Melody Wilding: Something I find myself coming back to again and again with the clients I work with is the fact that the gap between knowing what you need to do and doing it is almost never an intellect problem. You could be an incredibly capable person. Maybe you have run billion-dollar projects, you’ve managed hundreds of people, you’re known as a subject matter expert in your field, and you may still go blank in conversations or ramble, talk in circles, even when you know your stuff cold.

And if I were to ask you what happened, I bet you wouldn’t say, “I had no idea what the answer was,” but you would say something more like, “I was worried about how I would come across,” or, “I wasn’t sure they were buying it.” Or maybe deep down you have had your sights set on an exciting opportunity, but every time the chance to advocate for yourself comes up, you convince yourself, “Well, I’m not ready yet.

So and so is a better fit. Maybe I’m just being full of myself.” In both of these examples, it’s as if there is this invisible anchor dragging you down, slowing or completely stalling you from taking action. That anchor is your beliefs, and today’s guest has spent years researching exactly why beliefs are so hard to see, harder to change, and most importantly, a concrete process for finally being able to do both.

His name is Nir Eyal. He’s a globally recognized authority on behavior change and human potential, and author of two books I consider to be essential reading, Hooked and Indistractable. His new book is called Beyond Belief. By the end of this conversation, you will understand why the same situation that derails you has almost no effect on the colleague who sits next to you, and it has nothing to do with their smarts or their talent.

You’ll understand why the self-doubt that shows up right before you ask for what you want is predictable and one you have much more control of than you ever thought. And you will walk away with a totally new way of looking at the stories you have been telling yourself about who you are, what you’re capable of, and what’s available to you.

Here’s Nir.

Nir it is such a treat to have you here because you have written two of my all time favorite behavioral psychology books? I come back to again and again and again, which are Indistractable and Hooked. Love them. I feel like they were so cutting edge when they came.

You were so ahead of the curve with thinking about people’s behavior and how we interact with technology, and I am curious, how did you get from those two topics Indistractable and Hooked to now writing about Beyond Belief? What was the, what was the journey with that?

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: So the, um, so uh, the, the, the string that connects everything together is my fascination with human behavior. That’s really what I do is I’ve, I’ve always been obsessed with why we do what we do.

Uh, so Hooked was about how to build habit-forming products for good, how to use technology to. Uh, change people’s behavior to help them, uh, eat healthier or exercise more, or save money or any, any kind of habit that we can facilitate through the technology we use. And that’s, that’s definitely what’s happened. You know, the book has sold over, uh, half a million copies and I, I get emails all the time from every conceivable industry about how they’re using, uh, the, the, the psychology that used to be kept in Silicon Valley. And, and I. played a small part in, in democratizing those tools so that the rest of us could build habits for good.

the second book, Indistractable was kind of about the flip side. If Hooked was about how do you build good habits, Indistractable was about how do you break those bad habits? And that was a problem that came from my own struggle with overusing technology and, and how I finally became Indistractable going back to the first principles of of, of the psychology, of distraction.

Then, uh, I started getting some funny phone calls. Uh, you see, I do these office hours every week that anybody can call me up and ask me any questions, and if they read any one of my books, and I, I love talking to readers. And uh, every once in a while, maybe like one out of 20 calls or so would sound something like this, Melody.

Somebody would call me up and say, Hey, Nir, I, I read Indistractable. I really liked it, but I just wanted you to know that, uh, it didn’t work. I’d say, oh, wow. Tell, tell me more. You know, I’m, I, I would love to learn, you know, let, let’s go step by step. We’ll figure out where, where things didn’t work out for you.

So let’s start with step one. How did step one go? And they’d say, you know, Nir I, I, I, I read step one. I definitely read it. I just didn’t, um, just didn’t do it. And I’d say, okay, no worries. You know, that’s, it, I guess that happens sometimes.

Tell me about step two. How did step two go? And they’d say, yeah, you know, I, I, I read step two. I definitely read step two. I just, ugh, I didn’t do that one either. And so here I was kind of racking my brain trying to figure out how is it that people would wait for months to tell the author of a book that they had read, that the things that they didn’t do didn’t work. And at first I thought, well, did I mess up? Like, is is, you know, the, I spent five years writing this book and I put 30 pages of citations to peer-reviewed st- journals and, you know, I, I really wanna make sure my work is thorough.

Why didn’t it work for people? And then started thinking, actually, you know what, I kinda do this. for the books I read too, I, I have stacks of, of books on my bookshelf of books that I haven’t put into practice. I’ve listened to podcasts and youTube videos and paid consultants and gurus to tell me what to do, and I haven’t put a lot of that stuff into practice either. So. Isn’t that weird? Like,

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: isn’t that so interesting? Like what a, why is that? It turns out that Plato asked the sar- very same question. He, he called it in the Greek, uh, akrasia, the tendency to do things against our better interest. And so I wanted to dive in deeper and

what I realized after looking at this topic backwards and forwards, was that our fundamental understanding of motivation is incomplete. That we tend to think that all we need to do is know what to do, know the behavior. If somebody just gives me the secret of what it is I need to do, tell me the steps, if I want the benefit, well then the behavior will lead to the benefit. That’s all we need. Right. But we know that’s not true. Common sense tells us that that’s not true. Even if the Economist tells us that’s all you need is an incentive, there’s something missing. Clearly there’s something missing. ’cause if all we needed was the information, we’re drowning in information, right?

If you don’t know how to do something, just ask ChatGPT, Google it, buy a book. We’re drowning in the information. missing, what I concluded is that motivation is not a straight line between behavior and benefit, but that motivation is a triangle. That in order to sustain motivation, you not only need to know what to do, the behavior, you also need to know the benefit, but you, most importantly, what holds it all together is the belief. That, for example, if you’re working for a boss who you

don’t believe has your best interest at heart maybe you don’t believe they’re gonna give you that promotion. Maybe you don’t believe in their leadership. Maybe you don’t believe the company’s going in the right direction.

Are you gonna sustain your motivation to work for them? No. You’re gonna slack off or probably find another job. Conversely, if you don’t believe in your own ability to do the behavior, it doesn’t matter if you know exactly what to do, if you don’t believe you can do it. If you have imposter syndrome so-called, or if

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: job. Conversely, if you don’t believe in your own ability to do the behavior, it doesn’t matter if you know exactly what to do, if you don’t believe you can do it.

If you have

imposter syndrome so-called, or if

Melody Wilding: Hmm.

think, “I’m not good enough, I’m not ready, this won’t work, I need more information,” you’re also not going to do it. You’re gonna lose your motivation because you don’t have that belief.

going to do it.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: gonna lose your, your motivation because you don’t have that belief.

Melody Wilding: Yeah.

So I realized that there was this kind of hole in our everyday understanding for leaders, for managers, even for just the rest of us, everybody. If we don’t understand our beliefs, we don’t understand what drives our behavior, and we don’t understand why we don’t achieve our long-term goals.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: we don’t understand our beliefs, we don’t understand what drives our behavior, and we don’t understand why

we don’t achieve our long-term goals

Melody Wilding: Oh my gosh. It

is, it is so insightful to hear that because I, as you were saying, you know, you could have the most, you could have the fanciest technology in the world. You could have your ai, you could have, you know, push notifications on your. Phone to do something, but you still don’t do it. And it, and then it can turn into self recrimination is it me? Am I just not disciplined? Do I not want this bad enough? And all right. But I, I have some questions about that where we go, wrong with some of the mantras, we tend to believe about beliefs. Very meta there. But how do you define a belief? Because you have a very particular definition and I wanna make sure we’re all on the same page as we go through the rest of this conversation.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: Fellow word nerd here. Uh, uh, we have to get our definitions straight.

Melody Wilding: Correct. Yeah.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: Here’s what a belief is not. A belief is not a fact. fact is a conviction that is based on actual evidence. It is based on objective truth. The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. Sorry, Flat earthers. The world doesn’t care what you think. That is a fact. You cannot change a fact. Okay? That is, is an objective truth. On the other hand, we have faith. is a conviction that does not require evidence. God rewards the righteous. no amount of evidence that someone could pr- present to somebody who has that matter of faith, nor should they. That is faith. No more power to them. But in between fact and faith. what we call a belief and what makes belief so special. Their definition is a belief, is a conviction that is open to revision based on new evidence. So we’re not pulling it out of thin air. It’s based on evidence, but it is open to change. It is open to revision based on new evidence. And so the reason this is such a magical tool that unlike faith, which almost never changes, unlike facts which you cannot change. A belief is open to revision. And so the most important thing that I took away from the six years of research that went into Beyond Belief, was that beliefs are tools, truths. There’s a different burden of evidence for a belief versus a fact because beliefs tend to be about predictions for the future. They haven’t happened yet. AI is gonna take all our jobs. AI is gonna lead to utopia. I can do this. I can’t do this. I should marry this person. I shouldn’t marry this person. I should take this job. I shouldn’t take this job. All of these things are beliefs based on current evidence about the future. They’re not based on facts, they’re based on bits of evidence. And So if we. the right beliefs. We have what we call liberating beliefs. These beliefs that increase our motivation and decrease our suffering. we hold onto the wrong beliefs, the wrong tools for the job, we increase our suffering and decrease our motivation. And so it’s, it’s absolutely critical when it comes to sustaining our motivation for ourselves, for our other, for, for our colleagues. That we understand how to recognize those limiting beliefs. Call them for what they are, understand why we have them in the first place, and then turn them around. And there’s a process for us to do this so that we can adopt these more motivating, liberating beliefs. And this isn’t about positive thinking, it’s not about manifesting and all that hocus pocus stuff. You know, I’m, my books are very science-backed. and it turns out that a lot of the, the stuff people tend to think about beliefs not only is wrong, but actually. Backfires, for example, you know, positive thinking that’s also That’s ju- just, having blind faith that things are always gonna work out. No, that’s also not based on real word– world evidence. However, we can decide when it comes to these beliefs about the, the future, these convictions based on evidence that are open to revision, we can actually change not only what we see, literally what we are able to see, what we feel, not just our feelings, but also our actual physiological state. We’re talking pain and suffering are moderated by our beliefs. most importantly, we change what we do, our sense of agency, all those combined into who we ultimately become.

Melody Wilding: Yeah, that’s exactly what I was just thinking in my head is, is the way that beliefs then will calcify into an identity. And I was thinking the of an example, a lot of people who listen to this show are very focused on developing their executive presence and communication skills and influence skills, yet they will tell themselves, I am an introvert therefore I cannot do X. Or the people at my workplace will judge me if I change the way that I’m speaking up in meetings. So let’s get into, um, some of those stories we tell ourselves that. Well, this isn’t my style, right? That’s another one. I hear that. That’s just not me. That’s not authentic to who I am or a common one. I’m sure you, you also see a lot is, I’m not cut out for this, right? I just, I don’t have that in me. So what is that process to start shifting? I love the idea. A very pragmatic view to make our beliefs more useful to us. So they are serving us. They don’t have to be this ultra positive Pollyanna thing, but they need to be useful and utilitarian. The right tool for the right job. So what is that process? That we go from something that is a brick wall to something that is actually serving us.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: Absolutely.

Melody Wilding: Yeah.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: I’ll tell you personally how this, affected my own life. when I started, uh, my career, I had terrible stage fright. I would go on stage and right beforehand I’d get the sweaty armpits and the cotton mouth and the heartbeat in my chest, the palpitations.

And I, and I’d think to myself, the, the, look how anxious I am and I I’m not ready for this and I need more practice and I need more information. I should probably take some course and I, I’m not gonna do well. And if I don’t do well, I’m gonna embarrass myself. And I would go down this anxiety spiral. Based on what, based on a belief that I wasn’t good enough, that I wasn’t ready for this, and so I didn’t change the signal, I didn’t change the sensations. I still get, I’m getting it right now. Melody, I’ll be totally honest with you. I, s- right now I’m getting the sweaty armpits and the cotton mouth and the heart palpitations. My interpretation of that information is completely different. There’s a difference between pain and suffering. is just signal pain is just information. Suffering is our subjective interpretation that signal. completely judgment and and judgment is what causes our suffering. When we believe that something should be different than it is, that’s the source of all our suffering.

And so when we think of beliefs, not as facts, but as tools, I like to say beliefs are tools, not truths. And so now even with the same information, the same sensations that I always have had. I have a totally different belief. My belief today is you see my heart is beating quickly so that my brain can receive more oxygen so I can deliver my best possible presentation and help millions of people. So same exact data, same information, totally different belief. Now, what that took, what that that simple statement took a process. It’s almost like, you know, limiting beliefs are like your face, If I told you, look at your face. How? do you look at your face? You can’t look at your face. We all have a face, but you can’t look at your face. You can look at your hands, you can look at your feet. You can’t look at your face. Same goes with our limiting beliefs. We can’t see them. In order to see our own limiting beliefs, to reflect. We have to take out something outside of ourselves. We have to look in a mirror outside of ourselves. it is the same way with our limiting beliefs. We can see everybody else’s. Limiting beliefs. Just like we can see our own face, right? We can see our boss’s limit-limitations. we can see our limitations, our kids, everybody else. We can tell them, you know, for days about their limitations, own limiting beliefs we can’t see because to us feel like facts. And that’s why they’re so hard see, because they’re always hidden because your brain has spent your entire life getting you to do and believe what it has done in the past, because in the past, these beliefs served it in some way. And so it

was a good tool back then. But we don’t keep using a tool just because it worked once. It’s like a carpenter saying, oh, one time I used a hammer effective, so I’m only gonna use a hammer. It’s the one and only true tool. But you can set down that tool, a better tool that is better for that job. And so that’s what this process of figuring out these limiting beliefs that hold us back by asking ourselves, is this belief serving me or is it hurting me? But we don’t keep using a tool just because it worked once.

It’s like a, like a carpenter saying, oh, one time I used a hammer

Melody Wilding: Yeah.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: effective, so I’m only gonna use a hammer. It’s the one and only true tool. You can set down that tool, up a better tool that that is better for that job. And so that’s what this process of, of figuring out these limiting beliefs that hold us back by asking ourselves, is this belief serving me or is it hurting me?

And the effects are so profound. I mean, I talk about in the book how, how they increase your lifespan. Literally. It’s the, h- the, you know, there was a study done out of Yale. That found that just having a positive view of aging increases lifespan on average seven and a half years, seven and a half. And to put that in perspective, melody, that is greater than the effect of changing your diet. It’s greater than the effect of exercise. It’s greater than the effect of quitting smoking seven and a half

years. Now, it’s not some kind of cosmic magic that when you believe happy thoughts that you know that changes your mitochondria or something, that’s not what’s happening at all. It’s that people who have positive views of aging. People who believe something like growth is possible at

any age versus people who have a negative view of aging, such as aging involves inevitable decline. The people who have that positive view are more likely to change their behavior,

then changes their biology. And so when we adopt these, these liberating beliefs, we do do change our day-to-day lives.

We change our everyday behavior and therefore we also change our biology. And so if it does this to lifespan, this do for our business? You know, as we’re going through this rapid change of, of, of AI and, uh, you know, geopolitical unrest and everything that’s happening in the world. depending on how you see

that, that reality, depending on what your beliefs are, nobody knows what’s gonna happen.

Well, nobody knows what’s gonna happen tomorrow. H- we have no idea what’s going to happen to AI. It could be wonderful, it could be terrible. We have no idea. But based on your beliefs about what, what you think is going

to happen and, or what you choose to

believe, you will literally see opportunities that other people just won’t have access to.

And so it’s so important that we decide our beliefs or our beliefs will dictate our future.

Melody Wilding: Oh, it’s, I, I am always saying to my clients, you will act consistently with the beliefs you have about yourself and other people. I was just talking to a group of clients yesterday about how at the, at more mid and senior levels. Is the condition you are operating in. So just ex your belief needs to be and your expectation for situations needs to be. It is not going to go a full fully to plan. Someone is going to change a priority. Someone is going to interrupt me in the meeting. Someone will have a question that comes out of the blue and when you expect that, or your belief is that going in and you know, dot, dot dot. I can handle it. I have the resourcefulness and the skills to be able to handle that. Then all of a sudden, just as you were saying, the way you perform and are present in that moment, totally changes because you’re not blindsided. Buy it. You’re like, okay, here it is. Now this is the moment where I stay calm and I, I show myself and I respond in a diplomatic way, which as you were saying, has this cascading effect of how you perform. Then how people per perceive you, then the opportunities you get in the future. So

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: it,

Melody Wilding: yeah, go ahead.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: reminds me just, uh, before I forget it, is it’s such a great example, of how when we, w- when we think that it’s just about having positive thoughts, right? Just be a

po- just be positive, just be an optimist or, you know, just manifest. And we see this on social media a lot, that the s- the solution is just manifesting or vision exercises.

We hear that a lot too, the visioning exercises.

Melody Wilding: Yeah.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: turns out the da- the data shows, the studies show that

those type of visioning exercises when we, when we focus only on the goal. When we only focus on the outcome, studies have found that people become less likely to meet their goals.

Melody Wilding: Hmm.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: when, you know, Gabriele Oettingen did a study where she put people in, a room and she connected them to blood pressure monitors and they focused on their outcomes, right?

they manifested the beach body or business success or love in their life, or getting a good grade on their test. and what they, what she found was that they. relaxed, their blood pressure dropped, their heart rate dropped, and they became less likely to actually go out there and do the things that were necessary to get what they wanted. So just rah rah, let’s go get it. know, let, let’s go get our

goals is not enough. What you have to do is visualize the right way. You know, people say, well, athletes visualize, so doesn’t that work for athletes? Well, this is a great way example of the self-help industry taking something that’s true and making it false. Because if you actually look at what athletes do when they visualize, they don’t visualize the trophy and the gold medal. That’s not what they visualize. They visualize how they will react physically and psychologically to that difficulty. They prepare for the pain. So exactly as you said, it’s not a surprise because they know I can handle it. I’ve rehearsed it already. That’s the right way to visualize. That’s what we have to do to prepare for our goals, is to prepare for the pain psychologically. I mean, this is really what separates winners from losers is that people who consistently succeed are able to separate pain from suffering. I mean, this is the unlock, people who are very successful in all fields, whether it’s the arts or business or what that people who are at the top of their game, the same exact signal that the rest of us get, that we would interpret as pain and suffering to them is not pain and suffering. It’s still pain, right? They still feel the same things that the rest of us do, but they make completely different judgments, and that prepares them for the inevitable difficulty that comes along the path to getting what they desire. So just sitting back and saying, “Well, I want this thing. It’s just gonna happen. I’m gonna vibrate at the cosmic, uh, whatever, vibration of the universe,” that doesn’t work. But visualizing the pain in your way and how you will prepare for that psychologically, making sure that you can rise to the occasion, what changes the game.

Melody Wilding: Hmm. That, that is important. One, one question I find really helpful when, when I know I get stuck in, in these ruts between, i’m taking pain and I am turning it into suffering, or at least an extended struggle for myself, myself, what am I making this mean about me?

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: Oh, that’s

Melody Wilding: how am I.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: making this mean? I love that

Melody Wilding: Yeah. How am I personalizing a situation? I, I told this story on, my email list a while ago, but, um, a while ago I was on a, a plane, and you know how this happens where you’re trying to get onto wifi and you’re trying every possible, restart your computer, connect on your phone, nothing’s working. And so I am sitting there thinking, am I an idiot? I feel like everybody else is on wifi already. Why can’t I figure this out? What am I doing wrong? I shouldn’t even be in this class of the plane. I should be somewhere else. And then the, the flight attendant is walking past the gentleman in front of me grabs her and says, excuse me, the wifi isn’t working. And it was one of those moments where I, I was like, I was going to grab her and say, excuse me, I’m having trouble getting the wifi. I can’t get the wifi working for me. Which subtext is, there’s something wrong with me. I was personalizing, my belief was I was personalizing this situation that I was the only one. I couldn’t figure it out. And it was just one of those very small moments that makes you just think, what am I, what am I doing? Oh my gosh. I see. It’s so clearly there,

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: Yeah.

That’s a beautiful example. of What, what am I making this

mean? I really, really, like that. And that, that bit of reflection, that’s, that’s one of those cognitive mirrors

Melody Wilding: Yeah.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: just go through our day-to-day life. Without pausing for that exact reflection, you know, silly

Melody Wilding: Mm-hmm.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: To make me mad, you know, like a business deal didn’t work out or I, I, or a couple of days ago, I dropped a cup of coffee, okay? It spilled out of my hands.

Melody Wilding: Yeah.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: Would have made me mad. Oh, I dropped this cup of, or somebody cut me off in traffic, or said something I didn’t like, and that rubbed me the wrong way. And it would, it would irritate me. It would cause me suffering. Why? It’s, it’s not a fact that it has to cause me suffering. These are just subjective interpretation. They’re just beliefs. And when you realize that and you can unlock that power, it’s life-changing. I’ll give you a a great example. There was a study done, back in the 1950s. It’s a little bit of a morbid study, but this is what happened. You can’t do this anymore. But there was a study where a, a biologist by the name of Kurt Richter had a very simple question. He was a biologist. He wanted to know how long a wild rat could swim. Pretty simple question. Takes a wild rat, puts it in a cylinder of water, stands there with a timer and measures how long it takes for a rat to, to give up to stop swimming. Turns out 15 minutes. That’s his answer. 15 minutes. he wants to see can he make the rat more persistent? Can he increase the amount of time they swim for? a new rat, puts it in the same cylinder of water. This time at the 15-minute mark when s- he sees the rat is starting to struggle and give up, he reaches in. Pulls out the rat, dries it off, lets it catch its breath, and then back in the water it goes. he does this a few times. He conditions the rat to now believe that if he keeps swimming, salvation might be possible. So how much longer does the rat swim for? Right. You’ve read the book, so you know already, but for people listening, when I ask folks, what do you think, how much more persistent did the rat become after it was conditioned to expect that if it stayed motivated, if it kept swimming. pers– that salvation might come. say twice as long, okay, 100% improvement in persistence. 30 minutes of swimming. Then some people say, no, no, no, no. Probably four times as long I bet the rat could swim for 60 minutes. And if you take a step back, that’s, that’s crazy, right? Like, imagine if I could make you four times more persistent. You could, uh, run four times further. You could make four times the phone calls before you, you know, the sales calls before you gave up. You could be four times more patient if I could increase your persistence. four times longer. I mean, you– that would be game-changing, right? But the rats didn’t swim four times longer. The rats swam not for 60 minutes. They swam for 60 hours.

Melody Wilding: Wow.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: 60 hours of nonstop swimming. Now, what changed? Their bodies hadn’t changed. They hadn’t suddenly become Michael Phelps rats. Right? They their– nothing physically had changed in the rats. Same rats, same environment, right? The same cylinders. Nothing had changed in their outside environment. The only variable left, we can’t ask the rats, obviously, but the only variable left is that something switched in their minds.

Melody Wilding: Hmm.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: That the 60 hours was always within them. They always had the power to swim for 60 hours, but they gave up at 15 minutes, and what we do every single day. believe I’m at my limit. That’s it. I’ve had enough. Can’t anymore, and we’re not even close. Not even close. We’ve all got that, the, that 60 hours within us. We just keep quitting at those 15 minutes because our beliefs don’t let us see what we’re capable of doing.

Melody Wilding: Hmm. There is a, I think, related concept to this that you talk about in the book that I have turned over in my head so many times because it’s, it’s counterintuitive. It’s so fascinating. Which is , as our problems decrease, we expand what we consider a problem.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: Yeah.

Melody Wilding: Talk.

Yeah. Can, can you talk about how that may play out for the person who’s listening, how might they see that in their work or career? Because to me that was a huge light bulb that I know I am guilty of, so I I would love to hear you unpack that. Yeah.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: you’re part of a very illustrious club. We all do this. I’ll, tell you a study that, that, illuminates this. So they did a study at Dartmouth where they took a group of women and they said, Hey, you’re gonna be part of this study. We’re trying to figure out how people treat those with a facial disfigurement. So they had a Hollywood artist, a makeup artist come and put like a large scar on their cheek of these women, okay. A Large, visible scar. And they said, okay, we’re gonna send you into this room with a stranger, and we want you to have a conversation and simply note for us you’re treated. How do people treat you when you have this large scar on your face? Now they made it look super real so that the other, you know, the other person wouldn’t know it’s fake. And they showed the women who had the scar, what it looked like. Now, right before they go into this room to have a conversation with a stranger and report back on how they were treated, the makeup artist says, wait, wait, wait. One, one, quick second. Can you sit down for a minute? Let me just do a quick touch-up.” And unbeknownst to the person, the woman who had the scar, they actually removed the scar entirely. They completely removed it, but they didn’t let the women know. They didn’t see in the mirror that the scar was gone. They thought the scar was still there. So they go into this room, they had this conversation thinking that they had a scar that wasn’t even there. Now, what’s so amazing about this study is that these women who participated in the study who thought they had the scar, back and said how they were stared at. How they were treated poorly. How some people looked disgusted, even having a conversation with them because they had a scar. A scar that wasn’t there. So how many times have we walked into a business meeting, a sales conversation, talk about executive presence wearing a scar that’s invisible, only we see. Become super judgmental of ourselves making a problem that doesn’t even exist. I’m not good enough, I’m not ready. Impostor syndrome, blah, blah, blah. All these limiting beliefs that we think we are stricken with That in fact, nobody else can see. It’s just in our heads. And so we limit ourselves. we limit what we’re capable of of doing and becoming for problems that. don’t even exist.

Melody Wilding: Uh, so guilty of, of that. Right. And, and as you were saying.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: Research is me search. I wrote this book for me more than anybody else. let me

Melody Wilding: Oh yes. I, I feel that we, we, we teach what we most need to learn in many ways.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: right. And, and look, I’ll I’ll tell you what, I, with all my books, I write my books not because I know the answer. I write books because I want to know the answer. That’s why it takes me so long to

Melody Wilding: yeah.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: I go to first principles, I start with the research. And I build myself up back from that trying to solve my own issues. I oftentimes have to reread this stuff because, it’s very easy to discount how are– how. Desperately, your brain wants to pull you back into passivity. Because remember, your brain’s primary job to make sure you’re happy. It’s not to help you flourish. It’s not to help you meet your full potential. Your brain doesn’t care about any of that stuff. brain’s primary job is to keep you alive. and so the safest bet to keep you alive is to do and believe exactly what kept you alive before. Probabilistically, if it worked before, it’s gonna work again. thinking different and doing different, that’s risky. Something bad might happen, your brain hates changing its mind. I’ll say it again. It’s so true. Your brain hates changing its mind, which means we need to consciously? Fight against that pull back to passivity. You know, a few years ago there was this, this landmark research that everybody in the psychology organizational behavior community believed, which was called learned helplessness. You probably heard it talked about 100 times, learned helplessness, that, that you are taught over time if something doesn’t work, that you’re helpless and you just give up. Right? And everybody believed this. Martin Seligman, one of the authors of this study became the president of the American Psychological Association. This was gospel. To their credit, Seligman and Maier, this, the ex- original researchers of this learned helplessness study, they’re amazing scientists and they actually revisited the data and they did something that very few scientists do. They actually refuted their own results. And it turns out that not only was learned helplessness wrong, their conclusion after re-looking at the data it’s exactly the opposite Of what we all believed. do not learn helplessness. We are born helpless. That a baby, when a baby comes into the world, th- they are helpless. They require help from their caregivers, and the same with all of us. We are constantly being pulled back to passivity, to helplessness. What we have to learn is hope. Is what must be taught. That’s what we’re actually fighting is that helplessness that is our default state. so we, it’s not good enough to just, just to know, “Okay, I’ve, I know everything. I’m done,” right? I’ll read this book once.” I constantly have to remind myself of this research so that I myself will be able to overcome my limiting beliefs.

Melody Wilding: Hmm. One area connected to this last topic I wanna touch on with you as a, as a counter to everything we have been talking about, and that goes right along with Learned hope Fullness engineering your own luck. That’s something you talk about. How do you engineer your own luck? Again for the people who are listening to this, who are thinking about how they show up in their communication, in their meetings with their leadership. What can someone do to start engineering more luck into how they’re showing up at work day to day? What does that mean and look like?

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: Sure. So, so the studies find that actually the most successful salespeople out there, they enjoy what’s called provoked luck. Meaning they just think to them, it just looks like they got lucky. But in fact, when they went back and analyzed, well, how did that lead come about? chance. Luck is not chance. Luck can be engineered. And there’s some very simple practices we all can do. One of them is showing gratitude. So Tina Seelig talks about this. is, she’s at Stanford, j– a researcher there and she is known throughout Silicon Valley as being, the, goddess of gratefulness. You know, she just, i– she sends gratitude notes to anybody and everybody whenever, she never, and it’s, I think it’s a wonderful r-rule that we can all adopt when someone does something nice, even if it’s saying good morning. So, a simple gesture or, just something that’s worthy of praise. Never hold back on praise. For some reason it feels uncomfortable. Eh, we don’t wanna praise people. It might, it feels weird. Don’t hold back, showing gratitude. And so, she has this, this habit of sending people thank you notes, handwritten thank you notes. And so what a great example of provoked luck. if somebody’s sitting at their desk and there’s some kind of opportunity that comes to their mind, or is a passing thought and there’s your handwritten thank you note on their desk, gonna be first to mind. Right. So that practice of showing gratitude is definitely one way you can engineer luck. Another big one is thinking of yourself as lucky. And here’s the study that that proved this, I shouldn’t say proved. that showed this. We, we collect evidence. We definitive proof. I hate when people say, science proves The science never proves anything. We just have more evidence. So here’s one bit of evidence.

So there was a study that found that when two groups of people. group were people who believed they were lucky. One group of people believed they were unlucky. Now, it wasn’t a fact, okay? The scientists didn’t go around and say, oh, let’s, let’s see who is actually lucky or unlucky. They just asked people, do you think you’re a lucky person or an unlucky person? Okay, two groups. They gave them the same exact task. The task was, look through this newspaper they have given them and simply count how many images you see. Okay. How many photographs, how many images in this newspaper just count them? one, two, three, four, five. The group that believed they were unlucky took on average two and a half minutes. The group that believed they were lucky took eleven seconds. Why the difference?

Melody Wilding: Yeah.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: On page two of this newspaper, one of those images in big, bold letters said are forty-three images in this newspaper. Collect your reward. The lucky people to page two, the image, read it, got f- got up from their chairs, collected their reward, and they were out the door in 11 seconds. The unlucky people, even though they had correctly counted the number of images, they correctly put down 43 images, so they saw message that said how many images there are in the newspaper. It didn’t pass through conscious attention. It was all signal and no interpretation. They never made sense of it, even though they had counted it. So that’s a great example of how believing you are a lucky person more luck in your life. You see things, you literally see things with your eyeballs other people don’t see. By the way, this is what makes great entrepreneurs. If you read Walter Isaacson, uh, biography of Steve Jobs, he talks about how Jobs had a reality distortion field, and this is what we see among great entrepreneurs. They see $100 bills all over the place that the rest of us are blind to. have what’s called entrepreneurial alertness. They can see opportunities based on their beliefs that the rest of us can’t ever see.

Melody Wilding: That’s a, now I’m like, have entrepreneurial alertness. I feel like you’ve just, you’ve shifted a belief for me, which is fantastic. And to that end, before I ask where people can find you, if you could impart or install one belief in every person who is listening right now that could dramatically change their career or their work life, what would it be?

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: Just one. Can I have two?

Melody Wilding: You can have two. Yeah. Yeah.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: Number one, you don’t see reality clearly. We need that intellectual humility understand that none of us sees reality. Clearly, we see reality through a tiny pinhole of attention that we call reality, but it’s just a, a simulation happening in your brain because your brain just can’t absorb all that information. It has to see reality filtered from its belief. So number one, you do not see reality clearly. And number two, you are capable of far more than you can imagine.

Melody Wilding: Hmm. Amazing. Nir, thank you So much. Where is the best place to send people?

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: Sure. So my website is nirandfar.com, and we actually have a free five-minute Belief Change Guide, totally free. It’s yours for the taking. We just couldn’t fit it in the final edition of the book. So it’s all yours. And that’s at my website, nirandfar, Nir spelled like my first name, NIR and far.com. And the book is called Beyond Belief.

Melody Wilding: Thank you again.

Nir Eyal – NirAndFar.com: My pleasure. Thank you, Melody.