The Truth About Sleep - And How It Can Save Your Life with Dr. Matthew Walker

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Listen To The Episode

Show Notes

Video - 4 Scientifically Proven Paths To A Perfect Night Sleep

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic - Why You Should Sleep More

Links and Additional Research

Episode Transcript

Are you tired? If your answer is yes, it would seem relatively straightforward to assume you're not getting enough sleep.

It’s one of the most important things you can possibly do for yourself.

Improve. Your. Sleep.

You’re going to spend a large portion of your like sleeping. And that’s a good thing! Getting more sleep not only allows you to wake up well rested each morning but also prevents disease and can lead to a longer (and happier) life overall.

Did you know that routinely sleeping less than 6 hours a night can increase your risk of cancer by 50%? After just one night of less than 5 hours of sleep Natural Killer Cells (which fight cancer cells) drop by 70%! After just one night!

Sleep isn't just about rest. It's about the body repairing itself, doing maintenance so to speak. Unfortunately, what has been discovered over time (and discussed in this book) is that, if you lose sleep, taking a nap, while it takes the edge off, it doesn't replace the sleep lost during the night.

Our ability to fight disease (including cancer) and obesity may be directly tied to not getting enough restful sleep. Pills don't help either. Yes, they knock you out and make it easier to fall asleep but they lack the restorative power of natural sleep and, in fact, some sleeping pills can increase your risk of cancer.

Knowing this, it must change the way you think about the old saying “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”… because ironically adopting that mindset will get you there quicker.

Do you find that you wake up feel groggy or angry? Do you reach for the snooze button 1, 2 or even 3 times each morning? Or, do you hop right out of bed ready to tackle the new day?

What about at night? Do you struggle to fall asleep? Tossing and turning seemingly unable to count enough sheep to get to bed. Or, are you out like a light when you pull the covers over yourself?

If you want to literally improve every single aspect of your life and wake up feeling refreshed and rested each and every night this interview is for you.

To get started NOW, download our free guide below and learn 5 super simple and easy ways to maximize your sleep starting tonight!

In this episode we discuss everything you ever wanted to know about sleep. We examine the findings from hundreds of studies across millions of people and pull out the major findings about how vitally important sleep is, the global sleep loss epidemic, the stunning data about sleep and productivity, the simplest and most effective evidence based strategies for getting better sleep and much more with Dr. Matthew Walker. 

Dr. Matthew Walker is Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Founder and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He has published over 100 scientific studies and is the author of the book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Which is currently the #1 Amazon Bestseller in Neuroscience . He has been featured on numerous television and radio outlets, including CBS 60 Minutes, National Geographic Channel, NOVA Science, NRP and the BBC.

Show Notes

• Global sleep loss epidemic - the average American sleeps only 6.5 hours per night

• Sleep has slowly been eroded by our society over the last 60 years

• Sleep is vital and essential from an evolutionary standpoint - you can’t just lop off 25% of the necessary sleep you need

• Studies across millions of people show one clear thing - the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life

• If you sleep less, you will be dead sooner, lack of sleep kills your more quickly

• Lack of sleep is a major predictor of “all cause mortality” including cancer, Alzheimers, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, and suicide

• Hard science shows why a lack of sleep is tremendously bad for you

• Sleep has an image problem, we stigmatize sleep and think its lazy and slothful - people wear lack of sleep as a badge of honor to be celebrated

• Less sleep does not equal more productivity

• The 5 clear truths of sleep research and productivity

• Under-slept employees take on less challenging problems

  1. They produce fewer creative solutions

  2. They exert less effort when working in groups (slacking off, social loafing)

  3. They are more likely to lie, cheat, and engage in deviant behavior

  4. The more or less sleep that a CEO has had, the more or less charismatic they will be

• Chronic exhaustion cost most first world nation 2% of the GDP - 411 billion dollars lost each year to a lack of sleep

• The research is very clear that under-slept individuals are not as productive or successful

• The evidence is resoundingly clear - cutting on sleep makes you less productive and less creative and less effective

• After being awake for 21 hours, you’re as cognitively impaired as someone who is legally drunk

• The two principle types of sleep - REM sleep and non-REM sleep

• The different stages of sleep - the 4 stages of REM sleep

• Hard science shows that deep Sleep is critical to clearing toxins out of your brain

• Sleep is like a sewage system for your brain - it cleans all the toxins and debris out of your brain

• The less sleep you have, the higher your probability of getting Alzheimers

• Different cognitive systems in your brain also work during sleep - its like saving files to a hard drive, you have to sleep to get the save button

• The emotional circuits of the brain are changed and modified by sleep - the amygdala (which controls fight or flight) is regulated by the pre-frontal cortex

• Lack of sleep can have a serious negative impact on your emotional health

• Sleep reboots body systems as well - not just the brain

• Deep sleep is one of the best blood pressure medications you can imagine

• Deep sleep regulates insulin levels and blood glucose levels

• Sleep is also essential for the reproductive system

• Sleep boosts testosterone and lack of sleep makes you 10 years older from a testosterone standpoint

• Appetite, weight, food consumption are all regulated by sleep - lack of sleep makes you eat 300-550 more calories per day, and makes you eat more high sugar and high carb foods

• Sleep also has a profound impact on the immune system - one night of 4 hours of sleep will drop natural killer cells (body cancer fight cells) by 70%!

• The link between lack of sleep and cancer the WHO recently classified night shift work as a probable carcinogen

• Sleeping 5 hours per night makes you 200-300% more likely to catch a cold than someone sleeping 8 hours a night

• There is not a SYSTEM or PROCESS in the body/brain that is not impacted by sleep

• The most striking omission in the health literature today is that sleep is not at the center of the health conversation

• 3 key ways sleep improves your learning

• Is it wise to pull an all nighter? What does the research say?

• The “memory inbox of the brain” (hippocampus) and how sleep is vital to creating and storing memories

• Sleep is vital both BEFORE learning and AFTER learning to store and save new memories and solidify them into the architecture of the brain

• Sleep replays information and strengthens memories

• Sleep provides a 3x advantage to problem solving compared to an equivalent period being awake

• "The 6 Unpopular Tactics for Getting Enough Sleep"

• Carve out enough time and make sleep a priority - carve out an 8 hour window to sleep every night

  1. This is the #1 thing to do - regularity is KEY - go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter what

     1. Sleeping in late creates “social jetlag” which has serious negative consequences - regularity of sleep is key

  2. Keep the temperature cool - keep your bedroom 68 degrees - your body needs to drop its core temperature 2-3 degrees to fall asleep

  3. You can hack this by taking a hot bath before bed

  4. DARKNESS is key to producing melatonin. Phones, screens, blue light etc trick the brain into thinking its day time and shut off melatonin production

  5. Reading on a tablet 1 hour before bed shifts your melatonin production 3 hours later!

     1. Use blackout shades

     2. No screens 1 hour before bed

  6. Do NOT stay in bed if you’ve been in bed longer than 20 minutes. You brain is a very associative machine - being awake in bed trains the brain that it’s OK to be awake in bed. Get up, go to a different room, read a book in dim light, no screens, no eating. And only when you feel sleep return to bed, and you will re-learn the key association between making the bed about sleep

  7. Some people don’t like this idea.

     1. Meditation is a great way to get yourself to fall back asleep. The studies are very clear, very well done that meditation can help improve sleep.

  8. No caffeine after noon and avoid alcohol in the evenings.

  9. Caffein prevents deep sleep

     1. Alcohol fragments your sleep and makes your wake up much more, leaving with un-restorative sleep

     2. Alcohol blocks dreams and REM sleep

• Sedation is NOT sleep. Knocking out your cortex is not natural sleep.

• You could be A FAR BETTER VERSION OF YOURSELF mentally, cognitively, physiology if you just got more sleep

• Current sleeping pills are “sedative hypnotics” that do NOT productive naturalistic sleep, and do not get the benefits of sleep

• Sleeping pills have a far higher risk of death, cancer, infection

• CBTI - cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is just as effective as sleeping pills in the short term, but much more effective long term

• Melatonin can be a useful tool to time the onset of sleep

• Does napping work?

• There is no such thing as the sleep bank - you can’t accumulate a debt and then hope to cash in on the weekend - sleep doesn’t work like that

• Napping can prevent you from falling asleep and staying asleep! Be careful!

• How does GABA impact your sleep?

• Sleep is a remarkably complex neurochemical ballet

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic: Why You Should Sleep More 

Do you ever pull an all-nighter to cram for a test, but still fail? Maybe you work 60-hour weeks but feel like you’re getting nowhere. Unfortunately, developed nations are suffering from a sleep deprivation epidemic, but science can help us see the reasons for getting a good eight hours every night.

 A common saying you hear is, “You can sleep when you’re dead!” But recent sleep studies have shown us that less sleep means our lifespans shorten and our quality of life will decrease too. Unfortunately, our society pushes us to sleep less and work more, so we need help shifting our social perspective.

It turns out, that our relatively recent attempt to shorten the amount of sleep we get runs into a lot of problems against the million-year-old necessity that mother nature has put in place. The 20-25% decrease we’ve imposed on ourselves has led to an increased likelihood of developing every major disease that kills us in the developed world.

Elucidating Sleep Science

“I think part of the problem, perhaps, is that the science of sleep is actually not being adequately communicated to the public and I think it’s people like myself who are to blame.” – Dr. Matthew Walker 

Dr. Matthew Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science, and author of Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. His belief is that sleep science is not understood by the public, which was part of his motivation for writing Why We Sleep.

Many people appear to be proud of how little they sleep. However, the list of problems linked to a lack of sleep include Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, bipolar disorder, and suicide, among other mental health conditions. With this information in hand, it’s necessary to remove the stigma on getting a sufficient amount of sleep (about eight hours).

Dr. Walker set out to write a book of reasons why you should sleep, rather than rules. He addresses the relationship between sleep and productivity, citing laboratory and workplace studies that have provided him with five clear truths.

Five Facts About Sleep-Deprived Workers

“It’s very clear that under-slept individuals are not going to be successful.” – Dr. Walker

1. They take on less-challenging problems.

2. They produce fewer creative solutions.

3. They exert less effort when working in groups.

4. They are more likely to lie, cheat, and engage in deviant behaviors.

5. Less sleep means less-charismatic leaders.

He also notes that a recent report demonstrated that chronic exhaustion and fatigue (due to a lack of sleep) caused most first-world nations to lose about 2% of their GDP (that’s $411 billion for the U.S.). “If we solve the sleep deprivation problem in the U.S., we could almost double the budget for education, and we could make huge in-roads into the problems we have with healthcare,” he adds.

Dr. Walker shares an analogy to represent the current nature of an office workplace by comparing it to a spin class: “Everyone in the office looks like they’re working hard, but the scenery never changes – there’s never any forward progression in terms of momentum with productivity and creativity.”

Finally, he ends his evaluation of workplace attitudes by observing how their attempt to optimize the efficiency of every system stops at the human level. Where the budget, taxes, hardware, and software are all effective, there’s no focus or understanding of a human’s cognitive or physiological capacities and their necessity to reboot and recharge.

Sleep: The Human Recycling Period

“There really isn’t any system within your body, or process within the brain, that isn’t wonderfully enhanced by sleep when you get it or demonstrably impaired when you don’t get enough.” – Dr. Walker 

Dr. Walker informs us that we need eight-hours of sleep after 16-hours of wakefulness; and after 20-21 hours of being awake, we are as cognitively impaired as someone who would be legally drunk behind the wheel. So what exactly is happening when we sleep?

Sleep is simply divided into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, where we dream, and non-REM sleep; while non-REM sleep is further divided into four sub-stages. Each stage performs different yet necessary functions.

When we are awake, we are essentially in a form of low-level brain damage. Thus, one of the functions performed during the deepest stages of non-REM sleep is to clear out the metabolic toxins that have been built up in our brain. This is done through our brain’s glymphatic system (similar to our body’s lymphatic system). While asleep, this system’s performance increases by 200-300% relative to when we’re awake. (This process is known to remove a toxic protein called beta-amyloid, one of the leading candidate causes of Alzheimer’s disease.)

Sleeping also improves our learning in at least three ways.

1. Sleeping prepares our brain: A lack of sleep leads to a 40% deficit in our ability to make memories.

2. Sleeping ‘saves’ information: While asleep, we transfer information from our short-term to long-term memory. Like hitting the ‘Save’ button, it prevents us from forgetting memories.

3. Sleeping strengthens our memories: Sleep interconnects new memories together and interconnects it with pre-existing memories. This creates an updated associative network of memories.

Dr. Walker comments on the third point, “That’s the reason that you can come back the next day having extracted and divined creative novel solutions to previously impenetrable problems that you were facing.” While simple problems benefit from focused thought, complex problems benefit from non-conscious thought, such as that which occurs during sleep. It’s because of this function that nearly every language has a phrase similar to “sleep on a problem,” and not to “stay awake on a problem.” He ends with the analogy, “It’s essentially informational alchemy that occurs overnight.”

The emotional circuits of our brains are also modified during sleep. Our amygdala is reconnected to our prefrontal cortex when we get a good night’s sleep, which puts a brake on our emotional gas pedal. When we are deprived of sleep, the connection is severed, which essentially makes us all emotional gas pedal and no brake.

The benefits of sleep don’t end at the brain; there are many physiological systems that are rebooted during sleep as well. Deep, non-REM sleep is one of the best forms of blood pressure medicine, because it slows your heart rate. It also releases a variety of restorative chemicals and hormones, including a growth hormone that restores the cells in your body.

Sleep regulates your metabolic system, specifically insulin levels. In fact, studies have shown that one week of five-six hours of sleep a night will disrupt a person’s blood sugar enough to classify them as pre-diabetic. This illustrates the crucial role sleep plays in regulating the metabolic system.

A lack of sleep is known to age both men and women by a decade in terms of wellness and virility by disrupting the reproductive system.

Appetite regulation and food consumption are directly affected by sleep. Sleep deprivation causes in imbalance in leptin, which tells your brain when you’re satisfied with your food, and ghrelin, which tells your brain you’re not satisfied with your food. This causes you to eat 300-500 more calories a day. Not only do you eat more, but you’re also more likely to reach for starchy carbohydrates and high-sugar foods, while avoiding high-protein foods.

One night of four-hours of sleep will drop your cancer-fighting immune cells by 70%. The link between sleep-deprivation and cancer is so strong, that the World Health Organization recently classified night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen because it disrupts our sleep rate rhythms.

Five-hours of sleep per night the week before you get your flu shot will reduce your body’s antibody response to less than 50%, rendering it largely ineffective. Similarly, with five-hours you are 200-300% more likely to catch a cold than someone who gets eight-hours of sleep.

According to Dr. Walker, “All lack of sleep is, perhaps, a slow from of self-euthanasia.”

How to Fall Asleep Fast and Sleep Better

“I think what we know is that: Without sleep there is low energy and disease, with sleep there is vitality and health.” – Dr. Walker 

Dr. Walker begins to share five tips (and their explanations) for how to sleep better. These five tips all follow a primary, overarching requirement: Carve out an eight-hour, non-negotiable sleep window every night.

1. Go to bed and wake up at the same time.

Regardless if it’s a weekday, the weekend, or a holiday, always wake up at the same time. Even if you have a bad night of sleep, just make sure you fall asleep early the following evening. Sleeping in late causes “social jetlag” where you feel tired in the evening and drift forward in time; this has deleterious consequences to your health and sleep.

2. Keep it cool.

Keeping your bedroom around 68°F (18.5°C) is optimal for most people. This is because your body needs to drop its core temperate 2-3° to initiate sleep. If your feet get cold, then you can wear socks. Also, a hot bath before bed causes mass vasodilation (more so than a hot shower); this pulls your blood near your skin’s surface, plummeting your core temperature.

3. Keep it dark.

Darkness releases melatonin, a vital hormone for the onset of sleep. Too much light inside the house (or from LED screens) before bed will trick your brain into thinking it’s daytime, shut off the production of melatonin, and prevent sleep. Dim your lights by turning half of them off in the evening, avoid LED screens in the last hour before bed, and use black-out curtains.

4. Get up if you’ve been awake in bed for longer than 20-minutes.

Whether you’re trying to fall asleep or wake up, you must get out of bed if you’ve been lying awake for more than 20-minutes. If not, then your brain creates the association that your bed is about being awake, rather than asleep. If you’re trying to fall asleep but can’t, then go to another, dim room and maybe read a book (but avoid eating and screens). Only when you’re sleepy should you return to bed; that way you fall right asleep and recreate the association that beds are for sleeping. Dr. Walker, a hard scientist and skeptic, even suggests meditation, citing its support from clinical trial data and his recent conversion to the practice himself.

5. No caffeine after noon and no alcohol in the evenings.

Even people who claim that caffeine doesn’t affect them because they fall right asleep suffer from less-deep sleep. When they wake up, they don’t feel as refreshed, then reach for an extra cup in the morning, thus building a cycle of dependency and addiction. If you don’t stop at noon, then certainly after 2:00pm. Alcohol, on the other hand, sedates your cortex (effective knocking out your brain). This causes un-restorative sleep by waking you up multiple times throughout the night. It also blocks your REM sleep, which is critical for creativity and memory processing as well as emotional and mental health.

A common trap for people to fall into is thinking, “Well, this is how I am now at this age.” But this perception of yourself prevents you from realizing that you can be a far better version of yourself, mentally, cognitively, and physiologically, if you simply start getting enough sleep.

This trap can easily occur as a result of excessive or improper caffeine consumption. It isn’t until people come off caffeine that they start to feel the benefits that normally come from high-caffeine use. “It’s like wiping a fogged window, and you can start to see clearly through it,” Dr. Walker comments, attributing the improvement to a full, restorative night of sleep. 

How to Deal with Insomnia

            “There are no sleeping medications that we have currently that produce naturalistic sleep.” – Dr. Walker

Sleeping Pills

Dr. Walker goes on to address the question of sleeping pills. He explains that the current class of drugs one will be prescribed are called ‘sedative hypnotics.’ Just like alcohol, these sedate (or knock out) your brain. The sleep you get on sleeping pills is not the same as natural, healthy sleep.

Additionally, these pills are associated with a far higher risk of death, cancer, and infection. Though these links have not be confirmed as causal or merely associational. He goes on to inform us that that people don’t necessarily need them, and there is a safe, non-pharmacological alternative which is just as effective: cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBTI).

With CBTI, the benefits to your sleep are just as powerful in the short-term, but they also continue long-term as you maintain the practice. Sleeping pills, on the other hand, produce rebound insomnia, where your sleep is just as bad (or worse) once you stop taking them. (People should revisit these issues with their doctor if they’re interested in alternative treatment.) 

GABA

GABA is the principle, inhibitory neurotransmitter of the brain; it works like a red light for your neurons, telling them to stop firing. Most sleeping medications work by targeting the GABA system, though their blunt nature is incapable of properly mimicking the complex neuro-chemical and neuro-physiological ballet that occurs during sleep.

Melatonin Supplements

Next, Dr. Walker discusses the uses of melatonin supplements. While they don’t actually help a young, healthy person with a stable sleep schedule, they’re great for helping someone adjust to a new time zone. By taking it 30-60 minutes before you want to sleep, it can help reset your body’s internal clock and counteract jetlag. He also notes that if people take melatonin and they feel that it helps (even if it doesn’t), then they should continue to do so.

Napping

Many people think that, if they don’t get enough sleep, then they can just “catch up” on it later, either with a nap or by getting more sleep at night. Dr. Walker states, “Sleep is not like the bank. You can’t accumulate debt, then hope to pay it off at the weekend. There is no credit system.”

However, if you are sleep-deprived, then you can nap and overcome some of the basic sleepiness. Your reaction times improve a little, but you don’t overcome the higher-level cognitive issues, like decision-making, learning and memory, and focused attention. He goes on to discuss a futile tactic he sees in his students that he calls ‘sleep bulimia.’ This is where they get too little sleep during the week, then try to binge sleep during the weekend and make up the deficit.

He uses an analogy to describe a negative aspect of napping: Throughout the day we build up a chemical pressure in our brain, a sleepiness pressure, due to the build up of adenosine. The more you build up the sleepier you feel; and after 16-hours of wakefulness, you should fall right asleep and stay asleep for eight-hours, thus releasing the sleepiness pressure. However, when we nap, it’s like we open a valve and let a little of the pressure out. This makes it harder for us to sleep well at night, either by struggling to fall asleep or stay asleep.

Echoing the placebo affect associated with melatonin supplements, if you can nap regularly and sleep well at night, then keep napping. Otherwise, you should avoid napping and build up that sleepiness pressure until you fall asleep at night.

Action Steps for a Good Night’s Sleep

To finish off, Dr. Walker suggests a simple self-improvement test: Give yourself one week of eight-hours of sleep a night. Determine if you feel better when you get eight-hours of regularly scheduled sleep versus a random schedule of five-hours one night, then six-hours the next, and so on. Then ask yourself, “Did that experiment work? Is it in my favor? Do I feel any better? Do I notice that improvement?”

Thank you so much for listening!

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

What interferes with your happiness?

I know better than most that your thoughts and feelings aren't always true and can hold you bak from achieving your goals.

That's why I'm excited to share with you our sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp is offering 10% your first month when you go to www.betterhelp.com/sos and sign up.

BetterHelp isn't self-help, it's professional counseling. You'll get timeline and thoughtful responses from counselors and can schedule weekly video or phone sessions. All without ever having to enter a waiting room.

BetterHelp can provide you with professional counselors who are specialized in depression, anxiety, stress, relationships, grief, and much more.

Try them today and get 10% off your first month by going to www.betterhelp.com/sos!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

[Book] Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
[DVD] Memento
[Twitter] Matt Walker
[LinkedIn] Matthew Walker
[Website] Sleep Diplomat

Why We Sleep (14min)

• The incredible benefits of getting enough and the terrible side effects of not getting enough. 

• The Brain and The Functions of learnings and memory. 

  • Sleep after learning is essential and like hitting the “save” button after learning. We also now know that it’s important even before learning. 

  • Without sleep the memory circuits become blocked up.

• Examine The Hypothesis of the All Nighter

  • 40% deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep.

  • Brain activity is shot almost entirely after sleep deprivation. 

    • He describes it as like Memento the movie. (Great movie BTW)

• What is it that causes people to get good sleep and how does it affect our brain?

• What in sleep causes these benefits?

  • As we get older our memory gets work but our sleep does as well and they are related.

• Sleep is critical for your emotional and mental health

  • On less sleep these areas of the brain become irrational. 

  • Video of a subject illustrates this point. - Subject goes from angry to laughing then back to base in about 20 seconds. 

  • Without sleep you can’t take your foot off the emotional gas pedal.

• Sleep deprivation is correlated with depression and almost every psychiatric disorder. 

• The body relies on sleep as well.

  • 75% reduction in NK cell activity even after one bad night of sleep. Immune system will be shot. 

  • Lack of sleep and cancer has been shown to have a strong relationship. 

Matthew on CBS This Morning (6min)

• ⅔ of Americans do not get their full recommended 8 hours of sleep. 

• Every disease in developed nations is made worse by lack of sleep.

• Short Sleep = Shorter Life

• Brain - builds up a toxic buildup in the brain.

• Body - No immune system and activities stress chemistry leading to heart disease and cancer. 

• ALL RESEARCH BASED

• Naps - A double edged sword. Sleep is not like the bank, you can’t accumulate debt then pay it off as you go about your day. 

• Sleeping Pills - These are bad!

Secrets of the Sleeping Brain (1hr 41min)

• Long video that goes deep into some of the topics covered above. 

• Love the concept that we’ve hit on before that sleep actually allows you to integrate in ideas and learnings into what you’ve been doing prior. 

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic (6min)

• Sleep is one of the most important aspects of our life and yet it is increasingly neglected in twenty-first-century society, with devastating consequences. Award-winning professor of neuroscience Matthew Walker provides a fascinating insight into why it is vital we start taking sleep seriously.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet; bringing the world’s top experts right to you. Introducing your hosts, Matt Bodnar and Austin Fable.

[00:00:19] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than five million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode, we bring back one of our all-time greatest interviews from the archives and share everything you ever wanted to know about sleep, with one of the world’s pre-eminent sleep experts, Dr. Matthew Walker.

This is seriously one of my favorite podcasts that we’ve ever done. Matthew Walker’s work is truly important and impactful. Now more than ever, I think we all need to understand the power of a good night’s rest. 

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we shared insightful lessons from selling over a 1,000 companies, what really matters when you’re building a business, how to grow companies and what mistakes to avoid if you want to exit big with our previous guest, Michelle Seiler Tucker.

Now, for our interview with Matthew

[00:01:54] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Dr. Matthew Walker. He’s a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley and a founder and the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He’s published over a 100 scientific studies and is the author of the book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, which is currently the number one Amazon bestseller in the neuroscience category. He’s been featured on TV, radio, including CBS’s 60 Minutes, National Geographic and much more.

Matt, welcome to the Science of Success.

[00:02:26] MW: It’s a pleasure to be on Matt. Thank you for having me.

[00:02:28] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on here today. I’d love to begin the conversation and talk a little bit about – as I think you’ve called it the sleep deprivation epidemic, and what happens to us when we don’t get enough sleep.

[00:02:43] MW: You’re right. There is currently a global sleep-loss epidemic. This is sweeping developed nations. It’s been underway for probably about 60 or 70 years. We know from surveys back in the 1940s that the average American adult was sleeping 7.9 hours a night. Now we know that number is down to 6 hours and 31 minutes during the week for American adults.

Back in my home country, not much better. It’s 6 hours and 49 minutes on average people are sleeping. Japan seems to be the worse; 6 hours and 22 minutes. I just give you those numbers to reaffirm first this pernicious erosion of sleep that has happened over the past 70 or 80 years as truth. But also, just to take a step back, I think we have to realize that it took mother nature 3.6 million years to put this necessity of 8 hours of sleep in place.

Then we have come along, and in the space of blink of an evolutionary eye; 60, 70 years we’ve locked off maybe 20%, 25% of that sleep amount. How could it not come with deleterious consequences? I think it’s been proudly confirmed that we are in a global sleep-loss state of deficiency, or an epidemic as the CDC and the World Health Organization have called it.

What are the consequences though? Because if it’s not doing us any harm, then why worry? If only that were true, there is demonstrable harm that is underway because of the sleep-loss epidemic. We can start at the big 30,000-foot level and make it a very simple statement based on epidemiological studies from millions of people. That is the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Short sleep predicts all-cause mortality.

I think that classical maxim that you may have heard. You can sleep when you’re dead. It’s always struck me as ironic, because if you adopt that mindset, we know from the evidence that you will be both dead sooner, and the quality of that now shorter life will be significantly worse.

If you dig down a little deeper you can say, “Well, if a lack of sleep kills you more quickly, then what is it that is killing you more quickly?” It seems to be just about everything. Every made disease that is killing us in the developed world has causal insignificant links to a lack of sleep. That list currently and tragically includes Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, as well as numerous mental health conditions; depression, bipolar disorder and most recently and sadly, suicide as well.

I think we’re really now starting to understand not just how deathly a lack of sleep is and the current weight of our sleep deprivation, and that elastic band of sleep deprivation can stretch only so far before it snaps. But with also understanding from hard science exactly why a lack of sleep produces such disease, sickness and ill-health within the brain and the body.

[00:06:03] MB: It’s amazing and it’s so important to think about why sleep is so vital. Yet, in today’s society it seems like there is more and more of a push to sleep less, work more, hustle more, do more. How do we combat that?

[00:06:22] MW: There is. I think currently, sleep has an image problem in society, because more often than not, we seem to stigmatize sleep and we suggest that people who are getting sufficient sleep and I actually choose my words quite carefully there. As being lazy, as being slothful, those who get maybe 7 or 8 hours of sleep a night.

People I think are – or some people, I should say. Not all, but some people are perhaps quite proud of the fact of how little sleep that they’re getting and where it almost as though it’s a badge of honor to be celebrated. It’s sad, because for all of the reasons that we’ve just discussed, it’s an ill-advised mentality to expose.

It’s also strange, because if we don’t always have that opinion. I don’t think any of us would look at an infant sleeping during the day and say, “Gosh, what a lazy baby.” We don’t do that, because we know that sleep at that time of life is absolutely non-negotiable. It’s fundamentally necessary. But if you look at the evidence somewhere between infancy and now even childhood, not only do we abandon this notion that sleep is necessary and important, but we give it this terrible stigma.

I think that attitude has to change, and there are many ways in which it has to change. I think part of the problem perhaps is that the science of sleep is actually not being adequately communicated to the public. I think it’s people like myself who are to blame. I’m a sleep scientist, a professional sleep scientist for 20 years now.

I can’t go around wagging the finger at people if people have not been educated by the science that the taxpayer dollars have funded. That was part of the motivation to write the book that I didn’t feel as though there was a book after that gave people a blueprint manifesto of all of the real hard science of sleep.

There are lots of books out there that you can buy about the quick fix, these are the 10 rules to better sleep, or – I got nothing against those types of books, but for me I felt it was important because my sense is that people don’t respond to rules. They respond to reasons rather than rules, and I wanted to give and write a book of reasons for why you should sleep, rather than rules for how to sleep.

[00:09:00] MB: I want to dig a little bit more specifically into some of the negative implications or maybe the flipside of why sleep is so important for certain activities. For somebody who – let’s contextualize this maybe within a framework broadly thinking about, if I want to get more work done people often say, “All right, I’m going to sleep less,” or, “I’m going to pull a all-nighter,” or, “I’m going to cut down on my sleep so I can be more productive,” how does that usually pan out? What does the science say about doing that?

[00:09:31] MW: It doesn’t pan out very well. In fact, the opposite is true; we now know that less sleep does not equal more productivity. There have been lots of laboratory and workplace with these, and they give us five clear truths. Firstly, underslept employees tend to take on less challenging work problems. In other words, they opt for the easy way out. Underslept employees actually produce fewer creative solutions to work problems that they’re facing.

They also actually exert less effort when working in groups, and we’ve done some of these work. They essentially slack off. It’s what we call social-loafing. They write the tale of others and try to claim their hard work is their own.

We also know very interestingly that underslept employees are more likely to lie, cheat and engage in deviant behaviors, such as falsifying a claims, receipts, etc., and it’s a scaling function; the less sleep that you have, the more likely you are to lie and be deviant.

What’s also interesting is that it scales the business hierarchy all the way up to the top. We know that the more or less sleep that a business leader has had, the more or less charismatic their employees will rate that business leader.

Even though the employees themselves know nothing about how much sleep that business leader has had. They can actually see it in the expression of the behavior of their leader. You can then actually scale that up from those that have low-level studies, all the way up to the high-level studies. There was a recent round report, an independent report that demonstrated that chronic exhaustion and fatigue due to a lack of sleep caused most first-world nations about 2% of their GDP. For the United States, that’s 411 billion dollars that we lose each year due to a lack of sleep.

If you can just think about that, if we solve the sleep deprivation problem in the US, we could almost double the budget for education and we could make huge in-roads into the problems that we have with healthcare. Or we could just flat out give people remarkably high tax rebates, simply by solving the sleep-loss epidemic.

I think in response to your question, it’s very clear that underslept individuals are not going to be successful. It’s a little bit like, if you think about your workforce and you’re forcing them to come into work every morning, early and leave very late, so no one is getting enough sleep, it strikes me a little bit like a spin class at a gym.

Everyone in the office looks like they’re working hard, but the scenery never changes, there’s never any forward progression in terms of momentum with productivity and creativity. I think we need to change our attitude in the workplace regarding sleep. The evidence is very clear there.

[00:12:37] MB: Especially around the creativity and the productivity aspect of that. It makes me think almost about the – an applied version of the 80-20 principle, where it’s not necessarily just more hours of work equals more output, but it’s really vital to have quality work, where you’re creative, where you’re bringing a fresh perspective and a well-rested mind. That’s when you really produce value. That’s the 20% that produces 80% of your results. All the busy work and the hustle and muscle, if you don’t get enough sleep, you’re not going to be able to really be incredibly productive.

[00:13:17] MW: I think that that’s very true. Is there a way that we could actually break the classic praetors of 80-20 law that’s common throughout nature and it’s applied to human beings as well? By way of manipulating sleep, could we actually force it to be that it’s 30% or 40% of your workforce that returns now 80% or 90% of the productivity by way of sufficient sleep.

It’s just coming down to the very fact that what is the recycle rate of a human being? I think people have failed in the workplace to actually face this question and ask it. It’s surprising, because people in the workplace are wonderfully astute at trying to squeeze every ounce of effectiveness and efficiency out of all of their systems, be it the budget, be it the tax, be it the hardware, be it the software.

I think we forget about the biological organism at the heart of most companies, the human beings themselves. We have to ask, “How long can an individual be awake before they decline and decline significantly in the productivity, efficiency and effectiveness?” We now know that that evidence, you need 8 hours of sleep, 16 hours – after 16 hours of wakefulness, the cognitive capacities and the physiological capacities of the body starts to decline dramatically in after 20 or 21 hours of being awake. You are as cognitively impaired as someone who would be legally drunk in terms of driving behind the wheel.

There really is a recycle refresh rate of a human being, and we know that and it declines dramatically once you get past that 16. What I’m suggesting there is not 16 hours of work. I’m suggesting that this 8, 9-hour work span, then people need that downtime and they need to get that 8 hours of sleep to reboot and refresh.

[00:15:17] MB: What’s actually happening during that recycling period?

[00:15:22] MW: Well, we know firstly that there are multiple different stages of sleep that we ebb and flow in and out of, throughout a full 8-hour phase. Those different stages of sleeping, the two principle types of sleep, I should note that probably most people are aware of, or what are called non-rapid eye movement sleep, or non-REM sleep, and rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep, which is the stage principally from which we dream.

Non-REM sleep actually has several sub-stages to it, stages one through four, increasing in the depth of sleep. By the way, it always strikes me as funny that scientists are not a very creative bunch. We have these four stages of deep non-REM sleep, and all we could come up with was stages one through four. Let’s set that side for a second.

We know that all of those different stages of sleep perform different functions end up all necessary. To come back to your question though, exactly what is happening at night? Well, let’s take deep non-REM sleep for a start.  The deepest stages of non-REM sleep. That stage of sleep is actually critical for essentially clearing out all of the metabolic toxins that have been building up in your brain.

Now that may sound a little bit hand-waving, but is actually very hard to get science from animal studies. When we are awake, we are essentially in a form of low-level brain damage. That’s what wakefulness is. We produce a variety of metabolic byproducts as a result of all of that waking brain cell combustion that we’re doing.

It is during sleep at night when we clear that away. What is clearing that away? Well, it turns out that we made a discovery, which is a sewage system in your brain. Now you have a sewage system in your body that you’re probably familiar with called the lymphatic system. But your brain also has one, it’s called the glymphatic system after the cells that produce it or compose the system called glial cells.

That sewage system within the brain, glymphatic system, is not always on, at least not in highest flow capacity. It’s only during sleep and particular deep sleep at night where that cleansing system of the sewage network actually kicks in to high gear. It increases by maybe 2 to 300% relative to when we’re awake.

Why is this important? Well, one of the metabolic toxins that the glymphatic system clears away as we sleep at night is a toxic protein called beta-amyloid. Beta-amyloid is one of the leading candidate causes of Alzheimer’s disease. This is why we know that people who are not getting sufficient sleep across their lifespan are at a far high-risk probability of going on to develop Alzheimer’s disease. The less sleep that you have, the less clearing away of that toxic byproduct. That’s one-way, general way that we know that the brain gets essentially a refresh.

We also know that different cognitive systems and networks within your brain undergo a restoration. For example, we know that learning in memory systems get overhauled. We take information that we recently learned and we transfer it from short to long-term memory during sleep, which is actually like hitting the save button on new memories, so it prevents you from forgetting by cementing and solidifying those memories into long-term story sites.

We also know that there is a clearing out of your short-term memory reservoir. It’s perhaps a little bit like shifting files from a USB stick, so that when you wake up the next day, you have this renewed capacities to start learning and acquiring new facts and information all over again. That’s a more specific way in which the brain actually gets an overhaul at night during sleep.

We also know that the emotional circuits of the brain are changed and modified by sleep. There are deep emotional brain sensors, very old evolutionary centers specifically a structure called the amygdala, which controls the vital flight response. That structure, the amygdala is normally regulated in us higher order primates, human beings specifically, by a part of the brain that sits just above your eyes called the prefrontal cortex, which acts a little bit like the CEO of the brain. It makes very high-level executive top-down control decisions.

When you had a good night of sleep, that part of your frontal lobe has been reconnected to your deep Neanderthal amygdala fight or flight center of the brain. It just regulates it. It’s a little bit like a break to your emotional accelerator pedal. When you don’t get enough sleep, that connection is actually severed and there’s a consequence. You become almost all emotional gas pedal and too little frontal lobe regulatory control brake.

There are many different ways in which sleep generally and very specifically seems to regulate our brain. I could also speak about the different ways that sleep actually reboots multiple systems within the body. That’s certainly the ways in which it refreshes your brain.

[00:20:46] MB: I want to dig into learning productivity and the emotional aspects. But before we do, tell me briefly about the physiological and the body reset aspects of sleep as well.

[00:20:58] MW: Firstly, we know that deep non-REM sleep that we described is perhaps one of the best forms of blood pressure medication that you could ever imagine. It’s during that deep sleep that your heart rate actually drops, your blood pressure will lower. There are a variety of restorative chemicals and hormones that are released, a growth hormone in particular to actually restore the cells within the body. It’s fantastic for the cardiovascular system.

We also know that it regulates your metabolic system, specifically it regulates insulin levels. If you’re not getting sufficient sleep, your blood glucose actually starts to become disrupted. There are [inaudible 00:21:40] now that are taking healthy people with no signs of diabetes. And after one week of five to six hours of sleep a night, their blood sugar is disrupted so profoundly that their doctor would subsequently classify them as being pre-diabetic. That’s how critical sleep is to maintaining the metabolic system.

We also know that sleep is essential for another one of the major systems, the reproductive system. Here I’ll speak frankly about testicles, because we know that men who are routinely getting just 5 to 6 hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who are sleeping 8 hours or more.

In addition, men who report getting just 5 or 6 hours of sleep each night have a level of testosterone, which is that of someone 10 years their senior. In other words, a lack of sleep will actually age you by a decade in terms of that aspect of wellness and virility. We see very similar impairment in equivalent reproductive hormones and health, of course by a lack of sleep. It’s not just males who are disrupted in that way.

There are a variety of systems within the body. It also regulates appetite and weight and your food consumption. We know for example that those individuals who are not getting enough sleep will have an imbalance in the two hormones that control your hunger and your food intake. Those two hormones are called leptin and ghrelin.

Now leptin sounds like a Hobbit, I know, but trust me they are actually real hormones. Leptin is the hormone that tells your brain you’re satisfied with your food. You’re no longer hungry. You should stop eating. Ghrelin is the antithesis of that. Ghrelin will actually signal to your brain that you are not satisfied by the food that you’ve just eaten, that you are still hungry and that you should eat more.

People who are put on a regiment of just 5 or 6 hours of sleep for one week will have a mocked reduction in leptin, the hormone that says, “You’re fine. You’ve eaten enough, you can stop eating. You’re not hungry.” A mocked increase in the hormone ghrelin, which tells you, “You’re not satisfied with your food. You’re hungry and it’s time to eat more.”

That’s why people will actually eat somewhere between 3 to 500 calories more each day when they’re not getting sufficient sleep. You should also know by the way, it’s not just that you eat more, but what you eat is non-optimal when you’re sleep-deprived. Without sufficient sleep, you actually reach for the heavy-hitting starchy carbohydrates, as well as high-sugar foods and you stay away from the protein-rich foods. In other words, you’ll find yourself reaching for another slice of pizza rather than leafy greens, kale and beans.

It’s not just that you eat more. It’s what you eat that is also detrimental too. I hope that gives people just a little bit of a few brush strokes in terms of the bodily consequences. The one that we probably haven’t mentioned though, which is perhaps most impacted is your immune system. We know that one night of 4 hours of sleep will drop critical anti-cancer fighting immune cells called natural killer cells by 70%, which is a truly remarkable state of immune-deficiency, which happens very quickly within just one night.

Secondly, we also know that the link between a lack of sleep and cancer has now become so strong that the World Health Organization recently classified any form of night-time shift work as a probable cause energy. In other words, jobs that may induce cancer, because of a disruption of your sleep rate rhythms.

We can look to more benign things too. We know that if you’re getting just 5 hours of sleep in the week before you go and get your flu shot, you will only produce 50%, or in fact, less than 50% of the normal antibody response, rendering that flu shot largely ineffective.

Finally, know that if you’re getting just 5 hours of sleep a night, you are 2 to 300% more likely to capture cold, than someone who is getting 8 hours of sleep a night. This was a remarkable study where they quarantined people in a hotel and they had tracked how much sleep that they were getting in the week before. Then they flushed up the nose of all of these individuals; the flu virus. Then in the next few days they looked to see how many of those individuals succumbed to the flu, how many got infected. Then they bucketed them on the basis of how much sleep that they had in the week before, and that’s how they were able to come to that conclusion.

There really isn’t any system within your body, or process within the brain that isn’t wonderfully enhanced by sleep when you get it, or demonstrably impaired when you don’t get enough.

[00:26:58] MB: What a powerful statement. I mean, just that sentence alone really succinctly summarizes the fundamental conclusion that the science is in across nearly every spectrum of the body, the brain, etc., that sleep is incredibly valuable. That 8 hours of sleep specifically is really critical.

[00:27:18] MW: I think it is. I think what we know is that without sleep, there is low energy and disease. With sleep, there is vitality and health. The sleepless epidemic is perhaps the greatest curable disease that no one is really talking about, or effectively trying to solve. I would simply say that the lack of sleep is both the most striking omission in the health conversation of today. All lack of sleep is perhaps a slow form of self-Euthanasia.

[00:27:49] MB: I want to dig back into the relationship. Let’s touch on learning and memory. Tell me a little bit more about the work you’ve done and some of the research around how sleep can improve learning and memory.

[00:28:02] MW: Sleep actually is beneficial for memory in at least three ways that we’ve now discovered and this is the work that we’ve been doing, or some of the work that we do at my sleep center.

First, we know that you need sleep before learning to essentially prepare your brain; perhaps a little bit like a dry sponge, ready to initially soak up new information the next day. We did a study where we tested a very simple hypothesis. Is it wise to pull the all-nighter? Is it a good thing, or a bad thing?

We took a group of individuals and we either gave them a full night of sleep, or we kept them awake throughout the night. Then the next day, we wedged them inside an MRI scanner and then we have them try and learn a whole list of new facts as we were taking snapshots of brain activity. Then we tested them to see how effectively that learning had been.

Firstly, what we found is that when we put those two groups head to head, there was a 40% deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep, and just a frame that in context it would simply be the difference between acing an exam and failing it miserably. What we went on to discover from the brain scans however was why the brain was failing to lay down those new memories.

There is a structure in our brains, on the left and the right side called the hippocampus. You can think of the hippocampus a little bit like the memory inbox of the brain. That it’s actually very good at receiving new memory files and holding on to them initially.

When we looked at that structure in those people who’d had a full night of sleep, we saw lots of healthy learning-related activity. Yet, in those people who were sleep deprived, we actually couldn’t find any significant activity whatsoever.

It was almost as though sleep deprivation had shut down your memory inbox as it were and any new incoming files. They were just being bounced. You couldn’t effectively commit new experiences to memory. If people would like to just understand what that means in terms of the hippocampus, I’m sure many people listening have probably seen the movie Memento. In that movie, that gentleman has damage to the brain and specifically to the structure of the hippocampus. From that point forward, he can no longer make any new memories. It is what we call in neurology, densely amnesic.

That part of his brain was the hippocampus and it is the very same structure that your lack of sleep will actually attack and prevent your brain from actually laying down and placing those new memories into a fixed state within the brain. That’s the first way that sleep is good for learning a memory.

You also need sleep not just before learning, but also after learning, but for something different now. Sleep after learning will essentially hit the save button on those new memories. It will essentially solidify those memories into neural architecture of the brain. As we mentioned before, it actually will transfer those memories, almost like packets of information being transferred across the network, from a short-term vulnerable storage site to the more permanent long-term storage center within the brain, which is called the cortex; this wrinkled mass that sits on top of your brain.

That means that when you come back the next day, those memories are protected and safe and you will be able to remember, rather than those memories being vulnerable to being overwritten or lost, for example to the ravage of time. Which mean, that they are ultimately forgotten.

We also know a little bit about how sleep not only transfers memories during sleep, but even strengthens those memories. It’s during sleep that the brain actually replays the information that you’ve recently learned. These are studies done in humans, but also in animals they were actually placing electrodes into the brains of rats and they were having them run around a maze.

As they were running around the maze and learning the maze, all of these different brain cells which fire in a specific signature pattern, which was essentially the imprinting of a memory and it adds different tones to them. It would sound a little bit like “babababam, babababam, babababam.” The brain is imprinting this memory as the rat is running around the maze.

Low and behold, what happens is that when you then let the rats sleep, but keep recording and keep eavesdropping on the brain, what do you think reemerges? It’s exactly the same pattern, “babababam, babababam.” The rat is replaying those memories. What’s incredible however, is that it’s actually replaying them at somewhere between 10 to 20 times faster. Rather than “babababam,” it’s actually, “brrm, brrm, brr, brrm, brrm.” It’s this high-speed fidelity replay. We think that that actually helps score the memory trace into the brain in a strengthened manner, almost like etching on the surface of glass. You’re really strengthening that neural circuit. That’s sleep after learning to strengthen individual memories, and I guess essentially future proof that information within the brain.

There is a final third way that sleep actually helps memory that we’ve discovered, which I think is perhaps most exciting. Sleep doesn’t just simply strengthen individual memories. It’s that strengthening of individual memories by the way that happens during deep, non-rapid eye movement sleep, or dreamless sleep.

Sleep also then actually interconnects those new memories together and interconnects new information with all of your pre-existing back-catalog of autobiographical stored information. Essentially, what sleep is doing and this is actually the work of rapid eye movement sleep of dream sleep, is that you’re starting to collide information together within the brain. This is a bit like group therapy for memories.

What you awake with the next morning is a revised mind-wide web of information within the brain. It’s a new associative network, or at least not a radically new associative network, but it’s an updated and it’s a modified associative network. That’s the reason that you can come back the next day having extracted and divine, creative novel solutions to previously impenetrable problems that you were facing.

It’s probably the reason – I mean, now know this, for example that sleep will actually provide almost a three-fold advantage in problem solving relative to an equivalent time period spent awake. That science is now very well, I think rendered and described.

There probably is a reason that you’re never told to stay awake on a problem and in every language that I’ve inquired about to date, that phrase sleeping on a problem seems to exist. It seems to transcend cultural boundaries. It’s a phenomenon that is common across the globe. I should also note by the way that we – the British, we say you sleep on a problem. I believe and please correct me if anyone knows this, but I believe the French translation is a little closer to you sleep with the problem, rather than you sleep on a problem. I think that says so much about the romantic difference between the British and the French. I’ll digress before I lose my British passport.

[00:35:54] MB: That’s great. Yeah, that’s a funny anecdote and probably true. I’ve seen the phrase creative incubation and some research around creativity, and some of the science behind what you’re describing. To me, it makes so much sense that the more you give the brain the ability to something, and when you come back to that problem, you’re going to be much more creative. You’re going to be much more effective at solving.

[00:36:20] MW: That’s right. It’s not just sleep, by the way. If it’s a complex problem, simple problems tend to benefit from deliberative focused thought. But complex problems, problems where there are maybe 10, 20, 80 different variables and you could think of this as something very crass to you. What type of knife or fork set do you buy? This may be just three or four different variables. Versus, what type of card do you buy, where there is maybe 16 different features of variants that you have to choose between.

Well, the more complex a problem is, the more benefit there is to actually stepping away and stopping consciously thinking about it. That’s where the non-conscious brain seems to go to work. It seems to be able to distill amounts of information that we just can’t consciously juggle all up in the air at the same time when we’re awake. It’s just too much for a working memory.

If you’re to think of perhaps what the extreme version of that non-conscious processing would be, you would probably design a system that looks very similar to sleep. That’s exactly why sleep provides those creative benefits. It’s essentially informational alchemy that occurs overnight.

[00:37:42] AF: This episode of the Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at BetterHelp. That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P. You'll get 10% off your first month by going to BetterHelp. Once again, that's betterhelp.com/sos today for 10% off your first month.

Let me ask you, what interferes with your happiness? Is there something preventing you from achieving your goals? I know there have been plenty, plenty of times, getting too far into my own head has gotten in my way. Limiting beliefs, thoughts of doubt, it can all build up inside you and become paralyzing, or cause counterproductive behaviors to form. BetterHelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist.

You'll get timely and thoughtful responses, plus you can schedule weekly video, or phone sessions all without dealing with one of my least favorite things ever, the waiting room. It's effective and more affordable than traditional online counseling and financial aid is available. Licensed professionals are on-staff, who specialize in things like depression, stress, anxiety, relationships, trauma and even more. Plus, everything you share is completely confidential.

In fact, so many people have been using BetterHelp, they are recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states right now. If you want to start living a happier life today, as a listener, you'll get 10% percent off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com/sos. Join over 1 million people taking charge of their mental health. Again, that's betterhelp.com/sos for 10% off your first month today.

[00:39:33] MB: I want to segway now and get into strategies for sleeping more effectively. We’ve talked at length about how important sleep is both from avoiding a tremendous amount of negative consequences, but also in producing a myriad of positive benefits. Tell me about, for somebody who maybe has trouble sleeping, or just in general, what are some of the basic interventions that we can implement in our lives to sleep better?

[00:40:01] MW: These tips I suppose, and again, I’m not just going to tell you the rules. I won’t just try and explain the reasons for each of these rules. I do warn people that some of them are probably not necessarily desirable. It makes me very unpopular, but here they are.

The first overarching rule of course, is that you just have to carve out an 8-hour non-negotiable sleep opportunity every night. It sounds crass and it’s sounds hokie, but I do this in my life as well. I’m not just saying this because I’ve just written a book and I want to practice what I seem to be preaching. But it’s from a very selfish perspective, because I know the evidence so well. If you knew the evidences I do, which and I hope people will do after reading the book, you just wouldn’t do anything different. I don’t want to short a life, I don’t want a life filled disease and pain and sickness and suffering. That’s why I do give myself a non-negotiable 8-hour opportunity every night.

Once you’ve got that in place – I don’t think it’s insurmountable. People are doing wonderful things in terms of actually committing non-negotiable time to exercise, and people are trying to eat more healthily. I don’t think sleep is a lost cause in this regard.

Once you’re getting that opportunity, then I think there are five things that you could do. If there is one thing that you do from all of these tips, it is these; regularity. Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter what, no matter whether it’s the weekend, or the weekday. Even if you had a bad night of sleep, still wake up at the same time the next day. Accept that it’s going to be a bit of a tricky day. But then just get to bed early the following evening and then you will reset.

Because if you sleep in late for whatever reason, you’re not going to feel tired until later that following evening, and you start to drift forward in time and it’s called social jetlag. That has marked deleterious consequences to your health and to your sleep. Regularity is key.

The second is temperature. Keep it cool. Keep your bedroom around about 68 degrees is optimal for most people, which is probably colder than you think, or about 18 and a half degrees Celsius. The reason is this, that your body needs to drop its core temperature by about a 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit in order to initiate sleep. That’s the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that’s too cold, than too hot. Because at least the cold room is moving your brain and body in the right thermal direction, that it actually wants to go to for sound and healthy long sleep.

Try to keep your temperature in the bedroom cool. Wear socks if you get cold feet. Some people complain about this, so it’s okay to wear those socks, but keep the bedroom cool. Another way that you can exploit this hack is actually to take a hot bath before bed, or a hot shower. The bath is better if you look at the evidence.

Most people think that when they have a hot bath, they get into bed, they’re nice and warm and that’s what lets them fall asleep more easily. It’s actually the opposite. When you get into a bath, all of the blood comes from the core of your body out to the surface, that’s why you get that rosy glow. It’s what’s called mass vasodilation.

Once you get out of the bath with all of that blood near the surface of your skin, you have this huge massive thermal dump. You get this evacuation of heat from the body, which plummets your core temperature, and that’s why you’ll fall asleep more quickly and more soundly.

The third tip is the light, and actually darkness more specifically. We are actually a dark-deprived society in all first-world nations. You need darkness to allow the release of a critical hormone called melatonin. Melatonin will time the normal healthy onset of sleep. If you’ve got lots of light inside of the house during the evening, and especially if you’re looking and staring at those LED screens from phones, tablets, laptops etc., that will actually fool your brain into thinking it is still daytime and it will shut off melatonin, so you won’t be releasing melatonin.

There were studies done where they had people reading on an iPad for one hour before bed. If I was doing that here in California, their data demonstrated that my release and peak of melatonin didn’t happen, or were shifted by three hours forward in time. I would essentially be close to Hawaii in terms of my internal clock timing to sleep, rather than California.

Keep it dim. You can turn down half the lights in the house in the evening. You don’t need all of them on the last hour before bed. Also stay away from screens in the last hour, and try and use black out curtains, that can actually be very helpful.

The fourth tip is not to stay in bed if you have been awake for longer than 20 minutes. This applies to whether you’re trying to fall asleep, or whether you’ve woken up and are trying to fall back asleep. The reason is this, your brain is a remarkably associative device. If you are lying in bed awake, it quickly learns that being in bed is about being awake rather than being asleep.

You need to break that association. After 20 minutes or so, if you haven’t fallen asleep, get up, don’t get too stressed, go to a different room and in dim light, perhaps just read a book, no screens, no eating. Only when you feel sleepy should you return to bed. In that way, you will actually relearn the association between your bed being about being asleep, rather than being awake.

I would note that some people actually don’t like the idea of getting out of bed. It’s dark. Maybe they’re warm and maybe it’s colder in the rest of the house. I understand that. Another way to try and help you get back to sleep that has good proven clinical trial data behind it is actually meditation. I’m actually quite hard know a scientist, and when I was looking into this evidence as I was writing the book, I was really quite skeptical.

The studies were very clear, very well done, some of them out of Stanford here just down the way from me. So much so that I actually started meditating myself and that was seven months ago, and I’m now a regular meditator. If I’m traveling going through jetlag, for example and struggling with sleep, I will actually use a meditation relaxation practice.

The final tip is the one that really makes me deeply – well, deeply unpopular, just generally as a person anyway, but this is the one that really makes me unpopular with people. No caffeine after noon and avoid alcohol in the evenings. Forego and I kept and I’ll explain both. 

Everyone knows of course that caffeine activates you. It’s a class of drugs that we call a stimulants and it can keep people awake. What people may not know however is that for those people who say, “Well, I can drink an espresso after dinner and I force sleep fine and I stay asleep.” That may be true. However, the depth of the deep sleep that you have when caffeine is swirling around within your brain during sleep is nowhere near as deep as if you had not had that cup of coffee in the evening.

As a consequence, people wake up the next morning. They won’t fee refreshed or restored. They don’t remember having a problem falling asleep or staying asleep. They don’t equate it with the cup of coffee they had the night before. But now they find themselves reaching the two cups of coffee, or three cups of coffee in the morning, which essentially is building a dependency and addiction cycle. That’s the issue with caffeine and that’s why the suggestion is stop caffeine midday and certainly after 2 PM.

Alcohol is probably the most misunderstood drug when it comes to sleep. Alcohol is a class of drugs that we call the sedative hypnotics. Sedation is not sleep. Many people will say, “Well, I nightcap, I have a quick whiskey and it puts me to sleep. It’s great.” It’s actually not true. What you’re simply doing is you’re sedating your cortex, you’re knocking out your brain essentially. You’re not getting into natural sleep.

Then there are two more problems with alcohol. Firstly, it will fragment your sleep so you will wake up many more times throughout the night, which leaves you with what we call unrestorative sleep. The final thing is that alcohol is one of the best chemicals that we know blocking your dream sleep, your REM sleep, which is essential for not just creativity and that associative type of memory processing that we spoke about.

REM sleep is also critical for emotional and mental health. It is during REM sleep when we provide our brain a form of emotional first aid, and you won’t be getting that if you’re blocking REM sleep by way of alcohol. Those would be the five tips to better sleep and hopefully they help some folks. I’m also happy to speak a little bit about sleeping pills. They’re also misunderstood, but those would be for most people the five tips that I would offer.

[00:49:28] MB: Great advice. I try to implement as many of those as possible. One of the things, specifically caffeine is something that I used to drink at my peak. About a cup of – I mean, a pot of coffee a day. Now I basically don’t consume any caffeine. When I do, I limit myself, no caffeine afternoon. Maybe one cup of tea is the maximum. I’ve noticed a huge impact on that impact in my sleep. Sorry, were you going to say something?

[00:49:55] MW: Yeah. I’m just going to say, I mean it’s immensely wise and it’s one of the problems with a lack of sleep is that you quickly reset your perception of your effectiveness and your health. You just think, “Well, this is how I am now at this age.” Not realizing that you could actually be a far better version of yourself, both mentally, cognitively and physiologically if you were just to start getting sufficient sleep.

I think many people fail to realize that with caffeine especially that it’s only when they come off caffeine do they really start to feel both the benefits of all of the side effects that normally come with high caffeine use, but especially the benefits on sleep. It’s like wiping a fogged window and you finally can start to see clearly through it.  That’s the benefit of a full restorative night of sleep.

[00:50:46] MB: I have a couple short questions all around specific sleep strategies or tactics. Let’s start with – you touched on sleeping pills. Tell me about sleeping pills. Do they work? If so, why or why not?

[00:51:00] MW: There are no sleeping medications that we have currently that produce naturalistic sleep. The current class of drugs that you will be prescribed are called sedative hypnotics. Again, as we mentioned with alcohol, sedation is not sleep. The sleep that you have when you’re on sleeping pills, if I were to show you the electrical signature of your sleep if you would come to my laboratory, it would not be the same on sleeping pills as it would be if you’re just having naturalistic healthy sleep. That’s the first thing.

The second thing, and I go to great lengths and a whole chapter in the book to discuss this, is that people are probably not aware of the risks of sleeping pills. They have not been communicated to public adequately. Firstly, we know that sleeping pills are associated with a far higher risk of death. They’re also associated with a significantly high risk of cancer and infection.

Now, we don’t yet know if this is causal versus simply associational, but what I wanted to do is to try to get that information out to the public, so they at least could be armed with the knowledge and make an informed choice with that doctor when they go and see the surgery. That’s I think one of the biggest problems of sleeping pills is that the misunderstood nature about what they give you and the dangers.

People also don’t necessarily have to be taking sleeping pills, I should note. There is a safe and non-pharmacological alternative which is just as effective. It is called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBTI for short. You work with a therapist for a couple of weeks. As I mentioned, it’s just as powerful as sleeping in the short-term, but better still, once you finish that short therapy phase, you continue to maintain that better sleep. Unlike sleeping pills, when you come off those you tend to actually have what’s called rebound insomnia, where your sleep is as bad, if not worse than when you started.

I think people can revisit their sleep issues with their doctor. I’m not trying to shame people who are on sleeping pills. I’m not trying to make you feel bad if you are. I’m very sensitive to the desire for better sleep and I’m so sensitive to the issue of insomnia, or the desperate, desperate state. You should be aware of what sleeping pills are, what they do and what the alternatives are.

[00:53:26] MB: What about taking a melatonin supplement?

[00:53:29] MW: Melatonin is useful in the circumstance of jetlag to try and reset your body clock in a new time zone. You should take it 30 to 60 minutes before you want to get to sleep in the new time zone. Melatonin works to essentially time the onset of your sleep. I guess, the analogy would be if you think about the 100-meter race in the Olympics. Well, melatonin is the starting official who has the starter gun.

It’s melatonin that brings all of the different ingredients off the sleep race to the starting line, then starts the race in its entirety. It begins the sleep race. Melatonin itself does not actually participate in the race of sleep, in the generation of that sleep race. That’s a whole different set of chemicals. As a consequence, that’s why actually melatonin when you are in a new time zone and you’re stable now in that new time zone, if you’re a young healthy individual, then melatonin actually isn’t effective as a sleeping aid. It doesn’t actually help if you look at the studies.

That said, I would note that for those people who are taking melatonin and they feel as though it helps their sleep, well then I usually tell people continue on. It’s because the placebo effect is one of the most reliable effects in all pharmacology. No harm, no foul if you think it’s working for you.

[00:54:58] MB: What about napping? Is napping something – if you’re sleep-deprived, can you catch up with a nap?

[00:55:04] MW: Unfortunately, you cannot catch up on sleep. Sleep is not like the bank. This is another myth that I try to deconstruct in the book. You can’t accumulate a debt, let’s say during the week and then hope to pay it off at the weekend. Sleep just doesn’t work like that. There is no credit system, or there is no credit sleep sell within the brain.

You can if you are sleep-deprived, take a nap and overcome some of the basic sleepiness. Your reaction times will improve a little bit after a nap, but you don’t actually overcome all of the higher level, cognitive issues such as decision-making, learning in memory, focused attention, all of those types of things that we know are would buckle and collapse by way of a lack of sleep. Naps just don’t seem to be able to overcome those.

You can’t overcome – you can’t bank sleep and you can’t sleep off a debt. I see this in my students. It’s what I would call sleep bulimia, which is where they’re binging on sleep at the weekend and they’re – try and taking too little sleep during the week. It’s this binge purge kind of cycle.

I would also say naps, just more generally are a double-edged sword. If during the day when we’re awake, we actually build up a chemical pressure in our brain. It’s a sleepiness pressure. Now, it’s a hydraulic pressure, don’t worry. As I said, it’s a chemical pressure.  The chemical that builds up is called adenosine. The more of that sleepiness chemical that you have, the more and more sleepy that you will feel. After about 16 hours of being awake, you’re nice and tired and then you should fall asleep and stay asleep for about 8 hours.

When we sleep, we remove that sleepiness pressure. It’s almost like a valve on a pressure cooker. We release that sleepiness steam as it were. This is where I come back to naps. If you nap too late in the day, you actually release some of that healthy sleepiness, which means that when it comes time to sleep normally at night, you may actually struggle to fall asleep, or at least stay asleep.

The advice would be this, if you are someone who can nap regularly and you don’t struggle with your sleep at night, then naps are just fine. But if you can’t nap regularly and/or you’re having difficulties with your sleep at night then the advice is you shouldn’t nap, you should stay awake, build up that healthy sleepiness, and then you will have a better night of sleep because of it.

[00:57:40] MB: What about someone who’s in a situation, let’s say like a new parent. Is there anything that they can go through obviously, very chronically sleep-deprived state? Is there any strategy for them to be able to implement, that would help them battle through that in some way?

[00:57:55] MW: Some parents describe trying to work better shifts and what I mean by that is in two ways. Firstly, some parents will try to take early, the early shift and then the late shift, the first half of the night versus the second half of the night and switch between those two. Another way that you can do that on an informed choice is try to determine whether you are a night owl, or you’re a morning type, what we call a lock. That’s a genetically predisposed. It’s called your chrono type.

If you are someone who likes to go to bed late and wake up late, versus someone who likes to go to bed early and wake up early, that’s not a choice. That’s a genetic mandate that’s being given to you in your DNA code. You can try to ask in the couple, are you someone who would prefer to wake up early and go to bed early? In which case, could you take the morning shift, the late morning shift?

If I’m someone who likes to go to bed late and wake up late, well then it’s easier for me to actually take the first half of the night and then sleep for the second half of the morning and sleep late. You can think about split shifts like that. Some people will also flip-flop back and forth. Some people will say, “Well, I’ll take the next two nights and you get good sleep, then we switch over and you take two nights.” They try to mix and match it in that way too. It’s a desperately difficult situation.

In part, we would not actually design to be family units like this, if you look at hunter-gatherer tribes who have not been touched by the electrical influence, then they actually tend to sleep in groups. Restless legs dangling all over the place, arms intertwined. Whole families would sleep together and people would take turns in terms of caring for the young. It’s a lot to ask of parents, and those are some of the ways that you can try to overcome it.

[00:59:56] MB: One other question and this is out of left field a little bit. I’m curious, have you seen or studied around the neurotransmitter GABA and its relationship with sleep?

[01:00:07] MW: GABA is the principle inhibitory neurotransmitter of the brain. The way that most sleeping medications work right now and you can just name your favorite one and it will work in this way, is by essentially trying to activate the receptors in the brain for GABA. Those receptors essentially are like the red lights on your neurons. They stop them firing, they stop them from going.

Drugs that try to target the GABA system within the brain are really quite blunt instruments and that’s why sleeping pills, which act exactly in this way are really not precise tools. Sleep is a remarkably complex neuro-physiological and neuro-chemical ballet if you look at it. All of these different stages of sleep, neurotransmitters going up and down and brain networks ebbing and flowing.

To think that you can essentially recreate something that is so complex and so bi-directional sleep by simply just knocking the brain out and switching it off using GABA receptors is really just – it’s an unfortunate outcome of how poor our pharmacology is in this day and age. We just don’t yet have the pharmacological precision and sophistication to mimic sleep at this stage.

[01:01:32] MB: What’s one piece of homework that you would give to a listener who wants to sleep better?

[01:01:39] MW: I would say try giving yourself one week of 8 hours of sleep and see if you feel any better. Just give it as self-improvement test. Try it as a hack, that if you are one of those people who are into the quantified self-movement and you’re into self-experimentation then just test out all of that what you’ve just heard in the past week and just determine if you feel any better when you’re sleeping 8 hours every night and you’ve regular each and every night. Versus a staccato sleep schedule where you’re sleeping 5 hours and 6 hours and 12 hours and then 5 hours again. Just ask yourself, “Did that experiment work? Is it in my favor? Do I feel any better and do I notice that improvement?”

[01:02:29] MB: For listeners who want to learn more and want to find you and your book online, what’s the best place to do that?

[01:02:36] MW: They can find the book, which is called Why We Sleep. They can find that online. Amazon holds it. You can find it from all of your major bookstores, both the major brands, as well as all of the independent. It’s on the list of most libraries too. If you don’t want to part with your money, my publisher would probably won’t like me saying that, but I read online, it’s about the knowledge of the book, not the sales.

If you want to learn more about the work that I do, you can follow me on social media. I am at sleepdiplomat, all one word. Sleepdiplomat. I’m on Twitter and also you can find me on LinkedIn. Also, on the web I am at – it is www.sleepdiplomat.com.

[01:03:21] MB: Well, Matt. This has been a fascinating conversation. So much great information, practical strategies, tons and tons of science. Really appreciate it. Incredible insights. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of these wisdom.

[01:03:36] MW: Well, thank you and I have to say a real thanks to you too. It’s not just what people say at the end of these interviews, but I’m trying to fight this battle for sleep. I can only do so much by getting on shows or television, radio or writing a book for example. I need fantastic journalists and media and genius types to actually join and partner with me to get this message out. I too just want to thank you, Matt. Thank you for being part of the sleep mission.

I’m going to grant you now the title of being a sleep ambassador for having me on the show. Thank you very much. Sincerely, I really want to thank you. I desperately need to get this message out. This portal is a remarkable way to proclaim the virtues of sleep. Thank you.

[01:04:25] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail. 

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

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

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

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

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

Concrete Steps to Face Your Fears with Michelle Poler

In this episode we share how to face down your fears and we uncover what happens when you do. We hear the incredible story of how our guest, Michelle Poler, spent 100 days facing down her biggest fears and show what you can learn from her journey. 

Michelle Poler is a social entrepreneur, keynote speaker, and branding strategist. She is the Founder of Hello Fears, a social movement that helps people step outside of the comfort zone and tap into their full potential. She has spoken at TEDx, Google, P&G, Netflix, and many more. Her work has been featured on CBS, CNN, Huffington Post, among many other publications. 

• Living a normal life and going through the motions.. what happens if you wake up and realize that’s all BS?

• What was it like facing your fears?

• The seven major universal categories of fear.

• How do you determine which of your biggest fears is the most pernicious?

• It’s not about doing crazy stuff, it’s about facing the daily fears and little things every single day - the battle takes place in your day to day life, not in some theoretical future.

• What is it like to really face your fears?

• Your fears are never as bad as you think they will be when you face them head on. 

• You’re holding yourself back from so many experiences because you’re creating a worst case scenario in your head.

• You’re more likely to experience the best case scenario than the worst case scenario. 

• Fear at the end of the day is in your head. 

• The battle takes place beforehand.. not during the actual fear inducing experience. 

• How do you actually face your fears?

• What are the steps to facing your fears?

  • Identify your fears

  • Then you go into denial and ignoring your fear

  • Planning

  • The “WTF Am I Doing?” Stage

  • Action

  • Celebration

• What is it that makes someone go from the WTF stage to the action stage?

• Don’t ask what’s the WORST that can happen, ask yourself WHATS THE BEST that can happen. 

• Risk is ALWAYS there.. that’s part of existence. 

• The behavioral activation system is rigged by REWARDS, not risk. 

• Your life can be so much better if you have the courage to face your fears. 

• If you don’t take action you will NEVER achieve what you want the most. 

• The enemy of success is comfort, not failure. 

• The only time you fail, is the time you fail to try. The reason you don’t try is because you’re too comfortable.

• What are the best tools for facing fear during the hardest part of the journey?

• Don’t worry about being perfect 

• As a parent how can you stop generational fear from being passed down to your kids?

• It’s not about not facing your fears.. and it’s not about pretending you’re fearless. You have to face your fears, as a human, with self compassion, and realize that you aren’t perfect. Acknowledge your fears and face them together. 

• Tell your children that you’re scared, and then show them how you face that fear. 

• Homework: Find an accountability partner to help you face your fears. 

Thank you so much for listening!

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

This week's episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by Best Fiends.

Best Fiends is a 5-Star rated mobile puzzle game with over 100 million downloads. I’m not someone who is traditionally a mobile game person but I have to say I’m a HUGE fan of this game and it’s a great way to challenge yourself when you’re on the go, waiting in line, or doing some relaxing.

The games developers and team are constantly updating with new themes and levels so the game never gets old or less challenging. This really keeps you on your toes in a fun way as you need to utilize different characters and strategies in order to succeed. What may have gotten you to a certain point in most cases won’t get you to the next.

You’re constantly engaging your brain with fun puzzles and collecting tons of unique characters. Trust me, with over 100 millions downloads this 5-star rated mobile puzzle game is a must play. So check it out go to the Apple app store or Google Play store on your phone and download best fiends today and start playing.

The game is great, their team is great so go check it out now and start playing today, I’ll see you on the leaderboard! 

Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

General

• Michelle’s Website

• Michelle’s LinkedIn and Twitter

• Hello Fears Website, Facebook, and Instagram

• 100 Days Without Fear Site

Media

• Forbes - “How This Latina Turned 100 Days Of Facing Her Fears Into A New Career” by Vivian Nunez

• PSA Financial - “What’s the Best That Could Happen? Michelle Poler on How to Live Life Without Fear” by Justin Hoffman

• “This is what YouTube star Michelle Poler learned after 100 days of facing her fears” By Interaksyon Staff

• Article Directory on HuffPost

• Crunchbase Profile - Michelle Poler

• Deadline - “Fox Buys Drama ‘100 Days Without Fear’ From Akiva Goldsman Based On Michelle Poler Blog” By Denise Petski

• Fierce - “Meet Michelle Poler, The Venezolana Inspiring Women To Face Their Fears” by Raquel Reichard

• Bustle - “5 Lessons We Can Learn From Michelle Poler's Completed "100 Days Without Fear" Challenge By Emma Cueto (2015)

• [Podcast] The Rise Podcast w/ Rachel Hollis - Ep 120: How to Face Your Fears (with Michelle Poler)

• [Podcast] Amy Jo Martin - EPISODE 60: MICHELLE POLER

• [Podcast] Dream Big - DB 159: Michelle Poler On Facing Her 100 Greatest Fears & Why You Should Too!

Videos

• HelloFears YouTube Channel

  • Quitting my job - Day 59

• Michelle Poler YouTube Channel

• TEDx Talks - 100 days without fear | Michelle Poler | TEDxHouston

• Now I've Seen Everything - The "100 Days Without Fear" Challenge From Michelle Poler Is Awesome

• Kimberly Rich - Michelle Poler: 100 Days Without Fear

• CreativeMornings HQ - Michelle Poler: 100 Days Without Fear

• Today Show - This woman challenged herself to spend 100 days facing her fears

• Glamour - One Woman Faces Her Fear of Aging Head-On | 100 Days Without Fear

Books

• Hello, Fears: Crush Your Comfort Zone and Become Who You're Meant to Be by Michelle Poler (Released on May 5th)

• Hello Fears Book Site

Misc

• Journal Article - The Neuropsychology of Anxiety: An enquiry into the function of the septo-hippocampal system by Jeffrey A. Gray and Neil McNaughton

Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

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

In this episode, we share how to face down your fears and we uncover what happens when you do. We hear the incredible story of how our guest, Michelle Poler, spent a 100 days facing down her biggest fears and we show you what you can learn from her journey.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How to Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we shared how you can be more confident when you make the tough decisions in your life, discuss how to deal with FOMO and showed you the key to ultimately achieving greatness with our previous guest, Patrick McGinnis.

Now for our interview with Michele.

[0:01:34.6] MB: Michelle Poler is a social entrepreneur, keynote speaker and branding strategist. She's the founder of Hello Fears, a social movement that helps people step outside of their comfort zone and tap into their full potential. She's spoken at TEDx, Google, P&G, Netflix and many more places. Her work has been featured on CBS, CNN, The Huffington Post and many other publications.

Michelle, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:00.5] MP: Hi. Thank you for having me.

[0:02:02.5] MB: Well, we're super excited to have you on the show today. Austin is joining us as well. Austin, what's up?

[0:02:07.8] AF: Yeah, what's up guys? It's good to be a part of the conversation. Michelle, we really, really appreciate the time, really looking forward to digging in with you.

[0:02:13.5] MP:  I'm excited too.

[0:02:15.9] MB: Michelle, we are huge fans of your experience, your work. It's such an important topic. I just have this personal affinity and I think Austin probably the same way, for any discomfort challenge. That is just my favorite thing. Before we get into some of the specifics, I'd love to just step back and hear your story of the journey of how we got here and what your 100-day challenge was like and how it originated.

[0:02:42.9] MP: Okay. That's a big question. I'm originally from Caracas, Venezuela. If you're sensing or hearing an accent, that's why. I was born and raised there. I moved to the US for my college. When I was actually 19, I moved here and I started living a very normal life, where I was checking the saddest boxes, the things that promised ultimate happiness.

Along the way, what I realized as I was checking those boxes and by boxes, I mean, going to college, then finding a job, getting married. I was doing all of those. In the process, what I realized is that I was achieving comfort, not necessarily happiness. Not that I was not happy. I was not sad or anything. It was just not giving me the fulfillment that I was looking for.

Early in my life, because I even got married early at 23, and so I started having a lot of comfort around me. I had a really nice job in advertising. I had a nice apartment, two-bedroom, two-bathroom, husband of my dreams, everything around me was working out pretty nicely. But still, I was like, something's missing because this cannot be all. I'm only 23 and what's next? To have kids, to buy a home and then have grandkids and die? Is that it?

I definitely want more out of my life. I'm way too young to be living with such comfort around me. That's when I realized that my biggest dream has always been to live in New York. I was not fulfilling that dream, because I chose to get married and to settle. At 23 I said, “You know what? I need to fulfill this dream. I need more goals in my life, more challenges, actually.” I decided to move to New York to do a master's in branding at the School of Visual Arts. That's when my story started to change.

I moved to New York to fulfill my dream and I was not really fulfilling my dream, because I was living inside of my comfort zone. Even in the best city in the world, even as I was living my best life, I was still trying to stay very comfortable, because I was too afraid in general. I was afraid to feel fear. I learned that term called phobophobia, where you try to avoid facing your fears. That's how I lived for the first 25 years of my life. Then when I was doing my masters in branding, I had the opportunity to do a 100-day project.

We were challenged. All of us at the school, we were challenged to start a 100-day project of our choice. We had to choose one thing to do repeatedly for 100 days in a row. At that moment, I knew it was the perfect opportunity for me to go after my fears, become a braver person and changed my life. I decided to start tackling one fear a day, record myself and put all of those videos on YouTube.

[0:05:58.0] MB: There's so many fascinating things that you went through. Some of them are at least and watching them, I'm sure it was difficult to go through it, but some of them are almost hilarious to watch and look at. I'd love to hear a couple of the highlights from the 100-day challenge and some of the lessons that you learned from it as well.

[0:06:13.0] MP: Yeah, sure. I started facing smaller fears. For me, they were huge. If I tell you now you're like, “Seriously? That's not even a fear for so many people.” For example, my fear number two was to try an oyster and a snail, not only an oyster. Something that I've never tried before in my life. I was very disgusted by it. I gave it a chance. I did that. I have to tell you something interesting is that this happened, the oyster challenge happened exactly five years ago today. The 7th of April. That was the second day of my project five years ago. Now I'm doing this challenge five years later, re-watching all of my videos and publishing those on my Instagram just for fun. That's the way to commemorate this project. Okay, that was just a side note.

Then I did getting a Brazilian wax, or holding a cat for the first time in my life. All these things can sound small for a lot of people, but for me those were things that I was avoiding throughout my life and they limit my life in different ways, like driving at night and things like that. Well, around fear number 40, my project went viral. It was all over the news all over the world. At that point, I decided to challenge myself to face bigger fears. That's when I started tackling things, like skydiving, holding a tarantula, posing nude in front of a drawing class, speaking in a TEDx, what else? Quitting my job in advertising.

I definitely started tackling bigger things at that point, because I wanted to prove myself that I could actually go bigger than I thought, which these were things that I never considered before starting the project. Then by the end, this whole project turned into a movement. I had thousands of people following. I went from zero followers to thousands of followers, millions of views on YouTube and just transforming what was an experience and what started as a school project into a lifestyle and a career.

[0:08:23.2] MB: One of my favorites was the challenge of walking around New York City in a bikini. I thought that was so funny. I loved personally doing ridiculous rejection challenges and stuff like that. Tell me a little bit about that experience.

[0:08:36.0] MP: Well, you know what? New York City is a great place to face your fears and find your authenticity, because nobody cares. You can be doing the silliest things and people just look around and they think that you're part of the whole experience. Tourists may take a picture of you like, huh. That time when I went to New York and this girl was walking in a bikini in the middle of spring, where people are still wearing jackets and sweaters, and locals don't even care. They don't even look.

I don't know if you saw this one, but I spent a full day asking for money in the street. People would not even look at me. I thought I would feel weird asking for money. They wouldn't even see me. Every crazy challenge, go to New York, nobody will care and then you'll be able to experience that. That was funny, because I was walking in my bikini and I was really surprised that nobody would even pay attention. It was a great way to do some shock therapy for sure.

[0:09:38.4] MB: It reminds me, Austin, of the time that we've had a couple rejection adventures of our own as well.

[0:09:44.4] AF: Yeah. It's funny. We should have filmed those. Michelle I mean, obviously, you took this to a whole another level. Matt and I, one time we're traveling for a speaking gig and we had a whole evening to kill at the Mall of America. We took it upon ourselves to just go out and try to get rejected as many times as possible. One of the greatest takeaways too, I mean, there's a lot of things, like you mentioned, you thought everyone would stop and stare at you, but they didn't. People go about their lives and I think the expectation for us was pretty similar. They're like, it's terrifying. We're like, “Oh, my God. You do it. You do it. No, come on, man. Come on. You do it. You do it.”

Then we went out and did it. It devolves very quickly, but at the same time it's very fun, it's very challenging and it forces you to step off. Matt, I don't want to take the story, but I know we got some free loot out of that whole endeavor.

[0:10:27.8] MP: That’s so funny.

[0:10:29.9] AF: Let's see. I'm trying to remember all of them. We went to a bakery that was closing down. Matt, it was you. You asked them if we could have a free slice of cookie cake and the lady was like, “No.” I remember it, because it was great. You’re like, “Well, what's going to happen to this cookie cake if you don't give it to me?” She was like, “I'm going to throw it in the trash.” “Well, why don't you just do us a little favor here and make our day, as opposed to throw in the trash?” She looked around and was checking her shoulder, half-serious, checking to see if anybody was around and slid over the cookie cake. It was like, “Score.”

The smallest little thing, but we ran out of there like kids. Like, “Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. What else can we do?” It's like jumping into a cold pool of water. Once you're in there you're like, “All right, this is a little more comfortable. What else can we get?”

[0:11:11.8] MP: Right, right.

[0:11:13.3] AF: I have a quick question here. I listened to your story here and you talk about how you did all these things and then you still didn't feel you'd pushed yourself. One of the things you've talked about that I thought really hit on with me was looking back at the challenge, you realize you're not really afraid of speaking in public, or walking around in a bikini. There's bigger fears, right? Ultimately, you're really confront five or six fears, not a 100 different ones. How did you come to that realization? How far were you when you realized, “I'm not afraid of X, Y, Z. It's really the larger fears.” How did that change the way that you approached taking on these fears when they became these big things, not just small little acts?

[0:11:57.0] MP: Yeah. When I was facing these fears, I started to see patterns in the way that I felt in the different fears. For example, when I got Brazilian wax, it was a similar experience to when I got a piercing. The fear is not the Brazilian or the piercing, it’s pain. That's one fear, one umbrella that includes so many fears that are related to pain. I started to see these patterns later on.

What I did is I put all of my fears that I was facing on post-it notes and I started to put them together. I was like, this fear and this fear felt similar and this one and this one felt similar. I started creating this clouds of post-its and then I was able to identify seven clear ones that I was like, “This definitely fits here and this definitely fits here.” I ended up discovering that I didn't have 100 fears like I thought, or a 1,000 fears like I actually thought. I only had seven fears, which were pain, danger, embarrassment, rejection, loneliness, lack of control and disgust.

[0:13:06.9] AF: That's so interesting and I can only imagine when the light bulb went off, taking this thing that seems like a 100 and condensing it down to seven different things. How did that change the way that you approached each new task now that you knew what the root cause was of your fear?

[0:13:21.6] MP: Well, one interesting thing that came out of this is that I was able to understand which ones of the seven fears were easier for me and which ones were harder. Then I started to compare them with other people. I started asking people around, would you rather do this or this? Then for example, if I say would you rather crash a wedding or travel by yourself for a whole weekend? In my case, I would rather crash a wedding a thousand times before traveling by myself, because loneliness is one of my biggest fears.

Then some people would say, I would never in my life crash a wedding and I would love to be by myself. This is an interesting exercise that I included in my book that I asked people to rank the level of fear of these seven categories. For me loneliness like I was saying is at the top. Pain is at the top. I really try to avoid pain at all costs, and lack of control. I think those are the main ones.

For example, embarrassment and rejection, I tend to deal with those better, definitely. I did this challenge of dancing in the middle of Times Square, like no one's watching. It was not as bad. It was a little bit intimidating at the beginning, but I had so much fun. Then some people watched that video and they're like, “I could never do something like that,” but they don't care about getting piercings, or tattoos, or things that are is so hurtful that I would never consider them.

[0:14:48.4] AF: It's so interesting to me too, thinking about how you were 23, you moved to New York to take on this ambitious program and then you still felt you weren't pushing yourself into fear enough. Then to hear you say you were afraid of holding a cat, in my head I'm like, “Wow, at the age of 23, you moved to New York. I mean, that's huge, right?” People are so intimidated just into moving anywhere that's far away from home, or far away from school and away from friends. Then you decided, I really haven't even pushed myself to my potential right now, so you decided to take on this ambitious 100-day challenge.

Then the cat thing strikes me. Obviously, you've identified your fears and everything, but I think what it really sheds light on is something that can be just so mundane. I mean, there are people that pet cats every day first thing in the morning, right? Can also be a huge fear for someone else. I think by showing the vulnerability of what your true fears are and not saying, “Oh, it's all got to be good content for YouTube, or it's all got to be something absolutely crazy.” By really shedding light on those innate fears inside of you that aren't common to everybody, it really made the whole thing a lot more impactful. How was that journey diving into these small things, like trying an oyster, trying a snail, petting a cat that really were just unique to you, but ultimately really struck a chord with the large, obviously based on the traction you got?

[0:16:07.9] MP: Right. When I went viral, I was doing those kinds of fear. I was not doing the huge fears. I think that is exactly what resonated with so many people, because if I put the obvious fears in there, I'm facing my fears, but if everybody has those fears. Actually, you should have those fears. You should be afraid of holding a tarantula and doing skydiving and because, death, it's a possibility if you're not careful.

Those other fears were limiting my life. For example, actually in college I lived with two cats, because my roommate – I had four roommates and they had two cats and that was limiting my life a lot. I wouldn't go to the bathroom if the cats were there. Or if they would walk on top of my cereal, I would just stop eating and do something else, because I wouldn't touch them. I was afraid of them scratching me.

In my head, the fear was so big, they would hurt me. When I tried just petting the cat and during the project and holding it, God, it was so sweet. I was like, “Seriously? I've been missing out in this my entire life because of my fear? How irrational is that?” I was starting to build my confidence, but I had to start with the little things and that's what people resonate with, because we all have those fears and it's a taboo topic. Not a lot of people admit they have those fears, and so I didn't have a problem just putting myself out there and challenging myself in that way.

[0:17:32.8] AF: Yeah. I think that's really partially why it struck a big chord is it wasn't macho crazy things that was extremely relatable. People might see your channel and think, “Oh, she was afraid of petting cats.” Learn that and it just makes it so much more relatable than someone who's constantly skydiving and swimming with piranhas and everything that would be a lot of ways, expected of something focused on this, but not really what reality is, right?

[0:17:55.9] MP: Yeah.

[0:17:58.5] MB: Yeah, I think that's such an important point. It really comes back to the art of facing your fears and getting uncomfortable. It's this idea that it's not about doing crazy stuff. That's fun and it's cool and it's great for YouTube or whatever, but it's really about this daily battle, every single day in the mundane everyday stuff that you experience to you realize those fears that are coming up and face them. That's such an important piece of it.

[0:18:23.0] MP: That's a really great point. Actually, the whole project was very physical, because I had to capture all of these experiences to upload them to YouTube. After I was done with the 100-day project, I focused more on fears, or challenges that you can't necessarily capture on camera, but that are so life-changing.

For example, asking for a raise at work, a promotion. That is a huge fear. A lot of people have to face if they want to get somewhere in their careers; promoting yourself, exposing yourself on social media, asking for a divorce, launching a new project. Those things you can't put them on YouTube, but those are the big challenges that will take our life to the next level and will get us closer to our dreams. That's what I started focusing more after the 100-day project. That's how I was able to build a community of over 75,000 people on Instagram that they just want to be challenged on the day-to-day, to become who they're meant to be.

[0:19:31.2] MB: I'm so curious, there's a lot I want to unpack from what you've already shared, but just coming back to that experience of being afraid and then really stepping into facing your fears, what was that experience like to actually be in the moment, to face those fears and what were the fears like when you really encountered them up close?

[0:19:50.3] MP: Well, they were never as bad as the way I had them in my head before. That's one of the main takeaways that I got from this project, that before facing those fears, they were just so big. The worst case scenario was going to happen for sure. That's what we tell ourselves.

During my entire life, I just kept holding myself back from so many experiences, because I thought that the worst-case scenario was what's going to actually happen, but when I started to face my fears during the project, what I realize is that actually, you are more likely to experience the best case scenario than you are to experience the worst case scenario.

Day after day, I kept experiencing that things were not as bad as I had them in my head before. Whenever I went to the next fear, I had a little bit more confidence within me. I will challenge people to start facing those small fears and build up that confidence, because then when you encounter bigger fears, then you're not expecting the worst. That's so important, because the fear is at the end, what we tell ourselves. That is what it is. The actual challenge is never that. I was able to prove that to myself day after day.

When I was in it, when I was in the fear, the entire time I was like, it's going to be horrible, it's going to be horrible, it's going to be the worst. Then suddenly, it was not, day after day. I created an emoji meter for the project. That was a tool that helped me measure my fear before, during and after each challenge that I faced. That was really helpful for my audience to understand, because not every fear was terrifying. Some fears were more scary than others for me. That way I could communicate that. Always, the fear was definitely bigger before, during was not as bad and after, most of the times was way better.

[0:21:46.4] MB: Such a great piece of perspective. As someone who's faced down hundreds of fears literally, you just have such a good insight into this, that the battle with your fears really takes place beforehand and not during the actual fear-inducing experience itself.

[0:22:02.9] MP: Yeah. Exactly like that.

[0:22:05.6] MB: I'm curious, thinking about that process of facing a fear and going from the very beginning of okay, I'm afraid of this all the way through to the other side of having experienced it, how do you think about the life cycle of fear and really facing our fears?

[0:22:24.2] MP: That's a great question. The first step to facing a fear is the time when we acknowledge that we are afraid of something. For example, let's say that a friend of yours proposed an idea, something that you've never considered, right? Let’s say that someone tells you, “Hey, do you want to come this summer with me to Africa to volunteer?” You're like, “What?” Maybe you never even considered doing something like that. When the idea is proposed to you is how you react, what tells you if this is a fear or not.

If you're like, “Yeah, let's totally do that,” then you're not afraid of that. Let's not talk about that, because it's not in this topic. If your first reaction is like, “Let me think about it. I'm not sure.” You were not expecting that proposal, then maybe you're identifying something that is outside of your comfort zone. That is the first step when you identify that you're afraid of something.

Then the second step is to ignore the fear. That's where we automatically go as human beings, because when we face something that we are not comfortable with, our first reaction is to ignore it. Look another way and forget about that for a while. Most of the people just stay there and ignore their fears over and over again. They continue living a very comfortable life doing the things that they already know, hanging out with people that they're familiar with and life becomes very monotonous for a lot of people because of that.

The other kind of people that are other bit more adventurous would come back after that, after ignoring it for a while, maybe a few minutes, maybe hours or days and then come back to it and say, “But what if I actually do that?” They start thinking about the best-case scenario if they do it. Then at that point, you start to plan your fear. You're going to do this, you're going to take that risk, you're going to embark on the challenge. Maybe you have to set up a strategy, maybe you have to call someone, just plan the whole experience.

Or if it's just to say something out loud, like ask for a raise, you start to plan how you're going to say these things. That's the planning stage. Then from there before getting into the action stage, which you would assume is next, there's always this hidden stage in the middle, which I call the WTF am I doing stage. That's the stage where you freak out. It's the few moments before you take action. It is inevitable. As human beings, are immediately going to start thinking of the worst case scenarios, right? All these negative thoughts will start to pop into your head, telling you things, to try to convince you not to do that, because it's unnatural.

I mean, it's your fear talking, your comfort speaking. It will tell you things like, “Don't do it. You will regret it. Who do you think you are?” All these things that we’d tell ourselves. At that moment, it's really important that we overcome the WTF stage in order to get to the action stage. A lot of people and I would say most of the people, just drop the ball right there and they convince themselves that this was not a good idea in the first place and they come up with a thousand excuses why they shouldn't do that and that's it. They continue living their monotonous life, go back to their comfort zone.

Those who actually take action, I've been studying that and I've been trying to understand what is it that makes someone go from the WTF am I doing stage into the action stage. I came up with my own tool. The typical question that we tend to ask ourselves or other people when they're about to face a fear and we do it with the best intentions, which is hey, what's the worst that could happen, right? You ask yourself that sometimes?

[0:26:09.3] MB: Yeah, absolutely.

[0:26:10.1] MP: Yeah. That question, I got it a lot, because I was facing my fears over and over again. People tend to ask that and they're like, “But think about it? What's the worst that can happen if you hold a tarantula, or if you go camping, or if you whatever, dive with sharks?” Well, sharks could be really bad. Dance in the middle of Times Square like no one's watching.

The worst-case scenario, yeah, maybe it's not dying, but it could be things like hurting your ego, or crushing your confidence, or getting rejected, or being embarrassed. There are many other worse things that could happen, so that question is not really helpful. What I did is I changed the question around and flipped it around. I started asking myself what's the best that can happen. Because when you ask yourself what's the best that can happen, you start to focus on the real words, instead of in the risk. The risk will always be there. We're human. That's the first thoughts that we have in our mind. We have to train our brain to go the other way around and think about the rewards.

As I was trying to better understand this, I actually encounter a research from this psychologist called Jeffrey Gray. He says that in our brain, we have two systems; the behavioral inhibition system and the behavioral activation system. The behavioral inhibition system responds to risk and stop us from taking action, or we take action based on our fears. Then the behavioral activation system responds to reward. It's exactly what it encourages us to take action based on the rewards, instead of in the fear.

Asking yourself that question, what's the best that can happen is all about focusing on the rewards. Think about it, if you're about to let's say in my case, presents in front of 20,000 people, right? That's my job, but still scares the heck out of me every time I have to do one of those big presentations. If I'm backstage and I'm only focusing on the things that can go wrong and I'm like, “What if technology fails? What if I say a joke and nobody gets it, nobody laughs? What if nobody pays attention? What if people start to leave in the middle of my presentation?” I'm only thinking about the worst-case scenarios.

If I ask myself intentionally, what's the best that can happen? Immediately, my mind goes to the moment that this is all over and I have a huge smile in my face and I'm saying, “I can't believe this went amazing, that everybody laughed, that everything went according to plan, that technology worked, that I did one hell of a job and all of this positive outcomes that are most likely going to happen.” It just changes the way you walk into your fears and it encourages you to take action.

After we take action, which that is the action stage of course, then we go into the celebratory stage and that's when we feel very proud of ourselves for accomplishing something that was hard to do. I can tell you that during my entire life, I never actually felt really proud of myself, because I was only – like I was saying at the beginning, checking boxes. I graduated, because I had to graduate. It was not a big challenge for me. It was just something I had to do. Then I got married and I did all these things.

I never actually felt that feeling of being so proud of myself, because I did something hard, something despite my fears. That's what you experience when you intentionally decide to face a fear and you survive on the other side, which is what it's most likely going to happen.

[0:29:39.4] MB: That's such a great turnaround, instead of asking yourself what's the worst that can happen, focus on what's the best that could happen? I really like that.

[0:29:46.7] MP: It has helped me and now thousands of people.

[0:29:54.1] AF: This episode in the Science of Success is brought to you by the five-star rated mobile app Best Fiends. That's F-I-E-N-D-S. Think friends without the R. If you're looking for a fun way to pass the time while also engaging your brain in strategic thinking, then Best Fiends is for you.

Now we've discussed the idea of how games, especially our favorite video games can help your brain solve problems and think strategically in a fun and engaging way, which is exactly what Best Fiends does. Now I'm not someone who's traditionally a mobile game person, but I have to say, I'm a huge fan of this game and it's a great way to challenge yourself when you're on the go, waiting in line, or just doing some relaxing.

I'm already at level 45 and I've gained quite the crew of fiends myself, I must say. The games’ developers and team are constantly updating with new themes, new levels, new fiends, so the game never gets old, or less challenging. This really keeps you on your toes in a fun way as you need to utilize different characters and strategies in order to succeed.

What may have gotten you to a certain point in most cases won't get you to the next point. You're constantly engaging your brain with fun puzzles, collecting tons of unique characters and trust me, with over a 100 million downloads, this five-star rated mobile puzzle game is a must play. It's everywhere.

Check it out. Go to the Apple App Store, or Google Play Store on your phone today and download Best Fiends to start playing. Now remember, that's Best Fiends, not friends. F-I-E-N-D-S. Think best friends without the R. The game is great, their team is great, so go check it out now and start playing today and I'll see you on the leaderboard.

[0:31:36.0] MB: The other piece that I think is so important that often gets neglected or almost goes unseen is that WTF am I doing stage. It's so easy to gloss over that and think you're going to plan to face a fear and then next thing is you act on it, but really you have to go through a lot of mental anguish and in some cases and maybe in most instances, the hardest part of the battle is really that particular stage in fighting through all of the worst case scenarios and everything that's going on in your head.

[0:32:06.3] MP: That's exactly what I was saying. Yeah, it is the worst part. It's the turning point. You either surrender, I guess, to your fears at that point and you let them win the battle, which is what happens most of the times. There's so many examples. People that are in for example, marriages that they're not happy with, but they just go to that thought when they're about to maybe change their life and ask for a divorce, but they are like, “No, no, no, no. They start thinking what's the worst that can happen. I'm going to be alone. I'm not going to find anybody else. Then I have to hire lawyers and go through all that hassle. Let's just stay as I am.”

In that moment, it's the turning point where if you think all the positive things that can come out of this situation, if you decide to take action and how much better your life can be. If you decide to have the courage to do that, then everything changes and it’s that turning point.

[0:33:01.1] AF: I want to jump in here and I want to focus on what happens down the road a little bit, because I think it makes a lot of sense and it's very valuable for the audience to even have the take away of focus on the best, focus on the positive of what can happen. A lot of times in life, we’re faced with choices that will ultimately have good and bad outcomes. For example, if you decide you want to get divorced, keep the example going, but you're afraid of being lonely, well you may ask for that divorce and then you may wrestle with deep bouts of loneliness after that. It’s just a natural part of mourning and grieving and moving on.

I know even for you, they say that if you want to see the worst in humanity, take a look at YouTube comments, right? Even for you as you begin to gain traction and your name is getting spread around everywhere and things are picking up, I mean, you obviously also have that negative reaction from “haters” and people that really just spend their time focusing on the negative side of things. Obviously, we start out we want to focus on the best.

As you go down the road of some of these decisions that are largely good and there is a good to focus on, but there's a bad that creeps in, how do you keep from focusing on that negative that might be there? How do you ignore the bad comments and focus on the good feedback and the good ones? How do you ignore those bouts of loneliness after maybe being separated from a loved one, but ultimately know it's better for you?

[0:34:20.1] MP: That's a really great question, because everything in life will have positive and negative. You can't just escape that. No decision will just be just good or just bad. It's a matter of prioritizing what do you want the most. Maybe not what do you want now, but what do you want the most. If right now you just want company, then you're going to choose that, even if it's not the right company for you.

If you want the most is to find real love, for example, or the best job possible then maybe you do have to quit this job in order to find it. There's a journey that will happen between the time that you take action and the time that you actually achieve something. The problem is the people that don't take action, they will never achieve what they want the most. That's as simple as that. Are you willing to go through that journey and have the possibility of achieving the life of your dreams, or would you just rather stay in your comfort and never have that chance?

For example, talking about couples and that topic, I wrote a post in Valentine's last year, where normally what I do in those dates, special days and everybody is posting the exact same thing. Valentine's, everybody posts pictures of their loved ones and they tell the world how happy they are, even if they're not that's what they have to do. I'm like always, what can I post that it's a little bit more controversial? What is unexpected?

Last year, I decided to post this. I wanted to talk to single people that day and I'm like, right now you're on Instagram and you are watching so many happy couples as you're scrolling down your feed. You know what? I'm actually happier for you, because you have a greater chance at finding real love than all those “happy couples” that are not actually happy, but posting their pictures here on Instagram to make everybody believe they're happy, but they don't have now a chance to find real love, because they’re with someone else. I'm happy for you single people that you didn't settle for someone, just to not be by yourself.

It's all about that, having the courage to take a leap and trust that if we follow our hearts and we work hard, AF, we will eventually get what we want. It comes with a lot of sacrifices in the way, but all of those sacrifices will be worth it if you actually achieve what you want the most at the end.

[0:36:47.7] AF: That's a really great point. I love the content, by the way. That's so awesome. I think being able to go through the negatives of any decision and stick with that commitment, I think is a pretty good roadmap to show you that you're doing the right thing, right? If you start this movement that you did, but then there's a bunch of negative people are reaching out, you choose to focus on that and not on the positive and you give up after 75 days. Then really, you probably weren't all in in the first place, right?

Then the same thing, if you decided you want to make a huge life decision and maybe this partner is not right for you and you just feel it in your gut and you know it's not right and then you take action, but you ultimately come back, I think that that shows that either A, that wasn't the right decision, or B, you're not looking at things through the correct lens of reality. I really think that being able to put up with and to go through the pain of any decision that may have a negative consequence is really a sign that it's something you truly want to do.

[0:37:45.8] MP: Yeah, it is. You have to know that that will come with it and be willing to face all of it. It is also okay to make mistakes. Maybe you think you want something and you have the courage, you take action, you do it and then maybe that was not exactly what you wanted and it is okay to say, “Oh, maybe that was not exactly. Let me find what else was it,” but we need to try the things. If we constantly convinced ourselves that we should just stay in our comfort zone, we're not going to experience life much really. We're just going to stay in the same place.

[0:38:20.7] AF: Yeah, it's interesting. I kept going down with the relationship example, because we're on the road. On the second thought, if you jump into a tank of sharks because you want to overcome your fear and you realized very quickly, “I should not be in this tank of sharks,” you should probably get out of the tank. It's not a sign of wavering. It's probably just good common sense.

You've used a quote in the past, I really loved. It's the enemy of success is comfort, not failure. What does success mean to you?

[0:38:43.1] MP: Well, success is very personal. Everybody should have their own definition of success. I feel like that's something that they should be teaching us as we grow up, because when we're growing up, the whole world tells us what success looks like. It tells us that it's related to money and love and fame perhaps and stability. Then we grow up with certain ideals that might not be true for everybody.

For some people, yes, that is success to achieve fame and money and the recognition. For some people, success can be to have a balanced lifestyle, to be with your family and be present, not be at work all day long. For some people, success can be just being by yourself and loving the single life forever and that's it. It's so freaking personal that I think that's a question that we should all be asking ourselves and we should before we start any project, or any journey, we should first define what success means.

Because if not, it's like if we're driving somewhere in our car and we're not telling the GPS where to take us, then we would just be turning and turning and turning and then we would get very frustrated and think, “But where are we? Why am I not getting to where I want to be?” It's because you haven't told maybe your GPS where you want to go. Sometimes, we tell our GPS that we want to go to places only, because that is what people around us expect from us.

If your parents are always telling you that you should become a dentist and then you put in your GPS that you want to become a dentist and you achieve that and doesn't bring you happiness, it's because it was not your choice. It was your parents, or your communities, or your societies, like whoever is expecting this out of you. This is a very, very personal question and then very few people have the courage to actually take action and commit to their own definition of success. Because we're all the time looking around and comparing ourselves to other people, and if we don't have what other people have, mostly people that are close to us, then we feel we're not there, we don't have enough, or we are not good enough.

It is a matter of defining first and being very honest about it, what is success to you? Then owning that definition of success. Then what I say is that the enemy of success is not failure. A lot of people are afraid to try things that they're dying to do, they're dying to pursue a business, or be entrepreneur, or whatever it is that they want to do and they stop themselves from doing it because they're afraid to fail .

To me, the only time you fail is the time you fail to try. If you want to really do something and because of fear you decide not to do it, you're failing. You're failing yourself. You haven't even given yourself the chance to have success at that.

That's why I say that failure is not the enemy of success, it’s comfort. Because the reason that we don't try, it's because we're too comfortable with our salaries, with our partners, with our lifestyle, with being accepted by other people around us and by belonging the way we were taught to fit in to society.

[0:41:58.4] AF: That's definitely a journey that everybody has to figure out on their own and my definition of success might be completely different from Matt's, who might align a little bit with yours. It's really something I think that is extremely important for anybody, especially if they're going to reach their potential in life to understand what that means for them, even if it is being able to go to every kid's baseball game, or if it's working 18-hour days for the rest your life and buying a private jet. It's all just going to be different. Knowing what that is and having that Northstar really guides action and I think it's critically important.

[0:42:27.2] MP: That can also change throughout time, your definition.

[0:42:30.2] MB: You said something really, really important, Michelle, that to be is personally my biggest takeaway, maybe one of the biggest takeaways that I've gotten on this conversation is this idea, really simply that if you don't take action, you're never going to achieve what you want to achieve.

[0:42:45.8] MP: That's how it is. You don't even have a chance. I love this quote or this post that says something like, the chances of getting something if you try, pretty big. Chances of getting that same thing, if you don't even ask for it, zero. When you don't ask for the things you want, you are automatically telling yourself, no. You're not even giving yourself the chance to see what the answer to that question is.

[0:43:12.6] MB: I'm curious, coming back to the thing that stops people from acting as we've been talking about this whole conversation is fear. What are some of the tools that you found to be really successful for facing down your fears, especially at the hardest parts of the journey, if you're in that WTF am I doing stage, even before then, what are some of the resources and strategies that you've found to be really effective for facing down and overcoming fears?

[0:43:42.2] MP: Well, so one of the biggest fears that stop people a lot is the impostor syndrome, right? When you are about to do something that you feel that's what you should be doing and then you convince yourself that you're not the right person for that, that you're not good enough. Then you look around and you identify potential people that could be better for that. You're like, “Oh, yeah. I would like to do it, but I'm not as funny as that person.”

For example, let me never try stand-up comedy, because I know a lot of people that are way better than me. Or you look around and you’re like, “Oh, but I'm not a social, or as fit, or smart.” It's so easy to just look around, tell ourselves that we're not good enough and then continue whatever we were doing, instead of actually doing the thing we want the most, at least giving it a try. A few ways that I would suggest that we can confront the impostor syndrome mostly for example, we're about to launch something, an idea, we want to expose ourselves, the first thing we tell ourselves is that we are not experts, so we shouldn't be talking about a certain topic.

If you want to start a podcast about something that you're passionate about and then you convince yourself that you're not an expert on that, maybe you shouldn't do it, because there are other people already talking about it, what I want to tell those people is this, if you know more than a group of people, then you're definitely qualified to talk about it. Because we don't need to be the best ones, we don't need to be the most expert ones, we just need to know more than a group of people, or have a different approach to it.

That is something for example, my husband talks about personal finance. When he wanted to launch a brand about this to teach people about personal finance, he would always tell himself that, “No, no, no, but there are some people that are way better. I mean, look at Dave Ramsey, he's already doing that.” What I tell him is first, you know so much than so many people and they are your potential audience, right? That they want to learn from you.

Second, the other thing I want to tell people is yes, there might be so many people already doing what you want to do, but they are doing it their way and it's so important that we do it our way. The way to do this, because it's so easy to just say, do it your way, right? Maybe it's not as easy to implement it, but it's the difference between those who Google how to do things and those who try to look within themselves and find what is their way of doing things. I would say, don't be the Googler.

For example, if you're going to give a presentation and you google how to dress up for a presentation, or how to structure a presentation, I mean, you're just going to end up being one more if you do that. The only way to stand out and do the things in a more authentic way is by asking yourself those questions. How do I want to dress up if I would be presenting in front of others? How would I structure a presentation? Those are the questions that I ask myself and that is why my brand, Hello Fears, have been able to stand out. That's why so many people like it and want to be part of it, because it is not one more, because I'm not looking outside, identifying what other people are doing and try to imitate.

I'm always thinking how can I be more me. What is everybody else doing and how can I do it differently, not for the sake of being different, but for the sake of being me. For example, I have my own podcast and I decided to do it on the plane, because nobody's doing that and because I travel a lot. I travel with my husband, with Adam every single week, well, not now of course, because we’re in the middle of the coronavirus. Until three weeks ago, we were traveling every single week, maybe three, five times in a week. We spend so much time on airplanes that we decided to launch a podcast that we called it From the Plane.

We bought a small mic that we plug into our phone and we just record our conversations. People are loving our podcast, just because it's so different and because we're not trying to be perfect. We don't care about perfect audio, or people not talking. We have people talking all around us. We have babies crying. We have people sneezing and that is exactly what makes our podcast different and special and more authentic. It's a matter of looking inside and searching for those questions within yourself, instead of in Google.

[0:48:04.8] MB: The perspective of not worrying about being perfect and giving yourself permission to fail, having some self-compassion, to me that's such an important piece of dealing with your fears. It's interesting, because I've always found it to be a little bit of a paradox in the sense that the best way to conquer fear is just to start facing your fears, because as soon as you do that, you realize that your fears are ghosts. They're not real. It's not as bad. It's not even close to as bad as you think it might be. Until you're willing to just do that, with the first domino, with the first time, with the first experience, you're trapped at a prison of your own making.

[0:48:43.0] MP: I like the domino effect. It hits home. It's just like that. You face one, you're like, “It's not that bad. Let me try it again and then again. It's not that bad. Let me try it again.” You just go on and on.

[0:48:54.2] MB: Yeah. I mean, that's definitely been my experience in terms of you start with one little thing and then it comes back to what we're talking about earlier, facing these little battles every single day, whether it's being scared to hold a cat, or whatever else. You start with those little things. Then before you know it, you're pushing yourself so much further than you ever thought you possibly could.

[0:49:12.5] MP: Exactly.

[0:49:13.4] AF: Michelle, I'm going to ask for a little bit of personal help here. It’s written a roundabout way, but I know you've spoken about how fear can be generational. I'd love if you can dig into that a little bit more and Matt and I both have young children. I'm curious to know how as a parent can we overcome the urge to instill the same fears that we had, or that we might have in our kids?

[0:49:35.7] MP: Well, that's a great question and definitely, yes. I have to say first that I am not a parent, but I am a daughter and I experienced how my grandparents carried on their fears to my mom and then to me. Because my grandparents come from the Holocaust, so they are Holocaust survivors that moved to Venezuela in the 40s, late 40s after the war, early 50s, not sure the year. Then they had my mom. Then they raised her with so many fears from the war, because the worst that could happen is exactly what happened to them. Then that's how they raised my mom with those beliefs that the worst that can happen is going to happen.

She grew up being very negative in that way, always expecting the worst. Then she raised me just like that, because those were the tools that she had. That's why I grew up being very fearful myself, but at the same time there's something within me and I think it's my ambition perhaps that I think comes from my dad's side that wanted to win over those fears. Now I realize that my mom, the fact that she never faced a fear in front of me is exactly what made me choose again and again, not to face my fears for the first 25 years of my life, because I was too comfortable and I was like, “That's easy.” You just say, “I'm afraid of it,” and nobody bothers you again with that. Cool. I started using that too much in my life.

For example with my friends went backpacking through Europe. I was like, “No, I'm afraid of that.” They're like, “Okay.” They just went without me. I never went camping. I missed out on so many things growing up, because of that, because I was imitating my mom's behavior. Now what I been studying this a lot and trying to understand how that works because it is not about not facing your fears in front of your kids and it's also not about pretending to be fearless.

If you as a parent don't want to show your fears to your kid and you're always pretending that you're not afraid of anything, so they shouldn't be, then they won't be able to relate to you. Because fear is so natural and they will experience fear. I think the best thing you can do is to acknowledge their fears and to acknowledge your fears and then face them together. If you can tell your kids when you are afraid to do something and then you still do it and you ask them to join you and they know how afraid you are, for example, of donating blood and then you ask them to go with you and say, “Hey, I'm very afraid of doing this, but I think it's the right thing. Can you come with me, so you can encourage me to face my fear?”

Bring them into the experience. Show them your courage. There's nothing more empowering than that. That's what I did with my project. I was not really trying to inspire anybody as I was facing my fears on YouTube. I was not telling people, “You should go and face your fears.” I would never say that. I was just being terrified on camera every day facing my own fears. That is exactly what inspired people to go after their own fears. That is what I plan to do with my kids once I have kids in my home.

[0:52:57.5] AF: Yeah. I think that's so powerful. I mean, I love the idea of acknowledging the fear together and then bringing someone into the situation, in this case, obviously we're talking about a child. I think weirdly, I'm thinking back into my life and things that I did with my parents that I might have been afraid of at the time and things that we did together. Weirdly, there are a lot of the things that despite being really young, I actually remember. I think that's because I was part of that experience.

[0:53:23.2] MP: Yeah, totally. For example, my mom tells me things like, “Michelle, I always told you to go face your fear. I always told you to go pet the dog and sleep on your friend's house, all the things.” I’m like, “Yeah, you told me all of those things, but I never watched you face one of your fears, so what are you actually telling me with your actions?”

[0:53:43.1] AF: Yeah, that's huge.

[0:53:44.8] MB: For somebody who's been listening to this conversation that wants to take action, face their fears to begin this journey in some way, what would be one action step that you would give them to start down that path?

[0:53:58.0] MP: I would say, to find an accountability partner. Because it’s really hard to do this on your own. It doesn't have to be your spouse. My husband is Adam and we work together. We do everything together. They're like, “Do you need an Adam to face your fears and build an empire and do all these things that you're doing?” I'm like, “Yeah, you do.” It doesn't have to be your spouse. It can be a friend, it could be a business partner, it can be your parents, it could be your sister, it could be anybody that wants to be there for you, someone that wants the best for you and someone that wants to see you succeed more than they want to take care of you.

Because also, we have those people in our life that for example, when I told my mom that I was about to face all of my fears, she was like, “No way. No. I don't allow it.” I'm like, “I’m not asking for your permission. I'm letting you know I'm facing my fears and I have the support of my husband to do it, so I want to become a braver person myself. I'm doing this for myself. I'm doing this for my future kids. I'm doing it for my spouse and I'm doing it for you as well.” Because my ultimate goal was to also encourage my mom to be braver.

I'm so proud of her right now for all the fears that she's been overcoming, because of me and my inspiration. The advice that I would give people is find an accountability partner, someone that is there for you when you are way too afraid to take action. It is scary to share our big dreams with other people and our big plans, but if we don't do it, then we're more likely to not take action.

We're more likely to regret it before we do it, because nobody knows. It's just us. Yeah, I think we don't need to do that and that's it. That's what we tell ourselves. If more people know about it, people that want really to see you succeed, then they will be there to push you and make sure that you don't feel alone and that they encourage you when you need it the most. That is a good idea always to have an accountability partner.

Then the other one is to have a higher purpose, higher than yourself. Maybe you're doing this for someone that you care so much about. For example, I face my fear because I wanted to become a braver mom whenever I have kids. That is a greater purpose other than just myself. Those are my two advices that I would say that are very helpful.

[0:56:16.4] MB: Michelle, where can people find the book and your work online?

[0:56:21.6] MP: Well, you can find me on Instagram. I practically live there. My handle is @HelloFears. I post content daily. I challenge my audience daily and I challenge myself also and share those experiences with people, because there's like I was saying, nothing more encouraging to see someone else to face their own fears and lead by example. That and then if you want to find the book, go to hellofearsbook.com and you'll find all the information that you need there. It's on Amazon and everywhere where books are sold.

[0:56:54.4] MB: Well, Michelle. Thank you so much for coming on the show for sharing your journey and some great wisdom and really good insights into facing your fears. I don't know about you, Austin, but I really enjoyed this conversation.

[0:57:05.9] AF: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, so applicable for the audience, Michelle. I mean, much continued success. Obviously, we recommend everybody go check out the book. This was a very interesting, entertaining and very actionable conversation. Keep up the good work. I think the world needs people like you out there.

[0:57:19.2] MP: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation too.

[0:57:22.7] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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

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

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

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

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

The Secret To Growing Any Business, Building Unicorns & Crazy Ideas with Square Co-Founder Jim McKelvey

In this episode, we share the universal secret to growing any business, how to build a unicorn startup, what the real definition of an entrepreneur is and much more with our guest Jim McKelvey

Jim McKelvey is an American serial entrepreneur, artist, and philanthropist, best known for his popular invention, Square. He has founded around seven businesses in the technology and craft field. In addition to Square, he founded the non-profit LaunchCode and Third Degree Glass Factory. Jim is also an author having written two computer programming textbooks while in school, the bestselling book, The Art Of Fire, on glass art and most recently The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time, on entrepreneurship and creating lasting world-changing businesses.

• From glass blowing to co-founding Square - the winding path that leads to the co-founding of one of the most successful Silicon Valley unicorns. 

• It’s possible to do something for which you have no official qualifications. 

• “None of the stuff I’ve done have I had any formal qualifications or credentials for."

• You will almost always be unqualified if you're doing something truly interesting. Something that has not actually been done before. 

• Almost everything in business is a copy of something else - good results mostly come from replicating what has already been done and been learned from others. 

• In business, most of the time the best thing to do is to find an expert and teach them how to do it, or steal their ideas, or hire them.

• Copying and replication is the smartest business decision you can make, 99% of the time… BUT if you’re doing something that is NEW, that has never been done before.. you can’t copy... at that moment you feel supremely unqualified and alone. 

• “Does anyone know how to land a 737?” That’s the feeling of being a true innovator and solving the toughest business problems. 

• It’s possible to be successful even with ZERO qualifications, but you have to get over the fear of being unqualified to do something. If you’re doing ANYTHING interesting, you won’t be able to copy anyone else. 

• The great universal secret to any existing business - the answer to almost every single business problem.

• There is no checklist for something no one has done before.

• COPY!!! Do what everyone else does. Figure out what everyone is doing to do the same damn thing. Hire their people away. Copy their stuff. That ALMOST ALWAYS works… the ONLY time that doesn’t work is if you’re trying to do something truly NEW.

• Failure is the basis of all comedy. When you do something that’s never been done before, you have to fail. 

• “Maps are for tourists, not explorers"

• “What is an entrepreneur” vs a businessperson and why is entrepreneur such an overused word today?

• “Intelligently copying what has been done before is a good formula for getting rich."

• Thrill and terror are two sides of the same coin of entrepreneurship.

• The word entrepreneur is not always a compliment. It’s someone out on the fringe, pushing the boundaries, solving the unsolvable problems. 

• “I love problems because problems are easy to see."

• Opportunities are hard to see, but problems are very visible.

• How to discover the “perfect problems” that you can found a business to solve. 

• You have to work on a problem that you CARE about.

• If you’re doing something truly entrepreneurial - you will be lonely, you will get negative feedback, people will ignore you and ridicule you.

• Should you be bold or should you focus on humble perseverance?

• There’s a HUGE difference between being BOLD and being COMFORTABLE when you’re SCARED - being comfortable with discomfort.

• Don’t believe entrepreneurial hero stories about boldness - it’s much better to get comfortable with being scared. 

• Don’t worry about overcoming your fear - the trick is to begin the journey.

• A lot of the business advice you hear is crap.

• Our evolutionary relationship to fear short circuits our brain’s perception of threats - the reality is that in business you won’t die, so get comfortable being scared and take the risk. 

• There is no specific advice on being an entrepreneur - by definition, there is no advice that you can be given if you’re solving a problem that hasn’t been solved before. 

• Do something that makes you really uncomfortable. Hang out with your enemies, put yourself in situations that make you uncomfortable. 

• If you’re going to be an entrepreneur, almost by definition you will be uncomfortable.

• What is an innovation stack and how can you use it to solve new problems?

• How did Square survive an attack from Amazon?

• Amazon’s playbook for killing any company

• Undercut the competitor by 30%, copy their product, and watch them die. 

• You won’t find one new solution - you will find a stack of innovative solutions that all work together. You will have a chain of problems you have to solve that all eventually stack together into a competitive and differentiated business. 

• Homework: Look at your personal energy score. Figure out what increases your energy, which decreases your energy, and does more of what increases it and less of what decreases it. 

• When does an entrepreneur fail? 

• “Dude, the product is never gonna work."

Thank you so much for listening!

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

The Science of Success is brought to you by MetPro a world-renowned concierge nutrition, fitness & lifestyle coaching company. Using Metabolic Profiling, MetPro’s team of experts analyze your metabolism and provides an individualized approach to obtaining your goals.

Science of Success listeners receive a complimentary Metabolic Profiling assessment and a 30-minute consultation with a MetPro expert. To claim this offer head to metpro.co/success

MetPro’s team of experts will guide you through personalized nutrition and fitness strategies and educate you about how your body responds to macro and micro-adjustments to your fitness, nutrition, and daily routine.

Starting your own business is an incredible feat. 
It's a labor of love which makes getting through the late nights, early mornings, and occasional all-nighter so worth it. It's no secret that business owners are incredibly busy!

So why not make things easier?

FreshBooks invoicing and accounting software is simple, intuitive, and keeps you incredibly organized. Create and send professional invoices in thirty seconds. FreshBooks helps you get paid two times faster with automated online payments.

Go to FreshBooks.com/science today and enter THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESS in the how did you find us section and get started today!!

Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

General

• Jim’s Website and Wiki Page

• Jim’s LinkedIn and Twitter

Media

• STL Today - “Square's Jim McKelvey signed to write 'how I did it' book” by Joe Holleman

  • “Wash U renaming engineering school after Square co-founder Jim McKelvey” By Jacob Barker

• INC - “Why Square's Co-Founder Says Be Wary of Advice From Successful People” by Lisa Calhoun

• Washington University in St. Louis - “New era in engineering to begin at Washington University” By Julie Hail Flory

  • “The problem solver” By Terri Nappier

• Bold Business - “Bold Leader Spotlight: Jim McKelvey, Founder Of Square, LaunchCode, And Invisibly” by John R. Miles 

• Missouri Business Alert - “Jim McKelvey’s startup Invisibly raises $20 million” by Elliot Bauman

• E&T - “‘Shut up and build it!’ - Jim McKelvey, Square co-founder, on bringing ideas to life” By Jonathan Wilson

• SigEp - “Square co-founder Jim McKelvey won’t quit” By Beaux Carriere

• Entrepreneur - “Persevere, Laugh at the Absurd and Let Nothing Get on Your Nerves” by Jim McKelvey

• TechCrunch - Articles tagged Jim McKelvey

• [Podcast] Dorm Room Tycoon - Learning to be a Craftsman with Jim McKelvey, Square

• [Podcast] Unfiltered - Jim McKelvey: Lessons from serial entrepreneur and "renaissance man" with $2.9B IPOs and $27B valuations

Videos

• Missouri Partnership - Jim McKelvey Talks About Square - Past, Present and Future

• WashU Engineering - 2019 McKelvey Engineering Recognition

• Bold Business - Square Founder Jim McKelvey Discusses the Characteristics that Make a Leader BOLD!!! (Subtitled)

  • Square's Jim McKelvey Unveils the new Model for Digital Content Monetization - INVISIBLY (Subtitled)

• Presidents Institute - Jim McKelvey on "Fear Drives Innovation"

  • Jim McKelvey on "Things I’m Unlearning"

• Webrazzi - Lies of Success - Jim McKelvey @Webrazzi14

• The Aspen Insitute - edX CEO Anant Agarwal and Square and Launch Code Co-Founder Jim McKelvey

Books

• The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time by Jim McKelvey

• ART OF FIRE by James McKelvey

Episode Transcript

Announcer: Welcome to the Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

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

In this episode, we share the universal secret to growing any business, how to build a unicorn startup with a real definition of entrepreneur is and much more with our guest, Jim McKelvey.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous interview, we shared the power of the experimental mindset. How can you use experiments to make better decisions and improve your life? What makes for good experiments? We shared all of this and much more with our previous guest, Stefan Thomke.

Now for our interview with Jim.

[0:01:38.4] MB: Jim McKelvey is an American serial entrepreneur, artist and philanthropist, best known for his popular invention, Square. He has founded seven businesses in the technology and craft field. In addition to Square, he founded the non-profit LaunchCode and Third Degree Glass Factory. Jim is also an author, having written to computer programming textbooks while in school, the best-selling book The Art of Fire on Glass Art and most recently, The Innovation Stack: Building an Unbeatable Business One Crazy Idea at a Time.

Jim, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:11.1] JM: Thank you, Matt. This is going to be fun.

[0:02:13.0] MB: I'm so excited to have you on the show today. You have an incredible career filled with so many interesting stories and a fascinating journey from the world of glassblowing, to the Federal Reserve, to co-founding Square, which is a massively successful company. Tell me a little bit about your story and your background and how you've woven together so many disparate and different things.

[0:02:35.4] JM: There was no plan. I went into college not knowing anything I was going to be doing. I had a conversation with my father, where he recommended that I not be an engineer, because he thought engineering was too solitary of practice. He thought I'd be more interested in liberal arts. He recommended I study economics. I said, “Okay, dad. I'll be an economist.”

I studied economics. Got halfway through my freshman year and realized that econ was boring and it was actually more solitary than the engineering classes, because the problems that the engineers were working on required teams to get them right, whereas, the econ stuff was easy enough that you could do it by yourself.

Ironically, I found that doing really hard science was a more social activity, so I gravitated towards that and ended up doing all sorts of crazy stuff during college that I had no qualifications to doing. My God. I wrote a couple of computer textbooks. I guess, you mentioned those, when I was a freshman in college.

I was not one of these kids that loved computers when I was a kid. I never played with computers. I never had a computer. I basically saw my first computer when I got to college and I was so overwhelmed by how difficult it was to work with these machines. Then on top of that, I was really frustrated, because the professor from my class had written the textbook and this thing was just garbage. It was terrible and it was out of date and the programming examples didn't work. I was so pissed off that I said to my roommate, “I could write a better textbook than this.” He turns around and he goes, “Well, why don't you?” I was like, “Okay, I will.”

Basically on a bet, I decided to replace my professor’s textbook with a textbook that I have written. Yeah, again, I had no qualifications for this. It turns out, it's not that hard to write a programming textbook. You just have to do a lot of work. You don't have to come up with a plot, there's no characters. If you're willing to just grind it out and figure out what works on the computer and what doesn't, anybody could do this.

I did it. The book got published and this was back in the days before self-publishing. You had to actually interest real publishing house. The publishing house took the book; asked for another book. By the time I was a sophomore, I had more publications than a lot of my professors. It was this really early lesson that it's possible to do something for which you have no official qualification.

That's in the base note of my career, because again if you – Matt, if you think about all the stuff you listed out, none of the stuff that I've done have I had an official credential to do. I mean, even these days. I'm on the Federal Reserve. I vote on interest rates and I've got an undergraduate degree in economics. I mean, let me vote on interest rates. I don't have a PhD, or a master's degree. I couldn't draw the Phillips Curve if I had to. It's amazing to me the things that a person can accomplish, even without an official credential.

That's the thing that ties my career together. Then glassblowing was something else I did. I've done it for years. I'm actually heading into the studio right after this interview and got to make some Christmas gifts. Wow, it's just this crazy, weird hodgepodge of stuff that I do.

[0:06:00.9] MB: So interesting. I love this concept of not having the qualifications, or doing things without being worried or concerned about whether or not you're qualified to do it. In some ways, it seems that stifles so many people from even trying, or beginning their journey.

[0:06:17.1] JM: Oh, absolutely. One of the reasons I wrote this book – as a matter of fact, the primary reason I wrote this book was to reach out and tell people, “You will almost always be unqualified if you're doing something interesting.” By interesting, I mean something that has not been done before. Because think about it, okay, most of the stuff that we do in our lives is a copy of something else. As a matter of fact, that's what school is, right? You most of the time in school are learning to do what other people have learned to do. Good behavior and good grades come from replicating stuff that has been learned by others.

If you think about what we do in business, most of the time the smart thing to do is find an expert, find somebody who solved that problem. Hire McKinsey. Get somebody who has done what you need to do and have them teach you how to do it, or steal their ideas, or I mean, replication, replication, copy, copy, copy. This is the base note of our lives. We are copying machines.

I've got a little daughter at home, she's 2. She is just a sponge. She copies anything we say, anything we do. You want to make a kid hop in a circle with one hand above your head, like at my house, you just do that and this little girl will come in, just hop for no reason in a circle with one hand raised, because that's what humans and animals and businesses do. We copy stuff. It's the thing that is the smartest decision. We copy because it works. Sometimes if you are doing something that is new, that has never been done before. If you're trying to solve a problem that nobody else has solved, you don't get to copy.

At that moment, you are going to feel supremely unqualified. You will be one of those – Remember those old movies where the pilots die and they run into the back of the plane and goes, “Does anyone know how to land a 737?” I mean, not a 737 MAX, but a normal 737. That's everybody's fear is that they're going to be called out of the captain and put in the cockpit. The stewardess is going to say, “Land this sucker,” right?

What I've learned is just through this weird – I wouldn't even call it a career. Whatever I've done, the different types of work I've done, I've learned that it's possible to be successful if you're not qualified. The reason I wrote the book is I want to encourage people to get over that fear of being unqualified, because if you are doing anything interesting, by definition you don't get to copy the solution. Therefore, you were going to feel unqualified. In other words, you're trying to figure out something that nobody's figured out before. The first thing that's going to hit, at least, I mean, just speaking from mind first, the first thing that hits with me is this little voice in my head that says, “Jim, you have no idea what you're doing. You have never done this before. You have no experience.”

The first thing I always do is I look for somebody who's done it before and I try to copy what they've done. Sometimes there is nobody. When we were starting Square, nobody had built a payment system for tiny, tiny merchants and individuals. It just didn't exist. Jack and I, we’re out on our own. We had nobody to copy. When we were starting a launch code, which is this non-profit that's actually now around the nation and various cities, but we were trying to solve a problem that nobody had ever been able to solve before.

At my current company, Invisibly, we're tackling this problem that nobody's been able to fix this. We don't even know if the solution is possible, but we know that we are supremely unqualified to do what we're doing.

[0:10:12.3] MB: So interesting. There's a number of really important points that come out of that. One, which I thought was such a fascinating insight from the book was I think you call it the answer to almost every business problem is copying and replication.

[0:10:25.2] JM: Yes, yes. The book. Okay, so this is great. I wrote the book completely. I didn't know if it was any good or not. I didn't even know if I was going to publish it. At some point, I was like, “Okay, I got to show some publishers.” I got a book agent; great guy, Jim Levine. He took me around to all these fancy publishing houses.

One publishing house wouldn't even read it, because they'd flip through the book and there were no checklists. They're like “We can't publish a book without checklists.” I was like, “Wait a second. Did you read it?” They go, “No, we didn't have to read it. There were no checklists.” I was like, “Wait a second. How do I give you a checklist for something that nobody has done?” The editor just looked at me and she's like, “If you want a business book, you have to have a checklist.” There is no checklist in my book.

I was feeling guilty as I was writing it. I was like, “Oh, my God. I got to give them one thing.” I gave the universal checklist, which is a one bullet point checklist to solve any problem in any existing business. Here it is. This is the great secret. The Science of Success Pod, you will live up to your title better than you have ever lived up to the title of this whole series at this moment. I am about to reveal the universal secret of success in any existing business. Copy. Just do what everybody else does. That works. Figure out what everybody else is doing, do the same damn thing. Hire their people away, copy their stuff. Just do the same thing. That almost always works.

The only time that doesn't work is if you are trying to do something truly new. What I spend the rest of the book is for those people who don't want that one bullet point checklist, because let me tell you, Matt. When you are doing something that is different from what has been done before, it feels so weird and a different set of rules apply. The rules that you're used to using, the ones that serve you every day as a human and as a person who's working, or as a friend, as a family member, all the stuff that we do has this base note of copying.

We are so comfortable copying. We are so good at it. We are literally genetically programmed to do it. That when you stop doing it, you are going to feel strange. I wanted to write a book for those people who have the ability to do something new. I mean, really new, and just feel weird, because they are going to feel weird. I always feel weird doing it, but I figured maybe if I find some examples and give some principles and tell some funny stories, because believe me, when you do stuff that has not been done before, failure is your friend and failure is funny. Failure is the basis of all comedy.

Look at any great comedic persona. You know what they're talking about? The time it didn't work. When it works, that's boring. Boy, sometimes I give speeches and I always give my audience this choice. I say, “Would you rather have me tell you the story about how Jack Dorsey and I finally after a year and a half of trying, convinced MasterCard to change their rules on card-present aggregation,” which was the single most important decision that allowed Square to exist. I mean, if MasterCard had not done that, I wouldn't have a company right now, there would be millions of merchants who couldn't process credit cards.

That was the single make or break decision. That was probably the single biggest business triumph in my life and a great success. It's an interesting story. I can tell you that story, or I can tell you the story about the time I failed to notice that one of my blind dates had an Adam's apple. Which story do you want to hear, right? Failure is this funny companion. In the book, I talk a lot about failure, talk about how people throughout history have dealt with it and I try to keep it funny.

[0:14:39.8] MB: Yeah, that's a great point about how failure is the foundation of comedy. The overarching point you're making around not having a map, not having a checklist. If you're going to truly innovate, if you're going to solve as you call it and I wanted to get to this more as well, a perfect problem. The quote that really jumped out at me from one of the early parts of the book was this quote that “Maps are for tourists, not explorers.”

[0:15:06.0] JM: Yeah. I mean, we tend to confuse words in the English language and I think we tend to inflate words. Like, “I'm going to explore Lake Tahoe this weekend. No, I'm not. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go to Lake Tahoe this week, okay.” Tahoe has been explored. Tahoe is in Google Maps. It's right there. People have been there.

There may be some rain forests in some country that I couldn't find on a map that needs exploring. There's certainly parts of the ocean floor that I need exploring, but most of what we do as travelers is be tourists. I live in the city where probably one of the greatest explorations of all times began. Lewis and Clark started in St. Louis, Missouri to map the western part of the United States. They did not have a map when they started, okay. They had a river and a compass. A bunch of guys, many of whom were going to die, okay. That's what it's like exploring. You don't get a map. If you're an explorer, it's a different type of traveling, okay. As you go further into the wilderness, you're drawing the map as you go.

[0:16:26.2] MB: I thought that was just such a powerful image and analogy. It really gets to your definition of entrepreneur and entrepreneurship, which is quite distinct and comes back to what you said a moment ago about how words today have had their meanings diluted.

[0:16:44.3] JM: Yes. I needed a word to describe something other than business, a business person, somebody who's a business person. What's a business person? What do you call somebody who doesn't copy in the world of business? Most of the time, you call them a failure, right? Most of the time if you don't copy what works, you end up dead. There is a small group of people who don't copy and survive. Those people, I didn't have a word for.

I started looking at my history. It turns out that the original use of the word ‘entrepreneur’ was that meaning. The entrepreneur of 150 years ago when Joseph Schumpeter, whose an economist that basically gave us that word entrepreneur, he started using that word. The reason he started using that word was to describe this weird behavior. It was not business as usual, because business as usual is very rigid. It is slight refinement. It is replication. It's smart. By the way, I'm not knocking people who intelligently copy what's been done before. That is a good formula for getting rich. That is a good formula for success.

What if you don't do that and what do we call that person? It turns out that the original definition of entrepreneur was somebody who did crazy things. I looked at the word ‘entrepreneur’ in its current usage and I was like, “Oh, my God. Everybody at my world uses business person and entrepreneur interchangeably.” I've got a friend. He started a coffee shop, okay and he says, “I'm a coffee entrepreneur.” By today's definition, he's absolutely right. He started a coffee chain. You know how many other people have started coffee shops? More than 10, okay. More than 10 people, more than a 100, probably more than a thousand.

He's doing something and he is starting a business, but he's starting a business that is known and he can order his cups and the La Marzocco coffee steamer machine. I don't know that much. I'm not a coffee person. Believe me, there's almost a checklist for what he is doing. I needed to use the word ‘entrepreneur’, but I needed to use it in its archaic definition.

Throughout the book, I use the word entrepreneur, but I spend a paragraph and a half basically saying, look, when you read this word, I don't want you to think business. I want you to think crazy. Okay, I want you to think somebody that people are pointing to and laughing at and ridiculing and going, “What the hell were they thinking getting people to ride in strangers’ cars?” I remember when Uber was starting. Uber and Square started at the same time and they're our roommates and we were in the same building in California and we bumped into them, a bunch in New York.

I mean, they were one of our classmates, right? People don't remember what it was like in the early days of Uber, because these days everybody takes Uber and they take Lyft. You're totally comfortable getting in the car with a stranger. When I was a kid, they would tell us at home and in school, “Never get into a stranger's car.” That's what they teach you from the time you can walk, “Don't get in the car with a stranger.” If you did, you were a hitchhiker, right? You were a hitchhiker at your peril.

We first saw Uber and Lyft coming on the scene and a company called Sidecar, which nobody remembers Sidecar, but these guys were radical because their idea was well, you can get in the car with anybody. They were like, “No, you can't. That's hitchhiking.” We thought they were crazy. That's what I want the word ‘entrepreneur’, at least for the purposes of our conversation and the book that I wrote to be used in that, because I need a way to label that person. Because that person who's doing those crazy things has a totally different set of rules that apply, and learning those rules and sharing those rules is what I wanted to do.

[0:21:00.3] MB: I thought it was a great perspective. Using the word, subbing in the word ‘crazy’ instead of the word ‘entrepreneur’ helps to break apart the rigid and modern definition of it and really open up the perspective of realizing that the innovation you're talking about is really more somebody who's way on the fringe, who's pushing the limits, who's doing something that you don't – by definition, don't even know if it's possible to solve this problem.

[0:21:24.6] JM: Yeah, yeah. That's part of the thrill and it's part of the terror. Thrill and terror are really close. Thrill is just terror that's been constrained a little bit. It's been contained. Terror is when it breaks out of its container and just trashes your brain. Yes, I use the word ‘crazy’, partially because we haven’t denatured the word ‘crazy’, okay. The word ‘entrepreneur’ has been so recycled by industry and by well, frankly, the publishers of the world, of the podcasts of the world and the people of the world who are selling products to people who want to be entrepreneurs or want to be business people.

It's like saying, “I don't want to be a tourist. I want to go on an adventure. Well, really. Do I? Because I'm traveling with my family this week and I don't want to die, or have one of my kids eaten by some creature. I probably don't want an adventure. I want to do something cool and I'd like to think of myself as an adventurer, but you know what in the end of the day, I'm probably going to sleep someplace that's got a pillow.”

Even though we've worn out the word ‘entrepreneur’, the word ‘crazy’ still has this negative connotation. Now some people are like, “I like being crazy.” I mean, if you're talking about the word ‘crazy’, it's not always a compliment, right? I like this idea that we still have this word that has a little edge to it and a little bit of the being ostracized, that little idea of being kicked out. “You're not part of this club. You're not behaving like the rest of us, so you know what? You're not welcome here. You're crazy.”

We venerate these people in hindsight. When they succeed we say, “Oh, hey. Great idea. We were with you all along.” You know what? They weren’t. They show up when the exploration, when the adventure is over.

[0:23:25.0] AF: What's up, everybody? This is Austin Fable with the Science of Success. This episode of the Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at MetPro. What is MetPro, you ask? It's a world-renowned concierge, nutrition, fitness and lifestyle coaching company.

Right now, Science of Success listeners can receive a complimentary metabolic profiling assessment and a 30-minute consultation with a MetPro expert. To claim this offer today, just head to metpro.co, that’s M-E-T-P-R-O.co/success and you'll get the complimentary metabolic profiling assessment and a 30-minute consultation with an expert who's there to help you achieve your fitness goals.

Your metabolism, see what most people understand is it's constantly changing; it's adapting to your environment. Without identifying your specific starting point, it can be really hard to follow the right strategy. That's where MetPro comes in. If you want to learn more, we've recently released an interview with Angelo Poli, who's the Founder and CEO of MetPro. He is an internationally recognized fitness and nutrition expert, the founder of MetPro. The conversation was great. We went really deep into not only MetPro and what it is and how it can help our listeners in the world at large, but also into the science of nutrition and really the science of accountability.

One of the biggest things that I loved about MetPro was how accountable they held me. My coach was working with me every day via text, via e-mail, via phone calls to constantly tweak my diet and make sure that I was getting the right nutrition to meet my goals.

Again, Science of Success listeners are going to receive a complimentary metabolic profiling assessment and a 30-minute consultation with a MetPro expert. To claim this offer, just head to metpro.co. That’s M-E-T-P-R-O.co/success and get started today.

[0:25:18.6] MB: That makes me come back to the other side of the coin, or the other piece of this equation which is to be an entrepreneur, you have to be solving a problem that hasn't been solved, something that's on the frontier and as you call it, a perfect problem. Tell me a little bit more about what that is and how to discover one.

[0:25:38.9] JM: Okay. I talk in the book about my concept of the perfect problem. The perfect problem, it was just a thought experiment that I did. I said, okay, imagine every problem in the world, okay. There are lots of problems. I love problems, because problems are easy to see. If you say, “Here's an opportunity. I can't tell you if it's an opportunity or not.” If you say, “Jim, this is a problem.” I will say, “Oh, yes. That's a problem. Oh, no. It is.”

Problems are these beautiful, discrete things. Problems have this beautiful characteristic of being visible. Then I said, “Okay, let's consider all the problems in the world, okay.” Many of those problems have already been solved, okay. For instance, I'm going on vacation this weekend. I'm going to go to Lake Tahoe. A problem I am expecting to have in Lake Tahoe is I'm going to need food, okay. I expect that somebody in the Greater Tahoe area has solved the problem of feeding me and my family. I just assumed that's a solved problem. Haven't been there, okay. Can't prove it. Well, I guess I could probably prove it if I could go online. I'm pretty darn sure that that is a solved problem.

Imagine every problem in the world that's already been solved doesn't count, because if you want to solve one of those problems, all you got to do is find somebody who solved it and copy what they did. Those are copyable solutions, so let's eliminate those. Now, say those problems are on the left side, because I’m a visual person. Those are on the left side of the screen. Okay, now over on the right side of the screen we're going to throw every problem that is currently unsolvable. “I'm sorry, we do not know how to fix that. We do not know how to cure that cancer. We do not know how to make that car levitate. We do not know how to clean up politics.” They’re the unsolved problems, okay.

Then if you eliminate the problems that are unsolvable, they just – we don't have the tools yet to solve them. What you're left with in the middle are what I call the perfect problems. These are problems that are solvable problems, but their solution cannot be copied. In other words, this is something that you, or your team, or some other group of dedicated, hard-working people could solve if they tried. They can't solve it by copying somebody else's solution, but by God, if they try hard enough, those are solvable problems. That's what I focus on.

I look for these things called perfect problems. The perfect problem to me is something first of all, that you care about. To me, a perfect problem has this other criterion which is that you care deeply about it. Because if you're doing something that is entrepreneurial and entrepreneurial in the traditional sense of the world, i.e. you're doing something crazy, you are going to be very lonely and you're going to receive a lot of negative feedback and a lot of teasing and ridicule and basically, just people will ignore you. It's lonely and terrible.

You're going to need to sustain your energy through that period. Where does that energy come from? The answer that I found motivates most entrepreneurs is they care deeply about a problem and then they don't want to die, okay. Caring deeply about a problem is when Lewis and Clark say, “Okay, we are going to head west into this unknown territory. We don't know how big it is, we don't know how long it's going to take us. We're heading west, okay.”

Once you start on the path, then motivation is really simple. Don't die. What the hell is that? Oh, my God. It looks like a bear, but it's five times bigger than any bear we've ever seen. It's a grizzly bear. You've never seen a grizzly bear before, congratulations, here's a grizzly bear. You've got a new problem. You don't have any motivational issues, right? Run, shoot. I don't know. Outrun the other guy. Scale a tree. I don't know how you get away from the grizzly bear, but believe me, when Lewis and Clark first saw the grizzly bear, they didn't sit there and say, “Oh, let's have a motivational moment here.” They were like, “Run.”

You get this wonderful energy from a perfect problem that allows you to begin a journey. Then from there on, baby it's survival instinct. You just don't want to die. You refuse to give up and let the bear win.

[0:30:10.0] MB: That's a great analogy and reminds me of something you said in a speech a couple of years ago around the difference between being bold and humbly persevering, or humbly preserving.

[0:30:21.2] JM: Yeah. Here's the thing about being bold. I have never been bold. I may have been crazy, but I am not a bold person. I'm not a guy who does stuff that's risky. For instance, I fly planes. I'm a pilot and I have occasionally flown into situations where I was terrified, okay. If you're in a tiny little plane, 1 inch in, I mean, like crummy old plane from the 1960s, okay. It's a Mooney M20C. Great little plane. Really solid. Built during the space race. I mean, it's old, it’s clunky. It's not a good plane to fly into a storm with, okay. You're an idiot if you fly into a storm. You're an idiot if you fly near a storm.

One day I was an idiot. I got almost caught in a storm and I was terrified. I mean, just terrified. It turns out that I've done enough stuff in my life where I have been terrified, that I'm actually able to function even though I'm terrified. I was able to fly the plane not because I'm a bold pilot, but because I'm actually good at being a terrified pilot. If you scare the crap out of me and then say, “Here, Jim. Land this. Watch your airspeed, watch your altitude. Talk to the controllers. Get the plane on the ground safely. Get out of the situation. Even though my hands are sweating and I am probably as scared as I've ever been, I can still function.

I hear a lot of people give advice, sometimes from stage. I sometimes hear entrepreneurs, or people who have been very successful give advice to audiences and they tend to spin it a little differently. They tend to tell these hero stories about how they were so bold and how they were so brave and how when everyone turned against them, they didn't care. Well, I mean, I care, okay. I don't like that stuff.

What I've been able to do and recommend as a solution for those of us who are not bold is don't worry about being fearless. Don't worry about boldness. Don't worry about overcoming your fear. I would say the trick is to just begin, okay. Begin the journey. Understand that you will take that first step and the second step and the 27th step. At some point, you will be on the path. Once you're on the path, then the only question is will you keep going? When do you quit? At what point do you run out of energy, or resources? When do you give up?

If you don't quit, even though you're scared, you don't need to be bold. Boldness, done in or into it. You can be terrified. As long as you can function in a state of terror, that's fine. I tell this story often when I'm asked to give a speech about a time I was terrified and had to keep going. I guess, you saw one of those speeches. That's to me the essence of what the rest of us need in order to solve problems, because look, let me tell you this. This is the reason I love your podcast, okay. The people who listened to this podcast are interested in bettering themselves, they're interested in building new things, they're interested in somehow moving the world forward.

Now they may be interested in just moving their careers forward of copying and you get no judgment from me on that. That's cool. That works. By the way, you're smarter than those of us who are probably going to do stuff that might not work, okay? Now let me address that second group, the people who are going to do stuff that might not work. Because if you're in that group, you're going to feel really scared alone. I wanted to reach out to that group and say, “Look, a lot of the advice you hear is crap, okay? Because what about the person who has the ability to solve a perfect problem? They know what they want to do. They want to do it. They're going to go up against incredible odds and they're afraid.”

They say to themselves, “Oh, I'm probably not qualified to do this, because I'm afraid. I know when I'm afraid, I'm afraid for a good reason. I'm not going to get into a car with a stranger, or I'm not going to do this thing.” I'm telling you, that's a load of crap. You've been told your whole lives to be afraid for a very good reason. That fear saved your life hundreds of times growing up and it saves your life probably several times a year just as a sentient adult. Sometimes that fear stops you. The time to be afraid is when there is a known problem.

If it's an unknown problem, your fear is still there, but it is now irrational because how do you know? Nobody's been there. By the way in business, nobody kills you. Well, like in most businesses. Any business I get into – I almost got in a business that would kill me. I was in a roofing business for a while. That almost killed one of my guys. We fell through a roof, 20 feet through a roof. Bam!

I got out of that business, because like, “Oh, I don't want to do business that actually could literally kill me.” Square could have failed, but Jack and I would have still – we'd still be alive now. A lot of the stuff that I do, failure means well, the company loses a bunch of money and you've wasted a bunch of time. Usually doesn't mean accurate death, but again, your brain is not good at differentiating death fear from just lose your money fear, so I've tried to address that.

[0:35:59.9] MB: That's such a great point. The fact that the way that our brains evolved means that we can't really distinguish between existential mortal threats and business threats. It's such a great piece of advice to really start to get comfortable with discomfort and get comfortable being afraid when you're facing a tough business challenge, because not only are the stakes not as low as your brain often makes them feel like they are, but the reality is and this to me is one of the most important things that you've said in this whole conversation is this idea that there's a huge difference between boldness, or even what boldness looks like from the outside and with being comfortable with being uncomfortable.

[0:36:41.1] JM: Yeah. Yeah. Look, remember, a lot of people who preach how bold they are, I know some of these people, okay. I knew them before they were bold, okay, or at least I don't remember them being that way. There was a little bit of inflation. Once you're successful and they hand you the microphone, it's easy to be bold. Yeah, being comfortable with discomfort, that sounds like such a contradiction.

I think of Harry Houdini, one of the greatest escape artists in the history of the world; one of the greatest magicians. Fantastic guy. Used to lock himself up, have other people lock him up and then he would – he had this all these ways of picking locks and he was really good at getting out of locks. He would sometimes have them chained him up and chain him in a box and then throw the box in a river. Rivers are like 60-degree water sometimes, so he would have to deal with not only picking a lock underwater in the dark holding his breath, but he would have to do so in the cold, right?

Houdini as just a regular practice, every day took a cold shower. Have you ever taken cold shower, the first 10 times you do it, it sucks. If you do it every day, at some point you get used to it. You just go, “Oh. Well, now I'm going to take a shower.” The fact that the water is 50 degrees, doesn't freak you out anymore. Most of us never get to that point, because most of us live in civilized dwellings.

Houdini used his cold shower to become comfortable with a discomfort that he knew he was going to fix. Being thrown on the river, all of a sudden he doesn't have to deal with the fact that his body's cold, because he's like, “Oh, yeah. Just like in my morning. It's every day.” It's actually familiar to him. One of the things that I recommend and Matt, at the beginning I guess you asked me for some suggestions for your audience. I think okay, I really can't give you any specific advice on entrepreneurship, because by my definition, entrepreneurship is something that hasn't been done before, so I have nothing to offer you, like zero. I'm sorry. Nothing.

What I can tell you and this has been really effective for me personally is occasionally, do something that makes you really uncomfortable. Go talk to a stranger, or give a public speech, or dress in a way that nobody else is dressing, or go someplace that you don't like, or eat some weird food, travel, or hang out with your enemy, okay. I wish Washington would do this a little bit more. Why don't they have Republican and Democrat mixers anymore? I mean, just open up a bottle of gin and see if we could solve some problems.

I really believe that a person can get used to the feeling of discomfort and then the feeling of being able to still function when in that state. Believe me, if you're going to be an entrepreneur, you will be uncomfortable. Your physiology, your brain, the way you are evolved is going to tell you something is wrong. You need to have enough familiarity with that feeling to go, “Oh, well. That's just me being terrified. Oh, that's just me feeling really uncomfortable. Or oh, that's just my need for positive reinforcement.” You can get over that stuff.

Now I'm not saying being a total jerk, okay. I'm not saying going around and just making a public nuisance of yourself, but up to a point, yeah, sure. Do something that you're not going to just get heaps of praise for, because believe me, if you're one of these people and I'm one, okay. If you’re one of these people that craves praise, that lives for the, “Oh, that's a great job. We love it.” You're going to feel so weird when you actually start doing something that is new, because you're not going to get any praise. It just doesn't come. Nobody knows how to praise something that hasn't been done before. We lack the vocabulary.

[0:40:42.1] MB: I want to come back to the broader question, or problem around innovation. The name of the book is The Innovation Stack. Tell me a little bit about what is an innovation stack and how do you think about as somebody who's innovated and built incredible companies and organizations across a huge array of verticals and areas, how do you think about what innovation is and what is an innovation stack?

[0:41:08.4] JM: To me, the idea of the innovation stack is a series of independent and interdependent solutions to new problems. What I realized when I started doing my research was that this cascade of solutions was in itself, this massively powerful business tool. I discovered it by accident. What happened in our case was Square got attacked by Amazon. Amazon is the scariest company on the planet, as far as I'm concerned.

If you want to name a company that's going to attack you, it better not be Amazon. Amazon is the deadliest. I know Google's terrifying and Facebook can scare you if you’re a tech, but nobody has worked with Amazon, at least for us. Amazon did to us what they did to many other companies, and that is they copied our product, undercut our price by 30%, they are offered a bunch of features that we didn't have and then they said, “Okay, we're now going to take over your market.”

By the way, this works for Amazon in so many areas, okay. They are the kings of taking over other people's markets, to that formula that I just gave you. Oh, there. There's a second checklist, okay. If you happen to be Amazon, you now have – well, they already do that, but maybe somebody from Baidu's list, they can do the same; undercut the competitor by 30%, copy their product and watch them die, okay. Beautiful. There is another checklist for you.

They did this to us and we didn't die. As a matter of fact, we survived and eventually, Amazon retreated. When I saw this happen I was like “Why? How did we win? What happened?” That's actually the research that started this book, because I couldn't figure out why we won. I knew what we've done, but I didn't know why it worked. I started looking for other examples and looking and looking, looking. It took me three years to find a pattern. Then once I saw the pattern, I was like, “Oh, my God. The pattern is everywhere. It's so pervasive that it in fact exists at the beginning of almost any significant industry.”

What that is is a stack of innovations, a series of interrelated discoveries and new applications for old discoveries. For instance, the easy one is the Wright brothers and the airplane, right? When you think about the Wright brothers and you think about their airfoil designs, okay. The fact that they had a wind tunnel and could test their designs. A lot of history of the Wright brothers talks about how important that was. If you think about the airplane itself, there were so many things that they had to figure out and they do.

They had to figure out how to make lightweight structures. Well, they could copy some of that for gliders, but gliders behave differently because gliders didn't have to have engines, so they had to have an engine, but the engine had to be light enough to turn a propeller. What's a propeller? Because nobody have built a propeller before? They had to develop a propeller. Then once they got in the air, well they had to figure out how to steer and nobody knew how to steer, because nobody had been in the air before, so they had to figure out how to maneuver. Then well, they had to figure out how to land, because eventually, the plane had to come landing. Well, nobody figured how to land because nobody figured how to fly. You don't learn how to land until you first figured out how to fly. They had all this stuff at the same time.

What they ended up doing was not one or two things differently, but they did 15 or 20. That to me is what an innovation stack is. It's this inner-locking, interdependent solutions to problems. The way these evolved is so interesting. I look in the book at innovation stacks throughout history and starting a 100 years ago and then working up to present day, how these things tend to evolve in different parts of the world, at different points in history, in different industries, but they all follow these patterns. That's what we discussed. We talk about the patterns.

The hope is that somebody who is building a solution to a new problem, or to an unsolved problem, to a perfect problem is most likely not going to find one solution.

What they will do is they will start with one thing and they'll fix that. Then the solution to that problem will probably cause other problems, okay. Take the Wright brothers. Well, they need to make the plane move, so how are you going to do that? Well, how about our propeller? Okay, but, well now you got to turn the propeller so you got two sources of power, you either got the human, you can make him pump a bicycle pedal, I mean, and the Wrights were – they owned a bicycle shop, so they thought, “Well, human power works. Works for bicycles.”

If human power isn't enough, well, you have an engine. Well, now we got to make an engine. Okay, so they got an engine, problem with the engine is it weighs 50 pounds, so now your whole aircraft has to support 50 pounds of engine, so now your light little glider just turned into a much heavier structure and now your wing spars have to be heavier and all your control surfaces have to be stronger. Solving one problem causes other problems.

What happens in the course of solving these new problems issue end up in one of two places, you either end up dead, because you fail to solve some problem at some point. If the Wrights have not been able to strengthen the frame of the airplane to the point where it would support the engine, well the plane would not have flown. It would have broken in half, but they solved that. Then the other option is you end up solving all your problems and eventually, come up with this stack of interlocking innovation. That is what I call an innovation stack.

[0:46:53.3] MB: All right. Correct me if this is a mischaracterization, but the idea is that when you start to solve a really unique difficult, as you would call it a perfect problem, you initially come across one innovation that then unlocks another problem or challenge and then you create another innovation to solve that. Eventually, these stack together in a way that you've built a backbone, or some competitive differentiated structure, as you called an innovation stack, that then helps that business even stave off or defeat some brutal competition; in the case of Square, Amazon coming in and trying to destroy the company.

[0:47:30.1] JM: Oh, yeah. In every case where I studied one of these companies that had evolved in innovation stack, these companies were viciously attacked. I mean, what happened to Square, we were just attacked by Amazon, okay. That was not nearly as bad as what happened to some of the other companies that I studied. We weren't banished from our home country, okay. We weren't kicked out of the United States. That happened to one guy. We weren't attacked by the federal government, that happened to another guy. There are worse things than being attacked by Amazon and I Chronicle a lot of that.

The durability of the innovation stack is amazing. It's not just one thing leads to another, but it's this gnarly mess of interrelated defects, so that for instance if you make one change to one thing and that changes let's say, the way your customer has to use your product, well now you've changed how the customer interacts with your product and you may have changed the way the product is delivered, which may change something else. All of these things eventually interrelate.

[0:48:38.0] MB: There's some great examples. I know we're running out of time, but there's some really good examples in the book of how these innovations all stack together and build on one another from the cheap hardware component of Square and how that enabled you to have lower acquisition costs and lower barriers to onboarding, to Southwest and the standardization of their fleet and all of the synergies that came out of that. So many interesting insights from this business model, this perspective. It's a great way to approach solving any difficult problem.

[0:49:06.7] JM: Yeah. I think it's a good framework to have. I've got two young kids and the first thing about being a parent is your kids never listen to you. I thought, “Well, my kids are never going to listen to my advice. Maybe if I get hit by a bus or something happens to me and I wanted to pass one or two messages into the future to my children, this would be what I'd want to pass.” I'd like to have my children feel that they are powerful enough to do things that have not been done before. I wanted to pass that onto everybody, not just my kids. When I was writing it, I had this idea that somehow something had happened to me and these were the only words that I could leave behind.

That's a tough lesson to pass on. What I wanted to do was make it as funny as possible to read and then to confess that yeah. I mean, I've had a lot of stuff go right and hopefully, some more stuff in the future will go right. Boy, the real skill that I want to get people comfortable with is when things go wrong and how do you handle that and what do you do and what have people before in history done and how do they feel about it.

[0:50:23.1] MB: To bring this all the way back and you shared some great strategies throughout this conversation, but for listeners who want to concretely implement one thing that we've talked about today, what would be one piece of homework, or one action item that you would give them to start taking action in some way?

[0:50:41.3] JM: I don't think I've discussed this in the book. I honestly don't know. I don't know if this is in the book or not. It was there for a while and then I think I cut it out. I have this idea of personal energy score. I always think of things that I do, either increasing or decreasing my energy. For instance, get a good night's, sleep increase your energy, eat well, increase your energy, get some rest, hang out with people that make me laugh, increase energy. Go to long meetings, decrease energy, get a subpoena, decrease energy, be in a room that's too cold, decrease energy. I'm constantly looking at my day and my week and I guess, more than that as things that either add to my energy supply or decrease my energy supply.

By the way, if this is not in the book, I promise on JimMcKelvey.com, I will put this essay, because I know I've written about it. It's a great trick. Matt, you want to trick. Here's a trick; personal energy score. Manage your energy. The idea here is that you want to do things that increase your score and consciously catalog them. For instance, I have terrible taste in music. As a matter of fact, my taste in music is so apparently bad that I don't even tell people what I listen to. As a matter of fact, I'm embarrassed by it. I jealously hide my Spotify playlist sometimes. The songs I listen to psych me up. I will often listen to that if I'm going into anything. The idea is I just get a little more energy from. I get a little boost.

The real question of when does an entrepreneur fail, to me is when does the entrepreneur quit? It's the same question. Because I don't think of failure as this thing of oh, the product doesn't work. Dude, the product is never going to work, okay. If you're an engineer and I was trained as an engineer, you never get to work on a product that functions, right? If it functions, you hand it over to the marketing department. You're done as an engineer, okay. Me, my life, my career, I never get to work on stuff the functions, because if it functioned, I wouldn't be working on it.

What do you do in the case of a day when you have to constantly confront failure? The answer is you have to have enough energy to keep going. That energy comes from somewhere. The interesting trick is that sometimes, the cereal that I eat for breakfast, or the TV show that I watch the night before, or a conversation that I had with my wife a week ago is the thing that makes or breaks my performance on the job.

If I have this family problem and I'm worried about one of the kids, or I'm stressed out about the fact that my car doesn't start or something, there's a cost to that. I don't think of it as affecting my work performance, but it really does, because I come to the office with a little bit less energy and a little less resilience. Then some giant problem shows up and I'm depleted. I can't solve it. That problem just knocks me on my ass. I like this idea of a personal energy score, because it forces me to actively think about the things that I do that allow me to do the things that I do.

[0:54:07.2] MB: Jim, where can listeners find the book, find you and your work online?

[0:54:11.9] JM: I put up a website, JimMcKelvey.com. I apologize to everybody, I'm not on social media. Actually, one of the ways I manage my personal energy, getting back to personal energy, is I don't use social media. I don't use Facebook. I don't use Twitter. I don't use Instagram. I have a LinkedIn account. I don't use it ever. I mean, it's there and maybe once or twice a year I'll check it. I may have to start doing it now that I've written the book, so that may change by the time we broadcast this.

Generally, you're not going to find me on social media. Why? Because I find it drains my energy. I find it stresses me out. I find it's one of those things that at the end of the day has taken energy from me, as opposed to giving energy to me. If you want to find me, JimMcKelvey.com. Then the book is published by Penguin and I'm sure will be for sale on Amazon. This is the great irony of starting a book, where your lead story is being attacked by Amazon. Because writing it, I was like, “Oh, man. These guys are going to have to sell my book.” 

I didn't hold back. I figured they're big enough. They're not going to care what one guy says. Actually, Amazon was really cool about the way they handled one Square one, because after Square beat them, they mailed everybody a little Square reader. Great end to that story.

[0:55:28.9] MB: Yeah. That's just one of many really fascinating and great stories throughout the book. By the way, big respect for not being on social media. I think that's such a great decision and one that people are continuing to migrate towards in many ways as we see how dangerous it can be for us.

Either way, Jim, I just wanted to say thank you so much for coming on the show and for sharing all this wisdom.

[0:55:51.0] JM: Oh, Matt. Man, I love what you do. Your listeners may not know that you and I actually met under totally different circumstances in a different organization that I'm also part of, FINTOP Capital. Our paths have crossed and I've got tremendous respect from you and what you do and also for your listeners, because the people who listen to these things are trying to better themselves, are trying to do new things and they're trying to come up with ideas and that's admirable. Go. That's fantastic.

[0:56:17.9] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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

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

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

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

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

The Science of Sleep Revealed: How To Hack Your Sleep with Dr. Daniel Gartenberg

In this episode we discuss all things sleep. Sleep has been under attack for the last 10+ years and yet it is one of the most powerful things you can do for your performance, your health, your mental well being, and your body. We explore how to improve your sleep, how sleep works, and what you can be doing to sleep better with our guest Dr. Dan Gartenberg. 

Dr. Dan Gartenberg is a researcher and tech inventor. He holds a PhD in cognitive psychology with expertise in sleep, A.I. and preventative health. He is the creator of several apps including the Sonic Sleep app for detecting sleep stages and improving sleep quality using wearable tech. Daniel has three patents, numerous peer reviewed publications, and his technology has been featured on TED.com, the Today Show, Inside Science, and many more outlets!

• Sleep has been under attack for the last 10+ years in our society

• Lack of work life balance and constant phone addiction are destroying our society’s sleep 

• Sleep impacts nearly every single chronic health issue and disease, every organ of the body

• Sleep is the operating system for how we make sense of the world

• There’s a problematic “badge of honor” that people wear thinking that not sleeping is good for you

• The “synaptic homeostasis hypothesis” and why it demonstrates the vital importance of sleep to memory consolidation, personality, and much more. 

• Sleep cleans out beta amyloid plaques in your brain and reduces the risk of Alzheimer’s

• Daylight savings time predictably increases heart attack risks because of the 1 hour sleep reduction 

• Neuroscience and sleep is one of the final frontiers of human exploration. 

• What are the different phases of sleep?

• REM sleep vs Non-REM Sleep. REM sleep is “almost magical” for your brain. 

• In the US there are 4 stages of sleep.. but in Europe there are 5 stages of sleep… this demonstrates that our understanding of sleep is still VERY early stage.

• “N1 Sleep” - the transition between the conscious and unconscious mind. 

• You want more REM and you want more DEEP SLEEP and not more light sleep. 

• Deep sleep is how you prune, REM is how you integrate. 

• When you are in deep sleep your brain is operating on delta waves.. which are a completely different experience to waking life.

• Is there a way to get more out of the sleep that you’re getting?

• How many hours of sleep should you actually be getting?

• Adults need 7-9 hours of sleep on a regular basis according to the world’s top sleep scientists. 

• Hours in bed are not the same thing as hours asleep - you need 7.5+ hrs in bed to ensure you get a minimum of 7 hours of sleep. 

• Sleep until you can’t sleep anymore.

•  When should you nap? Is napping good for you?

• Taking a power nap right at your circadian dip is often an optimal performance strategy. 

• What is your circadian rhythm and how can it shape your sleep schedule and performance?

• What is “chronobiology” and how it can help us be more productive and effective?

•  The importance of sunlight in controlling your circadian rhythm.

• How does intermittent fasting interact with your daily energy levels and circadian rhythms?

• What are the hacks and strategies for improving your sleep quality and getting more out of your deep sleep?

• Tip: get rid of noise pollution when you’re sleeping. 

• Your “Homeostatic sleep need” builds up as you get tired and helps you sleep more effectively

• “Targeted memory reactivation” in sleep science - smells during a REM sleep will cause memories to process and encode while you are dreaming. 

• Visualizing and practicing in your dreams or practicing tasks in your dreams can help you improve waking performance

• Science backs up the concept of lucid dreaming.

• Homework: Find one thing to do to improve your sleep quality. 

Thank you so much for listening!

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

Starting your own business is an incredible feat. 
It's a labor of love which makes getting through the late nights, early mornings, and occasional all-nighter so worth it. It's no secret that business owners are incredibly busy!

So why not make things easier?

FreshBooks invoicing and accounting software is simple, intuitive, and keeps you incredibly organized. Create and send professional invoices in thirty seconds. FreshBooks helps you get paid two times faster with automated online payments.

Go to FreshBooks.com/science today and enter THE SCIENCE OF SUCCESS in the how did you find us section and get started today!!

Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

General

• Dan’s Website

• Dan’s LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook

Media

• Being Patient - “An Expert’s Secrets to a Better Night’s Sleep—And a Healthier Brain” By Christine Barba

• [Research Directory] ResearchGate - Daniel Gartenberg

• [Citation Directory] Google Scholar Citations - Daniel Gartenberg

• NY Times - “No, Night Owls Aren’t Doomed to Die Early” By Bryan Clark

• HumanOS - “Sleep Tracking and Sleep Enhancement. Podcast with Dr. Daniel Gartenberg” by Ginny Robards

• Quartz - “Why eight hours a night isn’t enough, according to a leading sleep scientist” By Georgia Frances King

• Bulletproof - “Your Sleep Quality Declines As You Age. Here’s What to Do About it” By Courtney Sperlazza

• Inc. - “The '8 Hours of Sleep' Rule Is a Myth. Here's What You Should Do Instead” By Julian Hayes II

• HotDoc - “The Science of Sleep, And the Noise that Induces Deep Sleep” By Michael McKay

• [Article Directory] on Medium

• NewsWire - A New Scientific Sleep App Recently Featured on Dr. Dan Gartenberg's TED.com Talk

• NY Post - “Modern life is so stressful that humans need even more sleep” By News.com.au

• HuffPost - “I’m Thinking About Sleeping - And Science” by Steven Rosenbaum

• [Podcast] FutureTech Podcast - An App That Can Help You Achieve Deep, High-Quality Sleep—Daniel Gartenberg, PhD—Sonic Sleep Coach

• [Podcast] Bulletproof Radio w/ Dave Asprey - “SLEEP NEED & SLEEP AGE: FIND OUT YOURS – DAN GARTENBERG, PH.D. #583”

• [Podcast] Founders and Funders - EP 56: The Software Team That’s Revolutionizing Sleep Health

• [Podcast] The Disruptors - 116. Sleeping Your Way to Superhuman Lifespan Before We Become Cyborgs | Dan Gartenberg

• [Podcast] Best Night Ever - The “Ask A Sleep Researcher Show” with Dr. Dan Gartenberg PhD

Videos

• TEDTalk - Dan Gartenberg | TED Residency - The brain benefits of deep sleep — and how to get more of it

• Being Patient - Have A Bad Night's Sleep? Here's What It Is Doing To Your Brain

• Dr. Nikki Talks Health - Tips to Deep Sleep with Daniel Gartenberg of Sonic Sleep

• Young and Profiting - Episode. 12: Unlocking the Power of Sleep with Daniel Gartenberg

• Dr. Anil Shah - "Masters Of Beauty" Sleep Scientifically with Dr. Daniel Gartenberg - Founder & CEO of Sonic Sleep

• Espeakers - Daniel Gartenberg: "Tracking and Improving My Sleep"

• NSL Experience: Never Stop Learning - NSL Bites: Daniel Gartenberg, PhD, Discusses the Impact of Sleep on our Health

• HumanOS.me - 071. Sleep Tracking and Sleep Enhancement. Podcast with Dr. Daniel Gartenberg

Misc

• [SoS Episode] Using The Bleeding Edge of Neuroscience to Optimize Your Brain with Dr. Daniel Chao

• [Film] Waking Life

• [Apps] Daniel’s Apps

Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

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

In this episode, we discuss all things sleep. Sleep has been under attack for the last 10 plus years and yet, it is one of the most powerful things you can do for your performance, your health, your mental well-being and your body. We explore how to improve your sleep, how sleep works and what you can be doing to sleep better right now with our guest, Dr. Dan Gartenberg.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word “smarter”, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we exposed the lie that success makes you happy and discovered the truth about engineering happiness into your life. Can you choose to be happy? If so, what should you do and how should you change your behavior? We also confronted the reality that in today's world, we no longer have the tools to handle real or even perceived threats. We discussed how to build mental toughness and what you can do to build your own mental strength and resilience. All of that and much more with our previous guest, Neil Pasricha. If you want to be happier, listen to our previous episode. Now for our interview with Dr. Dan.

[0:02:09.5] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Dr. Dan Gartenberg. Dr. Dan is a researcher and tech inventor. He holds a PhD in cognitive psychology with an expertise in sleep, AI and preventative health. He's the creator of several apps, including the Sonic Sleep app for detecting sleep stages and improving sleep quality using wearable technology. Dr. Dan has three patents, numerous peer-group publications and his technology has been featured on the TED stage, The Today Show and many more media outlets. Dr. Dan, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:40.2] DG: Hey, thanks for having me, Matt.

[0:02:42.0] MB: Well, we're super excited to have you on the show today. Sleep is such an important topic. I'm so excited to dig into it. Tell me a little bit about the way that we sleep today and why it's not the way that we've always slept?

[0:02:58.6] DG: Yeah. Sleep has been under attack really since the past 10 years, especially with all these chirping devices poking you at all times a day, the work/life balance where now that people have e-mails, they're always expected to be responsive. It’s really created this lack of boundary between when you should be in work mode and when you should be in sleep mode, regenerating your body.

When we start looking into the science of sleep, what we find is that sleep is literally impacts almost every single chronic health disease, it impacts every organ of the body. At this time when we're taking in more information than ever, sleep is actually the operating system for how we make sense of all of that, sometimes meaningful, but often times meaningless snapchats, or tweets, or what have you. At the same time that sleep is under attack with crummy lights from your office space and the lack of work-life balance, it's actually probably more important than ever to help us navigate this barrage of information that we're being attacked by every day.

[0:04:20.6] MB: It's funny, because in our society today, some people treat it as almost a badge of honor to not sleep, or to hustle 24/7 and to constantly be checking their phone and yet, the research is pretty clear that that's pretty devastating path for your health.

[0:04:37.1] DG: Yeah. I mean, this whole badge of honor societal thing, I'm a New Yorker, so it's especially palpable here, this I sleep when I'm dead. People are like, “Oh, I got four hours of sleep last night.” It's similar to when this smug badge of honor around binging Netflix for four hours and stuff. There's really a societal change that needs to be taken place just on how we think about sleep and how we value it. It's funny when people say they sleep-deprive themselves, I think in my mind, it's almost like when people used to brag like, “Oh, I smoke X amount of cigarettes or something like that.” That was more socially acceptable 40 years ago to say something like that. I think that's what in 30 years from now, people are going to look back on our society and they'll have a similar feeling around smoking as we think about sleep.

[0:05:36.1] MB: Yeah, that's a great perspective. It'll be interesting to see how we look back in the future, 40, 50 years in the future and see the way today that we treated sleep and all the things that we didn't understand about how important it is, or did understand and didn't act on.

[0:05:53.7] DG: Yeah. I mean, especially as jobs become more cognitive. I do a lot of – some programming, which I shouldn't do, but I do a lot of heavy-lifting cognitive tasks. Sleep is almost a useful tool in accomplishing those things. There's famous anecdotes about Einstein and Edison using naps to ideate. I think a lot of people can relate to waking up from say, a power nap and being able to solve that problem, because your brain is processing how to solve problems and optimize your survival while you're sleeping.

There's a theory that got me introduced to this when I was an undergrad at University of Wisconsin, one the most famous researchers in this field is a gentleman named Giulio Tononi and he founded something called the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis. It's basically this idea that deep sleep in particular functions to down-regulate all of the excitatory connections that you make throughout the day, such that they're relevant things to your survival rise to the top. It used to be like, “Oh, don't go to this part of the jungle. That's where the predators are.” Now it's like, “Oh, what did Mindy say to me at the office holiday dinner or whatever?” Something a lot more innocuous, but it's still relevant to your survival oftentimes.

Then in REM, you basically replay that pertinent information and then integrate it into your long-term memory and your working memory and your personality really, long-term memory and personality. That's one of the main functions of sleep called the synaptic homeostasis hypothesis for why sleep is so important to performance and success.

[0:07:41.9] MB: That's fascinating. Tell me a little bit more about why we sleep and how important it is.

[0:07:50.2] DG: Yes, so there's probably eight reasons why we sleep. Every organism on the planet sleeps for various reasons. Obviously for lower organisms, it’s more around energy conservation, making it so you can get predators at certain times and focus your energy, or get prey at certain times and focus your energy on that. For humans and actually all living organisms, a lot of this is cell recovery and repairing damaged cells in your body.

Something that we focus in our laboratory is in how sleep actually cleans out that beta amyloid plaques that form in your brain, which are associated with things like Alzheimer's disease. Deep sleep in particular, responsible for human growth hormone, doing the cell recovery thing and then these areas involving memory integration and whatnot. Sometimes when I try to scare people, I say stuff like, sleep is related to cardiovascular disease very strongly. If you don't go treated for something like sleep apnea, it takes five years off of your life in one study, they showed.

It also is correlated with cancer, as I mentioned, Alzheimer's disease. Really strong correlations with hypertension. Even one day of sleep deprivation can cause a spike. There's a cool science experiment that every member of society does twice a year, which is daylight savings time. It's looking at population studies. It's really interesting. What they find is when we lose an hour, the rate of heart attacks predictably increases, which again points to how sleep is really so tied to our health and well-being.

[0:09:50.0] MB: It's amazing that sleep, or lack of sleep essentially correlates with all-cause mortality essentially across nearly every negative outcome, increases in probability if you're not sleeping. Every positive outcome, or many positive outcomes increase in probability of you are.

[0:10:06.2] DG: That's right.

[0:10:07.4] MB: Tell me a little bit more about deep sleep and zooming that out slightly, more broadly the sleep phases. What is sleep made of and what are the different components of it?

[0:10:20.1] DG: This is what is so captivating to me. I'm a very curious person and explorer. I also want to help people. The neuroscience and sleep in particular is one of those last frontiers. Right up there, right? The brain is right up there with the universe in my mind. The crazy thing about sleep is we really only discovered this process around 70 years ago, when we made this distinction between REM and non-REM sleep, based on hooking people up to various EEGs. These EEG electrodes, this montage is known as in sleep as polysomnography. It's a 16-channel montage. Usually there's 12 on the scalp at various locations to get the different brain regions. EOGs to measure REM, because when you're in REM sleep, your eyes dart around while you're dreaming and actually, your body's paralyzed.

The first distinction that they made with the stages in the 40s basically was what's known as REM and non-REM. There's really clear physiological signals between those stages. Your body is paralyzed in REM, you lose thermal regulation. When I've looked at people's brainwaves in the lab and when they're in REM, it's almost a magical thing. You see a really noticeable transition on what we use to measure sleep.

Then there's non-REM. This is what points to how complicated this process is and we really still don't understand it, the fact that in the United States, there are four stages of sleep. In Europe, there are five stages of sleep. What this points to is the fact that humans a lot of times like to create these arbitrary categories. It gives you a sense of control. When you look at some of these physiological phenomena, it's not so easy to categorize them. The way that we even define sleep in and of itself is probably going to be archaic in the next – as soon as 10 years, I think.

Some researchers even claim that there are 19 stages of sleep. A lot of this has to do with distinctions in light sleep, or N1, that transition phase between consciousness and the unconscious mind, which is probably much more complicated than we give it credit for and another area that were fascinated in our laboratory. It's very complicated. A simple way of thinking about what you want to get out of your sleep is you want more REM and you want more deep sleep at the expense of light sleep, and you want to make sure that you're sleeping enough.

[0:13:21.1] MB: No, that's super helpful. I want to dig into how we can ultimately capture both more REM and more deep sleep. Before we do, tell me a little bit more about the distinction between each of those and which works for things like memory consolidation and things like that, which is more important for cell regeneration, etc., and what's happening in each of those phases.

[0:13:42.6] DG: Yeah. The thing about REM and deep sleep is that they're very tied together. It's hard to inhibit one without inhibiting the other. I think about it like deep sleep is how we prune and then REM is how we integrate. When you're in REM, your consciousness is very similar to your waking consciousness. It's why we remember our dreams from that perspective of the eye. You have your sense of self when you're in REM.

When you're in deep sleep, your brain is oscillating at these delta waves, which are very different to waking life. You basically don't have this sense of self really when you're in deep sleep. Your whole brain oscillates and these delta wave bursts, which is point 0.80 to 1 Hertz basically. As you get older, what happens is you lose that percentage of time spent in deep sleep usually at the expense of light sleep.

What a lot of researchers now are interested in is since we lose this as we get older, is there a way and they think it's related to aging, memory, all these really things that help you keep you young, is there a way, especially for older people to enhance your deep sleep brainwaves? I've been in this field for a while. I've been making sleep apps for a long time. I gave up for a while when I saw how inaccurate some of the sensors were when I was doing algorithm development work for a Fortune 500 company in grad school.

When the Apple watch came out, what we saw was finally we can get the raw data from the watch augmented with heart rate and actually detect people's sleep stages in real time, for the purpose of delivering an intervention that actually makes their sleep more regenerative. That's the golden goose thing that I'm going to dedicate my life to trying to figure out. Is there a way to get more out of the sleep that you're already getting?

I mean, first and foremost, get enough sleep. After that, how do you get more out of the sleep that you're getting? We study this in a very scientific way in our laboratory, but there's lots of hacks that I can throw at you in order to get you to have a more regenerative amount of sleep through increasing your deep sleep brainwaves and augmenting your REM as well. I'd be happy to dive into that with you.

[0:16:20.9] MB: Yeah, absolutely. No, I want to get into all of the hacks for improving deep sleep, for augmenting REM sleep, for making it more effective. Before we do that, the thing that fascinates me is and I've anecdotally heard this. I'm sure many people have, this idea that your sleep actually gets worse as you get older and it makes sense that this deep sleep phase is the thing that's decreasing.

I'm curious for somebody who's listening, we've probably heard these recommendations, but it always bears repeating, how much sleep should you actually be getting and what are the consequences of saying, “Oh, I can operate just fine on four hours of sleep, or six hours of sleep, or whatever that number is.” Tell me a little bit about that.

[0:17:02.0] DG: Yeah, great. Thanks for bringing that there, because that's really one of the core questions that needs to be understood. Oftentimes, the media is really bad at expressing nuance. There's all these articles like, get eight hours of sleep. I even had an article that I was quoted in eight and a half is the new eight. The thing about something like sleep is it's very individualistic. It's hard to give these generic pieces of advice that are good clickbait. It's not a great headline. Some people need seven hours, other people need eight.

The society of behavioral sleep medicine gave a consensus report amongst all the best sleep researchers in the field that adults need seven to nine hours of sleep on a regular basis. That's a nice lower limit. Something to keep in mind is when they say that they also need seven hours of sleep, not seven hours in bed. Actually, if you spend more than 95% - if you spend a 100% of the time in bed asleep, it actually probably means you're sleep-depriving yourself. A healthy amount would be 90% to 95%. Basically, what that means is adults should be spending at least seven and a half hours in bed.

Now, there's lots of things that can impact how much sleep you need. Not only does it differ between individuals, but it also differs intra-individually. Meaning, last week started up a more intense workout routine and I needed more sleep that next night. Bodybuilders do this all the time. They take these long naps in a day to build up their human growth hormone, so their body can recover and create more muscle.

Also, other situations like if you're sick, if you feel yourself getting sick, you want to get more sleep that day. Not only is it that I can't tell you what you need generally, I can't even tell you what you need exactly. It's going to vary from day-to-day too. There are certain ways that you could figure out your natural sleep need. One of them that my professor mentioned to me, Orfeu Buxton at Penn State; I work with him closely in our research, is basically try to book a relaxing vacation. Go to bed at the same time every day. Of vacation, you don't have a lot of external things pulling you out. How much you sleep without those external pressures is probably how much sleep you need.

One way we like to think about it is sleep to affect. Meaning, you should sleep until you basically can't sleep anymore. There's some nuance to that, but if you're depressed or if you have some thyroid issues, that might not be the case. For generally healthy people, you should just sleep until you can't sleep anymore and you shouldn't feel tired during the day.

[0:20:10.9] MB: Do you remember when you started your small business? It was no small feat. It took a lot of late nights, early mornings and the occasional all-nighter. The bottom line is that you've been insanely busy ever since. Why not make things a little easier? Well, our friends at FreshBooks have the solution.

FreshBooks invoicing and accounting software is designed specifically for small business owners. It's simple, intuitive and keeps you way more organized than a dusty shoebox filled with crumpled receipts. Create and send professional-looking invoices in 30 seconds and get them paid twice as fast with automated online payments. File expenses even quicker and keep them perfectly organized for tax time. The best part, FreshBooks grows alongside your business, so you'll always have the tools you need when you need them without ever having to learn the ins and outs of accounting.

Join the more than 24 million people who've used FreshBooks. Try it for free for 30 days, no catch and no credit card required. All you have to do is go to freshbooks.com/science and enter the Science of Success and how did you hear about us. That's all you have to do to get started for 30 days free, no credit card required. That's freshbooks.com/science. Go there and check it out.

[0:21:40.4] MB: Is there a such thing as oversleeping?

[0:21:43.1] DG: I mean, you can oversleep for sure. I'm not a medical doctor by the way, but if you're depressed for something, you might not want to sleep too much. Actually, there's some evidence that if they have some – if you do extreme sleep deprivation, it can actually bounce you out of depression. I'm not recommending doing that. Talk to your doctor.

There is some links to mood and depression and you can actually shift yourself into a manic state in a certain sleep-deprived state. I mean, this is another topic about our society has these very judgmental things about depression and mania. It's also a naturally occurring thing to be able to shift into a manic state when your environment pushes you to do so. If you're being chased by a predator, you better get into a manic state for that.

Sometimes when I'm watching a product or whatnot, I'll get in a manic state a little bit and I’ll actually get less sleep when I'm in that situation. I have a good metacognition on when I'm in a state like that, because I don't have a chemical thing. It's caused by external environmental pressures, basically pushing me into that mindset. A lot of times what I'll do in response and is – I'll have a recovery sleep after that high-performance situation. This is just some personal experiences that I've had, but I think a lot of people can relate.

[0:23:13.2] MB: Is there such a thing as either cashing up on sleep? Or I've heard some people use the concept of a sleep bank, where you sleep a bunch and then don't sleep as much for a couple nights. Does that actually work, or do you need a certain amount every single night to really reap the benefits?

[0:23:29.7] DG: I mean, it works to some degree, but you can't fully catch up. If I were to say what the ideal situation is is get a healthy amount every night. Now obviously, that's not necessarily practical. In the cases where you're not getting enough one night, it's better to catch up the next day than to continue getting not enough. Does that make sense?

[0:23:55.7] MB: Absolutely. Yeah. It's possible, but it's not an ideal scenario.

[0:24:00.6] DG: You can make up some of the sleep debt, but you can't make up all of it. There is actually a strategy for taking – in sleep, there's actually different types of naps. There's something called an appetitive nap that you can do in preparation for your sleep deprivation. The timing of naps, especially for shift work, jetlag is something that's really important to maybe proactively counteracting a situation where you know you'll be sleep-depriving yourself.

[0:24:31.9] MB: I know we're jumping around a little bit, but you're bringing up some topics that I think are really interesting. I want to dig into napping briefly. This is another one that there's a lot of confusion, there's a lot of gray areas. I've heard some people say that naps are amazing, they're super beneficial for you. I've heard other research that napping actually reduces the quality of your sleep, or your ability to fall asleep. If you're super tired, or if you're not, when is napping appropriate? When is napping a beneficial strategy, or should you be napping at all?

[0:25:00.8] DG: Yeah. This is one of those other nuances that it's really hard to give generic feedback on. Really, that's what we're trying to do with sonic sleep is understand uniquely what's going on with the individual, so we can give this relevant feedback. Napping is a perfect example, where you can't give a generic piece of advice to someone. If someone has a problem falling asleep and staying asleep, they have sleep problems, it's recommended that they do not take a nap, because what you want to do if you have problems falling asleep and stay asleep and staying asleep is you want to regulize your sleep and consolidate your sleep.

What naps can do for those people is it makes it – so it's even more difficult to consolidate their sleep, because it throws off their circadian rhythm. You actually want to build homeostatic sleep pressure at specific times if you're having problems falling asleep and staying asleep. One way to doing that is to not take naps and actually to push your bedtime back a little bit in certain situations.

Now if you're someone like me who doesn't really have a sleep problem, I mean, sometimes it's perfectly – almost everyone periodically throughout the year from a stressful situation has problems falling asleep. I don't have chronic problem. I don't have a chronic problem. For someone like me, taking a 20 minute power nap right at your circadian dip is probably the optimum performance. I find that my optimum performance is to probably get seven and a half hours sleep and then do a 20-minute power nap right at my circadian dip.

Now I'm a night person, so that's for me around 3:00, 3:30 in the afternoon, I'll do rest my – even resting your eyes for that period would naturally have this dip in alertness after lunch. After I do that, I come back, I'm able to reprocess what I was doing earlier in the day almost from a new slate, like I just woke up from processing all this information. I’m able to attack the day with more vigor when I do those sorts of power naps.

[0:27:23.1] MB: Very interesting. That's a great distinction between optimal performance and trying to reconcile, or solve some sleep problem and when napping may or may not be appropriate. The other topic that you just touched on that I want to understand a little bit better is the circadian rhythm. You talked about having a power nap right at your circadian dip. What is that and how does that fit into the broader structure of a circadian rhythm and how we can think about shaping our days and our sleep schedules and so forth around that?

[0:27:52.7] MB: Yeah. The story I like to tell around the circadian rhythm is the fact that we evolved from bacteria in the ocean that could differentiate sunlight from darkness. That's what eventually formed the human eye. Every organism on the planet responds to circadian rhythms, it’s a 24-hour cycle for humans, actually a little bit less than that, but close to a 24-hour cycle. 

Basically, what this is is they've done these crazy studies where they'll bring someone in a completely dark environment for X amount of time and days or months even, and you'll fall into a natural cycle of when you're awake and when you're asleep and when you have alertness and when you don't. They actually have these reaction-time tests called psychomotor vigilance task, which we've also implemented and explored in some of our software, where it's basically sensitive to how much alertness you have throughout the day.

A typical circadian rhythm for a human, usually you'll have a peak alertness about two hours after you wake up, you'll have a decline in alertness about two hours after lunch, you'll start getting more alert as you approach dinner. After you eat dinner and some of this correspondents to the glucose spikes after meals. When you're doing intermittent fasting stuff, which I actually do, there's some stuff to be considered of with all of these. Then you gradually get more tired after dinner and you get a peak tiredness at around 3:00 in the morning when you're going to wake up for a flight or something like this.

Knowing where you are in this and we actually have genes that can tell us if we're a morning person or an evening person and there's a field of sleep science called chronobiology, which is a type of understanding of how immediate early genes, like genes that express themselves based on your environment can get activated, to actually be able to shift you to be more of an evening person, or more of a night person.

We have a genetic predisposition to be one of these. It probably has to do with something like the fact that we were – in tribal clusters of a 100 people for a long time, it makes sense for someone to always be awake. There's also this shift that happens as you get older, you shift to be more of a morning lark as they say. I know I'm a night owl. You can actually shift these.

I'm a crazy mad scientist, so I've done some stuff where I've shifted mine based on this German word in sleep science. I get nerdy on some of this stuff. Sorry if I get a little too nerdy, but there's this German word called zeitnehmer, which means timekeeper in German. What that means is there are these environmental cues that you can exploit to entrench your circadian rhythm, actually and make your sleep deeper and shift your rhythm to either be more of a morning person, or a night owl.

The biggest zeitnehmer is actually sunlight and that's why these house – these office and hospital environments that are void of sunlight are so problematic. Other things are timing of meals, timing of exercise, even things like engaging in social interactions late at night where you're exciting yourself at a time when your body usually isn't excited. You can shift your circadian rhythm. By entrenching this rhythm, you want a healthy rhythm. As you get older, it flattens, which is bad. You want to peak alertness and you want a period of decline and that's something that would help people achieve is with timing of meals, getting sunlight and we integrate with smart lights.

I have this whole system in my home that's triggered with Alexa, where I say, “Hey, I'm going to sleep,” and there's this whole chain of events with sounds that relax me and the whole – all the lights turn red. You actually want red light as you get closer to nighttime. These are just some of the hacks that you can use to entrench the circadian rhythm and achieve more alertness and success the next day.

[0:32:12.8] MB: Really quickly, tell me how intermittent fasting interacts one way or another with the circadian rhythm and energy peaks and valleys throughout the day.

[0:32:22.8] DG: Yeah. What happens a lot of times, and so we have clients where I try to troubleshoot this with them. For example, if you're having issues with waking up too early, there's actually something called – there's evening insomnia and morning insomnia. Sometimes, the reason for that is some people fast at night and some people fast in the day. You have two options, right?

For the people that eat right when they wake up, sometimes when they activate that rhythm too early by eating or doing exercise early in the morning, it also confuses their body and it tells their body that they should be awake then, so then they start having problems where they're waking up too early and not being able to fall asleep. The same thing can be said for the other direction.

Another thing to be conscientious of is you don't want to go to bed too hungry, because it's going to negatively impact your sleep quality and stuff. A lot of this is figuring out if you're intermittent fasting and I'm a big proponent, I intermittent fast every day. I'm a big proponent of it. Just be conscientious of where you're lining up here and making sure that it's not negatively impacting your sleep quality.

[0:33:42.4] MB: Very interesting. All right, I want to come back to some of the ways that we can improve our deep sleep, some of the hacks and strategies for getting better deep sleep, for maximizing the deep sleep that we already have and for augmenting and improving our REM sleep as well.

[0:33:58.2] DG: Yeah. That's really the area of focus that I've dedicated my life to, which is this idea that basically, the brain is a set of circuits and associations, okay? What these researchers found in 2013 that reinvigorated my effort to build this technology was that you could actually play a sound at a certain pulse rate that emulates your deep sleep brain waves and it entrenches that neural state. 

They used to do this – there's pretty convincing evidence so you can do this with transcranial direct current stimulation. It's something similar to a Daniel Chao’s thing with halo neuroscience. What they also have shown is that you don't have to pulse electricity, which is a little bit invasive. You can actually get similar effects with sounds that pulse at a similar frequency as the delta wave.

What we did in our laboratory at Penn State is we brought people into a lab, hooked him up to polysomnography for four days, had someone, polysomnography technologists stay up all night and systematically play these sounds to people. What we were able to show is that we could actually increase your delta waves, increase the amount of time that you spend in deep sleep.

What we're trying to do now is map that on to being able to have improved memory performance the next day and actually addressing conversion to Alzheimer's disease by enhancing people's deep sleep, since it's so associated with cleaning out these maladaptive plaques that form in your brain throughout the day. Sleep is how we clean this stuff out and deep sleep in particular. That's how we're attacking getting more deep sleep. There's other low-hanging fruit things that we do with sonic.

Basically, a really easy way to improve your sleep quality is to block out noise pollution, especially in New York. This is something where you're not aware of how much sounds in your environment can adversely impact your sleep quality. I became very aware of this when I looked at people's brains in the lab and literally, I would see the air-conditioning turning on in the laboratory and you get these little brain arousals. People are not conscious of what's happening when they're asleep. Something emblematic of this is if you have sleep apnea, which is a disease where you won't be able to breathe throughout the night, you can have as many as a 100 arousals an hour and have no conscious awareness of this.

This is just pointing to how unconscious we are when we're in this sleep state to things like noise pollution and snoring, which can negatively impact sleep. A simple hack there, which many people have keyed into probably already, it's having like an air-conditioning, fan sound. We have this adaptive pink noise cushion that changes based on what your iPhone is sensing in your environment that's designed specifically to block out these noise pollution sounds.

Other just really quick hacks for your audience to try to understand how to get more deep sleep is actually messing with temperature with these ice baths, or saunas, or things, building up your homeostatic sleep need with exercise throughout the day is something. This is a recommendation I really like to give, but there's some evidence that having an orgasm actually improves your sleep quality. Those are little hacks to try to get more deep sleep. I can get into REM if we have time.

[0:37:50.5] MB: Yeah, I want to dig into the REM strategies as well. Before we do, really quickly I just want to make sure I understand this concept. You mentioned the idea of your homeostatic sleep need and how exercise as an example can build that up. Is that essentially the notion that the more activity, the more certain things you do throughout the day, you build up almost a level of tiredness and then you have better sleep as a result of that?

[0:38:15.6] DG: That's exactly right.

[0:38:17.0] MB: Okay, got it. No, that's really interesting. Yeah, let's dig into REM sleep a little bit. Tell me about some of the ways to improve or augment REM sleep as well.

[0:38:26.9] DG: Yes. This is experimental technology that still needs to be vetted out. In sleep science, there's something called targeted memory reactivation. Basically, what they found is that if you're doing some cognitive task while you're say, getting exposed to a certain smell, like the smell of roses and then you replay that smell when someone is in a REM state through associative priming, Pavlovian response, it actually primes that memory from the day while you're dreaming and it helps you process and encode that information more, such that you perform better the next day.

A lot of this, you can think about – Another way that I think about is how athletes visualize what they're good at and doing it during the night time, actually helps you perform the next day. That finding is a very strong finding. The act of visualizing doing something actually makes you better at doing it. The idea here is that you could prime the ability to visualize tasks that you want to be optimal at by priming yourself through various cues at certain times of your sleep. 

Since we understand the science of how to play sounds, such that your brain responds to it, but it doesn't wake you up, then we can actually do things where people – I do this thing where I focus on my 10-year vision, while I'm listening to a specific sound. Then sonic replays that sound when I'm most likely to be in a REM sleep, because I'm trying to actualize this 10-year vision that I had for myself.

[0:40:20.4] MB: Do you have any memories or experiences of dreams that you've had that the sounds actually created these vivid, or almost lucid dream experiences as a result of that?

[0:40:31.8] DG: Yeah. I mean, I'm still exploring this, honestly. A lot of this is subconscious, so it's a little bit hard to tell if it's working in all honesty. I generally through this practice of gratitude is another thing that I focused on a lot, and visualizing my reality. I am finding that the reality I'm visualizing and surrendering a little bit is coming to fruition. It's more of a general sense of things. I can't cite a specific lucid dream for you right now, unfortunately.

[0:41:09.1] MB: Have you done any research, or dug into it all of the concept of lucid dreaming, or how lucid dreaming works?

[0:41:15.3] DG: I have. This is partly in my college days. What got me so excited about this was this really fun movie Waking Life. Have you ever seen that?

[0:41:26.0] MB: Oh, yeah. That's one of my favorites.

[0:41:28.8] DG: Yeah. Richard Linklater, a brilliant guy. About lucid dreaming and how you can prime in. That really got me interested in this whole thing. There is science that backs it up. Honestly, I've tried to do it a little bit. I'm just starting to tackle it a little bit more, but I'm not great at it right now. People that are good at it, since the only thing you can move when you're in dream state, when you're in REM – and by the way, you dream a little bit in light sleep too. 

When you're in REM, you're having these intense dreams and they train these lucid dreamers to move their eyes in certain patterns when they're having a lucid dream, which pretty much unequivocally shows that people that are good at lucid dreaming can control their dreams. They're literally able to control their eye movements while they're in a dream state, which is some captivating science.

[0:42:21.4] MB: It's so fascinating. Yeah, that's probably a topic for a whole different interview, but it's something that's personally really interesting to me and I've always wanted to dig into a little bit more as well.

[0:42:29.5] DG: Me too. There's going to be some tools in store for you soon, I think.

[0:42:34.3] MB: Very interesting. Well, I'm curious. We've talked about a lot of different strategies, the importance of sleep, some great tools and tips. For listeners who want to concretely implement this, who want to improve their sleep or take action on something that we've talked about today, what would one action item be, or a piece of homework that you would give them to start taking action towards having better sleep?

[0:42:56.6] DG: This is the homework that I like to start people out with; think about your life. There is one thing unique to you that you can do that's going to either help you get more sleep, or improve the timing of your sleep, such that you can improve your sleep quality, whether it's maybe going to bed a little bit earlier, maybe letting yourself sleep in a little bit more on a day where you can. It's going to be different for everybody. Maybe it's talking to your boss about flexible work times, which is something that we're working with some corporate wellness clients to do stuff like this. It's unique to you. Everyone's at a different place, and so just think about what it might be for you and try to implement that thing.

[0:43:43.4] MB: You talked about work schedules and how this plays into it. That made me think of a putting a bow on this in some way, or really encapsulating an important point that we talked about at the beginning of the conversation as well, is this idea that in many ways, especially in America, especially in Western societies, this idea of sleep and getting a lot of sleep and being somebody who sleeps a full eight to nine hours a night or seven to nine hours a night is almost derided or looked down on, or thought of as being lazy, but the reality is that in many ways from a productivity standpoint, from an effectiveness standpoint, it's often much better to be someone who's sleeping enough and sleeping effectively than it is to be somebody who's pulling all-nighters and sleeping four hours a night.

[0:44:26.1] DG: Totally. As an entrepreneur, I would much rather someone that's on my team who has fully slept than someone who is sleep-deprived. You act erratically when you're sleep-deprived. Personally, I'm not a nice person. No one wants to work with that cranky sleep-deprived person. 

Frankly, we’re I think living in a society that has this global pathology when it's coming to not sleeping enough. We're having this global sickness where you're not as empathetic to other people when you're sleep-deprived. For me, I see sleep as a pathway frankly, just for making us a little nicer to each other.

[0:45:10.4] MB: Dr. Dan, for listeners who want to find out more about you, your work and all of the fascinating research and tools that you've created for improving sleep, where can people find you and these resources online?

[0:45:22.5] DG: Yeah, you can check out Sonic Sleep Coach. We have Android and Apple integration. I think we have probably the most accurate Apple watch algorithm for measuring sleep. There's a bunch of enhancement tools and meditations and deep sleep stimulation in that technology.

[0:45:39.9] MB: Well Dr. Dan, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing all this wisdom, some really insightful takeaways about how sleep works and how we can improve our own sleep.

[0:45:49.8] DG: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Great questions.

[0:45:52.5] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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

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

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

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

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

The Big Lie About Happiness with Neil Pasricha

In this episode we expose the lie that success makes you happy and discover the truth about engineering happiness into your life. Can you choose to be happy? If so, what should you do and how should you change your behavior? We also confront the reality that in today’s world we no longer have the tools to handle real or even perceived failures. We discuss how to build mental toughness and what you can do to build your mental strength and resilience. All of this and much more with our guest Neil Pasricha. 

Neil Pasricha is the New York Times-bestselling author of The Happiness Equation and The Book of Awesome series, which has been published in ten countries, spent over five years on bestseller lists, and sold over a million copies. He is one of the most popular TED speakers of all time, and today serves as Director of The Institute for Global Happiness. Neil has spoken to hundreds of thousands of people around the globe including Fortune 100 companies, Ivy League Deans, and Royal Families in the Middle East. His work has been featured in thousands of outlets including CNN, BBC, The Today Show, and many more!

• The myth of the idea that great work leads to big success and being happy. That’s totally backwards. 

• Looking at over 300 studies on the science of happiness, the model is the opposite. 

• Be happy —> Great Work —> Big Success 

• Being happy increases productive by 31%, Sales by 30%, and creativity by 300% 

• Happy people live longer! Happy people live an average of over ten years longer.

• Many people don’t think that happiness, compassion, understanding and emotional intelligence are not important to business success, that couldn’t be further from the truth

• 50% of your happiness is genetic, 10% of your happiness is circumstantial, and 40% is based on your intentional activities

• The average human is awake for 1000 minutes per day. Could you take 20 of them, 2% of those hours, to make the other 980 (98%) minutes happier? 

• 3 Things You Can Do RIGHT NOW to Increase your Happiness

  • Go for a 20 minute walk in the woods 

  • Journaling is a great way to have a powerful happiness practice 

  • Reading 20 pages of fiction per day.

• Reading fiction, especially literary fiction, helps improve your emotional intelligence. 

• You have to STRUCTURE your day to enable these contemplative, happiness creating routines

• How to be a lazy person and still get lots of things done. 

• How to structure a “family contract” to have more quality time with your loved ones. 

• "Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action."

• Everyone gets 168 hours per week. You have 168 pebbles and you can spend one every hour. 

• 168/3 = 3 buckets of 56 hours

  1. 56 hours of sleep

  2. 56 hours of work

  3. 56 hours of family & enjoyment

• Most people that work 70-80 hours per week have tons of wasted and dead time in their day. 

• What are you spending your buckets on?

• We are all getting more anxious, lonely, and depressed - despite the fact that we are healthier and safer than we’ve ever been.

• We no longer have the tools to handle failure or even perceived failure. 

• How do we get mentally tough?

• The ascendance of the smartphone has created a 30% spike in anxiety in the last five years. 

• 3 strategies to build mental strength and resilience. 

  • Get your cell phone out of your bedroom.

  • Do a “two minute morning"

  • Spend your lunch time doing a weird hobby or an unusual activity 

  • Intermittent Fasting from TECHNOLOGY 

• The “two minute morning” exercise:

  • I will let go of..

  • I am grateful for..

  • I will focus on...

• Gratitude has to be highly specific, not just “my wife” - it needs to be “when my wife gave me a kiss on the cheek this morning” - otherwise your brain doesn’t actually think about it. 

• Carve a “will do” from your “could do / should do” list. 

• Nobel prize winners are 22x more likely to have a weird or amateur hobby than their peers. 

• Your learning rate is the steepest when you know the least 

• How you can avoid “cognitive entrenchment” and mental fragility. 

• The person who is the most successful in life is not the person who has had the most successes, its the person who has the most failures. You have to increase your failure rate to increase your success. 

• When you overly specialize, success blocks future success. 

• Spend money on cultivating randomness in your life. 

• What other success could you have had, should you have had, or would you have had, if you had let yourself stay broader for longer? 

• How do you mentally unfurl yourself form all the identity sleeping bags you’re rolled up in?

• Homework: Start or finish your day by reading 20 pages of fiction from a good book. “A reader lives 1000 lives before he dies" 

Thank you so much for listening!

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

P.S. - Seriously…it’s kind of a

Check it out!

Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

General

• Neil’s Website and Podcast

• Neil’s LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook

• The Institute for Global Happiness

• 1000 Awesome Things blog

Media

• Author Directory on Quiet Revolution, Fast Company, Next Big Idea Club, Medium, and HuffPost

• Calgary Herald - “Neil Pasricha's new book shows how wrestling with failure can make you 'awesome'” Eric Volmers

• MindBodyGreen - “3 Ways To Be More Resilient, From This Happiness Expert” By Jason Wachob

• The Epoch Times - ‘Neil Pasricha Reminds Us What Is Truly Important in a Chaotic World” BY Catherine Yang

• WBUR - “Are You Failing At Failing? Author Neil Pasricha Says It's Time To Change The Narrative” by Jeremy Hobson and Allison Hagan

• Daily Stoic - “You Are Awesome: An Interview With Bestselling Author Neil Pasricha”

• HBR - “8 Ways to Read (a Lot) More Books This Year” by Neil Pasricha

• Observer - “How to Add an Hour to a Day with Only One Small Change” By Neil Pasricha

• SUCCESS Magazine - “7 Things You Can Do to Feel Happier” By Neil Pasricha

• TIME - “How to Conquer Your Biggest Fears” By Neil Pasricha

• Forbes - “Neil Pasricha: Why It Is Possible To Achieve Work-Life Balance” by Dan Schawbel

• Reddit AMA - I am Neil Pasricha, author of the 1000 Awesome Things blog and The Book of Awesome. AMA!

• [Podcast] The Jordan Harbinger - 277: Neil Pasricha | You Are Awesome

• [Podcast] The Learning Leader Show - Episode 238: Neil Pasricha – Why Action Creates Motivation: 1,000 Awesome Things

• [Podcast] Good Life Project - Neil Pasricha: From Awesome Hunter to Happiness Crusader

• [Podcast] Art of Charm - Neil Pasricha | The Happiness Equation (Episode 506)

• [Podcast] The Think Grow Podcast w/ Ruben Chavez - Episode #24: Neil Pasricha - How (And Why) to Read More Books

• [Podcast] The Ultimate Health Podcast - 265: Neil Pasricha – How To Be Happy • Untouchable Days • Find Your Authentic Self

• [Podcast] Don't Keep Your Day Job - You Are Awesome - Neil Pasricha

Videos

• TEDxTalks - Neil Pasricha | TEDxToronto 2010 - The 3 A's of awesome

  • TEDxTalks - How do you maximize your tiny, short life? | Neil Pasricha | TEDxToronto

• Talks at Google - Neil Pasricha: "The Happiness Equation" | Talks at Google

• Improvement Pill - The Key To Becoming Mentally Tougher (ft. Neil Pasricha)

• Evan Carmichael - Neil Pasricha's Top 10 Rules For Success (@NeilPasricha)

• Neil’s YouTube Channel

• LinkedIn - LinkedIn Speaker Series: Neil Pasricha

• FightMediocrity - How to Make More Money Than a Harvard MBA – The Happiness Equation by Neil Pasricha

• The Institute for Global Happiness - Awesome is Everywhere by Neil Pasricha - Book Trailer

Books

• You Are Awesome: How to Navigate Change, Wrestle with Failure, and Live an Intentional Life (Book of Awesome Series, The) by Neil Pasricha

• Two Minute Mornings: A Journal to Win Your Day Every Day (Gratitude Journal, Mental Health Journal, Mindfulness Journal, Self-Care Journal)  by Neil Pasricha

• How to Get Back Up: A Memoir of Failure & Resilience  by Neil Pasricha and Audible Original

• The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything  by Neil Pasricha

• Awesome Is Everywhere  by Neil Pasricha

• Journal of Awesome  by Neil Pasricha

• The Book of (Even More) Awesome (The Book of Awesome Series)  by Neil Pasricha

• The Book of (Holiday) Awesome (The Book of Awesome Series) by Neil Pasricha

• The Book of Awesome (The Book of Awesome Series) by Neil Pasricha

Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet, with more than five million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries. In this episode, we expose the lie that success makes you happy and discover the truth about engineering happiness into your life. 

Can you choose to be happy? If so, what should you do and how should you change your behavior? We also confront the reality that in today's world, we no longer have the tools to handle real or even perceived failures. We discuss how to build mental toughness and what you can do to build your own mental strength and resilience. All of this and much more with our guest, Neil Pasricha.

Are you a fan of the show? And have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our email list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How to Create Time for what Matters Most in Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting, and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the home page, that’s successpodcast.com or if you're on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word ‘smarter’. That's “smarter” to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we brought you a holiday special with some of the best moments on giving, connectedness, compassion, kindness, courage, and so much more. We brought in some familiar guests, like Brene Brown and Oscar Trimboli, as well as some guests from the archives like John Wang, Dacher Keltner and so many more. If you want something to ground you during this holiday season and really focus on gratitude, listen to our previous episode

Now for Interview with Neil. Today we have another exciting guest on the show, Neil Pasricha. Neil is a New York Times bestselling author of The Happiness Equation and The Book of Awesome series, which is sold over a 1,000,000 copies. He's one of the most popular Ted speakers of all time and today serves as director of the Institute for Global Happiness. His work has been featured in thousands of outlets, including CNN, BBC, The Today Show, and much more. 

[0:02:30] MB: Neil, welcome to the Science of Success.

[00:02:34] NP: Thank you so much for having me, Matt.

[0:02:35] MB: I'm really excited to have you on the show. Your work is so interesting and inspiring, and there's a lot of takeaways that I think we can share with the listeners.

[00:02:43] NP: I can't wait.

[0:02:44] MB: I want to start with an idea that you shared in some of your early work of this notion that people often have the equation backwards. They think that they have to work hard, do great work, be successful and that eventually they'll be happy, and you pointed out that perhaps that's not the right way to sequence things.

[00:02:34] NP: It's definitely not the right way to sequence things. And I blame all of our parents for this, because our parents said the same thing to all of us as we were kids. And it is six specific words. You mentioned all the Matt. Great work, that’s two, leads to big success, that’s four, leads to be happy, that’s six. Great work leads to big success leads to be happy, however, after reading over 300 [inaudible 0:03:28], like all these studies on the science of happiness, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, the model’s exactly reversed. It actually goes, be happy, leads to great work, leads to big success. 

Based on a study published in Harvard Business Review by Sonja Lyubomirsky and her colleagues, we know that being happy actually increases productivity 31%, increases sales 37%, and increases creativity 300%. What happens after that? Well, the big success comes. That’s the end, after the great work. Two kinds number one happy people are 40% more likely to get a promotion in the next 12 months. Not surprising when you think about your company, your office or workplace, you're like, “Well, that person probably gonna get promoted. They're in a good mood. We like working for that boss. We like working for that colleague,” and happy people also live longer. This is interesting, comes from the nun study at the University of Kentucky. It shows, happy people live in average of over 10 years longer. When you think about how short our life spans truly are, an extra 10 years is quite a big increase, just from priming your brain to be positive each day.

[0:04:32] MB: It's so interesting and this underscores to me one of the biggest takeaways or lessons that I've pulled from doing the podcast, which is this notion that a lot of these seeming soft skill things, emotional intelligence, happiness, gratitude, all of these things – people often think that they're not real business skills, that they can't help you be more productive, that they can help you be more successful. And yet the research is pretty resoundingly clear that, in fact, many of these soft skills, these woo-woo things like happiness are actually the cornerstones of being a highly productive and successful person.

[00:05:09] NP: Yeah, I like you framed it as, like, these are potentially kind uplifts as well, for sure, but I also want to just enter into the conversation. Another little injection here, I was director of leadership development at Walmart. That was my job title for a number of years, and so my job was to help really, really good leaders become great leaders, i.e, help vice presidents become senior vice presidents, help senior vice presidents become executive vice presidents, help executive presidents become C-suite leaders. Guess what everyone got fired for. Guess what? 

If you weren't going to make the leap, guess what reason it was. It wasn't because you couldn't do the numbers. It wasn’t because you couldn’t show confidence in meetings. It wasn't because you couldn't lead a team. It was because people didn’t like you. Like that's what it was. It was because nobody want to work for you. You were hard to get along with. You weren’t empathetic in meetings. You didn't show compassion and understanding. People got a rough feeling from you. 

And then when enough people feel that way, guess what? Your 360 scores, your managing up surveys, all that kind of stuff comes back negative so they can't promote you. So the number one de-railer in an office environment or an executive environment is actually your soft skills. Your EQ. So I like how you kinda said, “Hey, this is good. This helps you go up.” I'm also saying, it also helps prevent you from getting the boot. EQ is the hardest thing to grow, and we aren't spending enough time growing it.

[0:06:21] MB: I couldn't agree more. And I want to look at this because you could ramble on and you've shared some great statistics, but you could talk, you know, ad infinitum about the benefits of happiness. But I'm sure somebody could hear you say that and tell themselves. “Okay, great. That's awesome for people who are happy. But I'm not happy or I'm naturally not as happy.” So what does that mean? Am I left out of the cold?

[00:06:43] NP: Yeah. No, doesn't. And I'm gonna quote Sonja Lyubomirsky again. She's a real titan in this positive psychology world. Professor at Stanford University of California. She's positive model and her famous book called The How of Happiness that actually shows – it's a model, okay, so not like a proven concept, but she has the background and the chops – I’ve seen a lot of your guests at these kind of similar backgrounds. 

You know, you had [inaudible 0:07:04] etcetera on the show, like she's got the horsepower to say, “Look, guys, based on the research I've done 50% of your happiness is actually genetic. 10% of your happiness is circumstances, circumstantial or circumstances (based on what's happening in your life) and 40% of you happiness is based on your intentional activities. Again, 50% genetic, 10% circumstances, and 40% intentional activities.

So to the person who's saying, “Well, I'm just not a naturally happy person.” I get that. That's your genetic baseline. That is the 50%. Unfortunately you can't control it. You can control however the 40%, the part of the glass that you refill. Like I say to people, “The glass isn't half empty or half full. It's refillable.” What do you put into that 40%? So what I always preach to people is this. You, Matt, me, Neil, and everyone listening, we’re all awake on average for 1000 minutes a day. That is the average amount of minutes people are awake for a day. 

I'm obsessed with the number 1000 by the way, which we could talk about later if you want. That number is fascinating to me for many reasons. We’re awake a thousands minutes a day? My argument is could you take 20 of them? A 2% lever. Could you take 20 of them to make the other 980 minutes the other 98% of your day happier? When I ask that question, most people nod their heads like, “Yeah, I could do that. It makes up 90% of my day happier. Like I'm all in. We know it makes me or productive, or higher sales. I'm more creative, I’ll get along well with people. I'm going to get promoted. I'm in. So what do I do?”

Well, this is where all the positive psychology research comes in. So what you do is you read through all these studies. You distill them down the simple, most simple stuff you could find, and I'll tell you right now, I'll give you three of them. I could give you five or seven. Let's just leave it at three for now. Go on a 20 minute nature walk in the woods with no cell phone, okay. Trees release a chemical called phytoncides that actually reduce your cortisol level. You actually get happier by being in nature. 

[00:08:52] NP: We all have NDD these days or nature deficit disorder. So this is a healthy thing. Number two is Journal. Famous Research from the University of Texas, Slatcher and Pennebaker showed that couples in a relationship who journaled were 50% more likely to stay together in their romantic relationship after three months. I always joke that three months is a very long relationship at the University of Texas or any college campus. Also a friend of mine, Shawn Achor, positive psychology researcher has teamed up with the national MS Society to show that patients with chronic neuro-muscular pain, if they journal for six weeks, can have their pain medication at the six month mark reduced by up to 50%.

 Turns out in your brain, you’ve got something called the visual cortex when you rewrite something happy from your day, okay, a good conversation, the friend you bumped into, the hot coffee that somebody brought you, whatever, that your brain actually replays it in that visual cortex. An area called Area 17 lights up a second time or third time if you read your own journal. So journaling, again start of the day, end of the day, is a great way to have a 20 minute happiness practice.

And the third and final thing I'll mention. Again, there’s many we could talk about, but is reading 20 pages of fiction, okay. 2011 Annual Review of Psychology showed that reading fiction, especially literary fiction, opens up the mirror neurons in your brain, the parts of your brain responsible for empathy, compassion, understanding, all the EQ stuff we were talking about. 

If you want to be a better person, the best way to do that is to inhabit a totally other conscience for 20 minutes or 20 pages a day, because that teaches you how to be another gender, another religion, another culture, another geography, another nationality, another time period, etcetera.

So, quick summary. Yes, there's a genetic set point, but even though that's 50% of our happiness, we've got 10% based on circumstances and 40% on intentional activities, focusing on that 40% which is the part we can control, I say, spend 20 minutes a day doing one of three activities. Go for a 20 minute nature walk, do a 20 minute journaling exercise or read 20 pages of fiction from a good book.

[0:10:51] MB: All three of those are great suggestions, and the math on that is so powerful. I often tell people the same thing, which is just try to carve out a little bit of time for what I call contemplative routines, essentially things like journaling, meditation, reflection, stepping back from all the noise and dizziness and chaos of life. And I love the math on 20 Minutes is essentially 2% of your day, and is it possible to carve that out? It makes so much sense on paper. And yet it's so easy to get caught up in the business [inaudible 0:11:24] everything going on and feel like you don't have 20 minutes.

[00:11:27] NP: Well, you have to structure it, right. So these days I'm giving a bunch of speeches, and one question I always ask audiences, is, “How many of you sleep within 10 feet of your cell phone?” And honestly, Matt, like 95% or more hands go up, okay? And you know the same excuses that we all hear. “It’s my alarm clock.” You know, ah, “What if there's an emergency?” Stuff like that? Well, I say, plug your cell phone in the basement, buy an alarm clock from Walmart and start or finish your day with either a journaling practice or reading a good book. If you don't have your cell phone in the bedroom, that's a start. 

Look, if you drank a bottle of wine before bed every night, slept within 10 feet of a bottle of wine during the night and drank a bottle of wine when you got up in the morning, we would all call you an alcoholic. These days we're all phone-aholics. Our cell phones are terrible for us, and I could expand on why if you are interested but cell phones are horrible for us, and yet we sleep right beside them. We check them last thing at night and first thing in the morning as if it's no big deal. It is a big deal.

So system wise, in order to structure it, put your cellphone in the basement. It doesn't matter where you cell phone lives, it matters where your charger lives. If you're paranoid about emergencies, do what my wife and I have done: get a landline. They’re $20. It's illegal for telemarketers to call you at night, but your friends and family can call you if there actually is an emergency, which, by the way, there never is. 

And then start or finish today with the journaling practice or reading a good book.

[0:12:49] MB: That's a good example, and it really highlights – you said something a moment ago that is so important and often gets missed in the discussion of these routines and habits. And it's that you have to proactively structure your day to create the space for these contemplative routines. And if you don't do that, then they never happen. And if you do carve out just a little bit of time, even 20 minutes or more a day, that has a huge, compounded return on everything else that you do

[00:13:22] NP: Exactly, and by the way, I'm partly preaching to myself. I'm actually a very lazy person. People don't believe me when I say that because they are like, “No, you get so much done blah, blah, blah. Didn’t you write all these books?” No, it's just because I'm structured. Like it's just because I just made simple rules around things, right? So one rule is the cell phone lives in the basement. That's a rule. I can’t in my mind break it. So that allows me. What am I gonna do to record that? I got a journal sitting beside there. I got a book, so I flip it open. It's because I just natural – it's easier for me to do that than nothing, you know. 

So that's why I do that. And there's many things like that that Leslie and I, my wife have in our life. Another example just to throw in here, Matt, for those listening, like, “Okay, that's one, buddy. What else you got?” Is, we have a family contract. So my wife and I have written out on a piece of paper and signed in ink the number of nights I'm allowed to be away per month, the number of days we must have together as a family. I mean, no screens, no other people, like just our family. The number of days we get of vacation as a family, and the number of nights she and I both get to do our own thing each month. 

By the way, the number for all those things happens to be four. Okay, Neil's away four nights per a month because, I mean, that means I say no to lot of stuff. But, you know, we just talked earlier or we jumped on here like I can't do certain things because [Inaudible 0:14:39] cookie exchange. I was able to do that because I already maximize my nights away. So this is a little family contract. Does it actually – like If I break it, do I get in trouble? Do I get arrested? No, but because I wrote it out and I signed in ink, it’s a system that now guides my behavior. I'm a lazy person, so I just now follow this rigid ‘rule’ that I made for myself.

[0:14:57] MB: I tell people the same thing all the time, which is that I'm very lazy, but I use structures and routines to ensure that I both select the most important activities and get them done despite all of the other things constantly distracting and pulling me in so many different directions. 

[00:15:13] NP: You're a smart man. 

[0:15:14] MB: Well, this whole conversation, though, reminds me of something else that I've heard you talk about in the past, which is this idea that in today's culture, it's almost a rote response to say, “How are you doing?” What is somebody always respond back with? 

[00:15:28] NP: I'm busy. 

[0:15:29] MB: I‘m busy. That's what everyone says. And I've stopped saying that. I stopped saying that maybe a year ago, but it's amazing how almost everybody has that response, and we have this culture that promotes this this myth of having to be busy and always being busy as if it's a badge of honor, but it really, to me, in many ways is a detriment.

[00:15:50] NP: Yeah, there's a great essay on this by Tim Kreider called The Busy Trap, just published in The New York Times. Maybe you could share it out with your listers somehow or in the show notes or whatever. This really prompted my thinking. And then, of course, Tim Ferriss’s  words. And I think for our work weeks that the word busy is an excuse. It is somebody who is a lazy thinker and indiscriminately acting. You know, busy is a sign of, you don't know how to manage your priorities. And I love that. 

And so, in The Happiness Equation, the book I wrote before, You’re Awesome, before this one, I actually lay it out as a bucket model. I say, you, Matt Bodnar, me, Neil Pasricha, everyone listening, Oprah, Warren Buffett, Tim Ferriss, Tim Kreider, all these people, we all get the exact same number of hours per week, right? It's a 168. That’s how many everyone gets. Doesn't matter how old you are, how rich you are. You get 160 hours a week. 

I like to think of it like Monday morning at midnight or whenever the week starts on your calendar. Monday morning at midnight is like I got 168 like pebbles, and I spend one an hour and I’m – by the end of the week, I'm like, out of pebbles. That's all I got and I get another 168 for next week. The beautiful thing about that number 168 is it naturally divides by three. So you divide it by three, and it's three buckets of 56 hours each. 56 56 56. 

Well, guess what? Every doctor will tell you you're supposed to sleep eight hours a night. Eight times seven days a week is 56 hours. So one entire bucket per week for most people on average should be 56. What about work? Well, most people work about a 40 hour week job. Yeah, there's some higher, some lower, but let's round it up. Let's round it up for commuting time, maybe some emails home, maybe you do work on the weekend little bit. Let's just call it 56. We're gonna give you, like almost a 50% increase on your ’40 hour week job’.

[00:17:38] NP: And by the way, there's a lot of research says that people that say they work 70, 80, 90 hours like are kind of lying. You know, there's a lot of research that says they're not really working. I feel like that's crazy number of hours and most people don't work that much, even if they think they do, okay. There’s a lot of dead time and wasted time in there. Let's call it 56. Guess what Matt? Those two buckets, the work bucket and the sleep bucket, pay for, justify, and create your third bucket. Are you busy? Or are you filling up your third bucket with crap. 

For me? I worked 10 years at Walmart, right? And I, for eight of those years, on the side, you could call it the side hustle these days, I wrote. I wrote athousandaweseomthings.com. I wrote my books. I gave 200 speeches. I gave some TED talks. That was all in my 3rd 56 hour week budget. It's worth pointing out. I was not married at that time, and I did not have children. So I was able to put, pour all that time into my ‘fun bucket’ of writing and speaking.

Now I did get remarried. My wife, Leslie, and I have children. And guess what? My third bucket is now being an intentional, you know, and attuned and present father. So that's why I ended up quitting the WalMart job because I’d shifted that writing bucket from my third bucket into my second ‘work’ bucket. That mental structure really helps me. It aids me, and once every six months or year or so, I always just re-consciously think about what am I spending my buckets on? And is it the right thing to be spending them on? I'm not ever busy. I'm just conscious about spending my time.

[0:19:06] MB: Yeah, I love that distinction, and it's amazing once you step back and just spend even 20 minutes as we talked about earlier thinking about how you should be spending your time and looking at how it's actually being spent, you can come up with some pretty, pretty insightful takeaways about ways that you're wasting time or spinning your wheels on dead time or doing things so that you feel like you're being productive when you're really not?

[00:19:31] NP: Yeah, I think there's a famous quote. I can't remember who said it. It said you know, show me your calendar and I'll tell you your priorities. Of course, that assumes that your schedule is up to date and filed and all that stuff. But that is a really good indicator of what you actually care about. It's how you spend your time.

[0:19:47] MB: Hey, what's up? It's Matt. I want to tell you about the most epic and life-changing thing that we've ever done here at The Science of Success. It's about to happen, and I wanted to personally invite you to join me. We're launching an incredible, live, in-person two-day intensive for fans of the show that want to take their lives to the next level. This will be an intimate two-day in-person deep dive with me where we will go over all of the biggest lessons and greatest life-changing insights that I've personally pulled from years of interviewing the world's top experts on The Science of Success, and I'm gonna show you exactly how to apply and implement them to 10x-ing your own life in 2020 and beyond.

I've spent months planning the life-changing content for this live in-person intensive, and here's what we're going to dig into. You can bring your own unique challenges and desires and get highly specific, tailored feedback on exactly what you need to do in order to achieve your biggest goals. We will personally dig into what's holding you back and find out exactly what you need to do to take your life to the next level. I'll show you how to become a master negotiator and deal with any conversation, no matter how tough. You’ll get the exact tools that you can apply right now to influence anybody using Jedi mind tricks. I'll show you what to do to banish fear from your life and to get rid of negative emotions.

We’ll reveal exactly how you can overcome procrastination and overwhelm, and increase your productivity by more than 10X, and I'm gonna show you how to finally end self sabotage and overcome what's holding you back. And this is only scratching the surface of the epic things that we're gonna cover in this live two-day event. Here's the most important thing. This is not a listen and learn session. This intensive is an immersive implementation experience where you'll walk away with a comprehensive model to take your life to the next level.

After these two days, you'll have a tailored blueprint to see massive results in your productivity, your happiness, your influence, your creativity, and ultimately, in achieving your biggest goals. Because I want to make this a truly amazing experience and I want to give tons of personal one-on-one interaction and engagement with every single person who attends, there’s only 15 seats available for this intensive, and seats have already started filling up. 

[0:22:18] MB: I am personally committed that for every single person who attends this live intensive, that I will help you create massive results in your life, and I will do everything that it takes to make sure that you have an incredible experience and get the maximum amount of value possible. To find out more and to grab your seat for the intensive before it sells out, just go to successpodcast.com/live. That's successpodcast.com/live  to find out all the information.

The intensive is gonna be here in Nashville on January 27th and 28th. All the details and logistics are available at successpodcast.com/live. Grab your seat now. I cannot wait to see you and hang out with you and take your life to the next level here in Nashville in January. success podcast.com/live Grab your ticket today. 

[0:23:16] MB: So you touched on a minute ago, the new work that you've been doing about resilience. I want to dig into that a little bit. It's such an important topic. How did you come to take that on as a new project or a new area of focus?

[00:23:21] NP: Sure, it's really an evolution. So I'm 40 years old now at the time of this conversation. In my late twenties, my wife left me and my best friend took his own life. These are super hard and difficult things for anybody. And for me, I was a wreck. I was – I lost 40 pounds to distress. I got a therapist for the first time and I started my blog. 1000awesomethings.com was my personal therapeutic project to cheer myself up. That evolved into my first book, which is all about gratitude, and it's called The Book of Awesome. Five years later, I met Leslie. We fell in love. We got married. I'm giving you like the quick version here and on the plane home from our honeymoon she told me she was pregnant. 

I mean, on the plane. She bought the pregnancy test in the Kuala Lumpur Airport Pharmacy and she did the pregnancy test like 50,000 feet above sea level. We land home in Toronto. I then write a 300 page love letter to my unborn child about how to live a happy life. That love letter turns into a book called The Happiness Equation. So The Happiness Equation, my last book, is all about happiness and a lot of the stuff we've been talking about so far is kind of like from that kind of, that work and research and writing that I did.

Now, at the time of recording this, it's 2019 and I don't know when this will come out, but right at the end of 2019 we’re reporting and I'm 40 years old. I'm purportedly successful. Why, then that am I super thin skinned. Why, then when I get two likes on a photo am I like, “Nobody likes me”? Why, when I get a rude email from someone, am I like, “I need to delete this person from my life forever.” Like I want to like, just like – I can't handle it, you know? I'm actually weak, I'm fragile. I'm thin skinned and I look around and I see my own children, and I'm like, they're kind of like that, too. 

Is it a genetic thing? So I look around a little bit more. Guess what? It's all of us. We're all getting more and more anxious, lonely, depressed. We're living like an army of porcelain dolls. Why? Well, I have a thesis about this, and this is something I share in the introduction to my new book on resilience which is called You are Awesome. And that is this. We live in an era of the greatest abundance of all time. You're in Nashville? I'm in Toronto. We're having a conversation like we're old friends. Like that’s amazing. Like, you couldn't do this not that long ago. 

Not only that, we live longer than we've ever lived. We are healthier than we've ever been. We are safer than we've ever been. We have more money than we've ever had. By the way these are all generationally true, okay. Compare ourselves to previous generations or previous generations, higher education. Everything's better. Like we live in an era of infinite abundance.

And the point about safety is really valid. We don't have any gigantic huge famine. No great depression. No plague. No one's getting forcibly shipped off to war, which happened, like just a generation ago. We have it good. Unfortunately, and here's that here's the ‘ah ha’, the side effect of all this abundance is we no longer have the tools to handle failure or even perceived failure. Like the two likes on the photo, or the rude email. 

So the muscle I think we all are so desperate to build these days is resilience. How do we get mentally tougher? Because the world certainly will not help us. They will rampage us with messages telling us how much we suck and stink, and social media will feed us everyone else’s is pretty picture and six pack abs and the lobster buffet the mouths they're on to make your lunch look like crap. So you're on your own. So mental toughness or resilience is now my current focus area. And that's exactly why.

[0:26:47] MB: Such a great, insightful point. I wrote this down in bolded in my notes. We no longer have the tools to handle failure or even perceived failure.

[00:26:57] NP: Yeah, and this is the thing. Part of the problem right now is cell phones. Dr Jean Twengie, a researcher and professor at San Diego University has written about the fact that anxiety rates are up 30% over the past five years. By the way, anxiety rates have not gone up even double digits before that. Like, it's like a gigantic huge hockey stick-like curb, suddenly. In her report, she says this is due, her words not mine, to the ascendance of the smartphone.

I made some flippant comments earlier and I’ll right now, but the cell phones kill our productivity. 31% of our time is bookmarking, prioritizing, and switching between tasks now, they hurt us physically because bright screens before bedtime reduce our melatonin production, and we're all having 60 pounds of pressure when we’re texting and stuff like that tech neck and stuff. You've heard about it. And third of all, they're hurting us psychologically. You can no longer be the best anymore. You can't be the winner anymore. You can't be the best basketball player for your high school anymore because someone else is better on the Internet. 

Someone has more followers. Someone has more friends. You and I can have a quick conversation about our podcasts. You and I can name five people that have more downloads than us or five people have more better shows than us or bigger shows. We can. We will. Even when our shows double or triple in popularity and downloads, whatever, we will still be able to name five people, right?

Even Oprah is looking at how many followers Justin Bieber has on Twitter. You can't win. It's impossible. So that's why our anxiety rates are skyrocketing. It's not just that our loneliness rates are skyrocketing. We have purported connection with technology that actually creates disconnection because it's superficial, and we have higher rates of mental illness and depression and suicide than ever before.

[0:28:37] MB: You're painting a pretty bleak picture, and I agree in many ways, especially about smartphones, and you've made some really good points and I'm sure we'll dig into some strategies here in a minute, but you've named a ton of researchers and books, and resources. All of those are gonna be in the show notes for listeners who want to check them out. I'll also throw some other resources we have around breaking phone addictions and so forth too. 

But let's think into that. Tell me more about how we can, zooming out a little bit, how we can cultivate resilience, how we can start to learn to handle failure. And what are some of the specific things that we can do to really take action on that?

[00:29:13] NP: Sure, let me give you three tips to build mental strength or resilience. And these are things you can do, one in the morning, one during the day, and one at bedtime, okay? In the morning, I already told you, get rid of that cell phone. You have to get rid of it. The two most common excuses are, “It's an alarm clock.” Buy an alarm clock from Walmart, or, “It's needed for emergencies.” Get a landline. They're super cheap because no one has one and give it to your friends and family. Get the phone out of your bedroom. 

Instead, you could start your day with the 20 minute journalling exercise like I suggested. Or if you only have two minutes. Let me give you a two-minute research backed, mind strengthening practice that I do every morning when I get up. I shouldn't say every morning. I try to do it every morning. I do it most mornings. I call it Two Minute Mornings, and here's how it goes. Number one, answer the question, “I will let go of –” Number two, “I am grateful for –” and number three, “I will focus on –” That's it. I will let go of – I am grateful for – I will focus on – 

‘I will let go of’ is the first one. We used to go the Catholic confession chamber, you know? Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. The Gospel believes it's good to get things off your chest. There's research in Science magazine called Don't Look Back in Anger by Brasson and colleagues that also suggest that minimizing regrets as you age is good for you, okay? It makes you happier and live longer. It’s not just Catholicism by the way, Buddhism, Mormonism, Judaism, Islam, all have a form of confession built into their religious practices. However, Matt, guess what the fastest growing religion is in the world right now?

[0:30:38] MB: I don't know. Buddhism?

[00:30:39] NP: No religion! According to the National Geographic it is no religion. In fact, some countries, like Australia, France, UK, are about to cross into a secular majority, okay? So we need a form of contemporary confession. ‘I will let go of’ helps you crystallize and eject an anxiety and prevents it from swimming subconsciously your mind all day. I will let go of the 5 pounds I gained over the holidays. I will go of comparing my book to Tim Ferriss’s book, comparing my podcast to Tim Ferriss’s podcast. 

I will let go of the fact that I yelled at my toddler yesterday like I feel like a terrible dad, but I will let go of it. ‘I am grateful for’, this is based on research from Emmons and McCulloch that shows that if you write down 10 things you're grateful for at the end of the week, you’ll not only be happier but physically healthier after a 10 week period. The research, though, says that the gratitudes have to be specific, so you can't just write down like, “My husband, my kid and my job.” You have to write down, “When my husband, Antonio, put the toilet seat down. When my three year old son gave me a picture that he drew in school. When my boss gave me a compliment in the big morning meeting.” 

Specific. Specificity is important. Otherwise your brain is not really thinking about it. And the third thing is, “I will focus on.” I will focus on his way to carve a will do from your endless could do should do list, right? We all suffer from decision fatigue. Taking that 30 seconds in the morning to decide what the thing is that you're going to do today is awesome because then you can cross it off the next morning and you're done, okay.

“I will let go of. I’m grateful for. I will focus on,” is the morning practice I recommend to strengthen your mind for the day. Now I said I had three things. I said I had a lunchtime practice in an evening practice. You want the other two? 

[0:32:13] MB: Absolutely. 

[00:32:15] NP: Lunchtime. Okay. What should you be doing at lunchtime? First of all, I want you to be the most – If you work in an office environment, I would like you to become the most antisocial person in your office. Do not take your cell phone in your pocket, jump into a Toyota Corolla with four people heading over to the you know, local – what’s the chain I'm trying to think of. I don't know. I can literally picture – Oh Chili's. I was like picturing the red devil chili pepper. I was like, “What's the name of that restaurant?” Chili’s. 

Forget it. Don't do that. Do not participate in the team lunch. I'm sorry, but I want you to be antisocial. Instead. Leave your cell phone on your desk and go out and spend your lunch time doing a weird hobby. An unusual activity. According to research, Nobel Prize winners are 22 times more likely than their peer group, their scientific peer group, to take part in a strange, unusual or amateur hobby far outside their scientific discipline, like glass blowing or teaching magic or learning in the musical instrument or staring in a local town play.

Could you sign up for a cooking class? Could you go for a nature walk somewhere that nobody else goes? Could you take a – an aerobics class that you've never taken before or get a personal trainer if you're scared of the gym, like get a personal trainer, start – do something that's unusual for you. According to the research, this will avoid something called cognitive entrenchment, which is what happens to all of us as we get older and we increasingly specialized, we get too mentally fragile. It's the opposite of resilience. 

If you wouldn't develop greater resilience of mental strength, you have to broaden yourself. Do things far outside your comfort zone. If you can't do it at lunch, fine. In the evenings, take a cooking class, take a music class, pick up an instrument you don't know anything about, etcetera. Do something really weird and different because that will bring new learnings back to your core discipline or core focus area. 

By the way, side note, I interviewed Chris Anderson for my podcast, so my podcast is called Three Books. I ask people which three books changed your life. Chris Anderson runs TED. The whole thing. TED Conference. He said, “Neil, this is exactly how I designed TED. It's a series of incongruent ideas, presented as TED talks, where by the end of the conference, every single attendee has a gigantic ha ha. They have a cool new insight related to their core discipline because they were presented with such incongruent thinking. 

Most famous example, of course, is Steve Jobs taking that calligraphy course at Reed College, which helped to make that thought on the Mac computer, like many years later. Have a weird hobby, okay.

Number three. At night time. We all talk about this thing these days called intermittent fasting like, do you know what I am talking about, Matt, intermittent fasting?

[0:34:38] MB: Yes, for sure

[00:34:38] NP: You heard about it. Everyone's heard about it. Your listeners are probably all over the stuff. What we should be talking about is intermittent fasting on our cell phones. What we should be talking about intermittent fasting on our technology. For how many hours of the day can you completely untether yourself from The Matrix? That's to me the bigger question and why should we do it? 

Well, there's research that shows that when you aren't connected to your cell phone, you let your thoughts ferment, congeal, spark. You're more creative. You're more impassioned. You stopped doing things right and you go to doing the right things. You move from the front of the deck ship to the captain's seat on the ocean liner, you know? You go from living in the washing machine to looking at the washing machine. It helps you zoom out. 

So there's a couple ways to do this. One is you can try my technique, which is on Friday afternoons. I give my wife, Leslie my cell phone, and I say, “Hide this from me till fantasy football starts on Sunday.” Okay, which I know it sounds like not that much, but from Friday afternoon to Sunday afternoon, that's a lot. That's like 48 hours for me. No cell phone a week. Okay. And every night I got, I told you, I put cell phone in the basement and I put it in airplane mode. So I also have, like, untethering that happens at end of the day. 

If you can't do that, then there's a product I just learned about called Pom Box. The website is getpobox.com. It's a small, beautiful wood looking box. You put cell phone in, you set the timer and it locks you from your cell phone until the timer dings or opens it up. So a woman emailed me and told me about this. She said me and my husband were starting to realize we were distracted at dinner like from her own kids, you know. And we don't like that. We don't want to be distracted from our own kids. So we got a Pom Box, and from 5:30 to 8:30 each evening we go untouchable is what I call it. You are awesome. Going untouchable. And we put our phones in there for three hours. So that we could do like the bed, bath, and dinner routine as a family and actually make eye contact with people. 

Those three things, just to summarize, are a two minute morning practice. “I will let go of, I'm grateful for, I will focus on.” A lunchtime or some other time during the week, unusual or weird hobby that gets you out of your comfort zone. Remembering that you're learning rate is the steepest when you know the least. And finally at night or on the weekends, going untouchable, unplugging from the Matrix and thinking about how to intermittently fast on your cell phone.

[0:36:54] MB: All of those are great strategies and really, really interesting. The stat about the Nobel Prize winner is being 22 times more likely to have a weird or amateur hobby is so interesting. I'm curious on all of these things, and this is something that I've heard in the past or people who hear some of these strategies. How much of this notion of, let's say, getting off of your phone or carving out time for deep focus? How much is that apply or specifically, focus around someone who's a creative? Let's, say, a writer, an artist, et cetera, versus somebody who's, for example, managing a company or managing a team are trying to grow a business?

[00:37:32] NP: Two things on that. One is – So I'm 40. I am Indian, so I was supposed to be a doctor. So my life was an undergraduate business degree from, at the time, the top ranked business school in Canada, a master's of business degree from Harvard Business School, 10 years working at Walmart as project manager to our CEO and director of leadership. 

So my whole background  is kind of about that world. But I also deeply believe that everybody inside them has some little flame that is their creative mojo. And whether that’s singing, whether that's making music, whether that's stand-up comedy, when that's doing a podcast like you do, Matt, whether that's like selling stuff on Etsy. Like everyone's got, like this thing that they just really want to do for another reason and they love to do it. And so I hope that the strategies I've presented here kind of applied to both. Meaning that I spent 10 years in corporate kind of coming up that chain and also now I'm leaning more into my creative side because I think everybody has that. 

So I think you can apply it to both. Certainly, the time management stuff, the structuring stuff and how to kind of turn your mindset around each day with the 20 minute exercise. I think that applies everybody,

[0:38:39] MB: You know, you touched on something else that I think is really important and ties back to another concept of yours that I think is great, which is the notion of being a novice, being a beginner, getting out of your comfort zone, and as that as you called it. I think previously the idea of a failure budget. Tell me a little bit about that concept?

[00:38:55] NP: Sure. And I mentioned this idea called cognitive entrenchment. And if you want to read a little bit more on staying wide longer, a great book on this topic is called Range by David Epstein. E-P-S-T-E-I- N. That's where I got the the Nobel Prize Winners research study was from. I don't think he did the study, but he quotes that study in that book. It’s where I first became aware of it. 

So say you believe me on all this stuff and you're like, “Okay, the person used the most successful life is actually not the person who has had the most successes.” That's what we are inclined to think. That is not true. It is actually the person who has had the disproportionately higher amount of failures. Example, wedding photographer. “How did you get 50 awesome pictures of this wedding?” If you ask them, they always say the same thing. “I have 1500 bad ones. Like I took 2000 or I guess 1550 if I do my math, photos at this two-hour wedding. So of course I got 50 good ones.”

 Look at sports. The guy who has the most wins. Cy Young also has the most losses. The guy who has the most strikeouts, Nolan Ryan, also has the most walks. The most active quarterback with the most Super Bowl championships, Tom Brady, also, the active quarterback with the most Super Bowl losses, Tom Brady. 

See what I’m saying? If you’re wishing on this, then you believe that you have to increase your failure rate. It's hard to do that, especially isn't adult because we overtly specialize and we get good at one thing and success blocks future success. So what do you do? I, on January 1st of every year, my wife and I each take money from our joint account and we put into our personal account. We call it our failure budget. 

One thing that comes out of that is like frivolous stuff like my fantasy football stuff comes out of there, for example. But also I use that money as like a no excuses way to just spend on randomness. Again, examples like flying to some city with a friend to hear a concert by a band that he or she really likes that you've never heard of because you just decided to do it. Taking a sport up. Taking a sport up as an adult is so healthy for you. Remember ninth grade gym class? You do it different sport every week. What does every adult do? Nothing. Or maybe like one thing. Just jog. Or they like just play basketball. 

But pushing yourself in your comfort zone is much, much, much healthier. So failure budget helps and the reason it helps us because you could just make it a small percentage of your income. If you make $50,000, you could say I spend $50 anything I want to try. Or just move the decimal place over a few points, and then you have no excuses, so you are more likely to try new things. And when you try new things, you learn more. So, your failure rate goes up and your success rate eventually goes up.

[0:41:25] MB: Great point. And David Epstein's book, Range, one of the best books I read in the last 12 months. Probably my most recommended book of 2019. And I’ll  throw in, we did interview him a couple months ago. Throw it on the show notes for listeners who want to dig in. But even, you said something there that I thought was really interesting, which is this notion that success blocks future success. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

[00:41:45] NP: Yeah, here’s the thing: most of us were born as blobs were little bob blobs of brains of them. And so your parents’ goal is to expose it to a breath of things. You look at shapes and colors and you do drawing and you do sports and you're doing everything. Everything. Eventually you specialize. You feel like you have to. And maybe you stay brought his long felt. Maybe take liberal arts education or you dabble in the bunch things where you spend your twenties, I think as you should, doing a bunch of different things. 

Okay, I think the twenties are the decade of experimentation in many ways you just try as many new things in that decade as possible. Because it's the after the two decades of like forced learning and before your like seven decades of like living or running a family, if that's what you want to do, or being part of a family. So, it’s like twenties are your decade to play. Okay? The play decade, the experimentation decade. 

But here's what happens to most people in their twenties. You do something that works. Let's just say you sell a condo. Let's just say you get your real estate license and you sell one condo. You are not sure if you like real estate. You're not sure if it's for you, but you sell one condo and you get a $10,000 commission, and you're like, “Oh, my gosh, like I'm good at this.” So you tell people, “I got some business cards made. I'm a real estate agent now.” And when you go to parties, people know you as their real estate agent friend. You have had success in that area. They want to talk to you about interest rates, their house, when they should list with you or sell their house or blah, blah, blah. All those conversations served to deepen your own specialty in that one area. 

What's the downside? Well, say you become a millionaire by the time you're 30 as a real estate agent. You might think you made it, and maybe you have. But here's the question. I would ask you, “What other success could you have had, should you have had or would you have had if you had let yourself state broader longer?  Could you have pursued ballet till the time when you were dancing at the Met?” Right? We don't know because that success you had as a real estate agent blocked the future success you could have had in other areas. 

What's the way out of that? How do you mentally unfurl yourself from all the sleeping bags you’re rolled up in? Go to parties where you don't know anybody. Have a failure budget where you're trying new things. Put yourself in situations out of your comfort zone. Keep letting yourself experiment and play being open to Black Swan opportunities so that you jack up your mental strength and your resilience and make yourself, I hate to use the word, like more polymath-ish. You know, so you can do what I was talking about earlier and get a series of incongruent ideas in your mind so that you are stronger as a person. 

[0:44:05] MB: Very good advice. And that's something that I personally struggle with as well and having so many different projects and interesting things, it’s always confusing to try and yeah, at a cocktail party where you know, people it's easy to get pigeonholed, and it's hard to sometimes break out of that.

[00:44:20] NP: Yeah, that's what you have to try. A great book is The Black Swan by Naseem Taleb. Go to parties where you don't know anybody. Put a chip on a roulette wheel on every number and give it a spin. People ask me, “Neil, why did you start Three Books?” Like, “Why did you start your podcast?” And I said, I say to them, “It's because it turns out that the stuff I love doing since I was a kid, writing and speaking, it turns out, as I'm getting closer to 40, I'm getting paid for that stuff. I'm always getting paid for it, and I and nothing to push myself wider, all over the place. Just in crazy directions.” Is to start my podcast. Three Books. I'd purposely made it no ads so that I won't be beholden to anybody. 

I want to do it for 15 years so I can uncover the 1000 most formative books in the world. And who am I interviewing Matt? I just told you before, I'm trying to interview like, I interviewed the world's greatest Uber driver about customer service. I interviewed the woman who has founded the world's largest feminist magazine. Do I know much about feminism or feminist magazines? No. So I got to ask her like, “What's feminism? What's first wave Feminism? How do you define a feminist?” You know, I ask dumb questions because it's a way to broaden myself and put myself in situations where I get to play the fool. Because I am a fool, because we're all fools because the world's too big and complex to really know anything. And the podcast Three Books is a way for me to expose myself to endless Black Swan opportunities. 

It's an excuse, because it's being recorded and released, for people to start to say, “Yes,” to talking to me. Malcolm Gladwell I don't think we have said yes to my show if I was just like, “Hey, Malcolm, can I come over to your living room and, like, talk to you about books?” That answer would've been No. I was like, “Hey, could I talk to you about your three most formative books and release it when your new book comes out? Sharing with people what I thought of your new book, Talking to Strangers and your three most formative books?” Now the answer is yes. And I get to benefit from that conversation and, of course, record it and share it with people. 

So to me, it's like putting a learning kind of accelerated hill in my life. And I made it a countdown and I made it scheduled. All that stuff I did, Matt, that’s what it forces me to do it. Same with my blog back in the day, 1000awesomethings.com It was one awesome thing, every single week day at 12:01 a.m. for 1000 week days in a row. The system creates the laziness in a way, because I have to do it by the deadline I set.

[0:46:23] MB: Yeah, such a good perspective and and I couldn't agree more about podcasting as a powerful framework to open up all kinds of doors and opportunities? I want to dial this back to something really simple. For somebody who's been listening to us that wants to concretely implement or take action on one thing that we've talked about. What would be the one piece of homework or action item you would give them to start implementing these ideas?

[00:46:50] NP: Start or finish your day by reading 20 pages of fiction from a good book. Reading is – books are magic and reading his medicine. A few years ago, I read five books a year. Then my wife made fun of me and I read 50 books a year. In one year. I wrote an article about how he did that called Eight Ways to Read a Lot More Books This Year. It got published in Harvard Business Review in January of 2017. It became the most read article on the whole website, HBR Network, over that year, and you could link to it in the show notes. That tipped me off that everybody wants to read more. It wasn’t that the article was so well written. It was like when you see the headline Eight Ways to Read a Lot More Books, everyone’s like, “Well, I would like to do that, but I can't. So what did this guy do?

You click the article. Guess what? My advice is no brainer. It's like move the TV to the basement, put a bookshelf at your front door, commit to what you're going to read. So I started an email list of what I'm gonna read. Now because I have the books podcast now, the Three Books Podcast and I like totally eliminated like television, news media, I canceled two newspaper subscriptions, canceled five magazines subscription. All my time and energy outside of my day to day is reading.

I now – this year I'm gonna read like, something like 175 books a year, which I don't think that is sustainable, to be honest with you. But I have to reach 75 year just for my podcast. And because I'm starting and finishing the day with books, it adds up and it makes me, and it will make you a better leader, a better writer, a better speaker, a better father, a better mother, a better sister, a better brother, a better parent. 

Everything goes, gets better when you inhabit multiple consciences. It comes from the quote from Game of Thrones, which is ‘a reader lives 1000 lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.’

[0:48:27] MB: Love the Game of Thrones reference. What a great way to put a bow on that. So Neil, for listeners who want to find more about you and your work online, what is the best place for them to do that.

[00:48:36] NP: Well, my podcast is called Three Books, and my website is called neil.blog.

[0:48:42] MB: Well, Neal, thank you so much for sharing all this wisdom and all these insights with the listeners.

[00:48:47] NP: Matt, thank you. You are doing an amazing service for the world. I love your podcast it's a real flattering honor to be invited. Thank you for having me.

[00:48:56] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say, “Hi,” shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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

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

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

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

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

Life’s Great Question - How To Find MEANING In Your Work & Life with Tom Rath

In this episode we ask the big question - how do you find meaning in your life and work? When you’re starting death in the face, life’s purpose becomes clear. We learn how to harness those lessons to find meaning in your own life and discover a few simple things you can do every day - starting right now - to increase your odds of living a longer, healthier, happier life with our guest Tom Rath. 

• How a shocking cancer diagnosis and crippling blindness at the age of 16 transformed Tom’s life and put him on a path of transformation.

• What are the simple things you can do every day - starting right now - to increase your odds of living a longer, healthier life?

• If you want to be effective as a leader, or in your career as a parent - you have to start with YOURSELF. You have to put your oxygen mask on first. 

• Most people are operating at 20-25% effectiveness in today’s work environment. 

• Even one good night of sleep is like a reset button for your life. It gives you a clean and clear slate for the next day to get started on the right foot, and can create an upward spiral of health and productivity. 

• Building better default choices into your shopping and your environment is a great way to improve in a simple, small way

• It takes one little turning point, and then your life starts to go into a more and more positive direction. 

• It’s a mistake to think that more time = more productivity. The marginal effectiveness of working over 50-60 hours begins to be negative.

• We need to think about work as performance challenge - how do we optimize PERFORMANCE instead of just maximizing time.

• Wellness is not about disease prevention, it’s a question of PERFORMANCE and being as effective and being your best self. 

• Wellness/wellbeing is not a “nice to have” - it’s not about “disease burden reduction” - it’s about performance and results - and until we shift that focus and understand that these interventions are the KEY to unleashing more energy, creativity, and results in your life - we’re missing HUGE tools for being more effective leaders and producers. 

• The psychological and physical steps you can use to create better DAYs in your life. 

  • Eat, move, sleep

  • “Other people matter” - interactions and connections with people we love increase daily happiness.

  • We have to find ways to create MEANING in our work. Meaning more than money will be the currency of work. 

• We really don’t take enough time in a given day to ask meaningful questions of the people we love and care about. Invest in your closest personal relationships.

• Be known for not using your phone. The new status symbol is that you don’t have to be tethered to your phone.

• Walking outside for 10 minutes a day with someone can be a powerful way to improve your thinking and your relationships. 

• Consider having WALKING meetings with friends and colleagues. You have much more expansionary and open conversations when walking outside. 

• What is the difference between meaning and happiness? What happens when we get them confused? 

• How money can kill meaning and actually demotivate people. 

• How do you bring meaning back into your work and make life more meaningful?

• Life’s great jobs are MADE not FOUND. You can craft the job that you have into one that you love and find meaning in in most cases. Start with the job that you have. Look at the tasks that you achieve every day and start to connect that to serving a bigger purpose for OTHER people.

• Start tying the tasks that you do to the people that are helped by your work. 

• A great step to doing this is to help another person tie their work into how they help other people. 

• We ALL need reminders of how our work helps others, even nurses! 

• There’s nothing more powerful you can do from a contribution standpoint than to help another person spot how THEY are helping people. 

• When you’re starting or joining a new team - take the time to get aligned with everyone about what your strengths and contributions are and where you can add the most value.

• Dr. Martin Luther King: "Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others?"

• It’s a better use of your time to invest in things that can compound even if you're not directly moving them forward. 

• How do you identify the most significant contribution we can make in our lives?

  • Ask yourself - what are the central ROLES that you play in your life? Are you doing a good job in those roles and serving others? Mother, Father, sister, brother, parent, etc

  • Figure out your “Defining Roles” and see how you can contribute to them?

  • What are the 2-3 most significant life experiences that have changed your life? Positive and negative. How did they shape you?

• How can we each get clarity around the 3 core areas of contribution?

  • Create something 

  • Operate together 

  • Relating to one another 

• What should you do if you can’t find meaning or passion or purpose in your life? What should you do if you can’t 

• Forget about finding your passion or purpose - that’s a counter productive goal. Purpose and meaning are journeys that occur over decades, and it’s not a straight line, it has ups and downs. Purpose is a myth. 

• Find your greatest contribution, NOT your passion. There are a lot of passions that don’t do a lot for the world. Start with something that is directed at other people, find something that you can help even one other person. 

• Stop looking inward to find your meaning. Look outward and focus on contributing to others. 

• How do you balance doubling down on your strengths vs fixing your weaknesses? 

  • Spend 80% of your time on your strengths and 20% of your time on fixing your weaknesses. 

  • You can’t ignore your weaknesses, they can be big blindspots. 

  • This all starts with self awareness - it’s a KEY component of all of this. 

  • This is a balance - it’s not all or nothing. 

• Homework: take a moment right now and do a retrospective reflection on your typical day of work. See if you can draw a few direct lines between what you do during an average work day and how that helps another person. What’s something that you can do TODAY that will have a positive influence on another person? What can do you do remind yourself of that day after day?

• Homework: Do something today that helps another person you work with or care about to spot a way that they’re making a difference and contributing.

Thank you so much for listening!

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

Are you hiring for your business or next big project?

LinkedIn Talent Solutions is here to help and make hiring the right person simple, powerful, and easy!

LinkedIn goes above and beyond. Screening not just the hard skills you need but soft skill as well to find the right person fast!

LinkedIn looks at things like collaboration within a team, creative skills, adaptability and much much more! That’s how LinkedIn makes sure your post get in front of the right people at the right time to all your needs without all the typical hiring headaches.

It’s no wonder great candidates are hired every 8 seconds on LinkedIn!

Right now, LinkedIn is offering Science of Success listeners their first $50 on the Talent Solutions platform absolutely free! Just go to www.linkedin.com/success to find the right candidate for your project today!

Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

General

• Tom’s Website and Wiki Page

• Tom’s LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook

• Contribify Website

• Eat Move Sleep website

Media

• Optimize - Tom Rath Article Directory

• Heleo - “The 3 Keys to Daily Well-Being” By Editors

• Entrepreneur - “Excessive Sitting Could Shorten Your Life. Engineer Activity Into Your Routine Today” by Tom Rath

• Dave Ramsey - Finding Your Strengths: Tom Rath Discusses How to Engage Your Team

• Quiet Revolution - “You Have Today To Do What Matters Most”: An Interview with Tom Rath” By Susan Cain

• Book Review: “Are You Fully Charged?: The 3 Keys to Energizing Your Work Life” by Tom Rath

• Daniel H. Pink - “5 (or 6) Questions for Tom Rath”

• Mentor Coaching - Positive Psychology Coaching: Interview with Tom Rath

• TD Magazine - Tom Rath By Phaedra Brotherton

• Josh Kaufman - “Notes on StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath” by Josh Kaufman

• University of Minnesota - Small Steps to Big Change: An Interview with Tom Rath

• Forbes - “Tom Rath: How Small Changes Make All The Difference In Your Life” by Dan Schawbel

• [Podcast] Dose of Leadership - 146 – Tom Rath: Bestselling author of StrengthsFinder 2.0, Eat Move Sleep, Strengths Based Leadership, & How Full Is Your Bucket

• [Podcast] Accidental Creative - Podcast: Tom Rath by Todd Henry

• [Podcast] Elevate with Robert Glazer - EPISODE 37: Tom Rath on Discovering Your Strengths and Finding Purpose

Videos

• Tom’s YouTube Channel

• FULLY CHARGED - Official Trailer

• Colorado Thought Leaders Forum - 2017 Tom Rath Keynote With The Colorado Thought Leaders Forum

• Productivity Game - ARE YOU FULLY CHARGED? by Tom Rath | ANIMATED CORE MESSAGE

• Brian Johnson - Optimize Interview: Get Fully Charged with Tom Rath

  • PNTV: Eat Move Sleep by Tom Rath

  • PNTV: Are You Fully Charged? by Tom Rath

• Snapreads - StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath | Animated Book Review

• 3 Minutes Smarter - LEARN YOUR STRENGTHS - StrengthsFinder 2 0 by Tom Rath & Gallup

• Jessrartist - How Full is Your Bucket? For Kids by Tom Rath and Mary Reckmeyer

• Callibrain - Video Review for Strengths Based Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie

Books

• Tom’s Amazon Profile

• Life's Great Question: Discover How You Contribute To The World  by Tom Rath

• Are You Fully Charged?: The 3 Keys to Energizing Your Work and Life  by Tom Rath

• The Rechargeables: Eat Move Sleep  by Tom Rath and Carlos Aon

• Wellbeing: The Five Essential Elements  by Tom Rath and Jim Harter

• Eat Move Sleep: How Small Choices Lead to Big Changes  by Tom Rath

• Vital Friends: The People You Can't Afford to Live Without  by Tom Rath

• How Full Is Your Bucket? For Kids  by Tom Rath, Mary Reckmeyer, and  Maurie J. Manning

• How Full Is Your Bucket?; Positive Strategies for Work and Life (by book's seller)  by Tom Rath & Ph.D. Donald O. Clifton

• Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow  by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie

• StrengthsFinder 2.0 by Tom Rath

Misc

• [Article] Yale Insights - “When Is One Motivation Better than Two?” by Amy Wrzesniewski

Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

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

In this episode, we ask the big question, how do you find meaning in your life and work? When you're staring death in the face, life's purpose becomes clear. We learn how to harness those lessons, to find meaning in your own life and discover a few things that you can do every day starting right now, to increase your odds of living a longer healthier happier life, with our guest, Tom Rath.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word “smarter”, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we wished you a happy Thanksgiving with a beautiful compilation of some of our favorite takes, themes and ideas around the importance of gratitude and how you can be more grateful in your life. If you want to tap into the incredible power of gratitude and how we can transform your life, check out our previous episode.

Now for our interview with Tom.

[0:01:54.0] MB: Today we have another exciting guest on the show, Tom Rath. Tom is a consultant and author on employee engagement, strengths and well-being. He's best known for his studies on strength-based leadership, well-being and synthesizing research findings in his series of best-selling books. His 10 books have sold more than 10 million copies and he's made hundreds of appearances around the globe on best-seller lists. He also serves as a senior scientist and advisor to Gallup, among many other companies. Tom, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:21.6] TR: Thanks so much. It's an honor to be talking with you, Matt.

[0:02:23.6] MB: Well, we're really excited to have you on the show today. The topics that you've covered in your work are so fascinating and important. I think especially in today's world, these questions of meaning and contribution and what do I really want to spend my time on and focus my life on, these are things that I think about all the time, I know so many people are really concerned with.

Before we dig into that, I want to almost follow the narrative journey of your publishing career in some form or fashion, because there's so many lessons that come out of it and it's amazing how interwoven these things are. Let's start with you have a book, title is very simple, called Eat Move Sleep. Tell me about that project, how did that come about and what were the big lessons?

[0:03:08.8] TR: Yeah. The project came about, it does have an interesting backstory, but also I think has influenced the rest of the work that we'll talk about quite a bit. I'm now 43-years-old for context. When I was 16-years-old growing up a normal child, that I grew up in Nebraska in the middle of a country and I was having trouble seeing out of one eye.

Eventually went to an eye doctor and he said, “Well, you've got a lot of large tumors on the back of your left eye. They’re cancerous.” He said, “You'll probably lose all sight in that eye over the next few months.” He said, “In addition to that, we think you have a really rare genetic disorder that essentially shuts off the body's most powerful tumor suppressing gene.”

He said, as a product of that, we don't know the estimate at the time and said I might live to be 37. When I did some research and digging on it, but they said you will have cancer in your kidneys, in your pancreas, in your spine and a host of other areas. To make a really long story short, I am currently battling cancer in all those areas and I did lose all sight in my eye when I was young. The thing I struggle with most now are some large spinal tumors.

As a part of that journey, having that diagnosis when I was 16-years-old, I've essentially spent all of my time since then, or a good chunk of every single day I wake up and I just read through all the medical research and literature that I can get my hands on thousands and thousands of articles about what are all the small steps that I can take today that simply increase my odds of living longer in good health.

You mentioned the book Eat Move Sleep. When I turned 37, I viewed that as a moment to step back and say, “Hey, things have gone pretty well. I've been able to keep this at bay and live a relatively normal life for quite a while.” I thought that was a good time to step back and say, what are all the specific tips around eating, moving and sleeping better that aren't just good for me and my long-term health and keeping cancer at bay, but what are the things that anyone that I care about could learn from all of that research in order to have better days, be better role models and to increase their odds of decreasing things like heart disease, diabetes and cancer and all those odds as well?

The big takeaway as I got into that book was even for a guy like me with that extraordinary risk and threats every day, it's still really not a great motivator for me to avoid the cheeseburger and French fries at lunch today. What is our connecting the research with these moment-by-moment decisions to knowing that I need that energy to be my best in a meeting at 4:00 today. Boy, do I need a lot more energy when my kids get home at 5:00 tonight so I can be a good dad.

As I started to connect all these small, little daily choices about being more active and eating some of the right foods and getting a good night's sleep, I realized that that can help me and a lot of other people just to prioritize our own health and well-being in the moment today, so we can be better spouses, be better workers, be better members of our community.

[0:06:09.5] MB: I can't imagine getting that diagnosis, especially at such a young age. I'm sure that in many ways has shaped your focus and the journey that a lot of your work is taking you on. I want to come back and dig in a little bit more, because you said something really important, which is this idea that it's very hard to tie these important long-term goals into our daily choices. We know the things. In many ways, eating, sleeping, moving, these are things that we know how important they are, they're almost so simple that nobody even wants to hear that advice. It's almost demotivating or not motivating. How did you find a way to bridge that gap between the things we know we should be doing and what we actually do on a day-to-day basis?

[0:06:56.6] TR: One of the big realizations for me and especially thinking about it from a career and a leadership standpoint is if you want to be effective as a leader, or in your career, or as a parent, you have to put your own health and well-being first. Let me start with that, where it's the very tried but true oxygen mask example on an airplane. Most people are showing up at work today and I think they're operating at about 20%, 25% of their effectiveness based on my estimates. We need to say, “Hey, I'm going to prioritize my health and energy first, because I need it, my customers need it, my clients need it, my career needs it.”

The way to do that is in what's the encouraging thing I learned from all the deep research I did on eating, moving and sleeping is if you just get one good night of sleep, even if you've had a crummy day today, everything's gone wrong, you get a solid seven or eight hours of sleep, it's the reset button on a Xbox, or a smartphone. It just gives you a clear slate the next day and you're more likely to be more active and move around throughout the day. You're more likely to eat healthier foods. It starts these upward spirals where your days get progressively better, because you made the right, small choices in the moment.

The same thing applies in the other direction the way those three things work in tandem, where if I've had a pretty good night's sleep and I've been active and moving around throughout the morning and then all of a sudden, I see a bunch of people who I'm out to eat with and they make indulgent choices, a bunch of fried foods and have dessert at lunch, whatever it might be, then I go into a meeting at 4:00 that afternoon and I'm half asleep, I don't have anywhere near the ideas or creativity that I need. That's likely to disrupt my sleep and send things in the other direction.

I think when people start to see the interconnectedness of these small choices, then they realize that they need to build better default choices in. When I say build better default choices in, make sure the right stuff ends up in your grocery cart at the store, because then you're not going to be tempted in a weaker moment like we all are to grab for the bag of chips, or for me, it's peanut butter pretzels I can't resist, right?

How do you build some healthy choices into the place where you work and your home as well? Then to start to think about how do you just build a little bit more activity or into your routine. Like you mentioned, it's not big overarching changes. I think what I've learned over the last decade is that I think when a lot of us here, you need to have 30 to 60 minutes of intense cardiovascular activity five days a week. We just throw our hands up and say, “I’m not going to do that.” The bigger public health problems and bigger challenge for most of us is we just need to not sit in a chair with our butts glued to it for six to eight hours a day, because that's causing more cardiovascular disease, that's causing more diabetes, obesity, it’s causing all kinds of problems.

The solution to that is just to do what I'm doing right now. When you're on a phone call, be up and moving around and pacing around a little bit. It's that subtle variance in our activity that can reel long-term rewards for our overall health.

[0:09:55.0] MB: It's amazing, the power of upward spirals and how even one really small victory can compound and begin to grow into more and more positive healthy life choices.

[0:10:08.6] TR: Yeah. It just takes one little turning point there and then everything starts to go in the right direction in that. The things you do – the other thing I've learned through experience is that let's say you're in a workplace and you're someone like me, I'm normally a little more introverted, I've never preached to anyone about health. Even though I wrote the book Eat Move Sleep, but I would never even tell one of my relatives or in-laws or best friends what I think they should do with their health.

The one thing I do is I'm very careful to be a good example for my kids, for my friends, for my colleagues and with my own actions. It may take six months, sometimes it takes three years, but eventually people start to pick up on things that we do and we set better examples for the people around us and people we care about. I'm increasingly convinced that demonstrating good health and well-being is one of the most important things that leaders and organizations can do today, because if the opposite is true and you see leaders who are sacrificing their sleep first, which many, many leaders do and you see people who are setting bad examples with what they eat and they're not prioritizing sleep and so forth, boy that sends a message to the rest of the people, in that workgroup and maybe throughout the organization that prioritizing your own health and well-being isn't acceptable here. I don't think that's going to be acceptable for leaders to act like that 10 years from now. I hope not.

[0:11:25.7] MB: That comes back to what you said a minute ago as well, this idea of the oxygen mask principle; you have to start with yourself. In many ways, that seems like it's missing in our lexicon, or our understanding of productivity and health and happiness today.

[0:11:44.2] TR: Yeah. I grew up in a real hard-working farming Midwestern town in Lincoln, Nebraska. I never met a role model who I want to look up to who would admit that they needed seven or eight hours sleep back then. It was always a badge of honor to say, “I only had four hours sleep and I still did X and Y and Z.” There's that industrial mindset from a workplace standpoint and you have that paired with some of that real good intended upbringing and US is a country that tries and works hard and so forth.

I don't think we've taken enough of a step back yet to realize how much unintentional collateral damage that can do when everyone around you is just trying to ramp up and work longer hours. There's a lot of good research emerging the last five years that I've seen showing that just encouraging people to do long, work longer hours, after about 40 hours to be really specific from a research standpoint and I've looked at this and written about this, the book called Wellbeing that we worked on when I was at Gallup, once you get past 40 hours, hours 40 through 50 and hours 50 through 60, they're just nowhere near as productive as the first 20 or 30 hours.

It's a mistake to think that more time equals more productivity and it's certainly doesn’t equal more quality. It equals more errors and more variance and more safety challenges in the workplace.

[0:13:06.2] MB: That principle is something, I've seen that in the research, I've heard it echoed by a number of guests on the show and yet, even just being American, as part of our culture, that's something that's hard for me to internalize and I'm constantly battling that same internal dialogue of, “Oh, this isn't that productive, but the flipside of that Puritan work ethic that I need to be working more. I need to be doing more stuff. I need to be hustling harder.” How do we start to really internalize that lesson and come to grips with the notion that working harder doesn't necessarily lead to more productivity, more output, more result?

[0:13:45.1] TR: It's a great question. I think a part of the answer lies in just having open discussions about it with the people you work with and destigmatizing the notion that – I mean, I've been in cultures and worked with companies where it's always sudden, people feel they need to be the first ones to show up in the office in the morning, the last ones to leave.

I think if we just start to talk about that openly and say what are the ways that each of us can have our schedules work and our habits and patterns and defaults and the things that are available to be active in an office and the foods that are available and so forth, how can we all make that work so that we have more energy and more creativity at 3:00 in a meeting when we really need it most, or for a big client presentation? How can we think about optimizing the flow of people's energy within a work team, so that we can be at our peak as much as possible?

I think to your question, which is a very good one specifically, I think we need to start to look at it as a performance challenge to say how can we optimize performance, instead of just maximizing time. What I've seen that hasn't worked, to be really honest, I've spent 10 years on this well-being stuff, and when it's seen as a disease burden reduction program, or a benefits program that's about wellness and keeping people from having diabetes and obesity and stuff, boy, that's not seen as a real leadership issue, or a legitimate conversation in most work circles.

I think we've got to talk about it more about how can we be effective and be our best by tweaking these things and start to view it as an energy prioritization exercise, not a disease burden reduction exercise.

[0:15:29.9] MB: That's a great point, this whole endeavor of optimizing your life trying to pursue wellness is not – there are these ancillary side benefits around health outcomes and things like that, but really if you look at it from the lens of a ruthless performance-driven individual who wants more output and more results, a lot of these strategies are actually the most effective path for you to pursue, but the way we think about them in today's world is often counterproductive.

[0:16:02.0] TR: Right. I’ve spent a lot of time just on the semantic to this. I mean, all the work I’ve done on well-being, if it even sounds like wellness, it seems like a nice to have, right? It doesn’t become a part of the performance, critical conversation that leaders have in the workplace in too many cases. I think we start to get it more about leaders have been able to grasp my work on this and that my most recent book before this one coming out in 2020, that – called Fully Charged.

The point there was to get people talking about what do we all need to be fully charged like our devices and have as much energy as possible in a day to be productive and of course, that also benefits our health. I think putting it in the frame of energy and creativity and productivity makes it a more relevant and open conversation for people to have in the workplace.

[0:16:51.5] MB: Let's dig into some of the lessons and themes from Fully Charged, because there's so many great takeaways from that book. How did the journey progress? We've started answering this already, but how did the journey progress from eat, move, sleep, to fully charged?

[0:17:06.7] TR: Yeah. It's interesting, because a lot of the work that I mentioned on well-being, people talk about whether you want to call it well-being, or quality of life, or basically all the things that are important to how we think about and evaluate our lives is how we define it when I was at Gallup. It's supposed to be the biggest umbrella you can think of.

One of the fascinating findings for me from all the global research that I've been a part of is that if you ask people if they look back on their overall life over 30 years, or 50 years, or 70 years, how would you evaluate your life, if you do that and you line that up with how much money people make, it's almost a perfect correlation between the two.

When you ask people to just evaluate their life in a huge sum like that, people who live in wealthier countries rate their lives higher, we each doubling of income buys you about a point on the ladder you'd put yourself on and money matters too much when you ask people a big evaluative question like that.

What was more encouraging that I've seen in recent data is that if you ask people how much fun they're having right now, how much energy they have right now and do they have negative emotions, positive emotions, and you look at daily well-being, which I would argue having a bunch of good days is a lot more important than one rating, looking all the way back at the end of life. When you look at that, it's nowhere near as income-dependent and it's all about the little things we do during the day. It's about the people we're with, how much social interaction we have if we'd have done some meaningful work, if we feel we've had that physical energy we were just talking about.

The good news there is that after a threshold level of income, in the United States it's about depending on location, it's between $55,000 and $75,000 per household in income. That is a great equalizer where the relationship of income flattens out and doesn't predict how much daily well-being people will have. You see this across countries as well, with the countries with the highest daily well-being are countries like Panama and Paraguay and Uruguay, they're happy central American countries, to oversimplify it. It's not the real wealthy Nordic countries you normally see pop up in the big life satisfaction studies.

What I learned from that research and talked about in the Fully Charged book are the psychological and physical steps we can take to create better days in particular. The three big ones in there, we've talked a lot about the physical energy part of it, in terms of eating, moving, sleeping, so forth. The other one that according to all the psychological research I've studied, my grad advisor, Chris Peterson, used to say, “Other people matter,” was his summary of decades of psychological research.

There's no better predictor of how happy we’ll be in a day than the amount of time we spent around people we enjoy being with. If there's one spot that we'll talk about today that I have the most concern about frankly, even more than inactivity and stuff, it's the fact that we really don't take enough time in a given day to ask meaningful questions of the people we love and care about and close our own mouths and just genuinely listen to those responses.

You obviously do a lot of that with the work that you do, but we need more people who are really focused on keeping their devices off and stowed away and genuinely listening to and investing in their closest personal relationships. I think that's the one thing that people who do that really well are going to be increasingly valuable, especially in the workplace over the next 25 years, because there's so much flying out, it's just going to get harder and harder and harder to do.

When I spend time with groups talking about some of the concepts in the Fully Charged book, I challenge people to be known for not using their phone. It sounds simple, but when I was a kid it was always glamorous for people to be out seen smoking, right? Now they have to hide behind dumpsters and don't even want to be caught on the property having a cigarette.

10, 15 years ago when people first got cellphones, it was a big deal for a realtor to be carrying around a big bag, so you knew they were important and had to be accessible all the time, right? Now, I think the new status symbol needs to be that you don't have to be tethered to your phone and you can choose to pay attention to other people and care about that instead. That's the head of this Fully Charged factors, I think that's the big one we're going to face.

Then the third one folds into what I've been working on more recently, which is that we have to find ways to see how we're doing meaningful things through our work, because I think meaning more than money will be the new currency for careers and influence in the future.

[0:21:50.3] MB: So many things to unpack from that. I want to come back to what you said a minute ago around how we don't create enough time in our lives to ask meaningful questions of the people that we love and care about. Putting away your phone is obviously a huge step towards doing that. What are some other strategies, or things that you can do to create more meaningful connections in day-to-day life?

[0:22:14.1] TR: Yeah. I think we've got to be pretty deliberate about the investments we make in our very closest relationships and think about what it takes to nurture those relationships. I mean, in some cases it's about growing new ones. I think the part that a lot of us and gosh, I hate to start out as much, but I think men and I'm in this bill myself, are just horrible at it on average. I think to say what are you doing this week, to spend whether it's 15 minutes, whether it's an e-mail, whether it's sitting down with someone, asking someone to go have dinner, go on a walk.

One of the things that people never call out from the Walter Isaacson's great biography of Steve Jobs, people do – and there are all these quotes and everything else. My favorite part was were Walter Isaacson asked Steve Jobs. He said, “Why do you always ask people to come over to your house and go for walks around your neighborhood?” Jobs’ simple response was, “I think better when I walk.”

There are three things in that statement from Jobs; he's spending time with people one-on-one out in nature, we're not distracted. Just being in nature is huge. Being active, we all think better when we walk, but we don't – back to your question, I think all of us, we've got to force ourselves to get outdoors for at least 10 minutes a day just for our well-being and get some activity. Walk to the second closest Starbucks if you live in a city like I do. Find ways to build that in your routine, both activity and relationships, because they can go hand in hand.

My wife and I have created a pattern and ritual over the five, six years now, their kids have been in the elementary school down the road here, that any day that the weather's nice enough to do it, we walk our kids to school first thing in the morning, because it gives us time to have one-on-one conversation on the way home and it gets our kids some activity before school, because they don't get enough activity in school nowadays at all.

I'll tell you this, when I've gone on walks with colleagues and friends for meetings, which I do all the time now, you have so much more expansionary meaningful thought, versus if you're sitting in a traditional conference room, or an office. I got so fed up. About two to three years ago, I got so fed up with the normal ballrooms and conference rooms and hotel meeting rooms I spent time in, that one of my big projects over the last three years has been – we've been trying to build an active learning warehouse that's in the woods about 30, 50 minutes from DC here.

The whole point is even when there's bad weather, we have poor treadmills set up where you can look out the glass and feel like you're on side-by-side walking out in the woods just to have mind-expanding meetings and conversations with people, even if there's inclement weather out there. On nice days, you can actually go around and walk through the woods on this property. I did that, put that whole project together just because the traditional set up we have for meeting rooms and offices is so hard to work around in many cases.

[0:25:12.4] MB: That's a great and simple piece of advice, one that I definitely am going to integrate into my own habits and routines and meetings.

[0:25:22.3] MB: What if you could hire A players for your business based not just on resume, but on intangible job skills, like creativity, resourcefulness, flexibility and even the reviews and feedback of those they've previously worked with? With the power of LinkedIn Jobs, our sponsor for this week, you have all of that at your fingertips and much more, so you can find the perfect person for the job every time.

LinkedIn Jobs screens candidates with the hard and soft skills that you're looking for, so that you can find the right person fast. Because of the rich data sets and huge collection of talented individuals on LinkedIn, LinkedIn Jobs gets you in front of everybody with the skills and qualifications you want to hire while saving you the time, energy and headache of having to do it all yourself.

Find the right person meant for your business today with LinkedIn jobs. You can pay what you want and the first $50 is on them. Just visit linkedin.com/success. Again, that's linkedin.com/success to get $50 off your first job post. Terms and conditions apply.

[0:26:35.5] MB: I want to come back to the broader topic that you touched on a minute ago and the importance of meaning. What is the difference between meaning and happiness and what happens when we get those things confused?

[0:26:48.7] TR: Yes. I think those two words are at the center of a lot of good research. I think there's also a lot of misdirection that takes place sometimes where – I mean, I honestly, I've been a part of that doing a lot of research on happiness. My degree is in positive psychology and well-being over the years. Because I think happiness to me has more of an implication of looking inward and taking steps to make yourself happy. The thing I've learned through studying this in real good experiments and trials and the like on these topics is that if I had a friend who was really struggling and I sat down and had a long conversation, went for a walk with that friend, the last thing I would ever do is help him to map out ways to try and make himself happy.

The first thing I would get him directed on is what are some specific efforts he could take to do things that increase the happiness of people he cares about, to feel better about what he's doing to serve customers, or to feel better about projects he's involved in with his church, or with his community, or whatever that might be that actually leads to more happiness based on everything I've studied.

[0:28:09.1] MB: I want to drill down into another theme that you expound upon, which is this notion of the relationship between money and happiness and meaning. I just did it myself. I just confused meaning and happiness. What is the difference between, or the relationship between money and meaning and tell me more about what you touched on a minute ago, this idea that money can actually kill meaning in our lives?

[0:28:31.7] TR: Yeah. There's a great piece of research that – we put together a documentary called Fully Charged a couple years ago. We interviewed a professor named Amy Wrzesniewski, who’s at Yale now I believe. She did some research, I think it was with Barry Schwartz and a few others on Cadets West Point. They looked at these West Point cadets and said, do they have intrinsic motivation and they're driven from some internal desire? Or are they doing things because of external motivators, extrinsic motivators, like reward and prestige and pay and things like that, right?

I might have thought going into that study if you were to say okay, intrinsic, internal thing motivations are better, probably better than the external ones. I had a hunch that was right going in. What they found that surprised me is that even if you're really internally motivated, also having the external motivation is bad for the eventual outcomes for those cadets. I've seen evidence similar to that in other experiments and realms as well, where almost any – I'm trying not to use the word quid pro quo, because I’ve heard it way too much lately, but almost any incentive that is purely monetarily-driven is likely in my experience to drive motivation in the wrong direction.

If you're a manager right now in particular, or you're just an individual thinking about how do I motivate myself to do better work, I think the more you can see metrics and outcomes that are about the meaning and mission and purpose; for my work, if I focus more on how many people my work is reaching, or people that I've heard from who say their life has been demonstrably impacted by some of my research, or a book, or a talk, or whatever it might be, that's a much better motivation than counting dollars, or trying to count things that are more about financial and external metrics.

I think we've got to find ways, especially with the cohort of people entering the workforce today. Let's say between 18 and 35-years-old in particular, I pick on right now. I'm excited about that generation entering the workforce, because I think that generation has much higher expectations about working for a purpose that's bigger than a paycheck. It's so clear in all of the studies that I read. I think it's fun to see, because there's a generation past me where I think that the generation leaving the workforce right now, work was very little more than an economic transaction. It was sterile and there wasn't a lot of thought given to how people can see the meaning in their work. I'm encouraged that that'll be vastly different 10 or 20 years from now.

[0:31:28.0] MB: How do we start to bring meaning back into our work and make our work more meaningful?

[0:31:35.8] TR: I think it starts with the job you have today, which is one of the things I talk about in the new book Life's Great Question is about – a good friend of mine who passed away a couple of years ago, who was the world's leading researcher on hope, his name was Shane Lopez. What Shane taught me is that great jobs are made, not found. That's how he put it.

Basically, what he taught me and what I've learned from a lot of the research from some of the best professors in Michigan's business school in particular is that you can craft the job that you have into one that you love and find meaning in in most cases. That starts by taking a pretty careful look at the tasks that you do each day in a pretty functional way and saying, what are the things that I do each day and how does that connect to serving a bigger purpose for another person?

Even if that's indirect, if you can start to draw the line – so I mean, GE does a great job of helping people on their manufacturing floor. They bring people in who are making them, or who are making MRI machines, for example, and they have them hear from customers and people who are battling cancer who have benefited from that imaging. Facebook does a similar thing, where they bring in people who have met long-lost loved ones, or a friend they haven’t been able to get in touch with and have developers who are working on the platform hear from people who have benefited from that work.

Or the company can do that, but on an individual level, I think a part of it is auditing the tasks of our day and making sure that as many of those tasks as possible, you can draw a direct connection how you're serving a person or a group of people in a positive way that improves their life. I mean, there are some professions frankly, where and I've done some work on this where if you're working for a company that does nothing other than produce cigarettes for example, or sugar water, or whatever it might be, it could be difficult to draw those connections. If you care about that, you might want to ask much more serious questions.

In 95%, 98% of roles, there are pretty direct ways where you can connect what you're doing between 2:00 and 3:00 in the afternoon with the purpose it’s intended to serve, whether it's to keep people safe, if you work in a safety department or in a government agency that regulate things, or whether it's to reach more people if you have an important medicine or product.

I spend a lot of time with people in the healthcare industry, who you'd think that nurses in the hospital – hospice nurses and home care nurses and you'd think that it would be so obvious to them the purpose of their work serves every day. Even in those professions, they still need reminders. One of the more powerful things you can do of course is to help another person to see how their work tomorrow makes a difference for the life of another person, because we're not that – we're probably better at doing it for others and it's easier to do for others than it is to remind and do it ourselves all the time.

[0:34:44.8] MB: That's a great strategy, the idea of starting with someone else and helping them figure out how their work creates meaning, because oftentimes, you can get clouded or confused when you're trying to examine your own contributions.

[0:34:59.6] TR: Yeah. One of the stories I talk about in some detail in that Life's Great Question book is that I grew up in a family full of psychologists and teachers. When I was a little kid, they gave me every Rorschach test and block stacking thing. They were trying to figure out what I was good at. I was four, or five-years-old. I'd been through all that. Then when graduated from college, one of my first jobs was to work on the strengths finder application at Gallup that you might have heard of that it gives people their top talents out of a list of 34. I went through that 10 or 15 times while we were building it. I'd done all that.

Even then, by the time I was I think about 25-years-old and I've gone through all those batteries and had all this information, I still thought at that time that I was a really horrible writer and that was the one thing I was never going to do. Because a teacher, an English, an AP English teacher in my high school told me that I should stick to numbers and math, because writing wasn't my thing.

To make a long story short, my grandfather at that time challenged me to work on a book with him under some pretty extreme circumstances. He said to me, he’d been reading a little piece, a letter that I had written him, just a personal handwritten letter and he said, “I think you've got a little talent to bring things to life with words and I think we should try to put this book together in his final year to life.

Anyhow, the long story short is that book turned out to be a book called How Full Is Your Bucket, that caught on and that's what got me into doing all the writing I'm doing. I bring that up, because if he hadn't said he spotted a talent, even after all the batteries and diagnostics and everything else and giving me a real specific challenge on one day, there's no way I would have ever shared an article for public consumption. Instead because of what he noticed and pointed out, it completely altered the direction of my career and what I do.

My learning from that is that there's nothing more powerful you can do from a contribution standpoint than to help another person spot a talent or something meaningful they're doing that they might not have noticed. Boy, is that an important thing to do for other people in the workplace and in your home as well.

[0:37:11.1] MB: What are some ways that we can start to help others see their contributions?

[0:37:18.5] TR: The first thing that comes to mind to me and it sounds obvious, but it's just old. I think to hold up a mirror when you spot things and help people to see things that they're already doing and they're taking it for granted, because we all need that motivation of why we're doing things in order to keep going and to keep doing our best work.

The other thing that I've been working on specifically with this Life's Great Question book is how can you – when you start new teams, or when you join a new team, or you start a new job, anytime you're joining a new group trying to do something, how can you all get together and say, “Here's who I am, here's what motivates me, here are the things I'm interested in and here are the ways that I think I can make a unique contribution to this effort as we move forward.”

I'm amazed by how I'm guilty of doing this myself in recent years, where excuse me, where I get a team together and we're all charged up about a mission or something that we want to do, and six months later we all come back and realize that hey, nobody said they wanted to go sell this mission to the world and be the one that was helping us to bring in new business and get people interested in this. I think to level set expectations, anytime you form a new team or group and talk very openly about how each person can best contribute to the mission is a pretty important step.

[0:38:39.2] MB: You said something earlier that it's really stuck with me and defines the way that we think about contribution in a sense that maybe, or at least from my perspective and I think many people's perspective is not that intuitive, which is that contribution is about how you're serving other people. Tell me more about the importance of others and how serving them is such a cornerstone of meaning and contribution.

[0:39:09.8] TR: Yeah, I'm glad you asked that, because it brings me back to the root of where some of my thinking started on this. I've always just personally been motivated and haunted in my daily work by a quote from Dr. King. What Dr. King said was he said, “Life's most persistent and urgent question is what are you doing for others?” I've tried to wake up almost every day, whether I'm driving, or out for a walk early in the morning and orient my efforts in that direction to say what am I going to do today that in my case, I asked a question that will continue to grow when I'm gone?

I say grow when I'm gone with double meaning. I mean, a part of it is I have all these threats to my own mortality and health challenges and so forth. The bigger part of it is I think it's a better use of my time to invest in efforts that can compound, even if I'm not actively involved in a book or in a business or with a group or whatever it might be. I think when you orient your efforts to one, orient your efforts outwards about how they're going to have a positive influence on other people, that's the best place to start.

Then I would take that one more step beyond and say, how can you also start to think about what are the things you'll work on in the next few months that can continue to grow and pay dividends, even if you're not there actively involved in managing? That's one of the beautiful things about what you're doing right now with the podcast, or I've been working on with a book where – or anyone who's in a company working on a new product, or service, whatever it might be. If you can put something together that once it's out there, it continues to produce growth and meaning and wellbeing for people, even when you're not involved putting more hours in. I think that's just a best possible scenario for optimizing our time over the span of a career in a pretty general sense.

[0:41:04.8] MB: I love that quote and it brings me back to trying to wrap my head around this whole project of bringing more meaning into our lives and into our work. You touched on one or two of these strategies already, but what are some of the other core things, or really important steps that we can take when we want to identify and uncover the most significant contributions that we can make.

[0:41:31.1] TR: Yeah, one simple thing I've been putting together, this contribute my profile that's the – my goal with this recent book and the website and the company is I want people to put something together that's a nice one-page baseball card of who they are emotionally, that's a lot warmer and more personal than the sterile, lifeless resumes we pass around right now to get to know one another.

The first thing that I ask people on that profile that's at the very top of it is what are the essential roles you play in life? These roles are like for me, it's a father of two kids, and my son, daughter, the husband. Then the third most important role is being a researcher and a writer. I ask people to start there, because I mean, in the end, nobody's going to put – I hope nobody's going to put on their headstone that they had a 100,000 followers on Twitter, or that they made a million dollars or whatever it might be. I think in the end, we want to be remembered by the most important roles that we play in our lives overall and that's both personal and professional.

I would recommend that people get back to that and say, “Why am I doing what I'm doing today? Is it because I care about my family? Is it because I really want to share my faith? Is it because I'm so passionate about making the environment better?” Whatever it might be. Have those, I call them defining roles, the very top your radar screen. Those defining roles.

The other piece that I have learned through talking to people is what are the two or three most searing and influential life experiences? I call them miles in this profile, or most important life experiences that are about what are the things that really change your life? Some of those are really good positive moments for me, like when my first daughter was born, I reoriented a lot of my thinking in life. Some of them are really challenging, traumatic moments, like my final days with my grandfather that changed the way I think about some of the meaning in my work.

To sit down with whether it's your family, or your colleagues, or group of people and talk about why you're doing what you're doing, who it makes a difference for, boy, we get to relate and get to know each other on a very different level. Then the third element of that profile that I spent a lot of time on is how can we each get clarity around these three core areas of contribution?

In any team, you've got a team really needs to create something and they need to continue to operate regularly and they need to relate to one another. I went through thousands of job code categories that what does everybody really have to do on a team in any type of work, or industry, or role anywhere in the world? You have to do all those three things.

How can we sit down and say based on my interests and my motivations, my experience and the roles I want to play, here's how I want to contribute to this team. I think those are three of the big questions to ask, so that you can have your daily efforts much more closely aligned with how they make a substantive contribution to other people in the world eventually.

[0:44:28.0] MB: You've already answered this in part or in whole, but I want to repeat it or rephrase it, because I hear this so often, for someone who's thinking, “I can't figure out what my purpose is, or what my passion is. I don't know what I should be doing with my life. I don't know how I can find meaning,” what would you say to them?

[0:44:52.4] TR: I would say, start by finding exactly one thing that you can do that improves the lot in life of another human being. I think a lot of times – and I would also say, forget about finding or following your passion or purpose. Just forget. I think a lot of that conversation is counterproductive, to be honest. I don't think there is one singular purpose in life. I think purpose and meaning are both journeys that occur over decades. There are times when you really accelerate and get more purpose in a job, there are times when you go backwards, all of this.

Well, I have ups and downs, but that's an ongoing journey. I think to give up on the myth of you either have it or you don't, you find it don't. Then I would really say strongly that find your greatest contribution, not your passion. Because my passion could be golf, or playing Xbox, or whatever and some of the – there are a lot of passions that really don't do a lot for the rest of the world, to be honest. I would start with something that's other-directed, because I think if you want to find sustainable meaning, you need to start with something that serves the world, not just your own passions or interest.

[0:46:06.1] MB: Great piece of advice. I really like the perspective of forgetting about your passion and focusing on other people and how you can contribute something to them.

[0:46:18.1] TR: Yeah. I think a lot of these conversations, there are so many of us that are really interested in productivity and self-development all these things, but a lot of the writing and advice on this topic that I've studied at least, I mean, I've done it too, will pull you to look inward. I think the more time you spend looking inward that’s often at a detriment to time spent trying to orient those efforts to contribution and outwards. We've got to at least try and bring that into balance. That's what I've been working on with some of this latest project.

[0:46:51.6] MB: There's one other question I wanted to ask you. It's not directly about meaning, but interrelates with this in many ways. Coming back all the way to a lot of the research that you've done around strengths finder and finding your strengths, how do you reconcile, or think about the potentially conflicting pieces of advice around finding your strengths and doubling down on your strengths, versus fixing your weaknesses?

[0:47:17.9] TR: Yeah. I've always advocated for a balance of time spent on strengths and weaknesses. I think when I entered the workforce several decades ago now, in a typical performance review, manager would spend about 80% of the time telling you what you did wrong and maybe 20% of the time telling you what you did right. I've always thought that if you just inverted that, we'd be in a much better place. If you spend 80% of the time talking about the successes and celebrating victories and talking about people's strengths, that'd be good. Then you spend 20% of the time on their gaps and their areas for improvement. You got to have those tough conversations in the workplace.

I've never in any of the research I've seen on strength, or anything I've written about, I would not recommend ignoring weaknesses. I think weaknesses can be big blind spots that when I ask executives about some of the most influential development programs they've been to, they often talk about programs where they were either on video cameras, when they're in a meeting, or they did a 360 audit or something and they found clarity and blind spots and now they're aware of and they know how to manage around. Boy, that stuff's important.

Let's just take that back a little bit more broadly for a minute and say, I do think self-awareness is very important, both self-awareness about your strengths and your weaknesses. I think self-awareness about your natural talent is the single best place to start. I mean, even though I'm talking about contribution, I would argue that you need to know some of your natural talents before you can figure out how you want to best contribute and apply those to things that you're also interested in and that motivate you. I think that's a really good starting point, but I think you have to have some balance around that overall self-awareness.

[0:49:06.0] MB: That's a great piece of advice and the notion of keeping those things in balance with maybe a weighting more towards focusing on strengths is a really good perspective on that.

[0:49:14.7] TR: Yeah. There's some research on this where it's the basic human interaction. When we go through our days, we plow through our days, we need 80% of those comments to be positive, versus maybe 20% or the negative, just to get through the day with decent well-being. There's been a lot of work on ratios of interactions in workplaces and in marriages and relationships. You need four or five positives for every one negative, because one bad exchange with another person outweighs a good one, or outweighs four or five good ones. I think if we can look at the balance of time spent on development in a similar vein, it should be helpful.

[0:49:53.9] MB: For somebody who's listened to this conversation who wants to take concrete action and implement some of the things that we've talked about today, what would be one action step that you would give them to begin, or start taking action on something that we've discussed?

[0:50:11.6] TR: Yeah, I think the first thing I would recommend is to just take a moment right now and do a little retrospective reflection on your typical day of work and see if you can draw a few direct lines between what you do almost every day, or every weekday at least and how that helps another person. Going back to Dr. King's question, what's something you'll do yet today that will have a positive influence on another person? Then ask yourself, what can you do to remind yourself of that tomorrow and the day after and the day after? Because we need reminders of why we do what we do, so we can continue to make a big contribution there. That's one thing.

Second thing I would recommend is do something yet today that helps another person you work with, or care about to spot away they're making a difference and they're contributing. See if you can do that at least one, two, three times every week.

[0:51:10.5] MB: Both great pieces of advice and so simple to execute, great ways to really begin down the journey of creating meaning in our lives. Tom, for listeners who want to find you and all of your work online, what is the best place for them to do that?

[0:51:28.6] TR: Yeah, all of my books and writing can be found at TomRath.org. The new book Life's Great Question has a website called Contribify, that's diagnostic and profile that I encourage people to try and build, that will get that conversation started and it's meant for teams to use around the top of a contribution.

[0:51:48.7] MB: Well Tom, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all this wisdom, some really great insights into how we can create meaning in our work and in our lives.

[0:51:58.6] TR: Thanks so much. It's been a really fun conversation. I appreciate it.

[0:52:01.6] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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

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

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

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

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

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi - The Greatest Unanswered Question in Psychology Today

In this episode we have one of the absolute living legends of psychology on the show - we discuss the GREATEST unanswered question in psychology, the biggest thing people mis-understand about flow, what advice young people can take away from our guest's incredible career, and what he thinks the absolute biggest takeaways from his own research are - and much more with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

Your fate, your destiny, your future is not set out for you - you can shape it to be what you want it to be. You have the freedom to make life better for yourself and more worthwhile and meaningful for yourselves. Even the greatest traumas and struggles can be overcome. You don’t have to achieve fame and fortune to live a meaningful and wonderful life and to be truly alive.

Mihaly is Claremont Graduate University’s Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Management. He is a bestselling author and the founder and co-director of the Quality of Life Research Center. He is a member of the American Academy of Education, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Leisure Studies and his work has been featured on NPR,TED, WIRED, and more!!

• The key ideas supported by the data around how people respond to Trauma. People who are focused beyond themselves and their own wellbeing are more resilient to the things that happen to them.

• When you focus on the wellbeing of others, society, your family, etc - you’re much more resilient to Trauma

• How do you think of yourself? Do you think of yourself as the body in which you live? Do you see yourself as being part of a family, group, religion etc? This will shape your response to trauma.

• The self is a very poor site for meaning - don’t put all your eggs in the fragile basket of the self

• We are all connected - recognizing that helps contextualize our existence

• Flow and happiness are not the same thing - but they are very related

• Flow is a momentary state of experience and happiness is a general perspective towards life

• If your life is full of flow - it will be a happy life!

• How do we consistently create flow states in our lives?

• 2 Main conditions of your psychology

  • Seeing challenges as things that you can deal with and overcome

  • Having the skills to a actually do something about the challenge

• If you have those 2 traits you are more likely to be in flow more often

• Pay attention to the world around you and connect with it one way or another

  • Some people see life as full of opportunities, others see life as full of threats

• Life is quite malleable - we often feel like we’ve been dealt a tough hand, but its often how we react to it that is the most important

• How does Mihaly think about creating flow states in his own life?

• What is the greatest unanswered question in psychology today?

  • The way in which children learn to process information and why they develop certain interests in certain areas or spheres of their lives

• What is the biggest mistake or pitfall that younger people (in their mid 20s) can make?

  • You have to keep an open mind, be open to learning

  • Don’t be too instinctive, don’t become an ideologue too soon

• What’s the biggest thing that people misunderstand about Flow and Mihay’s research?

• We have the opportunity to shape ourselves into whoever we want to be- but we have to take into account where we came from and what our experiences have been.

• What’s the biggest takeaway from all the research on Flow?

• Your fate, your destiny, your future is not set out for you - you can shape it to be what you want it to be. You have the freedom to make life better for yourself and more worthwhile and meaningful for yourselves. Even the greatest traumas and struggles can be overcome. You don’t have to achieve fame and fortune to live a meaningful and wonderful life and to be truly alive.

  • It may not be an easy road to get there, but it’s possible for anyone to get there.

  • This is open to everyone, but it’s hard to do the work and get there.

  • Life can be much more fun than you think!

• We have to look past the limited perspective of our own egos and experiences to understand the beauty of 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).

Are you hiring for your business or next big project?

LinkedIn Talent Solutions is here to help and make hiring the right person simple, powerful, and easy!

LinkedIn goes above and beyond. Screening not just the hard skills you need but soft skill as well to find the right person fast!

LinkedIn looks at things like collaboration within a team, creative skills, adaptability and much much more! That’s how LinkedIn makes sure your post get in front of the right people at the right time to all your needs without all the typical hiring headaches.

It’s no wonder great candidates are hired every 8 seconds on LinkedIn!

Right now, LinkedIn is offering Science of Success listeners their first $50 on the Talent Solutions platform absolutely free! Just go to www.linkedin.com/success to find the right candidate for your project today!

Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

General

• Mihaly’s Faculty Profile

Media

• Positive Psychology Program Article

• NPR Interview - 10min - What Makes A Life Worth Living?

• Brain World Magazine interview

Videos

• TED: Flow, The Secret To Happiness

• FLOW + THE RISE OF SUPERMAN - BOOK REVIEW MIX!!

• Flow Animated Book Review

• Living In Flow - The Secret Of Happiness

• Philosophers Notes: Creativity

• Flow Theory In Less Than Five Minutes

Books

• Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) - 2008

• Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (Harper Perennial Modern Classics) - 2009

• Good Business: Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - 2004

• Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life (Masterminds Series) - 1998

Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

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

In this episode, we have one of the absolutely living legends of psychology on the show. We discuss the greatest unanswered questions in psychology, the biggest thing that people misunderstand about flow, what advice young people can take away from our guest’s incredible career and what he thinks about the absolute, biggest takeaways from his own research and much more with our guest, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

We had the incredible honor and privilege of interviewing Mihaly, who is literally one of the living legends of psychology. I'll be honest with you, the conversation wasn't easy. He's 84-years-old, he could barely use some of the interview equipment, it was hard to hear him at times and the interview was really tough. The audio quality is not amazing. We thought for a long time about whether or not we should air this interview.

Ultimately, we decided that the lessons and ideas and insights shared by Mihaly, who is one of the pioneers of psychology research, the person who coined the term ‘flow’ and has done so much powerful psychology research, we felt that we still needed to air this episode and share it with you.

I will tell you that the audio quality is not great. The content is really good, but it was a hard interview to do and we put a lot of thought into whether or not we should air this. It's a great conversation and I really hope you enjoy it.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com.

You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word “smarter”, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we showed you how to turn your fear into health, wealth and happiness. If you want something you've never had before, you have to do something you've never done before. That means suffering and taking risk. Building a positive relationship to suffering is one of the most important life skills you can master. Suffering is the true training ground of self-transcendence. With our previous guest, Akshay Nanavati, we showed you how to choose your struggle and build meaningful suffering into your life. If you want to overcome the fear that's been holding you back, listen to our previous episode.

Now for our interview with Mihaly.

[0:03:08.2] MB: Today, we have another legendary guest on the show, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Mihaly is a Claremont Graduate University’s distinguished professor of psychology and management. He's a best-selling author and the founder and co-director of the Quality of Life Research Center. He's a member of the American Academy of Education, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Leisure Studies and his work has been featured on NPR, the Ted Stage, Wired and much more. Mihaly, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:36.1] MC: Thank you. I'm glad to be here.

[0:03:38.6] MB: Well, we're very excited to have you on the show today. I'd love to start out with what differences you found in the research that you conducted around how people respond to trauma. I found that to be a really interesting piece of your work. I'd love to understand why do some people respond to trauma in a negative way and why do some people respond to it in a positive way?

[0:03:58.1] MC: We have of course, general notions, which are supported by the data and that people who have not only concern about themselves and their own well-being, more resilient to things that happened to them. They're more concerned about the well-being of society, or family at least, the country and so forth.

We suffer for different reasons psychologically. Physically, we suffer pretty much the same way. Although, even physically some people are much more sensitive and even more than this, but psychologically, we are different in what hurts us, what makes us feel bad and what makes us feel enraged and willing to fight and so forth.

There is no one reason, but certainly the overall issue is what do you identify yourself with? Do you think of yourself as being just the body in which you live, or do you see yourself as being part of a family, ethnic group, religion, or whatever. That depending on where you draw the boundaries of your own being will determine what will upset you and how much and what you're willing to do about it.

[0:05:40.1] MB: That makes me think of one of my favorite quotes from the book Learn Happiness, which is the idea that the self is a very poor site for meaning.

[0:05:49.3] MC: Oh, yeah, yeah. If that's all that you care about and consider, then you put all your eggs in a very fragile basket that sooner or later it’s going to be breaking down. It's good to define yourself in terms of larger and more stable entities. Then it’s through beyond that, not only is true that no man is an island, but we are all connected. If we recognize the connection and the size of and the permanence of our self as [inaudible 0:06:39.5]. I don't know if that's what you came – you conclusion is from that saying that that's how I would expand in that maxim that you had mentioned.

[0:06:53.0] MB: I think that's a great insight. Makes me think of – this is a tangential shift in the conversation, but in your work and research that you did around flow, how did you find, or what did you uncover around the root causes of happiness?

[0:07:10.5] MC: Yes. Flow and happiness is not exactly the same thing, because flow is a state that it's a momentary state of experience. Our happiness is a general stand towards life that doesn't change that much. Flow comes and goes depending on what we are doing at the moment. Of course, if your life is full of flow, it's going to be a happy life, a happier life than one that is more filled with boredom or anxiety. If you have more flow, you are likely to have a much better life, be happier overall.

[0:07:56.5] MB: How do we consistently create flow states within our lives?

[0:08:01.6] MC: Well. It means flow depends on two conditions of your consciousness, or your psychology. The two conditions are one, is that you see challenge that you think you can't deal with. Then the second is that you have the skills to do something about the challenge. If you have those two and you use them in your everyday life, you are more likely to be in flow more.

I knew a painter who lived in a garret across an alley from a house across the alley. If he looked out of his window, he could see the world, a blank wall of the house about 12 feet away from his window. He could put himself in a state of flow by looking at the bricks and their connections to each other and the different colors of the mortar around the bricks and imagine pictures and that he could draw on that, inspired by the momentary sight of the connection between the bricks.

This guy could get flow from the processing of visual information, because that's – he could walk across the intersection in the loop in Chicago and looked up and see the shadow of a building and a skyscraper, but a different skyscraper. He looked at that shadow and he would get ecstatic because, he said, “Wow, look at that. Look at that.” Then most people wouldn't even notice it. If they noticed it, they say there is a stupid shadow there on a building. What can help?

To him, the visual information that he got was enough to put him in a state of almost ecstasy, because he – it produced in his mind all kinds of connections and ideas that he could play with and that was enough. Most people, of course depend on external information that's produced to make them feel better, like comic strips, or television shows, or Broadway shows, or whatever, where the stimuli are organized by experts who make them pleasant and interesting and exciting to the viewer.

There are people who don't depend so much on the external organization of information, because they can do it on their own one way or the other. I mean, not just visually, but people who go around and are impressed by the expression on the face of children in the street, or other people they meet and they imagine where they last maybe and they feel the envy, or sorrow, or at what they see. That fills out their mind at the time and makes them want to do something on the other end.

They are always willing to help others and to get involved with others. That is the life they live. That's the world they live in. We make these worlds paying attention to what goes on around us and connecting with that information one way or the other. Either the information make you seem made, or makes you sad, or makes you want to do something, that makes you want to escape. The information is there and how we react to that will determine the quality of our lives. For some people, the life is full of opportunities to help others. For others, their life is full of things to escape from, because they don't want to see the – feel up, and so they want to get into a safe room where they are in control and powerful. They do that by taking drugs, or getting drunk or whatever.

In that respect, we are the masters of our faith. We can decide, learn to stop with our life that we linked to some, those that we set out. As I said, I am going to not to get upset about things, but try to help others and myself, or others who just try to see the beauty of what's around them and just – who’s mind is full of ideas that they hope to realize sometimes in the future. Our life is quite malleable. We offer to, “Oh, my God. I build out this deck of cards and I don't have any aces in it. I'm going to lose this game.” Others who say, “Okay, I don't have aces, but I still can get a good game of what I build out.” That's just what how I see the world. I don't know if that makes sense, but and that’s for me.

[0:14:23.9] MB: That definitely makes sense. I'm curious, how do you think about creating flow states and flow experiences in your own daily life?

[0:14:33.0] MC: Well, my life as a child was not that secure and safe as that of many others. Not as bad as many others either. I think the first time I realized that you can change your state of mind was during a train ride from Italy to Hungary with my family. I went across part of your Europe. There I was looking at the window and we were just entering the Alps in Norton Italy and we were crossing the Alps. I looked out the window and I looked at the mountains and they were so incredible, different from the seashore where I used to live.

I realized that by looking at this peak and glaciers around me, I could change my feeling of boredom, which has started with just being bored in the train and looking outside. I realized that the world had all kinds of things that sure can be interesting. If you look at them and try to follow and imagine what they could be and how it could to be there, then that would make your life much more interesting, than waiting for things to happen than to have fun.

That feeling stuck with me after the voyage, after, it took a long time and we were – the train was bombed by the artillery as we were crossing Yugoslavia and South [inaudible 0:16:33.2]. It was not an easy ride, but it was something that changed – I think I didn’t know that at the time of course, but looking back, I think that was when I first realized how your moods depends on how you – what you choose to look at and what you choose to think about when you look at things. That gave me a feeling that you could modify how you felt.

After that, I tried to look for that feeling, control over your environment by just changing the way you look at it and what you are thinking about it. I had a lot of brothers. A half-brother who was very good at paying attention, because he was a European champion of sail – how do you call the airplanes that go without engines? Just riding the currents of the air? Sailcraft? They are not really popular now, but the 1930s, 1940s, those were used – this airplane which was made of bamboo, or light wood, covered with really canvass and then you were pulled up by a regular plane, a small regular plane. Then your rope was – you were pulled by a rope by a plane and then when you got to a certain altitude, you disengage the rope and you were on your own.

What kept you up is that you went over currents of air and you had – you knew that the air above roads for instance was much more – the road would get warmed up by the sun and the air and there would be an updraft of air above the road. You will try to follow the road, but they were a few thousand above. You could stay up in the air, because of the updraft from the warm air on the road. Then you found other things; factories, lakes and so forth that changed the air.

This brother of mine who was the European champion and then it meant that he stayed up in the air for longer than everybody else during the competition. He stayed up I think 19 hours, 19 and a half hours without an engine, but just traveling across central Europe finding air currents. This brother was very influential, because his mind could get focused and process small bits of information that nobody else noticed that he could use to keep his plane aloft. It showed me that you have to do things, if you used your mind and paid attention to things, you could do things that most people don’t even notice there, or have idea that they exist.

[0:20:17.9] MB: Flow is definitely an amazing state that can transform the way you interact and engage with the world.

[0:20:27.3] MB: Want to hear a crazy statistic? Every 8 seconds, somebody is hired off of LinkedIn Jobs. As a business owner, I know how hard it is to hire good people. I want to use every tool available to me to get the absolute best talent for the job. That’s why I’m a big fan of our sponsors this week, LinkedIn Jobs.

LinkedIn Jobs screens candidates with the hard and soft skills that you’re looking so you can hire the right person quickly. You can look for all kinds of things, whether it’s adaptability, collaboration, creativity. You can look way beyond to flat one-dimensional resume and work skills and connect with the candidates who are going to be a perfect cultural and business fit for your company.

Find the right person meant for your business today with LinkedIn Jobs. You can pay what you want and the first $50 is on them. Just visit linkedin.com/success. Again, that’s linkedin.com/success to get $50 off your first job post. Terms and conditions apply.

[0:21:39.3] MB: I’m curious. Changing gears a little bit, what do you think is – as someone who’s been in this field for so long and done so much research, out of your own perspective, what do you think is the greatest unanswered question in psychology today?

[0:21:55.4] MC: There are of course – It depends – I’ll try it a little, but on what kind of things you are interested in and you an expert in, because some people will tell you very different things than what I will tell you. I don’t believe that these are the greatest alarms that crushes psychology. Whatever I tell you, they are the greatest alarms of question as far as I am concerned as a psychologist and in my expertise.

I really do think that what I would like to know a lot more about is the way which children learn to process information, in terms of what they get interested in. What is it that keeps them alert, awake, wondering about the world and so forth? Because that will determine the large extent of what they will do as adults, how they will spend their life. We really don’t know how to harness their energies and the drive that they have, point them in the right direction.

We tried to do that of course by teaching them good things, taking them to church and all these good things that we know would help them. That’s not necessarily what happens, because they don’t know why they are learning these things and they know that they have other things that they are interested in that they would rather do. They feel that they’re forced into a direction they don’t understand and they don’t want to depend, then don’t necessarily subscribe to.

The question is to what extent you have to change that, or to what extent the changing of their attention, what they attend to, what they try to accomplish. If you want them to become good, responsible and happy adults, what do you have to – how can you achieve that? How much freedom they need? How much encouragement, or exposure, or challenge to give them? That is varies a lot of child to child, then from environment to environment.

For instance, when we brought up our children, we tried very much to make sure that they have enough challenges in their environment, but not too hard ones and too difficult ones. Then we realized that we can do know exactly and we had to pay attention closely to what the children like, then harness their interest and curiosity by leaving them good opportunities to fulfill their curiosity, so that it could be a very good proposition that they enjoy what they do, they are motivated to what they do. Also, we know that what they are doing is rightful, then good for their growth and for their – they will be going in the right direction.

That is quite then difficult high-wire act for parents. Most of them luckily succeed without even thinking about it, but just follow things that they feel are right and they tend to do that more often than not, they are right. Our kids, where this is – took their own growth very quickly. I mean, we allowed them to explore what they like to do and they encouraged them and gave them new opportunities in-line what they were doing.

They both resulted – had very nice lives that they have children and they are very grateful. That’s very satisfying of course. It’s the things. I mean, you have to pay attention. You have to try to put yourself in their shoes and understand more they are living through and we try to have them on all [inaudible 0:27:08.6].

[0:27:10.4] MB: For somebody’s who’s listening, who let’s say is a younger person, 25-years-old something like that, what is the biggest mistake, or pitfall that you would warn them against falling prey to?

[0:27:25.9] MC: Well, I think there are so many crucial periods in life where you can go wrong. At that age, I think it’s not that different from before or after, but I think more – perhaps, it’s a more crucial period for becoming either too conservative and too traditional in your life and your profession and family and being too unconforming and thoughtless about what you are doing. I mean, there is a lot to learn from the culture, even the society we live in, with family, because entities have been alive for a long time.

They usually survive by not making too many – too drastic mistakes. You should be open to learning. At the same time, it’s important to trust your own experience, trust your own feelings and the actions to the world and that little ground between conformity and thoughtless, instinctive action, that middle ground is I think, it’s always a problem all through life to find the middle ground.

I think around 25, it really is the one of the crucial – if not the crucial moment, or period in which you have to establish the relation between yourself and the environment in which you have that comes to mind at the moment.

[0:29:28.5] MB: What is the biggest thing that people misunderstand about flow, or your research in general?

[0:29:36.3] MC: As I like to realize, that stage will work out only before you have developed a strong sense of identity of who you are. The stage before intimacy is identity formation. In the early 20s, late teens, you develop a sense of who you are and what you can do well, what you can do well, what you should be doing, or what you should be doing well. On the basis of knowing who you are and you can achieve intimacy on a more stable way, because you are less likely to get involved in intimate relations that are not build the whole personality of this thing.

Anyway, it’s not an easy thing to go through life, but especially the more complex the society is, the more opportunities there are to make bad mistakes, as well as good ones. I mean, the good thing about that, at times that you are not attached with an identity with the past. even a 100 years ago, if you are lucky you had the chance to develop into a person, with a strong identity and a strong intimacy.

Dependent, so much of the fickle senses of the development of the family, which will be a little exciting. Most people was not starting to condition where they were – they didn’t have the luxury to explore who they were and what they could do, so they had to follow the conditions and lived up to the conditions they were having by portion, by faith. They have that even to make ourselves more in the shape of what we want to become and what’s good for us, we have that opportunity.

Then on the other hand, what we are comforted with is social abundance of choice and so many different directions that it’s difficult to figure out what is really – who should be and what we should be doing. That’s possible. I thought more and more people will get to understand that task and trying to achieve it.

[0:32:36.5] MB: If you could really succinctly summarize in just one or two sentences for someone who’s not familiar with your work, what is the one thing you would want them to take away from the decades of research that you’ve done on flow and psychology and the human condition?

[0:32:52.2] MC: Well, I think one – I hope people would take away from some of the work I did is that the realization that their faith, their destiny, their future is not cut out for them to just follow on what happens to them on their side. They have the freedom to make life better and more worthwhile and meaningful for themselves. That even there is no – they don’t have to achieve fame and fortune and riches and comfort to be truly alive and involve and enjoy life.

It’s not an easy job to get there, but it’s really possible to everybody. Some of the happiest people I met and those who have been struggling with these issues, but had paid attention through their own life and discovered for themselves that they should trust their own instincts, but also trust the needs of people around them and the conditions around them and have to somehow harmonize, bring harmony between their own needs and the environment and [inaudible 0:34:29.7] and the possibilities that will be in there.

It’s not rocket science. It’s something that is open to everyone, but it’s hard. It’s hard, because we get so attached to the most obvious aspects of what surround us; the superficial, the loud, the colorful things that happen. These are parts of life. They are okay, but they’re not the secret, I don’t think of a good life. That you have to build up by yourself brick by brick and it can be a lot of fun. Much for fun than just enjoying the life of the rich and the famous that we get from so much of the media and that this is the life that’s part of it.

It’s hard, but it’s possible. I hope that everybody thinks about it and hears about it who have had to do it. In that sense, I give my best wishes to my ordeals. I don’t pretend to have the struggle the secret of life, but I do think that to the best of what I find possible resources, then I try to do it and it’s been fun in life, is the same from those who had taking and listening and had decisions.

[0:36:13.9] MB: Such a great insight that once we look beyond and look past our own limited perspective and our own ego and experiences, we can really start to uncover and understand the true of beauty of life. It may not be an easy journey, but it’s something that’s a path open to everyone.

[0:36:32.0] MC: To everyone, and it can be fun.

[0:36:34.8] MB: It could be fun. Exactly.

[0:36:37.7] MC: Okay. Okay.

[0:36:39.1] MB: Well, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi, I really want to thank you for coming on the Science of Success. It’s been truly, truly an honor to interview someone as incredibly legendary as you. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us and our listeners.

[0:36:50.7] MC: Thank you very much.

[0:36:52.7] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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

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

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

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

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

The Truth About Fear & Why You’ve Got It All Wrong with Akshay Nanavati

In this episode, we show you how to turn your fear into health, wealth, and happiness. If you want something you’ve never had before, you have to do something you’ve never done before. That means suffering and taking risks. Building a positive relationship with suffering is one of the most important life skills you can master. Suffering is the true training ground of self-transcendence. With our guest Akshay Nanavati we show you how to choose your struggle and build meaningful suffering into your life.

Akshay Nanavati is a Marine Corps Veteran, speaker, adventurer, entrepreneur and author of "Fearvana: The Revolutionary Science of How to Turn Fear into Health, Wealth and Happiness." He is also the founder of the nonprofit, the Fearvana Foundation. His work has been featured in Forbes, Psychology Today, entrepreneur.com, CNN, Huffington Post, Military Times, FOX 5 NY, ABC, NBC and other media outlets around the globe.

• From drug addiction to marine corps Bootcamp - to hunting for bombs in Iraq - how Akshay learned to deal with fear

• The toughest battle Akshay had to fight was coming home - dealing with PTSD and suicidal thoughts

• We live in a world that demonizes stress, anxiety, fear, pain and suffering - and yet in the psychology and neuroscience research shows us that our emotions are normal and inevitable

• We don’t live in a world of life-threatening risks anymore, and so our brain creates these risks

• There are no bad or good emotions, there are only emotions

• Fear is not the problem, its the fear of fear

• No emotions are good or bad - we assign and create the meaning via our beliefs

• Humans are meaning-making machines - we naturally create meaning out of everything

• Your problem is that you are waiting for the fear to go away.

• What you are labeling yourself can powerfully shape your experiences. Typical behaviors like “depression” “PTSD” etc are just brain patterns, and they can be re-written using “Top-Down Neuroplasticity”

• Don’t wait for the fear to go away, act despite the fear.. or once you learn to train yourself.. BECAUSE of the fear

• The best things in life come from struggle.

• The struggle is neurologically required for growth.

• Building a positive relationship to suffering is the single most important skill to master.

• “Hebbs Law” - neurons that fire together, wire together

• London taxi drivers have a physically larger brain memory structure in their brain because of their need to know the complex back streets of London

• There is a war in your brain for neuronal real estate - use it or lose it.

• Should you try to SEEK Suffering instead of AVOID suffering?

• "There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own Soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” - Dr. Carl Jung

• “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” - Dr. Carl Jung

• You are not weak when you feel fear.

• Visualize yourself in the process of going through the struggle, the suffering, the tough part of your goals - not the easy parts at the end.

• You have to “put yourself into the suck."

• There is tremendous beauty in pushing through and into your fears.

• Adversity and struggle are both inevitable and desirable

• Don’t wait for the fear, seek it out, train in it.

• Everything worthwhile is hard, and you have to train yourself to fall in love with suffering. Fall in love with the process.

• Be with what is, but don’t be what is.

• “Suffering is a training ground for self-transcendence”

• You cannot get better at something without doing it.

• Train yourself “in suffering”

• Exercise is a “miracle grow for your brain.” If you could put all the benefits of exercise into a pill, it would be the best selling pill of all time.

• There is bliss in pain. There is tremendous bliss in pain.

• If you want something you’ve never had before, you have to do something you’ve never done before. That means suffering and taking a risk.

• If you don’t proactively search out a proactive worthy challenge - something to struggle and suffer for in your life - then suffering will find you anyway.

• Don’t follow your passion, find your "worthy struggle."

• Stop looking for quick gratification, push yourself into a worthy struggle and commit entirely to it.

• “I like the pain that is necessary to be a champion.” - Arnold Schwartz

• You don’t discover a passion you develop a passion.

• You have to put yourself in uncomfortable situations to develop your passion.

• Train yourself in the journey, love the journey - but it’s not a journey its the STRUGGLE that really matters.

• You only evolve when you suffer. That’s why lottery winners typically lose their winnings. When you struggle for it, you become a different person.

• “There is no finish line"

• Progress is not the elimination of problems, the problem is the creation of new problems. Learn to fall in love with problems.

• The greater the struggle, the greater the evolution. Call forth more suffering.

• Once you push into fear, you will find your nirvana on the other side.

• Bliss is on the other side of fear.

• Stillness is so important in today’s distracted world.

• Homework: Find one little thing to test yourself. Do a little thing to push yourself outside your comfort zone. Don’t just do it, come back and reflect on it. Journal about it.

• “The Action-Awareness Cycle” - Take action, and then come back and reflect on it.

Thank you so much for listening!

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

Are you hiring for your business or next big project?

LinkedIn Talent Solutions is here to help and make hiring the right person simple, powerful, and easy!

LinkedIn goes above and beyond. Screening not just the hard skills you need but soft skill as well to find the right person fast!

LinkedIn looks at things like collaboration within a team, creative skills, adaptability and much much more! That’s how LinkedIn makes sure your post get in front of the right people at the right time to all your needs without all the typical hiring headaches.

It’s no wonder great candidates are hired every 8 seconds on LinkedIn!

Right now, LinkedIn is offering Science of Success listeners their first $50 on the Talent Solutions platform absolutely free! Just go to www.linkedin.com/success to find the right candidate for your project today!

Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

General

• Akshay’s Website

• Akshay’s Wiki Page

• Akshay’s LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook

Media

• Fearvana Media Directory

• Mark Pattison - “Finding Nirvana by Embracing Fear, with Akshay Nanavati” By Mark P

• Bloomberg (Travel Genius) - “How Many Push-ups Should You Do on a Plane?” By Mark Ellwood and Nikki Ekstein

• Thrive Global - “Why Failure Is Necessary To Evolution” By Apoorva Mittal

• Entrepreneur - “6 Lessons This Marine Veteran Learned Overcoming PTSD, Alcoholism and Suicidal Thoughts to Build a Successful Business” by Akshay Nanavati

• Forbes - “Fearvana: How Millennials Are Using Fear As A Gateway To Bliss” by Jules Schroeder

• Your First 10k Readers - “HOW TO CONNECT WITH INFLUENCERS, GET FEATURED ON MAJOR MEDIA, AND REACH MILLIONS ACROSS THE GLOBE” by Nick Stephenson

• Chris Guillebeau Interview - “FROM PTSD TO “FEARVANA”: AKSHAY NANAVATI’S QUEST TO RUN ACROSS EVERY COUNTRY”

• Inc - “The Marine, the Dalai Lama, Overcoming PTSD, and Overcoming Fear” By Joshua Spodek

• [Podcast] Mindfulness Mode - 359 Turn Fear into Health, Wealth and Happiness; Fearvana Author Akshay Nanavati

• [Podcast] Jordan Harbinger - 289: Akshay Nanavati | Fearvana: Finding Bliss from Suffering

• [Podcast] Finding Mastery - AKSHAY NANAVATI, MARINE CORPS VETERAN - FINDING MASTERY 176

• [Podcast] Superhuman Academy - THE NEUROSCIENCE OF FEAR & HOW TO CHANNEL IT FOR GOOD W/ AKSHAY NANAVATI

Videos

• Fearvana YouTube Channel

• From broken-down alcoholic to sober and thriving

• B-SCHOOL W/ MARIE FORLEO VID BY AKSHAY NANAVATI

• INKtalks - Akshay Nanavati: Find strength in fear

• Abel James - Akshay Nanavati: Fearvana, One Trick To Break Any Habit & Why He’s Running Across the World

• Knowledge for Men - Akshay Nanavati: Existing to Living

• Thai Nguyen - Meet Akshay Nanavati | Marine Corps Veteran Conquering Every Country...On Foot.

• The New Man - How to Fall in Love with Fear | Akshay Nanavati Fearvana | Interviewed by Tripp Lanier

• Wysa - Live Q&A: Akshay Nanavati and Chaitali talk about PTSD

• Hustle Island - How To Deal With Fear as an Entrepreneur with Fearvana's Akshay Nanavati

Books

• FEARVANA: The Revolutionary Science of How to Turn Fear into Health, Wealth and Happiness by Akshay Nanavati

Misc

• [SoS Episode] The Hidden Brain Science That Will Unlock Your True Potential with Daniel Coyle

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

Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

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

In this episode, we show you how to turn your fear into health, wealth and happiness. If you want something you've never had before, you have to do something you've never done before. That means suffering and taking risk. Building a positive relationship to suffering is one of the most important life skills that you can master. Suffering is the true training ground for self-transcendence. With our guest, Akshay Nanavati, we show you how to choose your own struggle and build meaningful suffering into your life.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How to Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life. If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we discussed how to get started building your network and traffic online. We learn exactly how to build an audience from scratch, shared insider lessons from the best content marketing approaches, talked about how to get your content to go viral and uncover a mind-blowing Facebook advertising strategy and showed you why e-mail is one of the most important marketing channels with our previous guest, Joe Fier. If you want to build an audience from scratch, check out our previous episode.

Now, for our interview with Akshay.

[0:02:08.6] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Akshay Nanavati. Akshay is a Marine Corps veteran, speaker, adventurer, entrepreneur and author of Fearvana: The Revolutionary Science of How to Turn Fear Into Health, Wealth and Happpiness. He's also the founder of the non-profit, the Fearvana Foundation. His work has been featured in Forbes, Psychology Today, CNN and many, many more media outlets. Akshay, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:34.5] AN: Thank you so much for having me here, Matt. It's a real pleasure and honor.

[0:02:37.9] MB: Well, we're so excited to have you on the show today. I love your work and all this stuff you talk about. I also really like that you have the word adventurer in your bio. That's just a really cool line. I think everybody wants to be an adventurer, or at least in my – I definitely want to be an adventurer.

[0:02:52.1] AN: Yeah, it's a beautiful thing for sure.

[0:02:54.2] MB: That's great. I'd love to start out with before we dig into a lot of the science and the research and the strategies around how to turn fear into health, wealth and happiness, I want to start with your personal story and how you got on this journey.

[0:03:10.9] AN: Yeah. It's been a long road to get to this point now with all the work that I do with Fearvana. The journey to Fearvana began when I moved to the US at about the age of 13. I moved from India and Singapore. Soon after moving here, I got very heavily into drugs. I lost two friends to drug addiction.

I was in a pretty dark space. I used to cut my own arm. I still have scars on my arm from cutting myself and burning myself. I did many things that sometimes I wonder how I made it out alive and thankfully, I did. I was heading down that path with just my two friends that I lost. Thankfully, my life changed after watching the movie Black Hawk Down. I don't know. Have you ever seen that movie, Matt?

[0:03:48.7] MB: Yeah, definitely. It's an awesome movie.

[0:03:50.4] AN: Yeah, very powerful movie, right? Watching that movie was a trigger that changed my life almost overnight. Stop doing drugs, join the Marines, despite two doctors telling me that boot camp would kill me, because of a blood disorder I was born with.

Obviously, I survived. Through the Marines, I started to find the beauty in adversity, the beauty in challenging myself and exploring really the limitlessness of the human potential. I started doing other things, like mountain climbing, cave diving, skydiving, ice climbing, I mean, you name it. Nature became my playground to push myself and test myself.

Then in 2007, I was deployed to Iraq as an infantry marine, where one of my jobs out there was to walk in front of vehicles looking for bombs before they could be used to kill me and my fellow Marines. Pretty dangerous job as you might imagine, but it taught me a lot, once again on navigating the experience of fear and having to deal with it. I then ultimately thrived in the experience of war.

My toughest battle really was after coming home. I struggled with PTSD, depression, alcoholism. I was on the brink of suicide. I was at a point in my life that I just binged drink just liters of vodka a day, until one morning I actually pictured myself walking over the kitchen picking up a knife and slitting my own wrists. That was a very dark moment in my life. That was the trigger to changing everything.

After that is when I started researching neuroscience, psychology, spirituality. Initially, it was just to heal myself, but it led me on this far more meaningful quest to figure out how do we collectively navigate human suffering, because obviously I'm not the only person who suffered, right? I spent years researching, reading books and just really delving deep into the subject. Then eventually, led me to Fearvana and everything that I do now with the book and the whole line of work and everything I do around this concept and this ethos of Fearvana.

[0:05:28.5] MB: Such a powerful story. I'm so thankful. I know the listeners will be thankful too that you made it through that tough struggle. Now you're on this mission to help people and help people understand fear and what it really is and the power that can come with fear. Tell me more about that.

[0:05:53.1] AN: Yeah. As I started researching and started learning to heal myself, I realized one thing just a real life experience that everything worthwhile I had done, had been absolutely terrifying and extremely hard. Yet, we live in a world that demonizes things like fear, stress, anxiety, pain, suffering, adversity. When people hear these words, nobody thinks of them as positive words, right? We don't frame them as positive emotions, positive experiences. We demonize them.

Yet in all my research – my life experience validated this. As I started researching, I came to learn that neuroscience and psychology, even in spirituality, all validate that we don't control what first shows up in our brain. They've done really, really fascinating studies with neuroscience that will show that they can actually register – they can find in someone's brain and that they've done – they can register in their subconscious, they've done an action before they actually consciously do that action.

If I pick up a glass of water next to me, it's registered in my brain before I physically do it. Spirituality is showing the same thing. Even if you think about it just logically, I mean, if I'm sitting in a room right now, right? Somebody walks in here with a gun, I'm not choosing to feel fear. Fear just shows up as an automated response, as a reaction to this external stimuli, because that's a normal reaction to a life-threatening risk. The reality is we don't live in a world of life-threatening risks anymore. We create these risks. Our brain is not designed for this world.

As I was researching this, I realized that the problem was not this fear, this stress, this anxiety, it was the demonization of this. Even post-traumatic stress disorder, for example. When I was diagnosed, they told me that I have PTSD, because I struggled with things like survivor's guilt. I lost a friend in the war and I always felt it should have been me that died instead of him. I was jumpy with loud noises. I didn't like crowds. They told me that these were symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

As I was doing all this research, I realized that being jumpy when there's loud noises is just a normal human response to war. My brain learned to say that loud noises equals death, so inevitably after the war, I was just a little bit more hyper vigilant than everybody else who hadn't had that life experience and that experience at being in war. I stopped labeling a disorder and I came to realize that the symptoms of post-traumatic stress are not indicative of a disorder. By separating myself from that self-identity, that label of disorder, I could ultimately create a new one.

That's how I stopped demonizing any of these emotions and came to realize that there are no bad or good emotions, there are only emotions, and it's up to us to decide what we do with them. So much research has even shown this. They've done studies, for example with students taking a math test. They showed that people had equally high – a bunch of groups of students had equally high levels of cortisol, which is the stress hormone, but the students who performed well were those who believed that they weren't anxious as a result of math. The other students who performed poorly said that they were – “I get anxious at math.”

It wasn't the cortisol and the stress levels that was a problem, it was their belief about stress. That's the real thing. Fear is not the problem. It's the fear of fear. It's the same thing with stress. Stress is not the problem, it's the stressing out over stress. That's how I learned to find value in all these emotions. Even my post-traumatic stress, so just as a practical example, what I did was I found meaning in my survivor's guilt. I put a poster up of my friend that I lost in the war and it said, “This should have been you. Earn this life.” The guilt never went away. I just learned how to use it, as I did with all these “negative emotions.”

[0:09:08.7] MB: Wow. That literally gave me goosebumps. Such a powerful message. The point that you made that there's no good or bad emotions, we assign and create the meaning of our emotions largely through the filter of our beliefs. Explain that to me more.

[0:09:28.7] AN: Sure. Yeah, we create a meanings to everything. We're meaning seeking creatures. There's a great researcher named Dr. Michael Gazzaniga, something like – I forget how to say his last name, but Gazzaniga, something like that. Amazing research he's done to show how we're all meaning seeking creatures. Even if there's parts of our brain missing that we're actually not able to create meaning, we'll find meaning anyway. We'll create meanings. We're doing that to external stimuli and we do that to the internal stimuli off our emotions as well.

As a tangible example of this, when I went rock climbing with somebody, she felt really scared. She felt terrified of the climb. Climbed anyway. We got to the top. Came back down. The problem was not her fear. After coming back from the climb, she said to herself things like, “Why was I scared and you weren't?” I wasn't scared on this particular climb. For me, it was easy. Now not because I was braver than her, but because my brain had created a relationship to these experiences that said these things aren't scary, these things aren't a risk, so that doesn't warrant the experience of fear anymore.

She created a meaning saying, “I'm scared, means I'm weak. If I'm scared of this and you weren't, then how will I write my book? How will I be successful? How will I build a business, because I'm scared of everything, right?”

I worked with another student of mine who said, “I'm just waiting for the fear to go away, so I can quit my job and start my business.” I said to him, “That’s your problem. You're waiting for the fear to go away,” but he believed he should be fearless, because we hear those things all the time. We assign meanings to our emotions and that is the real problem. In spirituality, Buddha said that we're all stabbed by the two darts of suffering. I call the second dart, syndrome. The first start is the one we don't control. It's if I stub my toe against a door, the first dart is the pain. Or if I'm sitting in this room and somebody comes in here with a gun, the first dart is the fear. I'm not choosing that. It happens as a neurological and psychological response to external stimuli.

The second dart is when I start saying things like, “I'm scared, because I'm weak, or my toe hurts. This door is stupid. Bad things only happened to me. Why does God hate me?” The self-dialog, we go into as a response to the emotions. I've seen this with people from all walks of life, people from struggling with depression, anxiety, PTSD.

I had one person I worked with who is labeled with the depression by a therapist. She started saying things to herself like, “I am depressed. I have depression.” It became her self-identity. Instead of saying things like, “My brain goes to a state of depression from time to time, but I'm not my brain and my brain is not me.” We are not our brain patterns, right? We are not those neurological patterns that we don't even control. They're wired into us as a result of everything that's happened in our lives. That's why I never even labeled myself alcoholic. I was refusing to assign myself that label of alcoholic. Instead, choose whoever I want to be and not be defined by these emotional stimuli.

Alcoholism had just become a pattern in my brain, right? It's neurological wiring that my brain had learned to say stress equals drinking. That's not me. It's just a pattern and I can rise above that pattern. Through conscious effort, you can actually change patterns in your brain. I mean, that's how building habits work. It's called top-down neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is basically the science of the – the brain's ability to change itself. You can literally change the physical and neuronal structure of your brain. Top-down neuroplasticity is when you consciously make efforts to change your brain. You consciously notice a pattern, rise above that pattern and decide who you want to be outside of that pattern. One of the most important things I ever share and just has been a game-changer for me is we are not our thoughts, our emotions, our experiences. We are the thinker of our thoughts, the feeler of our feelings and the experiencer of our experiences. Recognizing that space is everything. That space will shape your destiny; what you do in that space between what shows up and who you choose to be outside of that.

[0:13:00.1] MB: So many powerful points. I want to come back and dig more into top-down neuroplasticity and this idea of rewriting the brain. Before we do, you said something a minute ago that is one of the most important lessons that transforms your life once you realize it and yet, so few people do, which is this notion that it's not about waiting until the fear goes away. It's about acting despite the fear. Or if you can get really good and train yourself, it's acting because of the fear.

[0:13:31.1] AN: Yes. Absolutely, because it's not going to go away. It's a standard part of life. We respond with fear; fear, sadness, stress, anxiety, these are all normal human emotions. They're just part of the journey. By seeking to avoid them, you actually do yourself more harm. You would retreat to the easiest course of action. Neurologically, that's what we're going to do. Dr. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel prize-winning psychologist wrote this amazing book, Thinking Fast and Slow. He said that we are naturally lazy creatures. The brain is naturally lazy and it will retreat to the laziest course of action.

You have to notice that. Paradoxically at the same time, we are wired to seek novelty. When we do things that excite us, we release dopamine, that’s your hormone in the brain. It releases another chemical called Anandamide. The word ‘anan’ comes from the Sanskrit word ‘bliss’. This neurological wiring is paradoxical in a way that with the same time, we will retreat to the laziest course of action, because we seek comfort. Yet, we thrive on novelty, right?

We have to become aware of that and realize that it's not going to go away. The best things in life come from struggle. Even neurologically, struggle is required. You have to in order to build new brain patterns, you have to navigate your way to making those mistakes. Neurologically, you make these mistakes and your brain learns what to do and then it rewires itself. Even on a neurological level, Daniel Coyle writes this beautifully. He says, “Struggle is not optional. It's neurologically required.” You got to suffer. I like to say, to suffer well.

To build a positive relationship to suffering is the single most important skill to master. If you can learn how to suffer well, you can do anything. Because not only will you be able to thrive when life punches you in the face, which we all know it does from time to time, but you'll also be able to smile in the face of the inevitable challenges that stand between you and anywhere you want to go, because everything worthwhile in life will be hard. Embracing the suffering and the struggle of the experience will give you the means to keep pushing forward, no matter what comes in your way.

[0:15:20.5] MB: Incredible insight. I want to dig more into this notion that the importance of building a positive relationship with suffering and this idea that suffering is neurologically required in our lives, tell me about that.

[0:15:36.4] AN: Yeah. Dr. Daniel Coyle wrote about this beautifully in one of his books. I was researching plenty of this in writing my own about how struggle is neurologically required. Because if you think about how brain patterns work, right? Hebb’s law, it's this neurological – the science of neuroplasticity is called one of these rules, called Hebb’s law, which essentially states that neurons that fire together wire together.

If you think about a practical level with my drinking, right? Stress equals drinking. At that level, it's these neurons that fire together at this is how you respond to the world. In order to change that, you have to cultivate new neuronal wiring. Even if you just think as you're walking on a road, A to B, these pathways become stronger and stronger. The analogy I use in Fearvana is if you think about a sled going down a hill, when you put the sled down like a track on in the snow and you go down the same track over and over and over again, the snow gets deeper and deeper. As you go on the same track, the sled is trapped in this path, right? In order to change it, you have to fight your way into new snow, right? You have to consciously pick up the sled and go onto a new track.

Initially, that's hard as you build a track. Once you do, then it becomes easier and easier, easier. You have to go through that little struggle initially to change your pattern, to rewire the brain. Now I don't have any neurological data to prove this, because I didn't measure my brain science – I mean, take the brain scans at a time. I can say with 100% certainty, that my brain is going to look different now than it did when I was battling these demons.

They've done plenty of studies to show this. They've shown that for example, London taxi drivers, they have a bigger hippocampus, which is the part of the brain associated with memory, they have a bigger hippocampus than others, because they are forced to memorize the streets of London. The London taxi drivers have this huge ability to memorize these backroads of London, which is apparently very complicated. As a result, their brain has physically changed and they have a larger hippocampus. You're changing your brain as you – whatever you pursue, that will help you change your brain.

There's another principle of neuroplasticity called use it or lose it. What you're not pursuing, it will die out. This myth if we use only 10% of our brain is very flawed. We use a 100% of our brain and whatever part is not being used, it's going to be taken over by another part of the brain. You can almost think of it like a war. There's this war happening in your brain for neuronal real estate. If a part is not being used, that part will then be overtaken by other parts.

They’ve done something one quick really interesting study and outside of the morality of doing this on a animal testing level, these researchers took the hand of a monkey and they measured every part of the monkey’s hand to see what part of the brain would trigger. The right pinky and the top of the right pinky, what part of their brain would fire when they touch that right pinky? They did this to every – I mean, it was an amazing study. They did this to every single part of the monkey's hand.

Then eventually, what they did was again, outside of the morality of this, but what they did was they cut off two of the monkey's fingers. What happened was eventually, they found that when they touched another part of the monkey's hand, it actually was firing in the part that used to be previously associated with these two fingers that were cut off. Our brain is always fighting for neuronal real estate and you really want to be conscious about what you are putting in your brain and what is actually going to fire, because one way or the other, it's going to be used.

[0:18:50.3] MB: That's a great point to just touch on briefly, this idea that you have to be super conscious of all the little inputs in your brain, because there's so many subconscious influences. I just want to ping that point, because it's so important. I want to circle back and talk more about suffering, because we have such a fraught, confused relationship with suffering in our society. Tell me about how is it possible to have a positive relationship with suffering? Isn't suffering something that we should try to avoid?

[0:19:20.0] AN: That's the idea, right? That we should avoid suffering and because it's hard. The nature of anything challenging, like these fear, stress, anxiety, suffering, these are not negative, but they are more challenging than let's say joy, or calm, or happiness, right? They are more challenging emotions. That's why we run away from them. One of my favorite quotes of all time from a psychologist, Carl Jung, he says, “There is no coming to consciousness without pain. People will do anything no matter how absurd to avoid confronting their own soul. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”

You have to go into those dark spaces. You have to suffer and bring that into the conscious self, so you can do something with it. He also says, again one of my favorite quotes, until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Like you touched on earlier, we are all operating from the unconscious. We operate on autopilot most of our lives and even, just again, studies have shown we operate at a very high percentage unconsciously. We live our lives on complete autopilot based on everything that shaped us into who we are today.

In order to change those patterns, we have to go into the uncomfortable spaces. We have to suffer to train ourselves to build a positive relationship to that. You do that – I mean, there's many ways. Fundamentally, you stop labeling fear, stress, anxiety as negative. You stop demonizing these emotions. You stop demonizing the experiences and recognizing that there are only emotions and only experiences and it's up to us to decide what we do with them.

Fundamentally, this is just the mindset shift of not demonizing fear, stress and anxiety is huge. Because the world will tell you, “Be fearless. Don't be scared. Eliminate fear. I mean, eliminate stress.” We attach words like disorder to anxiety and that's nonsense. That sends us down the second dart syndrome of this conversation that, “I'm weak, because I feel fear.” When you feel fear, no matter how it shows up, no matter how it shows up, I mean, sometimes I feel afraid sitting in my house alone and I live in a very safe neighborhood in New Jersey, which is crazy considering the things I've done in my life, right?

I've walked in front of vehicles looking for bombs. I've jumped out of planes. I've done a lot of crazy dangerous things and here I am feeling scared sitting alone in my house. The thing is it doesn't matter how fear shows up. What matters is that it's there and I acknowledge this presence. It's just okay, fear is here. What am I going to do with it? Stop demonizing it is the fundamental starting point.

The next thing you can do, there's all kinds of tools that have been proven to be helpful, like visualizing yourself moving through the fear and not just on the other side, like law of attraction will say visualize yourself all happy with the million dollars walking down the beach. Research has actually shown, it's more valuable to visualize yourself in the process of overcoming the obstacles you face. Whenever I go for long runs, because I'm an ultra-runner now, so I do a lot of things, like recently, I ran 80 miles around a point two mile loop for 20-plus hours. It was a brutal psychological torture.

What I will do when I do these things is I'll visualize myself in the suffering, in the pain, which I know I will experience and rising above it. Visualizing yourself moving through the struggle. What is the value, the reward on the other side of that struggle, having clarity of purpose, of intention, of mission, knowing why you are embarking on this journey. When I joined the Marines, two doctors told me would kill me, right? Boot camp would kill me. I didn't care. I knew what I wanted to do and I was going to do it no matter what. Having clarity of purpose.

Then fundamentally, you can listen to every podcast, listen to me talk, read a book, this, that and the other thing, but you have to put yourself in the suck. You have to experience the suffering and push yourself one step, one step further, one step further. I mean, today I ran 80 miles, right? Recently, I spent seven days in darkness. I do very intense things. This didn't happen overnight. I used to be terrified of Ferris wheels. I used to be terrified of everything.

Whatever your limit is, push it one step, push it two steps, keep going, keep going and you'll actually start to find that there's tremendous beauty in this. I mean, even on a neurological level, there’s really a fascinating set of chemicals, this chemical cocktail of Fearvana that I call it, that releases when you push yourself into these experiences. You'll find that it's actually the most valuable thing you could possibly do.

Psychologist, Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, he's this author of this book Flow. He said, “Contrary to what we usually believe, the best moments in our lives are not the passive receptive relaxing times. The best moments usually occur when we push our bodies and minds to their limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.” This is a direct quote from one of the largest studies on happiness. That's what he found that. The keyword there is a voluntary effort. I call it a worthy struggle.

Find that struggle worthy of who you are and who you want to be. It doesn't have to be running ultra-marathons, it doesn't have to be skiing across polar icecaps like I do. What's your worthy struggle? I have friends who are about to be a grand master in chess, right? Writing movie scripts, writing a book, whatever it may be. Find that struggle worthy of who you are and who you want to be and the journey becomes more enjoyable, even through the pain, and there will be pain. It's inevitable. Pain is beautiful.

[0:23:49.9] MB: Hiring the right person takes time, time that you often don't have. You shouldn't let a time crunch get in the way of finding the right candidates for your business. That's why LinkedIn is the best place to post your job. In fact, I was on LinkedIn Jobs this morning looking for candidates to fill a key role in one of my businesses. LinkedIn Jobs screens candidates with hard and soft skills you’re looking for, so that you can hire the right person quickly.

You can look for things like collaboration, creativity and adaptability, looking beyond just work skills and resumes to connect you with the candidates who are a perfect match for your business. That's how LinkedIn makes sure that your job post gets in front of the people you actually want to hire, because they have a much better ability to get a deep insight into exactly who is the right candidate for you and your business.

Find the right person meant for your business today with LinkedIn Jobs. You can pay what you want and the first $50 is on them. Just visit linkedin.com/success. Again, that's linkedin.com/success to get $50 off your first job post. Terms and conditions apply.

[0:25:09.7] MB: I want to dig in to a number of different things you said. Let's start with this idea that adversity, or struggle is both inevitable and desirable.

[0:25:21.4] AN: Yeah. I mean, we all know it's inevitable, right? You're going to suffer in life. People who have seemingly everything, right? People with all the money, the success, fame in the world, we see that in Hollywood all the time, right? They're struggling with mental health issues, with addiction. You can try to go through life without it, but it's going to hit you. It's going to hit. It hits everybody.

I've worked with nine-figure entrepreneurs who are battling their own demons, right? It's going to show up no matter where you are in life, which is why I say don't wait for it, seek it out, train in it. Any emotion you are struggling with, any experience you are struggling with, the only way to get better at it, deliberate practice, right? Putting yourself in situations of struggle and that's how you train to get better at it. Even in emotion, you can actually train yourself emotionally as well.

For example, one of things I do today is I will consciously watch scenes from war movies knowing they will make me cry, knowing they will make me cry and they always do. They tear me up. I do this, because instead of letting my guilt, letting these emotions that I struggle with, letting my darkness and my demons consume me and take control of me, I put myself in those situations consciously and I train in them. I do this through ultra-running and I do this to writing a book was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I'm building a business. Everything worthwhile is hard. You have to train yourself to fall in love with that suffering, to suffer well.

It's fundamental and it's actually – like I said, it's enjoyable. I mean, I know when I go on long runs, I will go through moments, like just recently a couple weeks ago, I ran 72 miles and I hit this soul-crushing low at Mile 48, like soul-crushing. I was in such a dark space. I just sat there being in pure victim mode, complaining about life, how much everything sucks, I don't want to be here, I wanted to call an Uber to quit and go back home. I said, “All right, just pause. Let's take one more step.” The pain was overwhelming.

The beautiful thing about pain is that it's all-consuming. There's a purity to pain that when you're in pain, when you're in suffering, there's nowhere else to be but in the consumption of that pain. Then you get to decide what you do with that pain. I like to say that suffering is a training ground for self-transcendence. You know how we talked about that top-down neuroplasticity, right? Being conscious about changing your subconscious. That's what your self-transcendence is.

You rise above your feelings, you rise above your experience, you rise above your thoughts and choose who you want to be outside of them. Suffering trains you to transcend the self. It's the best training ground you can possibly get for self-transcendence and it will show you how to keep moving forward through the suck, through the pain, through whatever you're feeling. A mantra that I often use to guide me is be with what is, but do not become what is. This is how I move through pain when I'm in it and I'm in it a lot.

[0:27:47.7] MB: Incredible quote. Suffering is a training ground for self-transcendence. The point that you bring up in relation to that, this idea that we shouldn't wait for the fear, but we should actually seek it out. We should train in it. I love that phrase, “Train in the conditions that you're afraid of.”

[0:28:04.8] AN: Yeah. I mean, it's the only way to get better at it, right? I mean, it's the only way. That's why the Marine Corps boot camp, they push you through struggle. It's very, very hard. You cannot get better at something without doing it. The misconception of flow that I often see is there's these two states of deliberate practice and flow, right? People say in flow that there's this paradigm has been set, which I think is highly destructive, that when you're in a flow state, life is easy and everything is grand and beautiful and sunshine and rainbows and it's not.

Just as Professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the father of flow, Dr. Anders Ericsson, he's the father of deliberate practice. I call Fearvana the middle ground between deliberate practice and flow. You have to struggle. Then you will find yourself in moments of flow state, where you're just in the zone and you're no longer in the struggle, but you're going to go on this back and forth journey. Everything worthwhile, we'll have this dance between the two.

When I've climbed mountains, when I'm in ultra-running, the beautiful – why I love ultra-running is you get to experience everything; intense highs, intense lows, moments when you're in flow, there is no time, and moments where you just get to ponder everything about life. You get to experience the entire spectrum of the human condition in one moment, which is why I love it.

Train in whatever you want to do. I mean, and when you suffer well, when you train an – exercise is one of the best way, best ways to do it, to train in suffering. Because barring serious physical issues, almost anybody can do it. One neuroscientist, he calls exercise “miracle growth for the brain,” because on a neurological level, it dramatically improves the way your synaptic connections and how your brain functions.

Another neuroscientist said that if you could put all the effects of exercise into a pill, it'd be the best-selling pill of all time. Plenty of research has shown exercise is one of the best things you can do for beating depression and any mental health issues. On a spiritual level and even a psychological level, exercise trains you how to suffer well. You can apply those lessons in other areas of your life as well. That's why you got to train in it. I recommend exercise, no matter what your path, no matter what you're seeking, build some exercise routine, because it'll not only improve how your brain functions to pursue whatever task you want to pursue, it'll teach you to suffer, which will help you handle the inevitable adversity of life.

[0:30:04.5] MB: It bears repeating one more time, this notion that you should train yourself in the act, in the art, if you will, of suffering. It's important to seek out proactively suffering in your life, so that you can build that skill set, so that you can build that muscle, and so that you can grow, thrive and ultimately, transcend.

[0:30:24.5] AN: Yeah. You'll obviously hate it at first. It sucks. There's moments where it's horrible, but that's the best thing – as you do it more, you will start to develop a love for it. That's really counterintuitive, but there is bliss in pain. There is tremendous bliss in pain. You just have to go into those spaces to find it.

Again, you can't evolve without suffering, even whether it be neurologically, spiritually, psychologically. I mean, if you want something you've never had before, you're going to have to do something you've never done before. That means taking a risk, that means stretching your comfort zone, it means ultimately suffering. Put yourself in those spaces and you'll find an ability to transcend yourself.

[0:30:57.0] MB: A minute ago, you touched on a related piece of this, which is finding a worthy struggle, or a worthy challenge in your life and how if you don't proactively seek out a struggle for yourself that you think is worthy, struggle and suffering will find you.

[0:31:14.5] AN: Yeah. I like to say if you don't seek out a worthy struggle, struggle will find you anyway. It will. We all know that, right? Anybody listening to this, anybody in life has gone through some pain in life that's inevitable. A worthy struggle gives you the means to handle that pain and handle whatever pain you face. Now as I mentioned, right? I have this picture of my friend that I lost in the war up on my wall and says, “This should have been you. Earn this life.” My demons, my darkness, my pain, it became fuel to do the work that I do now with Fearvana, to help others through this work.

That worthy struggle is everything. Viktor Frankl, one of the best books of all time in my opinion, he wrote this book Man's Search for Meaning. He was a psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust in Auschwitz. He talks about how we could find meaning even in suffering and that's the ultimate quest. That's what we are here is we are meaning seeking creatures on a neurological level, but finding meaning to our lives, finding that path, that purpose, that is your worthy struggle. I call it a worthy struggle, not passion, because – Passion is a good thing.

To have passion for your pursuit is great, but the idea of following your passion in today's world often conveys this notion that if I do, then life will be rainbows and unicorns, right? If I love what I do, I'll never have to work a day in my life. That garbage.

It's going to be hard. I love what I do, but there are days where it sucks. It's really, really hard. Everything I do, building a business, writing a book, running ultra-marathons, right? I'm planning to ski across – ski to the North Pole in a few months. All these things are brutal. They're absolutely challenging. I have passion for them, but that doesn't mean it's easy. I call it your worthy struggle. That struggle worthy of who you are and who you want to be. You’ll find it by looking around the world, seeking references in your own world, look at references in your life, like what makes you come alive? Look at people who are doing things out there.

The ways to grow are basically surrounding yourself with people who are more advanced than you and then you'll learn, you'll grow, you'll be forced to adapt and to transcend yourself to evolve and to adapt into this environment of people who are more advanced than you. The other way is to suffer. Put yourself in those spaces and you'll find out, is this really for me? Then you'll challenge yourself and you'll discover what you're capable of.

Start looking for references of things around you and things in your own life that will show you okay, what could potentially be my worthy struggle? Then pursue that path. It might not be the right, but my path has changed, right? I joined the Marines and initially wanted to go career, but I changed that path and now I do what I do with Fearvana, but no regrets for that life experience.

Stop looking for that instant gratification, that okay, if I do this, then I'll immediately will be – it'll find the answers, right? Push yourself into a worthy struggle and commit yourself entirely to it. This myth of work-life balance I think is very flawed. Forget about the idea of balance, consume yourself. Obsession is a beautiful thing. Let your dream consume the entirety of your soul. Let it consume your dreams, let it consume your being and obsess yourself onto that path.

I talk about my personal life in my work just like I'm doing now. I talk about my work and my personal life. It is me. It is entirely me. Fearvana is my ethos, it's my world, I live, breathe, sleep and I will die Fearvana. Let it consume the entirety of your being and ultimately, you'll find joy and beauty in that pain. Arnold Schwarzenegger put it beautifully, one of the greatest bodybuilder of all time. He said, “I like the pain that is necessary to be the champion. I don't like sticking needles in my arm,” but he enjoys the pain that was necessary to be the champion. His version of being a champion was to be a bodybuilder.

We all have different meanings of what it means to be a champion. Find that. It's not just about software the sake of suffering. I used to cut myself, burn myself, there was no virtue to that pain, right? Find the pain that is worthy of who you are and what it means for you to be a champion.

[0:34:37.3] MB: You bring up another great point, which is this notion of not seeking out quick gratification, not looking for the easy path, “not finding your passion,” which we talked about so much in today's blogosphere and all the content online. Instead of finding your passion, find something to struggle with, find something to suffer for that's really meaningful and important in your life.

[0:35:01.7] AN: Yeah. I mean, and that's – and passion is developed. Passion, you don't discover your passion, you develop passion. As an example, Michael Phelps used to be terrified of swimming, terrified of swimming. He became Michael Phelps, one of the most – he won more Olympic medals than anybody in history, the greatest swimmer of all time. He struggled and through struggle, you would develop passion.

Find, pursue struggle, pursue a worthy struggle, pursue a meaningful struggle and passion will develop as a result of that. Not the other way around. You got to put yourself in those uncomfortable situations to figure out your passion. I mean, I used to hate long-distance running and now here I am doing crazy things, right? Running 80 miles, or I ran 167 miles across Liberia last year to help build a first sustainable school out there. Various things like that as a result of testing and putting myself out there and finding that worthy struggle.

[0:35:50.1] MB: This is very interrelated with what we've been talking about, but this notion of actively putting yourself in uncomfortable situations is such a cornerstone. You've talked at length about it. If you look at performance psychology, if you look at some of the world's top chess players, the world's top martial artists, the world's top competitors across any field, you see the same themes again and again and it all begins with embracing discomfort and pushing into it, instead of recoiling from it, or trying to avoid it.

[0:36:20.3] AN: Yeah. Like you said earlier, right? We live in a world that does that. I mean, like I was saying, Carl Jung says, we will do anything to avoid confronting our souls. We live in this world of instant gratification. We're taught we can get – I mean, these bones; social media, watching Netflix, little dopamine machines that's teaching us to get instant jolts of dopamine into our brain. That is so destructive, so destructive.

It is highly addictive and we see that all the time, right? It is teaching us that we can get joy from instantly – instant results. You can’t. Anything worthwhile in life is going to take significant effort in which you need to do is train yourself to fall in love with the journey, that the journey itself is a destination. The pursuit is where the passion lies, right? Falling in love with the pursuit, not just the result.

Again, the world will tell us that we'll be happy when we get six-pack abs, when we get the million dollars, when we get the car. We're always looking for the easiest way to do that. You see this nonsense all the time, right? I've seen this ad on TV, walk 14 minutes a day and you'll get six-pack abs. I train like a beast and I know it's so incredibly hard, incredibly hard to get that.

The whole point is it's missing the point anyway. You see even with diet, right? We'll say those things like, you don't need exercise to lose weight. I get it. Yes, that's true. I get it. Diet is more important in terms of losing weight than exercise. What all these mentalities miss, miss the point is that it's not about the result of losing 20 pounds, or the six-pack abs, or the million dollars, it's about the person you become on the journey. You will only evolve when you suffer.

This is why we see people who are lottery winners, they win millions of dollars, but not only do they lose it very, very fast, it doesn't improve the quality of their lives, because they haven't become someone different by earning that money. When you win it in a lottery, you haven't changed who you are. When you suffer for it, when you struggle for it, you become a different person. The value of the results you get is not the results you get, but the person you become on the journey to getting those results. That is everything.

[0:38:13.7] MB: Incredible point. Even the notion that I really like replacing – you hear all the time the cliché, it's about the journey, it's not the destination, right? I really like replacing the word journey with struggle, because that contextualizes it in a way that makes so much more sense. It's about the struggle, it's about who you become through that struggle. It's not about getting to the end-point. Lottery winners is such a perfect example of that.

[0:38:43.5] AN: Yeah. The thing is when you get to one end point, there'll be another one waiting for you, right? One of my other mantras that I use is there's no finish line. I always repeat to myself, there is no finish line. The only real finish line is death. Reminding yourself that until then, there will be another struggle. Progress is not the elimination of problems, progress is the creation of new problems. No matter what happens, no matter what result you get to, there will be a new problem that will show up. Learn to fall in love with those problem, because they're going to be there anyway. That's not a bad thing. You just want to keep having new problems.

I still struggle with all kinds of anxiety on a regular basis at the things I do in my life, on a regular basis. I still hit some very, very low moments, but I've learned and I still – I sometimes forget my own advice. Don't get me wrong. I'm a human after all, right? I've learned to say okay, great. Embrace this anxiety. This is it. In fact, I do this counterintuitive thing when I go for runs, I'll actually wish for it to be harder, because I know that I cannot evolve without suffering. I say thanks to myself like, “All right, I'm going to pray for the devil himself to rise out of hell and attempt to crush my own soul, so I can stare at him in the eyes and bury him in his own blood.”

I know that's a very dark intense thing, but the point is that I am hoping for the devil to commit his entirety of his being to the destruction of my soul, because I know the more suffering, the more pain, the more suck I go through, the greater the evolution, the greater the struggle, the greater the evolution. It's very counterintuitive, but by seeking out more suffering, by actually calling forth more suffering, it makes it that much easier to embrace the suffering of the journey. I've seen this show up all the time on runs, in building my business.

Recently, I spent seven days in pitch darkness isolation and silence to confront a fear of stillness that I had. Extremely challenging. I said, “Bring it. Bring out the darkness. Let the devil himself show himself to me and I'll face it.” I wished for it to be as hard as possible. It was pretty challenging as you might imagine.

[0:40:35.3] MB: Incredible. Once again, I love the way you phrase that. Very Marines of you, very military perspective, but very cool. This notion of calling forth suffering and the idea that the bigger the struggle, the bigger the evolution, that's another key point. It's not just that you have to suffer to evolve, to grow, to improve, it's that the more you suffer, the bigger the growth. If you want to improve your life, if you want to make a big change, if you want a big result, if you want to achieve something truly great, the path to doing that is to seek out as much suffering as you can on that journey.

[0:41:14.5] AN: Yeah, absolutely. Seek it out in whatever way you can find. Again, it doesn't have to be ultra-running, or what I choose, right? Find your own Fearvana. Find what Fearvana looks like to you, your path of Fearvana, as I like to call it. Once you push in the fears, you'll find the Nirvana on the other side. That's what the ethos of Fearvana is. It’s these two seemingly contradictory ideas that are in fact very complementary, and that fear is an access point to bliss and enlightenment.

[0:41:40.9] MB: I want to dig into making that more concrete. You obviously have pursued all kinds of extreme activities and adventures as we talked about earlier. What would be a simple example of a worthy struggle, or maybe a couple simple examples of worthy struggles, or some starting points to discover a struggle for somebody who wants to walk that path?

[0:42:06.8] AN: It could be anything. Could be raising a child. I mean, God knows I was a nightmare of a child to my parents, so that's probably the greatest worthy struggle. I always joke with my mom and dad that I bless them with the diversity in Fearvana by being a terrible kid. Raising a child is a worthy struggle, writing books, building a business, whatever you want to do, work in a job, everything is going to be hard, right?

Asking yourself what is my path. You've got to take some time to be still on this journey, because when you – We touched on this earlier, right? That we are constantly being affected by our environment. Everything we take in the environment is going into our subconscious. They've done some interesting studies where they call it the Jennifer Aniston neuron, where they put people into a brain scan. When a picture of Jennifer Aniston would show up on a screen, it would light up a particular part of their brain. If the person had watched a lot of Friends, it would light up even stronger, right? If a person watched Simpsons, their brain would light up when Homer Simpson would show up, or different things like that. These little things are constantly affecting our brain.

What happens is it becomes very hard to separate ourselves from what the world tells us we think we need to be happy in a program path to follow, versus what we really need and what we – what is like. It's going to be a combination. No matter how self-aware you are, no matter how much time you spend within yourself, inevitably, you are affected by the external influences of the world. They are shaping – I mean, from the day you're born, your parents have shaped belief systems in you, mental models in you, they've taught you about how the world works, you've learned how the world works as you go through life, right? Inevitably, your external environment and your world will shape who you are internally.

To separate yourself and create a distinction, take some time for stillness. Stillness is so important and another thing that rarely happens in today's world, because we're filled with distractions, right? I mean, phones, watching TV, drinking, drugs, anything, but sometimes even the positive things. For a long time, I realized that skiing across an ice cap, or climbing mountains was just really distracting me from myself, because I was running away from my demons.

Today I still do those things, but I do it from a very different level of consciousness. Taking time for stillness to be within, to go into those spaces of pain and just to figure out what is – who do I want to be on this path? I mean, I engaged stillness in a very extreme way of obviously spending time, seven days in darkness. You can sit still, meditate, sit still in a room, just being with your own thoughts. Shutting off everything. Obviously, no distractions, no TV, no phone.

Be with your thoughts and see where they go. Allow them to go places. It's very, very challenging, like very challenging, but it's important, it's necessary to go into those spaces of stillness to really figure out who you are and who do you want to be for yourself and for the world around you. Stillness will help you tap into those spaces to find your own worthy struggle and the pursuit that will ultimately bring you more meaning to your life, whatever that means for you.

[0:44:51.4] MB: Taking the time to listen, to journal and reflect, to think about what's going on in your life and what the research often calls those kinds of activities, our contemplative routines are such a critical component of performance, of self-awareness, of all of these results.

For somebody who's listening to this conversation, what would you say would be a starting point, or one piece of homework that you would give them to begin their journey? What would be one action item to say this is the first step on the path to having more suffering in your life?

[0:45:29.5] AN: First step is just find one little thing to test yourself. It could be skydiving, train for a 5K, go to a bar and talk to a member of the opposite sex, that's really scary. I recently went on a date and I was absolutely terrified. First time I went on a date in a long time. Do a little thing, just a little thing to push yourself outside your comfort zone. That's why I suggested exercise, because almost everybody can do that. Again, barring something severe and something, serious physical issues. Do a little thing to challenge yourself.

When you do, don't just do it, but come back and reflect on it. You mentioned this contemplative experiences, right? Like journal on it. I call it the action awareness cycle. Take an action and then get the awareness from it, reflect, journal. What did you gain from it? What insights did you find the value in it? I mean, our memory is doing this anyway. It's called memory reconsolidation. Do it consciously as well. That's how you'll start to find lessons and then ultimately, use those lessons to take the next action and the next action and the next action.

[0:46:24.2] MB: Akshay, for listeners who want to find out more about you, about your work, about the book, etc., what is the best place for them to find you online?

[0:46:34.5] AN: You can find me at fearvana.com. It’s F-E-A-R-V-A-N-A. The book is on Amazon and Kindle, paperback and Audible as well. 100% of the profits from the book go to charity and to some worthy causes we support as well. Just to let you know that yeah, the book is doing some good out there in terms of the funds we raise as well. That's how you can find me.

[0:46:55.8] MB: Well, this has been such a fascinating conversation. I love all the points about embracing suffering in our life, seeking out discomfort, training under struggle and suffering. Akshay, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing all this wisdom and all this knowledge with our listeners.

[0:47:13.6] AN: Thank you so much for having me, my friend. It was a real pleasure. Enjoyed our conversation.

[0:47:18.1] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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

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

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

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

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

Where Science & Spirituality Meet: Does The Law of Attraction Work? with Dr. Tara Swart

Have you always wondered if the “Law of Attraction” is real? In this episode we dig into the science behind visualization, manifesting and much more to find out what really works and what doesn’t. We share strategies for access your intuition and aligning your emotions, your intuition and your rational thought process to supercharge your brain, show you how to beat imposter syndrome, and much more with our guest Dr. Tara Swart.

Dr. Tara Swart is a neuroscientist and former psychiatric doctor. She is a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan and visiting senior lecturer at Kings College London, and an executive advisor to some of the world's most respected leaders in media and business. In 2016 she was named the world's first Neuroscientist-in-Residence at Corinthia Hotel, London. She is the author of the award-winning Neuroscience for Leadership, co-author of An Attitude for Acting, and lead author of her soon to be released third book, The Source.

• Can we merge science and spirituality?

• Is there science that actually explains the “law of attraction?"

• “The way that you think determines your life"

• Because of the way that you think you attract certain things into your life.

• The concept of abundant thinking

• The mental model “loss aversion” and why losses are more painful than gains

• Mastering your emotions, cultivating intuition, they are all very similar to learning a new language

  • Raising your awareness is the first step

  • Focused attention - look for opportunities where you can behave differently

    1. Look back at the past or journal now

    2. Notice where you’re not doing it an think differently

  • Deliberate practice - committing to intentional abundant thinking even if that’s not your natural default

  • Accountability - make a commitment to a friend or someone else

• Replace any negative thought with a positive thought immediately - an ancient Buddhist lesson that is supported by the neuroscience of neuroplasticity

• What should you do if you can’t dislodge a negative thought from your brain?

• If you have a repetitive negative thought or a theme to a negative narrative in your brain - distill it down to the basic underlying belief that drives that negative thought - create an opposite state and use that as your positive affirmation or mantra (check out limiting belief episodes for more)

• Use laughter and oxytocin to powerfully encode or recode beliefs

• How do you deal with imposter syndrome?

• Strategies for overcoming imposter syndrome

  • Positive affirmations

  • Journaling on accomplishments/achievements

  • If your fear is founded in a fact, then go and fix that fact (i.e. get training, etc)

  • Realize that everyone experiences imposter syndrome

• Does visualization work? Visualization makes things more certain for the brain.

• How creating a vision board can powerfully improve your brain’s focus on your goals

• Value tagging and selective attention - by visualizing your future you start to prime the brain to focus on the things that you want to be important.

• “The Tetris Effect” - Do your visualization board as the last thing you do before you go to bed to prime and feed information into your subconscious.

• The period of time that you’re about to fall asleep is the period where your subconscious can be the MOST influenced.

• Visualization is an umbrella that three big things fall under

  • Creating a vision board (or an Action Board)

• Neuroplasticity is the ability to change your brain. What you think and how you live can actually change physical things in your body.

• What you say and what you do changes your body and your physiology.

• Brain Agility

  • Mastering Emotions

  • Trusting Intuition

  • Brain-Body Connection

  • Logic & Decision Making

  • Motivated & Resilience

  • Creativity & Designing Your Future

• Journaling is the “single best way” to access your intuition and align your emotions, your intuition and your rational thought process.

• You can avoid repeating the same mistakes if you start to tap into and access your intuition

• There’s a large neuronal connection between the gut neurons and the limbic system

• If you take a high-quality probiotic it can reduce negative thinking in your life

• There’s a deep connection between your gut and your brain

• Probiotics, prebiotics, and fermented foods can improve your brain, your happiness, and your performance

• Meta-cognition - thinking about your thinking. Stepping back and asking yourself if your thought processes are healthy and helpful

  • Is there something you believe is a barrier to your success?

  • Could someone else point of view be helpful and better for you?

  • The beliefs that have been there the longest are the hardest to see - the early ones from childhood are so much a part of us that we can’t see them

• An awesome exercise you can use to improve your meta-cognition and reframe your thinking

  • Make an ideal statement that you want in your life

  • In column one - write down every single barrier to that statement. Come up with as many reasons as you can. Pull out every barrier you possibly can.

    1. I don’t have the money

    2. I don’t have the time

    3. I don’t have control

    4. There are other people, etc

  • In column two - write the opposite statement to all the barriers even if they couldn’t possibly be true

  • In column three - write as if the second column is now true - what do you do differently?

    1. Not what you would do, “what I do differently” not “what I WOULD do differently”

    2. Don’t put it into the future - create it for you NOW.

  • Group those answers by themes.

  • Usually, a bunch of those are things you could already start doing right away.

• Homework: Create an action board. The structure of the board is important. Don’t use words - that go down the logical/rational pathway.

  • Look out for opportunities in your life to execute and take action towards these goals.

  • Annually is the cadence

  • Goals for the next year or lifetime goals, leave a bit of room for magic

Thank you so much for listening!

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

Are you hiring for your business or next big project?

LinkedIn Talent Solutions is here to help and make hiring the right person simple, powerful, and easy!

LinkedIn goes above and beyond. Screening not just the hard skills you need but soft skill as well to find the right person fast!

LinkedIn looks at things like collaboration within a team, creative skills, adaptability and much much more! That’s how LinkedIn makes sure your post get in front of the right people at the right time to all your needs without all the typical hiring headaches.

It’s no wonder great candidates are hired every 8 seconds on LinkedIn!

Right now, LinkedIn is offering Science of Success listeners their first $50 on the Talent Solutions platform absolutely free! Just go to www.linkedin.com/success to find the right candidate for your project today!

Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

General

• Dr. Swart’s Website

• Dr. Swart’s LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook

Media

• Fast Company - “What brain supplements can and can’t do, according to a neuroscientist” by Tara Swart

• “These Are The 5 Brain Skills You’ll Need In The Future Of Work”

• “This is how you train your brain to be more creative” by Tara Swart

• Article Directory at Forbes and Medium

• [Faculty Profile] MIT Sloan - Dr. Tara Swart

• [Book Review] Books In My Opinion - The Source - Dr Tara Swart

• The Evening Standard - “Brain gain: The Source is a mind manual that might just change your life” by Alix O'Neill

• Business Insider - “A neuroscientist explains the 5 most effective methods to keep your brain healthy” by David Ibekwe 

• Thrive Global - “3 Tips for Building Your Best Brain: Your brain will thank you.” By Rachel Palekar

• Yahoo Finance - “Why neuroscientist Tara Swart recommends 12 minutes of mindfulness a day” by Lara O'Reilly

• Peter Fisk - “Neuroplasticity: The Secret of “The Source” … Tara Swart’s new book on how to change your brain to live a better life”

• Daily Mail - “How to train your brain to make your dreams come true: Neuroscientist Dr Tara Swart reveals the simple mind tricks that could turn your life around” by Dr. Tara Swart

• Luxury Travel Advisor - “Neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart Shares Top 10 Tips On How To Beat Jetlag”

• The Telegraph - “She Wears It Well: Neuroscientist Tara Swart knows how to dress to ease brain strain” by  Olivia Buxton Smith

• Whitney Johnson - “How Your Brain Processes Disruption: Interview with Dr. Tara Swart”

• Financial Times - “Women in Business — Tara Swart” by Charlotte Clarke

• [Podcast] Stellar's Podcast Series with Shaun McCambridge: 9: Dr. Tara Swart – Debunking Neuroscience - Part 1 (posted 9 days ago)

  • Dr Tara Swart - Debunking Neuroscience Part 2

• [Podcast] Dr. Chatterjee - How to Open Your Mind and Change Your Life with Dr Tara Swart

• [Podcast] How to Be Awesome at Your Job - 494: How to Train Your Brain for Maximum Growth with Dr. Tara Swart

Videos

• TEDxTalks - Technology and the Future of the Human Brain | Tara Swart | TEDxSaoPaulo

• Neuroscience and Nationalism | Tara Swart | TEDxLSE

• Inc. - 3 Ways To Become A Morning Person | Inc.

  • How Much Sleep You Really Need, According To Science | Inc.

  • Why You Get Imposter Syndrome And How to Overcome It | Inc.

• Sporting Edge - Tara Swart explains reasons why your brain needs sleep

• MIT Sloan Executive Education - Neuroscience for Leadership

• Brand Learning - View from neuroscience: Dr Tara Swart on how to excel at leadership in an AI World

Books

• The Source: The Secrets of the Universe, the Science of the Brain  by Tara Swart

• Neuroscience for Leadership: Harnessing the Brain Gain Advantage (The Neuroscience of Business)  by T. Swart, Kitty Chisholm, and Paul Brown

• An Attitude for Acting: How to Survive (and Thrive) as an Actor (Paperback) - Common by Dr. Tara Swart and Andrew Tidmarsh

Misc

• [SoS Episodes] Limiting Beliefs

• [App] HabitShare

• [Academic Article] “Positive fantasies about idealized futures sap energy” by Heather Barry Kappes and Gabriele Oettingen

Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

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

Have you always wondered if the law of attraction is real? In this episode, we dig into the science behind visualization, manifesting and much more to find out what really works and what doesn't. We share strategies for accessing your intuition and aligning your emotions, your intuition and your rational thought process to supercharge your brain. We talk about beating impostor syndrome and much more with our guest, Dr. Tara Swart.

Are you a fan of the show and have you been enjoying the content that we put together for you? If you have, I would love it if you signed up for our e-mail list. We have some amazing content on there, along with a really great free course that we put a ton of time into called How To Create Time for What Matters Most In Your Life.

If that sounds exciting and interesting and you want a bunch of other free goodies and giveaways along with that, just go to successpodcast.com. You can sign up right on the homepage. That’s successpodcast.com. Or if you’re on your phone right now, all you have to do is text the word smarter, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we looked at how one of the greatest geniuses of all time lost his life savings overnight. We talked about despite our illusions of rationality, even the most brilliant humans are not rational at all. We tell ourselves that it's always the other person who's irrational, envious and aggressive and that it's never us. Science shows that all of our brains are remarkably similar, sculpted by evolution to have baked in biases and bad habits. No one is exempted from the laws of human nature.

In our previous episode, we explored the path that all of the world's greatest strategists have used to master their own irrationality and achieve mastery with our legendary guest, Robert Greene. If you want to take control of your life, listen to our previous episode.

Now, for our interview with Tara.

[0:02:23.0] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Dr. Tara Swart. Tara is a neuroscientist and former psychiatric doctor. She's a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan and visiting senior lecturer at Kings College London and an executive advisor to some of the world's most respected leaders in media and business.

In 2016, she was named the world's first neuroscientist in residence at Corinthia Hotel London. She is the lead author the award-winning Neuroscience for Leadership, co-author of An Attitude for Acting and the author of the newly released book The Source. Tara, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:00.0] TS: Thank you so much. I'm just actually loving the fact that the strapline of the book is the secrets of the universe, the science of the brain, so we're already aligned.

[0:03:08.1] MB: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I love some of the stuff you talk about in the book and it's such an interesting, maybe even serendipitous time to interview you. One of the things that's always been so fascinating and interesting for me, and I've read voraciously around this intersection between science and spirituality. Your book, you're obviously a scientist, doctor very rooted and scientifically-driven, evidence-focused. Tell me about how you came to write this book and how you started approaching merging those two ideas?

[0:03:40.8] TS: Yeah, thank you. I think that's what everybody sees on the surface, isn't it? That I'm an MD and I have a PhD in neuroscience. I've always said, I'm also a person and I have things that I'm interested in. To some extent, you do feel you can't really talk about it if you're an MD and a scientist. For example, the spiritual side of things.

As I grew up in London with Indian parents, I felt a real conflict between the life that I had at home and the life that I had at school and with my friends. I learnt from an early age how to keep things separate. Then I went to medical school and studied neuroscience and became a doctor. I was practicing in psychiatry for seven years and spirituality doesn't really come into to those things. I would still do yoga sometimes, but I think that those things really drifted apart.

When I changed career and started applying neuroscience to mental health and mental performance, those things naturally started to come back together. The idea for writing a book that really brought those things together was a little germinating seed in my mind, for I think probably a couple of years, if not more.

I'll give you an example of the things that you don't talk about. Quite a few years ago, now maybe five, seven years ago, I went on a yoga retreat in Ibiza and I had some Reiki. When the book came out, the Reiki person contacted me on Instagram and said, “You told me you were going to write this book, remember?” I didn't remember. I think the idea had been there for a very long time, deeply hidden in my brain. When the opportunity arose to write it, I jumped at the chance and actually writing it really brought those two sides of my life together for me.

[0:05:35.8] MB: Such a great way to start that journey. I'm curious getting into the specifics of it a little bit more, what did you find, or how did you start to combine those two things? Because many people and I certainly count myself in some either previous iterations, or even today in some ways, really struggle to combine or marry science and spirituality. How did you think about the disconnects, the distances and how do you bridge that gap?

[0:06:04.8] TS: Well actually, because I am interested in things, like the law of attraction and vision boards, I wanted to know if they could be backed up by cognitive science. I'd been doing them and learning about it at the same time. What I hear from people who have read the book is that the science compels us to take action on things that we might think well, that's just a – it's a new age thing, or it's a spiritual thing.

I had been doing vision boards for quite a few years and we can talk about that later. Where I started was with the area that I was most skeptical about, which was the law of attraction. I googled it and there's 12, but actually when you research it, there isn't really agreement about what the 12 are. I had to start by distilling it down to the 12 most acknowledged ones. Then I started looking into the science behind them. Immediately, 10 of the 12 I could explain by neuroscience.

That's when I thought, “Okay, this is going to be really interesting.” I've been really honest in the book and said the one or two, I can't give you an explanation for how these work, but it's probably not going to harm you. If you're doing the other 10, you may as well do them as well, or if you want to leave them out, you can leave them out.

[0:07:18.3] MB: Let's dig into that a little bit more. Tell me about what even is the law of attraction and why, or how does the science support it?

[0:07:29.4] TS: There's many ways to describe it, but I think it's really summed up very nicely in this phrase, the way that we think determines our life. That because of the way that you think, you attract certain things into your life. Wherever this has been written about before, it's been explained by quantum science and vibrations and field energy. I think that's why it's received so much criticism. It always struck me that if it's to do with the way you think, then it should be explained by psychology and neuroscience, because those are the sciences of thinking.

Yeah, so I started looking into it. The one that I have picked out is number one and because I think it's the most important one is abundant thinking. The science behind that is a term called ‘loss aversion’, which is the fact that our brain is geared for survival reasons. To avoid loss more than it seeks reward. The psychological effect of this gearing is two to two and a half times stronger for loss avoidance than for gaining reward.

The easiest way to bring that to your mind is if you parked your car in the parking lot this morning and you walked to your office and you realize that you dropped $50 out of your pocket, you'd be really annoyed. You'd probably go back and check the parking lot a couple of times. You'd still be thinking about that for several hours, if not still thinking about it last thing at night before you go to sleep. If instead of that, you walked from your car to the office and you found $50 dollars lying on the ground in the parking lot, you would be pleasantly surprised. You might keep it. You might give it to charity, but you wouldn't be thinking about that even an hour later.

The equivalent loss or gain, the loss has a more psychologically powerful effect. That served us when we lived in the cave and it allowed us to survive as a species. In the modern world, it's not as helpful. In a safe scenario, cultivating abundant thinking where you believe there's enough out there for everyone you believe that good things will happen, you're generous because you don't feel you're in competition for resources. That's a way of thinking that actually changes what happens in the real world, because it changes what you do, it changes who you hang out with, it changes the perspectives and filters that you have about how the world works.

[0:09:54.5] MB: I want to come back to something you touched on a minute ago. I want to explore this more further, but you touch briefly on this notion of vibrations. That's one that as somebody who considers myself somewhat of a rational skeptic about many things, when I hear vibrations it almost sets off alarm bells like, “Oh, this can't be scientifically validated. This can't be reason.”

It just seems a little bit too woo-woo for me. How do you start to integrate that into – as somebody who comes out of the hard sciences, how do you integrate that into your perspective of things, like the law of attraction, things like personal development, etc.?

[0:10:31.4] TS: I mean, my first reaction is to say I don't. I believe that the law of attraction and that your thought process should be explained by cognitive science, not by a vibrational science, if you like. I’d put that in quote marks, “being very skeptical.”

However, there are a few things about social and emotional contagion that that feeling of when you go into a certain person's home or office that you just feel so drained and negative after spending time with them. There are some chemical and endocrine explanations for why that happens. Basically, if people are suppressing large amounts of stress and they've got high levels of cortisol, that can actually increase your cortisol levels, which then makes you feel stressed and negative.

There are some things like that, but I think basically that when I talk about the laws of attraction, all the personal development exercises that I've included in the book, I don't talk about vibrations.

[0:11:32.5] MB: Fair enough. I think that that, what you – you made a really good point that underscores a lot of this, which you said earlier, though there might be some pieces of this that are not supported by science, a huge amount of it is really robustly supported and has not only evidence backing into the science, but also really tangible results in the real world of positive outcomes that they've created for people.

[0:11:56.4] TS: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I mentioned the vision boards and I've done them for about 10 years now and I've got great stories for my own, about how the things on my vision boards have come true. You hear these stories. Now that the book is out, I'm actually getting messages on Instagram from people I don't know. When I hear the stories from my friends, I think, “Yeah. Yeah. I told you it would work.” When I get messages from strangers saying, “I arrived at this vacation destination and oh, my goodness. Look, the picture’s exactly the same as what was on my board.”

Or I get messages from people saying, “My boyfriend proposed to me.” I've had messages about being engaged, being married, getting pregnant, going freelance, this travel stuff. They come up a lot. It's actually just making me believe it even more.

[0:12:45.7] MB: Let's go back to the notion of abundance thinking. How do we start to cultivate a mindset of abundance and what happens to us and our lives and our thinking patterns when we do?

[0:12:58.3] TS: I think the first step is to decide that that's what you want to do. Actually, I talk about a four-step process for any behavior change. I make the analogy that anything you want to do, whether it's cultivating abundant thinking, whether it's mastering your emotions, whether it's accessing your intuition, it's exactly the same physiological process in the brain as learning a new language.

It starts with raising awareness, which is that basically asking yourself is my life exactly how I always dreamed it would be. If it's not, then would thinking in different ways potentially help me to achieve the life that I would like to have? Then once you're aware of what you need to do, we'll use the example of abundant thinking.

The next step is called focused attention and it's about looking for opportunities, where you could behave differently. Either looking back at the past, or journaling now and saying, “Okay, so there was this opportunity to travel for work, but I didn't take it because I thought that if I left the office, my team would manage fine without me and I'd basically not be needed anymore.” That thing. You start to notice where you're not doing it and you potentially could think differently.

The third stage is deliberate practice. It's committing to intentionally thinking abundantly, even if that's not your natural default. There's an ancient Buddhist philosophy that says you should replace any negative thought with a positive thought immediately. I write about this in the book. It's a Buddhist philosophy, but it's very much backed up by the science of neuroplasticity, which is how the brain changes, either itself or in response to things that we expose it to.

Every time we recall a thought, or a memory, or we have this narrative in our mind about something negative, it reinforces the neural pathway that supports that thought. As soon as you start thinking, “Oh, I'd never be able to start up my own business,” you immediately replace that with, “One day, I'll start up my own business.” You're reducing the number of negative thoughts and overwriting them with a new positive thought.

The way that neuroplasticity works, or brain pathways develop, or wither with disuse, you can't really undo something that's already a pathway in the brain, so you need to overwrite it with the new desired behavior. The final key to this whole process is about accountability. If you said, “After this podcast, I'd like to think more abundantly,” but then you didn't really do much about it and I caught up with you in six months’ time and you said, “Oh, yeah. I tried for a few weeks and then life got in the way.” That's basically because you're missing the key part of accountability.

You would either make a commitment to me or a friend or write it in your journal, but a bit more than that. Make a commitment so that you're held accountable. Or use technology. I like this app called HabitShare and I have at any one time 10 habits that I'm trying to cultivate. I shared the exercise, one with a colleague, I keep something private. You can share some of them with family. You can use technology to hold yourself accountable, but I always feel that for example with my coaching clients, they know that in a month's time, I'm going to come back and say, “Did you do that thing that we talked about?” That they're much more likely to do it, because they know that I'm going to ask.

[0:16:21.3] MB: That's a really important point about having accountability, because it's such a great way to create adherence to any new behavior pattern. I want to circle back and dig in a little bit deeper around this idea of neuroplasticity. I think it's such a critical strategy. I have two questions, which are interrelated; one is what would you say to somebody who either can't or feels they can't dislodge a negative thought from their head and it keeps repeating itself, keeps pinging around in there?

The second thing which is a corollary of that is how do you start to at a very practical and implementable level in your life, start to actually proactively use the science of neuroplasticity to overwrite thoughts and behavior patterns and brain infrastructure that you want to change?

[0:17:10.5] TS: Okay. You might have to remind me of the second part of the question again.

[0:17:13.7] MB: Fair enough.

[0:17:14.5] TS: Because I have quite a lot to say about the first part. Actually, I'm just going a little bit back to what we were saying before about replacing a negative thought with a positive one, what I encourage people to do is that if you have a repetitive negative thought, or a theme to your negative narrative, then you try to distill it down to the basic underlying belief that drives that negative thought.

Then what you do is you create an opposite statement and then you use that as your positive affirmation, or your mantra, whichever word you like to use. Again, that struggle between the spiritual world and the more scientific world.

A lot of people say, think, “I can't do something, or that will never happen for me.” You simply change it to, “I can do X, or one day that will happen for me.” I ask people to really use their own words and their own voice, something that's going resonate with them. It's quite difficult to choose that for someone. I sometimes make suggestions, but it's really important that you go where and think about it and think okay, what's really underneath all of this? Then create your personal statement that opposes that.

It really is a case of immediately replacing the thought. I used to have a list in my journal of things I'd accomplished, or compliments that I'd been given, new things that was proud of in my career. That if I started having negative thoughts, I could immediately go to the journal and they were already there. Because sometimes once you get into a spiral, it's very difficult to reverse it.

I started off like that and then it became a habit for me and I didn't have to go to the written down statements anymore. Actually, I have a few examples of thought for myself. I think we all have these negative thoughts and they've probably been there since we were children and that's why they're so entrenched, because they've been there for so long, they've been repeated so many times. It's a repetition and emotional intensity that embeds thoughts and behaviors more.

When I wrote my PhD, it was the hardest thing I've ever done. It's the only time in my life I'd wanted to give up at something. My PhD professor, I mean, I have a lot of love for the guy, but his management style was basically to say, “If you don't get on with this, then you're going to be seen as a failure for the rest of your life.” It was not very motivational. There are lots of negative emotions associated for me with that time.

When I met Andrew, who I co-wrote An Attitude for Acting with, we were actually going to do some workshops with that name, but I said to him that sounds like a book title. He said, “Let's write a book.” I thought, “Oh, no. I don't like writing. I'm not good at it. I don't want to do it.” He came back the next day with 12 chapter headings. I really liked him and I really wanted to work with him, so I did it. Basically, I practically had PTSD from it, because it reminded me of writing up my PhD. I definitely at that point said, I'm never going to write a book again.

Then Paul Brown, who I wrote Neuroscience for Leadership with, suggested that we write 12 short blogs basically and then make them into a book. I fell into that without thinking about it too much. In both those cases, because I really liked the person and I wouldn't let them down, I managed to complete the writing, but I found it very difficult and stressful. Again, I said I'll never write a book again.

Then the opportunity to write about science and spirituality was just too tempting for me. Of course, I knew that I had this secret fear deep down that I couldn't write a book by myself. It got to the point where I wanted to prove to myself that I could. The book came out in the UK about six months ago and it was immediately a UK bestseller. It actually in the first week was ranked just above The Secret in the non-fiction hardback chart, so that was a exciting moment.

My publisher actually said, “You couldn't make this up.” It was a really positive experience. One morning a few months after that, I was doing my makeup in the mirror in my bathroom and I was obviously having a little story going around in my head and I thought, “Yes, because I'm not a writer.” It was good I was in front of a mirror, because I stopped. I looked at myself in the mirror and I said, “Tara, Neuroscience for Leadership is an award-winning book. The Source is a best-seller. You are a writer.”

I came to that and now whenever that thought creeps in, I just laugh about it, because I have that little story. It relates to impostor syndrome, which I think so many people have, because I've blogged about that and got just so many e-mails from people saying they really resonated with it. One of my things is that I don't look like a typical MIT professor. This is a thought at the back of my mind and one day, I flew into San Francisco Airport, because I was giving a guest lecture at Stanford.

The immigration officer asked me what business I was coming into the country on. I said, Associate Professor at Stanford. I just flown from London overnight. I was wearing a hoodie and sneakers and had my hair scraped up and he actually looked at me and said, “You're a professor at Stanford?” I had this moment where I thought, “Yeah, I don't look like one.” Then I thought, “No, no, no. I do this to myself all the time. I'm not going to let somebody reinforce that thought.” I said, “Yeah, I am.” He asked me what I teach and I said neuroscience. He said, “Okay then.”

I think sometimes maybe, because both of those stories end with humor that's changed it for me. I think when we laugh about something, we release that bonding hormone oxytocin. That actually does – it trumps unconscious and conscious biases, for example. We know that. I think for me, I had a bias. When I laughed about it, it dissolved away.

[0:23:09.9] MB: That's a great point about using oxytocin to potentially re-encode some of those memories or experiences or beliefs. There's so many themes from The Source I want to explore. Before we do, you touched on something that is such a great topic and I'd love to hear you extrapolate on it a little bit. Tell me more about imposter syndrome and how people can overcome it.

[0:23:34.1] TS: I've just realized as well that we didn't really go into the neuroplasticity second part of the question, but we will. I'll try to weave them in together. Impostor syndrome is the feeling that you feel like a bit of a fraud, you feel you'll be found out. It often happens because people get promoted on their technical skills, but either aren't taught the managerial or leadership skills that they need, or they just don't have the experience, or take to it naturally.

Neuroplasticity is actually relevant here, in terms of either learning the behaviors that you need formally, or just practicing them over and over again, until you feel that it's more natural for you to behave as a leader. I want to say that when I first blogged about impostor syndrome, it was because the person that said to me, “One day someone's going to come into this corner office and tell me that I should never have been here,” was a hedge fund billionaire. That was the last – a male. I just thought, you are the stereotype at the last person that anybody would ever think has impostor syndrome.

I have to say that when he said it, I was thinking, okay, what exercises can I deal with him, or how can I explain it to him to help him move through this? There was definitely a part me that thought, “Thank, goodness. I'm not the only person that feels like that.” That's why I started asking all my clients, every industry, every age and gender, every continent of the world if they ever experienced it. I don't think there's been anybody that said no.

[0:25:05.1] MB: That's amazing. Yeah. I mean, I know that I have personally experienced impostor syndrome many times in my life. I remember when I was first hired at Goldman Sachs and I was a young analyst and I was in the training class, I felt like a total imposter. It's amazing how universal of an experience it is. What are some of the strategies or solutions for dealing with it?

[0:25:29.6] TS: One of them actually is what we talked about earlier, which is creating a positive statement that you use when you get those feelings. Other ones are in journaling to like I said before actually as well, have a list of things that you've accomplished, golden moments in your career, things you're proud of in your life. That's just reinforcing through writing and through what you think and what you say that this fear, or this uncertainty is not founded in a fact.

If it is founded in a fact, if it is, I've never been trained to manage people. I'm good at being an analyst, but I've never been trained to manage people, then to go and get the training. Go and read or get the formal training, whatever it is that you need to feel – to get over that feeling of I shouldn't be here, or I can't do this.

I think the reason that I – so I've actually wrote subsequently written about it again, because I think it's so important for people to realize that pretty much everybody has it. I think that normalizes it and it reduces the fair about it as well, because then it's not just you. Because all of us think it's just us and this makes you realize that it's not.

What I think is interesting is that people – often in my class at MIT, or just when I'm giving a talk somewhere, quote this statistic that women experience impostor syndrome more than men. Now I have to say that my case studies are biased by the fact that about 90% of the people I coach are men, simply because that's a reflection of who's at the level that I tend to coach. I can't say whether it's more in women or not, but I can say that there are an awful lot of men out there that you wouldn't think have it, but they do.

[0:27:14.4] MB: What if you could hire A players for your business based not just on resume, but on intangible job skills, like creativity, resourcefulness, flexibility and even the reviews and feedback of those they've previously worked with? With the power of LinkedIn Jobs, our sponsor for this week, you have all of that at your fingertips and much more, so you can find the perfect person for the job every time.

LinkedIn Jobs screens candidates with the hard and soft skills that you're looking for, so that you can find the right person fast. Because of the rich data sets and huge collection of talented individuals on LinkedIn, LinkedIn Jobs gets you in front of everybody with the skills and qualifications you want to hire, while saving you the time, energy and headache of having to do it all yourself.

Find the right person meant for your business today with LinkedIn Jobs. You can pay what you want and the first $50 is on them. Just visit linkedin.com/success. Again, that's linkedin.com/success to get $50 off your first job post. Terms and conditions apply.

[0:28:27.1] MB: I want to come back to some of the other themes we’ve talked about earlier. Tell me a little bit more about visualization, because that’s something that I’ve seen a lot of contradictory science on, both saying that visualization is good, it empowers you and also that it can even disempower you or make you feel you've already achieved your goals and demotivate you. What does the science say around visualization and what are some of the most effective strategies for visualization?

[0:28:53.6] TS: I haven't heard those negative ones before actually. I mean, it made me smile the last one about it makes you feel you've already achieved your goals and demotivates you. Because what I say is that visualizing something makes it less threatening for the brain, because in the brain, anything new, or any uncertainty is very threatening. If you visualize going to an important meeting or an interview, then to some extent it prepares your brain by making it feel it's not a completely unknown scenario.

However, I don't have any evidence to show you that visualizing success makes you feel you've already achieved everything. That would probably be taking things a little bit too far. However, I will say that one of the studies I quote in the book is that in three groups of people, a control group and then a group that lifted certain numbers of weights and repeated it a certain number of times over the time period of the study, compared to the group that just visualized lifting the same weights for the same time period.

The increase in muscle mass for the actual group was 30 something percent. The increase in muscle mass for the visualization group was 12% to 15%. It's not the same, but it's quite stunning that it has any effect at all.

Visualization, I think of it as three things. It's an umbrella that three main things fall under. One is actually creating a vision board, which by science I call it an action board, because it’s a collage that you create with metaphorical representations of what you would like your life to look like, or what you would like to achieve in your life, but it has to be backed up by actions. You can't just make the board and look at it and hope that everything comes true.

If you make the board and you look at it regularly and you visualize it coming true and you do something every day to move yourself closer to those goals, then it's much more likely that some things, or everything on it will eventually become real. The reason for that is that because we're bombarded with so much information all the time, everything we see, everything we hear, everyone we meet, all the things on our mind, the brain naturally filters out things that aren't deemed relevant to our success, or reaching our goals.

There's selective filtering of the data that we're bombarded with. Then there's selective attention to the things that are the most important. There's a another concept in the brain called value tagging, which is that everything that's prioritized is tagged in order of importance. Actually, when you make a vision board and you look at it regularly and you visualize the success, you are priming your brain with those images more at the front of your mind to potentially grasp opportunities that might otherwise have passed you by, because you're busy doing the day job, you're busy looking after the kids. It's not urgent enough to try to start your own business, or try redecorate your home, or go traveling.

You know that you want it, but it gets keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the list. The visual priming has a very strong effect in the brain in terms of raising up that list of what's tagged as important. Did you ever play Tetris when you're a kid?

[0:32:14.4] MB: Yeah, for sure.

[0:32:15.6] TS: Do you remember that if you played it last thing at night that when you closed your eyes to go to sleep, you would see the metal blocks falling down in front of your eyes?

[0:32:23.2] MB: Of course. Yeah, I've had that experience with several different games.

[0:32:26.4] TS: Yeah. It's a psychological phenomenon called the Tetris effect. That's why I recommend either looking at your vision board, or doing your visualization last thing at night, because the state of consciousness that's associated with going from being awake to falling asleep, the hypnagogic state is where your subconscious is most suggestible. That works.

Then I don't know if you would categorize this under visualization, but to me it's part of it and it's about the dramatic effect of the brain on the body. My favorite study on that is three groups of people in their 80s; one group, the controlled group asked to live not normally for a week, one group were asked to reminisce about what it was to be like in your 60s and one group were actually moved into homes that looked like their home did 20 years ago. They had their visual aids and their mobility aids taken away for a week. They had photos of themselves when they were in their 60s in the place that they lived for a week.

The group that lived like that, they had improved visual acuity and musculoskeletal coordination after a week. The reminiscing group had some improvements, but not as much. Just to tie this all up to everything that we've been speaking about, neuroplasticity is the ability to change your brain. If you know that what you think and how you live and what you see can actually change physical things in your body, then you're going to be much more careful about what you look at and who you talk to and how you behave.

Just a really small story, but just an example, because you asked for examples of how people can use neuroplasticity, is that when I went for my annual eye check up when I was turning 40, the optician said, “You look younger than 40, but you are 40, and so you're going to need reading glasses soon. You could take them now, or you might be able to manage for another year.” I immediately thought, “Well, reading glasses to me is associated with being old, so I don't want them.” I said, “No, I don't want them and I'm not going to have them next year either.” He said, “Well, we'll see.”

All I did was say no to that. Then whenever I needed to look at my phone or read a book and I felt it would be a bit easier if I moved it further away, I just didn't do that. That's what I did for a year. When I came back for my test, he said, “How have you been?” I said, “Fine.” He said, “Well, we'll see the numbers on your test.” Halfway through the test, he spun around in his chair and said, “What have you been doing?” I said, “Why? Is it still the same?” He said, “No, it's better than last year.” I told him and he said – I said, “I did a neuroplasticity experiment on myself.” He said, “Okay, that's great. Obviously, you haven't actually done that much, so I think you'll probably need them next year.” It’s now six years later and I still don't need them.

For me, knowing how the brain works has made me able to make that choice and actually make something different in the real world, because of it. That's why I wrote the book, because with what I know about neuroplasticity and brain agility, I just thought everybody needs to know this.

[0:35:46.1] MB: That's a fascinating story. I'm very curious about it. Tell me a little bit more about the – I understand how neuroplasticity works, but tell me about how the brain mechanism of either the belief of refusing to that you need glasses, or the actual activity of looking at things, tell me how that specifically interacted with neuroplasticity to create the brain state, or the physical changes in your brain, so that you wouldn't need to wear reading glasses?

[0:36:16.4] TS: It's based on the fact that we have these unconscious primers in our brain that dictate what goes on in our body through the interaction of nerves and hormones, so the neuro-endocrine system. For example, a study that was done on Harvard medical students, so young, healthy, smart people, they were asked to walk between five rooms. In the rooms, there were pieces of paper on a table that they had to string a sentence out of. They thought that was the whole experiment. One of the rooms had the words Florida, bungalow, walk, sunshine, beach.

These associations prime us to think about retirement. No matter what order they entered the rooms, 85% of the students walked out of that room more slowly than the other rooms, because they thought about retirement and that slowed them down. I think being aware of the fact that what you say and what you do changes your body, because it changes your physiology is the start. It really brings us back to the four-step process that I talked about earlier, that being aware, the focusing attention, the deliberate practice and the accountability.

If we take that backwards, I know that I'm going to have an eye test every year. I deliberately didn't change my behavior to accommodate my worsening vision and I focused attention on the things that I needed to do or not do to allow that to happen. Basically with that intention and those actions, the brain pathways that would have got lazier and lazier, especially if I took the glasses and then just could read without even thinking about it, actually physiologically I would say that I don't think I grew any new neurons, but I think that I made connections between neurons that already exist maybe myelinated some of the pathways to make that optic nerve pathway more efficient, or at least remain robust.

[0:38:20.7] MB: It's so fascinating. It's such a great example. I don't want to waste too much more time on it, but I'm just quite curious about it. Frankly, I wear glasses and have a really bad prescription, so I'm just trying to reverse engineer if I could apply that in some way. This is the last quick thing that I'll ask about this. Isn't the eye itself to some degree the lens, the shape of the eye, I mean, those are all things that are outside of the scope of neuroplasticity, right? If your eye lens is changing, you can't really do much about that just by thinking about it.

[0:38:49.1] TS: I agree. I think this example is really just an analogy for other things that we can change. For example, if we talk about brain agility, there are six things in the model that I describe, which are mastering your emotions, trusting your intuition, understanding your brain-body connection, making good decisions, staying motivated and resilient to reach your goals and creating the real-world outcomes that you desire. Those are all things that are pathways in the brain that you can do something about. That's I think more important than necessarily not getting really close.

[0:39:25.1] MB: Yes, that's right. Okay, perfect. Let's dig into that a little bit. Tell me about intuition. I'm very curious, how do we access our intuition and how do we align our intuition with our emotions, with our rational thought to create even more powerful brains?

[0:39:40.6] TS: That's a really good question, because they don't always align do they? That's the issue. I have found journaling to be the single, best way of raising my awareness about my intuition and the decisions that I make based on intuition and the decisions that I make based on logic. Obviously, if they naturally align that's no problem. If they don't and this comes up quite a lot in fire and hire situations, or well, I'll stick with fire – I was going to say in relationships as well.

I mean, well no, I'll talk about both, because the hire and fire situation is that if you've got similar resumes, similar qualifications and experience, sometimes you just get that gut feeling that this is the right person to choose. You must always double-check that through your logical system, or with somebody else. Intuition is basically, because we can't remember everything that we have experienced in our life, but it's the wisdom and life experiences that we've picked up, which are stored in our nervous system. It's accessing those.

What I find is reading back over the journal and seeing the times that I've said, “Oh, I don't think this is working. I think I need to change what I'm doing,” but then you don't do it and a few more months pass. Then you look back and you either see, “I'm in the same position I was in six months ago and I haven't done anything differently, but I'm expecting a different outcome,” or use and/or, you see the real positivity and benefit of the times that you have listened to your intuition.

The reason I said there's something else that's a bit more contentious, but I have so many cases of people saying, “I know I need to leave this relationship, but I don't want to be single again, or I don't know if I'll find somebody better, or time's running out and I want to have a family.” Every single time, that nagging doubt has started, it's ended at some point down the line.

Then if you'd listened to your intuition, you probably could have done that quicker. Obviously, you learn through mistakes, or near misses as well and that adds to your intuition. Everything probably comes out in the washer at the end of the day, but repeating the same mistakes is something you can avoid by listening to your intuition. I was going to say one other thing. Sorry, it's left me.

[0:41:58.7] MB: It's all good. Yeah, that's a great point about journaling. It's such a powerful strategy. You make a really good connection that journaling is how we can align our rational thinking with our intuition and with our emotions.

[0:42:16.1] TS: Exactly. I've remembered what I wanted to say. Can I add it on, because it's –

[0:42:20.1] MB: Please. Add it.

[0:42:22.5] TS: Thank you. What we know about how memories, or information gets stored in the brain is that in the outer cortex, we have what's called our working memory, which is everything we need to do our job and live our life. Deeper in the limbic system, we have the habits and behavior patterns that we’ve picked up over life. Since we've been able to scan brains and bodies, we've seen that there's a large neuronal connection between the gut neurons and the limbic part of the brain. This is believed to underlie intuition.

What's absolutely fascinating is that if you take a good quality probiotic, which improves your gut bacteria, or the diversity of your gut bacteria, if you take a good quality one for a month, you get less negative thinking. Actually, the health of your gut physically also clouds, or contributes to your intuition. There's a three-way connection between the gut bacteria themselves, the neurons in the gut and the brain. The gut neurons in the brain communicate through the neural pathways. The gut bacteria through cytokine transmission, which is chemical signaling through the blood, signal to the gut neurons and to the brain separately.

If you've been stressed, you've taken antibiotics, you've drunk alcohol, then your gut bacteria becomes depleted. Either the quality or the quantity goes down, or both. If you eat prebiotic foods, like onions, garlic, artichokes, if you eat fermented foods and you take probiotics, especially when you travel and depending on the strain that you take, it can actually contribute to improving mental health, mental performance and trust in your intuition.

[0:44:08.1] MB: Such a great point about gut health and probiotics. I think we're going to see some tremendous strides in that field, in science and research and action around that in the coming years. I want to jump around a little bit. There's a couple other concepts that I found really fascinating that I want to touch on. One of them that you talk about is the importance of the concept of metacognition. Can you talk about what that is and why it's so important?

[0:44:33.5] TS: Metacognition is basically thinking about your thinking. Because this age-old phrase, “I think, therefore I am,” we completely align ourselves with our thoughts. We think that everything we think is true, basically. Then there's the whole element of we don't know what we don't know. Metacognition is basically about stepping back and asking yourself, “Are your thought processes healthy? Is there something that you believe that is a barrier to your success? Could you reframe the way that you think? Could somebody else's point of view actually be helpful or better for you?”

Because of the way our brain develops from the womb and through childhood, the things that have been there for the longest are the ones that we’re the least aware of. These automatic reactions that we have to things, the thoughts that we have over and over again, they're so much part of who we are, but we can't separate ourselves from them.

It's just a really good practice and there are some exercises in the book and out there, about just stepping back and actually looking at your thinking and looking at and starting afresh what's working, what's not. There are many exercises in the book to exactly to help you reframe your thinking based on the understanding of that metacognition is an important thing to do.

[0:45:54.5] MB: I want to just really briefly check in. I know we're coming up on the hour. Do you have a hard stop, or do you have the ability to go just one or two minutes over?

[0:46:01.7] TS: Yeah, I can go one or two minutes over.

[0:46:03.4] MB: Okay, perfect. I would love it if you could give me an example of one of those concrete exercises that someone could use to improve metacognition, or to reframe their thinking.

[0:46:14.8] TS: Okay, there are several, but one’s really jumping to mind. It's a three column exercise. I have a couple of three column exercises in the book. It's a cultivating abundant thinking. Come full circle. You start by making an ideal statement, so something that you would like to have in your life, something you would like to do and it could be anything, like start my own business, or have a balanced life, something like that.

In the first column, you write down every single barrier to you being able to achieve that statement. When I work with people to do it, I really encourage them to think of more, to dig deeper, to keep coming up with the reasons, because it works best if you pretty much manage to come up with every single barrier that you believe exists between you and this ideal outcome.

Then in the second, so it can be – usually it's things like, “I don't have enough money. I don't have enough time. There are things that I can't control. There are other people involved,” and so on and so on. Then in the second column, you write the opposite statement to all of the barriers, even if they couldn't possibly be true. You might say, “I have unlimited resources. I spend 24 hours a day on this. I control the final outcome. I'm not dependent on other people for what I need to get done.”

Then once you've done an opposite statement for every single barrier, in the third column you write as if the second column is now true, you write what I do differently now that I have unlimited resources, I have total control over the situation, I'm not dependent on anyone else. The wording is very important. It's not what I would do, it's what I do now that this is true. You tend to get some repeat answers here from – the opposite statements can lead some of the same things that you actually do in the real world.

I get people to put those answers into themes. Usually, I'm not going to say half, but close to half of them are things that you could already do differently. You basically reframed your thinking, you've found some things that you could actually do already that would move you towards that goal and you basically have to start doing them.

[0:48:33.0] MB: I want to clarify one thing really quickly. You said a really important point, which is this idea that it's not what you would do differently, it's – frame that again, because I wasn't sure I fully understood it, or heard it correctly. I think it's a really important piece. In column three, what are you writing?

[0:48:48.6] TS: You're writing what I do differently now that I fully believe that column two is true. For example, if you said, “Well, I can't do it because I don't have enough money.” You write in column two, “I have unlimited financial resources for this project.” Then you write down, “Okay, now that I've got unlimited financial resources, what will I actually do?”

[0:49:09.8] MB: Got it. That totally makes sense. Now what you do?

[0:49:12.8] TS: Yeah, it's a subtle difference. I mean, I'm sure it also works if you say what I would to do, but that's putting it into the future and it separates creating an area of separation between you now and being able to do that thing. I specifically get people to say, what I do now that column two is true? Very often, there are almost half the things, the things that you could already do. Then the other ones might take you acting on the first half, to allow the other ones to be doable in the future.

[0:49:41.7] MB: That's a fantastic exercise. Thank you so much for sharing. I think that'll really be able to create some instant breakthroughs for the listeners. You may have just answered it with that, or you might have a different answer, but for somebody who's listening to this, what would be one action step, or a piece of homework that you would give them to implement some of the themes, or ideas that we've talked about today in their lives starting right away, based on what we've talked about today?

[0:50:12.3] TS: Oh, I know the answer to that immediately and that is to create an action board.

[0:50:16.1] MB: Tell me 30 seconds how would you go about creating an action board.

[0:50:20.4] TS: If you want to do it old-school, then you get a stack of magazines from various genres, like travel, lifestyle, fitness and you have an idea of what you want in your life obviously and you look for images that match that. As you leave through the magazines, you also – if you feel very struck by a certain image, but you can't explain why, then you cut that image out too. Then you place the images on the board and the whole board is important.

If you want a full life, then the board will be quite cluttered. If you want to have space and you want things balanced and in their own little niche, then you would have things in sections, you'd have space between them. Even things whether the images are touching each other or not can be important.

I advise people not to use words, because that tracks more to the logical pathways and the visual and creative and emotive pathways. You can use numbers, because a lot of people put the amount of money that they'd like to earn on the board. Then you either keep it in a prominent position, or take a photograph of it and look at it regularly. Sometimes the images of things that you know you want, they just don't feel right on the board, so you should get rid of them, because we're trying – it's accessing intuition. Then sometimes images that you didn't know you wanted might really just feel right on the board, so you'd include them.

You can do this using digitally, instead of actually creating the collage by hand. There's something about that whole tactile color, process that I think contributes to it really. Having said that, this year my one is actually done digitally, because I couldn't find the images that I thought I wanted. For a good seven years, I would make them like that. Like I said, it's an action board, not just a vision board, because you also do the visualization and you do things, you look out for opportunities to do things that will move you closer to those goals.

[0:52:15.7] MB: At what cadence do you typically recreate your action boards?

[0:52:20.3] TS: I do mine annually. I do mine in December for the next year, but there's no rule about that. You can do it on your birthday, you can do it at the start of the school year. To be honest, the best time to do it is now.

[0:52:33.4] MB: From a goal standpoint, are these goals for the next year, or are these lifetime goals?

[0:52:39.4] TS: It can be both. I feel – I like to leave a bit of room for magic. Lifetime just seems very far away and very big and so many things could change. In the meantime, that mine tends to be annual. Sometimes it takes 18 months for everything on the board to materialize. It may be that you can reuse some of it, or you can overlay some of it. I think, it feels more approachable if you start off with a shorter term goal, but then it's totally people's choice if they want to do one for their whole life.

[0:53:12.4] MB: Awesome. Well Tara, where can listeners find you, all of your work and the book online?

[0:53:19.9] TS: Thank you. My website, TaraSwart.com has a book page on it and it's got several retailers on there online and book stores throughout the US. Obviously, the book can be found on Amazon. I'm very active on social media. I'm DrTaraSwart on Instagram, D-RTaraSwart. I'm Tara Swart on Twitter. I regularly blog through my Forbes leadership channel.

[0:53:44.7] MB: Well Tara, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing all this wisdom and some really great practical action steps and ways to implement all of these fascinating ideas.

[0:53:54.7] TS: Thank you so much. It's been a really fun conversation. I feel you led me down the path of making it very practical and actionable for your listeners.

[0:54:03.1] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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

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

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

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

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

How High Performance is Created At The Most Successful Sports Franchise In The World with Dana Cavalea

In this episode, we discuss the truth about championship performance. Nobody becomes a champion by accident. We uncover the counter-intuitive reality that being a champion isn’t about doing more, it’s about doing less. We expose the reality that most people spend too much time planning and not enough time acting and share the specific habits and routines that you can use to model your behavior after champions with our guest Dana Cavalea.

Dana Cavalea is a high-level performance coach, speaker, and author. He coaches Pro Athletes, Entrepreneurs, and Business Executives on lifestyle strategies to improve daily performance and outcomes. He is the former Director of Performance for the New York Yankees, whom he led to a World Series Championship in 2009. In his first book, Habits of a Champion, he shares his own secrets to becoming a champion.

• Nobody becomes a champion by accident.

• When you study high-level performers and world champions - what habits and abilities make them different from everybody else?

• Champions are extremely consistent and extremely persistent 

• It takes a lot of work to become a champion - but there are commonalities 

• What makes people champions - a deep focus on the simple fundamentals and the basics. 

• It’s not about quick fixes, it’s not about “hacks” and short cuts - it's about really executing the basics and the fundamentals. 

• Step one for champions - MASTERY OF MINDSET

• What are your daily habits? Where are you spending your time? 

• Self-awareness is another cornerstone of championship performance

  • What works for you?

  • What are the trip wires that set you back and sabotage you?

• What is the mindset of a champion? What are the common mindsets of champions?

• How do we learn from and emulate and ultimately create a championship mindset for ourselves?

• 3 Keys of Championship Mindset

  • Slow everything down

  • Quiet the noise

  • Throw one pitch at a time

• What happens in the biggest and toughest situations? 

• “There are no big moments...all moments are the same” 

• How do you get ice in your veins? How do you perform under pressure? 

• What can Derek Jeter teach us about the psychology and mindset of champions?

• Baseball is a sport that is “built around failure” and what that can teach us about the psychology of performance?

• Reframe negative moments into positive moments

• It’s about training your mind to see things in a certain way 

• Listen to yourself. Hear what you’re telling yourself. Self-awareness is the cornerstone of championship performance. 

• We waste a lot of precious time and energy - and FOCUS - on social media and minutiae 

• Focusing on externals - focusing on others and what they are doing won’t get you to where you want to go 

• Championship performance is not about doing more, it’s about doing LESS

• No two people should have the same daily routine - we are all at different places in our journey, we have different strengths, different needs, etc 

• Tailor your daily routines to WHO you ARE as an individual 

• Lessons from managing over $300mm in human capital - and getting the most performance out of that asset 

• How do you go about crafting your own daily routine?

• Dana recommends starting with your health as the basis of your daily routine 

• The basis of any healthy routine - start with hydration - how hydrated are you? Start drinking half of your body weight in ounces per day 

• Next - look at the activity - how much time per day do you spend sitting? You can add in some foam rolling, some stretching, etc 

• The best place to begin changing your mindset is to start with the physical body - activating the body, hydrating the body, taking care of your body 

• Focusing at one thing at a time - mastermind that, and then adding things beyond that 

• What is your vision for yourself? What are you trying to build? What are you trying to create?

• How important is consistency to world-class performance?

• You can’t be consistent at everything. You have to keep it simple. Keep it small. Keep it very focused. If you have too many things, you won’t be consistent. 

• “The Law of One” - Do one thing at a time, do it well. 

• Identify what is interrupting your ability to be consistent. Identify things that are draining your energy away. 

• Are you spending too much time on your strategy and not enough time on execution?

  • Forget the plan. Get to work. Make the phone calls. 

  • The danger of over planning 

• Environments can impact your feeling - it’s important to create environments that enable you to focus on rest and recovery. Create a transition between work and home - create an opportunity to slow yourself down and transition out of work mode. 

• How do you reframe negative moments into positive moments? What causes your negative thoughts? Is your day set up to for you to win?

• Homework: Ask yourself if you’re ready to take action and commit to what it is you say you want. Ask yourself - are you willing to do the work?

• Homework: Start with the basics - hydration and mindset. Built consistency slowly with small habits. 

Thank you so much for listening!

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

This week's Mindset Monday/episode is brought to you by our incredible sponsors at HoneyBook!

If you're thinking of starting a business, a creative freelancer, or already own your own business, HoneyBook helps you stay organized, with custom templates and powerful automation tools.

Over seventy-five thousand photographers, designers, event professionals, and other entrepreneurs have saved hundreds to thousands of hours a year.

It’s your business. Just better. With HoneyBook.

Right now, HoneyBook is offering our listeners 50% off your first year with promo code SUCCESS. Payment is flexible, and this promotion applies whether you pay monthly or annually.

Go to HoneyBook.com, and use promo code SUCCESS for 50% off your first year.

Get paid faster, and work smarter, with HoneyBook.com, promo code SUCCESS.

Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

General

• Dana’s website

• Dana’s LinkedIn

• Dana’s Facebook

• Dana’s Podcast “Becoming a Champion“

Media

• [Article] PR Web - “Daniel E. Straus Of Careone Partners With Former Director Of Strength Training Of The New York Yankees To Facilitate Forever Fit Programs In New Jersey”

• [Article] West Fair Online - “Dana Cavalea takes life coaching from the ballpark to the C-Suite” By Phil Hall

• [Article] “Already forgot your New Year’s resolutions? Here are four tips to reset 2019” BY ABC News Radio

• [Article] The Saratogian - “Yankee performance coach brought out the best” By Paul Post

• [Directory] Article Directory on Medium

• [Profile] Marketplace e speakers profile

• [Podcast] Unconventional Life - 7 Surprising Things Ultra Successful People Do Differently

• [Podcast] Be Investable - ML Strength's Dana Cavalea

• [Podcast] Way of Champions - #97 “Nobody Becomes a Champion by Accident” with Dana Cavalea, Former NY Yankees Strength and Conditioning Coach

• [Podcast] Top Coach - TC307: Dana Cavalea

Videos

• Dana’s Youtube Channel - Coach Dana Cavalea

  • COACH DANA CAVALEA: Will walking 10,000 Steps a Day Help Me Lose Weight?

• Good Morning America - Habits of a champion and how to win in life

• (2012) Dana Cavalea On Motivation, Drive and Success

• Book Trailer on his channel (3 mins)

• Northeast Athletic Club - Dana Cavalea 2016 #LIsummit

• [Podcast] Natalie Jill Fitness - 035: 5 Drivers of Performance with Dana Cavalea

• [Podcast] The Baseball Awakening - Strength and Condition and The Lessons Learned with Dana Cavalea

Books

• Habits of a Champion by Dana Cavalea

• Book Trailer on his channel

Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

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

In this episode we discuss the truth about championship performance. Nobody becomes a champion by accident. We uncover the counterintuitive reality that being a champion isn't about doing more, it's often about doing less. We expose the reality that most people spend too much time planning and not enough time acting and share the specific habits and routines that you can use to model your behavior after champions, with our guest, Dana Cavalea.

I’m going to tell you why you’ve been missing out on some incredibly cool stuff if you haven’t signed up for our e-mail list yet. All you have to do to sign up is to go to successpodcast.com and sign up right on the home page.

On top of tons subscriber-only content, exclusive access and live Q&As with previous guests, monthly giveaways and much more, I also created an epic free video course just for you. It's called How to Create Time for What Matters Most Even When You're Really Busy. E-mail subscribers have been raving about this guide.

You can get all of that and much more by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the home page, or by texting the word “smarter” to the number 44-222 on your phone. If you like what I do on Science of Success, my e-mail list is the number one way to engage with me and go deeper on what I discuss on the show, including free guides, actionable takeaways, exclusive content and much, much more.

Sign up for my e-mail list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the home page, or if you're on the go, if you're on your phone right now, it's even easier. Just text the word “smarter", that's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222. I can't wait to show you all the exciting things you'll get when you sign up and join the e-mail list.

In our previous episode, we discussed how your wrong about what you think will make you happy. Research shows that the vast majority of people are terrible at predicting what will actually make them happy. Even when you think what will make you happy, you're often wrong. We break apart the core delusions that stop you from being happy and we dug into the scientific analysis of the state of enlightenment to uncover that it's not just something for Buddhist monks, but a remarkable brain state that can be achieved by anyone anywhere, with our previous guests, Dr. Ash Eldifrawi and Dr. Alex Lickerman. If you want to find out what actually makes you happy, listen to our previous episode.

Now for our interview with Dana.

[0:03:18.1] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Dana Cavalea. Dana is a high-level performance coach, speaker and author. He coaches pro athletes, entrepreneurs and businesses executives on lifestyle strategies to improve daily performance and outcomes. He's the former Director of Performance for the New York Yankees, whom he led to a World Series championship in 2009. His first book, Habits of A Champion, he shares the secrets to becoming a champion. Dana, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:48.3] DC: Thank you. Thanks, Matt. Thanks for having me.

[0:03:50.2] MB: Well, we're very excited to have you on the show today and then to dig into these topics. Being a champion and championship, high-level peak performance is a topic that's been one of my own really passion projects and things that I've spent a ton of time and energy researching and studying. I can't wait to dig in. Even the subtitle of the book really caught my eye, which is this idea and I'd like to start the conversation with today off of, is that nobody becomes a champion by accident. What does that mean?

[0:04:24.0] DC: Yeah. Listen, in all my years of working with professional athletes, I realized that the great ones, there's something special about them. It's not just their talent. When you really start to pull things back and you really start to take a deep dive, you start to see what are these habits and what makes them different than everybody else, is that they have an ability to be extremely consistent, extremely disciplined and they're not chasing the shiny object.

Before we even get to that point, I realized that nobody becomes a champion by accident. You can't be a default champion. They had a vision for themselves. They had talent. They combine that with the work. When you put all of that together and you stay consistent in your daily process, the end result can be championship performances.

Becoming a champion, it takes a lot of work as we know. There are some key steps to getting yourself there. One of the keys is when working with guys like Mariano Rivera, is that you realize that he wasn't trying to be something that he wasn't. That gave him a lot of confidence from within. I say he was a very intentional champion. That took daily discipline, daily process. Through consistency, he was able to achieve what he's achieved, so just as an example.

[0:05:50.6] MB: What are some of those steps, some of those commonalities that you see of intentional champions?

[0:05:58.9] DC: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I know we're in a culture right now of biohacking and looking for all of these. I still call them and consider them somewhat of quick fixes. Now some of them work really well, but what I found was what makes the guys champions and the steps that they take, it goes back to just the simple fundamentals and the basics. Before we talk about biohacking our system and really introducing some of those modalities and action steps, we got to get the body and we got to get the mind right. We got to get it aligned.

For me as an on-field coach, what I always started with was a conversation and understanding where the mindset was of that particular player as an individual, because every team is made up of individuals. We have to figure out what's going on in between those years, that 6 inches of each of those players.

For, me the first step of becoming, or moving somebody towards champion status is really understanding what their thoughts are, what are their patterns, what is going through their head when they may not be aware of what they're even thinking; that for me has always been step one. From that point, then we start to dissect and understand, hey, what are you doing throughout the day? What are your daily habits? Where are you putting your time? Where are you spending your time, that's giving you a return on your time and where are you wasting your time?

We start to go through this process, almost of dissection to understand what's going on. Then from that point, we start to move through this process of understanding and then moving into specifics, where we can start to say, “Hey, what's the return we're getting on this action? What's the return we're getting on that action? Which is greater?” That's how we actually start to formulate routines for our players. That is the ultimate goal, because your daily actions, your daily habits, your your daily routines are what move you through your process of success.

If you look at most successful people that don't just have success financially, but when you break down each part of their life, their relationships, their overall health and wellness and fitness status and what they do in their career, both for-profit and in terms of charity, that is what ultimate success is. How are we firing in all those buckets and making it work?

Then we have a sense of groundedness that makes us feel secure within ourselves. That's how the process of moving towards champion status and success works. It's very individualized. I always like to tell people, there are really no quick fixes. I know that's not good for marketing purposes, but it takes time to sometimes unwind the psychology habits and patterns that have been developed and conditioned for some, and most their entire life.

[0:09:03.5] MB: I think that's probably one of the most important themes and one of the things that I see again and again, when studying peak performers across any field or any discipline. It's this notion that there's no such thing as a quick fix, or a hack, or a shortcut. Really, championship performance at the deepest level is about fundamentally mastering the basics.

[0:09:29.4] DC: Exactly. In addition to, I also find it also comes down to again, really knowing yourself, knowing what makes you tick and also knowing the things that take you off course. What are your, I call them trip wires. What are your trip wires? What are the things that you keep gravitating towards that are not positively affecting your overall directionality and where you want to go. Because sometimes as much as we want a hack, we're also being hijacked and we have to realize that. We need to find out what's hijacking our performance and what traps and tripwires are we falling into and tripping over in the process.

Ultimately, when you meet a lot of the guys that have 10 plus years careers, especially in pro sports, there's also a level of groundedness and security that you feel when they're around. They really get to the – then we'll take that breath and feel really comfortable around them, because they're so secure in themselves. They're not letting the externals affect their internal world. They're not externally driven and motivated. Everything comes from within and therefore, they don't let external things and situations and words and actions affect their internal environment.

[0:10:45.0] MB: Let's come back and I want to dig into a couple of the things you've talked about so far. I want to start with this idea, which you've already started expanding on, but this notion of the mindset of a champion. Tell me a little bit more about in your work with people, who are literally world champions, what have you seen in terms of what is their mindset and also how do they create and cultivate that mindset?

[0:11:11.4] DC: Yeah. I'll give you two great examples. One is very fitting for when we're reporting this in the great Mariano Rivera, number 42 closer for the New York Yankees and recent Hall of Fame inductee. Mariano came on the scene back in 1995 in the New York area for the Yankees. He was a skinny kid from Panama, takes the mound, opens people's eyes. 1996 he really makes a name for himself when the Yankees win the championship and he locks it down in the seventh and eighth inning each night.

I remember, I was a kid in high school at that time when I was watching him play. I just remember the elegance, the grace and most importantly, the calm that this man had. At the time, he was maybe only 27, 28-years-old. I said, “I wonder how he does it.” Because as a kid, I was somebody that was at that point, still trying to figure out who I am, what I do and what I'm all about. I probably had a lot of self-doubt at the time as well. I saw this guy pitch and it was something that I froze in my mind that image.

Anyway, fast forward, really about 15 years and I'm actually in Mariano's house in Westchester New York, I'm in his basement and we're just talking. I'm working on him. I'm stretching him and I say, “Mo, you know what? After all these years, I have a question that I need to ask you. It's been pending since 1995.” He looks at me and he says, “What's that buddy?” I said, “How do you do it? How do you do it?” He looks at me and he says, “Do what?” I said, “How do you get it done in the big situations? The situations when most people would melt, or they have 50,000 eyes on them, plus everyone watching from home and you go out there in the thick of it and just get it done.”

He smirks and he says to me, he says, “You know, buddy, I do three things. Number one, I slow everything down.” He goes, “Number two, I quiet the noise. Number three, I throw one pitch at a time.” He never again let the situations and things that were going on around him affect his internal world. For him, it was peace and quiet with conviction and determination. It wasn't, “Oh, man. This crowd, the situation.” He wasn't focused on any of that. He was actually able to see and visualize his success in that moment.

Then I said, “Okay, that's great for the regular season. What about the big games? The World Series, game on the line, everything matters.” This was a really defining moment in my own personal growth and personal psychological switch. He said, “Buddy,” he goes, “There are no big situations. Every situation and every moment is the same. We decide what we give life to. We decide what is a big moment.” He goes, “But everything is the same.” I said, “Wow.”

That was really profound, because how many things in life do we get worked up about? You think about it, you're getting worked up about it, because you're putting your attention to it, you're putting your focus to it. You're allowing that moment to become bigger than you. That's the fastest way to fail. As opposed to keeping everything calm and focusing and visualizing yourself having success, without the elevation of heart rate, without the elevation of respiratory rate.

That's what he was able to do better than everybody else. When you talk about the ice and the veins and performing under pressure, number one, he was a master. Number two, he taught us how he does it. He doesn't focus on the moment. He doesn't focus on the magnitude and the size of the moment, because in his mind, it doesn't exist, aas anything more than just another moment. That was one example.

The other in terms of psychological state was a guy by the name of Derek Jeter, who most people know. In baseball, and the reason I love baseball and I love relating baseball to business and life is because baseball is a sport that is absolutely built around failure. If you allow that failure to take you down, it will.

There was a point during the season where Derek Jeter was about 0 for 30, 0 for 31, he hadn't gotten a hit in 31 at-bats. What happens, he doesn't get a hit and the media in New York wants to know what's going on. Are you worried about your career? You're getting older. Could this be the end? He answers back and he says, “You know, I haven't gotten a hit in 31 at-bats. That means, I'm that much closer to getting a hit,” because he knew he couldn't go 0 for 60, 0 for 70. He knew that the deeper he went into the slump, actually the closer he was getting to a hit.

I found that these guys have an ability to do what I call reframe. They reframe negative moments, or perceived negative moments to be positive. You could do that in any line of work. It's getting caught up in the ups and downs of the stock market and allowing that volatility to create volatility within a deal that doesn't go through. That could train-wreck a lot of people if they've been banking on it.

The ability to reframe, the ability to not create a bigger situation than the situation that's in front of you, all of that is super, super important when it comes to mindset. For me, it's not about the hacks. It's always about how can you create more security and more grounding within yourself. You realize very quickly that most of that is perspective-driven. It's not about if you take this vitamin, you'll be able to do this more or whatever. It's really about training your mind to see things in a certain way.

You switch the tracks very quickly. If you find yourself going negative and down and pessimistic, boom, as if a railroad track would switch tracks, you switch your tracks the other way. You have to have enough self-awareness to realize that your tracks are taking you down a bad road and a negative path, it's a negative patent.

[0:17:30.9] MB: That's such a cornerstone of any personal development is having self-awareness. Without self-awareness, you really can't take the steps necessary to correct any challenges, or problems that you're facing, or even know that they're there.

[0:17:47.5] DC: Exactly. I find today, like we – it sounds very cliche and you hear it over and over again. We're in the information era and there's information everywhere. There's always been information and it's always been accessible to those that want to access it. Today, what I find we don't do enough of is really investing in ourselves, not by seeking other people's information, but really seeking the information that we already have within ourselves and within our internal computer. Hey, when I do this, how do I feel?

Again, I coach a lot of executive leaders, Wall Street guys and athletes. The first thing I try to teach them is they listen to themselves. Hear what you're actually telling yourself in the moments when you're not fully conscious maybe of what you're telling yourself. Try to hit pause throughout the day. Now we're in that scrolling culture, which is different than the past. We scroll, we scroll, we go on Instagram, we go on social feeds.

I tell people. I say, “Listen, let me ask you something. What's the last five things that you saw? Please describe it to me in detail. Describe the last five things you saw while you were scrolling.” You'll be amazed that most people can't describe what they saw in detail, because the input of pictural imagery that they're taking in, their brain can't process it at that speed. They're taking in so much stimuli that they can't process it fast enough, so the brain doesn't remember what you're actually seeing.

We as a culture, again, especially in that 25 to 35 age bracket, we're wasting a lot of our precious energy and time and time that we could be focusing on ourselves in a healthy way, to ground ourselves, by looking at what others are doing and that's the fastest way to sabotage. That's the fastest way to based on what I said about Mo Mariano, is you're focused on externals, other people. That means you're taking away from yourself your own journey, your own ride and really taking the time to understand what's happening from within yourself.

[0:19:48.3] MB: The other piece of that is you said we're wasting so much time, we’re wasting so much energy on these things, like social media and focusing on other people. I think the other piece that underscores this is that we're also wasting so much focus and attention that could be much better spent.

[0:20:03.1] DC: Right, because we only have so much of it. I'm sure a lot of the listeners are probably like me and that the more time I spend on my phone and the more time I spend on my devices and technology, it exhausts me. I feel a level of mental and fog and fatigue. I know that that's just coming from too many inputs. It's about really, the more you can simplify things, and that's again something else that I learned from these champion performers is that they prefer a very simple life. It wasn't about how can I do more. It was about how can I do less and get more out of less, because I'm doing less. I can give better effort, I can give more attention and that less is actually what moves my needle.

So many of us, we may be doing a 100% of our work, but there's really only 25% of that total that moves the needle for you. It's your job to find out what that 25% is, and you could with a 100% effort on the 25% can move your needle a lot further and a lot faster than if you're just taking in so much and trying to do everything. That was another very important thing that I saw; efficiency and knowing your strengths, knowing your weaknesses and most importantly, doubling down on your strengths and delegating your weaknesses as best you can.

[0:21:30.0] MB: Another great point and I think it bears repeating that championship performance is not about doing more things. It's about doing fewer things. It's about doing less and it's about using things like the 80/20 principle to figure out the really important things to focus your time on and create leverage, so that you can get the maximum amount of effort for the few core things that you're focused on.

[0:21:54.4] DC: Exactly. It depends to where you're at, obviously in your business journey and in your overall career. I mean, as much as – if you're in startup mode, it's very hard to delegate everything. When you're in startup mode, you should be learning hey, what are the things that I'm awesome at, where I'm a rock star and what are the things I'm really struggling with? Again, that what you're really struggling with is probably where your first hires should come from. By you trying to put all your attention there and it's taking away from your greatness and that's what's going to be what drives you forward in all that you do.

The typical sports analogy, when I was growing up was about be the first one there and the last one to leave. That was something that was really important for a lot of coaches and a lot of programs and even a lot of employment settings. When I got to the Yankees, what I saw was Derek Jeter, A Rod, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte. Again, these guys are probably going to be first ballot Hall of Famers.

What I saw was they were the last ones there and the first ones to leave. When they got there, they executed a very tight, organized and time-sequenced process to get things done. They hit the ground running, boom. If you looked at your clock at 6:45, you knew where Derek Jeter was. I mean, these guys took it to the point where they ate the same things before every game. That was the level of consistency that they showed and applied. It was a different process. You don't have to be the first one there and the last one to leave. Face it, what am I producing and what am I getting done while I'm here? Instead of just being here.

[0:23:40.9] MB: That gets into something you touched on earlier that I wanted to follow back up on, this idea of daily discipline of consistency and dissecting the daily habits of these world performers. I love to dig into a little bit more around what you saw and what you've learned about how to craft and create these really effective daily disciplines and daily rituals.

[0:24:04.2] DC: Yeah. I always say, no two people should, or can have the same routine. The results of two people doing the same routine will ultimately be very different. There's a lot of talk today about morning routines and routine, routine, routine. What I see is a lot of people copying the routines of other people. This is what a guy like Steve Jobs did. This is what so-and-so does. You have to realize that you're not so-and-so, you're you. What works for one doesn't always work for the other.

It's because we are all different. Cellularly, we're different. We all have different mileage. We're all at different age ranges, so we need to address that. When I look at a player that was 18-years-old and a player that was 40, the plan is very different, but it's not just because of their age that plays into it, but it's also because of their psychology, it's also because of some other factors that may exist, like pain patterns, injury history. If somebody's a natural evening person, or night person, telling them they need to get up at 5:00 in the morning is not going to get the best out of them.

Now you look at the people that are in fields like music, a lot of great artists are up at 2:00, 3:00 in the morning. Their greatest thoughts and their greatest creativity comes out at that time. My father-in-law is a Oscar-winning makeup artist; up all night and that's when his greatness comes out. If I tell him, “Hey, you need to be up at 5:00 in the morning and you need to – make sure you have your green juice, you need the foam roll, you need to do all the stuff,” he's going to look at me like I'm crazy, because that's not how his greatness shows and expresses himself.

When it comes to putting together routines, like I said in the beginning, it's very important to know the person, know yourself, know your tendencies. Because I'm a person that does best between 4 a.m. and 10 a.m., which would sound crazy. Hey, by 10 a.m., you've already – your best hours are behind you. I said yeah, because I love the quiet, the focus. I'm introverted and I just love that peace in the morning. You find me at 9:00, 8:30, 8:00, I'm all ready to pass out on the couch, where other people are just hitting stride at that time. My routine should be built around the morning, somebody else should be built around the nighttime, if that's their normal cadence.

That's where it all says. You're going to see, I always take the question back to who are you as an individual. That's what my whole practice is built on. I would say, I was an asset manager with the team. I watched over 300 million dollars in human capital. None of those two humans acted the same. I had to understand how they responded to everything and then create the plan based on their individuality. Now, if I tell you, “Hey, by the way, they've done research and they kale and spinach are so good for you. It'll change your life. It'll prevent cancer. It'll do all these things.” You say, “Hey, whenever I eat that, I get gastrointestinal distress.” Still, the research says it prevents this, it prevents that.

That's not a good suggestion for you, because it's creating – although in society, it may create a positive overall and the research says, the reality is for you, those may not be good choices. That’s just a simple example. We got to start to understand what works for us, how do we test things and start to build a routine around hey, I tested this on myself and I got a great result. I tested that on myself and I got a bad result. Even though, the mass marketing says this is really good, it may not be really good for you.

That is what it's all about, helping people to create, develop and understand their own personal routines that they can own. If I make it for you and you make it for you, it's now yours. What's going to happen as a result of that? Your compliance to it, your results when you execute with consistency on that routine are going to be that much better. That's really what I find to be really important.

I was at my cousin's house last week and selling me out, “Hey, you have to put butter in your coffee and you have to put all these things in your coffee.” I said, “Listen, that's not for everybody. If you have a lactose issue, if you have some other issues, that doesn't work. For some, it may work great.” That's why you've got to always go back to the individual. I bring up that 300 million dollar number, because we had to make sure that these guys performed at the highest level and that started by dissecting them as individuals and understanding what makes them tick and what makes them also rebel, even against themselves.

[0:28:55.5] MB: For somebody who's listening, how would you recommend that they start to take those first steps towards crafting a daily routine that is aligned and tailored to helping them personally perform at their peak?

[0:29:12.9] DC: Yeah. I always lead with health. I say all right, we're going to lead with health and we can wrap our fitness with that. Health and fitness, we'll put that together. This is going to sound so simple, but I always start with your overall hydration status. What is your hydration status? People say, “This is where we start. How much water am I drinking?” I say, “Listen, half your body weight in ounces, a day of water. We're going to start there. Are you doing that? Yes or no?” Most people will tell you, no. They are drinking half a gallon of coffee perhaps, but they're not drinking enough water.

When you add more water to your system, you create efficiency in your system from a contractile standpoint of muscle, to a hydration standpoint of all of your tissue and it'll also help to regulate your overall digestive tract. That's where I start. I am different than other people, because I don't hit them with a lot.

For example, I'm working with an executive in San Diego and what we're working on now is again, this guy was dehydrated most of the time. When you're dehydrated, it'll also affect your overall energy and vitality. Half your body weight in ounces a day, we start there. Are you doing that? Yes or no. Then I guide them through that. We do that for a week. We do that for two weeks. Then we start to introduce other aspects.

Most people today, they sit for a majority of the day. Step two, is now we start to address more of the physical. I get them doing a daily foam rolling routine, a daily stretching routine. I put that right when they get up. If they get up at 10 a.m., or if they get up at 5 a.m., it doesn't matter. Well, we're going to address your tissue and there's two reasons. We're first hydrating the tissue with water. Then what we're doing with the foam rolling is we're pressing. We're getting the tissue to break up any knots, or trigger points, or what I call tension points. Because the higher the stress, the more type-A the person, the more of a chaser and hardcore, hard-charger they are, the body harbors stress within its tissues.

That makes you more susceptible to aches, pains and injury. We hydrate the tissue, then we relax the tissue. Then from there, we stretch the tissue. That's the first three steps of me building out a routine for a person. They're very easy checkpoints and that routine itself can take you maybe 10 minutes. That's how we start them on their day. Now if somebody comes to me and says, “Hey, that's not working for me,” then we start to create alternatives to that. Some people don't like foam rolling, so we use hot baths instead. That's how we start that tweaking.

The best way to know what works for you is ask yourself, “When I do this, do I feel better, or do I feel worse, or do I feel the same?” Your answer should be a, “Hey, you know what? It may not feel great while I'm doing it, but when I'm done I feel great.” That's how we start building it out.

[0:32:20.1] MB: It's interesting, starting these daily routines even for performers beyond the athletic space, as somebody who comes out of the fitness world, why do you think it's so important to begin with a physical component to these daily routines, or focusing on the body first?

[0:32:38.6] DC: I break it down really simply. Hey, after you work out and after you exercise, do you feel better, or worse psychologically? I don't know many people that finish their workout and don't feel great about themselves. I like to start my day feeling great about my day. I like to start my day feeling great about myself. Although I train athletes on their mindset, I change their mindset by first starting with physical modification, because I believe if you activate the body physically, you'll create a different mental state and a different mental feeling.

I find a lot of people today, they don't feel good about themselves. I mean, at the end of the day again, I can say this because I've coached a lot of people through the years. Ultimately, people are – there's a lot of down-and-out people and they lost their way. They lost their will. I've always found that it's my job to help get them back on track. I say, “Listen, we're going to get you in shape, but we're not going to do it with detoxes and cleanses and 10-day this and 10-day that. We’ll put you on the Brussels sprout diet. We're going to get you to execute this process one step at a time.”

When we look back over three months, nothing is going to feel like it was that hard, because we're going to focus on one thing at a time. Then we're going to focus on the next thing and then we're going to the next. When we look back, we've changed a lot of things about how we live and how we feel and then how we think. It's all of that together, but we do it one step at a time.

That's why for me, I'm not for everybody, because most people don't have the patience. I did an experiment with one of my clients that wanted to go fast. I said, “You want to go fast? Let's go fast.” What happened was his train derailed, because he wanted me to hit him with the diet, the training, the this, all at the same time and I said, “Let's do it.” Now he lost his mojo and he feels like, “Man, I don't know where to begin.” I said, “That's why we start one thing at a time.” It was meant to teach a lesson. It's about what you do over a year, what you do over two years and can you be consistent in that evolution and development of yourself. That's how you become a champion.

[0:35:01.5] MB: That comes back to what we were talking about earlier, this idea of focusing on fewer things, mastering really simple things. Then once you've mastered that really simple activity, then you start to add on something else and master that and then you start to add on something else.

[0:35:18.1] DC: Exactly. Also, part two is I ask a lot of people, “Hey, what is your vision for yourself? What are you trying to build? What are you trying to create? What does it look like?” You'll be amazed after you ask that question, how many people can't answer that question. They're working their butts off. Every day, they're working their butts off. They're showing up. They're giving a 100% effort and they can't even define what it is they're trying to build for themselves. That's crazy to me.

Think about it. How could you be possibly feeling fulfilled and happy and excited if you haven't defined exactly what you're trying to build, because if what are you doing everyday, is your process taking you closer to – what is it taking you closer to? You haven't defined where you actually even want to go. It's like saying, “Hey, I want to go on a vacation and travel,” and you have a picked a destination, but you're at the airport jumping on flight after flight after flight, you end up all these different places, but you actually wanted to go somewhere else. That's how I look at it.

[0:36:25.1] MB: Do you have a great idea for a business, or a passion that you want to take to the next level? If so, have you ever wondered what's holding you back? If the thought of having to handle tedious administrative tasks seems overwhelming, or stopping you from taking action, our sponsor HoneyBook is here to help you get your plans off the ground. HoneyBook is an online business management tool that lets you control everything from client communication, to booking, contracts and invoices all in one place.

If you're looking to start a business, or even if you already own a small business, HoneyBook can help you stay organized with custom templates and automation tools. Over 75,000 photographers, designers, event professionals and other entrepreneurs have saved hundreds to thousands of hours every year by using HoneyBook .

Right now, HoneyBook is offering our listeners 50% off of your first year with the promo code SUCCESS. Payment is flexible and this promotion applies whether you pay monthly, or annually. Go to honeybook.com and use the promo code SUCCESS for 50% off of your first year. Get paid faster and work smarter with honeybook.com promo code SUCCESS.

[0:37:45.3] MB: I want to come back to – actually before we do that, one of the other things that you've touched on, but I think it – I want to take into it a little bit more is something that sounds cliché. You hear it all the time. How important is consistency to world-class performance?

[0:38:04.0] DC: It's everything. I always say the fastest way to disrupt a high performer is disrupt their routine. By disrupting their routine, you've automatically disrupted their ability to be consistent, because they don't go and say, “I want to be consistent.” That's not how it works. It's within them. That consistency is a part of their being. A guy like Derek Jeter, I’ll use as an example again, when we would have rain delays, that would be the only time you would see distress on his face. He'd almost be panicking. He literally be watching the weather and tracking jet stream movement from the Midwest to the New York area, to see when the rain would hit and when there maybe what we would call a window to where we can get a game in, because he wanted to know, he had to start his pregame routine at the same time before the first pitch every single day.

That is something that altered routines. The consistency factor, it's everything. You can't be consistent at everything. Again, circling back to keeping it simple, keeping it small and keeping it very focused, if you have too many things, you can't focus on anything. Therefore, your chances for consistency go way down.

This is another example that I use. If I told you, “Listen, you got to do 10 push-ups and 10 jumping jacks every single day for the next three months.” You would be amazed at how many people couldn't do that. They can't do it. The average person cannot commit to doing the same thing every single day for a 90-day period. Can't do it. That shows you that even in a very – with even the smallest of tasks, they need to actually start to train themselves to be consistent again in the moment and say, “Listen, I have this to do. Let me do that. I need to get that done before I can move to the next thing.” That's why I'm very focused on the law of one. Do one thing at a time. Do it well. Achieve it and then move on, because that'll improve your overall consistency in what you do.

[0:40:18.7] MB: Tell me more about the law of one. For listeners, how do we build consistency? For somebody who is in a – I feel in our world today, it's so easy to get distracted, disrupted. Your attention gets sucked away by Instagram, or your phone, or all these notifications. How does somebody who's in this state of distractions start to create consistency in their life?

[0:40:43.1] DC: Yeah. Like I said before, the first part is to identify. You got to identify what is interrupting your ability to be consistent. Ultimately, it's you, but there are things that we allow ourselves and choices that we make and we allow ourselves to get involved with these energy suckers. For me personally, I had to take apps off my phone. I had to take Twitter, I had to take Instagram, I had to take Facebook, I had to take LinkedIn all off of my phone, so I can only go on them – I mean, I can go on them through my browser, but I don't – only through it a desktop.

Because I realized, hey, if you have all these things that you want to accomplish today, what is inhibiting you from accomplishing those things? It was the scrolling. That scroll would take me off path. It would take me off center and take me off my own mission, vision and goal. I said, if I can stop that, I'll start to create more efficiency just by elimination. That's what I find. There's things like apps, there's also in the corporate world, meetings are so ineffective, so many different – oftentimes. We're meeting to meet, it gets to that point. That becomes a drain and takes away from the consistency of your work and the consistency of your flow.

The other thing is working too long and working too many hours. I believe that you get your best output and your best production in working in 90-minute windows. You work an hour and a half, then you take a break, relax, let your mind unwind, take a break for 30 minutes. Then go back in. If you could do four micro-cycles of an hour-and-a-half, you're actually getting six hours of focused work done and you're getting two hours of total rest in between when you added up the 30 minute, 30 minutes, 30 minutes and 30 minutes.

That's why again, taking it back to self, where did you get off track? Those things that are taking you off track are ultimately hijacking your ability to stay focused, which is ultimately taking away from your ability to stay consistent. Find where you're wasting time, find where you're focused on things that are um not serving you.

I had a guy that works on Wall Street that was spending way too much time on his strategy and not enough time on executing what moves his needle. For him, it was phone calls, getting in touch with banks, getting in touch with other PE guys. He was trying to come up with this plan. I said, “Forget the plan. Get to work. Make the phone calls.” In one week, he had more action in one week than he had had in almost 52 weeks all of last year, because he kept drawing circles and lines and connecting this. He was over-planning, again taking away from action, which ultimately hijacks his results and his overall consistency. That's why it always returns to self and understanding your negative habits, so then you could eventually create those positive ones that leads you to again, more of a champion performance.

[0:43:57.3] MB: You bring up another really good point, which is and this is a theme I've seen in my own study of world champion performers, is this importance of rest and recovery and having that down time and integrating that into the routine as a part of the ritual of being a champion.

[0:44:18.6] DC: Yeah. There's two things that I do with that. I always tell people, “Listen, you got to have a transition between work and home.” For some, that's taking a shower, for some that's a workout and a shower. For some, it's hitting the steam room, some it's getting home and changing out of work clothes into more relaxed wear, for some, like A Rod for example, he was a guy that he'd actually staged his home for nighttime. At about 6:00, the lights would dim, music would go on Sonos that was more calming and chill, candles were lit.

People don't see athletes in this manner, but they get it, because they understand, they're so in-tune and in-touch with their body, that they understand how environments make them feel good, or make them feel bad. They understand how certain actions make them feel good, or make them feel bad. Ultimately, when you put all that together, you were able to find what works for you. As it relates to recovery, what I find as a non-negotiable is putting in a transition between work and home. Just to calm yourself, slow yourself down. For some, like I said, it could be a hot bath steam, sauna, it could be a workout, it could be laying on the floor literally for 5-10 minutes, not meditating, but just being unplugged. That is so important.

I have one guy that I work with that he's a drummer. After work, he runs his company during the day, he takes 15-20 minutes and plays the drums and jams out. That's his transition to where he could then go be with his family. Recovery comes in so many different forms. Many things today, like I said, if you're a meditator, if you see other people not meditating, you feel as if they're missing out, but not everybody is ready for a full-throttle meditation. For some, a walk after work is meditative, for some a walk in the woods is meditative, for some sitting outside and just listening to nature is meditative.

Recovery comes in many different forms. Many of our players after a game, I set them up with bath salts in their hotel room and they would literally take a hot bath and chill out. I call it burning their top layer off in a warm hot bath, more of a hot bath and then shower, nice cool shower. It brings their whole system down. It downshifts their whole system. That's a form of recovery. I do think there needs to be a place for recovery every single day.

[0:46:49.9] MB: I want to come back to something you talked about earlier that I want to figure out how we can apply to our lives, which is this idea of reframing things. You talked about the mindset of a champion and dealing with high stress, difficult situations. How do we concretely think about reframing those negative moments into positive moments?

[0:47:13.8] DC: Yeah. Again, I go back to this. You got to know what's causing that negative thought process, right? Oftentimes, you'll probably find you’re shortchanging yourself in some way somewhere. If you're working too much and you're not recovering and you're not spending time with family and doing some recreational things, that builds negativity over time, because you're so off balance.

First again, it's understanding is my day set up to win? You got to ask that for – only you'll know the answer for that, or am I too much on one side of the field and not spending enough time on the other. That's the start of it. The other thing is really just understanding your thoughts. Again, almost hearing yourself think. Personally, I know that with a lack of sleep, I can get negative pretty quick, especially the next day. That's why sleep helps keep me positive and I need less reframes.

Again, after every phone call, if you're in business and you have a call that doesn't go well, you got to take a minute. After that call, diffuse the call. At that point, you tell yourself, “Hey, although that may have been a negative result, boom, now I switch my tracks and I'm moving past it.” I'll give you just an example of baseball players. If you watch a guy like Derek Jeter through the years, if he struck out, or he got out in a big situation, he'd come into the dugout. He'd take a towel. It looked like he’s wiping his face, but he took that moment and screamed, dropping an F-bomb into the towel. At that point, he wiped his face again and the moment was clear. That was his tactic, if you will, to reframe.

It wasn't a conscious thought of, “Hey, I'm going to switch my thoughts.” He let it out. Then at that point, he moved past it. You got to find what works for you. We're all wired very differently. There's again, certain moments that cause us to be more negative and certain moments that that elicits positive. What I found is if we can work to create almost a flat line where our mood stays very, very consistent, because we've conditioned ourselves to think more on the positive side, that doesn't mean we have to get overly excited and jubilant. It's just means, hey, you know what? My perspective on life is more on the positive side, because I'm choosing that.

I have an analogy I use. I call it staying above the horizon line. You look out, you see a horizon line, below the line is negative, above the line is positive. You could say, “Hey, above the line on a sunny day, it's positive, it's bright and it's happy.” You got to catch yourself falling below that horizon line. When you're there, realize it and all you got to do is say, get above the line. Move above the horizon line. That's a verbal cue to do it.

There's different tools and every person responds differently. Some people yelling, getting it out. I say, let the demons out. I used to have a CEO of a private aviation company coming to my training facility. In the mornings he’d be on the treadmill and he'd literally scream at the top of his lungs. I would say, “Get it out. Get it out. Get it out.” That for him was a way of getting almost like an emotional release.

After that, he was calmed down. It was amazing. Everybody's a little bit different and obviously, people observing that would think he's borderline clinical. There's different tools and different tricks for everybody.

[0:50:59.4] MB: For somebody who's listening to this interview that wants to start concretely implementing some of the things we've talked about, what would be one action item that you would give them as a first step to really begin applying some of these ideas?

[0:51:15.1] DC: Well, the first step is asking yourself if you're actually ready to take action and commit to what it is that you say that you want, because that's the key. I mean, you ask somebody, “Hey, do you want to be rich?” 9 out of 10 people, 10 out of 10 people will say yes. “Are you willing to do the work?” 9 out of 10 people will probably say yes, and then when you actually describe the work that goes into it, you may be down to 20%. It's the same with this. You got to ask yourself if you're actually ready to take action. When your pain is great enough, you take action. For me, it starts with that question.

At that point, like I said before, activate your physical self. Before you get into the diets and all that, just hit your basics. Am I drinking enough water? Number one. Are my thoughts more positive and negative? Can I catch myself in the negative moment and move myself above that horizon line? Start there. Hydration, mindset. Then like I said, you can start to add in the morning stretching and flexibility and move towards the transition in the afternoon. Start there. Worry about the Monday, Wednesday, Friday, the Tuesday, Thursday or the Monday through Friday, work out. Worry about that after.

Show consistency in the water, show consistency in your ability to catch yourself in your thought process. Then lastly, get your daily stretching in, because stretching is a great intro point your, foam rolling and stretching, to get somebody to activity and get them to take the next step is more exercise. I basically walk them to the end of the diving board with the hydration, the mindset shifting and the daily foam rolling and stretching.

Then the next thing they say is, “Hey, I’ve been really good at that. What's next?” Now you're at the end of the diving board and I get you to jump. Once you jump off the board, then we get into a formal training program in terms of your exercise, and then we move you into some dietary reform and move you through the process from there. We've got to walk you to the end of the diving board. You have to choose to get on the board, walk to the end and then you make the decision if and when you're ready to jump. That's how it works.

[0:53:40.7] MB: Where can listeners find you and your work online?

[0:53:44.9] DC: Yeah. danacavalea.com. I write a daily blog with some of these habits that we talked about and have a YouTube channel. It's all accessible through there. The book is on the on the site and it's also on Amazon.

[0:54:01.9] MB: Well Dana, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing all this wisdom. Some really great insights into what it truly takes to perform in a world-class level.

[0:54:12.0] DC: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

[0:54:14.2] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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

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

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

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

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

How Superhumans and Navy SEALs Perform at The Extremes of Human Capacity with Dr. Rowan Hooper

In this episode we ask how champions are made. Are they born or are they built? Is nature vs nurture even a useful model for understanding human performance? We look at the incredible power of focus and how it translates into championship performance, we study how Navy SEALs use the technique of “drown proofing” and how you can use the same thing to conquer your own fear and perform like a champion. All of this and much more with our guest Dr. Rowan Hooper. 

Dr. Rowan Hooper is managing editor of New Scientist Magazine, where he has spent more than ten years writing about all aspects of science. He is also the author of the bestselling book Superhuman: Life at the Extremes of Our Capacity. He worked as a biologist and reporter in Japan and two collections of his long-running column for the Japan Times have been published in Japan. His work has also appeared in The Economist, The Guardian, Wired, and The Washington Post.

• Are champions and high performers born or are they made?

• How does expertise, traits, and personality develop over time? 

• To be the best in the world at something, no matter what the rest of us may desire, you probably have a genetic leg up to help you achieve absolute greatness 

• It's a combination of practice and extreme genetics that lead to world championship performance 

• Even if you don’t win the genetic lottery, you get make huge strides and get a very long way with practice - it’s an essential component of achievement 

• It’s not as simple as having a gene that simply makes you a better singer or better runner - it’s a mix or combination of dozens, if not hundreds, of genes - and whether those genes are expressed, via epigenetics 

• In complex traits, there are many more genes involved than we originally thought 

• What is epigenetics and how does it play into the expression of certain genes?

• Does nature vs nurture make sense? Is that still a useful model for understanding performance?

• There is no such thing as nature vs nurture - there is no battle between nature and nature - its never VS - it’s always nature & nature - combined - they stack together to create who you are 

• People often deny the nature side of the equation - because we can’t do much about it - but it does have an impact 

• For many complex traits, for example intelligence, around 50% of the variance in that trait is typically linked to genetics 

• For memory - its one of the traits where you can substantially increase your memory without any real genetic help. 

• What you can learn from the world record for sailing around the world solo 

• The incredible power of focus - and how Ellen MacArthur organized her entire life towards setting an epic world record 

• What does the science say about how we can become more focused?

• Massive meta analysis studies of meditation show that over time your brain structure changes and your cognitive ability improves 

• What does “the science of bravery” say?

• Extraordinary fear can lead to extraordinary stress and PTSD 

• What do scientists say about how we can increase bravery in ourselves? 

• What Navy SEALs training and “drown proofing” can teach us about conquering fear and being more brave 

• What does it mean when “the training kicks in” in a moment of crisis?

• Exposure therapy - and why it’s so important to helping conquer fear 

• When you study world class performance - you often come across this idea - exposure therapy and discomfort are tools to overcome fear and tough situations. Don’t move away from what scares you, learn to expose yourself to it slowly and build tolerance. 

• Courage is moving slowly towards what you’re naturally inclined to fear 

• The power of lucid dreaming - controlling your dreams to improve your performance

• There are some extraordinary studies about lucid dreaming

• How do we think about performance and achievement in our lives, in the context of this science?

• Think about WHY you are doing what you are doing. Is it really what you love doing? Why do you want to achieve that goal or improve that aspect of yourself?

• Cross train, and don’t specialize too early. Try different things until you find the one that just suits you perfectly

• Homework: Practice whatever it is you’ve decided you want to improve yourself in, practice in a directed and deliberate way, check the science behind what you’re doing 

Thank you so much for listening!

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

We’re proud to announce that this week’s episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Athletic Greens!

Athletic Greens is offering our listeners 20 FREE TRAVEL PACKS, a $79 value, with your first purchase when you go to www.athleticgreens.com/success.

Start this year off with a new incredibly impactful and easy to maintain healthy habit with Athletic Greens. The fact is, the perfect diet doesn't exist, and ultimately falls short due to a busy lifestyle, travel schedule or restrictive diets. That's why Athletic Greens packs in 75 whole food sourced ingredients and covers you in 5 key areas of health, making it one of the most comprehensive supplements on the market.

Want To Dig In More?! - Here’s The Show Notes, Links, & Research

General

• Editor of New Scientist Online

• Rowan’s Contently page

• LinkedIn

• Twitter

Media

• [Press Release] SuperHuman Press Release

• [Article] Daily Mail - “Are champions born or made? Is it blood, sweat and tears, pushy parents, or simply in the genes? A fascinating new book reveals what it takes to be superhuman” by Dominic Lawson

• [Article] The Times - “Review: Superhuman: Life at the Extremes of Mental and Physical Ability” by Rowan Hooper

• [Article] Early article directory on WIRED

• [Article] Wall Street Journal - “The Biology of Bravery—and Fear” by Rowan Hooper

• [Article] The Independent - “From happiness to drive, what makes people superhuman?” by Niamh Horan

• [Article] Slate’s Future Tense Newsletter - “Can You Replicate the Burning Desire to Win That Drives Superhuman Athletes?” by Rowan Hooper

• [Podcast] The Other F Word - Ep 99: Rowan Hooper on How Superhumans Deal with Failure

• [Podcast] LIVE INSPIRED PODCAST - 11 WAYS TO BE SUPERHUMAN (ROWAN HOOPER, EP. 105)

• [SoS Episode List] Episodes Covering Creativity & Memory

Videos

• ITV News - Rowan Hooper interview: What it takes to be superhuman

• Cision UK - Rowan Hooper, News Editor, New Scientist

• New Scientist Live Event Intro - Rowan Hooper -- Wild weather: Is climate change already taking its toll?

Books

Superhuman: Life at the Extremes of Our Capacity by Dr. Rowan Hooper

Episode Transcript

[00:00:04.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 3 million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries.

In this episode, we asked how champions are made. Are they born or are they built? Is nature versus nurture even a useful model for understanding human performance anymore? We look at the incredible power of focus and how it translates into championship performance. We study how Navy SEALs use a technique called drown-proofing and how you can use the same strategy to conquer your own fear and perform like a champion. All of these and much more with our guest, Dr. Rowan Hooper.

Do you need more time; time for work time, for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our email list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things That Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the email list at successpodcast.com.

You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our email subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode in an interview to our email subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience. That had tremendous implications, because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first. With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview, just for e-mail subscribers.

There's some amazing stuff that's available only to email subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or, if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

What happens when a prominent neuroscientist finds out there’s something with his own brain? In our previous episode, we explored the shocking discovery that our previous guest made when he realized after years of studying the brains of psychopaths, that he had the exact same brain structure. We unwind the twisted narrative and the wild conclusions that came out of his riveting discovery. All of that and much more in our previous interview with our guest, Dr. James Fallon. If you want to see inside the mind of a psychopath, listen to our last episode.

Now, for our interview with Rowan.

[00:03:05] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Rowan Hooper. Rowan is the managing editor of New Scientist Magazine where he spent more than 10 years writing about all aspects of science. He’s also the author of the bestselling book Superhuman: Life at The Extremes of Our Capacity. He worked as a biologist and a reporter in Japan and two collections of his long-running column for the Japan Times have been published in Japan as well. His work has also appeared in The Economist, The Guardian, Wired, The Washington Post and much more.

Rowan, welcome to the Science of Success.

[00:03:36] RH: Hey, Matt. Great to be on.

[00:03:38] MB: Well, we’re excited to have you on the show today. I’d love to start out with maybe a broad question, but I think it gets at the essence of a lot of what you write about and talk about in Superhuman and will give us a rich array of topics to really dig into from here. I know this is a big question, are champions and high-performers born or are they made?

[00:03:59] RH: Oh, man! You’ve gone to the heart of it straight away. Yeah. I mean, that’s the question we all want to know the answer. I actually think that they are made. So they’re born and made, but they’re born basically. What I mean by that is I think to be the best in world at something, no matter what the rest of us might think and what might desire, the people who are the best in the world tend to have a genetic leg up to help them achieve the absolute greatness.

That’s not to say they can roll out the bed and become the best in the world, but what we’re finding in genetic studies now, it looks like there’s a big genetic component to expertise and to top level world-class success. So are they born or made? They’re born but they’re also made because you still have to work, work, work, practice, train and do all that stuff, do all the nurture stuff, but you need nature as well.

[00:04:58] MB: There’s a great book called The Success Equation by Michael Mauboussin that I read some years ago that provides a really interesting mental model that I think kind of fits into this explanation. It’s this idea that for any outcome you draw from two jars, you draw from a luck jar and you draw from a skill jar, and the idea is you can get let’s say sort of a plus five to a minus five out of either of those jars and then that’s what your result is.

What I’m hearing you say, and correct me if this is wrong, but to be at the absolute top, that world champion level, you probably typically need to draw a max sort of roll from the luck jar in terms of your genetics or those kinds of abilities, but also a max roll from that practice of that skill jar as well.

[00:05:41] RH: That’s right. That’s birthright. I mean, and that’s not to say those who haven’t got – Haven’t lucked out on getting the right set of genes, and we can talk later about what that really means, because it’s not as simple as say having AG to being a great golf player or something. Those who don’t have like the genetic endowment, that doesn’t mean we just give up. You can still get a long way practicing, a long way. We’re talking about getting to be the best in world, then you’re right, you need to have top marks with both jars.

[00:06:12] MB: So let’s dig into that. Tell me more about the genes and perhaps even getting into epigenetics and how that works and how it’s not as simple as it may seem.

[00:06:20] RH: Sure. Well, I mean I think perhaps about 20 years ago, 10 years ago, when we just started sequencing the human genome and thinking about all these things in more detail, geneticist tended to think that a lot of our skills and traits and abilities would map quite closely to single genes, that there would be such a thing as like an intelligence gene even or a running gene, and people look to those things and they looked and looked and looked and we spent along many, many studies looking to these things by doing relations with people and genetic studies.

What we found is we have found many genes which looked to be related to, say, intelligence, or running ability, or singing ability, and I talk about all of these in the book. But the key point is we found many genes, many, many, many. For intelligence for example, there are hundreds of genes that are linked to intelligence, and each gene itself and each varying to that gene only has a .5% – Only adds about .5% of an increase in IQ, say, to the overall trait.

So it’s not like you have to have that one gene and you’re going to become super smart. You need to have lots of those, and that means that at least that sci-fi thinking about engineering those traits into ourselves, it’s not going to be possible for a foreseeable future, because there’s just so many genes that are involved in these traits.

So in complex traits, and they’re the ones where we’re all interested in. In complex traits, there are many more genes involved than we once thought. Even some relatively simple traits, like eye color, it turned out to be more genes than we thought. There are some things that still have the kind of old-fashioned one gene causes it, and they tend to be a few kinds of diseases that we know about. So cystic fibrosis, early onset Alzheimer’s, some diseases like that have – If you have the gene for that, then you’re almost certainly going to get the disease. But for more complex traits and for this also success outcome things that we’re interested in, they’re very complex and there’s a lot of genes involved in how that trait turns out as you grow up. So in short, we know that there is a big genetic component to these things, but it’s very complicated.

[00:08:39] MB: And help me understand and help some of the listeners understand how does epigenetics play into this and what exactly is epigenetics?

[00:08:46] RH: Right. Well, epigenetics is a way of modifying how genes turn on and off. So it doesn’t change the sequence of genes you have that you’ve inherited from your mother and father, but what happens is some genes can get turned on and off according to epigenetics, and that’s like a little marker that gets stuck on the sequence of your genetic code. So you can think of it like an on-off switch and saying, “Produce more of this gene or produce less of this gene.”

Maybe another way of thinking of it is like a volume switch. You can dial up the volume on gene and cause it to create more of its product or dial it down and it will create less. So things that happen to you from the moment you’re conceived, so from when you’re in the womb and as you’re growing up and in the everyday life, things like did your mother smoke when you were in the womb or did you smoke when you were a kid, say, before puberty. These things can have effects on your genes by causing like the volume switch to be dialed up or down. Your diet effects the epigenetics too.

I mean, what we’re understanding form this is that the genes that you have are by no means – You can’t tell everything that’s going to happen about your phenotypes. So your traits, your height, the way you behave, all of those sorts of things, just from gene sequence alone. You’ve got to look at the epigenetics as well, the way the genes are turned on and off.

[00:10:10] MB: So the idea is that you might start or have a certain array of genetic traits, but the environment and your upbringing the actions and things around you, diet, etc., all have a series effect on which genes are activated, which genes may be have the volume turned up and which genes may not activate at all.

[00:10:29] RH: That’s right. But I think that whilst we definitely should consider epigenetics, I think more important is whether you have that gene or not in the first place. So if you don’t have the right genes, say, are going to help you in endurance running, then it doesn’t matter if you’re going to dial them up or down. The right ones aren’t there.

So I think we got to think of genetics is a very, very complicated thing. So just to simplify it down, I think it just makes a bit more sense to think about the sort of underlying genetics that we’re working with and then perhaps worry about their epigenetics afterwards.

[00:11:04] MB: So how does this factor in to the traditional understanding or idea of nature versus nurture?

[00:11:11] RH: Well, to characterize that, is you’ve just described exactly what the common way of talking about development and ability is, which is you’ve put nature against nurture. It’s always called nature versus nurture when we have this conversation, but if there’s one thing I’d like people to take away from this conversation today is that that’s a false kind of fight by putting them against each other. It’s never nature versus nurture. It’s always both of those things. Nature is the genes that you’re born with and the epigenetic sort of markers that’s on there. Nurture is the environment you grow up in, which actually will include the epigenetic influence, but it’s the way you grow up, the school you go to, the diet you eat and so on. You can’t have one of those things in isolation, and people have often tried to emphasize that nurture is the more important one, and certainly it’s the one we can do more about, because we can’t do much about the genes we’ve got.

But I think people have tended to deny the importance of the nature side of things, and from huge amount of research that I’ve done and I’ve looked into during the reporting and writing of this book, I found that actually there’s a lot of information and a lot of evidence that suggests the nature side of things is more important than we thought.

Again, let me emphasize. It’s not to say it’s more important than nurture, but you got to consider both these things if you want to understand properly how things like expertise develop. How a human body develops and how our traits and personality and our abilities, how they all develop.

[00:12:54] MB: Tell me more about the robustness of this science.

[00:12:58] RH: Sure. So for something like intelligence, this has been very controversial, because the measurement of intelligence itself has been controversial. Then if you think about the genetics of intelligence, you can just imagine – Yeah, you know, you’re stirring a pot that can be very controversial. But putting that aside, what we’re finding from genetic studies is that about 50% of our intelligence seems to come from genetics. So there’s a big component about half of the variance and how intelligent we are is genetic.

Actually, that from many complex traits, intelligence is a complex trait. But many complex straits like that is a good rule of thumb and they found that about half of the variance in the ability in some trait is genetic, and this comes from many, many studies now, many, many genetic studies have found this. So, yeah, I think it’s actually very robust, but there’s a genetic, a strong genetic component to these things. Again, that doesn’t mean that there’s a single gene or even a few genes that correspond to giving us those traits. Again, there are many different genes, but there is a strong genetic component.

[00:14:11] MB: And in Superhuman, you reference and write about a lot of these studies. Many of them are meta-analysis with rather large datasets. Is that correct?

[00:14:20] RH: That’s right, yeah.

[00:14:21] MB: Why is that important?

[00:14:23] RH: Well, early studies will – When weren’t able to do genetic testing in a more widespread way, datasets were pretty small. So we could only look at maybe only a few hundred samples of people and look at how there might be some genetic correlation. So it meant that any conclusion we draw would have to be caveated with the understanding that there’s pretty small sample.

As genetic testing has got cheaper and got more widespread, datasets have just got bigger and bigger and bigger. So the robustness and the reliability of our studies has increased. By doing a meta-analysis, what that means is you can take separate individual studies from different places and pull them together and have a look at the bigger picture of what they all say. So that means you can really increase the size of the sample you’re looking at and try to get some really more robust idea about what might be going on underneath it all.

[00:15:19] MB: So I want to dig into a couple of the topics that you break down in the book and explore this a little more deeply. You touched on intelligence and talked a little bit about that. Tell me about some of the research you did on memory.

[00:15:33] RH: Yeah. Memory is a really interesting one, because we’ve just been talking about the role of genetics and I’ve been saying how I think to be the best in the world, you do need a kind of genetic leg up in most cases. But the memory, actually I think that’s one of the few traits where you can increase your memory in a certain way. Pretty much anyone can do it. I mean, we could do it if we want to.

So for a particular type of memory, and that is learning a list of things, like a long list of items or a number, and the number that I looked at was Pi. Learning a long number or list like this, there are techniques that anyone can learn and you just to apply yourself and learn it.

One guy I spoke to use this technique, it’s called memory palace technique, and he learned Pi till 100,000 digits. It took him something like 9 hours to recite them all. The method is that you create a story, you create a really memorable narrative and then you learn the story, and each word in the story corresponds to a number. In his case, the number of Pi.

The way to remember the number if you tell yourself a story and you convert back the words into the numbers and then that’s how you remember it. So that is a specific form of extraordinary memory, and this guy, he’s in the Guinness Book of World Records for memorizing the longest amount of Pi. But does it help you in day-to-day life, remembering if you got a French lesson you’ve got revise, or you’ve some physics exam and you’ve got to learn a whole lot of stuff. It doesn’t actually help.

So that just helps train a particular kind of memory. So that’s interesting. There’re other kinds of memory, but it’s hard to know how to kind of proactively train your mind so that you would suddenly have a greater memory for just anything you encounter.

[00:17:24] MB: Did you come across any strategies other than using visual, spatial memory and memory palaces and those kinds of things that you could use to train your working memory or things like that?

[00:17:34] RH: I can’t remember any offhand. I think there might be one or two things that I’ve mentioned in the book, but the most reliable way of doing it is the memory palace, and you can kind of adapt it to your everyday life to a certain extent. But I think that some people say, “I’ve got a lousy memory.” There are a few things you can do to try and help that.

But, I mean, memory is something that’s quite closely linked to IQ. So there’s not so much you can do to boost your sort of working memory capacity. You can do a little bit of tweaking around and playing with tricks, like memory palace, but overall it’s probably – You’re probably stopped with what you got at the moment.

[00:18:15] MB: Tell me a little bit about what you discovered around focus and the story of Ellen MacArthur.

[00:18:21] RH: Yeah. Ellen MacArthur is a yacht’s woman, and I think it’s about 10 years ago or so she won the world record for sailing around the world single handed, and she did it in the fastest time. Well, obviously she won the world record.

But what’s interesting about her was she did it because she’d have a goal. She was able to do this because she’d had a goal and she’d focus on that goal, and not just during the sailing itself. I mean, it was so intense that she said she had to sleep with the ropes of the yacht in her hand in case the wind blew up and she had to suddenly wake up and steer the boat, because otherwise it would capsize and she’d die, because she was on her own in the middle of the ocean.

So you can imagine, I think it was like nearly three months it took her and she was on her own the entire time, just getting small amounts of sleep all that time. You need incredible focus in the moment as you’re doing it. But one of the reasons I think she succeeded is that she’d had a long-term focus as well. So what happened was when she was four-years-old, she went on a boat trip with her auntie and she came home afterwards and she said to her mother and father, “Hey, I went on a boat today. I had the most amazing time. I want to sail around the world when I’m older,” and her mom and dad said, “Yeah, okay. Right. Now run along.”

But from when she was four, she decided that’s what she’s going to do, and she focused on that and then she started kind of organizing her life so that she could achieve this goal of sailing around the world. So she saved all her pocket money, she did jobs and she didn’t spend any money so that she could just save as much as she could until she had enough money to buy her own tiny little boat so she could learn to sail.

Piece by piece she did enough to reach her goal, and when she did it, when she got there to be actually racing around the world on her own, because she was doing something she worked her entire life to do. That got her through those sleepless nights night after night and the loneliness and the hard work, and having that focus, that laser focus on a goal was critically important for her. So I think that’s something that we can really all learn a lot from.

Now, we may not all be lucky enough to just understand what our goal is and to desire something as strongly as she did and certainly not from the age of four, right? I mean, it’s extraordinary that she understood something so clearly at the age of four. I mean, it takes most of us yeas before we understand we want something or we understand a goal. But we can still construct goals for ourselves and we might not want them with as much passion and drive as she did, but then generally they’re probably not going to be as challenging as sailing around the world on your own.

So the take-home message is if you can construct yourself a goal and do things to get towards that even in an incremental way. That’s going to be hugely important. It gives you something to focus on, and focus is really important for all these different levels. So the day-to-day focus and long-term goal focus.

[00:21:29] MB: What was some of the science that you uncovered around how to create more focus?

[00:21:34] RH: Sure. Well, I spoke to a neuroscientist who’s also a lifelong meditation kind of guru guy, and he told me a lot about how the brain changes after meditation, and not just after like one session of it, but after like extensive meditation. Various areas of the brain change and they all tend to be related to making the brain work more efficient, and this has also been tested a lot of times. You mentioned meta-analysis – He published a big meta-analysis of studies of meditation and brain studies and they basically found that your brain gets a boost after meditation. If meditation becomes a habit, your brain structures change subtly and the brain becomes more efficient. Your cognitive ability improves. So the brain works better. It works more efficiently. You do things with less stress, with less prevarication, and there’s a lot to be said from putting like a daily meditative practice into your life.

Many people talk about this now, and there is a lot of – So we may a little while ago thought, “Oh, that’s for hippies, going off and meditating,” but there’s a lot to be said about it just from a hard science point of view. It may be easy to make jokes about it, but it really focuses the mind. It changes the brain structure and it has great benefits and a lot of people swear by it.

[00:23:03] MB: It’s funny, probably the single most recommended strategy across our entire podcast is meditation.

[00:23:09] RH: Oh, really. Yeah. I can really understand it. I think there’s a huge amount to be said for it, and it doesn’t have to be onerous. It doesn’t have to be hard work. It can be something that you can introduce into your day very easily, and I think anyone will see benefits from it.

What’s interesting is – So this guy I spoke to, the neuroscientist, he first noticed it because he was a long distance runner when he was in high school and he noticed that his meditative practice as a school boy helps his running. At first, I didn’t really imagine meditation helping in a physical side of thing like that, but it does.

So I think it can help creatively and it can help in your work, in your day-to-day work, but it can also have a physical effect as well. It helps you get into flow, this kind of mysterious but very cool way of working where your brain is just really efficiently getting into the swing of things. Yeah, I’m really not surprised that you hear about this a lot in your show.

[00:24:08] MB: Another topic you wrote about that I found fascinating and I feel like come up frequently in the performance and self-improvement literature was bravery. I love to hear what you uncovered.

[00:24:18] RH: Yeah. Well, I guess when I went into that I just thought, “Okay.” I mean, the books is called Superhuman, and I wanted to look at people who’ve done extraordinary things on a whole range of different traits and abilities.

So bravery seem to me like, “Well, that’s a real superhero trait, bravery. Let’s look at it and let’s look at what science of bravery is,” and I very quickly realized, which anyone would if you start thinking about it for more than a minute,” that bravery comes in lots of different forms. So there’s the kind of bravery where you might see someone drowning and you don’t know who they are, but hey, if someone’s drowning – And sometimes people will just rush out into the ocean and risk their lives and save someone. That’s a particular kind of bravery.

Then there’s a bravery where you might do things – You might run back into your house to rescue your family, a burning house, to rescue your own family. That’s still brave, but it’s family. You can understand in another way why you might do that. There’s a kind of maternal bravery. Then this bravery in the face of something that’s kind of a constant threat that you know you’re going to have kind of grip your teeth and do something.

So there’re all these different kinds of bravery, and there’s also different things going on in the brain. There’re things going in the amygdala, which is the part of the brain where fear is processed. So I looked at a few examples. I spoke to people who have been exceptionally brave and try to understand like where did this come from, how did you manage to do brave in what you did? I spoke to scientists about what is bravery and can we perhaps increase it in ourselves?

So it all really depends on the kind of bravery we’re talking about. I think one other way – Another interesting thing about is that its opposite is fear, and extraordinary fear can often lead to extraordinary stress and sometimes posttraumatic stress disorder, which is a growing problem. So to understand how bravery works and how fear work is going to help treat some problems when we have – When it goes wrong, when we get this terrible stress response. Yeah, in a nutshell there’re lots of different kinds of bravery and there’s a lot going on in the brain underneath it all.

[00:26:36] MB: This episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our amazing sponsor; Athletic Greens. I've used Athletic Greens for years to make sure that I'm on top of my game. I'm sure you've heard about it from other experts, like Tim Ferriss or even previous Science of Success guest, Michael Gervais.

Athletic Greens is the best of the best all-in-one whole food supplement on the market. Just one scoop of Athletic Greens is the equivalent of 12 servings of fruits and vegetables. It was developed over 10 years by a team of doctors and nutritionists using 75 whole food sourced ingredients. Athletic Greens helps you fuel up with energy, boost your immunity, supports digestion and gut health, helps you manage stress and promote healthy aging and much more. Athletic Greens was kind enough to put together a special deal just for Science of Success listeners. They are giving away 23 travel packs, which is valued at $79 when you make your first purchase.

Start 2019 off right and created epic shifting your health by ordering some Athletic Greens today. You can do that by going to athleticgreens.com/success. That's athleticgreens.com/success to claim your special offer today.

[00:27:56] MB: I want to dig into some of the lessons and ideas that you shared around PTSD, because I thought that was a really fascinating discussion in the book. But before we do, I want to come back to this idea of what did you discover that some scientists say around how we can increase bravery in ourselves?

[00:28:11] RH: Well, one way is to try and rationalize it out. So you can try and think statistically how a thing you’re facing is unlikely and it’s a kind of irrational thing you’ve been trying and kind of talk your way through it in that way, or it’s to try and dilute the thing, or kind of in a way dilute, increase the bravery by kind of sucking it up from other people.

So this is what the military do. They create small groups of people who work together to support each other. So you’ve heard the phrase band of brothers. What the military does is create small bands of brothers that kind of tricks the brain into literally thinking that the people that you’re with are your kin so that you’re willing to do more for them than you would do for a total stranger, because you feel so close to them.

So we talk about that in the lot in the military. Well, the military uses this, but it’s also quite interesting to think for the rest of us who work in teams. Almost all of us work in an office. We work with a group of people. We band together and we’re not going to be asked to go to war or do anything incredibly schedule. So it’s interesting to think about the group dynamic the way the military does and to think about it binds us together and we can work together in a more profitable way together by understanding that.

[00:29:34] MB: One of the interesting military examples that you shared in that chapter was the Navy SEALs and how they drown-proof people. Tell me about that.

[00:29:42] RH: Oh my goodness! Yeah, that’s really extraordinary. The drown-proofing, so they tie your legs together and your arms together and you have to swim like 100 meters. Obviously, you can imagine – I’ve actually tried to do this. I haven’t tied myself together, but since learning about this, I’ve been in pool – And try it next time, like cross your legs and like hold your hands behind your back and then just try and swim and you have to kind of just buckle your body and try and swim. It’s incredibly hard. To do 100 meters, you can imagine how difficult it would be, but that’s what Navy SEALs have to do.

The reason is, is you can imagine there can be situations where you may be captured and tied up, get a chance to escape or you’re chucked overboard or something. There may be situations where you have to try and swim, but your arms and legs are tied. If you have the experience of doing this in training, then you will be slightly less scared when it happens for real. This is why the military put personal through this kind of training, and that’s really extreme, but this kind of principle happens in training all over the place.

If you look at airlines, the cabin crew undergo a lot of training, emergency training in case the aircraft goes down or there’s fire or something. So on the very rare occasions where those happen, that those things happen, we often hear reports that all the passengers are screaming and panicking. The cabin crew just very calmly click into action. They know what to do. They guide people out. They follow the protocol, and that’s because they’ve trained over and over again and they’re able just to follow their training. You often hear people say the training kicked in. You hear this in many different professions. When a disaster happens, when someone’s really brave, they get interviewed on TV and you often hear the phrase, “Yeah, the training kicked in,” and that’s not to sort of denigrate their bravery. They were brave. But the reason they were able to show this kind of bravery and to perform these actions is because they’ve trained it, and so their brains already have somewhere to go and they know what to do kind of unconsciously and they can click into this pathway and get the job done.

Whereas the rest of us, if we’re thrown into a river with our arms and legs tied, we’re going to drown, or if we’re in some unexpected situation we haven’t trained for, we’re going to just freeze and not going to know what to do. But this is why training is critically important in kind of facilitating bravery in those situation.

[00:32:12] MB: And this gets at and many ways comes back to touching on PTSD as well, but something really important and under-appreciated in today’s world, which underscores many of these ideas is the importance of exposure therapy. Tell me a little bit more about that.

[00:32:26] RH: Yeah. I mean, I guess that’s the similar sort of thing. It’s like getting people experience of a thing that’s frightening and just gradually training them and getting them used to it and overcoming the fear. As you say, this is something that’s used in PTSD. So I think the typical one – I think some veterans say they can’t drive a car anymore, because the noise of a car door closing reminds them of a gunshot or something. The way this is treated is by using exposure therapy very gradually, like they may be just shown images of cars, and that’s it for one session, and you may go to a parking lot, you see cars, and that’s it and you just gradually build up and you expose the person to it just a bit more each time and you build up the kind of reservoir, a protective reservoir that helps him get over the fear to whatever it is. Yeah, that is one way that PTSD is treated and one way that you can store up a protected element to bravery.

[00:33:32] MB: When you study world-class performance, you often come across this idea, that exposure therapy or discomfort as a tool to overcome fear in tough situations, and yet I feel like so many people’s response to negative stimulus is often to try and hide or minimize it or move away from it.

[00:33:49] RH: Sure. I mean, that is our immediate response will be to move away from it. I did read about one – I talk about it in the book, but there’s one extraordinary study that some neuroscientist did, and they got people who are scared of snakes. The normal response would be like move the hell away from that snake. All they did was put them in an MRI brain scanner and have next to the brain scanner a conveyor belt with a life snake on it, and inside the brain scanner, the people were able to move a little lever that would move the conveyor belt back or forth and they were told, “Right. Now, try and bring the snake closer towards your head.”

So the ones who made the decision basically to be brave and to move the snake closer towards them, you could look at what’s going on with the brain and find out what’s happening and they’re like, “That’s how they defined what courage was,” because they were working in a way that opposed what they naturally were inclined to do. They’re naturally inclined to move the snake away, but they worked in a way to oppose that and brought the snake closer. By doing that, you can find out, “What’s happening in the brain when you actively show bravery?” Basically, they found a couple of bits in the brain that were more active during that time. So we can start to understand what’s happening when you actively show bravery. What’s happening in the brain? That might give us a way of then tapping into that in the future and kind of being able to maybe induce bravery.

[00:35:17] MB: We’re jumping around a little bit, but this is another topic that I found so fascinating and something that’s been of interest to me for a long time. Tell me about the work that you uncovered around the power of lucid dreaming.

[00:35:29] RH: Yeah. This is really extraordinary. As you know, lucid dreaming is when you are asleep and you’re dreaming, but you become aware that you’re dreaming and that you’re asleep but you don’t wake up. I don’t know, many people have had some kind of experience of this. It might then happen that you fall back into deeper sleep or you wake up, but some people are able to then control that period of the sleep cycle where they’re asleep and dreaming but are in control. Then they can control it so well that you can start to use it. People can – You can exploit this.

So there’s some extraordinary studies done by people that go into lucid dreams, because what you can do is you go to sleep, you’re being watched through remote cameras by the scientists in an outside room. They’re watching in on you. When you go into a lucid dream, you’ve prearranged with the scientist that you’re going to move your eyes in a certain pattern underneath your eyelids but whilst you’re sleep, and that will signal to them that, “Okay, I’m in a lucid dream now,” and then you can do something.

For example, the scientist have played like tones of music that correspond to mathematical sums. So you might say like, “Give them 5 + 3 by playing notes of music,” then this person asleep has to make the calculation in their dream and signal back by moving their eyes what the answer is. So that’s quite a mundane or weird thing to do when you’re asleep and it just shows that you are able to communicate with the waking world from the sleeping world.

Then they started doing some more ambitious things. So one scientist I spoke to got a load of lucid dreamers in the lab, I taught them this game of darts. It wasn’t a typical game of darts. There’s a particular game, they have to throw the dart at the board in a certain way, and everyone practiced it in the evening before they went to bed. They all went to bed in the sleep lab and some of them were able to go into lucid dreams, and when they were in the dream, when they were in the lucid dream, they dreamt into existence a dartboard and the darts and they started throwing the darts and practicing a game that they had learned just a few hours before when they were awake.

The next day when they all woke up, they were all tested again in the waking world and the ones who’d been able to practice overnight in their dreams had highest scores than the ones who just had regular night sleep. So the idea that you can practice in your dream is starting to hold. As I looked into this more, I found some stories from snowboarders and performance divers who’ve been trying to do a new trick. It may be on a snowboard jump and they’re trying a trick. It’s something they can’t do in the real-world. But when they go into a lucid dream, what they say is they slowed time down so they’re able to make the turn, make the spin, pull off the trick and land, and they practiced it like that in their dreams, because it’s danger-free. They can happily practice it, and then in real-time, they can go on the slopes and do the jump for real and it gives them more confidence.

Other people I’ve spoken to practiced languages that they’re learning in their dream and they don’t have any of this social fear about sounding stupid, because you can’t remember the right word or you can’t get the accent right. The idea that you can kind of use your dreams or use your lucid dreams in this way is amazing.

[00:38:48] MB: So how could we begin to tap into that and train ourselves or start to lucid dream?

[00:38:53] RH: Well, yeah, for the rest of us who don’t naturally lucid dream, there are quite a few ways of inducing lucidity in the rest of us. So there are ways of doing it just by practice, and there’re also things you can buy now, like little headsets that will detect when you’re in REM sleep, so when you’re in regular dream sleep, and there’re ways that these little headsets you wear will sort of play flashlights through your eyelids, but just gently, and it’s a way of bringing on lucidity. So it won’t be enough to wake you up, but it will just be enough to bring you into lucidity.

[00:39:26] MB: I want to come back and look at the broader context of the various things that we’ve talked about. When you think about the genetic component of whether it’s intelligence, or focus, or any of these abilities, how do you contextualize that within an understanding of performance and achievement in our own lives, and for each of the listeners, for someone who’s not born with a top 1% of ability that can help them become a world champion, whether it’s a chess player or a singer or whatever it might be, how do you recommend or think about they view practice and performance and achievement?

[00:40:01] RH: I think one thing that I’ve really taken from this is that think about – We touched on this when we were talking about focus, is think about why you’re doing what you’re doing and do you have a goal? What is that goal? What are the reasons that you’re setting that goal?

Many of the people I’ve spoken to who are the top of their game for whatever trait it is, one thing they all have in common is a deep love of the thing they did. The rest of us, like that just translates into, “Are we doing this for the right reasons? Are we trying to be – If we’re trying to improve ourselves in some way, is it something we really love doing?”

I found one amazing study in athletics, and the scientists there had looked at a whole group of athletes who’d gone to the Olympics. So any athlete who gets to the Olympic games is already world-class athlete. But what the scientists did then was separate them out, the ones who’d just nearly qualified for the Olympics and those who’d won medals at the Olympics. If you then look at work and practice pattern of these two groups of people are, it turns out that the ones who achieved medals had specialized in their sport at a later stage than the ones who had just nearly managed to get to the Olympics.

Not only that, but they’ve done many other different kinds of sport when they were kids and when they’re growing up and perhaps still now. In other words, they kind of cross-trained, they did different things and they found – They specialized later, and that’s because they found the thing that they were – Not only best at physically, but more suited to mentally. So it meant that you they able to find the thing they were best at in multiple ways by doing different things, you stay stronger and this kind of cross-training benefits kind of moved across and help you in this sport that you’ve ended up doing. So that was at the Olympics, but the same thing actually applies in other fields as well.

So this kind of cross-training, non-specializing, don’t specialize too early, that kind of mantra applies I think to even non-athletes as well. One way I talk about it is think of it like the Goldilocks principle. Try different things until you find the one that’s just suits you perfectly well.

[00:42:18] MB: So for listeners who want to concretely implement some of the ideas we’ve talked about today, what would be an action item or a piece of homework that you would give them to execute on some of these ideas?

[00:42:29] RH: I think you certainly need to practice whatever you’ve decided to – You want to improve yourself in. I would make sure you’re practicing in a correct way, in a directed way that’s going to improve yourself. If you possibly can check the science behind what you’re doing. I mean, there’s a lot of hocus-pocus out there. There’s a lot of soft of advice given may well sound encouraging and beneficial, but I would always try to check out what’s the science underlying what you’re doing to make sure that you’re going to do something that’s going to be really beneficial.

[00:43:03] MB: For listeners who want to find you and your work online, what’s the best place for them to do that?

[00:43:08] RH: I guess on Twitter. I’m always there, @rohoop on Twitter. All the stuff we talked about is in the book. There’s a huge amount in there. That’s the first starting point, and then see what I’m doing on Twitter.

[00:43:18] MB: Well, Rowan, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing all these knowledge and wisdom. You took an incredible journey across a number of different fields of human performance and some really interesting insights.

[00:43:28] RH: Thanks, Matt. Great to chat with you.

[00:43:29] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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

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

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

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

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

The Surprising Idea You Can Use To Overcome Self Doubt, Negativity, and Insecurity with Todd Herman

In this episode we discuss a proven way of overcoming the self-doubt, negativity, and insecurity that hold you back and we show you how to ultimately become your best self using a unique and unlikely strategy. We look at legends from pro athletes to MLK and uncover how they used the same exact strategy to get into the zone when it counts. We discuss all this and much more with our guest Todd Herman.

Todd Herman is a high-performance coach and author of, 'The Alter Ego Effect: The Power of Secret Identities to Transform Your Life'. He is the creator of the 90 Day Year a performance system which is designed to create results for business owners, fast. He has worked with Olympic athletes, Entrepreneurs, and Leaders including members of the Spanish Royal Family. He's been featured on the Today Show, The Good Life Project, Inc Magazine and more.

• Nature is the ultimate litmus test of whether or not an idea has credence and truth

• If something doesn’t exist in nature - we need to look at it and understand it

• Balance does not exist in nature - but equilibrium does 

• Based on what evidence do you need to have balance in your life? 

• What is the alternative to finding balance in your life? What should you seek instead?

• If you want to achieve big things, if you want to explore your capabilities, you have to throw yourself out of balance, you have to push past your comfort zone, to achieve big goals

• In order to achieve big goals, you have to give up focus on other areas of your life to do it 

• On a farm there is no idea of work life balance

• Integration is far more important than balance - how do we actually integrate things into our lives? 

• How do you move beyond the idea of work-life balance and move into integration?

• What is an alter-ego?

• An alter-ego can be an internal trusted friend. Bring an ally inside your mind. 

• How do you get into the zone? How do you get into flow states? 

• An alter ego ALLOWS you to have permission to achieve

• How to leverage the science of "Enclothed Cognition” to transform yourself and create a powerful alter ego that can help you achieve anything 

• The power of artifacts and totems

• There are so many ideas that have been spread in the personal development world for so long that are false ideas, they aren’t rooted in science

• The alter-ego taps into your creative imagination - is let’s you harness the power of this to make yourself more powerful and effective

• How do you deal with resistance? Personal trauma? Self Doubt? Imposter Syndrome?

• How legends like pro athletes and Martin Luther King would use physical props to tap into their alter egos

• Stepping into your “distinguished self” 

• How to harness the power of intention using physical triggers and tools to create 

• The idea that you are one single self is completely flawed. Life is about context. You are different people in different contexts. 

• “Multiple Self Theory” and how it’s changing psychology

• You don’t build an alter-ego for your entire life. You build specific alter egos for specific contexts and opportunities.

• To meet force with force does not help when dealing with difficult people. All it does is prolong the tantrum and create problems. Be like Mr. Rogers.

• Don’t fight against yourself, leverage the way you naturally behave and turn that to your advantage. 

• “Willpower is a terrible tool” to create change. 

• Resistance comes from the unconscious and is extraordinarily powerful. Willpower comes from the frontal lobe. It’s like a mouse fighting an elephant. 

• “Bo Jackson never played a down of football in his life”

• It’s not pretending who you want to be, its “activating” who you want to be. 

• What happens when you get stuck in a “trapped approach"

• At your core, you have unlimited possibility - you have to decide and choose WHO you are and WHO is gonna show up to get the results you want. 

• If something is getting in the way of you doing what you want to do or know you can do - THAT’S being inauthentic

• Every single person - even you - has already done this - you’ve already use this idea. You just have to tap back into it. 

• Playing with ideas is not a bad thing. 

• What’s the critical difference between being childish and child-like? And why does that matter?

• This is about remembering something that’s already inside of you. 

• Homework: Define what “field of play” it makes the most sense for you to use an Alter Ego in. Start with - what area of life are you most frustrated with?

• Homework: What are the traits you most want to bring into that field of play? Is there anyone or anything that already embodies that? A fictional character? A real person? A historical figure? Is there someone that you’re really drawn to? Your mind is constantly telling stories - if you tap into an existing story that’s already been written - you harness the power of it. Ask yourself - how can you ACTIVATE that?

Thank you so much for listening!

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

We’re proud to announce that this week’s episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Athletic Greens!

Athletic Greens is offering our listeners 20 FREE TRAVEL PACKS, a $79 value, with your first purchase when you go to www.athleticgreens.com/success.

Start this year off with a new incredibly impactful and easy to maintain healthy habit with Athletic Greens. The fact is, the perfect diet doesn't exist, and ultimately falls short due to a busy lifestyle, travel schedule or restrictive diets. That's why Athletic Greens packs in 75 whole food sourced ingredients and covers you in 5 key areas of health, making it one of the most comprehensive supplements on the market.

Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Personal Site] Todd Herman

• [Book] The Alter Ego Effect: The Power of Secret Identities to Transform Your Life by Todd Herman

• [Article] One Self or Many Selves? by Gregg Henriques Ph.D.

• [Article] A Multiple Self Theory of the Mind by David Lester

• [Journal Article] Enclothed cognition by Hajo Adam and Adam D.Galinsky

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[00:00:11] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 3 million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. In this episode, we discuss a proven way of overcoming this self-doubt, negativity and insecurity that hold you back, and we show you how to ultimately become your best self using a unique and unlikely strategy. 

We look at legends from pro athletes to MLK and uncover how they use the same exact strategy to get into the zone when it counts. We discuss all of these and much more with our guest, Todd Herman. 

Do you need more time; time for work, time for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our email list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things That Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the email list at successpodcast.com.

You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our email subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode in an interview to our email subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience. That had tremendous implications, because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first. With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview, just for e-mail subscribers.

There's some amazing stuff that's available only to email subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or, if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

In our previous episode, we discussed how our guest helped secret agents become more creative. We look at specific strategies to navigate personal change while empowering and using your imagination. How do you become more imaginative? What are the keys to sparking imagination and creativity and how do you use creativity to get through challenges and setbacks? We discussed all of these and much more with our previous guest, Beth Comstock. If you want to unlock your creativity and imagination, listen to that episode. 

Now, for our interview with Todd. 

[00:03:00] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Todd Herman. Todd is a high-performance coach and author of The Alter Ego Effect: The Power of Secret Identities to Transform Your Life. He's the creator of the 90 Day Year, a performance system which is designed to create results for business owners fast. He’s worked with Olympic athletes, entrepreneurs and leaders, including members of the Spanish Royal Family. He’s been featured on the Today’s Show, the Good Life Project, Inc. Magazine and much more. Todd, welcome to The Science of Success. 

[00:03:31] TH: Matt, I'm excited to be here, because it's refreshing to talk to someone who values evidence and the scientific approach to success as much as I do. 

[00:03:41] MB: Well, that's awesome and that's one of the reason that we wanted to have you on the show, Todd. We were kind of getting into this in preshow, and so I wanted to just jump in and start recording. Let's expound on that topic. One of the things that I was telling you that is huge for me is there's no perfect way to resolve anything or really find the truth, right? In this life, nothing is certain, but one of the mental models that I like to use is this idea that science and data is one of the best mental models for predicting outcomes in the world and it gets proven wrong, it’s not perfect, but I really think it’s, at least in my experience and my research, one of the most useful ways to think about personal development. 

[00:04:25] TH: Yeah. Well, I mean, the way that I think of it too is does this exist in nature? I think nature is the ultimate litmus test of whether or not if someone is sharing an idea, whether or not it's got some sort of truth behind it, because if something doesn't exist in nature, then we need to really look at it then, because nature is – That’s where we come from. So there's up and there's down. There’s inside, there’s outside, there's duality. So it’s like the idea of balance. Balance does not exist in nature. It's trying to bring something back to an equilibrium, but this idea, say, in a personal world, where you have to have balance. Well, why?

Based on what evidence do we need to have balance in our life? Because it does not exist in nature. So why are we going to conform and try and constrain ourselves into a model that just does not exist, and many people create rules in their lives that are literally designed to force you to struggle, and balance is one that's going to force you to struggle and possibly beat yourself up. So I agree with you a hundred percent. 

[00:05:29] MB: That's really interesting. So obviously we’re going to get into your book and talk about some of those ideas, but before we do, this idea of balance is kind of interesting, and I’d like – It's a little bit kind of controversial. What would you say the alternative to balances and how would you think about for our listeners what should they seek instead and how do they do that?

[00:05:49] TH: Well, yeah. A, it’s just understanding that, especially for the people who are trying to strive, achieve, really like explore a lot of what their capabilities are. There are times when you are going to be throwing yourself out of balance in order to achieve that, because you need to be pushing past comfort zones, or just in order for anyone to achieve something, there needs to be a level of focus on that change that needs to happen, which means you need to be giving up focus on other areas of your life possibly. 

For example, right now I'm getting ready to launch this book that I have, that took me years to right. Now, of course, you're in that messaging where you're trying to get it out there, and it's so important to me that I have to let it go. I’ve got all of the other fields of play that I stand on in my life, right? With my family, I’ve got three little kids. My wife, friends, hobbies, and I go, “Okay. So I can't launch this thing out there and get it to where I want it, to get it towards – Or get it to by continuously still meeting up with my friends every single – Like there's just things I need to cut out. So now all of a sudden people go, “Oh! Well, that person isn't leading a balanced life.” No. No. No. It's by choice. I've chosen something else to be focused on in the next 90 days. So it's really helpful for people to understand so that you don't beat yourself up saying, “Oh, man! I've been working so hard on da-da-da and I'm not seeing my friends.” Yeah, but if you choose to do it, now you’re not going to beat yourself up over it. 

So the idea that I have – Now, I grew up on a huge farm and ranch in Western Canada. I live here in New York City now, which is the center of ambition on the planet. On the farm, it was such a great model for me to grow up inside of, A, because like I’d said before about nature. You learn about nature and what truly does work and doesn't work, but also there was no idea of work life balance. We lived where we worked. 

So I never thought that dad wasn't coming home from the office. He was out in the field. So integration is far more important to me. Now, how does that practically play out? Because I know that one of things that you do really well on the show is you actually get people practical advice as well and not leave people like up in the clouds. 

For me, how this plays out? Well, how could I take that idea of now, my family, where I definitely work a more white collar-ish job, right? I’m sharing ideas, I’m coaching, I’m advising and I’m putting on events and things like this. Well, how can I integrate my children more into this business? So, how it plays out when I do my live events and I have hundreds and thousands of people who might come to them? Molly and Sophie, who are – Molly is six now, and Sophie is 4-1/2. By the time their aged two, they have to come on stage with me and they have to sing something to the audience. They have to recite something to them. They have to do something. So I want to integrate them into my world, and there is one day, Matt, where – Well, I had my home office and I would close the door at around 7:00 to go in there to work, and my youngest daughter, Sophie, she was just before her second birthday, I heard her banging on the door and saying, “I hate work,” because I just said, “Daddy has to go to work now.” 

I thought to myself, “Wait a second. I don't want her establishing some sort of attitude or belief or whatever the case is that work is bad.” So I start every single day the exact same way. I sit down, and I’ve done this since I was just before my 22nd birthday. I write a handwritten note and I seal the letter with a wax seal and I send it off. So I've written well over 4,600 letters now to people. 

So the very next day I brought Molly and Sophie in with me and I have the box where all the tools are, like the letter, and the wax seal, and the wax itself, and the stamp, and all that and I got them to unpack it for me, set it all out for me, get me ready for my day, open up my laptop for me and get me ready. Now I’m integrating them in, and Sophie's response as soon as they had my desk all set up for me, she was like, “Okay, Molly. Let's go. Let’s leave daddy to get to work.” Then I heard her walk out the door and she said to my wife, Valerie, “What can we work on now?” So that’s just like an example of I'm not worried about balance. I want to integrate things in. How can I make everything just swim together, not keep it so separate.

[00:10:15] MB: Yeah, I totally agree with that, and I want to come back to Alter Egos in a second, but another kind of quick experience that I've had as well, I don't really see any distinction between work and life. They’re just one on blended thing for me, and I think it's important sometimes to have periods where you unplug from everything and really get that rest and relaxation, but at the same time, when I go on vacation, if I go to the beach for – I might go to the beach with my family for two weeks, but during that time, I might go surfing and then I'll come back in the afternoon and I'll work on a financial model or have a conference call or something like that, and I don't view that as working on vacation. I just view it as that's my life. So sometimes on a Wednesday afternoon I might play video games the middle of the day. It's all one fluid thing that is completely kind of interwoven. 

[00:11:05] TH: Yeah. It's the beautiful thing about the age that we’re living in now, and it can also be a handcuff for many people. I’d say generation X, like my generation, we've had to kind of stand on this border and balance this kind of we grew up at the latter end of that kind of industrial age and computer age and we started developing our themselves professionally at this huge shift that was happening where there was – you could start working from home. I think probably my generation really has a struggle with that almost schizophrenic nature of when you work at home – Like when I first started my business, actually I started it at my home in 1997, and when I told people that, that was back when people thought you're just basically unemployed if you're working from home. But this kind of great era that we live in now is we have this fantastic choice and I think some people struggle with the idea that they're not being productive or efficient if they're not always working, and that work happens between nine and five. But now the shift has happened where you work whenever you want to now. There is no defined time where you need to be working, and if you want to go play video games at 1:00 in the afternoon, do that, if that's the way that it kind of feeds you. So some fun stuff that we all have to navigate. 

[00:12:27] MB: Yeah, it's very interesting. It's a very distinct quandary. But I want to make sure we have some time to really dig into your book. So I want to transition and talk about alter ego. So the title alone really begs the question or makes me think, and I'm curious, what exactly are alter egos and why did you decide to write about that and why are they so important for personal development?

[00:12:54] TH: Sure. So there're many reasons and there're many powers to it, but alter ego was first mentioned in 44 B.C. by Cicero, the great Roman philosopher and statesman. Considered to be one of the greatest of all time, and the term itself in its root form truly means the other I or trusted friend. When you think about just how we all need to navigate life and be successful, there's really no denying the fact that having a phenomenal Rolodex and having great relationships is extraordinarily powerful. 

In fact, of all the studies that talk about happiness and joy and fulfillment in life, every single one always has a component of relationships playing a huge or massive part of that. Okay. So that's at the external space. But this idea of an alter ego being a trusted friend internally, in your mental game. I've played between the 6 inches of the years now for 22 years working, like you'd said in the intro, with Olympians, and business leaders, and public figures, and many, many people struggle with that inner voice that will beat them up or stop them or create resistance. What an alter ego – Again, with that trusted friend, now you’re bringing in ally internal to help you navigate that with more grace and allow you to bring those innate qualities that you do have that might be not showing up in your performance to leverage the idea of an alter ego and bring them out on to a field of play so that you get the results that you want and you’re showing up like you know that you can, but in some way through your current kind of self, there’re some sort of resistance that’s happening. 

So I got into using alter egos myself at a young age when I was playing. I played football and kind of how they’re recruited, and I went on to play college football. I was also nationally ranked badminton player as well, which typically people don't think of those two going together, badminton and football. But when I would go on the football field, I would channel my – What I called my inner Geronimo. I’m a massive Native American fan and buff and I created this kind of tribe of warriors in my mind. One was Walter Payton, another was Ronnie Lott, both Hall of Fame football players in the NFL, and then this tribal like Native American warriors, and I brought them all together and I just called that entire composite Geronimo. 

So when I showed up on that field, Todd didn't play the game. Geronimo did, and Geronimo – I was 6 feet and like 156 pounds soaking wet. So I could easily get caught up in the fact that I was not a big guy, but Geronimo would never have those thoughts in his own head, and I channeled the strengths of those people to bring my performance to a level on that field. For myself, I'm always trying to find, whether it's someone like you Matt, or it's an athlete, or whether it’s an entertainer, the core of my work is to help someone get into the zone and flow state where there is no judgment. You’re just so caught up in the process. When you're in that experience, you're literally allowing every single ounce of your capability to get out of you in that moment without any sort of restriction of negative self talk or whatever. It's a massive allowing that's happening. 

Alter ego was one of my top tools that I would go to when working with people after I started my business to allow them to get out on the field. To kind of carry this forward, when I started my business at the age of 21, I look like I was 12, Matt, you're actually very similar. You’ve got a young face too, right?

[00:16:38] MB: I definitely do. Oh, yeah. 

[00:16:39] TH: I don’t know about you with your experience, but I was so insecure about how young I looked, because I was going out there and I was talking about mental game and I didn't have like a degree in psychology. So I was concerned about my credibility because of my lack of a degree or something, but I wasn't really talking a lot about psychology. I was talking about the biology of things. I was talking about kinesiology. I was bringing together all these different worlds. But fundamentally, that was one of my strengths. I was really, really good at developing my own mental toughness, which allowed me to perform at a high level, and I was then good at teaching and breaking it down for people. But it was stopping me from getting out and marketing myself and getting my message out, because I was so insecure and caught up in my head about how young I looked. Then one day I was just like, “Wait a second. I wonder if this idea of Geronimo could help me in business,” and I was kind of reconciling and I was like, “Well, Geronimo is pretty aggressive. That doesn't really work for business, but is there someone or something else?” 

It dawned on me that all the people that I thought were confident and smart and articulate and all these things all have glasses when I was young. So I thought, “Well, why don’t I leverage that,” and I’d put on my helmet when I went on the football field to channel Geronimo, but then when I went – What could I used to kind of trigger and signal this confident and articulate and decisive self in business, and the glasses was going to be my tool. I’m going to get to the power scientifically behind this in a second, because it leverages a psychological phenomenon that we all carry with us. 

So that's what I did. I went to LensCrafters in West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton, Alberta where I was living at the time, and I went to the optometrist and I got a pair of nonprescription glasses. This is like in the late 90s when wearing glasses wasn't a cool fashion thing at all. Everyone was getting LASIK eye surgery trying to get away from glasses and here I am walking and the optometrist is giving this weird look at me, like, “You don't need glasses. Why are you getting glasses?” I’m like, “Can you please just shut up and give me the glasses please?” So that's what I did, and I would put those on and I would step into my Superman version of myself in business, just like Superman would put on his glasses become Clark Kent. I did the reverse. I was putting on the glass to be the Superman version of myself for business to carry forth the traits that I most wanted to show up and stop feeling so insecure. 

Now, what this actually leverages, because we want to talk about evidence, is this phenomenon called enclothed cognition. So human beings carry with us this sort of phenomenon that we have clothing and things that we wear, or in society there is clothing and there are artifacts and totems that signal to us an idea of what that thing is all about, so a lab coat, or a doctor's coat, or police officer's uniform. 

Now, the fascinating thing about this is when you put that thing on yourself, you will actually enclothe yourself in that same meaning and you will cognitively start to act through those traits yourself. We all have maybe a power tire, or we have like a shirt that we put on that makes us feel good. That's why that whole idea of look good, feel good; behave good, or act good works. It's actually proven out with science. 

So the Kellogg School of Management did this really great study where they brought in a bunch of students into a room individually and there was – I don’t know if you’ve ever seen this before, Matt, but there’s like this little puzzle that you can do where a bunch of boxes, and in each box is the word of a color. But then it's colored in a different color. Have you ever seen those before?

[00:20:14] MB: Yeah, I've done one of those tests before. 

[00:20:16] TH: Yeah. So it’s like the word green, but it's colored in yellow, and then the word blue, but it's colored in red, and so on, and there’s probably like 25 of these on a grid. They brought these students into a room and they wanted them – They were going to test them on their accuracy, their attention to detail, the amount of mistakes that they're going to make and the amount of time it was going to take them to say all of the words, because our brain processes the color first before it processes the word. So it's a real kind of mind trick. 

So anyways, they brought them in and individually they would go through this and they would track them. So that group gets done and they record all the data. Then they bring in another group and they hand them a white coat and they tell them that it's a painters coat and they get them to do the exact same experiment. So then these people leave and they bring in another group, hand them exact same white coat, but this time they tell them it's a lab coat or a doctor's coat and then they do it. 

Okay. So what you think the difference was in the results between the painters coat and plainclothes people?

[00:21:15] MB: I'm not sure. I mean, obviously, I think the painters coat would've maybe made people feel more creative. I'm not really sure.

[00:21:21] TH: That's right. You’re dead on. That means they’re more creative. However, does being more creative help you for that specific task? 

[00:21:28] MB: Yeah, I probably I heard it too. 

[00:21:30] TH: Yeah, it actually didn't, and what happened was they had the exact same results as the plainclothes. So there’s no effect that happened. However, the people who wore the lab coat or the doctor's coat made less than half the mistakes as everyone else, and they completed the task in less than half the time. So what happened? Well, they enclothed themselves cognitively into the mindset or the actions, behaviors, of someone who is detail-oriented, right? They’re methodical. They’re careful. They’re studious, all things that we associate with someone who might be in a lab or in a doctor's coat. Powerful – This is like a powerful little phenomenon. 

Well, me, as someone – Like I'm the practitioner, Matt. I'm not someone who wrote the book because I found this idea. I've been working with people one-on-one for 22 years now, and I do group stuff. I do events, but I still do a lot of one-on-one. Over the course of my career, I’ve worked with people over 16,000 hours one-on-one. When you work with people one-on-one, I'm paid to help people perform better, right? 

Like in the professional athletics world or Olympic world, you’re not going to be able to work with people on a consistent basis if you're not actually making a difference with people’s performance. So my biggest issue, and this is what I appreciate about your podcast, is that there are so many ideas that have been spread from the personal development, self-help leadership world, for so long that are not rooted in real evidence. They’re nice ideas, lovely ideas. It sounds like I would really want that thing to truly work, but they don't often times. 

So the alter ego taps into the one thing that we truly are gifted with as human beings that makes us unique on the planet, and it is our creative imagination. Einstein said it, that our imagination is more powerful than knowledge, and our creative imagination is truly our gift to handle the world and handle it with more grace, but we can also create a world inside of our heads that can hurt us, right? We can create heaven from hell or a hell from heaven. We have this fantastic ability to create story and narrative in our minds. That's what we do, and an alter ego is like the backdoor into our creative imagination to fight against the other part that we have inside of us, which is Carl Jung would call it the shadow self. In the book I call it – Just to give it more – To give it kind of the thematic, the theme that I have rolling through the book, I call it the enemy, and the enemy can pull us into the shadows. What is it do? It uses things like resistance, which can come in the form of, “Hey, personal trauma.” There's a lot of people who’ve had some tough things happen to them, me included. 

I've had – Or there’s people who have imposter syndrome, that idea that they always are discounting their achievements and what they've achieved in life or their wins that they’ve had and they’re concerned about people finding them out or not having enough skill yet, and it stops you from taking action. There's any one of a number of different forces that stop us; doubt, worry, the judgment of others, right? An alter ego can more gracefully move past that and really pull those qualities and traits that are really actually in the skills that you have inside of you out-past it and on to the field for people.

So for me, I love diving into in the book like just the history of them, who has used them in the past. A lot of people would be surprised at who has used them to leverage this idea and pull the best of themselves out there the – Like I was saying, with the enclothed cognition, the science of how to use this to activate things. I was using the glasses to activate specific traits and step in that kind of inner business Superman. 

I’ll tell you a quick little story if you don't mind. I was doing a speech in San Antonio, Texas. It was a leadership event back in 2004. I mentioned the idea of alter ego and the glasses and how I have perfect 20/15 vision, but I use glasses and use glasses when I started out to be very intentional about who and what was going to show up on that field for me. 

Afterwards, this lady came up to me and said, “Listen, Todd, I loved your talk. Specifically, I liked your story around how you use glasses,” and it's funny, because Martin never needed glasses either. He had perfect vision and he had nonprescription glasses too to help him do the hard things that he was out there doing. 

What's important to note is the Martin that she is referring to, when I looked down, if you saw her nametag, her name is a Coretta Scott King. It’s Martin Luther King's wife, and she was telling me and went on to tell me that he would step into what he called his distinguished self, because he felt like he was leading such an important movement and on such an important mission that he didn't want whatever insecurities that he had gathered up over his life to get in the way of that mission. So he put on those glasses as a way of stepping into his distinguished self and do the hard things to continue to move that mission and movement forward. So I kind of share that story in the book, and many other people that have used it along with just the science of what you're tapping into inside. 

[00:26:28] MB: It's so fascinating, and there's a number of different things that I want to unpack out of this strategy, this whole notion that you have these kind of physical triggers, or tools, or totems as you call them, is really interesting and I've never come across that or thought about that as a strategy, but it makes so much sense, and it's something that I think is very eminently applicable for a lot of people as well. 

[00:26:55] TH: Yeah. Well, you mean how often have you heard people talk about the power of intention, right?

[00:27:01] MB: Yeah, all the time. Yeah.

[00:27:03] TH: All the time, right? And they say it and I always thought, “Okay, that’s a lovely idea,” but then once I got into this work more, and even before, Matt, we were talking about the power of like just integration and you were saying how there is no difference for me in like work and life. It's all just one thing. There have been a lot of shifts and changes in the psychology world in the last few years. If you could basically say that it has been disrupted massively, because a few of the fundamental pillars that have made up the philosophy of psychology have been basically brought to the ground, because those old studies have been proven to be non-replicatable. 

But one of the things that has been shifted, for the longest time in the psychology world had always kind of spread the idea or message that, fundamentally, the healthiest human beings are the ones who see themselves as a single self. That is broken now. In fact, there is more evidence showing now that the people who think that there's one single self that you carry around all of the different fields that you go when you live in typically have a very, very high-level of – Or a propensity towards having mental health issues, because life is about context. 

Now, an extremely fast growing area of study in psychology is this theory of multiple self theory, which is that understanding that we live contextually, right? Like, Matt, who you are with me right now is, of course, going to be slightly different and different than who you are when you're at home, or when you're playing sport, or when you're with your family, or significant other, or whatever the case is. There traits and parts of our personality that get magnified so that we can perform to our best ability, whatever that might be. 

Again, it's not performing in the way of acting. It's performing in the context, for me, of getting a result that you want, okay? So context matters. So for building alter egos for people, it was always contextual. You don’t build an alter ego for your entire life. The Todd that shows up and has glasses on in business, now, I don't bring that. I’ve got a challenger personality type. When you're working with high-achieving people, you've got to challenge them, because they’re around nothing but yes people a lot of the times, and they're just operating at such a high-level that I need to be challenging them on things. 

But do my little kids want that aspect of my personality at home when they just want a fun, playful, get on the ground and muck around from dad? No. But it would be very easy for me to take that home with me, because so much of my day is sitting, doing this work. So when I – And I'm still at a young dad. My oldest is only six, but I was carrying that home too much and then I thought to myself, “Wait a second. I need to create context here. Who would I most like to be inspired by to show up in the home with my kids?” and it was easy to go to Mr. Rogers. I grew up with Mr. Rogers, the prolific children's entertainer, and I thought to myself, “At my core, I know that there's a gentle self that's in there, because absolutely there is,” an Mr. Rogers is such great inspirations. So that's who I would like to most show up as or bring as a spirit into that moment. 

Where this came to a head for me was my middle daughter, Sophie, has let's say a fantastic emotional bandwidth. She can have fantastic eyes and very quickly go to a fantastic tantrum. When a young kid is having a tantrum, any other parent that’s listening knows that to meet force with force does not work. You can yell and scream at them, you can challenge them and dominate them by your size, but that's not going to help the situation and that would probably be an easy default for me. 

But the moment I got down on one knee and – Because it was the day before that's exactly how I acted. I challenged force with force and all it did was prolong the tantrum for 15 minutes. But the next day when I really channeled that idea of Mr. Rogers, I got down on one knee just like he would and I reached out to Sophie, I grabbed her, I pulled her in and I gave her a big hug just like he would, and she melted. Her tantrum went from lasting what would've been 12 minutes till like 13 seconds, and we all have this where we see her kids then run off and they’re playing and it’s like nothing just happened and you’re like, “What? You guys are insane!” But I'm not there to solve the psychology of children. I'd much rather meet it in a way that's more meaningful. So that's the power of that in action contextually. Same thing with all my athletes, we’re building the alter ego, or that character or persona for that field of place. 

So now that's taking that power of intention and you going, “Who and what do I most want to be showing up as on that field to help me be as successful as I possibly can?” Then it's to override whatever self-doubt you have that you can do it. Why not tap into and leverage our creative imagination and not forget about it and use it to your advantage and maybe step into your inner Yoda, your inner Luke Skywalker, or Wonder Woman, or whoever that might be for you?

[00:32:15] MB: This is a little bit of a tangent, but I love this notion of not meeting force with force and channeling Mr. Rogers. What a thoughtful approach to dealing with any difficult emotional situation or difficult individual. 

[00:32:30] TH: I mean, can you imagine if the leaders of our world that had their fingers over top of war machines handled things with a little bit more. Mr. Rogers? We would probably be living – And this is coming from a fairly hard-charging ambitious person, but I can tell you that we’d probably be living in a far different world, definitely. 

[00:32:50] MB: This episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our amazing sponsor; Athletic Greens. I've used Athletic Greens for years to make sure that I'm on top of my game. I'm sure you've heard about it from other experts, like Tim Ferriss or even previous Science of Success guest, Michael Gervais. 

Athletic Greens is the best of the best all-in-one whole food supplement on the market. Just one scoop of Athletic Greens is the equivalent of 12 servings of fruits and vegetables. It was developed over 10 years by a team of doctors and nutritionists using 75 whole food sourced ingredients. Athletic Greens helps you fuel up with energy, boost your immunity, supports digestion and gut health, helps you manage stress and promote healthy aging and much more. Athletic greens was kind enough to put together a special deal just for Science of Success listeners.  They are giving away 23 travel packs, which is valued at $79 when you make your first purchase. 

Start 2019 off right and created epic shifting your health by ordering some Athletic Greens today. You can do that by going to athleticgreens.com/success. That's athleticgreens.com/success to claim your special offer today. 

[00:34:10] MB: So I want to circle back and talk about some of the struggles that people deal with and why this idea of an alter ego can be such a powerful tool, because when I think about the listeners, I'm sure there's people listening to this who face, as you call it, resistance. Whether it is a trauma they're trying to overcome, whether it's self-doubt, imposters syndrome, etc. How does this specifically help them overcome those challenges and those struggles?

[00:34:39] TH: Well, you know Matt, when you're looking at me or my life or you’re looking at someone else where you're not living inside of my head. We all do this, it’s the grass is greener effect, right? Where we go, “Oh, I can see how that works with that person, but I've got this going on, or I can see why that person built business up to being successful, because –” And we gloss over someone's life very easily. Human beings do that by very nature. That's just what we do. 

So me, as someone who’s a practitioner, I’m simply trying to leverage existing things that we do naturally, not fight against things like many people in the self-help world loves to push out the idea. Like the number one tool that most self-help personal book will typically give people leadership book is the number one tool is willpower. Of course, willpower is powerful. Yes, we do have the power of the will, the free will, but it is a terrible tool to use to overcome ourselves and change. Why? Because resistance comes from the unconscious and is extraordinarily powerful. Willpower comes from the frontal lobe, and on the grand scale of size, think of it like the mouse coming at the elephant. Just good luck with that. That's why most people wear out after – you can use willpower to steer yourself for a few days, a week, or a couple of weeks, but over time, typically, the unconscious and that resistance will win, typically. I didn’t say all the time, typically it will, which is why most people will struggle. 

Well, if this grass is green on the other side effect naturally happens, well, that's one of the things that we’re utilizing when we’re using an alter ego or a persona and tapping into someone and something else’s superpowers. Because we look at, say, James Bond, or we look at Daniel Craig, or we look at Michelle Obama or whoever it is that we might admire and we go, “Oh, I want to use their traits, because they just show up in an X, Y, Z way.” You're only seeing one part of that person's existence, and we’re not going deep because we don't have that person's narrative and storytelling going on. So why would I fight that? Instead, I’m going to use that and help you, a client, whatever, tap into it and step through that individual, that thing that might be being used, to help bring your traits out on to the field. So it's such a natural thing, and what you're just simply tapping into is that kind of – That gloss effect that we have. We strip away all of the negative that that person would have had to deal with in order to get to where they are and we’re just simply seeing the positive traits that that person has. 

So I’ll give you just a quick example too. I start off the book talking about a story that happened when I was speaking at an event in Atlanta years ago, and I was standing in the green room just sort of pacing and kind of practicing my talk by myself, and then in through the doorway comes like the most impressive physical specimen and one of the greatest athletes of all time, Bo Jackson. Me, a Nintendo fan from way back in the 80s and the early 90s, I'm like, “Oh my God! I played that guy in Nintendo all the time.” 

So he walks over to me and he’s like, “Hi, I’m Bo Jackson.” I said, “Yeah, I know who you are. I wouldn’t be a very good practitioner in sport if I didn't know who the only two time All-Star is in pro sport history in two different sports, in the NFL and Major League Baseball.” So he laughed and I said, “I played you a lot on Nintendo. You won me a lot of games on tech mobile.” He’s like, “Oh! You’re not the first one to say that.” 

Anyways, he said, “Are you talking today?” and I said, “Yeah, I'm going on next, I think, but you might had just bumped me,” and he’s like, “No, not quite. But what are you going to talk about?” and I said, “Well, I’m going to talk to the coaches about the mental game, the inner game, but specifically how to use an alter ego or persona to really unlock their capabilities on the field.” He looked at me kind of with this like a little bit of a shocked face and he kind of cocked his head to the side and he said, “Bo Jackson never played a down of football his entire life is like.” I was like, “Okay, interesting. Tell me more.” 

He was like, “Yeah. When people know my history, they know that I was actually a really angry kid, just filled with lots of emotion, and it sounds like that would work out well for you on the football field, but really what I did was I took a lot of bad penalties. I was not the most coachable kid because of it, and it was getting into some trouble. One night I was watching a movie and I saw this character come on the screen that was cold, calculating, methodical, unemotional and I thought to myself, “Wait a second. What if I brought that character on to the football field instead of this like angry and rageful and emotional kid? If I was unemotional and calculating and cold, that would seem to like help me out,” and the character that he saw on the screen was Jason from Friday the 13th. 

It doesn’t sound to most people, like an angry kid taking Jason out there would be a smart thing. Again, this is the power of our imaginations. It was his take away. It was the meaning that he took from that. For him, going out there and being more unemotional was going to help him perform better. So that's what he did. He took that out there and he said, “I'm sure you’re going to talk to kids about goals, but I had one mission and one mission alone, and that was just destroy anything that got in my path.” 

Now, again, in context, on that field of play called football, that mission serves that person. In business – And this is what – He did it so innately smart. That was the context. He didn't take Jason into business or into the classroom or anything like that that. That was where Jason lived, was out there on the football field. 

Same thing for me, I leave that Superman version of myself in business in my office, or on those moments of impact that matter to business. I don't take that home to my kids. That idea of myself is inspired by someone and something else. Then what happens is Cary Grant, this great Hollywood golden age actor in the 1940s and 50s, well-known for being like debonair, and charismatic, and well put together. He had this great quote near the end of his life where he said, “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be, and I finally became that person, or he became me, or we met at some point,” and that encapsulates just the perfect idea of this. 

The only thing that I would change in his quote is instead of I pretended to be, it’s I activated somebody I wanted to be, and I finally became that person. Id if you think of it like who you are today as a Venn diagram, there's a circle on the left-hand side and then maybe who and how you want to show up in another circle, and maybe they don't overlap perfectly right now with your performance. But the bridge between the two can be the idea of an alter ego or a secret identity to help bring and merge those together and then at some point in time you've actually become that new self naturally, if that makes sense. 

[00:41:32] MB: Yeah, that definitely make sense. I think it's important for somebody who's listening who might think to themselves, “Okay. So this is basically just fake it till you make it.” What would you say to one of those listeners? 

[00:41:42] TH: Not even close. Yeah. I mean, again, this gets back to the idea that people in the personal world have done a terrible job messaging a lot of things. Fake it till you make it. This has nothing to even remotely come close to that, because faking something till you make it, just that idea is about external. That's about trying to – Yeah, if anytime you’re trying to do something to deceive others or trick others, that's activating, or that's operating from what I call an outside-in approach, and you will always create – I talk about in chapter 3, a trapped self. Because any time you are being that influenced by what's happening on the outside world in order for you to operate on the inside, that's where you have this issue of being inauthentic. 

This is about really having people understand that at your core self, there is this unlimited possibility that sits inside of a human spirit and a human person, and that you are being very intentional. You're taking the power back. You’re deciding and choosing who and what you want to show up on that field so that you can get the results that you're really looking for, and that your field of play is far more representative of how you think you truly can perform. Nothing beats up a person more at the end of the day than when you put your head on a pillow and you beat yourself up with, “Man! I wish I would've said this instead of that,” or “I wish I would have spoken up,” or “Why didn’t I raise my hand?” or “Why didn't I ask for the sale when that person was – It was perfect fit for them.” There some sort of resistance there for people, and that's being inauthentic now. 

True inauthenticity is when you could be doing something and you're not doing it, and I know that to be true, because I've done this for two decades and I know how people beat themselves up. When you're not out there doing the things that you know you can do or want to do and something else is getting in the way, that really beats up people’s self-efficacy, their self-esteem, their self-confidence. A trusted friend, and alter ego, the other eye to help you navigate that with more grace to bring out those abilities helps to make that happen. So fake it till you make it is a terrible idea and it has nothing to do with leveraging an alter ego to help make that happen. 

[00:43:58] MB: That's a great point, and it gets back to this notion of self-sabotage, right? This idea that if you’re getting in your own way, if there're things you could or want to do that you're somehow not able to, then you’re sabotaging yourself. 

[00:44:15] TH: And instead of beating yourself up – Again, these are natural parts of the human experience. Every single person that has been listening to this, if you have been doubting this or you’ve been thinking like, “Oh! I can see how that works for an athlete or an entertainer, but how could this work for me?” Here’s what I want to remind you. Every single one of you, every single human being on the planet has already used this, because it's a part of the human condition. It's built into us. When we were children, we all played with this idea of pretending to be Superman, or Batman, or Wonder Woman, or a fireman, or a cowboy, or a nurse, or a teacher, or our favorite hockey player, or football player, or basketball player, “I’m going to go out there and be Michael Jordan.” That was you tapping into something that's innate, and then what happens? We start to grow up and we hear things like, “You got to start acting your age,” or “You just need to grow up.” 

We start to internalize growing up, meaning, “Oh! Me playing with those ideas is childish.” No. No. No. There’s a difference between childish and childlike. If people would actually approach a lot more of their life childlike, they would be a lot more playful, they would probably take it a lot easier on themselves and they would start exploring more of themselves and what they can do, because that’s what we always did as a kid. 

So this is not about handing people a brand-new idea. I say it in the book, this is about me causing people to remember something that's already inside of you, and in some cases almost giving people the permission to start doing it again, because you're not strange, you're not weird, you're simply joining a tribe of people that have been doing this for a very long time and helping them to achieve things that other people get amazed by. 

[00:45:58] MB: So for listeners who want to concretely start implementing this in their lives, what would be one piece of homework that you would give them as an action step to begin that journey?


[00:46:09] TH: Yeah. I mean, I’ll give them a couple here. So one is just define which field of play that it makes the most sense for you to possibly play with this idea for, and the easiest place to go to is what area of your life right now are you most frustrated with? It's so easy for people to think of in the context of say, media business and going out there and crushing it or whatever it is, but maybe actually it's with relationships, or its with your home life, or it’s with health and fitness, or whichever, but just first start with one field of play. Don't build out nine alter egos. Start with one to start playing with this idea, okay? So that’s step number one. 

Step number two, what are the traits that you most want to be bringing out there? When you think of like what would really help you succeed in that area. Are the things that you admire in other people, you’re like, “Oh! I wish I had that.” That's a signal. That's a signal of your creative imagination trying to nudge you in a certain way. 

So what would be those traits that you'd most like to bring out into that field? Okay? Is there anyone or anything that already embodies that right now? When you think of a favorite character from a book, like a fictional character or a nonfiction character that happened in history or something like that, is there someone that you'd most like to – Or that you're really drawn to? So that we can create form and shape. 

I mean, a big part of how our minds work is we’re storytelling machines constantly, right? By tapping into an existing story that's already been written because of someone else's life or in nature – I mean, Kobe Bryant, that's exactly what he did with the black mamba. I tell the story of how he came up with the black mamba and where he was inspired to get that idea from a movie that he was watching. 

So that kind of second step is where the superpowers or those traits you most want to start showing up that’s going to help you succeed. Is there anyone or anything that already has them to give you a better idea? Then as another step, is there anything that you could use then to help activate that, those superhero qualities or those traits out there? Like I did with glasses, or I did with the helmet, or other people have used bracelets, or wristbands in sport, or it could be your favorite shirt, it could be a uniform that you always wear, which is an extremely popular device that specially people in the tech space have used, weather it’s Steve Jobs, or Zuckerberg. That’s you being very intentional now about who and what is now showing up, because it’s that final moment where we’re, “Hey, when these glasses go on –” What ended up happening, Matt, was the arms of your glasses, they slide across your temple as you’re putting them on. After a while of doing this – Because I was being so intentional about how I was about to show up. It was almost like a switch was being flicked on and off when I took off the glasses. I was moving into a different self. But when I put them on, that switch was being flicked and I was stepping into that very specific self-built to help go and win on that field. 

[00:49:13] MB: Great pieces of homework and great advice. Todd, for our listeners who want to find you, your work, the book, etc., online, what's the best place for them to do that? 

[00:49:23] TH: Well, they can go to alteregoeffect.com, and we have like the links to all the different places around the world that you could buy it. Again, more information, some videos on there for people to read. My home base on the internet is toddherman.me. You can maybe learn more about me if you needed to, or see the other stuff that we've got going on, and of course all my social kind of links are on there too. 

[00:49:43] MB: Well, Todd, thank you so much for coming on the show, for sharing all these wisdom. Some really interesting strategies, great stories, and really practical ways to implement this. 

[00:49:54] TH: Thanks, Matt. Super appreciate it. 

[00:49:55] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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

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

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

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

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

The Hidden Brain Science That Will Unlock Your True Potential with Daniel Coyle

In this episode, we discuss the science of Talent. We look at how great talent is built into the very physical structure of the brain itself, explore the incredible importance of striving at the edge of your ability and staying there as long as possible, the vital importance of mistakes in the learning process, how a group of kindergartners beat a bunch of CEOs at a simple team-building exercise, a powerful tool Navy Seals use to make better decisions that you can apply to your life right now, and much more with our guest Daniel Coyle. 

Daniel Coyle is the New York Times Bestselling Author of The Talent Code, The Culture Code, several other books. He is a contributing editor for Outside Magazine and works as a special advisor to the Cleveland Indians. His most recent work focuses on how we can build cultures that last and high highly productive and his work has been featured on the TED stage and more.

• What is a talent hotbed? What are these little places that produce hugely disproportionate high achievers?

• How does the brain learn and what that has to do with Talent?

• What does great practice look like, what does great motivation look like,  what great coaching looks like?

• How do you learn a months worth of practice in 5 minutes?

• Repeatedly going to the edge of your ability, noticing your failure, and learning from it - that’s how great performance is built

• Modern science was deeply wrong about how the brain grows and responds - and the myelin (the wiring in your brain) grows 

• Muscle memory is a deep misnomer - all the memory comes from the wiring of the brain. 

• The faster and more accurately you build the wiring in your brain through deep 

• Great practice, great learning is really ugly - it's very effortful to hang out there and be in that place

• At most, you can really do this deep practice for 1-3 hours per day

• The 10,000-hour rule misses a key point - it's not just hours, but also quality reps

• Great talent is literally built in the physical structure of the brain

• The key idea is to REACH - get to the edge of your ability and play there - stay there as long as possible

• It’s not nature vs nature - it's not either or - its nature multiplied by nature 

• How do we learn at the edge of our growth zone?

• You should be aiming for a failure rate of 20-30% of the time

• If you’re failing more than that, move the target closer

  1. If you’re failing less, move the targets further away 

• This concept of learning at the edge of your comfort zone flips the entire idea of mistakes on its head - mistakes are WHERE the learning takes place 

• Mistakes are information that you can use for your next try - they’re a keep component of the learning process 

• Mistakes are the gift - they ARE the moment - when the learning is embedded in your brain

• If you flinch, turn away, and lose you the ability to learn from your mistakes

• Learning from your mistakes is not just a moral argument -it’s a physical reason - its a physical argument about your BRAIN STRUCTURE 

• Culture isn’t magic - it can be built - there are specific actions you can take to create a high-performance culture 

• The way to create feedback loops in business and areas with murky or long feedback loops is to define your scoreboard - define yourself against a very clear standard or dashboard for yourself - hold yourself accountable to metrics

• Define what you want - make the bar really clear

• Improvement comes down to 3 things

• Where are you?

  1. Where do you want to go?

  2. How will you get there?

• The first two pieces of that require a lot of reflection

• Learning = Experience + Reflection. Without the reflection, you won’t learn. 

• Get really specific on what skills you want to improve - and then build a process towards improving those skills and make it as measurable as possible

• Culture is not a mystical force - its something that’s really practical and specific

• When you look closer at cultures of high performance - you realize that there are specific activities 

• HBS study - different is net revenue for two identical companies with different cultures was 720% more net revenue over time 

• Culture is the MOST IMPORTANT THING you do in a group - it's your most important asset, it's your Achilles heel 

• “Signalling behaviors” - baked into us by evolution - can often short circuit 

• Being vulnerable and open builds trust - not the opposite 

• High-performance groups operationalize truth, vulnerability, and safety 

• Navy Seals “AAR” - After Action Review - hard conversation about what went wrong, what went right, what they’re doing to do differently next time 

• The most important words a leader can say is “I screwed that up"

• Groups that hide vulnerability are weak

• Leaders who are constantly radiating humility have more strength - humility takes strength 

• To be vulnerable at work - frame your vulnerability around learning

• How do you create a foundation of vulnerability in good cultures?

• Make sure the leader is vulnerable first and often

  1. Deliver negative things in person 

  2. 2 Line Email to your email

  3. One thing you want me to keep doing

     1. One thing you want me to stop doing

  4. Aim for warm candor and avoid brutal honesty. When you’re brutally honest you enforce a culture of brutality.

  5. Danny Meyer story - "If you don’t ask for help 10 times today, it will be a bad day"

     1. Give the truth, but give in a warm way

     2. When you make mistakes, I’m here to help - we are interconnected 

• How a group of kindergartners beat a group of CEOs at building a tower of spaghetti 

• Our mental model of group performance is wrong because it doesn’t include safety

  1. We are built to care about status - deeply wired into us is this worry about how we fit in and we’re constantly expending mental energy worrying about status 

• Group performance is not about how smart you are, not about how verbal you are - it’s about how safe you are

• How do we create psychological / status safety with those who we work with in order to foster a culture of high performance?

• Over-communicate safety

  1. Deliver a really clear signal of connection early on 

  2. Send a really clear signal that “I see you” “we are connected” 

• Smart groups use the first day, the first hour - to continually signal the basic human connective signals 

• Strong cultures over communicate their purpose by “a factor of 50x” - they talk all the time about their core principles and their core purpose

• Strong cultures have distilled what matters into a cohesive set of emotional GPS signals 

• Intensive questions about “what comes first” - really getting specific about what your values are 

• Build a map that show’s your organization what true north is - and be as vivid and explicit as possible about what that is

• Parables

  1. Stories

  2. Catch Phrases

  3. Images

  4. People

  5. Over-communicate what matters most to your organization 

• Do great cultures and organizations transcend conflict?

• We have a powerful instinct to hide away from negative moments and things we don’t like - and yet leaning into mistakes and problems is the best way to grow as an individual - and the best way to form strong organizations 

• Homework: “WSD” - Write shit down. Have a place and a time every day where you can get away from things and reflect on what happened. A cool calm place where you can reflect, trace threads, connect dots, reflect on your performance. This is the most powerful thing you can do. 

• “I've never met a high performer who doesn’t have a reflective habit"

Thank you so much for listening!

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

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

You can get started for free right now!

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

Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [SoS Episode] Research Reveals How You Can Create The Mindset of a Champion with Dr. Carol Dweck

• [Book] Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol S. Dweck

• [Wiki Article] Danny Meyer

• [Article] What a Marshmallow Reveals About Collaboration by The Build Network staff

• [Article] Does corporate culture drive financial performance? By Kotter

• [Personal Site] Daniel Coyle

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

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

In this episode, we discuss the science of talent. We look at how great talent is built into the very physical structure of the brain itself; explore the incredible importance of striving at the edge of your ability and staying there as long as possible, the vital importance of mistakes in the learning process, how a group of kindergarteners beat a bunch of CEOs at a simple team-building exercise, a powerful tool Navy SEALs use to make better decisions that you can apply to your life right now and much more with our guest, Daniel Coyle.

Do you need more time? Time for work, time for thinking and reading, time for the people in your life, time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our e-mail list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things that Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the e-mail list at successpodcast.com.

You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our e-mail subscribers. We recently pre-released an episode in an interview to our e-mail subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience, and that had tremendous implications because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the e-mail list first.

With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our e-mail list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live exclusive interview just for e-mail subscribers. There's some amazing stuff that's available only to e-mail subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the e-mail list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. Or if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you're on the go, you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44-222. That’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44-222.

In our previous episode, we discussed the foundations of evidence-based thinking, the important balance between habits and decisions and how each of them shapes who you ultimately become and dug into the idea that your decisions set their trajectory of your life, but your habits determine how far you walk on that journey.

From there, we explored how to build high-impact habits, what you need to do to determine the best habits to focus on first, how you can harness the power of the aggregation of marginal gains and much more with our guest, James Clear. If you want to crush procrastination and overwhelm, be sure to check out our previous episode with James.

Now, for our interview with Daniel.

[0:03:08.3] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Daniel Coyle. Daniel is the New York Times bestselling author of The Talent Code, The Culture Code and several other books. He's a contributing editor for Outside Magazine and works as a special adviser to the Cleveland Indians. His most recent work focuses on how we can build cultures that last and be highly productive. His works been featured on the TED stage and much more. Daniel, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:33.9] DC: Hey Matt. It's good to be here with you.

[0:03:35.4] MB: Well, we're very excited to have you on the show. I'd love to get started with, I mean, I think both of your – two of your biggest books, The Talent Code, The Culture Code have so much wisdom. I'd love to start with maybe this idea of individual talent and then when you move to looking at how we can collaborate and work in groups and build culture.

[0:03:54.8] DC: Yeah. Well, that's funny. That's how I started on this little journey. Got interested in his talent hotbeds and it sent me on this long trip I've been on for the last 10 years. I'd love to start there.

[0:04:05.1] MB: I think, even that statement is a great place to dig in. When you say talent hotbed, what is that and how did that spark this this journey?
[0:04:14.1] DC: We've all heard of these places and they're real. There are little places that produce statistically impossible numbers of talented performers. There's a place in Russia with chess players, there's a music camp in the Adirondacks that produces unbelievable players, there's a tennis club outside of Moscow called Spartak that produces more top 20 women than all of America did for a period of about 10 years.

We're all familiar with this idea, the little town in the Dominican that all the shortstops come from, we're all familiar with that and how unlikely it is. That mystery is what sent me on this journey with The Talent Code, where I went to find out what the hell's going on there? What's that all about? Is it something in the water? Is it something more?

The journey took me on this this deep dive into basically how the brain learns, and what great practice looks like, feels like, smells like, what great motivation looks like, feels like, smells like and what great coaching looks like. I found there was a pattern, that they all shared a pattern that is really clear when you look at the human brain. There's a certain practice that's happening there that improves your learning velocity. The subtitle of the book is that greatness isn't born, it's built. That's what I found out to be pretty much true.

[0:05:23.2] MB: There's so many ways I want to go from that and unpack what you said. Let's start with this simple idea of how the brain learns, in that journey to uncover these talent hotbeds, how did you start to peel back the layers and really understand how our brain really functions?

[0:05:40.4] DC: It started with going there, going to these places and seeing them involved in this certain practice that puts you on the edge of your ability. There's a story that I tell early in the book and it's of a clarinet player. Her name is Clarissa and she's part of this larger study that attract improvement for over years.

They were able identified these extraordinary moments where her learning velocity increased, where she learned. In this case, it was a month's worth of practice in five minutes. I was able to look at the videotape. What does that five minutes look like? We typically think of talent as something that just blooms and happens with effortlessness. What I found was exactly the opposite.
I mean, she's making mistakes, she's playing and then it's almost like she wants to drop her clarinet. She feels that mistake so intensely. She's so aware of what right is and what wrong is and she repeatedly goes to that edge of her ability, fails, notices the failure, learns from it and then moves again. That moment, which is really called deep practice is where her brain is being built, where she is building that brain.

Then you go a little deeper. I went to this fantastic doctor, Dr. Douglas fields who studies the brain and learning and a bunch of other stuff at the National Institute of Health in Maryland. He showed me this picture of something and it looked like electrical tape wrapping a wire. It was this spiral around a wire, and he started telling me about myelin.

Myelin is a brain substance that was thought to be inert for many years. It's basically the insulation around your wires of your brain. Like your brain is a bunch of wires and myelin is the insulation that lets the signal go from one spot to another. If you didn't have it, the signal would leak out and it's the same reason we got myelin on the cords that we're using to talk right now that insulates the wires.

He started telling me that modern science actually got it deeply wrong when it came to myelin. It wasn't inert. It grows and it grows in response to practice. They've actually done these brain studies where they can look at brains of say a piano player after 50 hours of practice, after a 100 hours of practice, after 200 hours of practice, and the myelin on those circuits in the brain grows in proportion to the hours that you spend.

In other words, every effortful rep earns you some new connections, every effort rep earns you another wrap of this insulation. When you get more insulation, I don't know if your audience is into electrical engineering, but the thicker insulation is, the faster the signal speed becomes. The thicker that myelin gets, the more you earn another wrap and earn another wrap and earn another wrap, you get better signal speed, which means you get better skill; this this idea of – we always talk about muscle memory. “Oh, he’s got great muscle memory.”

That's actually a deep misnomer. Muscles don't have any memory. They don't. All the memory comes in your wires of your brain. The faster and more accurately you build that machine between your years through deep practice, through going to the edge of your ability and repeating and learning, the better brain you build.
[0:08:34.2] MB: I love that idea of essentially cramming a month's worth of learning into five minutes by really being at the edge of your ability. That's really interesting.

[0:08:43.3] DC: It's beautiful to watch actually, because it's really ugly. It is not a pretty place to hang out, and it's very effortful to hang out there, which is why you can't do it in for five hours a day. You can't do it for 10 hours a day. Most the places I visited had really intensive practice for between one and three hours a day, and that's where they could really get the most done.

This idea that we have, and I think it's been fueled a little bit by the 10,000-hour number and this idea of great world-class experts, and so will only have to take 10,000 hours. That gives you a sense like, “Well, I just need to put more hours in, right? Now you were measuring hours.” It's actually a bad nudge, because don't measure hours, measure quality reps, measure – we often measure our practices by, “Oh, I spend an hour doing X.”

Don't measure it that way actually. Measure it by how many intensive reps you can get. For example, if you want to memorize part of a book, don't highlight it and go over it. That's been shown it doesn't work very well. The best way to do it is to read the book once, close it and then try to regenerate what's in the book. Actively put yourself in that [inaudible 0:09:48.6] spot of like, “Oh, I don't quite have it. I'm failing, but I've almost got it,” and try to generate that. As much as you can, make your rep active and reaching. The keyword is really reach, like to get to the edge ability and reach just past it. The more you can do that, the more effective your practice will be.

[0:10:05.7] MB: I think it's another really critical idea, this notion that talent is I mean, not something necessarily that you're born with, but it’s literally something that’s built into the physical structure of your brain through this, so this reach through this deep or deliberate practice.

[0:10:23.0] DC: It is. It’s liberating idea, and it comes with a few caveats. If we're talking about talent as pure speed, or pure ability to leap, no. Genes matter, you know what I mean? Genes are not important, right? We've always thought of this as nature versus nurture, right? Is this a nature or is a nurture? What the science is increasingly telling us is it’s nature times nurture. It's a multiplier. If you've got some natural proclivities and what you can do with quality practice is really deeply accelerate those through the active reaching.
[0:10:55.7] MB: Tell me a little bit more about this idea of reaching, or being at the edge of our growth zone.

[0:11:01.9] DC: Well, it's interesting. All reaching is not created equal, Matt. If I remember the first time I went downhill skiing, I was definitely reaching. I was 15-years-old, never really been on downhill skis before. I just flopped my way down the mountain. It was not pretty. I was definitely reaching, but I was way, way away from my target, and I didn't learn anything except how to fall really well.

What you should be aiming for is anything between – and it varies according to task, but aiming between making it between 70% and 80% of the time. You should be failing 20% to 30% of the time. That's a reach. If it's too easy and you're making it 90% percent of the time, you're probably not learning enough. If it's too hard and you're making it 10% at the time, you need to move the target closer, so that you can more accurately get it.

When you think about that reach, it really makes you reinterpret another word, which is the word mistake. When we fail, it feels really bad, and it feels we should stop and it feels it's a problem and it makes you turn away from it. What happens in these talent op eds and in other high learner environments is people really lean into that, because they realize that mistake is not a verdict. That mistake that you made is information. It's information that you can use for your next try.

It's like you're building a map, right? I'm trying to find Wichita on the map and if I reach toward Wichita and I have no idea where I am, it's hard to find where the right path is. If I know that I went to Kansas City, then I can go toward Wichita. I can use that to triangulate. Those mistakes are gifts, because they give you the edges in the field that you need and the information literally that you need to make us a more accurate reach next time.

[0:12:48.2] MB: The many ways that it almost seems like mistakes are where the learning is really taking place essentially.

[0:12:53.4] DC: Oh, my God. Mistakes are the gift. That is the moment. There's a really key moment. They've actually shown this on brain scans. I'm sure your listeners are familiar with Carol Dweck's work with Growth Mindset. They can actually identify the moment. It happens like 0.2 seconds after you make a mistake. In some people's brains they look intently at the mistake. What the hell happened there? I want to know, right? In other people's brains, they shut down and look elsewhere.

It's really a provocative question for all of us, like which one are we, right? When we make a mistake, there's that tendency to flinch and close your eyes. If you do that, you're losing a huge opportunity. If you make a mistake and you really get more interested, that's where the growth is going to happen.

[0:13:34.1] MB: Yeah. I mean, we're huge, huge fans of Carol Dweck. She's a previous guest on the show and her book Mindset, probably was one of the most transformational books that I ever read personally. I couldn't agree more about the theme that if you delude yourself into thinking that you haven't made a mistake, or you don't learn from your mistakes, there is so much self-sabotage happens, and it really all realms of learning and personal development.

[0:13:57.3] DC: Totally. We always think of that as being a moral point like, “Oh, you should learn from your mistakes, because it's the right thing to do.” It's actually also a neural point, right? You're actually having that opportunity to build – an unbelievable opportunity to build your brain that you're walking past. It's the right thing to do from being a better person point of view, but also from being a better learner.

[0:14:18.6] MB: I really like the way you phrase that. I mean, from the perspective of the myelin structures inside of your brain, if you're not learning from your mistakes, you're not allowing your brain to get wired in a way that's going to make you more talented and ultimately help you become more successful.

[0:14:31.7] DC: You're building habits, myelinating and building better wires for you to look away. All these things grow on each other. That's the other thing that got me interested as I went through the individual stuff, if we can in some ways make the turn toward culture here, because the power of a culture to create an environment where everybody is learning is incredibly cool.

The idea that certain leaders can send signals to say, “All right, we're going to make that safe. We're going to make it safe to really make mistakes and learn,” can have a huge effects on the overall learning of a group. I saw that. That's what got me interested in groups in the first place, because you'd walk into these hot beds and some of them just – they felt different, right? They felt really cool. They felt really connected.

We talk about that term chemistry, like that group has really great chemistry. We feel that when you walk into a great school, you walk around it, be around a great family, be around a great sports team, be around a great business. You walk in you feel that chemistry. We've always thought of that as magic, right? But it ain't. It's not magic. It's human signaling. They're aligned their behaviors with really powerful wires in our brain that help us generate closeness and connection and cohesion.

[0:15:39.5] MB: Absolutely want to dig in to all of that. There's one other thing I want to come back to before we go too deep down the culture rabbit hole, which is something that I constantly think about and struggle with. As somebody who's really done a lot of homework on this, I'm curious what your perspective would be. I can easily see how this deep practice and knowing when you're at the edge of your growth zone and all these things apply to things, like chess, or tennis, or discrete skills where it's easy to get feedback and measure the results. How do you think about applying this to things like business, or larger fields of interaction where there's really unclear long-term, murky feedback, or no feedback, or there's a huge amount of noise between action and feedback?

[0:16:23.4] DC: Right. Now that's a really cool question, and it's one that actually we faced a little bit in terms of some of the work I've done with the Cleveland Indians. Not with the baseball players so much, but with the on the baseball operations side, because we're trying to do what you're talking about, which is the big challenge there that I think you're speaking to is the fact that the world, especially the business world it's this really mushy place, right?

Like, did that meeting go well? Did that meeting not go well? How am I doing? If I'm shooting free-throws, I can add that up. I know my free-throw percentage, but what's my percentage on having good conversations with people, right?

I think the way to think about that space is exactly in-line with sports. You have to define your scoreboard, right? You have to create moments of reflection where you assess yourself on how you're doing against a clear standard. A lot of successful people I've seen build that standard for themselves. I've seen it like three or four times recently where people will build their own dashboard, right? It's a piece of paper that sits on their desk and it's got the key things they want to get done for the day and might have to do with learning this, it might be relational, might be connecting with a spouse, it might be something completely different, but the idea of constantly holding yourself accountable to some really specific metrics on what you want to do and really specific standards.

Making a bar really clear, this is where language ends up being massively important in defining what you want. Any improvement comes down to three things; you got to figure out where you're at, you got to figure out where you want to go, and you got to figure out how you're going to get there. Those first two pieces are really a lot of reflection.

In modern life, all learning is made of a loop. On the top you have experience, on the bottom is reflection. In our world, the world is filled with experiences. Carving out time to reflect, to really figure out, “Okay, where am I with my skills? Let's say my sales skills, or my skills at giving a pitch? Where am I with those skills? How can I assess that? Where do I want to be? Give me a really clear windshield of specifically the skills that I need to build.” Then I need to build a process for getting there.

I think a lot of times, we give a lot of credence to experience and a lot of lines of work. How do I become a better lawyer? Well, you just have to have a lot of experiences. How do I become a better baseball scout? Well, you just have to have a lot of experiences. That's what we're told. That's not actually true. You can build your own system, but it really hinges on figure out where you're at with reflection, figure out where you want to go by staring at greatness, who is great in your environment? How can you quantify that greatness and describe it? Then, build yourself a plan of daily habits for getting there.

[0:19:08.4] MB: I think that's a great answer, and especially the piece of both thinking about reflection and using those contemplative routines, or contemplative time, whether it's journaling, or thinking, or whatever to really step back and figure out how do I tie my experiences to what I want to take away from them and how I'm going to improve on them. Then I think marrying that with this notion of really measurable process-driven goals is a really comprehensive way to think about that. Thank you for such an insightful answer.

[0:19:36.7] DC: You bet.

[0:19:37.9] MB: Let's get back to this idea of culture now. I want to come back to something you touched on a moment ago, which is this notion that building great cultures isn't magic. It's not this voodoo thing. It's something that there's very practical, specific actions that you can take, and you've actually been out in the field and studied people like pro basketball teams and Navy SEALs and all these different realms of endeavor and found that it's not this impenetrable mystical force. It's something that's really practical and specific.

[0:20:11.0] DC: Mystical force. I love that, because that's exactly how we perceive it, right? Like, “Oh, man. Apples just got that thing, or Amazon, or whoever.” That idea is very sexy and pervasive, that they've got it and it's something they're born with. It's the group version of genes, right? They've just got that magical thing that lets them be awesome and we don't.

When you look closer at that – well, it's quite ironic actually that we view it with such – through such a mystical lens, because by far, when you look at the studies, there was a cool Harvard study that took 200 paired organizations, they were identical in every respect, except for one. One had a strong culture, one had a weak culture. Then they tracked them for 11 years. The difference in net revenue between strong culture and weak culture was 756%. Culture was worth that much 756% in that revenue, in performance basically.

Culture, it's this ironic thing because culture is by far the most important thing you do in a group. Ut's the most important asset that you have, it's your Achilles heel potentially. Yet, we regard it like it's some mystical smoke, which is crazy, because when you look underneath the smoke, what you see is this very old, very simple set of signals. Signal, they're called signaling behaviors.

There's certain behaviors that caused these ancient wires in our brains to light up and they have to do with some very fundamental evolutionary things, like safety. Am I safe? Am I not? Then the other one has to do with sharing risk. Are we sharing risk here, or are we not sharing risk together? The third has to do with where are we going?

A good visual for your listeners, if you're trying to think about what a great group looks like, picture a flock of birds moving through a forest, or maybe better, like a school of fish moving to a coral reef, thousands of fish altogether moving through this really complicated environment in real-time. That's what great culture is. When you look – watch Pixar make a movie, when you watch the Navy SEALs operate, it's connection, it's sharing of information. They're not hiding information. They're showing where each other is and it's clear direction of where the goal is, where are we going.

That image of those – of that school of silvery fish moving through the coral reef is exactly what they're achieving by sending these signaling behaviors of safety, like it's safe to be connected here, of sharing vulnerability, sharing risk and of purpose. This fundamental language is what the book is about.

[0:22:42.5] MB: I think it's great that you bring it back to how evolution has shaped our psychology. It's funny, the very first episode we ever did of the Science of Success many years ago was called The Biological Limits of the Human Mind and it was all about how evolution has baked in certain biases and behaviors into our brains. In most cases, they work really well, but occasionally especially in modern society which is not necessarily what our brains were designed for, they can often short-circuit.

[0:23:10.5] DC: Super exactly, exactly. One of the big ways it does that is around this notion of vulnerability. Typically, we're taught. If you and I are going to trust each other that we've got to build-up trust in order to be vulnerable, right? We're going to work together. We've got to build trust and then we can be vulnerable together.

In fact when you look at the science and you look at the experiments, we've got it exactly backwards. Being vulnerable together builds trust, being open together. There's some really cool experiments I talk about in the book where they pair people and ask them questions, one set of questions, one group gets one set of questions designed to create vulnerability. It asks something like, “When was the last time you sang in the shower?” People have to ask each other. Or, “Tell me one thing that you've always wanted to do and why haven't you done it?”

Another one it's just the other group just gets factual questions like, “Who's your favorite movie star?” At the end, they have them all do a cooperative act. The team that got vulnerable together performs better. They're better at cooperating and which really shows how backwards we've got it. Vulnerability, sharing weakness together is what builds trust. Great groups operationalize this.

They purposely create with the intent of an athlete training. They purposely create moments where people can get real and where people can be vulnerable and tell each other the truth about what's really happening. I mean, when the SEALs do a mission, whether it's a training mission, or whether it's Bin Laden. For the book, actually I end up talking to the guy who trained the people who got Bin Laden. They do something called an AAR, which is called an after-action review.

They get off the helicopter and they circle up and they start having a hard conversation about what went wrong, and about what went right, and about what they're going to do different next time. It can be a five or 10-minute thing. It's incredibly powerful. It's a hard conversation. It's really hard to admit, “Yep, I totally screwed that up.” It's the thing that lets them build a shared mental model of what they're doing. It’s the thing that lets than cooperate, just like the people in the experiment, cooperate better.

Actually, one of the commander that I spent time with, his name is Dave Cooper, he put it this way, he said, “The most important four words a leader can say are I screwed that up,” which was it was shocking to me in some ways. I thought Navy SEALs were supposed to be confident, and they are. The real confidence they have is that they can share weakness together. Groups that share their weaknesses are strong, and groups that hide their weaknesses are weak.

[0:25:34.8] MB: It's funny, that example about the Navy SEALs I thought was one of my favorite anecdotes from culture code, and especially that phrase, “I screwed up,” right? It's so often in our culture that we try to hide, or minimize and it comes back to what we're talking about earlier, right? Minimizing our mistakes, when in reality the best thing you can usually do is to take responsibility and own up to it.

[0:25:56.6] DC: Totally. For your sake, for the sake of your brain, but also for the sake of the culture because it makes it safe for others to do the same thing, and there's such – we're wired for status. We've got all of this impulses to preserve our status. It's really, what I saw in the places that I visited where that leader – world leaders who constantly radiated what you might call a backbone of humility.
We think of humility as being just a quality on its own. Like, “Oh, it's so humble.” Actually, it takes great strength. That's why it's really a backbone of humility, that it takes strength to be able to say, “Hey, I need you. I really need your help on this. Or, I do not know how to do that.” There's really cool ways to do that. I mean, especially for women, it ends up being sometimes hard to be vulnerable at work because it can be perceived as weakness and it would perceived with bias. The leaders I saw always framed their vulnerability around the learning.

There was a cool moment, an engineer at Google told me about he had used to work at Pixar. One day, they were hanging out as a bunch of young engineers and the head of Pixar came by, this guy named Ed Catmull who is a co-founder with Steve Jobs at Pixar. He came by and he just watched them. They got nervous. These are 20-something engineers working on a problem, and then Ed Catmull speaks up and he says, “Hey, when you guys are done, could you come up to my office and teach me how to do that?”

It was a really cool moment. The guy got goosebumps telling me about it happened 15 years before, but that way of expressing vulnerability around learning. We're not just going to say that were, “Oh, I'm not good at that. I'm done with that.” It's, “I want to learn that.” For a leader to send that signal is incredibly powerful.

[0:27:42.4] MB: Hey everyone. I wanted to take a quick second and tell you about this episode's incredible sponsor, Brilliant. Brilliant is a math and science enrichment learning platform. Brilliant is unique and that it teaches you these concepts through solving fascinating and challenging problems.

We'll be featuring a new sample problem to our e-mail subscribers every week as part of Brilliant’s support for the show, so be sure to check those out. Listeners have loved solving these sample problems in the past and Brilliant’s problems feature all kinds of cool scenarios from poker games to World War II airplanes. In fact, Brilliant explores many topics including computer science, probability, machine learning, physics and much more.

It's a great way to learn and an addictive interactive experience that's enjoyed by millions of students, professionals and enthusiasts around the world. You can get started today by going to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess for free. When you visit our link for a limited time, you'll also get 20% off of an annual subscription when you sign up, just for being a Science of Success listener.

Brilliant also has these amazing principles of learning, which showcase their passion and dedication to teach people these vitally important STEM skills. One of them is cultivating curiosity. From world champions to creative geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci, curiosity is such an important skill.

Another great learning principle from Brilliant is that math and science learning should be community-driven. Their incredibly engaged community is a great resource for chatting, learning and connecting when you're stuck, or can't solve one of their thought-provoking puzzles. Check out some of the amazing stuff going on at Brilliant.

Right now, you can go to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess to get started absolutely for free and save 20% off your annual subscription just for being a Science of Success subscriber. Once again, that's brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess for some incredible math and science learning. Be sure to check it out. Brilliant has been an incredible sponsor of the show for a long time, so check out what they're working on. It's really cool stuff.

[0:29:54.0] MB: I want to dig into – dig into the vulnerability a little bit more. Tell me about some of the – I think that that's a great way of framing around learning, but I'm curious what are some of the other – as you call them, ideas for action around cultivating vulnerability in a group setting and building a culture around, making a vulnerability acceptable?

[0:30:13.7] DC: Yeah. Really making sure that the leader is vulnerable first and often ends up being really important. Another related thing is delivering negative stuff in person. There's a lot of times when you got to give someone a no that you’re tempted to hide behind a text, or an e-mail, or a memo, or something like that. What I saw in good culture is a willingness to have that moment, where you're saying, “Look, this is a hard conversation to have, but we're going to have it.”
Actually at Facebook, Sheryl Sandberg asks her people, “Have you had a difficult conversation today?” Which is really pretty cool question. That ends up being a nice way to have vulnerability. Another way they could get sent is through something called the two line e-mail, and this is an idea that comes from Laszlo Bock who was former head of People Analytics at Google, now works for a startup called Humu. Laszlo says, “Send an e-mail to all your people. Make a habit of it saying, ‘Hey, tell me one thing you want me to keep doing and one thing you want me to stop doing.’” It's a really short e-mail, but it sends an extraordinary signal of connection and vulnerability and learning, willingness to learn. Tell me. I want to get better.

Another way to think about it is when you're talking about vulnerability and having real conversations is to aim for warm candor and avoid brutal honesty. When you talk about okay, we're going to have real conversations and tell each other the truth. There's a certain person in some organizations who gets real excited about that and like, “All right, we're going to be brutally honest together.” When you are brutally honest, you enforce a culture of brutality. What you should aim for instead is warm candor, which is when you send a signal of connection and I'm giving you this because I care about you, I'm interested in your development and also candor, I'm telling you the truth. Aim for warm candor and avoid brutal honesty.

[0:32:06.5] MB: I want to dig into that a little bit more, because I mean, being somebody who has read up on things like Principles by Ray Dalio and gone super deep into a lot of these rabbit holes, I think I may personally have a tendency to lean more towards the brutal honesty side of things. How do you think about really switching that, or cultivating warm candor instead of brutal honesty?

[0:32:28.1] DC: Use the camera. Deliver one signal, deliver a candor signal, but also pull the camera back to show the connections. One great example of that I saw – I studied Danny Meyer's restaurants. Danny Meyer runs some of the top restaurants in the world, known as a Gramercy Tavern.

I watched a woman named Whitney. It was her first day. She trained for six months to be a front-of-the-house waiter. She done all this training, this is her first day at the front of the house. Right before she was about to go out, her manager leaned over and said something to her. What did he say? Like, “Go get them. You can do it.” What he said was, “If you don't ask for help 10 times today, it's going to be a bad day,” which is really like a high candor.
I winced little bit when I heard it. That's high candor. You're going to make 10 mistakes today is basically what he’s saying. He’s also saying, “Look for me. Ask me for help 10 times today.” That’s a warm message. He delivered both. He gave her the truth. We expect he made mistakes safe. He put her on her learning edge. It wasn't like, “You better not make a mistake today.” It wasn't just mindless, good luck today, go get him. It was this in-between ground, which is uncomfortable to stand on, but it's like, you're going to make mistakes, and when you do, I'm here to help. We're a team.

It's really pulling that camera back and not just delivering the truth, but showing the interconnection between the people in the room, showing the interconnection between people who are there to support each other when they do fail. Makes that failure safe and makes the learning happen.

[0:33:56.2] MB: That's a great example. Correct me if I'm wrong, but am I thinking about this, it's almost like bring some emotional intelligence into that, into that honesty and think about how it's going to impact the other person and frame it more from perspective of caring about them and also being a resource for them to help them with whatever that particular issue is.

[0:34:17.9] DC: Exactly.

[0:34:18.8] MB: I want to come back to the concept of safety. We touched on it and then really went deep down the vulnerability rabbit hole, but I think that's a really important element as well. I know you tell story of these kindergarteners and how they defeated CEOs. Can you share that anecdote?

[0:34:38.0] DC: Yeah. This is my favorite one. I mean, this guy came up – Peter Skillman, he's this engineer and designer came for this contest. It was a super simple contest, right? Who can build the tallest tower with 20 pieces of raw spaghetti, a yard a tape and they had 18 minutes and a single standard-size marshmallow that had to go on top of the tower, right? Ready, set, go.

The interesting thing that he got was some CEO, some lawyers, some MBAs and groups of kindergartens, four-person teams, and they all start. Question is which one's going to win? They all start. All the adult groups start the same way. They talk, right? They're all talking. Then they suggest some ideas and then they hone those ideas and then they divide up roles and it's super smooth. It looks gorgeous. It looks so cooperative. It looks so polite. It looks so lovely.

Then over here you have the kindergartens and they're basically just eating marshmallows and it's complete chaos, right? They're taking stuff together and it's – if you had to bet your life savings on which one is going to win, most of us would bet on one of the adult groups, right? Because that's our mental model of group performance. When we see – it focuses on what we can see, which are individuals. When we see smooth, verbal, cooperative teams, we think it's going to be – it's going to work. When we see total chaos, we think it's not going to work well.

What ends up happening is the kindergartners win like every time. They beat the MBAs, they beat the lawyers, they beat the CEOs, and that's because our mental model of group performance is wrong, because it doesn't include safety. We’re built to care about status. Deeply wired in us is this worry of where we fit in, and that starts churning the second you put any human being in a group.

They're talking smoothly, but underneath their talking is this whisper, “Where do I fit in? Who's in charge here? Is it okay to say that?” It slows ideation, it slows creativity, it slows performance. Over with the kindergartners, they do not care. They do not care about status. They just are shoulder to shoulder, cramming stuff together, making it happen, building something, it falls down. What better feedback can you get to go back to where we started this conversation, than from making a great mistake together?

They learn from that mistake. They're able to churn out more tries and they get a better result. The adults usually do one try and it usually falls over, because they haven't anticipated how complicated this actually is.

It really gives you a new way to think about group performance, because it's ain’t about how smart you are. It really is not. It's not about how verbal you are, how well you talk. It is about how safe you are. Can you go shoulder-to-shoulder? Can you just start cramming stuff together and see what happens? That's what a good group does.

When you look deeply at the early days of Google, when you look deeply at the success of the San Antonio Spurs and the Navy SEALs, what you see are people who do not care about status, who are working shoulder-to-shoulder because they've created this atmosphere of safety, where their brains can relax and work together.

[0:37:38.6] MB: How do we start to think about creating that culture environment of safety with people that we work with?

[0:37:45.8] DC: Yeah, the first is to understand how the amygdala works, right? The amygdala is at the center your brain and it's the part that's a fight-or-flight alarm system. To understand how that works, you got to understand that it is super vigilant, it is constantly looking for micro-signals that you're not safe. When it does, it checks you out. It will start looking for the exit doors.

Understanding how important it is to over-communicate safety. That starts the first day, ends up being way more important I think than people think, the first hour. Delivering a really clear signal of connection early on that the previews further future connection that cares about the whole person – there was a cool experiment at a place called Wipro, which was a call center. They capture some of these lessons. They were struggling at Wipro. As a call center, they lost a huge percentage of their people every year. They figured, what can we do?

They tried this crazy experiment, where they changed training by one hour. The one hour – two groups. One group got the standard training. The other group got this training where instead of telling them about Wipro, they flipped it and they used the hour to ask questions. Like tell me new hire, what happens on your best day? What happens on your worst day? They asked them, if we were on a desert island and marooned, what skills would you bring to our survival?

Then they hired them all and then they went back seven months later and retention went up 270% in that second group. 270%, because they received a really clear signal that said, “I see you. We’re connected.” They over-communicated safety and they demonstrated that safety with behavior. Smart groups use that first day, that first hour to continually signal these very, very basic human connective signals.

When you get hired at Pixar, whether you're the barista, or a new director, you get brought into a room and the head of Pixar comes out and says the following sentence; he says, “Whatever you did before, you're a movie maker now. We need you to make our films better.” Then they have a meeting called The Daily, where they show the footage from the previous day, and anybody in the company can speak up and make an improvement or a suggestion. Anybody. A barista can raise their hand and say, “I think that color is off. I think those clouds look fake,” whatever. It ain't just the messaging, it's the messaging plus the behavior and the set of organizational habits that reinforce this very, very basic signal like, “Look, we're connected.”

[0:40:18.7] MB: I'm just clarifying this for the listeners, but it's essentially not a physical safety. It's more like, you're part of this community. We see you as a human and you're welcome here to express yourself and be yourself and you don't have to worry about your status.

[0:40:35.4] DC: Yes. Exactly right.

[0:40:37.1] MB: Let's move on to the concept of establishing purpose, which I know is the third building block of creating strong cultures. How do you think about what that means and how organizations can strive to do it?

[0:40:50.1] DC: Yeah. Somebody, when I start out on this journey I thought, “What purpose is something that seems to come from the organization's hearts and from their guts?” I didn't expect that they would talk much about it, especially the Navy SEALs. I thought they'd be quiet about their purpose. It turns out when you spend time in those communities, they over-communicate that stuff by a factor of 50.

The SEALs talk all the time about how they're the quiet professionals, which is funny because they talk all the time about how quiet they are. They talk all the time about shoot, move and communicate, and they talk all the time about how the only easy day was yesterday. They almost fill their windshield with these mantras. It ends up functioning like a mantra map, where they’ve distilled what matters into a cohesive set of emotional GPS signals, that really show what matters, that really, really show what matters.

The best the best story about purpose that I bumped into had to do with an event that happened in 80s, the Tylenol poisonings in 1983. Johnson & Johnson the maker of Tylenol got a call one day that, “Hey, your product just killed people in Chicago,” and some madman had replaced the capsules with poison and it killed innocent people. What happened next is Tylenol, just like that school of fish we were talking about before swung into action. They voluntarily pulled millions of dollars’ worth of product from the shelves. They dealt with total openness with the press against the advice of their lawyers. They went against the advice of the FBI to pull even more product from their shelves. They've developed safety packaging in a matter of weeks. I mean, it was absolutely incredible.

As a result, Tylenol still around. When you roll the clock back on that story like, why were they able to do that? That's amazing. Tylenol shouldn't exist today and yet, it does, because there was a leader at Johnson & Johnson, a guy named James Burke who a few years before had started to worry that his people lacked the purpose, that there wasn't a clear sense of direction of true north. He had created a series of what he called credo challenges, where people got together and had these intensive discussions around the question of what comes first.

Any business that anybody – you could have 10 things come first, right? Shareholder price comes first, quarterly report comes first. In Tylenol’s case, it could have been their relationships with hospitals, or their research and development. What they decided in those meetings was the patient comes first, the health of the patient comes first. They created this tremendous vivid consensus around what true north was.

As a result of those intensive conversations, when the crisis came, they all knew what true north was. Okay, should we pull the product? Yes. Should we develop safety packaging? Yes. They didn't have to debate it, they didn’t have to hesitate. They could act just like one giant brain. That to me illuminates how to use purpose in an organization.

You got to build a map. You got to build a map that shows what true north is and also what true south is, like what you definitely don't want to do, and be as vivid, explicit and flood the zone with really clear signals. Those signals can take the form of stories, parables, they can take the form of catchphrases, they can take the form of images, they can take the form of people, but to really over-communicate those – whatever 10 words matter most, whatever ten images matter most. Flood the zone, flood the windshield with that clear sense of purpose.

[0:44:21.6] MB: You also talked about in our pre-show conversation, you mentioned this idea that many people think that organizations that have a really healthy culture are conflict-free and yet, that wasn't necessarily what you uncovered in your research.
[0:44:35.9] DC: Totally. That's funny. When I got into this, I thought, “I'm going to get to Pixar and the SEALs and San Antonio Spurs and I'm going to find these magical places that transcend,” right? They're just awesome. I actually didn't find that at all. They have conflicts. These are incredibly successful places. They probably have more conflicts because of the way, because of the honesty with which they confront their core tensions.

Every organization – there's no such thing as over the rainbow where you'll ever get to a place where tensions will go away. What you can do though is face toward them. Face toward the real problems that you have, and that's what makes those groups I think unique, and it ultimately gives them a strong culture. The idea that continually being aware of those tensions that they face and those problems that they face and never hiding from them, but instead creating honest conversation around them.

[0:45:29.6] MB: I think that comes back to the same theme in many ways we've been talking about throughout this conversation, this idea that owning up to your challenges, facing reality, facing your mistakes is one of the core components of not only individual performance, but the performance of high-functioning groups as well.

[0:45:46.4] DC: It's so true. It really is. We have this powerful instinct to hide away from those moments, and to flinch away from them as organizations and as individuals. It doesn't mean they don't hurt. They still hurt, but leaning into that pain and using it. It's funny, because it's only in recent years, like I'll do a metaphor with physical fitness, right?

For many years, it was thought it was unhealthy to run long distances, or unhealthy to lift heavy weights, right? Until about the 70s when we discovered how the aerobic and anaerobic engines work. It turns out, pain is a good thing in a way, because it tells you where the edge is and by experiencing it and pushing your body to the edge, you actually get stronger.

I think what a lot of the science that we have now shows us that cultures and groups are built exactly the same way, by experiencing that vulnerability and risk and pain together, that is what makes groups stronger too. Leaning into that moment as painful as it is, ends up being the place where growth happens.

[0:46:49.8] MB: For listeners who want to concretely start implementing some of these ideas into their lives, what would be one piece of homework that you would give them as an action item to begin implementing some of these ideas?

[0:47:03.0] DC: Yeah. I think the main action item, I've heard it described would be WSD, which stands for write shit down. I think in our lives, we often have a lot of experiences and we presume that learning is going to take place, but actually having a place at a time every day where you can get away from things and reflect on what happened today, whether that's what your individual skills are with your group, to actually have a cool calm place where you can really reflect and see and start tracing the threads and start connecting dots and start setting goals and start reflecting on your performance and figuring out what where you want to go and how you're going to get there. To me, that that's the most powerful thing.

I haven't met any really high-performers that didn't have some way of capturing experience. Some way of really WSD and giving you an opportunity to layer on and reflect and see and learn, and that's what it's all about.

[0:47:54.8] MB: For listeners who want to find you, your work, etc., online, what's the best place to do that?

[0:47:59.7] DC: danielcoyle.com would be a good place to start.

[0:48:03.7] MB: Awesome. Well Daniel, thank you so much for coming on the show sharing all this wisdom. Really, really fascinating work and researches you've done and some great conclusions from all of that research.

[0:48:14.9] DC: It’s fun spending time with you, Matt. Let's do it again sometime.

[0:48:17.8] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

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

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

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

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

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

When the Impossible Becomes Possible - The Secrets of Flow Revealed with Steven Kotler

In this episode we discuss how the impossible becomes possible. We look at how to create paradigm shifting breakthroughs, dig into the science and research at the frontier of peak human performance to understand what’s at the core of nearly every gold medal or world championship - the powerful concept of flow. How do we create flow in our lives, how can we use it as a tool to become 400% more creative and learn skills 200% faster? We dig into this and much more with our guest Steven Kotler. 

Steven Kotler is a New York Times bestselling author, an award-winning journalist and the cofounder and director of research of the Flow Research Collective. His most recent work, Stealing Fire, was a national bestseller and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. Steven’s work have been translated into over 40 languages and appeared in over 100 publications, including The New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Wired and TIME.

• Wherever people are taking huge risks to change the world, you find flow 

• How do you create Paradigm Shifting Breakthroughs?

• Whenever you see the impossible become possible you see two things:

• People leverage and take advantage of disruptive technology

  1. People finding ways to extend human capacity

• Peak performance is about being fanatical - repeating, week after week, year after year, for your entire career. You have to have that level of hunger, motivation, and drive

• Steven’s work is focused on studying the peak performance state known as Flow

• How can we use Flow to massively level up performance?

• Major Characteristics of Flow

• Flow is definable - it has  core characteristics

  1. Complete Concentration

     1. Time Dilation

  2. Flow is measurable

  3. Flow is universal

  4. Flow is a spectrum experience - you can be in micro flow or macro flow

  5. Flow often mistaken for a mystical experience before it was measured and studied

• Similarities and differences between flow and addiction?

• What’s the relationship between the Brain’s default mode network and flow?

• People who have the highest life satisfaction have the most flow in their lives

• Every gold medal or world championship that’s been won - had flow at it’s core

• McKinsey did a 10 year study on flow - it made top executives 500% more effective

• Flow creates a 400% - 700% increase in creativity

• Can that really be true?

  1. What is creativity?

• Soldiers learn skills 230% faster in flow states

• What is creativity and how do you measure it?

• The act of creating

  1. Problem formation, idea generation, pattern recognition

• Triangle of High Performance - the foundational principle of ultimate performance in today’s world

• Motivation

  1. Creativity

  2. Learning

• When you’re in a flow state you’re actually using LESS of your brain not more of it

• Your brain is burning a lot of energy and so it shut’s this part of the brain down

  1. As your need for concentration goes up, the brain starts shutting down non-critical areas to maximize attention

• Why does time pass so strangely in flow states?

• Your sense of self falls apart when you move into a flow state - increasing your performance

• Flow shifts your brain wave function profoundly

• Flow also creates a huge dump of positive neurochemicals and stress hormones are flushed out of your system and replaced with “big five” neurochemicals

• All five of these chemicals are pleasure drugs / reward drugs 

• Flow is one of, if not the most, addictive experiences on earth

• Creativity is recombinatory - it’s what happens when your brain combines new ideas with old information and creates something new

• It’s early days in flow research - but neuroscience is still trying to figure out huge pieces of the data and research

• Flow is a tool, it can be used for good, it can used for ill

• Playing a video game puts you in a flow state

• Anybody can access flow because flow stats have triggers - flow is universal provided certain initial conditions are met

• One of the most important triggers is the challenge/skills balance - when the challenge slightly exceeds our skillset

• Complete Concentration is the #1 Necessary Pre-Requisite for Creating Flow States

• “F*ck Off I’m Flowing"

  1. You need 90-120 min periods with total concentration

  2. No email, no pop-ins, no distractions, etc

• How do you tune the challenge/skills balance to trigger flow states?

• If your challenge can be 4% greater than your skills you’re in the right zone

  1. Its totally arbitrary - it changes every day for every individual - and even within individuals 

• Discomfort is a great trigger to know you’re about to get into a flow state

• Peak performers have the problem of biting off too much of a challenge - puts too much fear into the equation and ends up blocking flow and locking yourself out of peak performance

• Chunk those challenges into smaller and smaller sub challenge until they’re “slightly challenging”

  1. You have to go slow to go fast

• “Let my people go surfing” - Patagonia

• Training up flow while you’re surfing trains the brain to enter flow states in general

  1. Heightened creativity lasts for several days

  2. Conscious altered and being focused is usually 1-1.5 hrs

• How long do flow triggers carry over from fun activities?

• You can’t live in flow all the time 

• Struggle

  1. Flow

  2. Recovery

• You have to move through the whole cycle before you can restart a flow state

• A place where most people screw up Flow - they take the amplified creativity from flow and ride it til the very bitter end until they are very exhausted. That makes it more difficult to jump into flow the next time. 

• Take yourself near the end and then call it quits. 

• Rest & Recovery is a core component of repeatedly re-entering flow states

• Naps

  1. Breaks

  2. Reset your consciousness/ focus on another problem 

  3. Active recovery protocols are really important

  4. Watching TV and drinking a beer is not a good recovery protocol

     1. Meditation

     2. Long Sauna

     3. Yoga

     4. Hot bath, massages

• The intersection of flow states and the Science of Spirituality

• The same neurobiological states from flow show up in the same place as mystical experiences, psychedelic states, states of awe, near death experiences. All of these experiences neurobiologically are very very similar.

• There is biology behind our mythology - mystical experiences are very similar to flow states. 

• Psychedelics are super powerful for healing capacity, but there are some positive applications to boosting creativity and more. 

• Psychedelic experiences are biologically indistinguishable from spiritual experiences

• Oneness with everything - the perennial philosophy - in every major tradition on earth

• From Tibetan buddhist to Franciscan nuns - the brain experience of being “one with everything” is the same

• In Science, at every level of scale you see one-ness. The separation from the universe is a controlled illusion maintained by the brain. From quantum cells to stardust - we are one with the universe. 

• We don’t live in reality - we live an estimated construction built by our brain. We create reality as we go along. 

Thank you so much for listening!

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

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

You can get started for free right now!

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

Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Book] Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

• [Book] The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

• [Book] Stealing Fire: How Silicon Valley, the Navy SEALs, and Maverick Scientists Are Revolutionizing the Way We Live and Work by Steven Kotler and Jamie Wheal

• [Book] Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

• [Wiki Article] Marsh Chapel Experiment

• [Website] Andrew Newberg

• [Website] Flow Research Collective

• [Personal Site] Steven Kotler

• [SoS Episode] Seven Catalysts To Creating Progress and Becoming A More Effective Leader with Dr. Teresa Amabile

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

Episode Transcript

[00:00:19.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:12.0] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than 2 million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the Self-Help for Smart People Podcast Network.

In this episode, we discuss how the possible becomes possible. We look at how to create paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, dig into the science and research at the frontier of peak human performance to understand what's at the core of nearly every gold medal and world championship; the powerful concept of flow. How do we create flow in our lives? How can we use it as a tool to become 400% more creative or learn skills 200% faster? We dig into this and much more with our guest, Steven Kotler. 

Do you need more time? Time for work time for thinking and reading? Time for the people in your life? Time to accomplish your goals? This was the number one problem our listeners outlined and we created a new video guide that you can get completely for free when you sign up and join our email list. It's called How You Can Create Time for the Things That Really Matter in Life. You can get it completely for free when you sign up and join the email list at successpodcast.com. You're also going to get exclusive content that's only available to our email subscribers. 

We recently pre-released an episode and an interview to our email subscribers a week before it went live to our broader audience, and that had tremendous implications because there is a limited offer in there with only 50 available spots that got eaten up by the people who were on the email list first. 

With that same interview, we also offered an exclusive opportunity for people on our email list to engage one-on-one for over an hour with one of our guests in a live, exclusive interview just for email subscribers. 

There are some amazing stuff that's available only to email subscribers that's only going on if you subscribe and sign up to the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage, or if you're driving around right now, if you're out and about and you’re on the go you and you don't have time, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. 

In our previous episode, we discussed how to make better decisions under conditions of uncertainty. We look at the worst call in the history of football, discussed examples from life, business, and even high-stakes poker to understand how to make the best possible decision in a world filled with unknowns. 

What exactly is a good decision? Is that different from a good outcome? We look at this key question and uncover the wisdom hidden in the reality that these two things might be completely different. All of these and much more with our previous guest, Annie Duke. 

Now, for our interview with Steven. 

[0:03:01.3] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Steven Kotler. Steven is a New York Times best-selling author, award-winning journalist and the cofounder and director of research of the Flow Genome Project. His most recent work, Stealing Fire, was a national bestseller and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. His work has been translated in over 40 languages and appeared in over 100 publications including the New York Times, The Atlantic, Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and much more. 

Steven, welcome to The Science of Success. 

[0:03:28.9] SK: Matt, thanks for having me. 

[0:03:29.8] MB: Well, we’ve very excited to have you on the show today. As I was kind of telling you in the preshow conversation, I’m a big fan of your work and I’ve been reading your books for a number of years. So it's great to have you on the show and kind of dig into some of the stuff you've been working on recently. 

[0:03:42.8] SK: Thank you. It’s really nice you say. 

[0:03:44.3] MB: So I want to start out with one of the ideas that you've written and talked about and I find really interesting, which is this kind of notion of creating paradigm-shifting breakthroughs. What exactly does that mean and how did you kind of come to the place of sort of thinking about those? 

[0:04:00.6] SK: At sort of at the center of the work I do has always been a kind of a singular question, which is; what does it take to do the impossible? What I mean by that is what does it take to achieve paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, or huge kind of levels up and in-game, and this is cross domains, right? I was interested in sports, in science, in technology, in business, wherever people are taking on huge and significant challenges. That’s sort of where you find me, and usually what you see is whenever you see the impossible becoming possible, in my experience you see one of two things interacting, right? You see people leveraging and taking advantage of disruptive technology and you see people finding ways to extend human capability. So I tend to play at the intersection of those two things. 

[0:04:50.2] MB: So I want to dig into that a little bit more. When you talk about this kind of idea of making the impossible become possible, and I know you’ve studied in many cases kind of worked alongside these people, like extreme athletes and really peak performers. Are these lessons that can actually be applied to sort of individual normal people or do they only really work for kind of extreme athletes and astronauts and these kind of top people?

[0:05:16.0] SK: Two-part answer, all right? I’m going to give you the user-friendly part one is, yes, of course. I mean, that's one of the amazing lessons of this kind of work. Bold, essentially – Abundance is a book about people solving impossible challenges in the world with technology. Bold is a book for how anybody can solve those challenges in the world of technology and build business around the ideas and such. Bold is the application of that stuff. 

Rise of Superman looks at action, adventure sports athletes who are extending the bounds of physical possibility, redefining kind of the physical limits of those species, and it kind of breaks down a little of how. I think Steel and Fire gives you much more of the application of that in ordinary lives. It takes an out of action sports, takes my research on flow, and talks about how it’s showing up everywhere from business, to technology, entrepreneurship, and so forth. So I think that the part one of this answer is, yes, of course. 

I think part two is peak performers have their ferocious about peak performance, and I always say if you're interested in this stuff and you want to know what are the three things you can do Monday morning, you're applying the wrong game. You’re not actually interested in peak performance. Because the truth of the matter is it's three things on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, repeat, week after week, year after year for a career. That's what you see with peak performers. You have to have that level of hunger. You have to have that level of motivation and drive. 

So the answer is, yeah, anybody can do this stuff. The tools and the techniques, the technologies are available to everyone at this point. They’ve absolutely been democratized across the boards. The question is; does the individual actually want this? You actually want to tackle those kind of challenges? You're going to suffer enormously along the way, but you probably can get it done. 

[0:07:20.3] MB: I want to dig in to this a little bit more. When you talk about kind of – You talked about the two components that make the impossible possible, which is technologies, or disruptive technology and extending human capacity. I want to look at specifically on the side of extending human capacity and some of the work and the research that you've done at that, at kind of the Flow Genome Project. What does that mean and how do you sort of think about extending human capacity?

[0:07:44.0] SK: The Flow Genome Project, we study the peak performance stake, known as flow, and we’re a research and training organization. What we’re interested in is how can we use flow to massively level up performance? That’s essentially the heart of the work we do. For those who aren’t familiar with the term, flow has a lot of synonyms, runner's high, being in the zone, being unconscious. It’s technically defined as an optimal state of performance when we feel our best and we perform our best. 

More specifically, it refers to any of those moments of rapid attention and total absorption. It’s so focused on the task at hand that everything else just seems to disappear. Action awareness will kind of merge together, your sense of self will vanish, time passes strangely. It will slow down. Sometimes you get a freeze-frame effect, memories from a car crash. More frequently, it speeds up and you get so engrossed in what you're doing five hours passes by in like five minutes. Throughout all aspects of performance, both mental and physical, go through the roof. So whenever you see the impossible become possible, you’re seeing people leveraging flow to make that happen.

[0:08:55.9] MB: And I want to get into and spend some time talking about kind of what creates flow and how we can cultivate it in our lives. But before we dig into that, I want to understand a little bit more about sort of what happens when somebody's in a flow state and maybe some of the results that you've seen around how being in flow can create kind of a massive impact on performance, productivity, etc. 

[0:09:17.1] SK: Great question. So flow – Let me put it in sort of a historical context for you. Flow science is pretty old. It stretches back about 150 years, to the late 1870s. That’s when the first studies on flow were actually done. 

So the idea that an altered state of consciousness, which is what flow technically is, could impact performance substantially is very real. It gets sort of this great leap forward in the 1960s and 70s because of a man named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He’s so often described as the godfather of flow psychology. 

He taught us five things about flow that are really critical that I reach now, and the first one sort of answers your question, which is he discovered that flow is definable. The state has eight core characteristics, and I mentioned some of them before. It starts off with complete concentration in the present moment, the vanishing of self, time passing strange, which is technically called time dilation, and so forth. 

So because it’s definable, it is also measurable. We have really good psychometric instruments. We don't have physiological flow detectors at this point, though my organization, the Flow Genome Project, is working on that, but we are getting to the point that we really trust the cycle of go metrics. So we can measure it off of these core characteristics. 

Csikszentmihalyi also discovered that the state is universal. So it shows up in anyone, anywhere, provided certain initial conditions are met. He also figured out that it's a spectrum experience. So you can be in a state of micro flow, and this happens to most people all the time. You ask for more of a description of the state. 

So micro flow is when only couple of flow’s characteristics show up at once, or maybe more of them show up that they’ve dialed down on low. So for example, you sit down to write that quickie email, and you look up an hour later and you've written an essay, right? Creative brilliance is just flown out of you for the past hour. Your focus was really intense. You were focused there. Maybe you sort of forgot bodily functions. You had to go to the bathroom and you didn't notice until you sort of pop back up. You felt it had a tremendous amount of control over your writing. One idea flowed into the next, into the next, into the next, which is by the way where flow's name comes from. That experience of every decision and every action flowing seamlessly and effortlessly from last is where we get the name of the state, and it was Csikszentmihalyi nemed it for that reason. 

Then you can have macro flow, which is when all the characteristics show up at once, and for a really long time, I mean the first seven years of flow research, people thought they were having mystical experiences, because then you were having – Time was slowing down and people are often having all kinds of like intuition was so loud and like the ideas that were flowing forth were so creative that it really felt like a force greater than yourself was sort of in control, and that's a macro flow state. 

It wasn't until Abraham Maslow did research on it in the 50s, and he found flow was common among all successful people, and everybody in his study group was an atheist. So suddenly, Oh, wait a minute. This isn’t a mystical experience reserved for spiritual and religious people. This is open to anybody interested in success,” and that sort of where that that went away, but kind of spectrum experience of it has made it really sort of hard to diagnose over the years. 

Did that answer your question?

[0:12:47.1] MB: Yeah, I think that's great. I have sort of a follow up to that, but before we dig into that, I have almost sort of a medic question for you. As somebody who studied flow really deeply for years and years and years and obviously dedicated a tremendous amount of time and energy to it, we actually have an upcoming interview with Mihai Csikszentmihalyi. I'd be curious, what would you want to ask him?

[0:13:07.5] SK: We’ve been in contact over the years, and in fact we are – The Flow Genome Project is now teamed up with a researcher in his lab and we’re building a flow and addiction study. We want to look at the similarities and differences between flow and addiction. 

Sort of ask him some of the stuff that I’ve wanted to ask him. If I had a chance, I've heard lately that he's been talking more about the relationship between the default mode network and flow. This gets more into the neurobiology of flow. So I would have questions around that and some of his new thinking there. 

We have a couple of spots that his ideas don't agree with our ideas, and some of the is work that we’ve been testing and studying and trying to get more clarification on, and I might bring those things up. But they’re not going to make sense until I tell you more about flow. 

[0:13:58.3] MB: Fair enough. Well, then let's get back into it. I'm curious the kind of impact, the importance of flow in terms of some of the results you've seen in the data, the research, etc. 

[0:14:07.3] SK: Oh, yeah. That was the second half of your question, which I failed to answer. My bad. All right. Csikszentmihalyi does his big work in the 60s and 70s, and suddenly we know that flow is universal, it’s definable, it’s measurable, it’s all of these, and it’s well established at this point, that flow is performance, and this is one that sort of Csikszentmihalyi’s last finding and starts to get at your question. 

His last finding and maybe his most important finding is that flow appeared to be the source code of not just kind of a peak performance, but the source code for overall well-being and life satisfaction and meaning, and this is one of the things that showed up. He conducted what was then one of the largest studies ever done in optimal side. This is what he discovered, is that the people who score off the charts for overall life satisfaction and meaning and such are the people who have the most flow I their lives. 

So that was kind of the first look at, “Oh, wow! This stuff is really important.” Then people started to ask the question, “Well, if this is optimal performance, how optimal? What are we actually talking about? What does that look like? Can you measure it?” 

What we now know is in sports, pretty much every gold-medal or world championship that’s been won, flow stayed in his heart. Flow is responsible for major progress in the arts, major breakthroughs in science, technology, business. We have really compelling work done by McKinsey. They did it 10 year study looking at looking at flow and business and top executives reported being five times more productive in flow than out of flow. So that’s 500% more productive. That means you could go to work on Monday, spend Monday in a flow state. Take Tuesday through Friday off and get as much done as everybody else. Huge increase in productivity. 

We are now starting to get much clearer as we get better at kind of understanding where flow comes from. We’re starting to be able to kind of break apart productivity and we’re now seeing flow, for example, and I can explain why. All these will make more sense if I explain the neurobiology with flow has a huge boost on motivation, huge impact on creativity. Studies are showing a 400 to 700% boost in creativity when you're in flow. We found that that heightened creativity, [inaudible 0:16:17.5] worked at Harvard outlast the flow state by a day, sometimes two. 

We’ve found – This is research done by advanced brain monitoring junction with The Department of Defense, that soldiers and radar operators in flow, for example, learn target acquisition skills 230% faster than normal. 

So huge step functions worth of change in flow, and we’re seeing this across the board. I mentioned in our preshow conversation that we just did some interesting work on creativity and flow, and I can't talk too much about it before it’s published. One of the things we looked at is, as I mentioned, there were these 400 to 700% increases in creativity and we went, “Oh, that's amazing! Can that actually be true? What do we really mean by creativity?” 

So we borrowed some ideas from – We did sort of a meta-analysis of creativity and psychology and how do you measure it and settled on five subcategories for the process component of creativity, which is the act of creating, not the product, not the outcome, nothing like that, but just the act of creating itself. We looked at everything from like problem formation, through idea generation, pattern recognition and so forth. We were using a Likert scale. So 50% boost is the most we could measure on our scale, but it was all 40%, 50% boost in all these subcategories in creativity. 

So when you start peeling back the hood, underneath creativity, you will also see these kinds of boosts. You just got to think about it in terms of your audience for a second. Motivation, creativity and learning are the three sides that are so-called high-performance triangle. They’re the foundational skills we need for thriving in the 21st-century. So huge impact on performance both at an elite level and at a normal level.

[0:18:11.0] MB: So we like to dig into the science on this show. Let's get into a little bit of the neurobiology and how that sort of flow states impact things like learning and motivation and creativity.

[0:18:20.9] SK: So when you ask questions like that, you usually want to know four things. I'm not going to fill you in on all four, but I just want to tell you that we’re leaving some stuff out. But you want to start with neurooanatomy. Where in the brain something is taking place? Flow is interesting, because  the old idea of ultimate performance was that – You probably know this. You’ve heard this. It’s 10% brain method. It’s, “Hey, you're only using a small portion of your brain under normal conditions. So performance, a.k.a. flow, must be the full brain on overdrive.” 

It turns out we had it totally, completely backward. In flow, we’re actually not using more of the brain. We’re using less of it. What happens is what's known as – I’s technically known as transient hypofrontality, transient means temporary. Hypo, H-Y-P-O is the opposite of hyper. It means to slowdown, deactivate. Frontality is the prefrontal cortex. Part of your brain that’s right behind your forehead. 

Prefrontal cortex is really a powerful part of your brain. It does a lot of good things for you. Complex logical decision-making, long-term planning, sense of morality, sense of will. All these things are important. But in flow, this whole portion of the brain gets shut down and it's technically an efficiency exchange. The brain burns a lot of energy. It’s always looking for ways to conserve, and as your need for intense concentration in the present moment goes up, more attention, right? The brain starts shutting down noncritical areas to maximize attention. As a result, you get a lot of flow’s core characteristics. 

So for example, why does time pass so strangely in flow? Time is actually calculated all over the prefrontal cortex. It’s sort of a network effect. Like any networks, node start to shut down. The network starts to collapse. In flow, what happens is we lose the ability to separate past, from present, from future. Instead we’re plugged into what researchers call the deep now, sort of an internal present. Same thing happens to your sense of self. Self is actually a bunch of different structures in the prefrontal cortex. Couple of other parts of the brain as well. 

Again, as the prefrontal cortex starts to shut down, your sense of self disappears. A huge impact on performance. When part of your brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, one part of the prefrontal cortex shuts down, that’s where your inner critic lives, so that nagging, always on, defeat this voice in your head. When you move into flow, that voice disappear. It goes silent. As a result, we experience this emotionally, first of all, is liberationist, is freedom, right? We are literally getting out of our way, but what we see on the backside is creativity goes way up, because you’re no longer doubting all of your need ideas. 

Risk-taking goes way up. So bringing those need ideas out into the world, for example, which is a risk that you have to take goes up. So that's what we’re seeing in terms of neural anatomy. A slightly larger version of that, we see networks. You've probably heard of the default mode network by now. This is one of the network systems that also governs your inner critic, and a lot of meditative practice is knock it out, turn it off. Same thing happens in flow. Your default mode network gets very, very, very quiet in flow. 

We have shifts in brainwave function that I'm not going to talk about, and then we have profound changes in neurochemistry, which is the last thing I’m going to talk about, and this is really where you see a lot of the performance boosts that you asked about earlier. So in flow, most of – We get a big dump of five of the most potent neurochemicals the brain can produce. This is dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, anandamide and endorphins. Flow appears the only time we get all five of these at once. What really happens is as you move into flow, stress hormones are flushed out of your system and they’re replaced with these big five neurochemicals. 

All five of them do a bunch of different things. They’re all performance-enhancing chemicals. On a physical, they’ll increase muscle reaction time, they’ll deaden our sensitivity pain, strength will go up, those sorts of things. Cognitively, they’re much more interesting, and I want to not break them down sort of in terms of motivation, learning and creativity, the three things I hit upon earlier. 

So all five of these chemicals are pleasure chemicals. They’re pleasure drugs. They’re the World War of drugs. Rarely do you get all five at once. Just to put this in context, romantic love, which many people identify as one of the greatest feelings on earth is mostly dopamine and norepinephrine. Two out of the five chemicals that you’re getting in flow. So flow is this huge burst of feel good neurochemistry. It makes it one of if not the most addictive experience on earth. Psychologist hate that term. So they call it the source code of intrinsic motivation. But when McKinsey found that 500% boost in motivation was the shift in neurochemistry that made it possible. 

Same thing happens with learning. Which shorthand for how learning works in the brain. The more neurochemicals that show up during an experience, the better chance that experience will be tagged as important and saved for later, transferred into long-term holding. So the more neurochemicals that show up, the better learning outcomes you get. Flow is an enormous dump of neurochemistry, which explains this 270% boost in learning that DARPA discovered. What it suggests is that that’s fabled 10,000 hours to master. The research shows that flow can significantly reduce them. 

Creativity, same thing. So what a lot of these neurochemicals do is they surround the creative process, and what I mean by that is creativity is recommendatory. What happens when your brain takes in a bunch of new information, combines it with older ideas and uses the results to produce something startlingly new. 

Flow boosts all – And these neurochemicals boost all the brain's information processing systems. So we take in more data per second, information acquisition goes up. We pay more attention to the data. Salience goes up. We find faster connections between that incoming data and our older ideas, so pattern recognition goes up. We find faster connections between that incoming information and far flung disparate outside the box ideas. So what’s called lateral thinking goes up. 

Then on the backend, when you’re able to take that idea and make it public, risk-taking goes up. So the neurochemistry that shows up in flow surrounds the creative process, which is why you're getting this big boost in creativity. 

So that’s the quick and dirty, very quick and dirty rundown of kind of the neurobiology of flow. Let’s also point out that this is its early days. I mean, neuroscience is accelerating exponentially. We’re seeing all kinds of breakthroughs, but there are still holes in this research we can drive a bus through. We know a ton more than we did more than we did 20 years ago, but we’ve got massive amounts of questions. So everything I just said is true until it's no longer true. We’re moving very quickly. So no longer cure could be around the corner. 

[0:25:33.1] MB: That's fasting, and that was a great kind of dive into the science, and I like the way you sort of broke everything out. That was really, really instructive. I'm curious, and this is kind of something maybe more from your sort of personal experience or maybe you’ve seen something in the research on this, but how did you sort of think about, I guess, sort of flow states that arise from what I would call kind of fun or extracurricular activities versus flow states within sort of work and productivity. 

Can we get kind of - and this kind of comes back to addiction - can we get kind of addicted to a flow state arising from something like video games or something like that? Versus flow from being in the zone when you're kind of executing in project or something. 

[0:26:11.6] SK: It’s a great question. Yes. To answers to your question, and I’ll start the first one, is that flow is a tool. It can be used for good. It can be used for ill. Soldiers fighting battles are in flow states. Terrorists and terrorist training camps are often in flow states. Kids playing video games are in flow states. You at work, really focused on an engineering project, an architectural project, a writing assignment, take your pick, are in a flow state. It’s across-the-board, and you are absolutely correct. Anything that produces flow is really sticky. When they want to know how popular is a videogame going to be, how much is it going to sell. One of the main metrics they try to measure is how much flow it produces. The most successful videogames in the world are the ones the produce the most flow, because huge, addictive neurochemistry.

Csikszentmihalyi I speaks about this really in an interesting fashion, and this sort of gets us to the second part of this, which is anybody that can access this stuff because  flow states have triggers. This is what we’ve learned over the past sort of 10 years, and Csikszentmihalyi discovered that flow is universal provided certain initial conditions are met. So those flow triggers are those initial conditions. 

One of the most important is what's known as the challenge skills balance. All these triggers do is drive attention into the present moment. They amp up attention, and some of the neurochemicals that we’re talking about are primarily focusing drugs, norepinephrine and dopamine. That’s primarily what they do cognitively. They help us pay attention, and that's their function. 

Besides being pleasure drugs, they’re focusing drugs. So that's what all of these triggers do. They drive our attention. Now, most important is the challenge skills balance as I mentioned, which says that we pay the most attention in the present moment when the challenge of the task at hand slightly exceeds our skillset. So you're always pushing hard on your skills when you’re flow. This is a constant. 

As a result, Csikszentmihalyi pointed out that flow is addictive. But unlike other addictions, gambling, video games, take your pick, that can lead backwards in life and slow down your progress. Flow, because you’re constantly leveling up your skillset, is an addiction that leads forward into the future. But make no mistake, it still an addiction. When we deal with action, adventure sports athletes who are transitioning out of risking their life for a living into, “I want to have a family and do something else.” They’re coming down from an addiction and you have to sort of deal with it that way. Same problem with special operators returning from war, same issues. 

[0:29:03.4] MB: This week's episode is brought to you by our partners at Brilliant. Brilliant is a math and science enrichment learning tool. You can learn concepts by solving fascinating, challenging problems. Brilliant explores probability, computer science, machine learning, the physics of everyday life, complex algebra and much more. They do this with addictive interactive experiences that are enjoyed by over 5 million students, professionals and enthusiasts around the world. 

One of the coolest things that I really also like about Brilliant is that they have these learning principles, and two of them in particular really kind of stick out to me as powerful and important principles. One of them is that learning is curiosity-driven. If you look at some of the most prolific thinkers and learners in history, people like Leonardo da Vinci, Albert Einstein, they were incredibly curious individuals, just really, really curious, and that it's so great to see that one of their learning principles is this principle of curiosity. 

Another one of Brilliant’s learning principles that's absolutely critical is that learning needs to allow for failure. If you look at Carol Dweck, if you look at the research behind mindset, this is one of the cornerstones of psychology research. You have to be able to fail to learn and improve. You have to be able to acknowledge your weaknesses. You have to be able to people to push yourself into a place where it's okay to make mistakes. 

These learning principles form the cornerstone of the foundation of Brilliant. It's such a great platform. I highly recommend checking it out. You can do that by going to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. 

I'm a huge fan of STEM learning, and that's why I'm so excited that Brilliant is sponsoring this episode.  They’ve been a sponsor of the show for a long time and there's a reason. They make learning math and science fun and engaging and exciting. You can get started today with Brilliant by going to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. That's brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. 

If you’ve been enjoying our weekly riddles in Mindset Monday, we’re also collaborating with Brilliant to bring some awesome and exciting riddles to our Mindset Monday email list. 

[0:31:09.9] MB: I want to dig now into some of these triggers and how we can kind of create flow states in our own lives. Let's start with kind of the challenge skills balance as you talked about. For example, what if we have some work that we want to get into a flow state on, but perhaps either the challenge is too great, or the challenges is sort of too small. How do we adjust that dial to kind of trigger flow? 

[0:31:30.1] SK: I’m actually going to back you up one step. Everything else is moot, unless we talk about complete concentration, which is the fundamental kind of – Challenge skills is the most important flow trigger, but you can't build a house without complete concentration. The reason I mentioned that is when I go into companies, the first thing I tell them is, “If you can hang a sign on your door that's says, Fuck off. I'm flowing,” you can't do this work. 

What the research shows is to really maximize flow and the productivity you get from flow. You need like 90 to 120 minute periods of uninterrupted concentration. That means that no open office plans. That means if you’re functioning under a regime that demands messages be returned in 15 minutes and emails in half an hour, you’ve got a problem and you need to kind of talk to your boss and shift that stuff around a little bit, or you need to carve out time before work or after work to focus on this stuff. That’s the place you have to start, otherwise you just can't build it. 

From there, I want to get to your question, which is how you tune the challenge skills balance. Here I want to talk about kind of the most useful piece of non-research research there has been on flow, and here's what I mean. A bunch of years ago, Csikszentmihalyi was talking to a Google mathematician and they were trying to figure out, “Can we measure the ratio between challenge and skills? Can we put a number on it?”

They almost arbitrarily just sort of decided on 4%, that the sweet spot was if your challenge could be 4% greater than your skills, you are in the right zone. We took this idea into the flow genome project and working primarily initially with athletes and then a little bit with artist. We’ve been studying it. It’s totally arbitrary. What 4% for you is is different for me and it's different on every day. Your 4% on a day that you got up great night sleep and ate great food the day before, versus I stayed up all night and I feasted on Twinkies, different. It varies on a day-to-day basis. 

What I like about using that number, and this is I think where it becomes practical, is 4% for people who are little shyer, meeker, maybe a little bit of an underachiever sometimes, is tricky because it's outside your comfort zone. How do you know when you're getting close to the right spot? You're uncomfortable. It doesn't feel good anymore. It's a really good way just to know where you are with this. 

For peak performers, that we have the other – The flip side of this problems is peak performers are going to bite off challenges that are 30%, 4, % 50% greater than their skillset without even noticing. Do it all the time. As a result, it is going to put too much fear into the equation. You’ll get too much norepinephrine and cortisol in system and it ends up blocking flow. So you’re going to lock yourself out of the state of peak performance. You’d really need to tackle those kinds of challenges. 

If you are the kind of person who bites off huge challenges, one, make sure you chunk them into smaller and smaller sub-challenges, smaller goals and smaller roles until they’re in that, “Oh, well. I'm slightly uncomfortable here, but I'm not overwhelmed,” spot, then you're on the right spot to maximize focus
and maximize flow. 

[0:35:03.1] MB: That’s extremely helpful, and I think I'm definitely somebody who kind of falls into that bucket of frequently biting off problems that are too large for myself. So I’ll be applying that technique for certain –

[0:35:13.2] SK: Yeah, we all have been saying at the Flow Genome Project, which is when it comes to this stuff, you got to go slow to go fast. Let me give you a different example of this in a different workplace environments. So, Patagonia, the outdoor retailer, always tops the list of best place to work in America. One of the reasons is their very high flow environment. They were sort of built around so much of Csikszentmihalyi earlier ideas back in the 90s, and they have one main corporate rule established by Yvon Chouinard, who’s the CEO. He calls it, “Let my people go surfing.” 

So Patagonia, obviously a lot of outdoor athletes who work there, and that's one of the reasons you’d want to work there. Their headquarters, it’s in Ventura County. It’s right on the Pacific Ocean. So they have a rule, which is, “Whenever the waves are breaking, it doesn't matter what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter if you're on deadline. It doesn’t matter if you’re in the middle of a project that was due yesterday. You can go surfing.” 

The reason is, surfing is packed with flow triggers, really high flow environment. We’ll talk more about what those triggers are in a second. But packed with flow triggers. So if you go out, you go surfing for an hour and you come back and you’re 500% more productive, who cares that you just wasted an hour? 
You’re now really, really, really hyper productive. 

It doesn't look like peak performance. In an organization, or anybody could be like, “I’m on deadline, but I’m going surfing. See you.” That doesn’t look like an organization dedicated to peak performance, to productivity, to the bottom line or any of those things. But it’s actually an organization that's totally dialed in for that stuff, because you’d got to go slow to go fast with this stuff and you got to prioritize flow. 

[0:36:49.0] MB: So how do those flow states kind of carry over, or I guess how long? So if you go surfing for an hour or you do some sort of – I guess what we’re talking about earlier, sort of a fun activity to trigger flow, how long will you be kind of reaping the harvest of that flow trigger?

[0:37:05.4] SK: So there’s three different answers to this. One is that flow is essentially a focusing skill. So first of all, by training up while you're surfing, you’re training up flow in the office, because you’re training the brain to think in a particular way basically, to shift consciousness in a particular way. So that in itself spills over. 

In terms of actual time in the flow state, that is an open and unanswered question. What we've seen for the research I mentioned earlier, we know, right? Because [inaudible 0:37:37.2] did the work, that the heightened creativity will outlast flow state by a couple of days. That sticks around for a little while. 

The really, “I'm in flow. My consciousness feels altered,” experience, it varies, but an hour and a half  is usually – That’s sort of the maximum kind of zone that most people stay in. This has to do with the fact that these neurochemicals, they’re easy for the brain to produce, but they've got raw materials and it takes a certain amount of time to produce them from scratch. Sometimes you need sunlight, and sometimes you need vitamins and minerals. So once you're through those things, there’s a down period. There’s a cycle. Flow isn’t an always on thing. You can't live in flow. There’s a four-stage process. The frontend of the process is a struggle phase. It doesn't feel like flow, and then you move into flow and then there’s a recovery phase on the backend. You have to move through the whole cycle before you can really start a flow state. 

That said, you can get access to the heightened learning, the heightened creativity, those things. They linger for a little while. The creativity seems to linger for longer than, I would guess, the heightened bits of learning and the motivation. But the honest answers, we don't really know on that one. 

In some flow states, there is altruism based flow state known as helper’s high. It was discovered by [inaudible 0:38:55.2] who founded Big Brother Big Sister. He discovered that that seems to lasted two days on average, which is really interesting and really strange. That maybe from a promote research perspective, we think that's because it's got – It may have a oxytocin involved and maybe more endorphins than other flows states. We don't really know, but those are the things we’re looking at. By we, I mean the entire research community. So there's no real immediate answer to your question, but usually 90 minutes is kind of what you work with as a core flow state, and then the afterglow usually a couple, two, three hours at a high level.

[0:39:31.5] MB: Yeah, that makes sense. I was just curious, because I’m trying to think about how to sort of concretely apply these principles to my own productivity. 

[0:39:38.1] SK: Yeah. Let me give you a tip here. A place where most people screw up, and this is the difference between people who had a lot of experience with flow, especially with deeper flow states, versus people who are new to these ideas. One of the things that people who are new to these ideas do is they will take that accelerated –  That amplified creativity and they will ride to the very bitter end. If their brain’s pattern recognition system is all fired up and they're coming up with new ideas, and new ideas, and new ideas, they're going to keep working until is totally exhausted. That actually makes it more difficult to really jump into flow the next time. You want to take yourself almost to the end and then you want to sort of call it mandatory quits before you’re totally exhausted. Because otherwise the recovery period is going to have to be more extensive than you want. 

[0:40:32.6] MB: Let’s say you do sort of a 90-minute burst of flow. How long should your recovery period be before you try to reenter?

[0:40:38.1] SK: Again, it depends. If you're in a really deep flow state, a lot of physical activity, you're really exhausted in the body. That may be it for your day, right? You may get one big flows state, and it may be a day, two, three before you sort of get back in. If it's a low-grade focused attention flow state, you can pop out, and usually if you have some kind of recovery protocol. For example, I wake up at 4 AM. Start my day. I usually start by working on whatever book I'm writing. I usually work from about 4 AM to 7:30 or so. Then I hike my dogs for an hour and eat some breakfast. Then I can come back to work. I can't really get in an another flow state just then. I'm still sort of like dithering around, but I break for lunch, take a short nap and then I' can usually get back into flow in the afternoon. 

[0:41:28.9] MB: Got it. Yeah, that makes sense. 

[0:41:30.5] SK: And everybody's different by the way. You’re going to – naps are good. Food is good. Resetting your consciousness is really important. Meaning, like take your mind off the problem, right? If I’ve been writing all morning, I don’t want to immediately jump to another writing task. I want to garden for an hour, go for a walk or do something to shift my consciousness a bit, meditation, whatever. 

[0:41:53.3] MB: Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. I mean, I think one of the themes that we’ve seen kind of repeatedly on the show is the importance of rest and recovery to peak performance in general, and then obviously kind of specifically around the creation and maintenance of flow states. 

[0:42:07.6] SK: Yeah. I always talk about it as one of the need for recovery. I talk about in terms of like a grit skill. I think for peak performers, it is so hard to shut it down, that grit is required for recovery. So I think active recovery protocols are really important. One of flow states, for example, if you end your day and your recovery protocol is, “I’m going to watch television and drink a beer,” you're not actually doing your body any good. Television doesn't shift the brain waves out of sort of a high beta for long enough for you to recover, and alcohol is really not your friend in that process. One or two drinks doesn't really matter, but if you go over that, you're going to mess with your REM sleep, and you have to sleep seven to eight hours a night is what the research shows most of us need. 

There are outliers, but that's really – That’s sort of baseline, and you have to have an active – An active recovery, by the way, if you’re not familiar with the term, is a term that talks about – It means like a restorative yoga practice. A long sauna, meditation, hot baths, massages, those sorts of things. You need a daily active recovery protocol if you’re going to do. You’re really going to have a high flow lifestyle. 

[0:43:28.3] MB: I’d like to take kind of a change in direction and talk a little bit about one of the other topics that I know you’ve spoken and written about that I find really fascinating and kind of aligns with some of the recent research you’ve been doing around, as I think you called it in a recent Google talk, the intersection of sort of flow states and the science of spirituality. 

[0:43:45.9] SK: I started out looking as much the science of spirituality, because it wasn't entirely clear that flow wasn't a spiritual experience, right? Those two ideas started out together. When early research, for example, William James, who did a lot of the foundational work on flow back at the turn-of-the-century, the first American psychologist, philosopher wrote the first psychology textbook. Back then, he was looking at flow as a mystical experience. He was studying the same thing. 

They split apart in the 20th century. Freud sort of really, really was a hard-core atheist. Didn't think psychology had any place kind of working in that world, and the rest of science will agree. So there was sort of a hundred year detour. Then these ideas come back together around the turn of the 21st-century neurobiological. 

What we started to discover is that when you look under the hood of flow, so the same neurochemical, neurobiological, neuroanatomical shifts, changes that we talked about earlier in flow, they show up across a bevy of experiences. Deep profound meditation, trance state, out of body experiences, near death experiences, mystical states, speaking in tongues, things like that, psychedelic states, states of awe. All of these things neurobiological are very, very, very similar. They’re similar on the inside and they produce similar effects on the outside. All of these experiences is self disappears. Time vanishes. We feel a huge boost in motivation and the feeling of being moved by forces greater than our control, put it in slightly more mystical terms, spiritual terms. 

Then we see a massive amplification in the information we have access to. This shows up across the boards in all of these experiences. So we sort of took a hundred year detour around these ideas and they’re coming back together now. Where they get really exciting is you have more tools to solve problems with. 

For example, I mentioned in our preshow conversation that another study we’re running at the Flow Genome Project is in conjunction with researchers at Imperial College in London, and what they've done at Imperial College in London is they’ve done – In David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris’s lab, they’ve done all the foundational research, FMRI research, on psychedelics. So they’ve looked at MDMA, psilocybin, iowaska, DMT, acid. 

So when I say flow shares characteristics with psychedelic states, this is the reason we know that, and we've teamed up to do a sort of comparison contrast study, and one of the reasons – And this is very downstream from where we’re going and we’re not there yet, is right now we’ve been looking at psychedelics for their healing capacity. They’re phenomenal for PTSD. There’s new work on anxiety, on depression, on addiction, those sorts of things. 

But there’s a lot of people who have noticed that the same thing that helps get you from subpar back to zero can help you go from zero up to Superman with psychedelic’s creativity is very old research. This research going back in the 60s that shows huge boost in creativity and psychedelics. We see the same thing in flow. So one of the simple questions you sort of from a performance standpoint you'd want to ask is, “Hey, I’ve got a creative problem. I need to solve. What’s the best thing? Should I aim for a flow state here? Is micro-dosing with psychedelics, will that get it done? What about a heroic dose of psychedelic? Is that better? What kind of creative project works best with which treatment?” Those sorts of questions are things we are starting to be able to ask and answer now. That’s the results – Psychedelics may not sound like the intersection of spirituality to you, but there’s research going back to the 60s, The Good Friday experiment most famously, that show that psychedelic experiences are indistinguishable from spiritual experiences. 

[0:48:06.5] MB: I think you also kind of previously talked about in line with that same theme this idea of sort of the unity experience and the experience of sort of being one with everything and how there's a sort of a biological component behind that. 

[0:48:19.6] SK: Okay. So this was my toe-hold into flow research. I said earlier, when I started this, it was really unclear, and the reason was surfers and flow, which was the first population I ever studied often report becoming one with the ocean. I was one with the two, and it’s really common. It happens all the time. Surfers didn't really like to talk about it because everybody would think they were nuts. You go into a shrink's office in 1995, 6, 7 and say, “Doc. Hey, man, I had this experience. I feel one with everything,” you are getting sent to a psych ward. That's what's happening. 

But then Andy Newberg, who’s a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, decides he wants to study this phenomenon. The reason he wants to study it is it’s so common. Oneness with everything has been called the perennial philosophy. It's in every mystical tradition on earth and it was there long before there was mass communication. 

So he figured it's got a point to something real, something biological. So he did brain scans of Buddhists and Franciscan nuns when they were experiencing moments of so-called unity, oneness with everything. He found that a portion of the brain known as the right parietal lobe gets very, very quiet. 

So earlier I said that in flow, the prefrontal cortex shuts down. In deeper and deeper flow states, when attention gives really focused, that will start moving deeper into the brain. One of the places that gets impacted is the right parietal lobe. This portion of the brain does a bunch of stuff, but it basically is a navigation system and it helps us draw a boundary that says, “This is where you end and the rest of the world begins." And this is sort of important if you want to walk through a crowded room. You sort of need a sense of like, “My shoulder is here,” and people who have brain damage to this portion of the brain, they can't sit down on a couch, because they’re not quite sure where does my leg end and the couch begin?

This portion of the brain when it shuts down completely in deep flow states, or in meditative experiences, or trance states or whatever, you can no longer separate itself from others. The brain conclude – It has to conclude that in this particular moment in time you’re one with everything. 

By the way, we’ve had this experience, right? If you played a racket sport, for example, and gotten really good at it, you get to a point where you can't feel your racket in your hand. It feels like an extension of your hand or your car. The pedals feel like an extension of your feet and you can feel the tires through your feet. This is common with racecar drivers. It’s because this boundary of self is flexible. We can move it around. Blind people feel the sidewalk to the tip of the cane. It’s because this boundary is extendable. 

[0:51:01.5] MB:  I think one of the most interesting kind of takeaways from some of that research is this idea that in some sense, the brain is sort of creating the experience of being separate from everything else. When you take that away, it's almost like the oneness has been there the entire time. 

[0:51:18.6] SK: Well, I’ve have written about this. This is where things get complicated, because at every level of the spectrum, scientifically, at every level of scale, you see oneness. If you reduce human beings to the quantum level, obviously, we got the same basic ingredients. That's true. But even if you look at just what you consider you, which is the stuff inside your skin, we know there's enough foreign bacteria in your body that essentially you're on from your elbow to your fingers is foreign bacteria. Most of it is in your micro biome, and we know that the micro biome control can impact our emotional state, for example, and our cognition, our ability to think about problems and such, and our consciousness. 

So our experience to the world, we experience it as I am Steven Kotler, a single unit. I'm just me. But the truth of the matter is it’s a cooperative experience. My version of the world is me, my micro biome, the viruses in my body. It’s all creating this experience. So sort of at every level of the scale, going all the way up to the cosmic, we are star dusts. We all got our star in the birth of stars. We’re made up of molecules that we’re spewed out of stars. At every level of scale, we are one, right? We have a discreet experience of consciousness while we’re inside our body, but on certain levels at least, something of an illusion. But that shouldn’t be a surprise. Current thinking on reality, right? We don't live in reality. The brain takes in a shit ton of information. It filters down something, hunting for like the most familiar pattern it can find. The minute it finds that pattern, it guesses about what is in reality based on our prior experience, which is why babies experience the world very differently from teenagers and adults. 

There's book after book after book in neuroscience for 25 years has talked about how we create kind of reality as we go along. The question gets a lot more nuanced and subtle when you start peeling it back, and it just gets really weird. I have no idea what the right or wrong answer is, and I don’t, by the way, think this is proof or not proof of any kind of metaphysical anything. I just think it's the facts of the case and they’re peculiar. 

[0:53:45.8] MB: It’s a fascinating mystery, and I just wanted to kind of touch on that, because I think it's one of the most interesting things that you work on and have talked about. So I wanted to share some of those really kind of unique ideas with the listeners. I know we’re running out of time here. To kind of wrap up our conversation, for listeners who want to concretely kind of implement what we've talked about in one way or another today, what would be sort of a first kind of action step or piece of homework that you would give them?

[0:54:10.7] SK: Yeah, the first place. I would tell you to go is the website for the Flow Genome Project. If you go to the landing page, you’ll see something that says, “Take the quiz.” That quiz – And I hate that language, and we’re changing the website. But it’s an older version of it that I don't love. But that quiz is actually our flow profile, which has become the largest study ever conducted in optimal psych. All it is is a diagnostic, and it's taken flow’s 20 triggers and broken them into four categories, sort of clumped them in their most familiar clumps. All it says is if you’re this kind of person, you are likely going to find more flow in this direction. That is a great next step. 

You can also, if you want to take things a step further, if you go to my website, stevenkotler.com, sign up for my email newsletter. A, you'll get lots of information. B, you’ll get a 90-page peak performance primer that has a complete breakdown of flow and all of flow’s triggers in it. So those would be my two next steps. 

[0:55:09.4] MB: Perfect, and I think you kind of touched on this already, but for listeners who want to find you, who want to learn more, I'm assuming those are kind of the place that you would have them go. 

[0:55:17.5] SK: Yes, stevenkotler.com, flowgenomeproject.com, or you can find me on social media. Twitter is Steven_Kotler. 

[0:55:26.6] MB: Well, Steven. Thank you so much for coming on the show, fascinating conversation. As I said, I've been a fan of your work for a long time and it was great to kind of dig into all of these really exciting ideas. 

[0:55:36.7] SK: Thanks for having me. It’s been a lot of fun. 

[0:55:38.8] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

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

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

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

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

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

This Is What Will Make You Finally Take Action - How To Bridge The Learning Doing Gap with Peter Shallard

In this episode, we take a look at the biggest failure of The Science of Success and what we can do about it. We examine the three types of people in the world and how they go about approaching their own development and achieving their goals. Peter and Matt dig into accountability, the impact it’s personally had on Matt and his businesses, and how you can build accountability in your own life with Matt himself. Finally, we examine the gap between learning and doing that prevents most people from ever actually applying what they’ve learned. 

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

• Matt has failed, failed you, failed his listeners. 

• Matt shares his personal struggle with moving from learning to doing and actually applying everything he learns.  

• The three types of people and how they go through life…which are you?

• Close eyed and on autopilot - These people typically have a closed mindset and are not ambitious about achieving their goals. 

  1. Learners - These people are curious and passionate about the world and their goals. Typically these types have a growth mindset.

  2. High Leverage Action Takers - There are not many. They concretely apply these learnings in their lives and execute every day. 

• What it means to be a high leverage action taker. 

• How can you become a high leverage action taker?

• Are some people just born in group 3? Born High Leverage?

• If you want to become high leverage and level 3 then you cannot do it alone. It’s not possible.

• The importance of having Accountability

• The Science Behind Accountability and what makes it so powerful. 

• How Peter and Matt formed strategies for accountability and executing on Matt’s most important projects. 

• It’s up to you to take the action, but group accountability will get you there. 

• We take a deep dive into Matt’s past both accomplishments and failures. 

• Learn the history behind the beginnings of The Science of Success. 

• Matt’s first experience learning outside of a classroom and actually applying that knowledge for results in the real world. 

• Matt’s list of his personal favorite influencers and thought leaders. 

• The best way to actually begin to apply what you learn. 

• The PERIL of the learning-doing gap. What is it? Are you in it? And how can we get our of this spiral?

• Are you stuck in the “bat-cave of learning?"

  1. Do you have a huge sense of what you’re capable and know you have potential… but never actually realize it?

  2. What evidence do you have for your own growth?

• How to move from intellectual learning mode to high energy doing mode.

• Matt’s unknown “selfish" reasons for starting The Science of Success. 

• What you need to do after every episode of The Science of Success from this day forward. 

• There is an aspect of development that simply cannot be taught, it must be experienced. 

• "What you are learning is only as valuable as your ability to implement it in your own life."

• What actions and tactics separate those who accomplish all their goals and those who just learn, become frustrated, and fall behind. 

• How can you maximize the time you spend in your flow states?

• The studies and research showing that conscientiousness is a learnable skill and can be a predictor of success. 

• This IS NOT about doing more stuff. It’s about doing the right things that require courage and discipline. 

• How isolation affects your productivity due to your mammalian brain. 

• Accountability is the biggest driver of human behavioral flourishing.

• Technology is robbing us of that “paleo” accountability that would normally flourish. 

• Do you have accountability - These questions will tell you!

• Is it even possible to hold oneself accountable?

• Are you spending time with people who don’t want you to succeed?

• Some of the most common accountability traps individuals and companies fall into. 

• What happens if you don’t have social accountability?

• Unveiling of The Science Of Action!

Thank you so much for listening!

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

This week's episode is brought to you by The Science of Action.

If you're looking to create big changes in your life and execute on your most important and ambitious goals, The Science of Action is for you. The Science of Action is based on years of research and working with thousands of individuals to level up their productivity. We guarantee the same results for you. 

As a member of The Science of Action, you'll receive...

• Exclusive access to Matt. We'll be hosting monthly webinars and going deep on some of the most important tools and tactics Matt uses to build his businesses, organize information, negotiate, and execute.

• A one-on-one call each week with your personal effectiveness aid who is trained in the research and psychology of accountability and The Science of Success podcast. Connect via text, email, and phone anytime and all our aids are based in the U.S.

• Access to our SoA web app - think of this as a dashboard for your personal growth. You can track and measure your performance and stay focused on your goals. Available any time from any device.

• A MASSIVE ROI in your personal and professional lives achieved through bridging the learning-doing gap.

All of this exclusively for Science of Success listeners for only $199/mo. Get started today and never fail to execute your goals again. 

Episode Transcript

[0:00:00.4] MB: So let's pull back from the darkness a little and dig into how we can solve this accountability problem permanently. 

[0:00:08.5] PS: What you're learning is only as good as your ability to actually build a practice of implementation and execution in your life. It's not about just doing more stuff. It's about doing the right kinds of things, which are typically the hardest things to do, the things that require the most courage and discipline. Human beings outsource their sanity. 

[00:00:19.4] ANNOUNCER: Welcome to The Science of Success. Introducing your host, Matt Bodnar.

[0:00:27.8] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than two million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries and part of the self-help for smart people podcast network.

In this episode, we look at the gap that exists between learning and doing. Why is it that so many smart ambitious people invest hours in their growth and development, but fail to see breakaway external results for the time they’ve invested? If you sometimes feel overwhelmed by all the things you know you could, or should be implementing to level up your life or career, then this episode is going to blow your mind.

We explore what science is telling us about the actual execution of concrete individual growth and measurable upward mobility across various dimensions of life. We share the most effective tactic for moving yourself from learning to doing, with our special guest, Peter Shallard.

I’m going to quickly tell you why you should sign-up for our e-mail list if you haven’t already. There’s some amazing stuff that’s only available e-mail subscribers including three awesome guides, curated weekly e-mail every single week that our listeners absolutely love, exclusive preview and early content and much more. If you haven’t, be sure to go to successpodcast.com and sign-up for our e-mail list right on the homepage.

Because I’m so excited for this episode, let’s go ahead and dig in. Here is the show.


[0:01:59.0] MB: Before we start the conversation with Peter, I wanted to share something with you. This episode is particularly personal for me, because this is a concept that I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time thinking about, and in many ways it’s been one of the most important epiphanies in my own life.

I recently realized that I failed. I failed myself, but more importantly I failed you, the Science of Success community. Let me explain what I mean. I’ve been committed to deep learning and passionate about evidence-based growth for much of my life. Through that journey, I’ve identified essentially three buckets of people.

The first bucket are people who haven’t woken up yet; people whose eyes are still closed. They’re in some ways asleep at the wheel. They go through life without really questioning why things are the way they are, they’re not ambitious, they’re not driven to take themselves to the next level, and many instances they have a closed mindset. I think you probably know somebody like that in your own life.

The next bucket of people are people that are lifelong learnings, people that are curious, that are passionate, that are driven to improve themselves. They’re fascinated by learning and growing. They often have a growth mindset and they want to figure out how they cannot only improve themselves, but ultimately improve the world. I think many of you, many of my listeners fall into this bucket.

There’s a third subset of people; these are people that are executing every single day. They’re high-leverage action takers. They’re a small subset of these lifelong learners. They take what they learned and they concretely apply it in their lives, so that they can create impact and that they can create results. It cascades through everything that they do, to their home life, their friends, their family. For them, self-improvement is not just an intellectual exercise, but it’s a lived day-to-day reality.

One of the biggest challenges in my own life has been moving myself from that second group to this third group, taking myself from who’s been a lifelong learner since I was young, something that’s come naturally to me and been part of my life, taking that and transforming that into something that I actually take action on.

I went on this journey from learning to doing and I made the shift from indulging intellectual curiosity to proactively applying driving change in my life. I’ve reaped tremendous awards as a result of becoming somebody who takes action and actually takes his ideas and puts them into practice. I started this many years ago, taking my learning, everything from mental models, evidence-based growth and much more and concretely executing on the principles that I learn and applying them in everything that I do in my day-to-day life.

This became one of the most important things in my professional life and one of the most rewarding parts of my personal life. Through doing this, I’ve realized how challenging it is, and I think doing it by yourself, I think you’re crazy to try and battle that battle alone.

To that end, for the last four years I’ve worked with Peter to create accountability in my own life. We have hundreds of hours under belts working together and dealing with the challenge of the learning-doing gap.

This interview and this conversation is going to be a lot different than a normal interview. It’s not just going to be me asking Peter questions. It’s going to be a dialogue and an exploration of my journey of becoming an action-taker. Peter in some cases is going to flip the script and ask me questions that I’m going to answer, but we’re going to have a really rich and informative dialogue that I hope shares with you some of the biggest lessons and strategies that we’ve come up with and we’ve put together for helping you become an action-taker and helping to close and bridge the learning-doing gap.

For those of you who don’t know, he’s a very early guest on the show, but Peter Shallard is known as The Shrink for Entrepreneurs. He’s an X-psychotherapist who works privately with the founders of some of the world’s top startups. His client roster has collectively over a billion dollars in market capitalization value.

He’s also a passionate advocate of evidence-based psychology and has founded a startup of his own that works with academic researchers to bring empirical performance optimization to small business owners.

Peter, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:06:18.1] PS: Thanks for having me. I’m excited.

[0:06:20.2] MB: Well, we’re super excited to have you on the show today. I can’t wait to really dig into this conversation. I think it’s going to be a unique and refreshing experience for the listeners, and I think it’s going to be something that’s a little bit different from a traditional Science of Success interview.

[0:06:34.1] PS: Yeah. That was one hell of an intro. I’m super, super honored to be back first of all, second time. Yeah, and just to be able to rev and go deep on this topic, which I know for you is everything in a way. It’s like really where it’s the meeting of our minds, right? This is something that’s super important to me too.

[0:06:52.3] MB: Yeah. We’ve been working on this for a long time obviously. I definitely give you a lot of credit for helping me bridge this gap. In many ways, it comes down to when the rubber meets the road, being the person who actually has to be in the trenches and execute. I mean, that’s a battle that not only I’ve had to face by myself, but I think everybody listening who’s tried to take action in their lives has faced the same challenge.

[0:07:15.7] PS: Yeah. I think, I mean obviously you can’t credit our work together for changing everything, because we’re literally talking about the gap that even exist in our work when you and I rev were stepping outside of we’re taking like a break in an hour a week outside of the day-to-day of living life and implementing things and building businesses and doing what you do, and talking about it and learning about. Closing the learning-doing gap really moving and taking what you’re learning and taking action on it is always something that you do alone, but in a weird paradoxical way, it’s been a focus of – I think it’s the meta focus of every conversation we’ve had for, well how many years has it been now?

[0:07:53.6] MB: I think it’s been at least four years, maybe four or five years. I was trying to remember if it was 2013 maybe when we met, 2014?

[0:08:00.4] PS: Yeah. Wow, okay. Cool. Yeah. This learning-doing gap, I mean it’s the meta dialogue of everything that we talk about, but I know that when I met you, you’re already a really successful guy that this is something that you have – we’ve been working to optimize together and make you more of an execution powerhouse. Yeah, I mean where do you see, you really started waking up to this idea that everything hinges on jumping from intellectually understanding things into actually taking concrete action on them.
[0:08:34.8] MB: Yeah. I mean, I think in the early stages of my life I was inconsistent, but I still took action. I started to accumulate results and achievements, everything from winning the national debate championship when I was in high school, to becoming one of the only people, or actually the only person in either my high school or college graduating class to get a job at Goldman Sachs. I was a political science major, but I read over 20 books in finance and completely taught myself about the financial markets, and then applied that knowledge to getting a job on Wall Street.

Once I started really creating a system and a process, I was able to create much more concrete and impactful and consistent results throughout my life. Everything from in my day job as an investor in the last five years, I’ve probably sourced and closed more than 20 million dollars’ worth of deals and transactions.

Another thing getting on the Forbes 30 under list in 2017, I wouldn’t have been able to do that if I hadn’t applied that lessons and the knowledge from the things I’ve learned, not only from the show, but books I’ve read about how to build relationships and how to influence people. Even in the trenches of some of the work we’ve done with companies we’ve invested in.

I spent years turning around failing technology company and our portfolio and recently got that company into the Inc. 5000 fastest growing companies in America. Without being a consistent – somebody who consistently executes and takes these ideas and these principles that I learned through things like the podcast, through things like being a voracious reader, I wouldn’t have been able to create those results in my life. Today, I have the flexibility to control my own destiny, control when I work, spend time traveling the world and learning and having fun and having a completely flexible schedule where I control what I do and when I work. I think a big piece of that has been the execution that has resulted from a consistent process of applying the things that I’ve learned.

[0:10:35.5] PS: I think that’s such an important distinction for people who are – for your listeners here, people who are tuning in and wondering like, “What is this learning-doing gap?” That we’re not talking about the value. It’s not my job to be on top of you every week cracking a weapon and making you work hundreds of hours to execute all of the stuff. In fact, it’s almost the opposite. What we’re talking about is that gap that exist between the most aspirational learning, the development of mental models, the reading of books.
I think that one of your – you’ve given us a laundry list of pretty badass accomplishments here, but I think one of the best ones for you is the Science of Success. I remember when you started this project that it was basically a project to satisfy your intellectual curiosity, because you wanted to have an excuse to have conversations with these people whose thinking that you admired, who are influencing the way you do business as an investor. It was really an exercise and satisfying that curiosity.

Then one of the things I’ve seen is that your access to people has turned into those incredible workflow of taking new ideas and then putting them to work in your life. I’m so stoked that we can have this conversation today, because I think that for a lot of Science of Success listeners, I’m guessing as they know you the guy who asks the smart questions and they’re taking notes thinking, “Here’s what I want to do with what I’m learning.” What isn’t always obvious from the outside is that you’re probably one of the biggest beneficiaries of the show itself in the sense that you’re building plans into your life and taking action based on the stuff.

[0:12:13.8] MB: Yeah, I think that’s totally right. It’s funny, I mean, I selfishly ask many of the questions in the interviews, because I’m implementing many of ideas in my life. Even the question we ask at the end of every interview, which is what’s the one piece of homework that they would give to our listeners to implement? I’m asking that for myself in many cases.

[0:12:30.7] PS: That’s for you too, yeah.

[0:12:32.5] MB: Yeah, absolutely.

[0:12:33.5] PS: I think that this is – it’s such an interesting thing in life, because that distinction that you made, I love this idea of three different types of people in the world, because I think it’s usually – it’s always a dichotomy. It’s like these two types of people in the world. It’s so true that these people who aren’t curious, these people are and who do a lot of learning. Then there’s this tiny, tiny fraction of those people who go on to actually take the things that they learn and do something with them. I think that there’s just a huge number of people who have a bunch of ideas of what they would do if they had the time or the energy, or maybe just the motivation or whatever it is to be this version of themselves that they have in their mind and taking that step, crossing that learning-doing gap is a real challenge.

It’s from my work, like with you as a client, the other people I work with, I see it as the juice of life itself, that that’s where the really big transformational shifts and leaps ahead and business and personal life come from. I think that a relentless, like increasing the rate at which somebody, which you, I’ve seen you do this, ask yourself what am I going to do with this idea? How am I going to apply this? Then having that go from being intellectual to being a practical conversation. That whole challenge is really everything that we’re talking about here is the daily practice of moving oneself out of cerebral intellectual mud and into execution tactics implementation.

[0:14:00.9] MB: I just think you bring a really unique perspective to this, because I’m one man. I’m an island and see, only within my own personal struggle with bridging the learning-doing gap. There are so many other people out there that suffer and struggle with the same challenge.

[0:14:14.7] PS: Well, this is the thing is that it’s actually totally possible to live your entire life in what I think of as like a bat cave of learning, right? Completely cutoff from the world, reimburse consuming all kinds of content, like podcast have made this stuff super accessible to people. Building up a sense of what you’re capable of without ever actually realizing it in the concrete sense.

It’s this lifestyle of holding a mental image of yourself that is bigger, better, smarter and more successful than objective reality. The scary thing about it is that it’s really comfortable for a lot of people to live that way, to have this idea but to never actually cross that leap, to feel great about what they’re learning, but to never cross the chasm and jump into the doing part.

[0:14:59.9] MB: I think that’s something that I struggle with myself is constantly building up the sense of like, “I’m collecting all these ideas and one day I’m going to implement them.” It’s really hard to break out of that shell and actually become someone who does. When we talk about evidence-based growth on the show and what we’re really digging into is we want to figure out what are the empirically valid science-based methodologies of improvement.

What we’re trying to figure is what evidence do we actually have for our own growth. I think when we get caught up in these as you call them bat caves of learning where we don’t see ourselves growing and approving and actually implanting what we’ve learned, I think it’s really easy to deceive ourselves about how much growth we’re actually achieving.
[0:15:43.4] PS: Totally. Yeah. I think that’s why when you hit me up about having this conversation and recording this for the podcast, I thought it’s a bold move, because Science of Success, like all podcast, like every book, that every author in the space, these and people, lectures, TED talks, all that stuff, everything that’s published really feeds those hungry for knowledge people, that second group that you articulated.

In a lot of ways, the self-development industry and even the more academic side of it, we could point and say that they’re a little bit of a failure, because it only does that. It encourages that second group of people, those curious people to just listen more, pop your head funds in, stop doing what you are doing and start listening, start listening to this podcast and that one. I know it’s like not something you’re supposed to say on a podcast interview as a guest, but I think that there is a reality that all of that learning stuff is great to a point, right?

[0:16:41.7] MB: Yeah. I mean, you and I started kicking this idea around. I think we both realize that was a really important conversation, because you’re right, it’s almost a taboo subject in the personal development, or self-help space to say, “All these ideas are great,” but does it really matter if you don’t actually implement any of them, right? I think being somebody who’s a high-leverage action-taker, somebody’s who is in that third bucket is a constant process. It’s a practice.

It’s a posture that requires energy to maintain. It’s not something you can learn to do. It’s something you have to practice doing and master through practice, right? The idea that you can learn it is almost that kind of coming back and falling back into that second bucket of thinking again. Only through practice and execution can you actually begin to become somebody who is truly an action-taker.

[0:17:35.1] PS: A lot of the founders that I work with will talk about, like entrepreneurs will sort of allude to this. I think it’s one of the biggest things that people who haven’t had that experience of building companies and doing all that stuff, that people just don’t get. These entrepreneurs talk about street smarts, school of hard knocks, getting hard one industry experience.

They’re all pointing, I think. Trying to verbalize this thing that can’t be verbalized, because it is something that can’t be learned. There’s an aspect of experiential development I think is what a psychologist would call it, that just intellectually is out of reach. It can’t be taught at college, or parents can’t teach it to you. It’s the thing that my clients get when they get out there into the world and they start taking action.

I think for people who are passionately curious about self-growth, there is that aspect too that what you’re learning is only as good as your ability to actually build a practice of implementation and execution in your life.

[0:18:32.3] MB: I mean, you and I have obviously had a number of conversations. If tens, if not hundreds of hours where we’ve kicked around to some degree or another this fundamental idea of how can we move ourselves down this path from learning to doing. The cool is that we’ve decided to collaborate on a new project, to help move Science of Success of listeners from learning to doing.

[0:18:57.5] PS: Like I said, my background comes from studying entrepreneurial success. The secret to my career is that I’ve done the world’s greatest MBA program over the last decade that I got paid to do, because I got to learn from all of my clients, and actually you’re one of them. I get to work with these incredible people. I’ve done a bunch of work advising venture capitalists who are investing in these entrepreneurs. I’ve worked directly as a service shrink with the entrepreneurs.

A big part of what I have to figure out is patent recognition. That’s figuring out what do we know about success? What do we know about the people and the businesses when they go in to work so that we can effectively predict the future, which is super important in the VC world? Then I launched a company called Commit Action. It’s a software and a human-powered coaching hybrid, which gave me access to over 10,000 conversations with business owners of all sizes. Not just the startup, the technology space, but also lots of different small business and FMEs across the world in over 20 countries.

We have also got to talk to a bunch of academic researchers as advices for those business and even test out a lot of what we’re doing with totally non-business people as well. We’ve stumbled across artists and also to creative professionals. Basically, what we have discovered is that these three types of people thing, what I’ve spent the last decade doing is working with people who are really strong in that level two space, who have deep intentions of being level three.

What we learned and especially in some of the research, we did at Commit Action is that success for these entrepreneurs isn’t really a spectrum. That is actually a really major goal. Like when I started out I thought, “Okay, there’s these people out there who want to build things and make their lives better as a consequence. There’s a whole rainbow spectrum of people who are just starting out, who are struggling, and then people who are widely successful and every type of person in between.

What we actually discovered is that there is a huge number of people who are really struggling. Then there’s a tiny fraction of people who have it all, who are hitting homerun after homerun in this area. Again, 90% of the folks that we talk to were totally dissatisfied with their progress of putting ideas into action, or just doing the things that they know they should do professionally, or even personally. What we found is that there weren’t differences in location, or knowledge, or education that separate these people.

[0:21:32.5] MB: I love that idea that success is not a spectrum, that it’s not evenly distributed. I think that’s really, really important and a fascinating conclusion from some of the work that you’ve done.

[0:21:44.2] PS: Yeah. We started asking, okay if it’s not a spectrum, if there is this quite binary like have, have not difference, what is it that could be contributing to it? That’s where we basically went down this rabbit hole of empirical psychology bunch in neuroscience and basically realize that what you’re talking about in this epic intro where you articulated this learning-doing gap is basically a crisis of conscientiousness, like what behavioral psychologists call conscientiousness, and what other psychologists call self-regulation.

These are understood by the people who study them, who go deep in these areas to both be the major social pathologies of our time. What I’m trying to explain here is summing up a whole bunch of different academic approaches to understanding the same thing, which I think that you have so succinctly articulated as the learning-doing gap.

What our research pointed us to was that the biggest course of this problem, the biggest reason that there’s some people who really, really struggle with this who never quite seem to take as much action as they want to who don’t get into the flow states as much as they want to, however you want to put is basically isolation. That social isolation is really at the root of the cause of these major social pathologies of the modern world.

[0:23:09.8] MB: I think accountability is so critical. The science obviously supports that conclusion. We talked about a number of components of that. In many ways, our relationship over the last four or five years has been a form of objectively created accountability via our professional relationship. That’s enabled me to become an action taker.

[0:23:36.1] PS: Totally. I mean, that’s exactly what works about literally any therapeutic or coaching relationship, whether it’s a good one or a bad one. I want to give myself credit, we’ve had a lot of great strategy conversations you and I. We’ve talked about some of the mental models, the things that you’ve learned and how you’re applying them to investing decisions and that kind of stuff. At the core of any professional relationship like that, where it’s my job to show up and basically hold on to a biggest set of expectations for you on a weekly basis, then you might even through yourself to hold that space. That is the heart of what I think really, really works about therapy, about coaching, about having mentors or advisers or any of that stuff.

I think so many people hung up on the content in thinking, “Well, what are we talking about?” They missed that it’s actually the container that creates a tremendous amount of that value. Those are the thing is that the specialization of our work in the modern world, like the technology, the fact that most people these days work behind a computer doesn’t even really matter where they are, if they’re blue collar, if they’re participants in the knowledge economy. Certainly, if they’re business owners or entrepreneurs.

All of the social changes that are very, very recent, that have only come about in the last 50 years, if I’m being generous, have robbed us of the natural accountability that would have existed even for our grandparents and certainly every generation beyond that with social ties that close would be right there and that would really help us flourish. I think that that’s why we’re seeing so many people who are stuck in the modern, why so many people are unhappy, not doing as well as they wish they could be. It’s why people have to proactively seek out accountability.

[0:25:22.0] MB: Let’s dig into that a little bit. Tell me a little bit more accountability and for somebody who’s listening, how can they figure out if they have accountability in their life or if it’s missing and maybe that’s something that could be holding them back?

[0:25:33.6] PS: Yeah. I mean, this is the thing. This is the sad state of affairs and the reason why I think that this is the root cause of the major social pathology about time is that most people, many, many people have absolutely zero accountability in their lives; for the personal growth, like the biggest opportunity that they have, like the thing that they’re working on. For people who are passionately listening to a podcast like Science of Success, or who reading books, who are really developing some aspect of themselves, or trying to, that’s an incredibly private process for most people.

Most of the folks we’ve talked to will tell us that the spouse doesn’t get it, their family doesn’t get what they’re up to, most of their friends don’t even get it, that they really are in that intellectual bat cave. As a consequence of that, while they are doing the learning, they are totally excited about what they’re doing, but as soon as they start moving from learning to doing, just putting their toe in this sort of proverbial doing swimming pool, they immediately become plagued by isolation, doubts and sort of loneliness, because they just don't have people who are in it together who are with them.

Then what we've seen is that some people play games to attempt to hold themselves accountable. That looks like weird mind games that people set up for themselves, where they're doing mental bargaining, they're installing reward systems in their life where they're trying to manage their schedules and various kind of things that they're implementing, or rituals, aspects of self-improvement, whatever it might be in the business world and their personal lives. That kind of feel like the way someone would manage an unruly toddler, right? It's like putting a little chart on the fridge and saying, “Now if you take this off, if you get this done then you get the cookie.”

It’s a very unhealthy mental dynamic. The other thing we see is people who try to get it from like a close friend, they find a buddy who's going through a journey with them, but then the challenge with that is that it's very – it sometimes works, right? Like jogging buddies work and that's a form that's really basic form of accountability, that's like a perfect metaphor for this. They fail when the first day that somebody's hungover, right? They tend to fall apart. They don't stress test well. Those relationships fall apart when you need it the most.
Or sometimes it's worse than that, that the form of accountability that's available to you socially keeps you stuck where you are, where as a consequence of your accountability partner or friend not being entirely on the same page with the vision you have for yourself, not quite wanting the same things as you. There are some people who actually don't want to the people around them succeed, because it makes them feel worse about where they're at. It's very difficult to spot.

[0:28:19.8] MB: I think a lot of these traditional strategies, I know definitely been challenging for me and I've seen other people I know struggle with the same things.

[0:28:28.4] PS: I mean, it is a major, major problem. We found this out when we started asking people at my company. We started doing this research, thousands of people we asked this one simple question which was, does anyone on earth really know if you spent the last week in the zone absolutely crushing it, or if you were just clocking in and out without accomplishing anything?

What was shocking about that question is that people with committed, like fantastic, like self-described fantastic marriages answered it no. That something about the way that modern human beings work has made people with close families, people with friends who live very near them all answer no this question, that our work has become increasingly digital, it's private, it's on screens other people can't see, no one knows whether or not you crushed it last week, or whether or not you just clocked in and out and wasted time. The human brain did not evolve to optimally perform in that vacuum of social accountability.

[0:29:28.6] MB: I want to dig into, and we're going deeper and deeper in this rabbit hole, but we'll come out of it. I want to into the implications of not having accountability. What are some of the problems that that creates in people's lives?

[0:29:40.6] PS: I think that the problem with a long-term, and it really is for some people, they begin these chapters of their lives that can last decades without really any social accountability. The first thing is that human beings are beginning to lose the mental mirror that develops self-awareness. There's this brilliant saying, I forget where I picked it up, that human beings outsource their sanity. That it takes a village to grow a human mind.

I think that that is everything that we're talking about. That when you're in the accountability vacuum, there's nothing making you honest with yourself. You might know that you're capable of more, right? I think we all believe deep down that we're capable of doing more, of being more, but you're not clear on the specifics of where you're letting yourself down. There's this feeling of uneasy loneliness as a consequence of long-term accountability vacuum.

We also saw people describe seeing others around them, particularly folks who live and like – live and work in really high-performance cultures where there's a lot of successful people and who are around that. That they sort of felt as though everything was on slow-mo for them compared to other people. That they would see other people move much faster and feel like taking action on whatever it was, took them two to five times longer, whatever that means.

We see people kind of – before I talked about the sort of mind games, the mental bargaining people play, I think that long-term, that tends to result in a sort of a schism of the psyche, where people describe this experience of feeling as though there's like an internal mental in a critic, or like a personal trainer whose job it is is to beat you up and tell you what you're supposed to be doing. What typically happens is that internal voice like lets you off your morning workout says, “You didn’t sleep so good last night. Take it easy. Or just chill on Facebook for a little bit this morning at work. Don't worry about it.” Then that afternoon turns around and screams and yells at you for not doing enough. There's this insane rollercoaster of inner critic dynamics that really upset people.

[0:31:50.5] MB: That's one that personally for me has been a major challenge. I mean, I think I'm naturally just very tough on myself. That split personality of letting myself off easy sometimes and then flipping it around and being really hard on myself as a result of that is something that I've personally dealt with and struggled with for sure.

[0:32:10.0] PS: Yeah. Well, yeah. Thanks for sharing. It's tough. I mean, we've heard some shocking things from people. We've heard folks who have described having epiphany after epiphany, breaking promise after promise to themselves, going a bit angry at themselves every single night swearing tomorrow that they're going to wake up and make everything different and turn over a new leaf, only to wake up and repeat the same mistakes and feel as though nothing ever changes. Like we've really interviewed folks on this and had this whole litany of what it looks like to be deep in the accountability vacuum with no way out.

[0:32:45.7] MB: Let's pull back from the darkness for a second and tell me what do people do once they've woken up to this lack of accountability in their lives?

[0:32:54.5] PS: Good question. In my experience talking about this stuff, I've done it from the stage, I've presented online and a whole bunch of different venues and variety of places. There's three kind of knee-jerk reactions that different groups of people have depending on where they're at in their journey of understanding the stuff and really internally clicking with this truth about the significance of accountability is something that drives positive human behavior change.

It's ironic. I mean, the first thing that the vast majority of people do the largest group is just do nothing. They hear about this stuff. They not along – they even have that internal experience of believing this is really going to change things, this is a refreshing wake up mind blowing new idea. Then they walk away from that intervention, that moment of realization with nothing, with no action whatsoever.

Then the second group of people ironically try to solve this by fixing it on their own. They think that this is something that they understand, it makes a lot of sense, they're super fired up to take action and they take everything that they've learned and there's perspective that accountability helps. Mentally imbue themselves with more willpower, and that creates that classic week-long follow-up, being fired up, that then fizzles out, because of the ironic lack of accountability that this is not a problem that you can solve on your own.

The group that I'm always excited about talking to, it's the people that I've built my career working with is the third kind of tiny fraction of a minority. That are the people who realize that the real message here is that they need external support and really learning about the psychological, like social implications of accountability is that final thing that kicks them off and has them solve the isolation problem in their lives.

[0:34:43.1] MB: This is the exact strategy that I've used and that's worked for me working with you using this external support. That's why I'm so excited to finally be able to discover a scalable way that we can share the same strategy with a group of listeners who are ready to take action and bridge the learning-doing gap.

This is something that I really believe in. I've worked with Peter for a number of years on personally solving this and creating a framework of external support. We've found a way now to take the exact strategies that have worked with my relationship with Peter and deliver them to a larger group of audience members who are ready to take that action and bridge that gap. Peter and I have teamed up actually to create an amazing solution to this accountability problem, and it's something that we call the science of action.

We've been working explicitly for months on this idea, but really implicitly for years. The conversations that we've had dating back several years and this whole idea of the learning-doing gap and how do we bridge it. We've created something based on our relationship and the strategies that have worked to help me become a high-leverage action taker, and we call it a total accountability package. It's designed to help you create accountability in your life, bridged learning doing gap and take action on the things that will matter and create an impact for you.

It's a one-on-one service and we're going to get into the details in a second, but we're only able to offer it to the first 50 people that sign up, because it's so personalized and it really helps you dig in and solve this problem.

[0:36:20.9] PS: I think that at this point before we break down the details of it, it's really important to talk about, because this is obviously a very, very specific high-touch white glove service that we've put together this total accountability package, to talk really about who it is for and who it isn't for in a really specific way. We've got a strong set of intentions about what it is that we want to use this accountability to accomplish. I think that there's a real clear person who could be listening to this for whom this is an absolute no-brainer and a fantastic fit for.

[0:36:54.4] MB: I think to start out, you have to have something, some kind of concrete thing that you can make an impact on something, that you can take a leap from learning to doing on, not just thinking about that's going to have an impact on your life. You need to have some sort of real opportunity in front of you, a path to creating improvements and outcomes in your life by taking more action, and asking yourself whether this change is going to truly matter and create an impact in your life.

You also need to be somebody who's ready, truly committed to taking that leap from learning to doing. Not just thinking about it, not just listening to it on a podcast, but really stepping into that practice of being an action taker. Lastly, you need to be able to commit at least five hours a month to invest wholeheartedly in moving from learning to doing and spending time implementing the super high-leverage tactics and strategies that are going to boost your professional and personal outcomes.

What we've created is a total accountability package. That has three components, all of them are designed not only based on the relationship that Peter and I have and how that has helped me be such an effective high-leverage action taker for the last five years, but also in the science and the principles of human motivation and accountability. The first thing is that you're going to get a personal executive effectiveness aide, who's going to have a weekly one-on-one phone call with you that's going to help you organize and prioritize your goals and hold you accountable to executing them.

They're going to check in with you throughout the week with SMS and e-mail to make sure you're on track and that you're actually executing. They're going to help you figure out what are the most important and high-leverage things that you can be doing, so you can execute on them. The next component is a focused monthly webinar with me and all of the members of science of action, where we're going to go through one particular lesson, or strategy from the Science of Success and talk about how to implement that concretely in your life.

I'm going to tell you how I've implemented it and share with you specific worksheets, strategies and tactics that you can use to execute and implement those ideas in your life every single day. Lastly, it comes with a customized software application that's both mobile online anywhere you want to use it that you use to work with your executive effectiveness aide, keep track and manage all of your tasks and activities, and has a full history of all the prior webinars that I've done with science of action members.

I want to get into the specifics of each of these three components of the total accountability package, because they all support and reinforce each other. All of them are based on the science of accountability and all of them are based on the relationship that Peter and I have had in creating a more scalable way to share that. Peter, do you want to start out and tell them a little bit about these executive effectiveness aides and how they work?

[0:39:48.6] PS: For sure. Yeah, I'm really excited about this. In addition to this entire science of action concept, instead of services being based on the work that Matt and I have been doing together, we're bringing in heavy hitters from my company Commit Action to serve the role as these executive effectiveness aides. Now, you need to understand that a couple of things about these people that make them so incredible is that their job is to almost act as a part of your support team.

We frame the executive aides as the most important hire somebody can ever make being the person whose job it is to keep you in the high-leverage zone, to make sure that you continually take action on all the things that you know you should. Their job is to act as a white glove concierge for your goal setting. Rather than you screwing around with systems and lists trying to figure out how to keep track of tasks and organize all of your projects and plans for these kind of high leverage growth opportunities in your life, you are now going to have somebody who takes care of that for you.

Their role is also to operate as a personal trainer, but for your focus and productivity. They're highly trained in brain science and psychology to help keep you focused on the things that you need to be. Of course, the thing that really is incredible about this service is that we're giving one-to-one professional objective accountability that helps you stay on track, stay focused and keep crossing that gap from learning into doing.

Every single one of these aides has hundreds and hundreds of hours of experience working with business owners and entrepreneurs with my business Commit Action. They've gone through a comprehensive training program. These are full-time 100% in-house staff that I've built up as a team and trained over many years. They're based in the US. We hire less than 1% of the people who apply for this position, because we take the psychological variable testing finding the right personality fit for people to be absolute experts at professional accountability. What you need to understand is that this is the absolute pinnacle of pro objective accountability, and it's going to be in your corner. You're going to be supported by the service.

[0:42:02.5] MB: Working with these aides is phenomenal. It effectively lets you outsource your battle for focus and productivity. There's a whole another component of the science of action as well, and that's the webinars that we're going to be hosting every single month. I'm going to be doing a webinar with all of the science of action members and we're going to concretely go through some of the most important ideas, lessons and strategies from the Science of Success. I'm going to walk you through specifically how to execute and implement those ideas in your life.

I'm going to share with you how I've done it, give you templates, tools worksheets and strategies so that you can do it yourself, and we're going to have a Q&A where we can walk through and ask questions, talk about struggles, setbacks, places where you're not clear about how to do it, or roadblocks that you might hit. I'm going to be a resource there for you to talk through and figure out how to overcome those challenges.

I'm going to give you a little sneak peek of the topics we're going to cover in the first three months of these science of action webinars. The first month, we're going to talk about how to get more done by focusing on less by using the power of contemplative routines. We're going to go deep into the 80/20 principle, which is one of the most important principles from my life. I'm going to show you how to conduct an 80/20 analysis on your own life and how you spend your time.

I'm going to give you a template and a worksheet that you can use anytime you want to create and conduct an 80/20 analysis to see what's working for you and what's not. I'm going to walk you through how I've conducted an 80/20 analysis on myself, share with you the raw notes from prior 80/20 analysis that I've conducted. Then we're going to walk through a Q&A for the questions or things you might not really understand, or feel uncertain about.

The second month, we're going to dig into how to solve any problem and generate breakthroughs in your life and work by digging into the science and strategies of how to create a creativity ritual in your life that's going to create breakthrough insights into the problems and challenges that you have. This is something I do every single morning and it's a strategy that I can't wait to share with you.

In the third month, we're going to get into how to get anyone to do what you want by applying the science of influence. These webinars are going to be phenomenal. They're going to be information-packed and it's all about how to take action.

[0:44:21.1] PS: The other component of the science of action, the other part of this total accountability package is the proprietary software that we've built and put together exclusively for science of action members. Now again, this draws from years of insights, data and research and testing that we've done over at Commit Action and really brings everything together. We started out by asking what is it that a professional executive aide for accountability needs to support their client, to support you to really be the highest leverage version of themselves?

We realized that building out a task list and a sort of a project manager tool where the project is you and your life is just the first step. We went beyond that to actually create a live interactive system built with some of the most cutting-edge software technology that enables you and your executive effectiveness aide to effectively collaborate in real-time when you're on your weekly check-in calls, to create order out of chaos, to sort through your task list, to specify different things that you're working on, to go through the methodology that your coach is trained in, to really dig deep into figuring out how you can measure what it is that you're working on, how you can be more specific about it finding the right level of implementation granularity.

We have a proprietary tool that I'm really excited for you to get access to that facilitates all of this and makes it easy for you to just focus on the doing on the action taking, and have your aide effectively just focus on keeping everything organized around you, so that you can be that high-leverage version of yourself.

The other thing I think it's really important to mention about the software is that the brings another tremendous psychological force. We haven't had too much time to talk about today beyond accountability. It's the force that's driving the multi-billion dollar quantified self-industry. The reason that that industry is blowing up with Fitbits and Apple watches and all that kind of stuff is because quantification works, measurement works.

The thing that our software does is it actually creates a track record of your shift from learning into doing. It builds up over time as you're using the science of action service on a monthly basis, you're going to start building an action record. Your executive aide takes responsibility for keeping track of the amount of hours, the time that you're putting in working on the highest leverage opportunities in your life. This isn't just a task management system that you're putting in notes, like don't forget to pick up milk after work, or pick up the dry cleaning. It's none of that.

Instead, it is a top-shelf solution for only the highest leverage, most important, least urgent opportunities that is creating meta measurement and psychological momentum around the streaks of consistently showing up on a daily, weekly and then monthly basis, to move forward on these huge courageous kind of bold projects in your life that create real concrete change. I'm really excited for science of action members to dig in and start to experience all of the measurement components of the software that we've built.

[0:47:24.0] MB: I want to pull it back now and re-summarize what we're offering here with the science of action. There's three big components that form a total accountability package. The first is that you're going to get an effectiveness aide that works with you one-on-one. You have a phone call every week and they're going to have weekly check-ins with you be on the phone call, where they're checking up and making sure that you're actually executing. This is one of the most effective strategies for accountability.

Next, you're going to get a monthly webinar with me, where we're going to go through how to actually implement the ideas from the Science of Success. Walking you through the tactics and strategies and giving you the tools to be able to do it. Lastly, this is all going to be housed on a proprietary software platform that's state-of-the-art and enables you to collaborate in real-time with your aide and get access to all of the content we've created with science of action now and in the future.

Peter’s work is really the foundation for what we're bringing and offering to the Science of Success community here. I wanted to share a couple quick stories. With the magic of editing, we can sort of insert them here from people who've worked with these executive aides in the past, and they can share with you just what it's like.

[0:48:33.7] CM: Hey, my name is Carl Mattiola and I'm the Founder of Clinic Metrics.

[0:48:37.7] KA: Hi, my name is Kathryn Atkins and I'm the owner of Writing World, LLC, a freelance business writing company.

[0:48:44.4] S: Hi, it’s Sen here in Scotland, and I just wanted to say a quick word of thanks to Commit Action and a bit about my experience with Commit Action over the last year.

[0:48:53.4] CM: I started with Commit Action about a year and a half ago. When I did, I was still working a day job –

[0:48:59.3] KA: Since last year, the first nine months of last year versus this year, I am up 50% in sales.

[0:49:06.2] S: It immediately started to inject some action-oriented structure to my weekly routines. I was always structured and driven, but became much more focused on the things I could control to move my business forward. Commit Action is now a permanent fixture in my life and it has been for the past year.

[0:49:21.5] CM: It always helps me stay focused and just really driven. It's just really good to have that extra person on the other side. It feels good to have that, know that they care and it makes me want to do more knowing that there's somebody else outside of my everyday life looking at what I'm doing, so it's worked really great for me.

[0:49:41.2] KA: It's been a great thing. Their simple formula is surprisingly powerful.

[0:49:46.2] S: I'm eternally grateful for the huge leaps that I made mentally.

[0:49:49.7] CM: Today and looking forward a lot has changed. I mean I've left my job since then. I'm working full-time on my businesses. At the time, I was only one employee just working for myself and now I have nine people working with me on these businesses.

[0:50:03.5] KA: I built the confidence and the momentum and the determination that I needed to go forward even more.

[0:50:11.8] CM: I highly recommend the service if you're somebody who really needs some help with productivity or being more productive, or if you're somebody like me who's already somewhat productive, but just wants to improve themselves. Yeah, highly recommend it.

[0:50:27.2] KA: It's like I've tapped into a force in a Star Wars kind of way.

[0:50:32.9] S: Now my future definitely looks bigger and bolder than I would have previously thought, because I’m mentally equipped with powerful tools that can guide and support me.

[0:50:42.8] MB: We're combining these executive effectiveness aides with these webinars with a software platform creating an end-to-end accountability service that's going to help you be more accountable. I'm sure probably asking yourself at this point how exactly is this going to work? What exactly is this going to cost? I wanted to put that in context for you.

As I said, this comes out of my work with Peter and how he's helped me personally become a high-leverage action taker and we found a way now to share that with a broader Science of Success community of people who want to become action takers. Working with Peter, he's incredibly busy. He can only take on maybe five, 10 clients at a time and he charges several thousand dollars a month for his service. He's done some homework and looked into what would be a more effective pricing strategy for the science of action.

[0:51:34.7] PS: Yeah. We actually kind of focused group this and talked to a few different people who are in the target psychographically of who it is that we want to be working with. The prices that we heard thrown out there for this level of weekly accountability varied from, you know, honestly up there with what I charge at the thousands of dollars a month point, down to I think about a $1,000 maybe $500 a month, which I think is great. It certainly is exciting that people are pumped about the value of this and see it as an investment in their life.

We think that we can do a hell of a lot better than that. This is a service that we're excited to bring to a decent sized group of people. We're starting off with 50 spaces and a hard limit on that availability, and we are pricing this at $199 per month.

[0:52:20.7] MB: I think it's really important to talk about why this is only available to the first 50 people who sign up. We have hundreds of thousands of downloads every month and we can only offer this to the first 50 listeners, because these are badass, highly-trained, high-touch executive effectiveness aides. They're going to be working with you one-on-one in a white glove concierge experience. This isn't something that we can offer completely in mass, but I am really excited that we can offer it to a larger chunk of the community, and so it's really specifically for the people who are right there ready to crush it, ready to take action, they know there's an opportunity in front of them that they need to be executing on and this is going to be the thing that helps push you over the edge, so that you can execute on it.

Specifically, take a look at your career, your life, your health, your relationships and see what you can do to improve it. If there's something right there in front of you that you know you could create a big impact on. Is it making a major shift in one of your relationships? Is it changing dramatically something about your lifestyles, so that you can be healthier or more mindful? Is it a career opportunity, whether it's getting recognition, taking charge, seizing that promotion, driving a particular outcome in your business. These are the kinds of things that you can use the science of action to create a breakthrough in your life immediately. With the help of these executive effectiveness aides, you're going to be able to create the accountability that's going to make those outcomes become a reality.

[0:53:48.6] PS: The way that I think about this is, you know my backgrounds both as shrink for entrepreneurs and my other company is always working with business owners, with entrepreneurs. For those people applying this kind of objective accountability is a no-brainer, because they're people who are living right up against that opportunity, where every single day their actions make a difference in terms of their bottom-line results. I think that for Science of Success listeners, if you take a really good hard look at yourself, you may feel that you're actually in a similar position.

The way that we've set this up the 50 space is the $199 a month price, is really something that you can think about being comparable to perhaps a high-end gym membership, or even working having like a session or two with a high-end personal trainer who's about to get you in the best shape of your life. These are the types of investments people make, because they know that that kind of accountability and sort of effectiveness really creates results. The only difference is this is in your wider life.

If you're an executive who's got something that you can really take initiative around, take outside responsibility for and create dramatic change in your life that's going to yield a result. In other words, if there's going to be a return on investment, not just for investing in the actual price of science of action, but for the time and energy that you'll need to put in in order to make that leap from learning to doing.
We are looking ultimately to work with people who are outcome-oriented, who are ready to make that type of commitment and investment in their life, because they know what it is that they want and they have a clear path in front of them to accomplishing it.

[0:55:21.8] MB: The way that you can sign up for science of action is by going to scienceofaction.net. You can sign up right there on the homepage, scienceofaction.net. Remember, we can only take the first 50 people who sign up, so be sure to go there as soon as possible. We exclusively release this early just to our e-mail list, so you're getting an early access to this.

We can only take the first 50 people who sign up at scienceofaction.net, and that's how you can join the service, get your own executive effectiveness aide, join our monthly webinars and become somebody who is an action taker.

[0:55:57.2] PS: Just to give you a perspective on what happens as soon as you hit that sign-up page and fill out your information, the very next thing that you're going to do is go to a webpage inside of our web app there that's going to give you a selection of different appointment times. We have tons available appointment times to suit all different time zones around the world out and serve clients in over 20 countries, so that's not a problem.

You're going to select the appointment time that suits you best, then you're going to be on-boarded and start filling out a questionnaire. The point of this questionnaire is to equip your executive effectiveness aide with everything they need to know about you and what you're working on, what you've got going on in your life, so that they can help you become the highest leverage version of yourself possible and really even make that first check-in call that they do with you really count.
The last step once you've done that questionnaire is you're going to get access to our proprietary web app. We set it up for new members coming in to be in what we call bucket mode. That's where you're going to be able to input tasks and ideas, hopes and dreams, anything that you've got on that kind of mental to-do list, or maybe it's a physical to-do list you have somewhere with a 101 kind of ideas and thoughts and hopes and dreams projects and things that you want to be doing.

What I want to encourage you to do is to put all of that stuff into the science of action app. Get it all listed out down there, so that your executive aide can start sifting through it helping you create priority, helping you tease out, using our proprietary, methodology, using the psychology that they are trained in, what the lowest-hanging fruit is, what the high-leverage opportunities are. They're going to create order out of that chaos, get you on track with specific measurable outcomes that you're going to stop pursuing on a weekly basis, and then updating them on and kind of beginning this entire process.

Treat this as an opportunity right after you sign up, fill out that questionnaire to then brain dump everything that you need, and that's how we're really going to start changing your life and moving you from learning to doing with this science of action service.

[0:57:57.7] MB: Once again, you can go to scienceofaction.net and sign up. Only the first 50 people who sign up are going to be able to get in the program right now, so be sure to be one of those people if you're primed and ready to take action in your life. Again, just to give you a sense, I know sometimes it's hard on a podcast if you're driving around, if you're at the gym, etc. I want to give you a quick summary and tell you again what science of action is.

It's a big shift for the Science of Success, but it's something I'm really passionate about and this process and these strategies have transformed my life and created a tremendous impact for me personally. I've been wracking my brain about how I can solve this learning-doing gap for you, the listeners of the show and this is the first step towards solving it and helping more people in the science obsessed community become high-leverage action takers.

The three pieces of this puzzle, this accountability package that we can now give to you and help you take the steps and become somebody who actually creates results and executes in their life. The first thing you're going to get is an executive effectiveness aide that's going to be your white glove concierge to help you stay accountable, manage your goals and figure out what your priorities are.

Next, you're going to get a monthly webinar with me and the other science of action members, where we're going to go through the specific steps and strategies for executing the most important ideas from the Science of Success. I'm going to walk you through how I've done it and share with you exactly what you need to do it as well. This is all going to be housed in a great custom proprietary software application that you can get online. You can get it on your phone, you can get it wherever you want. We can offer all this for just $199 a month, which is the fraction of a price of what something like this is truly worth.

You can go to scienceofaction.net and sign up right now. We can only accept the first 50 people who sign up, so be sure to go there and check it out. If you have more questions or you're curious, Peter and I are also going to be hopping on a live Q&A just for people who are on our e-mail list, and that Q&A is going to be Tuesday, May 29th at 6:30 p.m. Eastern Time. We're going to be doing a live Q&A, so we can talk to you more about science of action and share a few more insights about how to create accountability in your life.

I know this is a new step for me and it won't be for everybody. It won't be for all of my listeners, but regardless of that, I really wanted to create something like this. Again, this has been tremendously impactful for me personally. I truly believe in what we're doing with the science of action, and I wouldn't be creating this kind of special episode about the show. I wouldn't be sharing all these insights with you if it wasn't something that had personally worked for me and I know can work for you too to create results in your life.

Thank you for listening to us and for sharing this journey with us. I'm excited to be able to provide you with the real tools and strategies you can use in your life to become a high-leverage action taker and to become somebody who's accountable and creates results for what they want.

I think for everybody who's listening to this episode, the biggest meta takeaway of our whole conversation is that whatever you do, you need to find a way to supplement what you're learning with accountability so that you can become someone who creates action, who takes action and makes it happen in their lives.

Peter, thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for collaborating with me to create the science of action. I'm so happy and excited to be able to offer this to everybody and I can't wait to see what kind of results the listeners go out and create using this amazing service.

[1:01:31.3] PS: Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it. It’s been cool to riff on this. It's been a pleasure working with you to collaborate and build this over the last few months. I think that that meta takeaway is spot-on, by the way. I tell everybody that I meet this, to everyone I touch and interact with in all my capacities across different businesses, I think it's the same story for science of action, for Science of Success listeners, no matter who you are, no matter whether or not you feel like you're one of these people who's on that precipice who's ready to make the leap from learning to doing and joining us with this, or if it's not for you, either way solve this accountability problem in your life, get a mastermind together with friends, get accountability buddies, do all of that, because accountability works best when you stack it.

I'm going to encourage everyone who joins science of action to stack as much accountability as possible. What we've built, what we've put together with our executive aide service and all the bits and pieces that makes this a total accountability solution. That I think is the cream, the ultimate cherry on top for an accountability cake. I'm sort of taking this metaphor too far here, but it is a cake, a layer cake that you should be building in your life.

We're put together a white glove option for really busy ambitious people who want the absolute best accountability, the kind that's objective, that's utterly professional and is rock solid and dependable as a result of all of that. I totally agree. I want every listener today to walk away from today with a new sense of appreciation for the power of intentional social bonds and the accountability that springs forth for them. Thanks for having me.

[1:03:05.4] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you our listeners master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story, or just say hi, shoot me an e-mail. My e-mail is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I’d love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener e-mail.

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should sign up for our email list today by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage. There are some incredible stuff that’s only available to those on the email list, so be sure to sign up, including an exclusive curated weekly email from us called Mindset Monday, which is short, simple, filled with articles, stories, things that we found interesting and fascinating in the world of evidence-based growth in the last week. 
Next, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show, including voting on guests, submitting your own personal questions that we’ll ask guests on air and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get a free guide we created based on listener demand, our most popular guide, which is called how to organize and remember everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the email list today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com, sign up right at the homepage, or if you're on the go, just text the word “smarter”, S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. 

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

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

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

Your Ultimate Guide to Performing Under Pressure and Unleashing Confidence - Dr. Michael Gervais is BACK

In this episode we go deep into the high performance habits of the worlds top performers, look at the only place confidence truly comes from, dig into why we struggle to perform when the pressure is on, examine the habits, routines, and strategies the world’s absolute best use to perform at their peak, and much more with our guest Dr. Michael Gervais. 

Dr. Michael Gervais is a high performance psychologist who has worked with some of the world’s top performers including the Seattle Seahawks, Felix Baumgartner (The Red Bull Athlete Who Completed the Stratosphere Jump) Olympians, musicians, and champions! His work has been featured on ESPN, CNN, The New York Times, and much more!

• We love to put some of the world’s top performers on a pedestal - but there are extraordinary things that take place every day that aren’t capture on the cameras

• Are extraordinary performers born that way? No.

• Why do we struggle to perform “when the lights are on”/ “when there is pressure”

• Top performers have fundamentally organized their lives around growth and improvement

• What does it mean to have your life organized around performance and growth?

• There are only 3 things we can train

• We can train our body

  1. We can train our craft

  2. We can train our minds

• The origins of sport are built on the ancient traditions of war

• When we look at the best in the world across domains - they are more similar to each other than dissimilar

• Relentless dedication to building and refining their craft

  1. Relentless dedication to building the right body / carriage

  2. Ability to adapt and be strong from a mental perspective

• Provide opportunities to stress the system (mind & body) and to recover the system

• Feedback loops are both internal and external

• The importance of having consequences - both natural/physical consequences and man made consequences

• Lessons from working with coach Pete Carroll from the Seattle Seahawks

• Ask yourself: Who in your life helps you be better and what are the characteristics of those people?

• The most significant accelerant to someone’s success is knowing that you have their back

• Internal feedback loops

• How am I doing? How does it feel? Am I executing at the right level?

  1. What is going on in my body?

  2. Being aware of the energy, tension in your body, your thoughts, etc

• Once you become aware of maladaptive mental strategies - then you develop the tools to adjust

• First awareness,

  1. Then skill

• External feedback loops - having people in your life who can help you get better

• At any given time we can have our attention focused internally or externally - but we can’t spend too much time focused on the internal

• In training - the external feedback loops and human feedback becomes tricky - and that’s why Dr. Gervais has a deep commitment to maintaining and building healthy relationships

• To do extraordinary things in life - NOBODY does it alone. We need other people. You have to invest in the true connection with other people.

• The greatest wayfinders, when they set sail, they don’t pray for calm waters, they pray for rugged seas, moving through the rugged seas is what forges strength - that is where you get made, that is where you find your true nature

• The brain’s job is to scan the world and see what’s dangerous - but you can’t let the brain have too much control

• Your brain is underserved, underutilized, under-programmed

• If you don’t train the software of your brain - the brain’s natural reaction will win.

• You have to condition your mind so that your brain doesn’t win. So that your natural fight or flight reaction doesn’t take over.

• YOLO.. FOMO… now FOPO - Fear of Other People’s Opinion - one of the most silent traps that robs us and keeps us stuck

• What should we do if we get caught up in the internal dialogue too often? What should we do if we get stuck in our head too often?

• Start training your mind, just like you would train your body. Start training in simple, calm environments, and then push yourself into more and more stressful environments

• Optimism is at the core of mental toughness. Optimism is a skill, you’re not born with it, you have to TRAIN it.

• Just like everything - genetics are involved, environment is involved, training is involved.

• This is about conditioning your mind to be extraordinary on the razors edge

• 5 Functions Under Stress

• Fight

  1. Flight

  2. Freeze

  3. Submission

  4. Flow

• In western culture, our self worth is tied to our achievements and results. The idea that we need to do more to be more is broken. It’s wrong.

• The notion that you need to do more to be more is exhausting - it’s time to flip the model.

• We need to BE MORE to DO MORE, let our DOING flow form our BEING

• Present

  1. Rounded

  2. Authentic

• Our value in inherent and not contingent on what we do. The intellectual idea is not enough, we have to ACT ON IT.

• The acquisition of knowledge is not enough, you have to APPLY to knowledge.

• When you have a deep trust that you can do difficult things, and you don’t need the doing to define you, you have incredible freedom.

• The most powerful people in the world are those that have nothing to lose.

• Those that have NOTHING TO PROVE are incredibly powerful.

• I know how to be me, express me in any environment, and I'm not intimidated by what you think.

• Love deeply and know yourself and love others.

• When you don’t need to defend and protect yourself, when you can BE yourself, there is an incredible freedom in that.

• There are no tricks, there no tips - just the hard work.

• Can you be yourself in highly stressful, rugged, hostile, razor’s edge environments.

• When you get exposed for what you’re not good at, that’s when the GOOD FEEDBACK LOOPS OPEN UP - and you need to get into those environments more often.

• What are the environments and conditions where you struggle?

• Training confidence is extremely mechanical. Confidence only comes from one place - it’s not past success, its not preparation - confidence ONLY COMES FROM what you SAY TO YOURSELF.

• Write down what your internal dialogue sounds like - write those thoughts down, self doubt, self criticism, excessive worry - those thoughts don’t open up space, they constrict you.

• Write down what it sounds like to be in your head when you’re on point - when it’s good to be you, what do you say to yourself?

• Externalizing your thoughts is a key step in building confidence.

• Practice good thoughts, and put yourself in environments to test them.

• “If you’re gonna throw darts, know where the bullseye is” - the bullseye in this case is what thoughts work for you

• Thoughts lead to thought patterns, thought patterns lead to habits of mind. We want to build positive habits of mind.

• Feelings only happen if you reverse engineering them through thinking and thinking patterns.

• Insights from Felix Baumgartern’s Stratosphere Jump

• Thoughts lead to emotions, and emotions + thoughts impact performance

• It’s sloppy to show up and just think you will be OK, show up in presence

• Training the mind is not EXTRA - it’s something we need to invest in on a regular basis. If you train your craft to a ridiculous level, but you don’t train your mind, as soon as pressure enters the environment, you will will be exposed

• To have a strong mind, you have to TRAIN YOUR MIND FOR STRENGTH

• Mindfulness is intimately linked to confidence

• Mindfulness is a focus training to focus on the awareness - that awareness training is the beginning step of being aware of our thoughts and thought patterns. If we can become aware and more sensitive to our thoughts and thought patterns, we can course correct and built a more optimal internal state.

• “Choking” - where does that term come form? What does it mean to choke?

• Performing under pressure is good, but it’s not dissolving pressure - that’s a different thing.

• If you think there’s pressure you’re right.

• Is it possible to change your relationship with yourself and your environment in such a way that pressure is dissolved. You have to do the hard work to figure out your unique psychological framework from your parents, peers, pop culture, and more.

• Do you think buddha had pressure? No he dissolved it. What about Jesus? The purpose was so much larger, and their internal framework was so sturdy that they dissolved pressure. Flow state / the zone is essentially the dissolving of pressure. Using the challenge of the environment to create a deep focus.

• Focus on the task at hand, not focus on the clunkiness

• We dig into the daily architecture of a world class performer and what that looks like

• “You would be surprised by how much we focus on recovery” within the framework of a world class performer’s daily architecture

• Day in and day out is an internal competition with yourself

• Mindfulness/meditation is a “massive accelerate” to mastering your internal domain

• Homework - take a good hard look at your sleep patterns

Thank you so much for listening!

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

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

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

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

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [SoS Episode] The Psychology Secrets of Extreme Athletes, NFL Teams & The World’s Top Performers with Dr. Michael Gervais

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

• [Article] Good genes are nice, but joy is better by Liz Mineo

• [Wiki Article] Martin Seligman

• [TEDTalk] The new era of positive psychology by Martin Seligman

• [SoS Episode] Embracing Discomfort

• [SoS Episode] How To Demolish What’s Holding You Back & Leave Your Comfort Zone with Andy Molinsky

• [Book] Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M Pirsig

• [Website] Finding Mastery

• [Website] Compete to Create

• [Twitter] Michael Gervais

Episode Transcript

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

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

In this episode, we go deep into the high performance habits of the world’s top performers, look at the only place confidence truly comes from, dig into why we struggle to perform when the pressure is on, examine closely the habits, routines and strategies of the world’s absolute best, and what they use to perform at their peak and much more with our guest, Dr. Michael Gervais, who’s making a comeback appearance on the show. This is his second time around. We love the first interview so much that we’re having him back. 

I’m going to give you three quick reasons why you should sign up and join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There are some amazing stuff that’s only available to our email subscribers, so be sure, check that out, sign up and join the email list if you have not done it. 

First, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listeners demand. This is our most popular guide, it’s called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it absolutely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. You’re also going to get a curated weekly email from us every Monday called Mindset Monday, which listeners have been loving. It’s short, simple, articles, stories and videos that we found fascinating or interesting in the last week. 

Lastly, you're going to get an exclusive chance to shape the show. You can help us vote on guests. You can submit your own questions to our guests, help us change the intro music, become part of exclusive things that we only offered our community, including giveaways and much more, but you won't know about any of that stuff unless you're on the email list. So be sure to sign up, join email us today. Again, you can do that at successpodcast.com and sign up right there on the homepage, or if you’re driving around, if you're on your phone, if you're on the go right now, just text the words “smarter”. That's “smarter" to the number 44222. That's “smarter" to 44222. 

In our previous episode we discussed the relationship between bad ideas and creative genius; the three biggest lessons from setting the most successful hedge fund on earth; why a complete stranger may often be a better judge of your abilities than you are; the key things that stand in the way of developing more self-awareness and how you can fix them; why it's so important to invest in the ability to make better decisions and much more with our guest, Dr. Adam Grant. If you want to become a better version of yourself, be more creative, have more ideas and be more innovative, be sure to listen to that episode.

Now for the show. 

[0:03:05.5] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest coming back to the show, Dr. Michael Gervais. Michael is a high-performance psychologist who has worked with some of the world’s top performers, and including the Seattle Seahawks, Felix Baumgartner, the Red Bull athlete who completed the stratosphere jump, Olympians, musicians and champions. His work is been featured on ESPN, CNN, The New York Times, and much more. Michael, welcome back to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:31.6] MG: All right. Thanks for having me back. This was a great conversation the first time around. So, thank you. 

[0:03:37.7] MB: We really enjoyed the conversation last time and there's so many more nuggets of insight that we want to dig into. I mean, you obviously have spent a tremendous amount of time working with some of the world’s top performers, athletes, musicians, etc., and really kind of seen what it takes to perform at the highest levels. I'd love to, in this episode, kind of unpack and get into some of the concrete elements of kind of how do you work on those mindset trainings for somebody who's at the top of their game? What does that look like? How do they structure their day and how does that process kind of function? 

[0:04:11.8] MG: I love it. So one of the, I think, fundamental — I don't want to call it a mistake, but there's a nuance here that I want to talk about, which is we love to put the great doers of the world on a pedestal, and some of the most extraordinary people are people in sport, in science and people that have done amazing things. It's not that they — What they've done is not amazing, but there's media around it. So we pay attention to it. 

There are extraordinary things that take place all the time, but there're no cameras. We don’t know how to value that creativity, that dedicated disciplined mind, because we don't see it. So what I want to pull a thread back on is there are extraordinary people right now listening in your community that do extraordinary things and they know it and they’re nodding their head, like, “Yeah, right on.” They just don’t have a camera pointed at them.

That begs the question is; are the extraordinary doers that have cameras on them, are they born that way? No. We know. What is it about? Okay, yes. They are able to perform when the lights are on, and many of us struggle with that. Okay. So that is one piece of it, is that sometimes the non-conditioned mind finds it very difficult to be fluid and to be eloquent when there's “pressure”, and we have to define pressure for ourselves so we can get into that conversation. 

So it's not that these extraordinary doers that have media coverage are fundamentally different than the rest of us, but they have done something that is fundamentally different. They’ve organized their life, fundamentally organized their life to grow, to get better, to be progressive, to push to the boundaries, to have incredible feedback loops that are highly accurate and very sensitive and finely tuned, and those feedback loops are part of the accelerated arc or accelerated growth that they're looking for. 

So while it's easy to put extraordinary doers on a pedestal, and I don’t want to take anything away from what they've done, because you see some of the best in the world, the tip of the arrow in any domain and it’s like, “Wow! That is beautiful,” like look how easy they make the complicated seen, and it is beautiful, whether it's words, or whether it’s painting in canvas, or whether it's movement motion. It is beautiful when you see the best in the best. But when we pull back the curtain and really look what’s extraordinary, is the way that they fundamentally organize their life to get better and to help those around them get better. 

[0:06:49.8] MB: There're several different things I want to unpack from that. So just to make sure we don't forget these, I definitely want to dig into pressure and how to perform under pressure. I really want to talk about how we can build feedback loops into our lives. But before we do either of those, tell me more about this idea of having their day or their lives sort of fundamentally organized around performance and growth. 

[0:07:11.4] MG: Okay. Well, if we take a look first at what is very primary, like the basic, basic, basics of people getting better, there're only three things that we can train as we’ve talked about before. We can train our body, we can train our craft and we can train our mind. For a long time, people have invested incredible resources, good science as well as old school traditions on how to develop a craft, whether that craft be ballet or whether that craft be something about leadership. There’s a good science and some practices. On the leadership stuff, it goes all the way back Sun Tzu, The Art of War. I don’t know how many translations there’s been, but those principles seem to be interesting to lots of leaders and all of modern day research that comes up about leadership. 

The same with sport, like the origin of sport are built on ancient traditions of war. So those traditions have been passed down and past passed down and passed down and mutated and adapted for modern sport. So they're great traditions and there's good science. The emerging field of sport science is we’re starting to get our arms around what are the right questions and what is the right — Or what are the right data to be able to have better insights that are actionable for athletes to be even more finely tuned to both their intuition, their sense of how their body is doing based without data as well as how their body is doing with data. 

Okay. So then the third pillar though, the mind, and how to condition and train the mind. It’s a big deal, and I haven't met an athlete or a coach yet you on the world stage that doesn't say, “Oh, yeah. The mental part of the game, that’s a game. That is a big deal.” It begs the question; what are the ancient traditions and what is the science teaching us about how to condition our mind? 

So when we look at the best in the world and when we look at them across domains, the tip of the arrow across domains are more similar to each other than dissimilar. That being said, there is no just one path and not everybody does it a certain way. There are as many different routes to becoming one's best or the best that you can imagine. So there is a common thread though that people are uncommonly relentlessly dedicated in almost a nauseatingly focused way to build and refine their craft, to build and have the right body for the right carriage, if you will, to be strong and flexible to do things that they need to do. Then, also, saying ability to adapt and be strong from a mental standpoint. 

So those are the three lenses, and what they do is they organize their life to be able to provide opportunities to stress the system and recover the system. When I say system, I’m talking about the human mind and body, and it’s not that mechanical. It's not that simple, but every day we need to push on the limits of our craft, push on the limits of our body and push on the limits of our mind, and then appropriately recover. How do we know if we are pushing to the limits? We need those feedback loops, and those feedback loops are both internal and external. 

So what an external feedback loop is like information from the environment, which in, let’s say, actions sports or X-Games types of stuff or things that are happening outdoors. Less the stick and ball sports for just a moment, but more of the action-adventure sports. 

When people make mistakes there, there are consequences. I don’t want to be dramatic. There can be radical consequences, but they don’t have to be. But those consequences are often physical and they’re real and that sort of toll on the body can be very dangerous. So those feedback loops are wonderful. When you get real-time natural feedbacks, when there are consequences on the line, that feedback is awesome, because you have to be on. You have to have your antenna perked in just the right attunement. If not, those consequences can — They can get you. 

Then there's also more man-made or artificial consequences. Those man-made artificial consequences oftentimes show up in business, they show up on tradition stick and ball sport, where it's a little bit of like you look back to other humans to see how you're doing. That can be an accelerant, that could be a good thing and that could can be troublesome if that is — If looking for others for feedback becomes part of a loop that is not — What’s the right word here? Is not primary and pure, meaning that it can get cloudy and noisy when we’re looking to other people to see how you we’re doing. Unless we know those people in our lives, have our best interest at heart. 

We asked the last two years, we’ve spent — Coach Carroll is the head coach of the Seattle Seahawks. He and I built a joint venture together and we took our insights on how to switch on a culture and how to train the minds of people that want to be great. The work, essentially, we’ve been doing it up at the Seattle Seahawks together and we’ve built this business. Over the last 24 months we’ve trained 30,000 people, on average, eight hours a person. That's 240,000 human hours of mindset training across our efforts here, and we’re just getting started, but it’s a really good dent. I shouldn’t say it’s a dent. It’s a really good momentum is more of what it feels like. 

The point that I want to share about that is that when we ask folks about who in your life helps you be better and what are those characteristics of those people? It's basically an exercise to help people say, “What are those characteristics, and am I living that way? Am I helping people based on the characteristics [inaudible 0:12:59.3] be better?” 

Across the board, it’s like unanimously it’s outrageous. People say, “You know what? The most significant accelerants for me being better, those people in my life, are those that I just know that they have my back, that they have my best interest, not their best interest.” 

When we stitch that back to the feedback loop, the feedback loop from humans is really important when we know first and foremost that it is really about them providing us the right information in the right way at the right time to help us grow, to help the person grow. It doesn’t mean that they’re interested in the benefits, the ancillary benefits if you do extraordinarily well, and that’s kind of the coaching role in many ways, is you want to help athletes or executives be great. When I say coaching, I’m not talking about life coaching. I’m talking about performance coaching. When you want to help them be great, that there is a glow that you get and that helps your career as well. 

It is sticky in some circumstances because we are relying on each other to do great, but we have to first and foremost have the relationships where it’s pure, and the information I’m going to give you is for you to be your best. Anyways, I could talk more deeply if you’d like about feedback loops, but those are some of the large 60,000-foot frames that I think that are important to get right. 

[0:14:27.5] MB: I want drill down into feedback loops, but I don’t want to lose sight on the larger conversation, so I do want to come back to that. But talking specifically about kind of developing feedback loops in our lives, I think when I look at something like sport, or even something like poker, or chess where there's really clear sort of results and measurement and the ability to go back and analyze performance really succinctly, it's obvious kind of how to get feedback. But when I look at something like business or investing or even some creative endeavors, how do you think about developing feedback loops and those more kind of murky, nebulous fields? 

[0:15:04.2] MG: Okay. The main levers of feedback are internal, so that's like, “How am I doing?” What does it feel like? Am I aligned with my thoughts, my words and my actions? Is my body executing at the level or in the right way? 

When we’re talking about poker and those types of things, it is an alignment that you can sense. Is there clarity in my thought? Does my body have too much tension? Not enough tension? Am I under-aroused, over-aroused? There is an internal feedback loop, and that is a skill to become aware of that. 

The second part of that skill is to be able to once you’re aware that maybe — Let's say that you're a bit too much, or you’ve got too much energy in your body, or you're thinking about what happens if you blow it, or what the consequences will be if you’ll lose this hand or lose this round. That once you're aware of maladaptive physical or mental strategies, then the second part, the second skill is to have the tools, the mental skills and tools to be able to adjust. So it's a two-part system of being great as an internal feedback loop. First, awareness, then skill. 

Now, external is when you've got people in your life that are helping you get better. That's part of external, and the other part of external is being able to recognize the impact that you're having on the environment and/or that the environment is having on you. At any given point in time that we can have attention focused internally or externally, and if we spend too much time on the internal awareness, we lose the ability to focus on the external, which is really where sport and performance take place. It happens outside. All of the thinking and the regulation that happens inside is to ready us to be able to have output, and that output, what we’re looking for is high performing, eloquently adjusting, real-time, sensitive, extraordinary impact on our environment. That’s what the output is. Whether it's a paintbrush, whether it’s the analysis of a poker table, or whether it's snapping a free-throw, game seven of the finals in the NBA, whatever it might be. 

So there is an internal game that happens first, and then there's an external game. What we want to be able to do is have this rapid cycle between internal and external, and that is essentially the feedback loops that we’re talking about. 

Now, when we’re in training, those external feedback loops, the human part is the part that gets tricky, because human relationships are tricky. They’re not simple, and that's why we start — When I saw we, I’m talking about Coach Carroll and I, more particularly, maybe at the Seattle Seahawks, there's a deep commitment to want to be a relationship-based culture where we start with the relationships, because it's with the relationships with other people that makes us. Now we have to have a relationship with ourselves first to be a great partner for other people. So it's relationship with self first, then relationship with others, getting those things calibrated properly, getting the mission set up so that we can nod our head and point our noses in the right direction, in the same direction, and then work ridiculously hard running to the edge of our capacity on craft, body and mind every day. When guys are tripping and falling down or not doing exactly right or literally dropping a ball sometimes, it's okay. I got their back, because I know that I’m going to trust that they’re going to have my back as well. 

So to do extraordinary things in life, whether that's being an extraordinary lover or being an extraordinary entrepreneur, nobody does it alone. We need other people. So what that means is we’ve got to invests in the true connection to lock our arms, because to do extraordinary things, we need other people. That means we got to stay locked as best as we can when it gets hard, and the greatest way finders — I'm not sure if you're familiar with way finder. The people that travel the world without modern technology and travel the oceans without modern technology. When they set sail — And they might not come back, because the ocean is dangerous. When they set sail, they don't pray for calm waters, they pray for rugged sees, because it's the rugged see, it’s moving through the rugged see that becomes the separator. Most people can’t manage the tension. They can't manage the hostility or ruggedness, because they have not conditioned their mind to find that that is where we get exposed, that is where we get made. That is where we find out our true nature, in those rugged and hostile environments. 

For most people, if they haven’t conditioned their mind, their brain wins. So the brain's job is to scan the world and find what’s dangerous. I don’t want to oversimplify this really beautiful piece of electricity, chemistry tissue that we have really no idea what this three pounds of tissue is doing in our skull, and it's beautiful. It’s amazing and it’s underserved, underutilized, under-programed and that hardware, our brain tissue is programmed by our mind. The mind is the software, the hardware if you will, and those that haven’t been training the software, the mind, and brain will win, because its whole job is to keep you alive. The mind’s job is to override to know how to override our DNA when we find ourselves purely responding in survival mode as opposed to optimized mode. Our survival tactics that are natural to our brain will help us stay alive, and they are optimized for survival. 

When you're giving a speech in front of — I don’t know. Fill in the blank. Two people to 20,000 people, it’s not survival mode at that time. It’s meant to be a moment to express authentically, and if we don't condition our mind — This is not me on a pedestal. If we don’t condition our mind, our brain will win. I know you felt that, Matt. I know that your community folks feel it, that we have those moments and we’ve studied our ass off, we prepared for it and all of a sudden we tighten up and we've got cortisol running through our system. We’ve got too much adrenaline. We've got that stuff inside of us. We start to sweat in weird places. We start to think differently. We start to have this rapid eye movement. We’re scanning the world and seeing if we’re doing okay. Bullshit on that. That’s where we get into trouble, is when we look into the world and to the eyes of other people to see their body language to see if we’re okay, that's wrong. That's not having an accurate internal filter. That's having an external focus filter to see if you're okay based on what other people think of you. 

I know you've heard of YOLO, you only live once. That’s great. You’ve heard of FOMO, fear of missing out. That's cool. But I think there’s a new thing that — I don’t know. I haven’t heard it before. Maybe this is like where it happens, FOPO, fear of other people’s opinion. It’s one of, I think, the most silent traps that robs us, that t keeps us stuff from expressing and exploring our own potential, fear of other people’s opinions. 

Especially in our modern times, we’ve got this ancient brain that’s trying to keep us alive. In modern times, we just haven't quite figured out how to say, “I’m okay. I'm likely not be hunted today and there's not a predator that’s 15-feet tall that's trying to — Whatever, and there’s not a warring country that's coming into my tribe today.” This is a speech. This is a bet I’m laying on the poker table. This is a free-throw shot. This is — Well, fill in the blanks. 

I got to get off my pedestal for a minute. I got to tell you, Matt. I love these conversations, so when you asked me to come back I was like, “Yeah! I love it.” 

[0:22:53.7] MB: You’re probably listening to the show because you want to master new skills and abilities so that you can live a rich and rewarding life. That's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our loyal and amazing sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography and you get unlimited access to all of these classes for a single low monthly price so you never have to pay per class again. 

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

Skillshare is offering something incredible to our listeners; two months for just $0.99. You can get that by going to skillshare.com/success. That skillshare.com/success for two months of courses for just $0.99. Be sure to check that out. 

[0:24:00.6] MB: No. That’s great. I mean, there're so many things I want to dig into from what you said. I mean, let's start with when — By the way, I think it's such a really important point that the brain, the hardware of the brain was not designed to exist in modern society. It was designed to exist tens of thousands of years ago. The reactions we have to an email from your boss might be the same reaction we had to a dangerous threat out in the bush, and it's not the appropriate reaction in many cases. 

Funnily enough, the very first episode we ever did on the show was called the Biological Limits of the Human Mind, and that's what we talked about. So I love that principal. But I want to ground that back into what should we do when we get caught up in that internal dialogue, in that internal game when we’re too much in our heads. How does that look like to kind of both prepare for that and also in that moment kind of pull out of that? 

[0:24:56.7] MG: Okay. It’s just like everything else. It's just like physical training, and it's just like technical training, is that you want to start in a thoughtful progressive way. So early days, you start training your mind in calm environments and then you say, “Well, what does that mean? What are we training?” 

You can train confidence. You can train calm. You can train focus. You can train optimism, which is I think at the center of mental toughness. You can train passion, believe it or not, by understanding what gets in the way of passion. You can train passion as well by having a clear mission that really get your heart the thump. You train lots of mental skills, including imagery and resiliency skills. You can train all those in quiet, calm environments, and that sometimes is involved in knowledge acquisition, like what are the mechanics of competence? What is a definition of optimism? Why is it important? What’s the science around it? There’s knowledge acquisition first with just about anything. Then there’s the practicing of it. You practice those in progressively aggressive environments. So you start again with a calm environment, practicing optimism in a calm environment, and then practicing it in a more stressful environment until maybe you’re practicing it in hostile and rugged environments where consequences are real. 

I mean, we could get into the weeds of optimism if you want. Many people hear that word and they’re like, “Oh, okay! It just got soft.” “Oh! We’re going to talk about everything’s good and positive.” No, that’s not what it is. It’s not what it is at all. Optimism and pessimism are essentially the way that you think about the future and it's a skill. You’re not born with it. You don't come out of the womb optimistic or pessimistic. 

There is some evidence that there is some genetic dispositions where people come out of the womb with a little bit more of an anxious, pessimistic state, and some come out with a bit more optimistic, calm state. That being said, it’s a skill. Okay? It's just like everything. Genetics are involved, environments are involved and so is training. 

I don’t know. I just flat out don't know somebody who is world-class, world leading that doesn't believe that what's coming up is going to be extraordinary. That’s a skill. It’s totally a skill. As soon as I talk about optimism and pessimism in small rooms of 200 or 2,000 people, I could feel it. I could just feel that people are like, “Oh, okay. Here we go. I knew it. This is going to turn soft all of a sudden.” It’s like, again, bullshit on that. This is about conditioning your mind to be extraordinary on the razor’s edge, and if you don't believe it's going to get good, it happens, we’d give in to the attention of our brain and we eject out. If we eject out too early or pull out too early or escape, if you will — Remember, our brain is this five functions under stress; fight, flight, frees, submission and flow. If we pull out too early, we don’t get to the good stuff. 

If I could pull on this thread just a little bit more. Right now, we live in a culture, Western culture for certain, where productivity, where our identities are increasingly tied to how much we’re doing. We are running and gunning. We’re hustling and where our self-worth driven by all the non-conscious belief. If we do more, that we’ll be more. We’ll be more relevant, be more valuable. We’ll be more needed, maybe more worthy, and it's a function of what and how much we do. That’s wrong. The idea that we need to do more to be more is broken, and it was passed down for good reason from our great-great- grandparents coming through the Industrial Revolution when they saw machines coming in and they said, “Oh! You know what? No machine is taking my job. I’m going to outwork that thing. You can't replace a human.” So they went home and passed on that thinking that we need to work to save our jobs, and that's where like the real hard work value systems were reinforced in modern times, but now it's gone crazy. It’s literally — I bet you feel it. I bet your community feels it, where this idea that I need to do more to be more is so tiring and so exhausting that people find a real deep fatigue worrying about all the things that they need to do to be okay. It's time to flip the model. I think you would feel and I think most people do feel it. It’s time to flip the model, that we need to be more to do more and let our doing flow from our being. When we’re talking about being; being more present being more grounded,  being more authentic. It feels like to me it's time to recognize that our value is inherent and not contingent upon what we do. 

You can nod your head right now say, “Yeah. Mumbo-jumbo. Yeah, I hear you. Of course, that’s not new.” No, it’s not, but the intellectual idea and concept is not enough. We have to act on it. So the acquisition of knowledge is not enough, and so many of us are smart enough that learning comes easy, that we want to learn, learn, learn, learn, read this book, that book. I get asked all the time, “What are the three books that you enjoy?” Who cares? It's how do you apply. Why do you care what book I’m reading? I don’t get that. It’s a book that I’m interested in. That doesn’t mean you should be interested in it. It’s the application of knowledge that really is, I think, the most important accelerant to our growth. Knowledge is important. It’s a base, but it's how you condition and train and apply it in calm environments, progressively working up to rugged environments that allows you to say something to yourself, which is something along the lines, “I can do difficult things.” When you can say I can do difficult things and you can have a deep trust that you can be authentically yourself and grounded and present in any environment and you don't need the doing to define you, there is incredible freedom right on the side. That's a human that becomes really powerful. 

In graduate school, one of my professors was just bang-on right about this and you just hit it home. He says the most powerful people in the world are those that have nothing to lose. Then you just stopped talking. I could tell, he knew exactly what he meant, but he wasn't giving us the answer. Come to find out, it's like those that have too much money, they can just out-money in anything. They are dangerous, because they don't care about it. They have too much. I’m thinking about the billionaires that — Some sort of lawsuit or whatever. That’s a dangerous human. 

You know who the other dangerous ones are? Those who have nothing. They have nothing. Maybe they have no home. They become dangerous, because they have nothing. So there's nothing to lose. Then there's a third person, those that have nothing to prove. Because they don’t have to do the thing to prove to you that they are okay. 

So we can talk about all the mental skills and tactics and tools, and they’re all great. They’re very important to get you to one, which is I know how to be me and express me in any environment, and I'm not intimidated by what you think. I love you. I love people, and I no longer care what they think of me. If you can get to that place, there is an freedom on the other side to figure it out. I think that is part of all of our journeys, to figure out how to love deeply, to know yourself so well that you can love others. You’re not trying to protect and save your own ass and defend yourself when someone in your home says, “Why did you do that?”  Listen, I wish I was free from that. I’m not. I’m not trying to say that I’m this [inaudible 0:32:29.8]. That's wrong. I’m just like everyone else in your community trying to figure it out. 

When we don't need to defend and protect ourselves, that we can be ourselves and be eloquent and adjust, there's an incredible freedom on that. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a manager, a leader in an organization, a poker player or an aspiring or world-class athlete, to be able to be grounded and be present in stress, what once was a stressful environment — Woo! That’s the good stuff.

[0:33:01.2] MB: Wow! That was amazing. Literally, when you said that those who have nothing to prove are incredibly powerful, I got chills. I mean, a fascinating idea and concept and I think so, so important. I love also the notion that we need to let our doing flow from our being. Both of those ideas are really, really interesting to me. 

[0:33:23.7] MG: Yeah, there we go. There we go. It's good stuff. The tools and tricks and tactics — There's no tricks, by the way. There’s no tips. It's like you got to just do the hard yard of training your mind and get to the place that you can be you. What does that mean? Can you be yourself in a highly stressful, rugged, hostile, razor’s edge environments? Because if you can't and you know you can't, or know that most of the time you can’t, you’re just fooling yourself. You’re trying to prove that you're okay. That's a slippery little internal game that our minds can play on us. 

I know this from me, trying to work me out better so I can be a better partner to other people, is that it's hard to do the hard things. It's really hard. When it gets hard — There’s a sign in the Seattle Seahawks in one of the doors for one of the team rooms and it says, “Everyone wants to be great, and so they realize what is required of greatness,” and doing the hard things means that you're not great at it. It’s hard. It's sticky. It's like you're not eloquent, but that's where we get, again, exposed for what we’re not good at. Not exposed as a human, but exposed as a doer. Not a beer, but we get exposed what we’re not good at, and that's where the good feedback loops take place. It’s like, “Oh, look. I can't think clearly as soon as —” fill in the blank, or I can't move eloquently as soon as —” fill in the blank. I need to be in those environments more effort. 

For your community members that are listening, I think it's really important for them to write that stuff down. Write it down. Just put it on a whiteboard. Put it in your phone, whatever. What are the environments and conditions when you struggle? Them from there you can back in a very clear mental skills training and say, “Okay. Well, I’m going to train confidence. I’m going to train calm. I’m going to train mindfulness,” and that’s where it gets really, I think, bespoked and customized. 

[0:35:19.9] MB: There's so many different ways I want to dig into this. I do want to want to talk a little bit about some of those kind of tactics for training calm and confidence. I know in our previous conversation we went really deep into optimism and kindness of the strategies for training that. Tell me a little bit about how you work on training calm and confidence. 

[0:35:40.5] MG: Confidence is really mechanical. It’s super simple. It's super simple to understand. It doesn’t mean it’s super simple to do, but confidence only comes from one place. Most people when asked that question — I don’t want to put you on the spot, Matt, but like your community members that are listening, where does confidence come from? If you just take a moment to try to sort that out, where is that coming from? That if it only comes from one place, it's not success. It's not great performance. It's not path to success. It’s not preparation even. 

I can't tell you how many best in the world — Like in the UFC, I was fortunate enough to spend some time working with some amazing combative athletes in that domain, and some that didn't understand how to actually, the value of training their mind, but that they were doing some work, because I was obviously working with them. I would see them change from the concrete floor walking into the UFC cage, I’d see them change on the five steps that they walk up to walking through the threshold of the cage door. The cage door closes behind them and they’re looking across to another skilled human, equally as skilled, may be better, maybe a little bit worst, but equally as skilled. 

To have 18,000 fans in the environment, millions of people watching to want to see blood, potentially yours, and you're looking across to another man that is equally as skilled as you. All you have is your feet, your elbows, your hands, some knees and your mind. That’s it. Your hands and your feet and your mind in the most ancient tests, and I see people change because the environment dictated their mind, rather than their mind dictate the environment. It begins with conference. It really does. Confidence only comes from one place, which is not past success. It’s not preparation. Those are necessary, but not sufficient. It only comes from what you say to yourself, and I've seen people that are pretty confident on the concrete floor, but then as soon as they walk up the steps, they start to say something to themselves, that inner dialogue, that self-talk that’s like, “Oh, man! I don’t know. Maybe. God! I hope I’m going to be okay. Gees! I wish I would have slept a little bit better. Damn!” fill in the blanks, and that’s where we start to really unravel. 

So confidence doesn't come from preparation. You got to have it. It’s a necessary ingredient, but not enough. It only really comes from what you say to yourself. So, write it down. Write down what it sounds like when you’re a shithead to yourself, like when you're screwed up, write those thoughts down and then be done with them. Those thoughts, those self-critical, self-doubt, excessive worry, all of those thoughts don't build space. They build constriction, they build tension, they build tightness. While it might seem right or might seem — I don’t know, candid-flavored if you will. What’s the big deal? If I say to myself, “I suck.” That one statement is not enough to do any real damage, but it's a little paper cut, and over time, a bunch of paper cuts in the same area becomes a real irritant. 

Then on the other side, write down the thoughts. Literally, the statements, the way it sounds to be in your head when you're on point. When it's good to be you, what are you saying to yourself? That would be like 101, like the 101 course on confidence is what are the negative thoughts and what are the positive thoughts. Write them down. Get them out of your head. Externalize your hard drive. Get it out and then you could just make a decision about, “You know what? I want to have more of those good thoughts.” “Okay, for me to have those good, I want to practice them and then I want to put myself in environments that test them to see if they hold up, and that’s it.” 

Again, it's a mechanical process, but it doesn't mean it is mechanical and you do it. You don’t walk into an environment and say, “Oh, God! What are my good thoughts? What are my epic thoughts? That’s right, I am strong.” No, it's not like that. It’s like you’ve conditioned yourself to know that you are strong and to know that those types of thoughts build you. In the ready room, go back to the UFC. In the ready room when you’re breaking a sweat, that’s where you say to yourself, “I put in the fucking work. Let’s go! My shit is strong and on point. I’m going to snap my jab. I’m going to pivot my hips and I’m going to lock and load. Let’s go!” whatever it is. If you don't appreciate the combative sports, then you would use it something in a more artistic canvas and/or business way. So it’s doing the work ahead of time. Where does confidence come from? Now you know. It comes from what you say to yourself. Who’s responsible for that? You are that will do the work. 

[0:40:29.9] MB: So I want to get really specific on this. Once we — Let’s say somebody who’s listening and maybe has a lot of problems with negative thoughts or negative self-talk, write down the negative thoughts, write down kind of positive self-talk and what that looks like. How do we then start to — What are the mechanics of kind of conditioning ourselves to use an experience more positive self-talk? 

[0:40:53.9] MG: Again, the first is having — If you’re going to throw darts, know where the bull's-eye is. The bull's-eye in this case are thoughts that works for you, and it's not that if you wrote down five thoughts, those are the only five thoughts to have, but they just capture the spirit of that type of thinking. 

Remember, thoughts lead to thought patterns, and thoughts patterns lead to habits of mind. So we want to create habits of mind that you what? Build confidence. So what are the thoughts are just the beginning part of the bull's-eye to have thought patterns. How do you do it? Well, you could go way back to kind of early days in sport psychology and practice those thoughts. I don't think that's not — That’s too silly for me, but at least knowing them, writing them down is good, but it's really about the feeling, those thoughts and thought patterns and habits lead to emotions and feelings. So we want to get to those feelings, but feelings only happen if you reverse engineer them through thinking and thinking patterns. 

Then what do we do? We get clear that there is a type of thought structure that promotes us to feel big and strong and flexible and dynamic. So then the next thing that we do is we go challenge ourselves. Every day we’d make a commitment to challenge ourselves to see if we give in to the challenge and start to critique and doubt and worry, or do we stay the course and fight through it and say, basically, the thoughts on the other side. It’s not more complicated than that. 

Now if you don't want to do that because you can't quite figure out how to get to the edge of your comfort zone today or tomorrow, and there's lots of ways to do that. You can do that through emotional vulnerability and you can do the old school ways, do it through getting your heart rate up where it feels like it's going to — You’re at your max thresholds. So you can do it through fitness, but it’s limiting, but that's the way that a lot of people do it. Through emotional vulnerability is another way, by being uncomfortable emotionally. 

Now, you can also do it — If you don’t want to do it, again, physically, you can do it in imagination. So you can close your eyes and use this amazing imagery making machine that from good science we know does impact our performance, it impacts our neurochemistry, it impacts our neurobiology and it also impacts our psychology when we see ourselves performing and being in certain environments in particular ways. So if we can slow down and actually create a lifelike image of a particular scenario, that we can practice ways of thinking and ways of feeling and ways of moving. If you go back to something like one of the projects, the Red Bull Stratos Project that I was fortunate to be part of with Felix Baumgartner, he only got one shot in real life to jump from a 130,000 feet and he was going to be the first human to travel through the speed — To travel and break the speed of sound without a capsule around him. The brightest minds in aerospace were not sure if when he traveled through the sonic boom and part of his body was subsonic and part of his body was transonic, like there was these different tensions on every part of his body, they weren’t quite sure what was going to happen. Whether his arms and legs are going to rip off when he traveled through the sonic boom, if he could travel at the speed of sound, Mach 1. 

If you only get one shot at doing it, and we know that a particular way of thinking and feeling precedes behaviors, so thoughts lead to emotions, and emotions and thoughts together impact performance. Well, let’s get our thoughts and emotions right. So we put ourselves, especially in hostile environments, in the right condition to capture the right way of performing. How many times do you think — I’m not going to give you the number, because that part of the conversation is for him to share. What I just shared is all public. But you can imagine how many times that we used imagery to get the right state of mind and the right state of body prior to the jump so that he could perform and adjust eloquently. It is sloppy just to show up and think that you’re going to be okay. You show up in purposeful ways, in low stress environment all the way to the most rugged environment you can create. 

[0:45:06.0] MB: That's really fascinating. I’d love to hear a few more insights from your work with Felix. I mean, I remember watching that live and especially to the point where he kind of passed out for a second or they lost communication or whatever, was really, really tense, but it was an amazing jump. 

But before kind of digging into that a little bit more, I think underscoring this whole kind of delve into strategy and self-talk and how to think about your thought is something you said earlier, which is really important, which is that there are no shortcuts, right? There is no kind of tricks or tips, really, the piqued performance and all these things, the strategies are complex or hidden. They’re really simple. It's just about doing the hard work and actually putting the work in. 

[0:45:52.1] MG: Yeah, and that's why I think it's really important to just honor those — If you want to be the best version of yourself — Again, for what aim? So that you can be deeply connected to other people, and because it's the connection together that takes us to the extraordinary. Again, that's everywhere from business to love and sometimes those two are co-mingled. But the idea, meaning that we can love deeply what we do and the people that we’re with and do extraordinary things. The idea that there's only three things that we can train; craft, body and mind, training the mind is not extra. It's not something that we live to the end of the day or later. IT’s something that we need to invest in on a regular basis, because if you train your craft to a ridiculous aim and you are a technician, I mean, at the highest proficiency in the gym, so to speak, or in the office cubicle, but you don't train your mind, and then as soon as there is these forms of pressure in the environment, once you leave the workout gym and go into the arena or you leave the cubicle and go on stage, or go into the boardroom and your mind is not strong. Honestly, you're exposed. That's not good. That's optimal. We have to do all three. 

Again, I want to come back to — Let me see if I could stitch together confidence and mindfulness. Those two are intimately linked. So mindfulness by definition is a training modality to help increase awareness of thoughts. It is a focused training. It’s not a relaxation training. It’s a focused training to focus on the present moment without judgment of our awareness of our thoughts, our emotions, our body sensations and the unfolding environment around us. That awareness training becomes the beginning grounds of being aware of our thought patterns, being aware of our actual thoughts. If we can become aware of our thoughts and thought patterns and become more sensitive and finely tuned them, we can course correct and choose the thoughts that help build a state, an internal state promotes us to be more optimal as opposed to being unaware of our internal thinking patterns, and if those thinking patterns are not promoting, actually create so much tension and toxicity internally that we shut down or close off or tighten up. That's what the term choking comes from. There’s choking, there’s micro-choking, there's performing, there's performing under pressure and then there's dissolving pressure. But most people don't choke and most people don't dissolve pressure. They place somewhere safer in the middle. Micro-choking is more choking off access. Our mind is choking off access to our craft, and performing and thriving under pressure is cool, but it's not dissolving pressure. 

So our work is to become aware of our thoughts that lead the thinking patterns and course correct them as quickly as we possibly can to promote an internal state that allows us to be present, authentic and grounded so that we can adjust eloquently to the external demands, sometimes internal demands, of performance. Again, there’s no shortcut. You just got to do the hard work. At this point, I'm sure much of your community is familiar with mindfulness. If they’re not, it is a definite beginning place to start. 

[0:49:20.4] MB: Just in a side really quickly, I know we kind of came up on the hour. Do you have maybe like five more minutes or maybe a few more minutes just to kind of wrap up one or two questions and then get to kind of the end where we’ll ask where listeners can find you and that kind of thing? 

[0:49:31.4] MG: Sure. Of course. Yeah, thank you. 

[0:49:33.1] MB: Okay. Perfect. Those little housekeeping issue. So tell me more about — I love this distinction between the idea of performing under pressure versus dissolving pressure. 

[0:49:43.4] MG: Performing under pressure is that you interpret — If you think there's pressure, you're right, and that also holds true for being able to dissolve pressure. It is possible to change your relationship with yourself and the environment in such a way that pressure is dissolved. How does that happen? Well, there is no — I can't tell you how to do that. You have to figure it out. You have to do the hard work to figure out your unique psychological framework that your parents gave you, that your peers influenced, that pop culture’s influence and that you've learned and patchwork together based on your mentors and deep thinking that you’ve had. Each person has its unique psychological framework. If that psychological framework interprets something to be a pressure that could break or shift that framework, a framework like a building that can't withstand the tornadoes or winds or whatever, the rain even, then you're going to feel pressure. 

So you can dissolve it too. You can have such a sturdy framework. Think about the most influential people in the world, those that from thousands and thousands of years have changed the way we understand what's possible. Those tend to be political leaders and spiritual leaders. I mean, if you are a spiritual person, do you think that Buddha had pressure? No, he dissolved it. He did public speaking and his heart then would come up, like he was speaking from a grounded authentic place. How about Jesus? He was passionate and purposeful and he had to train his mind, I think, as the story goes, so did Buddha, so did Confucius, so did Muhammad, they trained their minds. They talk about that, but they dissolved pressure because the purpose was so much larger and their internal framework was so sturdy that they dissolved it often. 

You see when great performers in modern times talk about their “best”, they talk about being in flow state, and flow state or the zone, if you will, is essentially dissolving a pressure. It’s using the challenge in the environment to have a deep focus. Also, I guess, stitch back to mindfulness. Mindfulness is a deep focus training. So deep focus promotes is one of the promoters of flow state. So they use their environment to help deep focus. Focus on what? Focus on the most essential task at hand and not have to focus on the chunkiness of worry and doubt and frustration of our mind, because we really worked on having great thoughts. I hope I answered that question for you. 

[0:52:12.6] MB: I think that was great, and it’s a really important distinction and something that I think really gives me some good perspective on thinking about and kind of dealing with pressure. I'd love to circle back and kind of tie this in concretely in some way. We started out the conversation sort of talking about the daily architecture of world-class performers and sort of what that looks like. I’d love it, if you're comfortable sharing, maybe an example of what does the day in a life of a world-class performer look like from sort of the way that they structure and organize their day?

[0:52:49.1] MG: I think you’d be surprised by how much we talk about recovery, the science and the art of recovery. A normal structure looks something like wake up in the morning, maybe do some bodywork, because there are some recovery patterns that need to take place, and then there's obviously food throughout the day, is staple for most and high quality food. I’ll just talk about a more optimized program, but it's a pretty early wake-up. I get some food in, get some movement, rehab, tissue work on. There are some meetings take place, and those meetings are either with the entire team or sub-parts of a team and there’s individual meetings. There is anywhere between 15 to 20 minutes, to 60, 70 minutes of physical training in the gym. There's more study time, more meetings. There is at least one, sometimes two, training sessions where you're actually working out your mind, body and craft. So that's what a practice really is designed to do. 

There’s some down time, but it’s not as much as you think. There’s maybe 20 minutes here and there for some down time. There’s obviously, like I said, there’s lunch and everything embedded through, and then there's more film. So there's meetings, film. There’s individual meetings. There’s physical movement. There is technical movement, and then they’re either threaded throughout or separate time set up for mental training. The threading throughout is what the highest organizations in the world are doing. They are starting their meetings with X-number minutes of mindfulness training, not waiting for the athlete to do it later. They’re starting their meetings that way. That also happens in business as well. Some businesses are doing that or adopting that practice. 

So that's what it looks like, and there's often homework and the days are long and there’s usually at the upper limits about four hours of nauseatingly deep focused physical work, and then there is about four hours of cognitive and/or mental emotional work, and rinse and repeat until you get the chance to compete against other people. 

So day in and day out is an internal competition with your teammates as well, not trying to step on their throats and choke them out, but working with them to help sharpen their sword and sharpen your sword and return. Then you get a chance to do it with other teams as well. So that's kind of what it looks like, but we talk about the art and science of recovery far more than you might imagine, and we do not approach recovery as something that comes at the end of the process, but it's an integral part of the process itself. Taking time to do this often — To do this is challenging and it's often neglected. It is an essential component of higher performance. 

[0:55:37.2] MB: I know we dug pretty deep into recovery in our first conversation. So we’ll make sure to include that in the show notes for listeners who want to kind of dig in to some of the other topics that have been circling around what we've gotten into today. But for listeners who want to kind of concretely implement a lot of the ideas we've discussed, what would you give to them as kind of one piece of homework or an action item to start implementing some of the ideas we’ve talked about today?

[0:56:04.1] MG: I think that our last conversation, we talked about a philosophy. So if we — Having our own philosophy, and if that hasn't gotten done yet, it’d say go back and do that and get that done. If folks miss that, maybe having a link into our earlier conversation will help. I would start there. If that’s already done or you don’t want to do that for whatever reason, I would start with mindfulness and really paying attention to practicing being aware of the thoughts, of the emotions, of the body sensations and environment, and/or environment. Mindfulness can be substituted with the word meditation. We’ll just start there. 

I mean, that's a massive accelerant to maybe even mastering the internal domain. I can’t imagine a process without mindfulness or paying attention to the internal state and master being in the same conversation. So I would start there. I’d also like take a deep hard look at your sleep patterns. If you are under recovery, you’re eventually going to break down and/or just your brain does — Our brains does something pretty phenomenal, is that they adapt to suboptimal, because they say, “Okay. I see the game you're playing. You’re not going to allow me to recover properly. Well, I'm just going to not have as amazing of an output. So suboptimal becomes the new normal, which is a bomber, because it's like cooking a frog. You don’t quite realize that it’s the boiling water — The fog doesn’t ever quite realize that it's not in a god environment. 

So I would start with mindfulness, sleep, philosophy, kind of the big stuff. Last thing as we close this out, is that Harvard did an amazing study where they followed for 75 years, they followed people on the path of fulfillment, deep meaning in life stuff. What they found is one of the pillars of people that had fulfillment in life is that they asked and wrestled with the deep questions in life. They didn’t avoid them. They weren’t distracted by them. They actually [inaudible 0:58:03.9] with it. Who am I? What is my purpose? When am I doing with my efforts? What does this mean to be human? The deep questions in life. What is the purpose for spirituality? For mindset training? for doing this amazing amount of work? What am I doing here? [inaudible 0:58:24.6] with those big questions. Philosophy is who I am? To do that deep work is just another important, I guess I would say reminder for all that that that stuff you have to do alone. You can have those inspired conversation with people, but ultimately you have to make up your mind about who you are. 

[0:58:42.7] MB: For listeners who want more of you and your work, where can they find you online? 

[0:58:47.0] MG: So there’s a couple of places. Thank you for asking. The — What is it? 140 characters? Whatever. Is that what it is? Is Twitter 140 or is it 144? 

[0:58:56.2] MB: Didn’t they up it to 280 characters? 

[0:58:58.4] MG: We got 280. Okay. Something, 280 characters. You can find me on social media and Twitter, which is @MichaelGervais, and that’s Gervais, and LinkedIn, same thing, Michael Gervais. Instagram is @findingmastery. So we’ve got a podcast we fired up called Finding Mastery, and that websites is pretty clean. It’s fundingmastey.net, and world-class performers, deconstructing and better understanding their path of mastery. Then coach Carroll and I are just about done with writing a book. That would be coming soon. Those are the best places. Then my business with Coach Carroll is called Compete to Create, and that websites is competetocreate.net. 

[0:59:45.8] MB: Well, Michael, once again, an incredible conversation. So many great insights and ideas. Always a pleasure to have you on the show to share all of this wisdom. Thank you so much for coming back and returning to the Science of Success. 

[0:59:58.8] MG: Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it. Thank, Matt. 

[1:00:01.0] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created the show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Strategic memory techniques you can use to improve your memory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Our brains are built in clusters / neural networks

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

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

• The 3 primary strategies for improving your memory

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

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

  2. Next most powerful is location-based memory

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

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

• Connecting all of your knowledge to preexisting knowledge

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

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

• Always think of novel and creative imagery to remember things

• Learning how to use the memory palace technique

• Create strange / novel / unique visualizations

• Imagining that I get stabbed!?

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

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

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

  1. What if you get it wrong?

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

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

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

• Create artificial logic and connections -

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

• LeVeShel - to cook, in Hebrew

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

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

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

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

• Crash course in speed reading in 30 seconds

• Minimize back-skipping

  1. Minimize Subvocalization

  2. You can only listen at 300-400 wpm

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

• Spaced repetition is a key component of boosting retention

• Review

  1. Pre-reading chapters

Thank you so much for listening!

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

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

You can get started for free right now!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Website] Tony Buzan

• [Wiki Page] Harry Lorayne

• [Wiki Page] Malcolm Knowles

• [Wiki Page] Pygmalion effect

• [YouTube Channel] Jonathan Levi

• [Website] SuperLearner Academy

• [Website] Becoming SuperHuman

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

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

Episode Transcript

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jonathan, welcome to the Science of Success.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Back to the show.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

[0:50:38.5] MB: That’s important.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Your brain is being drained every day by stress, life, etc

• The 3 subtypes of brain drain

• Adrenaline

  1. Norepinephrine

  2. Cortisol

• What happens, neurologically, when you suffer from “brain drain” or brain fog

• What are we doing in our daily lives to cause brain drain?

• The brain balancing neurochemicals that are the antidotes to stress hormones

• Through everyday lifestyle changes you can transform your neurochemicals

• EPA and DHA Omega 3 Acids - and why they are important co-factors in building a healthy brain

• People are feeling more stressed than ever, working more, sleeping less

• How are we causing “brain drain” with our daily habits and activities?

• The 24 hour relationship between cortisol and melatonin

• Throughout the day, your melatonin level rises and your cortisol level decreases

• What we do every single day has a far more profound effect on our neurochemicals than we even realize

• Lifestyle interventions you can implement to rebalance and change your neurochemicals

• Stay away from foods that boost your glycemic index

• Sugar and flour drain and shrink the hippocampus - which is the main site of neurogenesis

• Eat more spinach, quiona, bannanas

• How do we cultivate GABA?

• Glutamine from spinach

  1. Vitamin B6 in bannanas, magnesium and zinc

• Eat seven servings of whole fruits and vegetables every day

• “Probiotics are the new prozac”

• Are vitamins and supplements are useful tool or should we get all our nutrients from whole foods?

• The importance of getting Omega-3 fatty acids (EPA and DHA)

• EPA = Feel Better Omega 3 (stress less Omega 3)

  1. DHA = Sleep soundly Omega 3 (promotes restful sleep)

  2. EPA and DHA compete for space in your cells

• Vegan and vegetarian options for Omega 3 fatty acids (ALA)

• Omega 3s are one of the best foods you can eat for your brain - they are the building blocks of yo

• You can build a “rockstar brain” with a modified mediterranean diet

• Lean protein

  1. Nuts

  2. Olive Oil

  3. Fish

  4. Lots of fruits and vegetables

• How soybean oil & Omega 6 fats cause brain inflammation

• The modified mediterranean diet has been shown via research to combat major depressive disorder

• "You are what you eat, ate"

• Common sources of omega 6 fats - soybean oil and factory farmed meat products - most intense source of omega 6 fats which cause brain inflammation

• Strategies for shifting the brain from the sympathetic to the parasympathetic

• Progressive muscle relaxation

  1. Autogenic training

  2. Self hypnosis

  3. Mindfulness meditation

  4. Mantra based meditation

• Fit people release 40% less cortisol than those who are out of shape

• The right exercise at the right time is essential to balancing your neurochemicals, for example Interval training is great long term for weight loss, but spikes cortisol levels in the short term

Thank you so much for listening!

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

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

You can get started for free right now!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Heal Your Drained Brain: Naturally Relieve Anxiety, Combat Insomnia, and Balance Your Brain in Just 14 Days by Dr. Mike Dow

• [Book] The Brain Fog Fix: Reclaim Your Focus, Memory, and Joy in Just 3 Weeks by Dr. Mike Dow

• [Personal Site] Dr. Mike Dow

• [Twitter] Dr. Mike Dow

Episode Transcript

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

[0:00:11.9] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. In this episode, we discuss how to build a rockstar brain. We get into the neurochemical compositions that create moods from happiness to depression and look at how you can change the building blocks of the neurochemicals by changing your diet and your habits. 

In a world where people are more stressed than ever, sleeping less and trying to do more, we look at the causes of brain drain and what we can do to have physically happier and more productive brains, with Dr. Michael Dow. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. There some amazing stuff that’s only available to our email subscriber, so be sure you sign up. First, you’re going to get access to awesome free guide that we create based on listener demand, including our most popular guide; How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. 

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single week called Mindset Monday. Send it out on Mondays, by the way. It’s short, simple, links, articles and stories that we found interesting, exciting and motivating in the last week. Next, you’re going to get a chance to shape the show. You’re going to get to vote on guests, vote on things like changing our intro music and even submit your own personal questions to our guests, which we will mix in and ask in our interviews. So be sure you sign up, get on the email list. Only people on the email list have access to these and other amazing content that I haven't even told you about. 

You can go to success podcast.com and sign up right on the homepage or if you’re driving around, if you’re on the go, if you’re on your phone, just text the word “smarter”, that’s S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. 

in our previous episode, We explored luck. Does luck exist? Is there a science behind luck? What does the research reveal about lucky people and unlucky people? Is it possible to manufacture your own luck?

We spoke with the research psychologist, Dr. Richard Wiseman, and learned the truth about luck and how you just might be able to create a little bit more in your own life. If you want to be luckier, listen to that episode. 

Now, for the show today. 

[0:02:31.3] MB: Today, we have another exciting guest on the show, Dr. Mike Dow. Mike is a psychotherapist, neurotherapist and New York Times best-selling author. He's been a host of several television series examining relationships, brain health, addiction and mental illness. He's frequently a guest or a cohost on The Doctors and his work has been features in Today, Good Morning America, Nightline and much more. 

Mike, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:02:54.0] MD: Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. 

[0:02:56.1] MB: We’re very excited to have you here. So I’d love to start out with when — And I think this is a more common phenomenon, more and more common phenomenon. When we feel kind of cloudy or we don't feel like ourselves, we feel like kind of sluggish, what is that and what’s going on? Is that just a natural part of aging? Is that a natural part of life or is there something deeper there?

[0:03:15.1] MD: To some degree, 1% of it is a natural part of aging. Our brains tend to shrink a little bit as we age, but most, 99% of it, I would say no. What's really going on is our brains are becoming drained. Of course, the title of my book is Heal Your Drained Brain, and I was inspired to write this book, because I was looking at the statistics and I was looking a brain scans, I was looking at what I was countering in my clinic, in my private practice. Just to be honest, a lot of my fellow authors, my colleagues, my friends, what they were experiencing in everyday life and how hard it is to be a high achieving human being these days if you want it all. 

So if you've ever seen like a madman, you look at these old days when you could kind of go to work and you had somebody taken care of your calls and you sat a quiet desk and you focused and then you came home and work rarely bothered you. Those days are over, but I guess the question remains; what is happening? What is all that chronic stress do to your brain, especially if you are somebody who is trying to juggle your romantic life, your personal life, your friends, your families, your career where our brains are becoming drained. 

I'm sure we can jump in to some of the neuroscience and the neurochemicals involved, but that feeling is what I call brain drain, and if you look at the stats, more and more Americans and, by the way, people around the world are now experiencing this condition of brain drain and chances are — It was funny, I just got back from New York and Rachael Ray and I were talking about this and she said she started up the segment by saying, “I don't know what a drained brain is, but I think I have it,” and if you're like her, you probably are in her shoes. If you have this drained brain, you're going to feel it. You're not can have the energy. You're not going to have the resiliency that you need to get through everything you need to do in your daily life. 

[0:05:14.1] MB: Tell me a little bit more about that, kind of what's going on at sort of a neurological level, neurochemical level when we’re experiencing this brain drain.

[0:05:22.1] MD: Yeah, a couple of things. So neurochemicaly, if you have a drained brain — I've created these names for the subtypes of drained brain. There are three stress hormones that I call your three brain drainers. They are adrenaline, norepinephrine and cortisol. So in a healthy brain you encounter a stress. So let's say you're creating a new app and maybe you're in a new relationship and you got those texts flowing in, rapid fire on your phone and that stress. Every time you get that new text of, “Hey! We have a new deadline approaching.” 

In a healthy balance brain, you have two waves. The primary wave is adrenaline and norepinephrine secreted from your adrenal glands, and then you have this secondary wave of cortisol. Ideally, of course, it’s a little bit easier in the book because you have — I have these nice X-Y graphs, but if you could kind of just visualize two waves. 
Imagine the ocean, you have the primary wave, that's adrenaline and norepinephrine, and then you have that second wave, and that's cortisol. Now what happens in drained brains is a couple of different things can happen. So in what I call the sort of the garden-variety, sort of light drain, all three stress hormones go a little bit too high. In what I call skyrocket drain what happens is they sort of — As the name implies, they skyrocket and then you have panic attacks, you have like feelings of absolute dread. The anxiety becomes almost paralyzing in that case. 

Then you have what I call drop drain. So we've seen in research that some people when you have that stressor, you have that initial response. So if you look at those two waves, you will see the waves of these stress hormones going up, but then it's like imagine two waves hitting a brick wall just as they're cresting. Instead of being able to rise and gently fall, they sort of rise and then they drop. 

Now, while generally speaking, we want to decrease the brain drainers. We also want this normal healthy response, because remember that stress hormones are designed to help you charge through that presentation, get through all the stressors, because a little bit of these brain drainers can be helpful. Then you have this fourth subtype of a drained brain, which is what I call X-treme drain, and I spell X-treme, X-treme, because if you look in an X-Y graph, it really does form an X, meaning the adrenaline and norepinephrine are going up, but cortisol sort of paradoxically stays low. 

So if you stress yourself out for too long and that is left untreated, or we also saw this and scientists and researchers were actually surprised, if you’re a vet, if you are somebody who’s been through a trauma, if you're the survivor of abuse, people who are diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder, and if you’re left untreated and you don't take some of my advice in the book, then you're going to have this extreme drain. So you're going to have low levels of cortisol that sort of remain too low and adrenaline and norepinephrine run too high, which creates the state that sort of this you're going to feel wired but also tired.

Cortisol actually helps to wake us up in the morning. In the wee hours, our cortisol starts to rise and that sort of helps to wake us up. So in these brains, the cortisol just stays too low and the other brain drainers are high. So it sort of forms this X, right? So that's sort of — In terms of the neurochemicals, those three brains drainers are at play, and then what I call the brain balancers, which sort of are the antidotes to these stress hormones, so that acetylcholine, GABA, serotonin, melatonin, endorphins, all of these feel-good hormones and neurotransmitters, they're basically running too low. What’s incredible is that through everyday lifestyle change, this is how you exercise, this is how you eat, you could make more of the brain balancers, you can make more GABA, more serotonin naturally, and of course later the show I’d love to tell you how, and then you can also manage the stress hormone spikes, which is really incredible, because we want to sort of regulate the brain drainers, and this is important overall. 

I'm talking about the chemicals now, but now, if we just shift to brain structure, what happens is in drained brains, you are literally shrinking your brain. Unresolved chronic stress we know shrinks the prefrontal cortex. That's a part of the brain that separates you from animals. It is the part of the brain that makes you a human being. It is the most advanced part of the brain. It helps you to put the brakes on urges. It's been said that if a soul, if you're soul lived in a part of the brain, it would be in the prefrontal cortex, right? So that part of the brain shrinks if you don't do anything about this drained brain. Also, if you are eating the wrong foods, we know that, for example, spiking your blood sugar too often shrinks another part of the brain, and hippocampus, and then some solutions, some of the foods in my 14-day program are really designed to help prevent sort of this shrunken drained brain by restoring the brain balancers, making sure your brain doesn't shrink. 

Our brains do, again, shrink a little bit as we age, but if you're getting the omega-3 super foods, especially the EPA, the DHA that's found in seafood. I can talk a little bit about vegan sources of omega-3's if you'd like and getting these B vitamins, especially B12 and B6, all of these vitamins and minerals that act as cofactors that help your brain and body to naturally manufacture the feel-good neurotransmitters that you need to balance this brain drain. 

[0:11:20.3] MB: I want to dig into the strategies we can implement and lifestyle interventions to create kind of a happier, healthier brain. But before we do, I want to look a little bit more at sort of what kind of the inverse side of that coin, which is what are people doing that's causing so much brain drain and kind of brain fog today? 

[0:11:40.2] MD: Yeah. That's a great question. So some of it is — I've a chapter in this book, in Heal You Drained Brain called wired for worry. There is some genetic loading, of course, and then people who are — If you have this family history of any sort of anxiety disorder, you're more likely to think in ways. For example, if you're anxious maybe you get caught in what I call paralysis analysis, which is another way of saying rumination or stewing in anxious thoughts. That drains your brain. It can be a little bit of genetics. It can be what you went through if you're the survivor of trauma, if you didn't have the kind of healthy parenting that you wish you had, but it can also be the result of our everyday lives. 

Even if you don't have a family history, even if you had great parents, it seems like everything in the modern world, Matt, is set up to drain us. So if you look at the stats, the American Psychological Association has been doing this landmark study for over a decade now, and 2017, last year, was the highest reported average stress level Americans had ever reported. So we really are more stressed out than ever. We sleep an hour less than we did a generation ago. We’re working more. This is especially true for Americans compared to other countries. We just — We work all the time. Our commutes have gotten longer as — it's great that our economy is doing so well, but that is also forced people to live further away from their jobs and further away from city centers. So our commutes have actually got longer, and then we’re on the rapid fire text, email, Instagram. It's almost as if the very technology — I always make a joke that it's funny isn't it that social media tends to make some people antisocial, because they're so glued to their social media accounts that they don't have any real friends. Remember that these technologies were invented to supplement or to help us in our lives not take the place of them. 

I think the danger for so many people these days is we are using our phones, our social media accounts as replacements for things like five minutes in nature, a walk with our dog, a sit down dinner without a phone for like 30 minutes. Our phones are great. I love social media. I love texting my friends. I love texting my mom. I don't like long phone calls. I'm not that kind of person. Thank goodness for texts. It’s how I stay in communication with the world mostly, but we have to also remember that dividing our attention — We know that in brain scans, what's happening. If you think you're multitasking, you're kidding yourself, because in brain scans, what you are doing is you are rapidly switching tasks. So what you're doing is you are rapidly single tasking so that it feels like you're multitasking, but in reality you're probably not. 

If you're multitasking between two things that are simple, that's fine, but what happens is as the complexity of the tasks will grow, you start to lose efficiency by switching from task to task in your brain. Even if it feels like you're doing two things at once, you're actually switching really quickly. And then your brain starts to slow down, and then if you are what researchers deem as a heavy media multiuser, so if you're sitting watching Netflix while you're completing a spreadsheet and then you have your phone in your lap and your checking on your Instagram account and you do that 24 hours a day, you lose the ability to filter out irrelevant stimuli. That means when you're at a meeting and you're at a job interview or you’re trying to land a client and somebody is talking to you, you're going to lose your train of thought. They're going to say something and you're going to say, “What? What did you just say?” and that's not going to look good, right?

So it's important to be — It's great — I'm guilty of it to. I love sometimes at the end of a long day sitting with my laptop in my lap and sort of perusing emails as I have something mindless on TV, but we should also know that we can't do that all the time, because it really is fogging our brain. It drains our brain. It increases our level of stress hormones. 

The subtitle of my book talks about how my program not only relieves anxiety and stress, but also insomnia. I also want to talk about the 24-hour relationship between cortisol and melatonin. So I think I mentioned before that cortisol spikes in the morning to help wake you up as melatonin dips, and then throughout the course of a day, your cortisol level should go down as melatonin rises. 

Think about that. At night when you go to bed, your cortisol levels should be at the lowest point they’ve been all day. One of those brain drainers, that stress hormone cortisol, and your melatonin levels should be at their highest, but if you are sitting at 11 PM in bed checking emails from your phone, number one, the stressful email from your boss is going to shoot up your cortisol levels when your cortisol levels should be going down, and then the blue light from all electronics screens — And by the way, if you have one of the newer iPhones, you should use the night filter, because it is the most [inaudible 0:16:46.7] production, but is not perfect. So it's still going to suppress a little bit of melatonin production. Television, phones, it's really taking the melatonin production in your brain. It's suppressing it at the very time when you want melatonin high and cortisol low. Basically everything we’re doing is in some way draining our brain and there's just so much we can do to naturally reverse that process. 

[0:17:09.2] MB: It's fascinating, and I love hearing kind of the sort of interplay between all these different neurochemicals, and something we talk a lot about on the show and I spent a lot of time thinking about, especially kind of how to cultivate things like GABA, serotonin and even dopamine. Is this kind of a good point to segue into and look at some of the positive interventions and ways that we can make lifestyle changes that can actually start to rebalance the neurochemicals within our brains?

[0:17:35.8] MD: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's really important for people to realize that what we do every single day has a far more profound effect on our neurochemicals on the state of our brain than we think. I want to give you an example. We mentioned serotonin. Serotonin is really our main feel-good downer. Dopamine is really our main feel-good upper, and then it I would say that GABA is also sort of a — Serotonin and GABA sort of are a little bit different, but they're both sort of feel-good downers. If you take a Xanax or releasing a lot of GABA, serotonin — People like the street drug molly, because that releases a lot of serotonin. It tends to make people very feel really good, but very calm, versus dopamine. 

So let's look at, for example, serotonin. First of all, we want to shift away from foods that spike our blood sugar, foods with a high glycemic index or glycemic load. All of those foods that you already know are bad for you, but they're probably worse for you than you think when it comes to your brain. We now know from recent research that your brain will shrink, that spiking your blood sugar with anything that contains sugar or flour, that is going to drain and shrink the hippocampus in your brain. That's a really important part of the brain that you don't want to shrink. It’s the main source, the main site of neurogenesis or the birth of new brain cells and connections, and sugar is basically undoing that and it's shrinking that part of your brain. 

We want your brain to get bigger and better. If you want to have it all in this world, if you want to have a life where you can have a healthy relationship, a rockstar career, you really do want a big beautiful brains to manage all of that stress and juggle all of those things. Let's say you're going to have a rich diet and you're going to eat — A lot of people, when they think of amino acids, they think of muscle growth in bodybuilder, and that's one of the — A variety of fruits, vegetables, and amino acids, but the other reason is for these brain chemicals. 

For example, tryptophan, which is an amino acid that’s found in, for example, quinoa. So if you’re shifting from pasta or pizza and the sugar and flour that's going to shrink your brain to healthy quinoa, you're also going to get this amino acid. Now, your body and your brain converts tryptophan into 5-HTP, which is then converted into serotonin, which is then later converted from serotonin into melatonin, but your body needs cofactors to make this conversion. 

To convert tryptophan into serotonin and melatonin, i needs folate, it needs vitamin B6, it needs vitamin C it needs zinc, it needs magnesium. So that's why you want these healthy food. So for example, you’re going to get some — Let's say you have the salad. So you have the quinoa, which is a great source of tryptophan. You have spinach, which is a great source of folate, a.k.a. vitamin B9. By the way, I like leafy greens, because folic acid, the synthetic form of folate, not nearly as good as folate, the authentic nature’s form of folate found in things like spinach, and then your body is going to convert that to 5-HTP, and then with the help of vitamin B6 from bananas, maybe some vitamin C from raspberries, maybe some think from chickpeas, maybe someone magnesium from Swiss Chard, your brain is going to convert that into serotonin. 

Now, the same thing — Let's talk about GABA, right? Something that also helps you to relieve anxiety. Same thing here, glutamine is an amino acid found in spinach with the help of vitamin B6, magnesium and zinc. That is converted into feel-good GABA. Then the same thing for your main feel-good upper. Tyrosine, with the help of these the same cofactors, these vitamins and minerals, it converts that into dopamine, right? This is why I recommend in my 14-day program that you eat seven servings of whole fruits and vegetables every single day to ensure that you're getting all these vitamins, these minerals that are going to help your brain to make the feel-good neurotransmitters that you need to start to keep
Feeling good and relieve that drain brain. 

[0:22:12.2] MB: One of the things we talk a lot about on the show is the importance of mental models, building a toolkit of mental models so that you can better understand reality and achieve your goals, and that’s why I'm excited to tell you about our sponsor this week, brilliant.org. 

Brilliant is in math and science enrichment learning tool that makes mastering the fundamentals of math and science easy and fun. You can learn the concepts by solving fascinating and challenging problems. Brilliant explores everything from probability, to computer science, machine learning, the physics of everyday life, complex algebra and much more. You can master these skills and exciting interactive experiences enjoyed by over 5 million students, professionals and enthusiasts around the world. 

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

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

Back to the show. 

[0:23:41.9] MB: I want to want to dig in to some of these solutions a little bit more, but for something like vitamins, for example, what are the effects or is it beneficial to take, for example, a vitamin B supplement or fish oil supplement, the kind of supplement your diet if you maybe are not getting enough of these foods naturally or is it not as bioavailable or is not as effective. Tell me a little bit about that. 

[0:24:02.8] MD: Listen. I think it's a great safety net for a lot of people. Nature has a way — I will say this. Nature has a way of putting things in combinations that increases our bioavailability. It’s just fascinating the way nature just knows how to put things together. 

In many ways, yes, when you do get in a natural form, I like to see the synergistic effects — Something else that heals your brain, probiotics, which I call the new Prozac. If you're eating a diet rich in probiotics, there are prebiotic, but then there are probiotic boosters. If you're eating natural healthy foods, that actually enhances the effect of other feel-good neurotransmitters. There is something to be said about synergy and synergistic effects of foods, but I will say that for a lot of people, supplements can be a really great safety net. 

What I don't want people to do is to supplement and then think that taking a B vitamin supplement means that you can skip all the other great sources of vitamin B6, B12 and folate, because those three B vitamins, 6, 12 and 9, a.k.a. folate, are just so vital. I have to say that I love supplementing, especially when I'm traveling and I’m not getting a healthy well-rounded diet. I can actually feel the difference when I get a little supplement of those B vitamins. So they are really helpful. 

It is also very difficult for a lot of people, unfortunately our world is polluted and it is polluted a lot of our seafood. In my book; Heal Your Drained Brain, I have what's called the omega-3 super food list, which is the list of fish that have, number one, high levels of omega threes, but number two, low levels of toxins, like mercury, and a lot of people just think, “Oh! I just should eat wild caught all the time,” but that’s actually a myth, because for salmon, that's true. Wild salmon, you want to stay away from farm raised salmon, but there are some farm raised varieties of fish, for example, farm raised rainbow trout that are actually very high in omega threes, but actually quite low in mercury. So it's safe to eat all the time, just about as safe as it is to eat wild caught salmon. Of course the same is not true for farm raised salmons. So you want to stay away from that. 

But supplementing with an omega-3 can be fantastic. In this book, in Brain Fog Fix, I call the two omega threes, the two usable forms of omega threes, EPA and DHA. In my book the Brain Fog Fix, because that book is really talking about brain fog, depression, dementia. EPA is your feel — I called it your feel-good omega-3, because it's been shown to relieve anxiety and boost mood, and I called DHA your think better omega-3, because it's also been shown to improve cognition and prevent dementia. 

Now, in this book; Heal Your Drained Brain, because I'm talking more about stress and insomnia, I call EPA your stress less omega-3. We know that supplementing with high levels of an EPA supplement with very low levels of a DHA can reduce your anxiety by 20%, but the ratio of EPA to DHA in a supplement needs to be 7 to 1 or higher for you to get that effect, and that’s because EPA and DHA compete for space in your cells. 

Now, in this book, I called DHA your sleep soundly omega-3, because it's also been shown to promote restful sleep. So even though I eat a lot of clean seafood and omega-3 super food, I do tend to also take on most days, not all days, I do really like taking an omega-3 supplements. I have a family history of heart disease. I'm always on planes. I’ve been to New York and back, been to LA , New York, LA in the past — What is that? Five or six days. So sometimes that's a little stressful packing and unpacking, waking up at 4 o'clock in the morning. A high EPA supplement can really help to relieve that anxiety, and if you're a vegan or vegetarian, I think what a lot of people don't understand — So number one, if you’re man, or number two, if you're an aging woman, what's interesting about the vegan sources of omega-3's, the ALA that you're going to find in walnuts and flaxseed, people don't understand that when they see a thousand milligrams of omega-3's that's like fortified and added to a food or maybe it's found in walnuts, your body has to convert that into the two usable forms that I just talked about, EPA and DHA, and it's not really good at this conversion, and men are not as good at this conversion when compared to women. 

We think that it has something to do with hormones. Theoretically, we know that younger women are probably better at this than older women. We also know that there is a difference between racial, people with different racial and ethnic background. So really, the best way to ensure you're getting the EPA and DHAs going straight to either the omega-3 super food sea foods or supplement. I'll tell you, if you are a vegan or a man and you're eating a lot of the vegan omega-3's, like walnuts, flaxseed, your body is okay at converting ALA found in walnuts into EPA, and it's a great food. Don't get me wrong. It's fantastic. I recommend everyone eat a lot of walnuts and all the other sources of ALAs that omega-3, the plant-based omega-3. But your body is terrible and men are especially terrible at converting ALAs into DHA, which, remember, is the omega-3 that helps you to think better and sleep soundly. 

If you are a vegan, you can supplement with a plant-based DHA supplement. For all those vegetarians out there who don't eat fish, that may be something, and especially the male vegans out there or vegetarian, you may want to pick up that supplement. I think people, when they think about in this way, it’s now, “Well, do I eat healthy or do I supplement?” It's sort of looking at who you are, your lifestyle and seeing which one works best for you and always using supplements hopefully as something to either augment, enhance or as a safety net for those times, like those busy travel periods where you just can't find. You’re at some chain hotel in the Midwest and in the suburbs and you know that all there is fast food around your hotel. That's a great time to get a great supplement to make sure you're getting all of these vitamin and mineral cofactors to heal a drained brain. 

[0:30:42.3] MB: It’s fascinating. I never knew that I can learn so much about just omega-3s. It’s really interesting. 

[0:30:48.7] MD: I love them. Omega-3s are probably one of the best things for your brain. Part of my 14-day program is you have to eat one omega-3 super food each and every day. It’s the best thing you can do for your brain in terms of food, that is. It's the building block of your brain. It’s why pregnant women need DHA to give their developing infant’s brain the building block that the human body needs to construct a brain, and if you're building new brain cells — And by the way, of course, I always talk about use it or lose it, and for a lot of people who are trying to enhance their productivity, it's use it and improve it, and if you're trying to improve your brain and you’re trying to boost neurogenesis and have a better brain, a faster brain, a bigger brain that is going to be able to handle more and be the best in your field, you really want those omega-3s, because it is the building block of your brain. It is important, and you can't go wrong if you supplement, if you supplement as a safety guard. Again, I do both. I supplement and I eat a lot of the omega-3 super foods. 

[0:31:52.6] MB: When you say that they are the building blocks of your brain, you mean sort of litearlly at a cellular level. It's one of the cornerstones of building healthy cells, correct?

[0:32:01.4] MD: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I really compare — When people don't understand what DHA is, that omega-3, I say imagine DHAs like play doh. It's your brains play doh that is actually constructing, or Tinker Toys is may visually is actually a little bit more accurate in terms of what neurons look like in the synapses and dendrites and all that. It really is literally the brain’s building block. People who had — If you have had a stroke, a traumatic brain injury, if your brain is healing from anything, high DHA supplement — My brother has a rare brain disease and had a massive stroke when he was 10 years old, and the first thing my brother, we started — I was 15 at the time and not an expert on brain health, but my father was a physician and did a lot of research and the first thing we did was we got my brother on a high DHA omega-3 and it really helps the brain to rewire. So even if you haven't had a stroke, if you are trying to make your brain better, DHA is probably one of the best things you can take. 

[0:33:04.3] MB: Really, really interesting. What about kind of — We touched on this a little bit, but macronutrients more broadly, sort of each of the different macros, so carbs, fat, etc., and protein, how do each of those kind of play into brain health?

[0:33:18.6] MD: That's a great question and a really large question in terms of what we could talk about. So let me just say that a couple of really interesting things when it comes to sort of that breakdown. I think it's really interesting. I think as Americans we are sort of all or nothing thinkers, right? Remember, a fat-free craze and then it was sort of the carb free craze. One day, everyone in America was eating bagels, fat-free bagels, and then everyone was on the Atkins diet and they’re eating no bagels, but they are eating bacon all day long, and I think what I recommend is the healthiest by far when it comes to having a rockstar brain is what I call a modified Mediterranean diet. That is a diet that is looking at sort of a nice healthy balance. So it's not going carb free. It's not going fat-free, but you’re shifting away from the high omega six fats. So you have this balance, and I call it modified, because in my program, it's a pretty — I would say it's a lower, but not carb free. It's a lower carbohydrate, Mediterranean diet. If you really want to lean body and a lean brain, you want a modified Mediterranean diet filled with the lean proteins, the nuts, olive oil. Those are your best fats.

Olive oil, there's a lot of — People are insane for coconut oil these days. I think coconut oil, if it's a high quality extra-virgin expeller-pressed organic, I think that can be a great treat, but in my opinion, extra-virgin olive oil is still the winner if those two were to be a wrestling match, coconut oil versus EV oil. I think extra-virgin olive oil is still the winner there. 

So you really want this balance. You want this modified Mediterranean diet that can really help your brain to become its best self or you to become your best self and your brain to become bigger and better. We know that shifting away from all of these oils that you will find in almost every food. One of my pet peeves is when I'm in an airport store and I see natural, some sort of a nut and it’ll say like, “All natural almonds,” or something, and I'll look on the back and it's nuts with some terrible oil. All of these oils, especially the worst oil, which is soybean oil, these oils are just terrible for you. If it's not extra-virgin olive oil, all of these disgusting oils, they’re just crap, because they put your brain in a state, something I don't think we've touched on yet. 

The other thing is it put your brain in a state of chronic inflammation. We know that the inflammatory response in the brain is just terrible for the brain. We want to shift to the brain from pro-inflammatory to anti-inflammatory, and if you take out all the crap oils in the standard American diet and you shift to oils found in nuts, nuts with no added oils, extra-virgin olive oil for cold preparations, and then extra-virgin olive oil isn't as stable at high temperatures. So if you're cooking, you can use just regular, sometimes it’s labeled light olive oil or just olive oil, if you're heating it, shifting you from high omega-6s, a.k.a. inflammation, to higher omega-3s anti-inflammatory response in the brain and the body. This used to be just a few years ago. We thought that this was sort of a preventative approach, but in the past, I believe it was just about one year ago, there was a human clinical study published that show that even for patients diagnosed. So this is not prevention. This is now treatment. Patients diagnosed with major depressive disorder who followed a what I call this modified Mediterranean diet. Some of them actually went into remission. So that's kind of huge for any of us. Even if you're not facing major depressive disorder, we know just how powerful this modified Mediterranean diet is for your brain. It's just fantastic. So it's a lot of fruits and vegetables, nuts, olive oil, fish, and then if you are eating animal products, I tend to try to limit mine. I think a lot of people eat too much. 

When you eat a lot of meat, by the way, your body and brain to get a little boost in stress hormones by eating a lot of meat, so you are going to get a little bit of that brain drainer. So you do want healthier meats, and research also shows that when you favor organic, grass-fed, pastured, humanely raised, all of these words aren't just great for the animals. They're great for you, because you are what you eat ate. 

If animal is humanely raised, grass-fed, free-roaming, organic, and they are actually outside and they are actually eating grass — Food companies can get away with some of these labels and trick you and feed them industrial grains, but if they’re organic, still get away with some of these. So you want as many — I try to go for as many of these words as you can find, and they're becoming less and less expensive these days. We know that animal products that have these words have more omega-3s, which again are great for the brain and less omega-6s when compared to conventionally factory-farmed animal products. Whether you're drinking milk, eating cheese, chicken, beef, no matter what it is. If you favor the organic, you're going to get more omega-3s and less omega-6s. You're still not going to get as many omega-3s when compared to eating like an on omega-3 superfood, but you're definitely going to get more than the conventionally raised crap meat that a lot of Americans are eating all day long. That's sort of a good overview, I think, may be of proteins and fats and sort of the macro approach. 

[0:39:16.5] MB: Just to give some examples. You touched a little bit on soybean oil, but what are some other kind of common sources of omega-6 fats?

[0:39:23.9] MD: I would say the most offensive villain here is the factory-farmed meat. If you go anywhere in the country, it’s pretty much anything you find in processed foods is going to have soybean oil and then it's going to have a factory-farmed meat product. So those two are the most egregious offenders of this high omega-6, a.k.a. a pro-inflammatory diet for your brain, and you just really want to shift away from that, if at all possible. 

[0:39:51.3] MB: I'm curious. Are there other kind of strategies that you recommend or have we missed anything in terms of kind of digging into the various interventions that we can implement to kind of get away from brain drain and build a really smart, healthy, vibrant brain?

[0:40:06.3] MD: Yeah. So I have a lot of practices. The second week of my 14-day program is all about these practices that help to shift your brain from a sympathetic nervous system dominant state, a.k.a. fight or flight, into a parasympathetic dominant one, a.k.a. rest and digest. 

If you kind of look at these two sides, I always use the analogy, this visual of a seesaw, your brain is always going to be tilted towards one or the other. If you're not stressed out and you’re nice and balanced, the seesaw will be tilted towards parasympathetic, rest and digest. If you're drained, it's going to be tilted towards sympathetic nervous system, a.k.a. fight or flight, and it's going to stay there, right?

We basically need to find a practice, and hopefully it's going to be a practice that's natural. I think the other thing that we’re relearning is the less people can rely on prescription medication, the better. So if you don't need to take a Klonopin or a Xanax or an Ativan to shift your brain away from fight or flight into rest and digest, the better. 

I have a lot of clinically proven practices, like progressive muscle relaxation, autogenic training, self- hypnosis, mindfulness meditation. I think this these things used to be sort of very hippie, airy fairy, but I think they've come into the mainstream and I'm so glad, because they really do work, and I think —I have a script of all of these practices in the book and sort of mantra meditation in the book, and it's sort of finding that tool that works for you. 

I've done a lot of mindfulness meditation and a lot of self-hypnosis. My brain, I prefer self-hypnosis in terms of how deep I can go how quickly, and if I'm feeling really stressed, that's a little practice that I can use in my own mind if I'm — No matter where I am, that works for me. Having that toolbox of what is that little practice, that 30-second practice that works for you. Also, exercise, right? 

In the chapter in Heal Your Drained Brain called jog for joy, it's fascinating. People are just loving — They're going nuts over this chapter, the people that have read and reviewed this book, because I've really broken down exercise into these brain chemicals. For example, overall, we want to be more fit, because during the course of the day, fit people release over 40% less cortisol, that stress hormone, that brain drainer, compared to people who are out of shape. You want to get in shape, but you also want to be really careful and you want to use the right exercise at the right time. 

So let me tell you what I mean by that. If you get on that treadmill and you're having a really bad day and you carry around a lot of anger and you're just having the worst day you’ve ever had, and then you do intense interval training. Recent research shows that you may increase your risk of a heart attack. It's kind of interesting that that would, for example, be a great day to do yoga or something, maybe something that's not interval training. 

Interval training, by the way, is one of the best ways to get in shape fast, and if you need to lose some belly fat, interval training is fantastic, and we do want to get in shape rapidly, because as I said, it's one of the best ways to sort of globally reduce your stress hormone levels, because fit people release less cortisol throughout the day compared to people who are not in shape, but interval training actually spikes your cortisol levels, your stress hormone levels in the short term, but then you get this long-term benefit. 

Another thing that I have in the book that people love is this new form of interval training, and it's a 10- minute interval training protocol that's been clinically proven in research. In this research, they found that cardiovascular health improved in these two groups in equal amounts. One group was doing standard interval training, about an hour class. The other group was doing 10-minute, these high intensity, let’s call it sprint interval training, where it’s sort of warm-up, jog, all out for 30 seconds, jog, all out for 30 seconds, jog, all out for 30 seconds, jog, cool down, a little 10-minute. Over the course of — I forget what the timeframe was, but I think it was about a month. These two groups had similar improvements. 

So this is not to take away from an hour long interval training class. You should absolutely do that. I do a lot of those classes myself, but it proves that 10 minutes — This is a little trick that I use. When I'm in a hotel gym that's disgusting and — It's like basically in this little room and it's hard to motivate yourself when you're tired and jetlagged and you're in this little hotel gym with like one treadmill. You can do this little 10-minute workout if you only have a little bit of time, and it's certainly better than nothing. If in fact, we think that if you follow this format that's in my book, that it may be just as effective in many ways as a longer class, because you're just pushing your body and then pulling back, but you also want to make sure that you're, again, choosing the right exercise for you on the right day at the right time, because it really does have a profound effect on your brain health. 

[0:45:28.8] MB: So many good strategies and kind of practical tips. For somebody who’s listening to this interview, what would be kind of one starting point that you would give them as kind of a piece of homework or an action item that they could use to implement the ideas that we’ve talked about today?

[0:45:44.5] MD: I would say just starts slowly. Remember that when it comes to brain health and healing your drained brain, my 14-day program is certainly a great jumpstart and most people start to feel a lot better, but at the end of the day, your brain health, it's not a sprint, it's actually a marathon, and a lot of the choices are choices that you're going to make for the rest your life. 

That being said, if it is a marathon, the biggest change — The pyramids started with one brick or the Empire State building or whatever that visual is that you love. Just do one healthy thing that you didn't do yesterday and do it today and gradually you’ll start to feel better, and a lot of times when people make one change, they start to feel a little better, and that provides them with the momentum and the positive feedback that makes two changes easier to do tomorrow. If you're somebody who maybe does need a little bit of a boot camp, my 14-day program is great, but what I don't want people to do is go all out and then feel hopeless and then say, “Oh! I can't do it. It was too hard.” 

If you’re in that boat where you’re just feeling, “Oh, gosh! There’s so much I have to do differently.” All you have to do — I would say today, do one thing that you've heard today that is going to be better for your brain. The positive feedback will carry through and hopefully tomorrow you'll do two. 

[0:47:03.7] MB: And where can listeners find you and your books and all these information online?

[0:47:07.8] MD: Yeah, you can go to my website, drmikedow, like Dow Jones, .com, drmikedow. I’m on social media, Dr. Mike Dow on all my accounts, and my new book; Heal Your Drained Brain, is available in all major bookstores; Amazon, hayhouse.com, all indie bookstores. It goes on sale February 6th, 2018.

[0:47:32.4] MB: Mike, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all these information. I learned a tremendous amount about brain health, omega-3s and much, much more. So thank you so much for being a guest and sharing all these wisdom. 

[0:47:42.6] MD: Thank for having me, Matt. 

[0:47:43.8] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created the show to help you, our listeners master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. 

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

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

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

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

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

Everything You Know About Sleep Is Wrong with Dr. Matthew Walker

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Listen To The Episode

Show Notes

Video - 4 Scientifically Proven Paths To A Perfect Night Sleep

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic - Why You Should Sleep More

Links and Additional Research

Episode Transcript

Are you tired? If your answer is yes, it would seem relatively straightforward to assume you're not getting enough sleep.

It’s one of the most important things you can possibly do for yourself.

Improve. Your. Sleep.

You’re going to spend a large portion of your like sleeping. And that’s a good thing! Getting more sleep not only allows you to wake up well rested each morning but also prevents disease and can lead to a longer (and happier) life overall.

Did you know that routinely sleeping less than 6 hours a night can increase your risk of cancer by 50%? After just one night of less than 5 hours of sleep Natural Killer Cells (which fight cancer cells) drop by 70%! After just one night!

Sleep isn't just about rest. It's about the body repairing itself, doing maintenance so to speak. Unfortunately, what has been discovered over time (and discussed in this book) is that, if you lose sleep, taking a nap, while it takes the edge off, it doesn't replace the sleep lost during the night.

Our ability to fight disease (including cancer) and obesity may be directly tied to not getting enough restful sleep. Pills don't help either. Yes, they knock you out and make it easier to fall asleep but they lack the restorative power of natural sleep and, in fact, some sleeping pills can increase your risk of cancer.

Knowing this, it must change the way you think about the old saying “I’ll sleep when I’m dead”… because ironically adopting that mindset will get you there quicker.

Do you find that you wake up feel groggy or angry? Do you reach for the snooze button 1, 2 or even 3 times each morning? Or, do you hop right out of bed ready to tackle the new day?

What about at night? Do you struggle to fall asleep? Tossing and turning seemingly unable to count enough sheep to get to bed. Or, are you out like a light when you pull the covers over yourself?

If you want to literally improve every single aspect of your life and wake up feeling refreshed and rested each and every night this interview is for you.

To get started NOW, download our free guide below and learn 5 super simple and easy ways to maximize your sleep starting tonight!

In this episode we discuss everything you ever wanted to know about sleep. We examine the findings from hundreds of studies across millions of people and pull out the major findings about how vitally important sleep is, the global sleep loss epidemic, the stunning data about sleep and productivity, the simplest and most effective evidence based strategies for getting better sleep and much more with Dr. Matthew Walker. 

Dr. Matthew Walker is Professor of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and Founder and Director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He has published over 100 scientific studies and is the author of the book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. Which is currently the #1 Amazon Bestseller in Neuroscience . He has been featured on numerous television and radio outlets, including CBS 60 Minutes, National Geographic Channel, NOVA Science, NRP and the BBC.

Show Notes

• Global sleep loss epidemic - the average American sleeps only 6.5 hours per night

• Sleep has slowly been eroded by our society over the last 60 years

• Sleep is vital and essential from an evolutionary standpoint - you can’t just lop off 25% of the necessary sleep you need

• Studies across millions of people show one clear thing - the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life

• If you sleep less, you will be dead sooner, lack of sleep kills your more quickly

• Lack of sleep is a major predictor of “all cause mortality” including cancer, Alzheimers, heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, and suicide

• Hard science shows why a lack of sleep is tremendously bad for you

• Sleep has an image problem, we stigmatize sleep and think its lazy and slothful - people wear lack of sleep as a badge of honor to be celebrated

• Less sleep does not equal more productivity

• The 5 clear truths of sleep research and productivity

• Under-slept employees take on less challenging problems

  1. They produce fewer creative solutions

  2. They exert less effort when working in groups (slacking off, social loafing)

  3. They are more likely to lie, cheat, and engage in deviant behavior

  4. The more or less sleep that a CEO has had, the more or less charismatic they will be

• Chronic exhaustion cost most first world nation 2% of the GDP - 411 billion dollars lost each year to a lack of sleep

• The research is very clear that under-slept individuals are not as productive or successful

• The evidence is resoundingly clear - cutting on sleep makes you less productive and less creative and less effective

• After being awake for 21 hours, you’re as cognitively impaired as someone who is legally drunk

• The two principle types of sleep - REM sleep and non-REM sleep

• The different stages of sleep - the 4 stages of REM sleep

• Hard science shows that deep Sleep is critical to clearing toxins out of your brain

• Sleep is like a sewage system for your brain - it cleans all the toxins and debris out of your brain

• The less sleep you have, the higher your probability of getting Alzheimers

• Different cognitive systems in your brain also work during sleep - its like saving files to a hard drive, you have to sleep to get the save button

• The emotional circuits of the brain are changed and modified by sleep - the amygdala (which controls fight or flight) is regulated by the pre-frontal cortex

• Lack of sleep can have a serious negative impact on your emotional health

• Sleep reboots body systems as well - not just the brain

• Deep sleep is one of the best blood pressure medications you can imagine

• Deep sleep regulates insulin levels and blood glucose levels

• Sleep is also essential for the reproductive system

• Sleep boosts testosterone and lack of sleep makes you 10 years older from a testosterone standpoint

• Appetite, weight, food consumption are all regulated by sleep - lack of sleep makes you eat 300-550 more calories per day, and makes you eat more high sugar and high carb foods

• Sleep also has a profound impact on the immune system - one night of 4 hours of sleep will drop natural killer cells (body cancer fight cells) by 70%!

• The link between lack of sleep and cancer the WHO recently classified night shift work as a probable carcinogen

• Sleeping 5 hours per night makes you 200-300% more likely to catch a cold than someone sleeping 8 hours a night

• There is not a SYSTEM or PROCESS in the body/brain that is not impacted by sleep

• The most striking omission in the health literature today is that sleep is not at the center of the health conversation

• 3 key ways sleep improves your learning

• Is it wise to pull an all nighter? What does the research say?

• The “memory inbox of the brain” (hippocampus) and how sleep is vital to creating and storing memories

• Sleep is vital both BEFORE learning and AFTER learning to store and save new memories and solidify them into the architecture of the brain

• Sleep replays information and strengthens memories

• Sleep provides a 3x advantage to problem solving compared to an equivalent period being awake

• "The 6 Unpopular Tactics for Getting Enough Sleep"

• Carve out enough time and make sleep a priority - carve out an 8 hour window to sleep every night

  1. This is the #1 thing to do - regularity is KEY - go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter what

     1. Sleeping in late creates “social jetlag” which has serious negative consequences - regularity of sleep is key

  2. Keep the temperature cool - keep your bedroom 68 degrees - your body needs to drop its core temperature 2-3 degrees to fall asleep

  3. You can hack this by taking a hot bath before bed

  4. DARKNESS is key to producing melatonin. Phones, screens, blue light etc trick the brain into thinking its day time and shut off melatonin production

  5. Reading on a tablet 1 hour before bed shifts your melatonin production 3 hours later!

     1. Use blackout shades

     2. No screens 1 hour before bed

  6. Do NOT stay in bed if you’ve been in bed longer than 20 minutes. You brain is a very associative machine - being awake in bed trains the brain that it’s OK to be awake in bed. Get up, go to a different room, read a book in dim light, no screens, no eating. And only when you feel sleep return to bed, and you will re-learn the key association between making the bed about sleep

  7. Some people don’t like this idea.

     1. Meditation is a great way to get yourself to fall back asleep. The studies are very clear, very well done that meditation can help improve sleep.

  8. No caffeine after noon and avoid alcohol in the evenings.

  9. Caffein prevents deep sleep

     1. Alcohol fragments your sleep and makes your wake up much more, leaving with un-restorative sleep

     2. Alcohol blocks dreams and REM sleep

• Sedation is NOT sleep. Knocking out your cortex is not natural sleep.

• You could be A FAR BETTER VERSION OF YOURSELF mentally, cognitively, physiology if you just got more sleep

• Current sleeping pills are “sedative hypnotics” that do NOT productive naturalistic sleep, and do not get the benefits of sleep

• Sleeping pills have a far higher risk of death, cancer, infection

• CBTI - cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia is just as effective as sleeping pills in the short term, but much more effective long term

• Melatonin can be a useful tool to time the onset of sleep

• Does napping work?

• There is no such thing as the sleep bank - you can’t accumulate a debt and then hope to cash in on the weekend - sleep doesn’t work like that

• Napping can prevent you from falling asleep and staying asleep! Be careful!

• How does GABA impact your sleep?

• Sleep is a remarkably complex neurochemical ballet

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic: Why You Should Sleep More 

Do you ever pull an all-nighter to cram for a test, but still fail? Maybe you work 60-hour weeks but feel like you’re getting nowhere. Unfortunately, developed nations are suffering from a sleep deprivation epidemic, but science can help us see the reasons for getting a good eight hours every night.

 A common saying you hear is, “You can sleep when you’re dead!” But recent sleep studies have shown us that less sleep means our lifespans shorten and our quality of life will decrease too. Unfortunately, our society pushes us to sleep less and work more, so we need help shifting our social perspective.

It turns out, that our relatively recent attempt to shorten the amount of sleep we get runs into a lot of problems against the million-year-old necessity that mother nature has put in place. The 20-25% decrease we’ve imposed on ourselves has led to an increased likelihood of developing every major disease that kills us in the developed world.

Elucidating Sleep Science

“I think part of the problem, perhaps, is that the science of sleep is actually not being adequately communicated to the public and I think it’s people like myself who are to blame.” – Dr. Matthew Walker 

Dr. Matthew Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, founder and director of the Center for Human Sleep Science, and author of Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams. His belief is that sleep science is not understood by the public, which was part of his motivation for writing Why We Sleep.

Many people appear to be proud of how little they sleep. However, the list of problems linked to a lack of sleep include Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, bipolar disorder, and suicide, among other mental health conditions. With this information in hand, it’s necessary to remove the stigma on getting a sufficient amount of sleep (about eight hours).

Dr. Walker set out to write a book of reasons why you should sleep, rather than rules. He addresses the relationship between sleep and productivity, citing laboratory and workplace studies that have provided him with five clear truths.

Five Facts About Sleep-Deprived Workers

“It’s very clear that under-slept individuals are not going to be successful.” – Dr. Walker

1. They take on less-challenging problems.

2. They produce fewer creative solutions.

3. They exert less effort when working in groups.

4. They are more likely to lie, cheat, and engage in deviant behaviors.

5. Less sleep means less-charismatic leaders.

He also notes that a recent report demonstrated that chronic exhaustion and fatigue (due to a lack of sleep) caused most first-world nations to lose about 2% of their GDP (that’s $411 billion for the U.S.). “If we solve the sleep deprivation problem in the U.S., we could almost double the budget for education, and we could make huge in-roads into the problems we have with healthcare,” he adds.

Dr. Walker shares an analogy to represent the current nature of an office workplace by comparing it to a spin class: “Everyone in the office looks like they’re working hard, but the scenery never changes – there’s never any forward progression in terms of momentum with productivity and creativity.”

Finally, he ends his evaluation of workplace attitudes by observing how their attempt to optimize the efficiency of every system stops at the human level. Where the budget, taxes, hardware, and software are all effective, there’s no focus or understanding of a human’s cognitive or physiological capacities and their necessity to reboot and recharge.

Sleep: The Human Recycling Period

“There really isn’t any system within your body, or process within the brain, that isn’t wonderfully enhanced by sleep when you get it or demonstrably impaired when you don’t get enough.” – Dr. Walker 

Dr. Walker informs us that we need eight-hours of sleep after 16-hours of wakefulness; and after 20-21 hours of being awake, we are as cognitively impaired as someone who would be legally drunk behind the wheel. So what exactly is happening when we sleep?

Sleep is simply divided into rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, where we dream, and non-REM sleep; while non-REM sleep is further divided into four sub-stages. Each stage performs different yet necessary functions.

When we are awake, we are essentially in a form of low-level brain damage. Thus, one of the functions performed during the deepest stages of non-REM sleep is to clear out the metabolic toxins that have been built up in our brain. This is done through our brain’s glymphatic system (similar to our body’s lymphatic system). While asleep, this system’s performance increases by 200-300% relative to when we’re awake. (This process is known to remove a toxic protein called beta-amyloid, one of the leading candidate causes of Alzheimer’s disease.)

Sleeping also improves our learning in at least three ways.

1. Sleeping prepares our brain: A lack of sleep leads to a 40% deficit in our ability to make memories.

2. Sleeping ‘saves’ information: While asleep, we transfer information from our short-term to long-term memory. Like hitting the ‘Save’ button, it prevents us from forgetting memories.

3. Sleeping strengthens our memories: Sleep interconnects new memories together and interconnects it with pre-existing memories. This creates an updated associative network of memories.

Dr. Walker comments on the third point, “That’s the reason that you can come back the next day having extracted and divined creative novel solutions to previously impenetrable problems that you were facing.” While simple problems benefit from focused thought, complex problems benefit from non-conscious thought, such as that which occurs during sleep. It’s because of this function that nearly every language has a phrase similar to “sleep on a problem,” and not to “stay awake on a problem.” He ends with the analogy, “It’s essentially informational alchemy that occurs overnight.”

The emotional circuits of our brains are also modified during sleep. Our amygdala is reconnected to our prefrontal cortex when we get a good night’s sleep, which puts a brake on our emotional gas pedal. When we are deprived of sleep, the connection is severed, which essentially makes us all emotional gas pedal and no brake.

The benefits of sleep don’t end at the brain; there are many physiological systems that are rebooted during sleep as well. Deep, non-REM sleep is one of the best forms of blood pressure medicine, because it slows your heart rate. It also releases a variety of restorative chemicals and hormones, including a growth hormone that restores the cells in your body.

Sleep regulates your metabolic system, specifically insulin levels. In fact, studies have shown that one week of five-six hours of sleep a night will disrupt a person’s blood sugar enough to classify them as pre-diabetic. This illustrates the crucial role sleep plays in regulating the metabolic system.

A lack of sleep is known to age both men and women by a decade in terms of wellness and virility by disrupting the reproductive system.

Appetite regulation and food consumption are directly affected by sleep. Sleep deprivation causes in imbalance in leptin, which tells your brain when you’re satisfied with your food, and ghrelin, which tells your brain you’re not satisfied with your food. This causes you to eat 300-500 more calories a day. Not only do you eat more, but you’re also more likely to reach for starchy carbohydrates and high-sugar foods, while avoiding high-protein foods.

One night of four-hours of sleep will drop your cancer-fighting immune cells by 70%. The link between sleep-deprivation and cancer is so strong, that the World Health Organization recently classified night-time shift work as a probable carcinogen because it disrupts our sleep rate rhythms.

Five-hours of sleep per night the week before you get your flu shot will reduce your body’s antibody response to less than 50%, rendering it largely ineffective. Similarly, with five-hours you are 200-300% more likely to catch a cold than someone who gets eight-hours of sleep.

According to Dr. Walker, “All lack of sleep is, perhaps, a slow from of self-euthanasia.”

How to Fall Asleep Fast and Sleep Better

“I think what we know is that: Without sleep there is low energy and disease, with sleep there is vitality and health.” – Dr. Walker 

Dr. Walker begins to share five tips (and their explanations) for how to sleep better. These five tips all follow a primary, overarching requirement: Carve out an eight-hour, non-negotiable sleep window every night.

1. Go to bed and wake up at the same time.

Regardless if it’s a weekday, the weekend, or a holiday, always wake up at the same time. Even if you have a bad night of sleep, just make sure you fall asleep early the following evening. Sleeping in late causes “social jetlag” where you feel tired in the evening and drift forward in time; this has deleterious consequences to your health and sleep.

2. Keep it cool.

Keeping your bedroom around 68°F (18.5°C) is optimal for most people. This is because your body needs to drop its core temperate 2-3° to initiate sleep. If your feet get cold, then you can wear socks. Also, a hot bath before bed causes mass vasodilation (more so than a hot shower); this pulls your blood near your skin’s surface, plummeting your core temperature.

3. Keep it dark.

Darkness releases melatonin, a vital hormone for the onset of sleep. Too much light inside the house (or from LED screens) before bed will trick your brain into thinking it’s daytime, shut off the production of melatonin, and prevent sleep. Dim your lights by turning half of them off in the evening, avoid LED screens in the last hour before bed, and use black-out curtains.

4. Get up if you’ve been awake in bed for longer than 20-minutes.

Whether you’re trying to fall asleep or wake up, you must get out of bed if you’ve been lying awake for more than 20-minutes. If not, then your brain creates the association that your bed is about being awake, rather than asleep. If you’re trying to fall asleep but can’t, then go to another, dim room and maybe read a book (but avoid eating and screens). Only when you’re sleepy should you return to bed; that way you fall right asleep and recreate the association that beds are for sleeping. Dr. Walker, a hard scientist and skeptic, even suggests meditation, citing its support from clinical trial data and his recent conversion to the practice himself.

5. No caffeine after noon and no alcohol in the evenings.

Even people who claim that caffeine doesn’t affect them because they fall right asleep suffer from less-deep sleep. When they wake up, they don’t feel as refreshed, then reach for an extra cup in the morning, thus building a cycle of dependency and addiction. If you don’t stop at noon, then certainly after 2:00pm. Alcohol, on the other hand, sedates your cortex (effective knocking out your brain). This causes un-restorative sleep by waking you up multiple times throughout the night. It also blocks your REM sleep, which is critical for creativity and memory processing as well as emotional and mental health.

A common trap for people to fall into is thinking, “Well, this is how I am now at this age.” But this perception of yourself prevents you from realizing that you can be a far better version of yourself, mentally, cognitively, and physiologically, if you simply start getting enough sleep.

This trap can easily occur as a result of excessive or improper caffeine consumption. It isn’t until people come off caffeine that they start to feel the benefits that normally come from high-caffeine use. “It’s like wiping a fogged window, and you can start to see clearly through it,” Dr. Walker comments, attributing the improvement to a full, restorative night of sleep. 

How to Deal with Insomnia

            “There are no sleeping medications that we have currently that produce naturalistic sleep.” – Dr. Walker

Sleeping Pills

Dr. Walker goes on to address the question of sleeping pills. He explains that the current class of drugs one will be prescribed are called ‘sedative hypnotics.’ Just like alcohol, these sedate (or knock out) your brain. The sleep you get on sleeping pills is not the same as natural, healthy sleep.

Additionally, these pills are associated with a far higher risk of death, cancer, and infection. Though these links have not be confirmed as causal or merely associational. He goes on to inform us that that people don’t necessarily need them, and there is a safe, non-pharmacological alternative which is just as effective: cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia (CBTI).

With CBTI, the benefits to your sleep are just as powerful in the short-term, but they also continue long-term as you maintain the practice. Sleeping pills, on the other hand, produce rebound insomnia, where your sleep is just as bad (or worse) once you stop taking them. (People should revisit these issues with their doctor if they’re interested in alternative treatment.) 

GABA

GABA is the principle, inhibitory neurotransmitter of the brain; it works like a red light for your neurons, telling them to stop firing. Most sleeping medications work by targeting the GABA system, though their blunt nature is incapable of properly mimicking the complex neuro-chemical and neuro-physiological ballet that occurs during sleep.

Melatonin Supplements

Next, Dr. Walker discusses the uses of melatonin supplements. While they don’t actually help a young, healthy person with a stable sleep schedule, they’re great for helping someone adjust to a new time zone. By taking it 30-60 minutes before you want to sleep, it can help reset your body’s internal clock and counteract jetlag. He also notes that if people take melatonin and they feel that it helps (even if it doesn’t), then they should continue to do so.

Napping

Many people think that, if they don’t get enough sleep, then they can just “catch up” on it later, either with a nap or by getting more sleep at night. Dr. Walker states, “Sleep is not like the bank. You can’t accumulate debt, then hope to pay it off at the weekend. There is no credit system.”

However, if you are sleep-deprived, then you can nap and overcome some of the basic sleepiness. Your reaction times improve a little, but you don’t overcome the higher-level cognitive issues, like decision-making, learning and memory, and focused attention. He goes on to discuss a futile tactic he sees in his students that he calls ‘sleep bulimia.’ This is where they get too little sleep during the week, then try to binge sleep during the weekend and make up the deficit.

He uses an analogy to describe a negative aspect of napping: Throughout the day we build up a chemical pressure in our brain, a sleepiness pressure, due to the build up of adenosine. The more you build up the sleepier you feel; and after 16-hours of wakefulness, you should fall right asleep and stay asleep for eight-hours, thus releasing the sleepiness pressure. However, when we nap, it’s like we open a valve and let a little of the pressure out. This makes it harder for us to sleep well at night, either by struggling to fall asleep or stay asleep.

Echoing the placebo affect associated with melatonin supplements, if you can nap regularly and sleep well at night, then keep napping. Otherwise, you should avoid napping and build up that sleepiness pressure until you fall asleep at night.

Action Steps for a Good Night’s Sleep

To finish off, Dr. Walker suggests a simple self-improvement test: Give yourself one week of eight-hours of sleep a night. Determine if you feel better when you get eight-hours of regularly scheduled sleep versus a random schedule of five-hours one night, then six-hours the next, and so on. Then ask yourself, “Did that experiment work? Is it in my favor? Do I feel any better? Do I notice that improvement?”

Thank you so much for listening!

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

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

[Book] Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker
[DVD] Memento
[Twitter] Matt Walker
[LinkedIn] Matthew Walker
[Website] Sleep Diplomat

Why We Sleep (14min)

• The incredible benefits of getting enough and the terrible side effects of not getting enough. 

• The Brain and The Functions of learnings and memory. 

  • Sleep after learning is essential and like hitting the “save” button after learning. We also now know that it’s important even before learning. 

  • Without sleep the memory circuits become blocked up.

• Examine The Hypothesis of the All Nighter

  • 40% deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep.

  • Brain activity is shot almost entirely after sleep deprivation. 

    • He describes it as like Memento the movie. (Great movie BTW)

• What is it that causes people to get good sleep and how does it affect our brain?

• What in sleep causes these benefits?

  • As we get older our memory gets work but our sleep does as well and they are related.

• Sleep is critical for your emotional and mental health

  • On less sleep these areas of the brain become irrational. 

  • Video of a subject illustrates this point. - Subject goes from angry to laughing then back to base in about 20 seconds. 

  • Without sleep you can’t take your foot off the emotional gas pedal.

• Sleep deprivation is correlated with depression and almost every psychiatric disorder. 

• The body relies on sleep as well.

  • 75% reduction in NK cell activity even after one bad night of sleep. Immune system will be shot. 

  • Lack of sleep and cancer has been shown to have a strong relationship. 

Matthew on CBS This Morning (6min)

• ⅔ of Americans do not get their full recommended 8 hours of sleep. 

• Every disease in developed nations is made worse by lack of sleep.

• Short Sleep = Shorter Life

• Brain - builds up a toxic buildup in the brain.

• Body - No immune system and activities stress chemistry leading to heart disease and cancer. 

• ALL RESEARCH BASED

• Naps - A double edged sword. Sleep is not like the bank, you can’t accumulate debt then pay it off as you go about your day. 

• Sleeping Pills - These are bad!

Secrets of the Sleeping Brain (1hr 41min)

• Long video that goes deep into some of the topics covered above. 

• Love the concept that we’ve hit on before that sleep actually allows you to integrate in ideas and learnings into what you’ve been doing prior. 

The Sleep Deprivation Epidemic (6min)

• Sleep is one of the most important aspects of our life and yet it is increasingly neglected in twenty-first-century society, with devastating consequences. Award-winning professor of neuroscience Matthew Walker provides a fascinating insight into why it is vital we start taking sleep seriously.

Episode Transcript

[0:02:21.7] MB: Today, we have another fascinating guest on the show, Dr. Matthew Walker. He’s a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley and a founder and the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science. He’s published over a 100 scientific studies and is the author of the book, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the power of Sleep and Dreams, which is currently the number one Amazon bestseller in the neuroscience category. He’s been featured on TV, radio, including CBS’s 60 Minutes, National Geographic and much more.

Matt, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:02:53.7] MW: It’s a pleasure to be on Matt. Thank you for having me. 

[0:02:56.2] MB: Well, we’re very excited to have you on here today. I’d love to begin the conversation and talk a little bit about – as I think you’ve called it the sleep deprivation epidemic, and what happens to us when we don’t get enough sleep.

[0:03:11.4] MW: You’re right. There is currently a global sleep-loss epidemic. This is sweeping developed nations. It’s been underway for probably about 60 or 70 years. We know from surveys back in the 1940s that the average American adult was sleeping 7.9 hours a night. Now we know that number is down to 6 hours and 31 minutes during the week for American adults.

Back in my home country, not much better. It’s 6 hours and 49 minutes on average people are sleeping. Japan seems to be the worse; 6 hours and 22 minutes. I just give you those numbers to reaffirm first this pernicious erosion of sleep that has happened over the past 70 or 80 years as truth. But also just to take a step back, I think we have to realize that it took mother nature 3.6 million years to put this necessity of 8 hours of sleep in place.

Then we have come along, and in the space of blink of an evolutionary eye; 60, 70 years we’ve locked off maybe 20%, 25% of that sleep amount. How could it not come with deleterious consequences? I think it’s been proudly confirmed that we are in a global sleep-loss state of deficiency, or an epidemic as the CDC and the World Health Organization have called it.

What are the consequences though? Because if it’s not doing us any harm, then why worry? If only that were true, there is demonstrable harm that is underway because of the sleep-loss epidemic. We can start at the big 30,000-foot level and make it a very simple statement based on epidemiological studies from millions of people. That is the shorter your sleep, the shorter your life. Short sleep predicts all-cause mortality.

I think that classical maxim that you may have heard. You can sleep when you’re dead. It’s always struck me as ironic, because if you adopt that mindset, we know from the evidence that you will be both dead sooner, and the quality of that now shorter life will be significantly worse. 

If you dig down a little deeper you can say, “Well, if a lack of sleep kills you more quickly, then what is it that is killing you more quickly?” It seems to be just about everything. Every made disease that is killing us in the developed world has causal insignificant links to a lack of sleep. That list currently and tragically includes Alzheimer’s disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, diabetes, as well as numerous mental health conditions; depression, bipolar disorder and most recently and sadly, suicide as well.

I think we’re really now starting to understand not just how deathly a lack of sleep is and the current weight of our sleep deprivation, and that elastic band of sleep deprivation can stretch only so far before it snaps. But with also understanding from hard science exactly why a lack of sleep produces such disease, sickness and ill-health within the brain and the body.

[0:06:31.1] MB: It’s amazing and it’s so important to think about why sleep is so vital. Yet, in today’s society it seems like there is more and more of a push to sleep less, work more, hustle more, do more. How do we combat that? 

[0:06:49.5] MW: There is. I think currently, sleep has an image problem in society, because more often than not, we seem to stigmatize sleep and we suggest that people who are getting sufficient sleep and I actually choose my words quite carefully there. As being lazy, as being slothful, those who get maybe 7 or 8 hours of sleep a night.

People I think are – or some people, I should say. Not all, but some people are perhaps quite proud of the fact of how little sleep that they’re getting and where it almost as though it’s a badge of honor to be celebrated. It’s sad, because for all of the reasons that we’ve just discussed, it’s an ill-advised mentality to expose.

It’s also strange, because if we don’t always have that opinion. I don’t think any of us would look at an infant sleeping during the day and say, “Gosh, what a lazy baby.” We don’t do that, because we know that sleep at that time of life is absolutely non-negotiable. It’s fundamentally necessary. But if you look at the evidence somewhere between infancy and now even childhood, not only do we abandon this notion that sleep is necessary and important, but we give it this terrible stigma.

I think that attitude has to change, and there are many ways in which it has to change. I think part of the problem perhaps is that the science of sleep is actually not being adequately communicated to the public. I think it’s people like myself who are to blame. I’m a sleep scientist, a professional sleep scientist for 20 years now.

I can’t go around wagging the finger at people if people have not been educated by the science that the taxpayer dollars have funded. That was part of the motivation to write the book that I didn’t feel as though there was a book after that gave people a blueprint manifesto of all of the real hard science of sleep.

There are lots of books out there that you can buy about the quick fix, these are the 10 rules to better sleep, or – I got nothing against those types of books, but for me I felt it was important because my sense is that people don’t respond to rules. They respond to reasons rather than rules, and I wanted to give and write a book of reasons for why you should sleep, rather than rules for how to sleep.

[0:09:27.7] MB: I want to dig a little bit more specifically into some of the negative implications or maybe the flipside of why sleep is so important for certain activities. For somebody who – let’s contextualize this maybe within a framework broadly thinking about, if I want to get more work done people often say, “All right, I’m going to sleep less,” or, “I’m going to pull a all-nighter,” or, “I’m going to cut down on my sleep so I can be more productive,” how does that usually pan out? What does the science say about doing that?

[0:09:59.5] MW: It doesn’t pan out very well. In fact, the opposite is true; we now know that less sleep does not equal more productivity. There have been lots of laboratory and workplace with these, and they give us five clear truths. Firstly, under-slept employees tend to take on less challenging work problems. In other words, they opt for the easy way out. Under-slept employees actually produce fewer creative solutions to work problems that they’re facing.

They also actually exert less effort when working in groups, and we’ve done some of these work. They essentially slack off. It’s what we call social-loafing. They write the tale of others and try to claim their hard work is their own.

We also know very interestingly that under-slept employees are more likely to lie, cheat and engage in deviant behaviors, such as falsifying a claims, receipts, etc., and it’s a scaling function; the less sleep that you have, the more likely you are to lie and be deviant. 

What’s also interesting is that it scales the business hierarchy all the way up to the top. We know that the more or less sleep that a business leader has had, the more or less charismatic their employees will rate that business leader.

Even though the employees themselves know nothing about how much sleep that business leader has had. They can actually see it in the expression of the behavior of their leader. You can then actually scale that up from those that have low-level studies, all the way up to the high-level studies. There was a recent round report, an independent report that demonstrated that chronic exhaustion and fatigue due to a lack of sleep caused most first-world nations about 2% of their GDP. For the United States, that’s 411 billion dollars that we lose each year due to a lack of sleep.

If you can just think about that, if we solve the sleep deprivation problem in the US, we could almost double the budget for education and we could make huge in-roads into the problems that we have with healthcare. Or we could just flat out give people remarkably high tax rebates, simply by solving the sleep-loss epidemic.

I think in response to your question, it’s very clear that under-slept individuals are not going to be successful. It’s a little bit like, if you think about your workforce and you’re forcing them to come into work every morning, early and leave very late, so no one is getting enough sleep, it strikes me a little bit like a spin class at a gym.

Everyone in the office looks like they’re working hard, but the scenery never changes, there’s never any forward progression in terms of momentum with productivity and creativity. I think we need to change our attitude in the workplace regarding sleep. The evidence is very clear there.

[0:13:04.3] MB: Especially around the creativity and the productivity aspect of that. It makes me think almost about the – an applied version of the 80-20 principle, where it’s not necessarily just more hours of work equals more output, but it’s really vital to have quality work, where you’re creative, where you’re bringing a fresh perspective and a well-rested mind. That’s when you really produce value. That’s the 20% that produces 80% of your results. All the busy work and the hustle and muscle, if you don’t get enough sleep you’re not going to be able to really be incredibly productive.

[0:13:44.3] MW: I think that that’s very true. Is there a way that we could actually break the classic [inaudible 0:13:50.0] 80-20 law that’s common throughout nature and it’s applied to human beings as well. By way of manipulating sleep could we actually force it to be that it’s 30% or 40% of your workforce that returns now 80% or 90% of the productivity by way of sufficient sleep. 

It’s just coming down to the very fact that what is the recycle rate of a human being? I think people have failed in the workplace to actually face this question and ask it. It’s surprising, because people in the workplace are wonderfully astute at trying to squeeze every ounce of effectiveness and efficiency out of all of their systems, be it the budget, be it the tax, be it the hardware, be it the software.

I think we forget about the biological organism at the heart of most companies, the human beings themselves. We have to ask, “How long can an individual be awake before they decline and decline significantly in the productivity, efficiency and effectiveness?” We now know that that evidence, you need 8 hours of sleep, 16 hours – after 16 hours of wakefulness, the cognitive capacities and the physiological capacities of the body starts to decline dramatically in after 20 or 21 hours of being awake. You are as cognitively impaired as someone who would be legally drunk in terms of driving behind the wheel.

There really is a recycle refresh rate of a human being, and we know that and it declines dramatically once you get past that 16. What I’m suggesting there is not 16 hours of work. I’m suggesting that this 8, 9-hour work span, then people need that downtime and they need to get that 8 hours of sleep to reboot and refresh.

[0:15:45.3] MB: What’s actually happening during that recycling period?

[0:15:49.7] MW: Well, we know firstly that there are multiple different stages of sleep that we ebb and flow in and out of, throughout a full 8-hour phase. Those different stages of sleeping, the two principle types of sleep, I should note that probably most people are aware of, or what are called non-rapid eye movement sleep, or non-REM sleep, and rapid eye movement sleep or REM sleep, which is the stage principally from which we dream.

Non-REM sleep actually has several sub-stages to it, stages one through four, increasing in the depth of sleep. By the way, it always strikes me as funny that scientists are not a very creative bunch. We have these four stages of deep non-REM sleep, and all we could come up with was stages one through four. Let’s set that side for a second.

We know that all of those different stages of sleep perform different functions end up all necessary. To come back to your question though, exactly what is happening at night? Well, let’s take deep non-REM sleep for a start.  The deepest stages of non-REM sleep. That stage of sleep is actually critical for essentially clearing out all of the metabolic toxins that have been building up in your brain.

Now that may sound a little bit hand-waving, but is actually very hard to get science from animal studies. When we are awake, we are essentially in a form of low-level brain damage. That’s what wakefulness is. We produce a variety of metabolic byproducts as a result of all of that waking brain cell combustion that we’re doing.

It is during sleep at night when we clear that away. What is clearing that away? Well, it turns out that we made a discovery, which is a sewage system in your brain. Now you have a sewage system in your body that you’re probably familiar with called the lymphatic system. But your brain also has one, it’s called the glymphatic system after the cells that produce it or compose the system called glial cells. 

That sewage system within the brain, glymphatic system, is not always on, at least not in highest flow capacity. It’s only during sleep and particular deep sleep at night where that cleansing system of the sewage network actually kicks in to high gear. It increases by maybe 2 to 300% relative to when we’re awake.

Why is this important? Well, one of the metabolic toxins that the glymphatic system clears away as we sleep at night is a toxic protein called beta-amyloid. Beta-amyloid is one of the leading candidate causes of Alzheimer’s disease. This is why we know that people who are not getting sufficient sleep across their lifespan are at a far high risk probability of going on to develop Alzheimer’s disease. The less sleep that you have, the less clearing away of that toxic byproduct. That’s one way, general way that we know that the brain gets essentially a refresh.

We also know that different cognitive systems and networks within your brain undergo a restoration. For example, we know that learning in memory systems get overhauled. We take information that we recently learned and we transfer it from short to long-term memory during sleep, which is actually like hitting the save button on new memories, so it prevents you from forgetting by cementing and solidifying those memories into long-term story sites.

We also know that there is a clearing out of your short-term memory reservoir. It’s perhaps a little bit like shifting files from a USB stick, so that when you wake up the next day, you have this renewed capacities to start learning and acquiring new facts and information all over again. That’s a more specific way in which the brain actually gets an overhaul at night during sleep.

We also know that the emotional circuits of the brain are changed and modified by sleep. There are deep emotional brain sensors, very old evolutionary centers specifically a structure called the amygdala, which controls the vital flight response. That structure, the amygdala is normally regulated in us higher order primates, human beings specifically, by a part of the brain that sits just above  your eyes called the prefrontal cortex, which acts a little bit like the CEO of the brain. It makes very high-level executive top-down control decisions.

When you had a good night of sleep, that part of your frontal lobe has been reconnected to your deep Neanderthal amygdala fight or flight center of the brain. It just regulates it. It’s a little bit like a break to your emotional accelerator pedal. When you don’t get enough sleep, that connection is actually severed and there’s a consequence. You become almost all emotional gas pedal and too little frontal lobe regulatory control brake.

There are many different ways in which sleep generally and very specifically seems to regulate our brain. I could also speak about the different ways that sleep actually reboots multiple systems within the body. That’s certainly the ways in which it refreshes your brain.

[0:21:13.5] MB: I want to dig into learning productivity and the emotional aspects. But before we do, tell me briefly about the physiological and the body reset aspects of sleep as well.

[0:21:25.3] MW: Firstly, we know that deep non-REM sleep that we described is perhaps one of the best forms of blood pressure medication that you could ever imagine. It’s during that deep sleep that your heart rate actually drops, your blood pressure will lower. There are a variety of restorative chemicals and hormones that are released, a growth hormone in particular to actually restore the cells within the body. It’s fantastic for the cardiovascular system.

We also know that it regulates your metabolic system, specifically it regulates insulin levels. If you’re not getting sufficient sleep, your blood glucose actually starts to become disrupted. There are [inaudible 0:22:07.7] that is now taking healthy people with no signs of diabetes. After one week of five to six hours of sleep a night, their blood sugar is disrupted so profoundly that their doctor would subsequently classify them as being pre-diabetic. That’s how critical sleep is to maintaining the metabolic system.

We also know that sleep is essential for another one of the major systems, the reproductive system. Here I’ll speak frankly about testicles, because we know that men who are routinely getting just 5 to 6 hours a night have significantly smaller testicles than those who are sleeping 8 hours or more.

In addition, men who report getting just 5 or 6 hours of sleep each night have a level of testosterone, which is that of someone 10 years their senior. In other words, a lack of sleep will actually age you by a decade in terms of that aspect of wellness and virility. We see very similar impairment in equivalent reproductive hormones and health, of course by a lack of sleep. It’s not just males who are disrupted in that way.

There are a variety of systems within the body. It also regulates appetite and weight and your food consumption. We know for example that those individuals who are not getting enough sleep will have an imbalance in the two hormones that control your hunger and your food intake. Those two hormones are called leptin and ghrelin.

Now leptin sounds like a Hobbit, I know, but trust me they are actually real hormones. Leptin is the hormone that tells your brain you’re satisfied with your food. You’re no longer hungry. You should stop eating. Ghrelin is the antithesis of that. Ghrelin will actually signal to your brain that you are not satisfied by the food that you’ve just eaten, that you are still hungry and that you should eat more.

People who are put on a regiment of just 5 or 6 hours of sleep for one week will have a mocked reduction in leptin, the hormone that says, “You’re fine. You’ve eaten enough, you can stop eating. You’re not hungry.” A mocked increase in the hormone ghrelin, which tells you, “You’re not satisfied with your food. You’re hungry and it’s time to eat more.”

That’s why people will actually eat somewhere between 3 to 500 calories more each day when they’re not getting sufficient sleep. You should also know by the way, it’s not just that you eat more, but what you eat is non-optimal when you’re sleep-deprived. Without sufficient sleep, you actually reach for the heavy-hitting starchy carbohydrates, as well as high-sugar foods and you stay away from the protein-rich foods. In other words, you’ll find yourself reaching for another slice of pizza rather than leafy greens, kale and beans.

It’s not just that you eat more. It’s what you eat that is also detrimental too. I hope that gives people just a little bit of a few brush strokes in terms of the bodily consequences. The one that we probably haven’t mentioned though, which is perhaps most impacted is your immune system. We know that one night of 4 hours of sleep will drop critical anti-cancer fighting immune cells called natural killer cells by 70%, which is a truly remarkable state of immune-deficiency, which happens very quickly within just one night.

Secondly, we also know that the link between a lack of sleep and cancer has now become so strong that the World Health Organization recently classified any form of night-time shift work as a probable cause energy. In other words, jobs that may induce cancer, because of a disruption of your sleep rate rhythms.

We can look to more benign things too. We know that if you’re getting just 5 hours of sleep in the week before you go and get your flu shot, you will only produce 50%, or in fact, less than 50% of the normal antibody response, rendering that flu shot largely ineffective.

Finally, know that if you’re getting just 5 hours of sleep a night, you are 2 to 300% more likely to capture cold, than someone who is getting 8 hours of sleep a night. This was a remarkable study where they quarantined people in a hotel and they had tracked how much sleep that they were getting in the week before. Then they flushed up the nose of all of these individuals; the flu virus. Then in the next few days they looked to see how many of those individuals succumbed to the flu, how many got infected. Then they bucketed them on the basis of how much sleep that they had in the week before, and that’s how they were able to come to that conclusion.

There really isn’t any system within your body, or process within the brain that isn’t wonderfully enhanced by sleep when you get it, or demonstrably impaired when you don’t get enough.

[0:27:25.3] MB: What a powerful statement. I mean, just that sentence alone really succinctly summarizes the fundamental conclusion that the science is in across nearly every spectrum of the body, the brain, etc., that sleep is incredibly valuable. That 8 hours of sleep specifically is really critical.

[0:27:46.2] MW: I think it is. I think what we know is that without sleep, there is low energy and disease. With sleep, there is vitality and health. The sleepless epidemic is perhaps the greatest curable disease that no one is really talking about, or effectively trying to solve. I would simply say that the lack of sleep is both the most striking omission in the health conversation of today. All lack of sleep is perhaps a slow form of self-Euthanasia.

[0:28:16.6] MB: I want to dig back into the relationship. Let’s touch on learning and memory. Tell me a little bit more about the work you’ve done and some of the research around how sleep can improve learning and memory.

[0:28:29.8] MW: Sleep actually is beneficial for memory in at least three ways that we’ve now discovered and this is the work that we’ve been doing, or some of the work that we do at my sleep center.

First, we know that you need sleep before learning to essentially prepare your brain; perhaps a little bit like a dry sponge, ready to initially soak up new information the next day. We did a study where we tested a very simple hypothesis. Is it wise to pull the all-nighter? Is it a good thing, or a bad thing?

We took a group of individuals and we either gave them a full night of sleep, or we kept them awake throughout the night. Then the next day, we wedged them inside an MRI scanner and then we have them try and learn a whole list of new facts as we were taking snapshots of brain activity. Then we tested them to see how effectively that learning had been.

Firstly, what we found is that when we put those two groups head to head, there was a 40% deficit in the ability of the brain to make new memories without sleep, and just a frame that in context it would simply be the difference between acing an exam and failing it miserably. What we went on to discover from the brain scans however was why the brain was failing to lay down those new memories.

There is a structure in our brains, on the left and the right side called the hippocampus. You can think of the hippocampus a little bit like the memory inbox of the brain. That it’s actually very good at receiving new memory files and holding on to them initially.

When we looked at that structure in those people who’d had a full night of sleep, we saw lots of healthy learning-related activity. Yet, in those people who were sleep deprived, we actually couldn’t find any significant activity whatsoever.

It was almost as though sleep deprivation had shut down your memory inbox as it were and any new incoming files. They were just being bounced. You couldn’t effectively commit new experiences to memory. If people would like to just understand what that means in terms of the hippocampus, I’m sure many people listening have probably seen the movie Memento. In that movie, that gentleman has damage to the brain and specifically to the structure of the hippocampus. From that point forward, he can no longer make any new memories. It is what we call in neurology, densely amnesic.

That part of his brain was the hippocampus and it is the very same structure that your lack of sleep will actually attack and prevent your brain from actually laying down and placing those new memories into a fixed state within the brain. That’s the first way that sleep is good for learning a memory.

You also need sleep not just before learning, but also after learning, but for something different now. Sleep after learning will essentially hit the save button on those new memories. It will essentially solidify those memories into neural architecture of the brain. As we mentioned before, it actually will transfer those memories, almost like packets of information being transferred across the network, from a short-term vulnerable storage site to the more permanent long-term storage center within the brain, which is called the cortex; this wrinkled mass that sits on top of your brain.

That means that when you come back the next day, those memories are protected and safe and you will be able to remember, rather than those memories being vulnerable to being overwritten or lost, for example to the ravage of time. Which mean, that they are ultimately forgotten. 

We also know a little bit about how sleep not only transfers memories during sleep, but even strengthens those memories. It’s during sleep that the brain actually replays the information that you’ve recently learned. These are studies done in humans, but also in animals they were actually placing electrodes into the brains of rats and they were having them run around a maze.

As they were running around the maze and learning the maze, all of these different brain cells which fire in a specific signature pattern, which was essentially the imprinting of a memory and it adds different tones to them. It would sound a little bit like “babababam, babababam, babababam.” The brain is imprinting this memory as the rat is running around the maze.

Low and behold, what happens is that when you then let the rats sleep, but keep recording and keep eavesdropping on the brain, what do you think reemerges? It’s exactly the same pattern, “babababam, babababam.” The rat is replaying those memories. What’s incredible however, is that it’s actually replaying them at somewhere between 10 to 20 times faster. Rather than “babababam,” it’s actually, “brrm, brrm, brr, brrm, brrm.” It’s this high-speed fidelity replay. We think that that actually helps score the memory trace into the brain in a strengthened manner, almost like etching on the surface of glass. You’re really strengthening that neural circuit. That’s sleep after learning to strengthen individual memories, and I guess essentially future proof that information within the brain.

There is a final third way that sleep actually helps memory that we’ve discovered, which I think is perhaps most exciting. Sleep doesn’t just simply strengthen individual memories. It’s that strengthening of individual memories by the way that happens during deep, non-rapid eye movement sleep, or dreamless sleep.

Sleep also then actually interconnects those new memories together and interconnects new information with all of your pre-existing back-catalog of autobiographical stored information. Essentially, what sleep is doing and this is actually the work of rapid eye movement sleep of dream sleep, is that you’re starting to collide information together within the brain. This is a bit like group therapy for memories.

What you awake with the next morning is a revised mind-wide web of information within the brain. It’s a new associative network, or at least not a radically new associative network, but it’s an updated and it’s a modified associative network. That’s the reason that you can come back the next day having extracted and divine, creative novel solutions to previously impenetrable problems that you were facing.

It’s probably the reason – I mean, now know this, for example that sleep will actually provide almost a three-fold advantage in problem solving relative to an equivalent time period spent awake. That science is now very well, I think rendered and described.

There probably is a reason that you’re never told to stay awake on a problem and in every language that I’ve inquired about to date, that phrase sleeping on a problem seems to exist. It seems to transcend cultural boundaries. It’s a phenomenon that is common across the globe. I should also note by the way that we – the British, we say you sleep on a problem. I believe and please correct me if anyone knows this, but I believe the French translation is a little closer to you sleep with the problem, rather than you sleep on a problem. I think that says so much about the romantic difference between the British and the French. I’ll digress before I lose my British passport.

[0:36:22.5] MB: That’s great. Yeah, that’s a funny anecdote and probably true. I’ve seen the phrase creative incubation and some research around creativity, and some of the science behind what you’re describing. To me, it makes so much sense that the more you give the brain the ability to something, and when you come back to that problem, you’re going to be much more creative. You’re going to be much more effective at solving. 

[0:36:48.0] MW: That’s right. It’s not just sleep by the way. If it’s a complex problem, simple problems tend to benefit from deliberative focused thought. But complex problems, problems where there are maybe 10, 20, 80 different variables and you could think of this as something very crass to you. What type of knife or fork set do you buy? This may be just three or four different variables. Versus, what type of card do you buy, where there is maybe 16 different features of variants that you have to choose between.

Well, the more complex a problem is, the more benefit there is to actually stepping away and stopping consciously thinking about it. That’s where the non-conscious brain seems to go to work. It seems to be able to distill amounts of information that we just can’t consciously juggle all up in the air at the same time when we’re awake. It’s just too much for a working memory. 

If you’re to think of perhaps what the extreme version of that non-conscious processing would be, you would probably design a system that looks very similar to sleep. That’s exactly why sleep provides those creative benefits. It’s essentially informational alchemy that occurs overnight.

[0:39:22.9] MB: I want to segway now and get into strategies for sleeping more effectively. We’ve talked at length about how important sleep is both from avoiding a tremendous amount of negative consequences, but also in producing a myriad of positive benefits. Tell me about, for somebody who maybe has trouble sleeping, or just in general, what are some of the basic interventions that we can implement in our lives to sleep better?

[0:39:50.5] MW: These tips I suppose, and again, I’m not just going to tell you the rules. I won’t just try and explain the reasons for each of these rules. I do warn people that some of them are probably not necessarily desirable. It makes me very unpopular, but here they are.

The first overarching rule of course, is that you just have to carve out an 8-hour non-negotiable sleep opportunity every night. It sounds crass and it’s sounds hokie, but I do this in my life as well. I’m not just saying this because I’ve just written a book and I want to practice what I seem to be preaching. But it’s from a very selfish perspective, because I know the evidence so well. If you knew the evidences I do, which and I hope people will do after reading the book, you just wouldn’t do anything different. I don’t want to short a life, I don’t want a life filled disease and pain and sickness and suffering. That’s why I do give myself a non-negotiable 8-hour opportunity every night.

Once you’ve got that in place – I don’t think it’s insurmountable. People are doing wonderful things in terms of actually committing non-negotiable time to exercise, and people are trying to eat more healthily. I don’t think sleep is a lost cause in this regard. 

Once you’re getting that opportunity, then I think there are five things that you could do. If there is one thing that you do from all of these tips, it is these; regularity. Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter what, no matter whether it’s the weekend, or the weekday. Even if you had a bad night of sleep, still wake up at the same time the next day. Accept that it’s going to be a bit of a tricky day. But then just get to bed early the following evening and then you will reset.

Because if you sleep in late for whatever reason, you’re not going to feel tired until later that following evening, and you start to drift forward in time and it’s called social jetlag. That has marked deleterious consequences to your health and to your sleep. Regularity is key.

The second is temperature. Keep it cool. Keep your bedroom around about 68 degrees is optimal for most people, which is probably colder than you think, or about 18 and a half degrees Celsius. The reason is this, that your body needs to drop its core temperature by about a 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit in order to initiate sleep. That’s the reason that you will always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that’s too cold, than too hot. Because at least the cold room is moving your brain and body in the right thermal direction, that it actually wants to go to for sound and healthy long sleep. 

Try to keep your temperature in the bedroom cool. Wear socks if you get cold feet. Some people complain about this, so it’s okay to wear those socks, but keep the bedroom cool. Another way that you can exploit this hack is actually to take a hot bath before bed, or a hot shower. The bath is better if you look at the evidence.

Most people think that when they have a hot bath, they get into bed, they’re nice and warm and that’s what lets them fall asleep more easily. It’s actually the opposite. When you get into a bath, all of the blood comes from the core of your body out to the surface, that’s why you get that rosy glow. It’s what’s called mass vasodilation.

Once you get out of the bath with all of that blood near the surface of your skin, you have this huge massive thermal dump. You get this evacuation of heat from the body, which plummets your core temperature, and that’s why you’ll fall asleep more quickly and more soundly.

The third tip is the light, and actually darkness more specifically. We are actually a dark-deprived society in all first-world nations. You need darkness to allow the release of a critical hormone called melatonin. Melatonin will time the normal healthy onset of sleep. If you’ve got lots of light inside of the house during the evening, and especially if you’re looking and staring at those LED screens from phones, tablets, laptops etc., that will actually fool your brain into thinking it is still daytime and it will shut off melatonin, so you won’t be releasing melatonin.

There were studies done where they had people reading on an iPad for one hour before bed. If I was doing that here in California, their data demonstrated that my release and peak of melatonin didn’t happen, or were shifted by three hours forward in time. I would essentially be close to Hawaii in terms of my internal clock timing to sleep, rather than California.

Keep it dim. You can turn down half the lights in the house in the evening. You don’t need all of them on the last hour before bed. Also stay away from screens in the last hour, and try and use black out curtains, that can actually be very helpful.

The fourth tip is not to stay in bed if you have been awake for longer than 20 minutes. This applies to whether you’re trying to fall asleep, or whether you’ve woken up and are trying to fall back asleep. The reason is this, your brain is a remarkably associative device. If you are lying in bed awake, it quickly learns that being in bed is about being awake rather than being asleep.

You need to break that association. After 20 minutes or so, if you haven’t fallen asleep, get up, don’t get too stressed, go to a different room and in dim light, perhaps just read a book, no screens, no eating. Only when you feel sleepy should you return to bed. In that way, you will actually relearn the association between your bed being about being asleep, rather than being awake.

I would note that some people actually don’t like the idea of getting out of bed. It’s dark. Maybe they’re warm and maybe it’s colder in the rest of the house. I understand that. Another way to try and help you get back to sleep that has good proven clinical trial data behind it is actually meditation. I’m actually quite hard know a scientist, and when I was looking into this evidence as I was writing the book, I was really quite skeptical.

The studies were very clear, very well done, some of them out of Stanford here just down the way from me. So much so that I actually started meditating myself and that was seven months ago, and I’m now a regular meditator. If I’m traveling going through jetlag, for example and struggling with sleep, I will actually use a meditation relaxation practice.

The final tip is the one that really makes me deeply – well, deeply unpopular, just generally as a person anyway, but this is the one that really makes me unpopular with people. No caffeine after noon and avoid alcohol in the evenings. Forego and I kept and I’ll explain both.

Everyone knows of course that caffeine activates you. It’s a class of drugs that we call a stimulants and it can keep people awake. What people may not know however is that for those people who say, “Well, I can drink an espresso after dinner and I force sleep fine and I stay asleep.” That may be true. However, the depth of the deep sleep that you have when caffeine is swirling around within your brain during sleep is nowhere near as deep as if you had not had that cup of coffee in the evening.

As a consequence, people wake up the next morning. They won’t fee refreshed or restored. They don’t remember having a problem falling asleep or staying asleep. They don’t equate it with the cup of coffee they had the night before. But now they find themselves reaching the two cups of coffee, or three cups of coffee in the morning, which essentially is building a dependency and addiction cycle. That’s the issue with caffeine and that’s why the suggestion is stop caffeine midday and certainly after 2 PM.

Alcohol is probably the most misunderstood drug when it comes to sleep. Alcohol is a class of drugs that we call the sedative hypnotics. Sedation is not sleep. Many people will say, “Well, I nightcap, I have a quick whiskey and it puts me to sleep. It’s great.” It’s actually not true. What you’re simply doing is you’re sedating your cortex, you’re knocking out your brain essentially. You’re not getting into natural sleep.

Then there are two more problems with alcohol. Firstly, it will fragment your sleep so you will wake up many more times throughout the night, which leaves you with what we call un-restorative sleep. The final thing is that alcohol is one of the best chemicals that we know blocking your dream sleep, your REM sleep, which is essential for not just creativity and that associative type of memory processing that we spoke about.

REM sleep is also critical for emotional and mental health. It is during REM sleep when we provide our brain a form of emotional first aid, and you won’t be getting that if you’re blocking REM sleep by way of alcohol. Those would be the five tips to better sleep and hopefully they help some folks. I’m also happy to speak a little bit about sleeping pills. They’re also misunderstood, but those would be for most people the five tips that I would offer.

[0:49:17.9] MB: Great advice. I try to implement as many of those as possible. One of the things, specifically caffeine is something that I used to drink at my peak. About a cup of – I mean, a pot of coffee a day. Now I basically don’t consume any caffeine. When I do, I limit myself, no caffeine afternoon. Maybe one cup of tea is the maximum. I’ve noticed a huge impact on that impact in my sleep. Sorry, were you going to say something? 

[0:49:44.6] MW: Yeah. I’m just going to say, I mean it’s immensely wise and it’s one of the problems with a lack of sleep is that you quickly reset your perception of your effectiveness and your health. You just think, “Well, this is how I am now at this age.” Not realizing that you could actually be a far better version of yourself, both mentally, cognitively and physiologically if you were just to start getting sufficient sleep.

I think many people fail to realize that with caffeine especially that it’s only when they come off caffeine do they really start to feel both the benefits of all of the side effects that normally come with high caffeine use, but especially the benefits on sleep. It’s like wiping a fogged window and you finally can start to see clearly through it.  That’s the benefit of a full restorative night of sleep.

[0:50:36.8] MB: I have a couple short questions all around specific sleep strategies or tactics. Let’s start with – you touched on sleeping pills. Tell me about sleeping pills. Do they work? If so, why or why not?

[0:50:50.2] MW: There are no sleeping medications that we have currently that produce naturalistic sleep. The current class of drugs that you will be prescribed are called sedative hypnotics. Again, as we mentioned with alcohol, sedation is not sleep. The sleep that you have when you’re on sleeping pills, if I were to show you the electrical signature of your sleep if you would come to my laboratory, it would  not be the same on sleeping pills as it would be if you’re just having naturalistic healthy sleep. That’s the first thing.

The second thing, and I go to great lengths and a whole chapter in the book to discuss this, is that people are probably not aware of the risks of sleeping pills. They have not been communicated to public adequately. Firstly, we know that sleeping pills are associated with a far higher risk of death. They’re also associated with a significantly high risk of cancer and infection.

Now, we don’t yet know if this is causal versus simply associational, but what I wanted to do is to try to get that information out to the public, so they at least could be armed with the knowledge and make an informed choice with that doctor when they go and see the surgery. That’s I think one of the biggest problems of sleeping pills is that the misunderstood nature about what they give you and the dangers.

People also don’t necessarily have to be taking sleeping pills, I should note. There is a safe and non-pharmacological alternative which is just as effective. It is called cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or CBTI for short. You work with a therapist for a couple of weeks. As I mentioned, it’s just as powerful as sleeping in the short-term, but better still, once you finish that short therapy phase, you continue to maintain that better sleep. Unlike sleeping pills, when you come off those you tend to actually have what’s called rebound insomnia, where your sleep is as bad, if not worse than when you started. 

I think people can revisit their sleep issues with their doctor. I’m not trying to shame people who are on sleeping pills. I’m not trying to make you feel bad if you are. I’m very sensitive to the desire for better sleep and I’m so sensitive to the issue of insomnia, or the desperate, desperate state. You should be aware of what sleeping pills are, what they do and what the alternatives are.

[0:53:15.8] MB: What about taking a melatonin supplement?

[0:53:18.6] MW: Melatonin is useful in the circumstance of jetlag to try and reset your body clock in a new time zone. You should take it 30 to 60 minutes before you want to get to sleep in the new time zone. Melatonin works to essentially time the onset of your sleep. I guess, the analogy would be if you think about the 100-meter race in the Olympics. Well, melatonin is the starting official who has the starter gun.

It’s melatonin that brings all of the different ingredients off the sleep race to the starting line, then starts the race in its entirety. It begins the sleep race. Melatonin itself does not actually participate in the race of sleep, in the generation of that sleep race. That’s a whole different set of chemicals. As a consequence, that’s why actually melatonin when you are in a new time zone and you’re stable now in that new time zone, if you’re a young healthy individual, then melatonin actually isn’t effective as a sleeping aid. It doesn’t actually help if you look at the studies.

That said, I would note that for those people who are taking melatonin and they feel as though it helps their sleep, well then I usually tell people continue on. It’s because the placebo effect is one of the most reliable effects in all pharmacology. No harm, no foul if you think it’s working for you.

[0:54:48.1] MB: What about napping? Is napping something – if you’re sleep-deprived, can you catch up with a nap?

[0:54:53.7] MW: Unfortunately, you cannot catch up on sleep. Sleep is not like the bank. This is another myth that I try to deconstruct in the book. You can’t accumulate a debt, let’s say during the week and then hope to pay it off at the weekend. Sleep just doesn’t work like that. There is no credit system, or there is no credit sleep sell within the brain.

You can if you are sleep-deprived, take a nap and overcome some of the basic sleepiness. Your reaction times will improve a little bit after a nap, but you don’t actually overcome all of the higher level, cognitive issues such as decision-making, learning in memory, focused attention, all of those types of things that we know are would buckle and collapse by way of a lack of sleep. Naps just don’t seem to be able to overcome those.

You can’t overcome – you can’t bank sleep and you can’t sleep off a debt. I see this in my students. It’s what I would call sleep bulimia, which is where they’re binging on sleep at the weekend and they’re – try and taking too little sleep during the week. It’s this binge purge kind of cycle.

I would also say naps, just more generally are a double-edged sword. If during the day when we’re awake, we actually build up a chemical pressure in our brain. It’s a sleepiness pressure. Now, it’s a hydraulic pressure, don’t worry. As I said, it’s a chemical pressure.  The chemical that builds up is called adenosine. The more of that sleepiness chemical that you have, the more and more sleepy that you will feel. After about 16 hours of being awake, you’re nice and tired and then you should fall asleep and stay asleep for about 8 hours.

When we sleep, we remove that sleepiness pressure. It’s almost like a valve on a pressure cooker. We release that sleepiness steam as it were. This is where I come back to naps. If you nap too late in the day, you actually release some of that healthy sleepiness, which means that when it comes time to sleep normally at night, you may actually struggle to fall asleep, or at least stay asleep.

The advice would be this, if you are someone who can nap regularly and you don’t struggle with your sleep at night, then naps are just fine. But if you can’t nap regularly and/or you’re having difficulties with your sleep at night then the advice is you shouldn’t nap, you should stay awake, build up that healthy sleepiness, and then you will have a better night of sleep because of it.

[0:57:30.1] MB: What about someone who’s in a situation, let’s say like a new parent. Is there anything that they can go through obviously, very chronically sleep-deprived state? Is there any strategy for them to be able to implement, that would help them battle through that in some way? 

[0:57:45.0] MW: Some parents describe trying to work better shifts and what I mean by that is in two ways. Firstly, some parents will try to take early, the early shift and then the late shift, the first half of the night versus the second half of the night and switch between those two. Another way that you can do that on an informed choice is try to determine whether you are a night owl, or you’re a morning type, what we call a lock. That’s a genetically predisposed. It’s called your chrono type.

If you are someone who likes to go to bed late and wake up late, versus someone who likes to go to bed early and wake up early, that’s not a choice. That’s a genetic mandate that’s being given to you in your DNA code. You can try to ask in the couple, are you someone who would prefer to wake up early and go to bed early? In which case, could you take the morning shift, the late morning shift?

If I’m someone who likes to go to bed late and wake up late, well then it’s easier for me to actually take the first half of the night and then sleep for the second half of the morning and sleep late. You can think about split shifts like that. Some people will also flip-flop back and forth. Some people will say, “Well, I’ll take the next two nights and you get good sleep, then we switch over and you take two nights.” They try to mix and match it in that way too. It’s a desperately difficult situation.

In part, we would not actually design to be family units like this, if you look at [inaudible 0:59:17.8] tribes who have not been touched by the electrical influence, then they actually tend to sleep in groups. Restless legs dangling all over the place, arms intertwined. Whole families would sleep together and people would take turns in terms of caring for the young. It’s a lot to ask of parents, and those are some of the ways that you can try to overcome it.

[0:59:45.6] MB: One other question and this is out of left field a little bit. I’m curious, have you seen or studied around the neurotransmitter GABA and its relationship with sleep?

[0:59:56.5] MW: GABA is the principle inhibitory neurotransmitter of the brain. The way that most sleeping medications work right now and you can just name your favorite one and it will work in this way, is by essentially trying to activate the receptors in the brain for GABA. Those receptors essentially are like the red lights on your neurons. They stop them firing, they stop them from going. 

Drugs that try to target the GABA system within the brain are really quite blunt instruments and that’s why sleeping pills, which act exactly in this way are really not precise tools. Sleep is a remarkably complex neuro-physiological and neuro-chemical ballet if you look at it. All of these different stages of sleep, neurotransmitters going up and down and brain networks ebbing and flowing.

To think that you can essentially recreate something that is so complex and so bi-directional sleep by simply just knocking the brain out and switching it off using GABA receptors is really just – it’s an unfortunate outcome of how poor our pharmacology is in this day and age. We just don’t yet have the pharmacological precision and sophistication to mimic sleep at this stage.

[1:01:22.4] MB: What’s one piece of homework that you would give to a listener who wants to sleep better?

[1:01:28.5] MW: I would say try giving yourself one week of 8 hours of sleep and see if you feel any better. Just give it as self-improvement test. Try it as a hack, that if you are one of those people who are into the quantified self-movement and you’re into self-experimentation then just test out all of that what you’ve just heard in the past week and just determine if you feel any better when you’re sleeping 8 hours every night and you’ve regular each and every night. Versus a staccato sleep schedule where you’re sleeping 5 hours and 6 hours and 12 hours and then 5 hours again. Just ask yourself, “Did that experiment work? Is it in my favor? Do I feel any better and do I notice that improvement? 

[1:02:19.2] MB: For listeners who want to learn more and want to find you and your book online, what’s the best place to do that?

[1:02:25.9] MW: They can find the book, which is called Why We Sleep. They can find that online. Amazon holds it. You can find it from all of your major bookstores, both the major brands, as well as all of the independent. It’s on the list of most libraries too. If you don’t want to part with your money, my publisher would probably won’t like me saying that, but I read online, it’s about the knowledge of the book, not the sales.

If you want to learn more about the work that I do, you can follow me on social media. I am at sleepdiplomat, all one word. Sleepdiplomat. I’m on Twitter and also you can find me on LinkedIn. Also on the web I am at – it is www.sleepdiplomat.com 

[1:03:11.4] MB: Well, Matt. This has been a fascinating conversation. So much great information, practical strategies, tons and tons of science. Really appreciate it. Incredible insights. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of these wisdom.

[1:03:25.4] MW: Well, thank you and I have to say a real thanks to you too. It’s not just what people say at the end of these interviews, but I’m trying to fight this battle for sleep. I can only do so much by getting on shows or television, radio or writing a book for example. I need fantastic journalists and media and genius types to actually join and partner with me to get this message out. I too just want to thank you, Matt. Thank you for being part of the sleep mission.

I’m going to grant you now the title of being a sleep ambassador for having me on the show. Thank you very much. Sincerely, I really want to thank you. I desperately need to get this message out. This portal is a remarkable way to proclaim the virtues of sleep. Thank you.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

Evidence Reveals The Most Important Skill of the 21st Century with Dr. Tasha Eurich

In this episode we discuss one of the most important evidence based psychology principles that make people successful - self awareness. We look at the difference between people who succeed and those who plateau. We talk about why self awareness is the meta-skill of the 21st century and the foundational skill required to succeed in anything, and we examine conclusions form over 800 scientific studies about self awareness with our guest Dr. Tasha Eurich.  

Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organizational psychologist, researcher, and principal of The Eurich Group. She received her Ph.D in Industrial-Organizational Psychology from Colorado State University and a BA in Theatre and Psychology. She is the New York Times Bestselling author of Bankable Leadership and INSIGHT. Her TED talk has been viewed over one million times and her work has been featured in Business Insider, Forbes, The New York Times and many more!

• How Tasha uses evidence based psychology principles to make people more succesful

• The difference between people who plateau and people who meet and defeat challenge head on

• Self awareness “the meta skill of the 21st century"

• What does the data show is linked to high self awareness?

• Self awareness is foundational to all skills required to succeed

• What does the Science say about Self Awareness?

• Self aware people are:

• More fulfilled

  1. Better communications

  2. More confidence

  3. Have better relationships

  4. More effective leaders

  5. Run more profitable companies

• Self awareness sets the UPPER LIMIT for the skills you need to be successful in the world today

• "The secret weapon of the 21st century”

• 95% people of people think that they are self aware but only 10-15% actually are

• On a good day 80% of people are lying to themselves about lying to themselves

• Conclusions from reviewing over 800 scientific studies to figure out WHAT self awareness was

• The 2 broad categories of self awareness - the ability to see yourself cleary

• Internal Self Awareness (introspective people)

  1. External Self Awareness (pleasers)

• Those 2 types of self knowledge are completely unrelated

• Self knowledge underpins any other skill

• Self awareness is an “infinitely learnable skill”

• Research conclusions from people who began with a lack of self awareness, but then developed self awareness

• There are no demographic commonalities between self awareness

• The 3 categories of Self Awareness Unicorns

• Being in a new role / new set of rules

  1. Earthquake events - usually negative - that are so devastating that they either cause is to bury our heads in the sand, or they become a catalyst for self awareness

  2. The MOST LIKELY - everyday insights

• You have a tremendous amount of opportunities within your daily life to improve your self awareness

• The barriers to self awareness are myriad

• Internal wiring of human beings - change the way you introspect

  1. The power of substituting the word WHY for the word WHAT

  2. The world we live in today - social media, reality TV, the “cult of self”

• The cult of the self - and how our culture damages self awareness

• The challenges of excavating our subconscious / unconscious mind

• Moving forward with purpose, logic, and curiosity

• Too much Introspection can make you anxious and depressed

• To gain insight, focus on moving FORWARD

• Do your introspective practices serve you?

• Tasha’s training regimen to start to develop self awareness

• Tools for improving your internal and external self awareness

• The power of "The Daily Check-In”

• What went well today?

  1. What didn’t go well?

  2. What can I do to be smarter tomorrow?

• How you can use a “dinner of truth” to ask “What do I do that’s most annoying to you?”

• Dont’ defend, explain, disagree, just LISTEN

• The truth about feedback - you don't have to listen to or act on feedback from anyone

• How to become aware of your true strengths and gifts - ask your close friends

• WHY are you friends with me?

• Most self awareness unicorns rely on a handful of KEY people to provide them with feedback

• Someone has to truly have your back and want you to be truly successful

  1. They have to be willing to tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly

• The power of “loving critics”

• Our strenghts - seem obvious to us which makes it hard for us to see them

• You must be very strategic and very focused on WHO you get feedback from

• Self awareness unicorns don’t rely on other people to approach them with feedback. They never assumed that people would tell them ANYTHING - they took it on themselves to get regular feedback on their own terms

• You need feedback from multiple sources to get a clear picture

• The easiest, highest payoff activity to get initial self awareness

Thank you so much for listening!

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

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] Insight: Why We're Not as Self-Aware as We Think, and How Seeing Ourselves Clearly Helps Us Succeed at Work and in Life by Tasha Eurich

• [Book] Strangers to Ourselves: Discovering the Adaptive Unconscious by Timothy D. Wilson

• [TEDxTalks] Learning to be awesome at anything you do, including being a leader by Tasha Eurich

• [Article] The Self-Reflection and Insight Scale: A New Measure of Private Self-Consciousness by Anthony M. Grant, John Franklin, and Peter Langford

• [Quiz] Insight Quiz

• [Book Site] Insight

• [Article] An Examination of the Deaf Effect Response to Bad News Reporting in Information Systems Projects by Michael John Cuellar

Episode Transcript

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

[0:00:11.9] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the Internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over 100 countries. In this episode we discuss one of the most important evidence-based psychology principles that makes you successful; self-awareness. We look at the difference between people who succeed and those who plateau. We talk about why self-awareness is the meta-skill of the 21st-century and the foundational skill required to succeed in nearly anything, and we examine conclusions from over 800 scientific studies about self-awareness, with our guest, Dr. Tasha Eurich. 

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

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday, which our listeners absolutely love. It’s short, simple, filled with links, articles and stories of things that we found interesting and exciting in the last week. 

Lastly, you're going to get a chance to shape the show. You could vote on guests, change our intro music, even submit your own questions to upcoming guests. There're some amazing stuff that’s only available to our email subscribers, so be sure to sign up, join the email list. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage, or if you're on the go, if you’re driving around, just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222. That's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222. Join email list today. 

In our previous episode, we discussed how to master relationships. Went deep into cutting-edge networking strategies from one of the world’s top connectors. Examine how to unite people in collaboration and co-elevation. Look at the power of generosity in building real and authentic relationships. Discussed how to let go of individualism and much more with our guest, Keith Ferrazzi. If you want to build a world-class network, listen to that episode.

[0:02:36.4] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Dr. Tasha Eurich. Tasha is an organizational psychologist, researcher and principal of the Eurich group. She received her PhD in industrial organizational psychology from Colorado State University. She is the New York Times best-selling author of Bankable Leadership and Insight. Her TED Talk has been viewed over a million times and her work has been featured in Business Insider, Forbes, The New York Times, and much more. 

Tasha, welcome to the Science of Success.

[0:03:04.5] TE: Thanks for having me. Great to be here. 

[0:03:06.4] MB: We’re super excited to have you on today. So I'd love to start out with — One of the biggest themes and biggest things we talk about all the time in the show is self-awareness, and I know you’ve kind of describe self-awareness as the meta-skill of the 21st-century, and I’d love to hear little bit about what does that mean to you and why self-awareness is so important. 

[0:03:27.4] TE: It’s such a great place to start, because I think it's really the Genesis of really all of my passion about the subject. So I'm an organizational psychologist, as you mentioned, and what I have done for the last 15 years is use evidence-based principles of psychology to help usually executives, but people in organizations be successful and make companies a better place to work and make leaders more effective and happier and be able to engage their people. 

What I started to see him, really, over the course of that time were two types of leaders. One type of leader was successful, successful enough to get promoted, but really didn't have an appreciation of who they were. Who were they authentically? What did they value? What was important to them? Nor did they have an appreciation of how other people saw them. They inadvertently got in their own way. A lot of times with those people, it's not a matter of if, but when they crash and burn. 

On the optimistic side, the other type of person I saw or leader were people who were able to sort of meet any challenge that came their way, and the reason they could was they knew very clearly who they were. They knew their values. They knew their strengths. They knew what they didn't know, and they also had an appreciation for the effects they were having on the people around them. This is sort of what we call self-awareness. 

About four years ago, I — This is really embarrassing, but it was Christmas break and I was kind of bored. I didn't have a lot of client work and I said, “I wonder ant what the research on self-awareness really is. What do we now?” 

I started to do a review of what the science on self-awareness really said and I discovered just how little we knew. We've been talking about it in the business world so much that it's kind of this buzzword, but from a scientific evidence-based perspective, there were so many things that we were assuming that may or may not have been true. 

I basically have spent the last four years of my life going through a very in-depth program to understand what self-awareness really is, where it comes from, why we needed and, really, how to get more of it. So that’s the preface of how I became so passionate about this. 

The reason that everybody who’s listening to this can be passionate about it too, if they’re not already, is I call it the meta-skill of the 21st-century. There’s so much evidence that people who are self-aware are more fulfilled. They have stronger relationships. They’re more creative. They’re better communicators. They’re more confident. They are more effective leaders. Actually, there is evidence that self-aware leaders actually lead more profitable companies. So there’s tremendous amount of benefit. 

The reason it’s the meta-skill is basically our self-awareness sets the upper limit for so many of the skills that we need to be successful in the world right now. Things like communication skills, influence, emotional intelligence, collaboration. We can only be as good at each of those things as we are self-aware. The other thing I call it sometimes is the secret weapon of the 21st-century. So many people think they're self-aware, but they actually aren't. So people that work on it are the ones that really I've seen reap the rewards time and time again. 

[0:06:52.1] MB: You brought up a great point, which is something that I've always found really sort of fascinating and maybe a little bit sad, but the idea that the less self-aware someone is, the less they realize it. 

[0:07:04.7] TS: It's pretty disconcerting, isn’t it? 

[0:07:06.5] MB: Yeah. I mean it's kind of a manifestation essentially of the Dunning-Kruger effect and the idea that the least competent people have the least awareness of how unaware and sort of incompetent they are. 

[0:07:20.2] TE: That's exactly it, and it does extend to self-awareness. My research has shown that — Get this, 95% of people think that they're self-aware, but only 10 to 15% actually are. The joke I always make is that means that on a good day, 80% of us are lying to ourselves about whether we’re lying to ourselves. 

[0:07:41.9] MB: That's pretty amazing. It’s very meta in a sense. I'm curious, going back slightly, because I want to make sure we have a clear definition of this. You touched on it a little bit, but how do you actually define what is self-awareness?

[0:07:57.1] TE: We thought early on in our research program that this would be a pretty quick cursory questions to answer, but we ended up taking almost a year and reviewing 800 scientific studies to figure out what the heck is this thing we call self-awareness. People were defining it differently. They were using sometimes like conflicting definitions. We did that review of all of the research and we came up with two broad categories. Self-awareness in general is the ability to see ourselves clearly, but it's made up of two specific types of self-knowledge. 

Number one, we call internal self-awareness, and that's kind of what we think about when we hear that term most of the time. It’s being clear on our values and our passions and our personality, our strengths and weaknesses, really seeing ourselves clearly from an internal perspective. 

The other type of self-awareness, external self-awareness, has to do with our understanding of how other people see us. So that’s a completely different skillset. It's a different mindset. Surprisingly in our research, we also found that those two types of self-knowledge were completely unrelated. So somebody could be low on both, in which case they have nowhere to go but up. They could be high on both, which again is very rare. But more often than not, people tend to be a little bit higher on one than the other. You get these archetypes. You’ve got somebody who is clear internally, but doesn't understand external perceptions. I call those introspectors. Self-examination might be a hobby for them, but if you go talk to their friends, their friends would say, “Oh boy! Sometimes that person can be a little annoying, or they’re cheap or whatever,” but the person doesn't even have an understanding of that because they haven't taken the time. 

The other side of the coin, I call pleasers, and I put myself in this category. These are people who spend so much time trying to understand how other people see them, that they might actually lose sight of what really matters to them. I think it's a really interesting framework because it helps us discover what are the areas of self-awareness that we can improve that will give us the biggest bang for our buck. 

[0:10:07.6] MB: Have you found any correlation kind of between either one of those two being more or less related with kind of some of the outcomes you talked about a moment ago? Whether it’s being more fulfilled or being happy or being better communicators, etc.?

[0:10:20.5] TE: There is some evidence there that there is a little bit different effects. You start to think about some of those internal outcomes, like happiness, confidence. Those seem to be a little bit more related to internal self-awareness, and then if you look at the outcomes of that external self-awareness, things like our relationship strength or even other people's ratings of our emotional intelligence. Those tend to be a little bit more related to those external perceptions. What's interesting is for most outcomes, both of them are related. If we work on one out of the two, we might get benefits in both areas of our lives, kind of the internal part of our life and the external part of our life. 

[0:11:03.0] MB: I want to dig in to kind of how we can cultivate both of those forms of self-awareness. But before we start with that, I want to circle back, one of the topics you touched on a second ago is this this idea that self-awareness is sort of a foundational skill. It's almost an underpinning of every other skill. I think that's a really critical point. 

[0:11:22.9] TE: Exactly. Take something like communication. I cannot name a single person that I know that is a good communicator that is not also highly self-aware. To think about that internal and external self-awareness again, to be a good communicator you’ve got to know what you do well, what you don't do well. You’ve got to know what's important to you so you can be able to sort of authentically represent that. Then you also have to know the effect you're having on the people around you. You need to be able to tailor your communication to their style and their needs and their passions. It's just such a great example of where both of those types of self-knowledge are underpinning pretty much any other skill, and we could substitute so many other skills for communication, but I think that's just a good example kind of to start with. 

[0:12:13.2] MB: We've seen that — I mean on the show we've interviewed all kinds of experts from a variety of fields and I’d say the single most current lessons that we've uncovered is that self-awareness is, as you said, sort of the meta-skill that’s necessary to be successful in, really, any area. 

[0:12:31.3] TE: What I love about that is that our research has shown that self-awareness is an infinitely learnable skill. So sometimes it feels overwhelming to say, “Oh my gosh! I was one of those 95% who thought I was self-aware. Maybe I'm not that self-aware.” That’s a good thing, and what I can tell people is after that somewhat rude awakening, there is nothing but confidence and success and fulfillment on the other side of it. 

In our research, one of the things we did, it was fascinating. We found people who didn't start out self-aware, but who became self-aware and made these really dramatic improvements in their lives, in their work, and we didn't find any demographic patterns. They weren’t more likely to be one gender than the other. Didn't matter what their industry was or their job. It didn't matter whether they worked or not. It didn't matter what age they were. The only thing these people had in common were really two things. Number one was a belief in the importance of self-awareness, and number two was a daily commitment to improving it. What I love about that is it sort of makes self-awareness available to all of us. We all are equally capable of building that self-awareness. 

[0:13:49.7] MB: I'm curious, how did you cultivate that sort of — Maybe not cultivate, but those people who had as you called it kind of a rude awakening where they started to realize their own kind of lack of self-awareness. What was that catalyst and some of the research you did or the work you've done? What is really kind of broken people through that kind of fog and taught them, “Wow! Maybe I'm not nearly as self-aware as I thought I was.” 

[0:14:15.5] TE: That’s such a good question. So just for terminology, we actually started to jokingly call these people that we’re talking about self-awareness unicorns, because we weren’t sure if we’d be able to actually find any, but thankfully we did. When we interviewed our unicorns about that exact question, we sort of found that those experiences fell into at least one of three categories. So the first category was being in some kind of a new role in their lives or having to play by a new set of rules. So that might be getting married, living with someone for the first time. It might be a new job in the same company. It might be a new job in a different company. Really, any situation where you have to fundamentally change your assumptions about your environment and sort of how you fit into that environment. 

The second was something I call earthquake events, and these are those events in our lives that they’re usually negative that are so devastating that we can either bury our heads in the sand or we can say, “I need to figure out what role I played in this.” Everything from unexpected divorces, people were telling us about getting fired and they had no idea. They were completely shocked. We also found some people talked about even illnesses, really serious illnesses that they got through on to the other side, but that really catalyzed their self-awareness journey. 

Here’s what interesting. Those two types of events to me seems like they would be the most common catalyst for self-awareness. We actually found a third type of event that was twice as likely to be a catalyst than the other two, and I call them every day insights. These are basically things that if we pay attention on a daily basis, we are getting so many opportunities to improve our self-awareness in just the normal course of our lives. This is a silly example, but I think it’s really — It says a lot about this area. One of our unicorns was talking about she was in her first apartment after college and she was moving in with her best friend. They were so excited. They were unpacking their kitchen and she barked to her friends, “Don't put the plastic cups in front of the glass cups. That's just ridiculous.” 

She remembered sort of hovering outside of her body in that moment and saying, “Oh my gosh! Wow! I must be really controlling if I just said that,” and that was a huge insight for her that she was able to sort of build on and continue to examine her behavior. 

Once again, I think it's great. We don’t have to wait for these events to come to us. We can decide that we’re going to get on top of it and really be in charge of our own journey. 

[0:16:54.7] MB: I think that's a great point. Every day, life is so filled with rich experiences to think about and observe and get feedback on your behavior, your own thought patterns, the way you kind of act and behave in the world, and there is such ample opportunity if you can kind of open your eyes and start to actually look for these things. 

[0:17:16.7] TE: That’s it. It’s all about paying attention, and sort of behind that is the mindset that in a positive self-accepting way, maybe I don't know myself as well as I think. What if I didn't? What kind of a newfound curiosity might that give me about my world?

[0:17:33.3] MB: So in the work you've done, what have you seen? What are some of the barriers that people have when they try to kind or begin this journey of self-awareness? What are some of the struggles or challenges that they encounter?

[0:17:44.9] TE: Oh my gosh! There are so many. We could do our own podcast just on this probably, but maybe I can attempt to sort of talk about the different categories that they fall in just so people can be aware of sometimes these really hidden factors that get in our way. The first type of barrier are the things internally just about how human beings are wired. What we've learned since the days of Freud is as much as we want to be able to excavate our own conscious thoughts and our feelings and our motives, “Why did I really do that?” or “Why am I really like this?” Most of that information is simply not available to us. It's trapped sort of in a locked basement where we can never find the key. 

So many people — I think it's the influence of Freud that we just feel like, “Well, if I go to enough therapy or if I journal enough, these things are going to come to me.” It's not that we shouldn't introspect. Part of it is just that we often make many mistakes without knowing we’re making those mistakes. 

One sort of easy way to get around that barrier is to accept it and to say, “Okay. I might not be able to know exactly why I picked a fight with my spouse this morning, but maybe instead of asking why, I should ask more action oriented logic-based questions.” Usually what I tell people is if you can substitute the word what for the word why, that’s going to give you a lot more insight. So instead of why did I get in the fight with my spouse, I can say, “Well, wait a minute. What contributions did my behavior have to the situation?” or “What are the common situations that I find myself behaving like this the most?” or “What do I need to work on in the future so that I can be more coolheaded?” Those are sort of those internal barriers that I think we just have to change the way we’re introspecting and we’ll get a lot more benefit. 

The second overall category of barriers to self-awareness is the world that we live in. You sort of think about the rise or social media and reality TV and all of these celebrities who are famous for doing absolutely nothing. That isn’t coming without a cost, and I call it the cult of self. It’s this idea that in our daily lives, both online and offline, we’re being tempted to become more and more self-absorbed and less and less self-aware. Unless we actively fight back, we might find ourselves belonging to the cult without even knowing it. 

One really easy way to get around that barrier, again, it’s not going to do everything, but it's a good start, is to really spend some time thinking about how you're showing up on and offline. Are you what researchers call a me former? Which is someone who constantly talks about themselves, is posting all their recent work accomplishments on their Facebook page or regaling all of their friends with stories about them all night, or are you in an informer who is really trying to focus on adding to other people's lives? Posting a beautiful photograph to Facebook or asking somebody about themselves and trying to learn more about them than talk about how smart or how right you are. 

I think, again, it’s something that we just need to be aware of. Even in writing this book, I’ve become aware of so many behaviors I didn't know I was demonstrating, and that was one of them. 

[0:21:03.8] MB: Those are kind of the two largest barriers, having sort of a flawed methodology of introspection and then also getting caught up in this kind of cult of the self. 

[0:21:13.7] TE: Yeah. I think overall, those are probably the two places we can look first, and I think it’s important to remember that first barrier. We cannot excavate our unconsciousness. For so many people, that’s how they spend their time trying to get self-awareness. This is a very complicated subject and I don't want to be glib, but there are a lot of therapeutic approaches that are solely focused on excavating the in unconsciousness. 

I think I’m not saying that therapy is bad. I'm not saying that introspection is bad. I just am encouraging people maybe to be a little bit more intelligent consumers both of help that they're getting from someone else, as well as the questions they’re asking themselves. 

[0:21:59.5] MB: We talk all the time on the show about the importance of mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our amazing sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn anything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and the cool part about Skillshare is that they give you unlimited access for a monthly fee so you don't have to pay per class. 

They have some amazing courses on there that I personally really enjoy, everything from mastering Evernote, to mind mapping, to learning how to sketch and draw. If you want to get a leg up on everything from graphic design to your knife skills, if you're into cooking, and much, much more, Skillshare is giving every single Science of Success listener one month of unlimited access completely for free. That's pretty awesome. 

Go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:23:05.0] MB: Tel me more about that, that kind of notion that it's difficult to excavate our own conscience.

[0:23:10.8] TE: Really there, I think — I mentioned this earlier, but the influence of Freud has not left us. There has been so much research and evidence showing that a lot of his most fundamental assumptions about his work were wrong. He was right that we have sort of an unconscious set of thoughts, feelings, even behaviors that sometimes other people can see but we just don't have access to, and it's really interesting. There's so much work that's being done on this. 

For example, we often have implicit behaviors that we’re engaging in that we have no idea we’re doing that other people do see. There was one study that said the reason for that, the researchers thoughts was that it was just because we didn't see ourselves from a different perspective and that if, for example, the researchers showed participants videos of themselves doing these things, that participants would actually notice it. Shockingly, they found that that wasn't the case. 

There’s something about us that researchers, to be honest, don't fully understand that just gets in our way of seeing so many of our internal processes as well as our behavior. I think that’s alarming for some people, especially aficionados of self-awareness, but there's also something freeing about it to say, “I don't have to spend this time talking about my childhood. Maybe I need to make peace with my past and understand my past, but maybe it's about moving forward with purpose and sort of logic and curiosity.” That’s what I would encourage people to start to change in their mind.

The one other thing I'll say just about introspection in general is that in addition to the fact that it doesn't work the way most people are doing it, it's been shown over and over and over to be something that depresses us, that stresses us out, that makes us anxious. I remember the first time I discovered this in my data, it was really late at night and I was in my office and I just analyzed a set of data. We were looking at the relationship between people who introspect and things like happiness and stress and job satisfaction. I was absolutely convinced that the people who spent the time introspect would be better off. But our data found the exact opposite pattern. 

We found that people who introspected were more stressed, they were more depressed, they felt less in control of their lives, and that sort of gets to some of these mistakes that we’re making, but it also has to do with this idea that to gain insight, we don’t have to get into all of those dark horrible places about ourselves. We can really think about moving forward. 

I think if nothing else, if somebody is listening to this podcast and is passionate about self-awareness, I’d really encourage you to think about just kind of a self-awareness audit. What are the things I'm doing from an introspection perspective that are serving me, and what things might not be serving me as well as I think they are? 

[0:26:17.9] MB: Yeah. It seems very counterintuitive, the idea that introspection can sort of fuel anxiety or depression, etc., and yet if we want to pursue self-awareness, that's kind of a very tight rope to be walking it seems. 

[0:26:32.4] TE: It is. There's a reason so few of us are self-aware. I think even the most well-intentioned students of self-awareness, they're not aware of a lot of this research, and part of what my goal has been with all of these work with the work I'm doing and the work I am representing that other scientists are doing is to kind of get the word out and say, “We can make the world a more self-aware place. We can make ourselves more self-aware. To do it, we’re going to have to examine some of those fundamental assumptions that we've been making. 

[0:27:02.2] MB: Just making sure that I understand, the idea is that focusing primarily on kind of action oriented, sort of forward-thinking applications to solve some of your sort of current challenges or problems is more effective than the idea that you should dig deep into past traumas or something like that. 

[0:27:22.6] TE: That's what my research and a ton of other people's research has shown. Again, it’s sort of a hard fact to swallow. Back early in my research program when I first discovered this, I had this moment where I said, “Oh my God! Maybe self-awareness isn't actually a good thing to have, but I think we can distinguish the process of self-reflection from the outcome of self-reflection.” 

Most people just generally assume that if I think about myself I’ll know myself better. Again, it's about being intelligent about the way we’re approaching it. 

[0:27:55.7] MB: If you don't have this off the top of your head, it’s totally fine. But I’m curious. Do you know of who some of the other kind of researchers are as well? I’d love to dig in and do some homework on my own.

[0:28:04.3] TE: Oh, sure! Timothy Wilson has done a lot of really great work on that. He has a wonderful book called Strangers to Ourselves and it's very geeky and academic, which makes me love it. In there is basically every citation that has shown some of these effects. 

Another researcher that's done a lot of really great work on this in the last 10 years is a gentleman named Anthony Grant, and he was, as far as I can tell, one of the first people to disentangle this idea of nonproductive self-reflection from productive insight about ourselves and really sort of discover the facts that just because we self-reflect doesn't mean we’re necessarily going to be self-aware. 

[0:28:45.6] MB: We’ll make sure to include both of those sites in the show notes as well. I think that's a really interesting conclusion and very important distinction to make. 

[0:28:53.9] TE: It really is, and I hope everyone that’s listening to this can help us get the word out. Again, if we want to make the world a better place, and I think probably everybody wants to do that right now given where we are, we have to start by making it more self-aware. To do that, I think it's not even just educating ourselves and changing our own behavior. It's helping other people who are open to it and interested, really learn kind of the truth about it. 

[0:29:18.5] MB: So for someone who wants to embark on that journey of self-awareness, from the work you've done, how would you kind of put together a self-awareness training regimen for them to start or some other kind of first steps that would be really productive, things to do to begin that journey?

[0:29:35.0] TE: Sure. My glib response is they should totally buy a copy of my new book, Insight. The reason I say that actually in truth is there are tons and tons and tons of strategies, and it's not just a matter of saying do this, this and this and you will be self-aware. It's about really sort of starting with a mindset that says, “I am going to be braver enough to become wiser about myself,” and I call that braver, but wiser, to start to question some of those assumptions you’ve been making about yourself or about how others see you. 

From there, you’ve got to start doing some diagnostics about my internal and external self-awareness. Where am I actually at? Everyone who's listening to this is smart enough to know that we can’t evaluate our self-awareness on our own. We have to look at how other people see us and talk to them about those perceptions. 

There's actually a really cool quiz that we put together just as a resource to support this book that's totally free. If anybody wants to take a quick quiz on that, where basically you fill out 14 questions and then you send a survey to someone who knows you well. They fill out the 14 questions and then you get a report that says, “Here's your high-level internal and external self-awareness.” I think that's a really important part of the process, because maybe you're doing great at one and you should be focusing most of your time on the other. Maybe you have room to improve in both and you make an educated decision about what’s going to help you the most. I think that's critical and we shouldn't sort of overlook that step.

Then from there, it’s a matter of saying, “Okay. What do I want to improve?” If you want to improve your internal self-awareness, again, there are tons and tons and tons of tools, but one thing that our unicorns really universally reported doing that is so easy to incorporate into your life is something called the daily check-in. What they do basically is at the end of every day, whether it's driving home from the office, whether it’s sitting in bed before they go to sleep, they ask themselves essentially three questions. Number one, what went well today? Number two, what didn't go so well? Number three, what can I do to be smarter tomorrow? 

What I loved about that was it sort of allows us to reflect in a mindful and curious way without starting to overthink some of those things in a way that leads us away from the truth about ourselves. That's one thing people can do for internal. 

The suggestion I’d have if you think you need to improve your external self-awareness. The first thing you could you is have what I call a dinner of truth. This is actually an exercise that was developed by Austin communications professor, Dr. Josh Meisner, that he's been using this with his students for years and years and years. The way it works is you find someone who you want to improve your relationship with them and you believe that you have a solid relationship, but it could get even better. You invite them out to meal. I suggest dinner in case you want a nerve-defusing adult beverage, although it’s not required, and you sit down at dinner and you ask them, “What do I do that's most annoying to you?” Then you resist every temptation to defend or explain or disagree and you simply listen.

Just in general, in terms of our external self-awareness, I think we’re overly simplistic in the way we think about feedback. We assume that anybody gives us feedback, we should listen, and any feedback anyone gives us, we should act upon. Of course, it's not that simple. We don't always have to act on everything we hear, especially if the person who’s giving us that feedback might not have the best of intentions or they might not be comfortable telling us the real truth, the ugly truth as they see it, or maybe we get feedback about a skill that doesn't really matter to us, or we get feedback about a skill that we don't feel like we can improve no matter how hard we try. It's really a matter of having that self-awareness and the self-acceptance say, “What do I want to work on and what instead am I going to just be more open about?” 

I tell a story in the book about a leader, an executive entrepreneur who started a bunch of companies who learn that he wasn't the best communicator. In fact, he was a terrible communicator, and he did all these research and basically concluded that he wasn't wired that way. But instead of letting himself off the hook, he now is more open about that with his team and he says, “This doesn't mean I don't care about you. Here's how I’m going to show you that.” That's just another tip I would give people to intelligently consume feedback just like we are going to intelligently consume the introspective methods that we use. 

[0:34:20.8] MB: I want to dig deeper into feedback, but I also want to — I love the question; what do I do that's most annoying to you? I'm curious, are there other questions other than just focusing on annoyance? Is that too kind of narrowly focused in terms of getting a clear perspective?

[0:34:37.4] TE: Yes, and I think it’s not too narrowly focused. It’s one tool and one exercise that we can do. There a lot of people in my experience, just in my work and kind of getting the word out on this book who might not be fully aware of their strengths and what they bring to the table. A lot of us are overconfidence, but a lot of us by that same token don't fully appreciate our gifts. For them, if you feel like you’ve fallen that that category, I would probably say, “Instead of doing the dinner of truth, find friends that you really feel like you’ve got a strong relationship with and ask them a different question. Ask them, “Why are you friends with me?” 

For both of those exercises, I wouldn't put anything in my book that I haven't personally done multiple times. Just like I learned from degenerative truth, I learned very new strengths that other people see in me that I frankly never even thought about before. So I think we can look at it from both of those angles and it's really a matter of saying, “Where could I stand to have the most growth?” 

[0:35:47.6] MB: I think that the great question about cultivating or sort of understanding your strengths. One of the things that I've found is that often times when someone — I personally experienced this as well. When you’re really strong at something, it seems almost obvious to you it's almost hard to sort of get clear perspective that that's something you're good at as supposed to just something that people are good at in general and distinguishing between those two things. 

[0:36:12.1] TE: I think that's so true. Imagine somebody who’s accidentally great at presenting, let’s say.   They’re sort of built that way, that they’re an amazing public speaker. If they don’t know that that’s a defining strength of how they're showing up, it doesn't give them the ability to leverage that and utilize that help them be more successful. If I don't know that public speaking is a unique strength for me, I might not raise my hands when it comes time to volunteer for the board presentation. If I did, it would help me be even more successful. I think your point is a really excellent one. 

[0:36:48.7] MB: Let's circle back to the concept of feedback. Tell me a little bit about — One of the things that we talk about a lot of the show as well is the idea that to be self-aware you need to be constantly getting information about your behavior, about your own thoughts, about your actions, etc. I completely agree at the same time that you have to be very cognizant of what the source of that information is. 

[0:37:13.5] TE: That was another very surprising finding frankly from me in talking to our self-awareness unicorns. I expected that when we conducted these interviews with them, they would report, “Oh my gosh! I get feedback all the time. I get feedback from everyone I know at work and all of my family and the person behind me and the checkout line at the grocery store.” But we actually found the exact opposite. Most of our unicorns, almost all of our unicorns relied on just a handful of people that they actively got feedback from, and the two characteristics that almost all of those people had were as follows. 

The first was the person was confident that that source of feedback really wanted them to be successful. Remember I said earlier, not all feedback is well intended. You have to be sure that somebody really has your back and they're giving you any feedback they're giving you in the spirit of your success. That’s not enough, right? 

We also have to believe that they are going to tell us the good, the bad and the ugly. The first part is the person is loving, and the second person is they’re willing to be a critic if they need to. I call them loving critics. A lot of times people have one but not the other. Everybody has that coworker who just is negative about everything, who would be a great critic, but maybe who doesn't really want you to be that successful. You might have somebody in your life that just loves you and adores you but will never tell you that that haircut you got really doesn't do you any favors. And so the unicorns were very strategic and very discerning about who they got feedback from. In my opinion, that is at least 70% of the work in terms of getting feedback, is just being a laser-focused on who we listen to.

Another thing we learned was that they — Our unicorns didn't rely on other people to approach them with feedback, and this is supported by a lot of science. There was a really cool study from the 1960s, Dr. Rosen was one of the researchers, and basically they put people in a room and created a situation where a stranger, a participant in the study really should have given somebody else in the room some bad news. They sort of mocked it up. It was a crisis about their family, but the person who needed the bad news was a confederate of the researchers. They found that when the news was bad, almost no one told this person the truth, and they really needed to hear it in the situation they concocted. 

From that, they called this phenomenon the mum effect. Our unicorns smartly never assumed that people would tell them anything. They never assumed that people would tell them what they're doing well. They never assumed that people would tell them what they weren’t doing well. Instead, they took it on themselves to get regular feedback on their own terms. 

Kind of related to that, another thing I'd say is one person's feedback is not necessarily going to be something that's reflective of how all people see you. Especially if maybe you get feedback from that nasty coworker and you say, “Okay. I don't want to dismiss this outright, because maybe there's something valuable in it for me. I’m going to go talk to a couple of my loving critics and see if they see it too.” That way, if you can find a consistent pattern either in a strength or an area for development, that is going to give you more confidence that focusing on it will impact lots and lots of areas of your life.

[0:40:53.8] MB: How could we or how have you sort of found in your work to be — How can you open people up to feedback? Especially kind of bringing back the idea of the Dunning- Kruger effect, someone who doesn't understand their own lack of self-awareness, how kind of far off the mark they are and may be resists or doesn't want to hear feedback or criticism? How can you kind of open their ears so to speak? 

[0:41:19.7] TE: That’s a question I get all the time, and I’ve gone back and forth on this and landed at a place that I think is the most reasonable place, which is to say that other people’s self-awareness journeys are not ours to navigate. What I mean by that is, it doesn't necessarily mean that we can't help other people, but it also means that we can't give them the motivation to get there if they don't have it. 

I talked at the very beginning of this conversation about this people at work who just have absolutely no idea how they're coming across. You could, if you felt like it and you were willing to assume the risk, sit down with them and tell them all of these things, but because we have such well-honed defense mechanisms, if they are not feeling the pain or if they're not ready to do something differently, it's only going to make things worse in a lot of cases. They might resent you or they might think you're out to get them there. 

There are a couple of situations that I talk about in the book where we can approach somebody very tentatively with feedback. Sometimes unaware people know that something is wrong, but they don't know that they’re a large part of the problem. Sometimes in those situations they might be genuinely curious about what's going on. 

Maybe I interrupt people in the office all the time and I’m sort of noticing that I'm having prickly relationships with people. Maybe I turn to my coworker and I say, “Why is everybody so mean around here?” That might be an entry point to the conversation, but the other thing I’ll tell people is you have to be willing to assume the risk and you have to be willing to accept the worst case scenario and think about that. If this person is so unaware and if I truly want to take that risk, am I willing to accept what happens if things go really, really south? I think that's a judgment call. There are no hard and fast rules for that, but we should always, always,always, go into that with our eyes wide open. 

[0:43:22.4] MB: What is one piece of homework that you would give for somebody listing to this show that kind of wants to take the first step towards self-awareness? 

[0:43:30.8] TE: I think the easiest, highest payoff activity would actually be to take that insight quiz that I mentioned earlier. They can access it, it's at www.insight-quiz.com, and what I think is really valuable about it is it takes less than five minutes and it gives you a high-level picture of your internal and your external self-awareness. From there, that sort of opens up a whole new path and a whole new way to strategize about what you want to work on. 

[0:44:00.4] MB: Perfect. We will make sure to include that quiz in the show notes. So listeners who are checking that out can definitely access it. I think that's a great tool. One of the questions I actually was thinking about asking you was; are there any kind of tried-and-true self-assessments that you can have someone take that sort of gauges their self-awareness? So I think that's a great resource. 

[0:44:19.3] TE: That’s actually a subset, a 14 item subset of the larger, more comprehensive assessment that we've been researching and developing. So even though it's not your entirety of self-awareness, it's a very, very rigorously developed scientific tool. 

[0:44:33.3] MB: Excellent. Tasha, where can people find you and the book and your work online?

[0:44:39.9] TE: I am not difficult to find online. They can connect with me on pretty much any social media, Tasha Eurich. If they want to learn more about the book and/or take the insight quiz, the overall book website is insight–book.com. 

[0:44:54.8] MB: Awesome. Tasha, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of your wisdom. We’re huge proponents of self-awareness on the show and I think that the strategies and insights you’ve shared today were super valuable. 

[0:45:06.2] TE: Wonderful. Thank you so much for advancing that cause, it was really a pleasure. 

[0:45:10.0] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created the show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every listener email. 

I’m going to give you three quick reasons why you should join our email list today by going the successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get exclusive curated weekly emails from us, including our mindset Monday email, which listeners have been absolutely loving it. It’s short, simple, articles, stories, things we found fascinating and interesting in the last week. Next, you're going to get a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, submit your own personal questions to our guests and change aspects of the show, like our intro music and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand called How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. There are some incredible stuff on the email list that only people who’ve signed up get access to. So be sure to sign up. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage, or if you're on the go, if you’re driving around, if you’re out and about, just text the word “smarter”, that's S-M-A-R-T-E-R to the number 44222.

Remember, the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to a friend either live or online. If you've enjoyed this episode, please leave us an awesome review and subscribe on iTunes. That helps more and more people discover the Science of Success.

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

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

The Psychology Secrets of Extreme Athletes, NFL Teams & The World’s Top Performers with Dr. Michael Gervais

In this episode we explore what it takes to succeed at the highest possible levels, we get science and data from years in the trenches with top performers to uncover the strategies that really work for achieving results, we dig deep into the life long quest of discovering your own personal philosophy and much more with Dr. Michael Gervais. 

Dr. Michael Gervais - Michael is a high performance psychologist who trains mindset skills and practices that are essential to revealing one’s potential. Michael has worked with some of the world’s top performers including sports teams such as the Seattle Seahawks, Felix Baumgartner (The Red Bull Sponsored Athlete Who Completed the Stratosphere Jump)Olympians, musicians, and more! His work has been featured on ESPN, CNN, The New York Times, and much more!

• Years in the trenches with top performers to get the best strategies

• The importance of rugged and hostile environments to cultivating presence and peak performance

• The value of working hard and getting right on the edge of capacity in order to grow

• Our ancient brain is the thing that gets us stuck, keeps us safe, and keeps us small

• The importance of stillness - the place where all of life happens

• Expressing your authentic self in harmony with other people

• There are only 3 things you can train as a human

• You can train your body

  1. You can train your craft - this varies by person - can be anything from writing to motorcross to partening

  2. You can train your mind

  3. Everything falls into those buckets when we talk about the development of the human experience

• A personal philosophy is one of the most significant anchors you can ground yourself with. Great achievers always have clarity of personal philosophy

• Line up your thoughts, words, and actions across any environment - there is a sense of power that comes from that - an inner knowing and being that is so rock solid that you can move eloquently in any environment when you have that mindset

• The life-long quest of discovering your own personal philosophy - and the 3 methodologies

• Mindfulness - being present with your inner experience

  1. Being around wise people - people who are switched on, people who are having deep convos, talking about their philosophies, having those conversations

  2. Writing - the art of writing, taking a thought and all the words in your native tongue and lock down these ideas and concepts

• Start with putting your philosophy to memory, and then most importantly begin putting your philosophy into practice

• There’s nothing new in the world of self help - the science is super clear - this is what we know to be true - you just have to do the work

• Optimism is a foundational pillar for mental toughness, optimism is about how you think about your future

• Optimism is a learned behavior - how to train it

• Relentless belief that you can focus your mind on what’s good

  1. First function - without awareness of inner dialogue you’re dead in the water - you must have meditation/mindfulness - train your inner experience to become more aware of thoughts and sensations

  2. Second - Martin Seligman - focus on 3 good things - gratitude journal

  3. Become a researcher of amazing / researcher of good in your own life

• Mindfulness is the backbone that runs through all of these strategies

• Going through difficult things doesn’t mean you will be traumatized - Post Traumatic Growth is also possible - How can you achieve post traumatic growth?

• “Small t trauma” vs “Big T Trauma"

• Resilience is at the center of growth - and the only way to become resilient is to go through difficult situations

• The difficult things you go through either get you stuck or push you to the edge of growth.

• In modern life for the average person - the most dangerous thing is what people think of us

• Getting uncomfortable is a requirement for you to be your best. This can be easily demonstrated with any world class performer from music to sports to any field.

• Knowledge won’t carry us through - it's not about more information - that learning has to turn into application and action. Learning has to turn into insights - and those insights need to change your behavior

• The 4 Pillars of Recovery

• Sleeping well - the science is pretty clear - the commitment to doing that requires incredible discipline

  1. Eating & Hydration are necessary pillars - colorful vegetables & clean protein

  2. Moving well - getting your body switched on, oxygenating your system - 6-7 hours of moderate to intense movement per week

  3. Think Well - your mind is an incredible tool, but it also needs to be harnessed

• Most people cannot even fathom the amount of vulnerability necessary to get to the truth - radical vulnerability - allowing the inner stuff to be revealed - is incredible, and so hard to do - most of us retreat to our normal patterns

• Doing difficult things expands your comfort zone

• How do you strike the balance between achievement and non-attachment?

• Winning is fun, winning pays bills - but the far deeper part of that is that the process of becoming - the process of knowing that you have what it takes, the process of being creative to solve problems on the fly and make decisions is much more fun.

• Winning is a requirement to keep going - but in order to cultivate non-attachment you have to be focused on the present moment

• Practice is more important than the conceptual idea itself

• What is your “craft" and why is it so important?

• For most people who are not on the world stage - begs the question - what is my craft? It’s not as complicated as it sounds - what are you most passionate about - what is the thing you care so much about you love doing it, you put work into it?

• Get back to seeing what we do from 9-5 as a primary craft - think about your work and your job as a craft

• Social media has made us lose our way, lose our true north, lose our focus on our craft

• Taking time to think about and articulate your personal philosophy - just starting WRITING “My personal philosophy is…” in 25 words or less - what do you stand for, what are you all about? What’s your true north, your compass?

• Write down the people who have inspired you in life - and next to their names right down the characteristics that they expemplify - those characertics might be part of your philosophy

• How you can engineer your inner experience

• Mindfulness is not a relaxation training - it's a focus training

• That moment of awareness (that your mind has wandered) is the work taking place

• Minimum effective dose is 6-8 minutes, optimal dose is 20 minutes

• Compete to become the best version of yourself

• Every day is an opportunity to create a living masterpiece

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

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

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Wiki Page] Martin Seligman

• [TEDTalk] The New Era of Positive Psychology by Martin Seligman

• [SoS Episode] Embracing Discomfort

• [SoS Episode] How To Demolish What’s Holding You Back & Leave Your Comfort Zone with Andy Molinsky

• [Book] Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values by Robert M. Pirsig

• [Website] Finding Mastery

• [Website] Compete to Create

• [Twitter] Michael Gervais

Episode Transcript

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

[0:00:12.0] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success; the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet with more than a million downloads and listeners in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode, we explore what it takes to succeed at the highest possible level. We get science and data from years in the trenches with top performers to uncover the strategies that really work for achieving results. We dig deep into the lifelong quest of discovering your own personal philosophy and much more, with Dr. Michael Gervais. 

I'm going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. One; you’re going to get awesome free guides that we create based on listener demand including our most popular guide; How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide, but you got to sign up to find out by joining our email list today. 

Next, you're going to get an curated weekly email from us every week, including our Mindset Monday email, which listeners have been absolutely loving, and you're going to get a an exclusive chance to shape the show, that means voting on guests, changing parts of the show like our intro and outro music and much more, and even submitting your own personal questions to our guests. 

There're some amazing stuff that's only available to our email subscribers, so be sure to sign up. You can sign up by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage, or if you're on the go right now, you’re out and about, just text the word “smarter”, that smarter” to the number 44222. 

In our previous episode we discussed the proven strategies for building effective relationships. Why it's vital to understand the results you get in the world come from working with other people. How you can see the world from other people's perspectives, tactics for building your credibility, how to get better feedback and much more with our previous guest, Todd Davis. If you want uncover the number one strategy for achieving results and getting what you want in life, listen to that episode. 

Now for the interview.

[0:02:22.3] MB: Today we have another awesome guest on the show, Dr. Michael Gervais. Michael is a high-performance psychologist who trains mindset skills and practices that are essential to revealing one’s potential. He’s worked with some of the world’s top performers, including sports teams such as the Seattle Seahawks, Felix Baumgartner, the Red Bull sponsored athlete who completed the stratosphere job, Olympians, musicians and much more. His work has been featured on ESPN, CNN, The New York Times and many other sites. 

Michael, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:02:51.7] MG: Thanks for having me on. 

[0:02:53.0] MB: We’re super excited to have you on here today. I’d love to start out, tell me a little bit about what is your mission? What is kind of the driving purpose behind what you do? 

[0:03:04.0] MG: Well, it’s changed, and I can work in reverse order, so I think it's probably a bit easier, but the beginnings is — Or where I am now, the mission now, is to see if we can make an impact in one in seven people across the globe. That sounds daunting and ridiculous, but we make it where it’s bite-size or snackable if you will and we’re trying to make a difference, one of five people in any organization that we work with. 

The reason one in five, the image in place is to help people be more clear about how they can train their mind to be more present. So that's the mission. If we can increase the frequency of people becoming their authentic self and by meeting the present moment when it happens and having command of their mind to do so in rugged and hostile environments, then the idea is that we’ll create a rising tide where that swell floats all boats. 

[0:03:56.6] MB: You touched on the idea of rugged and hostile environments. How does that play into the cultivation of presence? Another topic I know you’ve worked a lot on is mastery. 

[0:04:07.5] MG: Well, by trade and training, my skillset is high-performance psychology, or performance psychology. I think that it’s important to give some context to where I’m coming from, so it’s grounded in good science. Then I’ve spend years in the field and in the trenches with some of the top performance in the world learning how they, and we together, customize a mindset training or psychological skills training programs. 

The rugged and hostile environments is relative and in many of the environments I work in, they’re physically rugged and hostile. For the rest of folks, like it doesn’t have to be physically dangerous to be rugged. It can be emotionally dangerous and risky. What that means is any time that your heart starts to thump because of the interpretation that something is on the line, then by definition that becomes relatively hostile. It feels as though — No. A better way of saying that, it is the exact same feeling as if somebody were chasing you down with a knife in a dark alley when you’re required to walk across the dancehall in 7th grade and experience that vulnerability being the first person to dance or to walk across and ask somebody to dance.

All of the same ancient brain stuff from our ancestors that were passed on to us about fight, flight, freeze, mission or flow state, all of those are at play. In modern times, so many of us, we understand the value of working hard and getting right on the edge of capacity or getting right on the edge of this instability to grow and to become larger in our ability to manage moments. The truth is that our ancient brain is that thing that gets us stuck and keeps us safe and small in many regards.  

So that’s a long way of saying that the hostile and rugged environments is where we learn about who we really are. The way that we learn about who we are is only we really know our experience in those moments. Do we shut it down? Do we avoid them? Do we — Are so self-critical that it’s hard to be fluid in our craft, whether that’d be words or whether that’d be something more physical, like sport?

It’s the dangerous and hostile environments that teach us how well we prepared to be still in the present moment. Why is the stillness important, is because that’s where life happens. That’s where all things high-performance, that’s where all things that look like or feel like mastery take place. It’s where we’re connected to ourselves. It’s where we’re connected to nature. It’s where we’re connected to our craft. It’s where we’re connected to others. 

The essence is the whole inner engineering game is to figure out ways to become more present and to have that presence be aligned with your personal philosophy about who it is that you want to become and who it is that you’re working on being, and it’s the confluence of those variables that be more specific. Those variables are hostile or rugged environments. The personal philosophy about who it is that you’re working on becoming and the mental skills to have command of your inner experience so that you can do one thing, which is express your authentic self, and when you can do that in harmony with other people, really good stuff takes place. That’s the essence of how I spend most of my time conceptually. Thinking about those elements and how to leverage them and manipulate them in all the right ways and then to train our minds to be more calm and more confident, more resilient, more mentally tough, more nimble if you will to adjust to the unfolding and unpredictable unknown that only comes within the uncertainty of hostile and rugged environments. 

[0:08:06.3] MB: There’s a tremendous amount of stuff that I want to dig into just from that answer. I’d love to start out with the idea of really getting clear about who you are and how important it is to know who you are and how that intersects with performance.

[0:08:22.3] MG: Yeah. I think it seems like a simple question, but it’s a really big question. Let’s start with one concept above that, which is there’s only three things that as humans, there’s only three things that we can train. We can train our body, and science is pretty good there. We’ve got a pretty good handle on how to do that. You can train our craft, and our crafts vary across people. Some people, their craft is writing, and some people, their craft is motocross. There’re all different types of crafts people have. Parenting is a craft. You can train your body. You can train your craft and you can train your mind. 

Everything else in life falls in one of those three buckets when we’re talking about development of the human experience, and there’s an asterisk, and that asterisk is your spirit. There is some thought that I — I’m a scientist at heart and there’s no science that I can point to that says you can train spirit, but not put an asterisk next to it, because I think it’s possible.

Okay. There’s only those three things that you can train. Now, I spend most of my time on how to train the mind. When we talk about training the mind, it becomes almost fruitless to have mental skills, but there’s nothing to calibrate who you are and who you’re becoming, which is a personal philosophy. A personal philosophy becomes — Seriously, like one of the most significant anchors that we can ground ourselves with, and if you think about some of the most significant people in the world that have shaped the culture and the rhythm of the world, we’re very clear about their philosophy. 

Martin Luther King Jr., we know exactly what he stood for, because he talked about it, he thought about it, and his actions lined up, and that’s the essence of why a personal philosophy is really important, is to line up your thoughts, your words and your actions across any environment. When you can line up your thoughts, words and actions, there is a sense of power that comes from that. Now, I don’t mean power in a cheesy way, but there’s an inner-knowing and an inner-being that is so rock solid that you can — No. Not align. That you can move eloquently in any environment when you have that alignment. That’s Martin Luther King Jr. We knew that he stood for equality. 

Malcom X on the other side also stood for equality and they had very different tones to how they went about achieving that aim of equality. Malcolm X was widely known for by any means necessary, and Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. King, was very clear about having a non-violent approach. 

There’s dials that get embedded in one’s philosophy, but the philosophy itself becomes the compass for how to line up your thoughts, your words and your actions.

[0:11:14.8] MB: That’s so powerful, and I think it’s critically important point. I’m curious, for somebody who’s listening that kind of wants to ground that experience, how would you recommend starting out to uncover or discover what your own personal philosophy is or starting to get to the core of that?

[0:11:34.2] MG: It’s a lifelong quest, and it’s starts by getting clear, and there’s three methodologies to get clear that both science and ancient wisdoms would teach us. It starts with a basic principle, and the basic principle is that everything you need is already inside you. It’s not about going and asking other people for their philosophy, but it is helpful to have your eyes open to be curious about what other people’s philosophies are so that you can be more connected to what it is that they’re searching for and how they’ve organized their life. I’m talking about people of wisdom and passion and people that had great influence that you think is remarkable. Okay. That’s the first part. 

The second part is if everything you know — Everything you need to know is already inside you, how do you reveal that? There’s three methodologies, and the first is mindfulness. So that is the practice of being present with your inner experience. We can down as much of that conversation as you’d like. The second form is being around wise people, being around people that are switched on and having those conversations about deep stuff, about their philosophy, about how they have cultivated their philosophy, about how their philosophy has changed overtime and being able to bounce deeper type conversations across the people that have wisdom. If you’re not fortunate enough to know somebody that’s wise, that’s okay. There’re certainly people in your community that like are on the ball. Maybe they don’t have wisdom and they haven’t revealed it yet, but they’re certainly on the ball and they’re switched on. That’s the second; those types of conversations and building that community. 

Then the third is writing. The art of writing, of being able to take an esoteric thought and all the words in your native tongue to be able to lockdown as a forcing function to say, “This is the word or sentence or phrase that best describes this feeling or thought or concept that I’m trying to articulate.” It’s something incredibly powerful about that forcing function to take all the possible words that swirl on our head and pick one or two or a phrase of words to articulate ourselves. Those are the three ways, but it starts with a premise that everything you need is already inside you. Your work is to reveal that, and that happens by being, by listening, by having conversations and by writing.
 
[0:13:58.2] MB: What has your own journey been like to uncover your personal philosophy?

[0:14:04.8] MG: I’ve had wonderful experiences with this and I’ve been fortunate enough to have some mentors. I needed mentors when I was younger I should say, and so I was fortunate enough to have some really amazing people that helped guide me. One of those folks challenged me and said, “What is your philosophy?” and I had no idea what it was and I just couldn’t articulate it, and I tried. Just like most people that say, “Well, the things that are most important to me are —” But that’s not what it is. It’s like there’s something much deeper, and that deeper calling is to say, “I know it’s this.” The way to get to that clarity are the three approaches I just talked about, but also having somebody say, “Hey, listen. I really would love to know your philosophy.” There’s something really important about at the accountability that that person cares, they’re interested and I’m going to do this with them, or they’re calling me out on the carpet. That’s what happened to me. Somebody called me out and said, “I thought you had done this — You said that you’ve done this work and I thought you did, but it’s clear you haven’t.” I said, “Okay.” 

What ends up happening for me is I went based on that kind of — I wouldn’t say it was embarrassment, but I let myself down. I let my mentor down. I just went on a quest to really try to figure it out, but it took me two years and it was two years of searching and I was reading and I was talking and I was writing and I was listening. I was doing all the things that I shared with you earlier.

Then one day I was reading a chapter in a book and it just spilled out of me, and so I don’t think that what I’m describing is the absolute, most efficient way to do it, but that’s how it happened for me. Then when I realized, like this is me looking back with hindsight, that there’s some particular phases that we go through, there’s the searching phase of trying to understand it, and then there’s the phase of like shaping it, paring it and saying, “These are the words.” 

What I’d suggest to people is that you want to be able to so crisp with your philosophy is that you could get it out at knife point in a dark alley. That means that it’s got to be just a handful of words, or certainly less than 15, that maybe you start with a whole page and then you pare it down to half a page and then you pare it down to 25 words or less and then maybe you could get it done to just a handful of words that really get to the center of your compass in your life. 

Okay. Then the next is taking that work and putting it to memory. Little extra here is that when it happened for me, is that when it just spilled out of me, it was so right and so true, because I’ve been thinking and searching and really wrestling with it sometimes in the background, but sometimes in the foreground of my daily rhythms, that I only needed to edit two words in my statement. That leads me to this next phase, which is putting it to memory. For me, it was so crisp that I didn’t need to put it to memory. It was just there for me. 

Most people need to say, “Okay,” and they need to practice it, like, “Okay. What are those words? That’s right. Okay. It was these words. All right.” There’s just a memorization process. 

Then the fourth phase is to put it into practice, and so we’ve got to wake up in the morning in some kind of way and practice it. If you want to be good at it, especially in rugged and hostile environments to have that alignment, that true north that only a philosophy can offer us, is that we have to wake up and practice it. 

Then we want to practice mental skills to support us to be about it in hostile and rugged environments. That’s it. It’s not complicated. I think that there’s something very important about simplicity and it feels like I know I’m on to something when it’s really simple, but it’s hard to do and it just seems like that’s what I’ve learned from both being in the trenches with world’s best and variety of domains, that it’s not complicated to know how to shoot a basketball or do whatever the skill is in whatever sport we’re talking about when nobody is looking, but it’s extremely hard to do it when there are more people looking and there’s pressure involved. It’s even more difficult to do that in repeated fashion. That’s how I think about it.

[0:18:18.4] MB: Yeah, I feel like many of the most important things in life are simple but not easy. 

[0:18:24.2] MG: Yeah. A thousand percent. There’s something nauseating about the self-help world. It’s like, “Jesus! There’s nothing new.” It’s a fantastic field waiting for people to help them become their very best. The science is phenomenal saying, “Listen. This is what we know to be true. You just have to freaking do it. You got to put in the lonely work and roll up your sleeves, be really clear about your philosophy. Train your mind to know how to be confident in any environment.” That’s mechanical. That’s so mechanical, but the practice in the doing of it, it’s just not easy. How to become in any environment, completely possible to do, but we have to practice. How do we practice? If you want, we can go through those mechanics, but I’m sure that most of your listeners already know the answers on how to do that. 

[0:19:16.2] MB: Let’s briefly touch on that. Tell me kind of just in an overview sense what are those core mechanics and mental skills that are necessary to command your inner experience?

[0:19:27.0] MG: Yeah. Okay. Once we’ve locked in and we’ve got our compass for our philosophy and we’ve got a sense of, “Okay. I’m going to do the hard work,” and you make that commitment. It’s hard work to do. Then you can move into training the mental skills, which are the not complicated. It’s generating a sense of confidence, calm, the ability to lock in and focus in the present moment. The ability to trust yourself in difficult, rugged environments. Those are four, right? Calm, confidence, focus and trust. 

Then there’s some psychological framework stuff to work on as well, which is a fancy phrase for how you think about your future. Is it optimistic or pessimistic? We want to double down on optimism, because for us what we’ve learned, and science supports this as well, is that it’s part of a foundation, if not the center pillar for mental toughness. To create a life of high performance, let alone mastery or peace and meaning, we need — We require to be mentally tough. If the center of mental toughness is the belief that the future is going to work out and I have the capacity to figure it out, that’s a fancy phrase for self-efficacy. Then optimism is really important for us. That’s trainable. Optimism, pessimism are learned behaviors and if we want to be more mentally tough, we need to train optimism. 

Then the last two are being able to focus on what’s in our control, be very clear about that. Then the last is developing a sense of grit. Grit is a simple term, but it really means living with passion and a sense of resiliency to persevere for the long-term haul, for the long trek if you will towards your potential. 

If I make it more clear, it’s calm, confidence, focus and trust, optimism, control and grit. Those are the key mental skills that I spent a lot of time thinking about how to cultivate. If you’re going to do all of that, working to line up your thoughts, words and actions on a regular basis in safe environments all the way up to hostile events, and that’s what kind of natural training progression looks like. We start in a quiet, safe environment and then progressively get louder with more risk until it becomes more hostile. Then at some point, there’s the possibility to dissolve that hostility and dissolve that pressure if you will. That’s much more nuanced, but that’s left for people that are truly at the tip of the arrow to figure that out. 

If we’re going to do all of that work, then the last pillar, if you will, for a programmatic approach to progressive improvement would be getting your recovery program locked down. On the world stage, we do not talk about working hard. Everybody works hard. Everybody is freaking hard worker on the world stage and they’ve got this incredible talent to go with it. It’s exciting and it’s fun to work hard. 

We talk more about science and the art of recovery so that we can work hard on a regular basis and we down burn ourselves out in ways emotionally, physically or sometimes spiritually so to speak that we can’t go the distance. We got to push up against the edge, and if you’re going to push up against the edge of instability and doubt and physical limitations, then we’ve got to figure out the right way to recover our mind and our body.

[0:22:46.1] MB: I want to dig in recovery, but before we do, one of the things that I’ve thought about a lot is how do we balance optimism with the kind of acceptance of negative emotions and experiences? That’s something I think personally I’ve struggled with is, is kind of how do you balance spending time accepting and dealing with and thinking about past trauma or current negative emotional experiences with what you just talked about in terms of how powerful optimism is as a psychological framework and a key component of mental toughness and performance.

[0:23:20.9] MG: Okay. Yeah, it’s good. Everything that I just talked about, the wick that runs through it is mindfulness. Mindfulness is a particular well-being in the present moment without judgment. It’s a definition that was coined by Jo Kabat-Zinn. 

To answer your question, optimism is about how you think about your future. Now, if you’ve been burned, and I don’t mean physically burned, but that could be the case too. If you’ve been emotionally burned or let down or you’ve been through some really tough stuff you’ve seen or smelled or heard things that are traumatic or difficult for you to deal with, that that can and will likely impact a sense of optimism. Okay?

If you’re been through some really tough stuff, it makes sense to have mechanisms to protect yourself from experiencing those difficult emotions. Again, so how do we train optimism? The first thing we need to do is recognize that going through difficult things doesn’t mean that we’re going come out the other side of it traumatized. There’s a lesser known research about — What I’m talking about is post-traumatic stress disorder and trauma. Being traumatized is kind of a feature of that obviously. That there’s less research or less widely known research around post-traumatic growth, so that means it is possible to go through really heavy situations and come up the other side stronger, to come out the other side with the sense of growth. How? It’s really important. How?

It’s not as simple as I’m about to describe. I don’t want to pretend that this is not nuanced. It’s very nuanced when we’re dealing with emotional stuff that’s heavy, and I mean, shit a Ph.D., which is about 14 years of study doesn’t prepare us even enough to deal with what I’m about to say. It requires many more years in the field on top of that to deal with people that have been through traumatic experiences, but there’s trauma with a big T and there’s trauma with a small T. 

Let’s just say we’re dealing with trauma with a small T. It means maybe you’re publicly embarrassed. It doesn’t mean that you saw body parts or you almost died yourself. Trauma with a small T is more common. 

That means you maybe are publicly embarrassed or you let down some other people or there’s some sort of embarrassment or smaller traumatic experience that took place. If that was the case and that experience was fused with emotion and that fusion of emotion and physical experience becomes capsulated in such a way that we don’t want to experience it again because it was so hard, everything that you do looking forward would be to naturally protect yourself from that. 

We have to undo. We have to rewire that experience. How do we do that? That’s the complicated part. That’s where you want to get in touch with somebody that really has a deep understanding of how the mind works, a psychologist or a properly trained clinician, to understand how to unpack that, at the same time create the sense that resiliency is at the center of growth. 

We don’t become these amazing human beings without being resilient, and the only way to become resilient is to go through difficult shit. At some point, we have to have this meta-analysis, this observation that the difficult things that I go through are either going to keep me stuck or push me right to the edge of growth. That becomes very important. 

Now, from that point, the idea of optimism is a purposeful decision to think about what could be amazing in the future. We have to spend time to train that, because if our ancient brain and our traumatized brain with a small T, but big T for trauma, is working to protect us. It literally feels like we have to override our DNA, and this is why psychology is so freaking powerful and wonderful and complicated, because our software, our mind is driving our brain, our hardware. 

If the software is not strong enough, the hardware wins, the brain wins. The brain is designed for survival. So if we want to go back to any of our — Let’s say, glitchy experiences in us becoming our best version of ourselves, it’s either because our software has been traumatized or it’s glitchy or the hardware is doing its job, and it’s doing its job to protect you from all the things that could potentially be dangerous. In a modern life, the things that are most dangerous are what people think of us. 

Certainly, that there are physically dangerous elements that take place. There are dangerous and bad people that lurk in dark places. That is true. For most of us, the worst thing that we experience is what other people might be thinking about us. We have to face down our glitchy software to upgrade it or know that our hardware is working to keep us safe and small and stuck and just okay, and we have to override that hardware by purposely training our mind to find what could be good as supposed to what our brain wants us to do is scan the world and find what could go wrong. It’s the combination of the balance of those two, because it’s ridiculous to think that nothing could go wrong. We do need to entertain those thoughts, but it’s that purposeful balance and double down or tripling down on what could be amazing and saying, “Okay. If that’s an outcome that could be amazing, what do I have to do to position myself right now in this moment or over the next week or month or years to see if that thing is actually possible.” That’s where all of the mental and physical and technical craft-base work goes into play.

[0:29:08.5] MB: If optimism is a learned skill, how can we cultivate and train it?

[0:29:14.9] MG: Okay. It starts with a decision, like I’m going to focus my mind on what could be good and what could be amazing. It’s a relentless belief that that’s possible. Then once that’s in place, then we back into how to train it, and there’re two functions of it. The first function is, without awareness of our inner dialogue, we’re literally dead in the water. 

It begins with an awareness of your inner experience. How do you train awareness? Mindfulness. Mindfulness is a way to train your inner experience to become more aware of your thoughts, your emotions, your body sensations and the stuff outside, the external environment. 

It starts with awareness. If you don’t know your thoughts, you can’t change them. The second is there’s some really great research out of UPenn that Martin Seligman designed, and that study reflects — They put people through — I can’t remember. Thousands of people. I think it was 4,000 people that put them through a study. I could be mixing up my research right now. He put thousands of people through a study and they asked them for seven days to just focus on three good things and at the end of the day just write those three good things down. 

What they’ve found is people came into that study that were depressed. It stabilized their depression. What they’ve found is people that were not depressed, overall life satisfaction and wellness increased after just 7 days. That’s on a bunch of research around optimism training and gratitude training. That would be the most mechanical, the easiest way, evidence-based practice to start is wake up in the morning, become a researcher of good. Just do that. Become a researcher of amazing and a researcher or good. Then at the end of the day, write those things down. At the end of the day you’d have a sentence and a parenthesis right next to the end of the sentence. 

Literally, I’ve got so many athletes and folks out and artists and folks I work with that they’ll send me a text as an accountability measure at the end of the day and it will say something like, “A woman held the door open for me.” Period. Then a parenthesis, it would say connection. Like they felt connected. The parenthesis is the emotion or the piece that made it special, and then the sentence is the thing that actually took place. It’s got to be real. It’s got to be something that happened and it’s, by the definition, has to be good or amazing if we’re so bold to be able to make that list. 

It forces our brain to scan the world and find what’s good as supposed to all the things that could go wrong. It’s simple. It’s mechanical and it’s evidence-based. 

[0:31:53.2] MB: We talk all the time on the show about the importance of mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our amazing sponsor, Skillshare. Skillshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn anything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and the cool part about Skillshare is that they give you unlimited access for a monthly fee so you don't have to pay per class. 

They have some amazing courses on there that I personally really enjoy, everything from mastering Evernote, to mind mapping, to learning how to sketch and draw. If you want to get a leg up on everything from graphic design to your knife skills, if you're into cooking, and much, much more, Skillshare is giving every single Science of Success listener one month of unlimited access completely for free. That's pretty awesome. 

Go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:32:58.1] MB: Let’s transition back to talking about recovery. You mentioned how important recovery is and talked about a little bit of the art and science of that. Tell me more.

[0:33:07.3] MG: Okay. If you’re going to get on the edge, if you nudge your head and say, “Yes. I understand that getting uncomfortable, I’ve heard it over and over again, that getting uncomfortable is a requirement for me to be my best.” 

Then what that means is that you’re physically taxing your body on a regular basis. If we’re doing that, then we’ve got to put in the right recovery mechanisms so that we can replenish. There’re four pillars of recovery. The first is sleeping well. The science around that is pretty clear. We all know it. We all know that most human beings, 68% of human beings need to between 7 and 8 hours of sleep pm a regular basis. That’s not new. Grandma told us that. 

However, making the commitment to do that does require an incredible discipline and it requires organizing our lives in such a way that we value recovery, because we’re working at our capacity on a regular basis. 

Knowledge is not going to carry us through. It’s not more information, and it sounds counterintuitive for me to say this, but the idea of listening to — And I have a podcast and I love it and I’m clip just like you to learn. At some point, the learning has to turn into application and then that application has to turn into insight. Then we have that insight, we can reveal our potential easier. 

It moves from not knowing and hearing again that, “Oh, I should be getting 8 hours of sleep.” It’s having a fundamental pivot and orientation in your life to say that, “I’m freaking getting after it, and because of that I need to be disciplined and organize myself to ensure that I have at least 8 hours in bed on a regular basis.” That’s one. Sleep is the first pillar. 

Eating and hydration is the second pillar, and that’s mechanical as well. I’m not going to tell you more information that is going to be helpful other than you know that having colorful foods on your plate and having clean protein is essential. Colorful foods, I don’t mean like Skittles. I mean like all the different colors that mother nature offers us, and having handfuls of clean protein on a regular basis are really important. We can dig down in the weeds and to go deeper in that, but that’s a basic frame. If you’re not doing that on a regular basis and eating on a regular basis every three to four hours, then you’re kind of blowing it. The hydration piece is essential as well. When we are dehydrated, one of the first things that happens is we dehydrate our brain. I actually say the first thing, but we know that dehydrated people also had a shrinkage in volume in their brain, because so much of our cellular structure happens up in that three pounds of tissue in our skull. Eating right and hydration, that’s the second pillar. 

Then the third pillar is moving well, and that’s just a function of getting your body switched on and oxygenating your system. Basic guidelines are like 6 to 7 hours of movement, moderate to intense movement a week. It’s probably not quite enough if you’re really trying to get on the edge. 

The reason we want to get our bodies moving in that way is because it oxygenates our system, it gets our blood flowing, it gets all of the joints and the muscular and the skeletal tissue, all of that stuff is working and it helps enhance our brain for lots of different reasons. Also, it’s one of the ways that helps promote before lifting heavy things, and I say this with an asterisk, if you’re going to lift heavy thing, make sure that you’re skilled and qualified to do that with a coach, a sports performance coach or your local exercise guru, whoever that might be, and lift heavy stuff. It helps promote growth hormone. It helps promote the testosterone, and both men and women need those especially as we get into our 20s and 30s and 40s. We need to make sure that we’re taking care of those two hormones. That is all part of it. 

Then the fourth pillar is the think well. If you did all those three pillars, if you kicked ass all day, got right up into the edge of your capacity by doing difficult things, whether it’s emotional or physical and you’re in the amphitheater so to speak on a regular basis and you recover for the first three pillars, but you wake up in the morning and you pull your sheets off and the first thing it happens is that you drop into a state of anxiousness or worry or frustration that somebody drank the last — I don’t know. Say, milk or orange juice or whatever. The image in my mind is that you to the refrigerator and somebody drank all of the juices that you wanted. I’m not a fan of juices, that’s why I’m kind of stammering in this part of it. That if you wake up with a mind that’s anxious or frustrated, you just undo all of the recovery that you put in place. 

Our mind is an incredible tool. It’s also a weapon that can be used against us if we don’t put the right harnesses on it, and those harnesses begin with great awareness. Again, awareness can be cultivated, it can be trained, and mindfulness is one of the center pillars for increasing that awareness. 

[0:38:09.8] MB: You actually kind of tossed out a phrase that I think is a phenomenal insight, which is the idea that getting uncomfortable is a requirement to be your best. I think so many people get trapped in their comfort zone and it ends up really kind of stifling much of their growth potential. 

[0:38:25.4] MG: Yeah, for sure. I mean that’s one of the things that we can easily learn from world-class in anything, whether it’s music. The amount of artist, world-class artists — I’m spending some time right now with an artist who — I don’t want to say who it is for confidentiality, but has over 200 hits, and I mean hits. He’s a writer/producer and artist himself. When he goes on stage, he sells out in 15 minutes. He books at about $1.8 a night and works about 50 nights a year. I mean mega influencer of the world.

The amount of vulnerability, the intensity of vulnerability to get to the truth, I don’t think most people can even fathom what it takes to get to the truth. That level of radical vulnerability to allow the inner stuff to be revealed is incredible and it’s so hard to do. That what most of us do is we retreat to our normal patterns. We drive almost the same way every day to work. We eat from the same restaurants. We think the same patterns. We talk about the same silly shit with our friends on a regular basis, really getting on the edge, whether that’s physical. 

Great athletes have taught us this for years and coaches, world-class coaches have this insight; practice has got to be real. It’s got to be on. We’ve got to get switched on and get the most out of ourselves so that we can learn, so that we can figure out and push our capacity. I’m holding my hands, like I’ve got my hands around a balloon. If I breathe air into the balloon, which is doing difficult things, the balloon stretches and there’s a new capacity. There’s more room to play when the capacity gets bigger, when the balloon gets bigger and there’s ways to do it emotionally and there’s ways to do it physically. There’s no such thing as mental uncomfortableness. Thoughts are thoughts. 

Thoughts become challenging as soon as we have an emotional experience to them. There’s emotional uncomfortableness, which is really vulnerability. Then the physical stuff is much more mechanical and much easier to do. It’s about getting your heart rate up and your lactic acid and the [inaudible 0:40:53.3], or the chemicals in our body that are difficult to deal with. It’s about getting our wind up and breathing heavy, because we’re out of capacity from an oxygen standpoint, and from my lactic acid [inaudible 0:41:06.1] standpoint, when our muscles feel like they’re shutting down. You can do that by long distance stuff or intense burst of stuff. That’s how you do it physically. The whole purpose of that is to be able to have better command of your mind in those difficult situations and command of your craft, whatever that craft is, physical or mental. 

[0:41:26.4] MB: I want to come back and dig into craft as well, but there’s another topic that I’m curious to hear your insights on. One of the other psychological frameworks you talked about was focusing on what’s within your control, and kind of the corollary to that is something that I think that I think a lot about is striking the balance between pushing and really trying to achieve a lot and also kind of the concept of non-attachment, non-attachment to the outcomes. How do these high-performance you work with and how do you think about sort of striking that balance between not being attached to outcomes and at the same time still striving to achieve great things? 

[0:42:01.8] MG: Yeah. The concept of non-attachment is very much — The origins of that are very much in a Buddhist practice. I think that it’s hard. What you just described sounds wonderful and is really, really difficult to do. However — Before I get to the however, almost everyone I know wants to win. They know, they understand the invisible handshake that winning is really fun. If you don’t win enough, you don’t get to keep going. That visible handshake is for me or for an athlete or a coach in world-class organizations is that if we don’t win in the first — Let’s say in the NFL. If coaches don’t win the first four games, the owners can just fire you. That’s kind of the tolerance. 

Imagine if you’ve got four weeks to get it right and it doesn’t work right. You’re gone. You have to win. It’s a requirement. Winning pays bills. Winning is certainly fun, but it’s far deeper than that. The far deeper part of it is that the process of becoming, the process of knowing that you have what it takes. The process of being creative to solve problems and make decisions on the fly is much more fun. It’s just like when we match up against our competitors and we get to see how well we prepared, that’s the real reward. The winning part of it is a requirement to keep going to get another shot at it. 

Okay. How do you get into the non-attachment piece? By thrusting yourself completely into the present experience. Our minds are wired in such a way that we cannot process two new things at the same thing. It’s called serial processing, and that’s how we think at least we’re wired.  

If you can’t process two new things at the same time and you make a conscious decision and you have the ability — Anytime you have an ability, that means you can get better at it. You make a decision and develop the ability to put your mind in the present moment to focus on the most relevant task-at-hand, then that’s where we experience non-attachment. Non-attachment is a byproduct of full absorption in the present moment.

[0:44:27.2] MB: That’s a great insight, and I think that makes a ton of sense. That balance is something that I spend a lot of time kind of thinking about how do you strike a balance between those two things. Thank you for sharing that insight.

[0:44:38.4] MG: Yeah, good. I’d say it’s not going to probably do you much good thinking about it. The next phase is if once you have some clarity around it, is practicing it. How do you practice being fully connected to the present moment just this next thing is you might actually be practicing it on a regular basis through these conversations and in your podcast is by listening deeply. 

If you’re just listening deeply to this conversation right now, you’re practicing single pointed presence, like just this word, just this word again and you’re here now again in the present moment and again in the present moment and doing that for 15 seconds, 20 seconds and locking in for another 30 seconds once your mind wanders, maybe even doing it for one second at a time. That’s how it works. I’d say practicing it is far more important than thinking about just the conceptualize piece of it.

[0:45:31.7] MB: Another really good insight and very true — I’m a very cerebral person, so I naturally gravitate towards the ideas, but I think the practice is integral and critical.

[0:45:42.4] MG: Yeah. These are all abilities. That means wherever we are with them, we can get better. What I love about the space of psychology and the space of mindset conditioning and training is that it’s wide open right now and our potential as humans is untapped and we’re moving into a digital world where our ancient brains are not primed properly for it. So we have to train our minds to pursue our potential. We have to train our minds to override our DNA and that DNA function is to survive. If we can train our minds and we’ve got a clear purpose of our philosophy and connection to our philosophy, the world becomes so much more playful and wonderful. It doesn’t mean it’s not easy. It’s like hard, and there is real danger in the world. It’s a fantastic time right now for the science of psychology and the application of it. It’s phenomenal.

[0:46:36.2] MB: I want to circle back to craft, which we talked a little bit about earlier. Tell me — When you say craft, kind of what does that mean and how does thinking about that factor into the work you do with top performers?

[0:46:49.5] MG: Craft is — It’s so easy to look at an athlete and say, “Oh, I understand their craft. Their craft is dribbling a basketball or throwing a football or throwing a javelin or whatever. That’s super simple.” You look at an artist, you’re like, “Oh, okay. His craft or her craft is playing the guitar or singing.” 

For most people that are not on the world stage or are not professional at what they do, it begs the question what is my craft, and it’s not as complicated as it sounds. The way to think about your craft is what are you most passionate about? What is the thing that you care so much about that you love doing it? You put work into it? It could be a hobby, but that can be your craft. 

I’d also suggest that it’s really important for us to get back to seeing what we do from 9 to 5 or whatever that rhythm is for work for people to seeing that as a primary craft even if it doesn’t have the same type of passion around what it feels like to spin some pottery or to play music on a guitar as a hobby, but to see what we do and how we spend most of our time as a workforce, as that being our primary craft, that’s a really important distinction between being a laborer and being a craftsman. Even if it’s a factory worker, even if whatever — It does not matter. What we’ve found form research is that people that have a deep connection to purpose and meaning in life, they see that the simple bolt that they’re attaching on the factory line to the nut that is eventually one day going to turn into an automobile where people can have some freedom to move around or it’s going to turn into whatever piece of technology that provides creativity for people, that connecting to the deeper part of what they’re doing is significantly important to overall well-being, to happiness, to joy and to purpose in life. 

That science has been around a long time, but what’s happening right now is that the modern pace of instant access and the need for comparing our Instagram highlight reel to other people’s Instagram highlight reel is that we’ve lost our way and we’ve lost our way about what is our true north, what is the craft that we’re working on refining and why are we here. What is the purpose for us to be here, and it’s a difficult conversation that only you can answer for yourself. I would encourage us to take a good look at how we spend our time and to think about the things that we do through the lens of being craftsman.  

[0:49:38.4] MB: The idea of seeing your job as a craft makes me think of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and especially the notion of quality from that book.

[0:49:46.2] MG: Yeah. It’s a classic book. It’s really good. Yeah, certainly, he has pulled on that thread quite a bit. If you haven’t read that book, I highly encourage to take a look at it for sure. 

[0:49:58.2] MB: What is one piece of homework that you would give somebody listening to this episode so that they could concretely implement some of the ideas we’ve talked about today?

[0:50:06.6] MG: Okay. Certainly, taking time to think about and articulate your philosophy, your personal philosophy. How do you do that? Just start writing and just start feeling the words that start thumping when you say, “My personal philosophy is,” and just kind of sense and feel your way through that. That would be a phenomenal and significant investment in yourself to see if you can articulate in 25 words or less what you stand for, what you’re all about, what it is that is your true north, your compass for what you’re doing here in life. That would be a phenomenal thing to do. Maybe even go research other people’s philosophies just to get your juices rolling. 

Then let me add one more thing, and I want to give your listeners two things. That would be one, and if I could add to that, it would be you could even write down the people that have inspired you in life, whether you know them or not, write down their names. Then write next to the names, write down the characteristics that they embody, that they exemplify. Those characteristics will also be part maybe of the words that you choose for your philosophy. That’s a significant contribution to your overall inner engineering, right? We do get to engineer our inner experience. 

The second would be an investment in mindfulness. Mindfulness has been around for 2,600 years. I feel like we’ve moved past the conversation with folks about what it is and why it’s important. I feel like that pop culture has done a great job there. Mindfulness, the actual practice of mindfulness is so powerful and so wonderful to increase our awareness of our inner experience, our thoughts, our emotions, our body sensations as well the awareness of the unfolding world around us so that we can pivot and adjust, that investing in a mindfulness practice will be a second very significant investment in one’s potency in life or efficacy in life. 

How do you it? Mechanically, there’re thousands of mindfulness practices, there are thousands of ways to meditate. Mechanically, if we start it off with some training wheels, it would be as simple as mastering your inhale. Breath in and take a nice deep breath in and maybe that breath lasts for about four to five seconds, somewhere in that range, and master it. How do you master the inhale, is when your mind wanders away from it? Just bring it back. Bring it back to the inhale, and when your mind wanders away again, bring it back. If you ask yourself, “Am I doing it right?” That’s the wandering mind. Just bring it back. 

Then notice the tension at the top of the inhale and master that tension, that pause at the top. It’s not radical, but it’s just enough to say that I’ve got a full breath. Then master the exhale. If the exhale is longer than the inhale, overtime, you’re going to get the benefit of a bit of relaxation. But mindfulness is not a relaxation training. Mindfulness is a focus training. 

As soon as your mind defocuses, moves away from the present moment, which in this case is the breath, your breath, that the moment that you’re aware that you’re away from the most important task at hand that you set up for yourself, the breathing, that moment of awareness is the moment of the work taking place, and so you gently bring it back. It’s like that, “Yes! I’ve realized I’m away. Okay. Come back.” That’s the mechanical part of refocusing back to the present moment. 

If you set a timer and if you follow good science, somewhere between six and eight minutes is a minimal effective dose, and my teacher from, I guess it’s about 20 years ago, is rolling his eyes right now if he’s listening saying, “Mike, are you still thinking about timing yourself? That’s not what it’s about.” 

An optimal dose according to science is somewhere around 20 minutes. It’s not like it’s completely hard science. We’re still trying to figure it out and there are some great researchers that are doing that right now, but somewhere between six and eight minutes is a minimal effective dose and the upper limits are somewhere around 20 minutes. That is what a mental mindfulness practice would look like.

[0:54:19.0] MB: Where can listeners find you and your work online?

[0:54:22.6] MG: Brilliant. The head coach of the Seattle Seahawks, Coach Pete Carroll, who I think is going to go down as one of the great coaches of our era is — That’s an NFL team for people that are not familiar with the National Football League, that he and I about four years ago we created a joint venture where we’ve taken his insights and best practices on how to switch on a culture and my insights and practices on how to train the minds of people that want to become their very best. It’s essentially what we’ve been doing together up at Seattle Seahawks, how to cultivate culture and how to train the minds of people inside of it, and we’ve created a business out of it. 

So you can go to competetocreate.net and those two words are the center of our personal philosophy. His personal philosophy is always compete, to become the best version of yourself, the best dad, the best wife, the best coach, the best friend. Then mine is philosophy is the word create is important, which is every day is an opportunity to create a living masterpiece. 

We took our two set of philosophies and spun it into a business, and that’s competetocreate.net. You can also find me at findingmastery.net, which is a podcast we spun up to have conversations about mastery and with world’s best and a variety of different domains. Them more mechanically on social media to @michaelgervais, it’s G-E-R-V-A-I-S, and on Instagram is @findingmastery.

[0:55:52.7] MB: Michael, this has been a tremendously insightful conversation. There are so much that we got into and so many fascinating insights. Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all of these knowledge and all these practical insights with the listeners.

[0:56:05.5] MG: Matt, thanks for having me on. Like what you’re doing is a fantastic expression of people being able to share what they’ve spent their life figuring out and I felt honored to be in the conversation with you and I hope that some folks have found this fast conversation to have maybe one little gem in there that they can practice and apply, and so thank you for the opportunity.

[0:56:27.7] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say high, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s M-A-T-T@successpodcast.com. I love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email.

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. One; you’re going to get exclusive curated weekly emailed content from us every single week including our Mindset Monday email, which is short, simple tidbits, articles and stories that we've been loving for the last week. Next, you’re going to get an exclusive listener-only chance to shape the show, that includes voting on guests, changing parts of the show, like our intro and outro music and even submitting your own personal questions that we will ask in interviews with our guests. 

Lastly, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we created based on listener demand called How To Organize and Remember Everything. You can get that completely for free along with a surprise bonus guide by signing up and joining the email list today. You can do that by going to successpodcast.com, signing up right on the homepage, or if you're driving, if you're on the go, if you’re on your phone right now, just text the word “smarter”, that's asked “smarter” to the number 44222. 

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

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

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

How To Learn More In Record Time - Speed Reading, Concentration, & Memory with Jim Kwik

How to Learn More in Record Time: Speed Reading, Concentration, and Memory

November 16, 2017

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Listen to the Episode

Why You Need to Hear This

Watch the Episode

The Science of Becoming a Super Learner

Show Notes, Links, and Additional Research

7 Brain Hacks

Reviews of Jim’s Work

Get Help

Episode Transcript

The Science of Becoming a Super Learner 

Do you ever read a page of a book, then stop and realize you don’t remember a single word you just read? Or maybe long sentences take you so long to read that you forget how it started before you even get to the end. Fortunately, we can greatly improve our reading and learning abilities with just a little bit of knowledge.

  A lot of people believe that our abilities, potential, intelligence, and memory are all set in stone. However, in the past 20 years, we’ve learned more about our brains than we ever have. The things we are taught in school are essentially a lie, but by rethinking and altering a few false, core beliefs, we can smooth the path towards mastery.

The good news is that we’re underestimating what we’re actually capable of. That means we can only get better. A few, simple brain hacks will improve our minds and capabilities for the rest of our lives.

From Head Injury to Brain Coach

“My goal is: I want to be a personal trainer—a brain coach if you will—to help people to tap into more of that potential so they could be more productive, have higher performance, and have greater peace of mind in a world where we’re driven to distraction.” – Jim Kwik

 Jim Kwik is a brain coach and the founder of Kwik Learning and SuperheroYou. He has worked with high-profile companies, like Nike, and individuals, like Oprah. His work helps improve people’s reading and learning speed, memory, and brain performance. However, he hasn’t always had a high-octane mind.

His abilities are actually preceded by an early-childhood head injury which made him slow to understand, ruined his focus, and left him with no memory. Though it took him three extra years to learn to read and he struggled through school, it didn’t stop him from becoming the super learner he is today.

When he was about 18, a heavy workload and lack of self-care led him to the hospital again. There, a fall down the stairs left him with another head injury—but this time, it woke him up. He started studying meta-learning (or learning how to learn).

 A deep dive into adult learning theory and multiple intelligence caused a light switch to flip on in him. This gave him a laser-focus, effortless retention, and improved reading abilities. By reading two or three books a week, his grades improved—with his grades, his life improved as well. He thought, “I can’t believe this is not taught back in school,” so he started tutoring.

 One of his first students read 30 books in 30 days. She did it because her mother was given 60-days to live. In the books she read, she was looking for answers to help her mother. Six months later, her mother was alive and getting better, which she attributed to the information her daughter shared from the books she read.         

Learning: Mankind’s Superpower

Jim believes: If knowledge is power, then learning is our superpower. He comments about how modern workers are paid less for brute strength and more for brain strength. In our knowledge economy, knowledge is profit; so the faster you learn the faster you earn.

He laments about how people suffer from digital overload and dementia. The amount of information available on our smart devices easily distract us and decreases our use of memory. Thus, the issue is: How do we churn through so much information, retain it, and apply it usefully? The answer and goal are at the heart of Jim’s work.

How to Learn Faster

“I think people first have to start with what’s important to them, meaning that motivation is really a key drive towards learning.” – J.K.

 Jim doesn’t simply focus on speed-reading, though he believes everyone can double or triple their reading skill with a few brain hacks. Due to his childhood struggle with reading, he spends a lot of time on smart reading, or how to comprehend and retain more information when reading.

He challenges the audience to read one book a week, then brings up that the average person only reads one or two books a year. A book written by an expert contains decades of experience, and that wealth of knowledge could be learned in just a few days.

Jim recalls when Warren Buffet shared with Bill Gates that he had probably wasted 10-years of his life by reading slowly. Between processing information and reading emails, blogs, websites, books, newspapers, and magazines, we stand to save a lot of time by improving our reading speed.

He breaks down some simple math. If you currently read four-hours a day but double your reading speed and save two-hours a day, then you would save 730-hours a year. Even if you only save one-hour a day, that’s 365-hours a year—or nine 40-hour workweeks.

When Jim was discussing the future of education with Bill Gates, he brought up meta-learning and Bill Gates brought up technology, but a third person asked, “Is there anything missing?” And Jim believes the key ingredient is motivation. Because many people know what they should do, but they still don’t do it.

H-Cubed: A Success Formula

“I would say when it comes to reading, which is one of the focuses here, if you want to boost your comprehension, first of all, have a purpose for why you read.” – J.K.

Jim talks about the Three Hs: Head, heart, and hands. You can visualize, affirm, set goals, and have a vision in your head, but if you aren’t acting with your hands, then nothing will change. So he usually looks at the “heart” of this formula, or your “why” for learning.

 “Where your focus goes, energy flows,” he says. As the symbol of emotions, Jim views the heart in this formula as a representation of the fuel for your car, because your emotions and purpose will compel you to do anything, such as speed reading.

 He sees many people wasting time studying something that isn’t relevant to them and not filtering it out appropriately; so first, you should be clear on your outcome. He says, “If you have the greatest interest and higher levels of motivation, then automatically, your retention and focus are going to be boosted and enhanced.”

He believes we grossly underestimate our own capabilities, and half of success is just mindset. Instead of a fixed mindset, we should adopt a growth mindset. If you say you can’t do something, then you need to tack on a simple, three-letter word at the end of the statement: “Yet.” Otherwise, you limit yourself and prevent any growth from ever happening.

GPA: Another Success Formula

“The average CEO reads about four or five books a month—about a book a week.” – J.K.

 Jim shares another formula for success: GPA (or Goal, Purpose, and Action). He parallels this with the previous formula: Goal is in the head, Purpose is in the heart, and Action is in the hands. To take this out of the abstract, he applies this to reading by setting a goal of reading a book a week.

He comments how the median word-count for books is 64,000 words. For the average reader reading at 200-words per minute, that’s 320-minutes to finish the book. Across seven-days, that’s about 45-minutes a day. Not only does this show you the power of reading every day, it also demonstrates the power of breaking down big goals into smaller, more attainable goals.

To compound the benefits of reading daily, he also comments on the power of winning the first hour or two of your day. Instead of playing on your phone, which distracts you and wires you to be distracted all day, you can build momentum by doing something productive that wires you to be reactive.

Mental Fitness

“There’s two things I do every day: I like to run, and I like to read.” – Will Smith

When he coached Will Smith, Jim noticed that he did two things daily: One physical, and the other mental. If you’re trying to improve your mental intelligence, then improving your mental fitness might even be more important. Like a personal trainer at the gym, Jim wants your mental muscles to be focused and have energy, agility, flexibility, and lots of power.   

Visual Pacers

“Using a visual pacer will boost your reading speed 25% to 50%.” – J.K.

Whether you are tying to improve your reading speed, focus, or comprehension, a visual pacer will help all three. It’s as simple as using your finger, a pen, or a computer mouse to underline the words as you read. This works because your senses of sight and touch are closely linked, just like smell and taste, so your eyes are attracted to motion (in this case, the motion of your finger or other pacer).

Jim suggests you test it for yourself. Just read anything for 60-seconds without your finger, then count the lines you read. When you’ve done that, reset the timer, and do it again, but underline the words this time. When you count the number of lines you read this time, it will be about 25-50% more. Also, when you ask someone to count the number of lines they just read, they’ll use their finger to count the lines! That’s because it improves your focus.

 However, it’s really about reading for maximum understanding and comprehension. Simply reading fast or slow and trying to retain every bit of information isn’t always the answer, it’s dependent on your desired outcome from reading. Most people don’t retain anything when they read slowly; that’s because their minds get distracted and tired. When you read fast, your mind focuses on the reading material more and boosts comprehension.

Sub-Vocalization

“If you have to say all the words to understand what you’re reading, you can only read as fast as you could talk—not as fast as you could think.” – J.K.

While visual pacers help you read faster, sub-vocalization makes you read slower. “We don’t have to say words in our mind to understand them,” Jim explains. Ninety-five percent of the words we read every day are called “sight words.” That means we don’t have to pronounce them to understand them, because we’ve seen them so often.

Rituals, Routines, and Habits

“Excellence really comes down to a set of rituals and routines and habits.” – J.K.

Have you ever noticed that Mark Zuckerberg always wears the same t-shirt? According to scientific research, that’s because we can only make a certain amount of good decisions a day before we develop “decision fatigue.” Jim found this out when he was doing research on surgeons, as the number of mistakes they make increases as their starting times begin later in the day. Why would you waste one of your good decisions on what you’re going to wear?

Jim believes discipline gives you freedom, contrary to the idea that it takes it away. If you’re doing the hard things, then life gets easy; but if you do the easy things, then life gets hard. He then brings up Dr. BJ Fogg, a researcher at Stanford University, and a specific model to undo bad habits: BEMAT (Behavior Equals Motivation, Ability, and Trigger).

If your desired behavior is to read every day, then you need a proper incentive (or motivation), the ability to read, and a trigger. The trigger is what many people ignore. The trigger is a reminder for your desired behavior. Jim explains that he does squats every time he’s on an elevator—the trigger is getting on an elevator, and the behavior is doing squats.

 To help start the habit of reading every day, just say to yourself, “I’ll pick up a book and read one word.” This is a tiny, easily manageable task. And since the book is already in your hand, you’re most likely going to read a few more words, then a paragraph, and finally a few pages. That one word is just the first domino that builds momentum for bigger, better habits.

The Pomodoro Technique

“Reasons reap rewards.” – J.K.

 After 30-45 minutes of an activity, such as reading, there are huge dips of focus due to primacy and recency. Primacy is a memory principle that says you tend to remember things from the beginning, such as the first few people you meet at a party. Recency says you tend to remember things from the end, such as the last few people you meet at a party. What happens in the middle though?

 While everyone knows there’s a learning curve, they don’t realize there’s also a forgetting curve. This curve also causes us to forget up to 80% of what we learn within two days. An answer to mitigating how much information you lose in the middle is the Pomodoro Technique. With it, you take a five-minute break every 30-45 minutes.

 By splitting up a 5-hour party or work session into 45-minute chunks, you have more beginnings and ends with fewer lost, middle chunks. Ideally, during your five-minute breaks, you’ll choose to do the things that are good for your brain, such as movement, deep breathing, and hydration.

The Power of Teaching

“We learn best by co-creating it with other people.” – J.K.

Jim shares another simple brain hack to boost your comprehension: Read something, then talk about it with someone else. “That’s why book clubs are so powerful, because learning is not always solo,” he adds. When you teach someone something, it’s no longer random information from a third-party, now you’re making it personal for yourself in an effort to make them understand.

He also suggests learning something with the intention of teaching it to someone else, because, “You get to learn it twice.” This will help you accelerate your learning since it makes you more active, ask more questions, and take better notes because you have a stake in it.

Reticular Activating System

Jim recalls a time when his sister kept sending him photos of pugs. He finally asked her why she kept sending him these dog pictures, and he realized her birthday was coming up and she wanted one. After that realization, he started seeing pugs everywhere he went. That’s because of our reticular activating system.

It turns out, if you have a question, then you start seeing answers everywhere because it acts like a magnet that pulls all the relevant information to you. It’s not that the people around Jim suddenly got pugs, it’s that they were always there; but he only just started noticing them. Once she made it important to him, he started seeing them everywhere.

Mind Maps and Taking and Making Notes

“Is it because they’re geniuses that they journal all the time or is it because they’re taking notes and journaling all the time that makes them a genius?” – J.K.

Jim explains the concept behind mind mapping, which is essentially a bubble map with a main idea in the middle, all the associated ideas branching out from it, and even more associated ideas branching out from those. It takes 20-pages worth of notes and puts it into one-page view, so you can see all the associations and relationships between the information.

Next, he explains the difference between taking and making notes—two useful tactics for learning. Taking notes is where you capture information, strategies, or ideas. This is a factual copy of what you’ve learned. Making notes is writing your own impressions of what you’re capturing, what questions you have, and how it relates to what you already know. This is a creative attempt of combining the new information with your preexisting knowledge.

Jim suggests taking a piece of paper, splitting it in two with a line down the middle, then putting “Taking Notes” on one side and “Making Notes” on the other. The thoughts you have when your mind wanders while listening to a podcast or any speaker are excellent for making notes.

Learn Faster with FAST

· Forget – Forget what you know (or think you know) and have an open mind, forget what is unimportant, and forget your limitations.

·  Active – Be active when you learn by asking questions and taking notes.

·  State – Change your state by adding emotion to your learning process, and you will learn faster.

·  Teach –Teach what you learn, so it will benefits others as well as yourself.

 Jim shares this acronym as another strategy to learn faster. He explains that multi-tasking is a completely debunked myth. When you switch between tasks, you get a dopamine reward each time for the novelty, which only tricks you into feeling like you’re being productive. In reality, it takes you 5-20 minutes just to regain your focus and flow.             

He also explains that all learning is state dependent. A state is a snapshot of the mood of your mind and body—your emotional state of how you feel. This is important because it’s key to quick recall. “Information combined with emotions becomes a long-term memory,” he says. He compares this to how a song or smell can take us back to a distant memory.

Lastly, he says we should be a thermostat, not a thermometer. While a thermometer simply reacts or reflects the environment, a thermostat sets a standard or goal and the environment raises to meet that standard. The standard you set is how you feel about things, and that change in how you feel will help you learn faster.

Action Steps

“Every 30-days, take on a new challenge—because when we’re green, we’re growing; and when we’re brown, we’re rotting.” – J.K.

As a starting place for the audience, Jim invites everyone to listen to his podcast. They are 10-minute long podcasts and provide brain hacks for free. Next, he encourages everyone to “schedule it.” Whatever it is that you talk about doing it, you have to write and down and make it real. It takes the invisible and makes it visible on the calendar.

He adds that he has a very large “Not to Do” list, such as not using his phone for the first hour of his day, as well as a “To Learn” list. He encourages us to dedicate our lives to learning by picking subjects and skills that we’re interested in. Finally, if you want to grow to your fullest potential, then you have to schedule time for yourself.

In this episode we discuss how our guest went from a childhood head injury to becoming an accelerated learning expert. We cover memory, speed reading, improving your focus, taking notes like an expert and go deep into tactics for accelerated learning. We talk about the importance of mastering the fundamentals, and get into tons of highly specific and actionable advice you can use today with our guest Jim Kwik. 

Jim Kwik is the founder of Kwik Learning and Superhero You. Jim is a brain coach in speed reading, memory improvement, brain performance, and accelerated learning. Jim’s methods and work have been utilized by with several high profile companies including Nike, SpaceX, and GE, as well as individuals such as the Clintons, Oprah, Richard Branson and more.

• We’ve discovered more in the last 20 years about the human brain than we learned in the 2000 years before that

• How Jim went from growing up with learning challenges from an early childhood head injury to become an expert in accelerated learning and speed reading

• How to read 30 books in 30 days

• How we can actually retain what we read

• Knowledge is not power, its only potential power

• The one super power you want to master in the 21st century (learn faster)

• Traditional speed reeding, skimming, skipping words, getting the gist of something is not enough - its about fully capturing and retaining the information

• The average person reads 1-2 books per year, but the average CEO reads 4-5 books per month

• What Bill Gates said the #1 super power he would pick would be

• Warren buffet said he wasted 10 years of his life reading too slowly

• How you can gain 2 months of productive time per year

• Why motivation is such a critical component of accelerated learning - have a purpose for why you read

• "H-Cubed” - 3 things you need for motivation to have accelerated learning

• The fastest way to read something is not to read it at all - figured out what your end goal is

• How you can remember names more effectively & become a great connector

• If you forget someone’s name, you show that they’re not important to you

• Self Awareness is a super power

• “Smart reading” - what’s your goal for reading these books?

• How to give a speech without notes

• Half of success is just mindset, then get the mechanics right

• Brain Hacks for Speed Reading

• “Leaders are readers” and why Jim thinks you should read 30 minutes per day

• 12 things Jim does every morning to jumpstart his brain

• Mental fitness is as important, if not more important, than mental intelligence

• If you read 45 minutes a day, on average, you should be able to read a book a week

• Using a “visual pacer” and how that brain hack can help you instantly double your reading speed

• The adventure of lifelong learning

• One of the biggest traps in the personal development field is the “next new thing”

• People who are truly on the path to Mastery focus on the fundamentals and get REALLY REALLY GOOD at the BASICS

• How to get a 20-50% boost in your reading speed right now

• Excellence comes down to a set of routines, rituals, and habits

• If we always do the easy thing in life, life becomes hard, if we do the hard things, life becomes easy

• BEMAT = behavior equals motivation ability and trigger

• The primacy principle and the recency principle - and why you should chunk and take breaks to create more “beginnings and ends”

• Start as simply as possible - pick up a book and read one word

• "Upleveling your ability to process information” not just skimming - reading so that you understand

• Another brain hack - talk to someone else about what you just learned - we learn best by co-creating and sharing information

• If you make everything important than nothing is important

• It's not about reading slowly or quickly - its about reading for understanding - reading faster creates flow and focus

• Read for maximum comprehension and understanding for the goal you have for your reading

• You can learn things faster by overcoming the forgetting curve - you forget 80% of what you’ve learned within 2 days

• There is a difference between taking notes vs making notes - note taking is capturing ideas, note making is writing your impressions of what you’re capturing - you’re CREATING, questions you have, how it relates to what you already know, how you would teach it to someone else

• Ultimately all learning comes down to associations - that’s why metaphors are so powerful

• Mindmapping is an incredibly powerful strategy for you to remember concepts and ideas

• Most successful people in any industry journal on a regular basis - journalling helps us retain information and make new associations to things

• Brain hack - learn something with the intention of teaching someone else very specific - or think you were coaching someone or teaching them or giving a presentation on these topics. When you teach something you get to learn it twice.

• The FAST method - 4 strategies for learning anything more quickly

• Forget what you already know about a subject (set it aside)

  1. Active - be active about learning (doing problems, engaging your mind, etc). Learning is not a spectator sport.

  2. State - all learning is state dependent. Information + emotion becomes a long term memory.

  3. Teach - learn to benefit yourself and learn to teach others

• Forget about your limitations - if you fight for your limitations, you get to keep them - add the word “yet” to negative self talk - be very careful to the words you put behind the words “I am”

• Be a thermostat not a thermometer

• To turn knowledge into real power - you have to schedule it into an activity and execute that

Thank you so much for listening!

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

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better?

Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Personal Site] Jim Kwik

• [Website] Kwik Brain

• [Article] The Zeigarnik Effect and Open Loops by Stephanie Booth

• [Wiki page] Mind Map

• [TEDTalk] How Great Leaders Inspire Action by Simon Sinek

Reviews of Jim’s Work

“Get his course. It will change your life in ways you cannot imagine. Jim’s training is incredible. I read faster because of Jim. I have a better memory because of him. LOVE his stuff. Get his course. It will change your life in ways you cannot imagine.”
-Brendon Burchard, New York Times Bestselling Author, Personal Development & Marketing Trainer

“Real thanks to Jim Kwik and the whole team for the minds that they are creating, how they are empowering people to change the world and commit to making this a better planet.”
-Peter Diamandis, CEO of XPRIZE & Chairman Of Singularity University

“Jim is one of the foremost authorities in the world on this subject. Jim makes it easy, fast, and efficient. So then you can say to yourself, I can learn anything that I need to learn.”
-Brian Tracy, Chairman & CEO of Brian Tracy International & Top Selling Author of Over 70 Books

“Unleash Your Superbrain! Never forget a name again and read faster and smarter with memory expert Jim Kwik.”
-Success Magazine

“There is no one that I trust more than Jim Kwik and his programs to optimize brain functioning.”
-Dr. Daniel Amen, New York Times Bestselling Author Change Your Brain, Change Your Life

“Jim’s superpower is learning. The ability to learn quickly is a distinct and powerful competitive advantage in business. It enables all success in a fast paced, fast changing world.”
-Forbes Magazine

Episode Transcript

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

[0:00:12.0] MB: Welcome to the Science of Success, the number one evidence-based growth podcast on the internet, with more than a million downloads in over a hundred countries. 

In this episode we discuss how our guest went from a childhood head injury to becoming an accelerated learning expert. We covered memory, speed reading, improving your focus, taking notes like an expert. We go deep into the tactics of accelerated learning. We talk about the importance of mastering the fundamentals and get into tons of highly specific and actionable advice that you can use with our guest, Jim Kwik. 

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

Next, you’re going to get a curated weekly email from us every single Monday called Mindset Monday. Listeners have been absolutely loving this. It’s simple, short, sweet, a few articles, stories, videos that we find really fascinating that we’ve enjoyed in the last week. 

Lastly, you’re going to get a listener exclusive chance to shape the show. You get to vote on guests, submit your own personal questions that we will ask the guest in interviews and vote on changes to the show, like new intro music and much more. 

Sign up and join the email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage, or just text the word “smarter” to the number 44222 if you’re on the go or if that’s easier. Again, that’s “smarter” to 44222. 

In our previous episode, we discussed how our guest went from a hard-nosed skeptic who thought most self-help was BS, to someone who uncovered that evidence-based growth strategies that actually work. We talked about guest journey from meeting self-help gurus, to spiritual leaders and even neuroscientists to discover the biggest lessons about improving your mind and body and the simple, scientifically validated tools that evidence demonstrates are the best ways to be happier, with Dan Harris. If you want to know the science about being happy, listen to that episode. 

[0:02:32.0] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Jim Kwik. Jim is the founder of Kwik Learning and SuperheroYou. He’s a brain coach in speed reading, memory improvement, brain performance and accelerated learning. His methods and work have been utilized with several high-profile companies including Nike, SpaceX and GE as well as individuals such as the Clintons, Oprah and Richard Branson. 

Jim, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:02:57.5] JK: Matt, thank you so much for having me. I’ve been looking forward to this, and thank everyone who’s joining us.  

[0:03:02.2] MB: We’re super excited to have you on here today. For listeners who might not be familiar with you and your background, tell us a little bit about your story and how you got so interested in accelerated learning. 

[0:03:13.8] JK: You could say when people see on my stage, they see me do these demos where I’ll memorize a hundred people’s names forward and backwards or these hundred words or hundred numbers and I always tell people, “I don’t do this to impress you. I really do this to express to you what’s really possible,” because the truth is each of us, everyone who’s listening could also do that and a lot more. The only reason why we can’t is just because we are taught, if anything, a lie. A lie that’s somehow that our intelligence, our potential, our memory, abilities is somehow fixed, like our shoe size. We have discovered more about the human brain more in the past 20 years than the previous 2,000 years, and what we fund is we’re grossly underestimating its potential. 

That’s what I’m really excited about, and I know this from personal experience, because as you’re asking, my origin story started — I wasn’t born with these abilities. If anything, I grew up with learning challenges and some people are surprised when they hear me say that, but it came from an early childhood injury. I had a head injury when I was a kid and I was very slow to understand things. Teachers would have to repeat themselves numerous times. I had no memory to speak of. I have very, very poor focus. It actually took me an extra three years to learn how to read. That was really debilitating for me and really affected me when I was a child. 

I struggled all through school. When I was about 18 years old, it got so bad. I was looking at everybody. I’m looking for a fresh start sometimes and I want to show the world and show my family and my friends and myself that I did, that I was smart enough, that I was good enough in these areas. I started taking on a lot of workload and I actually was ended up being hospitalized again because I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping, I wasn’t working out. I wasn’t doing anything remotely, looking like self-care, and I ended up passing out in the hospital one night because that’s where I was living practically. I fell down a flight of stairs, I hit my head again. I was in the hospital and I just — A part of me woke me at the same time thinking there has to be a better way. 

I started studying, doing a deep dive instead of on subjects in schools. School teaches you what to learn; math, history, science, Spanish, all the important classes, but there was zero classes on how to learn. Just like what we’re talking about in the beginning, this idea of meta-learning, learning how to learn, adult learning theory. I wanted to solve this riddle that, basically, how does my brain work so I could work my brain better? I did a deep dive into adult learning theory and multiple intelligence. It is the early, like old school, the art of memory training and speed reading. 

About 60 days into it, a light switch flipped on and I just started. A whole new world opened up to me. I started to understand things. I started to have this laser-focus. I started to retain information almost without trying. I started to be able to adopt my reading abilities to the point where I never finished a book cover to cover, and I was reading like a good book or two or three a week, and my grades improve, and with my grades improving, my life improved. 

Really, Matt, the reason why I’m still doing it to this day, a couple of decades later, is because one of the first students I started tutoring this, because I was like, “I can’t believe this is not taught back in school.” One of my very first students, she read 30 books in 30 days. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine going on Amazon and picking up 30 business marketing entrepreneur or leadership, in health, in relationship, whatever, topic you’re interested in, picking up 30 of those books and then finishing it within a month’s time. It blew my mind. I wanted to find out not how she did it, but why she did it, and I found out that through asking that her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Was given 60 days to live, two months only to live, and the book she was reading were books to help save her mother’s life. I was blown away because I found out six months later that not only does her mother alive. She’s really started to get better. Doctors don’t know how or why. They were calling it a miracle. But her mother attributed 100% to the great advice she got from her daughter that learned them from all these books. That’s where I realized at that moment, I realized that if knowledge is power — We’ve all heard that, right? If knowledge is power, then learning is your super power. Learning is our super power. 

I think, now, in today’s millennium of the mind, we live in an age where our greatest wealth is found between our ears. Like no longer are we paid like an industrial age for our brute strength. It’s our brain strength. Like nobody listening here is paid for their muscle power. They’re compensated, rewarded for find-tuning their mind power, because we live in this knowledge economy, and knowledge is not only power, knowledge is profit. I don’t just mean financial profit, that’s obvious. The faster you could learn, the faster you could earn. Just all the advantages in life; in your health, in your relationships, in your career and so on. 

A lot of it, as you know with your show, the Science of Success, there’s a science in art to being smart, and that’ what I’ve devoted my life to. I never want people to struggle the way I struggled with. I think nowadays people are suffering from all these digital overload and digital dementia, where we’re losing our memories, because we’re relying on our smart devices, or digital distraction. Who doesn’t feel like their brain is not wired differently, because they can’t focus in any area, because their mind is going place to place to place, to phone notification, and texts, and WhatsApp, and social media, and emails and so much to keep up with. It feels like it’s taking a sip of water out of the fire hose. 

My goal is I want to be a personal trainer, a brain coach if you will to help people to tap in to more of that potential so they could be more productive, higher performance, have greater peace of mind in a world where we’re driven to distraction. 

[0:08:50.6] MB: There’s so much I want to unpack from that. Just starting out, one of the thing that sticks out to me, I want to understand the tension or kind of the connection between doing something, like reading 30 books in a month and how you can actually retain all that information. There’s so much, as you talked about, overload and digital dementia, and there’s just a deluge of knowledge that I feel like it goes in ear and out the other. How can we simultaneously churn through so much and actually retain it and turn it into sort of applied knowledge that becomes useful and relevant?

[0:09:28.2] JK: That’s really the goal; applied knowledge, because knowledge in itself if not power. We know it’s cliché, but we’ve heard it so much, but just all clichés, there’s truth to it, that knowledge is not power. It’s only potential power. It only becomes power when we apply it, when we take action upon it.

This is one that I think if there’s one super power to master in the 21st century, I think it’s the ability to learn faster. We do that with our podcast show and our online programs and we focus in areas of memory improvement, of speed reading, focus on concentration, in note taking and listening skills. These are the things I wish we would have learned back in school. There was never a class on memory. 

I think once you’re talking about when your people are reading, are they really retaining what they read? For example, a lot of people, like traditional speed reading programs taught years ago, and in some areas it’s evolved, some areas it hasn’t. Traditional speed reading is more associated with skimming or skipping words or getting the gist of what you’re reading, which is fine, because I think, for some people, maybe that’s all they need. They’re looking for a very specific information, and once they get it, that’s all that they need and they could take an exam and then they could just forget it and that’s all. 

For me, that was not the case. I grew up not being able to read very well, and so that was always something I’ve always wanted to conquer and a challenge that led to a greater change. The methods that I teach are really focused around not just speed reading. I think everybody has the potential, double or triple their reading speed and with the same level of retention and comprehension, and we could go over some of those brain hacks. 

For me, also, it made sense not just speed reading, but smart reading. I like to spend a significant amount of time teaching people how to comprehend information, even if they’re not reading it faster. How to actually understand more of it and retain more of it also as well. I like to get people who are listening here, if they’re up for the challenge. I just did our own podcast episode on how to read one book a week. 

You know how many books the average person reads? Obviously, you read a lot more than the average person, but it’s about one or two books a year, which I find really scary, because I think there’s so much great information out there that if somebody wrote took decades of experience and they put it into a book, maybe they are experts in marketing, or leadership, or optimal performance, health, relationships, whatever it is, and they put it into a book, and you could download decades into days. 

I think people first have to start with what’s important to them, meaning that motivation is really a key drive towards learning. I remember I was skimming a talk recently in Silicon Valley, and afterwards Bill Gates came up to me. He was in the audience. We started talking about the future of education, and he’s an avid reader. In fact, I asked him, talking about speed reading, I asked him if he got any one super power, what would it be. He looked at me and says, “Jim, the ability to read faster.” I was like, “Wow! I could totally help with you that.” 

Warren Buffett has said to Bill that he’s probably wasted 10 years of his life reading slowly, because think about how much reading we have to do. Probably about four hours a day, half on our workday is spent just processing information, reading emails and blogs and websites and books, newspapers, magazines, you name it. If you could just double your reading speed and save two hours a day, two hours a day over the course of a year is how many hours, right? We’re talking about 730 hours — Let’s just say if you save one hour a day. One hour a day over the course of a year is 365 hours. If you divide that 40-hour work weeks, that’s more than nine weeks of productivity, two months of productivity you get back saving one hour a day. 

I think starting point with reading, I think you want to tap into this motivation, because when I was talking to Bill Gates about this, we’re talking about the future of education. I was taking in a meta-learning approach, adult learning theory, and he was talking about it from a technology standpoint where those two things collide, and somebody who was listening was saying, “Is there anything missing?” We’re talking about it. Is there a thing we came up with for that legs of a stool, if you will, is motivation, like human motivation, like what drives people to do what they do, because a lot of people know what they should be doing, but why aren’t they executing and why aren’t they inconsistent, why aren’t they not completing it? 

I would say when it comes to reading, which is one of the focuses here, if you want to boost your comprehension, first of all, have a purpose why you read. If we’re talking about motivation, I always talk about the success formula. I call it H-cubed. H, the letter H. Three H’s; head, heart, hands. Head, heart, hands. Meaning that you could visualize things in your head. You could affirm things in your head. You could set goals in your head and have this vision for what you want things to be and imagine it, but if you’re not acting with your hands, nothing change. You’re not taking action. 

Usually what I would look at as the second H, which is the heart, which is the symbol of emotions. Where your focus goes, energy flows. What’s the fuel for the car? Everyone, most of your listeners probably read a great book called Start With Why, by Simon Sinek, I assume. Tapping into you why for learning is very important. 

Where I would start with when it comes to speed running, even before reading faster, I would tap into your purpose, because the fastest way to read something is just not to read it at all. I see so many people wasting time going through and studying something that might not be relevant and they’re not filtering out for it. Be clear on what your outcome is, going back to motivation. What’s it going to give for you? 

For the same reason, like one of the big focuses of our company and our podcast is focusing on helping people to remember names, because I think that’s some of the most successful people out there are really great networks, they’re really great connectors, they have great charisma and they have this unique ability to show that they care to other people. I think that starts with the very first words out of your mouth which is like introducing yourself. 

The problem is when people forget other people’s names, they communicate that that person is not important to them and it’s really hard to show someone you really care for their future, their family, their business, whatever it is, if you don’t care enough just to remember them. 

That’s just really starting with human motivation, and I think the self-awareness — I do believe self-awareness is a super power to understand intrinsically, extrinsically what motivates you to learn. When it comes to speed reading, I would start with smart reading, understand what your goal is for reading the books that you’re reading, because if you have greatest interest and higher levels of motivation, automatically, your retention, your focus, is going to be boosted and enhanced. 

Then when it comes to tactical things, I am not really big on getting soft information. I remember years ago, I’ve learned these skills, and I was speaking on it. I started to build a good reputation for speaking and making entertaining with these mental feats, kind of like a magician who does their tricks, if you will, but then I show, I pull the curtain behind and take people behind the curtain and show them exactly how to do it so they could be the incredible mentalists as well. 

We were getting home one night and the person, I didn’t know who it was, so I answered it and he says, “You got to help me, Jim. I have a conference tomorrow and my main speaker, they cancelled.” I was like, “Who’s this? How did you get my number?” “It came through a referral.” Basically, this person couldn’t get out for inclement weather or whatever, to do a keynote, and they needed somebody to speak on stage. 

I was like, “Well, what’s the topic? I’m not really prepared for this.” He tells me the topic. I was like, “Why are you calling me? I know absolutely nothing about that topic.” He was like, “Yeah, but this guy, he wrote a book.” I’m like, “So?” He’s like, “I heard you’re a speed reader.” I’m like, “Okay.” He’s like, “Well, can you show up a little bit early and read the book?” I was like, “Well, this is really going to cost you.” 

I ended up going there. The talk was around the 12:00. I ended up getting there around 9:30, 10:00. I read the book and then I present on it, and humbly it was the highest rated talk of the whole conference. I don’t think it’s because of my ability to present. I’ve never taken one minute of public speaking, but I was able to read it and also retain it, and also I do this whole thing on how to give a speech without notes and go through it, and I taught it. I think everybody has that ability, and I know it. Just after teaching this for 25 years and having students online, students in over 150 countries, that we grossly are underestimating our own capabilities and we’re faster and we’re smarter than we think. 

I’m just putting this out there. Just to start with, I think that half of success is just mindset, and I do believe — That’s why I think it’s great with your show, having people like Carol Dweck and all these amazing icons and experts talking about the power of mindset and growth mindset and such. I really think that’s a starting point. But the other half is really what we teach, which are all the mechanics. Not the person that fixes your car, but like the tools, the strategies, the step-by-step recipes, if you will, to learn another language, to read a book a day, to be able to walk into a room and meet 30 strangers and leave saying, “Bye,” remembering every single one of their names, because I think these are critical skills. 

Especially, I know a lot of your listeners are thinking about starting their own business, or they are entrepreneurs, or anybody has a relationship with a human being. These are super powers that’s attainable for anybody.

[0:19:00.2] MB: There’s so many things I want to dig into from that. Let’s start with share a couple of the strategies that you have for speed reading. What are some of these brain hacks? 

[0:19:10.3] JK: Okay. What I would start with if you want to — People, their goal is to read more. Let’s say they want to read — I would start with a goal. Let’s say with college students and high schools, I talk about their GPA, but I don’t talk about like their grade point averages. I do it as more of like a success formula which G stands for goal, P stands for purpose and A stands for the action that’s going to reach that goal. Kind of like H-cubed. 

The goal is inside the head. The purpose is inside the heart. The action lies inside the hands. Having a book, let’s say, starting with the G in terms of goal. I would have a goal for reading. I think one of the most important — I challenge everyone to do this also, is leaders are readers, and I challenge everybody who’s not already doing this consistently to read 30 minutes a day. I do this whole morning routine where I have 12 things I do every single morning to jumpstart my brain and I try to hit most of those 12 things. 

I think, as you’ve heard many times, and I’m not the person to talk about this. If you win the first hour or two of your day, then you could win the day. I think people have really bad habits in the morning, like playing with their phone and stuff like that distracts them and wires them to be distracted, wires them to be reactive. 

Going back to how I started my day, I start more like — My goal, things I want to be able to accomplish. You always start with a goal. If we’re talking about speed reading, I would have a goal on your reading. Let’s say maybe it is to read one book a week. If you break that down, when it comes to hacking reading — I was looking on Amazon and said that about the middle amount of words per book is about 64,000 words. That’s a really large number, but if you break it down, say the average person reads about 200 words per minute, we’re talking about 320 minutes approximately to read a book. If you break that down into, let’s say, seven days, we’re talking about approximately 45 minutes of reading a day, which makes it much more doable. It’s not like this unattainable goal for people who just never start with reading. I would chart, really hit, see if you could do 30 minutes and start with 30 minutes a day.  

One of my favorite actors is Will Smith, and I had the privilege to be able to coach him, and he has this phrase where he says, “There’s two things I do every day. I like to run. I like to read.” I like to run; meaning something to do with something physical. I like to read; do something mental. 

When it comes to your brain — What I do is I help people to improve their mental intelligence, and I think it’s great to be able to recall facts and figures and [inaudible 0:21:37.8] all this stuff. As important, if not, more important than mental intelligence, is mental fitness. Really, when I talk about being a brain coach, just like how a physical trainer, a personal trainer at the gym will make your muscles faster and make it stronger, give it energy and give it focus, agility. That’s what I want for your mental muscles. I want your mental muscles to be focused. I want it to have energy, agility, flexibility, lots of power there. A lot of it is underused. 

Going back to reading, breaking it down to really set goals, I challenge people to read 30 minutes a day, maybe up to 45 minutes. Finish a book a week, and that would change your life. They say that the — I was looking online and I saw these reports are people reading — The average person reads one or two books a years. The average CEO reads about four or five books a month, about a book a week. I would commit to seeing if you can do 30 minutes a day and watch your life transform completely, because you feed your brain, it’s good things in, good things out. 

When it comes to the mechanics of reading, there’s whole programs on this. Fundamentally, people want to improve usually their reading speed, their focus or comprehension. One of the things that will help all three of these things is using what they call a visual pacer. This is such an easy brain hack, and I really have to emphasize and pull out for a minute before I go into this. As you’re listening to this, I doubt this is the first show you’ve ever listened to, right? If you’re listening to this show, you listen to other shows, you’ve read other books and going to conferences, because you’re on this path, this adventure of lifelong learning, because you know in order for your life to grow, you need to grow. Your income to grow, you need to grow. 

I would say that one of the dangers and the traps in the personal development field is this idea where people always want the next best thing, and I totally get it, because our minds thrive on novelty. But there is a difference between a dabbler and somebody on the path of mastery. I find that the people that are really on the path of mastery, that the people that I get to coach on a regular basis and spend time with that are icons in technology or entertainment or in politics or what have you, they really focus on the fundamentals and they get really, really good at the basics. It’s that idea with that quote with Bruce Lee saying, “I’m not scared of anything. The only thing I’m scared of is I’m not scared about — I’m not scared of the man who practiced 10,000 kicks once. What I’m scared of is the person who practiced one kick 10,000 times.” Metaphorically, the 10,000 hours and there’s some misunderstandings around that. The idea here is getting really good at the basics. What I’m going to give you is very basic and fundamental, and yet that’s going to give you — Those are the things that are going to give you the highest returns. 

For example, my talk about a visual pacer when you read. A visual pacer is like underlining the words as you read with a pen, a highlighter, a pencil, your finger, mouse on a computer, whatever it is, will boost your reading speed, your focus and your comprehension. Simple. Again, it’s common sense, and I’m going to explain why it works. The common sense is not — As we know, it’s not often a common practice. 

The reason why it works is when you’re underlining the words with your finger, as you’re underlying, not skipping not anything. Fancy finger motions I don’t think are necessary where you’re taking your finger and running it down the page and making it look like an S. You’re skipping over big pieces of information. My clients, some of the top financial advisers, doctors, attorneys in the world. You don’t want your doctor just get the gist of what he’s reading or she’s reading, right? That wouldn’t be the [inaudible 0:25:15.3]. You’d be very scared to go to that kind of doctor. 

Using a visual pacer will boost your reading speed 25% to 50%. Now, I don’t know if that sounds remarkable or not. I was blown away when I first saw this, and I’m not expecting people to believe what I’m saying. I’m saying you are the expert. Test it for yourself . Read something. Take a book. Pick up any book in your home or your office, read for 60 seconds, count the number of lines that you just read, and then reset the timer and then this time underline the words as you read the next 60 seconds and you’ll find that second number will be about 25% to 50% boost instantly with very, very little practice. Maybe people have to practice for a few minutes, they get a feel for whatever it is. 

Some people actually improve 100% their reading speed just using a visual pacer. That’s pretty remarkable, right? A 25%, 50% jump doesn’t sound like a lot. How many people would have loved to get in the 25%, 50% return on their investments this past year? It’s incredible, right? That reading takes time, and time is money. 

Let’s unpack this. The reason why using the visual pacer while you reads works. Number one is it’s interesting children do it. Every single child, when they’re learning to read will use their finger to help them maintain focus until we teach them not to do it. Second of all, you do it. People who are listening saying, “When I read, I don’t use my finger.” Yes, I understand that, because we’re taught that, but when I ask you to count the number of lines you just read, a hundred out of a hundred people will use their finger to count the number of lines, because they’re using a visual pacer, their finger, to help maintain their focus so they could count. We do it naturally until we’re told to not do it. 

The third reason why you use your finger while you read is because your eyes are attracted to motion. As you’re underlying the words, instead of your attention being pulled apart, which often it is. People report to me all the time, “Have you ever read a page in a book, got to the end and just forgot what you just read?” It just happens, right? You go back and reread it and you still forget what you just read. By using your finger while you read, it maintains your focus. Your attention is not being spread apart. It’s being pulled through the information. 

The fourth, and I’ll give you one more. This is one I find most interesting, is that certain senses in your nervous system works very closely together. For example, have you ever tasted, Matt, like a great tasting piece of fruit? Like something like right off the vine or like right from the farmer’s market? It’s not like it’s been sprayed for six months and sitting in wax and sitting in a supermarket and stuff. Have you ever tasted like a great tasting peach before?

[0:27:49.8] MB: Yeah, for sure. 

[0:27:51.2] JK: It’s amazing, right? There’s nothing like it. In actuality, you’re not actually tasting a peach. Your tongue is not really capable of tasting everything that’s in a peach. What you’re actually doing more, so as you’re smelling the peach and you’re like, “Are you sure?” “Yeah.” Because your mind doesn’t know the difference between what you’re tasting and what you’re smelling, because your sense of smell and your sense of taste are so closely linked in your nervous system. You don’t know the difference. You know it when you’re sick though. When your nose is congested and you can’t breathe out of your nose, what does food taste like?  

[0:28:25.9] MB: It’s bland.

[0:28:27.0] JK: It’s bland, right? It loses its flavor, if you will. It’s because that’s how much you rely on your sense of smell, and we confuse sometimes our sense of smell and taste, just like our sense of smell and taste are so closely linked, so as our sense of sight and our sense of touch. That actually people who use their finger while they read is what they will report. They say they feel more in touch, touch with their reading. There’s a kinesthetic connections. Kind of like with a little child. Let’s say there’s a toddler there and you’re kind of waving your keys and they look at my keys, “Look. Look with your eyes. Look at my keys,” and the toddler will reach out and grab the keys, because in order for the toddler to feel like they are looking at it, they have to touch it. In fact, when you lose your sense of sight, how do you read? You use your sense of touch with brail and such. 

Just one really quick brain hack — And I spend more time to explaining why to do it, because, again, going through the H-cube, you can have in your head, “I want to read 25%, 50%, 100% faster,” but if you’re not practicing the technique with your hand, get into the motivation of it. That’s why I explained why, and I go into leaders are readers, and Bill Gates is an avid reader, and just the more you could learn the more you could earn. 

Then tap into your focal point in terms of things like the reasons why, because I do believe — I always tell people, and I get retweeted on this every day, is just reasons reap results. Reasons reap results. You always need to — If you’re not taking action — Like I just did a whole episode on procrastination, because I think so many people are overloaded, overwhelmed. They can’t get themselves to start and do the things that they need to do. Part of it is they’re just not tapping into their motivation in terms of why they need to do it. 

Other reasons why — Interesting enough, when it comes to reading — I’ll give you another brain hack, is changing habits. Habits are so hard, but I do believe first do make your habits, and then your habits make you back. It really becomes — Excellence really comes down to a set of rituals and routines and habits. 

The reason why you want to habitualize things, routine things, the reason why my whole first hour of the day is set up is because I have decision fatigue. You’re hearing this world all over the place. It’s the idea and science, the research is saying that you could only make a certain amount of good decisions a day. It’s a finite amount. After you hit that limit, you can’t decide what to order at a restaurant at night, because you’re so fatigued. I found this doing research with surgeons and how the increase of mistakes that they’re making later in the day from what their start time was. It’s interesting. That’s the reason why Mark Zuckerberg and Tony Hsieh of Zappos, that they wear the same t-shirt, they wear the same sweatshirt, because they don’t want to waste one of their good decisions on, “What am I going to wear today?” 

Going back to what we’re talking about in terms of reading and hacking a brain, is starting new habits. Sometimes it takes a little bit more will power to start it, a new habit and to develop that habit. Once you’re done with it, I find that if we’re always doing the easy things in life, that life is really hard. If we’re doing the difficult, the hard things in life, life becomes really easy. Reading and discipline is one of those things. 

As we’ve heard many times, discipline is not something that takes away freedom. Discipline is what gives you freedom, because if you can’t get yourself to do the things you need to do, meditate each day, journal each day. I do this whole thing where I do brain tease and then make brain power smoothies and all these other stuff. You can’t get yourself to do that. Really, that’s a prison that’s taken away from your freedom. 

When I’m looking to do this when it comes to habit formation, and I’m going to close this loop in a second, is besides starting with your why and reasons reaping results, is also breaking things down. A lot of people don’t take on something brand new, because it’s this big monster. If you break things down into tiny habits — I get to interview this gentleman. He’s a researcher at Stanford University. His name is Dr. BJ Fogg, and we did a two-parter on how to create habits and how to undo bad habits, break bad habits. 

He was talking about this very specific model, it’s called BEMAT; behavior equals motivation, ability and trigger. Whatever behavior you want to, let’s say it’s to read each day, and you did — Your behavior is equal to the motivation. You need a motive, some kind of reward or incentive for what that reading is going to give you. You need the ability to be able to read, and then you need a trigger. That’s the area that a lot of things get ignored. Often, when it comes down to memory training, it comes down to anchors and triggers, reminders, for example. 

One of the triggers that I have like, like it’s silly, but every time I get into an elevator, especially when I’m alone, I’ll just do squats, and it’s so silly, but it’s just I feel like — You’ve heard that sitting is the new smoking. That living a very sedentary lifestyle, sitting at your computer all day for eight hours a day is really bad for you. You need to get up. I recommend this Pomodoro Technique, it’s a time management technique that says that they find there’s huge dips of focus after about 30 to 45 minutes. Setting my phone alarm every 30 minutes to 45 minutes to just remind me to get up and take a five minute break is very important. 

Going back to memory training and reading training, the reason why I don’t read for more than 30 or 45 minutes, the reason why I don’t study anything for 35, more than 35, for 35, 45 minutes or so on average, is because there’s something called primacy and recency. Primacy says — It’s a memory principle. It says you tend to remember things in the beginning. If I give you, Matt, a list of 30 words to memorize, you probably remember the first few words, because that’s prime. It’s first. 

Recency says you tend to remember things more recent, or at the end. You probably remember a few of those last words, because they’re most recent. Similar to if you went to a party and you meet 20 strangers there. You probably remember primacy, the people in the beginning at the party; and recency, the people at the end. Now, how to use this when it comes to reading and studying and stuff like that? A lot of people, they realize there’s a learning curve. What they don’t realize is there’s a forgetting curve. You learn something, it’d be gone. If you want to insulate that and mitigate the loss, sitting for five hours is not the process to do it. 

That’s why we take breaks, because if primacy says you remember stuff in the beginning of that five hours, and then stuff at the end of that five hours, but in the middle there’s a huge dip [inaudible 0:34:57.4] of regression where you lose that information. By taking a break every 45 minutes and breaking up that five hours into 45 minute chunks with five minute breaks, all of a sudden you created more beginning and more ends. Do you see that? All of a sudden you could have like eight beginning and eight ends which creates more primacy and more recency, which is more opportunities to retain information. 

It also coincides with our focus, that we can maintain really peak focus for more than 30 or so minutes. So since you’re getting diminishing returns, you should take a middle brain break, if you will, for five minutes and do the things that are good for your brain. Movement; which is very important. Deep breathing; which is very important. Most people get tired because they’re not getting enough oxygen. Then hydration, because your brain is mostly water and it needs to be hydrated. 

Going back to habit formation, where I’d like to start with people is just breaking it down. I don’t even tell people to read for 20, 30 minutes. I’ll just say, “Hey, just pick up a book and read one word.” That’s where what I’ve mentioned tiny habits. That’s out of Dr. BJ Fogg’s work at Stanford. That’s where Instagram came out of and everything out of his one of his students, is just starting somewhere small, and then just like flossing your teeth. We know flossing your teeth actually is good for your health. It actually helps you live longer. It’s crazy, right? That brain hack. But most people don’t floss their teeth, and what I would say for them is just, “Hey, practice flossing one tooth.” Who’s going to just floss one tooth? Nobody. So you’re going to do the second tooth and the third and fourth and so on. 

That’s one of the ways of overcoming procrastination, is starting with your why. Having a real reason. Motivation; a motive for action. Number two; breaking things into tiny little habits where it’s attainable. Instead of thinking about, “Oh, I got to go all the way to the gym and do this 60-90 minute work,” whatever. Tiny habits is putting on your sneakers. It’s something everybody could do, and then you start building momentum. Then there’s a memory principle actually called the Zeigarnik Effect. Zeigarnik effect is a psychologist, Dr. Zerganik in Europe that was noticing — She would notice when she’s at this café that the wait staff, the waiter and the waitress would remember everybody’s order. 

Have you ever had like going out to dinner and had somebody like memorize your order and you’re like a table, a sizeable table and they’re not writing any of it down? The reason why they could do it, it’s something called the Zeigarnik Effect. Unless they’ve been — Unless we do a lot of training at a lot of the hospitality hotels and restaurants and such. 

The Zeigarnik Effect basically says that the mind isn’t like open loops. It needs closure. Even when I’m talking right now, I’m opening up a lot of loops and that I’m going through and my cycling through and I’m closing them with reading and habits and everything else like that. The Zeigarnik Effect basically says that if a waiter opens up the loop in terms of what your order is, they will remember it until they deliver the order. Once the order is delivered and the customer has their food, they forget it. 

Similar to procrastination and getting yourself to take action, once you at least somewhere, the mind is more likely to want to finish it and conclude it, because it doesn’t like keeping that door open and it wants to be able to finish. 

When it comes to speed reading, I would start with using a visual pacer. It would boost productivity 25%-50%. Some of you will double your reading speed. Remember, saving one hour a day saves you 9 weeks of productivity every single year. That’s two months of productivity. I would say if you can’t get yourself to do that, break it down and just say, “Okay. Yeah, I want to build up some reading 20 or 30 minutes a day, because I like what Jim is saying and that makes sense, reading a book a week, 50 books a year and really retaining it. It’s going to be huge for my career and my personal life.” Just saying, “Hey, I’m going to break this down. I’m just going to read one sentence. Start with that.” Once you read the first sentence, I’ll guarantee you’ll read the second sentence and so on. Practice — It’s a misnomer. Everyone says practice makes, how do you say? Makes perfect. I would say that practice makes progress. Practice makes permanent, and that’s really the goal. 

[0:39:00.6] MB: I’m sure if you're listening to this show, you’re passionate about mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our sponsor this week, Skillshare. Skillsshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and you can get unlimited access to the entire catalog for a low monthly price so you don't have to pay per class like many other sites. 

They have some really cool courses on there. They have a course on Evernote mastery. You know how much I love Evernote. Evernote runs basically my entire life and I highly recommend using it as a tool, but also checking out their course on how to do it. They have a really cool course on productivity planning and they have a course on mind maps. Mind maps are awesome. I have a mind map sitting on my desk that I'm looking at right now for the Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin. I love my mind maps. It’s an incredible strategy that speaks directly to your brain and your subconscious and it's a really cool tool to remember things. 

There's so many fascinating courses on Skillshare, and the cool thing is they’ve been so kind to the show, they've been an incredible sponsor, and they're giving all of our listeners a free month of access, so get in there. You can get free classes for up to a month completely for free. You can check out all of these courses, just go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:40:28.3] MB: I’d like to come back to the concept of sort of applied knowledge and the idea that — You mentioned, people on the path to mastery focus on the fundamentals. One of the things that I recently realized and I’ve really sort of shifted my focus on a little bit is I feel like there’s so much information out there. There’s so many new self-help books, information, all these stuff, and I’ve actually kind of dialed back and said, “I’m going to read less. I’m going to focus on really high quality stuff. Reading it very deeply and deliberately, and then actually applying and using the information that I read about.” 

[0:41:05.8] JK: Yeah. I completely support that. I’m an advocate for people. Whatever it take to actually use the information, because I think there is this imposter effect, meaning that a lot of people getting personal development and they’re trying to live up to some kind of standard that they’re seeing in the industry or social media. I think people waste a lot of energy there trying to maintain this image of who they pretend that they are, and then they’re putting energy into an area where they feel like this is who they fear they are, and then the energy into that they really are. A lot of people are depleted that way. 

I would say that you’re 100% right, that I learn something, if you’re not going to apply it for something. There are certain areas that it’s okay. Certain areas that you could learn out of the surface, and that you feel well read on it and it serves you. There are certain areas based on your filtering or qualification, how you’re qualifying information, of good information that you want to deep dive into something. I think a lot of a cycle through both areas, from one thinking to another, where sometimes we want to — Just like with people. Some people want to go out and meet a lot of quantity people, and other people want to go deeper with the handful of people that they’re interested in. There’s no unnecessarily right or wrong. I think that’s great, because that comes down to, again, starting with a goal in mind and having a purpose. 

I like mastery, because I feel like the future belongs to those experts who are really to demonstrate a level of outstanding ability and competence. I’m completely good with focusing on one subject, focusing on one book. When I speed reading, again, it’s misnomer. I’m not talking about skimming or scanning. You never read faster than you understand. I’m about up-leveling people’s ability to process information through a series of questions that they’re asking, through series of note taking, through a series of teaching other people and relating to other people so they could deeper in the level of knowledge. It’s not just some information that’s from some third-party, but when they’re teaching it to other people, they get to make it personal for themselves. 

Even in a nice brain hack to help people boost their comprehension is reading something. Then after you’re reading it, talking about it to somebody else. That’s why book clubs are so powerful, because learning is not always solo. It’s social. We don’t learn just by consuming information. We learn best by co-creating it with other people. Really, the other thing is there’s — It’s valid. Meaning that — Like I’m all about saying no in our life. I think people should say no more often and make things more clear. I think people, one of the reasons why people feel overloaded, overwhelmed, that they feel depleted, they feel like it’s too much mental fatigue, is because they’re overcommitting to things all the time.
They’re out there saying yes to everything. 

When you say yes to everything, it’s equivalent of highlighting everything. Which actually those people that just are reading and they are just like highlighting every other sentence, but if you make everything important, then nothing becomes important. It’s similar to like that book, it’s similar to your life. If you overcommit to everything and everything becomes important, then nothing becomes important. I don’t think you could necessarily manage your time, because time is very abstract. I do believe we can manage our behavior and our priorities. 

It’s even hard for me to say the word priorities, because as you know, from your reading, that the word priorities was never plural. It was never multiple priorities. It was always this one thing. More recently, over the past few decades, people have all of these priorities. If everything becomes important, nothing becomes important. 

I would scale back to if it’s a goal for people to reach a level of mastery in a specific subject, then I would not dabble. There’s nothing wrong with reading slowly. I just want to make sure people know that reading slowly doesn’t necessarily equate to understanding, because some people read so painfully slow, they don’t retain anything. It’s like riding a bicycle really slow. If I ride a bicycle really, really slow, I’m going to end up falling over. 

One of the reason — I’ll debunk this myth a little bit as best as I can in this like very short period of time. A lot of people think that if they read faster, their comprehension would go down. Maybe I work with a lot of people from all kinds of countries and backgrounds and levels of education, I find that it’s a misnomer and it’s actually not actually correct, because I find that some of the best readers, in terms of their comprehension, are actually some of the fastest readers, because they have the best focus. 

Meaning that the human brain has an incredible capacity to process information. Yet when we read, we feed it one word at a time. Metaphorically, we’re starving our mind. If you don’t give your brain the stimulus and needs, it will seek entertainment elsewhere in the form of distraction. 

There’s a myth out there that people that read faster don’t understand as much, but in actually they have some of the best understanding, they have the best focus. It’s equivalent of — Like notice when I was talking slowly. It’s like reading slowly. It’s like — You start thinking about other things. Like if I’m talking slow, your mind would wander. You would get tired. You would go off and do something else. You would fall asleep or whatever it is. Aren’t those the same exact symptoms have when they read? Their mind wanders. They get tired. They use reading as a sedative. It’s such a boring chore, because you’re dulling your brain. 

It’s like driving a car. If you’re driving in your neighborhood, you’re going 15-20 miles slow. You could do a lot of different things, because you’re going so slow. You could be drinking your bulletproof coffee, be texting, which you shouldn’t. You could be having a conversation, thinking about the dry cleaning, five different things, because you’re only going 20 miles an hour. If your racing car is going 200 miles an hour down a raceway, do you have more or less focus? 100% focused, right? You’re not trying to text. You’re not trying to fix your makeup. You’re not trying to think about the clients or dry cleaning or anything. You’re 100% focused on what’s in front of you, and that focus gives you the comprehension that you want. 

What I would say if you want to go deep in your information, then definitely go deep, especially if it serves you for a topic that’s important to you. Then do a bunch of — Use your finger while you read. Don’t read any faster than you understand, it also as well. But I think that the speed will give you the focus and the focus will give you the comprehension that you’re looking for.  

[0:47:21.1] MB: I think that’s a great distinction. Essentially, the idea that it’s not about whether you’re reading slowly or quickly. It’s really about reading for maximum understanding and maximum comprehension. 

[0:47:33.4] JK: Right. To your goal, because some people could skim or “speed read” the newspaper and they get full — They get fully satisfied. You know what I mean? Because not everything that we read do we need to 100% focus on or retain every single bit in chunk. It really depends on what your outcome is. That’s why having questions is so important for comprehension. Whether it’s listening to a podcast or reading a book or going to a seminar or reading someone’s blog. Questions are the answer. 

What questions do is they activate that part of your brain called the reticular activating system, RAS for short. Basically, it determines right now there’s two billion stimuli in your environment that you could pay attention to, but you can’t, because mainly your brain has a deletion device, because you would be, you’d go crazy if you had to pay attention to too much. Mostly, it’s trying to block stuff out. 

You have this reticular activating system that determines where your focus goes. Years ago, years ago, my sister was sending me postcards and emails, photos of these pug dogs. You know, these little like smooching face, little fun or whatever dogs. I was like, “Why are you sending these to me?” I realized that her birthday was coming up and that’s what she wanted. 

I noticed everywhere I was going, I go to the supermarket, I see a lady holding a pug dog. I’d be running and doing my jog around my neighborhood, I saw this guy walking six pug dogs. I was like, “Where were these pug dogs before?” The truth is they were always there. It’s just my mind, it fell into that two billion of things that I just didn’t pay attention to. Once she made it important to me, like me asking why is she sending these to me. What’s so important about pug dogs? I started seeing pug dogs everywhere. 

Just when it comes to those, if you imagine, pug dogs are the answer you’re looking for, they’re the knowledge or the wisdom, comprehension, if you will, that you want, then you’ll start seeing them everywhere. If you have questions about sales or marketing or whatever it is, and when you’re listening to a podcast, you’re reading that book, all of a sudden you’re like, “There’s an answer. There’s an answer.” Because it acts like a magnet and you’re pulling the information inside as supposed to somebody, a lecturer trying to push it inside of you, because the brain doesn’t work that way. It works better by wanting to answer these questions themselves and satisfy that open loop. 

I would focus mostly on what your outcome is for reading, and then that should determine your level of speed and comprehension. I don’t speed read everything. One of the challenges to overcome, the reasons why our programs are so successful and we’re getting 300% increase of reading speed in our online is because the biggest challenge when it comes to reading actually is not focus. It’s something called sub-vocalization. Sub-vocalization is that inner talk that we have. 

You notice, Matt, when you’re reading something to yourself, you heard that inner voice inside your head reading along with you? 

[0:50:29.9] MB: Yeah. 

[0:50:30.7] JK: That voice and stuff. Yeah. Hopefully it’s your own voice. It’s not like somebody else’s voice. You don’t hear like two or three voices in there. The reason why it’s a challenge is because if you have to say all the words to understand what you’re reading, you can only read as fast as you could talk. Not as fast as you could think. 

That’s why when I listen to podcast and many people listen to podcast or listen to books on — Like audible and stuff like that, books, audiobooks, is they put it on 1.5 or 2.0 or whatever, because you could understand all that information. It’s just you can’t possibly talk that fast. You don’t have to say words in your mind to understand what words mean, and it’s just a bad habit we picked up when we’re kids based on the way we’re taught in school. The fastest readers I find don’t pronounce a lot of the words, because you don’t have to pronounce a word like New York City, take all that time to say it, because you know what it means on sight. 95% of the words you read every single day are what they call sight words. You don’t have to pronounce and to understand it, because you’ve seen them tens of thousands of times. 

This is just going in to just reading methodology and stepping to this commonsense corner of your mind saying, “Does what I learn back then still make sense to me?” I think being a quick learner or having what I call a quick brain is not about just memorizing facts, because you get a lot of facts on Google. The ability to be able to focus, be able to absorb, to learn, to teach, to apply this information. 

That being said, a good memory now is more important than ever, because at any given time you can — Our live is a reflection of our decisions that we make day to day, like the decisions of where to live and what to do and who to be with and what to eat and everything. You could only make good decisions based on the information you know and remember. 

That’s why Socrates said, learning is remembering. That without remembering, you can’t make good decisions and you lose your power in the areas that you would normally be able to really be unstoppable.  

[0:52:28.7] MB: Another strategy, and I think that’s the really key point. In today’s world, there’s so much out there. How can we focus on really capturing and remembering, as much as possible sort of align with our goals in terms of what we’ve determined we want to learn about. One of the strategies that I’ve heard you talk in the past is using things like mind maps. Will you talk a little bit about that?  

[0:52:53.0] JK: What happens is when we’re learning something, people want to learn any subject or skill faster, whether it’s Mandarin or martial arts, or it’s marketing, music, whatever it is. Obviously, everyone like to do it faster. What helps you to be able to do it faster is to overcome what they call the forgetting curve. That within 48 hours, just two days, up to 80% of what you learn can be gone within two days. That’s a lot of loss that’s there. 

One of the ways to keep that from happening is by taking good notes. I like to talk about different ways of taking notes. Different than making notes, and that’s my distinction, is that when I take notes very simply. Mind mapping is one way of taking notes. It was created by a gentleman by the name of Tony Buzan, and some of your listeners may be very familiar with it, where you put the main idea in the middle of the page and branching out, just like the branches of the tree. You have those sub-ideas. 

Imagine the middle is health and then branching out of health is, “Oh, it’s exercise,” and then another branch out of the trunk is called nutrition and so on. Off of nutrition could be a branch that says food, because that’s one place you get your nutrition. Then another part of the nutrition branch could be supplements, so on. Then you can have a branch come off of supplements, different kinds of nutritional supplements and so on, or different kinds of food. You could break down the food groups. You could have this rare kind of sardine that leads to this, say, under the fish, to lead to protein, to lead to food, to lead to nutrition and that leads to overall health. 

It’s kind of a neat way on one page view instead of seeing notes on like 20 pages linear notes, and something on page 17 could be important than what’s on page one but it’s varied on page 17. Mind mapping is one way of seeing all the notes on one page view and seeing the relationships and the associations, because ultimately all learning is going to come down to associations, one thing linked to another. 

When  you’re learning something, you’re taking something unknown, something outside of you and you’re connecting it to something that you know already. That’s why metaphors are such a powerful way of learning when you’re comparing things to what you already understand. 

Another way — If to like the mind map with all the colors and the icons and images, these two right brain or imaginary creative for somebody. What I recommend, and I did a whole show on this, is just take a piece of paper and put a line down the middle page, and on the left side, take notes, and on the right side, make notes. 

There’s a clear distinction. What I’m talking about is — Because it’s only like a letter off. Note taking is where you’re capturing information. You’re capturing the strategies or the ideas. This is how to read faster. Okay, use your visual pace or a great rate. Do one thing at a time. That would be where you’re taking notes on the left side, you’re capturing notes. On the right side, you’re writing your impressions of what you’re capturing. On the right side, instead of taking notes, you’re making notes. Instead of capturing it, you’re actually creating. 

On the right side, you’re writing down questions that you have. How it relates to what you already know. How you’re going to teach it so somebody else, and I think that’s very important, because when you look at geniuses, and I don’t just mean IQ geniuses. People who are excelling in any area and at any industry, the majority of them journal. They take lots of notes. When you’re there — It’s interesting, because I just had a dinner recently with this very well-known multibillionaire. During this gala, if you will, he was just taking lots of notes of every single, what every speaker was saying and everything. I think that’s one of the ways not only do we retain information, but it also helps us to make new associations to something. 

Think about the journals of Einstein and Edison and Da Vinci and how priceless those things are.  There are studies that want to know, like, “Is it because they’re geniuses that they journal all the time or is it because they’re taking notes and journaling all the time that makes them a genius?” 

I’m a big believer in note taking, whether it’s mind mapping or this idea of capturing on the left side and creating on the other side. That’s the other reason, is it also is a great focus tool, because if your attention is going to somewhere else, like it often does when you’re listening to a podcast or sitting in a conference or a summit or whatever, then it might as well go on the right side of the page. Your creative expression of things might as well go to like, “Oh! How is this relate to what I already know? What about this and how am I going to share this with this person and everything?” 

By the way, you notice that I’m talking a lot about teaching other people, because another brain hack, if you will, is learn something with intention of teaching it somebody else. Again, it’s common sense, but it’s not common practice, that I challenge everybody who’s listening to this to re-listen to this episode and listen with the intention of teaching it to someone very specific, because if you had to give a talk on this in a couple of days, 48 hours from now on stage or coach somebody on how to speed read or whatever, you would listen at a higher level. You would be more active. You would ask more questions. You would take better notes, because you would have a stake in it. 

The reason why I like that is — What gets twitted all the time is this thing they say, I say that, “When you teach something, you get to learn it twice.” Is intention matter. If you learn with the intention of teaching and sharing it with somebody else, when you teach it, you get to learn it twice. 

If you want to accelerate your learning, learn any subject or any skill faster, learn it with the idea, the motive to teach it to someone else. Again, going back to this mastery path about fundamentals and the basics, this is very basic. It’s not very sexy, but it’s going to get you’re the result that you’re looking for.

[0:58:45.4] MB: Tell me a little bit about the FAST method and the strategies you have from learning faster. 

[0:58:50.3] JK: Perfect. I love talking about this, because — This is a framework that I use, just a guide system for learning anything more quickly, because I think that’s what we want to do. Our ability to acquire new skills. Our ability to acquire new subjects. Really simple four steps. The F in FAST stands for forget. If you want to learn something faster, I would say forget what you already know about a subject. Not permanently, but just set aside what you already know. I find that when I’m coaching somebody, as long as they have a motivation to learn something and then they have an open mind to learn something, a beginner’s mind, that’s really the phrase here, then they can learn faster. 

A lot of people won’t learn something faster, because they feel like they know everything and they’re not going to learn faster. I would say if you want to learn something new, temporary forget about what you think you know about it. 

The other thing I would say really fast when it comes to forgetting, I would forget about what’s going on that’s not urgent and important. It’s a myth that you can multitask. It is completely been debunk. Yes, you could walk and chew gum and have a conversation on the phone. You can’t do two cognitive intensive activities at once. It’s not possible. 

It’s a myth, and when people are multitasking, what they really are doing is what they call task switching, they’re switching from one task to another and every single time you switch to another task, because you’re getting these dopamine fixes and everything, because you’re getting rewarded for the novelty, you’re feeling like you’re getting stuff done, but it actually takes you another 5 to 10 to 20 minutes just to regain your focus and your flow. 

You lose time and, actually, that person also has more errors, so they make more mistakes. I would say focus on one thing. The F when it comes to forgetting, I would forget about anything else that’s not going — That’s going on that’s not urgent and important, because if 25% of your attention is being spent trying to do this and thinking about this and this, that only leaves you like 25% to really learn. 

The last F I would say for forgetting is forget about what you know about a subject. Forget about situational things, but also forget about your limitations, because most people are out there and they have a focus on what they can’t do. They have a fixed mindset where they are saying, “Oh, I’m just too old,” or “Oh, I’m just not smart enough,” or “I didn’t go to that school,” or “I don’t have that background,” or “This runs in my family,” or whatever it is. They’ll fight for their limitations. If you argue for your limits, you get to keep them. If you argue for your limits, you get to keep them. 

I would stop fighting for them. Instead, just set the possibility that something else is possible. Just a quick hack; if you find yourself saying, “I’m not successful.” Just add the word yet. Three letters at the end of that limitation, so at least your mind opens up the possibility that it’s going to happen, because imagination is very powerful. But be very careful whenever you put behind the words I am. Those are very — The two smallest words, but they’re the most powerful words on the planet, because whatever you put after I am, it’s going to determine your life, an identity level. Forget about subjects, what you know. Forget about situations. Forget about limitations.

The A is active. If you want to learn any subject or skill faster, you need to be active about it. While I was saying that one of the challenges is most people grow up with this very passive education where they were just sitting quietly by themselves, not talking to their neighbors. They had to regurgitate information or [inaudible 1:02:07.6] passive, and learning is not a spectator sport. Learning is not a spectator sport. You have to get off the bench, roll up your sleeves and get involved. Ask questions. Be active. Take notes, like we’re talking about. 

The S in FAST stands for state, and this is really a key one. I want to really emphasize this. If you walk out with anything from this conversation know this, all learning is state dependent. All learning is state dependent. 

What is your state? A state is a simple word for snapshot of the mood of your mind and your body. How you feel, your motional state. The reason why it’s important is one of the keys when it comes to quick recall, if you want a better memory that I teach, is information combined with emotion becomes a long term memory. Information combined with emotions becomes a long term memory, and you know this because there’s probably a song, a fragrance, or a food, or something that could you take you back when to when you’re a kid, right? We all have it. 

There’s a food, a scent, a perfume, some fragrance, some kind of music, whatever. It takes us back decades. That’s because information combined with emotion became a long term memory. You didn’t have to repeat it over and over again. You did it once and it’ll be there forever. That’s really accurate when it comes to learning, that you have to add emotion into your learning process. Otherwise we don’t remember the boring. We don’t remember the mundane, because if your emotional state is zero, zero times anything is anything. You want to up your state. 

We have control of our state and how we feel, because what I challenge everybody here is to be a thermostat, not a thermometer. What’s the difference? A thermometer is something — Functionally, it reacts to the environment. It reflects the environment, what the environment is giving it. That’s not a thermostat though. A thermostat is different. Thermostat sets the standard. It sets a goal. It sets a vision, and all of a sudden what happens to the environment, the environment raises to meet that standard, because that’s the power of the thermostat, and I’m here to say that just remember who you are, that you’re more of a thermostat than a thermometer, and that whatever you set that too, you’re more likely to be able to achieve. The thing that you really want to set, the standard for most, is how you feel about things. You could control how you feel based on just your mind and your body. You change your thoughts, right? Thoughts are things. There’s a biology to belief as we’ve learned. Also, by moving your physiology, it affects your psychology. That changing your posture, doing deep breathing, doing the things that I do in my morning jumpstart your brain kind of thing, it changes your physiology, and all of a sudden it changes the way you feel. When you change the way you feel, you’re going to learn faster. 

Finally, the T in fast is what we covered already. It’s Teach. Because I think there’re two reasons to learn anything. You learn it. Number one, how it could benefit you. The other reason you learn anything is because how it could benefit somebody else. I would always learn — One of the reasons why I feel like I learn fast, is everything I learn, I learn to be able to share with somebody else. That’s who I am. I think everyone else should do that and should give and pay it forward that way. Don’t give to get, give because it’s who you are. 

They say those who can’t do teach, I never thought that was negative. I thought, “Wow! Those who can’t do, teach. When you teach it, then you could do it.” I would encourage people. That’s FAST; forget, be active, manage your state and learn with the intention of teaching somebody else. 

[1:05:32.6] MB: Really quickly, for somebody who wants to be — We covered so many topics today. For someone who wants to really simply and easily start implementing some of these ideas today, what would kind of one piece of homework be that you would give them as a starting point to begin? 

[1:05:48.6] JK: Yeah. I’ll give people two. Number one, I would invite people to listen to our podcast. It’s only 10 minutes long. It’s not guest-driven. It’s just one brain hack for busy people who want to learn fast or achieve more, on how to learn a language or how to get rid of negative habits, how to read a book a week and so on. It’s not a big time investment. There’s zero cost. 

Number two, I would say schedule it. That’s the big thing I would encourage people to do. I think people don’t — They talk about things all the time. If you want to turn knowledge into real power, you have to schedule it down to a task or an activity and you have to schedule it and treat it as time that you would never cancel it with somebody. You would never cancel on a family member. You never cancel this doctor’s appointment. You never cancel this meeting with an investor or your number one client, because if we talk about stuff, it’s a dream. When we write it down and you put it into your calendar, then it’s real. 

I would say that the most important thing to take something invisible and make it visible is make it visible on your calendar. I would say like even with your show, I would say, “Hey, this many times a week I’m going to listen to this show at this time.” Then once it’s in there, that’s your learning time, and it’s time you never compromise. 

I would encourage everybody to listen to this episode again. Maybe try — Actually, listen to this episode again and do the note taking with the intention of teaching, that capture and create. The big thing is, schedule your learnings. Everybody has a to-do-list. For me, two more important lists that I have is a not to do list. I never touch my phone the first hour of the day. I think it’s somewhat the most destructive things to your productivity or performance. I have a very large not to do list. 

I also have a to learn list, and I think that’s very important, that if you want to be a leader, that you always are learning. Dedicate a lifelong learning, and pick subjects and skills that you want to — Every 30 days, take on a new challenge, because when we’re growing, when we’re green we’re growing, when we’re brown we’re rotting. I think all of us, everyone who’s listening to this wants to grow to their fullest potential. I would say it starts with scheduling time for yourself and it’s time well-invested. 

[1:07:56.2] MB: Jim, where could people find you and your show online? 

[1:08:00.3] JK: The best place for people to go is kwikbrain.com. You have to spell Kwik — Kwik really is my last name. I didn’t change it to do what I do. It’s K-W-I-K, kwikbrain.com. That’s how people can see our podcast. You can see it on Sticher and iTunes and so on. 

Then I would love to continue the conversation on social media. I’ve very, very active on Facebook, Instgram and Twitter, just @jimkwik, J-I-M K-W-I-K. I would love people to actually tag both of us on this episode, so if you’re sharing this episode, that’s a way of you teaching somebody else, like we talked about. I think that’s important. I would love to know everybody’s big takeaway. If there’s one aha after this conversation that we had together, I would love for you to post that big aha, because that’s a way of you demonstrating, you’re taking the invisible and making it visible and you’re teaching it, and so you’re owning it and making it your own, and tag us un it, and I would love to read that and respond it and re-share it also as well. 

Yeah, Kwik Brain is the podcast, kwikbrain.com, K-W-I-K, and @jimkwik, K-W-I-K.

[1:09:02.7] MB: I think that’s great. I’ll second that. I respond to every listener tweet, and so definitely do that. We’ll both chime in and give you some feedback. Jim, thank you so much for coming on the show. You shared a tremendous amount of wisdom today. I really appreciate all of the awesome insights that you shared with our listeners. 

[1:09:19.9] JK: Matt, this was tremendous. I really appreciate you and everyone who’s listening. Remember, you’re faster and smarter than you think. I wish your days be filled with lots of life and lots of love, lots of laughter and always lots of learning. Thank you. 

[1:09:31.5] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That’s matt@successpodcast.com. 

I’d love to hear from you and I personally read and respond to every single listener email. I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. 

First, you’re going to get our exclusive weekly Mindset Monday email which listeners have been loving. It’s simple, short, sweet, articles and stories that we’ve enjoyed from the last week. Next, you’re going to get a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, submit your own personal questions, vote on things like changing our intro and much more. Lastly, you’re going to get an awesome free guide that we create based on listener demand, including our most popular guide; How To Organize and Remember Everything, which you can get completely for free along with another surprise bonus guide when you sign up and join the email list today. You can join by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage, or if you’re on the go, just text the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 4222. 

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

Don’t forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we’ve talked about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes, which you can get at successpodcast.com. Just go there and hit the show notes button right at the top. 

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

How This Astronaut Survived Going Blind In Space & Tools for Crushing Fear with Chris Hadfield

In this episode we discuss what happened when our guest astronaut Chris Hadfield went blind during a space walk - and how he made it out alive. We talk about the mental toughness necessary to survive extremely dangerous situations like that, discuss in depth how astronauts deal with fear, look at the vital importance of powerful training to deal with huge risks, and much more with  Chris Hadfield.

Chris Hadfield, who the BBC called “the most famous astronaut since Neil Armstrong" has been a part of several space missions with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA. He served as Chief of Robotics and Chief of International Space Station Operations. Chris was the first Canadian to command the International Space Station and was awarded the NASA Exceptional Service Medal and inducted to the Canadian Aviation Hall Of Fame. In addition to his work as an engineer and astronaut Chris is an author, musician, and speaker.

We discuss:

• The 3 key things that enabled chris to make it all the way through the astronaut selection process

• How Chris survived going BLIND during a space walk in outer space!!

• How astronauts rescue incapacitated crew in outer space

• How to cultivate the mental toughness to survive the most dangerous situations imaginable

• The learned and trained ability to deal with extremely complex circumstances

• Why Chris was an astronaut for 21 years and only spent 6 months in space, thats how important training is

• In outer space, you can’t count on luck, you count on your own learned ability to deal with the probable things that could go wrong

• How NASA develops training programs to do everything possible to be successful

• The vital importance of visualizing failure and understanding what could go wrong

• The importance of practicing the 10,000 things that could go wrong

• Astronauts don’t visualize success, they practice for failure, all the time

• Visualize failure, incrementally improve, don't count on luck

• NASA’s Recipe for Success

• The relationship between DANGER and FEAR

• Things aren't’ scary, but people get scared

• Things don’t change whether or not you are afraid of them - the ONLY question is whether or not you are prepared

• Preparation is the antidote to fear, if you’re ready, you won’t be afraid

• Your body’s physiology reacts to being unprepared to a dangers situation with a reaction we simply call “fear”

• FEAR = LACK OF PREPARATION

• Perpetual fear = STRESS (and overwhelm)

• Ask yourself “what thing am I not prepared for that is causing me stress?"

• Listen to fear, but don’t keep fear from allowing you to dictate your life

• How do you change your own threshold of fear?

• How to overcome your fear of spiders!

• Recognize real threats through the noise of the non threats

• if you dont know what to be afraid fo, then your afraid of everything

• the difference between belief and knowledge

• If you're afraid of a jaguar, should you be afraid of a kitten?

• One of the ways to increase your own significance is to exaggerate your problems

• Why the perception that the world is more dangerous now than ever is fundamentally flawed

• "The Sky is Not The Limit"

• Life is TOUGH and the earth is TOUGH - it’s been here for 4.5 billion years

• The perspective of an astronaut viewing the entire world from above

• The shared nature of human existence

• Why Chris recommends that you should “aim to be a zero”

• Take the time to get informed, understand what is happening, and then take action

• The building is very seldom on fire, yet we always treat it like it is

• In space, ”there is no problem so bad, that you can’t make it worse”

• Don’t just accept your fear, understand WHY, dig in, and treat it clinically - whats the REAL danger, whats the REAL problem I’m trying to solve, how can I change who I am to solve that problem / challenge better, what skill am I lacking? Why am I allowing myself to be terrified?

• How can I change myself to move beyond fear

• Fear is a destructive long term solution to anything

Thank you so much for listening!

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

This Episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Skillshare! For a limited time, Skillshare is offering our listeners One Month of UNLIMITED ACCESS ABSOLUTELY FREE! Just go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free unlimited month NOW!

Are you a professional looking to get a leg-up at work? Or just someone who just loves learning new things? Are you looking to do your job better? 
Want to add some impressive skills to your resume? Skillshare is an online learning community with over sixteen thousand classes in design, business, and more. You can learn everything from logo design to social media marketing to street photography. Unlimited access to all of this for a low monthly price – never pay PER class again!

Again, Skillshare is giving our listeners a month of unlimited access - absolutely FREE! Go towww.skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Personal Site] Chris Hadfield

• [Twitter] @Cmdr_Hadfield

Episode Transcript

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

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

In this episode we what happened when our guest, astronaut Chris Hadfield, went blind during a spacewalk and how he made it out alive. We talk about the mental toughness necessary to survive extremely dangerous situations just like that. We discuss in depth how astronauts deal with fear. We look at the vital importance of powerful training to deal with huge risks and much more with Chris Hatfield. 

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

Second, you’re going to get curated weekly emails from us every week including our mindset Monday email, which listeners have been loving. It’s a short email that shares articles, stories and links of things that we found interesting in the last week. 

Lastly, you’re going to get listener exclusive content and a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, change our intro music, like when we rolled out our new intro a couple of weeks ago, and weigh in on many important things that are going on with the show. 

Again, join the email list today by going to successpodcast.com signing up right on the homepage, or if you’re on the go right now, you can just text the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222. Again, that’s “smarter” to 44222.

In our previous episode we discussed how a neurologist’s perspective on your brain fundamentally ignores the health of the entire system. We talked about your gut biome’s role in depression, mood regulation and how the micro-biome controls your behavior and emotions. We ask why it is so hard for people to break negative eating habits, looked at the biochemistry of addiction, discuss the incredible importance of understanding your micro-biome and gut health and much more with Dr. Kulreet Chaudhary. If you want to get the neuroscience behind your gut in your micro-biome, listen to that episode. 

Now, for the interview. 

I want to make a quick note before we dive in. Chris had to dial in via phone, so the audio quality on this episode is a little bit rougher than some of our typical interviews. Remember, we are interviewing experts across the world, people in many different industries and in many cases, you know, astronauts like Chris are not professional podcasters. They don't have a professional recording set up. We do the best we can to try and deliver the highest quality audio possible, but I just wanted to give you heads up that the audio quality on this interview is not the best that we've done, but the conversation is amazing. I know you’re going to get a ton out of it, so let's dive right in. 

[0:03:15.7] MB: Today we have another incredible guest on the show, astronaut Chris Hatfield. Chris, who the BBC called the most famous astronaut since Neil Armstrong, has been part of several space missions with the Canadian Space Agency and NASA. He served as the Chief of Robotics and the Chief of International Space Station Operations. Chris was the first Canadian to command the International Space Station and was awarded the NASA Exceptional Service medal and inducted to the Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame. In addition, his work as an engineer and astronaut, Chris is an author, musician and speaker. 

Chris, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:03:50.4] CH: Thanks, Matt. It’s really nice to be joining you. That’s almost embarrassing to listen to all of that introduction, but thanks for mentioning everything. 

[0:03:57.0] MB: You had quite a storied career and some really, really fascinating experiences. I’d love to start out, for listeners who may not be familiar with you and some of your background, tell us how did you become an astronaut and what were you doing before that? 

[0:04:12.3] CH: The simple question, or I guess how to answer to your question is, I decided to be an astronaut when I was a kid and I started trying to turn myself into one starting at like 10 years old. I really had no idea, but I thought astronauts fly in space, so I’m going to learn to fly. Astronauts have to know how to operate complex machinery, so I’m going to become an engineer. I noticed that a lot of astronauts traditionally at the beginning were test pilots, so I thought I’m going to try and become a military test pilot and see if all that works or not, and if it doesn’t, that’s all still a bunch of interesting things to be a pilot and a test pilot and an engineer. That's the path I followed. 

I served 25 years in the Air Force and became a test pilot, actually even serving with the NAVY, U.S. NAVY as a test pilot. At the end of all of that, I even got a university degree in Tennessee, in fact. After all of that, I got selected as an astronaut and then served 21 years as an astronaut. 

[0:05:09.9] MB: That’s fascinating. Both of those things, how do you — I know it’s such a competitive and challenging field even just becoming a test pilot, let alone becoming an astronaut. What do you think enabled you to make your way through that incredibly difficult selection process? 

[0:05:28.4] CH: Three different things, Matt. I think let me get through all that. Number one was an unquenchable burning desire. You really, really have to want to do this just because there're so many dead ends and obstacles and unlikely opportunities. The second is a huge amount of work. I love work. I grew up on a farm work. I think work is interesting and productive and it gives me satisfaction. I think in addition to an unquenchable desire is also a big appetite for hard work. Then the third is luck. If I’ve been born 10 years prior, I couldn't have been an astronaut. It’s just timing, and health, and circumstance and such. There’s always going to be some luck involved. 

I think if you have a burning desire, you have a huge amount of ability to work at something and then accept that there's luck involved, that's not a bad recipe for no matter what you’re dreaming of doing. 

[0:06:21.3] MB: One of the most famous things that you're kind of known for is this infamous spacewalk that you talked about in your TED Talk. Could you share that story with the audience? 

[0:06:33.1] CH: Sure. I’ve done two spacewalks to help build things orbiting the earth. I helped build part of the International Space Station. Spacewalks are hard. They take many, many years of training, development, invention, practice, but even while they're happening, they’re physically very demanding and very technically complicated. Nothing like you see in the movies ever. But stuff goes wrong during spacewalks all the time naturally. We try and keep it safe, because your danger is very hard and, touch wood, we've never lost an astronaut during a spacewalk to this point, but we recognize the risk and the danger of them. 

During my first spacewalk there was contamination inside the suit that got into one of my eyes, sort of stopped it from working. Suddenly I couldn't see out of my left eye. I just kept working, because I figured well maybe it will clear and I couldn't do anything about it anyway. I couldn’t rub my eye or anything. It’s stuck inside a helmet. My eye was irritated enough by the contamination. It was tearing up, and without gravity, the tears don’t go anywhere. They just stay in your eyes like this big ball of contaminated saltwater and tear. 

Eventually, that ball of contamination got big enough that unfortunately it bridged to the side of my nose and flowed this little bubble of contaminated stuff flowed into my other eye and contaminated my other eye. So then both my eyes were contaminated and I was blinded during my first spacewalk. That was a difficult thing to deal with, being outside, holding on to the outside of the ship suddenly unable to see. 

I think if we hadn't practiced, if we’ve taken it lightly, if we hadn’t done all the work in advance, that would've been cripplingly scary and unsolvable. I was outside with a guy named Scott Parazynski, a classmate of mine, really competent fellow, and we practiced for years and years and help invent everything we’re going to do out there. One of the things we had practiced is just in the category of if one of us becomes unable for whatever reason. You might have a loss of communication, so your suit might short out or you might lose oxygen or you might have a leak in your suit or whatever. You might have a heart attack. Who knows? We call that incapacitated crew rescue. 

Scott and I had practiced that. In fact it's one of the things you have to qualify at in order to be trusted to do a spacewalk. In this case I was incapacitated to some degree. I could talk. I could think. I was still fine. I could communicate with everybody. I just couldn’t see. Without being able to see, you really can't do the job out there. I talked to everybody and we ended up realizing that it might be something pretty serious contaminating my suit, and so I opened up the purge valve. The in-consultation with mission control down in Houston opened up the purge valve on my suit to let the contaminated atmosphere around my head flush and squirt out into space and then tapping into my limited reserves of pressurized oxygen in the suit. Listening to the oxygen hiss out of my suit alone out of the universe, and the universe is kind of bit to re-pressurize with one oxygen tank. I knew I was going to lose at that eventually. 

What it did was it brought enough fresh oxygen, and therefore atmosphere into my suit, that it allowed the contamination to evaporate around my eyes and sort of build a crusty ring around my eyes, and my eyes continued tearing. After a while the contamination got dilute enough that I could see again and could get back to work and my eye stopped tearing. 

It turned out just to be the anti-fog that we used on the visor, sort of a mixture of oil and a harsh soap and it’s as if someone had just squirted oily harsh soap into your eye. Your eye doesn't work anymore. Nothing super technical, just a thing, but enough that it definitely upped the danger and decreased our chances of success. We practiced and prepared enough that the mission control allowed us to continue and finish the entire spacewalk actually and got everything done. Since then we've changed the anti-fog solution that we use, when in truth we use Johnson’s No More Tears now, which probably what we should use right from the get go. That little problem manifested itself into me being blind, alone, out of my very first spacewalk, pretty interesting place to be. 

[0:10:57.6] MB: What goes through your mind in that moment when you completely lose your vision and you’re floating in outer space? 

[0:11:06.1] CH: Well, in my case it was, number one, what caused it. I’m thinking, “Okay. What can be causing — What’s irritating my eyes? Why am I struck blind by this?” I’ve studied all of the stuff very carefully. I know how all of the systems in the suit work really well. I’m trying visualize through all of the schematics and chemistry and everything of what might be causing this problem. Two; frustration, because I'm not able to do the things that I’m there for. I’m supposed to be building this huge robot arm to Canada onto the outside of the spaceship and now I’m useless and just there hanging on waiting for this problem to clear. I’m kind of frustrated at this event. 

Then, three, having to tell Houston, because I know just what a grenade that's going to be at mission control to tell everybody down there that I’m blind. They just have a real serious problem to try and give me good advice on. I’m just thinking about all of those things. 

The real bottom line is am I okay or not? As soon as you established yourself that, “Okay. I’m breathing. I’m fine. The only thing is I can’t see. So what? If you close your eyes, you can't see.” It’s just a matter of just something to deal with. Not a problem I wanted to deal with, and hopefully nothing that’s going to strike me permanently blind, but still just one sense out of five that I lost and let's try and solve the problem. Let’s work the problem and get to the solution of that. Let’s not going to worry and panic and overdramatic about the thing. Let’s deal with it and move on. 

[0:12:33.7] MB: How do you cultivate the mental toughness to be in such an incredibly high stress situation and maintain that kind of calm presence of mind to be able to problem solve and work your way through it? 

[0:12:48.9] CH: That’s why NASA hire the astronauts that they do. NASA is currently going through an astronaut selection, and 18,000 people have applied for like 8 or 10 slots, 8 or 10 positions. If you have 18,000 people to choose from, you don't just choose people that are fit or you don't just choose people that have a certain type of university degree. You try and choose people that not only are fit and have a certain type university degree, but also have a proven ability to make good decisions under really complex and high-stakes situations. Who would you hire? You’ll hire test plots, because test pilots are used to balancing all of that stuff, a very dangerous job. Test pilots are killed all the time, because the job itself is dangerous. Also, have that a learned and trained ability to deal with huge number of factors simultaneously. You’re flying the airplane, you're testing something new, you're dealing with unexpected circumstances and you still, at the end of it, have to somehow get home and land. 

Or we hire medical doctors, and not just run-of-the-mill medical doctors, but as competent as possible, or we hire people who have ran large stage of life, or not only do they have all the raw material, but they have the proven ability to make good decisions, but the consequences really truly matter. When you never have enough information, you’ve shown that you are the type of person that can be trusted to make the right call and not just get all panicked. Then that’s how we do it; the right type of people chosen and then years and years of training and preparation and study. 

I was an astronaut for 21 years, and I was only in space for six months. For 20-1/2 years I was training and studying and preparing and helping to support and invent space flight. That’s how you deal with it. 

[0:14:40.5] MB: Wow! That ratio, it really demonstrates the point which I think is vital that training and practice is so important. Talk to me a little bit more about that and how critical that is. For somebody who's — I’m trying to draw this back to almost an actionable insight for someone who’s listening in. How vital is training and how can people integrate that lesson of how they can build toughness in their own lives?

[0:15:05.2] CH: I think a lot of people just count on good looks and charm and luck and such. If you do that, that’s fine. Sometimes it will work and sometimes it won't, and if the consequences are low, then so what? It’s no big deal. So this didn’t work out. If the consequences of what you’re trying to do are life and death and also it meant financial consequence, or if you get this wrong, that you have wasted an entire shuttle flight or you’ve ruined a piece of equipment that cost a lot of people a lot of money. We take it immensely seriously. 

If that’s the type of thing you're trying to accomplish, then you don't just count on random events. You don’t just count on luck. It changes your entire job. Your job is now to do everything that is possible prior to this event happening so that you could optimize your chances of success. To do that, you don't visualize success. You visualize failure. Like in the book, my first book, the Astronaut’s Guide to Life on Earth, what I call the power of negative thinking. There's not much point in just visualizing success, because if it happens it's great. If it doesn't, then visualizing it didn’t help. 

Visualizing failure serves you well. This is what I’m trying to accomplish. What is the most likely thing to go wrong and am I ready to face it, and how do I know? Let’s practice that thing going wrong and see if I can deal with it. If I can't, let’s practice it again and again and again until, “Okay. If that thing goes wrong, I now know how to deal with it, and then let’s move on to the next most probable thing to go wrong and let's practice that until we understand it and then the next and the next thing.” 

I don’t know. We practiced 10,000 different things, and that's what astronauts do for a living; visualize success. They practice for failure all the time. They live in a world of negative thinking, because then when something's coming along, like space fuck, and suddenly you’re struck blind. You’re like, “Okay. What’s really gone wrong here? What am I dealing with? What could have caused this? What are the impacts? What can I do next? What did we practice? What do we know about this and how can we improve it for the future?” It just changes what your role is. You don't count on luck. You count on your own learned and practiced ability to deal with the probable things that are going to go wrong, and that applies to everything. It applies to driving your car down the highway. 

Eventually in your life, Matt, driving down a road, you are going to have a tire go flat, but how many times have you practiced it? How many times have you actually look at your model of car, whether it's front-wheel-drive, all-wheel-drive, rear wheel drive. W type of steering do you have? What type of run flat tires do you have? All that information, you know in one minute you could look it up. What is the right thing to do if you’re going 60 down the highway and your front left tire blows? What should you do? It’s a thing that's going to happen sometime in your life and you can learn exactly what you're supposed to do in 10 minutes on the Internet and the next time you’re driving your car, you can practice it 10 times. Just say, “Okay. Right now my front left —” on some empty stretch of road while you’re just driving long anyway. “My front left tire just blew up. Okay. What are my actions? Do I break? Do I not break? Do I downshift? Do I go into neutral? What do I do? Do I go left? Do I go right?” Just practice it. After you've done it, looked it up and done it 10 times, then you just file that away inside yourself as, “Okay. this is one of the things I'm now ready for.” Astronauts treat everything, like that flat tire. That’s how we fly in space. 

[0:18:39.8] MB: It’s amazing that when you look across people who’ve been incredibly successful in various different disciplines. I’m thinking about Charlie Monger, Warren Buffett. The business partner, the cochairman of Berkshire Hathaway, a guy we talk about all the time on the show. I’m thinking about people like the ancient Stoics. They all have very, very similar lessons, which is this idea that it's not necessarily about focusing on and visualizing things can go right. It's about figuring out the most probable things that can go wrong and planning and optimizing and building a strategy so that you can minimize those things. 

[0:19:16.3] CH: Yeah. That’s the only way that NASA has been successful in putting people that are up on the space station right now and driving our probe through the plumes of Enceladus that are going around Saturn right now and flying out beyond Pluto and driving the probes around on Mars and all these stuff we’re doing. It is purely the results of setting ourselves a goal and then starting to visualize failure and then learning incrementally better and better, how to get closer and closer to what it is we’re dreaming of and not counting on luck. 

No astronaut launches for space with their fingers crossed. That's not how we deal with risk. That’s just not an actual way to step up to something, and anything we’re doing in life, the people that you just mentioned. They have a set of goals in life. Things that they value, things that they want to get done. Any of the choices that they make have risk. Whether it's personal, reputational, financial, life or death. Anything worth doing in life has risk. Then the real question is, “How are you changing who you are so that you have a better chance of succeeding when you’re faced that particular risk?” That's really the whole recipe for success in spaceflight and really, I think, in anything worthwhile in life. 

[0:20:35.8] MB: That brings up a couple of points that I want to dig into. One of them is the relationship between danger and fear. Being somebody who's been a test pilot, an astronaut, you’ve put yourself in some incredibly dangerous situations, I guess, by most people's estimations. How do you view the interaction between those two things and are they the same? 

[0:21:00.0] CH: People ask you all the time, “Was launch scary?” or “Boy! Doing a spacewalk, that must be scary.” I became aware years and years ago as a test pilot and then as an astronaut that things aren't scary, just people are scared and they’re fundamentally different. 

Some people are afraid of whatever; a mouse or some people aren’t. Some people are afraid of — I don’t know, marriage, and some people are afraid of flying. The thing doesn't change. The mouse doesn't change, whether you’re afraid of it or not, or the airplane or the idea of flight or whatever. The real question is, “What are you prepared for and what are you unprepared for?” 

If you're unprepared for something then, really, the only recourse that we have is to be afraid, because fear causes physiological changes in your body. When you’re afraid, your body changes; you shiver or the blood drains from some part of your body or adrenaline gets released into your veins. Your body recognizes that, “Holy cow! This guy isn't ready for the thing that's happening. This wildebeest that just jumped out of the woods at him, he wasn’t ready for that.” And so I need to change momentarily this person's physiology so that they could deal with it. We call that change of physiology fear, because it allows us maybe for a momentary period to be able to face up to a risk. You don't want to fly a spaceship just by using adrenaline in your veins. It’s harmful to your body, but also it’s transient. That's not exactly how we fly spaceships. It’s not relying on super quick muscle twitch and reaction. It relies on complex reasons, a practiced deep technical understanding of how to do things. 

You can draw the parallel to just about anything. I don’t know, learning to use a skateboard. First time you get on a skateboard, you're useless at it and you fall, and so you’re kind of a little bit scared getting on a skateboard at first when you're a kid or, even worse, as an adult, or you don’t have the skills yet and you have a pretty good chance of falling and least skin in your knee, if not breaking a leg or busting a tooth or something, because you are incompetent at it. 

If you spend a time and you turn your natural talent into a honed ability, if you practice skateboarding until you can get on one, not even think about it, and now you could start to do tricks and jumps and all the cool things that the good skateboarders can do, you get to a point where it is no longer scary at all. In fact it's just sort of freedom. It's a cool thing. The skateboard didn’t change. The skateboards exactly the same. The physics didn’t change. It’s just you that changed, and that’s the difference between fear and danger. Things aren't scary, just people are scared. The only reason you're scared is because you didn't do your homework, you didn't practice, you didn’t get ready. You’re just trying to count on luck to carry you through this thing. It will work for some things in life. 

I think that gives you then the choice of you can go through life afraid, and one of our ways of describing perpetual fear stress. You could be overwhelmed by it, but just pick off one thing at a time. What is the thing that I don't how to do that I wish I could that is causing me danger or causing me stress, and let’s try and get good at that today. Let’s spend the next hour getting good at that thing so I don't longer have to be afraid of that. Then let’s go on to the next thing and the thing after that and the thing after that. That’s how I trained as a pilot. I used to be a downhill ski racer as well, same thing. That’s how I t rained as a test pilot and that is the absolute essence of training to fly in space, is to recognize the difference between danger and fear and then use all the available time to be ready for the risk so that you optimize your chances of success. 

[0:25:05.7] MB: What a great point. I really, really like that idea, that fear is essentially lack of preparation. If you prepare enough, if you train enough, it's possible to overcome any fear. Really, in many ways, fear — The kind of logical conclusion of that, is that fear is simply a signal telling you that you need to do more preparation. 

[0:25:27.4] CH: Yeah, or don't do that thing. I’m afraid of heights. Just generically, I think everybody should be afraid of heights, because if you’re in a position where you can fall without any control, then you don’t have to fall for much higher than your own standing height do yourself damage. You can crack your skull just by falling from your own standing height. That’s kind of the limit of how tall evolution is allowed our bodies to be, because if you fall from any more of your own height, you did. 

If you're standing on the edge of a cliff and one tiny little random gust of wind or lack of attention will kill you, then your body should be screaming at you that this is not where you ought to be, and either anchor yourself to something or do something else, but don't put yourself at risk if there's no benefit to what you’re doing. 

If this is a thing you really want to do, if there’s some great benefit to it. This is accomplishing some goals for you, then that's a different set of circumstances and you need to build all the skills you have so that you won't fall. 

The raw idea of fear is really just trying to protect you against hurting yourself, against ending your life unnecessarily. So you should listen to fear, but you should not keep fear from allowing you to dictate the constraints of your life. If you can't, you should locate, “This is important to me, just because I'm afraid.” Well, the afraid part is just because I’m not good at this yet. Let’s start gaining skills so I can do this thing that’s important to me and not just spend my life being stressed and wringing my hands and crossing my fingers and being afraid. 

[0:26:57.9] MB: I’m sure if you're listening to this show, you’re passionate about mastering new skills and abilities, and that's why I'm excited to tell you once again about our sponsor this week, Skillshare. Skillsshare is an online learning community with over 16,000 classes in design, business and much more. You can learn everything from logo design, to social media marketing, to street photography, and you can get unlimited access to the entire catalog for low monthly price so you don't have to pay per class like many other sites. 

They have some really cool courses on there. They have a course on Evernote mastery. You know how much I love Evernote. Evernote runs basically my entire life and I highly recommend using it as a tool, but also checking out their course on how to do it. They have a really cool course on productivity planning and they have a course on mind maps. Mind maps are awesome. I have a mind map sitting on my desk that I'm looking at right now for the Art of Learning, by Josh Waitzkin. I love my mind maps. It’s an incredible strategy that speaks directly to your brain and your subconscious and it's a really cool tool to remember things. 

There's so many fascinating courses on Skillshare, and the cool thing is they’ve been so kind to the show, they've been an incredible sponsor, and they're giving all of our listeners a free month of access, so get in there. You can get free classes for up to a month completely for free. You can check out all of these courses, just go to skillshare.com/success to redeem your free month. 

[0:28:25.7] MB: Another example that you’ve shared around this is the idea of dealing with spiders or fear of spiders and walking through spider webs. Can you share that example? 

[0:28:34.2] CH: what I was trying to explain to folks how is it you can change your own threshold of fear. One of the examples that occurred to me was spiders, because a lot of people are afraid of spiders and there’s a good reason for that, of course, and that some spiders are quite venomous. The venom that they have has a really nasty negative effect and there are some that are really awful that can cause — That’s a neurotoxin or cause really bad damage to the human bodies. Black widow has a certain reputation or a brown recluse. They’ve even got bad names. 

Of course, most spiders are fine. Almost every spider on earth is just a little bug and it’s just being a spider and it’s terrified of you because you’re huge and can squish it any moment. If you have no understanding of spiders at all, then you could treat every single little thing in the corner of your eye that might turn out to be a spider as the most venomous spider that exists, and some people do. They treat every single little bug that they see as potential death, and that’s unreasonable, of course, because the odds of actually running into one of those spiders that does you harm is really low. Rather than spending your life screaming and running every time you see a bug, why not say, “Okay. Some spiders are bad for me, but most aren’t. Where I live, how many spiders are actually poisonous or venomous? How many actually do me harm? 

For a lot of the places in the world, you’ll find that the answer is none. There are spiders at all that exist where you live that are venomous, or maybe there’ just one or two, and you could look up where they actually exist. Maybe they’re only in a certain type of cave or at a certain type of circumstances and maybe they’re easily identifiable. Like a black widow has a great big red hourglass on its back. It couldn’t have a clear, like a danger marking on it just to let you know. 

Then say, “Okay. Now I know what the actual danger is. If it's just any other type of spider, I can treat it like a ladybug. It’s got the same threat to me as a ladybug, but there's a couple of spiders I have to watch out for, or this type, and what do their nest look like, and I won’t walk into one of those type of webs, like the small web, like a black widow that build close to the ground, often dark corners.” 

Then say, “Okay. Now I know what the risk is, but I still have this fundamental sort of gut reaction, my instinctive reaction of fear. Every time I feel a spider web on my face walking in the dusk, I feel that same raw animal fear.” Then say to yourself, “But that can’t be a venomous spider. They don’t build spider webs up here. That can't be it. So I'm just being silly.” 

To overcome it, what I recommend is walk-through spider webs deliberately. Find a spider web that you know actually isn't a threat and walk through it and then find another one and walk-through that. Go up to an attic where there’s a whole bunch of spider webs that are obviously not any sort of threat and just walk through to them. Get over your primitive, illogical, instinctive, fearful reaction and actually look into the information. Find out — Use your brain and figure it out and practice and practice and practice. After you walked through a hundred spider webs with no consequence, then you could start to change your fundamental instinctive reaction. You can start to control your own instinctive fear, and now you can make your decisions based on reality and not just on the same amount of intellect that a simplest forms of life put into their decision-making. 

We treat everything like that in the space business. How does this spider web, or how does this spider actually shape up as a threat? What’s the real threat? What is the real threat look like? How am I going to recognize the real threat from all the noise of the non-threats so that I don't overreact, because if you don't know what to be afraid of, then you're afraid of everything, and I don't think that’s a useful way to go through life. I just think it’s self-destructive. 

[0:32:47.6] MB: I love the example of forcing yourself to walk through spider webs, and I wanted to hear the story, because, to me, I personally am kind of afraid of spiders and so it was very relevant story. I almost instinctively hear, and maybe this is just a lack of knowledge, but I sort of instinctively hear myself saying like, “Yeah. That sounds like a great idea to go walk through some spider webs, but what if?” I think it's the what if that always gets me and like makes me more fearful. It’s like, “What if that web that I happened to walk through happens to be a dangerous spider?”

[0:33:20.4] CH: Right. That’s where your intellect comes into effect, and actually look and do the work in advance. Don't just count on randomness. If you are afraid of jaguars, that doesn't mean you need to be afraid of kittens, house cat kittens, but they’re both cats. You can spend your entire life terrified of kittens because you’re also afraid of jaguars, but it doesn’t make any sense. Yet, for whatever reason, you’re going to put spiders in the same category 

Just do the work in advance. If you have no information, then you have to assume the worst, but you have your whole life to gather information, so why not do it? Why just assume the worst all the time? 

[0:34:04.4] MB: The cat and the kitty jaguar example definitely brings that into light and shows sort of how ridiculous that framework of belief is. 

[0:34:12.0] CH: Yeah. It’s the difference between belief and knowledge. If you’re just running around instinctively reacting on belief, that you may as well be a pug. I have a pug. He’s a delightful dog, but he’s not a deep thinker and he just deals with stuff the best he can and just instinctively reacts to everything, but we’re not pugs. We are the most rational of all beings, and what do you choose to do with your ability to think I think has a big effect on what happens in your life. 

[0:34:42.7] MB: That kind of makes me think we’re transitioning a little bit into another thing that you’ve talked about which I fully agree with is this idea that dovetailing that concept of risk and danger, the Idea that most people's perception of how dangerous their lives are is actually totally disconnected from the reality that today we live in the safest, healthiest period ever in human history and the world is actually a much better place than people realize. 

[0:35:14.1] CH: Absolute. Everybody wants to feel significant, of course. It’s a fundamental human natural need, and that's good, and you should recognize that you are no different than everybody else. You want to feel worthwhile and significant. 

One of the ways to increase your own significance is to exaggerate the problems that exist. The people that hold up the sign the end of the world is coming, it's because the world has been here for 4-1/2 billion years and this person has painted a sign and stuck it up here in there, particular 75 years on earth, because they want this to be the most significant 75 years out of all the 4-1/2 billion, because it makes them feel good, but it’s kind of ridiculous. The world isn't about to suddenly end just because this person held up a sign. 

I think that natural lack of temporal perspective of yourself and the desire to feel significant tends to let you over exaggerate the risks that exist in your life. I never been harder to whatever, to raise children or to do anything, it’s never been harder than it is now. Boy! You shouldn’t have to go very far back in human history to find examples that counter that argument. Like gosh, the 400 million people died of smallpox in the last century, which is the population of Europe, or the number of people that were killed in World War I and how, or the influenza epidemic of 1919-1920 that killed millions and hundreds of millions of people around the world, or whatever, child disease. The number of people that make at their full natural lifespan now is higher than it's ever been for our species worldwide. The opportunity just in the cellphone you hold in your hand, you have the library of Alexandria. Some total of human knowledge available to you and we’ve eliminated a lot of the diseases that used to plague us all the time. 

Yeah, life isn't easy, but I think in an effort to sometimes — I don’t know, feel a little more significant, we tend to over exaggerate the problems that face us right now. Looking back into history of studying the problems that our predecessors faced, hopefully the helps put us into a little clearer image in the mirror. 

[0:37:29.1] MB: In many ways, it’s almost the same lesson, which is the idea that the more informed you are, the more you understand how reality really is, the less fear you have about sort of vague things that are out there that people are worried about and afraid of. 

[0:37:44.7] CH: Yeah, I think so. People say often to me, “Gosh! Would you take a one-way trip to Mars?” I sort of remind myself all the time that, “Hey, we’re all in a one-way trip,” that you can't get away from that. You get your years of then life is done. Get over that part. Don't pretend that you’re going to be the first person ever to never die. 

The real focus then is not to prolong some vestige of life for as desperately long as possible, but actually to do things that are important to you while you are alive. That's the real key. What is important to me and what should I be working on? Because there’s a randomness to life, and what should I be working on? How should I be trying to change who I am? What are the things that I love and that I want to do and that I hope to get done? Let's work on those and not just spend my life cowering under the pillows and hope that somehow that will extend my life by one more day. Deal with the difference between fear and danger and recognize that you are kind of the thinking link between those two so that one doesn't need to overpower the other. 

[0:38:56.0] MB: Let’s change directions. I want to talk about another kind of quote or idea that you’ve shared, which is the idea that the sky is not the limit. 

[0:39:03.5] CH: Yeah, I think it's funny when you see some advertising campaign and somebody says the sky's the limit. I’m going, “Wow! Have you ever looked through a telescope? Have you ever gone outside at night?” I’m just thinking, “What a funny phrase? The sky is the limit.” Maybe that made sense before the Wright Brothers got flagged at Kitty Hawk or before Yeager went through the speed of sound during, whatever, ’47, or Al Shepard flew in space in ’61, or Neil and Buzz walked to the moon and ’69, or Peggy, who’s commanding the space station right now when she did — This is her second time commanding the International Space Station. The sky is this ghostly reflection of light that is the tiniest of vestige of onionskin tin sheaf around the hard rock of our planet. That’s what the sky is. To think that sky is the limit, it just makes me laugh. 

[0:39:59.3] MB: I think that kind of hints at the — One of the things that I've heard a lot of astronauts talk about is this idea that viewing the earth from outer space fundamentally shifts your perspective and gives you a much deeper understanding of the shared journey that humanity is on and the fragileness of earth. Can you tell me a little bit about that experience and what that was like? 

[0:40:25.5] CH: Sure. Earth is incredibly tough. Earth has been here 4-1/2 billion year, which is an almost — It’s such a big number. It's almost infinity, 4-1/2 billion years, and we’ve recently found fossils on earth from 4 billion years ago, the earliest of the two worms that were growing at the rift at the bottom of the oceans. There's been life on earth for 4 billion years. Life tough and the earth is tough, but certain little styles of living. They’re transient, of course. They’re fragile, and the earth gets hit by big events, huge electromagnetic pulses from the sun and other stars and huge million year-long volcanic eruptions and caldera and asteroid impacts and stuff. The earth is tough. It withstood all of those. 

Life is precious, and the earth, as far as we can tell, is the only place that life exists so far. We haven’t found life anywhere else. There's lots of probabilities out there, but we have found no evidence of life anywhere except on earth so far, and we’re looking. Maybe we will find it, but we haven’t found it yet. I think you need to balance those when you’re onboard a spaceship and going around the world in 90 minutes. You can see the rugged, self-repairing, ancient nature of the world. You can see the onslaught of life and the flow of it and the undeniable rejuvenated nature of it, because you go from 56 north to 56 south and you see the whole planet has — Or our orbit is tipped from the equator. You get to really truly understand the world without anybody telling you what to think. You just actually get to see it. 

The common shared way that we set up towns and villages and cities. It doesn't matter whether you’re over Timbuktu or Timmons, or Phoenix, or London. It doesn't matter. That pattern of how we choose to live as people is the same worldwide. Our common goals, we have different cultures and languages and histories and religions and beliefs, but the stuff that is common to us way outweighs the stuff that is different amongst us. We tend to exaggerate the differences naturally enough. It’s just human nature, but I think orbiting the world, you are very much struck by the shared nature of human existence and the commonality of it and the transient nature of it, but also the necessity to cherish it. All of those part of being one of the human beings that gets a chance to orbit the world. 

Also, the reason you mentioned at the outset that I’m an author and a speaker and such is not squander that experience to let people see it as clearly as possible. To try and express it through words or images or music or whatever, to let people truly see where we live and the fact that we’re all breathing out of the same bubble. I think those perspectives are fairly new to us as a species. It’s the result of our new technology that allows us to see ourselves that way and what we do with that information I think is important. 

[0:43:49.1] MB: Another idea that you’ve shared is the concept of aiming to be a zero. Can you tell me about that? 

[0:43:55.4] CH: When I was a young man, I, of course, was very confident. Like a lot of young men, that’s sort of bravado and feeling of invincibility, and I was a downhill ski racer and a pilot and becoming a fighter pilot, and so you sort of become over-sure of your own decision-making ability and your own ability to do the right thing. Of course, you're nowhere near perfect and you make some good decisions and you make some bad ones, but you only see the world through your own eyes and sometimes it gets pretty distorted. 

I found the natural thing to do is, especially when younger, was to assume that no matter what I decided, it was probably right. The way I tried to explain it to myself was no matter what I do, I’m going to be a positive influence. If I come in to a situation and I look around and a bunch of people are doing stuff, what they really need is me to tell them what to do, or at least to express my opinion. That'll sort everything out. 

If I can be a positive, I called myself — Like I’m a plus one. No matter what I do, I come in as a positive plus one influence. Of course, if you're coming into a complicated situation that's been going on for a while, there are all sorts of subtle influences and factors and history and things that are going on that you’re unaware of and you’ll come blundering in with some ideal that just occurred to you as if you're the only person that could have thought of that idea, and everybody around you recognize that you’re not a positive. You’re a negative. You’re a minus one, and everybody around you immediately says, “Wow! I’ll wait till this guy leaves, because what an idiot.” 

I tried to be slightly more realistic in my own abilities and instead of just assuming I was a plus one, and inevitably under a lot of complex circumstances in effect being a minus one, I tried to do instead come in to a new situation deliberately saying, “Okay. I’m going to aim initially to be a zero here.” I’m just going to aim to actually not cause harm. To try and give myself time to notice what’s actually happening, to become informed, to become sensitive to the subtleties that actually dictate what's happening here, and then be a lot more selective and deliberate in how I'm going to try and be a plus one and be a positive influence. 

There are lots of times that won’t work. The classic example is if the building is on fire, it's not time for a nuanced interpretation of what needs to be done. You need to take action. Is something bad is happening, then you don't have time for consultation. You just have to go with everything you’ve learned to that point of take action and do your absolute best to be a plus one. But the building is very seldom on fire and yet we often treat it like it always is. 

I think it's good to have a bunch of tricks up your sleeve, but you are better served in life to come into a new situation deliberately targeting yourself as a zero than just assuming that you’re going to be a plus one. I think it'll serve you better, but it will also serve the environment around you a lot better. 

[0:47:02.0] MB: What is one piece of homework that you would give for somebody listening to this conversation that they could do to concretely implement some of the ideas that we’ve talked about today? 

[0:47:12.7] CH: Two things. One is find something that you’re really interested in, that you're passionate about, that expires you, that raises your pulse just to think about it, that makes you want to know more, and start using your free time to become more expert in that area. Actually, if you’re interested in — It doesn't matter what. If you're interested in — I don't know, trees. It doesn’t matter. Spend some time actually studying it, learn about it, become expert in one part of it and then another part of it. Start making expertise in the areas that you’re interested in part of who you are. Try and really tap into what naturally motivates you and then allow yourself the privilege of becoming expert and competent in the areas that motivate you. I think that will serve you well no matter what. 

The other is have a look at what it is that makes you fearful and don't just accept the fear, but actually say, “Why does that make — I could tell when I'm feeling fearful. That unsettled feeling in my gut, that I can feel the cleanliness of my skin. That makes me afraid just to deal with that.” Then start to treat it clinically. What is it about that that actually is the danger? What is the real problem that I'm trying to solve? How can I change who I am so that I could deal with that problem better? What skill am I lacking? Why am I allowing myself just to be a terrified little chihuahua here when I’m a functioning homo-sapiens? How can I change who I am so that I’m not just relying on fear to deal with that facet of my life? Because fear to me this is a destructive long-term solution to anything. It’s okay in the short term, but you don’t want to have that the way that you deal with something in life. 

I think if you balance those two things, that's probably enough homework for today. 

[0:49:10.0] MB: Chris, where can listeners find you and your books online? 

[0:49:14.7] CH: The books, of course, are available everywhere, any of the online booksellers; Amazon or something. They can go to chrishadfield.ca, Chris Hadfield, chrishadfield.ca, and all of the stuff is available there. Then there're all sorts of stuff available online as well. I perform music with symphonies and have various music available and ideas and the books. Then I speak all over the world. If you go to chrishadfield.ca, you can look under events and see where and when I’m going to be speaking somewhere nearby. Yeah, it’s a world of information and relatively easy to access, but I think you can just Google under my name, then that's probably the best place to start. 

[0:49:57.4] MB: Chris, thank you so much for coming on the show, sharing your incredible story and all of your wisdom, so many great lessons for the audience. Really, thank you very much. 

[0:50:06.7] CH: It was a pleasure to talk with you, and I look forward to seeing you in person. 

[0:50:10.2] MB: Thank you so much for listening to the Science of Success. We created this show to help you, our listeners, master evidence-based growth. I love hearing from listeners. If you want to reach out, share your story or just say hi, shoot me an email. My email is matt@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. I'd love to hear from you and I read and respond to every single listener email. In fact I responded into a number of listener emails this morning from across the globe. 

I’m going to give you three reasons why you should join our email list today by going to successpodcast.com and signing up right on the homepage. First, you’re going to get our exclusive Mindset Monday email. This is something that listeners have been loving. It's short, simple links, stories, articles, things that have us excited in the last week. Next, you’re going to get a chance to shape the show, vote on guests, change the intro music like we rolled out a couple of weeks ago, weigh in on guest questions and much more. Don't miss out on that opportunity. 

Next, you're getting an awesome free guide that we created based on listener feedback and demand, which is our most popular guide; How to Organize and Remember Everything. You can get it completely for free along with all the other perks of being on the email list by signing up and joining the email list today at successpodcast.com. If you join right now you’re going to get another exclusive bonus guide that's a surprise. It's pretty awesome. It’s actually one of favorites personally, and you can get it just by going to the website, signing up, or texting the word “smarter” if you're on the go, just text “smarter” to the number 44222. 

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

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

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

How You Can CRUSH Self Sabotage with Dr. Gay Hendricks

In this episode we discuss how you can fall into cycles of self sabotage and constantly reset your happiness down to where you think it should be, lessons learned from coaching over 20,000 people, how to crush upper limit problems and break through the beliefs holding you back, the questions you need to discover and live in your zone of genius, and much more with Dr. Gay Hendricks. 

Dr. Gay Hendricks is the president of the Hendricks Institute, he earned his Ph.D in counseling psychology from Stanford and taught at the University of Colorado for 21 years and conducted seminars across the globe. He is also a multi best-selling author, having written more than 40 books and his work has been featured on CNN, CNBC, Oprah, and more.

We discuss:

• Gay’s "encounter with destiny" and how it “knocked him out” of his usual way of thinking

• Lessons from training thousands of counselors and coaches to help people transform their lives

• Lessons from counseling and coaching over 20,000 individuals!

• How Gay went from 300+ lbs, smoking 2-3 packs of cigarettes per day, and transformed his entire life

• The two “big ideas” from the Big Leap

• Upper Limit Problems

  1. Occupying your Zone of Genius

• What are "Upper Limit Problems?"

• How to Occupying your “Zone of Genius"

• Success is not just financial - focusing only on financial success puts your out of balance

• Often times its not the lack of business skills that stifle us, its lack of heart centric communication skills

• If you’re able to bring forth what is within you, it will pave the path to success - but if you keep your emotions in, you stifle yourself

• How a tiny bit of misalignment can create echos and rattles throughout your life

• How we fall into cycles of self sabotage to “reset” our happiness down to where we think it should be

• We often manufacture fears, stresses, and anxieties to stop ourselves from feeling good

• The core fears you experience underpinning that Upper Limit Problem

• #1 The Fear of Outshining

• #2 The Fear of Being Fundamentally Flawed

• Upper limit problems are rooted in fear - unless we come to terms with those - we cannot actualize our full potential

• How to explore, lovingly, your own fears and limitations

• The concept of having enough vs having plenty

• #3 The Fear of Leaving Behind or being disloyal to the people you care about

• Do you ever feel like “things are going too well, now something bad is going to happen”

• Focusing on what can go wrong is useful if we TAKE ACTION about it, but if we can’t act on it, its just useless worrying

• The “quick fix” for blame and criticism - get underneath the blame, own what you’re afraid of that is causing that blame and talk about it openly and honestly

• How to fix broken relationships and heal communication problems in 10 minutes or less

• Self criticism is rooted in FEAR - something you’re afraid of in yourself, or something your afraid to communicate to someone else - what is it that im basically afraid of?

• The role shame plays in self criticism and how to find your original shaming

• Is Life Suffering as the Buddha said?

• Can honesty (with ourselves and our relationships) reduce suffering?

• Begin an open hearted, open mind inquiry into what you really want

• Ultimate success mantra - I expand in love, abundance, creativity, and success every day as I inspire other people to expand in love, abundance, success, and creativity!

• The idea of happiness thermostat

• Shine in your life the way you want to shine, not in reference to other people

• Human beings have no idea what their full potential is once they shatter their upper limits

• Using a Lear Jet to plow a potato field

• The Zone of Incompetence vs The Zone competence vs the Zone of Excellence vs the Zone of Genius

• The questions you need to discover and live in your zone of genius

• Even the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies have blocks to their zones of genius

• “All of human beings problems come from an inability to sit in a room by ourselves doing nothing”

• Your zone of genius is a positive addiction - focused on actualizing your life’s purpose

• How to get out negative addictions like worrying and overeating

• The success mantra you can use to push yourself into your zone of genius every day

• And much more!

Thank you so much for listening!

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

This weeks episode of The Science of Success is brought to you by our partners at Brilliant! Brilliant is math and science enrichment learning. Learn concepts by solving fascinating, challenging problems. Brilliant explores probability, computer science, machine learning, physics of the everyday, complex algebra, and much more. Dive into an addictive interactive experience enjoyed by over 4 million students, professionals, and enthusiasts around the world.

You can access courses online for free right now! however, Brilliant is offering The Science of Success Listeners 20% OFF THEIR FULL SUITE of classes and course simply go to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess in order to claim your discount and start learning these incredibly important skills today!

SUCCESS Live: Learn. Develop Achieve.  SUCCESS believes success is possible for every person who seeks it.  Find it at SUCCESS Live, a two-day event, open to the public, taking place in Long Beach, California on September 8th & 9th 2017. SUCCESS Live features some amazing guest speakers including Keith Ferrazzi, Peter Diamandis, Jocko Willink, and More

Ticket packages are still available to the public at https://www.successliveevent.com/! Don't miss the chance to learn the inner workings of your mind, reignite your passions, and become a better leader by becoming a better YOU! JOIN US, members of The Science of Success team at SUCCESS LIve by going to https://www.successliveevent.com/ today!

SHOW NOTES, LINKS, & RESEARCH

• [Book] The Big Leap: Conquer Your Hidden Fear and Take Life to the Next Level by PhD Hendricks Gay

• [Book] The Corporate Mystic by Gay Hendricks

• [Book] Conscious Loving: The Journey to Co-Commitment by Gay Hendricks and Kathlyn Hendricks

• [Book] Conscious Loving Ever After: How to Create Thriving Relationships at Midlife and Beyond by Gay Hendricks and Kathlyn Hendricks

• [Book] Healing the Shame that Binds You by John Bradshaw

• [Article] Writing to heal By Bridget Murray

• [Personal site] The Hendricks Institute

• [Website] Foundation for Conscious Living

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 how you can fall into cycles of self-sabotage and constantly reset your happiness down to where you think it should be. Lessons learned from coaching over 20,000 people. How to crush upper limit problems and rake through the beliefs holding you back? The questions you need to discover and live in your zone of genius, and much more with Dr. Gay Hendricks. 

The Science of Success continues to grow with now more than a million downloads, listeners in over a hundred countries, being nominated for the 2017 People’s Choice Podcast Awards and much more. I get listener comments and emails all the time asking me, “Matt, how do you organize and remember all these incredible information?” 

A lot of her 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’ve created an epic resource just for you. It’s a detailed guide called How to Organize and Remember Everything, and 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, and all you have to do to get it is to text the word “smarter”, that’s “smarter”, to the number 44222, or you can just join our email list at successpodcast.com. As bonus we send out exclusive weekly updates to all the listeners on our email list, so be sure to join. 

In a previous episode we looked at why your definition of success might be hurting you and how you can redefine it in a much healthier way. We examined the power in what some humility, talked about what it means to provide value and how to do it. We went deep into the power of listening, why it’s so important. We discussed three strategies you can use to become a better listener. We explored the concept of brilliance and how you can use it to unlock your own brilliance in 30 seconds and much more with Simon T. Bailey. 

If you want to unleash your inner brilliance, listen to that episode. Don’t forget, if you want to get all the incredible information in this episode, links, transcripts, all the notes for everything we talk about and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. You can get them at successpodcast.com, just hit the show notes button at the top. 

[0:03:00.5] MB: You know how much I talk about the concept of mental models and how vital it is to build a toolkit of mental models in order to be successful and achieve your goals. That's why this week I'm super excited to tell you about one of our sponsors, brilliant.org. 

Brilliant is a math and science learning enrichment tool that makes mastering the fundamentals of math and science easy and fun. They’re offering a special promotion for Science of Success listeners, which you can get it at brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. 

Mastering the fundamentals of math and science is such an important component of building a toolkit of mental models, and Brilliant is a great way to get started with that. 

Another sponsor for this episode is the Success Live Summit, which as we hinted at is not actually the Science of Success, but Success Magazine puts on an awesome life summit and they’ve been kind enough to sponsor this episode as well as hook us up with some sweet guest speakers which will be coming on the show in the next couple of weeks. 

This summit is actually pretty awesome and I'm kind of bummed out that I'm not to get to go to have it. I have an immovable schedule conflicts, but my producer, Austin, who's here in the studio with me will be able to attend and he’s going to be there. 

[0:04:04.1] AF: Yeah, we’re super excited, and if anybody listening to this right now wants to meet up, shoot me an email, austin@successpodcast.com. We’d love to chat, shake hands, take pictures, it’d be awesome. I think it’s really important for people that are striving to become more successful, to become more fulfilled, looking into the science of success, to be around other people with those same goals. This time around, the event is two days. It’s in September 8th and 9th in Long Beach, California. There’s ticket packages available and they’ve got some amazing speakers, Matt. 

[0:04:29.5] MB: They really do. There’s people like some of my favorite authors, Keith Ferrazzi, Never Eat Alone, which is literally sitting on my desk right here. I constantly keep it in front of me because it’s probably the greatest book ever written about networking. They’ve got Peter Diamandis, incredible thinker and leader. People like Brendon Buchard, Mel Robbins, really phenomenal line up. 

[0:04:47.0] AF: Yeah. It’s going to be great, and they’re speaking on a ton of things, from success, how to become a leader, find balance in your life. If you’re a CEO of a company you really got to find time to recharge, time to hit the gas. Just finding balance and mental strategies to making yourself bigger and better and your business bigger and better. Really hitting on all cylinders here. It’s going to be a great, great event. 

[0:05:05.8] MB: You can learn more and get tickets at successliveevent.com. That’s successliveevent.com. Definitely check it out. If you’re in Long Beach, I would highly recommend checking it out, or if you’re looking for a really cool event, September 8th and 9th, Long Beach, California, successliveevent.com. You can find all the information you need. 

[0:05:25.1] AF: Success Live: Learn, Develop, Achieve. Go to successliveevent.com today to your ticket. 

[0:05:29.9] MB: Now, for the episode. 

[0:05:30.1] MB: Today, we have another awesome guest on the show, Dr. Gay Hendricks. Gay is the president of the Hendricks Institute. He earned his Ph.D. in counseling psychology from Stanford and he taught at the University of Colorado for 21 years, has conducted seminars across the globe. He's also a multi-best-selling author having written more than 40 books and his work has been featured on CNN, CNBC, Oprah and much more. 

Gay, welcome to the Science of Success. 

[0:05:57.9] GH: Thanks, Mat. Really good to be with you. 

[0:05:59.8] MB: We’re so excited to have you on here today. For listeners who may not be familiar with you and all of the work that you've done, tell us a little about your story and, specifically, I love to hear about kind of one of the inflection points that changed your life early on. 

[0:06:16.1] GH: Yes. I was going one way in my life until I had a big encounter with destiny when I was 24 years old. What happened before that is I was born, I had a lot of medical problems growing up. I was very obese. There was something wrong with my glandular system and I was taken around lots of different experts, but I never could get the problem handled until when I was 24 years old. I had what you might call not an out-of-the-body experience, but it was definitely an out of Hendricks experience.

I was, at the time, in really toxic relationship and I didn’t like my job and I was 120 pounds overweight. I weigh about 180 pounds now. At that time, I weight a little over 300 pounds and I was smoking two or three packs of cigarettes a day. Things were just not going well in my life. 

One particular day I slipped on the ice. I was walking down a road in New England and I slipped on the ice and I kind of slammed down. I didn’t knock myself out, but as I say, I knocked myself out of my usual way of thinking and in that moment I laid there and I realized I could've died here because where I landed was about 6 inches from this real jagged rock on the side of the road and I was realizing I could've easily taken myself out really before I ever had a chance to have my own life. 

In that moment, I had a vision of what was possible that there was an element inside us, a pure consciousness that didn't have anything to do with our programming and that at any time we could begin to create an entirely different life by making entirely different choices. 

That was this moment of real aliveness this for me. Afterwards, I really clung to that moment and I started eating only foods that fed that new consciousness. I quit eating all the old foods that I ate and I lost more than 100 pounds within a year. Got rid of my tobacco addiction and got out of that relationship. I basically changed my whole life. It was a real pivot point for me. I’ve gone on to do lots of different things since then, but to look back over my whole life, that was a moment that really changed everything. 

At the time I didn't really know anything about relationships, how they worked or anything. I kind of just stumbled into them, but I started really paying attention to the dynamics of my relationships until finally I had obviously learned enough about relationships by 1980 that I met the love of my life, Kathlyn Hendricks, also known as Katie, and she and I have been together for the past 38 years. As a matter of fact, right now she's on a seminar tour of Europe teaching about the very same things I'm talking to you about right now. We’ve had this great discrete working relationship as well as love relationship for the past 38 years. 

All of the things that are in the Big Leap particularly, which is my most popular book especially in the coaching industry and among people who are interested in success, I really discovered those two main principles that are in the Big Leap which I'll talk more about shortly. But I really began to discover the elements of those in my close relationship with Katie. 

The two big ideas in the Big Leap are one that we have an upper limit problem of how much love and abundance and success we allow ourselves to have, and I was able to discover the underlying underpinnings of what causes the upper limit problem. The second thing that the Big Leap is about, is about how to occupy your zone of genius, and that part of yourself which is completely full of good ideas, it never has a shortage of good ideas, it’s completely in harmony with who you are as a person, that I think each of us has this largely undiscovered zone of genius inside us where that if we work it right we can uncover that zone of genius and begin to express it in the world. 

Katie and I for the past 38 years had been really committed to spreading those ideas throughout the world and our other books such as Conscious Loving, that was actually what the first got us on Oprah’s  show and other talk shows like that. 

Let me pause and catch my breath and let you ask me any questions you want to ask. 

[0:11:03.3] MB: I definitely want to dig into both the concept of upper limit problems and how we can get into our zone of genius. Before we do that, one of the things that you talked about in the book that I think is vitally important to understand is that — And even on the show broadly, is that when we talk about success, a lot of people are sort of preprogrammed to think that that necessarily means financial success or monetary success. I think there’s that you talked, there's a much bigger and broader picture to that. There's more facets to success. Can you can you elaborate on that? 

[0:11:37.4] GH: Yes. I’ve had the opportunity, for many years I did a lot of business coaching with the executives after my book, The Corporate Mystique, came out about 20 years or so ago. I did a lot of work with high-powered people in executive suites around the country and one thing I found is that unless you can have what I call success of the heart along with success of the wallet, it puts you out of balance and almost always causes misery that keeps you from enjoying your success. 

I was able to work with over the years one powerful executive after the other who had gone overboard in the direction of success in the financial realm but at the sacrifice of closing their heart to their own deeper needs and also not allowing as much love into their lives as they possibly could. 

For me, my definition of success has to do both with the expansion of our abundance, but also the expansion of the love and the creativity that we have flowing in our lives. When I would work with executives that were experiencing stress or troubled lives in various ways, it was almost never a shortage of business skills in the charts and graphs arena. What it was was a shortage of heart-centered communication skills. 

I’ll give you an example of that. I once worked with one of the top executives at a big well-known computer firm that everybody knows the name of and his problem wasn't that he didn't have enough business skills. He was one of the most awesome business people that I've ever seen, but his problem had to do with oftentimes he would blow his stack in communication and he would get angry at someone and then they would be scared of him. For him, his anger it would blow over in five minutes and he never thought about it again. For other people, he hadn’t considered the fallout from his anger. 

We have a moment in conversation with him where I was able to point out that his anger explosions were basically the underlying feeling was one of hurt or sadness or disappointment and he didn't know how to express that, so he would blow his stack instead. I showed him some simple ways to express hurt and anger and disappointment in appropriate businesslike way and it really changed the man's life. It really changed him from being basically what everybody described as a hot head to being a person who was able to communicate in a straightforward level about the emotions that were underneath his anger. 

If you think about it, that's an essential thing for any relationship whether it's a business relationship or a relationship at home, because if you're able to bring forth what's within you, what's within you will actually save you, will actually pave the way to your greater success, but if you don't bring forth what is within you, if you keep your feelings concealed inside and if you keep your genius concealed inside, then nothing works right in life. 

I compare it to a car. Let’s say you bought a new car and you drive out of the showroom and this actually happened to a friend of mine. Drove her new car out of the showroom, and because it was a little bit wider than her old car, the first corner she took she dinged the back wheel of the car. She hit the curve and dinged the back wheel and knocked the wheel out of alignment. Here she is with a brand-new car driving down the street and it’s got a shimmy in it because the back wheel is out of alignment. It only takes a tiny little bit of misalignment in ourselves to cause that off-center rattling sensation inside. What we do like in the book, The Big Leap, what I lay out is all the places that take us out of alignment and how to fix those so that you can have a nice smooth easy ride into your zone of genius. 

[0:16:20.3] MB: Let’s dig into that now. Let's start with upper limit problems. What does that mean and how do people experience upper limit problems? 

[0:16:29.9] GH: Yes, the upper limit problem. I began to notice that first in myself long before I wrote the book The Big Leap. People ask me how long sometimes it took me to write The Big Leap, and I said, “Well, it took me actually 30 years,” because from the moment I first started noticing the upper limit problem and the zone of genius, it took me a long time of working with people and myself on that before I finally in the early days of this century sat down and wrote the book. 

What I noticed was I would tend to sabotage myself when things were going well. At the time I had my girlfriend, I was a graduate students at Stanford at the time working in the counseling psychology department and I was getting my Ph.D. This goes back to the early 1970s. I would notice with my girlfriend at the time that we would get along well for a few days and then one of us would start an argument and then the other person would get into the argument and then sometimes it would take us a couple of weeks to get out of that cycle and back into a state of feeling harmony together. I barely begin to notice that we would often sabotage ourselves when things were going really good. 

On another occasion, at the time my daughter had just started for the first time a three-day sleep away camp. She was only five or six years old at the time and she was going to sleep overnight for the first time. I was a single parent at the time and so I never had a night where she spent a night out of my house. I was very nervous about it. 

I took her over to the camp and later on in the day I started getting images in my mind of her feeling alone and homesick and sitting by herself or something in a dining hall. I called the director of the camp who is this really lovely lady and I told her my concerns and I said, “Is Amanda okay?” The camp director, she said, “Yes. I can see her right now. She's out in the field here playing soccer with a bunch of the girls. That's what they are doing this hour.” The images in my mind were completely unreal. I had manufactured them myself out of my own fears about her and her well-being. 

What I realized was I was feeling really good right up until the moment I started manufacturing those images of her feeling lonely at camp, which turned out to be completely bogus. They had nothing to do with what she was actually feeling. I started wondering, “Hmm, I wonder if we have this human tendency to sabotage ourselves when things are feeling good or when things are going well.” I began to pay attention to that and I begin to work with it in my clients and that's how the original discoveries were made about the upper limit problem. 

Now, where I made my biggest breakthroughs was where I started seeing that the upper limit problem was based on certain fears that human beings carry around inside ourselves, and so I began to look at what those fears were. One of the biggest ones interestingly enough in helping people, in helping guide people toward success as I've done over the years, is to realize that a lot of us have a fear of outshining other people. 

What you can sometimes see in the psychological literature is the fear of outdoing someone, and I call it the fear of outshining, because it does have to do with our choice whether to really let ourselves shine or to keep ourselves a little bit hidden and concealed. 

When I looked into it and started reading the scientific literature that had to do with early childhood, I often found that successful people were often still concealing an element of their genius inside and still upper limiting themselves by that fear of outshining. That wasn't the only fear though. I noticed that in some of my clients that they also had a fear of — That there was something fundamentally wrong with themselves. We call it fundamentally flawed. That a lot of people think they've done something wrong in life that they have to apologize for, or that they feel some kind of shame about something that happened a long time ago. 

That a lot of people carry around this feeling that there's something fundamentally wrong with them and they never address that fully so that they can allow themselves to fully shine. As I started working with the upper limit problem, Matt, I realized that it’s really rooted in fear and that unless we can come to terms with our fundamental fears in life we don't have really a good hope of actualizing our full potential. 

I always say to my students — I’ve trained trade about a thousand of so coaches over the years to do our work through the Hendricks Institute. Not only that, but I trained about 1,200 counselors and therapists when I was teaching at the University of Colorado for 21 years in the counseling psychology program. I always say that in order to be a success as a coach you really need to open the door to exploring lovingly your own fears and limitations, because you can only take your clients as far as you've gone yourself. To really go to the full element of success, I’ve really needed to get underneath a lot of my old fears about myself. 

I have one other story. Do I have time to tell another story about financial success? 

[0:22:42.3] MB: Absolutely. Yeah, we love stories. 

[0:22:44.7] GH: Okay. Good. Let me take you back to the early days of my relationship with Katie, which was in the early 1980s. I met her in 1980. We've been together for a year or two and we weren't doing well financially. I was broke when I met her because I've just taken six month sabbatical to travel around and learn new things in different settings. I'd taken half a year off from my university position. I was pretty much flat broke. In fact, I was underneath flat broke. I owed American Express $800 and they had just repossessed my card. I was really in the hole. 

Katie had $300 in savings and an old Mustang. That was for her dowry when we got together. Anyway, we didn’t have a lot of good financial prospects, but we had started developing an idea that, “Wow! If we could somehow get out from under our old programming that maybe we might be able to create something brand-new.” 

One night, it was winter in Colorado, and I couldn't go outside and exercise, so I was pedaling furiously on my exercise bike and suddenly I had a realization that through my mind was running a series of thoughts that said, “I wonder if we've got enough money to make it through to the end of the month?” That's what I was obsessing on. Do we have enough money? I was kind of adding up things in my mind, but I was pedaling along on my exercise bike and suddenly I realized that's the exact same conversation I heard around me all the time growing up, was people saying, “Oh my God! Are we going to have enough to make it through to the end of the month?” 

It occurred to me as I was on my exercise bike, “Did I just take that on as my overall programming for life, how life had to be, that I always had to worry about making it through to the end of the month?” I jumped off my exercise bike and I ran and I talked to Katie and I shared this realization with her and I said, “What if we — Instead of running off of our old programming, what if we sat down and figured out exactly what we want to create and where we want to go and what we want to have in our lives and that would take us out of our old programming?” It was kind of similar to what I've done to lose all the weight, but I'd never thought of doing it really in my financial or abundance or success area. 

We went out to lunch and had a salad at this place, and ironically the name of the restaurant we went to, Matt, was called Poor Richards in Colorado Springs, Colorado. That restaurant might even still be there for all I know, but I thought it was ironic that we did our success planning in a restaurant called Poor Richard. 

We sat down and we had a salad and plotted out how we wanted our future to be. Listen to what we came up with. We said we want enough so that we never have to worry about money. Then we realize, “Wait a minute. Why did we use the word enough?” because it had that idea of having just enough so that we didn't have to worry. We changed that word to we always have plenty of money so that we never have to think about money when we consider buying something. That was the basic idea that we started out with, that we always have plenty of money to do whatever we want to do so. 

We started writing down that idea and actually posting in different places. Then we came up with a practical thing, and this will tell you exactly how long ago this was. We came up with this outrageously expanded idea. We said, “What if we had a thousand dollars saved up in a savings account and we never touched that? We always had at least that $1,000 and we just agreed never to touch that for basic needs?” This was this outrageous idea. We said, “Wow! Is that even possible?” 

Interestingly enough it only took us — Gosh! A matter of months to create that once we got our attention on it and then we set this really outrageous goal, “Wouldn’t it be great if we had $10,000 dollars that we just had in an account and we never touched it.” 

Then it took us, I think, a couple of years to manifest that, but then we set it one notch higher, “Let’s create $100,000 that we never touched.” Anyway, we started our whole investment portfolio based on those kinds of ideas, and so by the time we had been at this for a couple of years we had created a significant amount of wealth simply by keeping focused on those core ideas. We really never — We founded the Hendricks Institute in 1989 as I was kind of winding down my university career. After we were on Oprah a couple of times and that kind of thing, I felt guilty about doing all the traveling we were doing and I felt guilty about that I wasn't doing my university a full hundred percent job. I wound down my career there and we set up the Hendricks Institute. We’ve never really had a bad year. We’ve gone through every recession and everything like that in a steady upward track. 

I really feel solidly committed to teaching these principles because I know for a fact that they work at home here for me and my family and people that I've worked with. so that gives me a sense of real solidarity about that when I stand up in front of a group and talk about these things, that I can say definitely that I've used them myself to create the kind of magic I wanted in my own life. 

[0:28:47.4] MB: You touched on guilt a second ago, which makes me think about some of the other features that can often underpin an upper limit problem, specifically the idea of either abandoning people or sort of moving beyond what peoples expectation of you are. Can you talk a little bit about that? 

[0:29:07.5] GH: Yes. One of the big fears that successful people have, even people who are already successful but are not yet at their full measure of success. One of the big fears is that if I go to my full measure of success, if I go to my full level of success, that will mean I will have to leave behind or be disloyal to people that I love and care about. They’ll think bad thoughts about me because I've gone to another level of success. 

Many of us grew up in a family where success wasn't something that happened very often. I think I told a story in The Big Leap about when I wrote my first book and published it in 1975, which was a small book about education. I'd written it because I thought that like when my daughter was in the first grade and the 2nd grade, I thought they wasted a lot of their time just trying to get kids organize, and so I created this whole new curriculum of relaxation exercises and things that would help kids kind of get centered and focused and would help them get centered before tests and that kind of thing. I was able to create this curriculum. Prentice Hall ended up publishing it as a book. 

I remember, nobody in my family ever published a book before and I remember when I took the book and showed it to my brother and my mother they both just kind of looked at it and resumed their conversation. Neither one of them either said congratulations or wow or that's cool or anything like. I remember being kind of flabbergasted by that. Later on I realized that nobody had ever done anything like that and so they didn’t have a way to think about it and so it probably touched on buttons for them that I was getting too big for my britches or something like that and they needed to cut me back down the size. My family was kind of like that. It is that people would always — If you were going around feeling happy, somebody would say, “Okay. Don't worry. Something bad is about to happen,” and I think that's where the upper limit problem gets its origin in that kind of early programing. 

[0:31:25.1] MB: One of the biggest things that I’m a huge fan of on the show are mental models. You’ve heard me talk a lot about mental models and how critically important it is if you want to be successful to build a toolkit of mental models that can help you better understand reality. 

One of the topics and many of the topics actually that are critical to developing an amazing and rich toolkit of mental models is a deep understanding of mathematics, science, physics, chemistry, etc. The hard sciences are some of the backbones of the most useful and effective mental model toolkits, and that's why I'm super excited to announce that our sponsor for this episode is brilliant.org. 

Brilliant.org is a math and science enrichment learning website where you can learn concepts by actually solving fascinating and challenging problems. I'm really, really excited about this, because I'm a huge fan of STEM learning; science, technology, engineering and math, and I think that it’s something that America in general needs to do a better job of and it's something that I really want you, the listeners, to be improving and getting these skills and getting better at things like science and math. 

Too many people in our society have lost the ability to quantitatively understand reality, and the mental models from a hard sciences are some of the most powerful in describing what happens in the real world. I personally am super psyched about Brilliant. The courses on there are amazing, and I'm going to through and take a bunch of them to re-up my understanding of things like probability, games of chance, problem-solving and they even have some really cool stuff, things like machine learning. 

Right now brilliant.org is offering our listeners an additional 20% off of their premium plan. This discount is only for Science of Success listeners and you can unlock it by going to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. That’s brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess. You can sign up using our custom link and then you’ll get the 20% premium membership which comes with all of their courses and you can use this to learn about probability. You can increase your mathematics abilities. You can learn more about the hard sciences, like physics and chemistry. If you want to build a toolkit of powerful mental models, I cannot recommend enough using something like brilliant.org to improve your quantitative understanding of the world and how it works. Again, you can go to brilliant.org/scienceofsuccess to get this 20% discount.

That’s something that that's one of the reasons I love Big Leap and that particular fear really resonated with me and I feel like I'm naturally very analytical person, very — I don’t want to say pessimistic, but my mind naturally thinks about, “Okay. What can go wrong? how can things go wrong?” That fear of, “Oh! Things are going well. Something bad has to happen now or something bad is looming around the corner,” is really been something that I've dealt within my own life and had cropped up again and again. How do we battle that fear or how do we break down the underpinnings of it? 

[0:34:18.7] GH: Yes. That’s really a good one for me to talk about, Matt, because I have exactly that same issue and I’ve turned it into something that I think is very useful. What happens is when I get in a situation, like my daughter, for example, is in the midst of — Now, this is not the six-year-old version of my daughter. This is now forty years later, but she’s in the process of buying a house boat up in the Bay Area to fix it up plans to live on it for several days of the week, which is what’s allowed in her particular marina. 

Immediately, as soon as she said it, I started thinking of all the possible things that could go wrong. Now, that's a useful thing in a way if you don't turn it into an obsessive thing. I just wrote those things down and asked her if we could talk about those and has she considered those. That's a useful use of that particular way of thinking, but what's not useful is if we don't do anything about it. 

I think a lot of the things that trouble us wouldn't be troubling to us if we just took some action about it. For example, if you go around all day obsessing about some friend that said something to you that you didn't like, that's a 10 second problem. It takes 10 seconds to pick up the phone and call your friend and say, “Hey, I’d like to talk over something with you.” 

See, most of the things that I discovered were problems in relationships. Some of them are 10-second problems but none of them are bigger than 10-minute problems, because the 10-minute problem is the problem where you can get two people together and say, “Hey, I was angry about this. I'm scared about this. I'm sad about this. I was hurt by this.” When two people can talk at that kind of raw level of honesty, I've never seen a problem yet that couldn’t be cleared up in 10 minutes of communication like that. 

Sometimes — Gosh! I’ve had couples in here. I'm remembering one that’s coming to mind right now. Very successful couple but they fought constantly. Didn’t enjoy their wealth because they were always fighting, and when I really worked with them, when Katie and I worked with them for an hour, we realized in that first hour that they've been having essentially the same argument for the whole 30 years that they've been together. It always went the same way. One of them would conceal some feeling, like I'm angry at you or I was hurt by something you said or I'm scared about something we’re doing. 

One of them would conceal that, usually anger, and then they would start criticizing the other person. Then the other person would start criticizing them back and they would get into a cycle of blame and criticism. That's why Katie and I and both our original book, Conscious Loving and our more recent book for midlife couples called Conscious Loving Ever After, we have a whole chapter on how to end blame and criticism in close relationships. We show you, we pick apart blame and criticism and show you the quick fix for it. 

The quick fix is to get underneath the blame and own whatever it is that you're afraid of and talk about it on that level rather than continuing to criticize and blame the other person. When two people can talk about their fears openly and honestly, they stop blaming and criticizing each other. That's important because when people leave relationships and they ask them, “Why did you leave this relationship?” One of the things they almost always say is, “I got sick and tired of all the blame and criticism. I figured if I was going to get blamed and criticized I might as well go ahead and move out and letter him or her blame and criticize me 24 hours a day.” 

The same thing works in business. When I was doing business consulting I ended up spending a lot of my time helping people fix broken relationships that it happened as a result of some kind communication glitch. Again, Matt, I haven’t found one yet that couldn't be completely healed up and cleared up and set on the right track in 10 minutes of clear communication. It’s trying to get those 10 minutes put together though that sometimes takes hours or years. 

[0:38:48.8] MB: On the concept of criticism, another topic that you dig into a little bit in Big Leap that really resonated with me was also the underpinning of that and the idea of self-criticism. My natural state again is kind of being very hard on myself, very critical, and you talked about how to deal with that. Can you elaborate on that? 

[0:39:08.5] GH: Yes. Again, that’s another one that I’ve worked on a lot personally in addition to — I’ve worked with about I think a little over 20,000 individuals now. Frankly, I haven't found very many of those that didn't have that self-critical function. We’ll do a couple of things. First of all realize that self-criticism and criticizing other people both come out of the same toothpaste tube, and the toothpaste tube it comes out of is something that you're afraid of in yourself or something you're afraid to communicate to someone else. So I needed to get underneath that whole issue and find out what is it that I'm basically afraid of? 

In my own case, I don't know if this is true for you or others that you’ve worked with, but in my own case I grew up with a lot of kind of shame-based parenting. In other words you should be ashamed of yourself for that or whatever possessed, what family are you from? Anyway, the idea of shaming people was very important at least in this section of the world I grew up in and many families have that function built into it. We need to look underneath that. 

Like my old friend and colleague, John Bradshaw, says in his famous book Healing The Shame That Binds You, we need to look and find out what the original shaming was of, because it usually didn't start with us. You look at what was my family ashamed of and what did people shame each other for? 

If you look into some of those original kinds of programming things, you will see where many of us got that sense of feeling bad about ourselves. If you look into even early religious scriptures, whether it's in the Hindu religion or Christian or Jewish or Buddhist or wherever you look, the first line of Buddha's Four Noble Truths says life is suffering. 

Well, I always had trouble with that because that's one element of life, but why are we suffering? Well, we’re suffering because we're not honest in our relationships. We’re not honest with ourselves. The moment we start being honest with ourselves and honest in our relationships, life stops being purely about suffering. It begins to be about the possibilities of success, the possibilities of having more love in our lives. 

What we need to do when we notice these limitations in ourselves is begin an openhearted, open-minded inquiry down deep into ourselves into our own hearts and minds and find out what it is that we really want and what it is we’re really here to do and what it is we're really here to contribute. 

In the Big Leap I print out what I call sometimes my universal success mantra or my ultimate success mantra, which is the idea that I expand in love and abundance and creativity and success every day myself as I inspire other people to expand in love and abundance and success and creativity. 

The idea is that I want to have my life be about a constant expansion of the things that are dearest to me and I think are dearest to all of human beings, which is increasing the amount of love in our lives, increasing the amount of abundance in our lives, increasing the amount of success and increasing the amount of creativity, because without that spark of creativity in our lives, life doesn't have the juiciness that I like my life to have. 

Also, Matt, I think it's important especially for many of us that are in the line of work that you and I are in and many of the people who are listening are in which is the business of helping people an themselves be more effective in their work and being more effective as leaders and being more effective in creating abundance for their families. We need to realize that it's not just a process of opening up more to yourself. It’s inspiring other people by your actions, because I found that life is really only at its best when I'm not only expanding my own love, abundance and creativity, but also inspiring other people to open up more to theirs every day. I feel very blessed because 30 or 40 years ago I created a job that I would never want to retire from. As you can probably hear, I’m just as excited about it now at age 72 as I was age at 32 when I began to first catch on to some of these ideas. It gives me a great deal of pleasure to be able to talk about them in a way that helps people learn more about how to make more of their lives a daily miracle for themselves. 

[0:44:24.9] MB: I want to go back a little bit and explore one of the concept you talked about at the beginning of the Big Leap, which is the idea of sort of a happiness thermostat and that we have a setting that's been programmed into us one way or another about how happy we think we’re allowed to be and how we naturally sort of push ourselves or subconsciously reset ourselves back to that level. 

[0:44:48.3] GH: Yes. Think of the upper limit problem as kind of like the governor on a car. Let's say you had a governor installed on your car that wouldn’t let you go beyond 40 miles an hour and that every time you came up to 40 miles an hour it would slow you back down again. That's exactly how the upper limit problem works. 

I tell the story in the Big Leap about a man who was in the real estate business and he’d never made more than $200,000 a year and he said that every time he had gotten up to $200,000 a year he found some way to sabotage himself. We talked about that and so I asked one of the questions that all good coaches and therapists ask is; how is this problem familiar? Have you ever known anybody else that had a similar problem? 

It had never dawned on him, but he said, “Oh! My dad's in real estate and he's never made more than $200,000 a year,” and so it became obvious that it was a fear of outshining. That if he made more than $200,000 a year that it would somehow mean that he was going beyond his dad and his dad would feel bad about that. 

When we work together I was able to help him reframe it by saying, “Maybe instead of that, it'll inspire your dad. That he’ll feel proud of you or maybe it will inspire him to make $300,000, but it doesn't really have anything to do with you. Your job is to shine in your life the way you want to shine not in reference to other people.” 

It was interesting, I think I told the end of the story in the Big Leap where I didn't see him again for a while and then one day I happened to bump into him or see him across the crowd at a July 4th parade and he kind of gave me a high five and he shouted across, “It worked!” Meaning that he broke through the $200,000 mark. 

I love stories like that, because what it tells us is that — And what I deeply believe is that human beings really have no idea about what our full potential can be once we start overcoming our upper limit problem. The way I talk about it in the Big Leap, I said it’s like we’re born with the Learjet, but we use the Learjet to plow potato fields with. We taxied back and forth across the potato field and use it for that purpose rather than soaring. What I want us to do is get ourselves studying the upper limit problem in yourself so you can begin to notice it. Unwinding those fears it’s based on and letting your genius flow 24/7. 

[0:47:32.4] MB: There's there so many topics I want to get into and I know we don’t have a ton of more time, but tell me a little bit — We haven't dug into yet, what is the zone of genius and what are the other zones of competence and excellence, etc., and how can they prevent us from getting to our zone of genius? 

[0:47:48.5] GH: Yes. If you look about what you do, look at what you do every day on a daily basis, you'll notice that it falls into one of four zones. One is you’re doing things you're not good at doing, but you persistent in doing them anyway. I call that the zone of incompetence. The zone of competence is when you're doing things that your good at but somebody else could do just as well. 

The zone of excellence is where you're doing things that your excellent at, you’re better at them than other people, but it doesn't represent who you are at your most expanded. I call that the zone of genius. When you're functioning in your zone genius, you're doing what you love to do and you're doing it in such a way that it creates the maximum amount of abundance and satisfaction for you. 

The zone of genius is when you're in the groove of what you love to do and you're in the groove of doing those things that create satisfaction and abundance for you and your family and your business. That's really the zone of genius. Some good ways to find out that zone of genius, the first big question is to start asking yourself, “What do I most love to do and how can I set up my life so I do more of that every day?” 

I start people with 10 minutes a day. I have them identify their zone of genius, like when I’m coaching executives here in my office or when I'm out teaching seminars or on television. I ask people to start first with 10 minutes a day. That's all you need to start with. Find a way to put 10 minutes on the calendar today of sitting in a room by yourself usually doing something that's related to your zone of genius. Maybe you don't know what your zone of genius is, but if you go in a room for 10 minutes and just write the question a dozen times, “What is my zone of genius?” “What do I most love to do?” I lay out those questions in the Big Leap. If you just take those question in a room by yourself and write them down or say them out loud or record them into your phone, but just the active inquiry into what your zone of genius is gets the process started. 

[0:50:11.7] MB: That's something that I thought personally it seems really simple and easy to figure out, “Okay, what do I love doing? What am I good at doing or what am I great at doing?” But I feel like there’s some — I think a lot listeners will hear that and say, “ That sounds great and all, but it's got to be more complicated than that.” How do I tie my zone of genius into making money or does it have to be within just my job or can it be something completely different? All of these sort of various different questions. I’m curious, how do you sort of answer somebody who is concerned for something like that? 

[0:50:47.2] GH: Yes. Well, I’ve worked with that extensively, because believe it or not I work with CEOs of big companies that everybody had heard of and when I opened up the subject with them even if they have blocks to their zone of genius. I can remember one conversation it's coming to mind right now where all I was trying to do was get this executives to carve out 10 minutes a day to go in a room by himself and just sit and think. Because here's what he told me, he said very wistfully one day, “You know, in the beginning I could just sit and think and figure things out. Now, I never have chance to do that. I'm always responding to other things.” 

What I do is I get very practical. I help the person get out their calendar and I say, “Okay. Today, from 1:15 to 1:25 I want you to close out the world and just go in a room and sit and think.” You wouldn't believe how much resistance. He said, “Oh! No. I can’t. I just don’t have time to do that kind of stuff anymore,” but we did it. We blocked out 10 minutes, and I sat there with him and all we did was breathe together. It changed that guy’s work life, because he was able to see that he would be able on a daily basis to commit at least 10 minutes to his zone of genius. Well, pretty soon he got to doing more and more of that. It was no longer satisfying to do it just 10 minutes. You have to start somewhere. 

There's a great quote from the philosopher Blaise Pascal several hundred years ago. He said, “All of human beings problems come from an inability to sit in a room by ourselves for 10 minutes doing nothing.” I started with a 10-minute rule that I ask people to go in a room and just do nothing but think about their genius for 10 minutes. It's harder than you think, but you can't really argue with it until after you've done it. My suggestion is if anybody argues with it, just go-ahead and sit down and do it. All you’ve got is 10 minutes to lose and you’ll be blown away by what happens. I'm thinking also too of — There have been a number of studies, like there's a psychologist named James Pennebaker who did a famous study where all he did was ask a group of college sophomores to sit down for 15 minutes now and then four times a week and just write down what was going on in their life and the various stresses they were having and what issues and stuff like that, to just journal about those things for 15 minutes four times a week. Then he followed up those people and he found that over the next year they had significantly fewer visits to the doctor, to the health center, that kind of thing. 

Just think. In an hour a week, you can change your health of doing nothing except drilling. Imagine what you could do if you committed your first 10 minutes a day, an hour a week in other words to focusing on your zone of genius. Next week you might want to do an hour and a half the week after that. That's how I started. When I first started these I realized that I was spending 90% of my time not in my zone of genius, not doing what I love to do. I just started increasing and I set the goal first of having 50% of my time in my zone of genius. That took me a few years to accomplish, but that was 20 years ago. I worked up from there. 

Now, basically, I spend all my time in my zone of genius and some of my time getting around from place to place and sleeping and eating and that kind of thing, but the rest of my life is all structured around my zone genius. 

[0:54:42.4] MB: What about someone who maybe has multiple unique abilities or zones of genius. Is it possible to have — Does the zone of genius very tight and confined or can it be lots of different things that sort of flow together? 

[0:54:57.4] GH: I think it’s very likely to be lots of things that float together. Our great American poet, Walt Whitman said, “I am large and contain multitudes,” and so if we think of ourselves that way, we have a multitude within us, I think that if you really boil it down though you'll find that there is something really essential at the heart of your zone of genius. 

I was working with a group of advanced students who were here last week that my wife and I were working with that come to work with us a few times a year, here at our place in Southern California. I was working with them on this concept and one of the things that all of them had discovered as they began to work more in their zone of genius is that it's a positive addiction. You want to do more. Once you start locking in on your zone genius it has a natural positive ability to want you to do it more and more, and that's a good thing because what we want to do is get out from under our negative addiction, such as to worry and bad habits and drinking too much and eating too much and smoking too much and watching too much TV, all the things that human beings to do to distract themselves from their life purpose. What we need to do is get ourselves focused on actualizing our life purpose and develop positive addictions that feed that kind of lifestyle. 

For example, for me, I started working out five or six years ago doing resistance training three days a week. If you'd ask me 10 years ago if I’d ever spent time in a gym with a trainer, I would laugh in your face because I hated stuff like that. I’m a golfer and a bicyclist. The idea of going into a gym and pumping iron for an hour seem like a really retrograde. 

Five or six years ago I discovered how much that feeds my genius. The more I increase the liveliness in my muscles and I’ve really restructured my body for being a kind of pear-shaped fat intellectual look 40 years ago to, now — I have essentially the same physique. I weigh about the same and look about the same as Tiger Woods, one of my golf heroes. That was my goal was to look like Tiger Woods by the time I was 70 years old. By doing a lot of working out I’ve kind of adopted the Tiger stereotype physique rather than the intellectual pear-shaped physique. 

[0:57:33.8] MB: For somebody who's was listening to this interview that wants to start concretely implementing some of these ideas in their lives, what's one kind of piece of homework that you would give them as a starting point? 

[0:57:45.0] GH: Get hold of the arm universal or ultimate success mantra that’s in the Big Leap and go in a room by yourself for 10 minutes and do nothing, but say that mantra, that affirmation over and over again in your mind. Just get comfortable with this idea of using your life to expand every day in your love, your abundance, your creativity, your success at the same time as you inspire others by your actions to do the same. Just start with that fundamental idea and get comfortable with having your life be about that. That’s probably the simplest thing you can do to get started. 

[0:58:29.9] MB: For listeners who want to find out more about you, who want to find your books and resources online, where can they do that? 

[0:58:36.9] GH: Probably the easiest places to go to hendricks.com. That’s Hendricks.com, and we also have the foundation for conscious living, that’s our nonprofit foundation. That’s at foundationforconsciousliving.com. But probablyhendricks.com is the jumping off place for all that kind of thing because there you can see excerpts from interviews with us and get different techniques and things like that that are the main areas of interest that we’re in. 

[0:59:05.4] MB: Gay, thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing all these incredible wisdom. Big Leap is a book that really resonated with me and one that that spoke to a lot of the struggles and challenges that I faced in my life. Thank you so much for being a guest. 

[0:59:20.6] GH: My pleasure, Matt. Thanks a lot for the good conversation. 

[0:59:25.3] MB: Thank you so much for listening to The Science of Success. Listeners like you are why we do this podcast. Your support is what drives us and keeps us creating great new content, adding value to the world and interviewing amazing guests every single week. 

The emails and stories we receive from listeners around the globe brings us joy in fuels 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@successpodcast.com. That's matt@successpodcast.com. 

I would love to hear from you and I read and respond personally 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 us in the algorithm and gets more and more people discovering the Science of Success. 

I get a ton of listeners asking me, “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”, that’s “smarter” to the number 44222, or you can just go to successpodcast.com, that’s successpodcast.com and joining our email list. 

Don’t forget, if you want to get all these incredible information, links, transcripts, everything we just talked about in the show and much more, be sure to check out our show notes. Just go to successpodcast.com and hit the show notes button at the top. 

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