come across and we want to share it with as many people as possible.

[0:25:33.6 ] MB: For somebody that struggles to have an optimistic outlook and for example, I feel like personally I’m kind of naturally sort of a pessimistic person. What do you think that — what are some tips or strategies to sort of shift your perspective?

[0:25:47.4 ] JJ: I think gratitude can play a huge part and it’s starting with — some people do gratitude journals, some people try to weave it in before meals or lunch, special meal a day. I think those are two very tangible ways. One huge one that we’ve learned from our customers is this phrase, “get to”. It came in a form of one letter but it really represents the mindset of a lot of this letters and emails we’ve received, it really is the notion that, let me give you example like at work, at Life is Good, we try as best we can not to say “have to”, “we have to go to a meeting, have to work late, have to work on this assignment.”

We get to do these things because we have jobs and you can apply it to any part of your life, you can say to yourself, I have to go grocery shopping or get to go grocery shopping because I live in the land of abundance that has grocery stores and accessible food. I have to pay the bills or I get to pay the bills because I have a roof over my head. It’s so simple but it’s one word that can shift us from a common and then when I say us, myself included, all of us can fall in to a moment where we feel like we’re burdened, where we’re almost martyrs for fulfilling the responsibilities we have, whether it’s worker’s responsibilities or family or friends that we have to do these things.

We get to do this things because first of all, we’re breathing, we’re alive, let’s seize that opportunity while we’re here. Life is relatively short, let’s remind ourselves that we have a limited time and are we going to choose to bring positive energy to the day because the results tend to be better when we do but this get to phrase has been super powerful and it’s just a tool that is timeless if you put it in that frame, anytime you’re wrestling with something or it feels like a big burden, it’s like well, actually a lot of people don’t have access to a grocery store, a lot of people aren’t paying bills because they don’t have any income and that’s the most basic things that we start to take for granted.

When we find ourselves complaining about things like the weather or traffic, it’s kind of absurd when you compare to what a lot of people — you know how the parts of the globe are dealing with on a daily basis, for severe hunger, poverty, violence and yet sometimes we just need a reset button and that can come in the form of the phrase get to.

[0:28:32.3 ] MB: I love that phrase and that idea, it’s so simple but it creates this incredible perspective shift.

[0:28:38.8 ] JJ: Yup. We love simple phrases, maybe because we’re not capable of anything beyond that, but “yes and” is another one we love and it comes from improv comedy. I don’t know if you're familiar with that one, but with the principle law rule of improv is that you don’t negate the offering of another actor who is on stage because it tends to kill a scene. In order to keep some momentum, whatever your teammates says, you roll with that and you build on it, you augment it.

And we found in brain storming, in doing our best to be creative and finding new ways to spread the power of optimism with new phrases, with new images, “yes and” is a great tool to let ideas breathe a little bit for a minute or two before you get to a stage or a meeting where you’re editing out and you’re narrowing and you’re cutting ideas. You can really benefit from having a more wide open approach and it’s applicable to life as well. Whether it’s with a spouse or a friend or just having conversations that are more yes and’s and building on someone’s idea, instead of that, I think it’s unfortunately kind of hard wired in a lot of maybe all of us human beings.

The fight or flight thing or first thinking about why something won’t work or why it could be a threat. The news again helps build this into people too but if you can release that, try to take on that openness of a five or six year old, a healthy five or six year old who just is open to ideas that says yes to things that wants to explore, that’s a difficult thing for people to retain when we get older. Yet it’s super powerful when it comes to being creative and to building instead of knocking and that’s another favorite simple phrase, don’t knock it, build it and if I get tied back. I am so grateful that you’re giving us a forum here today to talk about what we believe more than anything right now, I think there is a lot of positive media out there, a lot of positive podcast.

Then there’s a lot of shows that just give people place to events and talk about what’s wrong. I think people that spend a lot of energy talked about what’s wrong without transitioning to solutions tend to hurt people’s desire or drive to progress, to grow, to try and do things. I think it’s so healthy that when people are listening to more and more of this content that I don’t mean my content book but what you feature on your show and other podcast or let’s say storytelling hour, things that stories that actually can lift people.

We’ve translated in the last year or two or a lot of the greatest letters we received to stories and video forum and that was incredibly exciting when the book came out. Our book, it gave us a reason to get out on the road and connect with customers to raise over a million dollars for our kid’s foundation with various events over around the country but the most impactful thing we did on that trip, we went coast to coast for 60 days visiting 40 communities and the most impactful thing was visiting the people that had written the most inspiring letters.

Some of them we’d never met in person and I didn’t know if their stories could be better than they were in letter form but there’s a few that just — people who have got incredible response to a couple of boys in Alex and Nick, twin brothers that were born a pound and as I said, had a lot of growing to do and they have — one of the kids has on leg, the other kid is legally blind and they wrote a letter when they were 10 years old and it’s all about how lucky they are and it’s just very moving and very eloquent for 10 year old to write and we share that video as much as we can, there’s another young woman who is now 27.

She wrote to us when she was 11, she was dealing with a prognosis that was — she had bone cancer and it looked like she wasn’t going to live another two years and yet she is alive today but more impressively, when she was 11 and dealing with hat prognosis, she was always cheering people up, anyone who interviewed her and should have brought to our attention because she was always wearing Life is Good hat and literally someone on a radio interview asked about the hat.

Do you understand your prognosis and she said, I think I tended to take things for granted and ever since I heard what’s happening with my body, I don’t, I really realized how lucky I am and I’m trying to savor every day. It was incredible wisdom form an 11 year old and those examples are what fuel our company and just to make us want to spread this message as widely as we can and have people share more and more stories because that seems to be the thing more than anything else that list people and helps people through adversity.

[0:33:59.3 ] MB: For listeners who want to check that out, where can they find some of this videos?

[0:34:03.7 ] JJ: That’s at lifeisgood.com and there’s a button called “discover” and that will bring you to a really fun section of our site that features a lot of this inspiring, uplifting stories.

[0:34:16.8 ] MB: We’ll make sure to include those in the show notes as well. One other thing I wanted to touch on, you have a phrase, “life is not easy, life is not perfect, life is good”. I’d love to just hear your thoughts on that.

[0:34:29.6 ] JJ: Yeah, again, if someone was just introduced to our company and just saw the words “Life is Good”, some might understand the depth of those three words. Some might just say it’s sort of pollyannaish and yet the depth of our brand came from people like our mom and then this stories form people like Alex and Nick and Lindsey that I just mentioned. It really taught us, and that phrase is getting more popular on our product because it does acknowledge and we’ve always tried to acknowledge the darkness in the world, the adversity in the world, the strain that is inevitable in every person’s life at one time or another but that phrase sums it up nicely and it doesn’t mean, when we say Life is Good, it doesn’t mean everything is ice cream and freebies.

It’s a matter of mindset and choice. Okay, I acknowledge that there’s going to be really difficult times in my life and it’s going to be incredibly imperfect just like I am as a person. Whoever says that? Anyone has to look in the mirror and say, “I’ve got so many imperfections, my life has been quite a mix of highs and lows. I’m going through either a good stretch right now or rudely difficult stretch.” But if you step back and look at the whole picture, Life is Good and to us that means if you choose to focus on the good, that’s what will grow.

Acknowledge the painful points, maybe you’re right in the middle one right now and you say, at some point, it’s going to get better, I need to lean on some friends right now, I need to take care of myself, I need to be exercise, I need to talk to friends who understand what I’m going through. Maybe I need to see a professional about it and maybe I just need to recognize a window time where I have a physical ailment or I’m not in a job that I love. It could be any of those things but it’s really a mindset that says.

In the scheme of things, when you look at the whole picture, life itself and my life as a person is going to be good and therefore, that’s going to give me a little more resilience and a little more fire to try to drive through this difficult stretch and that’s what that phrase is all about, it’s acknowledging the hard parts and for your neighbor as well as yourself and saying together, we can make life good.

[0:37:06.1 ] MB: What is one piece of homework that you would give to somebody listening to this episode?

[0:37:11.3 ] JJ: Let’s see. I’m ranging to the super powers in my head and I would say two things. When you get home, if you live with anyone or if you get to work, if you work with any others, try devoting the first five minute to a real human connection with that person. Whether you’re getting home to kids, bring some levities, some humor, some fun. Whether it’s a fun story from your day, or just imitating some bizarre character, sharing a funny movie quote you love or — the point is, a lot of us go from task to ask, whether it’s work at home, and we start to form this checklist and that’s what dominates our minds and if we take just a few minutes to connect with people, all the other stuff gets a lot easier.

If you have to get through a bit of a laundry list or a plan for the weekend or what is the week ahead look like with your team at work or with your family at home or with friends, just spending those moment, that’s why fun and humor are both super powers in the Life is Good world because we found it opens doors, it relaxes people, it unites people, it makes them feel less like robots. Just taking those five minutes, it makes everything run a lot smoother and the other tip or homework I would say is — we really believe in trying.

When you try something new or a little bit outside your comfort zone, you either succeed or you learn. If you take failure off the table like, “Oh no, I don’t want to do that because I might not be good at it,” you inevitably grow and you grow as a person and you feel better that you’ve kind of stretched beyond that comfort zone and it is a chapter we have about courage where it says, “rejection, you can imagine rejection as your best teacher but think of it as your best teacher, as your best trainer.” That’s actually what makes you stronger is — and that, for my brother and I, that biggest period of that was probably the dorms for five years and we just heard “no” and sometimes a polite “no”, sometimes very rude “no”.

But when we’re trying to sell our shirts in the dorms, so many times, thousands of times a week that we realize it didn’t hurt us at all and we just took notes, “Why didn’t they like our shirt?” And ever since then, I feel like that’s been a nice little reference point for us, no matter what stage of the company or stage of our life we were going through, it’s like we’ll shake it off and grow from it and that’s part of the magic of this life is exploring new territory and trying new things. It’s also what keeps relationships, friendships, et cetera fresh is being willing to try new things.

Either together or new hobbies on your own and so, I would encourage listeners to think about, is our hobby whether it’s guitar or writing or knitting, ever wanted to make a little short movie or is it work, is there some project in the garage or is there something you’ve always thought about doing it, “if you had the time”. We really believe in not just finding the time to do things that are, maybe seemed frivolous or very secondary like something related to your personal passion or your hobby.

Something that’s — you might put in a “fun category” and therefore you’re only going to do it on Saturday night or that’s a big thing we talked about in the fun chapters like, fun is not some desert you might get to at the end of your week. It’s part of the main course and if you actually weave it in, you consciously say, “In order to be healthy and to kind of refresh my own sense of optimism and playfulness, I need to look at my calendar and say yeah, I’m going to make time for my cooking, my craft brewing, my writing, drawing, my playing cards with my friends like playing guitar.”

That stuff is a huge replenisher and that’s a big part of what our kid’s foundation actually does is we work with child care providers, there’s a lot of burnout in positions like teacher, counselor, they’re doing such noble work but if they don’t’ take care of themselves, they can’t teach what they don’t — they can’t give what they don’t have, they can’t give joy, they can’t give curiosity, optimism, playfulness if they don’t have those things themselves.

It’s a long answer but I think the most important thing Is looking out for your own health and part of that is not just nutrition and exercise, it’s laughter, it’s fun and whatever brings you that sense of joy, make sure you schedule it into your weekly schedule so that time isn’t going by and you’re falling into this trap of “have to, I have to, I have to” and check this list off every week.

Instead, first of all, I get to do these things even the most mundane things, it’s helpful to look through that lens and then where did I carve out time to do things that just sort of feed your soul, that make you feel more you and make you feel joyful? That stuff is crucial to your own happiness and fulfillment. I don’t think it’s just an American thing or our ambition sometimes pushes us to a level where it’s all about productivity, we found in our business that if people are having fun at work, cracking jokes with each other, throwing the ball around, throwing the Frisbee around.

It actually makes us not just happier but more productive because our brains are more alert, we’re enjoying our time at work and it’s applicable to all of our lives so I’ve said it already, at least twice but the homework to me would be, think about what brings you joy, even if you haven’t done it in 10 years and say, “How do I weave that back into my life?” I’ll give you a personal example, I have always liked, loved movies, always want to make movies, don’t really know how to make movies but a friend of mine with a similar mindset many years ago, we were talking about it, we said, “Let’s just create some forum.”

We created this film festival and asked our friends to make a movie, eight minutes or less and the movies were pretty bad quality the first year but there’s probably two or three gems in there and we do it every two years and the quality has slowly increased but more importantly, we have a deadline, we have a supportive network of friends who want to do something creative and we’re doing it.

It’s over 10 years running and that might be for you like getting together to play music every month with a friend or two or knitting or gardening or whatever that thing is that brings you joy, make sure it’s not an afterthought that’s put away for some day but you actually say to yourself, this is important to my happiness and I’m going to actually schedule it on my calendar and I’ll leave it at that now.

[0:44:40.2 ] MB: That’s an incredible piece of advice and you touched on this once already but tell us again, where can people find you online?

[0:44:46.7 ] JJ: We’re at lifeisgood.com and there is a lot of fun content on there as well as product that we’re really proud of. I would encourage all listeners who sought out your podcast to go to the discover section because there is a really treasure trove of inspiring videos and content that can pick you up and a place to go back to whenever you need a lift.

That’s really what we’re trying to build with our website is a hub of optimism. Where people can come to be lifted and inspired and a community can share stories with each other to keep each other up and optimistic.

[0:45:28.4 ] MB: Well John, this has been a fascinating interview and incredibly inspirational story and obviously your company, Life is Good, it’s so inspirational as well. I just wanted to say thank you very much for being on the show.

[0:45:41.0 ] JJ: Matt, we’re so grateful. Life is Good is, and I am individually. Thanks so much for carving up time for us and I hope anything I shared will be helpful to your listeners and you.

[0:45:53.3 ] MB: Thank you. 

Seven Catalysts To Creating Progress and Becoming A More Effective Leader with Dr. Teresa Amabile

In this episode we look at the single biggest factor that impacts your performance at work, the 7 major catalysts for creating progress in your life, we dig deep into the data to look closely at the correlations between mental states and actual performance in terms of creativity, technical skill, productivity and much more with Dr. Teresa Amabile.

Dr. Amabile is a Professor and Director of Research at Harvard Business School. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford. Her research investigates how life inside organizations can influence people and their performance. She has published over 100 articles in top scholarly journal and is the co-author of The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work, as well as Creativity in Context and Growing up Creative.

We discuss:

• How offering a reward can undermine people’s intrinsic motivation to do something

• We dig deep into the nearly 12,000 daily diary entries from over 200 professionals inside organizations that formed the foundation of Teresa’s research

• We look closely at the correlations between mental states and actual performance in terms of creativity, technical skill, productivity and more

• How positive and negative work environments arise within organizations

• Your “inner work life” and why its so important (and you may not even be aware of it)

• How external motivators can accidentally wipe out your true motive for working and achieving your goals

• Why “Making Progress on Meaningful Work” is the single biggest factor impacting performance

• An important and powerful tool that managers can use to help people do better in their work and have better experiences every day

• The "intrinsic motivation principle of creativity” and why it matters to you!

• The largest disconnect between what managers think motivates their employees and what the research actually shows that motivates them

• The 7 catalysts to creating progress in your life

• The importance of having clear goals (what you’re doing and why it matters)

• Why creating a culture where people learn from problems, failures, and mistakes is vital to success

• The importance of control and autonomy in your work

• How to create emotional support for your employees and coworkers

• How small words of kindness and understanding can make a huge impact on productivity

• The importance of setting daily goals for yourself - something you want to get done that is really core to your work

• The importance of measurement and tracking your progress with a daily progress journal

• The enormous impact of even a tiny win on your day

• And much more!

If you want to master motivation for yourself and others, listen to this episode!

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] The Progress Principle by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer

• [Article] The Power of Small Wins by Teresa Amabile and Steven J. Kramer

• [Checklist] Daily Progress Checklist

EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Today, we have another incredible guest on the show, Teresa Amabile. Teresa is a professor and director of research at Harvard business school. She received her PhD in psychology from Stanford. Her research investigates how life inside organizations can influence people and their performance. She has published over a hundred articles in top scholarly journals and is the coauthor of The Progress Principle: Using small wins to ignite joy, engagement, and creativity at work, as well as Creativity in Context and Growing Up Creative.

Teresa, welcome to the science of success.

[0:02:54.2] TA: Hey Matt, I’m really happy to be here.

[0:02:56.2] MB: Well we’re very excited to have you on. So for audience members who may not be familiar with you, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, and how you kind of got into this field of research.

[0:03:06.4] TA: I actually started my adult life as a chemist and made my way fairly quickly after working as a chemist for only about a year, made my way to a PhD in psychology and I’m really glad that I did. The thing is, I’ve always loved science from the time I was a little kid. I didn’t know that psychology was a science though until I got halfway through college as a chemistry major and I realized I was a whole lot more interested in the behavior of humans than the behavior of molecules. So that’s how I ended up doing the psychology degree and it was in grad school that I got some of the initial ideas for my research that I’m actually still playing out all these years later.

I was lucky enough at Stanford to be able to work with a professor named Mark Leper. He was at that point doing some of the earliest research on what’s called “intrinsic motivation” and that’s the motivation to do something because you’re passionate about it because you find it interesting, enjoyable, personally satisfying, personally challenging. Mark had discovered, paradoxically, that rewarding people for doing something that they were already intrinsically interested in doing without a reward, offering them a reward to do it could undermine their intrinsic motivation. Could make them actually less interested in doing it later on when the reward was removed.

This caused a huge hubbub in the field of psychology and I was absolutely fascinated by it and it occurred to me that not only might things like reward and other kinds of external motivators, not only could they possibly have a negative effect on people’s subsequent interest in doing something, but they might also have a negative impact on how people do whatever it is they’re doing, whatever the task is that they’ve been rewarded for. And I was interested in particular in how reward and other external motivators, external constraints, how those things could influence the creativity of someone’s performance.

So I began doing some experiments, with children and with adults, while I was in grad school and I discovered what I called the “intrinsic motivation principle of creativity”. That is that people are more creative when they’re interested primarily in doing the work out of their own enjoyment of it, their own interest in it, their own sense of personal challenge and personal satisfaction rather than doing it because of extrinsic motivators, something that someone is holding out there as a carrot, or external constraints, something that someone is telling them to do.

That intrinsic motivation principle has held up through dozens of experiments that I’ve done, that other researchers have done and it’s even held up in situations like business organizations where people are trying to do creative work on a day by day basis. So that was really the beginning of my research. It’s gone off into many directions, looking at the environments in classrooms and in homes that can best support children’s creativity, versus the classroom and home environments that can undermine it. As well as the business environments, the organizational environments that can be most conducive to people’s intrinsic motivation and creativity as well as looking at those obstacles that can get in the way of creativity at work.

So that was the foundation of my research. The research that I did for The Progress Principle took off from there and began looking at things outside of creativities. Certainly including creativity, but that research looked at other aspects of performance. Including productivity, commitment to the work, collegiality, how people treat each other and it looked at psychological states beyond intrinsic motivation. Including emotions and perceptions that people have while they’re doing their work.

[0:07:41.7] MB: That’s a fascinating journey and a very counterintuitive conclusion to some of the kind of common sense wisdom of how we think we should motivate people.

[0:07:52.4] TA: Absolutely. That’s why I was so excited about these results when they first came out.

[0:07:58.2] MB: I’m curious tell me as little bit more about Progress Principle and kind of some of the research that went into writing it.

[0:08:04.8] TA: My collaborators and I wanted to understand how this positive and negative work environments for creativity at how they arise inside organizations we decided that it was really going to be important to look at what was going on inside people’s hearts and minds, if you will, day by day as they were working in order to get some real insight into what influenced people at that micro level. Because that’s where it all starts. That’s where creative ideas occur or die or never fail to come out, never come out at all, that’s where people can become more motivated or less motivated. On a day by day, and even maybe a moment by moment basis.

So we were really interested in that very microscopic level, what are people thinking, what are they feeling, how motivated are they in their work, and ultimately does this influence their creativity? How does it influence their creativity and their productivity and those other aspects of performance? We called those internal psychological states of emotions, perceptions and motivations, we call that an inner work life. Everybody has inner work life all the time while they’re working, whether they’re conscious of it or not.

So we all have a continuous stream of thoughts and perceptions. That’s just really the impressions that we form of our work our colleagues, coworkers, our managers, our organization, what’s going on and what it means. So that’s perceptions. It’s also the ongoing stream of emotions that we have. So at any given moment, we could be experiencing mild positive emotion, extreme positive emotion, mild or extreme negative emotion, we could be in a more or less neutral emotional state but most of us have some sort of motivation, emotion going on most of the time that we’re at work. Again, even if we’re not aware of it and positive and negative emotions can actually coexist.

That third component, motivation. We all have some degree of motivation for our work and every moment that we’re working and we have both intrinsic and extrinsic motives for doing most of what we do. If we’re working in an organization or even working as a freelancer, we all have extrinsic motivations. Of course we all want to get paid, equitably and generously, for the work that we do. That’s always there as a baselines. We also have extrinsic motivators like deadlines very often and other rewards and bonuses that we might stand to gain. We all have the extrinsic motivator of wanting to look good and wanting other people to evaluate our work well.

Many of us are extrinsically motivated by competition, wanting to do better than other people. Those extrinsic motivations are usually there for almost all of us, almost all of the time, they’re usually kind of in the background. We also have intrinsic motivation for what we’re doing, hopefully, most of us, much of the time and that is that feeling of real interest and engagement in the work itself. What my early experiment showed is that if those extrinsic motivators become too prominent, if they become the focus of why we feel like we’re doing what we’re doing, they can wipe out that intrinsic motivation, they can undermine it.

Ideally, we’re going to be in an intrinsically motivated state most of the time because that’s a state that’s most conducive to creativity and we found, to the other dimensions of performance as well. But ten we face the really hard question. All right, we’re interested in a work life for such as emotions and motivations, how do we look at it? We called it an inner work life because it’s hidden most of the time. It’s not something that an observer can just see, it’s not something we reveal to other people at work much of the time. In fact, we’ve been kind of trained at least in this culture to hide our emotions when we’re at work. “Put on a professional face.”

So this was a tricky problem for us methodologically, how do we get in this? We decided the best way to do it would be to ask people to fill out a daily confidential electronic diary, toward the end of each work day. Short but piffy in terms of getting at their inner work life for that day specifically. So this little diary form that we emailed to everyone who participated in our study, toward the end of their work day, had a few numerical scale questions on it, getting at their inner work life that day.

So there were flow survey questions on, “Today at work, did you perceive that you had support from your coworkers that you’d had support from your managers? Did you perceive support from the organization at large for the work that you were doing? Did you feel emotionally supported in your work day? How much time pressure did you have today? To what extent did you have access to the resources you needed?” So these are all perceptions and they were about half a dozen other questions about people’s perceptions of the work and their team, their manager, the organization that day.

We also had some numerical questions on their motivations. Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and we had scale rated questions on their emotions that they experienced that day. That was a very quick sort of numerical, taking of the person’s inner work life temperature that day, if you will. Then, we did the x-ray, if you will, of what your work day was like. In particular, what stood out in their mind as being a significant event from the day, or at least something that they recalled when they thought back on their day. Something that stood out in their mind.

So we had an open ended question at the end of the diary form and it simply said, “Briefly describe one event that occurred today that stands out in your mind. It can be anything at all, as long as it’s relevant to the work or the project that your work is part of. Please describe in detail what happened and who was involved.” They got that same question every day so they knew it was coming. We sent them these diary forms every day through the entire course of an important creativity project that they were working on.

So we recruited people in seven companies in three industries to participate in the study. There were a total of 26 project teams across this seven companies and each project team was doing an important innovation project for its company and these people were more or less 100% dedicated to this projects. So we thought, “All right, we’re going to be able to find out day by day what’s happening in this people’s work lives as those work lives unfold day by day through the entire course of an important project that requires creativity to be successful.”

We assumed that some of this 26 projects would indeed be successful and some of them would not. We wanted to see if we could understand something about why creativity happened in some of these projects, didn’t happen in others. Why some of this people were able to creative in their work and be productive but others were not. Wanted to see if there was something going on in those work days that would allow us to make those predictions. So we followed this people 238 of them, they were professionals, we followed them every day through the entire course of their project. On average, these projects were four and a half months long. That’s a lot of weeks for people to be getting this diary every day, Monday through Friday.

It was quick, it took them only about five to eight minutes to fill out but the data were incredibly fascinating and we had a lot of data. We ended up with nearly 12,000 of this individual dairy diaries being sent back to us. That’s 75% of the diaries that we sent to this people. We had an astonishing 75% response rate. These people filled out this diary form and sent it back to us. When we analyzed these diaries, we felt it was really important to correlate them with the actual performance of this people. We wanted to know what was going on inside their heads, their hearts and minds, during the work day, was that in any way related to their performance? This is the prediction that we wanted to make.

So we had to have good measures of their performance, and we decided not to trust what they said about their own performance. We decided to ask people who knew their work well and that was their supervisors and their close colleagues. Monthly, during the study and by the way, there were some teams that were in the study for eight months, even nine months if they had a long-ish project. Monthly during the study, we asked every participant, close colleagues and supervisors to make a quick rating of them on a little questionnaire that just asked for assessments on four items, for each person who is participating in the study. The person’s creative contributions to the project over the previous year, their technical contributions to the productivity of the work, they demonstrated commitment to the work and their collegiality, how they treated the other people on their team.

When we analyzed those data, those performance data against the inner work life ratings that we got from this people every day, we made an astonishing discovery. We found that on most days and most weeks and those months. When people were having the most positive perceptions of their organizations, their coworkers, their managers, even themselves, when they were having the strongest, intrinsic motivation for their work and they’re experiencing the most positive emotions, it was on most days and weeks and months that they were most likely to produce work that was creative.

Not only that, they were more likely to be productive in their work, demonstrate commitment to it and be better colleagues to each other, which of course raises the level of everyone else’s performance in the team. This was a really important discovery. This means that inner work life does predict performance, including creativity. At that point, we backed up and we said, “All right, if inner work life is so important for performance, what happens day by day that can influence inner work life? What is it that makes people have more positive emotions? Have stronger intrinsic motivations at their work? Have those positive perceptions?”

So we went back into the diaries and we analyzed everything what this people reported as an event in their day, in those open ended responses that they wrote, those on average 50 to 60 word paragraphs that they wrote about one event from their day. We categorized all these events using a very long and complex coding scheme and we wanted to see, are there certain events that show up repeatedly on people’s very best inner work life days?

Are there other events that show up repeatedly on people’s very worst inner work life days? We thought, “Those would be the likely suspect for distinguishing between positive inner work life and negative inner work life. Those are the likely suspects for the events that make the biggest difference.” We found that if all the positive events that people reported, on their very best inner work life days, the single most prominent was simply making progress in meaningful work. I want to just explain a little bit about what we mean there. Making progress means moving forward, feeling like you’re getting somewhere in solving a problem or coming up with new ideas.

Meaningful work means that the person feels that they’re contributing to something that they value in the work that they’re doing. Occasionally we found that people felt that they had made a lot of progress on work that they didn’t hear about, occasionally they felt that they were doing something that wasn’t really central to this important innovation project, that we’re doing something that they considered go for work or they didn’t know why they were doing this or they were stuck in a boring meeting all day that wasn’t really about the project.

On those days, even though people thought they got a lot done maybe, they made progress, they didn’t have particularly good inner work life. But most of the time, because they were doing this important innovation projects, most of the time, most of this people did find meaning in their work, they felt they were contributing to something that really mattered to the company, to the customers, maybe even to society at large because of the things that they were inventing in this projects.

When they felt that they were doing meaningful work, if they move forward in that work, they were more likely to have positive perceptions of the environment, the organization, their colleagues, their team, they were more likely to be strongly intrinsically motivated in their work and they were more likely to have these positive emotions. So what we found here is important and powerful tool that managers can use to help people do better in their work and not only do better in their work but actually have more positive inner work life experiences, have better experiences day by day in their work and that is for managers to simply pay attention to supporting progress.

Supporting the progress that their people are trying to make in their most important work. We even found a carryover effect. We found that on those days when people are having progress events in their work, when they’re feeling happy in their work, not only are the more likely to come up with a creative idea or solve a problem creatively that day, they’re even more likely to come up with a creative idea the next day regardless of the next day’s mood.

So what this means is that there’s an incubation effect, there’s kind of a cognitive process that gets setup when people are having positive inner work life that allows them to make new connections between ideas that they might not have connected otherwise or to get insight into difficult and complex problems and they can result in a solution or a new idea that day but if it doesn’t, it can actually kind or marinate or cook or incubate overnight and show up this creative idea or a good solution to the problem the next day.

That’s a really powerful result and it means that managers would do well to pay close attention to what they could do to bolster people’s inner work lives day by day. I’ll be happy to talk a little bit more about what it is managers can do, if that’s a direction you’d like to go on the conversation.

[0:24:06.8] MB: I’m curious for somebody who is listening, who might be a manager or in some sort of organizational role? How can they support progress, which you said is kind of a critical component of enabling people to make progress on meaningful work and also what are some of the biggest disconnects between what people think motivated their employees and what the research actually shows, empowers them and motivates them.

[0:24:31.3] TA: Yeah, those are great questions. Matt, I’m going to actually answer your first question, your second question first. Managers are taught and they see, in this culture at least, that the way to motivate employees is to offer them rewards for the work, to have a bonus structure for example that will keep them motivated, keep them engaged, keep them plugging away at their work. Well we found through this day by day diaries, 12,000 of them, 12,000 days of people’s experiences was that they rarely were thinking about rewards and other extrinsic motivators during their work day.

They rarely felt that that was motivating them in their work and we asked about it every day in the diary form. What really motivated them, it turned out, was feeling that they were getting somewhere, that they were making progress and also feeling that they were in a work environment that cared about them as people, that supported them as people and I hadn’t been emphasizing that because it turned out to not be quite as important as the progress factor but it actually is pretty important, this feeling that you are valued as a human being.

So let me talk about the two sides of that. One is the progress side, the other is almost as important, the human side. We discovered when we went back into the diaries and looked at what kinds of things managers were doing, what kind of events people reported before they had this progress events. We discovered that there were a small set of things that managers did consistently that did support progress. We call this the catalyst to progress. There are seven of them. First, maybe most fundamentally, it’s very important for people to have clear goals in their work. To have a sense of what they’re doing and why it matters. That why it matters part is the meaningfulness part. But they need to have a sense of what it is they’re trying to achieve with the project, with this work that they’re doing.

The second very important catalyst is autonomy in the work. People feeling that they do have autonomy, control over how to achieve these goals in their work so they’re not micro managed. So that they can actually make decisions for themselves about the best route for solving this problem, for taking care of this part of the project. So if you think about these two catalyst, clear goals and autonomy, they may seem like they’re opposing but they’re not really. In setting clear goals, the manager, the leader is saying, “This is the mountain we’re trying to climb.” But in giving the autonomy, they’re saying, “It’s up to you to figure out how to climb it. We want you to use your skills, your creativity, your own ideas to figure out how to climb this mountain.” That’s very motivating for people. Both the clear goal that aspiration of what they’re trying to achieve and the autonomy, “I’m in control of my work. I can figure out the best way to do this.”

Other catalyst include sufficient resources for getting the work done, not lavish but sufficient to do the work so the people aren’t scrambling constantly and you then expending all their creativity, just getting the resources that they need, the funding, the materials and so on, the information, that they need to get the work done. Having sufficient time for the work. Again, not lavish amounts of time, there actually should be some sense of urgency in the work. Otherwise it will seem meaningless and unimportant if nobody cares about when the work is done, there should be some sense of urgency but the time pressure should not be extreme. We found that that can kill creativity. So sufficient resources, sufficient time.

Help with the work when it gets difficult. I’m very aware, by the way, that these are entirely mundane. These sound like basic management 101. Bu the thing is, managers don’t pay attention to this things nearly as often as they should. If people in doing an important innovation project, if they’re struggling with something that’s really difficult, get help for them. Either by connecting them to others in the organization and what it would be able to help out or helping them out yourself. That can make a huge difference in getting people past the home and helping them to continue making progress in difficult work.

This next one is really important and that’s something that very few managers do well, that is having an atmosphere, a culture where people learn from problems and failures and mistakes. As well as from successes. We found that in most of these seven organizations, most of these 26 teams, when there was something new that was tried, a new experiment maybe that failed, the usual response of the team leader, often of team members themselves certainly of higher level managers, the immediate response was to either castigate the people who did the work, “How could you have been so stupid?” Or, sweep it under the rug, “We’re going to pretend that didn’t happen, ignore it.”

The organization, the teams that did the best were those where people talked about the mistakes, talked about the failures, they called them out themselves. You know, “I did an experiment this week,” they would say, in the team meeting for example, “that failed and I’m having a hard time figuring out why.” Then the whole team would do a debrief. “All right, let’s talk about the steps you followed, what did you do here, what did you do there? All right, looks like maybe this is the reason that it didn’t work out.” So the whole team, including the individuals who did this failed experiment, the whole team extracted failure value from that thing that didn’t work.

There was one organization out of the seven that we followed that did spectacularly well and they in fact are still doing very well, they’re at the top of their industry. In their organization, people almost as a reflex, when something went wrong, would talk about it. Very quickly, very matter of factly, without pointing fingers, “Oh, this person was an idiot,” but just, “How can we learn from this?” There was this wonderful diary where the people in this company said, “I told the manager today that the experiment that I did failed and he said, “That’s all right, as long as we know what we did.”

And then the debrief happened right away and they were able to move on from that and that team actually had one of the very true breakthroughs of any of the 26 teams that we followed during our study. So learning from problems is extremely important and the atmosphere that helps people do that is called “psychological safety” where you know it’s safe to speak up about things that are going wrong about failures and you’re not going to get ridiculed, you’re not going to get blamed. But people are going to actually deal with it and appreciate your bringing it up.

[0:31:55.2] MB: That’s something we’re huge fans of on Science of Success in general is the idea of embracing failure, embracing mistakes and not casting blame or making excuses and we have a number of previous episodes about things like the fixed mindset, things like accepting reality, not making excuses. So I love to hear that some of the most successful companies in your study focused on that.

[0:32:18.5] TA: That’s right. In fact, it was only one unfortunately out of the seven that was that successful. But there were other teams here and there that where we would see psychological safety and those teams did tend to do much better even when they were in other companies. There are other catalyst that we discovered that people couldn’t see, they look at the book. I did want to mention something about the people support. The emotional support for people, as human beings, is so important.

Managers can do this by paying attention to first of all, basically respect in recognition for the value that each employee brings to the work. It’s really disheartening to see how seldom managers, from team leaders all the way up to top level leaders in an organization, how seldom they think to make a word of appreciation to someone, either in private or even better, in public. Just a simple way of noting what someone has done, let them know that they’re appreciated, to show them basic civility and respect.

It’s really important also to have an environment where people are encouraged when the work is difficult or they have a sense that there’s confidence that they can overcome this obstacle and get the work done. It’s important for people to feel that they have emotional support. If they’re having difficulty in their professional life or their personal life and sometimes all that requires is a simple acknowledgement. Even if you can’t say, “What can I do to help, let me help? At least say, “I know that you’re going through a tough time right now and I’m sorry for that, I understand that things are really stressful for you.” That makes a huge difference.

Comments like that from leaders made their way into the diaries when they happened, they had a huge positive effect on people’s emotions and perceptions that day. Finally a sense of camaraderie in a team, how can people feel that they’re in a group that can trust each other, where there’s mutual support, mutual understanding. Not that they don’t challenge each other, they should be open to each other’s ideas and that means challenging each other’s ideas too and really looking at them and trying to make them better. That sense of camaraderie can get people through a lot of difficult times in a project.

[0:34:35.1] MB: So for somebody who is listening, and I know your research focuses primarily on organizational dynamics. For somebody who is listening that maybe works form home or works by themselves, how can they kind of create this progress principle for themselves?

[0:34:50.5] TA: It’s not easy, but if you think about it, you can set a plan for yourself and it is doable, I’ve talked with many people who have tried this for themselves. First of all, set daily goals for yourself, not a lot of them. Maybe it’s one goal of something that you want to get done that’s really core to your work, that you feel is allowing you to get somewhere on what you consider most important in your work. Second, try to protect some time in your day to actually work on that goal. Even if it’s only half an hour, I know many of us get to work and we find that our work day ends up being pulled in a million directions that we didn’t anticipate.

Depending on your role in an organization, that may be part of what you need to do is help put out the fires that are going on each day. But ideally you will be able to protect some time even if it’s only at the very beginning of the day before most people are there to focus on that most important part of your work, the thing that you care about the most, it’s more intrinsically motivating to you and allow yourself to dig into it and make at least a bit of progress on it. The third thing is to track your progress. I recommend and we talk about this in The Progress Principle.

We recommend a daily progress journal where you spent not even more than two or three minutes at the end of the day noting what progress you did make in your work that day. If there were set backs to mention those and to see if you can get some insight into what caused those setbacks and what you might be able to do to overcome that obstacle. I’ve been keeping a progress journal myself in the last five and a half years or so, and I found that it really does make a difference. It helps me to stay tuned into my goals, I think it does help me to make more progress in my work and it certainly uplifts my inner work life to note what progress I made during the day, even if it was a small thing, because many days feel pretty frustrating at the end and it’s great to have that little boost in your inner work life.

[0:37:00.5] MB: We’ve obviously gone in depth into some of the lessons and much of the research behind Progress Principle. What are some additional resources you would recommend for somebody who wants to do some research or kind of dig in a little bit more about this topic?

[0:37:14.8] TA: Well, I would recommend looking at my website because I do have some resources there. In fact, I do have a daily progress check list that managers can use and I have a diary form that individuals can use for themselves. This daily progress checklist overcomes, I think, the most important barrier to managers and supporting progress and that is, they don’t pay attention to this seemingly ordinary things like, “Do people have clear goals? Do they know actually what it is they’re trying to achieve?”

Do they have sufficient resources, do they have the help that they need? So just going through that checklist, daily or even weekly, can help manage you stay tuned in to what people need and help them figure out ways of supporting progress and the daily diary form is something that people can use to do what I was just talking about, to keep track of those goals and their progress against those goals. We found that even the small wind that is a small step forward can have an enormous impact, positive impact, on people’s inner work life every day. Let me give you the website, it is simply progressprinciple.com.

[0:38:36.6] MB: Got it, and is that where people can find you online?

[0:38:39.1] TA: That’s right.

[0:38:40.2] MB: Perfect, and what is one piece of homework that you would give to our listeners?

[0:38:44.9] TA: Wow, I would ask your listeners to try this out today, write down one or two important goals that you have in your work for the next couple of weeks and make a plan to protect some time in your day today and tomorrow to make progress against those goals. Just for this two days, at the end of the day, spend a couple of minutes writing out what progress you felt you did make in the goals and if you had setbacks, you weren’t able to get much movement on those goals, what you might be able to do to remove those obstacles.

[0:39:22.8] MB: That’s a great piece of homework and I think something that I may implement myself.

[0:39:27.0] TA: Great.

[0:39:27.7] MB: Well, Teresa, this has been fascinating and I loved really going deep into some of the research and the astounding amount of data that you collected and the findings from that data. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all these incredible insights.

[0:39:42.4] TA: It was my pleasure Matt. I wish you and your listeners as well.

[0:39:45.3] MB: Thank you.