Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals

Social psychologist Emily Balcetis has devoted her career to understanding how people’s perceptions of the world fuel their motivations and life goals. In this episode she goes in-depth on that wealth of research, what she’s learned from studying some of the world’s most successful people and how they set goals, and how you can get better results in life if you change the way you see the world and where you place your focus. Balcetis is an Associate Professor of Psychology at New York University (NYU), focused on how the motivations, emotions, needs, and goals people hold impact the basic ways people perceive, interpret, and ultimately react to information around them. She is also the author of the book Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World, which was released in 2020. -- Want even more? Members get early access, hand-edited transcripts, member-only episodes, and so much more. Learn more here: https://fs.blog/membership/ Every Sunday our Brain Food newsletter shares timeless insights and ideas that you can use at work and home. Add it to your inbox: https://fs.blog/newsletter/ Follow Shane on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/ShaneAParrish Our Sponsors: MetaLab: Helping the world’s top companies design, build, and ship amazing products and services. https://www.metalab.com Aeropress: Press your perfect cup, every time. https://aeropress.com House of Macadamias: Nourish your daily routine, and nurture your lifestyle. https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/TKP 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

  You can tell people, just like I have you, to focus their attention. Choose a target. Imagine there's a spotlight shining just on it. Don't pay much attention to what's in your periphery, almost as if you have like blinders on, right? So don't pay attention to those distractors. And when we taught people that narrowed style of attention, they moved 23% faster in this course that we had set up. From the start line to the finish line, it was always exactly the same distance. And they said it hurt 17% less. We are capable of changing our eyes that can change our psychology, that can change our performance. Why not embrace this and use it as a source of power and control and opportunity?

• 0:55Shane Parrish?

  Welcome to The Knowledge Project. I'm your host, Shane Parrish. This podcast is about mastering the best, what other people have already figured out, so you can apply their insights to your life. If you're listening to this, you're missing out. If you'd like access to the podcast before public release, private episodes that only appear in your feed, hand-edited transcripts, including my personal highlights, and more, you can join at fs.blog/membership. Check out the show notes for a link. My guest today is Dr. Emily Belchettis, PhD, professor of psychology at New York University. Dr. Belchettis specializes in how our perception of the world influences our persistence and motivation.

• 1:39Shane Parrish?

  The perception gap is the difference between what we see and what is. And understanding this gap not only explains why we sometimes have trouble getting started or finishing, but how we can use it to our advantage. This episode is about achievement and getting better results. It's about how our perception and where we focus changes not only our motivation to work toward our goals, but how hard we work and the pain or pleasure we experience as we work. If the gap between where you are and where you want to be is too large, getting started seems impossible. If the gap between where you are and where you want to be is too small, you'll eventually get bored. And if it's just right, you become

• 2:21Shane Parrish?

  unstoppable. For example, if you want to write a book and you focus on the book being done, you're unlikely to start. If your goal is to write a word, you'll eventually get bored because it doesn't challenge you enough. We need to focus on the Goldilocks zone, where it's just right for us. And in this episode, you'll learn how to do that. In the end, your achievement depends on where you focus. It's time to listen and learn.

• 2:51Shane Parrish?

  Our eyes are incredible tools for shaping the world. However, they create a perception gap between what we see and what is. In your book, you wrote, "We think we see the world the way it actually is. We think that when we look at ourselves in the mirror, we see our face the same way others do. We believe that when we peer down the street in front of us, we know what will pass by on our journey. We are certain that when we scan the food on our plate, we see what it is we'll be eating." But none of this is always true. Instead, our visual experiences are often misrepresentations. We form an imperfect impression, and our eager mind fills in the gaps, putting in place the missing piece.

• 3:34Shane Parrish?

  And this happens all the time without our awareness, in big decisions and little decisions, the ones that matter and the ones that don't really. Yet, we can take advantage of this if we know when and why it happens. I think we should start with the relationship between perception and how we see the world.

• 3:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I think there's something really special about vision for the reasons that you've just articulated. But in comparison to other sensations, other ways that we get information about the world. We don't get the kind of feedback about our visual experience the way we do about all the other senses. So, you know, oftentimes, we could be touching something really wonderful, like a new fabric, or trying to find the right kind of, the right outfit on the, on the shelves, and, and it feels so soft. And then we look at the label to find out, well, what is that? And only sadly to discover it was polyester and not silk that we thought, or something, right? So we get that kind of tangible feedback that what we think we're feeling isn't quite

• 4:34Speaker 00

  what is really true. You have a conversation with somebody and you've misunderstood what they said, and they correct you in the moment. Oh, that's not what I said. And not just meant, but that's not what I said, right? So you've gotten their words wrong. Or, you know, something delicious that you're tasting or smelling at a restaurant, and you're trying to figure out what the chef put in there, and you know that you don't have the whole story. But rarely do we have that experience with vision. And, and that's what I think is one of the things that makes it really special, is that if we are seeing something the way that it is not really, or if we've missed seeing something, very rarely does the world correct that experience for us. And that contributes to, you know, a sense of confidence that we're getting the whole picture,

• 5:17Speaker 00

  which builds a trust in visual experience that may not be so well founded. We believe that we're seeing everything that's really out there, because very rarely do we ever have that impression, that belief, second guessed, or corrected for us to learn otherwise. Especially when you make that, when you take that in, in contrast to all the other senses that we have. So that's just one of the things that I think is, makes that visual experience unique, and builds a unique sense of, of trust and miscalibration. It's because we lack the opportunity for feedback and updating.

• 5:54Shane Parrish?

  Are, are there other aspects to that? So feedback being one of them, are there other things that come to mind?

• 6:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, there's things about the way that the eyes are constructed that I think are also really interesting. Again, it's, it's always helpful to put it in, in contrast or in comparison. So if we think about how our faces are structured, we have, for the most part, two eyes on the front of our face that point forward. But think about a horse. Think about any other animal that's a, an animal of, of, of prey, that, that it is what is eaten. Like horses, they have eyes on the sides of their head, li- like literally on the sides of their head. And so as a result, their field of view is like, you know, two hundred and seventy degrees, three quarters of, of everything that's around them, they can pick up with their eyes. Now, that's not true for us. We have to move our heads around. That's not true for owls. We are so excited when we can see like what an owl's neck is capable

• 6:45Speaker 00

  of doing because it really moves its head all around. So when we look at the basic biology of our physical construction, we can see, why don't we get the whole story? Why aren't we getting the whole picture? Because what our eyes are pointed at reflects a very narrow selection of what is in the world that we are, we are situated in at any given moment. Now, we know that, but are we really consciously aware of that at any given point in time? Of course, we know it, we can know it, but are we thinking about it and taking that into consideration when we're trying to decide if we've got the whole picture or not? And I would say like, for the most part, no, we're, you know, that's not generally that important to us to be constantly reminding ourselves of the unknown unknown. So things

• 7:30Speaker 00

  you don't even know that are happening all around you. Are you thinking about those things? No, you're thinking about the things that you do know, more so than the things that you don't know, that you don't know. Another thing about, about our physical construction is that, you know, if you think about what can you take in with great clarity and precision, our, our foveal view, like what your eyes are doing if you're reading text in a book, you're trying to read a passage and, and you know that to pick out those words and to, and to take those letters and, and construct sentences, that you're looking at a really, you're focused on a very narrow subset of what's on the page. Now, you get that experience, we know that experience. That's why we consciously move our eyes from, at least in the United States,

• 8:12Speaker 00

  from like top to bottom, left to right. Uh, because we know that we can't pick up on, we can't focus on everything. We don't take a snapshot of the page. We have to move that, that focused view around. To put it in a perspective, essentially, if you take your two thumbs, put them side by side and hold them at arm's length, that surface area of your thumbnails is what you can take in with great precision and clarity. And the rest is coming in fuzzy. It's coming in through our peripheral view. We're missing details about, we can't detect sharp edges necessarily. Sort of, it sort of blends together. It's more foggy what's coming in. We lose information that comes in through our peripheral vision. We're not, we can't

• 8:56Speaker 00

  really pick up on color very well of what's on the sides outside of that focused, foveal view. And so as a result, you know, a lot of the information, that narrowed, selected amount of information that our eyes are even capable of taking in, is coming in ambiguously, in a degraded fashion, in a sense. And all of that is stuff that like, yes, once we talk about it, you know that, but you're not thinking about that at any given point in time. And you're not correcting for it. You're not acknowledging that like, oh, most of what I think is true right now, I should put an asterisk next to, I should take with a grain of salt because I recognize the biology of my physical construction and the way that our eyes are set up at this moment is going to leave me information deficient. We don't

• 9:41Speaker 00

  think that way. And as a result, it can often go overlooked and help to foster that perception-reality gap.

• 9:48Shane Parrish?

  The focus thing is super interesting because it's almost like we're filtering too at the same time. Our eyes are taking in so much information that it's almost impossible to process everything. And so we naturally have to narrow the focus in order to, I would assume, process the information.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  Exactly. Because it's not just what light lands on our retinas and then gets fed up through our optic nerve into our brain. That's not what seeing is. Seeing is taking that information, taking the light and the cells that respond to that light, but then making sense of it. Seeing is making sense of that information. And that's where our brains really come into play, that we are incredible, well, not AI, we are, you know, not artificial intelligence, we are true intelligence. Our brain has created this great algorithm to help us do that really efficiently, to take these little bits of light and craft something meaningful out of it. So it's not just zeros and ones, but

• 10:45Speaker 00

  it's, you know, the face of our husband, it's the crawling of our child, right? That's what we're seeing. But we can only do that if we can put those little bits of information into context. Our brain is taking what we already know to be true. It's relying on memories that we have formed to help us very quickly piece together those little bits of information that we've gotten from the world around us to construct something meaningful, to put that information together, to acknowledge this is what I'm looking at right now. It does that based in part on what it already thinks we're going to be seeing, what we already think we're going to be seeing, and then sort of tests the input against that visual hypothesis.

• 11:26Speaker 02

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• 11:44Speaker 03

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• 11:47Speaker 03

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• 12:11Shane Parrish?

  We prioritize what we see versus what we hear. Why is that? Now, what comes to mind when I say that is when, you know, somebody is saying no but shaking their head yes. And so we have this disconnect, but we tend to prioritize what the action and not what we're hearing. So something that we visually see instead of what we hear.

• 12:33Speaker 00

  There isn't a definitive answer on that, but you know, one source of insight on why do we do that? It could be related to the neurological real estate that's taken up by our visual experience. There's far more of our cortex. You know, the outer layer of our brain that responds to visual information than any other form of information. So our brain thinks it's important, more of our brain space is is taken up to respond to visual input than auditory input or to tactile input. And, you know, I think, and that just might reflect our sort of evolutionary origins as well, that that we base a lot of what we see, what we're going to think,

• 13:16Speaker 00

  what our next actions are going to be, based on what it is that we're seeing, that has done us well, to be able to prepare for something that might be dangerous by being able to to see it before it's right upon us.

• 13:28Shane Parrish?

  And how did you land on this idea of the perception gap?

• 13:31Speaker 00

  To be perfectly honest, it's because I didn't really know the literature well enough. And I thought I had discovered something totally amazing and mind blowing, but no, because all of science is is developed in this sort of incremental way. So to be completely transparent, it was a fundamental misunderstanding of the scientists who've done great work before me. So I had read a really important paper by somebody named John Barge, who's at Yale, faculty member at Yale University, and and he had talked about the perception behavior link that we react, we can react very automatically, instantly to what it is that we're seeing. And we can sort of build up these habitual

• 14:12Speaker 00

  patterns of acting in a particular context, in response to a particular person, or when we see something like chocolate cake, oh, I just want to eat it right now. You know, all kinds of pairings can happen that when we see something, we act in a certain way. And he was talking about sort of the malleability of how those pairings come to be, that not everybody sees the same thing and does the same action. Not everybody sees a cigarette and wants wants to hold it, or doesn't feel that craving, right, of I want to smoke this. Not everybody feels that way, but some people really do strongly. The actions can vary with with with what it is paired against, the visual stimulus is paired against. So he was saying like, actions can be automatic, but but interchangeable from one person to the next. And I thought, well, what about visual experiences? Maybe visual experiences

• 14:57Speaker 00

  also are malleable. Maybe we don't all, if we don't all act the same way in the same context, maybe we don't all see the same context. Maybe we see things in different ways, too. Twenty years ago, when I had what I thought was this great insight, it was me just not realizing that people have been studying this at this point for, you know, seventy, eighty years. It had been theorized by psychological theorists for hundreds of years at this point. So I started doing some studies and then grew much more aware of the literature that I was engaging with to realize that people had been asking this question for a really long time. But now, in the last twenty years, twenty years ago, we were at a time in science where the technologies available to us are just much better and our

• 15:41Speaker 00

  understanding of how the brain works is much better. And so we can develop more sophisticated, accurate theories about how is this possible? How could I see something different than you, but you and I both don't know it? So like, how is that even possible? And so now we're at a time in our understanding of science to be able to answer those kinds of questions with more sophisticated technology to study them with more precision. Like, in our lab, we use eye tracking. We have, you know, like, sensors that emit light that bounces off the back of our retina, kind of goes through our pupil, bounces off our retina and sends it back to the computer. The computer can pick it up and sort of cross-reference to know what you're seeing in the world out there on the computer screen, if that's where I presented it. I know

• 16:23Speaker 00

  exactly where your eye is looking. I know for how long it's hanging out there, if it's fixated or if it's passing through that context. And what's interesting is that in our lab, we can study that without people even knowing it. So you don't have to wear anything on your head. You don't have anything like that your chin has to sit on. Like, when you go to a doctor's office and you're looking at something and they're looking back at your pupil, people can just be looking at the world the way they naturally do and we can be monitoring what, where it is that they're looking to understand natural patterns of eye movement without disrupting what is natural. And that's not a technology that fifty, seventy years ago was available to people.

• 16:59Shane Parrish?

  And that's really exciting, the fact that we see the world in different ways, because it creates an avenue where certain people see the world in a certain way and maybe something looks easier to them than it does to somebody else, where we can hack this. Talk to me a little bit about maybe the relationship between what we see and maybe what we accomplish or our motivation to do it.

• 17:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, so you know, that that question that you're asking really is at the heart of one of our longstanding lines of research is one trying to understand, well, what are sources of problems as people are trying to get stuff done in this world? The goals that they care most about, you know, as a motivation psychologist, which I am also, you know, a lot of work has been done trying to understand, well, maybe people just really don't care, you know, maybe they actually aren't as motivated on the things that they're working towards than they should be. So let's increase motivation. Yeah, that's part of it. Maybe they are doing themselves a disservice. They're talking to themselves in ways that aren't helpful, like, you know, they're putting themselves down, or they don't really believe in themselves enough to be able to get the job done. We're our own worst enemy when it

• 18:06Speaker 00

  comes to self sabotaging kinds of language. Yeah, that's part of it. And we can change those things, but that those changes don't help enough to push people, in some cases, literally over the finish line if we're talking about the context of exercise. So we were taking that idea that I had said 20 years ago, I was so naive to think I had discovered, and applied it to the context of exercise and tried to think, okay, maybe there's something about exercise that not everybody sees it the same way. Of course, we don't all think about exercise the same way. I like exercising. My husband hates it. He's a very fit person, which is annoying that he can hate exercise and yet still be quite fit. He burns his calories when he sleeps. It's so weird and he's so lucky.

• 18:51Speaker 00

  But that's because it's not fun, right? So like, we all know those kinds of examples where we think about exercise in different ways, but maybe there is something about the visual experience when exercising that is helpful for some people and might be part of the problem for others who are struggling to do it at the level that they want. So one, so that's one of the questions that motivated a big line of work that we've been engaged in, is trying to think, okay, when it comes to exercise, distance perception is something that really matters. That, you know, we have to assess how much energy do I have, how much motivation do I have, and how far do I need to go and trying to regulate that, get those two in sync with one another. So one of the first places that we started looking was, you know, how do people perceive distance? And is it related

• 19:34Speaker 00

  to something about their bodies or about their motivation?

• 19:39Speaker 00

  We spent a long time looking through the literature to see how do people study distance perception, coming up with our own measures as well as using those from the past, to see not just what do people think about distance, but how are they really seeing distances? And some of the things that we found, regardless of what measures we were using, was that people who weigh more, we index this by waist to hip ratio and by BMI, two metrics that the medical community uses to index people's weight status or to diagnose weight status. And we found that people who have a higher waist to hip ratio, or a higher BMI, see distances as farther than people who have a lower waist to hip ratio or a lower BMI.

• 20:22Speaker 00

  Those distances literally look farther to people that for whom it might be harder to make it to that finish line, to navigate that space. We also found that that's the case with motivation, that when people are more motivated to exercise or to make it to that finish line, that motivation can, in a sense, compensate for that effect of their body on their perception of distance. So that even highly motivated people, people who are highly motivated, even if they have a higher waist to hip ratio, might see the distance in a way that suggests it's just as short as people who have a lower waist to hip ratio.

• 21:02Speaker 00

  So motivation can change our visual experience and align people to experience a world that looks more like a person who'd have an easier time navigating it. So those were like, you know, two initial findings, that sets of findings that suggested our visual experiences are not just reflective of the world that's out there. But instead, it has to do with what is our body capable of doing and what is our brain capable of supplementing? Our own motivational states and physical states of our body are working together to shift what it is that we're seeing in the world out there. Now you couple that with like around this time, they had the opportunity to to talk with

• 21:44Speaker 00

  some amazing athletes, some Olympic athletes, some of the world's fastest runners, like the fastest guy out of Trinidad, um, someone else who's trained against Hussein Lightning Bolt, like, these are amazing accomplished athletes. Uh, and, and, and I was wondering like, well, what are they doing? Like, what, what's happening with their eyes as they are running? And like, I have no expectation that if I just interview them and then, uh, and adopt what they say, that I'll be able to do what they have done. Of course not, but I just wanted to get some insight from some really accomplished people. Now, my intuition going into this con- these conversations, um, was that they would say that they have like amazing powers of perception. They could see in front of them, on the sides, behind them, you know? I know that's not physically possible, but that's just what I thought would happen, that

• 22:27Speaker 00

  they knew exactly where they were relative to their competition, that they could do something with their peripheral vision that maybe I couldn't do. But that's not at all. I was totally wrong. They said they, they had this sort of hyper focus that, you know, for shorter runs, um, that they just focused on the finish line, as if there was, you know, a spotlight shining just on that finish line and that they weren't paying any attention at all to their peripheral vision. Uh, when it was longer runs, that they would choose a target up ahead and focus on that till they hit it, and then they would choose another target. And that seemed to resonate with other sort of memoirs that I was reading about accomplished athletes as well, like marathon runners would take that approach.

• 23:08Speaker 00

  So then I thought, okay, visual experience does seem to be implicated in how they're moving their body at these amazing paces. Um, and what they're talking about is something that we can teach other people to do. And we're not gonna, we're not gonna be able to take somebody who, you know, is really struggling to be in shape and turn them into a gold medalist. That's not the point here. That's not most people's goal, but can we improve their experience in some way? By teaching them to do with their eyes what these Olympic athletes are doing? The answer is yes. You can tell people, just like I have you, to focus their attention, choose a target, imagine there's a spotlight shining just on it. Don't pay much attention to what's in your periphery, almost as if you have like blinders on, right? So don't pay attention to those distractors.

• 23:52Speaker 00

  People can do that. We have them talk to us about like, well, what is it that you're focused on? What's catching your attention right now? Those are easy instructions to understand and it's easy to make your eyes do it. What's important, though, is that that's not what their eyes do naturally. When they're walking or when they're running, people do take a sort of wider perspective. They broaden their scope of attention relative to what these instructions are having them do.

• 24:16Speaker 00

  And when we taught people that narrowed style of attention, what we found is that they moved 23% faster in this course that we had set up. From the start line to the finish line, it was always exactly the same distance. And we were using our stopwatches to see how fast did they move? They moved 23% faster and they said it hurt 17% less. Right? So exactly the same actual experience, but subjectively it was easier and they performed better. They increased the efficiency of this particular exercise. Now, of course, that's not going to make people, you know, one bout of of efficient exercise isn't going to change people's body body composition or help that won't have them meet a health goal.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  They need to do this over time. But what we also found is that if we taught them that strategy and tested its impact right here in front of us when we're watching and then tell them, now go out and exercise over the course of the next week and do you mind if we check out your fitness uh tracking app? What we found is that people who have been trained in that narrowed focus of attention go out for more walks, they take more steps and they walk faster in each walk. So we've improved the efficiency of their exercise, even when we're not there to monitor what they're doing. And even when they're like compensation isn't contingent on what they're doing. It's just like, hey, if you could go, you know, go for some walks and go for some or some runs and and and then let us see how it's going for you using the strategy that we talked to you about.

• 25:47Speaker 00

  Now, why does that happen? I think that's pretty amazing that that does happen. Because it's not magic. It's about changing people's psychology. Yes, we're changing what their eyes are doing. That's changing their visual experience of the landscape. But that then has psychological consequences. People, when they see that, when they experience that finish line is closer, or the stop sign that they've focused on, or the building that they've always hoped that they could walk to, that they're focused their attention on is closer, that changes their mindset. Now, it doesn't seem so hard because now it looks close. It looks closer to me. They believe in themselves. They have a sense of self-efficacy that is higher now. The task doesn't seem so difficult. They believe they have the resources to take on this challenge.

• 26:31Speaker 00

  There's a host of cascading sort of psychological effects that comes from that misperception of proximity. That visual illusion of greater proximity changes their psychology. That then is what translates into the improved performance. So here, really, to understand, like, you know, how do we get people to exercise better? One is that we want to induce that perception-reality gap. It's not something to be afraid of or to think is a deficiency. It's an opportunity, actually. It's an opportunity for some sort of self-trickery, self-deception here that can work to our advantage. Once we know we are capable of changing our eyes, that can change our psychology, that can change our performance,

• 27:13Speaker 00

  why not embrace this, this perception-reality gap? And use it as a source of power and control and opportunity?

• 27:21Shane Parrish?

  There's so many rabbit holes I want to explore with what you just said. I think the first one is there's multiple parts to a goal, right? So with exercise, there's sort of like getting started. There's while we're in it. And then there's near the end, so the finish line. And so, does where you focus change your motivation depending on what stage you're at in the process?

• 27:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, you know, my, my lab hasn't done this work, but a great suggestion comes out of IEL at Fishbox Research at the University of Chicago, that, again, if we realize that we have different places that we can look, or that we can focus our, our attention, our cognitive attention or our visual attention. Again, we can open ourselves up to more possibilities than we might use as a default. So if we're thinking about a goal, oftentimes the tricky part is in the middle. You know, if we've set a goal, usually we've set the goal because we're excited to try something new. That's often the case is that we are setting these goals and and there's a there's a a moment of of excitement about it. Or we're getting towards the end and there's either the panic because we need to get this thing done

• 28:28Speaker 00

  or the excitement that we're almost done or the impending reward that we're that we're looking forward to receiving. So, you know, the beginning and the end have sort of unique motivational properties in and of themselves for where they're at. But it's the middle where we've been working at it for a while, but there's still kind of a ways to go. Um, I don't know. How's my progress? There's obstacles. There's competing goals. The the middle gets murky and that's oftentimes uh when we see drop off happening. After people have given the the first the the first stab at it and then they have to reassess their commitment and try something else. And that's where the strategy that I that Fishbach has talked about can come in useful, which is being intentionable intentional

• 29:08Speaker 00

  about where you direct your attentional focus, intentional about attentional focus. And what she has found is that people get a burst of motivation or, you know, and and performance increases. People engage in the goal relevant activity at that halfway point if they look towards the finish line. Look towards what separates where I'm at right now and where I want to go. But especially for people who are committed to that goal. So if you already know this is something that I want, this is something I'm passionate about. This is, uh, you know, I've got a personal intrinsic interest in this. People find motivation by looking at closing that gap between where I am and where I want to be.

• 29:53Speaker 00

  But for people who are less committed, maybe, you know, this is the first time they're trying out this goal or it was a goal that was given to them. They haven't had buy in at a personal level themselves. Looking backwards back is what is useful, focusing their attention on how far they've come. This is where I am now and that's where I started. And they get a sense of, you know, they get to pat themselves on the back in a sense like, oh, I didn't even, I didn't even know that I cared about this. I didn't even know I was capable of doing this, but look how far I've come. And that's a source of energy or motivation for them. So, so the takeaway here is that just recognize that there are options. I say them now, they probably come as no surprise. It's like a, yeah, I know that moment, but being able to self diagnose,

• 30:37Speaker 00

  what is, what is this goal? What is your personal commitment to this goal? And if it feels low to you, then looking backwards, you might be motivating in that middle, in that middle ground. But if it is something that you've always wanted to do, you're passionate about, you've already shown interest, looking forward might be a source of motivation.

• 30:54Shane Parrish?

  So is it backwards from I've accomplished this goal already and I'm visualizing it? Or is it backwards from something else, some other milestone?

• 31:04Speaker 00

  It's not about having accomplished it already. It's, it's when you're trying to track where are you at and where do you have to go? It's sort of in these moments of accountability when you're taking stock of, of progress where you have options. So if you're already at the end of a goal, you know, that's a different conversation about, well, do you need to reset the goal? What kind of goal is this? Is it, is it a one and done experience? Or is this something that requires sort of a habitual life change? You know, fitness, health does, right? You, you can meet your ideal weight. You can get your A1C to where you want it to be. But unless you sustain that for a very long time, you're going to be back to square one pretty soon.

• 31:46Shane Parrish?

  When you talk to athletes and they're setting these sort of sub-goals that are closer, like I want to make it to the next lamppost, or I want to, you know, where, where I'm focusing my attention, is there a frequency at which it becomes too frequent?

• 32:00Speaker 00

  That's a great question. And the answer is yes. When, when we've done extensive studies, like of thousands of people who are runners, you know, at, at all levels of accomplishment. And we ask them about these strategies, you know, starting at the beginning of the race. Let's take a 5K, the beginning, at the, at the beginning, when you're just coming out of the starting blocks versus you're a kilometer in, you're halfway, you've got a kilometer left, you're nearing the finish line. You know, when we break a race down like that and ask them, how frequently are you using narrowed attention? How frequently are you using more expansive widened attention? What you find is that for people who already can perform at that level, you know, to run a 5K for most people is they have to train at least to some degree for that.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  So these are people who are capable of running and who have chosen to run and report on their experience about running. They use the narrowed attention a little bit more than the wide attention, but that gap grows tremendously over the course of the run. So that by the time, you know, they're nearing the end, reaching the halfway point, you know, there's a kilometer left, they're nearing the end. They're really using their attention quite a lot and really have dropped off on that wide attention. And that sort of, you know, sort of polarizing polarization of the use of these two strategies, where narrowed is increasing and wide attention is decreasing. That is especially done by people who end up, who run faster.

• 33:26Speaker 00

  We've collected their bib numbers and then looked up their performance statistics by whatever organization is responsible for recording official race times. That's publicly available information. And what we found is that the people who actually run races faster and in other studies, who report that their fastest race time or what they're currently running at is faster than those that have slower race times. Those are the people that use this strategy of ramping up narrowed attention and ramping down wide attention to the greatest degree. Does that make sense?

• 34:00Shane Parrish?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 34:01Speaker 00

  Yeah, so, you know, so yes, people who already can perform at this are using these two strategies pretty strategically that they recognize, as you intuited Shane, that like, they can't use this all at the beginning, you know, max, max capacity, because it would be tiring to engage in that kind of effort of like finding a target, focusing on it, fixating on it, setting another one. That would be really challenging to do and come at a cognitive and maybe even a physical, mental cost. But they, but they do use that strategy and then sort of conserve its use to maximize it towards the end. And that seems to be correlated with, with high performance.

• 34:41Shane Parrish?

  It seems like the end is almost easier because our narrowed focus is actually the end goal at the end. And then there's Hypotheses, and maybe I'll let you explain it to everybody, but the goal gradient hypotheses, and how that affects our motivation as we reach or become closer to our goal.

• 35:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, so two parts there that it seems like, you know, one way to put your first part of your question of like, when the finish line is present, like, how could you not be focused on it? You know, just if that was resonating with other people, yes, you would be focused on it, but you could also be focused on your competition unless you're, you know, five minutes ahead of the pack.

• 35:24Shane Parrish?

  Right.

• 35:24Speaker 00

  There's probably other people that are around you. And how much are you paying attention to those people? And just, you know, to remind you, like, our Olympic athletes said they don't do that. They are not, they are not really focused on, you know, where are other people relative to where they are when they're really trying to push themselves over the finish line? So, so do keep in mind that there are options for most people that that finish line could capture attention, but so could the competition that's, you know, running neck and neck alongside you, or the people that are cheering you on and that are holding signs with your name, or, you know, hitting the cowbell off to the side. That's all possible forms of distraction that would widen your attention. And these data are suggesting that that may not be the best thing to focus on.

• 36:08Speaker 00

  Even if it's exciting to see, you know, your, your sister who's screaming for you over there, it might not be the best to really pay her a lot of attention towards, towards that end. Okay, so that was the first thing that I wanted to respond to. And the second one was the goal gradient hypothesis. Now, you're getting it deep in the weeds on some, you know, classic psychology, which is really great. Those that don't know about this, you know, this was work that was started in the 30s and the 40s. Oftentimes, in, in, in those decades, people were using animal models where they would look at, well, how do mice respond? How do rats respond? All different kinds of animals in addition to studying people. But some of the best work on this goal gradient idea came from the study of mice and rats, looking to see, you know, when they're running a maze, what is their pace?

• 36:51Speaker 00

  How fast are they trying to finish this maze? And, you know, I say this just with a little grimace, that oftentimes they motivate these animals by making them hungry, depriving them of food for a bit or of water so that their treat at the end is something that their bodies really want, more water, more food, or a treat of some kind. And, and the rats and mice will know that that's what they're going to get when they get towards the end. And I mentioned that. Just also to note that like they don't, like marathon runners, they, they don't have a lot of resources to go off of, especially as they're getting towards the end of the race. And yet, what these scientists find is that the pace is faster

• 37:36Speaker 00

  towards the end, once these rats and mice are getting nearer to the finish line than it was at the beginning. Even when they have just expended some resources to try to make it through the maze, to engage in this maze, they have even less than the deprived state that they started with. And they're doubling down, they're moving faster through this to, when they're in the last, you know, quarter of their maze compared to the first quarter of their maze. And like cute little studies where they've like, you know, put restraining harnesses to, to measure how much pull is there? So how hard are they pulling to try to cross that finish line to get the treat? And they pull harder at the end than at the beginning. And that's the idea of the goal gradient hypothesis, that as we get close to meeting our goal, whether we are rats, mice, or people,

• 38:19Speaker 00

  that we double down on how much we're investing to cross over that finish line.

• 38:24Shane Parrish?

  So is part of the reason that the, the sub-goals work then is that we're really just moving the finish line slightly farther than where we are, so we're more motivated to accomplish it? And then we're, we're tricking ourselves and resetting once we reach that sub-goal to the next goal?

• 38:39Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think there's a couple of things that are implicated here. Is that if we have a goal that seems impossible, if we construe this is really far. If you just looked at what 26.2 miles looks like to you, that might look really far, impossibly far. And, you know, colleagues of mine at New York University have found that when we construe goals at that level, when they feel at that level of impossibility, we give up before we've even gotten started. That they've looked at systolic blood pressure as a physiological indicator of our psychological readiness to do something. And they have found that systolic blood pressure goes down when people Set goals that feel impossibly hard to accomplish.

• 39:22Speaker 00

  It's as if their bodies are giving up before they've even gotten started. And so what setting subgoals can do is sort of pull that appraisal of the difficulty of the goal into this, almost like Goldilocks, you know, just right, and just that sweet spot of being just right, where if I know I'm going to need to harness something here to get the job done, but it's not, it's not, I'm not thinking about this as something that is totally beyond the realm of possibility for me. So that's one part of how setting subgoals can help is that it, it changes our cognitive thinking about the difficulty of, of this particular goal. Two goals that would be like, kind of hard to do is going to be more motivating than one goal that seems impossible, because I'm not even going to try for

• 40:07Speaker 00

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• 40:47Speaker 03

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• 41:12Speaker 00

  And the other thing about, you know, that narrowed focus of attention that we've been talking about is that it can do that sort of, you know, perceptually, psychologically, it could, it could take that goal that maybe is immovable when you're not setting a subgoal, but bring it in, give the illusion of proximity that then might gear us up to, to take the next step or to find that energy that those rats and mice found when they thought that they were close to the finish line.

• 41:38Shane Parrish?

  So it's almost like if we perceive the goal to be too hard, we won't even get started. So we, okay, that's interesting. How would you use this in terms of just goal setting for people? Like, how do you use this information to set better goals for yourself?

• 41:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, so what have, you know, we can sort of liken this conversation to something that's a really commonly used tactic, vision boards. People like vision boards, dream boards. If those words don't resonate with you, it's the idea of, you know, collecting visual icons that reflect what would your ideal life look like in this space? You know, what, what does it look like to have met your health goals? What will you look like? What would life be like? Or your professional goals? What would it look like if your business reaches? It's the goals that you've projected out for the next five years. What's that going to look like? The idea here is you collect all these visuals, sort of scrapbook them together into this combination, and then put that, put that somewhere that will motivate you.

• 42:35Speaker 00

  Maybe it's the backdrop or the desktop on your computer screen. Maybe if you've cut out images from magazines, you put it next to your mirror in the bathroom to remind yourself each day of where it is that you, that you want to be. What is it that you're working towards? Now, a lot of times what people put into these vision boards or these dream boards reflects like, you know, their farthest out, most loftiest goals, like what would my perfect life look like? That's a, that might be at that level of impossibility that we're talking about that like, you know, you might think that it's motivating, you think it, it might help you have a vision for where you want to be. But if those things reflect things that right now feel impossible, it might not actually be motivating. It might be, it might be depressing.

• 43:21Speaker 00

  The other thing is that it doesn't give you concretely the steps that you need to take in order to make it, to hit that big vision that you have for yourself.

• 43:31Speaker 00

  And so, you know, it's not to say that vision boards or dream boards are not effective. And even if the way that I've described it doesn't really resonate with you, some version of it of thinking, thinking big picture is really commonly used in personal life, in professional life. There's, there's a side note, there was a study done by TD Bank of small business owners and the vast majority, over three quarters of people, say that they use vision boards or think that they would be effective for motivating their workforce and clearly communicating where they see their company going. So even if you're not into scrapbooking and that you don't do that, probably some version of this big picture thinking you do integrate. Into into your planning.

• 44:12Speaker 00

  But what's important is that when we have these sessions where we are planning, what does five years out look like? What is our our ideal life look like? What's on our bucket list? That we need to couple those brainstorming sessions with concrete action planning. We need to be thinking about what can I do this week? What can I do this month? That's going to help me to advance progress in that area. So that you can tie the big vision with the concrete actions. So that you basically know, all right, am I going to go left or am I going to go right? Which way do I even start? How do I take the first steps here? And third is that in again, these brainstorming sessions, we need to start thinking about the obstacles that we might experience along the way.

• 44:54Speaker 00

  Now, when I say that and say that that actually will help us better reach our goals. It's a form of motivation. That can seem counterintuitive people to to some people when I start saying like, yeah, dream big. You know, what do you want your life to look like? What's what's perfection for you? Or what is it that you're striving for? And think about all the things that are going to stand in your way that are going to make it hard for you. And then they're like, how would that motivate me? It's you know, it just makes it seem like I'm not excited anymore, but it's going to be really, really hard and maybe even impossible. It could, if that's the way that you think about it. But instead, I encourage everybody to think about it as like coming up with a plan B or a plan C. Because when we experience these obstacles,

• 45:38Speaker 00

  that's usually the time when we don't have the mental bandwidth to think about ways to push through them. That we're short on time, we don't have the resources or the support. Something is is is is taking up more of our mental space now. This thing we're trying to troubleshoot our way out of. And we're not able to figure out a solution when you're, you know, in the bunker, when you're in the sand pit. If this was a golf analogy, it can be hard to see what the green looks like above you when you're down in that sand pit. Instead, if you had had the opportunity to create sort of a mental map of of what that hole looked like, then you're going to have a better idea of which way should you try to try to hit it out of the bunker?

• 46:20Speaker 00

  If you've already been thinking about, should this happen, I will do this. If this happens, then I'll do this. It's easier to pivot. You already know what the next steps will be and you don't have to then pause when you might not be able to pause to try to think about which way am I going to get out of this? How do I get out of this? What do I do? You've already done that hard work. And so you can think about it as a, you know, as a safety net in advance of starting a goal at the planning stages of a goal, you've already foreshadowed the ways that it could go wrong. And you have your backup plan. You have your safety net. You're very well prepared to move forward. And and you're well supported because you've got plan B and plan C in the works.

• 47:00Shane Parrish?

  Are there any examples that come to mind as you're saying that about how somebody has visualized something going wrong and already prepared for it and it helped them succeed?

• 47:10Speaker 00

  Well, I think the most compelling example to me is Michael Phelps, that this is something that he routinely has integrated into his training sessions. And, you know, this, this, this came out about about how he trains a while back, actually, when he was in the 2008 Beijing Olympics. That was his first Olympics where he really hit the international stage hardcore. At the time of this story that I'm about to tell you, he had won seven gold medals. He needed one more gold medal to do something that Olympians had never done in the history of the Olympic Games, which is win eight gold medals in a single Olympiad. And all he had to do was the 200 fly. That was like his jam, right? That's

• 47:50Speaker 00

  what he's known for. As he dove into the pool for for this 200 meter fly, his goggles started to leak. And by the time he had just one length of the pool left, they were completely filled with water and he was essentially swimming blind. If this had happened to me, I would have sunk to the bottom. I mean, I wouldn't be in this situation, anyway. I can hardly swim at all. My six year old son is much better at swimming than I am now after one summer of really trying. But I would have panicked. And I think a lot of people might have that intuition, too, that, well, that's the end, right? He did, he got seven. That's great. He's tied up. But he isn't going to have won the eighth. But that was something that he had foreshadowed. He and his coach had talked through the possibility that his goggles malfunction and what are you going to do about it? And so they had

• 48:33Speaker 00

  practiced that. What's the, what's the plan B if your goggles fail you? In fact, so the story goes that his coach would sometimes rip his goggles off his head just as he was about to dive in and then smash them on the side of the pool. I don't know why, for dramatic effect or something. But like, he really can't be swimming with his goggles. So what is he going to do? Count his strokes. He had practiced that, counting his strokes. He knew exactly how many strokes it takes for him to get from one end of the pool to the next. He wasn't paying attention to the competition on the sides because he literally couldn't see them. He just turned to his plan B. He won that 200 meter fly. He won his eighth gold medal and he would go on to win 15 more in his career.

• 49:14Speaker 00

  So an incredible athlete, of course, but a message that I think can resonate with us all is that like, here is a compelling example of having planned for these obstacles. And so when they crop up, he just instantly was able to turn to his backup plan and still make good on this very amazing goal that he had set.

• 49:33Shane Parrish?

  One of the things I love about that story is that it would have been so easy to understand that excuse at the end. Right? Had it not turned into a gold medal and he said, hey, I dove in and my goggles filled with water. We'd all be like, oh yeah, of course.

• 49:47Speaker 00

  Yeah. And that's, I mean, a testament also to how quickly he was able to pivot, right? So, so it's not just coming up with that backup plan, but I think important in this story is that he had practiced it so that he could do that quick pivot, you know, and not even, you know, not even miss a beat, not even miss a breath. But, you know, if there had been a moment of like, what do I do? Plan B, then he would have been done for, you know? That kind of less than a second moment in time could have been enough to throw him off or to pull him back from first place, but he was able to almost instantly pivot to that plan B because he had practiced it. So in the course of, you know, trying to pursue our goal, we need to keep that in mind too.

• 50:27Speaker 00

  That like, yeah, a month ago, a year ago, you could have gone through this mental activity, this exercise of planning big picture, pairing it with concrete actions, checking in on your progress, knowing whether to look forward or look backwards and planning for the obstacles. But if that sort of loses saliency, if it no longer is at the ready and available to you, it's not going to be an effective backup plan.

• 50:51Shane Parrish?

  The other point you said that I wanted to come back to is sort of breaking your, your goals down into the week and the month. Is there an ideal sort of frequency or duration that we should be looking at? Like, should we be looking at a, you know, a lot of people use to do lists or whatever. Should we be looking at these on a, what do I want to accomplish this week or today or this hour? Like, how frequently in practice should those be?

• 51:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I don't know that I have a prescription about that necessarily about what to do, but instead what not to do. I think that a lot of us, especially I, I am not immune to this, even though I know the science and I have tested myself on this science. It's still a challenge to implement. That when things get really hairy, when there's a lot that you've got managing, we often start thinking myopically just about, I gotta get through the day, gotta get through the day. You know, when's my next moment today to, to take a break, you know, to go to the bathroom even, or, you know, to try to troubleshoot um, what's, what's, what's next for me? Or even if we know we're about to have a hectic day, we wake up and we just look at the day.

• 51:53Speaker 00

  Now, that is problematic because the, the day just keeps going and the next day just keeps going. And we, we need to take some time to plan strategically about how we're gonna get the things done that we need to get done. So within my team, we, we designed this experiment um, where we were testing the impact, how many, the impact of different ways about using our calendar. Looking at the day, which is what we all tended to do when things got really stressful, planning our day versus planning a longer timeframe. In this case, we tested a week. And what we did was have people think about a, a goal that they were working towards that was important for them. Somebody in this team was um, you know, working on producing her first film. And, and she was nearing the end, but it wasn't gonna happen in a month.

• 52:38Speaker 00

  There was still maybe about three or four months of, of work that's left. Somebody else was trying to launch a new social organization. Uh, a, a, and other people are trying to like, you know, finish up a novel that they were writing on. So, so big projects that were personally important. The problem wasn't about investment, it's not about motivation. They all wanted to get it done, but it's about how do I find the time for these big projects that require, you know, daily or at least every couple of days persistence and effort, but will, but I'm not gonna see the fruits of those labors for quite some time. How do I manage that? So, everybody thought about what their unique personal goal was. For one week, we, you know, woke up, thought about today. What can I do today that's gonna make progress on this goal? And when can I slot it into my calendar?

• 53:21Speaker 00

  And then at the end of every day, reported on, uh, how much time did you spend working on, on this task? Or any part of it, whether it was even something different than you had planned, but how much time did you spend on this, on this big goal for yourself? And they did that for seven days. In contrast to what I think is problematic, at least my problematic approach to managing my own calendar, uh, was that we had people wake up on Sunday, they thought about this big goal that they have, they thought about all the concrete actions that they could take that would help them make progress on that, on that bigger, bigger goal. And then they planned out the next seven days. They slotted in times into their calendar for when they might be able to work on a particular task, or at least carve out time for even the unknown or unforeseeable actions that they might have to take.

• 54:06Speaker 00

  And they slotted that into their calendar, even up to seven days out. Same as before, at the end of every day, they reported on how much time did they spend working on that goal? And what we found was that, over the course of a week, when people had spent, had planned time in their calendar a week in advance, when they thought more big picture about time allocation, they found two and a half more hours to work on their goal, in contrast to when people were thinking myopically about the day. Now, it's not to say thinking about the day wasn't helpful, and that slotting time into their calendar wasn't helpful. That's not what I'm saying. But it was even more helpful to be able to plan and commit a week out to times in their

• 54:49Speaker 00

  calendar for when they're gonna hold that slot to be, to be working on their goal. And that worked for sixty-six percent of people to find more time. That was an effective strategy for sixty-six percent of people. Now, why would that be? I mean, it probably seems obvious now, but you know, your calendar seven days out is much freer than your calendar today. Right? Because things come up that need instant attention, and they fill up any free spots that you have in your calendar. The second thing is that we prioritize what we see. And so if we have a block of time in our calendar, seven days out, that we've already scheduled something, even if it's just for ourselves, we work the rest of our life around it. So, seven days out, our calendar is much more open. But if we can fill it with one or two blocks for those things that are like, you know,

• 55:34Speaker 00

  our nagging to-do list items, or the things that we just think like, okay, I'll just, I'll get to that when I have a free moment. You'll never have a free moment in your day, if that's the way that we operate. Our days end up usually being filled with much more than we had planned for, or that we really can accommodate. So, you know, So, so you know, it's like you had a meeting with your boss in the calendar. You wouldn't just forget that or scrap that or blow it off. And that we can use that same sort of philosophy when we're thinking about the things that matter to ourselves personally. Scheduling time for ourselves further out in advance. We'll make sure that we, we stick to that. We can hold ourselves more accountable to actually spending the time if we plan for it further out than we usually do.

• 56:15Shane Parrish?

  Which also has an interesting byproduct that if things come to you and you're trying, somebody's like, oh, let's grab coffee. And you would never say yes today, but two weeks from now, when your calendar is free, you're like, no problem. And then the day comes and you're like, oh, I have to do this coffee thing, right?

• 56:32Speaker 00

  Yeah, and that comes down to a different, you know, different mindsets that we have also, that when we become more psychologically distant. It can be in terms of time. In this case, it's in terms of time, that further removed time, we start thinking about what we want to do. So, most of us want to get coffee with this person. When we're thinking more temporally, more locally about what's today, you know, yes, I love that person, but today is so busy. I don't want to, I don't want to do it today because it's not feasible. We start thinking about what's feasible when we're in a more psychologically close point in time or a moment of consideration. And we're thinking about what's desirable when it's further removed from time.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  So that's just another tactic we have to sort of take back control of our brain is knowing that when we have a greater distance from something. We start thinking about, do I want to do this? Is, is this related to something that would be of interest to me? And in the here and now, it's about feasibility. So that's often why we over commit is that there's probably a lot of things that we really want to do that feasibly. When it comes down to thinking about what can I actually get done today is, isn't possible. That's where a lot of the over commitment comes from.

• 57:42Shane Parrish?

  That's an excellent point. I hadn't thought of it that way. Is there a relationship between how we talk to ourselves and how we process information?

• 57:51Shane Parrish?

  Or is the relationship stronger between how we process information and then how we talk to ourselves?

• 57:57Speaker 00

  Can you give an example about your thinking of?

• 57:59Shane Parrish?

  Well, if I if I think of myself as the the type of person that likes to go to the gym, or I go to the gym every day, and that this is part of my identity, then I would assume that it becomes easier for me to go to the gym every day. And obstacles would sort of like I wouldn't see them. Whereas if I don't think of myself as somebody who goes to the gym every day, every obstacle becomes much larger so that we have a visual perception impact, also a self-talk impact. And so is how I'm talking to myself changing the information I'm getting from the world? Or is the information that I'm seeing from the world changing how I talk to myself? Or is it some sort of relationship between both of them?

• 58:39Speaker 00

  That's really deep. I'm not sure that I have a convincing answer for that, especially as it relates to the visual experience. But there is something called self self-consistency theory that we that we want to hold consistent understandings of of who we are. It can lead to some counterintuitive findings, which is how this idea has been demonstrated and supported by other researchers, which is that sometimes, counterintuitively, we'd rather get negative feedback about ourselves than positive feedback. We relish that if it's consistent with what we think is true about ourselves. But getting something that maybe is even positive or at least neutral that isn't part of our self schema can be challenging for people. It can be, you know, a little bit weird for somebody to think you're good at something

• 59:24Speaker 00

  that you have forever thought that you're bad at. Either, you know, you start to second guess them. Maybe maybe they aren't a good assessor of of people's abilities. Like, are they really paying attention? Do they really know who I am? That's not who I am. So that idea of self-consistency is important for for people. You know, sometimes even at a detriment to like, you know, getting a compliment that can make you feel better.

• 59:48Shane Parrish?

  Also, as you were, as you were saying that, one of the other ways that I I think it manifests itself is there's some people think they're not worthy of happiness or they're not worthy of love or something like that. And that affects how they're seeing things.

• 1:00:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, true. Yeah, so that has jogged my, my thinking on some, uh, maybe more direct evidence to your first question about the visual experience part, that, um, there has been research done by clinical psychologists. I'm not a clinical psychologist in that, you know, I, I don't deal in therapeutic contexts and I don't diagnose people with mental health disorders, uh, but I'm aware of some research that, that does look at people who have depression and anxiety and they have found some visual orienting effects, um, that, you know, people who have depression or anxiety or specific kind of phobias are quicker to notice and then at times can fixate

• 1:00:44Speaker 00

  on the things that are the source of that depression, anxiety or the phobia, you know, concretely, people who are spider phobics, you know, if you show them sort of, you know, photographs of different environments or spaces or rooms that they orient really quickly to where those spiders are. They have this, you know, almost like a sixth sense for where are they, that their eyes gravitate to that. Now, uh, you know, and then that sort of fosters their belief, uh, or their phobia that, you know, these, these environments, these are dangerous spaces because they have the things that are really threatening to me. I can see them. Like, what do you mean you can't see them? I see them. I see, and they are seeing them. They're seeing them faster there and they're holding on to them, you know, more

• 1:01:25Speaker 00

  so than, than people who don't have that same kind of phobia. Um, so there, there is some work suggesting, supporting what you're saying, that our, our, our, maybe our negative states that we may not wish that we have are changing our visual experience and then that feedback, that understandably feeds back into, uh, reifying or supporting our belief that, um, that we live in a sad, dangerous world.

• 1:01:49Shane Parrish?

  Why do some people sort of see the glass half full and some people see it as half empty?

• 1:01:54Speaker 00

  That's such a big question. Which way to tackle that? Um, well,

• 1:02:00Speaker 00

  And, okay, so one perspective is that people have resonated with is the idea of negativity dominance. That, that things that are negative pack a bigger hedonic punch, that we feel them more strongly than positive things that should be at the same magnitude. Like, one, like, one compliment, you know, one sentence that's a compliment should be just as powerful as one sentence that's an insult. But we can probably all think of one compliment we've recently received in one insult, and we probably feel much more anger about that insult than we do good about that compliment. You know, that's the idea that the bad looms larger than the good.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  Now, why would that be the case? And people start speculating about that, that we, you know, needed to be attuned to the things that could cause us harm or the threat setter environment to evolutionarily keep us alive. Yeah, there's something to that, but if we weren't paying attention to all the good things like the food, the love, the warmth in our world, we'd also die. So, you know, there's, there's also that, but maybe it's about the severity that anything that could cause us harm could do us more harm more quickly than missing out on an opportunity that could provide warmth or food or growth or something like that. And so that's created this negativity dominance where our brains are like much more tuned in to, to things that are harmful, that could hurt us, or that are the insults, if you will, than the things that could do us good.

• 1:03:28Shane Parrish?

  That's almost like a version of loss aversion, I'm thinking, as you're saying that, right? Where we feel losses much more than we feel gains. And, and I'm sure this happened to you too, you're reading your book reviews and there's thousands of positive ones, and then there's that one negative one.

• 1:03:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly, right? And you just wish that that person never got a copy of your book, for sure, yeah. Um, so why, so why do people see it as half-full and half-empty? We probably all have a tendency to ruminate over the negative, that's what I'm saying. But then some people can put that into check, they've noticed that about themselves and they're actively working to maybe circumvent what might be a natural tendency for people to engage with the negative more strongly than the good.

• 1:04:08Speaker 00

  It can also come from past experiences too, because part of our, part of our thinking is based on our memories. Like I was saying at the beginning of our conversation, memory informs perception, not only of what our eyes are doing, but our beliefs about the world. Our memories inform that. So if we've had a lot of unfortunate negative experiences, we come to expect them moving forward. People have had a lot of positive experiences, you come to expect that moving forward. And there's nothing wrong with that, that, you know, again, our brain is, is a really sophisticated, sophisticated cognitive processing system. It's based on the idea of like, I've learned something, I'm gonna apply what I've learned. If I've learned that this world is generally safe and happy and conducive to good things for me,

• 1:04:53Speaker 00

  then yes, you can extrapolate safely from that data that you have available. But somebody who's grown up in an entirely different context, whose brain has learned a different, you know, set of parameters or contingencies about how things work, would have a different set of expectations and memories that would lead them to have a different belief system. So those are a couple, you know, sort of high level explanations about why are some people a half full, half-empty mentality?

• 1:05:21Shane Parrish?

  What have you discovered about how we can shape our environment that impacts our behavior? In terms of visual perception, and the thing that comes to mind as I'm saying this is, I think I read this a long time ago, like if you use a small plate when you're putting your food on, you put less food on. And so we have this sort of, because your plate looks fuller, which is a visual sort of almost hack in how we're seeing the information, but it nudges us towards a more desired behavior.

• 1:05:50Speaker 00

  So, you know, that, that hearkens back to a classic visual illusion, which is about context. If you have a circle that's surrounded by really tiny circles, or that same circle surrounded by very large circles, our, our experience of that center circle is gonna change. It either looks smaller, it looks bigger than, than it otherwise would in a different context. So, you know, we can, we can use that idea of, of contrast or of surrounds to try to, to change our experience of something. On a, on a more personal note, my mom is, is like living this experience right now that, that she had. A cancer scare and she's had to have part of her stomach removed in order to deal with that. So she has to eat small portions now. And probably other people have had this experience

• 1:06:35Speaker 00

  too. They've had this kind of surgery. There's several reasons why one would have it. But she has she has to eat, you know, less than what my seven month old daughter eats at each meal. You know, she is supposed to have five or six ounces of food. My seven month old daughter has eight ounces of food. So how can you, part of it is tricking yourself, especially at the beginning, tricking yourself into knowing like this is enough. This will be enough for me right now in in my life. And so she uses small plates. She uses a little appetizer plates or like a a teacup saucer for her full meal. So that and then of course eats very slowly and mindfully and makes sure that she's choosing the right kinds of food. But she's she's using that perceptual

• 1:07:15Speaker 00

  trick to trick her brain into making what's a really radical life change, like believing that this is going to be enough for me. She feels like she's having a full meal by having induced that illusion that you're talking about.

• 1:07:28Shane Parrish?

  Are there other sort of environmental illusions that come to mind where we can?

• 1:07:33Speaker 00

  I mean, we can extrapolate from that too. And think about maybe more general concept of visual sparks that going back to that, you know, what started my interest in this, the perception behavior link, what you see predicts what you do. We can, we can be intentional and mindful about that, about crafting a visual environment that's going to spark the kinds of actions that we want to encourage in ourselves. So you're trying to eat less unhealthy foods. Don't bring them into the house. First of all, don't buy them at the grocery store. But if you do, if they're in your house, because other people are enjoying them and eating them, or or that's the challenge for you, don't make them as accessible, visually accessible. Because

• 1:08:14Speaker 00

  there are, of course, moments when we're mindlessly eating. We, we feel a three o'clock or four o'clock nudge, you know, like we need a snack right now. We go to our pantry and we're going to feel pulled by the things that we see. In fact, you know, Google did a really compelling demonstration of this experiment on their own Googlers, their own employees at Google, with all of the the different locations that they have for snacks at their company. And around every corner, there's a little cafe or pantry or a snack station. And what they were noticing is that the accessibility of all these snacks was doing a disservice to their employees. They were putting on weight. Now, right, Google is known for their free food. A lot of tech companies are as one of the perks.

• 1:08:58Speaker 00

  So is it really feasible to say, oh, no, for the sake of your health, we're taking away all of the snack stations? Probably not, too drastic, too dramatic. But what they did change was the visual layout of those snack stations. And they, they put some of the less healthy options, like the M and N's in opaque containers that you couldn't see through, not clear glass, but frosted glass. They put the unhealthy drinks at the bottom of the, of the cooler rather than at eye level at the top. And then they had the people who restocked the pantries each week report on what was being consumed. And so pre-test, post-test, what they found was that just by changing what it is that people could see easily, they changed consumption patterns.

• 1:09:43Speaker 00

  People, people ate less of the unhealthier stuff, even though it was still there, simply because it was sort of out of sight. It was harder to see. And this was also replicated at Massachusetts General Hospital in their cafeteria that was there. They, they played around with where do products get placed? You know, at eye level, on lower shelves, near the checkout point, at the, at the cash register. And they also used some sort of visual coding strategies. They put green price tags on healthier options, red price tags on things that people should consume that were like the least nutritious. And, and yellow labels on things that people should approach with caution.

• 1:10:27Speaker 00

  And so that coupling of being mindful about healthier things at eye level and this color-coded scheme for reminding people of what's good and what's not so good to eat, drastically changed employees' consumptions at the cafeteria, too. That healthy eating went up and unhealthy eating went down. So you know, you can take those examples and think about, well, what does that mean for my own life? How do I stock my fridge? What do I put in my pantry? But beyond just eating, we can think about too, what do we, what do we do in our bedroom? Where, where do we put things in our bedroom? Do you have your slippers at the edge of your bed? Or do you have your running shoes at the edge of your bed? You know, do you have your workout clothes? You know, right on the top of your dresser?

• 1:11:09Speaker 00

  Or have you, you know, left your pajamas from the night before, your robe the night before? Are you visually cueing yourself to get up and exercise? Or are you visually cueing yourself to relax in the morning? We can also think about like outside of the fitness context of how can we? How can we hold ourselves accountable? We probably have had this done to us as children. We might be doing it to our own children now, but using stars, you know, to visually reward. Doing chores, I had that, you know, chore chart for the week. I could put a star on every time that I weeded the garden, cleaned the bathroom or whatever, and kept it on the fridge to try to encourage me to meet whatever the goal was. Probably getting quarters to go play skee ball at the arcade. That was what was motivating for me.

• 1:11:53Speaker 00

  But we can do that to ourselves as adults also. And that's helpful in a couple of ways. Getting that visual feedback about our progress can be, can be useful. It can help us be better accountants of our own progress. Because again, some of us may be more oriented to thinking about our failures or about the obstacles and not give ourselves enough credit for our successes. And as a result, be pretty bad personal accountants, thinking we haven't made as much progress as we actually have if we were keeping data on ourselves through a star chart or something like that chore chart that maybe you've seen with children. So when we do that, then we can be more accurate about assessing our own progress on whatever goal it is that we're interested in. Again, because there's a lot of power in what we see.

• 1:12:37Speaker 00

  If we start thinking about ways to. To more intentionally engage our eyes with our surroundings, we can nudge ourselves in pretty incredible ways.

• 1:12:47Shane Parrish?

  One of the things that a lot of people do is set New Year's resolutions. Why do we break them? What can we do to keep them? I mean, we all have the best intentions, but then something happens and it doesn't work out the way that we thought it would.

• 1:13:01Speaker 00

  Well, there's no simple answer. And a lot of what we talked about already, I think, is is part of the problem. That we're using the wrong strategies to motivate ourselves. We try talking to ourselves in encouraging ways. We try to constantly remind ourselves of the importance of the goal. And those are really effortful. They were, they are a goal in of themselves and to find the ways to best motivate yourself, to be the person who's always going to be the cheerleader for yourself every day. That takes a lot of work in and of itself, which is why I find value in trying to think about how can we set up habits? Taking advantage of this perception, behavior, automatic link that we have, so that we don't have to do that work of reminding ourselves. If we can form a new habit to leave our our running shoes at this part of our closet.

• 1:13:42Speaker 00

  That's nearer to the door that we open all the time, rather than this part of the closet that we hardly ever look into, and that's really quite dark. You know, we don't need to remind ourselves that we need to go out for more steps. We need to take another walk. Our environment can do that for us. So we can make it easier. That's part of the reason why people break New Year's resolutions. And in fact, the vast majority of people break New Year's resolutions by Valentine's Day. We give up pretty quickly into the year because of these things that we've talked about is that we've made it really difficult for us to sustain that motivation. We set goals at a level that's impossible. New Year's resolutions often start with, I'm gonna learn, I'm gonna lose forty pounds, you know, before swimsuit season.

• 1:14:23Speaker 00

  Now, is that really reasonable? When have you ever lost forty pounds before? Maybe you've set a goal that it's impossible. And so you work on it for the first six weeks, which is a really long time to stay committed to something. And you've seen a drop of in weight of like three pounds. Right? And you're so disappointed. I spent all this time, um, you know, I put in six weeks worth of effort and I haven't seen these kinds of, you know, the changes that I would like. So then you throw in the towel because it just seems like it's, it's, it's too challenging. Now, the problem may have been that we set a goal that was really too hard. You still lost three pounds. That's great. Maybe we don't understand enough about how our body works and it's requiring more than just, you know, walking more or eating differently, but we're going to have to change the way that our, our, our body and all of our, our, our circuitry is working together.

• 1:15:07Speaker 00

  We might need to give ourselves some goals rather than saying by June, I'm going to lose forty pounds. You say by the first six weeks, I want to go down, not up. And that I will consider to be a success. Right? And then you set the next goal after you've seen, yeah, you've gone down by three, three pounds. So we need to be thinking about those sub-goals intentionally as well and creatively about what would constitute success at this sort of micro moment within the length of the goal that we're working on. And also, you know, that three-step planning that we've already talked about, set that big goal. Sure. If you decide that really forty pounds in, in six months is reasonable for you. Uh, it's not the realm of impossible, but it's a moderately challenging and still feasible, uh, way to set a goal.

• 1:15:53Speaker 00

  Great. Think concretely about what you can do each week that's going to help make progress. How will you hold yourself accountable? What's a motivating strategy for accountability for you? Oftentimes it's social support for people. That's a, that's a great motivator. So how can you keep that social support network? Uh, how can you be a better accountant for yourself as well, knowing that we have faulty memories? And what about obstacles? What obstacles we might you expect? Uh, and what can you do about it? You know, January for some people is, is lighter, uh, as things start to ramp up again, but by February, full bore. Kids, kids,

• 1:16:32Speaker 00

  you know, soccer schedules are in, are in full effect. Your work schedule is now like all the goals are, are hardcore. You've got your own personal family responsibilities. And so, once time becomes thinner, what are you gonna do if you can't, you know, you know, you can't, you know, hit the gym every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon? What's the backup plan? If you miss a moment, if you, if you miss one of your, of your pre-slotted, pre-committed times in your calendar that you had set a week in advance? What's the backup for that? Do you have a backup time scheduled in your calendar that you've already worked the rest of your schedule around? So those are, those are some things that we can do to help us move past that Valentine's

• 1:17:15Speaker 00

  Day point of destruction that a lot of people experience.

• 1:17:20Shane Parrish?

  It's like, can you handle the first obstacle that comes your way?

• 1:17:22Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:17:23Shane Parrish?

  And get past it? Because if you can do that once, then you can do it again and again, and it becomes sort of like reinforcing. Is there a way to move away from goals that are, lose 20 pounds and actually focus the goal on the process? Like, we know how to lose weight, right? We, we understand this intuitively, and then we have this goal, and then we feel bad about ourselves until we accomplish this goal in one way or another. Is there a way to get out of that feeling and actually create more progress and better, more sustainable progress by just being like, you know what, my goal is to eat healthy today? My goal is to go to the gym today.

• 1:18:04Speaker 00

  Yes, for sure. That, that would be a different way to set, set a goal, rather than thinking about in six months' time, what do I want to accomplish? It's about, you know, setting it today. What do I want to accomplish today? Another thing that I could think that's relevant to that question is about the mindset that we bring to when we experience obstacles or challenges, or setbacks, or, you know, not hitting our mark, whatever timeframe we've used as that mark, that check-in point, is that oftentimes we think about it as failure. We use that word failure a lot. I'm a failure. I failed at this. And, and that's sometimes why people also stop working on the goal, is that they feel like they failed, and they avoid that. They don't want to feel like a failure. They don't want that label put on them. That can be really challenging.

• 1:18:49Speaker 00

  And I think the problem is because we think about it as... Failure, we think of it as diagnostic about something about us or our ability to meet this goal and that it seems really like a black and white label that gets permanently tattooed onto ourselves. That's how we tend to think about failure. In contrast, you can think about it as a learning opportunity. Anytime you fail at something, it means that something didn't work out, right? And so maybe rather than thinking about that as a failure, those are the moments where we need to start like introspecting, that this is a debriefing moment. Okay, what did work? What didn't work? What did I learn about this? Maybe it's about the level of difficulty with the goal itself. Maybe it's

• 1:19:33Speaker 00

  about how I used my calendar. Maybe it's about the social support I did or I didn't have. Maybe it's about how I checked in with my own progress over the course of time. That rather than thinking about these moments of failure where you didn't hit the goal in whatever specified time at whatever level you set it at, we don't decide to put those labels on ourselves. Instead, we're like, you know what? I am happy about this because this is where the world is telling me it's time to check in, that I need to change something. I gotta switch it up. I gotta try something else out and let's see. Let's see what else I can do because this, this, something about this, one of these pieces of a puzzle didn't come together quite right. So let's, let's, for the next three weeks, let's try something

• 1:20:14Speaker 00

  else, right? Here's an opportunity for creative self-exploration and, and don't feel like, don't use that language of failure for ourselves because what are you supposed to do with that? Just feel like crap? But that's not helpful, right? It's not helpful to just feel that way. And instead, I think people would be a little bit more excited if we tried to rid our, rid ourselves of using that word and instead consider it a diagnostic moment for evaluation.

• 1:20:41Shane Parrish?

  That's a great point. I want to switch gears and ask you a couple of questions before we, or personal questions before we wrap up, if that's okay. Well, what do you need to remind yourself when you're stressed?

• 1:20:51Speaker 00

  Oh, be patient. You know, I think my biggest source of stress just comes from trying to juggle too many things at one time that, you know, I have a six, a six year old and a seventh month, a seven month old. And I'm a director of a, a international research lab with, you know, forty, fifty people that I'm responsible for and I, and I'm a wife and I'm a daughter and I'm a sister. Like, you know, we all have all of these identities that are really important to us. And they're often in conflict with each other. And so that's the source of my stress is like, you know, I don't doubt my ability to be a really good mom and I don't doubt my ability to be a really good scientist or a communicator or a daughter, whatever. I know that I can do a really good job at all of these things.

• 1:21:36Speaker 00

  That's not the source of my stress, but, but knowing that it's hard to figure out how to do them all at one time. Well, do a couple of them at one time and I just have to be patient with myself. Multitasking doesn't work for me. I have to remind myself of that, that I'm not a good scientist and mom to a seven month old at the same time. Those are incompatible. She doesn't understand what I'm saying, so I can't, I can't explain, you know, multiple regressions and statistics to her to, to work on the thing I need to work on and also be a good mom. Right? So these things don't work together sometimes. And so it's about being patient and compartmentalizing and, and, and then just trying to carve out enough time to, in the course of a day or in the course of a week, you know, put on each of these hats and, and make progress and being patient with that.

• 1:22:20Shane Parrish?

  What words do you use when you talk to yourself about those competing priorities? And I don't want to plant any in your head. That's why I'm not saying any, but how do you think about them?

• 1:22:31Speaker 00

  I just try to remind myself of the, of, of the positivity of it, that I like playing Legos. You like playing Legos. Right now, you think that you need to be analyzing this data. Right now, you think that you need to be jumping back onto this work call that you know is going on, but you've committed yourself to playing Legos right now, to stay in the moment, right? Enjoy the Legos because in a year from now, your six year old might not like Legos anymore. And he might not playing, he might not like, well, he probably will like Legos, but he may not like playing with you, right? Anymore. So. Stay present, stay in this moment and enjoy this moment. Because you know, you can't do two things at once, so enjoy the one that you are doing.

• 1:23:12Shane Parrish?

  What did you used to spend time on that you now see as unhelpful or a waste of time?

• 1:23:18Speaker 00

  Trying to get everybody to like me. I think, you know, like, that's probably, it feels, ooh, I can't believe I just said that to you and to the audience who's listening, but. Uh, you know, people, but like, that's, I think, but I think we can all relate to that. So I think, you know, being honest about that is something that, that probably a lot of people can resonate with. That it, you know, people just have different personalities and different styles and different value systems. And, and one doesn't, having one doesn't mean the other is right or wrong. But they may be not be compatible. And so that may mean that, you know, we don't get along. And that's okay. So the effort doesn't need to be spent trying to have us be friends, but instead to be productive. If it's a relationship that you, that you have to maintain, even if you wouldn't choose to maintain it.

• 1:24:04Shane Parrish?

  I can relate to that. A final question that we, we ask almost everybody, what does success mean to you?

• 1:24:11Speaker 00

  Uh, being happy. And, and it sounds so cliche, corny, but, but just being happy, appreciating what I have, not striving for something that, that isn't possible for, for my life. Just, you know, just yesterday, uh, my husband, we were talking about skiing for some reason, and I would love to ski. Uh, I think he was mentioning a friend that is a very humble friend, and he didn't realize that every couple of months he gets to, this friend gets to jet off with his sister to go ski the Italian Alps, followed by the French Alps before he comes back to work. Oh, I want that life. I want that life and that will never be my life. And he's like, why won't that ever be your life? Because I'm too afraid of tearing my ACL like I did before, right?

• 1:24:50Speaker 00

  So, but like, so I was kind of annoyed at myself for feeling like, oh, I want that life that I know I, I, I'm not going to pursue. Right? So just appreciating what I have and, and the wonderful life that we, that, that we've created for ourselves and all the opportunities that I get. And, um, and probably avoiding the social comparison because that's the source of the unhappiness a lot of times is, is looking at somebody else's life and, and, and wanting it, even if you, even if you don't really want it or you can't have it. And, and that leads to a failure to appreciate all the good that is available in, in our own situations.

• 1:25:38Shane Parrish?

  Somebody told me this story the other day about how their grandmother used to tell them, "Take all of your life and your problems and chuck it into a pile. And if everybody did that, you would instantly take back your life and your problems."

• 1:25:52Speaker 00

  That's very sweet.

• 1:25:53Shane Parrish?

  Thank you so much for taking the time, Emily.

• 1:25:56Speaker 00

  Thank you very much. I've enjoyed this conversation with you.

• 1:26:09Shane Parrish?

  Thanks for listening and learning with us.

• 1:26:13Shane Parrish?

  For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcripts, and more, go to fs.blog/podcast,

• 1:26:23Shane Parrish?

  or just Google The Knowledge Project.

• 1:26:27Shane Parrish?

  Until next time.