Nir Eyal: The Four Questions That Can Change Any Belief

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25:16You tell a story about this one time that you were really frustrated with your mom.

25:20Nir 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?

25:47Nir Eyal:I'm a good son. I patted myself on the back. Like she's going to love them. You know, she's going to, I'm going to 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. You know, 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.

26:16Nir Eyal: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. Even time-limited venting, like two minutes?

26:52Nir Eyal:Well, if you do it 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-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.

27:24Nir Eyal: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.

27:52Nir Eyal: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 believed 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 a potentially different point of view.

28:35Nir Eyal: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.

29:12Nir Eyal: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 an obvious answer. Yes, it's true. I just told, didn't I just tell you what my mom did? That's clearly too judgmental, right? 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.

29:47Nir Eyal:Not really, right? Maybe there's another explanation for why she did what she did. I can't be 100 % sure that she was being judgmental and hard to please. Okay, third question. Who am I when I hold on to 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 on to 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? Who would I be without this belief? If I had a magic wand and poof, that belief disappeared from my brain, who would I be?

30:25Nir Eyal:How would I feel? I'd 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.

31:04Nir Eyal: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.

31:37Nir Eyal:Here's a third perspective. The opposite of my mother's 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?

32:19Nir Eyal: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.

32:54Nir Eyal: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. 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. 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 beliefs are tools, not truth.

33:24Nir Eyal: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. I 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. Would you mind if we wrote these out as AI prompts and did a giveaway? Yeah, of course. Like I feel like - But give credit to Byron Katie because it's not the inquiry-based destruction.

33:54Nir Eyal:Yeah. I am quoting her. I'm citing her. 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 - Sure. Whatever belief is troubling you. Yeah. 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. 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.

34:32Nir Eyal:The baby on the flight is crying. The stock market's going up and down. Like it doesn't fight me anymore. Like I don't have to suffer from that stuff anymore. That is so liberating. Bad stuff happens. Bad stuff happens all the time. I barely slept last night because of this terrible jet lag, right? That we don't seem to have. Yeah, same. Before 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. And 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.

35:10Nir Eyal:He can't handle it 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.

35:39Nir Eyal: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 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, 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 overdose symptoms? They look it up on the computer and it turns out that Mr.

36:10Nir Eyal: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 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.

36:52On the topic of the placebo effect, it's not just the pill itself. It's the ritual around it that goes into the effect that many people have.

37:04Nir 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 Kapchak 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.

37:43Nir Eyal: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. Kapchuk, that IBS placebo pill was so effective. Can I get some more of those placebo pills?

38:18Nir Eyal:Because they work so well. In fact, we know that the placebo effect is getting stronger. And this is 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.

38:43Nir Eyal:But the placebo effect 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 Kapturk 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.

39:17Nir Eyal: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, hold that conviction lightly. But if you anticipate some kind of response, now when I get sick, I used to always make fun of my wife's family. They're into Chinese medicine, the herbs and the treatments and the acupuncture.

39:51Nir Eyal:I always made fun of that stuff. Like, ah, that doesn't work. There's no 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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43:34I 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. That's right.

43:47Nir Eyal: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've 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.

44:23Nir Eyal: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 gonna 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. So helplessness turns out is our default state.

44:58Nir Eyal: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.

45:32How 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 making. That seems like the opposite of helplessness. You know, that seems very empowering.

45:53Nir Eyal:To a point. 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 a baby shark starts swimming immediately. Babies can't do anything. They are completely helpless. I know I have a 17-year-old daughter. Remember when she was born? But you 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.

46:29Nir Eyal: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 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. How do people learn hope? 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 can identify what's keeping us back, again, we're not trying to defy the laws of physics.

47:13Nir Eyal: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 the 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. It gave up, drowned, died.

47:52Nir Eyal: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 read the book already, so you know the answer.

48:27Nir Eyal:But when I ask audiences, how much longer did the rat swim for? Now that it had been conditioned to expect 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 times more persistent, that'd be incredible. Like you could study for four times longer. You could run four times farther.

49:00Nir Eyal:That would be unbelievable. That's not what happened. The rats didn't swim for 60 minutes. They swam for 60 hours. 60 hours of nonstop swimming. They became 240 times more persistent. How? 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.

49:40Nir Eyal:The 60 hours. Sorry, the 60 hours. That's right. They always had the 60 hours within them, but they just gave up at 15 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.

50:15Nir Eyal: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. And eventually we will have to stop, but that our potential is far, far greater than we think it is. 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?

50:49Nir Eyal:Great question. So when do you quit? Yeah. It's not that quitting is always a bad thing. Sometimes quitting is a wonder. 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.

51:23Nir Eyal:I'm going to try on this new belief for a certain number of days before I reevaluate. So I'm going to 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 going to try it and see how I feel, when it gets hard, you're going to quit. So that's the wrong reason to quit. Try January. Perfect example. Exactly. I'm going to do this for 30 days and see how that suits me. The second criteria is, am I still learning? If you're still learning, failure is 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.

51:56Nir Eyal: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 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.

52:29Nir Eyal: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. How do you factor for opportunity cost for the alternatives not pursued by virtue of dedicating your time and resources to this?

53:06Nir 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. What do you do when the shiny pony has some conceivable benefit towards the dominant goal?

53:43Okay. So what I'm thinking about specifically is, let's say the goal is 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 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. And 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.

54:23There are so many things that you could potentially do. Right. And they all have some conceivable benefit. Right.

54:32Nir 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.

55:04Nir Eyal: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 enough. To-do lists are endless. And that's why to-do lists are terrible. What you need is a time box calendar. A time box 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. I also have this dream. Dreams don't become reality until you devote the time to do them.

55:32Nir Eyal: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. 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.

56:01Nir Eyal: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.

56:32Nir Eyal:So to answer your question, well, how do I prioritize? I ask 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?

57:00Nir Eyal: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.

57:31Nir Eyal: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. 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.

58:03Nir Eyal: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.

58:33Nir Eyal: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. 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.

59:08Nir 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 time box 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 it in the stock market or invest it somewhere. What do you do? It feels crummy.

59:40Nir Eyal: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. Just a feeling. 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. That's all it is. It's just an uncomfortable sensation. It's my interpretation that causes these problems. We've talked about prioritization of tasks, prioritization of time. Can you talk about how to map prioritization of money onto this?

1:00:17That'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 kid's 529 plan and save money for their kid's 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?

1:00:40Nir 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.

1:01:18Nir Eyal: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. You can always make more money.

1:01:46Nir Eyal: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 kid's 529 plan versus my IRA? Well, you could do the math on what's the time value of money and am I going to need this versus am I going to fund that?

1:02:25Nir Eyal: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 kid's 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 kid's education more than your retirement? Nobody can advise you on which one is more important to you.

1:02:54Right. And you said values are, how did you describe it? Attributes of the person

1:02:57Nir Eyal:you want to become. Attributes of the person you want to become. I love that. That's my definition. I love that. Well, thank you so much for spending this time with us. My pleasure. Thank you. Where can people find you if they'd like to learn more? Sure. So my website is nearandfar.com, near a spell like my first name, N-I-R-andfar.com. and the new book is Beyond Belief. It's available wherever books are sold. 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.

1:03:36It'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. In terms of dollars and cents, they are. But behaviorally, they're making a pain management mistake.

1:04:03Nir 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 motivation is about the desire to escape discomfort, which must therefore mean that money management is pain management. 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.

1:04:40It looks like repeated failure because people who succeed fail over and over and over and over and over until they don't.

1:04:48Nir 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. 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.

1:05:27The question you should be asking is not, is this true? The question you should be asking is, does this serve me?

1:05:34Nir 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. 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.

1:06:14You 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 slash turn it around. That's totally free, affordanything.com slash turn it around. 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.

1:06:56Share 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-I-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 swim 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 slash turn it around. Thank you again for being part of this community.

1:07:38My name is Paula Pant. This is the Afford Anything Podcast, and I'll meet you in the next episode.