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Nir Eyal: Beyond Belief and how to change your mind to change your life
01:07:03
We talk to author Nir Eyal about why your brain actively resists changing its mind, how the placebo effect is reshaping what we know about pain and performance, and what all of this means for designers and creative thinkers navigating the uncertainty of AI. Nir also gets personal about living with ADHD and dyslexia, stage fright, and how a single reframe — not a new fact, just a new belief — changed the way he experiences all of it.
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- [00:02]
Nir Eyal
This should shake everyone to our core, because what this tells you is that if you can't see a silly optical illusion after being told the truth, if your brain can't show you reality, where else are you not seeing reality? Everywhere you don't see reality. You never saw reality because reality is a simulation created by your beliefs.
- [00:26]
Eli Woolery
If you want to understand how much your beliefs shape your reality, try this quick exercise. Google the Checkerboard illusion and you can witness firsthand that even when you know two squares are the same shade of gray, your brain still refuses to show you the truth. If it can't get a simple shade of gray right, imagine what it's doing with everything else. In his book Hooked, Nir Eyal helped people build habit forming products for good. Then he wrote Indistractable to help people break free from the ones that weren't so good. But after years of hearing from readers who knew exactly what to do and still couldn't make themselves do it, he realized something was missing from the equation entirely.
- [01:03]
Aaron Walter
His new book, Beyond Belief, argues that motivation isn't a straight line between behavior and benefit. It's actually a triangle. And the third side is belief. The convictions we carry about ourselves, our abilities, and our circumstances quietly determine what we see, what we feel, and ultimately, what we do. In this conversation, we dig into why your brain actively resists changing its mind, how the placebo effect is reshaping what we know about pain and performance, and what all of this means for designers and creative thinkers. Navigating the uncertainty of AI Nir also gets personal about living with ADHD and dyslexia, his stage fright, and how a single reframe, not a new fact, just a new belief, changed the way he experiences all of it. This is Design Better, where we explore creativity at the intersection of design and technology. I'm Aaron Walter.
- [02:03]
Eli Woolery
And I'm eli Woolery.
- [02:04]
Aaron Walter
At DesignBetter, our primary mission is to produce work that helps people like you refine your craft, improve your collaboration skills, and get inspired by the creative process of others. If you enjoy what we do here, the best way to support us is to become a Premium subscriber@designbetterpodcast.com subscribe. We'll return to the conversation after this quick break.
- [02:41]
Nir Eyal
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- [03:12]
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- [03:42]
Aaron Walter
And now back to the show.
- [03:49]
Eli Woolery
Nir Eyal, welcome back to Design Better.
- [03:51]
Nir Eyal
Thank you. It's great to be back. I'm always honored when someone invites me back, so thank you.
- [03:55]
Eli Woolery
We're really thrilled to have you back. And our history actually goes back a ways. I first met you at Innovation Endeavors when I was working there, the venture capital firm. And you kind of come originally maybe from the startup world. And then you had this journey from building a book called Hooked, which was about building habit forming products, to your next book, indistractable, setting up boundaries about maybe some of those same products. And then you have this current book which right here you've got behind you Beyond Belief, which I've been diving into. And that's all about the importance of belief. So for folks who aren't familiar, walk us through the quick journey of what took you across that arc.
- [04:33]
Nir Eyal
Hooked was about how do you build habit forming products? And you know, all my books I write, for me, I'm very happy that other people want to read them. That's amazing. But really I'm trying to solve my own problems. And so Hooked I wrote because I wanted to design products that would change behavior in a good way to build healthy habits. When I looked around for how do I do that? I couldn't find a book that taught that. I found a lot of books on personal habits, but I didn't see anything about product habits. And so what I wanted to do was frankly, steal the secrets of Silicon Valley so that the rest of us could use the same psychological tricks for good. And that's exactly what's happened in the past. What is it over a decade now since Hooked was published. Kahoot uses the Hook model to get kids hooked on education. Canva uses the Hook model. Fitbod uses the Hook model to get people hooked on exercise. You get all kinds of examples from every industry. I didn't even imagine how many industries could use the same psychology. So that's Been fantastic. Indistractable was the other side of the story where I found in my own life again, one of my own problems was that I was using my technology too much. Different products, right? Hooked wasn't for the social media companies and the gaming companies. They know these techniques. They've always known these techniques. My book was published far after those companies were started. But Indistractible looked at the opposite side of if. Hooked is about how do you build good habits? Indistractable is about how do you break bad habits. That book really delved into how do we stop doing anything? Too much, so to speak, right? So whether it's too much news, too much booze, too much football, too much Facebook, how do we make sure that we live our lives without regret by doing what we say we're going to do? And this came from, again, a very personal problem that I had where I was using my device instead of being with the people I loved. And so that was kind of the genesis for that book. And then Beyond Belief came about, because after I'd spent five years writing Indistractable and it changed my life and sold half a million copies, and I know it helped a lot of people, I started getting kind of a funny phone call. You see, every once in a while, I would get this call from a reader. And I do these office hours every week where anybody can call me and ask me any questions about one of the books I've written. And every once in a while, somebody would call and tell me, hey, Nir, I read your book. And I read Indistractable. I really liked it, but it didn't work. And I'd say, oh, that's interesting. Tell me more. Why didn't it work? Let's go step by step. And I'd say, okay, you know, let's start with step one. How did step one go for you? And they'd say, oh, you know, I read Step one. I read it. I just didn't do step one. I'd say, okay, no problem. Maybe step one was a little hard for you. Let's skip that one. Let's go to step two. How'd that go for you? And they'd say, you know, I read that one, too. I just didn't have time to do that one either. I didn't do it. It kind of irked me, right, that I spent five years writing this book, and here people were waiting for months to talk to the author of a book that they had read but hadn't actually put into practice so that they could tell me that the techniques that they didn't do didn't work. And at first I was like, well, is it my readers? Is it me? Did I write a bad book? Well, what's going on? Then I realized, wait a minute, I have tons of books on my bookshelf that I haven't put into practice. I've paid gurus and experts to help me and tell me what to do, and yet I haven't done it. And so the real fundamental question became, wait a minute, why is it in an age of such abundance where we have so much information at our fingertips, why don't we just do the stuff we know we're supposed to do, right? Like, why is it that hard? And so the more I delved into it, the more I realized that this is, I think, the most important question of our time. Because we are drowning in information. We have more information than we know what to do with. If you don't know how to do something, Google it. Ask AI right? Like buy a book. The answers are all there. There's no more secrets. If anybody has the slightest insight on any, they're going to put on social media or write a book about it or a blog post. Like all the information's out there. So why do we have such a tough time putting into practice? And I think what I concluded after six years of researching this field is that our traditional model of motivation is incomplete. That we tend to have kind of this economic model of motivation that if I have some kind of benefit that I want, then I will do the behavior. Classic economic incentives. But something's missing there. Because if that was good enough, if all we needed was to know what we wanted, the benefit and how to do it, the behavior, well, then we would all have six pack abs and be multimillionaires because the answers are out there. So why don't we just do it? And the reason we don't just do it is because something is missing, is that motivation is not a straight line. Motivation is a triangle. So on one side is the behavior knowing what to do. The other side is the benefit. Why do I do it? But holding it all together is a belief. So if I, for example, don't believe that my boss will give me the benefit, let's say I don't believe that my boss has my best interest at heart. Maybe they're not going to give me that promotion, they're not going to give me that raise. Well, am I going to sustain my motivation to keep working for that person if I don't Believe they're going to give me the benefit? Not really. I'm going to slack off or I'm going to look for a different gig. Conversely, if I don't believe in my own abilities to do the behavior. We hear this all the time in the design community. Well, you know what? I'm not ready, or I'm not good enough, or look at other people. They're so much better than I am. I'm an impostor, right? That script in my mind telling me that I can't do that thing that I know to do, well, then am I going to stay motivated? No. I'm also going to quit. And so to sustain our motivation and to meet our goals and to meet our full potential in life, we have to not only know what it is we're going to do, the behavior, not only know the benefit, but also have that liberating belief that sustains our motivation over the long term. And so that's what beyond belief is all about, is about how do we increase our motivation, decrease our suffering so that we can sustain our potential and finally have the kind of life we deserve?
- [10:06]
Aaron Walter
So we start to get an idea of what a belief is. But I think maybe we should pull that apart in more detail. When I think of a belief, I think the first thing that comes to mind is there's, like, religious connotation. So there are beliefs, there are facts, and there is faith. What's the relationship between those three? And how do you define belief in your book?
- [10:29]
Nir Eyal
Yeah, Aaron, my fellow word nerd, I love it. So, yeah, we got to define our terms here. So we make sure we get them right. It's important. So a fact is an objective truth. It is something that is true whether or not you believe it. The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. It's a fact. Sorry, flat Earthers, the world doesn't care what you believe. It is what it is. You cannot change facts. Faith is on the other side. Faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. So God rewards the righteous. There's no amount of facts that are going to dispute that claim. If I have that conviction, if that's my faith, then evidence is not going to change that, nor should it. It's a matter of faith. Beliefs are somewhere in between. Beliefs are convictions that are open to revision based on new evidence. Okay, so we don't just pull them out of thin air. They are open to revision based on new evidence. And what makes beliefs so powerful is that unlike faith, which people almost never change, unlike facts, which you Cannot change. Beliefs can change. They can change based on whether they serve us or whether they hurt us. So the big aha for me, what has changed my life, what has increased my well being? I can't tell you how much. I mean several fold. I'm so much more relaxed, I suffer so much less. I enjoy my life so much more. Because I've realized what the literature has told us for ages now, and in fact, what many religions have taught for even longer than that, is that beliefs are tools, not truths. That the bar that we have for beliefs is much lower than for a fact. That a belief we can choose based on what it does for us, whether it makes us better, whether it motivates us, whether it decreases our suffering. And so we can either hold on to these limiting beliefs, which we all have, and we could talk about why we have those limiting beliefs, or we can see them for what they are and choose to change them into these liberating beliefs. That's kind of the kicking off point of the book. And what blew my mind around this research is that it's not just about productivity and getting things done and being your best at work. It's fundamental stuff like how we see the world, literally how we see reality can be determined by our beliefs. For example, people who are on a diet, people who are see food as larger, that people who are afraid of heights see distances as further. That I can show you an image called the coffer illusion. Maybe you can put it up in the YouTube video where I can show you the same exact image. And based on where you were born, you will see rectangles or circles, same image. And people will see totally different things based on our priors, based on our beliefs. So beliefs shape what we see. They shape what we feel. Not just emotionally, not just our feelings, but our physical responses. So chronic pain, turns out, is a belief problem. Relationships. One of the chapters in the book is that you don't have relationship problems, you have belief problems. That it's all about our sense of perception. So beliefs shape not only what we see, what we feel, and ultimately what we do. We call this our sense of agency. So based on what I believe I am capable of doing, that will in fact limit me or provide me the motivation to persist. So beliefs change what we see, what we feel, and ultimately what we do.
- [13:40]
Eli Woolery
Talk for a minute about that first kind of pillar. I was listening to another interview with you on a different show and I found it fascinating, the kind of neurological and maybe psychological underpinnings there where as humans we have to process a lot of information. In fact, there's so much information coming at us, there's no way we could process it all. So we end up processing a small subset of it. And that has an impact on how we see and our beliefs, it sounds like, have an impact on that. Maybe you could talk through that portion of it.
- [14:06]
Nir Eyal
One of the studies that blew my mind, and I recommend everybody goes and looks this up. There's something called the checkerboard illusion. There's a copy of it in my book, but you can also just search on Google Search. Checkerboard illusion. What you're going to see is a checkerboard with a cylinder next to it that casts a shadow on the checkerboard. And you'll see that there are two squares on this checkerboard, and one of the squares is A. One of the squares is B. Now, 100% of the people, 100% of the time, if you ask them which square is darker, they will tell you that square A is darker. If it doesn't look darker, something's wrong with the printing or your eyes. 100% of the time, people will tell you, square A looks darker, but square A is not darker. That if I put the same color of gray by square A and B, you'll see that it's an optical illusion, that square A and B are in fact the same exact shade of gray. Same exact color. That's not the amazing part. The amazing part is that even when you know this fact and 100% of people, 100% of the time will agree and say, oh, you know what? Wow, look at that. Square A and B are in fact the same color. Isn't that interesting? Even when they know this and agree with me, yes, they're the same color when they look at the first image without the gray bars that show you they're the same color when they're confronted with the original image, square A still looks darker. Doesn't that blow your mind? Even when you know the truth, you know the fact that your brain will not let you see reality clearly. That should make us all stop and gasp.
- [15:32]
Aaron Walter
I'm looking at it right now, and it's crazy. Yeah, I can't see.
- [15:35]
Nir Eyal
It's crazy. It's crazy, right? You cannot see it clearly. This should shake everyone to our core. Because what this tells you is that if you can't see a silly optical illusion after being told the truth, if your brain can't show you reality, where else are you not seeing reality? Everywhere. You don't see reality. You never saw Reality. Because reality is a simulation created by your beliefs that the reason you can't see that square A and square B are in fact the same color even when you know the truth is because of what's called your priors. This is the way the brain makes sense of reality, because it takes prior information, what it has seen in the past, and it reflects it based on the current information that it's taking in now. Why does it do this? Why will square A still look darker even when you know the truth? Because the brain can simply not absorb all the information that it's taking in. It can't process it consciously. So right now, your brain is processing 11 million bits of information per second. 11 million bits of information is the equivalent of reading War and Peace every second twice. It's about a thousand pages per second of information. Okay? Tons of information are entering your brain right now. The light entering your retinas, the sound of my voice in your ears, the ambient temperature of the room. Your brain is processing that. It's just not conscious of it until your conscious attention focuses on it. Your conscious attention, however, can only process 50 bits of information. 50 bits is one sentence per second. So 1,000 pages per second versus one sentence per second. So your brain is only able to process this tiny pinhole of attention of which you look through and call that reality. But it's not reality. It's a simulation based on your beliefs. And so this should make us question so many of the things that we think are true in life, right? All these things that we assume to be true, we. Which are nothing more than the fact that you don't see reality clearly. You see reality as you are, not as reality actually is.
- [17:43]
Aaron Walter
This is interesting. And it's a lot like an LLM. You know, we hallucinate like an LLM hallucinates. And there's a reason why we hallucinate with the checkerboard example, because it's too expensive for us to process all of the information all of the time. It would be exhausting. We would never get anything done. It'd be very limiting. So those priors are actually an evolutionary advantage. It's a shorthand for us to solve some problems. So that's an advantage. Most of the time. Some of the times it's not. And that maybe leads us to this notion of beliefs that are empowering and beliefs that are limiting. And when we were preparing for the interview, I confess to Eli that one of my number one pet peeves, like the thing that really gets my goat, is when I encounter people Whose lives are so governed by limiting beliefs of like, I can't do this. I can't try this. There's a lot of I cannot in their life. And I pride myself on trying to be on the opposite side of that spectrum. Talk to us about limiting beliefs, how we identify them, define them, recognize them.
- [18:56]
Nir Eyal
And the interesting thing is that we all have them. We all have them. I interviewed billionaires, and I interviewed people who were broke, and it turns out we all have these limiting beliefs. The problem is that our limiting beliefs are like our face. That if I told you, look at your face, how do you look at your face? You can't look at your face. You can look at your face.
- [19:14]
Eli Woolery
Unless you're on zoom and then you're, like, always looking at your face, right?
- [19:16]
Nir Eyal
Yeah, exactly. You need something outside of yourself. You need a mirror. You need zoom. You need to reflect in order to see your own face. Just like we can't see our own limiting beliefs. They're hidden to us. We have to reflect upon them in order to see them. Interestingly, we can see other people's limiting beliefs. You can tell me your colleagues and your kids and your parents and your spouse. You can see all their limiting beliefs. You just can't see your own. And so what we have to do in order to uncover them is to have some kind of process to reflect. We have to take them out, to unpack them in order to see them. Now the question is, why do we have them? Why is the brain intentionally limiting us from our true potential? Well, the fact of the matter is your brain doesn't care about your potential. The brain doesn't care if you're flourishing. The brain doesn't care if you're happy. And the brain's primary job is to keep you alive. And what's the best way to keep you alive? To keep you doing and thinking exactly what kept you alive before? It's predictive processing. It's based on probabilities. Well, what did you do in the past? Did you survive? Were you hurt or not? And if it worked for you in the past, just keep believing it in the future, because that's what worked. And so your brain is there in order to keep you safe. And new behaviors, new beliefs can be dangerous. They're risky. So your brain is constantly pulling you into passivity, constantly pulling you into whatever it is that you did in the past. That's what you're going to continue to do in the future. This really overturns what used to be a really kind of gospel in the Psychology community. This concept of learned helplessness. We used to think that the brain had to learn to be helpless. And this was a theory proposed by Seligman and Meyer, and it was gospel. Seligman became president of the American Psychological Association. Everybody believed it, that it explained generational poverty, it explained all kinds of social maladies, that if you try and try again, you keep failing. Well, then you learn that you're helpless. Turns out, to their credit as good scientists, Seligman and Meyer completely reversed their conclusions. Not only did they determine that there is no such thing as learned helplessness, but that the conclusion was 180 degrees the opposite of what they originally thought. You do not learn helplessness. You are born helpless. We all are. That helplessness is our default state. Think about it. A baby is born into the world completely helpless. They need help from their caregivers to survive. That's how we come into the world, and that's how we stay. Unless we learn hope. Hope is what we have to learn, not helplessness. Helplessness is our default state. So knowing that we have to constantly be on guard to our brain's default state, constantly reminding ourselves, I still. I mean, again, I write books. For me, this was my problem. I had constantly these voices in my head saying, who are you to talk about this? You don't know enough about this. You're not ready for this. People are gonna find out that you did something wrong. Or, you know, what. What are you doing sticking your neck out, right? Go back to doing what you've always done. That's the voice I would always hear in my head. And it wasn't serving me. And it wasn't until I realized, wait a minute, this is by design, this is what evolution gave me that I was able to take out those limiting beliefs, examine them, and figure out a better way to work with them. So I'll give you a very detailed example of how my life changed with these limiting beliefs. I get very passionate about the work I'm doing, and I like to share it with people. And so I remember when I started my public speaking on my first book, Hooked, I used to have terrible stage fright. Terrible stage fright. Right before I would go on stage, I'd feel my heart beating in my chest, and I'd get the sweaty armpits, and I'd get the cotton mouth, and I'd get all these terrible symptoms of stage fright. And I'd have this dialogue in my brain of, I'm not ready for this. This is too big of a crowd, and what if they don't like it. And what if I stumble over my words and I'm not gonna do very good at this? And I would start getting down this anxiety cycle about my presentations, and it really wasn't serving me. You know, sometimes I would actually back out of speeches because I would think, oh, I'm just not ready for that size of a crowd. I wouldn't do it. So I was limiting myself based on this conversation I was having in my head. Well, I don't do that anymore. Now I have a liberating belief. What's interesting is that I experience the same exact physiological symptoms. Okay, I still like right now, guys, you're a big deal podcast. I still get the palpitations in my heart. I still get the sweaty armpits. I still get the cotton mouth. I feel them right now, but I interpret them completely differently. Now, I don't tell myself, oh, I'm not ready for this and this is gonna go horribly. Instead, I tell myself, okay, my heart is beating in my chest because my brain needs more oxygen so I can deliver my best possible presentation about something I really care about. Now, is that true? Is that physiologically, medically true? I don't know. I don't care. Because beliefs are tools, not truths. I feel much better. I don't suffer anymore. Same symptoms, Same information. Same 11 million bits of information are still coming into my brain. Same things are happening in my body, but completely different interpretation. It's no longer suffering. I've changed the belief that it's hurting me. Now I believe it's serving me.
- [24:24]
Eli Woolery
Our audience of designers, in some ways, should have a natural advantage here, because part of what we teach as human centered design is first gaining empathy. So going out to the field and observing people and then defining a problem. But that often involves reframing what we might have thought is the original problem into something that's actually closer to the core problem. And to walk through a quick example, many years ago, this industrial designer, Doug Dietz, he was tasked with sort of redesigning one of GE's big MRI machines. And he was, at first thought the problem was, oh, this thing is just kind of ugly. We have to make it look more cool and updated. But luckily, he took a class at the D school. He went into the field, and he observed that there was a young child about to be scanned, and she was just terrified. She was in tears. And he learned that about 80% of pediatric patients have to be sedated just to go through a scan. And he realized the problem isn't an ugly machine. It's the whole experience is bad for kids. And so he redesigned it such that it was like an adventure. So the kids now are told that they're about to go on a pirate ship and there's going to be some loud noises, but they're kind of positioned as the hero. And it drastically reduced the number of patients that had to be sedated. So you'd think that designers should understand this idea of reframing and be able to reframe these beliefs. But I guess as many of us don't. So might there be a way that we could take the skill that we have for other people and apply it more to ourselves?
- [25:45]
Nir Eyal
For sure, absolutely. So I call this the experience loop. And I talk about this four step process that we can use in our products, but also in terms of our own lives. So the experience loop goes like this. So it's believe, anticipate, feel, confirm. Believe, anticipate, feel, confirm. And I give several examples of various products. So there was an experiment where they took people, funny enough in an FMRI machine, something similar to what you described. And. And while they were in an FMRI machine that scans blood flow in the brain, they gave them two kinds of wine. So they had a little tube in their mouth, and they said, okay, now we're gonna give you the first sample of wine. This is a $5 bottle of wine. Okay, what do you think of it? And people said, ah, you know what? The wine's all right. It's a little bit flat, It's a little bit harsh on the finish. Not a big fan. Okay, Then they flushed their mouth out with water. They had a little spritz. Then they said, okay, now we're gonna give you the second bottle of wine. You ready? Okay, here's the second bottle of wine. This bottle of wine is a very expensive bottle of wine. It's a Chateau de something something. What do you think of this wine? And people said, wow, this wine is very delicious. It's so much better than the other wine. It's so smooth. And I really enjoy. And they started saying all the things that wine snobs like to say about wine. You know, the oakiness and the wine snobbery type stuff that they would describe. And of course, you know, there's a trick coming. The trick was that it was the same exact wine. Now, what's interesting is that not only did people describe the more expensive wine as better, not only did they say they liked it better and that it tasted better. The researchers could see in their brains as they were sampling this Wine that the reward centers of their brains became more active when they were sampling the wine they believed was more expensive. So they had a belief that confirmed an experience that created a feeling that then they said out loud, by confirming it to other people, as wine people do when they sample wine, that confirmed what they already believed in this, created this cycle. Because one of the fundamental expectations is that price is a signal of quality. Many times it is. Many times it's not that, it's just the price. But here's the thing. It's not a trick. I used to think that, ah, those suckers who buy luxury handbags and fancy cars and expensive wines, you know, they're just wasting their money. I don't believe that anymore. Because if we can see that the expectation of a more expensive wine actually makes you enjoy it more, this should probably make us take a step back and ask ourselves about the role of marketing. What is the role of positioning your product? You're not putting lipstick on a pig. You're not just fancying it up or just getting more attention to your product. That's not the role of advertising and marketing. You are actually incepting how the product will be experienced. You are creating the value of the product through the marketing, through the expectation of the product. That's the job, right? So it's not just the product itself. Another example that I profile in the book is a product called Liquid Death. Do you guys know Liquid Death? The water?
- [28:46]
Eli Woolery
Yes.
- [28:47]
Nir Eyal
The canned water?
- [28:47]
Aaron Walter
Yes. And I am mystified by it.
- [28:50]
Nir Eyal
It's water. Water. And they tell you they don't even try and market it as special water. Okay, it comes from Austria, but the only reason it comes from Austria is because that was the only place that the CEO could find to put water in a can. Everybody else insisted on putting in plastic bottles, but his whole thing is death to plastic. That's why it's called Liquid Death. It's all about death to plastic. I don't know how people know that there's kind of this covert environmental message, but that's what it's all about. Now here's the thing. It's water in a can. The company doesn't tell you it's artisanal. It doesn't try and make it Frou Frou water. It's just water. And yet people will tell you the water tastes better. And they're not lying. Because just like the expectation of expensive wine makes it taste better. The expectation of this edgy, you know, heavy metal water that if, you know, you know, if you're part of the brand cult, it probably does taste better. Give you another example, they gave golfers a putter that they told them was used by a famous golfer. I don't know, they probably mentioned some famous golfer's name. I don't know who they said. They said this putter was used by a famous golfer. It wasn't. And yet the golfers on their game when they used this putter did better when they believed that this was somehow a magical putter that some famous golfer had used. So is that a lie? Not really. I mean, if it does affect your performance, then the lying away becomes reality. Why? Because you expect it to be so.
- [30:19]
Aaron Walter
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- [33:36]
Eli Woolery
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- [34:10]
Aaron Walter
And now back to the show. So beliefs are something that can be a liability when you're going through a big change in your life. We recently started a conversation with our community on Substack. Just asking, like, how are you feeling about AI and everything that's happening? Do you feel a sense of anxiety or overwhelm? And it was insane. Like the moment that I posted that message, it was just bing bing bing bing bing bing bing. Constant responses of Hate it. Exhausted. I want to get out of here. One person even said I would be happy to let the world pass me by. Which I found sort of heartbreaking that there's so much stress and anxiety that's happening right now. It's AI. There's a lot of other uncertainties in the world and so forth. But what beliefs should designers, creative thinkers, illustrators, filmmakers, anyone that's pursuing a creative life. What should they be holding onto right now and what needs to be reframed? How could they use the power of beliefs to guide them through a transition?
- [35:24]
Nir Eyal
Let me start with a different example. It's going to seem off track I'm going to bring it back, I promise.
- [35:29]
Aaron Walter
Sure.
- [35:29]
Nir Eyal
So a fascinating area of studies around longevity. How do our beliefs shape our health? Turns out that there's a study at Yale that found that people who have a positive view of aging live on average, seven and a half years longer now, guys. Seven and a half years. To put that in perspective, that is greater than the effect of diet. It's greater than the effect of exercise. It's greater than the longevity effects of quitting smoking. And yet, how much public effort, right? How much media, how many dollars have been spent trying to convince people to eat right and exercise and stop smoking compared to changing their beliefs? Seven and a half years longer? Is that insane? That's crazy. That's such a huge impact. Now, what does that actually practically look like? People who have a positive view of aging will believe something like growth is possible at any age. People who have a negative view of aging will believe something like aging involves inevitable decline. And you've probably heard something like this, oh, I'm having a senior moment, or I'm getting older. Oh, these. You know, it's expecting bad things to happen because aging involves inevitable decline. So based on your default belief, whichever one you go to first, aging involves inevitable decline or growth is possible at any age. That will determine how long you live now. Which is true, guys. Which is false. They're both true, right? Aging does involve inevitable decline, and growth is possible at any age. But what's your default belief, right? When you have some pain in your back or you forget something, is that a senior moment or is it just part of life and you're getting better? So based on that fact that you can choose which belief you default to first. Now, why does that change your lifespan? One theory, what you'll hear from some people is that, well, your beliefs are changing the vibrations of your mitochondria, and they're touching the quantum physical fields. That's rubbish. None of that's true. At least nothing that we can observe in any kind of scientific measurement. What's actually happening is that beliefs really do become your biology. In that respect, the Woowoo community is right, that your beliefs can become your biology, but not the way they say it. The way your beliefs become your biology is via your behavior. So the big secret here is that people who have a positive view of aging, growth is possible at any age. How likely is that person over the person who says, aging involves inevitable decline? How likely is that person to go volunteer in their community and make more friends or go out and tend the garden? And get some exercise. They're much more likely to do these healthy behaviors when they believe growth is possible at any age versus the person who says, eh, aging involves inevitable decline. I'm going to sit here at home on the couch, watch TV and eat some Cheetos because our beliefs really do change our behavior, which really does change our biology. So to answer your question, to bring this all back around when it comes to AI or any technological change, well, of course, if you say, I'm going to sit this one out and I wish it would all go away and I wish, you know, we could roll back to the good old days and everything is getting awful and AI is going to take all our jobs and we're all going to be, well, guess what? That's going to be true for you because your behavior will change based on your beliefs versus someone who says, amazing AI reshuffles the deck and creates new opportunities that I can take advantage of. Now, which one is true? They're probably both true. AI will eliminate jobs and is going to create amazing opportunities. We don't know what's true yet because it hasn't happened yet. What we do know is that one set of beliefs will make you much more likely to succeed and actually take advantage of those opportunities versus the other belief, which will make you much less likely. It's like asking me if you've got two runners, two identical runners. They're identical twins and they have trained exactly the same amount since day one. Physically, they are perfect match specimens. The only difference is that racer number one says, I don't think I can finish this race. The other one says, I'm pretty sure I can finish this race. Where are you going to put your money? Of course you're going to bet on the person who believes that they can succeed. And so if we don't know the future, nobody has a crystal ball and can tell me with any kind of certainty what AI is going to do to the economy. And if everybody has certainty, they're full of hot air. They don't know what they're talking about. Nobody knows. We just have guesses. It's not a fact, it's a belief. And so you can choose the belief that's going to make you more likely to succeed doesn't guarantee success. Perseverance does not guarantee success. But quitting guarantees failure.
- [40:03]
Eli Woolery
It's interesting because on this topic there's sort of two interesting diverging schools of thought. And I'll talk about a specific subset of our audience that might be illustrators. And we have Friends who are illustrators and people who've been on the show. And there's kind of like two paths that I've seen them taking. One is, this is terrible. It's taking client work away from me, which it legitimately is. It was trained on my work. I don't want anything to do with this. It's awful. And I respect that because many of these folks spent decades working on their craft and now they're seeing, like, machines ingest it and able to spit out a really cheap imitation of what they do. And then there's another path that's like, yeah, I kind of believe all that stuff, but I'm using it for all the work that I have to do. That is not my creative work. That creative work, that drawing, that sketching, that's still me. But now I can kind of offload all this other stuff onto the AI that I previously had to deal with, and I don't anymore. And to me, that's an interesting spin on it, where you can kind of segment the belief, I guess, in some ways where, yes, I think this is negative, but I'm going to take the parts that are positive and use it to my advantage.
- [41:06]
Nir Eyal
Yeah. And that's the definition of a limiting versus a liberating belief. A limiting belief is a belief that saps your motivation and increases your suffering. So when I believe, I believe that AI is going to take my job. How motivated am I to find new opportunities? I've closed the door. AI is going to take my job. Done deal. I believe it. I'm not very motivated. And how much suffering have I created for myself? A lot. Because now I have no agency in the matter. Whereas if I do what's called a turnaround, this comes from inquiry based stress reduction, which is a technique that we use to uncover these liberating beliefs. And the way we do that is we ask ourselves, how could the opposite be true? Now, I guarantee you somebody's listening to me right now and says, no, this guy does not understand my situation. He doesn't know what's going on. He's out of touch. It's definitely going to take my job. I'm telling you, that person who's listening right now, I'm talking to you. That is your brain doing everything it can to not change its mind. The brain hates changing its mind. You don't want to change your mind. Your brain hates changing its mind because what it believed in the past kept it perfectly safe. So that resistance that you feel is very normal. Your brain is doing its job. And it's probably not serving you because if you stay with that old belief that you've always had, you're going to get the same results, probably worse, because you're not adapting. Whereas if you just open up the opportunity, the possibility of this question, could the exact opposite be true? You don't have to adopt that belief. Just a question, just consider it. Could the exact opposite be true? By the way, you can do this with any limiting belief. For example, I have terrible stage fright. What? I told you earlier, what would I don't have terrible stage fright look like? And that's how I came up with this new liberating belief of actually, this isn't stage fright. This is my body preparing me to deliver a great talk. But I wouldn't get there unless I consider the possibility of could the exact opposite be true? I could have stuck. No, no, no. I definitely have terrible stage fright. Oh, by the way, I also have been diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. I could pick any one of these things and say, oh, you see, these things are holding me back. Or I could say, actually, I'm learning a new skill. That's a liberating belief that makes me much more motivated to persist versus ugh, I can't do it. No way. I could become a three times best selling author. I have ADHD and dyslexia. Sorry. Versus. This is a skill I'm learning to overcome. And in fact, my ADHD gives me the ability to super focus on things I'm really interested in. Amazing. Now, what's biologically true? I don't know. I'm not a doctor, but I know what serves me. I know what keeps me motivated. So if I say to myself, AI is taking my job 100%, okay, what could the exact opposite be true? Is there any possible universe where AI is not taking my job? I guarantee you, if you think for five minutes you'll probably come up with 10 different ways that AI is not taking your job, that AI is giving you opportunities. Now, what you choose among all these new beliefs, that's up to you. That's where you can do what's called collecting. A portfolio of perspectives. You look at all these different beliefs and maybe you try one on. Kind of like if you need a new pair of shoes, right? Your old set of shoes, they're stinky and they've got holes in them. So you go to the shoe store and you know you need a new pair of shoes. Do you walk in there and you take the first pair you see? No. You ask for the right size, you try it on, you walk around the store, you make sure it fits right. And that's exactly what we do with our beliefs. We've got beliefs that are stinky, that have holes in them and we keep wearing them. And when we want to adopt a new one, we try it on. So what would it look like if just try a day, maybe a week of AI is not taking my job. AI is creating opportunities for me. What could that look like? What could that belief look like? Try it on. Just try it on. What's the harm? You would be amazed at what you will see. You will physically, literally see things. Your brain will see opportunities you never thought possible. Let me tell you one quick example that again, one of these studies that I can't stop thinking about. They ask people to do a very simple task. They ask them to look at a newspaper and simply count the number of images in the newspaper. Just count, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. How many images are in this newspaper. Now, they split people into two groups. One group were people who were self identified. People who believed that they were lucky. It wasn't a fact. The scientists didn't follow these people around to determine if they were lucky. They just asked them, do you believe you're lucky or unlucky? They took the people who were lucky, separated from people who thought they were unlucky, and they gave them the exact same task again. They believed they were either lucky or unlucky. The people who believed they were unlucky to do this task, to count the number of images in the newspaper, they took two and a half minutes. Okay, two and a half minutes. Okay. One, two, three, four. Two and a half minutes to do the task. The people who believed they were lucky took 11 seconds. Why the difference? Well, on page two of this newspaper, there was one image that said, there are 43 images in this newspaper. Collect your reward. The lucky people saw the image, read the text, got up from the table, went to the proctor, collected their reward and were out the door in 11 seconds. The unlucky people, despite correctly counting the number of images in the newspaper, they counted the 43 images. But they never read the text. They never saw. The answer was right there on page two. Because that kind of thing doesn't happen to me. It is what it is. I am what I am. How many times do we hear that? That's just the way I am. The most dangerous words in the English language is whatever comes after I am. If you believe that's the way it is, that's the way it Is. And so that tells us this amazing fact that we see based on what we believe, we do not see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. So if you believe there are no AI opportunities out there, guess what? You're right.
- [47:04]
Aaron Walter
I'd like to put another common, limiting belief in front of you that we have seen many times over throughout our careers from designers. So designers often say, I'm not a business person. So this is part of their identity is I'm a creative person. I don't pay attention to all of that stuff, like the math, the analytics, all of that stuff. These words have come out of my mouth. I know it to be true that I've said that I'm not good at systems, I'm not good at operations meetings, et cetera. Creative people don't work that way. How do these beliefs shift shape? What work actually gets done? And could we maybe just use the same methodology to pull some of those apart for those listening?
- [47:49]
Nir Eyal
For sure. I used to say that stuff all the time too. And if you believe designers just can't think that way. Right. As if we were born this way. Well, that's not like our brown eyes or blue eyes. Right. It's just a skill that you haven't developed. I'll give you another fascinating study. I love these studies. So there was a guy by the name of Mr. A who was anonymized in the literature. And Mr. A had a very bad breakup with his girlfriend. And he decides to swallow an entire pill jar of antidepressants. And just as he's swallowing this entire bottle of antidepressants, he decides to change his mind. After he swallowed the very last pill, he rushes to the hospital, he collapses on the floor of the emergency room. And he tells the doctors in the er, he says, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. The doctors pick them up, they put him on a gurney, and he's showing all the symptoms of an overdose. His blood pressure is dangerously low, his heart rate is falling, and he's slipping in and out of consciousness. Now they're trying to figure out what did Mr. A overdose on. So they take this pill jar, and they look at the pill jar, and it doesn't say the name of the antidepressant. Rather, it just has a phone number. They call the phone number, and it turns out that Mr. A was enrolled in a clinical trial. And when they look him up on the computer, they realize that he hadn't taken the antidepressant. He was in the placebo group. What he had taken was an entire bottle of nothing. Nothing he had taken could have possibly caused these physiological symptoms. The falling heart rate, the blood pressure. None of that stuff could have been caused by the placebo. They tell Mr. A this, and within 15 minutes, his blood pressure is normalized, his heart rate returns to normal. He walks out of the hospital perfectly healthy, maybe a bit embarrassed. So why do I tell you this story if believing that I have overdosed can cause these physiological symptoms that were completely psychosomatic? It was just his beliefs creating those symptoms. You can't tell me that believing I have a. Whatever. I'm not a morning person. I have adhd. I have anxiety, I have such and such, which I have. Right. I've been diagnosed as well with adhd, believing that that has this negative consequence. There is no way it doesn't create physiological symptoms in you. No way. Because your labels will become your limits. So there's a right way to look at a label and there's a wrong way. The right way is to look at your labels as a map. Okay? A map. You're on this map, and here's the treasure, right? X marks the spot, and so the map shows you, hey, you're here. You're going to get to there. That's the right way to look at a label or a diagnosis. So with my adhd, if I want to get better at something, here's a path I can follow. Now, other people might be closer to the treasure. Maybe the fact that they don't have ADHD means it's easier for them in some way or they don't have to learn this skill that I have to learn. But I am not the map. Okay, Telling yourself something like, I'm not a business person. Creatives can't be analytical. You're the map. You've decided on your identity. And this is called identity foreclosure. That when we decide we are a kind of person who. Done deal. Nothing more to discuss. Foreclosed. That's it. That's who I am. And so, guess what? We don't try, we don't change, and we never will be anything but who we currently are. So now I don't tell myself what I used to tell myself about my adhd, that, oh, this is a lifelong condition. I'm never going to get over it. What happens if I don't meet my deadline? And why can't I concentrate and why am I always distracted, et cetera, et cetera. Now I just tell myself, this is a skill I'm getting better at.
- [51:25]
Eli Woolery
Right.
- [51:26]
Nir Eyal
Just like I didn't know how to ride a bike at first, I didn't know how to write a book at first. And now this is just another skill I'm getting better at. So that's a much healthier method. Now, you could also say, I would not like to do that thing. Right. Maybe I don't currently enjoy it, Maybe it causes me suffering. But that's also a limiting belief. You know, pain is not suffering. Those are two separate things in the brain. Pain is not suffering. Pain is the signal. Pain is the 11 million bits of information. That's all it is, just information. But suffering is the interpretation of that signal. So all of this is malleable. There are people who all of a sudden, when they free themselves of these limiting beliefs, they find that they actually can enjoy things that they never thought they might enjoy, as opposed to saying, I can never enjoy business. If you say, actually, I bet there's some things I could love about business, I think I could be analytical. And when you free yourself from that, you might actually find that you enjoy it much more than you ever thought.
- [52:22]
Eli Woolery
That was a really great segue into the question I was about to follow up on, which is one of the things that surprised me a bit about the book. I find the frameworks and techniques you share very fresh and new. But this idea of a placebo has been around forever. It's been around since the 1950s or before in clinical trials. Why haven't we latched onto this more like, what has held us back from understanding that the beliefs, yes. Shape actual physiological things in our body? And why haven't more of us already, like, realized this?
- [52:49]
Nir Eyal
Essentially, I'll tell you the biggest reason. We used to think that placebos required deception, and that was a big problem, because it's unethical for a healthcare practitioner to lie to their patients, even if it's for their benefit. There's a lot of ethical issues with that. Until the placebo researchers learned that placebos don't require deception. Ted Kaptrak at Harvard showed told me that he did this study where for IBS patients, people with irritable bowel syndrome, which is highly influenced by the placebo effect, as are many maladies, insomnia, depression, anxiety, adhd. A lot of things are influenced by placebo. Some things are not. By the way, just to be very, very clear, illness and sickness are two different things. Sickness is in the body, illness is in the mind, just like pain and suffering are two different things. Sickness is not illness. Placebos are terrible at sickness. Placebos don't cure cancer. Placebos don't heal a broken arm. Placebos are amazing for illness because illness is in the mind. Where is pain and suffering? Pain and suffering is not in your elbow. It's not in your back. Pain and suffering is always in the brain. It doesn't mean that pain and suffering is fake. All pain is real. All pain is real. Nobody's faking it. Nobody's lying, okay? And yet, even though all pain is real, all pain is in the brain. So that means that we have some degree of control over our pain and suffering, of that interpretation of the signal to the suffering. So what's new is what Dr. Kaptluk did is that for these irritable bowel syndrome patients, he gave them what's called an open label placebo or an honest placebo. He gave them this bottle, and it said placebo right on the bottle. And he said, this is a placebo. It's an inert substance. But, and here's the important part, he said it has been shown to help some people with their symptoms of ibs. So again, that expectation, right? Belief, anticipate, feel and confirm. So he gives this expectation of it has been shown to be effective for some people. And wouldn't you know it, in his study, he found that giving someone an open label placebo was as effective as changing their perception of their symptoms as the leading medication, as the leading pharmaceutical, even though they knew it was a placebo from day one. In fact, we know the placebo effect is getting more effective. Over the past 50 years, the placebo effect has become more effective. Why? Why would that be? By the way, this is a huge problem for the pharmaceutical companies because, you know, when you want to get FDA approval, you can't just show that the medication works. It has to be more efficacious than the placebo. Right? That's why we have to do these placebo trials. So it's a big problem, because a placebo, even though the drugs work because they have to outdo the placebo, it's a higher and higher bar. Now, why is a placebo effect getting stronger over the past 50 years? Well, because more people have heard how effective placebos are, so they keep getting stronger. So it just goes to show you that the placebo effect, I think, is way underutilized. You know, we know that 80% of healthcare spending is on illness, not sickness. 80% of healthcare spending today is on the perception of the symptoms of sickness, not the sickness itself. So I think we should be using placebos way, way More in lots of shapes and forms. And good news is you can go on Amazon today. You can buy placebo pills, pills that say on the jar, placebo. And you will find underneath that Amazon listing at the bottom, you will see five star reviews for fast acting relief from these placebo pills.
- [56:10]
Aaron Walter
This makes me think of hypnosis, which is starting to come back into vogue. My wife went to architecture school and I think anyone who knows anything about architecture school knows it's the gauntlet. You don't sleep. It's very challenging. And so my wife got hooked on drinking Coke caffeine to try to stay awake. And of course after architecture school, long after, she still was craving Coke because it had become part of her life. And so she went to a hypnotist just as an experiment, like, let's see if this will work. And the hypnotist just sort of gave her a message, you're not the type of person who drinks Coca Cola. That's it. She knows that that was the message. She is conscious of that and she does not drink Coca Cola because of it. I think that is fascinating.
- [56:56]
Nir Eyal
That is fascinating. A lot of these discoveries of the past several years are connected, you know, the explosion in psychedelics, you know, psychedelics for mental health. It's not that psychedelics heal the brain. It's not that, you know, you're fixing a miswiring or something. What you're doing, what psychedelics allow people to do is, is to see things from a different perspective, to feel things that they otherwise could not have felt or considered or believed before. You know, this intense feeling of love and gratitude that people feel on certain substances, that's not creating the healing, it's giving them a new perspective so that they can release this old belief. So releasing the belief that I'm addicted to Coca Cola by saying to yourself, actually, I'm not the kind of person who gets addicted to Coca Cola. That's a new belief. It's exactly what we talked about before. Exactly. That's what inquiry based stress reduction, that turnaround we talked about earlier, AI is taking my job. AI is not taking my job. I'm addicted to Coca Cola. I'm not addicted to Coca Cola. That's exactly what it's doing. And so whether it's through hypnosis or the turnarounds or inquiry based stress reduction or hallucinogenics, it's all basically the fundamentally the same process. Now, the good news is, I don't think in some severe cases, perhaps, but for the vast majority of people, for the vast majority of our problems, we can do it ourselves. There's a lot of things that we can do ourselves here that can make us a lot better off and reduce our suffering.
- [58:16]
Aaron Walter
This is fascinating and I hope that people will check out the book and dive into this because this is eminently useful regardless of where you are in your life. Before we wrap up though, I want to just dive into a sidebar because you've mentioned ADHD multiple times and this has been fascinating to us that we have seen a theme. Eli We've done more than 240 interviews over the past eight years. We've talked to so many different types of people and there is a red thread that seems to run through not all, but many of the people that we've talked to because we talk to a lot of creative thinkers. We have observed in companies we worked for, consulted with, been involved in that. Silicon Valley seems to be full of adhd. I did a little poking around and I saw that the U.S. national Institute of Health did a study. Roughly 7% of global population is diagnosed with ADHD. I have a conviction, I have a belief that that is underreported big time and it's framed as a disorder, Attention deficit disorder. My hunch is that it is not a disorder if that large of a cohort of the population continues to carry this gene forward. I'm curious what you've learned about ADHD personally, how you manage it, how it serves you and how it holds you back and what you know about it more broadly.
- [59:41]
Nir Eyal
It's a controversial topic because it's one that's full of people who hold a faith around it versus beliefs or even facts that the science is definitely not settled. There's a lot of open questions that even ADHD researchers who are steeped in the latest research will tell you. There's a lot of gaps in the research. My best assessment is that it's a confluence of a few things. One, I'm not convinced it's a disorder. I'm not saying it's not real. There's definitely a spectrum of severity. When you say adhd, it's such a loaded term because like many different disorders, it depends how severe it is. Some people have very few symptoms, some people have very severe symptoms. But I think that it could very well be a confluence of symptoms that are maladaptive to a certain environment. I don't think that when I was 6 years old that sitting in a classroom and being told to sit still all the time and listen to somebody, blah, blah, blah, at the front of the class classroom was really serving me and that at six years old, as a little boy, I needed to do what little boys have done for 200,000 years, which is go out there and play. I see that with a lot of kids. You know, I have a 17 year old now, but I could see with a lot of kids, I don't know if it was a medicalized thing, it was maladaptive for what society was asking them to do. I'm not sure that what we ask of kids these days is what we've evolved to do. It's no surprise that if you put people in cages all day, they're going to behave like animals. I dare you to try and sit through your kids high school education. You will be bored to tears. It is so boring what they make kids do today in institutionalized education. So of course you're gonna get kids who can't sit still and who wanna rebel cause they're told what to do all day. That's part of it. I think there's another phenomenon that's going on at the same time as one of the doctors I spoke with researching the book told me. He said one day medical science will advance to a point where, where we're all sick today. You know, in the United Kingdom there are more neurodivergent people than non neurodivergent people. It's reached 51%. 51% of the UK population is neurodivergent. Shouldn't that set up some red flags? If there's some kind of industry that's so good at diagnosing people without a check and balance to go get a diagnosis for a lot of these things is not that hard. Especially if you have some money. You know, you pay a few thousand dollars. I bet you that the reject rate if you go in and say I have adhd, you're going to have adhd. It's not that hard to get a diagnosis. And frankly you're kind of an idiot for not getting a diagnosis if you're a kid these days. If you're a parent of a kid, I should say, why haven't you gotten your kid a diagnosis? They get special treatment, they get time and a half, if not double time, they get to take their test in a special room. They get so many advantages that, you know, it's kind of silly not to go do it. And there's no check and balance. It's a likert scale. They say, how often do you have these symptoms? Often, sometimes, never, Always. Well, to me I feel like I'm always distracted. But I've never been inside your brain. I've never been in a brain that doesn't have adhd. So what do I compare it to? There's no blood test, there's no X ray. So I think there's probably a confluence of there is such thing as neurodivergence. Clearly we look different, we have different heights, we have different like people are different, clearly. And so I'm positive that people's brains also operate differently. And who knows why. It's always this classic question of nature or nurture. I think when you couple the fact that we spend more time in classrooms at a younger and younger in age overvaluing institutionalized learning, you conflate that plus the rise in testing. I mean just the number of psychologists out there has boomed and it's one of the only professions where more healthcare practitioners has coincided with more mental health issues. Right. You would think more doctors in cancer research, more oncologists means less cancer, less death. That's not what's happened with psychiatry and psychology. It's the opposite. More psychologists, more clinicians means more mental health issues. You see where I'm going with this. There's many confluencing factors here. That's not as simple as saying that it's underdiagnosed. I think in many ways it's over diagnosed. But then maybe for some people, people who don't have means, it's probably underdiagnosed. The homeless person that you see on the streets there, it's under diagnosed. But for people who have some money and can get their kids a diagnosis, I think it's probably way over diagnosed.
- [64:02]
Eli Woolery
We definitely see this at elite institutions like Stanford. I think now 40% of the student population claims some sort of accommodation like this. And I'm not saying they don't have it, but the negative effect is that like you said, it's a spectrum. And maybe the people that are far end of the spectrum that have some real challenges in learning now, a lot of these special accommodations, they're too full, they can't take more people. And so I think there's kind of these knock on effects where if you are over diagnosing or treating a very maybe mild case of one of these conditions as the same as a very severe case, you're taking away resources from people that really, really, truly need them.
- [64:38]
Nir Eyal
Yeah, I think it started from a good place. Right. I think what we saw was people with severe conditions and we treated it like a disorder that required special attention. Right. Of course, if someone's disabled if they're in a wheelchair. We want to do everything we can that they feel included, that they don't feel like they can't access what everyone else can access. We don't want to be ableist, but we can't see things the same way because it's all subjective. It's all up here. And so there's a lot of room for interpretation and of course, abuse. And I think you're absolutely right. This is the real tragedy that the people that these laws were meant to help are the ones that are actually being hurt because it's being overused and abused by people who a generation ago would say, okay, you're fidgety or you just haven't learned how to concentrate or you're in the wrong place because you're trying to be really good at standardized testing. And really what you should do is work with your hands at first and see, maybe you master skills a different way, and that's fine. But instead, everybody has to go to college and everybody has to take the SAT and everybody has to to get straight A's, and we all have to go to elite schools. And so, of course, if some people aren't enjoying that process, I mean, that's what I learned, right? Like, with what I struggle with, you know, when I'm into a topic, ugh, I love it, all right? You can't tear me away, but if I don't like it, if I'm bored by it, if it's not interesting to me, I have to put in a lot more effort. Now, it doesn't mean it's impossible. I could still do it, but it's going to take a lot of belief work to get me to do that.
- [66:00]
Aaron Walter
The thing I struggle with is I see a lot of creative people that this is the way their brain works. And they're often told that this is, you know, it's a disorder, it's a dysfunction, that it's a disadvantage. And I see it as a superpower. It's just that the world is designed for a certain type of thinker, and it's not really built for people who want to learn a lot of different things or want to be obsessed about a particular thing. And I think the message I would love for our listeners to take away from this is there's nothing wrong with you. There's not a damn thing wrong with you. It's just your brain works the way it does, and the more introspective and reflective you can be about when your brain is at its best, feels Good operates well, you feel successful, lean into more of that stuff and that's okay. We don't all have to, as you said, follow the same path.
- [66:56]
Nir Eyal
I totally agree with you. And to have those liberating beliefs of, hey, this is my superpower, this is where I can excel, I can do things better than others can because of how my brain works, if that serves you, I think that's wonderful. It's a great example of a belief. Whether or not it's true, I don't think it matters. If it's factually true, it's a belief, it's a tool that serves you. It doesn't necessarily have to be true. And also, as long as you don't limit yourself to say, well, I shouldn't do anything that is hard or I shouldn't do anything that I think I can't do or I shouldn't do anything that my ADHD won't let me do, then it becomes a problem, right? Then your labels become your limits. And so as long as you can do both, as long as you can say it makes me really great the things I enjoy and okay, maybe I have to acquire some new skills, maybe it's going to be a little bit more tough for me than it might be for other people, but I can still do it. I can still adopt positive beliefs around that and learn from that struggle as well.
- [67:49]
Aaron Walter
Absolutely. Nir, what have you been watching, reading, listening to that has you excited, inspired, or maybe giving you new perspective?
- [67:58]
Nir Eyal
Actually, I started reading a great book on this very topic, funny you should mention it, called the Age of Diagnosis. That's really good. It's topping the bestseller list in the uk, which is where I came across it. But not many people have read it in the US but that's what's on my Kindle right now.
- [68:10]
Aaron Walter
And where can people learn more about you and get ahold of your new book, Beyond Belief.
- [68:16]
Nir Eyal
Thank you. Yeah, so my website is nearanfar.com and that's spelled like my first name, N I r and far.com if you go there. Actually we have a five minute belief change guide that's totally free that maybe you guys can put in the show notes as well in case anybody has any trouble finding it. It's just a free tool. You don't have to buy anything. Just get you started on finding those limiting beliefs and adopting those liberating ones.
- [68:37]
Eli Woolery
Nir, thanks so much for coming back to design Better.
- [68:40]
Nir Eyal
My pleasure. Thanks guys.
- [68:46]
Aaron Walter
This episode was produced by Eli Woolery and me, Aaron Walter with engineering and production support from Brian Paik of Pacific Audio. If you found this episode useful, we hope that you'll leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to finer shows. Or simply drop a link to the show in your team's Slack channel designbetterpodcast.com It'll really help others discover the show. Until next time,
- [69:26]
Sponsor/Ad Voice
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