Pod Insights Change Wired Why you keep quitting your diet after day 3. The missing piece of your lasting motivation. About this episode Quitting isn’t always a character flaw. A lot of the time it’s a belief problem. When I see people stall on a healthier diet, regular exercise, better sleep, a bold career move, or the messy work of improving relationships, the pattern is the same: they stop when they no longer believe their effort will pay off. Today I share a practical framework inspired by Nir Eyal’s work, the book Beyond Belief: a 3-part motivation triangle. Remove any side and consistency collapses. If you want more dis...
Transcript 0:09 Speaker 00 Hey guys and welcome back to another episode of Change Wired Podcast. My name is Angela Sharina, I'm your host, I'm your partner in change, personal and collective transformation, I'm just someone who's really passionate, obsessed with and can't stop learning and being fascinated with human potential, unlocking and using more of it in our lives, in the world, so we get to live our most extraordinary lives and create the most extraordinary world all around us. Today, guys, we are talking about some fundamental understanding of how your motivation works. And you need your motivation for absolutely everything, whether you're trying to stay
0:54 Speaker 00 on a healthier diet, or do regular exercise, or work on your sleeping habits, or lust in your business, or your career pursuits, or longer working, you know, on important, on hard things that move important goals, agenda in your life, or maybe you're trying to work on your communication skills, or on your relationships, whatever that is, you need motivation, consistent motivation to get going. And I want to address first the question of discipline, but before we even do that, I want to tell you guys that by the end of this podcast, you will understand what is
1:37 Speaker 00 the cause of you quitting too fast and not persevering with the things that you know are important to you, the hard things that you need to do to move yourself to the next level, like, why do you quit, when do you do quit too early? So by the end of this podcast, you get to understand this, perhaps figure out finally that missing piece that doesn't allow you to move forward, to keep going long enough to get a breakthrough in your life, in your relationships, in your health, in your fitness, in your business. So gonna be a good podcast, but before we jump into all the talk, research and experiment
2:17 Speaker 00 in mice, before we talk about motivation, I want to address the question that's often brought up when I talk about motivation, it's discipline. It's like you don't need motivation, you just need discipline. And again and again, I more and more often understand that people who say those things don't really understand what motivation is. The definition of motivation is the reason to act, your motive for action. And without that reason, without that clear understanding of why you're trying to do the things that you do, I doubt you'll have any discipline.
2:58 Speaker 00 People who seem to be the most disciplined, quote unquote, they have a conviction, face, believe the things that we're gonna talk about, that they can do it, that this matters. And the reason, the reward, the goal at the end of the tunnel is worthy, all the effort, worthy of all the pursuit. That's how you get to unlock discipline. But again, before you unlock discipline, you kind of get a, gotta really in your gut, understand why is this important, the thing that you're doing in the first place? Let me tell you a story. I was reminded of this
3:39 Speaker 00 research that has been around, I don't actually know for how many years, but I've read it in many books by now. So Neil Yehl and his new book, Beyond Belief, reminded me of this experiment, this famous experiment on, they call it learned hopelessness. I call it learned optimism, because researchers actually start thinking that by default, at least animals are quite hopeless, meaning they do not extend effort unless they learn the reason to be optimistic and work harder for certain things. Anyhow, the research, researchers took wild mice, like
4:23 Speaker 00 a lot of them, obviously, to get all this research done. I didn't even know, you know, where they get all these wild mice these days. But anyhow, so they dropped these wild mice.
4:35 Speaker 00 Into water. And mice are not great swimmers, like, well, at least not by any standards that we have for great swimming anyhow. So they drop the mice into water. And that wild mice left by themselves, they swam for about one to fifteen minutes before giving up and starting drowning. And apparently, probably researchers let some mice just drown. But then some mice, they rescued, they dried them off, and then let them recover, and then put them back into that water.
5:13 Speaker 00 And those same mice swam sometimes for up to sixty nine minutes, hours, guys, sixty hours from one to fifteen minutes. The researchers replicated this again and again and again, and actually, the same type of research was done on different animals. I'm familiar with this research done on dogs, when they shocked them with electric shocks. And the dogs who previously knew that some of the efforts, like pressing some levers, would end up helping them to escape these shocks, they would try to do something even when they didn't have any levers to change the situation.
5:58 Speaker 00 And dogs who learned that no matter what they did, nothing worked, and they would be just continuously shocked, they did nothing. So that's why the experiments usually are called learned hopelessness, even though, again, researchers now actually think that hopelessness was there by default, and just some dogs learned the optimism based on their experience. And that is a very important note here. So animals learn to try harder when they have this experience of either being rescued or that when they try harder, they're
6:38 Speaker 00 Uh, s- something to save them or something to give them reward or something to escape the suffering. We'll end up giving them results. So humans are no different. When we believe our efforts can actually work, we try harder. Because guys, when do you think people quit their diet? When they do it for, I don't know, several days in a week and they didn't lose much. Or maybe even gained because they, I don't know, started exercising or just, you know, our weight fluctuates. And they give up. And when they try enough times and it seems to quote unquote not working. People end up giving up for good.
7:22 Speaker 00 But when we believe, and especially when we see the evidence like mice do, that certain things can work. We last longer. We push through the moments that would otherwise make us quit. You know why most entrepreneurs give up too early before they ever get a chance to see their thing uh through to success? Because more often than not, you don't get direct experience or signs of progress. So you end up thinking, well, I'm, you know, I'm trying and trying this thing and I'm not really seeing the evidence that I can rely on. So and I actually don't have
8:05 Speaker 00 my personal experience that I will succeed with this and the thing gonna improve anytime soon. And so they give up. We start believing that this thing won't actually work. And that is fundamentally the biggest reason for quitting. Now, whether that's right or wrong, you know, whether you pivot or not, that's a different story, but that's why we quit. So humans are no different. When again, when we believe our efforts can actually work, we try harder, we'll last longer, we push through the moments that would otherwise make us quit. But for humans, it also gets a little bit more interesting.
8:44 Speaker 00 We, unlike mice or dogs, we don't need the direct experience of making it that the mice or dogs needed. We don't need to be rescued first before we believe rescue is possible. We can choose what we believe by choosing where we direct our attention or where we focus. On all the people who succeeded before us with fewer resources or all the people who failed. We get to decide which story we are gathering evidence for. There is a reason why Roger Bannister, you know, broke this four-minute mile record and then everybody else did. Because it's not like he changed humans.
9:30 Speaker 00 He changed what humans believed about their ability to break that four-minute mile. So humans do possess this unfair advantage, cognitive advantage in evidence gathering. We don't need direct evidence. We can curate our stories to believe into what gets us pushing harder, if that's our decision to do so. We can direct and focus our attention on the stories that helps us to keep going. We can be proactive about designing the evidence, the stories versus animals. They just see what they see and there is little they can do about their own cognition. Right?
10:17 Speaker 00 So New Yehl, in his book Beyond Belief, he even created this triangle, what I call now a new equation for motivation. And triangle has three sides. It's knowing, one side is knowing what to do. The other side is knowing what benefit you'll get from doing that. And then believing the third side is that your efforts can actually get you there. Remove any one of those three sides and the whole thing collapses.
10:54 Speaker 00 So if you're struggling to keep going, two days into a diet, months into your business with no traction, weeks into trying to sleep better, improve yourself, talk of your relationship or working on some problem, you know, actually, speaking of the problem, even Einstein said, or somebody maybe quoted it for him, that he believed that he did not possess any special intelligence, but he just stayed with the problem longer. And the reason why he stayed with the problem longer is because he believed he could figure out how the universe works. He could figure out it better. It's not like all the other people were more stupid. They
11:35 Speaker 00 just did not stay with this specific problem long enough to actually figure it out. He stayed with it for like years while working on some clerk in a patent office. So do you actually believe this thing that you're trying to do can change meaningful things for you guys? Not do I hope, not do I wish, do you believe? Nietzsche famously said, "He who has a strong enough why will bear any how." I think this quote, while I was writing today's blog on this, I realized this quote is actually missing something very important. I'm not
12:19 Speaker 00 sure if Nietzsche ever said that or wrote about it, but this quote, "He who has a strong enough why will bear anyhow," misses a crucial piece. The why, your reason, only carries you through if you also believe that the how, your actions can help you reach it, that you can make it. The why plus the how plus your belief equals consistent action. Remove one of them and the whole thing collapses. So over to you, dear listener. What story of disbelief are you telling yourself, the one that makes you drown in minutes when
13:02 Speaker 00 you have what it takes to go for hours? Just like that mice have. They didn't know they have it, but when they believed, they lasted for up to 60 hours. Can you imagine how much longer can you go and persevere, longer than you think you have?
13:22 Speaker 00 Review, revisit, audit your belief, whatever it is you can't stick with. Ask yourself honestly, do I actually believe that I can last and I can make it happen? And if you don't, which can be the case, borrow that belief from someone else. You know, everyone had Roger Bynister breaking this record. But also you have a ton of biographers, people on social media you admire, all kinds of leaders, all kinds of regular folks who overcame so many odds and made extraordinary stuff happen that nobody believed they could.
14:08 Speaker 00 So, dear listener, what story of belief do you need to tell yourself to get yourself motivated consistently and in a lasting fashion to see things through, the important, the hard things? So you get the results that you want and create more meaningful, extraordinary life experiences. So you unlock more of your full potential and get to live the most extraordinary version of your life. That's it for today, guys. I rumbled long enough about one of my favorite topics to talk about, the motivation, the science of it,
14:51 Speaker 00 how brain was wired for creating it or removing it from our efforts. So we don't end up wasting a lot of energy and effort and time. Hope you enjoyed this episode. Again, the practical takeaway is to explore, to audit your beliefs. Whenever you find yourself not sticking consistently with certain actions that you know you need to stick with in order to get to the next level of, I don't know, health, career, your business relationships, etc. So audit your belief and then if it doesn't really work for your consistency, like you have some or a lot of disbelief, think about all the examples in, again, books,
15:31 Speaker 00 social media, in your immediate life, that you can lean on to see that the change is possible with consistent effort and people with less sort of talent and will and discipline made it and you probably can do too.
15:50 Speaker 00 Thank you guys for tuning in. Thank you for listening. If you found this episode inspiring, giving you more strength to persevere, and you'd like to help more people to keep going after their dreams, their potential, their most extraordinary lives, then please do share this podcast episode with at least one other person or a whole bunch of people. A review, rate, all of it will help us reach more people. So we together unlock more potential and get to live more extraordinary lives in a more extraordinary world. Thank you guys, and till next time, keep growing.
Previous Why you know what to do and still don't do it — with UCLA Nudge Unit Co-Director Hengchen Dai. Next 🍍The Cut Pineapple Principle: how to do the right thing without discipline Page updated November 10, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
