Nir Eyal: The Four Questions That Can Change Any Belief

Summary

Afford Anything Podcast: “Nir Eyal: The Four Questions That Can Change Any Belief”
Host: Paula Pant
Guest: Nir Eyal (Author of “Indistractable” and “Beyond Belief”)
Release Date: March 20, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Paula Pant sits down with behavioral psychologist and bestselling author Nir Eyal to explore how our beliefs shape both our perception of reality and our ability to achieve goals. The conversation centers on why motivation is really about escaping discomfort, not chasing rewards, and includes a deep dive into a practical, four-question exercise designed to challenge and shift limiting beliefs. The discussion weaves together real-life stories, scientific research, and actionable frameworks—particularly relevant to financial psychology and personal development.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Motivation Is Escaping Discomfort, Not Chasing Rewards

• Motivation Misconception: Motivation isn’t about wanting something enough, but about the desire to escape discomfort.
• Mental Contrasting vs. Manifesting: Visualizing only success (manifesting) can decrease motivation; visualizing obstacles (mental contrasting) boosts follow-through.
  • Research Reference: Gabrielle Oettingen’s studies show that simply picturing success reduces the drive to take action, while mentally rehearsing obstacles helps prepare for real-life setbacks.

Notable Quote:

“Motivation is not about rewards. Motivation is about the desire to escape discomfort… money management is pain management, time management is pain management, weight management is pain management. It’s all pain management.”
— Nir Eyal [06:01]

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How Beliefs Shape Reality

• Predictive Processing: Our brains process 11 million bits of data per second, but conscious attention is only about 50 bits. We see not reality, but a predicted, belief-filtered version.
• Self-Limiting vs. Liberating Beliefs: A limiting belief amplifies suffering and saps motivation; liberating beliefs do the opposite.
• “Lucky” Mindset: People who believe they're lucky actually notice opportunities others miss (e.g., “there are 43 images in this paper” experiment).

Notable Quote:

“People who see themselves as lucky actually become lucky.”
— Paula Pant [10:04]

“Our beliefs become our reality.”
— Nir Eyal [02:53]

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Persistence: The True Separator of Success

• Successful People Are Persistent “Losers”: Persistence, not skill or resources, is what distinguishes the successful.
  • “Successful people lose more than unsuccessful people. They persist through obstacles.” — Nir Eyal [14:57]
• Comfort with Discomfort: The ability to tolerate discomfort and keep going matters more than being on the “perfect plan.”

Notable Quote:

“Successful people are losers… They lose all the time. Unsuccessful people say, ‘Well, I tried, it didn’t work, so I never tried again.’”
— Nir Eyal [16:11]

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Practical Tool: The Four-Question Turnaround Exercise

The Framework (Byron Katie’s Inquiry-Based Stress Reduction)

1. Is it true?
2. Is it absolutely true?
3. Who am I when I hold onto this belief?
4. Who would I be without this belief?
   • Then, try the Turnaround: Consider if the opposite could also be true, or if the belief applies to oneself.

Example Application: “My mother is too judgmental and hard to please.”

• [25:50-32:43] Nir Eyal shares a personal story applying the framework, revealing how shifting the belief reduced his suffering and improved his relationships.

Notable Quote:

“Beliefs are tools, not truths… You get to decide which beliefs serve you.”
— Nir Eyal [32:28, 63:16]

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Placebo, Nocebo, and Belief’s Biological Power

• The strength of belief can result in real physiological changes (e.g., the placebo and nocebo effect).
• Open Label Placebos: Even when people know a pill is inert, their symptoms can improve if they expect improvement—a rapidly growing field in medicine.

Notable Quote:

“If our beliefs are so powerful that they can affect what we physically feel, they can affect everything we do and everything we think we are capable of doing.”
— Nir Eyal [35:51]

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Learned Helplessness Revisited: Hope Must Be Learned

• Helplessness is Innate: Contrary to longstanding belief, psychology now finds we’re born passive and self-protective—hope and persistence must be learned.
  • Rat Experiment: Rats rescued from drowning once can swim for 60 hours vs. just 15 minutes at first—having hope makes them vastly more persistent.
• Fight Passivity with Small Steps: Build hope and persistence with incremental progress and by identifying and working through limiting beliefs.

Notable Quote:

“Helplessness is our default state and what has to be learned is hope. We have to actively fight against that passivity.”
— Nir Eyal [41:28]

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When to Quit: Three Checkpoints

1. Have you hit your checkpoint? (predetermined evaluation point)
2. Are you still learning? (If yes, keep going; if not, reconsider)
3. Does sustained effort still offer value? (If not, it’s time to quit)

“Persistence just for the sake of banging your head against the wall—you don’t win medals for that.”
— Nir Eyal [49:20]

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From To-Do Lists to Timeboxing: Turning Values Into Action

• Timeboxing: Allocate actual blocks on your calendar to what matters; to-do lists are endless and breed overwhelm.
• Values = Attributes of the Person You Want to Become: Embed your values into your schedule (and your budget).
  • Prioritize self-care > relationships > work (both reflective and reactive).

Notable Quote:

“Turn your values into time… because you can’t say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from.”
— Nir Eyal [52:44]

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Money vs. Time: Where to Prioritize

• Be Stingy with Time, Generous with Money: Time is a finite, non-renewable resource—unlike income.
• Money Decisions: Unlike with time, financial priorities can often be sorted using math; once the math is done, values pick up where formulas end.
• Values Drive Allocation: No one can tell you whether your retirement or your kid’s college fund is more important—that’s a values question.

Notable Quote:

“I think we should be actually generous with our money but stingy with our time.”
— Nir Eyal [59:00]

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• “We don’t see people as they are, we see people as we are.” — Nir Eyal [25:58]
• “Venting doesn’t work because it reinforces your beliefs about the other person.” — Nir Eyal [25:53]
• “The brain hates changing its mind.” — Nir Eyal [26:12]
• “Dreams don’t become reality until you devote the time to do them.” — Nir Eyal [53:05]
• “All motivation is about pain management.” — Nir Eyal [56:53]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• [00:00] Episode intro, Nir Eyal introduction
• [02:23] Why beliefs are critical to performance and resilience
• [03:40] The science behind “beliefs become reality” (non-woo-woo)
• [05:01] Visualization research: pitfalls of manifesting
• [07:05] Motivation, pain, and procrastination
• [10:04] Study: Lucky vs. unlucky people, and scanning for opportunity
• [11:56] Ann Mallam/Solidcore: The “reality distortion field”
• [14:47] Persistence vs. knowledge/resources
• [18:20] Dealing with conflicting advice, comfort with discomfort
• [24:21] The four-question turnaround exercise
• [32:46] Turning beliefs framework into AI prompts/handouts
• [33:52] The placebo and nocebo effect in belief
• [41:16] Learned helplessness: why hope, not helplessness, must be learned
• [44:42] Experiments on hope: Rat swimming study
• [48:31] How and when to quit: The three checkpoints
• [52:13] Timeboxing, prioritization, and living your values
• [57:51] Prioritizing money versus time
• [60:36] Summarizing key takeaways

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Key Takeaways (as highlighted in episode close)

1. Motivation is pain management

“Every financial decision… is about managing discomfort. It’s not about rewards.”
— Paula Pant [61:01]

2. Success is a function of persistence, not avoiding failure

“Successful people are losers… They lose all the time… They persist through obstacles.”
— Nir Eyal [62:30]

3. Beliefs are tools, not truths

“If a belief is making you miserable… ask: does this serve me? Not, is this true?”
— Paula Pant [62:49]

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Resources & Free Handout

• Four-Question “Turnaround” Exercise by Byron Katie
  With an interactive, fillable handout and AI prompt: affordanything.com/turnitaround

• Nir Eyal’s site: Nirandfar.com

• Book: Beyond Belief, available wherever books are sold

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Conclusion

This episode delivers a science-backed, deeply practical guide to changing limiting beliefs and unlocking personal growth, especially in finances and career. Through real-world examples, memorable analogies, and step-by-step mental models, Nir Eyal and Paula Pant provide listeners with mindsets and tools to break through mental barriers, persist through challenges, and align daily decisions with one’s highest values.

Transcript

[Paula Pant]

Most of us think that motivation is about wanting something badly enough, but today's guest says that's wrong. Motivation is not about rewards. Motivation is about escaping discomfort. And that reframe has powerful implications for how we achieve our goals. Today's guest is Nir Eyal. He writes at the intersection of psychology and technology and previously taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He his previous book Indistractable, sold a million copies and he has a new book out called Beyond Belief. And he's here to talk about why your beliefs become your biology and what to do about it. So we talk about why visualizing your goals can actually backfire. We discuss why helplessness is not learned. It's actually our default state. And we walk through a four question exercise for interrogating a belief that is holding you back. And this works for money and it works for your relationships, your career, for anything. Welcome to the Afford Anything podcast, the show that knows you can afford anything, not everything. This show covers five pillars, financial psychology, which is the subject of today's episode. Increasing your income, investing, real estate and entrepreneurship. So the acronym is Fire with two eyes. Double I fire. I'm your host, Paula Pantai, trained in economic reporting at Columbia. Remember that four question exercise that I talked about? Four questions for interrogating a belief that's holding you back. We have a free handout that you can use so that you can go through this four question exercise yourself. It is interactive, it's fill outable and it also includes an AI prompt so you can just copy paste the prompt and that will help you with this exercise so you can download it for free at affordanything.com turnitaround that's affordanything.com/turn it around. With that said, here is Nir Eyal. Nir, welcome.

[Nir Eyal]

Thank you. Great to be here.

[Paula Pant]

I'm so happy to be talking to you. But I have to admit I just flew back from Singapore. I am completely jet lagged. The thing that I told myself on my way here is I believe that I'm awake. I believe that I will be able to stay awake.

[Nir Eyal]

Great so far.

[Paula Pant]

Thank you.

[Nir Eyal]

I'm impressed. It's working.

[Paula Pant]

Thank you, thank you. But that belief is critical. Tell me why.

[Nir Eyal]

Well, I would alter the belief a little bit. It's not so you might have the physical feeling of being tired. Okay. But your interpretation of that information can change. So you could be feeling physically tired and say, I'm going to mess up this interview. It's not going to go well. I'm not going to Ask my best questions, what are people going to think? And start a rumination cycle like I

[Paula Pant]

used to do, right?

[Nir Eyal]

Or you could say, you know what, even if I'm tired, it's a new challenge. I'm gonna see what happens and it's gonna work out. I'm gonna learn from it either way. That this isn't happening for me. I'm sorry. That this isn't happening to me. It's happening for me. So it's another learning opportunity. I'm also jet lagged, by the way. I came from Barcelona and last night I was up at 2 in the morning thinking, oh my gosh, I'm typically gonna love this interview. And if I'm too tired, then how could I possibly perform? And turns out those are nothing but limiting beliefs. That two people can experience the same exact reality and have completely different interpretations about what. And based on how they deal with that information, whether they think it's helpful or harmful, they perform completely differently because our beliefs become our reality. Hmm.

[Paula Pant]

I feel like many of us have heard this concept before, but it can sound a little bit woo woo. What makes this not woo woo?

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah, it's a great point. So I am not woo woo at all. Like I'm the opposite of that. But it turns out that some of the woo woo is actually right for the wrong reasons.

[Paula Pant]

Okay.

[Nir Eyal]

The universe does not care about your cosmic vibrations. It's not, you know, saying, putting out wishes and vision boards and manifesting. Sorry, that's. That's just not how dreams come true. You have to actually do the work. But, but it turns out that there's a wrong way and a right way to do this kind of stuff. That if you manifest the outcomes, if you envision just the ends, it backfires. And this is the work of Gabrielle Otigen. She did these studies where she connected people to heart rate monitors and blood pressure monitors and she asked them to visualize their manifested future. Right. Envision that beach body. Think about how I'm going to have that luxury home and the Lamborghini, or I'm going to find love in my life. Whatever the outcomes. And she found that when people did that, their blood pressure dropped, they became more relaxed. And then afterwards, when she followed up with them, turns out the people who had done these manifesting exercises became less likely to do the work to get the outcomes. In one case, she had college students do visualization exercises about getting an A on their exam. And those same students were the ones who were less likely to study for the exam, and they did worse.

[Paula Pant]

Did the brain get some form of gratification?

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah, yeah. It basically tells the brain you're already good to go, like you've already done the work and so you don't have that, that drive, that motivation to keep going. Because one is motivation. Motivation is not about rewards. Motivation is about the desire to escape discomfort. All motivation, and this is super important for, you know, when it comes to personal finance for sure, that all motivation is about the desire to escape discomfort, which must therefore mean that money management is pain management, time management is pain management, weight management is pain management. It's all pain management. When we tell the brain, hey, things are fine, feels like you already got it. Don't worry about the obstacles in your way. It's gonna just come to you. Just think good thoughts and, you know, extract good vibes into the universe and it'll happen. You don't do it, you, you become less likely to go do those steps. So the right way to do it is called mental contrasting. Mental contrasting is where we contrast the outcome we want to what's in our way. So this is where self help takes a good idea that is true and kind of bastardized it. So they took visioning and they say, you know, lots of people do visioning exercises. For example, athletes, they definitely have visualizations exercises. But what does an athlete visualize? An athlete does not visualize, here's my trophy, here's my, you know, gold medal. An athlete visualizes the obstacles in their way. So if I'm on offense and defense is coming at me, what am I going to do? If I'm skiing down that mountain, what's my path? That's what they're visualizing, what's in their way. So what we have to do, how do we make this concrete? We have to visualize what is going to be in our way for any one of our goals. So if it's accruing wealth, it's not, oh, I want the Lamborghini in the pretty house. It's what am I going to do when I'm tempted to splurge on something I can't afford or something I shouldn't buy for myself? How will I deal with those feelings when I want to spend? And I'm telling myself that's not a good idea. That's what we need. We need that script in our minds to separate the pain, the stimulus from the suffering. That's the most important lesson I learned over the past six years of research, is that pain and suffering is not the same thing, that we can disconnect

[Paula Pant]

the two what is procrastination then? If motivation is related to pain, I mean, procrastination feels like a little bit of both because it's the avoidance of pain, but also the perpetuation of pain.

[Nir Eyal]

That's a great example. It's the avoidance of immediate discomfort for immediate gratification, but that results in long term suffering. And this is the nature of actually all limiting beliefs. That limiting beliefs, by definition, they SAP motivation and they increase suffering. Whereas a liberating belief increases motivation and decreases suffering. So when I procrastinate and I tell myself I don't feel like this, and what's the limiting belief there? Because I don't feel like it, it's bad, I'm making a judgment. Limiting beliefs always involve judgments. So do liberating beliefs. So when I judge to myself, I don't feel like it. Right now I'm interpreting the pain, the signal of discomfort. And sometimes it's physiological, right? I'm tired, my body doesn't feel right, whatever. I have adhd. Sometimes it's my ADHD symptoms acting up, so to speak. But I don't have to put a label those feelings. Just because I don't feel like it doesn't mean that doing it is bad, that I don't have to suffer from that discomfort. Here's. Let me back up a minute. The biggest myth out there is that you see reality clearly. Folks don't understand how untrue that is. None of us sees reality. There's no such thing. Because the brain is taking in 11 million bits of information per second. Right now your brain is absorbing 11 million bits of information per second. That's the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second twice. It's a tremendous amount of information. The light entering your retinas, the sound of my voice in your ears, the ambient temperature of the room. Your brain is aware of all this and it's processing all this data. Conscious attention can only process about 50 bits of information. That's the equivalent of one sentence per second. So 11 million bits versus 50 bits. Your brain simply can't process all that information. So it has to take a shortcut. It has to look at the world through this tiny pinhole of attention and try and make sense of what it observes. But it can't. So it has to adjust. How does it adjust? It predicts reality. Doesn't see reality, it predicts reality. We call this predictive processing. This is the best model we know of the brain to date. How does it predict based on its beliefs, based on your priors, your Prior beliefs will dictate what information comes into your conscious awareness. So, and this isn't woo at all, this is, this is well supported science. So what you expect to see, what you pay attention to affects what you will actually do. So when I get a piece of information that says from my body, my body feels one way and that must therefore mean that it must be interpreted, it must be judged in a certain way. I'm feeling tired, therefore that's bad and I shouldn't do X, Y, Z. I've made a judgment and that judgment is based on what served me before in the past. So what can immediately take me out of suffering can lead, of course, to long term suffering.

[Paula Pant]

And that's why in a non woo woo way, people who see themselves as lucky actually become lucky.

[Nir Eyal]

Exactly right. So this study, they had two groups of people. One was they believed they were lucky versus they believed they were unlucky. And they gave them a very simple task. They said, look at this newspaper. And we want you to simply count the number of images in the paper. That's all you gotta do. One, two, three, four, five. How many images? The unlucky people took two and a half minutes to do the task. Two and a half minutes. The lucky people who just believed they were lucky, there wasn't an objective fact. Right. They didn't, you know, measure, are these people actually lucky or not? They just believed they were lucky and identified as lucky. They took 11 seconds. So two and a half minutes versus 11 seconds, why the difference? There was one image that said, there are 43 images in this paper. Collect your reward. The unlucky people didn't even see it. Their eyes glanced over it. The information entered their brains, but their conscious attention was never triggered. The 50 bits of information didn't include what was written on the picture. The people who believed they were lucky saw it immediately and, and we're out of there in 11 seconds. So this is an amazing demonstration of how people who have certain beliefs, whether they are true or not, believing that you are lucky, for example, is that an objective truth? No, not really. It's just a belief, but it changes how you view reality. That simulation running in your mind will see things that other people's simulation just won't see. So entrepreneurs have what's called entrepreneurial alertness. To an Entrepreneur, they see $100 bills all over the ground. They see opportunities everywhere. Most people don't. Most people who are not entrepreneurs, they don't see it. Right? They just don't see the opportunities because their brain is not Operating on that same belief set.

[Paula Pant]

There's a great story about the founder of Solidcore who saw a handful of opportunities that many would have overlooked. Many did overlook.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah. So Ann Mallam, she was an avid runner, and in her early 20s, she was running by a homeless shelter. One of the homeless guys asked her, hey, is all you do run all day? And she said, is all you do stand out there all day? And they started this, like, funny rapport with each other. And then she would run by day after day, and she would kind of like, say a snarky remark, and they would remark back, and, hey, there's that girl running again. And then one day, she kind of stopped cold in her tracks, and she asked herself, why do they have to be the homeless people and I get to be the runner? And she decided to do something about it. She had this crazy idea, what if we ran together? Now, she wasn't trying to solve homelessness. She knew that it's a systemic problem. There's lots of issues that go into systemic homelessness. But she wanted to do something for those guys. So she asked them, do you want to run? Do you want to go on a run with me? First time she did this, I think nine guys showed up, and they did a little jog around the block. But then they did it again and again and again, and it became this massive organization that has touched the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. I think they're in 13 cities now called Back on My Feet. And so what they're trying to do is change people's belief systems, that if I can get up at 6am and go for a jog, what else am I capable of doing, right? You wouldn't think of a homeless person as the kind of person who has the dedication, the commitment to go running at 6am but those who do get connected with all kinds of other services and volunteers and opportunities, and they start changing their belief system. And then they were able to see things differently, to feel things differently, and then ultimately to do some things differently. And so you say, okay, maybe Ann got lucky. She had a nice opportunity, but then she did it again. So while she was out fundraising for Back on My Feet, she goes on a trip to la. And she walks by this fitness studio, and she just falls in love with it. And she starts thinking to herself, there's. There's something here. And she digs into it. She walks in, she asks the owner a few questions, and she starts, like being almost a forensic accountant on how the business makes money. She decides to replicate something like this. And she writes down, she calls her shot. She says, I will sell this business for $100 million. She literally, like, writes it down on a piece of paper, and a few years later, she does it. She manages to sell this company, Solidcore, from her conviction that it's going to happen. And so she has this. This trait that Walter Isaacson described in his biography of Steve Jobs called a reality distortion field. She saw something that everybody could see. Right. Everybody. Lots of people walked by this particular gym. Lots of us walk by, homeless people and don't think anything of it. Somebody else will fix it. An entrepreneur like Ann saw something that. That most people don't see. She had this reality distortion field that she could see, an opportunity that the rest of us just would walk by, and she made it happen.

[Paula Pant]

So she saw potential. She saw what could be.

[Nir Eyal]

That's right.

[Paula Pant]

You mentioned earlier that it's important to see obstacles, to be able to visualize you. You gave the analogy of an athlete skiing down a hill who sees the obstacles, the trees in the path.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah.

[Paula Pant]

How do we square seeing potential, seeing what could be, with also seeing the

[Nir Eyal]

obstacles and not becoming overwhelmed?

[Paula Pant]

Yeah.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah. It's not saying that those obstacles won't exist. It's about believing you will rise to the challenge, that you will learn something no matter what the obstacle is, that it's not something to be feared. And that's where most people crumble. Because when they think to themselves, well, this should just happen for me because I manifested it or I thought positively about it, and then they get hit with some kind of obstacle, some kind of problem in their way. They don't know how to emotionally deal with it. And we all deal with this. Right. So I used to be clinically obese. When I first started dieting, you know, I made the plans. I had the conviction that I was going to lose weight, but then when it would get difficult or when someone would tell me about a different diet. So when I was on low fat and someone said, no, you should do keto. No, you should do vegan diets. No, you should do intermittent fasting. No, you should do this. That loss of confidence and that inability to deal with that discomfort and that uncertainty of, well, am I on the right path? And are these feelings that I have this discomfort, do I know how to deal with it, or do I crumble underneath it? That's what separates the people who can sustain their efforts for over the long term, because turns out, successful people are losers. What do I mean by that? That successful people lose more than Unsuccessful people. We think that successful people are always successful. No, they're successful because they persist through obstacles. They're losers, they lose all the time. You talk to successful people, they can tell you, oh my gosh, that didn't work, that didn't work, that didn't work. Whereas an unsuccessful person says, well, I tried, it didn't work, so I never tried again. That's the difference. What creates success in all facets of life, whether it's personal finance, whether it's relationships, whether it's raising a family, whether it's personal health. The biggest factor of who succeeds and who fails, it's not knowing the right information. It's not resources. There's plenty of people who have everything and accomplish very little. There's plenty of people who have very little and do great things. It's not even skill acquisition because skill can be learned. It's persistence. That's really what separates achieving your goal. It's, do you quit? Not that it's always a bad thing to quit. Sometimes quitting is the right thing to do. But persistence, it turns out, is the most defining trait. So how do you sustain your motivation over the long term? You need to build the right beliefs that when things get hard, you will know you can overcome them, you'll learn something from them. So things never get easier, you get stronger. That's one of my personal mantras that I have to constantly repeat to myself, because your default state is to slip into passivity. But to repeat those daily mantras, that's something that I've. That I've since adopted over the past six years of research. You need to have these phrases, these mantras, these prayers, in a way that you're constantly reminding yourself that you can do this. Not to lie to yourself, but to unlock what's already there. You're just reminding yourself to not slip into that passivity that you can do more than you think you're capable of.

[Paula Pant]

You mentioned that you used to be clinically obese, but at the time you were. Part of the struggle was that there were so many different tactics presented. Keto, vegan, low fat, low carb. How did you. At that time, you know, this is something we see in the personal finance space as well. There are so many different theories about how you should manage your money.

[Nir Eyal]

Right?

[Paula Pant]

And when presented with contrasting information, people will sometimes switch so rapidly from theory A to theory B to theory C to theory D that there's no forward progress in any given domain. How did you deal with that?

[Nir Eyal]

Or what I did is I would give up completely, right? I would say, well, you see, I knew it. Dieting doesn't work, right? It's the food industrial complex. That's why I'm overweight. And so I would just give up completely. And so then I'd have a slice of pizza and followed up the slice of pizza with a chaser of fries and maybe a beer. And I would say, ah, what the hell, it's too late. See now, now there's evidence diets don't work because I fell off the train. As opposed to a liberating belief, which is, you know what? I can decide with the next thing I eat. I don't have to be on this perfect plan and always do the do exactly what the plan says. Sometimes I can diverge, but I can get back to the path I know is going to work over the long term. That took, I think, comfort with discomfort. I mean, with personal finance, how many times do we suffer from either spending because of our feelings, trying to ride out the market because of our inability to deal with the turbulations in the market, Right? We know that the average investor will sell at the bottom and buy at the peak, which is exactly the opposite of what you do. Why? It's because it's uncomfortable. I'm losing money. Look how much I lost. I can't deal with that again. Money management is pain management. So having the skill, the exercise of knowing how to deal with that discomfort, knowing that, that signal entering your brain of, ugh, this feels bad. This feels bad. That's just data. That's just part of that 11 million bits of information. The judgment is what it's all about. That. Well, if we can shift from a mindset of saying to ourselves, oh, this hurts, I need to get out of this situation versus this hurts. And it's an opportunity. Good. Awesome. Like, just before I came over here, I was making a cup of coffee this morning, I dropped the glass and it shattered. Normally I'd be mad at it, and why does this happen? And I got these big interviews today. This is terrible. Judgment, judgment, judgment, judgment. That's what I would always do. This time when I drop the coffee mug. Great. This is my opportunity to practice patience. Market drops. It's my opportunity to practice patience. I'm hungry, but I'm trying to lose weight. Awesome. It's an opportunity for me to practice patience. My kid is annoying me, right? Like all of these relationships, the news, all of these annoyances in life, there's no reason to suffer from it. It's just data. It's our Interpretation of the data that causes the suffering.

[Paula Pant]

Hmm.

[Nir Eyal]

And leads us to bad decisions ultimately.

[Paula Pant]

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[Nir Eyal]

Yeah, this is still hard to tell because it's a little embarrassing, but I'll do it anyway. A few years ago, my mother was turning 74. I wanted to do something nice for her. The problem was I was in Singapore and she was in central Florida, where I grew up. I decided I wanted to get her some flowers because I can call those in. But I spent a lot of time finding the right florist, making sure the flowers got on out on time, that they would be delivered, they wouldn't burn in the Florida heat. And I spent a lot of time and effort making sure that she got her flowers. And I went to bed that night thinking, okay, you know what? I'm a good son. I patted myself on the back like she's gonna love them. I'm call her tomorrow and she's going to say, wow, what a nice gesture. Thank you so much. That's not what happened. I called her up the next day and I said, hey mom, happy birthday. Did you get the flowers I sent? And she said, yes, I did. Thank you very much. But just so you know, the flowers that you sent, they were half dead and I wouldn't use that florist again. To which I said, well, that's the last time I buy you flowers. And that went over about as well as you'd imagine. Not so good. After the call, my wife turned to me and she said, do you want to do a turnaround on this? To which I said, no, I do not want to do your hocus pocus mumbo jumbo touchy feely nonsense. I need to vent. Right? My mother clearly was being super judgmental and super hard to please. And I need you to listen to me tell you why my mother is wrong and I'm right. But I knew at that point well enough that venting doesn't work. Even though we're told, you know, you got to get it off your chest. You got to tell people how you really feel. Don't keep your feelings inside. That's bad advice.

[Paula Pant]

Even, even time limited venting, like two minutes, like, well, if you do it

[Nir Eyal]

to yourself, if you write it out, what you typically will realize when you do it by yourself is that it's nonsense. Because what happens when you vent is that you are reinforcing this effigy of the other person. And so what happens? Just like we don't see reality clearly, we don't see people as they are, we see people as we are. That's ancient wisdom, right? That's not woo at all. That's the truth. Because again, your brain sees what it predicts because it has that tiny keyhole of attention. So you don't see the closest people in your life as they really are. Strangers see them differently. You see them as you know them. So when my mom does the little tiniest thing, that annoys me. Now I'm 13 years old again, because of my prior beliefs, my prior experiences. There she goes again. She's doing that thing again. She's doing it to annoy me, right? She's being so judgmental. So venting doesn't work because it does nothing but reinforce again and again your beliefs about that other person. A much better tactic is called a turnaround. And this comes from what's called inquiry based stress reduction. It's a technique developed by Byron, Katie, and actually it goes back all the way to Aristotle did something very similar. And this technique offers you the opportunity to collect what I call a portfolio of perspectives. You're not doing it to change your mind. That's not the point. Because your brain hates changing its mind. Your brain hates changing its mind. For us to try and think something different might be true is super uncomfortable. Because our default state is passivity, we want to revert back to what we always believe because that was safe. It protected us in the past, so it'll protect us in the future. But of course, we can't grow if we keep doing the same thing again and again. So what inquiry based stress reduction offers us is the chance to ask ourselves four questions that let us see things from potentially different point of view. So what does this sound like? First thing I did was write down the belief. The belief was, my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. Okay, that was my belief. The first question was, is it true. And you can do this with any belief. Whether it's a belief about somebody else, whether it's why your personal financial situation is difficult, why you can't save money, why you can't get that promotion, why your kids are arguing with you, any type of belief that you think this is the way it is, but things aren't getting better and you're not sure why. I call this the muck. If you have that situation, you're in that muck, you're in that relationship that's not being repaired, the suffering it's causing you from one thing or another, this is where to look for it. So I wrote down that belief. My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. The first question is, is it true? Now it's a super annoying question because it seems like a obvious answer. Yes, it's true. I just told. Didn't I just tell you what my mom did? That's clearly too judgmental.

[Paula Pant]

Right?

[Nir Eyal]

Second question is, is it absolutely true? Sounds like the first question, but it's a little bit different. Is it absolutely true? Meaning there is no potential other explanation? A hundred percent, Absolutely. Only one potential truth. As true as the world being a sphere and not flat. There's only one potential truth. Not really. Right? Maybe. Maybe there's another explanation for why she did what she did. I can't be a hundred percent sure that she was being judgmental and hard to please. Okay, third question. Who am I when I hold onto this belief? When I believe my mother is too judgmental and hard to please? By the way, we haven't asked is this true yet? That's not the exercise. It's just what happens to me when I hold onto that belief. I'm not very nice, I'm impatient. I act like a 13 year old version of myself. Now the fourth question. Who would I be without this belief? Would I be without this belief? If I had a magic wand and poof, that belief disappeared from my brain, who would I be? How would I feel? Feel better? I'd feel lighter. I'd feel less judgmental. I'd be more myself. So in 30 seconds, we determined that this thing we think is a fact may not be a fact, may just be a belief that it doesn't serve us and that doing away with it actually might serve us quite well. Now the next part of the exercise is to do what's called a turnaround, which is where we ask ourselves to do something super uncomfortable, which feels totally unnatural, which is to ask ourselves, could the exact opposite also be true? Again, the brain hates changing its mind. This will sound ridiculous to you at first, as it did for me. So what's the opposite of my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. My mother is not too judgmental and hard to please. Could there be any possible way that's true? Any possible way? Well, it was just a statement of fact. The flowers were half dead. Is that necessarily a judgment? It's a statement of fact. Maybe she was trying to protect me from getting scammed from this florist. So she was trying to be helpful, not hurtful. It's one potential perspective. I'm not saying it's true or false. That's not what we're looking for. Is there any possibility that that could also be true? Yes. Okay, here's a third perspective. The opposite of my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. I am too judgmental and hard to please. Could that possibly be true? Well, when I went to bed that night, I rehearsed in my head exactly the kind of praise I was expecting. And when I didn't hear that effusive praise from my mom thanking me for the flowers, I lost it. So who was being judgmental? I was. I was judging her response. Now, there's a fourth belief, and this one turned out to be the most painful, the most true. I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. So when I spent all that time and money shopping for the perfect flowers and they didn't show up, I messed up, right? I did something wrong. I took it as something about. As a commentary on myself, that I was judging myself as being incompetent, right? So this is what we call a misattribution of emotion. I felt crappy about something I'd done, so I was looking for the first person to take it out on. She was judging me. But that might not necessarily be the case. So now I have four potential beliefs. Which one is wrong? Which one is right? Which one is true? Which one is false? All of them. None of them. Who cares? Beliefs are tools, not truths. Beliefs are tools, not truths. One of those beliefs. That my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. In order to reduce my suffering, my mom had to change so I could be happy. I know you don't know my mom, but that's not gonna happen anytime. We're waiting for someone else to change so I can be happy, so I don't have to suffer. Don't hold your breath. You're gonna suffocate. The other three beliefs I could do something with right that was in my responsibility. I could change my suffering based on those three beliefs. And so it's not about which one is true, which one is false. It's not about finding fact. It's about which one serves me and which one hurts me. That believes are tools, not truth. So I could choose any of those three other beliefs, try them on for size, see how they change my life, see if they reduce my suffering and increase my motivation to have a positive relationship with my mom. And then if it doesn't work, I can go to the next belief, or the next can always revert to the first one. But I know the first one wasn't serving me. So now I had options as opposed to being stuck in one singular limiting belief.

[Paula Pant]

Would you mind if we wrote these out as AI prompts and did a giveaway? Yeah, of course.

[Nir Eyal]

Give credit to Byron, Katie, because it's not the inquiry Brace destroduction. I am quoting her. I'm citing her.

[Paula Pant]

Perfect. Yeah, I think that would be a really good. Because as you've been going through them, I'm visualizing in my head doing this as an AI prompt and then plugging in whatever belief is troubling you.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah.

[Paula Pant]

And then kind of going through. Because the. What else could be true? Like, that's something that I think AI could help you brainstorm.

[Nir Eyal]

Absolutely. Absolutely. Now, it is something that. It's like any new skill that it's uncomfortable at first, but it will change your life. Like, I used to be kind of annoyable. You know, like stupid things. Somebody cut me off in traffic. The baby on the flight is crying. The stock market's going up and down. Like, doesn't bother me anymore. Like, I don't have to suffer from that stuff anymore. That is so liberating that bad stuff happens. Bad stuff happens all the time. I was. I. I barely slept last night because of this terrible jet lag. Right. That we both seem to have.

[Paula Pant]

Yeah. Same before.

[Nir Eyal]

That would have really bugged me. And you know what's crazy? A big part of the research I've done over the past six years has been around the placebo effect and how there's. Not only is there a placebo effect, there's a nocebo effect. In fact, there's an amazing case study of a guy who has a terrible breakup with his girlfriend and decides that he's going to commit suicide. He can't handle that anymore. So he takes an entire bottle of pills, antidepressants. He swallows the whole bottle of pills and tries to commit suicide. The last moment after he swallows these pills, he decides he wants to change his mind. He wants to live after all. He runs over to the neighbor's house, knocks on the door and says, I took all my pills. You need to take me to the hospital. Friend rushes him to the emergency room. By the time he gets there, he's feeling incredibly weak. He passes out on the floor. But just before he passes out, he's able to tell the nurse, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. They rush him into the operating room to figure out what he's overdosed on, and they track his vitals. And his heart rate is plummeting. His blood pressure is dangerously low, and they're trying to figure out what. What did he take? They look on the pill jar, and it doesn't say the name of the antidepressant. It says a telephone number. You see this guy, Mr. He's called Mr. A in the case study. He was in a clinical trial. They called up this phone number and asked, what was this antidepressant? What did he take that's causing all these. These overdose symptoms? They look it up on the computer, and it turns out that Mr. A was in a clinical trial for these antidepressants, and he was in the control group. So those pills were not antidepressants. They were placebos. These physiological symptoms that he was feeling could not have been caused by the substance he took because there was nothing in the substance. They were basically empty pills. But he believed that he had taken something that would. Would kill him. And that's why his heart rate plummeted, his blood pressure plummeted. He was passing in and out of consciousness because his beliefs became his biology. And so if our beliefs are so powerful that they can affect what we physically feel, they can affect everything we do and everything we think we are capable of doing.

[Paula Pant]

On the topic of the placebo effect, isn't it. It's not just the pill itself. It's the ritual around it that goes into the effect that many people have.

[Nir Eyal]

It's two things. It's one expectancy that when we expect a certain result based on prior beliefs, that's what we will experience. And so the brain makes us feel, you know, placebos don't heal broken bones, placebos don't cure cancer. That's not how placebos work. They affect the symptoms of those maladies. So they're incredibly effective for insomnia, for adhd, for depression, for anxiety, for ibs. There was a study with ibs, Irritable bowel syndrome, where Ted Kapchuk at Harvard gave people who suffer from IBS a medication that it said on the pill bottle, placebo. In fact, you can buy these on Amazon. You can go on Amazon and you can buy placebo pills. After this study, here's what he found. He gave people what's called an open label placebo. So he told people, this is an inert substance, it has no active ingredients. But, and here's the most important part, it has been shown to be effective for some people. That's all I had to say. People took these placebo pills that they knew were placebos and it was as effective as the leading medication for IBS symptoms. In fact, after the study, people called Dr. Kapchuk and said, hey, Dr. Kopchak, that IBS placebo pill was so effective. Can I get some more of those placebo pills? Because they work so well. In fact, we know that the placebo effect is getting stronger. And it's a big problem because for pharmaceutical companies, whenever they do a clinical trial, in order for a medication to be approved, it has to show that it's more efficacious than a placebo pill. So you have to do. The control group takes a placebo. Typically nobody knows. It's called a double blind control study. The participant doesn't know if they're getting a placebo. The person who's administering the medicine doesn't know if they're getting a placebo. So we're kind of excluding all the variables. But the placebo effect gets, keeps getting stronger and stronger and stronger. So it's. Even though a medication works, it's not stronger than the placebo effect, so it doesn't get approved. Now this is a huge problem for the pharmaceutical companies. Why does the placebo effect keep getting stronger and stronger and stronger over the past 50 years? Because more people are hearing that the placebo effect is effective and so it becomes more effective. And that's exactly what Ted Kapchuk found. So this is another one of those areas that sounds kind of woo woo, but actually is hard science and has made me kind of reconsider some of my practices. Like maybe it's not so bad to have that lucky rabbit's foot or the lucky charms or the horseshoe. Those things serve a purpose that when you believe that this works, that it might give you more luck if it's not costing you that much, if it's not hurting you. You know what? Placebos are super effective if they give you a sense of agency and control and you think it affects some kind of outcomes, you know, hold that conviction lightly. But if you anticipate some kind of response, you know, now, now when I get sick, I used to always make fun of my wife's family. They're into Chinese medicine. They, you know, the herbs and the treatments and the acupuncture and I always made fun of that stuff like, ah, that doesn't work. There's no, you know, clinical trials. I'm very science based now. I don't say that anymore because even if it's a placebo and it's not hurting anybody, it's not very expensive. Do it. If it works, it works. Why not.

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[Paula Pant]

I want to talk about the notion of learned helplessness. You actually found that it isn't helplessness that's learned. Helplessness is innate. Hope is the thing that needs to be learned.

[Nir Eyal]

That's right. Yeah. So this was kind of gospel in the psychology community. Everybody believed in what's called learned helplessness. That the idea is that people who are in difficult socioeconomic conditions, that they have learned to give up, they've learned to stop trying because they've been beat down, told again and again that nothing they do matters. And this kind of became just widely accepted. And the authors of this study, Seligman and Meyer, just a few years ago, realized that they were completely wrong. Not just a little bit wrong, 180 degrees. The opposite of what they thought, that in fact we do not learn helplessness. Helplessness is our default state. That why does this happen from an evolutionary basis? New ways of doing things, putting yourself out on a limb is dangerous. And evolution does not favor dangerous things. Evolution favors safety. Well, how do I stay safe? Well, if I was alive, whatever I did in the past, it worked in the past. So I'm going to continue to do it in the future. So the brain doesn't like you to go into your. To go outside of your comfort zones. It wants to keep you safe and comfortable so that you can stay alive. That's what your brain is doing. It's protecting you. Helplessness, turns out, is our default state. And what has to be learned is hope. We have to actively fight against that passivity. Those whispers in our ear of this is too hard. You can't do this. You're not ready. You're not good enough. That is your brain trying to protect you. And so what we can do, we can say thank you very much. Right. I appreciate that you're trying to protect me. That's just more data doesn't mean I have to listen to it. There's no like, secret inner voice that's going to tell you that you're not ready for something that you can't do something or that it's too painful. It's just information. It's just your brain trying to keep you safe that you don't learn helplessness. But in fact that is our default.

[Paula Pant]

How do we square that with the fact that kids naturally are learners? They are builders, they are doers. You watch a child move through the world and you see somebody who's actively intaking information and then building and creating and playing and, and making. That seems like the opposite of helplessness. You know, that seems very empowering to a point.

[Nir Eyal]

So babies are a great demonstration of ultimate helplessness. When a human baby is born, it's not like a giraffe that starts walking within minutes or a deer or you know, a shark that starts, a baby shark starts swimming immediately. Babies can't do anything. Like they are completely helpless. I know I have a 17 year old daughter, remember when she was born, she couldn't do anything. As we develop at a very young age, we expect to be in a safe circumstance. We expect to be protected from harm. And within that nice little crib we have or in our parents protection, that's where we can explore. And so babies will do very simple things like putting things in their mouth. They're not going out there to make PowerPoint presentations. They're making very, very small incremental steps to figure out what's safe. Unfortunately, as we get older, we take less and less risks that we learn in school. Don't be the tall poppy we learn at work. You know, don't, don't stick your neck out too much. We learn as we go out in life as well that it reinforces our constraints that we become more and more passive unless we actively fight against that.

[Paula Pant]

How do people learn hope?

[Nir Eyal]

We take small steps. The way that the research now shows is that the sooner we can identify those limiting beliefs, as soon as we identify what's keeping us back again. We're not trying to defy the laws of physics. We're trying to unlock what's already within us. In the 1950s there is a biologist by the name of Kurt Richter and Richter wants to answer a very simple question. How long can a wild rat survive swimming in water? Super simple, right? It's 50 years ago, this was in 1950s, so you can't do these kind of experiments anymore. But they already did them. The rats are dead. So let's learn from them. He took a wild rat, put it in a cylinder of water, filled halfway and he just watched the rat swim, trying to survive. And he found that at 15 minutes, the rat didn't seem exhausted, it just gave up. Gave up, drowned, died. Then he wanted to see, could he make the rat more persistent? How could he increase how long the rat swam for? So here's what he did. He took a new group of rats, he put them in the same cylinders, and then he stood there and timed. And just at the 15 minute mark, at the mark, the previous rats had given up and died. Just before the 15 minute mark, when he saw that the rat was starting to give up, he reached in, pulled out the rat, dried it off, let it catch its breath, and then plunk back into the cylinder it went. And he did this a few times to condition the rat's behavior. You know, you read the book already, so you know the answer. But when I ask audiences, how much longer did the rat swim for? Now that it had been conditioned to expect that that salvation might be possible, how much longer could it swim? People guess 30 minutes, doubled its endurance from 15 minutes to 30. That would be amazing if you could double your endurance. Some people say no. Three times longer, four times longer, the same for 60 minutes. That would be amazing, right? If I gave you some kind of intervention, some kind of magic pill that could make you four time more persistent, that'd be incredible. Like you could study for four times longer, you could run four times farther. That would be unbelievable. But that's not what happened. The rats didn't swim for 60 minutes. They swam for 60 hours. 60 hours of non stop swimming, they became 240 times more persistent. How? What, what changed? Same bodies. Nothing changed physically. They didn't suddenly become stronger. Same exact rat bodies, same exact environment. The experiment hadn't changed at all. We can't ask the rats what they thought, but we think the only variable left was something happened in their brain. That something had unlocked what was always in them. They always had the 60 minutes, but they just gave up at 15. They thought it was hopeless.

[Paula Pant]

The 60 hours.

[Nir Eyal]

Sorry, the 60 hours. That's right. They always had the 60 hours within them, but they just gave up at fifteen minutes. And so this is the metaphor for us. We quit way sooner than our actual limits. There are actual limits. We are not limitless. There are biological laws of what you are able to do. But we quit way, way before our limits. Why? Because it hurts. I don't like this. I don't want to do it. It's hard. That's why we quit. Time management, money management, is all pain management. So when we quit at that 15 minute mark of oh, this is uncomfortable, I Don't like it, I gotta stop. It's your brain telling you I'm trying to protect you, right? That if you're running physically, if you're running, you don't stop when you really can stop, when you're exhausted. You stop when it doesn't feel good anymore and it hurts. So if we can train ourselves to realize that it's just signal, it's just information that we don't have to interpret it necessarily as a signal to stop, per se. Eventually we will have to stop, but that our. Our potential is far, far greater than we think it is.

[Paula Pant]

How do we know when we're right on the verge of an actual signal to stop? How do we distinguish the signal from the noise?

[Nir Eyal]

Great question. So when do you quit? Yeah, it's not that quitting is always a bad thing. Sometimes quitting is a wonderful. You should. I've quit a lot. I've quit business projects. I've quit book projects. I've quit relationships. I've quit all kinds of stuff. There is a wrong and a right way to quit. There are three criteria for when it's the right time to quit. Number one is, did you meet your checkpoint? Not your deadline per se, but the checkpoint. A checkpoint is when you say, I will persist with this behavior, whatever it is, I'm going to invest for so many weeks in a row, or I'm going to try this diet, or I'm going to start thinking about my mom differently for these number of days. I'm going to try on this new belief for a certain number of days before I reevaluate. Okay? So I'm gonna do this thing for 30 days, and then I have a checkpoint. So did you meet that checkpoint? Because if you just say, I'm gonna try it and see how I feel when it gets hard, you're gonna quit. That's the wrong reason to quit.

[Paula Pant]

Try January. Perfect example.

[Nir Eyal]

Example. Exactly. I'm gonna do this for 30 days and see how that suits me. Okay, the second criteria is, am I still learning? If you're still learning, failure's not a problem. That failure is a good thing. Right? If I told you, hey, you only need to fail five more times, and the sixth time you're going to succeed. Make five more sales calls. The sixth one is going to close. Go on five more dates. The sixth one, you're going to find your life partner, whatever it might be. If you knew that, would you avoid failure? No, you'd say, come on, quick, let's. Let's get through the failures. Because I want to get to the success. So if you're still learning, failure is not a problem. That's the second criteria. The third. The third criteria to see if you should quit or persist is is there value in persistence? Meaning if I persist, would things change? Some things, no matter how persistent you are, are not going to change. Or at least they're not going to change soon enough. So, for example, if you work around toxic people, let's say the people at work are awful, they bring you down. You're not going to outlast them. Okay? So being persistent in a place where you have a toxic work environment doesn't benefit you. So persistence just for the sake of banging your head against the wall, you don't win any medals for that. If you've met your checkpoint, if you've exhausted the learning, and if persistence doesn't make a difference, that's the right time to quit before those three conditions keep going.

[Paula Pant]

How do you factor for opportunity cost for the alternatives not pursued? By virtue of dedicating your time and resources to this.

[Nir Eyal]

That's where the checkpoint comes in. Because if you don't have a checkpoint, I like to call them shiny ponies. There's always a shiny pony. Oh, my gosh, look at this opportunity, that opportunity, this opportunity. You need a checkpoint so that you tell yourself, I am not going to think about anything else. I'm just going to laser focus on what's in front of me so I can give it my best shot. After that checkpoint, okay, I might reevaluate and say, okay, I did this. I gave it my best shot. Maybe it's not a good use of my time. Maybe I should do something else.

[Paula Pant]

What do you do when the shiny pony has some conceivable benefit towards the dominant goal? Okay, so what I'm thinking about specifically is, let's say the goal is you. You want to be a small business owner. And in the type of small business that you want to build, public speaking skills would be valuable. So you could join Toastmasters or you could take on more speaking engagements. And. And that would pose a benefit, but it's not necessarily the best possible use of your time, right? Because writing skills would also be valuable.

[Nir Eyal]

Right?

[Paula Pant]

And sales. Learning how to close sales would also be valuable. And learning operations in a more structured way would also be. And there's like Cal Newport calls it the any benefit hypothesis. There are so many things that you could potentially do, right? And they all have some conceivable benefit, right?

[Nir Eyal]

Prioritization is separate from persistence. Persistence is after you Decide on the goal prioritization. That's what you're speaking of. I could do a million different things. Which one of them do I do? I think the most effective technique I found is not a to do list. To do lists are awful for your personal productivity. To do lists are terrible. There actually is very little research that they're effective. What's much more effective is called time boxing, because time boxing has a trait that to do lists don't. To do lists have no constraints. You can always add more to a to do list. I want to research this. I want to be a good presenter. Maybe I want to write a blog. Maybe I want to start this other business. Maybe there's another to do. Lists are endless. And that's why to do lists are terrible. What you need is a timebox calendar. A timebox calendar is when you decide in advance. It's called setting an implementation intention. It's the most well studied time management technique that nobody wants to do because it's so much easier to say, I have this dream I'm going to put on my to do list. And I also have this dream. And I also have this dream. Dreams don't become reality until you devote the time to do them. And so this is the hard truth that people don't like to hear is that you have to turn your values into time. If you want to know someone's values, don't ask them what they are. They will lie to you because they lie to themselves. People say, oh, what are my values? My family. Oh, family and friends. Well, do you have any time for your family in your calendar? No, I'll just see them when I see them. Well, that's not one of your values. Health. Oh, you know what? Health is everything. And you got to take care of your health. Do you have time for exercise in your day? No, it's not one of your values. Oh, you know, I want to be smart. I want to be well read. I want to be articulate. Well, do you have time to read a book in your calendar? No, I just kind of go on Instagram and TikTok. You'd have to turn your values into time because you can't say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. Can't say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. So if you look at your calendar and you've got a bunch of white space, what the hell are you complaining about? Everything is a distraction unless you decided in advance what you want to do with your time and attention. So to Answer your question. Well, how do I prioritize? I asked myself, how do I turn my values into time? What are values? Values are attributes of the person you want to become. Values are attributes of the person you want to become. You look at your life with these three life domains. First is you. You're at the center of these three life domains. If you can't take care of yourself, you can't take care of other people. So you take out your calendar for the week and you make sure you put in the time for yourself, which can include anything you want to do. You want to read a book, great. You want to meditate, great. You want to play video games, awesome. Social media, great. Put it in your calendar. Then the next life domain, your relationships, your siblings, your spouse, your kids, your parents, your community, your church group, whatever it might be, put in that time in your calendar. Next, the last category, which is where most people start, is your work domain. There are two kinds of work. We have what's called reactive work and reflective work. Reactive work is reacting to emails, reacting to notifications, reacting to taps on the shoulder from your boss. That's reactive work. Then we have what's called reflective work. Most people spend almost their entire day doing reactive work, reacting to slack notifications, emails, all that stuff. If you don't schedule time for that reflective work, you'll never do the kind of work that is required to move your life and career forward. So you end up running real fast in the wrong direction, right? So now that you have those three life domains, you need to put that time in your calendar. The time for the reflective work, the time for the reactive work, the time for the relationship domain, and the time for yourself. What will always happen is that you will never have enough time. You will never be able to do everything. So what this forces you to do is to make trade offs. If I'm going to be better as a public speaker and I'm going to go to Toastmasters every evening, that means I'm not going to be with my spouse, or I'm not going to be with my kids, or I'm not going to be at work and doing something else. So I'm forcing myself to make a trade off. Now is that difficult? Sometimes it can be difficult, but the alternative is way worse. The alternative is a life lived with regret. Because if you don't make that conscious choice, if you just add it to your to do list like a dummy, it becomes an aspiration. Whereas if you say it's in my calendar and I chose this over that the gym is more important than TikTok. My kids are more important than work. It's a difficult trade off to make, but it's only when you do that in advance that you live your values. This is how you turn your values into time.

[Paula Pant]

What do you do if you've attempted this but you have low calendar adhesion, so you've built kind of like a budget. People do this with budgets too. You built this theoretically perfectly blocked calendar or this theoretically perfectly laid out budget and then reality looks nothing like it at the end of the week.

[Nir Eyal]

Yeah. So that's only one step of four. The first is mastering the internal triggers. Because again, time management is pain management, money management is pain management, weight management, it's all pain management. All motivation is about pain management. So the first step before you make a timebox calendar is learning what to do with discomfort. What do I do when I want to go check email and not work on this presentation? It's the same thing I would do. If I say I really want to buy that thing and not save my money and put in the stock market or invest it somewhere, what do you do? It feels crummy. It's just discomfort. It's just a signal. It's not necessarily suffering. So you free yourselves from the shackles of your mind when you are able to process that information, which is all it is as not being suffering. It's just a feeling.

[Sponsor Voice]

Just a feeling.

[Nir Eyal]

Sometimes I stub my toe, that's a feeling. Sometimes I'm hungry, that's a feeling. Sometimes I'm tired. That's a feeling, right? That's all it is. It's just an uncomfortable sensation. It's my interpretation that causes these problems.

[Paula Pant]

We've talked about prioritization of tasks, prioritization of time. Can you talk about how to map prioritization of money onto this? That's a question I get frequently from this audience. And I'm not just talking about spending, I'm also talking about savings goals. You know, people want to put money towards their kids529 plan and save money for their kids college, but they also want to save for retirement. But they also want to make a down payment on a house or finish paying off their mortgage. People have a lot of long term savings goals and it's hard to prioritize all of those. Do you have any tips?

[Nir Eyal]

The good thing is, unlike with time, where it's more amorphous, where it's solely based on your values. Meaning the way I did this personally is, you know, I asked myself, how would the person I want to become spend their time. For me, it was how much time would a person that I want to become spend with their daughter or with my wife or working on this book or whatever, you know. So by looking at it, I can say, how would I allocate the limited time I have? What's interesting actually from a money and time perspective is that we're pretty stingy with our money, right? We clip coupons, we look for deals, we split checks at lunch. We're pretty stingy with our money. We put it in bank accounts so it's safe when it comes to our time, we just give it to everybody, right? There's some stupid thing in the news that's happening 5,000 miles away and I can't do anything about. That's what I'm going to spend my time on. There's a bit of gossip at the company water cooler. That's what I'm going to spend my time on. Some stupid cat video on TikTok. That's what I'm going to spend my time on. I give it to everybody. But it should be exactly the opposite if you think about it. You can always make more money, can always make more money. You can always find something to do to make a few bucks. You can't make more time. There's only 24 hours in the day, and I don't care if you're Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos, you only get the same number of hours in a day. Doesn't matter how rich you are. So I think we should be actually generous with our money but stingy with our time. Even though today most people it's the opposite. The good news about how do you prioritize how to spend your money? Is that there are calculations you can do in a way you can't do with time. So for example, should I save for my kids 529 plan versus my IRA? Well, you could do the math on, you know, what's the time value of money and am I going to need this versus am I going to fund that? There are cold hard facts there that will tell you what's the better economic decision. Everything being equal, then it becomes a value judgment. Then it becomes, well, how much more do I value my retirement over my kids college fund or whatever? Then it becomes a values issue that frankly, that's where a financial advisor can't help you. Any financial advisor won't just tell you the dollars and cents, black and white savings, they'll tell you. Yeah, but it's a values decision. Do you value for example your kids education more than your retirement. That's nobody can advise you on which one is more important to you. Right.

[Paula Pant]

And you said values are how did you.

[Nir Eyal]

Attributes of the person you want to become.

[Paula Pant]

Attributes of the person you want to become. I love that.

[Nir Eyal]

That's my definition.

[Paula Pant]

I love that. Well, thank you so much for spending this time with us.

[Nir Eyal]

My pleasure. Thank you.

[Paula Pant]

Where can people find you if they'd like to learn more?

[Nir Eyal]

Sure. So my website is near and far.com near spell like my first name n I r and far.com and the new book is Beyond Belief and it's available wherever books are sold.

[Paula Pant]

Thank you to Nir Eyal. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Key takeaway number one, Motivation is pain management. Every financial decision that you make, spending, saving, investing, these are all decisions about managing discomfort. It's not about what you want, it's not about the rewards. It's about the avoidance of discomfort or pain. So the investor who sells at the bottom of the market, who panics and sells during a market crash, they're not making a financial mistake from a behavioral or psychological perspective. They're in terms of dollars and cents, they are. But behaviorally they're making a pain management mistake.

[Nir Eyal]

Motivation is not about rewards. Motivation is about the desire to escape discomfort. All motivation, and this is super important for, you know, when it comes to personal finance for sure, that all motivations about the desire to escape discomfort, which must therefore mean that money management is pain management.

[Paula Pant]

That is the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two, successful people are losers. The thing that separates people who succeed from people who don't, people who build wealth from people who don't. It isn't information, it isn't resources, it isn't skill, it's persistence. And persistence looks a lot like failure. It looks like repeated failure. Because people who succeed fail over and over and over and over and over until they don't.

[Nir Eyal]

Successful people lose more than unsuccessful people. We think that successful people are always successful. No, they're successful because they persist through obstacles. They're losers. They lose all the time. You talk to successful people, they can tell you, oh my gosh, that didn't work, that didn't work, that didn't work. Whereas an unsuccessful person says, well, I tried, it didn't work, so I never tried again.

[Paula Pant]

Finally, key takeaway number three. Beliefs are tools, not truths. So if a belief is making you miserable and it's keeping you stuck, whether it's a belief that you hold about money, about career, about your work, about your relationships, whatever it's about, the goal is not to figure out if it's true. The question you should be asking is not is this true? The question you should be asking is does this serve me?

[Nir Eyal]

Beliefs are tools, not truths. One of those beliefs that my mother is too judgmental and hard to please. In order to reduce my suffering, my mom had to change so I could be happy. I know you don't know my mom, but that's not going to happen, right? Anytime we're waiting for someone else to change so I can be happy so I don't have to suffer. Don't hold your breath. You're going to suffocate.

[Paula Pant]

Beliefs are tools, not truths. That is the third key takeaway from this conversation with Nir Eyal. Now remember, Nir walked us through that four question turnaround exercise developed by Byron Katie. We turned that into a free handout so that you can use it yourself. You can use it on any belief that's keeping you stuck. There's an AI prompt in there that you can copy and paste. You can get this for free at affordanything.com turnitaround that's totally free. Affordanything.com turnitaround thank you so much for being an afforder for being part of this community. If you enjoyed today's episode, please share this with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues. Share it with your florist who delivers you half dead flowers or who delivers your mom half dead flowers. Share it with your financial advisor. Share it with athletes who are doing visualization exercises in the right way. Share it with a pilot who flew you from a trip that you're jet lagged from. Share it with all of those people and more. Because that is the single most important way that you spread the message of F double I R E. Oh, how did I forget? Share it with the people at solidcore and share it with any researchers you know who make rats swimming for prolonged periods of time. Oh, and with the people who take placebos. Share it with them too. And again, don't forget, download the turnaround exercise along with an AI prompt for free at affordanything.com turnitaround thank you again for being part of this community. My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything podcast and I'll meet you in the next episode.