Nir Eyal on how belief can transform your life & your brand

20:37Nir Eyal:So now it proves that it's not a fact. It's just a belief. It's not objective truth. The third question, who am I when I hold on to this belief? Well, when I believe that my mother is too judgmental and hard to please, I'm short-tempered. I'm not very nice. I become this 13-year-old version of myself that I don't really like. Fourth question, who would I be without this belief? If I had a magic wand and poof, I could tap my brain and that belief disappeared, how would I feel? I felt instantly lighter. I felt better. I didn't suffer as much. If I thought, wow, if I could never think that my mother is judgmental, I'd be more myself.

21:20So in four questions, I determined, one, that that thing that I thought was a fact maybe wasn't a fact.

21:25Nir Eyal:Maybe it was just a belief. Two, that that belief wasn't really serving me. And finally, that I might be better off without that belief. And now comes the hard part. Remember, your brain hates changing its mind. So what inquiry-based stress reduction asks you to do is to ask yourself, could the exact opposite be true? Could the exact opposite be true? And your brain hates doing this, by the way. Every time you do this, your brain is going to say, no, no, no, no, no. Don't change your mind. Things were fine the way they were. Keep doing what you're doing. So you have to fight that impulse because you're not trying to change your mind.

21:54Nir Eyal:You're just creating a portfolio of perspectives. You collect baseball cards or Pokemon cards or stock portfolio, just options. We just want just to collect options. You don't have to change your mind. So let's do that real quick. Okay, 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 that possibly be true in any universe? How could that be true? Well, she did thank me for the flowers. She was saying a statement of fact, right? That doesn't necessarily mean it's a judgment. She was saying the flowers were half dead, and so maybe she was actually trying to protect me so I wouldn't get scammed by this florist.

22:30Nir Eyal:Maybe she was trying to be helpful, not hurtful. Okay, so now we have two beliefs. Here's a third one. I am judgmental and hard to please. How could that be true? Well, I had rehearsed in my brain that when I was going to call her, she was supposed to tell me effusive praise of what a great son I was. And when that didn't happen, I lost it. So who's being judgmental? I was. Finally, the fourth turnaround. I am being too judgmental of myself. That when I put all this time and effort into doing something important and it didn't work out, I felt incompetent. I felt like I'd messed up. And this is called a misattribution of emotion.

23:13When I feel crummy, I'm going to find someone else to feel crummy to.

23:16Nir Eyal:I'm going to attribute my bad feeling, my suffering to them. That's exactly what I did. So now I have four beliefs. So which one, John, which one of those four is true? Well, I'd say they're all true, right? Yeah. All of them? None of them? Who cares? Yeah. Beliefs are tools, not truths. That first tool, that first belief, there was only one way out for me to not suffer anymore. She had to change so I could stop suffering. You don't know my mom, but I'm telling you, she's not going to do that. Right? If you hold your breath waiting for other people to change so you can stop suffering, you're going to suffocate.

23:46Nir Eyal:It doesn't work that way. So that only gave me one way out. It was a pretty crappy tool. The other three tools, the other three beliefs, huh, now there's another way out. I don't have to suffer. So what defines a limiting belief is a belief that creates suffering and decreases motivation. A liberating belief increases motivation and decreases suffering. So with these other three beliefs, these liberating beliefs, I didn't have to suffer anymore. Does it mean my mom has to be my best friend? No. Do I have to forgive her for everything she's ever done? no, it doesn't mean any of that. It just means I don't have to suffer anymore.

24:19Nir Eyal:And I became more motivated to work on that relationship with her. So that technique, which I can't take credit for, it's not mine. It's been heavily researched, but I think underutilized. We can actually use that in all kinds of circumstances. In business applications, when we feel stuck, when we feel like something that we should be able to do is not getting done, in interpersonal conflicts, in areas of our life that we feel we're not accomplishing what we're capable of. I'm not good with public speaking. I don't like sales calls. Whatever the case might be, anything that you know you can do, but there's something keeping you from doing it.

24:51Nir Eyal:That New Year's resolution that you have year after year, that relationship that you can't seem to fix, that aspiration, that goal, that dream that's not getting done. At the center of that is some type of limiting belief. That's what I found so powerful about it because I think most people blame the other person, don't they? They sit in that victimhood of like, well, obviously it's not me. It must be them. But in four simple steps. And they're incremental steps, aren't they? They kind of they open the door and then and then it becomes wide open, doesn't it? But you realize that you've got much more control over your reality than you thought you did.

25:24And suddenly in that situation, you freed yourself of all that, you know, the anguish and pain. I love, by the way, you sum up in this chapter as well. The quality of my relationship depends far more on my beliefs than on the other person's behavior. Damn it. I love that. We'll say if we all took ownership for how we feel about the relationship and how it affects us, everything changes, doesn't it?

25:49Nir Eyal:Yeah. Like, you know. And not only really, we were talking earlier before we started recording about who's at fault for distraction from social media. Yeah. Another example. If you believe that social media and technology is hijacking your brain, there's nothing you can do, you know what? You're 100 % right. Yeah. It's their fault. So I'm not going to do anything about it. And we love that. We love that. Again, the brain wants us to be passive. The brain wants us to adopt limiting beliefs. The brain doesn't want us to do anything different from what we've done in the past. So trying to think differently, you know, maybe social media isn't addictive.

26:22Nir Eyal:If it's true or not, it doesn't matter. Does it serve you to believe that? Does it serve you to have – I see this all the time, labels, you know, especially at our age. We hear people saying all the time, I'm having a senior moment. Why do we say that? You know, we know that people who have positive views of aging, this study blew my mind, a study out of Yale, people who have a positive view of aging at age 30 live seven and a half years longer. John, that's more than the effect of diet, exercise, or stopping smoking. Seven and a half years longer. And we always hear about, you know, you have to change your diet, you have to eat right, you have to stop smoking, you have to exercise.

27:01Nir Eyal:Turns out the biggest impact you could possibly have is to have a positive view of aging. Now, what does that sound like? A negative view of aging, you hear all the time. You almost never hear the positive. You hear the negative side. I'm having a senior moment. This is what it means to get older. I can't do that. My back aches. Basically, it's something around this theme that aging involves inevitable decline. A positive view of aging is something that sounds like growth is possible at any age. That's what this study found. Growth is possible at any age versus aging involves inevitable decline.

27:34Nir Eyal:Which one is true? Both are true. But factually, right, what is a fact? They're both true. But which one comes top of mind? Which colors your world? Which changes your behavior? And so this is what's so important about realizing how our beliefs can literally become our biology. Do we live seven and a half years longer because of our beliefs because we're vibrating at the cosmic quantum level of the universe? No, the universe doesn't give a shit. That's not what's happening here. It's not that your beliefs are changing your mitochondria and making you live longer. No, that's not at all what's happening as far as the research shows.

28:06Nir Eyal:What's happening is that people who have positive views about aging change their behavior, and that becomes their biology. So someone who has a positive view of aging, someone who says, oh, growth is possible at any age, they go on walks with their spouse. They go contribute to their community and volunteer. They work in the garden. They do things because they say, hey, I can grow at any age no matter what. Growth is always possible. And so their beliefs do, in fact, become their biology but via behavior. That is so fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Seven and a half years. Seven and a half years.

28:38Nir Eyal:That is material, isn't it? Wow. It's amazing. Actually, there's another study that I love where, and this one has been replicated many times. And there's a lot of misinformation out there as well about what placebos can and can't do. I would say half the time I spent on this book was getting really excited about a study and then digging into it and realizing, oh man, it's low sample size, it hasn't replicated, low effect size. But there's some that really, there's some famous ones that are terrible that I talk about in the book about why you shouldn't believe. and they're basically have a, they fit into this common category of the ones that are too good to be true, the ones that aren't explainable through behavior.

29:11Nir Eyal:Those are the ones that don't replicate and I think are false. And it's a shame because the placebo effect is so incredibly powerful. But if you expect it to do things it can't, you're going to be disappointed because there's a difference between sickness and illness. Those are two different things. Just like we have pain and suffering, those are two separate things. Sickness is not illness. Sickness is in the body. It's a physical malady. Illness is in the mind. So placebos are amazing at fixing illness. They do nothing for sickness. Placebos don't cure cancer. They don't heal a broken bone. That's not how placebos work.

29:42Nir Eyal:They're amazingly effective at the symptoms, the illness associated with those sickness. What's interesting is that 80 % of our healthcare spending, at least in the United States, I don't know the UK, 80 % of healthcare spending is spent on illness, not sickness, the symptoms. So there was another study that demonstrates this where they took male athletes and they told them, we have an amazing new steroid and you're lucky enough, you're gonna get to try this steroid. No side effects, it's amazing. Please go exercise, we're gonna track your progress, how much you lift, how much muscle mass you gain.

30:14Nir Eyal:Another group, they didn't give them any steroid, they just said, go exercise, we're gonna compare you two. That was the control condition. Turns out that the steroid was a placebo. Incredibly enough, the men who took the placebo pill gained significantly more muscle mass and this study has been replicated now several times. They gained more muscle mass. They became stronger because they had taken this steroid, which could not have affected their physiology in any way. And yet it had. How? Well, when they believed that they were taking a steroid, they behaved differently. They pushed a little bit harder.

30:50Nir Eyal:They put on a little bit more weight because I'm taking this steroid. Look at how strong I'm getting. And so that's another example of what placebos can and can't do. The studies where you can't find an intermediary step of behavior are probably crappy studies. Those are not the ones to look at. However, it's incredibly powerful. Like I started taking placebos on my own. Did you? Yes. Even knowing they're placebos. Well, here's the thing. We used to think that placebos only work if you were deceived. Yeah. You had to have a double blind control study because both, you know, the patient had to be blinded to the placebo.

31:17Nir Eyal:The doctor had to be blinded to the placebo. Nobody could know which condition you were in the placebo or the actual substance, the active ingredient. Well, then Ted Kapschuk at Harvard decides to test that theory. And he brings in patients who have irritable bowel syndrome, and he tells them, this is a placebo. He holds up this bottle. This is a placebo. It says, see, placebo right on the jar, right? Placebo. And he says, this is a completely inert substance. However, some people have found that their symptoms are alleviated when they take a placebo for IBS. Turns out that people who took the placebo, knowing it was a placebo, showed just as much improvement as the leading pain medication for IBS.

31:58Just based on that little bit of information

31:59Nir Eyal:suggesting that some people, a tiny bit of belief. You can go on Amazon and search placebo pills and you will see pill bottles that say placebo on the side that are sold as placebos, as completely inert, and you'll see five-star reviews about fast-acting relief. That is insane. That people in the study actually called up Dr. Kapchuk afterwards and said, Dr. Kapchuk, where can we get some more of those placebo pills? They're amazing. Yeah. And did you know as well that the placebo effect is getting stronger. Is it? It is. That over the past 50 years, the placebo effect is getting stronger and stronger.

32:32Nir Eyal:Why would that be? Well, and this is a big problem because pharmaceutical companies, you know, in order to get a medication approved, they have to show that it's more efficacious. They got beat the placebo. Exactly. It can't be as good as a placebo. It has to be better than a placebo. But this is a huge problem because the placebo effect keeps getting stronger and stronger. Why? Because more people are hearing that placebo effects are effective. And so they expect it to be so. I see. So the power of belief, the power of anticipation is that you will feel how you expect to feel. Now, talking about anticipation, I had Mike Cesario on the podcast a couple of years ago, one of the best conversations I've ever had.

33:08And if ever there was an example of the power of anticipation, taking water and calling it liquid death and putting it in some punk rock packaging is just, I think, the ultimate expression. Isn't it, though? Of the power of anticipation and managing how people feel about it. Right.

33:23Nir Eyal:It's a stunning story. And I was very cautious about including that story because, you know, there are many business books where they talk about a case study and then that company goes bankrupt and then it's, you know, discredited. But, you know, look, a product is not a company make. So it doesn't matter what happens to liquid death. What happened to liquid death is absolutely fascinating. The fact that they could sell water with a skull on it, this burning skull, and call it liquid death. And everybody said this was ridiculous. A mother is not going to buy liquid death for their child when the child is thirsty.

33:54Nir Eyal:You're not going to pick that up at a convenience store. Well, they couldn't be more wrong. The company is killing it. They're doing incredibly well. And so part of you is like, well, are people just stupid? Are they like, why would they buy expensive water that isn't even artisanal spring water? It's just tap water. It does come from a, I think it's, is it Austria? Austria, yeah. Austria that comes from. Spring water from Austria. But why did Mike choose that particular spring in Austria? Well, the only place in the world you can put it in a can. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's the only reason.

34:23Nir Eyal:It's not because it's better water. It's just the only place that would can it for him. And so what's fascinating, though, is that even though it's just water in a can, I would argue it actually tastes better. Not because it's special, but because of this what I call the experience loop. That when you believe something, you anticipate that it will create some kind of reaction. You feel that reaction because of what you anticipated based on what you believe. And then you confirm that response. And that creates this loop. And every time you go through that loop, you're confirming that experience.

34:56Nir Eyal:You're reinforcing the belief. And you're going through it again and again. This is the hidden role of advertising. That advertising isn't just about increasing awareness. It's not just about brand recall. It's about incepting what the product should feel like. like literally how you will experience it when you consume it. So I would argue that people who consume liquid death, to them, if you've bought into the brand and you're excited about it and it's this little bit of edgy, naughty, weird thing that you're a member of this club around, it does actually taste better. Is it any strain? We've known for a long time.

35:30Nir Eyal:I'm sure you know that study where they gave people wine. They said one was a cheap bottle of wine, one was an expensive bottle of wine. Turns out it was the same wine. And even though the people didn't know it, they experienced the expensive wine as better. Not just based on what they said, but in their brains. This was a Baba Shiv study at Stanford where he could actually see that the reward center of the brain that was associated with pleasure became more active when people thought the wine was expensive. So if you can do that with wine, that's the same wine, you can do it with the brand when people expect it to be something special, something different, something new.

36:01I don't know if you saw the Pepsi Super Bowl ad. Which one? They were doing a parody of Coke. They had the polar bear and they were doing a taste challenge. because obviously Pepsi's famous for, you know, more people prefer the taste of Pepsi than Coke. But Coke outsells Pepsi three or four times to one. So why would that be? You know, very similar products. You know, Pepsi has a slight edge on a taste test, but it is the anticipation. It's the brand they've created for many years. It's the same kind of thing at play.

36:28Nir Eyal:That's exactly right. So we discount that as, ah, it's just marketing. It's just advertising. It's not real. No, that's the entire point. Like that's the whole enchilada, is that if you can incept, This is what the product should feel like when you experience it. It reminds me of one of my favorite case studies is at the Numi Toyota Lab, where they had identical cars. You know this case study where identical cars rolled off the factory? Same exact car. One was a Geo Prism made by GM. The other was a Toyota, I think it was Camry. I think it was. Same exact car. The only difference was that one said GM and one said Toyota.

37:07Nir Eyal:Same car, made in the same factory. It was a joint venture. And wouldn't you know it, the GM car had much higher complaints of customer problems with the transmission is clanking. And it was rated, I think, 67 or something in terms of the ratings of best cars. And the Toyota Camry was rated in the top 10. Same exact car, only the logo was different. Why? Because of what people expected. So that little rattling that you couldn't hear if you're a proud Toyota driver and Toyota makes great cars, versus if you were a GM driver and you're driving this cheap geo, these cheap geos, you're looking out for it.

37:41Nir Eyal:Exactly. You see what you expect. Now talking about looking out for problems, there's also looking out for opportunities, which you talk about in the book as well. It's like, you know, what creates luck? Right. And that I thought was quite interesting, isn't it? That some people are good at identifying opportunities. Right. This is a beautiful example of how our beliefs literally shape what we are able to see. So there's a study done where they gave people a very simple task. The task was to look through a newspaper and simply count how many images, how many photos do you see in this newspaper.

38:10Nir Eyal:One group of people were people who believed they were lucky. Another group of people were people who believed they were unlucky. Now, this doesn't have anything to do with the truth, a fact. It wasn't that they assessed their life and said, oh, you are objectively lucky or unlucky. No, it was just people who believed they were lucky or people who believed they were unlucky. The unlucky people to do this simple task took two and a half minutes. They count one, two, three. They counted all the images. Two and a half minutes. The lucky people, the people who believed they were lucky, took 11 seconds.

38:40Nir Eyal:Why the difference? Because on page two of this newspaper, when you opened up this newspaper on page two, one of those images said, there are 43 images in this newspaper. Collect your reward. The lucky people could see it. They immediately observed it. The unlucky people, it didn't even cross their awareness, right? that 11 million bits of information, they had collected that 11 million bits of information. It had entered their brain, but their conscious attention didn't make sense of it. It never became the 50 bits that they were actually able to process. So this is an amazing example of how what we believe, if you believe you're lucky versus unlucky, you will literally see opportunities that other people don't see.

39:18So believing that you're lucky will make you luckier. Right. That's exactly right. And it sounds silly, but having these simple reminders to replace

39:27Nir Eyal:these limiting beliefs like i'm unlucky or whatever uh by the way this is this is what makes entrepreneurs so special you know in in uh walter isaacson's biography of steve jobs he talks about how he had a reality distortion field how he could see opportunities that other people just couldn't imagine now you talk as well in that chapter as well about actually success can also be a problem because you re you almost reinforce your own perceptions don't you and actually the The ability to keep your beliefs open and to adapt your beliefs to new information circumstances is really important, isn't it?

40:01That's right. And I think this is why smart people are not that successful. Really? Yeah.

40:06Nir Eyal:I think that being smart can actually be a real liability. If you're too intelligent, you know, look at professors. Professors, they're the most intelligent. They score the best in all the IQ tests. But they're not necessarily the most successful. They don't necessarily contribute to society the most. They don't make the most money. They don't have the most friends. They're not necessarily the most successful people in the world. And I think part of it is because they're almost too smart. They judge things based on the strata of facts. What is objective truth? And if you've ever talked to very, very smart people, they can't kind of get to the point.

40:37Nir Eyal:You can't really make sense of what they're talking about because they want to tell you everything. They're not able to filter down. Whereas I know a lot of very successful people, people who have hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars, they're modestly intelligent. Because that's not the defining trait. I think it's partially because if you're too smart, you just have too high of a bar for how you view reality. Everything needs to be fact. Whereas if you're a little bit less smart, if you're a little bit less intelligent, you're able to put those things into the realm of belief. And you realize that you can alter your beliefs to shape what you do rather than just being right.

41:12Nir Eyal:It's okay not to be right. The beliefs are tools not true. So if it benefits you to say, I'm going to succeed no matter what, right? If that serves you, it's a belief you can adopt. Is it factually true? No, because look, most of our decisions in life, they're not based on fact. Should I marry this person? Should I move to this town? Should I take this job? Those aren't facts. Those aren't laws of nature. They're based on beliefs because they're predictions about the future. And also, I'm into a lot of entrepreneurs and founders on the podcast, and they're constantly experimenting, trying, getting feedback, and pivoting all the time.

41:45Right. Whereas, you know, big successful kind of corporations will go, this is how we manage our brand. This is how we launch a product. We've got a roadmap for kind of 20 years. And we always adopt the same kind of processes. Founders will go, well, we tried this, didn't work. We're going to do something else.

42:00Nir Eyal:And then they'll discover the reality. And this leads to company culture, I think. It's a very, very practical application of this. What is company culture but codified beliefs? That's all it is, right? Just codified beliefs. So having that company culture where you're repeating these liberating beliefs, like take Amazon, for example. One of Amazon's liberating beliefs, and they have these company mantras that are constantly repeated. And I know people who work at Amazon. It's true. They really do repeat this all the time, sometimes to an annoying extent. One of them is it's always day one. It's always day one.

42:31Nir Eyal:They want to remind people at the company that no matter how big we get, we're still a startup. We still need to be scrappy. Now, beliefs are tools, not truths. and they have found that that belief serves them. It is objectively false. It is not day one. It has not been day one for a very long time. It is not the truth, but it serves them. And so they've adopted it. And I think that's incredibly powerful. We can do that for ourselves. We can do that for our families and we can do that for our companies. That's brilliant. I love that a lot. We talked earlier, didn't we, about persistence and consistency.

43:04And I've learned that a lot. You know, success compounds over time, isn't it? And it's repeating the habits. It's doing the things. It's learning. But the other side of that is surely there is a moment that you should quit. Right. And the idea of just mind over matter. I'll just power through. I'll just keep on bashing through it. Right. How do you know the difference between when to double down on the belief because it's good and it's working versus actually it's time to quit?

43:30Nir Eyal:Yeah, this is a terrific question. I think it's very important because the book is very anti quitting because by and large, we quit far too soon. That is good for us. And that's what destroys human potential. So we have to be recognized. We have to be cognizant of that is that most of the time we quit at the 15 minutes when we have the 60 hours in us. But there is definitely a time to quit. Lord knows I've quit book projects. I've quit relationships. I've quit business ventures. Quitting is a good thing. But when should we quit? I think there are three criteria. The first is that you need a mile marker.

44:01Nir Eyal:Not a goal per se, but a mile marker. And the difference is that a mile marker says, I am going to do this uncomfortable thing because a new thing will always take you outside of your comfort zone. I'm going to do this risky, this slightly uncomfortable thing for a fixed number of days, whether it's a week, 30 days, doesn't matter. Some kind of predetermined number of days that I will try this. I'm going to try this ad campaign for 30 days. I'm going to try this new hire for X number of days. I'm going to try posting on social media for whatever days. So you need a mile marker. Why is that so important?

44:28because if you don't do that,

44:31Nir Eyal:at the first sign of discomfort, you're going to quit. You're going to say, I'm sick of this. It's not working. Maybe it'll quietly be something you start procrastinating on. So you need that mile marker to say, I'm not going to stop until I hit that mile marker. That's criteria one. Criteria number two is, are you still learning? You see, many people conflate failure with a reason to quit. I don't think that's true. If you're failing, that can be great, right? If I looked in the future and I said, look, I took a time machine and I saw that on your sixth time, after five failures, you're going to succeed.

45:01Nir Eyal:After five sales calls, the sixth one you're going to close. After five dates, you're going to find the love of your life. You would want those failures. You'd say, okay, great. Let's go through those failures quickly so I can get to the success. So even if you're failing, if you're still learning, then don't quit. And then finally, does persistence matter? There are many ventures where persistence does matter. if you're trying to get in shape. I used to be clinically obese, but when I started exercising, there were many months and months where I was plateauing. I was working, working, working, and nothing was changing.

45:33Nir Eyal:But physical fitness, like business, like relationships, sometimes you hit a plateau, but then eventually, if you persist, boom, now you've got progress. You bust through that plateau. But that's not with everything. For example, let's say you work at a company with really crappy company culture. You're not going to outlast that company culture. If you're working with toxic people, your persistence is not going to pay off. You're just banging your head against the wall. So I think those are the three criteria. Did you meet your mile marker? Are you no longer learning? And does persistence matter or not?

46:03Nir Eyal:And only after you've checked those three boxes, then it's a good time to quit. And it links as well to what is in your control and what is not in your control. It's like master the things you're in your control and learn to let go of the things that happen. Oh, this is huge. So do you know there's a formula for burnout? There's literally a recipe for burnout. And this comes from Oxford. There's a study done by Stansfield and Candy where they found when you think about what type of jobs do people burn out, what type of jobs are more likely to create anxiety and depression disorder in people. It's not a sad job.

46:33Nir Eyal:When I first saw this research and I saw the heading around what kind of jobs create depression and anxiety, you think maybe a sad job, right, a mortician or somebody who has to put puppies to sleep, a sad job. That's not true. It's not the job you do. It's the environment you do it in. The formula for burnout is two things. High expectations coupled with low control. That is literally the formula for burnout. Now, what's interesting, high expectations with high control, no problem. We love it. That's when we rise to the occasion. So that's fantastic. It's when we have high expectations, but we don't control the outcome.

47:08Nir Eyal:That's what literally drives us crazy. What about the stories we tell ourselves? Stories we tell about ourselves as well. I mean, people often laugh at me because I very often refer to the fact I got fired twice. And part of the reason I tell it is to take away any power it has on how I think about myself or what I'm going to do. But I meet so many people that have this narrative about themselves. I'm not good at this. I got fired. This happened. And it shapes what they do next. So true. And unfortunately, this is a bit controversial, but I think it's important. I think there's a bit of an industry around labeling us these days.

47:50Nir Eyal:And I think it's very dangerous. There's a chapter in the book called Your Labels Are Your Limits. This came to mind because I don't think there's much of a check and balance when it comes to these labels. We love labels. We love to label ourselves. We certainly love to label other people. But we love to label ourselves because there's this phenomenon called the Rumpelstiltskin effect. The Rumpelstiltskin effect says that there's comfort in naming a diagnosis, a problem we're having, right? Oh, that's why that's happening. I'm a Sagittarius. Oh, you know, I'm not a morning person. Oh, I have ADHD or whatever.

48:21Nir Eyal:And I have ADHD, but here's what happened when I was diagnosed with ADHD. At first, it was very comforting. That explains so much. That's so comforting. But then after a few months, every time I would get distracted, I would focus on the diagnosis. Ah, there's my ADHD again. I can't focus. And if I can't focus, what if I don't meet my deadline? If I don't meet my deadline, the book's not going to be any good. And what if It's crap and nobody likes it. And I would get into this rumination cycle, all these limiting beliefs talking inside my head, trying to keep me passive. Don't try, don't push.

48:49Nir Eyal:You're not good enough. This won't work. And I became so fixated on my diagnosis that it stopped helping me. Because what I forgot was that a diagnosis is a map. A label is a map. It tells you, okay, you're here and you want to get there. So here's how you could do it. And maybe you're starting from a different place. Maybe you're here and other people are a step ahead, for example. Okay, but you're not the map. The diagnosis is not your identity. So we have to hold these identities very lightly and be very careful of them because our labels can become our limits. Whereas now my limiting belief was I have a chronic diagnosis, which is not true.

49:25You know, when I took my ADHD test, you get a Likert scale.

49:30Nir Eyal:It says how often do you feel these symptoms? How often do you get distracted? Well, compared to who? I only have my own subjective experience. To me, I feel like I get distracted a lot. Do you know anybody who doesn't get distracted a lot? Everybody does. But go walk into a doctor and ask for a diagnosis and see if you won't get one. You're going to get one, right? What's the check and balance? There's no check and balance. In fact, today in the UK, there are more neurodivergent people than not. Really? Yes. I didn't know that. Wow. I talked to a doctor for the book who told me, one day, medical science will advance to the point where we're all sick.

50:06Nir Eyal:That is exactly what's happening, my friend. That's exactly what's happening. And we think, well, what's the problem? We need to accept these diagnoses. These are conditions. These are, and I'm not disputing that. What I'm disputing is, is it serving us? Is it always serving us? Because when you foreclose on your identity, when you become your diagnosis, you create a cage of your own device. I think that's really dangerous. And there's nobody warning us about those troubles. And I think this will be one of those things in a few years that we'll say, that was a big mistake. We needed more checks and balances.

50:38Nir Eyal:We needed more than just psychiatrists telling us that we should have labels and we should have more warnings around how sometimes our labels can become our limits. I totally agree. I mean, that's what I found so powerful about your book is how much of it is in our control, how much agency we actually have to control this. So maybe to wrap up, what would be your big advice or recommendation for developing good, building good beliefs that are enhancing rather than limiting? So I would start with what I call the muck. The muck is that area of your life where you feel stuck. Is it that resolution that you've made year after year?

51:15Nir Eyal:Is it that relationship that's causing you suffering? Is it that business venture that's just not working? Is it the sales calls you know you need to make but you don't want to? Is it I'm no good at presenting in front of others? Whatever it is, the thing that is causing you suffering in your life in one way or the other. and I would sit with that for a minute and write down why you believe you're not able to do it. And it's not easy to do. You know, it's interesting. Our limiting beliefs are like faces. We all have a face. We all have a face. But you can't look at your face. If I said, John, look at your face, you can't look at your face.

51:49Nir Eyal:You can look at your hands. You can look at your feet. You can't look at your face. Same with limiting beliefs. You can't see your own limiting beliefs because to you, they feel like facts. You can see other people's limiting beliefs. I can see my mom's limiting beliefs. I can see my kids limiting. I can see everybody else's limiting beliefs. I can't see my own limiting beliefs. And so what we have to do is to have a process. We have to take steps in order to see these hidden limiting beliefs because they're always hidden. They feel like facts, but they're not. They're just beliefs. So if you can identify that area of your life where you're struggling in one way or the other, whatever goals you're stuck on, your health, your wellness, your business, doesn't matter, follow this process to uncover that limiting belief and then see if you can turn it around to find a belief, a liberating belief that could be as true and then try it on for size.

52:31Nir Eyal:You don't have to change your mind. Just try and experiment. For one week, I'm going to adopt this liberating belief, see how my life changes. And if it doesn't work, if my life doesn't get better, if I don't decrease my suffering and increase my motivation to work on this problem, I'll try a different belief. You can always go back to the default. It's free. There's really no side effects. I think it's something we can all do. Yeah, thank you. I know everyone's going to get a huge amount out of this. And I was so keen to include your book and this conversation at The Calling, which is the funnily enough is the first big event that uncensored cmo has put on so what i loved about this is i'm reading this book while putting on a my first ever big event and having to kind of put it all into practice literally now so thank you i love it because honestly it it was so good because i i realize i mean i've been doing a podcast for seven years i know how to do it i know i'm good at it i know how it works right i've never put a big event on and i suddenly found myself lacking belief.

53:28I found myself with all those questions in my mind and started thinking, oh, am I going to be any good at this or what's going to happen and this sort of thing. So it was amazing timing. I have to say, thank you so much. And I know it's going to be an awesome contribution to the day. My pleasure. So listen, thank you for writing the book. It is genuinely amazing and recommend everyone go out and grab a copy.

53:48Nir Eyal:Thank you so much. It was great being here and I wish you a fantastic event. Thank you. So I hope you enjoyed that episode of Uncensored CMO as much as I enjoyed making it. Now, by the way, I've got a new newsletter. So if you'd like to get my thoughts on the one thing that I take out from each episode every week, then do subscribe to the One Thing newsletter. I'd really appreciate it. Also, I have another podcast. Just launched Uncensored Renegades with the fabulous Cori Marchesotto. She is one of the world's best CMOs. She's an absolute rock star. Every week we pick one topic, spend 20 minutes trying to fix it.

54:23So check out that. It's in your feed, Uncensored Renegades. And finally, I want to give a huge thank you to my sponsor, System 1. They generously provide so much support for this podcast. It would not happen without them. So big thanks and lots of love to System 1. I'll see you next time.