683: Nir Eyal - How to Break Limiting Beliefs, Create Your Own Luck, Transform Your Relationships, and Start Seeing Opportunities Everyone Else Is Missing

19:52Nir Eyal:What makes beliefs so special, the reason they are so underutilized is that they can change. They can change. And so most of our problems in the world, interpersonal problems, personal problems, geopolitical problems, come from this unfortunate situation where too many people think that their faith is a fact and the thing that they think are facts are nothing more than beliefs, which are changeable. And so now when I had these four beliefs, I could look at them and say, huh, I've held onto this one, which says my mom is too judgmental and hard to please. And that only has one way out. The only way that I could be happy is if my mom changed with that belief.

20:30Nir Eyal:Only one way. She has to change so I could be happy. Good luck. That doesn't often happen. The other three beliefs, well, now I could do something about that. They were in my control. And so that enabled me, it freed me. It was liberating. It's a liberating belief. I could do something I couldn't previously do. I could have a relationship with her because I could take care of my own garbage as opposed to insisting that she admit that she was wrong, which was not gonna happen. And so this is just one quick example. You can do this with your interpersonal relationships, with yourself about how you think about the world, with business challenges, I mean, the aspects of this go on and on and on.

21:06Nir Eyal:I think it's an incredibly powerful technique.

21:08Ryan Hawk:Okay, can I push on it a little bit? Please. Okay, so your mom is one of the four.

21:13Nir Eyal:By the way, changing my mind is the best thing ever, right? Because I'm all about changing beliefs. So I love it. This is my love language.

21:18Ryan Hawk:I don't know if I'm going to change your mind. I just want to say what I'm honestly thinking. Okay, so, and I don't even know how to phrase it yet. We'll figure it out. Your mom is one of the four people that you dedicate the book to. so I don't know if she's like the best example to use for this tool because in life you love your mom unconditionally she loves you unconditionally I'm guessing so there are other people in life at times I mentioned a boss or whatever the Liz Weissman story or others but there are sometimes we have to deal with people who are legitimately narcissist not that I can factually say that, but you know, you know, these people and we have to work with them or deal with them from time to time.

22:04Ryan Hawk:And yes, we could try the turnaround and we could try to put it more on us and be more reflective and thoughtful. Like you are, I want to be around people like you, by the way, like that are that reflective and thoughtful and curious. That's my tribe. That's what I'm talking about. But you are the minority of the world by being that thoughtful of a person. We can all have those thought bubbles of the people that come up that are not like your mom, that are not going to love you unconditionally, that are actually trying to do harm to other people that are very self-centered. You know what I'm saying?

22:41Ryan Hawk:Sure. What about for those types of people that we've all encountered? Do we just say, I'm just going to go the other way? I mean, what do you do? What do you do in that situation?

22:51Nir Eyal:Let's go back to what is a limiting belief. A limiting belief is a belief that decreases motivation and increases suffering. So where does suffering come from? What is suffering? Suffering is what happens in the gap between what is and what you want to be. So my suffering with my relationship with my mom was coming from the fact that I wanted her to be different. That's where my suffering was coming from. Who said I have the power to change that? Why should I expect her to be different? So this limiting belief, that person's a narcissist. What's implicit in that belief is, and that's bad. Does it have to be bad?

23:31Nir Eyal:Give me one way that that person in your life who's a narcissist is not bad. The easiest is that person's a narcissist. Awesome, awesome. You know why? Because I don't want to be around narcissists. I don't have to suffer anymore, right? I'm not expecting them to change, right? We have to understand everyone, even the narcissists, they are operating from the best tools they have. And so how do we measure love when we say, oh, I love you so much. What does that even mean? I love you a lot. I love it. What does that mean? To me, love is measured by the benefit of the doubt. How much benefit of the doubt we give to somebody.

24:10Nir Eyal:If you think about, so for me.

24:11Ryan Hawk:Like your kids, you give them the whole world. Yeah.

24:14Nir Eyal:Yeah. Like somebody you love more than I miss. So my daughter. Okay. When my daughter was born, I remember the day when she was born, they let me wash her for the first time. I take her downstairs after my wife gave birth, and I was the first person to give her a bath and wipe off all the gunk. And I remember when I held her, I just felt this overwhelming feeling of adoration. Like, I'm just crazy about this girl. Five minutes ago, she didn't exist, and now I love her more than anything. And I gave her complete, total benefit of the doubt. Now, why do I love her so much? Is it because she does things for me?

24:42Nir Eyal:She never sent me flowers, right? So she didn't do anything. She didn't make me feel good. I love her so much because I gave her complete benefit of the doubt. Even though babies, they poop, they need food all the time, they cry. But I never said, oh, she's crying to annoy me. She's doing that to hurt me. That's stupid. That's really delusional. No, we give babies ultimate benefit of the doubt because it's the only tool they have is to cry. They're not doing it to annoy us. And yet why is it that when those babies grow up and become adults, we don't give them benefit of the doubt? The narcissist in your life, the person who offends you, the person that hurts you, they just, that's the best tools they have.

25:24Nir Eyal:That's the best tools they have. You know, it doesn't mean you have to be with them. It doesn't mean you have to include them in your life. That's not the requirement. The requirement is how do you figure out to stop suffering, to be at peace. That's what I want in my life. I want to be at peace. as opposed to constantly expecting things to be different than they actually are. And so that's what this technique does. It helps you find the belief in your life that reduces suffering. That's the whole idea. It doesn't mean you have to be with them. It doesn't mean you have to forgive them per se, although forgiving means you had to judge them in the first place.

26:04Nir Eyal:And so part of it is releasing that idea of needing to forgive in the first place because you can't forgive unless you have previously judged. And so this big revelation for me is that I was constantly judging everything. Everything, right? Somebody cuts me off in traffic. I'm a jerk. There's a line at the burrito place. Oh my gosh. The business thing didn't work out. The stock market goes down. Judging, judging, judging all day long. It's all we do is judge. Good, bad, good, bad, good, bad. Expecting things to be different than they are. Why? These are all limiting beliefs and all they do is make us suffer.

26:37Nir Eyal:They make us miserable.

26:39Ryan Hawk:Thank you for going along with that with me because I think what it is is, at least personally, it's an expectation problem.

26:47Nir Eyal:Exactly.

26:48Ryan Hawk:I try to have high expectations for myself, for the people that I love in my life, both how I treat them and how I respect them and love them and care for them and them for me. But maybe there are others who I have the same expectations for them, but that's not who they are. And that's being -

27:08Nir Eyal:you to suffer. Correct. We don't, we don't have relationship problems. We have belief problems. It's your belief that something should be different than it is that people, it's like asking my, my daughter to speak Russian. She can't speak Russian. Like, what am I expecting? She can't, she doesn't have that ability. So why should I have expectations that people should meet my expectations? Now, it doesn't mean that if an employee is not performing, that I have to keep them around, I can fire them. That's okay. Like, but I'm not going to suffer from that. here was the requirement. Here's what they did or didn't meet.

27:39Nir Eyal:We may part ways. That's totally fine, but it's not going to cause me suffering. It's not going to cause me this emotional angst. I'm not going to be ruminating about it. I'm going to let it go because it's a limiting belief to believe that things should be different than they are.

27:53Ryan Hawk:Okay. Can we take a slight off ramp for a second? Sure. It applies to chapter three. Okay. It's about better relationships. So I want to get to the secret to better relationships in a second, but we were introduced by mutual friend of ours, a guy named Shane Snow. I love Shane Snow. I've been lucky to have dinner with him a few times in New York City. He's been super helpful to me over the past 11 years. The first person I had on my list that I wanted to interview when I launched this podcast 11 years ago. He said, you got to talk to Nir. He's the best. He's the man. We've done a lot together.

28:25Ryan Hawk:We wrote together. And right before we started recording, you talked about these sessions you would have with him and a few other people, these writing sessions. Can you take me inside that room for a second? I know this is not part of what we're going to talk about, but I can't help it. I can't help it. Can you take me like inside that room of you and Tim, Urban and Shane, these other people I've had on my podcast, what it was like, why you did it and how it helped you?

28:49Nir Eyal:Yeah. So this has to do with my second book, Indistractable, How to Control Your Intention and Choose Your Life. And one of the techniques in the book that I discovered is this amazing power of focus through a mutual goal. Even if that mutual goal is just to stay focused, it's incredible. When I would work on my own, I would get distracted. I would check email. I would do this, I would do that. But when I had other authors around me and what we would do, we would sit down, I'd prepare some coffee. I have a big old jug of coffee and I'd sit down. We would write for 45 minutes, then take a 15 minute break.

29:23Nir Eyal:Then write for 45 minutes, take a 15 minute break. We do that for three hours every morning.

29:27Ryan Hawk:Just sit there on your computers, type it away?

29:28Nir Eyal:Yep, just type it away. But we were with each other. And so when you see the person next to you, you know, Mark Manson typing furiously, getting his book done and Shane was there and Tim Urban was there and we were all writing. Not only is it inspiring, it keeps you on track. And so this is actually a technique I recommend is to find what I call a focus friend. So somebody that you can go to a coffee shop with or go to the company canteen and say, hey, you know what? I really need to focus. Let's keep each other accountable. Let's just work next to each other. And just like working side by side and seeing that other person also working on the stuff they should be working on.

29:59Nir Eyal:So we would oftentimes say, okay, what are you working on? What are you working on? All right, go. And that would keep each other accountable. And it turned out to be incredible. Mark finished his second book. I finished my second book that way.

30:10Ryan Hawk:Wow. Who could have thought at that time you guys would all go on to be these big time famous authors? Were you like that at the time or no? You guys were just all trying to figure it out together. there.

30:20Nir Eyal:Well, so, uh, I published my first book hooked and Mark had published subtle art. Shane had published, I think one or two books at that point. And Tim was, I hadn't published his book yet, but he was a pretty famous blogger at that point as well. So yeah, we weren't like super young in our careers. We were like getting going.

30:39Ryan Hawk:Yeah. I just think there's a big power in putting yourself physically in rooms with high standard, get after it type people. And regardless of what you're striving to do, having a practice of that, I know you mentioned you want to get back to that when you get back to New York City, of putting yourself in rooms with others who are getting after it, who you respect and they respect you. That's just like a universal truth life. Yeah.

31:06Nir Eyal:Now, there is definitely something to that. There's also a dark side, which you can't help but compare. And back to what we were saying earlier about expectations and suffering is that comparison is the thief of joy. Yeah. And so sometimes it can be tricky to be like, wow, I'm in a room with people who are super duper successful. I was like the least successful author there at the time. And so sometimes it can, you have to put it in perspective and to know, you know, I'm following a process. It's not about the outcome. It's about the journey. And it turns out the best thing you can do is do the work.

31:38Ryan Hawk:Well, I was going to say, I mean, now that's even more prevalent than ever. Instagram, social media in general, that you look out and you see the highlight reels of your friends, of people you don't know, of just the world in general. And it is so easy, even for the most self-aware person in the world, to start comparing themselves to other people's highlight reels. How do you manage that?

32:04Nir Eyal:I try and stick with the process. I think that's the best line of defense. So I'm a big fan of time boxing as opposed to to-do lists. And so I think what most people do, we're told that if a task is under two minutes, Just do it, which I think is terrible advice because every email takes less than two minutes. And so now you're spending your entire freaking day doing email. And then two, to-do lists are one of the worst things you can do for personal productivity because there's no constraint, right? You can always add more things to a to-do list. And so you come home from work every day and you say, oh my gosh, I still have all these things I haven't done on my to-do list.

32:35Nir Eyal:And you start saying stupid things like, oh, I'm no good at time management. Well, no, it's not that you're not good at time management. It's a stupid technique you're using. To-do lists are dumb. They don't have constraints. Whereas a time box calendar, and this is a very old technique. I didn't make this up. It's actually the most well-researched time management technique, way, way better than to-do lists. To-do lists have not been shown to be very effective at all. What's much more effective than a to-do list is planning out what you're going to do and when you're going to do it. This is called an implementation intention.

33:03Nir Eyal:Very well studied. The reason this is so much better is because the goal now becomes not to finish anything. Okay, this is super, super important. The goal is not to finish anything. What is this crazy guy talking about? What do you mean? Isn't to-do lists all about finishing stuff? Yeah, that's the problem because what do we do with a to-do list? We measure our self-worth by how many cute little boxes we check off. I used to do a task and say, oh, I forgot to put that on my to-do list. I'd write on my to-do list after I did it just so I could check it off. How stupid is that?

33:32Ryan Hawk:We all do it, man. What do we do with a to-do list? We all do that.

33:33Nir Eyal:We do the urgent stuff. We do the fun stuff. We don't do the important stuff that we need to do to move our lives and careers forward. Whereas when you have a time box calendar, and this answers your question of how do you stop looking to your left and right and comparing and contrasting with everybody you know, you put the time to do the work. So by having it on your calendar, the reason the goal changes, it's doing the work, not finishing the work. So why is it so much better than a to-do list? Because when you start on a to-do list, you work on something for five minutes. You say, well, let me, I have this question.

34:03Nir Eyal:Let me just go check this thing on Instagram. Let me answer an email. Let me check my Slack channel. And then what am I working on again? Oh, I totally forgot. Whereas a time box calendar, the only goal is to work on that task or do that thing for as long as you said you would without distraction. That's it, okay? Not finishing working on that task without distraction. Why? Because now you have a feedback loop. The biggest problem with stupid to-do lists is that there's no feedback loop. How long did that take you? You have to do a presentation. You have to write a blog post. How long did it take?

34:37Nir Eyal:I don't know, because you weren't tracking. Whereas when you say, okay, I have a presentation to give. It needs to be 30 slides long. and when I worked on it for one hour, I got three slides done. Okay, well, that means I need this many time boxes to finish the entire presentation. So now I have a feedback loop. I can start assessing how long things take for me to finish. So that's how you do it. You make time to do the work, to turn your values into time. That's the secret.

35:03Ryan Hawk:What is the secret to better relationships? You write that you don't have relationship problems. You have perception problems.

35:13Nir Eyal:What do you mean by that? So this is exactly what I was saying before about this relationship with my mom, that the problem was not in the relationship. It's not that anybody had to do anything different. It's that I had the belief that she had to change so I could be happy. So I was stuck on one and only singular belief. Well, guess what? I could be happy other ways. I could be happy if I realized any of the other three beliefs that we discussed earlier, that she was not being too judgmental and hard to please, that I was being too judgmental and hard to please, that I was being too judgmental and hard to please towards myself.

35:46Those three made me much happier

35:48Nir Eyal:than sitting there and waiting. She has to apologize and admit she was wrong, right? Those didn't make me happy because it wasn't going to happen. So that's the belief problem. You don't have relationship problems. You have belief problems.

35:59Ryan Hawk:I'm just thinking of you and Julie both living the turnaround. This is a weird question, but how is it when you guys have a disagreement, perhaps a fight? Are you like, wait a second, I didn't do the turnaround. I'm doing this wrong. Like, how does that go? when you're both so knowledgeable of these tools. Guess what? You don't fight.

36:17Nir Eyal:Really? You don't fight. You and Julie don't fight? Why would you fight with your spouse? We're on the same team. You fight with your enemy. Why would you fight with your spouse?

36:26Ryan Hawk:Let's say you have a disagreement about a parenting thing, any decision. I mean, you know, you're living together. You do life together. So you're not the same person. So you have disagreements, I assume. So how do you not fight? How do you make sure that you stay aligned on the same team, headed in the same direction?

36:43Nir Eyal:honestly since we have started this technique we used to fight or not fight we used to have disagreements now we don't even have disagreements we collaborate we collaborate because now this has become our habit this has become what we just default to if there's a very smart person much smarter than me who has an opinion who i respect deeply i love and admire why would i like fight with that person. Why would I even disagree with that person? I would collaborate with that person. It's like going to a mentor and saying, what do you think we should do with our daughter is having this in this challenge.

37:19Nir Eyal:We've had challenges that doesn't go away. Okay. Life never gets easier. You get stronger. That's a very important point. Life never gets easier. You just get stronger. Stuff keeps coming, right? But we don't suffer from it. Now we collaborate through it. And that's a completely different mindset. We're not adversarial. There's no need to be because I know she's operating with the best tools she has. She knows I'm operating with the best tools I have. And because we have this understanding that if we see things differently, that's an asset. Awesome. Now we celebrate the fact, okay, I think things should be this way.

37:56Nir Eyal:You don't think so. Amazing. A new perspective, right? Because think about it like collecting that portfolio perspectives we talked about earlier. I came in with one. It took work to get to the other three. Now, if I have a person who comes in with another perspective, amazing. and now it's like collecting pokemon cards right you've got to get them all then now with more perspectives i can pick the best one so it's it's a game changer wow you guys should go on the road teach that stuff seriously you know what though here's the thing people don't want to hear this yeah they do why would you say that my limiting belief at this very moment and this is what i'm doing the best with is that by sharing this stuff i'm sharing what's worked for me i don't want to change people, right?

38:41Nir Eyal:It's hard enough to have changed myself, right? To be where I am today. And that's what I share in my work. When I try and change people, when I try and kind of take this stuff on the road and say, hey, here's the right way to be, instantly people come up with excuses. They instantly want to share all their limiting beliefs. Well, you understand, my husband is this and my wife is that and she did this and he did that and they'll come up with a million reasons why they are the source of the problem, never me. Hate being me. Oh, definitely not me. And so it doesn't go anywhere. So what I've tried to do, and this is why Julie is very private about this as well, is we try and figure it out for ourselves.

39:21Nir Eyal:And if we learn some lessons along the way, we would try and share them this way. And you ask actually excellent questions. Most people don't ask these kinds of questions.

39:29Ryan Hawk:Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Your work though, is absolutely transformational. Correct?

39:34Nir Eyal:Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you.

39:36Ryan Hawk:You would agree though. That's correct. I don't think that's a belief. I think that's a fact. It's transformational. By definition, transformation means change, hopefully for the better. I hope my work's transformational. So you say you don't want to change people, but you do, right? I mean, that's what your work does. It by definition changes people. If they read it, They listen to you. They listen to this podcast. They actually think about it. They have a conversation with their husband or wife about it. They do some work. And then they try to use the tools to improve, to get better, to actually put it into play instead of just being a theory.

40:15Ryan Hawk:Because I think that's why your work is so good, why it's helped me long before we ever even talked, right? Which is the first time is that it by definition is transformational, which then means it's changed me for the better and lots of other people too. So in a way, you say you don't want to change people, but you do. You do change people in a great way.

40:34Nir Eyal:Well, I appreciate that. That's very, very kind of you. I guess that's not my goal. When you say - What's your goal? If people want to change, wonderful. That's fantastic. It's benefited my life and it can help others. There's nothing better. Like when I wake up in the morning and I get an email from someone, as I did this morning, saying, here's how my life changed. It's amazing. It's a beautiful, beautiful feeling. But that's not what I want. That's not what I'm expecting. If it happens, beautiful. That's a wonderful thing. Well, what do you want then? I want to explain the world so they can be made better.

41:07Nir Eyal:That's my mission. That's what I do. I do the explaining part. And this, by the way, this happens with a lot of folks, right? Like, you know who the most successful people are? They're not the people selling you online programs about how to make online programs. That's not where the insights are. The insights are locked up in secret, right? Because there's no incentive to share it. And frankly, knock on wood, life has been good. We've started three companies together. Julie and I have started three businesses. This is our latest business, this writing stuff, which I do for me. Frankly, I like to write.

41:39Nir Eyal:I like to process. I write books on stuff I'm stuck on. So when I was getting distracted all the time, I wrote Indistractable to try and figure out how to manage distraction. When I learned about the power of beliefs and how to utilize them in my life, I wrote Beyond Belief. And if others benefit from that as well, that's fantastic, but I'm not out there selling courses and that's, that's not my, because I don't have to. Yeah.

42:02Ryan Hawk:Well, no, it's awesome. Isn't writing though, such an amazing tool for both clarity and learning. That's why all leaders, whether it's public or not, should have some form of writing practice because it creates such clarity. It helps you understand what you really believe the process of getting those messy thoughts out of your head onto the page like you guys were doing in that room together and like you and Julie do now, that is valuable as a tool, as a practice, as exists if you want to be a clearer, more informed thinker.

42:36Nir Eyal:It is the most underutilized secret weapon. I could not agree more because you can't write clearly if you can't think clearly. And so writing forces you to sit down and put in text, right? In black and white, what you believe. Now, the next level, okay? So you can write, write, write, write, write. You can have a bunch of gobbledygook, which is the first level because there's even more gobbledygook in your brain. So when you actually get it out on paper and write it down, then you can actually see what you believe. Then the next level, if you really want clarity, is to try and teach. That when you try and give a talk, turn a 350-page book into a 45-minute talk.

43:17Nir Eyal:That's going to force you to get real in terms of what really matters, not just what's fluff.

43:22Ryan Hawk:Yeah, I love it. Okay, you write a little bit about luck. Luck isn't chance. This is a great chapter title. How do you see opportunities that others miss? So we're out here. We're all looking for the opportunities. We're all missing them. Then somebody else does something and you go, ah, I just got lucky. He just got lucky with that thing, right? So you're right. Luck isn't chance though. So how do we see opportunities that others miss?

43:49Nir Eyal:So this is the first power of belief. There's these three powers of belief. The power of attention, which changes what you see. The power of anticipation, which changes how you feel. And the power of agency, which changes what you do. And so in the power of attention, the power to change what you see, what the research literature shows us is that having certain beliefs literally changes what you're able to see. So back when we talked about the 11 million bits versus 50 bits of information that you're able to process, that tiny pinhole of attention that you can see reality through, our beliefs shape what that pinhole is focusing on and how it's being filtered in our brain.

44:23Nir Eyal:So let me give you a good example. They did a study where they asked people who were self-described lucky or unlucky to do a very simple task. The task was take a newspaper, which the researchers had given them, same newspaper, both groups, and they said, would you please count the number of photographs in this newspaper, right? The number of images in this newspaper. The people who were self-identified as unlucky, people who thought that they believed that they were unlucky, they took on average two and a half minutes to finish this task, okay? The people who were self-described as lucky, who believed they were lucky, whether they were lucky or not didn't matter.

45:04Nir Eyal:It's people who believed they were lucky. They didn't take two and a half minutes. They took 11 seconds. Why the difference? The difference was that in this experiment, every paper that they gave had on page two, one of the images said in big bold text, you couldn't miss it, there are whatever it was, 43 images in this paper. Collect your prize. It literally told them the answer. The people who were self-described unlucky, who believed they were unlucky, They never saw it. They literally, their eyes glanced over it. Their brains took in the formation, but it never became part of their conscious awareness.

45:42Nir Eyal:It never made it into that pinhole of 50 bits of information per second. So to them, it didn't exist. Whereas the lucky people saw it. So they literally saw reality differently because they believe that opportunities come, that things like this happen. And so that's just a great example. In entrepreneurship, we see this all the time. Walter Isaacson, in his biography of Steve Jobs, was talked about his reality distortion field. And that's exactly what this is, that entrepreneurs, one, they tend to be way more optimistic. They believe that lucky things happen to them. And so they see opportunities.

46:16Nir Eyal:To be an entrepreneur, you got to see things differently. I mean, you see$100 bills on the ground when everybody's walking over them, right? You have to see this opportunity. And so that is driven by beliefs that you believe you can will things to change. Pronoia, right? What's that? Have you talked about pronoia before? Did I hear this? Learn this from you. Oh, not for me, but I know the phenomenon. You think everything's good is going to happen.

46:37Ryan Hawk:Pronoia is this belief that the world is out to treat you well, that good things are going to happen. I know I cut you off, so I apologize. I'm going to get back to this in a second. It actually made me think of a very personal story about a few days before my wedding day with my wife, Miranda. She's one of the things I love most about her is her. She shares this trait with my dad. and that is being insanely optimistic all the time. Love it. And so part of our wedding was planned to be outside some of the reception stuff. So we looked at the weather forecast and it showed it was going to rain, which puts a damper on a wedding if you're going to do some of it outside.

47:19Ryan Hawk:You got to move and do all this stuff. And I'll never forget it because we say it all the time now. Miranda looked at me and she said, with our luck, it's going to be a bright, beautiful sunny day for all of our guests and our family with our luck so many people in the world say with my luck and then they follow it by something that is bad or negative and i remember that it was just a few days before we got married that i was like man that's the right woman what a way to go through life and now we say it all the time we both say to each other our children say it With our luck. Now, that doesn't mean it's going to come true.

47:56Ryan Hawk:That doesn't mean we're right. But it means we believe in pro-noia. We believe in that. We've had our share of adversity like every other family, like every other couple. We've all have it, right? It's coming. We know it. But this belief and this mindset of saying, with our luck, fill in the blank of something that's extremely positive. It is so much more enjoyable to go through life with a person who looks at the world like that. It's so nice, man.

48:23Nir Eyal:It's contagious too.

48:24Ryan Hawk:It's contagious to the people around you. So this idea of with our luck, something great's gonna happen. Oh, I'm just telling you, man. It's contagious and it's fun and it's so much more enjoyable to walk through the world with people like that.

48:39Nir Eyal:It's so true. And here's the ironic thing is that it becomes true. So my family does something similar. We say, whenever something good happens, we say, ah, everything good happens to us, right? We just celebrate, right? Like there's no line at the TSA. Hey, everything good happens to us. The food was good. Oh, you see, we found this cool restaurant. Everything good happens to us. Like little things, big things, everything good happens to us. Now, do more good things happen to us than bad things? I don't know. Maybe, maybe not. Who cares? Beliefs are tools, not truths. Beliefs are tools, not truths.

49:10Nir Eyal:So you can choose to believe. And here's what's crazy. When you believe those things, you notice them more. So to you, your life actually does seem like it's magical. It does seem blessed. It does seem like you're always lucky because that's what you are letting through those 50 bits of information. You're seeing life through that lens. And so what this study demonstrated with people counting the photos was that they did become more lucky because they thought they were more lucky. So they saw opportunities that others missed.

49:38Ryan Hawk:It's similar with, maybe you have the science behind this, with gratitude. So my thinking is if you're always looking for opportunities to say thank you to somebody, whether you write them notes, You text them, you call them, you say it to them to their face. Having this mindset, my friends, Brooke, Codds, Garen, Stokes, they have thankful Thursdays. But what I noticed, it's not only on Thursdays when they write like three handwritten notes to people they're grateful for every Thursday. It's not only Thursdays that they're more grateful. It's every day. It's all the time of regularly saying, I'm the type of person who lives with gratitude.

50:13Ryan Hawk:I say thank you to people all the time. Like we have a contest with my girls is, you know, how many times can you say thank you when we stand in line at Chipotle, right? Because there's like four or five different people that work on your bowl or your burrito, whatever you're going to get. And you say you want white rice or brown rice? Brown rice. They do it. Thank you. Okay, the next person puts the chicken. Thank you. You know, and so just this idea of saying thank you regularly, it becomes your default setting. It opens your eyes out into the world to like, you just see more good things happening because you're constantly looking for opportunities to say thank you.

50:49Ryan Hawk:It's again, it's another cool way to go through life instead of saying, oh, that person messed up or they did that thing bad. You're looking for opportunities for people doing well so that you can thank them.

51:00Nir Eyal:That's absolutely right. And in fact, we know in a business setting that having gratitude, and I learned this from Tina Selig at Stanford. This is called provoked luck. They did a study on salespeople and they found that the salespeople who show gratitude more often, they found that 60 % of their opportunities were provoked luck, meaning that 60 % of the opportunities that came their way, they provoked the lucky thing that happened. So how does that happen? How do they create luck? How do you provoke luck? So something as simple as sending a note of gratitude. And this is something that I try and do all circumstances, right?

51:39Nir Eyal:If somebody makes me feel just a little bit of happiness, never hold back on a compliment. Never, ever hold back on a compliment. They're free. You get so much back from them. That's not why you should do it. But it just turns out that that's a fact of life, that you just get so much back. How does that happen? You know, you write a note. Tina Selle does this. She writes thank you notes compulsively. Like just, hey, thank you for this. A little reminder, a post-it note. Thank you for that. And she gives us a great example of, she wrote a thank you note one time to somebody. and the thank you note landed on someone's desk.

52:08Nir Eyal:And think about it, right? You're sitting at your desk and you've got all these things to do. And here's a thank you note. And then to the right of that thank you note is your laptop where you've got an email about a new opportunity that's come up. Well, who is gonna get the call about that opportunity? Well, your thank you notes right there. Oh yeah, Ryan's top of mind. Ryan's such a nice guy. He sent me that note. Wow, what a sweetheart. Yeah, you know what? I'm gonna call Ryan about that opportunity. You're just top of mind more often and that's how you provoke luck to come back at you.

52:35Ryan Hawk:Nir, there's a million more things we could get to. We touched on just a little bit of your book. I love it. I'm grateful for you that you sent it to me. I want to close with one more question. Since we started personal, we've touched on personal moments throughout. I want to end with a personal question. So fast forward to one year from today. Okay. This is called the champagne question. You and Julie, I don't know if you drink champagne or not. It doesn't matter. You and Julie though, let's say for the instance of the question, are popping bottles. you guys are celebrating like crazy what are you celebrating wow what are we celebrating a year from now one year thing that comes to mind is that my daughter's going to college

53:18Nir Eyal:and so we'll be celebrating sending her off to to school yeah that little baby grew up

53:24Ryan Hawk:how do you feel about that i'm going through the exact same thing right now yeah how old are your kids? We have four. They'll all be in college next year.

53:32Nir Eyal:Wow. All four going to college next year?

53:35Ryan Hawk:Yeah. Yeah. Holy smokes.

53:37Nir Eyal:So one of the byproducts of changing my relationship with my mom is that I started changing my relationship with my daughter, right? These two incredibly important women in my life because, you know, love is measured from the benefit of the doubt. And so when I started re-giving my daughter benefit doubt that a few years ago, you know, we were kind of having difficulty. We were arguing. This was before I started writing Beyond Belief and I learned about these techniques. And then expecting the grace from my daughter that she would give me benefit of the doubt pushed me to figure it out with my mom because I needed to give her the benefit of the doubt as I would want my daughter to give me benefit of the doubt that I know that in my shoes, I'm doing my best.

54:22Nir Eyal:I'm not perfect. I make mistakes. It's the tools I got. And you know what? My mom as well. And you know what? My daughter too. And everybody, even the narcissist, asshole, person who's, we're all just trying our best, right? With the tools we have available based on our beliefs, based on our history. And so that completely changed our relationship. We just, for my birthday, my birthday was a few weeks ago, we went skiing together. And let me tell you, Ryan, the entire three-hour car ride up, the entire three-hour car ride back, we were having a conversation. We were just chatting. We wrote an article together in the car.

54:58Nir Eyal:We had an idea for like a blog post we want to do together. She's into writing as well. And, and it was just, it was just amazing. Cause like you always love your kid. As soon as your kid's born, you love them. But if you do your job right and things fall into place and you're very lucky, you like them. And that's a game changer, right? You go from loving them to I like you. Like I was sitting across the table from we had dinner after we went skiing together. And like, I just, I just like you. Like you're a good person. Like you're, you're a friend. And that's just, gosh, is there anything better?

55:31Nir Eyal:And frankly, I don't know if I would have gotten there had I not learned these techniques of seeing my beliefs differently.

55:36Ryan Hawk:Oh man, that's as good as it gets. Thank you for sharing. The book's called Beyond Belief, The Science Back Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results. Like your other books, man, I think you're getting better and your past ones were awesome. And so I've been a follower of your work. I'm so glad and grateful for Shane for connecting us. I know this will not be the last time we talk and I'm pumped, man, to continue our dialogue as we both progress. Thank you so much.

56:05Nir Eyal:You call me anytime and we'll commiserate as we miss our daughters and kids together anytime. I love it, man. Thank you so much.

56:16Ryan Hawk:It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, Ryan at learningleader.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with near aisle. A few takeaways from my notes. Beliefs are tools, not truths. The most powerful ones aren't the ones you can prove. They're the ones that help you live better. And then you do not have relationship problems. You have perception problems. change what you believe about someone and you can change what you're capable of seeing in them and then lucky people aren't necessarily lucky they see opportunities others miss because their beliefs have trained their attention to look for them with our luck it's going to be a beautiful bright sunny day it's so nice to be around people like that and then the belief that once served you may now be your biggest obstacle.

57:18Ryan Hawk:The goal isn't to find the right belief and hold it forever. It's to stay curious enough and to keep revising. Near really made me think throughout this entire conversation. I hope you found it useful. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Near Isle. I think he'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that and you also go to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, subscribe to the show, rate it five stars, hopefully. Write a thought for you by doing all of that.

57:53Ryan Hawk:You are giving me the opportunity to do what I love on a daily basis. And for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk to you soon. Can't wait.