Nir Eyal: Fix the Mindset Sabotaging Your Success in Business and Life | Human Behavior | E391

Mindset is everything, but what if your beliefs are holding you back? Nir Eyal faced this painful reality when readers praised his work, yet still struggled to change their habits or act on a single piece of advice. It led him to a deeper truth: in a world overflowing with information, knowledge isn’t the problem; hidden limiting beliefs are. That realization led him to write Beyond Belief. In this episode, Nir returns with personal development tools to help you uncover and destroy the beliefs silently sabotaging your success in business, relationships, and life. In this episode, Hala and Nir will discuss: (00:00) Introduction (01:56) Why Nir Wrote Beyond Belief (05:56) The Rat Study: How Beliefs Drive Persistence (10:31) How Beliefs Become Your Biology (18:47) What Is the Motivation Triangle? (24:30) How Beliefs Hijack Your Reality (36:03) Building Entrepreneurial Alertness and Luck (44:29) Reframing Beliefs to Improve Relationships (55:05) The Power of Anticipation in Business (1:01:02) The Danger of Limiting Identity Beliefs (1:08:13) Live Coaching to Overcome Limiting Beliefs Nir Eyal is a bestselling author, behavioral design consultant, and former Stanford lecturer known for teaching the intersection of psychology, technology, and business. His groundbreaking books, Hooked and Indistractable, have sold over one million copies in more than 30 languages, helping entrepreneurs and leaders worldwide. His newest book, Beyond Belief, reveals how to identify and replace the hidden beliefs that define our limits. Sponsored By: Indeed - Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com/profiting Shopify - Start your $1/month trial at Shopify.com/profiting. Spectrum Business - Keep your business connected seamlessly with fast, reliable Internet, Phone, TV, and Mobile services. Visit https://spectrum.com/Business to learn more. Northwest Registered Agent - Build your brand and get your complete business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes at northwestregisteredagent.com/paidyap Framer - Publish beautiful and production-ready websites. Go to Framer.com/profiting and get 30% off their Framer Pro annual plan. Quo - Run your business communications the smart way. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to quo.com/profiting Experian - Manage and cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reduce your bills. Get started now with the Experian App and let your Big Financial Friend do the work for you. See experian.com for details. Bitdefender - Start protecting your business today with Bitdefender Ultimate Small Business Security. Get 30% off your plan at bitdefender.com/profiting Intuit - Start paying bills the smart way, not the hard way. Learn more at QuickBooks.com/billpay Huel - Grab nutritionally complete meals you can drink. Get 15% off with code PROFITING at huel.com/PROFITING Resources Mentioned: Nir's Website: nirandfar.com Nir's Book, Beyond Belief: bit.ly/NE-BBelief Nir's Book, Indistractable: bit.ly/NE-Indistractable Nir's Book, Hooked: bit.ly/NE-Hooked Nir’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/nireyal Nir’s 30-Day Belief Transformation Journal: nirandfar.com/beyond-belief YAP E34 with Nir Eyal: bit.ly/NE-E34 Active Deals - youngandprofiting.com/deals Key YAP Links Reviews - ratethispodcast.com/yap YouTube - youtube.com/c/YoungandProfiting Newsletter - youngandprofiting.co/newsletter LinkedIn - linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Instagram - instagram.com/yapwithhala/ Social + Podcast Services: yapmedia.com Transcripts - youngandprofiting.com/episodes-new Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship Podcast, Business, Business Podcast, Self Improvement, Self-Improvement, Personal Development, Starting a Business, Strategy, Investing, Sales, Selling, Psychology, Productivity, Entrepreneurs, AI, Artificial Intelligence, Technology, Marketing, Negotiation, Money, Finance, Side Hustle, Startup, Mental Health, Career, Leadership, Mindset, Health, Growth Mindset, Positivity, Human Nature, Human Psychology, Critical Thinking, Robert Greene, Chris Voss, Robert Cialdini

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

• 0:00Hala Taha?

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• 0:45Hala Taha?

  See their website for important safety information. AG1 Next Gen supports your nutritional foundation with vitamins, minerals, pre- and probiotics, and superfoods. Go to drinkag1.com/profitting and get a free immune support bundle with your first subscription order. As always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or at youngandprofiting.com/deals.

• 1:08Speaker 01

  Our important decisions in life. Should I start this business? Should I work with this partner? Should I marry this person? Should I move to this city? Most of our decisions are not based on facts because we can't see into the future. They're not laws of physics. It's a belief. I believe it will succeed. That's why we have to master these beliefs or they become our masters. We have to pick them consciously or they decide our life for us.

• 1:32Hala Taha?

  Back on Young and Profiting is Nir Eyal, a behavioral design expert and bestselling author of Hooked and Indistractable. In his new book, Beyond Belief, Nir reveals the missing link between knowing what to do and actually doing it: belief.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  We don't see people as they are. We see our beliefs about people. That's so like him, or she always does that. And we see this all the time. You know, people who, the longer they stay married, the worse they treat each other. They treat strangers super well because they don't see that person anymore. They see this patina that they've built over the years because of their beliefs.

• 2:03Hala Taha?

  If we know that our brain is basically playing tricks on us and we're not experiencing real reality, what are we supposed to do about it?

• 2:10Speaker 01

  We need to have... We know that successful entrepreneurs, they're not necessarily lucky. They make their own luck.

• 2:16Hala Taha?

  What are some ways that we can try to create more luck in our lives?

• 2:20Speaker 01

  Okay, so the first thing you can do...

• 2:24Hala Taha?

  Yeah, fam. What if the real reason you're not reaching your potential isn't your habits, discipline, or focus, but the beliefs quietly running your life? When Nir first joined us on episode 34, we talked about mastering distraction and building better habits. But this time around, we're going way deeper. The hidden stories you tell yourself shape what you notice, how you handle stress, how long you endure, and even how you perform and connect with others. Because belief doesn't just influence behavior, it defines what you think is possible. And if you can upgrade your beliefs, you can upgrade your entire life. Nir, welcome back to Young and Profiting.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Thanks. Great to be back. I'm honored that you asked me to come back. That's a big compliment.

• 3:04Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and I'm so excited to hear about your new book. You know, I got a chance to read it. I love your work. You came on to talk about hooked and indistractable, and you're the type of person that comes on and I'm like, okay, we can just focus on the book because it's going to be interesting enough, because there's just so much to unpack. Like, you always write like, book books, you know what I mean? So I'm just really excited to kind of unpack your newest work, which is all about belief. So my first question to you is really, why was belief a topic that you felt like you needed to write a book about? And I know that a lot of your books come from you solving your own problems. So what problem were you trying to solve with this new book about beliefs?

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. You know, they say that research is me-search. And so I don't write what I know. I write about what I need to know, what I want to know. And so when I was struggling with distraction, I wrote Indistractable, and it worked. It changed my life. The problem was that I would get these phone calls from readers. Every week I do these office hours where anybody who's read one of my books can call me up and ask me questions about about one of my books. And every so often, a call would sound like this. Somebody would call me and say, hey, Nir, I read your book. I really liked it, but it didn't work. And I'd be kind of surprised. You know, I spent five years writing Indistractable, and I really went to great lengths to find the latest research, 30 pages of citations to peer-reviewed studies. And so I'd say, well, tell me more.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  Why didn't it work? You know, let's start with step one. How did step one go for you? And they'd say something to the effect of, you know, I read step one. I read step one. I just didn't, I just didn't do it. I say, okay, no problem. Let's skip step one. Let's talk about step two. How's step two go for you? Oh, you know what? I read that one too, but also, you know, I just, I didn't, I didn't do it. And at first, I got kind of offended, like, what, why not? Here's the answer on a silver platter to this problem that everybody says is so terrible. Distraction, you know, social media, we're all so distracted. Here you go, here's the answer. And people didn't put it to use. And then I realized, you know what? I do that too. You know, I have tons of books on my bookshelf that I haven't put into practice. I've heard great advice from gurus and experts that it was in one ear and out the other. Why?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Especially today in the age of AI, we all have the answers. And we know what to do. If you don't know the answer, just ask an LLM or ask Google, you'll find all the answers you need. There's something missing. And what's missing is that we don't understand motivation. That motivation we think is a straight line, right? If I want the benefit, I do the behavior. Simple, classic economics. But there's obviously something missing. And the thing that's missing is belief, that, that motivation is not a straight line. It's a triangle. So you can know what to do, the behavior. You can even know the benefit, right? Why you want to do it? But if you don't believe in either the outcome or that you will do the behavior, it's not going to happen.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  So for example, if you don't believe that your boss has your best interests at heart, right? Maybe you're not going to, you don't trust them to give you that promotion or that raise. Then you're not going to work that hard. Or much more often, if you don't believe in your own capabilities to do the behavior, you're going to self sabotage with what we call limiting beliefs. So if you don't understand how to choose your beliefs wisely, no amount of information is going to help you. So I weren't to write the book that, that, that appreciates that and teaches people not just positive thinking, because we know that there's a huge negative side to positive thinking the wrong way, but rather gives people the tools to actually understand for the first time, what are my hidden limiting beliefs? Because we all carry around these hidden limiting beliefs. We can't see them, that's why they're hidden.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  And then how do we turn those limiting beliefs into liberating beliefs? So we finally do what we say we're going to do.

• 6:48Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I love this and I feel like it's such an important conversation for entrepreneurs, especially we've got so much to learn about how to make sure that we're believing in ourselves, that we're believing in the right beliefs or like following the right beliefs. And I just feel like it's so impactful. One of the things that was really eye opening to me to kind of warm up our listeners about this concept of belief and why it's so important is a study about rats that you put right in the beginning of your book. The book, by the way, is called Beyond Belief. And it's this 1950s rat study that was just so interesting. Tell us about that.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Sure thing, yeah. So this study really blew my mind and here's what it showed. So it's a little bit depressing, but that's okay because the rats are already dead. So it already happened, so we can learn from the study. So here's what happened in this study Kurt Richter, who is this scientist, he took these rats and at the time he wanted to figure out how long a wild rat could swim for in water. So he put a rat in a cylinder filled halfway with water and he sat there and he timed how long the rat would keep swimming. It turns out a wild rat swims for about 15 minutes before it gives up. Okay, 15 minutes. Then he wanted to have a little intervention. He wanted to do something to see if he could increase the amount of time that the wild rat kept swimming. And so what did he do? He took a new group of rats, put them in a, these same exact cylinders filled halfway

• 8:10Speaker 01

  with water. And he knew that after about 15 minutes, they were going to give up. So right before they were about to give up, he reaches in, he pulls out the rat, dries it off, lets it catch its breath and plunk back into the water it goes. And now he sat there and timed how much longer the rat could swim for. He did this a few times. He conditioned the rat and he wanted to see how much longer they could swim. Now you've read the book already, so you already know the results and people guess there's going to be some kind of surprising outcome. There certainly is. When I asked people, how much longer did the rat persist? What was the effect of this conditioning? Right? And by the way, what changed here? Nothing changed in the experiment. Nothing changed in the rat's body. Something with the conditioning had changed. What changed?

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Now that they knew that salvation was possible, that they might be saved. How would their performance be affected? Well, some people guess twice as long. Some people guess three times as long. If somebody's really optimistic, they might say four times longer. The rat went from 15 minutes to an hour of swimming. Wouldn't that be amazing? That would be unprecedented if you could persist in your business four times longer. If you could spend four times longer making those sales calls or doing that difficult task. Wouldn't that be amazing if you could turn on a switch and persist four times longer? But the rats didn't persist four times longer, not even close. They didn't swim for 30 minutes twice as long or four times as long at 60 minutes. They swam for 60 hours, not 60 minutes.

• 9:38Hala Taha?

  Whoa.

• 9:39Speaker 01

  60 hours.

• 9:41Hala Taha?

  I thought 60 minutes in my head when I was remembering the story. 60 hours?

• 9:45Speaker 01

  60 hours. They went from 15 minutes to 60 straight hours of swimming. They became 240 times more persistent. So why do I tell this story? We're not rats. I tell this story because it illustrates the power of belief. Now, we can't ask the rats, did they change their minds about something? But that's the only variable left. Same bodies, same experiments, same conditions. We think that what happened was that now that the rats knew that salvation was possible, that their efforts would matter, that something might happen if they kept swimming, they might get saved. And so that greatly increased their perseverance. And it seems like magic, but really it was there all along.

• 10:28Speaker 01

  That that persistence was always there. And that's exactly the same case for us. For many of us, especially entrepreneurs, you know, I've started three companies. The most important factor, you back me up here, right? You've talked to thousands of entrepreneurs. What's the most important factor for an entrepreneur's success? Is it intelligence? No. Is it background? No. Is it having the right resources? No. Is it having the right information for what to do? No. It's persistence.

• 10:54Hala Taha?

  Yep.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  It's persistence, right? And let me ask you this. When it comes to successful people, who fails more?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  People who succeed or people who don't succeed? It's actually the people who succeed, right? That successful people are losers, meaning they lose more often. Why? Because they try more, they persist more, they keep going. They don't tell you about their losses. You only hear about their successes. But it turns out that successful people are the ones who are more persistent. So it turns out that if you could unlock that motivation to do those hard things and to do it joyfully, to not mind to do them, wow, that unlocks so much possibility in your relationships, in your business, in all aspects of life. And how do we do that? We use our beliefs.

• 11:39Hala Taha?

  So would you say that beliefs are biological and that there's something like happening in our brain when we're believing something that is true? Like, what is actually changing biologically? How did the rats swim so much longer than previously?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  This is what's so fascinating is that your beliefs can actually become your biology. Now, not in some kind of metaphysical, magical way. There's no magic here whatsoever. It's that when we change our beliefs, we do things differently. I'll give you a great example of how your beliefs can become your biology. We now know that your beliefs at age 30 about aging, if you have positive beliefs about aging at age 30, you will statistically, according to this study, live seven and a half years longer. Okay? To put that in perspective, seven and a half years longer, that's more than the effect of smoking. That's more than the effect of a healthy diet. That's more than the effect of exercise. Is your beliefs about aging?

• 12:39Speaker 01

  What does a positive view of aging sound like? A positive view might be growth and change is possible at any age. A negative view of aging is aging involves inevitable decline. Okay, those are two beliefs. One is positive, one is negative. Aging involves inevitable decline versus growth and adaptation is possible at any age. Now, let me ask you, which one of those is true?

• 13:05Hala Taha?

  That, you know, anything is possible at any age.

• 13:08Speaker 01

  Well, both are actually true. And aging does involve inevitable decline. The point is, is that beliefs aren't necessarily truths. That that's not the deciding factor. A belief is a tool, not a truth, a tool. A fact is an objective truth. A fact is something that is true whether you believe it or not. The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. Sorry, flat-earthers. The globe doesn't care what you think. The world is round, whether you like it or not. On the other end of the spectrum is faith. Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. Okay, so that's faith and fact. In between fact and faith is a belief. A belief is a strongly held conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence.

• 13:54Speaker 01

  A strongly held conviction, open to revision based on new evidence. And the fact of the matter is that our important decisions in life, should I start this business? Should I work with this partner? Should I marry this person? Should I move to this city? Most of our decisions are not based on facts because we can't see into the future. They're not laws of physics, whether I should start this business. It's a belief. I believe it will succeed. Right? And so that's why we have to master these beliefs or they become our masters. We have to pick them consciously or they decide our life for us. And once we gain that power, once we actually learn, not just think positively, but actually which beliefs serve me versus which ones hurt me, they not only do they become our biology,

• 14:37Speaker 01

  as was the case with a study that increased lifespan, literally increased lifespan. How did they do that? Because when I believe that I can grow and adapt at any age, well, how do I behave? I do things differently. I'm more likely to go take a walk in the park, even if I'm a little sore. I go see my friends, I garden. I do things that actually help me live longer. So to answer your question, beliefs aren't magic. Beliefs change behavior and that behavior becomes our biology. And that is the case when it comes to our physical bodies, for our businesses, for our relationships, in all assets, in all facets of our life.

• 15:12Hala Taha?

  So to your point, beliefs can help us and hurt us. So how can we tell if a belief is useful to us or not?

• 15:20Speaker 01

  So we want to look at those areas of our life where we feel the muck. Right? That New Year's resolution that you've had for years and years that keeps coming back. That relationship that annoys you and somehow, you know, you can't repair for whatever reason. It just keeps being an annoyance. The little things in life that frustrate you. Anywhere that you're not being your full self, you're not living to your full potential. And what's fascinating is that everybody has these limiting beliefs. Everyone has them because they're hidden. Because at the time, these limiting beliefs, they feel like facts. And we don't recognize them for what they are. They just feel like they're absolutely true. That person is just that kind of person. That business opportunity can't possibly work. I'm the kind of person who can't.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Oh, here's the most common one I hear. I don't have time. I'm too busy. Hear it all the time. What is that? Just a limiting belief. And it's not always serving us. So what we want to do is to look for the areas where we're stuck. Not necessarily find more information, but actually assess for ourselves. Take out those limiting beliefs. Look at them and figure out, are they serving us or are they hurting us? Now, the hard part is that we can't see these for ourself because they're hidden, right? Because we think they're facts. It's almost like your face. That we all have faces, but you can't see your own face. The only way you can see your own face is to take a look at the mirror. And that's not always comfortable because sometimes you see things you don't like. Maybe you have a pimple or whatever.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  You have a hair where it shouldn't be. Sometimes you see things you don't like. And so we resist looking at those limiting beliefs. Why? Because we have what's called a psychological immune system. We resist anything that might change our beliefs because our default state is passivity. We like sticking with our old beliefs. Why? Because then I don't have to do anything. That business can't possibly work. Impossible. These leads are crappy. There's no way anybody could succeed. Well, if I believe that, it instantly becomes true. I don't have to do anything about it. And so it's only if we want to reach our full potential, we have to unpack those limiting beliefs, take a good, hard look at them and figure out how we can change them to serve us.

• 17:28Hala Taha?

  And something that you do really well is that you always give us frameworks to line around and you've got this, I think it's called the motivation triangle that has three sides. Talk to us about all three sides. I know you mentioned it earlier, but like go a little bit deeper and then I want to get into the three powers of belief.

• 17:47Speaker 01

  Sure. Yeah. So we talked about how you need to know for motivation to persist, you have to know the behavior, right? What it is you're going to do, the benefit, why you're going to do it, and then the belief underlying it all. So it's a triangle where the base of that motivation triangle is of course belief. And so you have to believe in the benefit coming and you have to believe in your ability to do the behavior. Now, how do you do that? Like, how do you pick good beliefs? You know, we've all heard, just believe, that's the key, just believe in it. Well, where's that magic button that I can just alter my beliefs? Right? It's not that simple. And in fact, we know that positive thinking, that just, you know, manifesting and visualizing, if you do it wrong, it can actually be harmful. We can talk about how to do this right versus how

• 18:29Speaker 01

  to do it in a way that actually saps your motivation. But the right way to do it is to leverage what I call the three powers of belief. The three powers of belief are the fact that our beliefs shape what we see. This is called attention. They shape what we feel, literally shape, they decide our internal states, what we feel inside our bodies. So that's the power of anticipation. And then finally, and most importantly, our beliefs define what we do. We call this agency. So those are the three powers of belief, the power to change what we see, what we feel, and what we do.

• 19:03Hala Taha?

  So I run a team of about 60 people all over the world. I didn't get to like introduce myself from an entrepreneurial perspective when we first hopped on the call. And as I was reading about this motivational triangle, I kept thinking, man, like, how do I instill more belief in my team so they they get their projects done? How do I, you know, use belief in our performance reviews and try to understand if the team actually believes that it's possible to do what we're doing? Otherwise, we're not going to achieve whatever we want to achieve. So what's your advice for people who are trying to motivate themselves, but also trying to motivate others in terms of how to use this new concept of belief or ensuring that people also believe in what they're doing?

• 19:44Speaker 01

  We underestimate this greatly as entrepreneurs because we think we have to be very logical and fact-based. And that is important, of course. We have to speak from a place of honesty. But when we don't really know, okay, we can't predict the future. We don't know what's going to happen. This is where what we call company culture really matters. What is company culture? Company culture is just a codified set of beliefs. Okay, this is what we do here. This is what gets you promoted. This is what gets you fired. This is what we value. This is what we like to see around here. This is how we are going to succeed. This is how we're going to fail. So we don't want to do this, we want to do that. Is any of this a fact? No, it's just a belief. It's our best guess at, hey, we have to have these standards or we want to do things this way

• 20:29Speaker 01

  or this matters here and that doesn't. This is based on the company and it's not universal. That a company that has one set of values, if you transfer to an industry, it might work in one industry, but it won't work in a different industry. So it has to be a lock and key of the right company culture with the right beliefs for each and every company. Now, if you don't think of that company culture, if you don't consciously, if you aren't consciously aware of those beliefs, you're going to get a bunch of crappy default states that are not going to help you succeed. You're going to get just the collective background of whoever you hire, right? This is why founders have such a profound impact because of course people look to the founder. They look to the founder's beliefs and there's no better example of that than Steve Jobs.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  In his biography, Walter Isaacson talked about how Steve Jobs used to have a reality distortion field, meaning he would see a future that nobody else could see, right? We call this founder vision. That is nothing more than a belief, not a fact, right? Steve Jobs didn't always predict the future correctly. Many times he was wildly off.

• 21:36Speaker 01

  But he always had this vision and that vision wasn't based on fact. He didn't know the future. He chose a set of beliefs that motivated everyone at Apple. And that's what every single founder has to do with employees. So your most important job is to build a vision for where you're going, to help people see that possible reality. And this is the second power of belief, the power of anticipation. Based on what we see, it defines what we will do.

• 22:03Hala Taha?

  That makes a lot of sense. So when somebody is saying like, you know, I lost motivation. What is actually happening? Like, what belief is being impacted when someone's like, man, I just feel so unmotivated. I have no motivation right now.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Well, it depends which of the three is missing. So is it that you don't know what to do? That's almost never the case these days because if you don't know what to do, just Google it, right? Ask ChatGPT, you'll you'll figure out what to do. That's not the barrier anymore. It used to be, not anymore in the information age. Then you've got the benefit, right? Maybe I know what to do, but I don't really care about the reward. It does not meaningful for me. Maybe it's not enough of a reward, so never mind, I won't do it. Those are kind of obvious. The missing element, when people say, yeah, yeah, you know, I really do want to get healthier and I know I need to go to the gym. So there's the behavior and the benefit, but I don't really want to. It's because of some kind of underlying limiting belief, probably something like exercise sucks, right? Exercise hurts. Exercise is suffering.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Take it from a former fat person. I used to be clinically obese. I would tell myself stuff like that all the time. I don't have time. This is painful. I don't like it. I I'm I'm not athletic. What are these? Are they facts? No, they're just limiting beliefs.

• 23:14Hala Taha?

  Okay, so let's go over the three powers of belief and we can start off like going deep on the first one, which is attention. So the power to see what you believe. So you talk about perception in the book and that essentially you even go as far as saying as you believe that we're basically living in a simulation because our reality is just based on our perception. Help us understand what you mean by that.

• 23:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, then this is probably one of the most important things. If you want to change your life. Is to realize that you do not see reality as it is. It's impossible. The human brain absorbs about 11 million bits of information per second. 11 million bits. That's about the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second, twice. Okay, it's a tremendous amount of information. What does that information look like? It's the light entering your eyes. It's the sound of my voice entering your ears. It's the ambient temperature of the room. Your brain is processing all that information. You're just not conscious of it because your conscious awareness can only process about 50 bits of information. Okay, 50 bits versus 11 million bits.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  That means you are aware of only 0.0045% of the information available to you. So because the brain just can't handle all this information, it has to do something about it to help us function in a world where we have so much information entering our brains. It takes a shortcut. And that shortcut is to leverage our beliefs. So we see reality not as it is. We see it through this tiny keyhole of attention that is dictated by our beliefs. And that keyhole of attention determines what we can even see as possible, not only in present reality, but also in the future. I'll give you an example. Do you like riddles? Yeah. Okay, let me give you a riddle.

• 25:07Speaker 01

  So there's a father and a son who are driving in the middle of the night on a deserted country road. There are no lights around, completely pitch black. And all of a sudden, a deer jumps in front of the car. The car smashes into the deer. It's a terrible car accident. The father is killed instantly. The son is in critical condition and must be rushed to the hospital. When the son gets to the hospital, he's placed on the operating table. The surgeon barges into the operating room, takes one look at the child and says, "I can't operate on this boy. He's my son."

• 25:48Speaker 01

  How can that be? Do you know the answer?

• 25:50Hala Taha?

  No.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  Okay, think about it for, I'll say it one more time. Okay, think, I'll say it one more time. I'll say it a little faster this time, but the same basic story. Father and son on a dark deserted road. They're driving, father and son together in a car. All of a sudden, a deer jumps in front. They smash into this deer. The father is instantly killed. The boys rush to the operating room. On the operating room table, the surgeon barges into the door, into the operating room, takes one look at the boy and says, I can't operate on this boy. He's my son. Now, just to, don't feel bad if you don't know the answer. Eighty-three percent of people don't get this puzzle. Eighty-three percent of people don't get the answer. Do you have, do you have a clue?

• 26:30Hala Taha?

  Um, I don't know, it's a stepfather or something?

• 26:33Speaker 01

  That's an answer, that is an answer. But that's not the answer. Can you think of any more? The answer is...

• 26:40Hala Taha?

  Oh, it's, it's his mom.

• 26:42Speaker 01

  Bingo, you got it.

• 26:43Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  You're in the minority of people who got the answer. That's exactly right, very good. Eighty-three percent of people can't figure it out. They can't see the possibility that the surgeon was the boy's mother. Because typically, eighty percent, statistically, eighty percent of surgeons are men. Twenty percent are women. That's a reality, right? That's a fact. But we can't see it. We can't even imagine that possibility because of our prior beliefs, because our prior experiences. So when you think about something as simple, like, and when you, once you know the answer, like, duh, of course, it's, it's the boy's mother, obviously. By the way, men and women, this doesn't, you know, if you don't get this, if you're listening, don't feel bad. It doesn't mean that you're sexist or anything. The same proportion of men and women don't get this puzzle. So it's, it's, it doesn't mean that.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  It just means that your prior beliefs have a tendency to predict future events. So if you've seen that most surgeons are men, you will predict that most surgeons will be men in this scenario that I just outlined. So why is this so important? Think about what this means for you as an entrepreneur. That if you can't even imagine a potential future, if you can't see a reality, you can't work towards it because you don't believe it. So what great entrepreneurs are able to do, they suspend reality. I mean, think about how ridiculous it is. When you started your company, right? And you probably told people about the company. Did anybody say, no, I don't think that's gonna work. I think it's a bad idea. Did anybody do that to you?

• 28:05Hala Taha?

  Yeah, one hundred, especially people who were closest to me, actually.

• 28:09Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 28:10Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  What did they say to you?

• 28:12Hala Taha?

  Um, you know, keep your stable job. This is so risky. Um, you know, that it's just risky.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  Right, right, because it probably is not going to work. They could envision how it could work. What are you going to do? A podcast? And yeah, okay, yeah, sure. Good luck with that one, right?

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Because for them, they couldn't see what you saw. Because you believed, not only in your abilities, you believed in this opportunity. And that shaped your reality. You could see something that other people just couldn't see.

• 28:42Hala Taha?

  Yeah. And isn't it true that not only like, does it impact our beliefs, but actually visually, how we see our reality? I know that there was this checkerboard analogy, where basically you just see what you, what you're anticipating to see, not necessarily what is reality.

• 28:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. Yeah, so if you, if you go on Google and type in checkerboard illusion, what you'll see is that there's two squares, square A and square B. And square A looks much darker than square B. Very obvious, right? Everybody who looks at this says, yes, absolutely. Square A is definitely darker than square B. But if I put a strip of the same color overlapping square A and square B, you'll see that square A and square B are exactly the same color. Now, that's very interesting. It's kind of an optical illusion. What's crazy is that even when you agree with me, yes, square A and B are the same color, when you look at it again, it still looks like they're different colors. So your brain is lying to you, is literally lying to you, and not allowing you to see the truth.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Even when you know the truth, it won't allow you to see it, reality as it really is, because of your prior understandings, because of your prior conditioning. And so, this is why, how the power of attention changes so dramatically what we are actually able to, to see in our environment.

• 30:01Hala Taha?

  So what are we supposed to do about this? If we know that our brain is basically playing tricks on us, and we're not experiencing real reality, we're experiencing how we perceive reality, what are we supposed to do about it?

• 30:14Speaker 01

  We need to have practices in place that constantly remind us that we're wrong. That we need to have what's called intellectual humility. That if we want to get the best out of ourselves, we have to see reality not only as it is, but as it could be. So we need strict practices in place to force us to see these opportunities, to see what's available to us. And so this gets us into the subject that we call entrepreneurial alertness. Entrepreneurial alertness. That we know that successful entrepreneurs, they're not necessarily lucky innately. They make their own luck. They make their own luck. It's a beautiful study where they took people who were self-identified, people who called themselves lucky or unlucky. Okay, it was a label they assigned to themselves.

• 30:58Speaker 01

  They believed, is it a fact? No, they believed they were either lucky or unlucky. Then they gave them a very simple task. The task was, we want you to look at this newspaper and simply count the number of images. One, two, three, four. How many images are in this newspaper? Okay? People who believed they were lucky, it took them about 11 seconds. People who believed they were unlucky took them two and a half minutes. Why the gap? The gap occurred because on page two of this newspaper, one of the pictures, one of the images that they were counting, said there are 48 images in this newspaper. Collect your prize.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  The people who saw themselves as lucky saw that opportunity. They could read the image because they were seeing something that the unlucky people couldn't imagine existed. They couldn't see it. It was right there in front of them. But they, just like you can't imagine that the surgeon was the boy's mom, people couldn't see what was right in front of them. The same exact image the unlucky people couldn't see. And it took them two and a half minutes versus 11 seconds. This is exactly what happens to us every day. Because if you believe opportunities won't happen to you, if you believe they will happen to you, you're right. You see reality differently. And so we have to institute these practices, and there's a few that we can all implement, that force us to provoke luck. That in fact, luck isn't chance. It's something we manufacture for ourselves.

• 32:26Hala Taha?

  What are some ways that we can try to create more luck in our lives?

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Okay, so the first thing you can do is to show extreme amounts of gratitude. Extreme amounts of gratitude. So this comes from Tina Seelig at Stanford. And she has this practice, she shared with me, where she has a stack of thank you cards. And she has this daily habit of whenever anyone does something nice, makes her feel good, makes her feel appreciated, just has a pleasant sensation, she wants to thank them. Whether that's saying it out loud, whether that's writing a little thank you card, whether that's sending an email. Never ever miss an opportunity to say thank you, to show gratitude, right? Whether it's the someone who serves you at a restaurant and does a nice job, whether it's your child that you thank them for being extra polite to you, or whatever, your spouse giving them an extra hug, or an employee or colleague.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Always be gracious to people and show them how appreciative you are. Now, why is that good? It's not just good karma. Turns out that you are provoking luck. How does that happen? Imagine when you send someone a handwritten thank you note, which takes maybe 30 seconds. When that thank you note lands on their desk and just so happens to land next to a business opportunity, that they're thinking, well, who would be someone I should share this with? You're top of mind. So you're kind of pollinating opportunities. You're creating these opportunities. You're provoking luck. So that's one thing we can do. Another thing we can do that we have to get into the habit of doing is intentionally exiting our comfort zones, finding ways to do things that are a little weird, a little uncomfortable.

• 34:00Speaker 01

  Because it turns out that motivation is in large part about discomfort. It's about overcoming something that's difficult. Because what spurs us to action is that we want something and wanting itself hurts. Right? So the more we can get comfortable with the pain of doing something, the better we become at it, the less resistance we have, right? It's just like practice. The first time you learned to ride a bike, it was very difficult. You kept falling over. Oh, it was so hard. And then it became easy peasy. First time you learn to drive a car, first time you learn to do anything, it's difficult until it's not. And so what we find in the research is that people who consistently push themselves out of their comfort zone, they take opportunities that maybe were a little uncomfortable. They talk to people that was a little bit uncomfortable. They do things that push themselves

• 34:44Speaker 01

  slightly out of their comfort zone again and again. And again, turns out they not only provoke luck, they become more lucky. They start seeing opportunities where they didn't before. For example, oh, no, I can never just walk up to a stranger and have a conversation. I just did this on the plane right over. I'm in LA. I just I just took a flight from Spain. And I had a conversation in the flight in the in the galley, right? Where they had little snacks and drinks. I talked to this wonderful lady who lives in LA. We had this great conversation. Now we exchange information. We might do some business together in the future. That would only happen if I was pushing myself, if I was looking for opportunities to push myself out of a comfort zone. That was something I wouldn't do before is just talk to a random stranger for an hour and a half on a flight. That's super weird and uncomfortable. But you know what? It provokes luck. It makes those opportunities.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  And then the next thing, and this is probably the most important of the three, is to relish failure opportunities. That people see failure as a sign that they're doing something wrong. And that's not the attitude of successful people, that in fact, successful people relish those opportunities. Right? So, hey, I'm making my sales calls, not a lot of people said no. But, oh, man, I've got more to do. Look how many no's I got. That means the next one might be a yes. So, for example, if I told you, whatever goal you might have, if I, you know, I tell you, I traveled into the future and I know that you have only five more failures before number six is going to be a success. If you're looking for love, go on five more dates, six one, you're going to find your soulmate.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Five more leads and the sixth one, you're going to close a deal. Whatever it is, if I knew five more failures and then you're going to have the sixth one's going to be a big success. Would you avoid failure?

• 36:23Hala Taha?

  No, I'd run to it.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  You would? Yeah, exactly. You look forward to it. Come on, let's fail so we can get to the success. Well, that's reality. And if you believe that, it becomes your reality. If you believe that failures are an opportunity, you're going to try more, you're going to persevere, you're going to stay more motivated. And guess what? You're going to get lucky more often.

• 36:42Hala Taha?

  I know that you give a case study of the lady who launched Solid Core. And she had exceptional entrepreneurial alertness and it allowed her to see opportunities where most people wouldn't see an opportunity there at all. Can you tell us about that story?

• 36:57Speaker 01

  Sure, Anne Mallon. She's an amazing story. She's an amazing example of the power of beliefs and the power of attention specifically. So she was in Philadelphia. She was working for some job she wasn't too happy with. And she, one day she ran by this homeless shelter, this homeless mission. And then she ran by it again. It kind of became part of her routine. And for years, she would just run by this homeless shelter and didn't do anything about it. Like many people today, you know, we see someone suffering, eh, just the way it is, right? Someone's on the street, it's probably a drug problem, nothing you can do. Okay, I, you know, that's someone else's problem. Well, one day, one of these men at the homeless shelter makes a joke and says, is all you do,

• 37:42Speaker 01

  run all day? And she jokes back, is all you do, stand there all day? And then they start having a little rapport. And the next day, they have a little bit more of a conversation. And this is something she would never did before. She would never had this conversation with a person at a homeless mission. And then they started forming a bit of a relationship. And then after a few days of this, she stops in her tracks and she asks herself, how come I'm the runner and they're homeless? Why can't we all be runners? And so she has this crazy idea of what would it be like to run with homeless men? And that's exactly what she does. She forms a group called Back on My Feet that teaches unhoused people how to get back on their feet, how to get their life back in order, first by starting with physical fitness.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Now, she's not trying to fix homelessness as a systemic issue. We're all very aware that homelessness is not fixable just with running shoes, that it involves, you know, unaffordability of housing, it involves mental health issues. There's lots of issues to homelessness. But she wasn't worried about all that. She just wanted to help people in this one mission in her neighborhood. She wanted to do something for them. So she looked for agency, the third power belief, something that she could actually do something about. She used the power of attention to notice potential in these these men, that she saw something that everyone else discounted, this potential. And then she anticipated that they might change. And so what did she do the first session? They got together, I think it was about nine guys, and they went on a little jog.

• 39:09Speaker 01

  It turns out that that little bit of of of hope that that they saw that, hey, I could do something, I can set a difficult goal and and do it. And day after day, they started to change. They would talk to each other about what they're going through. They would be a little bit more vulnerable. They would exchange different opportunities. And this organization now, several years later, is still up and running. I think it's in eight different cities, and they have run together collectively, millions of miles together. Now, that experience that Anne had, where she saw potential where others did not, transferred into her next act. When she went to Los Angeles and she saw a little fitness studio, and she thought it was super cute and pink and very L.A., and so she got inspired. And she took elements of that fitness studio.

• 39:54Speaker 01

  And her next venture was to start a fitness company, where it was called Solid Core, where she opened up these studios that nobody saw an opportunity to to open. And she sold that company a few years later. What was interesting about this? She sold it for over a hundred million dollars. And what's fascinating is she totally called her shot. The day she started the company, she wrote down on a piece of paper, I will sell this company for a hundred million dollars. And that's exactly what she did. Now, was that a fact? No, it was a belief. And I'm sure she had all kinds of other predictions that she didn't tell me about, that maybe she didn't accomplish. That's not the point. It doesn't matter if it's true, because beliefs are tools, not truths. Because writing it down and saying, I will do this, allowed her to see it. It became a possibility.

• 40:40Speaker 01

  And when you can see it, you can do it. And so she's a wonderful example of of how these beliefs can become a reality based on on your beliefs, on your perception.

• 40:49Hala Taha?

  That's such a good story. It's such an inspiring story. I know that you have a whole chapter on, in your book about relationships. And initially, when I saw that, I was like, well, how do relationships really relate to beliefs? But then I soon understood that really you're also perceiving people and making judgments on people. And a lot of these judgments will stick on people. It's like, you know, the concept of first impressions. You know, you meet somebody for the first 20 seconds and that's the impression you have indefinitely with that person, no matter what they do or how they change.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  True.

• 41:22Hala Taha?

  So help us understand relationships, perceptions related to relationships, and how we can make sure that we're also seeing people in their reality or in reality.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Absolutely. So I'll start with a little story, a personal story. It's a little difficult to relay, but I think it conveys the point. That this happened with my mom. I'll talk about relationships and difficulties. So my mom, a few years ago, had her 74th birthday. And I wanted to do something nice for her. I wanted to get her some flowers. And I was in Singapore at the time. She was in Central Florida where I grew up. And it was a bit of a challenge to get her flowers for her birthday. I had to stay up late and talk to the florist and figure out would it arrive on time and make sure that the flowers wouldn't wilt by the time they arrived at her house and all that. I went to bed at 1:00 in the morning. I patted myself on the back. I said, "Mia, you did a good job. You're a good son. You did a nice thing." I woke up the next morning. I called my mom on her birthday and I said,

• 42:17Speaker 01

  "Hey, Mom, happy birthday. Did you get the flowers?" I said. And she said, "Yes, I did. Thank you very much. But you should know the flowers arrived kind of half-dead. You shouldn't order from that florist anymore." To which I got very offended and I said something to the effect of, "Well, that's the last time I buy you flowers." And that went over just about as well as you'd expect. And so after the call, my wife turned to me and she said, do you want to do a turnaround on this? I turned around and I said, no, I do not want to do a turnaround. I don't want to do your touchy feely, hocus pocus, you know, mumbo jumbo. I need to vent because venting is what we've been taught to do, right?

• 43:00Speaker 01

  When somebody makes you mad, you're not supposed to keep your feelings to yourself. You're supposed to let them out. You're supposed to vent. You're supposed to tell people how you really feel. Well, it turns out that's not true. That venting is one of the worst things you can do because venting does nothing more than cement this, this, this effigy that we build of people because we don't see people as we, as they are. We see our beliefs about people, right? We don't accurately, especially people you know the best in your life. That's so like him, or she always does that, or we see people as we believe they are, not as they truly are. And we see this all the time, you know, people who, the longer they stay married, the worse they treat each other, right? When they first fell in love with each other, they treat each other nicely. Or maybe they, you know, I've seen this with, with some of my friends. They treat strangers super well, but the person they love more, they're supposed to

• 43:43Speaker 01

  love more and be more loyal to than anybody else in the world. They, they treat poorly because they don't see that person anymore. They see this, this patina that they built over the years because of their beliefs. So anyways, I knew that, that venting was not going to be helpful. And instead I did a turnaround. Now, what is a turnaround? This technique comes from Byron Katie, so she deserves credit for it. And she developed these four questions that help us evaluate the usefulness of our beliefs. And it turns out that this practice is actually thousands of years old. It goes back all the way to Aristotle. So she gives us four questions. The first question is, is this belief true? Okay, so I wrote down my belief. My belief was my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. And that was my belief. My, my, in that instance, my mother was clearly too judgmental and hard to please. Are you going to, are you going to back me up hollow?

• 44:28Speaker 01

  Is that, is that right?

• 44:30Hala Taha?

  Uh, yeah. I mean, maybe, maybe.

• 44:35Speaker 01

  I was absolutely convinced, right?

• 44:37Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 44:37Speaker 01

  And I, that's why I didn't want, you know, to, to do this exercise. I wanted someone to acknowledge that I had been wrong, that like, who says that to their son who gets them flowers?

• 44:45Hala Taha?

  She should just be thankful and say thank you.

• 44:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Just be thankful. So, okay. Question number one, easy peasy, right? Obviously, is it true? Yeah, it's true. She was clearly, she did, she was in the wrong, I was in the right. But here's the second question. Second question is,

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Is it absolutely true? Is this belief that my mother was too judgmental and hard to please absolutely true? Is there no possible interpretation? Absolutely means 100% without exception. Every single time, there's no possible way she wasn't being too judgmental and hard to please. Well, I'm honest with myself. I mean, maybe, maybe I could come up with a reason. Maybe she was uh uh trying to just help me, right? But she didn't want me to get scammed by this florist. Well, okay, maybe there's another explanation. Okay, reluctantly, I I agreed. The third question, the third question is,

• 45:34Speaker 01

  who am I when I hold on to this belief? Who do I become? What do I act like? How do I feel? And by the way, i- if this doesn't resonate with your mother, you know, this is a business podcast. Think about it with your employees, your boss, your coworkers. You can do this with any relationship or any, any challenge for that matter. So the third question is, who do I become when I hold on to this belief? When I believe that my mother is too judgmental and hard to please, I'm short-tempered, I'm not very kind, and frankly, I'm not myself, right? I regretted what I said to her. Now, the fourth question. Who would I be without that belief? Well, if I had a magic wand and I could tap my brain and all of a sudden this belief would dissolve, I'd probably be nicer. I'd be more myself.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  I wouldn't be embarrassed by something I said and later regretted. So what we established with just four questions is that that belief may not be true. It wasn't serving me, and I would be better without it. So now it cracks open a possibility. Because remember, our immune system, our psychological immune system hates changing our beliefs. And the beliefs that we think we are most certain about, particularly about other people, that's just the way they are. Those are the beliefs we most need to examine, or even more so beliefs about ourselves. Those are the really, really hard ones to change. And if you feel resistance, if you say, well, no, that's, that's not something I want to evaluate. I don't want to think differently. That's probably the beliefs you need to be most conscious of, that you most need to explore. So now we do a turnaround.

• 47:00Speaker 01

  Okay, turnaround, the idea behind a turnaround is not to change your beliefs, not to change your beliefs, to collect a portfolio of perspectives, a portfolio of perspectives. Because right now, I only have one belief. My belief was, my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. It's the only perspective I had. Now, what you do is you do a turnaround to create more potential beliefs, to see if any of those might be more helpful. Because remember, beliefs are tools, not truths. So we don't want to just use a tool just because that's what we've always used, right? A carpenter doesn't say, "Oh, I've used a hammer before, so everything I do, I have to hammer." No, sometimes you use a screwdriver, sometimes you use a wrench, sometimes you use a saw, based on the job. Which one is helpful? So, to do a turnaround, we ask ourselves if the exact opposite could also be true.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  So what's the exact opposite of my mother is too judgmental and hard to please? My mother is not too judgmental and hard to please. Could that be true? Could be true, yeah. Like, maybe she was just trying to be helpful, right? It could be that maybe she wasn't being too judgmental and hard to please. Okay, that's perspective number two. Let's go deeper. This is called a turnaround to the self. Instead of "my mother is too judgmental and hard to please", could it be true that I am too judgmental and hard to please? Could that be true? Well, in my mind, I had rehearsed that when I did this nice thing for her, I expected her to give me effusive praise. I wanted her to tell me how nice I was, that I did this for her.

• 48:28Speaker 01

  And when that praise didn't come, I lost it. And I lashed out. So who was being judgmental and hard to please? I kinda was, wasn't I?

• 48:39Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 01

  Right? And now, there's a fourth perspective. I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself, that when I put all this effort and things didn't work out exactly as I planned, I took it to mean that I was incompetent, that I was a bad son, that I wasn't capable of doing this very simple task of ordering her some flowers. And so what had happened, this is called a misattribution of emotion. We do this all the time. That we feel something, and as soon as we can see someone dependent on, that's the person who's causing that discomfort. But really, it came from me, because I felt bad that I had messed up somehow. So I was being too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. And I can't help it if the florist delivers crappy flowers. It happens.

• 49:22Speaker 01

  That's, okay, I won't order from them again. But I lashed out at her because I felt bad about what I had done, that I took blame that I didn't deserve to take. So which one of those four perspectives is the truth? Which one is a fact? None of them. All of them. It doesn't matter. Because beliefs are tools, not truths. The one belief that I had, that my mother was too judgmental and hard to please, that only had one solution. There's only one way out of that. She had to change so I could be happy. Not gonna happen. Okay, that happens all the time in business, right? That that jerk said this and this, how could they do that? Well, what you're essentially requiring is that they have to do something so I can be happy. If you hold your breath, you're gonna suffocate.

• 50:06Speaker 01

  And that doesn't happen very often, right? Rather, with those other three perspectives, whether they were true or not, gave me more peace. Allowed me to be myself. I could act the way I was proud of as opposed to a way I regretted. And that's the goal. Is it true? It doesn't matter. What matters is, does it make me better? Does it make me treat others better? That's how we use these beliefs in our relationships.

• 50:30Hala Taha?

  I think that's really powerful, especially for entrepreneurs, whether you're dealing with employees or, you know, another business partner or even your spouse. So I just wanna recap that to the audience. So when you, when you do these turnarounds, you wanna think to the opposite, to the other, and to the self. Those are the three kind of perspectives that you wanna think about. So you have a portfolio of perspectives. That's, that's what a turnaround is.

• 50:54Speaker 01

  Exactly. To the opposite is, is the exact opposite is true. My mother is not too judgmental and hard to please. To the other, I am too judgmental and hard to please. And to the self, I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. And then you could do, you know, variations. It's not gonna all be the same. I do, I literally do this type of exercise six, seven times a day. Whenever someone annoys me or I'm feeling like I'm not being myself or I'm saying something that I might later regret. Now I catch myself and I can, I can act in, in, with, with, with more patience, with more calm, more rationally, than just letting my feelings control me through my beliefs.

• 51:26Hala Taha?

  You have this second power of belief called anticipation. And we touched on it a bit, but I want to go deeper in terms of how brand is impacted by anticipation. Like what we can do as entrepreneurs to build a brand where people expect certain things and will pay more for it and things like that.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah. So one of the most fascinating studies that I came across was a study that found that, uh, why? Well, let me, let me set up this. I'll tell you all of that. Okay. So they took, they took people and they put them into an fMRI machine. And fMRI machine measures blood flow in the brain. Okay. And when they were in this machine, they gave them a squirt of wine. They said, this is a cheap bottle of wine, $5 bottle of wine. Okay. Tell us about it. What do you think of this $5 bottle of wine? Uh, you know, it's a little harsh on the finish. I don't know. It's okay. Okay. Great. Now we're going to give you an expensive bottle of wine. You ready for it? Okay. And they're sitting in the fMRI machine. They get this little tube that squirts an expensive, uh, sample of wine in their mouth.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  And now they report, oh, you know, tell us what you think of this, this wine. Oh, this wine is very complex. It has hints of oak and cherry and, uh, what, you know, all the things that wine snobs say. Of course, the trick here is, you know, there's a trick. There's always a trick. It's the same wine. The only thing that was different was that they told them one was cheap and one was expensive. Now, not only did people report that the expensive wine tastes better, right? That's not that surprising. Their brains actually experienced the wine differently. So we could see areas of their brain activate differently, showing us that they actually did perceive the more expensive wine as tastier. They weren't lying. They weren't making it up. They actually were experiencing it differently.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  And this is where people really misunderstand the point of advertising. People think advertising is just to build awareness. Okay. Hey, come to Joe's cafeteria or go, you know, come to my dry cleaner, whatever, like come to my consulting business. That's not the only reason we advertise. That advertising in fact, shapes the experience itself. Why do you think Coca-Cola, why have we all seen? Thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of ads for Coca-Cola. How many times have you seen an ad for Coke in your life? Again and again, we know about Coke. Why do they keep advertising it to us? Because they are building an experience once we consume it. When we think we're supposed to feel a certain way when we consume a product,

• 53:56Speaker 01

  we actually do because we expect it. So this is this loop that first you have a belief. What is that belief that you have about this product? What do you anticipate to happen? That's the second step. Then you feel that thing that you experience. And then the most important step, you confirm it. So when wine people get together and they talk about, you know, what do they do? They like to drink with each other and they talk about tasting notes and they read what editors think. And they get all these. They are actually shaping the experience in real time and confirming it for next time. And so that loop, we can use that for all kinds of products and services. And we shouldn't take it for granted. You know, we shouldn't discount the amazing impact that expectations and anticipation can have on our customers' actual experience with our product or service.

• 54:41Hala Taha?

  So what are some actionable things that we can do when we're developing our brand to kind of play into this anticipation belief? Like, what do we, like, is it the way that we price it? Is it like our messaging? Like, what do we do?

• 54:54Speaker 01

  All of that, all of that. Don't just chase the competition. That's the worst thing you can do. People do this all the time. Well, what's everybody else doing? Let's do that, too. And we think that our competition knows something we don't know. And they're just as blind as you are. What you really want to do is to consciously be aware of what do we want our customer to anticipate? And then incept that feeling. We know that when, there's a couple of great examples. We know that when people were given a putter, golfers were given a putter, that they were told this putter was used by a very famous golfer. I don't know who they told them, somebody famous, Tiger Woods or something. He said, Tiger Woods used this putter. They golfed better. They actually did better, fewer strokes on the golf course because they believed

• 55:37Speaker 01

  that there was some kind of anticipatory response to this special type of putter. So it turns out we really do act differently based on how we anticipate a product will affect us.

• 55:49Hala Taha?

  And this placebo effect also transcends to our own health, right? You were talking about us actually believing if, you know, we will live longer if we believe that, you know, it's possible to live longer, that aging isn't a negative thing. We actually live longer. Also, same thing with illnesses.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  Seven and a half years? Yeah, with illnesses, with steroids. It turns out when they did a study and they gave men a steroid, they said, hey, here's a steroid pill. It's an amazing new drug and that if you take this pill, you're going to build lots and lots of muscle. They gave them this pill, they gave a control group nothing, and they put them on a workout regimen. It turns out that the men who took the steroid gained more muscle despite the fact that it was a placebo. There was, it was completely inert, there was nothing in the steroid. And yet these men got stronger. They actually built more muscle mass. How? It's not magic. It's not that the brain made the muscle. You know what happened? They worked out a tiny bit harder. They actually did something differently. So placebos aren't magic.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Placebos don't cure disease, right? They don't cure sickness. Sickness is a physical malady. They change the perception, right? The illness, sickness is in your body, illness is in your brain. And so placebos are incredibly effective at shaping our experience and we can leverage that power of placebo, right? If a placebo steroid can actually build muscle, maybe it's a good investment to buy a little bit more expensive running shoes if you're trying to take up jogging. Or maybe, you know, taking that vitamin C is not really going to cure your cold, but it might actually cure some of the symptoms. It might make you feel better, even if it's a placebo effect.

• 57:25Hala Taha?

  What's the danger of labeling ourselves having a certain mental illness or sickness? Like, let's say, a lot of people are on this kick of, I have ADHD, right? What's the problem with having these identity beliefs?

• 57:38Speaker 01

  Okay, so now we're into the power of agency, the third power of belief. And one of the best demonstrations of the power of agency is what happens when we sap our agency through what we call a nocebo effect. So we have placebo effect. Placebo effect is, comes from the Latin, I will heal. A no placebo effect is I will hurt. It's the opposite of the placebo effect. And to demonstrate this, let me tell you about Mr. A. Mr. A was in a, there was a study where he was anonymized. Mr. A had a breakup with his girlfriend. He took it really hard. And he took a, a bottle of antidepressants and he swallowed all the pills and he wanted to commit suicide. The last minute after he swallowed the pills, he decided he wanted to live. He rushed over to the neighbor's house. The neighbor rushes him to the emergency room.

• 58:23Speaker 01

  This is not a riddle, by the way. There's no, it's a study, it's really happened. He's rushed into the emergency room. He collapses on the floor. And the last thing he says before he passes out, he says, "I took all my pills, I took all my pills." The doctors and nurses rush him into the operating room. His, they connect him to the heart rate monitors. His heart rate is plummeting. His blood pressure is dangerously low. He's passed out. And they look at the pill bottle and they try and figure out, what did he take? What medicine did he take that caused him to have these overdose symptoms? And it doesn't say what medication he took. They just says it's an antidepressant, but it doesn't say what type of medicine. What it does have is a phone number. Because Mr. A was in a clinical trial for these antidepressants. And so it didn't say what the medicine was. They call the phone number.

• 59:07Speaker 01

  They say, "What, what, what was in this medication? We need to treat this person. He's just had an overdose." They look it up on the computer and they see Mr. A was in the placebo group. That in every medical trial, you have the medicine, the actual active ingredient. And then you have to have the placebo group to see if the medication is more efficacious than the placebo. Right, that's the only way you get a medicine approved. It has to be better than a placebo response. Well, he had taken an entire pill bottle of nothing. There was nothing that could have caused that physical reaction. And yet here he was sweating and convulsing, low blood pressure, low heart rate, passed out. Why? It wasn't the, the pills. It was his mind. That he had the message that he had done something that should cause these symptoms.

• 59:52Speaker 01

  And that's exactly what happened. Within 15 minutes, Hala, they told him, "Hey, you were in the placebo group. There's nothing in these bottles." Within 15 minutes, his heart rate stabilized, his blood pressure back to normal, and he was revived. He walked out. Now, that's what happens when we take these pills that we think are gonna have some kind of magical effect on us. And oftentimes, they, they do have an incredible physical effect. Turns out, we have these psychological placebos, these non-medical placebos when it comes to our labels. That when we label ourselves as, "Well, I'm not a morning person. I'm too old. It's too late. I can't do that. I'm a Sagittarius. I'm an ENTJ. I'm a whatever."

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  When that becomes our label, it also can become our limit. Because, and I have ADHD. I've been diagnosed with ADHD. And here's what I used to do all the time. Every time I was distracted, and look, everybody gets distracted. You don't have to have ADHD to get distracted. Everybody these days gets distracted by one thing or another. But every time I got distracted, I would say, "Oh, man, that's my ADHD again." And people say something similar. If you don't have a, "I'm having a senior moment." Or, "I'm not a morning person," or whatever the case might be. We say these things to ourselves. And what happens instantly? When I refocus my attention in terms of my limitations, they become true. Because now, I'm not thinking about the thing I was actually working on. I'm thinking about my limits.

• 1:01:19Speaker 01

  And I'm conforming to those limits. So that's where we have to be very, very careful. Not that there's anything wrong with these diagnoses, obviously. ADHD is real. It's something that we have to manage. We have to find ways to overcome, which is what indistractable is all about. But having that as a map is very useful. So if you have a diagnosis, if you have a label that says, "Okay, I have this thing that makes what I'm trying to do a little bit more difficult than for the normal, for the average person." Now, it's a map. That can lead me to behavioral tactics that I can change. It can help me navigate my path to changing my behavior. Wonderful. It's a map. When it becomes an identity, that's when we get into trouble. Because it's unnecessary, right? We think it's a fact, but it's nothing more than a belief.

• 1:02:04Speaker 01

  And so to constantly reinforce our limitations, we are putting ourselves in a cage of our own creation. So having a diagnosis as a map to guide us, very helpful. Having an identity around our limitation can be very harmful.

• 1:02:18Hala Taha?

  Yeah, and I can imagine that if you go around saying you have an identity, other people will start telling you you have that identity too. Like, I can, I'm always late, right? Like, I'm always, I'm somebody who's like always running behind, always late. And because people know that, like, they'll tell me I'm late. Even if I'm on time, you know, they have to mention how I'm usually, oh, you're early, but you're usually late, right? So you can't even win in those instances, right? So it's important not to let other people label you, yeah.

• 1:02:45Speaker 01

  Yes, I would strongly invite you,

• 1:02:49Speaker 01

  get rid of that label and don't let people tell you that anymore. Because you will conform to that label.

• 1:02:54Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:54Speaker 01

  Rather, you can, you can use a liberating belief. You can turn it around. I'm not someone who's, like, how could it be who you are? Were you, is that your biology? No, it's made up. And in fact, the more you believe it, the more it becomes true. But you can also believe a liberating belief. You can also believe a different belief that can help you modify your behavior in different ways. But you don't want to keep reinforcing this limitation.

• 1:03:18Hala Taha?

  Well, Nir, I'm really excited about your book. It comes out in March, so I think everybody should go grab a copy of Beyond Belief. Before we go, I end my show with two questions that I ask all of my guests. The first one can be related to everything that we just talked about today. So what is one actionable thing our young improfitters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow?

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Okay, I want you to tell yourself that you are, two things. Number one, that you don't perceive reality as it actually is, to have more humility. So that's something you could practice every single day. You don't see things clearly, and that's a good thing. Because acknowledging your uncertainty gives you more intellectual humility to see other perspectives. That's one thing you can do every day, be more intellectually humble. The next thing you can do is to realize and to reinforce that you are far more capable than you think you are. You have not even touched the surface of your potential, just like those rats who gave up and died after 15 minutes, and then something was unlocked and they could persist for 60 hours?

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  The same secret is within you. You are capable of far, far more than you believe.

• 1:04:33Hala Taha?

  I have to say, like, this made me realize, like, I've really got to look at my beliefs, my team's beliefs, and make sure that, like, everybody is able to, you know, believe in things that even might not seem so possible. And having that belief itself is going to give us the stamina to achieve the goals that we need. So I feel like that was like-

• 1:04:52Speaker 01

  You want to do one right now? Do you have a few minutes? We can, we can-

• 1:04:54Hala Taha?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  -try and tackle one of your limiting beliefs if you want. Do you tell that to yourself, that, that I am always late? Is that one of your beliefs?

• 1:05:00Hala Taha?

  Oh, that is definitely, like, if I could think of, like, one, my most negative thing that, like, I believe, or that my, you know, boyfriend and sister and everybody believes about me, is that I'm always late.

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:05:14Hala Taha?

  I'm always late, yeah.

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  You want to, you want to try it?

• 1:05:15Hala Taha?

  Yeah, let's do it.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Let's do it. Okay, so I'm, I am always late. Is that something you do believe about yourself?

• 1:05:22Hala Taha?

  Yes.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  All right, so first question, is it true? You kind of answered that, yes.

• 1:05:27Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I think it is.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Second question.

• 1:05:28Hala Taha?

  I think it's true in a lot of instances, in a lot of instances, yeah.

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  Okay, second question, is it absolutely true?

• 1:05:35Hala Taha?

  No, because it's like, not like I'm always late. Like, I'm not late to meetings, I'm not late to, like, you know, I'm not always late. I'm just-

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:05:44Hala Taha?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm not always late.

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  All right, beautiful, very good. Look, question number three. Who are you when you hold on to that belief? What do you feel, who do you become when you think to yourself, I am always late? How does that affect you?

• 1:05:57Hala Taha?

  Uh, it makes me nervous, anxious, uh, because it's like I stress over not being late because I don't want people to keep saying I'm late. So it makes me more anxious, which actually slows me down.

• 1:06:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:06:12Hala Taha?

  And I would say that it makes me feel, uh, you know, I'm a very accomplished person, so it makes me feel like less accomplished or, or smart enough, you know, if I can't even be on time, right?

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  Wow, okay, so it makes you fit, feel unnecessarily incompetent? It makes you feel inferior? It surprisingly takes time? It slows you down, right? The thing you need least if you're running late is to actually be slowed down. Amazing, amazing. Look at all the negatives that come from this label that you've attached. Okay, now, let's say, okay, I have a magic wand, I can wave it over your brain, and poof, that belief is gone. You never, ever again think, I'm always late. How does that feel? What would you be? Who would you become?

• 1:06:56Hala Taha?

  I would feel clear headed to manage my time, hopefully in a way that I would be more on time. Um, or I wouldn't give my excuse of like, I'm always late, so I could just be late. You know, they expect me to be late anyway. Or something like that.

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  Interesting. Wow. That's, did you hear what you just said there?

• 1:07:17Hala Taha?

  Yeah, but that I'm like, uh, adapting to what everybody's telling me I am.

• 1:07:23Hala Taha?

  There we go. Maybe I won't be late anymore.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  The power of anticipation. People expect you to be late.

• 1:07:31Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  And so you're thinking in your head, well, people aren't expecting me to be late, so I'll just go ahead and be late. And now everybody says you're always late. And then you start believing I'm always late.

• 1:07:41Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:42Speaker 01

  It's an invention. It's not true.

• 1:07:47Speaker 01

  It's just a belief and it's a limiting belief because all those bad things we just talked about. Okay, so we've determined, maybe it's not true. We've determined you'd be better off without it. Uh, and that your life would be much, much better if, if you didn't have it anymore. Okay, so now let's do some turnarounds. Okay, what's the opposite of I am always late?

• 1:08:07Hala Taha?

  I'm on time. I'm always on time.

• 1:08:09Speaker 01

  I'm on time. Okay. How could that be true? Give me some examples of how that's true.

• 1:08:13Hala Taha?

  I'm on time for meetings. I'm on time for interviews. I'm on time for speaking engagements in front of 7,000 people. I'm on time for, you know, uh, webinars, uh, that I have to present like, I'm on time, especially when it matters.

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  Ah, okay.

• 1:08:30Hala Taha?

  Especially when it matters.

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  So you went, okay, so now you had a previous belief that was I'm, I am always late. By the way, that, that's an identity. I am are some of the two worst words in the English language because whatever follows I am, you will become. Right? I am always late. I am too skinny. I am too old. I am too fat. I am whatever. That becomes your, your reality. It becomes the truth. Okay, so you went from, uh, I am always late to I'm on time when it matters. Is that what you said?

• 1:09:03Hala Taha?

  Yeah, I'm on time when it matters or when I'm getting paid or when it's work related, I'm usually on time.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  Okay, fantastic. So now you have two beliefs, which is true, which is false. Who cares? Which one is more motivating?

• 1:09:15Hala Taha?

  I'm on time when it matters.

• 1:09:17Speaker 01

  Which one reduces suffering?

• 1:09:18Hala Taha?

  I'm on time when it matters.

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  Okay, is there another turnaround you might be able to do? From I am always late? Is there another turnaround?

• 1:09:27Hala Taha?

  Maybe like I, I care about other people's time? Or I, or something along those lines? Or like, I'm caring about other people's time? Or, I don't know. I don't know. Uh, I don't know another one.

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  I'm late. I'm not on time for people who don't matter?

• 1:09:45Hala Taha?

  Hmm, that's kind of nasty.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  Is it? Could it be true?

• 1:09:52Hala Taha?

  I think it's more of like, for, if I can just speak like without in the I am's, it's more about, like, for me, I'm so busy that like, I don't want, like, if some, like, to me, if I'm 10 minutes late for a dinner reservation with my friends, like, that's not a big deal. Because it's like, it's just a fun thing and we're going to dinner. We don't, I don't understand why I have to, how, why it has to be like military or gotta start at this time. I don't function that way because to me, it's not work, it's fun.

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's not important. You said earlier that if someone you really admire, if you say, speaking in front of 7,000 people, you're on the dot because it's important.

• 1:10:28Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:29Speaker 01

  So maybe there's a revelation here. You don't want to, and I can feel the resistance. By the way, this is psychological resistance.

• 1:10:34Hala Taha?

  Because I don't want my friends to think that they're not important, right? They are important. It's more of like, I don't align to, to being so military about fun plans because then it's not fun anymore. Like, if, if I'm rushing to get there, then I'm anxious and I'd rather like, take my time and come in a good mood, you know? So that's kind of it.

• 1:10:55Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 1:10:56Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:56Speaker 01

  Super interesting. We've uncovered a new limiting belief.

• 1:11:01Speaker 01

  Because people are telling you, it's annoying them that you're not on time.

• 1:11:05Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:06Speaker 01

  This is causing suffering.

• 1:11:07Hala Taha?

  It is.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Right? And so in your head, look at, look at what's happened here. Your brain so wants to fight this belief that you might be hurting people and causing suffering, that you've created a new limiting belief that it's no big deal. When really what you just told me is, you're only on time when it matters. So when you're not on time, it's because their interests don't matter.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  Just sit with that for a second.

• 1:11:36Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:39Hala Taha?

  Well, that's not nice because I love my friends.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  Of course you do.

• 1:11:43Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43Speaker 01

  Absolutely, you do. And what is the whole point of looking at limiting beliefs? And the reason you say it's not nice is because your brain now has created a new belief so that you can keep thinking you're nice and your behavior is okay, even when you know you're not behaving in a way that's nice.

• 1:12:02Hala Taha?

  Hmm.

• 1:12:04Speaker 01

  Because if you are telling in your life, "Hey, it's kind of hurting me that you don't think I'm important." They see this. They know that you're on time for a 7,000-person event. And so your brain has manufactured a belief that, "What's the big deal? It's a casual event. I don't want to be stressed. So you be stressed. So you miss me. So you think that you're not that important." So, again, what's true? I don't know. That's not the point. The point here is to reduce suffering. And so if this is a constant thing that nags at you, that you think, "You know what? I built a huge business. I'm doing amazing. I have so many friends. But this is an area of my life that's not that great. Like, I wish I could fix this." It could be something worth exploring to think, "Is that belief serving me?

• 1:12:49Speaker 01

  Is it worth serving me that it doesn't hurt anybody when I'm late? What's the big deal?" That could be a limiting belief. I don't know.

• 1:12:59Hala Taha?

  And it could be helpful for me to tell everybody in my life too, like, "Hey, I'm working on this. Like, don't call me a late person anymore." Because even when I do good, I get told like, "Oh, you're early. What a surprise." Like, you know what I mean? So it's like, it's also important for people in your life to know, like, "Hey, I'm working on this so that they don't come back in that way."

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  I think that's great. It's another limiting belief, though. Why? Because if that doesn't happen...

• 1:13:30Hala Taha?

  Then I'll be resentful, yeah. Then I have to do my own turnaround.

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  So now you're offloading. It's because you keep telling me, I keep telling people, stop calling me late. Can't control that.

• 1:13:42Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:42Speaker 01

  What you can control is your interpretation of that. Right? What you can control, what is in your control is being on time, which it sounds like you're working on, which is fantastic. That's something that's important to you. It's one of your values to be seen as someone who has personal integrity, right? If I show up on time, I deliver the goods on time, I pay my bills on time, I'm reliable, I have integrity. That's you. I know you. That's you. This is one weird quirk about your behavior, but 99% of you is someone who lives with personal integrity. You would have gotten this far if you didn't have personal integrity. So it's this weird little quirk. But asking others to do something, to change, and making that dependent on, well, I can't change unless they do, that's going to be a long road.

• 1:14:25Hala Taha?

  Yeah. This is so helpful.

• 1:14:27Speaker 01

  Is it? So what can you do differently, you think?

• 1:14:30Hala Taha?

  I think what I can do differently is in the moments where I know that I need to be somewhere, like dinner reservations, right? Like, that's like my, the biggest thing that I'm like late for is like, I'll come 15 minutes late to dinner or something like that. Tell myself like this, my relationships are just as important as work. And so I need to treat this just as important as a work thing, so I don't let them down, I don't let me down. And also so I start to establish this new identity of somebody who's on time. And even if it means that they're surprised, if I surprise them enough times, that maybe they'll stop believing that I'm somebody who's not on time and I'll also believe in myself that I'm more on time.

• 1:15:11Speaker 01

  Beautiful. And here's what's gonna happen, the more you do that, at first, people will say, oh my God, look at you, you're on time. Wow, good for you. They'll dig into you. And you know what you're gonna be able to say is, yeah, I've been hearing that a lot lately, thanks.

• 1:15:27Speaker 01

  And you say that two, three, four times. Yeah, I've been hearing that a lot, that I'm on time. Thanks a lot for acknowledging that. And then they're gonna stop saying it.

• 1:15:34Hala Taha?

  Yep.

• 1:15:35Speaker 01

  Because over time, you're gonna prove it to yourself that this is something that you do. And they're gonna stop saying it because now it's not funny anymore, right? Like, it's just...

• 1:15:44Hala Taha?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:45Speaker 01

  It's not interesting anymore because now your behavior has actually changed. And the most important thing is you're going to teach your brain a new belief that I'm not always late. In fact, I'm pretty much always on time. It's not the minority of instances. Almost always I am on time.

• 1:16:01Hala Taha?

  It's such a great exercise for anybody who has any sort of limiting belief, whether it's, you know, you believe that you're always late or everybody has different limiting beliefs. So I love that we went through this exercise.

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  Well, thanks for being so vulnerable and being a good sport around this.

• 1:16:14Hala Taha?

  Of course, of course. I feel like my whole audience knows I'm always... This has gotten brought up more than one time.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  And they wanna see this. It's really important that successful people show that we all have these limiting beliefs. I mean, I wrote the book for me. You know how many limiting beliefs I have? Oh, my God. You'll read all about them in the book. So many limiting beliefs. But our default state is always to go into what we know, what's comfortable. That's where we are safe. Because changing is hard. It means that we have to do something differently, that we're not perfect. But that's how we grow. That's how we get better.

• 1:16:45Hala Taha?

  Totally. So my last question to you is, what is your secret to profiting in life? And this can go beyond things that we talked about today, beyond business even. Just what is your secret to living a successful, profiting life?

• 1:16:59Speaker 01

  I think it's self-examination. I think it's the secret to a profitable life is a life lived with minimal regret. I don't wanna get to the end of... I don't wanna live a day, I don't wanna live a week, a month, a year, certainly not a lifetime, saying, "I could've done that thing. I could've changed that. I could've treated people better in some way, and I didn't." I don't want regret in my life. I mean, we're gonna all have regrets, right? We make mistakes. But to know about something that I can change and not change it when it's possible, that's a missed opportunity. So to me, profiting in life is about living a life that is full of joy, is full of companionship, is full of helping others, and limiting as much as possible the regret we have.

• 1:17:43Hala Taha?

  That's beautiful. Nir, where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?

• 1:17:48Speaker 01

  Thanks. Yeah, so my website is nirandfar.com. That's spelled like my first name, N-I-R-andfar.com. And we have a special gift for listeners. We have at nirandfar.com/belief-change. That's forward slash belief-change. There's a five-minute belief change guide that you can use every single day that gets you on this pattern. Again, this is a practice. It's repetition. That's how you change your limiting beliefs, and it's absolutely free. You don't have to buy a single thing.

• 1:18:13Hala Taha?

  Amazing. We'll put that link in the show notes. Thank you so much for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast.

• 1:18:18Speaker 01

  My pleasure. Thanks for having me.

• 1:18:20Hala Taha?

  Yeah, Bam, I really loved this episode. Nir always comes with the fire. He does such great thinking, and he just always gives us something to really noodle on and really change our perspective. And today, he gave us a deeper understanding of what truly drives performance. Information is abundant, especially in 2026. Advice is endless, but execution is rare. And the gap between knowing and achieving, it all comes down to belief. So here are three things I want you to actually take into your life and your business moving forward. First off, use Nir's motivation triangle. The next time you procrastinate on a sales call, a workout, a launch, pause and diagnose why. Define the behavior clearly. Define the benefit clearly.

• 1:19:04Hala Taha?

  Then examine the belief under it. Do you believe the effort will actually pay off? Do you believe you can execute? If you catch a sentence like, "This won't work," or "I'm not ready," that's the actual obstacle that you're facing. Replace that belief with a belief that supports your action before you go on to touch your to-do list. Secondly, run the turnaround exercise the moment that you feel triggered. Let's say a teammate frustrates you or a partner disappoints you. Write that belief down. Maybe it sounds like... They don't care, or they always drop the ball. Then ask if that's absolutely true. Notice how you show up when you hold on to it. Then deliberately test the opposite. Turn it towards yourself. Ask where you might be contributing to this problem. It's not about blame.

• 1:19:49Hala Taha?

  It's about agency, and that shift alone can change how you lead and how you build trust with others. Third, stop turning labels into limits. Neer said it all too well. A diagnosis can be a map, but the moment it becomes your identity, it becomes a cage. Start noticing the phrases that shrink you, like, "I'm always late," or "I'm not a morning person." And then swap those beliefs out for ones that give you ownership and get you moving again. Yap Bham, you are so much more capable than you think. The persistence you admire in others is not reserved just for them. It's unlocked by what you choose to believe, and that choice is available to you right now. I believe in you, Yap Bham. All right, gang. Thank you so much for spending your time with me today. It genuinely means the world to me.

• 1:20:33Hala Taha?

  And if you haven't already, you guys can go subscribe to our YouTube channel. It's growing super fast. And I love connecting with you guys personally. So you can find me on Instagram at YapWithHala, or just link up with me on LinkedIn and search Hala Taha. Until next time, this is your host, Hala Taha, AKA The Podcast Princess, signing off.