Good Life Project - The Surprising Science of Motivation (it’s not what you think) | Emily Balcetis

Episode Date: April 20, 2023

Have you ever wondered what sets successful people apart, and how they stay motivated to achieve their goals? What if you could discover the secrets to maximizing your own motivation and achieving the success you desire? In today's podcast, we delve into the surprising science of motivation and accomplishment, uncovering powerful strategies to help you conquer challenges and propel yourself toward your dreams with my guest, Emily Balcetis.Emily is an Associate Professor of Psychology and the director of the New York University Social Perception Action and Motivation research lab. Described as a pioneer in the scientific investigation of behavioral science and motivation, she leads an international team of scholars, writers, artists, and advocates. Her research has uncovered previously unknown strategies that increase, sustain, and direct people's efforts to meet their goals. As a TED speaker and author of Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World, she has become one of the most sought-after voices on motivation science in the world.During this conversation, you'll learn:How our perception of the world shapes our motivation and, in turn, our success.The surprising strategies successful people use to sustain and direct their efforts.The role of self-compassion in overcoming setbacks and maintaining motivation.How to unlock your own inner resources to achieve your personal and professional goals.You can find Emily at: Psychology Today | LinkedInIf you LOVED this episode you’ll also love the conversations we had with Lewis Howes about the mindset that propels greatness.Check out our offerings & partners: My New Book SparkedMy New Podcast SPARKED. To submit your “moment & question” for consideration to be on the show go to sparketype.com/submit. Visit Our Sponsor Page For Great Resources & Discount Codes Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our eyes are special. It's like our human superpower for a number of reasons. One of them is that more of our neurological real estate is taken up by our experience of sight. More square footage in our brain is devoted to processing visual input than taste, smell, or hearing. There's something powerful about our eyes and the power that seeing something can do to nudge us into choices or behaviors that we hope that we'll take. So have you ever wondered what sets quote successful people apart and how they stay motivated to achieve big goals? Well, what if you could discover the secret to really maximizing your own motivation and achieving whatever success means to you. In today's podcast, we delve into

the surprising science of motivation and accomplishment and how the way that we see the world around us and the way that we see ourselves really impacts it. Uncovering powerful strategies to help you conquer challenges and propel yourself towards your dreams with my guest, Emily Belchedis. So Emily is an associate professor of psychology and the director of the New York University Social Perception, Action, and Motivation Research Lab. She's described as a pioneer in the scientific investigation of behavioral science and motivation, and she leads an international team of scholars and writers and artists and advocates. Her research has uncovered previously unknown strategies that increase

sustain and direct people's effort to meet their goals. As a TED speaker and author of Clearer, Closer, Better, How Successful People See the World, Emily's work has received numerous national grants from the National Science Foundation and appears in over 75 scientific publications. She has become one of the most sought-after voices on the science of motivation in the world. During our conversation, we go deep on a bunch of different topics, but you'll learn things like how our perception of the world shapes our motivation and in turn, our success, the surprising strategies that successful people use to sustain and direct their efforts, and the role of self-compassion in overcoming setbacks and maintaining motivation,

and how to unlock your own inner resources to really achieve your personal and professional goals, and so much more. So you may want to settle in and grab something to take note so you can tap Emily's deep wisdom on the inner workings of motivation and unlock the keys to more of the life you dream of living. So excited to share this conversation with you. I'm Jonathan Fields me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later require, charge time and actual results will vary. Just super excited to dive in. I have been deeply fascinated by why people do what they do and especially the field of motivation and also as somebody who sort of lives in two worlds of being an artist and a multi-time entrepreneur it's always been fascinating to me to explore the link between what we see and what we create. And also to really

understand that what we see often isn't what actually is in front of us. You have this great quote, we live our lives as if we see the world as it really is, but our eyes never tell the whole story. Take me deeper into this. Yeah. I mean, I think our eyes are special. It's like our human superpower for a number of reasons. One of them is that more of our neurological real estate is taken up by our experience of sight. More square footage in our brain is devoted to processing visual input than taste or smell or hearing. So that is an indicator that there's something special going on about our visual experience.

But also what it doesn't do, unlike those other senses, is that we rarely have that opportunity to have our experience second guessed or to be told that we've done it wrong. We've gone out to great restaurants and tasted something delicious and, oh, I wonder what that is. And you try to figure out what's the spice profile that went in there to have somebody say like, oh, no, I'm totally reading cinnamon. Well, I'm reading cardamom, whatever. So we have that experience knowing that like, well, our tongues don't quite get it right. And you feel some lovely texture, you know, on some new piece of clothing that

you're considering. And then you look at the tag and you realize, oh, my God, I thought that was silk and it's just viscous or something, you know, like we have those experiences where every other way that we get information into our brain, we can have the experience of knowing that what we thought was the case, isn't the case, but that doesn't really happen with vision so much. It's not the case that I'm having this great conversation with you, Jonathan, looking at you over the screen, but then all of a sudden, like, it's my mom, right? Like we never get it so wrong like that, that, you know, that the person we think is there isn't actually the person that we're talking to. And even just in more mundane ways that, you know, it's like, if we haven't seen something, if we've missed it, because we're paying attention to, you know, the people that are dressed a particular way, and we haven't seen the people if we've missed it because we're paying attention to the people that are

dressed a particular way and we haven't seen the people that are dressed another way, how would we know what we don't know? There isn't a system for cluing in to the things that we missed because the world just keeps going by. So if we didn't catch it that first time, there isn't an auto replay in everyday life for us to learn something different than what we thought before. So I think that's how you can get to that place of believing that what I've seen reflects what is really there because there's hardly any times where we get a different perspective. Yeah. I remember a couple of years back, there was this meme that was floating around the internet and it was a video. And the prompt in the video was count how many people touched

the basketball and it was being passed between basketball players. And then in the middle of all this, there's a person in a gorilla suit walking through the center of the frame. And then after it, like the question was, did you see the gorilla? And most people didn't see the gorilla, even though it was clearly visible, like right in the front and center of everyone, but something about it made it so that you literally did not see this thing in the middle of the screen, even though it was right there. Yeah. That's amazing. You know, and people have followed up those studies. Those were done at Cornell, my alma mater as well. That idea of inattentional blindness, we've paid attention to it, but somehow we haven't seen what's really there.

They've done studies with eye tracking technology looking to see like, well, maybe people's eyes didn't actually land on it. Maybe they were all like skirting the periphery or something. And so they never actually had a chance to have their foveal view, the part of our visual experience that we take in information with great clarity

and precision and accuracy. Maybe it never landed on the gorilla. That's not the case. People's foveal view did land on that gorilla and they still don't have that experience of seeing it. And that phenomenon is so robust, actually, that it's become the backdrop of a health and safety campaign in London. That same idea of there's basketball players wearing black and white shirts. You pay attention to the one in white. A gorilla dressed in black, a black furred gorilla walks through. And they pivoted. Most people have that experience of not seeing the gorilla. And then they pivot and saying, the danger comes in what we don't see as a campaign to

help bicyclists. Because in a single year, I think there were over 2,000 bicyclists in London that were hit by drivers, automobile drivers. And when asked, what happened? Tell us what happened. The most frequently offered response is, I just didn't see them. In the same way that we're like, oh, I just didn't see that gorilla.

I just didn't see the bicyclist. Because that's, as a driver, not what we're looking for. We're not looking for bicyclists. We're looking for other cars. Or maybe we're looking for pedestrians. But of course, there's a whole other genre of people that travel the streets. And those aren't ones that are as cognitively accessible. They're not on our mind. And that's how we can go from not thinking about them to literally not seeing them and as a result, hitting them. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing. And also,

it makes it really clear that I think most of us think about vision is what comes into our eyes, but that's really only half the equation because it sounds like the fuller experience of vision is vision is part what comes into our eyes, but then the other part is how our brain processes it. I'm so curious in that scenario, is there data or is there insight on whether the brain sort of like sees things or doesn't see things because of a rating of relevance or importance or urgency or attentiveness or alertness or something like that. I'm so curious, like how and why a brain would get input from the eyes and choose either to see or not see something from that point. And then literally let you believe that it either does or doesn't exist. Yeah. I mean, what comes in to our eyes are

light waves, right? Like there isn't actually anything that touches our eye. It's just these invisible waves, right? Like when we touch fabric, we have direct contact between our body, our sensory system, and that thing that's out there. When we taste something, it's the same idea, but light waves, right? It's this invisible stuff that's floating around in the space. And then somehow it goes into our, goes into the, our, this like ball, you know, there's a hole in our eyeball and then those invisible waves go in there and it ends up going to our brain. And so our brain has to make sense of it, right?

Our brain makes sense of like, what is like literally invisible to us otherwise. And there is evidence to say that like, you know, the brain is doing that interpretation. The brain is doing like a leveling and sharpening of letting some information get processed to a deeper level, which is then giving rise to our conscious or our known experience of what it is that we're looking at, and sort of doing that same gorilla thing at the level of our brain's processing in the visual cortex areas. For example, there's been research that's done, you know, it's kind of a contrived lab setting, but just play along here. There'll be like two pictures, right? Maybe a picture of a shoe, a photograph of a shoe and a photograph of a house.

And they take that photograph of the shoe and they put it in hues of red, right? So rather than black and white or the actual color palette that that photograph is, they just sort of put a wash of red. So it's like light red, darker red, medium red. They take a picture of the house and put it in sort of shades of cyan, right? A blue green, right? It's lighter, darker cyan and no more purple if that's what the house was. I don't know. So they take those two, set them to like half transparency, overlap them over the top. So when you're looking at it, you can tell like, oh, these are two photographs that are, you know, somehow you can see through them so that you can see the houses underneath of

the shoe or the shoes underneath the house and that they're in different colors. So that's what we see when we look at it with both of our eyes, but what they have people do is that, and what we have done in our lab, in fact, is that people wear those old school 3d glasses where, you know, one lens is red and one lens is cyan. So the experience then is like when you are looking with if you close one eye and let's say you're looking through those glasses, through the red lens, that sort of distorts or gets rid of the red image. And you can only see what appears in cyan in that eye.

But the other eye has a lens that has that bluish green color, the cyan color there. So that washes out anything that isn't cyan. And now instead, all you see is what's red. What that means is when you're wearing these glasses and looking at that image that clearly before you saw were two pictures overlapped on top of one another, is that now one eye sees the house, one eye sees the shoe. And that's super weird for our brain, right? Our brain is actually used to having slightly different images presented to the left eye and the right eye, because you can get a little bit more of the left peripheral vision of what's over on the side through the left eye and the right eye can't see that because our nose blocks it, right? But the brain is used

to that, like, oh, here's two images, the left eye and the right eye are giving me, you know, basically the same thing. And it stitches it together so that it looks like one coherent image is what our eyes are taking in. Unless you've had that experience where like me as a kid, you swing really high on swings on the playground and you try to jump off and you fall and you hit the back of your head and like you get you go, you have double vision, right? That's literally that experience is like, is when that there is this disconnect for a moment, your brain isn't able to fuse those two slightly different images together and you get that blurriness. Or if you're, you know, really have vision problems, again, like I do, and you're not wearing your glasses and you try to read your text messages

in the middle of the night or something, you could have like double vision, right? Your brain has a hard time stitching those two together. But when you're looking at this image of the night or something, you could have like double vision. Your brain has a hard time stitching those two together. But when you're looking at this image of the house and the shoe with these 3D glasses on, that's so different. Your brain cannot stitch them together. There's no way that this house lines up with the shoe that the left eye and the right eye are differentially presenting to my visual cortex. So the brain makes a choice and the brain decides, you know what, I'm just going to forget what's coming in, coming in through that left eye. And I'm just going to

see the house for a while. And then it gets super tired because now you're overtaxing half of the system. And so it fades out and the shoe fades in and then that fades out and the house fades back in. And so that's the experience that you have when you're wearing these glasses, looking at these with this red and blue cyan image overlaid over the top of one another. We have that experience. We can create a weird experience of blindness in a sense. And when people put perceivers in an fMRI machine that can sort of scan what's happening neurologically as people are having this binocular rivalry experience where the eyes are rivaling for which, you know, which input are we going to have the conscious experience of seeing? There are differential patterns of activation in the brain to suggest that, yeah,

even though all that information is coming into the brain, it is choosing to prioritize the house or the shoe or face sometimes people use because those show up in different parts of the brain. So it's not just that like somehow we aren't aware of seeing the house, it's that our brain is not even like processing it as input in the first place. So all of which is to say like, this is happening at a really early level, sort of the deep seated, early stages of our whole conscious awareness. Do we see this kind of blindness or selection happening? That was a deep dive into the nerding out on the science there. It's so fascinating though. I mean, literally just the notion that you would sit there and

you're getting these two images in each eye with your brain, your brain just sort of keeps flipping back and forth between them. You're like, oh, for a hot second, this is what I'm actually seeing for the next second. This is what I'm seeing because it just can't, it can't reconcile. It can't do the stitching because they're so different. It's interesting, right? Because there's the old phrase, you got to see it to believe it, but it almost makes you wonder if that's backwards to a certain extent, because there's got to be something in your brain that actually has to happen to let you actually take whatever's coming in visually and believe that that's real or to be able to literally say, I see it. That phrase resonates with me both ways, honestly, because I think that you ought to see it to believe it is the sort of anecdotal

support or cliched support for the power that we give to our visual experience. If I see it, then I believe it. If I've seen it with my own eyes, how could you possibly tell me that it's supposed to be some other way? And to be honest, I think that is what is at the heart of a lot of what society is dealing with right now, polarization, where we all see the same video of this person doing something to this person. And yet we have very different interpretations of what it is that we're looking at and a lot of different things, but we are certain what we are united on is that we are certain that we saw it the right way. And it's because we saw it because I saw that video, you know, like if it's about something that's happening

in the legal system and a trial, like, well, let's just wait until the video evidence comes out. Right. Like then we'll know the truth. So I think all of that speaks to the confidence and trust that we have in our visual experience and the lack of awareness that there are many, even with that visual evidence, that visual fact, we are still going to have differences in interpretation. There'll be, still will be things that we miss, like that gorilla walking right through the middle that we don't even see and don't even know that we don't see, that might give us a different understanding of what's really happening. Yeah. As you describe it, I almost wonder if the way you describe that we are open to questioning what comes into us through the other senses, but somehow not our eyes. I almost wonder if it's

sort of like it's the last holdover where we feel like we've got a true anchor, like this is the truth. And if we give that up, our world becomes so fuzzy in general, that it's unmooring on a level where it makes it hard to walk through the day and figure out what is real and what is not. Yeah. I have this great experience, you know, where I had that moment in my life. It was probably 20 years ago and I was in some group therapy session, really getting some through some like stress of grad school and some personal things I was dealing with. And, you know, at some point the therapist just turned to me out of everybody in the group and was like,

maybe you're just not going to know. And that's what you have to accept. And that was mind blowing, right? It was like, I might not know. And that's the answer. And I mean, that was like 20 years ago. And that moment still sticks with me because I think you're right that, you know, we want something. We want to say like, this is the truth. This is our anchor to the real world. And then I can build off of that. And, and at least in that moment, it was undermined for me that, oh, there will be ways to find out the truth, to find out what's actually happening. And she was like, no, maybe not. Oh God. Shocking. Yeah. Then we have to deal with uncertainty. Yeah. The ultimate truth of anything in life. Great. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. So you've been studying this. You're studying vision and motivation and the brain

and psychology for years. And at some point, you start to get really curious about what's the link between the way that we see and our willingness, our motivation to actually go and do things in the world, to set big goals, to try and achieve big things. I'm curious what triggers that journey for you. It was really starting to click when I was looking at this in the context of exercise. So backing up philosophically, people know, people wax and wane about the connection between seeing and doing that our eyes predict our behavior. I buy into that, you know, in a theoretical sense. And, but I really started to see that play out when I was trying to understand how can we help people exercise more effectively. Now, what I was finding, well, first of all, it started with some, you know, conversations I was having with Olympic athletes, people who'd

won gold medals at, you know, fastest person to run the 400 in the last Olympics and amazing, amazing people. They were all men in this case that I had a chance to talk to. And I went in thinking like, there's probably something really special about their eyes. Of course, all the rest of their bodies too, but their eyes, maybe they have a special power of sight that if only we understood, then we could unlock the, you know, my own running potential, which I never seemed to really grasp in the first place. And I went in thinking that like, you know, they probably know where they're going. They're really focused on what it is that they're working towards, that they're running towards, but they also know where they are relative to the competition. What are the, you know,

what's standing in their way? What are the possible obstacles and what's on the edges? And I couldn't have been more wrong, but that is not at all what they said that their experience was. And even if they said something that was like that kind of aligned with that, they said, but that's not what you should do. They said, you actually should be really narrowly focused. I, I choose a target. I focus on it until I hit it and I pass it. And then I reset the next target. And when I started diving into stories of like, you know, so those guys ran four, 400 meters or, you know, 800 meters, but this is the same thing that marathon runners use. The first woman, woman to ever win the marathon in the Olympics, uh, when women were allowed to compete in that sport, not that long

ago said she did the same thing, choose a target, focus on it until she hit that, and then choose the next target, you know, the shorts of the woman up ahead until she passed that person and reset the new target. They were really talking about this narrowed attentional spotlight. And that's a different way of looking than what I thought would be helpful. And so I just started teaching other people that, you know, people who wanted to exercise more, those that didn't, but I had them participate in our controlled lab experiments. I taught them about that. Can you imagine, choose a target, here's a finish line up ahead for you in this race that we've created, or this competition we've created. And imagine a spotlight is shining just on that and don't pay attention to what's in the periphery. First of all, that's different than what they do naturally.

When we ask them to look around naturally, they assume a wider spans of attention. But what we found is that when we, by flip of the coin, taught some people to use this narrow detention strategy that our world-class runners use, we saw that they actually completed the race 23% faster. And they said that it hurt 17% less. Everything about that experience was exactly the same as what people who are attending, looking at their world as they naturally do is the same as what they experienced. It's just, we had them look at it in a different way and it improved their performance. They did it better and it hurt less. You know, it can feel like magic or it can sound like magic, but it's not because it

has this whole cascading effect on motivation that then changes behavior. What that narrowed attention does is produce an illusion of proximity. That thing you're focusing on now, the finish line, the stop sign, the shorts of the person up ahead of you, appears closer to you than it otherwise would because you've sort of taken out all of the other cues to distance that you might pick up on and sort of integrate in your brain when you're assessing how far away is that thing that I'm running towards or I'm walking towards, it looks closer than it otherwise would. And when it looks closer, then we have a whole change in our appraisal and our mental state. It doesn't seem so hard to get there now. That's not going to be a challenging task.

I think I have what it takes to make it there. Increases in self-efficacy and empowerment and motivation and mobilization. We believe in ourselves. We believe that we can make it. And that is what translates into our improved performance. So a simple shift in how we look at the world around us does translate into fairly significant behavioral outcomes through this change in the psychology that happens as a result. And we didn't just find in this like one-off artificial run that we created, but we've

tested this in so many different ways. When we teach people this in the lab and then they give us access to their health apps on their phone and let us tap into seeing what they're doing for the week that follows, they go out for more walks, they take more steps. They can walk farther. They're having more, they're more frequent and more efficient exercise afterwards. And we find that this narrowed attention, especially as you progress through the course of a run or a race or a walk is something that people who perform at higher levels, who are the fast, you know, who are winning their races, who are the faster runners. That's the strategy that they use more so than the people who are coming in second, third place, who are running slower.

Yeah. I mean, so that's amazing. So that was sort of, it sounds like the inciting incident for a lot of this research and then deepening into it. And the whole, what you described as narrowing the focus is one of the strategies. The notion that it starts visually by like changing the way that you're seeing, right? And that simple shift then changes your psychology. And then that shift changes your physiology so that you're working differently. And it sounds like what you're describing in the data is you're actually working harder because you're performing at a higher level, but you're experiencing it as less hard to a certain extent. It's not as painful, which is kind of wild. Yeah. Yeah. You gave that a good summary.

You described that, and this is one of four strategies that you lay out actually in your book. You described it just now in the context of a physical goal, like a meaningful physical goal. Does this also relate to, let's say you're like a work goal, you're like working on a big project or trying to achieve something in a context, which is not at all about sort of like physical exertion? Yeah, for sure. I mean, these studies on exercise were about physical distance that you'd have to traverse to make it to accomplish your goal. There's other kinds of distance too that matters and that are relevant to goals outside of exercise, like temporal distance, the time that separates where I am right now and where I need to

be to get done what I want to get done. And often our conception or our perception, not in the literal visual sense, but our thoughts about time get in the way of our ability to get our job done. When we set big goals, for instance, they are often things that aren't going to get accomplished in one day or one week, maybe not a month. The hardest ones are ones that require that we give up temptations or make choices today and then every day for something that won't confer a benefit until far off in the future. Oftentimes that's the case for investing for retirement, for instance, right? Like, you know, you're in your twenties and you're supposed to start saving and you're not going to

reap the benefits for like three times as long as you've been alive, right? Who does that? Very few people do that. Why? Well, when I ask them, they say, because that like retired self, that person who's going to get all that money feels so far off. Like retirement feels so far away, implicating the same kinds of ideas as people who struggle with exercise report on. Like that just feels too far away. I can't make it there. So if that conception of time, that temporal distance is part of the problem, can we do something to bring that far off future closer to the here and now? There are two things that we've used, sort of that narrowed focus of attention idea. Well, let's narrowly focus our cognitive attention, our thoughts on what that future self looks like. I took a picture of these people that

I was working with and morphed it with an older successful person like Maya Angelou, Betty White, Dan Rather, and then let them see it. Now that constricted time because now all of a sudden they are their 25 year old self, but looking at a 65 ish version of who they are, that 40 years just got put into the same sort of plane right now, queen in time. They're mostly all horrified at what they look like with white hair and wrinkles, except for one man who was like, I think I look pretty good. And the man who said that no women, no women said that, but I also had them do something else. Like that there's an element of that. That's, that's materializing. It's another tactic that I talk about, like rather than taking something

abstract, leaving it in your brain, let's make it concrete and visual in the here and now let's use our eyes to our advantage. Let's make this concrete. So narrowly focusing on that one point of time in the future, what does that retired self, what is that point in time to bring it in closer and the materializing it to make that concrete rich and vivid. And so they also spend the time thinking about like, what would my day look like as I'm this person? What does retired me do? And how do they spend their time? And then ask them again, like, what do you think about retirement and saving for retirement now? And they're like, I get it. This is important to me. And I'm going to start thinking about how I can do it. So they went from a shift of like,

I don't even understand why you're talking to me about this to like, oh, I have a different perspective on it now because they can see that connection, right. Of, of the choices and sacrifices I make now, even if they're small, and especially if they're small, now I might reap bigger gains later on. So that's one way, you know, it's not just about retirement, but it's really saving for retirement, but about anything where the rewards may not come for a really long time. And that can be challenging then to continue daily, weekly, monthly, or whatever, to make sacrifices for something that you're not going to see the benefits of for a very long time. That's often one of the reasons why people throw in the towel is just that there's too much of a disconnect, psychological, temporal disconnect between today and that future self. Yeah. It's like, it's just not real enough. I'm curious. So you basically did a little bit of engineering and created, okay, so this is literally a visual image that you can look at,

you know, and we're going to just say like, this is you in 40 years. Does visualization without actually having something to look at externally work in a meaningful way or in a similar way? Like if I just projected me out, if somebody said, imagine yourself at 40 years down the road. What do you look like? What does your skin look like? What does your hair look like? Where are you? How do you feel? All that stuff. Does it have a similar effect or is it not as powerful as if you actually see something? It's not wildly different, but there is added utility to having that image created in some sense. And it did for the people that I was

working with because I recorded their reactions of when they saw their, their older self for the first time. And you can tell that it was different than when they were just thinking about retirement, when they finally saw it, literally it took their breath away. Some of them, you know, and I was like, come on, you know, breathe with me here. They, it was just so shocking because they saw it. Of course, they had thought about it. We were having a conversation about retirement. And so that is possible.

And like, who are you in the future? Who's going to get this money? But when they saw it, it literally had an effect on their body in a different way than just thinking and talking about it did. I also, you know, so that's the anecdotal part, but the science part of it is that our memory systems are set up in a way to make mistakes that can be to our advantage. If we did remember everything that came in, we would be overwhelmed, right? The amount of stimulation that we get just by living our lives is overwhelming.

And so just like that gorilla example, we allow some information to rise to our conscious experience. And some of it, we just don't give as much weight to our brain does not give as much weight to because it needs to make these choices about what am I going to pay attention to? And what am I not so that I can know what I'm looking at and help you better make a decision to stay alive, right? If we're talking about in terms of why would we have designed a system that works this way? In terms of the psychology of it, it's also advantageous because could you imagine, how would you feel if you remembered everything that you did in your life? The good things that you accomplished, which might be easier for us to recall, and then the bad things, which for most

people are harder to recall. All of the missteps, all of the embarrassing moments, all the times that you hurt somebody's feelings, all the times that you did say something that you should have apologized for and you didn't. So you should feel doubly bad that you did it and then didn't say you're sorry. What if we actually remembered all that stuff? We don't. I can, if I reflect on my last fight with my husband, like, yeah, I don't, I remember the things he did and I'm sure vice versa. But we don't. Why? Because it's helpful for our well-being to have sort of these self-enhancing biases that level and sharpen what we remember about ourselves so that we can continue to think that we are good people that are worth taking up space on this planet.

And so our brain is set up in a way that it doesn't record with accurate, true veracity, all of our lived experiences and all of what's possible. So when we take that into consideration, when we can make something materialize, be concrete, be visual, it makes it harder for us to forget, right? We can overcome our faulty memory systems that may or may not be doing this intentionally about like, you know, what does our future self look like? We aren't like holding that back because it could be too aversive or something. We just might not know enough about what that looks like to be able to

create an image. But when we do that, we can override those sort of natural errors in our memory system to help us along the way in a better way. Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense to me. And there are some TV shows and movies about people who can't forget anything that ever happened in their entire lives. And it's awful, right? That's the point of those. It's like, it's a blessing and a curse and nobody thinks about the curse out of it. Yeah. The Apple Watch Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.

Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. So you brought in one of these second strategies into the conversation, which was what you call materializing. Take me a little bit deeper into like what this is and how it works. Yeah. I mean, again, it's related to those, you know, in part those memory systems.

We can think about it, you know, maybe more concretely in terms of how do we use our calendar and do we use our calendar? Probably many of us do use a calendar in some form. And what is it that we put on there? Doctor's appointments, meetings with bosses, team meetings, you know, whatever appointments that we make for ourself or for our kids. What do we not put on there? A lot of other stuff that actually takes up our

time, like showering, like having breakfast, you know? And so by the end of the day, we're like, you know, feeling so overwhelmed. What happened to my day? Where did the whole day go? Where'd the time go? Yeah, because we haven't actually used our calendar to account for everything that we actually need to get done in the day. And so it ends up being a much fuller plate that we've plated for ourself. Then we can even foreshadow, even if we do this to ourselves every single day, I don't put, take a shower in my calendar, but I should, because then I might have a better conception of how long does it actually take me to take for me and my family to get write that into my calendar of here is the time in your day that you will schedule that doctor's appointment? No, it's usually when I'm wrapping up at the end of the day. Of course, when the doctor's office have closed that I remember like, oh crap, I didn't schedule that doctor's appointment again today. And so we'd have

like our actual to-do list or actual calendar of obligations that we have to meet. And then we have a secondary one that's just running through our head. Which one wins out? The one that we see, right? If there are mistakes, if there are things that we don't get to, is it more likely the things that we've just tried to remember or the things that we wrote down in our calendar that we look at, that we set notifications for? That, that's what gets done, right? And so that's the example of the power of materializing. Like if we put into our calendar, like here's the 10 minute block where I'm going to call that doctor's office and make that appointment. I am confident that I would actually get that done rather than putting it off as I have been. That's like literally what's on my mind right now. For two weeks, I haven't called that doctor's office. Right.

And all it takes is five minutes. And so why haven't I done it? Because I haven't scheduled time to make that happen and created that visual reminder. There's something powerful about our eyes and the power that seeing something can do to nudge us into choices or behaviors that we hope that we'll take. Yeah. So it's almost like saying what we see we do, or at least we're more likely to do. Yeah, totally. Even if we think other things or we know other things in the back of our mind feel more important than what's in that calendar that we look at like all day. The fact that we see it gives a priority to a certain extent. We can call those visual sparks as well. There's some really cool work about habits and what habits stick, when do we drop habits, when do we lose habits, even when we

want to keep them. There's cool work that was done looking at when people move to a new neighborhood, new house, new apartment, whatever, new city, when people move to a new neighborhood, new house, new apartment, whatever, new city, and what happens to their exercise habits and exercise routines. Now, it's always a challenge to learn like a new route that you're going to run or walk or, you know, what's a safe place to go at whatever time of day, or what's the gym that you're going to hit up now that you've moved to a new neighborhood. But what these researchers found is that if there were visual similarities, visual similarities between the neighborhood you left in the neighborhood you went to, those people are far more likely to hold on to their exercise habits. But if there's so

interesting, yeah, fewer of those visual sparks, then those are the people that were more likely to drop their habits. That's if you know, like, oh, I love running around trees or seeing tulips or something. And if they're there in both locations, it triggers that action again. It visually sparks that thing that you had been doing before, even though your world maybe has been turned upside down now after this move. I mean, it also, what you're describing also, I'm thinking if you're working towards something big and long-term, it also, I guess, makes the argument that you should chunk it down into like all of the necessary steps to get

there. Not just because it's like the rational thing to do, but because by doing that, you can then take each one of those individual steps, calendar it, or somehow make it visual every on a daily or weekly basis. Then you're more likely to actually take those action steps and eventually lead to like the bigger overall goal. Yeah. Great example. What's interesting also, because I'm in Boulder, Colorado, Jim Collins here, you know, that classic book, Good to Great, where he described that acronym BHAGS, Big Hairy Audacious Goals. And he's, you know, like the theory was that, you know, like the biggest of the biggest, most companies that sustain the longest were generally led by these big hairy audacious

goals, not reasonable goals, not smart goals. In the context of what we're talking about, it seems like you're saying, you're not saying don't set those really, really big things, but once they're set, like you got to really reverse engineer what it's going to take to get there. Like focus as much on process, if not more, and then make process visual if you really want that to happen. Yeah. Some colleagues of mine looked at what happens when we just stop with the beehives, right? And they didn't use that term, but that's what they were studying. And so they had some people do that. Like think about what is it going to be like when you meet this goal? You know, they visualized it. They made that like end state really clear in their imagination,

but they just stopped at that level of setting and thinking about what that great big goal would be. They compared that to people who did that same thing. They still had their BHAG, but then also started thinking concretely about what do I need to do to get the job done? What are some obstacles that I might experience along the way? They didn't necessarily measure progress or performance in those goals. Instead, in that moment, what they measured was systolic blood pressure. What behavioral scientists know is that it's an indicator of motivation, of mobilization, of our body's readiness to get up and do something, to take the first steps and get out there and start making progress. It's been studied in racing horses who are in their stalls before the gates open. So those horses are confined. They're actually not racing yet, but in anticipation,

as they know that the gate is about to open, their systolic blood pressure goes up in anticipation of doing something related to their goal. Same thing happens with people. And it doesn't have to be something that's physical, but it can just be a cognitive goal. People that are sitting there about to do really challenging math problems,

systolic blood pressure goes up in anticipation of needing to focus up on this thing that's important to the goal that's at hand right now. So my colleagues at New York University, they found that systolic blood pressure stays pretty low when people are just thinking about that BHAG. What is it going to be like when I achieve this far off lofty dream for myself compared to those people who started thinking concretely as well. So blood pressure was higher in those cases. So as if, yes, they're motivating themselves at knowing what is it that I'm working towards, but also what are the steps that I'm going to take to get there? That gets our motivational juices going. Yeah. And that makes sense. As

you're sharing that, I was thinking back probably a dozen years ago that I remember reading some research on a comparison between what they termed process visualization versus outcome visualization. And they effectively said something similar where they were saying those who just focus on the outcome, I think it was students actually trying to get an A on the exam, were less likely to actually do the work necessary to get an A on the exam than those who just focused on doing the work every day that would be sort of like, in theory, required to actually score really well on exam. They actually got the A much more frequently because they focused not on the outcome, but on the process. And they were just

much more likely to do what was needed to get to the outcome that was desired. Exactly. I know that study too. That's such a great one. And part of what they measured was how many hours did people study? And that was what visualizing the process translated into, as you said, literally doing the work that would be needed then to produce that A on the final exam or their final class grade. People have studied this also in terms of voting and like actual voter turnout and, you know, made these phone calls said, Hey, are you going to vote in the next election? Yes or no. It wasn't about who are you voting for? It wasn't about trying to nudge people towards one political camp or the other, but it was just trying to get voter turnout to increase. And so when they compare that, like, Hey, are you going to vote tomorrow? Yes or no.

And they added on like, can you tell me how, like, how are you going to get to the voting booth? Are you going to drive? Are you going to walk with somebody? Is somebody going to give you a ride? What time are you going to go? And they started visualizing that process. Voter turnout was higher. You know, it might seem like low numbers, two or three percent. But just keep in mind that, you know, our elections, our presidential elections and primaries are decided by 1% of the vote, by 2% of the vote. So we're talking about a shift in voter turnout that did, like, you know, exceed what would be necessary to flip the outcome of an entire presidential election. So visualizing process matters. Yeah. And as you're saying that, I'm, like, remembering we got canvassing calls in the last election. And my wife and I actually had this conversation because she said the person was literally saying, do you have a car? How are you getting there? How far are you from? Do you have it?

What if the weather is bad? And we were like, what's that about? And you're kind of explaining. There's science behind exactly why they did that. That's fascinating. Totally. And did you go vote? Of course.

Yeah. See? It worked. You also brought up the notion of obstacles. You said like visualize the obstacles. Also, tell me how this works into the whole process. It's coming up with a backup plan and a safety net, essentially. It can seem counterintuitive to some people.

You know, once you've set this BHAG, this lofty goal that you're working towards, you've come up with your plan and the means and the process for how you're going to do it. And if I were to say, you will be even more motivated if you, in that same planning session, start thinking about what's going to stand in your way. What's the weather going to be like? What are you going to do if it's raining? What if your car breaks down? What are you going to start doing? Do you still feel motivated? Well, some people might say, I'm not doing that. Like I just did the hard work of figuring out what do I want in my life. And now I got to think of like the six ways that it's not going to work out. I'm not doing that. Maybe. And that makes sense to me too, of like, it could seem deflating, but you can think about it as setting up the safety net

or the backup plan because life rarely is without obstacles and challenges. We wish that it was that way, but it's not. And so if we accept that there will be hurdles that we have to overcome, what we're doing is just coming up with like, well, what are we going to do instead when we experience those? Because often when we're faced with challenges, they're not coming at a predictable time. We don't have the time or the resources, the bandwidth, the help to do the best job possible of not only getting through that challenge, but knowing how am I going to get through that challenge? So when we're stressed out, when we experienced that obstacle, if we can instantly pivot because we already did that hard work, then we're more likely to be able to push through and continue on our way. You know, this to me landed best when I heard about some of the training

regimen that Michael Phelps uses, you know, world-class swimmer beat so many world records and Olympic records. That's what he does as part of his training with his coach. When he was in the 2008 Beijing Olympics, he was on the brink of doing something that nobody had ever done in the history of the Olympic games before, which was win eight gold medals in the single Olympic game. Now at the time of this story, he had already won seven. To win his eighth, he just needed to win the 200 meter fly. That's what he's known for, right? Like it just seemed like a shoo-in, except for the fact that when he dove into the pool, his goggles started to leak. And when he had just one length of the pool left to go, his goggles were completely

filled with water and he couldn't see anything. And now I think most people would probably panic or throw in the towel or at least lose. But he didn't because this was something that he had prepared for. He and his coach had thought about what happens if you can't see out of your goggles, if they leak, if they crack, if they break, fall off, whatever. And so they had planned for that. And what his backup plan was, is that he'll start counting his strokes. So he knew exactly how many strokes it takes for him to get from one end of the pool to the other. He could instantly pivot when his goggles stopped working for him. And if you think about, and he

won, he won that 200 meter fly. He won his eighth gold medal and he'd go on to win 15 more medals in his career. Pretty incredible. And if you think about how much time separates first and second place at that level of performance, I mean, we're talking about microseconds. There wouldn't have been time for him to start thinking of like, there can't be a moment of panic and there can't be a moment even to start thinking about what should I do next. It needs to just be so ingrained. I'm sure that it was that that's why he could instantly pivot to his backup plan and still win. Yeah. I mean, it's powerful. And I think we're much more hesitant to go to that place where I'd say like, what are the possible things that could go wrong? And let me actually put myself in that scenario, make it real, and then figure out like, what would I do beforehand? So you have it figured out, especially when time is of the essence in whatever it is that you're doing. Framing is one of the other interesting tools that you talk about. And again, like we keep drawing it back to sort of like changing the way that you see

an experience, but also interpret. Take me deeper into this and how it works. It's coming back to the core idea of what we see can nudge or predict what we do. And so let's take advantage of that. Let's learn that about ourselves and how can we set ourselves up for success, taking advantage of that superpower of our site? This came to me because I found this really interesting pair of women. They are the authors of a book called Dear Data. They were strangers to each other at the time that they started a pretty major and cool project. They were at a really interdisciplinary conference.

They're graphic designers and data scientists. They had this really interesting background background, both of them and met each other at this conference and said, you know what? We don't have a commitment to each other. In fact, we live in different continents. We're never going to see each other again, but let's try something. Let's try entering a relationship for a year, not a romantic relationship, but a professional one. And let's choose something that's going to require, in my mind, like a ton of effort. Every week, they picked a theme to learn about each other, each other's lives, something like, you know, one lived in London, one lived in New York. What kind of wildlife do you see on your commute to work? Wildlife in London and New York? I'd be afraid to know that.

Is there any? The answer is yes. And you should be afraid to know that of what it is that they were seeing. But every moment of their commute, both ways, every day for seven days, they kept track of that. And then they wanted to tell each other what did they see? But they didn't do it just by picking up the phone and saying, like, well, I saw seven rats and two raccoons. That's not how they did it. They drew each other pictures. And that's what's in this book, Dear Data. And in fact, their collection got acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York because it's beautiful what they did. They depicted it on postcards and it could be things like, it looks like a hand-drawn field of dandelions, except that the stem on each dandelion represented a number.

The largeness of the plumes on top, how many foxes they saw or whatever. It's like every element of what they hand drew somehow reflected the data that they had collected on the theme that they had decided. So every day they're collecting data on some chosen experience, like how many times did people smile? How many times do I give or receive compliments? What happens to me when I drink too much? Whatever, you know, they're keeping track of all of that. And then they're summarizing it and they're putting it into a postcard and they did that every day, every week for 52 weeks. And I was like, that's amazing. I had the chance to talk with both of these women. I'm like, how did you do it? And how did you sustain that? And did you ever have any blips? And they're like, well, except for the times that we were so drunk that

we couldn't keep track of what it was that we were doing. There wasn't a moment where we messed up. How did you do that? And she said, the woman who was living in London told me it's because, you know, every Tuesday I had, you know, she had a door, her front door had a little mail slot. Postman would slip my mail in and it would land on my floor mat. And I would pick up my mail at the end of the day or that one particular day every week. And I would see the postcard from her. And that was my reminder of like, oh, you got to keep going because she's invested in me. Right.

So the floor mat was the frame that framed up this beautiful piece of artwork that somebody had created for her. And so that was the idea of the frame. You know, that was like an analogy or a metaphor, metaphorical, anecdotal experience that was like it resonated with me about how what we put in our line of sight can help motivate us, can sustain our choices that we need to make. And it's more than just artwork or tracking rats in our city that this is relevant to. Just think of all of the ways that what we see can change what it is that we do. How do we organize our refrigerator?

How do we organize our closet? Where do we put our running shoes versus our slippers? All of those things that we put into our line of sight can have different consequences or effects for the things that we do in this world. Yeah. Which makes you really want to rethink your own physical environment, whether it's home, whether it's office or pretty much everything. Because what you're saying functionally is whatever your physical environment allows you to see, puts in your light of sight on a regular basis is kind of become more prominent and affect you. It's going to change the decisions you make, the actions that you take, and probably in ways that you're not even aware of, I'm guessing. I'm wondering also, does this tie into the way that you were describing sort of like the deer data,

the back and forth and every Tuesday, there's like an accountability that gets built into this also. So I'm wondering what the relationship is between having something in the line of sight on sort of like a recurring basis and a sense of accountability or like, I'm going to keep taking a certain action. Yeah. I mean, so we can use those, those things can be separated, of course, but we can also use them to our advantage, right?

We can have, you know, I was talking to somebody yesterday who has an idea of the kind of personality that he wants for himself, the kind of leader that he wants to be. And he created a visual symbol for himself and he had sort of like hides it throughout his life on a bookshelf. There's, you know, there could be this little symbol that is a reminder to him about the types of personality characteristics in himself that he wants to cultivate at his home, in his car, you know, different locations. And you may not even know that you're looking at it. Someone else may not know, but he knows. So he's not really accountable. In fact,

he didn't even share what that symbol is. And if I was looking at it at that moment, as I was talking to him, it's for himself, but he's accountable to himself. It reminds him to be accountable to his own goals. But when we add on the social element, that's a whole nother tactic that we have. And there's lots of tools at our disposal to do that. There's some websites that you can use accountability in other ways, like put $10 on the line. And if I don't do this thing, then the $10 is going to the other political campaign than what you believe in if you don't follow through with your goal. So that's an element of social accountability. But of course, the people that are in our lives can serve that function too without having to involve politics at all. One other thing that I'm curious about also around the notion of framing, like what you see effectively really influences your behavior,

because this can be used both in a positive way to motivate you or to sort of place the things in your purview that you want to move towards or remind you to take action in a positive way when you want to actually achieve something. It can also be used in a negative way, especially if we're not super aware of how our environment is affecting our decisions and our actions. Actually, you write about this, right? The example of supermarkets and the way that they sort of manipulate this phenomenon. Actually, you write about this, right? The example of supermarkets and the way

that they sort of manipulate this phenomenon. Yeah, exactly. And that's why there has been legislation in some sense about what can be near the cash register as a point of sale. And there's been a shift. And probably in most people's lives, if you're over the age of 20, you can remember what used to be near cash register is cigarettes, right? That's not allowed in most cities anymore. Because right when your wallet is taken out, there would be a visual reminder of like, oh, buy cigarettes, right? And that's not something that as a public service, we want to be encouraging. And there hasn't quite been legislation on the same front with sugary cereals that oftentimes are on end caps of supermarket displays nearest to the cash register. But we can do an audit on our own environment.

We can become aware that this is something that is happening, that we might be setting up our own environment in this way, or the environments that we enter might be set up in this way. And just being aware of that can bring an intentionality that can help us to override what might be that automatic nudge that we get. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So a lot of what we've been talking about is some variation of focusing and becoming really clear of what you're seeing. The first thing we talked about is really narrowing the focus. But you're also saying beyond that, there is also a place to do the exact opposite. So literally just widen your peripheral vision to actually broaden out,

which is fascinating to me because it would seem at first glance that those are diametric opposites. Yes. I talk about another characteristic, the wide focus of attention, wide bracketing. And that can seem like contradictory advice to narrowed focus of attention. And it's not contradictory. It's used in a different way, but just think about building a house. You can't build a house with only hammers. You need a wider array of tools to build the house. And the same is true with how we meet our goals. We need multiple tools. A hammer sometimes works and a screwdriver other times. Narrowed focus works. And sometimes you need to take a wider perspective. And that's often the case when we need to see another means forward. When we have maybe doggedly been pursuing one tack and then we realize like, this is not working for

me. But it can be hard. We get stuck in then we realize like, this is not working for me, but it can be hard. We get stuck in that rut of like, this is my routine. This is my habit. This is what I do. I don't know another way. And you've got to figure out what's a different mechanism. What's another means what's a different process. And we need to then, you know, take a step back, metaphorically see the forest, not just the trees to find another mechanism, another path forward. Yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. So it's alternating between the two. It feels like a good place for us to come full circle as well. One final question I always wrap with in this container of a good life project. If I offer up

the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To live it with intention, to choose your own life and to bring yourself and others happiness. That's what living a good life to me means. Thank you so much. Hey, before you leave, if you'd love this episode, safe bet you will also love the conversation we had with Lewis Howes about the mindset that propels greatness. You'll find a link to Lewis's episode in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, please go ahead and follow Good Life Project

in your favorite listening app. And if you found this conversation interesting or inspiring or valuable, and chances are you did since you're still listening here, would you do me a personal favor, a seven second favor and share it maybe on social or by text or by email, even just with one person, just copy the link from the app you're using and tell those you know, those you love, those you want to help navigate this thing called life a little better so we can all do it better together with more ease and more joy. Tell them to listen. Then even invite them to talk about what you've both discovered because when podcasts become conversations and conversations become action, that's how we all come alive together. Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields,

signing off for Good Life Project. is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet

black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is?

You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.