How To Stay Focused, Beat Distraction, and Get Things Done | Nir Eyal

My new book Own Or Be Owned is out now! I wrote Own or Be Owned to answer one question: How do you make more money, less miserably? I broke it into the 12 Profit Levers… The 12 levers I've seen determine whether you print cash or hate your life. Check it out: → https://contrarianthinking.biz/oobo_bigdeal What if the things holding you back aren’t real? Your brain processes 11 million bits of information per second, but you only consciously attend to 50. That tiny keyhole of attention shapes your entire reality — and most people never realize they're looking through the wrong lens. Nir Eyal has spent years researching how beliefs shape behavior, attention, and outcomes. He's the bestselling author of Hooked, Indistractable, and now Beyond Belief. In this conversation, he breaks down the neuroscience of perception, why your limiting beliefs are quietly destroying your potential, and how to rewire your brain to see opportunities others miss. You'll learn: How a man had surgery with zero anesthesia using only his mind Why pain and suffering are separate — and how to disconnect them The 10-minute rule that makes distraction powerless Why willpower only depletes if you believe it does How beliefs about aging at 30 predict whether you live 7.5 years longer The turnaround technique that stops limiting beliefs cold If you've ever felt stuck or convinced something won't work — this episode will change how you see yourself. Because the only thing standing between you and what you want is a belief you haven't questioned yet. Check out Nir Eyal's new book "Beyond Belief" here: https://www.nirandfar.com/beyond-belief/ Build your newsletter, grow your audience, and start monetizing — all in one place. Head https://beehiiv.link/06f6y3 and use CODIE30 for 30% off your first 3 months ___________ 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:07 You Don't See Reality: The Optical Illusion That Proves It 00:03:40 The Rat Study: How Beliefs Unlock 240X More Persistence 00:05:40 Attention, Anticipation, and Agency: The Three Powers of Belief 00:07:11 Hypnosedation: Surgery Without Anesthesia Through Mind Power 00:09:04 The Carrot Is the Stick: Why All Motivation Is Pain Management 00:10:20 Relationship Perception Problems: The Turnaround Technique 00:15:37 Lucky People See More: Training Your Brain for Entrepreneurial Alertness 00:24:34 The 10 Minute Rule: Your Weapon Against Distraction 00:27:31 Internal Triggers: The Real Cause of 90% of Distractions 00:29:00 Gratitude, Failure, and Luck Surface Area: Daily Habits That Change Reality 00:19:59 Prayer Without Faith: The Science of Secular Mantras 00:42:36 Your Labels Become Your Limits: Why Identity Is Dangerous 00:43:09 Beliefs Become Biology: The 7.5 Year Longevity Advantage 00:49:47 The Placebo Suicide: Mr. A's Story and the Mind-Body Connection 00:57:08 Willpower Is Not a Depleting Resource: The Ego Depletion Myth 00:59:56 Hedonic Adaptation and the Gratitude Antidote 01:03:30 The Ulysses Pact: Pre-Commitment Devices for Intimacy and Focus 01:07:39 The Surgeon Riddle: How Priors Blind You to Possibilities 00:56:23 This Is What It Feels Like to Get Better: Your New Mantra ___________ MORE FROM BIGDEAL 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@podcastbigdeal 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bigdeal.podcast 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@big.deal.pod MORE FROM CODIE SANCHEZ 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@codiesanchezct 📸 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/codiesanchez 📽️ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@realcodiesanchez OTHER THINGS WE DO 🌐 Our community: https://contrarianthinking.typeform.com/to/WBztXXID 📰 Free newsletter: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3XWLlZp 📚 Biz buying course: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3NhjGgN 🏠 Resibrands: https://resibrands.com/ 💰 CT Capital: https://contrarianthinking.biz/4eRyGOk 🏦 Main St Hold Co: https://contrarianthinking.biz/3YfGa8u Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Indeed. You're ready to level up your business, but the pressure to find the right person to make that happen is intense. Indeed sponsored jobs can help carry the load. It boosts your job post to help it reach quality talent fast. Cut through the chaos with Indeed sponsored jobs. Get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring now? Then this is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Let me show you. This will blow your mind. Which square looks darker?

• 0:33Codie Sanchez?

  A.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  Definitely A.

• 0:34Codie Sanchez?

  Hundred percent.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Your eyes are lying to you. You do not see reality. Successful entrepreneurs have this ability to see a reality that nobody else can see. They can see the hundred dollar bills all over the street. You can change what you see and ultimately what you do.

• 0:47Codie Sanchez?

  Nuriel has spent six years to figure out, first to not get distracted and now to change your belief systems. He's been sought out all over the world to do exactly what he is going to teach you today.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  The 10 minute rule says you can give in to any distraction, but not right now. I don't know what to do right now. I gotta do something. That's the cause of distraction. What you will find is that the 10 minute rule becomes the 12 minute rule, the 20 minute rule. You're proving your self-efficacy in creativity. Right now, you are processing 11 million bits of information per second. You can only attend to this tiny keyhole of attention.

• 1:18Codie Sanchez?

  We have to be so careful about what we let in here.

• 1:21Speaker 01

  More than ever. But how exactly do we do that for technology? Turns out, it's actually not that hard. That's the superpower that most people have no clue that they could unlock within them right now. There's four steps to becoming indistractible, but the firewall against distraction is...

• 1:37Codie Sanchez?

  When you are fighting with somebody else, how do you take a step back and say, oh, wait a second. I might have just perceived that wrong.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  So this is a big part of the revelation for me was realizing that I don't see reality as it is. If you believe, no, no, no, absolutely, 100%, I'm certain, done deal, you can't change my mind, that becomes your reality. Right? Think about it as somebody running a marathon. Who's more likely to finish a marathon? The person who says, "I can't finish this marathon," or the person who says, "I think I can finish the marathon?" Now, the objective fact could be either way. Neither of those are facts, they are beliefs, right? The fact could be that some people don't finish a marathon. But who are you gonna bet on, right? Are you gonna bet on the person who says, "I cannot finish this marathon," in which case they quit, they're out, versus the person who says, "I might be able to," or "I think I can finish this marathon"?

• 2:27Speaker 01

  They do, or they're more likely to, because they persist, because they try. So the beliefs that get people the most upset, that get people the most agitated, that get people to say, "That's ridiculous," those are the beliefs we most need to explore. The ones that we say, "That cannot be true. That person is definitely evil. That business definitely will not work. That idea is the stupidest thing ever." We don't see reality as it is, we see reality as we are. And so the more agitated we get by the idea of thinking differently, it's because there's something in us that we are desperately trying to protect. It's called an immunity to change. Your brain does not want to change its beliefs, because our default setting, we used to think in psychology, that there was a thing called learned helplessness. It's kind of a very prevailing theory,

• 3:12Speaker 01

  and it explained why poor people stay poor. It's because they learn helplessness. That over time, if you keep trying and failing and trying and failing, well, you just give up. A few years ago, the authors of that study, and they did this with animal studies, where they taught, seemingly taught animals to kind of give up and learn hopelessness. Those authors, Selley, Men and Meyer, declared that they had gotten the study 100% backwards. That the study results were 180 degrees the opposite of what they thought. That we don't learn helplessness, that's our default. Our default state is helplessness. We constantly want to retreat into passivity. Think about it, when you're born, a baby is perfectly helpless.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  There's nothing they can do, they rely on others to help them. We don't have claws, we don't have sharp teeth, we can't run fast when we're born. We're completely helpless. So that is your default state. What we learn is hope. We must learn hope. 1950s Kurt Richter takes these wild rats and he wants to see how long they can swim for. So he puts them in a cylinder halfway full of water. And he sits there with a timer and he watches the poor little rat swim, swim, swim. And he sees that in about 15 minutes, the rat gives up, slips under the water, dies. You can't do these kind of studies anymore. It's kind of cruel, but the rats are already dead, so let's learn from them. Then he decides to change up the experiment. He gets a new group of rats, same cylinder, same water.

• 4:41Speaker 01

  Puts the new group of rats inside these cylinders and he knows that they're going to last for about 15 minutes. And just as his stopwatch reaches 15 minutes and they begin struggling and starting to give up. He reaches in, pulls out the rat, dries it off, lets it catch its breath and plunk back into the cylinder it goes. Now he does this a few times, so he conditions the rat to do something amazing. Now he wants to see how much longer the rat can swim for. When I ask audiences, they know there's something amazing that's about to be revealed. And so I ask them, how much longer did the rat swim for? Once the rat was conditioned to this new belief set, how much longer did it swim? People say double, they had three times, four times longer, right? Wouldn't that be amazing if you could be four times more perseverant? That would be incredible, right?

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Running a marathon four times longer or sticking with a hard project four times longer. That'd be amazing. The rats didn't swim four times longer. They didn't swim for 60 minutes. They swam for 60 hours. They went from 15 minutes to 240 times more persistent. 60 hours of swimming. Now what changed? Same experiment, same body, nothing changed physically. So they didn't have super strength all of a sudden. We think, we can't ask rats what they believe, obviously, but we think the only factor left was something changed in their mind. That when they suddenly had the hope of salvation, that something could save them from their death, they persisted. They changed their belief and then kept going. That's the unlock. That's the superpower that.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Most people have no clue that they could unlock within them right now. That we need to be very humble. We don't see reality clearly. We don't feel things as they really are either. And our beliefs greatly influence what we do. So we call this attention, anticipation, and agency. See, feel, do. Those are the three powers of belief. So that's the most important thing. That if you can harness what you believe, you can change what you see, how you feel, and ultimately, what you do. So just like those rats had the 60 hours in them all along, right? It was there. Their belief changing unlocked that potential. And we know, you know, that there were several studies now that find that the defining trait of success in individuals, it's not necessarily intelligence, right?

• 6:57Speaker 01

  It's not how smart you are. It's really two things. It's persistence and adaptability. And I would argue those two things go hand in hand. That successful people, and I'm guessing you can attest to this, if you want to find who are the losers? Who fails a lot? It's not the people who are not successful. Successful people are the biggest losers. Meaning in terms of number of failures, it's the successful people. Why? Because they persist. They keep going. If you can unlock that, if you can suddenly change in your brain the pain, the suffering that comes along with difficult tasks, and now all of a sudden you can persist way longer without having to suffer through it? Man, what can't you do?

• 7:40Codie Sanchez?

  Speaking of what can't you do, I was fascinated by the section that you wrote about how powerful your mind is and a word called hypnosisedation. And you gave an example of a guy by the name of Daniel Giesler.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  And it's not just Daniel. So here's what happened. So this guy was a commodities trader, okay? Also, very buttoned up, like very analytical, the opposite of anything, supernatural, mumbo jumbo. He's a very, very analytical guy. And the guy has this freak accident, and he has to get screws put in his ankle. A few years later, he has to get them removed. And he comes across this technique on YouTube called hypnosisedation, which is a form of hypnosis, not stage hypnosis. That's a whole nother thing going on there. It's basically harnessing the power of the mind to focus deeply through its attentional filter. So you're basically using that keyhole of attention we talked about earlier to only let in certain signals and not others, right? Because pain is just information. Just like the light entering your retinas right now, it's just more information. So he takes this course.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  He learns how to hypnosedate himself. He starts with these clamps that are very painful pinchers on his hands. And he trains himself over time to tune out those pain signals. And by the time he's finished with his course, he goes into the operating room. And the doctors, for 55 minutes, cut into flesh and bone, pull out metal screws from his body with zero local anesthesia, zero general anesthesia, all through the power of his mind. So why do I tell this story? I'm not advocating for hypnosis. You don't have to go do that. But the reason I want people to know about this, and the reason I use it in my life, is that if the brain has the power

• 9:21Speaker 01

  to change our perception of the pain of surgery without anesthesia, what are we complaining about? Exactly.

• 9:29Codie Sanchez?

  And what else can it do?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  What else can it do? Right? Like, when things get hard, it's just pain management. Right? We used to think that motivation was about carrots and sticks. You've heard this metaphor, right? That it's about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. Well, now we know that's not true. That when you actually look inside the brain, what we can see happening is that the brain is only motivated by one thing. That the carrot is the stick. The carrot is the stick. What does that mean? That even when we are pursuing pleasure, wanting, craving, desire, lusting, hunger, those things are psychologically destabilizing. So the carrot is the stick. When we want to feel good, it's because wanting hurts. You know, they say, "Love hurts." Remember that song? It's exactly true.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  So what that means, therefore, if all human behavior is spurred by a desire to escape discomfort, that means, therefore, that time management is pain management. Money management is pain management. Weight management is pain management. It's all about managing discomfort. And so what we learn, what the literature shows us, the research finds, is that pain and suffering are two separate things. And that's exactly what Daniel did. He was able to separate the signals coming into his brain, telling him about the pain, and separate it from the suffering, from the response that most of us feel.

• 10:50Codie Sanchez?

  You know, it's fascinating, because to use it tactically, you talk a lot about relationships in the book. And intimate relationships, familial relationships. But you have a line that I loved, which was, "You don't have relationship problems, you have perception problems." And so can you apply this to a relationship today? And we were kind of joking about this beforehand, but... I'm sure nobody can relate, but imagine that you're having a fight. And you are convinced that your husband is wrong and judgmental and this is all their fault.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Trying to hurt you.

• 11:23Codie Sanchez?

  A hundred percent. And yeah, maybe that's true.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:27Codie Sanchez?

  Or maybe it's not.

• 11:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:28Codie Sanchez?

  So what do you do to use this practice to help in your relationship and your marriage?

• 11:33Speaker 01

  So the most important thing is to realize that you are only seeing reality through this keyhole of attention. And so you can't possi-- you can't even process your own reality, right? You, your brain is predicting what is happening based on its prior understandings, right? Actually, let me give you an example. You have that, that optical illusion?

• 11:53Codie Sanchez?

  Oh, yeah.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Let me show you. This, this will blow your mind and this will be directly relevant for relationships.

• 11:58Codie Sanchez?

  Okay.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Okay, so in this illusion.

• 11:59Codie Sanchez?

  Can you explain this?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. So look, look at this and tell me which square looks darker?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  A or B?

• 12:07Codie Sanchez?

  Oh, A.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  A. Definitely A.

• 12:09Codie Sanchez?

  Hundred percent.

• 12:10Speaker 01

  Hundred percent A is darker than B. But of course, if you look at the bottom image and I put a strip of the same color, you will see that A and B are in fact the same color. Now look back at the first image on the top. Does it look any different?

• 12:24Codie Sanchez?

  It still looks.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  It still looks the same.

• 12:26Codie Sanchez?

  Of course.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  Your eyes are lying to you because you don't see with your eyes. You see with your brain based on priors, based on what's happened in the past. Your brain has been conditioned that that's the way reality works. So it's predicting a future that doesn't really exist. Now, why does the brain do this? Because it can't keep up with the 11 million bits.

• 12:44Codie Sanchez?

  Right.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  It has to do this in order to process all the information that's coming into it. So all of us need to bring down that certainty a notch and say, okay, I need the intellectual humility to understand that I only see things the way I see them based on my prior understanding. I only see reality as I am. I only see others as I am. And once we have that intellectual humility, then we can open up other possibilities. Because people don't understand that there's a difference between an emotion and a feeling. Those are two separate things. An emotion is a physiological response. A feeling is an interpretation of that physiological response. So feelings are psychological, emotions are physiological. So for example, if right now, you started getting heart palpitations, you started breathing quickly,

• 13:29Speaker 01

  we have to go to the ER. That's something to be really worried about. Like, that should not happen right now. But if you're at the gym, and you're experiencing the exact same physiological reaction, hey, I'm having a good workout. You're happy about that. What changed? The context. Right? So that's the key to these relationships, is understanding that we don't see reality. That's the first step. And then, when we get into these interpersonal conflicts, forcing ourselves to intentionally take the opposite opinion, to do that turnaround we talked about earlier that I did with my mom, to force ourselves to say, okay, clearly, a smart person that I respect disagrees with me. Let me take the opposing argument. So with my wife and I are celebrating 25 years this year together. Congratulations.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  25 years married, thank you, thank you. And we don't fight. We honestly, we don't fight. We disagree. We disagree, we do not fight. Fighting is bullshit. There's no need to fight. Because if I respect this person, and I know she's no dummy, I wouldn't have married her if she was. She's a very, very smart person. If she has an alternative perspective of what's happening in the world, right, with our daughter, or with our relationship, or with our business, she should be listened to. So it's not a fight. It might be a disagreement. But my job, if we, and sometimes we definitely disagree, you know, we have very different opinions. But one of the things what we'll do is intentionally take each other's perspectives, that to have a good faith argument where we say,

• 14:58Speaker 01

  okay, I'm gonna try my best, not just to mirror what you're saying, blah, blah, blah, because that feels very fake to me, but to actually have a good faith effort to steel man her argument, to make the best possible display of what she's trying to say. And nine times out of 10, Cody, that's actually what the argument's about.

• 15:17Codie Sanchez?

  Interesting. It's such a good point because you're right. I've done the mirror thing before. And it does feel it's like it's parroting, you know.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  But when somebody actually feels heard.

• 15:25Codie Sanchez?

  Right. Then, then it goes away.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Right?

• 15:28Codie Sanchez?

  That's so fascinating. I'm, I'm gonna use this because you're right. I think often the other person, you're just listening to kind of get your words in, right? And you're like.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Or to win.

• 15:37Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, or to win. And, you know, and I think increasingly in a world where everybody's telling you, you know, have your boundaries and, you know, you hold the line and don't get walked over and don't become a rug. Well, there's good parts to that, but there also is of, you know, some sort of forgetfulness about the fact that you might be on the same team with this person. And so if you've, if you've chosen to spend your life with them, then maybe it makes sense to listen to what they're saying.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 16:02Codie Sanchez?

  You know, what's interesting too, is you talk about this in, in regards to luck too. And so I had never thought about the fact that you might not just be a lucky person. You might just have a different attention to luck.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 16:16Codie Sanchez?

  And is that true? Like, if we pay more attention to luck, or if you pay more attention to luck, could you in fact be luckier?

• 16:25Speaker 01

  That's absolutely what the research shows. And, and the study that, that really demonstrate this, they took two groups of people. One were self-identified lucky people, people who call themselves, hey, I tend to be pretty lucky. And people who said, no, I tend to be pretty unlucky in life. And they gave them a very simple task. The task was to look through the newspaper and simply count the number of images in the newspaper. And they said, if you do that, we'll give you $250 as soon as you finish, finish as quickly as possible. The unlucky people, again, self-identified unlucky people, finished in two and a half minutes. The lucky people finished in about 11 seconds. Why? Because when they flipped to page two, one of those images said, there are 43 images in this paper, collect your prize.

• 17:12Speaker 01

  So the unlucky people didn't even see the ad. Again, their reality was different. Their beliefs didn't let them see the totality of information. That 11 million bits of information, that bit of information didn't even get in. Whereas the lucky people, ah, bingo. And they went to collect their prize. Right? And so this is a classic hallmark trait of entrepreneurs. What Walter Isaacson called about Steve Jobs, he called it the reality distortion field. That entrepreneurs do, successful entrepreneurs, have this ability to see a reality that nobody else can see. They can see the hundred dollar bills all over the street. And they have this crazy belief in themselves that they can go and make an enterprise that nobody else sees possible. Right? I mean, you did this in spades, right? How many people said, ah, that can't be done.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  That's a silly idea.

• 17:58Codie Sanchez?

  No, it's so true. I mean, one of my favorite quotes is that pessimists sound smart and optimists make all the money. And I think you're right. Well, I didn't realize there was research to back it. But it does seem to be true. I mean, we talk about turning on your reticular activating system and how, and that's not really probably a right way to say it from a science perspective. But just when you train your brain to look for something, apparently you find it.

• 18:23Speaker 01

  It's so true. I mean, we have a mutual friend, Vanessa Van Edwards.

• 18:25Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  And I love how she, I hadn't heard it before, but I love how she says, don't, don't say, how you doing? What do people say when you say, how you doing? I'm busy, things are tough, okay, good, fine. She said, what's good? Right? What a simple way to help us refocus on the good things in life. In my family, since, since I did this kind of research, whenever something good happens, we say, somebody in the family will say, ah, everything good happens to us. We just say it out loud, right? It's just like a family phrase. Everything good happens to us. Now, what we don't say, which a lot of, I used to say all the time is, ugh, that's just my luck. Or why does this always happen to me? Or, you know, again, I'm stuck in traffic. This always happens. Or she's always like that. Or that's so like him.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Right? What do we, why do we do that? We are doing that to reinforce the comfort of these limiting beliefs that essentially keep us stuck. Whereas if we refocus our attention on the good things, guess what? Not only do we see more of those things, more of those good things start happening to us as well.

• 19:29Codie Sanchez?

  So you actually have lines that you tell your family to say consistently?

• 19:32Speaker 01

  I don't tell them to do anything. That's just become kind of a family tradition.

• 19:37Codie Sanchez?

  You have lines that your family says continuously, and then you have lines that you guys do not say. Is that right?

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Well, we don't, nothing is enforced. It just has become kind of like a family mantra. I have a lot of mantras that I repeat to myself all the time as well. And that's something that's changed in my life quite a bit, because I found this research around the power of prayer. And I stopped praying when I was six years old. I prayed when my family came to America. A few years after they came here, they got scammed out of every penny they had. They literally, like, some American guy saw that my parents barely spoke English, and he took every cent they had. And my family had to start over, and we had some really, really hard times. And that's the last time I remember praying. And I remember it being very helpful. But then I got older, and I stopped believing in the supernatural. And I just didn't, I didn't find any, like, organized religion that really spoke to me.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  And so I stopped praying. And then, while I was doing this research, I came across this really difficult-to-ignore evidence around the power of prayer. And what blew my mind is that prayer works even without faith. That for, it turns out, the biggest religious community in America today, the largest religious group are nuns. Not the Catholic nuns, not N-U-N, N-O-N-E. People who don't affiliate with any religion, like I used to be. And it turns out that those people, and many of them call themselves spiritual but not religious. You hear that a lot. I'm spiritual but not religious. Meaning I have some kind of belief in some kind of supernatural, that there's something bigger than me, but I don't attend any kind of faith tradition. Turns out, those people are much more likely

• 21:12Speaker 01

  to suffer from depression and anxiety disorder than people who do affiliate with some kind of religious community. So I kind of got jealous, to be honest. Like, I wanted some of those benefits, incontrovertible. And then I came across this amazing study, where they test, there's a standard protocol to test people's pain tolerance. Basically, what they do is they put people's hands in very, very cold ice water, and they see how long they can last. And they monitor when they grimace, and they'll strain. And then eventually, when do they say, "Okay, I can't take it anymore," they take their hands out. And they had three groups of people. One group was a control group, so no, you know, nothing changed with them. The second group were people who prayed with some kind of faith tradition. Okay, they had some kind of religious background. The third group were people who didn't have a faith background and who were taught how to pray.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  And they were told that if you don't want to say God, substitute it for anything of meaning. Mother Nature, the universe, the sum of all forces, whatever's meaningful to you. And it turns out that the people who learned how to pray and the people who prayed out of a faith tradition had a much higher pain tolerance than the people who didn't pray at all. So there are these psychologically protective effects to prayer. And so one of the things I did, I went to five faith leaders. It sounds like a setup of a joke, right? A rabbi, and a mom, a priest, a swami, and a monk. I'll walk into a bar. And I actually interviewed all five of them. And I said, how does one pray, even if you have uncertainties about God?

• 22:42Speaker 01

  And so I took away these five lessons from them. And I've adopted them in my life and found that, you know what? They're incredibly beneficial. So now, for the first time in my life, I pray. Because beliefs are tools, not truths. I don't need to have perfect certainty. I used to say, well, I can't pray because I'm not sure if everything in that book is 100% true. And if I can't prove it, I can't step into church. I can't go to synagogue. I can't step into a mosque. No, it's not true. I've relaxed that. Because you know what? Beliefs are tools, not truths. And so I can have this conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence, because it serves me. It's improved my life. It's made me more patient. It's made me more calm. It's made me more at peace. And so I've stopped really asking, can I prove it's true? And rather asked, does it serve me? Does it improve my life and the life of those around me?

• 23:26Codie Sanchez?

  The most successful people in the world know exactly what Nier I L. is telling us, which is that success is not actually a discipline. It is a habit, and it is a belief. And if we can build systems around our beliefs, then they become habits. And this is what I have found over and over again in my life, is that I don't have to have more willpower. I don't have to be more disciplined. I just need a system that makes it so I get to be thoughtless, have no thought at all. Which is why I'm obsessed with this company Beehive that helps us create systems around email and our newsletters. We don't have to come up with something wild and crazy to sell our audience. We can actually send out an email every single week from a third-party provider that already does all the monetization,

• 24:11Codie Sanchez?

  all the design work, all of the ads inside of it, all of the data, so we can see who we're sending to and when we're sending it. You know why most companies don't have a good email list or a newsletter anybody wants to read? Because... They don't have a system that makes it easy as one, two, three, send in order to get one. That is why I'm obsessed with this company Beehive and with systems thinkers creating a way where newsletter reading, creating and writing becomes so habitual, you do it no matter what. In fact, I asked Beehive for a code for you guys. So if you don't already have a newsletter, or if you do and you want a better one, go to Beehive.com, B-E-E-H-I-I-V dot com.

• 24:54Codie Sanchez?

  Use code CODI30 and you get 30% off your first three months. Because making money should be a system, not a discipline. What is interesting about this is we're talking here about beliefs, but your work kind of compounds, it seems like. Your first book was about how to get people obsessed with something in some ways, hooked, right? How to hook people to a product, which is near and dear to my heart. Your second book was about distraction, right? And how to not be distractible. And then this third book kind of gets to the core of it, which is like, in order to not be distracted or get hooked, like what do you believe in your head? There's something deeper, right?

• 25:35Codie Sanchez?

  So I want to go there too, but I also want to talk about your 10-minute rule. And what it does to help with distraction in a world that is very distractible.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 25:47Codie Sanchez?

  What is it? Can you talk to us about it?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  So the 10-minute rule says that you can give in to any distraction, but not right now. You're going to give into that distraction in 10 minutes. Now, why is this so powerful? Because we know that abstinence backfires. That sometimes abstinence can work if you can remove what we call the external trigger, right? When people are trying to get off of some kind of addicted, something they're addicted to. If you can remove that substance and all the things associated with it, right? Your peer group and all that stuff, the paraphernalia, yes, that can be very helpful. But how exactly do we do that for technology? You can't just stop using technology, nor would you want to. It's incredibly empowering. So that's not a good solution.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  So telling yourself "no" doesn't work. It releases what's called psychological reactance. Psychological reactance is when someone tells you what to do, your reaction will be, "Don't tell me what to do, right? F off." If your boss micromanages you, that reaction, "Don't tell me what to do." Or if your parent told you to put on a coat, "Don't tell me what to do, I know what to do." That's psychological reactance. Now, the crazy thing is that you can elicit psychological reactance even when you tell yourself what to do. Right? That's how weird our psychology is. So a better way than "no, don't do it, and I'm a bad person if I check social media too much, and I shouldn't do it, no, no, no, stop doing it,"

• 27:14Speaker 01

  is not to say "no," it's to say "not yet." "I will do it, I'm a grown up, I can do whatever I want, but I choose to do it in 10 minutes. And if 10 minutes are too long, make it the 5-minute rule, the 2-minute rule, doesn't really matter." So whether it's I'm trying to quit smoking, whether it's I'm trying not to give into that chocolate cake, whether it's I'm trying to focus on an important project rather than checking email every 3 seconds. So if I tell myself, "I will do it, but in 10 minutes." And then your job during those 10 minutes is to do what's called "surf the urge." Because these emotions, we think that they're going to be there forever. We feel boredom, we think we're always going to be bored, lonely, tense, uncertain, stressed, anxious. We feel like it's always going to be there, but that's never the case. These sensations are like waves. They crest, and then they subside.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  And so if you can ride out that sensation for just sometimes a few seconds, you can refocus your attention. Because again, what causes us to get distracted, we think it's the external triggers. We think it's the pings, the dings, the rings, all this technology. That's only 10% of the cause. Studies have found 10% of the time you check your phone, is it because of some kind of ping, ding, or ring? 90% of the time, it's because of an internal trigger. Remember, time management is pain management. What is an internal trigger? Boredom, loneliness, fatigue, uncertainty, anxiety. That is 90% of the time you check your phone. It's because of a feeling. I don't know what to do right now. I gotta do something. That's the cause of distraction 90% of the time.

• 28:41Speaker 01

  So if you can just ride out that sensation like a surfer on a surfboard, what you will find is that the 10-minute rule becomes the 12-minute rule, becomes the 20-minute rule. And over time, you're proving to yourself, wait a minute, I'm not addicted to these things. I'm not addicted to distraction. I can wait for a minute. I have control over them. You're proving your self-efficacy in your agency.

• 28:59Codie Sanchez?

  What's the flip side of that? Like, you talk about something else I really liked, which is, so we're gonna stop the distractions here, maybe with this 10-minute rule, plus a few other things I wanna go into.

• 29:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's just like one teeny-tiny technique.

• 29:10Codie Sanchez?

  Oh, God, they're so good. We're gonna go through all of them. But the next was, like, you had a whole section about how to basically increase your luck surface area and about daily habits you can do to train your brain to see things that other people cannot.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 29:25Codie Sanchez?

  Can you talk about what daily habits you put into place so you train your brain to find luck?

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Sure. So this is called entrepreneurial alertness, that you can literally create your own luck. And so there's a few things you can do. And these are traits common among entrepreneurs. And entrepreneurs, it's funny, don't understand why everybody doesn't do this, but they're very common traits. So one of them is stretching beyond your comfort zone. And we can do this in all kinds of small ways. I think one of the best is to talk to people, right? You spread your luck surface area when you just talk to folks. On the flight here, I just came from Barcelona. Talk for an hour and a half in the galley way of the flight, right? Where, you know, people by the restrooms where they give out drinks. Talk to this lady for an hour and a half. Now we're friends and we're keeping in touch. But I don't know what's gonna come out of that. But that's something that I think before doing this research, I would not have done, and now I'm very open to.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  So pushing yourself outside your comfort zone. Another thing we do is to express extreme amounts of gratitude.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  That you increase your entrepreneurial alertness when you become attuned to ways to thank people in your life. That even the smallest, Tina Selig taught me this at Stanford. She will, she has a big old stack of these thank you cards that she just whips off, you know, as soon as she can write, hey, thanks for that pleasant good morning greeting today, or I really appreciated your comment in class today, or whatever, thank you for doing that. Like she never, ever skips an opportunity to tell someone that they had a positive effect on her life. And of course, what happens is that the more surface area you spread with gratitude is the more you are thought of when good opportunities arise. So if your thank you note is on someone's desk next to, hey, here's a business deal,

• 31:06Speaker 01

  or here's an opportunity, or here's something to talk about, well, maybe there's a connection there. So you're creating luck, you're provoking luck by showing more gratitude and entering into that, that daily habit. And then the third thing is to intentionally fail more. That if I were to tell you, whatever it is that you're stuck doing, let's say you're trying to, you know, start a podcast, or make your sales calls, or whatever it is, find love, for example. And I told you, I took a time machine and I looked into the future and I found that all you have to do is to fail five more times. Go on five more dates and then you'll find love. Make five more sales calls and then you're going to close that big deal.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  If I told you that, would you then say, well, I don't want to, I don't want to do those failures anymore? No, you'd be like, come on, let's fail quick, let's go, come on, I want to fail five times so I can get to the sixth success. And so that's one of those daily habits, is to relish the failures, to look forward to them, to teach your brain, again, there's a difference between pain and suffering. You can, something can be difficult and yet meaningful, it doesn't have, you don't have to suffer from it. So if you can teach your brain through the power of beliefs to want to get through those failures and learn to relish those failures, that is a habit that will increase your luck surface area.

• 32:18Codie Sanchez?

  Is there actual science that shows that people who are successful don't remember the failures as much? Is that a thing? Like, do you train your brain where eventually you don't even mean to and you kind of can't remember all those failures?

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Yes, we see others by how we think of them, but we judge ourselves differently. That if somebody messes up, it's because they're incompetent. But when we mess up, we have a story. Like, you just don't understand. If somebody cuts you off in traffic, it's because they're being a jerk. But if you cut someone off in traffic, it's because I'm in a hurry and it's very important. Right? So we, we look at our beliefs, even our memories, actually. We know that memory is incredibly valuable, uh, vulnerable to revision. That every time you think of a memory, you are actually revising it in your brain. Actually, there's a, a friend of mine, Chris, uh, that I was telling him about my research. And he says, you know what? There's a very, uh, there's a perfect example in my life. You know, for years, I couldn't cry. I couldn't cry.

• 33:12Speaker 01

  And it really hurt my relationships with my girlfriends because they would say I wasn't emotionally available. Because we would have a difficult time and I just couldn't cry. And you know why I couldn't cry? It's because when I was a kid, I went to a funeral at six years old and it was really traumatizing. And ever since then, I can't cry. And he told his sister this story. Chris told his sister that, you know, this is, you know, it's another breakup, another reason. Here's why I'm not emotionally available. It's because I can't cry and I went to this funeral. And she says, Chris, you didn't go to that funeral. Mom and dad thought you were too young. You were at home with the babysitter. This is older sister, she remembered it. And he had been living with this memory that never even happened.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  And we do this all the time. Memory is incredibly vulnerable to revision. That Elizabeth Loftus has these amazing studies where she, uh, implants memories of people going on a hot air balloon ride that never happened. And they'll describe the wind in their hair and the color of the balloon, completely made up. And this is, this, so where does this get back to? That based on those memories that we think are so true, you know, we think of memories as, uh, like, like a video camera. It's not a video camera at all. It's incredibly vulnerable. That, you know, people will take it two different ways. Some people will say, oh, this terrible thing happened to me. This person did this thing to me. And maybe it happened, but 100% sure, it didn't happen the way you think it did. You have revised it since, for sure.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Second example is when people who have a positive outlook on life, they can look at the same exact events and you see because that happened, that's why I have to prove others wrong, or that's why I succeed is because I had to show them. So same exact thing can happen. You can have post-traumatic stress, right? And that can cause people a lot of suffering. Or for some people, you have post-traumatic growth. It was because that terrible thing happened, that's why I'm so driven today.

• 35:02Codie Sanchez?

  Do people ever push back on your research and they're like, you must have never been through anything very hard because how could you say I couldn't have PTSD instead of having, you know, PTGD?

• 35:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:15Codie Sanchez?

  Do you get that kind of pushback?

• 35:16Speaker 01

  I'm not, I'm not saying that. I would never say to somebody that they're not in pain. All pain is real. All pain is real. The pushback I oftentimes hear is that, are you telling people to lie to themselves? Are you, are we, are you telling me that I should gaslight myself and make up a different truth? Because you're saying that beliefs are just tools. I can make up whatever I want. And my response is, guess what? You're already gaslighting yourself. You are already lying to yourself. You're just lying to yourself with a limiting belief. So you could choose a different belief. Now, the whole point here, what is a limiting belief? What is a liberating belief? A limiting belief is a belief that saps motivation or causes suffering.

• 35:58Speaker 01

  A liberating belief is a belief that supplies motivation or eases suffering. And that's a choice. That's a choice, even when it sounds crazy. So I never tell people to change their beliefs. I tell people to try on different beliefs. So what you're doing is just like you're trying a pair of glasses and you say, eh, it doesn't fit my face. I don't like it. This is weird. Okay, let's try on a different pair of glasses. You're already wearing those glasses, that keyhole of attention, those 50 bits of information. That's already there. You just didn't choose it. Your society chose it, your background chose it, your history chose it. All these other things chose it. You didn't choose it. It's kind of like your face, that you can't see your face. We all have these limiting beliefs, but they're always hidden to us. And the ones you most defend are the ones you most need to examine.

• 36:41Speaker 01

  So when people hear this and say, that's crazy. You don't understand what happened to me. That's what needs some digging. That's what needs some examination if they want to stop suffering. Look, some people don't mind the suffering. They find their identity is the suffering. And I'm not here to change anybody, right? I'm telling you what worked in my life. I found that I started living when I disconnected the pain from the suffering. The pain can still be there, but just like Daniel Giesler, that could use the power of his mind to not interpret the pain as suffering. And we can do that not just with surgery. I mean, if we can do it with surgery, we can certainly do it with our past experiences and with our challenges and tribulations.

• 37:20Codie Sanchez?

  That's so good. Yeah, my husband and I always say to each other, do you want to be right or do you want to win?

• 37:24Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 37:25Codie Sanchez?

  And it's true. Like, do you need to prove your point all the time? Or, you know, do you want to move forward in the world?

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:30Codie Sanchez?

  And so, but I like this differentiation of liberating beliefs and limiting beliefs. Because if you do get to try on two hats, that just means you pick one.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 37:39Codie Sanchez?

  And if that's true, and if we have all this research to suppose it, then why not? The other thing that I think is really interesting about this is, you know, you started your career by essentially figuring out how attention worked with tech products. And so if today we're feeling overwhelmed by a lot of the things in front of us from technology, I think we have a lot of reasons, excuses, you could use whatever word you want, to say that it is not in my power to be undistracted, or it is not in my power what I focus on. But you had this line from one of your, it was from, no, it was from your last book, that was, "There will be two types of people in the world.

• 38:21Codie Sanchez?

  There will be those who are distracted, and there will be those who are indistractable. And the indistractable will win," to summarize your statement. What do you mean by that? And do you still believe that's true?

• 38:35Speaker 01

  More than ever, because the world is becoming an increasingly distractible place. That with the dawn of AI, we know where this is going. And it's not, it's not all bad. I'm quite the tech optimist. I have to be, because I know history. I know that the world is terrible, and there's a lot of suffering. And also, it's better than it's ever been, and it's getting better. And even that idea, I bet you right now, people are thinking this guy's crazy. And they're like, isn't he watching the news? Doesn't he see all the terrible things happening in the world today? Yeah, those things are happening, and things are getting better. And I'm optimistic about the future because we can create the future unless we give up.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  So when you believe there's nothing to be done, what do you do? Nothing. And this is exactly the message that has been spreading in mainstream traditional media. Tells you, "Technology is addictive and it's hijacking your brain." And they have documentaries ironically on Netflix telling you how technology is melting your brain, there's nothing you can do. It's exactly what the tech companies want you to think. They want you to think there's nothing you can do for your children. They're all addicted, that it's hopeless. Because what are you gonna do? Nothing. That is the message of passivity they are trying to default us into. That is our default, to do nothing. Because now I've absolved responsibility, right? It's not my fault, Zuckerberg is doing it to me. Maybe, that could be a truth, right? I don't know.

• 40:03Speaker 01

  Is that a fact or is it a belief? I choose to believe I can do something about it. Turns out, it's actually not that hard. And there's a few steps anyone can take to become indistractable themselves and to teach their kids to be indistractable. And if you don't teach your kids how to be indistractable, they will be part of this mass of people who can't control their attention because they don't want to and they don't learn the skills. I mean, we're not taught in school how to focus our attention. And I think those who do not learn how to be indistractable will be at the whim of whatever is happening, right? The gossip in the office or whatever's happening on Twitter or whatever's happening in the news or some war 3,000 miles away. It's got nothing to do with me. But that's what I keep paying attention to.

• 40:46Speaker 01

  As opposed to, "How can I make people's lives better in my family, in my community? How can I affect change right now, right here?" I'm paying attention to all this other stuff. Because frankly, the media wants me to, right? They make money. I don't care if people rag on social media. How exactly do you think the New York Times makes money? Or Fox News or CNN? They're all in the same business. They're monetizing your attention. So you better hold on to it carefully.

• 41:11Codie Sanchez?

  It's such a good point. You know, I was thinking about, I heard a quote yesterday and I can't remember who said it, but the summary was basically when, you know, David asked for a bigger life, a bigger challenge, you know, more, God didn't just give him easy, he gave him Goliath. And, you know, part of me, what your work makes me think about in some ways, if we want to go super optimistic, it's, well, what if, you know, this next level of what I would consider to be superhuman, which is I don't feel pain, which is like a 240x my ability to withstand treading water, AKA, you know, what happened to the rats. If we wanted to become more superhuman, well, then we kind of need bigger challenges, which might just be this AI in front of us, this tech in front of us. And if you could see it instead, not as defeatist, but what if this is the opportunity?

• 41:56Codie Sanchez?

  If, you know, whether you believe in God or not, but if God's like, all right, you're ready for the next level of the game.

• 42:00Speaker 01

  That is a real life hack. And I, I, that was not my natural. I was kind of highly anxious, kind of, you know, ran hot and was that kind of person who repeated, oh, why does this ton to happen to me? And, I mean, just today, right? Like I, I was preparing some food and it dropped on the floor. Okay, you're talking about like big AI challenges. I'm talking about like day to day as well. The food drops on the floor, before I'd be like, God, what does that happen to me? I'm late. I've got this interview with Cody. Ah. Now I say, all right, I have an opportunity to practice patience. Right?

• 42:33Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Like, I can find an opportunity here. Is it a fact? No, it's a belief. I choose to believe that there's something. And you can, I literally do this 10 times a day with like, whenever something happens a little funny in my life that before would, would bring me down. And of course, you know, it takes a toll. It drains that battery throughout the day. The more you tell yourself, there it is again, or there it's. I used to do this with my ADHD. I was diagnosed with ADHD. And I used to, every time I got a bit distracted or, you know, I'd say, there's my ADHD again. And now, you know, people my age, we start saying that all my peers, oh, that's, you know, that's what happens when you get old, right? Like, it's inevitable, right? Oh, this hurts, that hurts. Like, it's inevitable. That's what happens.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  And so when you're having that senior moment, what are you thinking about? Are you thinking about where your keys are? Are you thinking about what you just forgot or what the distractions? No, you're thinking about this label you've attached to yourself. And so in this way, your labels become your limits. There's, and even more so, your beliefs become your biology. There's an amazing study done at Yale where they found that people who have positive views about aging at age 30 live seven and a half years longer. Now, but to put that in perspective, Cody, seven and a half years longer, that is more than the effect of exercise, that's more than the effect of what you eat, that's more than the effect of smoking.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Think about how much time and attention we hear about you should eat right, don't smoke, exercise. Who tells you the best thing you can do for your longevity and lifespan is to believe differently, is to have positive views about aging? Now, why is that happening? Are the beliefs magically changing the cells in your body? Nope, that's not how it works. What's happening is that two beliefs about the world can be equally true. So for example, a positive view of aging sounds like this. Growth is possible at any age. That's a positive view about aging. What's a negative view about aging? Aging involves inevitable decline. Okay? Two perspectives. Which one is true, Cody? Both. Both. Exactly. Which one is going to make me more active? The growth.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  Growth is possible at any age. So why do we tell ourselves this stupid stuff like, I'm not a morning person, I'm a Sagittarius, I have ADHD, that's why I can't this, this? These are all limiting beliefs. Now, sometimes they can be a map, right? So for example, an ADHD diagnosis can guide you to work on something that you weren't aware of, that there's a path to help you get some kind of guidance. But it cannot become your identity. Once it becomes your identity, it stops becoming the map. You become the map. And then it's useless because that becomes your default state. Why you can't, why you can't. Rather, you need to reinforce why you can. That becomes the empowering belief that keeps you motivated and reduces suffering.

• 45:21Codie Sanchez?

  God, this is so important because I could never put my finger on the point of why I got so annoyed many times in my career, but especially these last couple of years where people would say, well, you know, Latinas, I'm Latina, Latinas and women, you know, they just aren't as successful as men overall. And Latina CEOs, you know, can't, oh, and you know, female CEOs aren't paid this way. And don't you, wasn't it hard when you were in a male dominated industry and like you can't progress very much? I would just be like, take your victim labels off me. This is not helpful to me at all. In fact, couldn't the opposite be true? Couldn't it be true that it could be really useful to be in a male dominated field, field where it's Tom, Dick and Larry every seven seconds? Everyone's wearing blue, black or, you know, gray suits and I stand out differently. That could be helpful too.

• 46:06Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, that's, and that's, I can hear in your voice that that's motivating. And you don't seem to be suffering.

• 46:11Codie Sanchez?

  No, I like, but I do like the chip on my shoulder. You know, I like a little.

• 46:15Speaker 01

  But that's a belief.

• 46:16Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  That's a belief. And is it true?

• 46:18Codie Sanchez?

  No, I don't know.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Who cares? Who cares? Is it useful?

• 46:22Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 46:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. You seem to be getting a lot of traction, a lot of motivation. You're not suffering. You're invigorated based on this belief that you chose. And what's crazy is that we know that even when you have every reason to objectively say, the cards are stacked against me. It turns out that people who have an internal locus of control, internal locus of control are people who believe that their actions affect change in the world versus an external locus of control. An external locus of control is someone who believes that things happen to them, right? It's my environment, it's my upbringing, it's society, it's whatever's happening in the world. That's what affects my life. Turns out that all the good stuff happens to people with an internal locus of control. Okay, that's not that surprising, right?

• 47:05Speaker 01

  That like they make more money, they live longer, they contribute more to the community. All, all good things happen to people with internal locus of control because they have more agency in the world. What's fascinating is that even if you objectively have all the reasons to claim victimhood.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  It still serves you more to have an internal locus of control. You still will go farther and be happier, have less depression, less anxiety. All the good things come from having that agency. Now, what's interesting, it's important to have an internal locus of control about yourself, but to see others with a different perspective. That you have more peace when you think, you know what? If others aren't doing what I think they should do, it's because they have their own constraints. They're doing the best they can with the tools they have. But for me, I'm going to affect change. I'm going, I believe that I have agency and control.

• 47:50Codie Sanchez?

  You know, it's fascinating. Back in the day, we lived in DC and my husband's a former ex-Navy SEAL. And he was one of the first people to try on the Whoop, that little bracelet thing. And so they ran it through the teams back then and they studied them. And so one day, one of the heads, I believe it was Kirsten Holmes, but one of the heads of Whoop came to DC and wanted to meet with him. And he was like, this is incredible. I must be a specimen. She wants to meet with me because my stats, right? So he goes to me with her, they sit down for coffee, they sit down, they start talking, normal things, and she goes, hey, I need to talk to you. It's like, great. What do you want to know? And he is fit, jacked and all the things.

• 48:33Codie Sanchez?

  And he's, she's like, well, I think you might have a heart attack. And he's like, excuse me, I'm in like, I have, you know, 7% body fat, I am. She's like, something is happening to you every day where you are off the charts with your stress levels and or your HRV or some measurement that they were able to tell biologically between, you know, 715 and 745 every morning. And like, I think you need to chill out your workouts and that is like too much. Your heart is not going to be able to sustain this. And she's like, so what are you doing from that time? What kind of level of workout is this? And he thinks about it and he's like.

• 49:13Codie Sanchez?

  I'm driving to work. Because, because he works out every morning at 6 a.m.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Not the workout, the driving to work.

• 49:20Codie Sanchez?

  Not just the drive.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Wow, stressing him out.

• 49:22Codie Sanchez?

  It was stressing him out. And he would have these stories to me every day that he would kind of like proliferate. Like, yeah, he cut me off and the drivers in DC and the terrible his drivers and blah. And it was sort of fascinating. And then he changed his perspective. For some reason, he was talking to her and he just said, I'm just gonna assume everybody's pregnant and they're going to the hospital. And like, if they cut me off, they're either not gonna make it, the baby's popping on the dashboard, like, that's what's happening.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:47Codie Sanchez?

  And he was able to sort of drop his HRV. But, you know, it was a funny story then, but I think about it now. Because if it can literally raise your heart rate or lower your heart rate just based on his belief of what was happening with the same exact drivers every single morning to his commute, what else again can you do?

• 50:04Speaker 01

  Okay, I'll, I'll, I'll give you a similar one up here. There's a case of a guy by the name of Mr. A. He was anonymized. And Mr. A was in a study, this really happened, this is a real study. He was in a, a, a group that was trying a new antidepressant medication. He broke up with his girlfriend, bad breakup, and he decides he doesn't want to live anymore. He takes the entire pill jar, pill jar? What's the word I'm looking for?

• 50:30Codie Sanchez?

  Jar of pills.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Jar of pills. Takes all his pills. Then after he swallows all these pills, he decides he does want to live. He rushes to the neighbor's house. He says, take me to the hospital, I need to go to the ER, I just swallowed all my pills. By the time he gets to the hospital, he, he falls on the floor. He manages to tell the nurse, I took all my pills, I took all my pills. They rush him into the ER. They, they start monitoring his heart rate. His heart rate is dangerously low, his blood pressure is falling. He passes out and they look on the pill jar and they can't figure out what he took because it doesn't say the name of the medication because he was in this clinical trial. All it has is a phone number. They call the phone number and they say, this guy took all these pills. What is this medicine? He said, give me one second. They look up on the computer, say, oh, okay, this, he was in the placebo group.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Nothing in those pills could have caused this. It's completely inert. They tell Mr. A this. In 15 minutes, his heart rate is back to normal. His blood pressure is back to normal. Everything is physiologically exactly where it should be. He's revived. He walks out in 15 minutes. Talk about the power of the mind, right? He had this expectation. He anticipated something to happen, and it did. And again, if that's, if that can happen physiologically, what happens when we keep telling ourselves the same limiting beliefs? I'm having a senior moment. I'm too old for this. I'm too young for this. The world sucks. The exercise is hard. Whatever. People are annoying. Whatever the limiting belief that we keep telling ourselves again and again and again, it has a physiological effect on us, just like Mr. A. did.

• 52:01Codie Sanchez?

  So what else do we do to not have this? You've given us a bunch of tools. Are there, like, do you stick a little sticky note on the mirror? Does that work? Do you put it on your computer? Like, what else can we do every single day to make sure that we are not inadvertently giving ourselves a wrong version of a heart attack?

• 52:14Speaker 01

  Well, I think, one, we need to identify the beliefs. That's the hardest part, is because we have that immunity to change. I mean, I'm sure if you were listening to us talking right now, there's got to be at least one thing you're like, no, that won't work for me. Perk up. Listen to that. If you are telling yourself, if anything we've said, that sounds ridiculous, won't work for me, pay attention to it. That's your psychological immune system saying, I don't want to change my beliefs. I want to resort to pessimism.

• 52:36Codie Sanchez?

  So do you, like, write those down? And then apply your turnarounds to them?

• 52:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. Exactly. So write it down. Come up with turnarounds. What, how, think of the opposite, and it's always going to sound ridiculous. If it doesn't sound ridiculous, you didn't do it right. It's always going to sound ridiculous. And then, step number three, look for ways that it could be as true. So that's, that's basically how we do this. Now, it sounds easy. I'm, I have to remind, I wrote this book for me. I have to constantly remind myself how to do this.

• 53:03Codie Sanchez?

  Me too.

• 53:04Speaker 01

  And then there's, there's all kinds of ways you can do that. You know, one of the things that, that really impacted me is I'm really working on disconnecting pain from suffering in all assets, in all facets of my life. There's amazing research around how chronic pain, you know, pain that doesn't have a, a physical cause that lasts for more than six months. So we're talking fibromyalgia. We're talking insomnia. We're talking, uh, chronic back pain. All these things, turns out, they are what we call neuroplastic pain. They're, they're, they're...

• 53:33Speaker 01

  All pain is real, okay, all pain is real. But all pain is also in the brain, right? Pain isn't here, pain isn't here, pain is up here. And so it turns out that we can learn practices to quiet that signal. So just like Daniel Gisler quieted that signal when he had surgery, chronic pain, these symptoms are a hyper focusing of attention. When I'm constantly thinking about what's wrong, what's causing me pain, I turn up the fear dial. And the more fear I feel, the more pain I feel. And it becomes this vicious cycle. So if you can detach that, if you can realize, one, you're safe. That's the most important thing, that I am safe right now. Okay, so and that can apply in a painful situation. If it's physical pain, it can also be stress, right?

• 54:16Speaker 01

  In a business situation, you know, I used to have this with public speaking. I would go on stage and I'd get the sweaty armpits and I'd get the heart palpitations and I'd get the dry mouth and I still get that. I'm getting it right now, talking to you. But I interpret it completely differently. So I used to say, well, you know, if my heart's beating and my mouth is dry, then I'm gonna do a terrible job. And if I was a real public speaker, I wouldn't have these. Now I don't say that anymore. Now I say I have a different story. Now my story is that I tell myself. You see, the reason my heart is beating so fast is because my brain needs more oxygen so that I can deliver my best possible presentation. Is it true? Does it matter? It works. Maybe that is a psychological placebo that I'm using. But I've told myself a different story. So just like you can constantly remind yourself when you're stressed,

• 54:59Speaker 01

  when you're anxious, when you feel like, oh, I need an escape. I'm safe, I'm safe. Second, reduce the urgency. When we have a problem, whether it's, you know, I used to struggle with insomnia, anxiety, ADHD, all kinds of things. I wanted to fix it right away. Why isn't this fixed, right? Give me a pill, give me a solution right now. There needs to be an urgent solution. That increases the fear cycle. Why? Because if I can't find an urgent solution, am I gonna have this forever? Right? Then I start getting into this rumination loop of like, when is it ever gonna go away? And what causes many of these problems, again, it's that pain, fear, pain cycle. The more I fear something, the more pain is caused, the more I fear in the future. So reduce the urgency. And then look for examples of how your safety is validated, right?

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Bring, for example, you can bring humor to the situation, bring levity to the situation, or repeat the situation. So I used to have back pain. And the standard advice is if you have some kind of pain, ice it, heat it, don't move, immobilize, rest, right? Don't stress it. Turns out that's not always the best advice. Now, if there is an actual physiological cause, different story. But if it's chronic pain that lasts for more than six months without a physical cause, that's not the right idea. So what do I now do? I still get that back pain, right? I'm 48, I'm gonna get it from time to time. Now, I don't immobilize, say, "Oh, my God, I'm gonna be in pain." No, I do the same movement 10 times. I literally, I just felt it as I was sitting down here. Okay, then that means I need to do it 10 times to teach my brain, "I'm safe, I'm

• 56:29Speaker 01

  safe, I'm safe." And so I use it in the example of chronic pain, but we can do that for all our limiting beliefs, to constantly remind ourselves again and again. So for example, when I'm writing, writing is really hard. I've written three books now, thousands of articles. I've been in the New York Times, I've been in the Atlanta, I've been in a lot of places. It's always frickin' hard work. So the mantra I've developed, the secular prayer, if you will, that I developed, that I tell myself, is when it's difficult, when I'm in pain and I want to reduce my suffering, I disconnect the two by telling myself this mantra. You can steal it, you can make up your own. My mantra is, "This is what it feels like to get better. This is what it feels like to get better." Just remind, that's a simple mantra, I can say it a couple of times a day, and now I'm relishing that feeling.

• 57:13Speaker 01

  Oh, it's painful? Good. That means I'm getting better. If it didn't feel painful, everybody could do it. But I'm developing this superpower, right? Just like you were saying, that because I'm Latina, because I'm a woman, I have an opportunity here. I'm N of 1, I've got something special here. So I'm leaning into that discomfort, as opposed to trying to run away from it by scrolling it away, or clicking it away, or emailing it away. Good, that's a positive now, versus something I should run away from.

• 57:37Codie Sanchez?

  I recently thought that willpower was a depleting asset. Like, I've heard that recently. I didn't know that that was one way or another. And then now that I have that as a belief, I've thought, "Oh, okay, well, that means that I need to make less decisions in this certain way, I need to do X or Y or Z." In your research, have you found that willpower is a depleting asset? Do we only have so much of it in a day?

• 58:01Speaker 01

  We used to think that there was this research, it was called ego depletion, that your willpower runs out, like gas in a gas tank, or battery charger in your phone, that the more you use up your willpower, you're done with it. And I used to totally believe this, and I would come home from work and I'd say, "Oh, I'm spent. I'm gonna go on the couch and have a jar of ice cream and watch TV, because I've got no more willpower, it's spent, it's gone, right? You use it up."

• 58:26Speaker 01

  Well, it turns out it's not true. That when we try and replicate those studies, and this happens in the social science. This is how science works. Science doesn't say anything. Science is the process of doing repeated experiments and seeing if they replicate. And then we can draw conclusions based on evidence. But the evidence doesn't show that ego depletion exists. You do not run out of willpower like you run out of charge on your phone. Unless, there's one group of people who really do run out of willpower. Those group of people are only people who believe that willpower is a limited resource.

• 58:59Codie Sanchez?

  God, that's such a mind fart.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  I know.

• 59:02Codie Sanchez?

  What? We have to be so careful about what we let in here.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  So true. Because if you believe, "I'm spent," guess what? You are. But if you don't let that enter your mind, that willpower is not a resource, it's a feeling. But you don't say to yourself, "Oh, I'm always gonna be happy," or "I'm always gonna be sad," or "I'm out..." No, it's just a feeling, and it comes and goes. So yeah, sometimes we have more willpower, sometimes we have less. It's not a resource unless you believe that you're gonna run out of it.

• 59:27Codie Sanchez?

  This is just so good. I mean, I already told you this, but I was like, walking through all my notes this morning. I was on the treadmill, I was on a run, and I just was picturing everybody I was gonna send this to. I was literally picturing, and, yeah, I mean, and, starting with myself, and then starting with everybody else that I want to have this tool in their life. Because it's very seldom, we hear shit like this. I live in Austin. Everybody's into crystals, you know, fucking astrology, whatever else we've got going on. But it's very seldom that you hear this stuff in such a clinical way, and without so many "shoulds" in it. A lot of, "Hey, this is what I'm doing, here's what the science says." But you're very particular. Like, I've tried to get you a few times to say, "Will you do X, Y, and Z?" You're like, "No, I'm not telling them. I'm saying this is what we do."

• 1:00:12Codie Sanchez?

  And I think it's really powerful. I also wanna uncover one other thing that I found interesting from your research. I hadn't ever heard the term before, hedonic adaptation. Can you tell me what is hedonic adaptation, and how could it ruin your focus?

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  So hedonic adaptation is when our circumstances improve to a point where we no longer appreciate them. And so we need more, and more, and more, and more. If you think about, for example, how today, the middle class doesn't feel particularly... Well off, right? But if you compare the middle class today, the assets that they have, the color television, the iPhone, the all the plumbing. If you look back two generations, certainly three generations, that, you know, the kings of France didn't have indoor plumbing, right? The kings of France didn't have antibiotics, right? They were constantly had tooth decay and syphilis and all kinds of terrible things

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  that even though they had all the money in the world, they didn't have the luxuries that we have today through modern medicine and all these things. But we have adapted. So we have so much more, but we don't feel any happier because of it. And so that's something to watch out for. Now, the antidote to that is, again, beliefs and beliefs powered through gratitude. And so taking that pause to realize that I'm alive, like I can breathe today, like that we keep thinking we need more to be happy. These things have to happen. But if we actually put things in perspective, and it's very difficult to do because we are so inundated with how terrible things are all the time, all the news. The news doesn't tell you all the great things that happen today. I went to journalism school.

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  The first rule of journalism is if it bleeds, it leads. It's not to inform you. The news media is not there to inform you. The news media is there to make money. And it's not a political issue, it's a business issue. Now, there's anything wrong with that, right? It's okay to consume the news. It's all right to be informed if that's how you want to spend your time, that's fine. But when it becomes something you have to do, when you become enthralled in that story and you have to keep up with the latest everything that's going on, everybody else is suffering, you become distracted from what really matters in your life. And so it's very important to refocus, to actually bring perspective back to what really matters and be very careful with that media diet that is designed in a way to constantly keep you unhappy, to constantly keep you unsatisfied.

• 1:02:38Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. In YouTube, we um, we know that if you have a negative versus a positive thumbnail and title, you have a 23% higher click-through rate.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  If it's negative versus positive?

• 1:02:49Codie Sanchez?

  Correct.

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:02:50Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, and so, um, and also, sort of, the scarier it looks, often, and scary is the right way, I can't remember how they actually determine that one, but dark colors, I believe it's like, very dark, or very red, and those two things have some sort of signal to us, and those thumbnails outperform as well. And so, you know, if you go to some, you know, creator's account and you look at their YouTube, you'll find, often, that the ones that are really viral are like, "Warning, disaster," you know, "World-ending."

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  It's over.

• 1:03:23Codie Sanchez?

  And it's because they have a higher click-through rate.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Because we have what's called a negativity bias. Again, our default is passivity. We like the negativity. Why? From an evolutionary basis, good things are nice, right? Good things are nice. Bad things will kill you. So what are you gonna pay attention to? What's gonna be led through that keyhole of attention? The good news? No, that's nice. What do I do with that? Bad news? Oh my gosh, there's terrible things happening, I have to do something, warning, warning, right? Danger. That's what gets our attention.

• 1:03:48Codie Sanchez?

  You had a line that was really helpful to me about tactics versus strategy, and how if we only apply the tactics, but we don't understand the strategy of why we're using them, and our deeper why, we probably won't internalize them and actually do it. But you did have one tactic I kinda liked. Well, you have a lot, but one in particular was about intimacy time, and your wife, and cellphones. And I just, you know, I was-

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  Oh, you went way back. That's great.

• 1:04:14Codie Sanchez?

  I was trying, I was, you know, I was looking at the YouTube comments and seeing what people ask about on this podcast. And, and one of the things I keep seeing pop up is this desire for like, a deep intimate love. And I don't know, I'm not a relationship coach, I have no idea. Like, if you wanna help, I can look at your EBITDA numbers, we can try to raise them, like, that's what I got. But you had at least one tactic that I really liked, and I wonder if you would share this tactic, and it's pretty simple, and I think anybody could use it today.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this was, this was a long, this was when I first kind of started writing in public, and I wrote an article called "The Strange Sex Habits of Silicon Valley." And it was basically about this phenomenon that at the time was kinda novel, the Apple App Store was three years old at the time, right? So it was brand-new. And I started seeing that every night, my wife was fondling her iPad, and I was caressing my iPhone, and we weren't being intimate with each other. And that had some negative consequences on our relationship. And you know, we've been married now for 25 years. And I learned, one of the things I learned was the power of what's called a pre-commitment device. And this is a very old technique. In fact, it's in the Odyssey written by Homer. It's a very, very old technique where you make a pre-commitment. So you remember the story of the Odyssey?

• 1:05:29Speaker 01

  Ulysses, this Greek hero, has to sail his ship home and he has to sail by the island of the sirens. And he knows that there's this temptation. He knows that there's this distraction of any sailor who hears a siren song crashes their ship onto the shore of the siren's island and dies. So he knows this is gonna happen. So what does he do? He enters into a pre-commitment. He tells his crew to tie him to the mast of the ship. And he tells them, no matter what I do, no matter what I say, don't let me go. And he tells everyone in his crew to put beeswax in their ears so they can't hear the siren song. And it works. And today, we call this a Ulysses Pact. So what we have to do is, as the last resort, there's four steps to becoming indistractable. But as the last line of defense, the fourth step, the firewall against distraction, is

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  we make a pact that when distraction rears its ugly head and the first three techniques, for whatever reason, didn't work, there's a failsafe, there's a last line of defense. So what did I do? In order to stop going to bed too late and restore intimacy with my wife, we went to the hardware store and we bought this $5 outlet timer. Okay? And this outlet timer will turn on or off whatever you plug into it at a set time of day or night. And so what do we do? At 10 o'clock at night, every night, the internet router shuts off. Okay? Now, today, this is many years ago, today, we actually don't even need it because we've been trained now, it's become a habit, 10 o'clock. All right, internet's shutting off.

• 1:06:59Speaker 01

  Now, could I turn it back on? Of course I could turn it back on, right? Like, I could tether to my cellphone. I could, you know, go under my desk and pull out the timer and, you know, replug it in. But now there's effort. Now there's friction. So what I've done is to take a mindless behavior and add some mindfulness. Now I have to think about, wait a minute, is this really worth it? Do I really need to check more email or social media or whatever? Or should I go to bed? Right? So adding that bit of friction as a pact, as a pre-commitment device in advance. And this is the key. That if you leave it to the last minute, you will fail. If you're on a diet, but the chocolate cake is on the fork, you're gonna eat it. If you're trying to quit smoking, but the cigarette's in your hand, it's too late, you're gonna smoke it. If you sleep next to your cellphone every night, it's the first thing you pick up in the morning. Right?

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  But if you plan ahead, there's no distraction you can't overcome. Because the antidote to impulsiveness is forethought. These problems with distraction, it's not a character flaw, it's not a moral failing, there's nothing broken about you. It's just that you haven't learned how to control these uncomfortable impulses. It's just pain management. So if you plan ahead, right? There's no distraction you can't overcome if you plan ahead for it.

• 1:08:09Codie Sanchez?

  Is it true that, like, a lot of times, you can't actually see the opportunities in front of you because of the way you view reality? Or is there something else going on?

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  So you remember this, uh, this optical illusion?

• 1:08:20Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  I'll give you an example of how I can demonstrate how you don't see reality and you can't see even the possibilities that are ahead of you with, with a riddle. Do you like riddles?

• 1:08:32Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, you do?

• 1:08:33Codie Sanchez?

  I'm nervous, though.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  Okay, here's a riddle. So if you know the answer, if you've heard it before, don't say it, okay?

• 1:08:37Codie Sanchez?

  Okay, deal.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  There's a father and son, and they're riding in their car late at night. There are absolutely no lights on the highway. All of a sudden, a deer jumps in front of the car. They have a horrible accident. The father is instantly killed. The boy is in critical condition. He's rushed to the hospital. When he gets to the hospital, he's wheeled into the operating room. The surgeon barges through the door, takes one look at the boy and says, "I can't operate on this boy. He's my son." How could that be? Now, have you heard this before?

• 1:09:12Codie Sanchez?

  No.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  87% of people who hear this riddle can't get the answer. Okay, so do you have a guess?

• 1:09:19Codie Sanchez?

  No.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  How could that be? You want me to say it again?

• 1:09:22Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, I don't know. There's two fathers, they're gay.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  Okay, that's one possible answer. That's not the answer. That is one possible answer. Can you think of another one?

• 1:09:29Codie Sanchez?

  No.

• 1:09:30Speaker 01

  You're gonna hate the answer.

• 1:09:31Codie Sanchez?

  Oh, no.

• 1:09:32Speaker 01

  The answer is, the surgeon was his mom.

• 1:09:36Codie Sanchez?

  Oh, my God, that's terrible. You never said it was a man?

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  I never said it was a man.

• 1:09:42Codie Sanchez?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  Now, why did that happen?

• 1:09:45Codie Sanchez?

  Because I'm a misogynist.

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  No, no. In fact, even self-identified feminists don't get this. Again, 87% of people don't get this riddle. Why? Because they can't see the reality. They can't, their brain doesn't let them see based on their prior beliefs. Even though 20% of surgeons are female, 80% are male. And so your priors dictate that you can only see reality a certain way. Now, if I can do that with a simple riddle that you kick yourself over, is it any surprise that when you're trying to convince somebody to start a business for themselves, and they go, "Ah, that wouldn't work for me, and here's why, and I can't, because of this situation, that's..." They can't see it, Cody. They can't see the possibility. Just like you couldn't see until I told you the answer. By the way, if anybody ever tells you this riddle, again, you'll know exactly the answer, right?

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  It's so obvious.

• 1:10:33Codie Sanchez?

  Yeah, so it's part of the 13%.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  Right. But the fact that all these people, they can't get the riddle because of these prior beliefs. And so this is why we have to be so, so careful about the beliefs we let in and how we need to consciously... Actively test ourselves and look for this portfolio of perspectives so we can look at other points of view.

• 1:10:52Codie Sanchez?

  It's so useful because actually it's almost a little bit like a magic trick. Like how when you see somebody do a magic trick, then it makes you question your own capability. And until then, you almost can't pattern and interrupt enough where somebody could go, oh, I can, I can actually read this book and get it deeply inside. But hopefully, we gave everybody enough pause and they had the same thought that I did. And then they're out of their mind and not listen back to this and say, how can I do this differently?

• 1:11:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:18Codie Sanchez?

  God, that was good. I'm glad it worked and also so ashamed that it worked.

• 1:11:23Speaker 01

  There's nothing to be ashamed of. Seriously, it's not, it doesn't mean you're.

• 1:11:26Codie Sanchez?

  Oh, no, I don't actually care. No, I actually have really nice things that I say about myself in my head, so that has no bearing on it. Mira, this is incredible. I love your new book, as evidenced by the fact that I keep talking about it. And like, in case they haven't seen here, there's a lot of bookmarks, there's a lot of tabs in here. So Beyond Belief, incredible. Will be out for sale by the time we do this. And I just want to say thank you for writing it because it's not an easy path.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

• 1:11:55Codie Sanchez?

  You chose the hard path. Thanks, Mira.

• 1:12:04Speaker 03

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