SOLVED with Mark Manson - How to Change Your Life, Solved

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Starting point is 00:00:30 Drew, did you notice? Notice what? I'm a new person. Completely new. I did not notice this. Completely new. Top the bottom. I can't believe you didn't notice.

Starting point is 00:00:40 Okay. Tell me. Did you see the white wall? Well, yeah, okay, new studio. This is my wall. All right. I replaced my black wall with my white wall. Okay.

Starting point is 00:00:51 So brand new studio. Yes. New microphone. Yeah. New jacket. I shaved. Mm-hmm. which you haven't known in a while, I've noticed.

Starting point is 00:01:01 I'm a new person. I think it's a little more complicated than that. If you were as superficial as I am. Oh, right? Oh, okay. There is no soul within this walking meat robot known as Mark Manson. Sitting across from me now. Therefore, the fact that I changed my jacket and shaved and sat us in front of a new wall is the entirety of myself.

Starting point is 00:01:22 What does constitute change? That's a good question. You know, the Buddha said there's no such thing as self. Can you change that which does not exist? Can you just read the intro, please? Okay. All right, I'll read the intro. Here we go.

Starting point is 00:01:43 Welcome to Solved, everybody. I am Mark Manson, and today we're talking about changes. I'm going to take a not-so-wild guess and say that if you're listening to this, you have tried at some point in your life to make a big change. You've read the books, you've done the courses, you've woken up at 4 a.m. Like a paled-faced Victorian factory owner and journaled your intentions into a bound notebook while the rest of the world slept. Why do I let you write the intros? You have tried, dear listener. Nobody can say you have not tried. And yet, you're still the same you, still caught in the

Starting point is 00:02:16 same patterns that you've tried to escape, and you're still in the same petty feud with your mailman since 2009. I've never met my mailman, for the record. Fortunately, I have some good news, but I also have some bad news. The good news is all of that fruitless effort is not evidence that you're a lazy sack of shit. Or it might be actually, but we'll get to that. You're not uniquely doomed to always be the same hapless lost soul you think you are. You can change. Change is just really fucking hard. But the bad news is that you can't change everything about yourself and you definitely cannot change all of the things at once. There is a subtle art to change and we're here today to uncover how all of it works. And here's what most people get wrong. Most people,

Starting point is 00:03:05 don't fail at change because they lack discipline or commitment or the right morning routine. They fail because they keep aiming at the wrong target over and over for years on end. What we're going to discover is that who you are is actually a layered system. And if you don't know which layer you're dealing with, it doesn't matter how hard you try. It doesn't matter how many tactics or tips you implement. It's just not going to work. You can be a genuinely motivated person solving the wrong problem. So in this episode of Solved, we're going to talk.

Starting point is 00:03:35 about why your brain is actively working against you every time you try to change and why insight, self-awareness, and understanding your patterns on its own can be almost completely useless. We're going to talk about why the most popular personality tests in the world, taken by millions of people every year, predicts almost nothing useful about you and what actually does. We're going to talk about the real reason you revert to your old self every time you go home for the holidays and why it has nothing to do with how triggering your parents are. We'll discuss, how the world came to misunderstand the most famous psychology experiment about self-control and what the researchers were actually arguing for. We'll get into why trying to suppress a bad

Starting point is 00:04:15 habit is one of the most reliable ways to make sure it sticks. We'll talk about the one category of change that is faster, deeper, and more permanent than anything else in psychology, and the four-step pattern behind every single case of it. And we'll talk about why heroin, traumatic events often lead to the most durable change in your life. This and much, much more. The argument that we're going to make in this episode is that you're not stuck because you're a lazy sack of shit or cosmically cursed, but because you've spent years heroically trying to change the wrong layer of yourself. We're going to point you to the right layer and then give you the actual practical steps to change. Because once you understand which part of you actually needs to change, it stops feeling like a character flaw and it starts feeling like a problem with an actual solution.

Starting point is 00:05:00 one that does not require you to wake up at 4 a.m. and inject exotic vegetable juices directly into your bloodstream every day. Does anybody do that? I am New York Times bestselling author Mark Manson, and this is Drew Bernie, my co-host, producer, lead researcher, and the only person who has ever been known to formally ask to stop phrasing his hand in therapy. Oh boy.

Starting point is 00:05:23 And this is solved, the most comprehensive podcast in the world where every episode we aim to solve one problem in your life once and for all. Today, we are solving how to change, how it happens, how to do it, and how to make sure it sticks. Let's do it. Let's do it. I'm already tired. So our story begins with a chance encounter between Sigmund Freud and a recent college graduate. And this encounter would go on to change the path of the field of psychology and influence how we see human nature. So there was a young man named Gordon Alport. He had just graduated from college. It was around 1920, and he had just finished up a study abroad program in Turkey. Like many recent college grads, he wanted the backpack across Europe.

Starting point is 00:06:15 And on his way back, he thought, what would be cooler than the stop in Vienna and visit Sigmund Freud? Now, Freud at the time was an intellectual celebrity. He was world-renowned by this point, and a lot of people would make pilgrimages to Vienna to meet him and to even be analyzed by him. So Alport wrote a letter. He reached out. Freud said, sure, come on by. And they set up the meeting. It's important to note that Gordon Alport was not a psychologist. He didn't study psychology in school. He didn't really know a whole lot about it. He just kind of wanted to see Freud just the same way, like, you know, you would probably want to go see Justin Bieber or I would want to go see, you know, Lady Gaga. Right.

Starting point is 00:06:58 So Alport shows up in Vienna, goes to Freud's office. Freud's office is famously super weird. It's full of like all sorts of Egyptian artifacts and like weird ancient texts and all this stuff. And Freud just sits there and stares at him for minutes, like multiple minutes go by. And this poor college kid is just like, oh my God, like what is what is happening? It's like this old Viennese guy who stare at it. into your soul. And so just to make small talk, Gordon Alport decides to talk about a little boy that he saw on the tram on the way over. And he noticed that this little boy was obsessively cleaning

Starting point is 00:07:39 the areas of the train around him and complaining to his mother about how dirty everything was. And he thought this was really interesting and that Freud would find this interesting because there's clearly some sort of psychological thing going on with this boy. And like Freud's into psychological things, right? And Freud just stared at him and said, was the little boy you. Gordon did not take this well. It's very Freudian nap. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:08:07 He did not take it very well. He kind of freaked out. He got, actually, he got very offended. And he left Freud's office in a bit of a huff. And as he made his way back across Europe, he kept thinking about the encounter. And he really just rejected this whole notion that there was anything in his unconscious, that had anything to do with who he was.

Starting point is 00:08:29 He believed on a very base level instinctively that human beings, we are not our past. We are what we do. And ultimately, this schism of philosophies would result in multiple decades of research and different approaches to human behavior and how we can actually change ourselves, whether we can actually change ourselves. It actually gets at a very deep philosophical question of, are we restricted to who we were in our past? Are we confined by our childhood experiences? Are we doomed to repeat the things that our parents did to us or our genetic heritage? Or do we have agency? Do we get to dictate and decide who we are moment to moment?

Starting point is 00:09:16 And Gordon Alport felt very strongly that we do. So when he went back to Harvard to do his graduate program, he decided to study psychology. And he decided to try to find this out, to try to prove this, that people are not, not their past, they actually get to choose who they are moment to moment. And this was important because up until this point, Freud just absolutely dominated our understanding of the human mind and human identity. And Freud believed that we had a limited capacity to change. Freud argued that the whole point of psychoanalysis was to turn, quote, hysterical misery

Starting point is 00:09:51 into common unhappiness, which is just a bundle of joy in a fruit basket. So Alport just rejected this. He was like, there's got to be a better way. Like, I can change my decisions. I've changed in my life. Like, there's got to be a more objective way to measure these things. So measure who is a person and then how do they change over time? And so when he returned to grad school, he switched to psychology and he decided to tackle this problem.

Starting point is 00:10:18 This debate still goes on today, right? We still feel this tension. I think anybody you talk to, they're going to have some idea about how fixed they are. versus how much they can actually change. And that's a tension that goes on within us. There's still a large debate, as we're going to get into here as well. That is a real tension that we all feel. Yeah, I mean, it's in some ways you feel trapped.

Starting point is 00:10:40 I mean, there's certainly things about myself that I feel like trapped in sometimes. And then there are other things where I'm like, no, I'm just being lazy. Right, right. Or like you, you know, you see something you do that like your dad did, right? And you're like, well, that's just how I am because of that. Yeah, because of my dad. I get into all of that. Right, right.

Starting point is 00:10:56 There's that real tension. we all feel that. Yeah. We're always answering that question, too. It turns out it's completely natural to feel those two sides of the tension. And we're going to explain in this chapter the psychological explanation

Starting point is 00:11:06 of why each person feels that tension within themselves and how both sides of that tension are simultaneously true. But before we answer whether change is actually possible, we actually have to look at a more important question, which is, how do you even measure what somebody is? How can you even measure change until you know who a person is in the first place.

Starting point is 00:11:29 And it starts in a very unusual place, which is a dictionary. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. There's a moment a few weeks into starting something new where you realize that the change you signed up for is not the change that you're actually making. You wanted to launch a clothing line, but now you're having to be a tax person. Now you have to be an SEO person.

Starting point is 00:11:50 You're a customer service person on a Sunday night. People don't usually quit at the scary launch moment. they quit here in the boring humdrum middle. That's why Shopify is so effective. It's the e-commerce platform behind 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, from brands like Allbirds or Jim Shark to someone who just sold their first t-shirt this morning. Inventory payments, analytics, it's all in one place, email and social campaigns, like you have a marketing team behind you, and 24-7 support, so when you get stuck at midnight, you're not actually alone. It can't make you the type of person who finishes things, but it can definitely take 14 of the jobs off your

Starting point is 00:12:25 plate. So the one job you actually came to do is the one you spend most of your time on. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing sign up for your $1 a month trial today at Shopify.com slash solved. Go to Shopify.com slash solved. But we're going to continue with Alport here because he really did stumble upon, I mean, some people would definitely argue the most important branch of psychology, or at least probably the most stable and replicable branch of psychology and how we understand people today. So Alport returned to Harvard, and he started thinking very deeply about this problem. And if you think about it, it's actually a very difficult problem, which is, A, how do you define who a person is?

Starting point is 00:13:10 Because you can't define change unless you can actually define who somebody is. And then secondly, once you define who that person is, how do you actually measure if they have changed at all or not? There are a lot of different approaches, a lot of different schools of thought. Obviously, the Freudian school of thought had to do with unconscious motivations and drives. There was another school of thought that emerged slightly after this called behaviorism, which we've talked about in previous episodes, which was all about just measuring actual actions and behaviors, kind of treating the human mind as like an input output machine. Alport stumbled upon a pretty novel approach to this problem.

Starting point is 00:13:48 I did not appreciate how brilliant this was until we started researching for this episode. So I had heard about this before, but up until we started prepping for this episode, it really gave me an appreciation of just how brilliant this was. So there was a guy in the 19th century named Francis Galton. He was Darwin's cousin. He was a bit of a polymath, wrote books and papers and articles on all sorts of different topics. Also was like apparently a virulent racist and nationalist and like proto-Nazi. But we'll leave that for another podcast. But Galton had a really interesting insight. He said that if you want to actually measure who a person is, you should start by looking at language. Because if you think about why we invent words for things, we invent words for things because those behaviors are significant in some way that they're worth identifying with some shared piece of meaning, lexical piece of meaning, right? And so if you go through the dictionary and you identify all of the words that could be used to identify a person or a person's behavior, that should give you a nice, well-rounded look at how do you define a person?

Starting point is 00:15:03 And you can probably find all sorts of commonalities among those words and start grouping them in certain ways. Allport decided to take this on. And he did it with one of his PhD students. They found the biggest dictionary they could possibly find. and they started going word by word and singling out every word that could be possibly used to identify a human or a human behavior.

Starting point is 00:15:24 And they initially pulled out 17,953 words. This took them multiple years. They're just flipping through a dictionary. Can you imagine? Like, can you imagine? Like, first of all, you were a PhD student. Like, can you imagine somebody asking you like,

Starting point is 00:15:38 oh, what's your PhD work on? And you're like, I'm reading the dictionary to understand human behavior. here. This is what happens when you're incredibly bored, right? This is so there's

Starting point is 00:15:49 with no phones around anything like that. Flipping through a dictionary is better than that. See, it could be worse, guys. It could be worse. It could be worse. They narrowed this list

Starting point is 00:15:55 down the 4,500 distinct descriptions or characteristics. And then once they got down the 4,500, they just published the list and left it for other people to deal with.

Starting point is 00:16:06 And the reason for that primarily was because they simply did not have the technology or the means to like statistically analyze these words at the time. Computers had not been invented yet. And so you would have to literally calculate all 4,500 of these words, how prevalent they are, how much they occur in human language, and do all sorts of combinatorial factoring and all this stuff. So it wasn't until in

Starting point is 00:16:31 1940s with the very first early computer systems that you were even able to like start processing some of this stuff. And this is when you start getting some researchers, taking that list of 4,500 words, and then trying to use statistical and mathematical means to clump them into clusters, to identify, okay, if we have all these words to describe human behaviors and human traits, clearly, like, a lot of them must be similar. A lot of them must be used interchangeably, right? You can say somebody is a very exciting person. You can also say that they're a very fun person, right? Like, those are two very similar ways to describe somebody, and they're probably referring to slightly different surfaces of the same character trait.

Starting point is 00:17:12 So there was a guy named Raymond Cattel who was the first person to do this, and he went through all 4,500 words, and he boiled them down to what he called the 16 factors. And these 16 factors were kind of the very, very earliest edition of today what we would call a personality test or personality traits. Now, the problem with Cattel's 16 factors is that nobody could replicate them. researchers would go out and interview people and like ask them a battery of questions and do the same statistical analyses that Cattel was doing and they would get completely different factors than he was getting. And this same problem continued to happen for the next 20 years or so. There was a,

Starting point is 00:17:50 there was a guy named Hans Idenc who narrowed it down to three factors, but that seemed implausible. There were a number of researchers in the 60s that also came down, you know, were able to narrow it down to say seven factors or six factors or five factors. Now, Interestingly, today, what we know is the Big Five, which is what all this is driving towards, was originally discovered by a couple Air Force clerks, which is fascinating. And the reason the Air Force discovered this was because they were studying fighter pilots. They wanted to understand why are some people just so cool and calm and functional and like an air fight, and why do some people freak out or they're not able to like maintain their composure

Starting point is 00:18:33 or they're not able to, you know, last in such like a demanding profession. They're looking for an aptitude test really around that, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Which makes sense. I mean, the military, right.

Starting point is 00:18:46 If there's any profession that, like, really needs to objectively understand how good a person is or not, it's going to be the military, which, interestingly, the, I believe the IQ test was created for the military as well. And notice there, there's stakes involved here. And that's kind of like, that was, yeah. Anyway, wasn't just academic in that sense. Exactly. Yeah. Two men by the name of Ernest Toops and Raymond Crystal independently landed on the big five. And this, I believe this was like 1963.

Starting point is 00:19:12 Yeah, early 60s. And they correctly identified what we today know is the five fundamental traits of human personality and the five traits that really define each of our uniqueness and who we are as an individual. But the funny thing is, is that they they published it internally at the Air Force and then it just got filed away with a bunch of other internal research and wasn't. red for. Yeah, it was like a bulletin basically. It was like an Air Force bulletin that just didn't get circulated. Yeah. And so it's funny because psychologists would take another 20 years to land on the Big Five. And it was only later, I believe it was in the 90s that they actually like randomly discovered that these guys in the Air Force had independently discovered the Big Five 20 years prior to psychologists. So this brings us to the Big Five. And everybody listening to this has probably

Starting point is 00:20:01 taking a Big Five personality test at some point in their life, whether you realize it or not. The Big Five are called the Big Five because these are the most replicated, dependable, durable, persistent, stable traits of human characteristics and behaviors

Starting point is 00:20:17 that we have ever found. Is there anything you know of that's been replicated more across more cultures and more consistently than the Big Five? And across that big of data sets too? No, I don't know. Like, I think.

Starting point is 00:20:31 I think, I don't know this for sure, but I would guess if I was a betting man, which I am, I would bet a lot of money that the Big Five is the single most replicated finding in psychology, period, full stop. Yeah. So this is like as credible as it gets. Right, right. It doesn't mean it's perfect necessarily. It's not perfect. Absolutely the best thing we have. Yes.

Starting point is 00:20:53 If you've ever heard the acronym Ocean, right? So that stands for openness to new experiences, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness. and neuroticism. And I'll just give a very, very brief explanation of what each one of those is. So openness to new experiences is generally people who are open to new experiences. So it maps pretty well to creativity, adventurousness, novelty seeking, novelty seeking, people who, you know, if you're somebody who like loves parties, you love trips, you love travel, you love spontaneity, you're very open-minded about how a, people live or other people's ideas, you're probably very high in openness to new experiences. People who are very low in openness, they tend to be very regimented.

Starting point is 00:21:41 They tend to like rituals and routines. They are not very open-minded. They're very traditional. They like to do things the way things have always been done because it's more dependable, it's more reliable. The interesting thing about all five of these traits is that none of them is necessarily right or wrong. We're all high or low in all of them.

Starting point is 00:22:00 each one comes with tradeoffs, right? So if you're high in openness to experience, you're probably going to be a very creative individual, you're probably going to be a very spontaneous individual. And that's great in a lot of contexts, but it's also bad in other contexts, right? So if you're in a situation where you do need to be very regimented

Starting point is 00:22:17 and you do need to be very repetitive and intentional and you do have to follow tradition, you're probably not going to perform very well. So a lot of this, it's not that any trade is good or bad, except for one, which we'll get to in a second. it's just that they're different. I am personally extremely high. I'm actually, I'm like 99th percent of you are up there for sure.

Starting point is 00:22:36 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think I'm slightly over average, but not, no, not like you. You're not a degenerate like I am. Yeah. Second one is conscientiousness.

Starting point is 00:22:46 So conscientiousness is somebody who's very conscientious, is very detail-oriented. They're very organized. They're very reliable, predictable. They like things to be in order. They like to have, structure and schedules. I'm definitely not super high in conscientiousness. I actually, I think when I was younger, I was extremely low, but I think now I'm probably around average. Okay. I don't know. We'll get to that. What is that supposed to? What is why that might be? Yeah. What is that

Starting point is 00:23:17 supposed to be? No, no. I don't think you're super high and conscientious. Not super high, no. I think maybe slightly above average or right around average, I would say, yeah. Then there's extraversion, which this one, I imagine, is probably the one everybody's heard of. Yeah. Introversion versus extroversion. Everybody has a label for themselves for this for sure. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:23:34 Then there's agreeableness, which is how much people prioritize social harmony, getting along with each other, cooperation, making sure everybody's happy. So like a very highly agreeable person is, it's going to be very important to them that people like them, that people get along with each other, that there's no conflict, that everybody's on the same page. People who are very disagreeable are comfortable with confidence. They're comfortable being alone. They're comfortable being disliked. It's funny because, as you know, probably the single most common question we get from readers, I get from fans, is how do I stop giving a fuck what other people think about me? Those people are probably very high in agreeableness. And so that is a challenge for them to let go of that social harmony and to allow themselves to be disliked.

Starting point is 00:24:22 And then finally, there's neuroticism. And this is probably the only thing that you can maybe argue that you don't want to be high in. Neuroticism, it predicts a tendency towards negative emotions, particularly anxiety, depression, stress. Highly neurotic people,

Starting point is 00:24:37 they tend to experience more dissatisfaction in their relationships. They tend to experience more conflict. And they struggle to cope with stress more often. People would wonder, like, why would neuroticism even, like, why do we have that? If you're in a, uh, a, uh,

Starting point is 00:24:53 a chaotic, unstable environment. Go, go, do it. Can I guess what you're going to say is only the paranoid survive? Yes. Right? In a lot of ways, that's true. Yeah. You could make the argument, too, that, yeah, the people who are more neurotic are looking

Starting point is 00:25:07 out for everyone who's not so neurotic. And probably should be a little bit more worried. And, you know, the point is it's not all black and white. Yes. Okay. Even neuroticism. That's true. That's true.

Starting point is 00:25:15 That is true. You probably, if you're in a small tribe of like 20 people, you probably want one really neurotic person in the group to, like, call out risk. and dangers, even if they're wrong 90% of the time. That's right. Yeah, you just hope it's not you. So yeah. They all have advantages and disadvantages. And so I think what makes us interesting individuals is the unique combination of traits that we have.

Starting point is 00:25:37 And then if you think about how we evolved in these tribal systems, right? It's like every tribe needs to have some people extremely high in each of these traits, but you don't want everybody high in each one of these traits. You kind of want a division of labor across, you know, the social, the social, the social, Right. There's diversification there that, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, helps everybody out. Yeah. Another one of the reasons that this, this framework, the Big Five framework, has lasted throughout the decades, too, is that it does actually have predictive power. Unlike a lot of the other models that came before this, the Big Five can actually predict some outcomes. Conscientiousness, you kind of already alluded to this already. It's one of the strongest predictors of job performance, actually. Also, like long-term health as well. Conscientious people will take care of the health more.

Starting point is 00:26:23 they will work harder, usually, or show up to work on time more or put in those extra hours more, they're more likely to do that. Okay. Neuroticism, too, that's actually one of the most consistent predictors of, like, poor relationships and poor health as well, poor mental health, especially, too. Extraversion, that is a really good predictor of, like, social integration and your social relationships. Same thing with agreeableness, too. That actually is one of the best predictors of relationship satisfaction.

Starting point is 00:26:50 So all those people will come to you and they say, how do we not give a fuck? Well, it's like, you need to give a fuck about something. Yeah. Obviously. Openness to that will predict things like creativity and even political liberalism too. Okay. Should mention this real quick too. There's another model called the Hexico model that adds one more dimension, which is the dimension of honesty and humility.

Starting point is 00:27:11 There's still some debate. This has been around for a while. There's still some debate about how universal that is. The Big Five, it's been replicated across time. It's been replicated across many, many cultures, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of, of, subjects have taken the Big Five test across the world. It's been found that it's, it is actually very consistent. Yeah. Across a lot of different populations. Now, that said, okay? We can, we can predict those things, but notice what I said is that like conscientiousness predicts

Starting point is 00:27:39 job performance. It predicts long-term health. I can't actually tell you necessarily, though, that if you are high and extraversion, that you got a meeting on Tuesday, I can't say you're going to be the first one to talk. It's actually not that specific. okay. It predicts tendencies, but it doesn't predict like microbehavior. Exactly. Yeah. This is at the population level, kind of at the aggregate level, or even within a person,

Starting point is 00:28:02 it's over long periods of times and many, many interactions with the world or the people around you, right? So there was this question that came up out of all of this was, you know, those tendencies are they set in stone, right? Are they set like plaster? Yeah, which is what William James said. Right. Right.

Starting point is 00:28:20 Which is he believed that who you. were at 30 was who you were going to be forever. And there was not really anything you could do about it. Kind of a modification of Freud there, right? Yeah. Yeah. It's like all these things have happened to you up to this point. It's interesting to me that this idea that we can even change ourselves is such a recent idea.

Starting point is 00:28:39 If you go back and look at James, he believed we couldn't. Freud didn't really believe we could. Even Alport, I mean like this lineage that we're tracing that ends up becoming personality psychology, most of the personality psychologists from the 80s and 90s also landed on the conclusion that you couldn't change these. Right. So it's like we're consistently landing on this idea of like, nope, this is who you are. Good luck. Right. Right. Yeah. So the researchers who found all of those studies I was talking about all over the world across time, across cultures, Kostin McRae were their names. They're two famous personalities psychologists and researchers.

Starting point is 00:29:16 They basically came to the conclusion that, yeah, it's pretty much set. There's not a whole a lot you can do about it. So, I mean, it raises the point. Like, what are we even doing this episode for? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if William James says we can't change, if Freud says we can't change, if Gordon Alport and the personality psychologist concluded that we can't change, like, what the hell are we doing a six-hour change episode on, Drew? Are we crazy? Are we making things up? No, we're not making things up. It turns out there's more to this story. And there's more to us than simply our personality traits. This episode is brought to you by purpose. Here's something that I've been writing about for 15 years and people still get wrong. The reason you can't change is not that you

Starting point is 00:29:58 don't know how. You know exactly how. You've read all the books, you've watched all the videos, you've listened to the podcast, but in the moment, you don't make the right decision. Your emotions hijack you. You default back to all your bad decisions. And then you're back at square one. The truth is, nothing on the internet can close that gap for you. You don't need more information, what you need is someone who knows your specific patterns and can intervene to help you make sense of the decision when you make it. That's what I built purpose for. It's an AI personal growth coach that learns your patterns, sticking points, and can prep you for the moment you're most likely to cave. I spent months training and crafting the AI myself.

Starting point is 00:30:36 You can get a free assessment by going to purpose.apps. Solved and try it out now. I'm confident that the AI will blow you away. There was a researcher Walter Meishel. He'll come up a few times. Okay. So in the late 60s, he actually started arguing the exact opposite, that actually there wasn't any such thing as like a stable personality that we could point to. And again, make those specific predictions. Precisely because he was doing study showing I can't, this person's high and extra version, I can't tell you if they're going to speak up in this situation or not. They just couldn't do it. Came up over and over again. William Fleeson was another researcher at this time who found that personalities seemed to be more like a distribution. there's a tendency, kind of a stable basin around which you would kind of float. Interesting. Like a center of gravity. Like a center of gravity. Exactly. Exactly. There's like a

Starting point is 00:31:25 fabric around you that pulls you back into this well. Gotcha. So if you're high and extraversion, yeah, generally you're high and extraversion, but that doesn't mean you're not introverted in certain situations either. So kind of together, Michal came up with the idea of this if then signatures. Okay. Yes, you have this kind of not really set point, but distribution around which you float, like I said. And then in certain situations, you change, we've all experienced this, right? The hats you wear or, you know, you're probably not the same person around your grandma as you are your best friend when you two are alone, obviously. So we all know that experience, right? The question then becomes then, so which one of those is the real us? Is that even the right question to ask? Your high in

Starting point is 00:32:07 openness, let's say, or you're introverted, where do you flip those scripts? So interestingly, the one trait that is flip-flopped quite a bit throughout my life is introversion and extroversion. And it took me a long time to recognize this pattern. So when I was very young, I always tested as a pretty strong introvert. And then once I got to university and started drinking and partying and partying and meeting girls, I would always test as an extrovert. But that's because partying was like a big part of my life and I was dating a lot. So it was going out all the time. And it is self-report, self-identification, right? So they ask you questions. like, you know, when you're when you're at a party, are you standing on the corner by yourself

Starting point is 00:32:47 against the wall or are you in the middle of the room talking to lots of people? And I like spent many years intentionally training myself to be the guy in the middle of the room talking to lots of people, even though it didn't come naturally to me. And so what would happen is that I would start answering that question differently in my 20s, which would then trigger a report of high extroversion. And then interestingly, once I got married and settled down and, you know, started going to bed at nine like an old man, now I, now I show up as an introvert again. We're going to get into the explanations of like why this happens, right? Because you could look at that.

Starting point is 00:33:21 You could say like, well, that's me changing, right? Changing throughout my life. It's like, okay, well, what changed? Did I actually ever stop being an introvert? Or did I just become an introvert that like trained himself to behave as an extrovert for a certain period of time and in a certain context? And Michel and Fleson would argue, yes, that's what I did. there were certain contexts where I learned that it was adaptable to be more extroverted.

Starting point is 00:33:47 And we're going to get it all into what those adaptations are and how you can develop them for yourself. Mine is actually the one that's most salient to me anyway is agreeableness. I'm an agreeable person. I have a need to please. Sometimes it gets a little toxic. But usually I think it's fairly healthy. I like to help people. I like to.

Starting point is 00:34:05 You are very easy going. It's interesting because we've worked together for a long time. I know that when you speak up and disapprove of something, I'm like, okay, it must be bad. Okay. That's, because it's like if Drew, if Drew is raising a fuss, it's like, okay, it must be right. Yeah, yeah. I do, I like calm and going with the flow and everything like that. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:34:24 Until I don't. Yeah. Okay. And this was very salient to me a few weeks ago or, you know, it's probably a month to go at this point. Drew Hulk smash. Is this where this is going? So, okay. I want to preface this, too.

Starting point is 00:34:35 Do you remember the values episode when I had the allegory of the taco truck? and I almost got into a fist fight with the guy at a taco truck I forgot about the allegory of the taco truck right so I'm going to tell another story that's kind of in that same vein I just want you to know that these incidences are seven years apart from one another

Starting point is 00:34:50 this is not a pattern okay well it is a little bit of a pattern but it's not a frequent occurrence you're not starting fights at taco trucks on a regular basis so just a little bit of background we're just gonna keep you away from taco trucks I was

Starting point is 00:35:03 I was having a very agreeable Drew does the day Okay. Kind of day, okay? And I went to yoga. I was, you were centered. Your inner peace. Yogies are very agreeable people, too, for the most part.

Starting point is 00:35:19 They are accepting and want to, you know, yeah, of course, eager to please. Yeah. Right outside, there was a charity that was set up. I bought five book bags for kids who are, you know, victims of domestic abuse and fleeing their homes. I needed a bookbats. I was like, I'm a good person.

Starting point is 00:35:33 Look how, you know, good I am. I buy these five book bags. Later on that night, I needed a, I was going to help out friend. I went to another friend's house to pick something up and take it over to them. When I was driving over there, I did some boneheaded things in the street. It was a residential street, nobody around. Sun was shining. I couldn't see very well. Now, I realized when I parked, there was somebody behind me, like, waiting for me. And it's this older man, probably about 70 years old, and he's in this little Honda Civic. And he's throwing a fit, like a toddler in the middle of the

Starting point is 00:36:02 street that I, like delayed him by 10 seconds. Wouldn't let it go to honking at me, yell at me. and so I flip him off. Okay, I was irate. I rate at this guy, okay? Because I'm like, dude, it's, yeah, come on, man. Ten seconds, like, come on. But I flip him off. He calls me a prick.

Starting point is 00:36:20 I called him a crusty old toddler. I think of the words I use. I know, I know. So in the span of one day, that's what happened. Okay. Right. Generally speaking, though, I'm agreeable. I'm, I'm.

Starting point is 00:36:32 So which one is the real Drew? Which one is the real Drew in that situation? And again, if you go back and listen, to the allegory, the taco truck. There's a similar thing happening there. Our listeners are definitely getting a certain impression of Drew Bernie. Suffice it to say, I restored my agreeableness. I went into my friend's house.

Starting point is 00:36:49 He's like, I know that guy. He's an asshole. This is where he lives. And there was a whole thing that went down. Okay. But I wasn't proud of that. I went and I apologize to him. We buried the hatchet.

Starting point is 00:36:59 It was cool, whatever. But I'm agreeable until I'm not. Yes. There's just situations where that can come out for me. Yes. Okay. And I'm sure everybody has something. like that, you know. So just know that, yes, these things are, you do have the stable basin

Starting point is 00:37:12 usually where you're around, but you can get knocked out of that. Yes. For sure. And you can push yourself out of that. Yeah. Yeah. temporarily. Let's say you are naturally very introverted. You can train yourself to be extroverted, but it's going to demand a lot more energy than it would say if you're naturally extroverted. That was the question I was going to ask you is that when you were, like, that more extraversion and you've come back to introversion, which one of those, like, were you more exhausted in one of those situations? Absolutely. I mean, the extrovert, that extroverted period of my life, it felt like it was like work,

Starting point is 00:37:47 you know, it was like a task, it was a skill. I was like consciously developing. Whereas my introversion just feels like my default. It feels like if there's no outside influence or pressure on me, I default to being a sack of potatoes on the couch. Yeah. I imagine that experience with the crusty toddler. It was probably very draining for you.

Starting point is 00:38:08 Yes. Like it was incredibly. You probably felt exhausted by the end. Very exhausted afterwards. Whereas like buying the book bags for a bunch of kids like that probably just felt very natural. Whereas like somebody who's extremely disagreeable calling that old man a crusty toddler would probably feel very natural to them. It wouldn't be draining at all.

Starting point is 00:38:24 I think what we're driving at here and why we're pushing on this in the first chapter of this episode is because we really just want to establish the framework of like who a person is. How do we define ourselves? Because it turns out that the self is operating on three different layers simultaneously. So we've established the personality traits, right? It's like it's the basin. It's the center of gravity. It's your natural tendency towards a pattern of behavior over a long period of time.

Starting point is 00:38:57 And yes, your personality, it is. largely unchangeable. It can be changed slightly over a very long period of time, but we're going to argue in this episode that that is probably not what you should be focusing on. The best thing you can do with your personality is just a self-understanding of like, this is my natural set point, and so I need to be aware, right? It's like my natural set point is to be quite introverted. And so my awareness of that allows me to build adaptations in different patterns of behavior around that natural set point. And that's layer two, which is the adaptation layer.

Starting point is 00:39:33 A lot of what we consider who we are, a lot of our self-definition, our identity, our understanding of ourselves in the world, a lot of our patterns and habits and routines, like these are all adaptations to moderate our natural personality and then the environment around us, right? So simple example is that I was a very introvert, kid when I went to university, I realized that left to my own devices, I'm just going to sit in my

Starting point is 00:40:04 dorm and play video games all day every day. I'm never going to make friends. I'm never going to have a girlfriend. So I had to develop an adaptation, which is an identity of a party guy, a guy who is very social, who went out a lot, who knew a bunch of different people. And that adaptation allowed me to adapt to my environment to get my needs met and to become a happier and more well-rounded. individual. So that's layer two. The third layer is our actual behavior, right? It's the old maxim, you are what you do repeatedly. And the simplest way to change who you are in some ways is to simply change a behavior, to go from somebody who never exercises to somebody who exercises, to go from somebody who never speaks up for themselves to somebody who speaks up for

Starting point is 00:40:52 themselves. And all three of these layers are very deeply interlinked. Right. They flow and direction. So one way to think about it is kind of a bottom up point of view, which is that on your base layer, you have your personality traits, which is like your natural set points, your center of gravity, your natural tendencies. On top of that, you've built your layer of adaptations, right? Your different belief systems and identities and habits to help you interact with the world around you. And then those adaptations produce behavioral outputs. And those behavioral outputs are ultimately how other people understand and relate to you. So the bottom up point of view is kind of the accurate depiction of, I guess, who you are, quote unquote. Now, the top down

Starting point is 00:41:40 version of the three layers is how we change. So what we're going to discover in this episode is that the starting point is always the behavior. You change a behavior because that new behavior begins to create a new adaptation, and that new adaptation will suddenly shift the set point of your personality or where you exist among the spectrum of your potential personality. So the way to understand yourself is bottom up,

Starting point is 00:42:07 start with traits, move to adaptations, and then move to behavior. The way to change is to start with behavior, move that down into adaptation, and then let that slightly alter your personality. Easy. Yeah, so fucking easy. That's so easy.

Starting point is 00:42:24 This framework is really important, and we're probably going to reiterate it throughout the episode, because when people want to change consistently over a long period of time and they keep failing over and over, it's usually because they're making one of two mistakes. And I'm just going to call these the two fundamental errors of change. So the first one is that they are treating a trait like a behavior, right? So it's like somebody's just like, I'm going to be extroverted now. and they think they can just decide tomorrow to go be an extrovert. Or they're going to say, I'm going to be really organized and conscientious.

Starting point is 00:42:57 Your traits are not switches that can be flipped. Like they are extremely hard to alter and in many cases cannot be altered. And so the goal with traits is not to change them. It's to understand them so you can adapt to them. The second error is treating a behavior like a trait. So it's saying, wow, I'm never get off the couch and go to the gym, I must just be a lazy person. And I'm never going to change that. And again, you're making a fundamental error. You're taking a behavior, something that is very easily changed. And then you

Starting point is 00:43:32 are judging it as a permanent trait of your personality, which is just simply not the case. And so the goal with behaviors is to change them. And we're going to have a whole section in this episode on how to change behaviors. And the goal with traits is to understand them. And then the adaptations is all the psychological layers that we build in the middle to make the two coalesce and synchronize. Right, right. Okay, so it would be easier if we could change traits. That would be nice and fast if we could flip that switch. It's just not likely or maybe even impossible to do that, you're saying.

Starting point is 00:44:07 Correct. So the most reliable way to do this, you're saying, is to start with the behaviors and then work those into your adaptations, what you're calling, and then those will adapt your traits. And we're going to start with traits in this process because I think it's extremely important for people to come to terms with their own personality traits.

Starting point is 00:44:27 Yeah, understand yourself first. There's two ways that this can really go wrong. One is that people just don't accept their own personality traits. Like they're introverted and they think they're a loser because they're not an extrovert. And it's like, so if you judge yourself for not having the right personality, You're just setting yourself up for a lot of shame and self-loathing, which is not good. And then secondly, those adaptations, when you do decide to take on new behaviors, those new behaviors need to be aligned and adaptable to your personality trait, right?

Starting point is 00:45:00 So I am very introverted, but a big part of my job is doing public events, like going and doing public speaking, going and meeting like hundreds of fans, right? doing tons of media like a dozen interviews in a single afternoon. It can be exhausting. And so I have had to learn the behaviors and build up a skill set so that I can be adaptable to my environment. But that doesn't necessarily change who I am. It just simply is building an adaptation that fits in with my personality.

Starting point is 00:45:30 And even then, it's even though I've built that skill set, I do a fraction of the speaking and appearances that a lot of other people in our industry do. And a lot of that's just driven by my personality. It's important to understand the personality because A, it sets the parameters of like kind of who you can be. And then B, it helps you understand which behaviors are reasonable to pursue and which ones are maybe a little bit less reasonable to pursue. Now, the interesting thing about this three-layer cake of personality is everybody kind of ended up being partially right. Right. We've talked about so far.

Starting point is 00:46:07 Yeah. So like, Gore-Nalpur was right and all the personality psychologists were right in that like you do have these baked in tendencies that are very measurable and appear repeatedly across cultures and across languages and across contexts and time. Walter Mischel was also correct in that situations matter and most behavior is adaptable and you can change behavior depending on the situation and the environment. And funny enough, Freud was also correct because Freud's theory of the ego, was that our self-identity, the way we come to see ourselves and identify ourselves, is itself an adaptation between who we are and our environment, which fits right in with this. And one way to look at Freud's theory of the unconscious is that it's a bunch of old adaptation layers that we have forgotten, that we developed in childhood, and then we grew up and forgot that we created them.

Starting point is 00:47:04 and so they've just been running on autopilot beneath the surface of consciousness. And gives you that sense of this is just me. Yeah, I'm just, this is just how I am. I can't handle these situations or like the world is just an upsetting place or, you know, whatever, whatever baked in beliefs you have, you've carried over from your childhood trauma,

Starting point is 00:47:24 those are adaptations you developed at an early age and then just forgot they were there. So throughout the rest of this episode, we're going to go through these three layers, one by one. We're going to be spending quite a bit of time on each one so that listeners can really understand what they're working with and really understand themselves at each of these three layers. And then we're going to talk about the most evidence-based ways of approaching how to change each of those layers and how much each of those layers can change. What we're going to find is that the bottom layer, traits, do not change very much.

Starting point is 00:47:57 You can change them a little, but not a whole lot. the middle layer, the adaptations, you can change, but it's a lot of work and it takes a lot of time. The top layer, behaviors, you can change tomorrow. And it's just really about understanding and strategizing correctly how to approach it. Now, as we go through this, we're going to take some pretty fascinating twists and turns. We're going to talk about everything from horoscope readings to morning routines and why you should always leave your gym shoes by the door. And towards the end of the episode, we're actually going to talk about. the one way that we know of, that the research knows of,

Starting point is 00:48:34 to actually completely change your life extremely quickly, like even overnight. But we're also going to explain why you might not want to. But first, in the next chapter, we're going to start by digging further into the personality research, really understanding our personality traits, really understanding these default set points that we all exist with, how to come to terms with them,

Starting point is 00:48:56 how to understand them, how to correctly identify them, and then how we can better work with them throughout our lives. But to explain it, we're going to start with a failed novelist and how she created one of the biggest corporate scams in modern history. This episode is brought to you by Factor. One of the big things that came up on today's episode is that you don't change yourself by trying harder. You change by redesigning your environment,

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Starting point is 00:50:26 So there's a paradox. of self-awareness that I think we all struggle with. And it kind of doesn't make sense on the surface, which is that we spend every moment of our entire lives with ourselves. So you would think that we would understand ourselves better and more accurately than anybody else. Yet we all struggle so intensely to accurately perceive ourselves. We all have blind spots. We exaggerate certain aspects of ourselves. We imagine that everybody is looking or laughing at some aspect of ourselves that they don't even notice. And so there's this weird contradiction in each of us in that we are self-obsessed, yet we are not accurate in our obsessions. And I think this obsession with

Starting point is 00:51:18 understanding ourselves, it's a natural human drive and it is the reason why we're so drawn to all these personality tests, all these assessments. And I don't know if you remember back in the old days with Facebook, there were like new, like, what Harry Potter character are you or like what Star Wars character are you? And everybody would sign up and take all these tests and then send it to their friends and compare them. There's something about defining and labeling ourselves that is distinctly human and natural. And of course, marketers discovered this at a certain point and they started leveraging it to sell their shit to us. And certain personalities assessments proliferated in the corporate world and are probably the most popular personality

Starting point is 00:52:03 assessments today. Now, the most popular of these corporate-driven assessments is known as the MBTI or the Myers-Briggs type indicator. And I imagine you've taken it a bunch of times. I've taken it a bunch of times. Do you know your type off the top of your head? Well, it depends. It depends what day of the week you took. You took it? A little bit. A little bit. But, yeah, I NJ, I NF. INFJ. INFJ, there we go. Okay.

Starting point is 00:52:34 I'm generally I NTP, although I've been in E&TP in the past. People love this. Like, I've been in so many groups and forums. I mean, there are people, people put this in their LinkedIn profiles. Yeah, yeah. People will ask you this at job interviews. I've seen people with T-shirts that have their type on them. Really?

Starting point is 00:52:50 Yeah, yeah. It's amazing how sticky this test is. And it's funny because when we announced that we were doing this episode, we got multiple people requesting that we talk about MBTI on the episode, to which my response was, this person's not going to be happy with what we have this thing. Right, right. Yeah, yeah. So this is the story of the Myers-Briggs type indicator.

Starting point is 00:53:16 So most people who are really into the MBTI, they will reference that it is based on Jungian psychology, Carl Jung, Freud's protege. This is true. in the abstract. It's kind of Jungian, like, in the way that Limp Biscuit is hip-hop. Like, it's... Okay. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:53:37 Inspired by, but, like, no rational person would actually call it... Apologies to Fred Durs. Hip-hop. No, no apologies to Fred Durs. Come on. Okay. Let's be real. Let's be more disagreeable, D.

Starting point is 00:53:49 All right, all right. So in his notes, Young tried to categorize people, based on his clinical observations. And he identified what he called two attitudes, which is actually introversion to extroversion. This is where introversion and extroversion comes from is, comes from Young. And then four functions. And those four functions were thinking, feeling, sensing, and intuition.

Starting point is 00:54:14 Now, interestingly, Young did not put any weight into these types or categories that he came up with. He kind of just wrote them as a brainstorm and was like, this is kind of interesting to think about. And he explicitly said that you shouldn't categorize people and you shouldn't base a person's personality based on like one of these simple things that he identified. Yet that did not stop people. It was actually an American woman named Catherine Briggs who discovered young in around 1920, became really obsessed with his work, loved it and took it upon herself to become the American English interpreter.

Starting point is 00:54:54 of Young's work. And so she translated a bunch of his work. She wrote a bunch of articles about him. She popularized him in the American consciousness. She had articles that appeared in the New Republic about him. And so she was just talking about Young all the time. She really made a career out of spreading and proselytizing Jungian psychology to the American public. Now, she had a daughter named Isabel Briggs-Myers. Now, Isabelle was a novelist, and she wrote some mystery novels, had a modest amount of success. But it wasn't until World War II when women were being called into the workforce in mass,

Starting point is 00:55:28 that there was a real need to quickly identify each woman's natural strengths and tendencies. And Isabel saw this as an opportunity to create some sort of personality-type system that would quickly identify what each woman was good at, what they were bad at, and so that they could be quickly allotted into a job or a line of work

Starting point is 00:55:49 that could utilize their skills and talents effectively. Now, of course, Isabel grew up with her mom constantly talking about Young. So Isabel relied on some of that early Jungian categories and functions that she had discovered. And this is how you get the four spectrums of the MBTI system. So the first spectrum is introversion, extroversion. The second one is intuition versus sensing. The third one is thinking versus feeling. And then she just kind of made up the fourth,

Starting point is 00:56:18 which is perceiving versus judging. It's funny that that's the one she made up because that's the one I find that like nobody knows what it means or what to do with it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I guess perceiving is kind of low conscientiousness. You're like spontaneous.

Starting point is 00:56:33 You don't plan things. Judging, apparently you're very conscientious. You're very rigid, structured. All that's judicious. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. And so Isabel started administering the MBTI test

Starting point is 00:56:45 from her dining room table with her mother during World War II. There was no scientific validation. There was no peer review. There was no control group. It just spread like wildfire. Now, this eventually caught on among government administrations.

Starting point is 00:57:00 They decided, well, we need to use something, so why not this? So they used it throughout the 1940s. And by the 1950s, it had actually been codified by some governmental agencies as a legitimate test to give to people to measure their personality,

Starting point is 00:57:15 their natural talents, their natural skill sets. By the 1960s, corporate consultant groups started applying the MBTI to their Fortune 100 clients. And by the 1980s, I think it was 89 out of the top 100 companies in the world had administered the MBTI to their entire workforce. This is where you get all these theories of certain MBTI types, like, work better together. And some are, you know, better at certain managerial positions. And some MBTI types should date each other and some shouldn't date each other. all these like hairbrain theories going on.

Starting point is 00:57:48 None of it was validated. None of it replicated any sort of empirical study. It was all spread simply through the expediency of the corporate world. Today it's estimated that two million people per year take the MBTI in a corporate setting. My degree is in an international business. So I took a bunch of business courses. I remember in our organizational behavior course, half of the entire course was spent on MPTI. Oh, really?

Starting point is 00:58:13 Yes. Oh, wow. Like we spent, everybody took the test and like there were like long discussions of like how you should organize a team around different MBTI types, how certain MBTI types worked well together, some didn't. It's all just like fucking pseudoscience. That's the business department at universities. Well, it's just not as empirical. Reason number 250 to not study business in university kids. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:58:38 So this test has withstood at this point almost 100 years of popularity and is taken by. millions, tens of millions of people around the world. It is taken seriously by some of the richest corporations in the world. It just blows me away how sticky it is. And I think it really comes back to the importance that we place on like knowing ourselves. We want something that will reflect ourselves back to us so that we can have a proper understanding of who we are and what we're doing. And I can't tell you how many times I've ended up in conversations with people who, have asked me about the MBTI and I have to sit there and tell them like it's basically a horoscope for smart people they're like no man no you don't understand like it's i had my whole team take it

Starting point is 00:59:25 it's like it's amazing it's changed the business organization all this stuff to me it's really notable just how far this is traveled and how much legs it has underneath it well it almost it feels like it resolves that paradox that you opened up with right it feels like it resolves that we have this deep knee to know who we are and so here's a tool. You just have to sit down and then we're going to spit back out this label for you. And so it feels like it resolves that paradox for you. And so I'm, I'm sure there's a whole bunch of people are like really pissed off right now and they're like, what are you talking about? I'm an E and JF2. ESFJ. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Cool. But let me bring you down to destroy their dreams.

Starting point is 01:00:03 Yeah. Let me bring you down. Destroy their dreams. Repeated tests on this, like actual empirical test where you go out and you actually try to sit down and parse this all out, right? There's really bad reliability with this test. Somewhere between a third. and half of the people who retake it, even just a few weeks later, get different results. Okay. Okay. So right away, I don't know if you were taking a blood test of some kind or something and a third or half the time you got something different, would you rely on that test?

Starting point is 01:00:27 No. Absolutely you wouldn't, right? It's more of a coin flip than it is a personality test at that point, right? The other problem, which you've already alluded to as well, is the kind of the binary nature of these labels that you have. Young never actually said these were even categories necessarily. that he's like, these are spectrums probably of something that you can, you can shade towards one end of this or the other. And yet, it doesn't matter if you're 51% extroverted, you're an extrovert.

Starting point is 01:00:53 You're an E. On that day, if you're 51% of anything, you're that thing. No, there's actually a continuum and again, kind of a distribution around which you kind of float. Unlike the Big Five, too, the MBTI actually does not predict very much at all. Whereas the Big Five does predict like the job performance. Like I talked about relationship satisfaction, mental health. MBTI, we cannot reliably predict any of those things, any of those real important outcomes that we would hope they would predict. Just doesn't predict it.

Starting point is 01:01:27 There's no measure of neuroticism. There is like a subcomponent that they kind of try to throw in. It's like I think it's assertive versus tumultuous. I mean, I don't think those are good labels to begin with. But it really doesn't get at neuroticism. And you could argue, like we did earlier, is that that's one of the most important personality traits for your mental health and well-being in the long run.

Starting point is 01:01:48 It doesn't even measure that. So just all of that taken together should at least put a little kernel of doubt in your mind if you're really stuck on your MBTI score or your type, that there's something off here. Recently, I retook this test in prep for this, and I was an INFJ. I know I took it a while back and I was an I, STJ. Okay. So my two middle labels flipped. Flipped, yeah. Right? And I think it was just because of the mood I was in, I'm sure. Like, you know, I was feeling a little more emotional. And so all of a sudden I'm an INFJ. Yeah. Emu, emo Drew is I'm infj. I was emo Drew a couple of weeks ago when I took this, right? And that's how it goes. If something can't be reliably reproduced like that, that should raise a red flag right off the bat and then all the other things that went through. It does blow my mind how durable this test has been, the popularity of it. This like you said, it's just incredible. So why? Why then? Why do we, why do we cling to these? Why,

Starting point is 01:02:43 like, why are we so obsessed with these? I think there's an inherent importance of self-knowledge. It circles back to the whole point of this episode. How do you change? You can't figure out how to change until you understand who you are and what your natural predisposition is. I think we instinctually seek out information and frameworks that will reflect back to us an accurate picture of who we are. We feel this. There's like a deep-seated need to feel some sort of certainty and predictability around who we are. I think this is why people love horoscopes. I think it's why people get really into like stuff like the eneogram. I think it's why people are like obsessed over astrology. And I think it's why corporate people are really into MBTI. It gives them that

Starting point is 01:03:25 false sense of certainty. It is a plausible framework that is just accurate enough for them to find some credibility in it and then, you know, base some decisions off of it. Where you're getting at is a little bit of like the Barnum effect, right? Yes. Like it's, there's a little bit of truth to it because it's so general that it's kind of applicable to everyone. So the Barnum effect is basically you can give someone a like a general description of just about anything.

Starting point is 01:03:51 This is how horoscopes tend to work, okay? You just make these generalizations that could be true of just about anyone. And if you're reading it and this text is telling you that this is what you are and it's so general and usually almost always positive as well it's just the the human brain is going to just accept you start justifying why it's true right right so it's like i could sit down and let's say we've never met and i could sit down let's say i'm a fortune teller quote unquote right and i could start saying like oh you're somebody who's been through a lot in your life and you do a lot for others but sometimes you're not appreciated right like these are things that are literally true about every

Starting point is 01:04:30 single fucking person, right? But it's when somebody says that to us, we feel so seen. We're like, oh, my God, they understand me. And this is, it's essentially what horoscopes are doing. It's like leveraging this cognitive bias to affirm a reflection of ourselves that we like. You want to believe that you've been through a lot and people don't appreciate you. So, of course, when somebody says that to you, you're going to be like, yes. Right. Right. When an MBTI says, yeah, you tend to get in your head a lot and that causes, you know, means you're really smart, but it also causes some problems because you're a little bit cerebral when you should be feeling a little bit more. And you're like, yes, that's totally me.

Starting point is 01:05:03 Yeah, the confirmation bias, too, it's like anything that is could be interpreted as negative, you're probably just going to dismiss that as well. So you have those two powerful effects going on, the bottom effect and the confirmation bias. Yes. Two sides of the same coin a little bit. So let's talk about why this matters and why this is actually very dangerous. Isn't it just harmless, Mark?

Starting point is 01:05:20 This is harmless fun. You're on whatever, you know, back in the day, like you were talking about, the personality test on Facebook. It's just fun. It's just harmless fun. I will ruin your dinner part. party, if you let me. So a number of female friends of mine have been really into astrology and I just fucking rain on their parade. Because this is why this is actually not helpful.

Starting point is 01:05:42 Labels matter. When you label yourself something, you will start looking for evidence that that label is true. And this is why shame is so damaging, right? So when you label yourself as an unlovable or an unworthy person, you will unconsciously start seeking out relationships that confirm that perception of yourself. So if you take some test, and the test is like, you're a very sensing person who, like,

Starting point is 01:06:09 needs to work with your hands. You're going to start looking for confirmation of that in the world, whether or not it's true. And if it's not true, then you're going to bump into a lot of friction in the things that you pursue and the things that you try to do.

Starting point is 01:06:22 And this is why accuracy, around our traits is just so important. Because traits can't really be changed, you have to be accurate about them. The most important thing is the accuracy. Because if you're inaccurate about a trait, if you become convinced that you say you are very extroverted when you are actually very introverted, then you are going to spend your life fighting your own introversion and creating tons of unnecessary struggle and frustration for yourself. So there's a reason bogus personality tests have survived for decades without scientific support. I mean, they're fun, they're almost always flattering. They tell us something that feels true, but also like isn't necessarily verifiable or

Starting point is 01:07:05 like not really debatable. There's no like friction or tension of like trying to like, you know, actually understand if it's accurate or not. I think it gives us a false sense of certainty. Like, okay, we don't have to question this part of ourselves anymore. Like there's just this constant like not knowing of like, is this really right? for me, like, is this who I should be? Should I try this other thing instead? And, like, that's a very stressful place. It's uncomfortable to be all the time.

Starting point is 01:07:31 Yeah, yeah. And so when a test comes around and it's like, no, you shouldn't do that. You should do this. There's a, there's a certain amount of relief that comes with that. With that clarity. Right. It's like, oh, I don't have to worry about this anymore. But figuring out who you are, it's difficult.

Starting point is 01:07:45 It's painful. I think that, again, that goes with that clarity. If you just have this label that we can give you, you don't have to worry about that. You just don't have to worry about that anymore. This is what I am and okay. I'm not going to question it. I'm not going to sit with it. I'm not going to be uncomfortable with it.

Starting point is 01:08:00 I'm not going to have to change my mind at any time down the road. All the uncertainty's gone. This actually comes up all the time in personal growth and psychology, right? So if you label yourself something and it's not accurate, then you're going to cause a lot of strife and hardship and stress. But if that label is accurate, then it can actually be extremely useful. I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was young. I tried meds for a while.

Starting point is 01:08:23 you know, we talked about this on the focus episode. And I went through this long period of my life where I actually just rejected the label of ADHD. And I didn't find it helpful. And then now I've kind of come back around to it. And I'm like, eh, it might be useful, actually. It kind of explains some of my tendencies and my mental habits. The danger is that if you adopt a label and there's just like the underlying behavior is not there, the underlying evidence is not there.

Starting point is 01:08:47 Then you're going to start seeking out the evidence in the world where it wouldn't naturally be. You run into this too with like addiction groups, right? I mean, I've had this conversation with recovered alcoholics and I've like told them my story with alcohol and I asked them like, does that constitute alcoholism? And they're like, well, it depends. Like, is the label useful for you? Because if it's not, then like don't call yourself an alcoholic. Only call yourself an alcoholic if you find that label useful and it feels true to you because it like, again, helps you develop those adaptations. Another one I'll throw in too.

Starting point is 01:09:20 this excuses a lot of shitty behavior. True. It's true. It's a responsibility shield, right? It's like, well, I'm an introvert, so I don't have to do that. I'm ADHD, so you can't ask me to do anything. It's like, I am who I am, take it or leave it, right? And that's a shitty way to go about, you know, interacting with other people.

Starting point is 01:09:40 So yeah, we're handed this label and then it's like, oh, now I have a shield and this explains all of my behavior and so I don't have to do anything about it. Okay, the explanation of the behavior is only. one part of it or explanation of the e who you are. It's only one part of it. And that's, I'll remind you, that's the first fundamental error we talked about in chapter one is, is that mistaking the trait for the behavior. You can have a trait doesn't mean you can't have a contrary behavior. I would also argue a little bit too, the tests like the MBTI. At best, what they're telling you is more about your adaptations. It's not about your actual core traits

Starting point is 01:10:14 that you have. I agree with that. It's more about the stories that you're telling yourself about. I would say that that's a real risk you're running too, is that. Right. This is really who I am. And so now I'm going to latch on to those stories even harder. I think understanding the difference between those two things is absolutely crucial. A hundred percent. Right.

Starting point is 01:10:29 It's like understanding like, okay, this is who I am and it's a trade, which means I'm probably not going to change it. But this is who I am, but it's an adaptation. It's a story. It's a narrative. It's a habit that I picked up. And I can change that. And like distinguishing between those two things is is absolutely fundamental. So I guess that raises the question is, what are the fundamental traits? And we've already talked about the Big Five. We've already talked about how predictive they are, how they can predict health outcomes, relationship quality, career success. Go down the list, the Big Five predicts it as well or better than pretty much anything we've ever found. There are traits that we carry that we can't really change that are not limited to personality traits, like chronotype, for instance, right? Like we've talked before about how some people are just naturally genetically predisposed.

Starting point is 01:11:17 to be night owls and some people are just naturally predisposed to be morning people. And understanding which one you are and working with it rather than like fighting against it is way more effective. So like I would throw chronotype in there as like another example of a trait that you should just identify and then accept rather than trying to change. I mean, there's an even deeper question though too around this, which is like is, is this really the big, like are the big five the base level of who you are and that gets into like this deeper philosophical type of argument that we could have, you know, or go to like the existentialist, like Jean-Paul Sart, right? Living in bad faith was if you think you can't change yourself. How deep does this go?

Starting point is 01:11:58 That I'm not sure about, honestly. I'm honestly not. I think this is like the empirical way that we describe who we are. Is there a deeper level to it? Absolutely could be, I'm not sure. Again, this is the best we have so far. Yeah. To explain how we could change what we're going to talk about as our adaptations and our behaviors. Yeah, I think what you alluded to there is kind of a blank slate philosophy, right? So blank slateism comes from John Locke in the 17th century, and he wrote essays concerning human understanding. And in that book, he argued that human beings are born tabula rasa, which is blank slate, or it's like an empty tile, right, that is meant to be written on. And so everything of who we are comes from our environment and our early

Starting point is 01:12:45 experiences. This idea persists even today. Like you, you run into this. You don't run into it so much in psychology departments, probably as much. Other social sciences. Yeah, there's some humanities. You run into it. It's kind of the default point of view. It's the default point of view of far left political ideology is that we're all born kind of pure and innocent and that it's society that corrupts us and it is all the trauma and awful things that happen to us that like bake in our personalities and everything. First thing, I, I, I, I, I feel like I know with pretty good certainty. Blank Slateism is false.

Starting point is 01:13:20 And there's just the amount of evidence that is amassed, particularly over the last like 40 years, is just overwhelming. Almost every significant psychological trait or measurement that we have, there's some degree of heritability involved in it. In some cases, a lot of heritability involved. Stephen Pinker has a fantastic book called The Blank Slate. It is like a 600-page book digging into all of the,

Starting point is 01:13:45 research like dispelling the assumptions of blank slate ideology. And in that book, he talks about a certain category of research, which I'm completely fascinated with. It is probably some of the research that's actually changed a lot of my personal views on just human nature and human behavior. And that is twin studies. It started at the University of Minnesota with a researcher named Bouchard. And he started identifying twins that have been separated at birth and adopted by separate families in separate places. And so you get these unbelievable stories of like tracking down two identical twins, grew up in completely different places, completely different families, completely different

Starting point is 01:14:26 socioeconomic conditions, different religions, different households, different cultures, like everything. And it turns out that like they're both firefighters, they both married a woman named Linda, they both drink the same brand of beer, they both wash their car with a garden, hose. Like, it's just, it's like all of these insane commonalities show up across these, these separated twins. And Bouchard decided to actually study this. And like, there's this ancient question of nature versus nurture, like how much of us is just born into us and then how much of is determined by our environment. And identical twins who are genetically identical, but who grow up

Starting point is 01:15:06 in different environments, they are kind of the perfect tool of measurement. Right. Natural experiment. Yeah. To resolve this as much as possible. Those early twin studies were very, very informative for us to figure out, like, what is the contribution of our genetics versus our environment? Parsing all that out, these natural experiments that came about because these identical twins were raised apart. That gave us a great opportunity to study this, okay? Here's the thing, though, in behavioral genetics especially, heredability has a very specific definition. It doesn't mean determined, okay? This is something that I think our industry, and we've probably,

Starting point is 01:15:43 even perpetuated this to some degree to. When you hear the word heritability, that's what you think. I inherited this and there's nothing I can do about it. So what those studies did show, though, is that somewhere between 40 and 60 percent of personality traits, the big five that we've been talking about, are heritable, okay? But heritability is a population level measure, okay? It can't really predict any individual differences necessarily. What it's really doing is it's telling you some, the, the degree to which your personality traits in that environment, at that time, with those specific people, that specific population, how much of that can be attributed to genes. It does not mean that these genes determined that. Actually, if you change

Starting point is 01:16:26 the environment, the heritability measure will change too. Okay. If that makes, it probably doesn't make sense, but that's the point. It's based on the variability, right? That's right. It's a variation. So if you have a very, um, very stable, non-variable environment. Right. Most of the observed variability between, say, two twins or two people will be genetically determined. Right.

Starting point is 01:16:52 It's not that the genes are causing that necessarily. It's not that they're determining that. It's just how much of it is due to the genes versus the environment. And it depends on how much variation is within both of those types of things. So it really is that interaction between genes and environment. Okay. It's almost like there's like a stew and, And there's two types of ingredients in the stew, and, like, one is genetics and one is environment.

Starting point is 01:17:17 The genetics, I guess, this is kind of how I'm imagining. It's kind of a fixed amount. Yes. And then the environment, you can either add a little bit of environment ingredients or a lot of environment ingredients. And depending on how much you add, the proportion of genetics goes up or down. So the genetics matter more or less based on the environment. Yes. Okay.

Starting point is 01:17:37 So I know that's a little bit of an abstract, like, idea. you have to wrap your head around. But when you see this, especially like in like this self-help industry, they'll say, you know, 40 to 60 percent is terrible. They call it half, right? So 50 percent of who you are is determined. They don't even say that, but. I've seen it.

Starting point is 01:17:53 I've seen it before. But, you know, they say that. Most people are like, you can change anything tonight. Okay. Even the more nuanced version. Give me $10,000. I'll change your entire personality. I get that.

Starting point is 01:18:04 I get that too. But even the more nuanced version where they say, okay, so half of your, your personality, or who you are is determined by your genetics. But you know what? Turn lemons into lemonade and that means half isn't, right? That's not what the heritability is saying at all. It's just saying this is our best estimate from behavioral genetics. When you start doing molecular genetics and you start looking at what they call genome-wide

Starting point is 01:18:25 association studies, doesn't matter what those are. But when you start doing those, so far we've only found somewhere between 5% and 15% of personality is heritable in those studies. So it's somewhere between 5 and 60%. That's what we can tell you right now. All right. That's not helpful. We really don't know. The point is we really don't know how much of our personalities and who we are is actually

Starting point is 01:18:51 genetically determined. And it probably changes based on the environment a lot. Okay. Well, to kind of bring this back to practicality, it is definitely more heritable than most things, right? Like, say, my preference of TV show. Yeah, sure. Or like a food you like or something like that.

Starting point is 01:19:08 Yeah, yeah, definitely. I don't know. There is evidence that it is definitely heritable, that it is somewhat genetically determined. It's at least influenced by genes. We just don't know the extent to which it is. Pretty much everybody in the field has come to the conclusion that, yes, genes matter. The debate is really around the degree of what's going on. That said, yes, it still looks like, for whatever reason, your personality does get fairly well solidified through a combination of genes and environment. fairly early on and it is harder to change over time. Personality is one of the most what they call polygenic features of humanity that we studied so far, which means there's like thousands of genes that go into this and you can't point to one of them for any of that. Even like the SSRI genes, which we thought in the 80s and 90s like, oh, this is like a mental health. This explains neuroticism.

Starting point is 01:20:00 That's what we thought for the longest time. That's not even true, you know, which is like a single gene or small set of genes anyway that determines those. bad variations. A certain amount of our personality is heritable. Yes, it's influenced by genes, for sure. And a certain amount is driven by our environment and our childhood. And as you said in passing there, which I think this is a really important point to drive home, the older we get, especially as we enter adulthood and as we do get towards middle age to William James's point, it really does start to set. Up to this point, we've been talking about like you can't really change your traits a whole lot. if you're like 15 years old and listening to this, you are the, probably the exception. Right. You're a lot more valuable. Yes. If you're 22, you're still kind of an exception, but maybe less of an exception than the 15 year old. Whereas if you're listening to this and you're like 45, it's probably harder.

Starting point is 01:20:56 Yeah. It's going to be very, very hard. And that is what they've seen. So between the ages of 20 and 40 are about where we see, like, our personality traits really solidify. And that's a general rule that we see, okay? Not steadfast, not every single time. Yes, there's some opportunities for change, and that's what we're talking about, right? But somewhere between 20 and 40 is where we kind of see those set in more, okay? Depends on your past experiences and your experiences within that time range, too.

Starting point is 01:21:25 So I think it's probably worth stating for the listener, younger listeners, you're going to have a little bit more influence on these traits. So if you are, say, very introverted and you'd like to be more extroverted or if you're not very conscientious, he'd like to be more conscientious. The levers that you can pull on the behavioral and the adaptation level are probably going to have a little bit more force than, say, somebody listening who's 50 or 60 years. Right. There are predictable shifts in personality, too, as you get older. Yes. For instance, as we age, we get more conscientious.

Starting point is 01:21:58 You already mentioned this. You said you were not at all as a teenager or even into your, even in your, even in your, 20s and you're much more conscientious now where you're taking care of yourself, you clean up more a little bit. A little bit. Right? A little bit. That's fine. Agreeableness too, that arises, that raises as you get older as well. And you know, think about it. Like when you were younger anyway, like your dad was a hard ass and now he's like this, you know, and now he's a great mom. He's softy. Yeah. Yeah. That's very predictable too. That happens with almost everyone. Neuroticism falls too as we get older. We get more emotionally stable as we get older. The thing about that is,

Starting point is 01:22:33 is though is that everyone kind of tends to do that right and so where you fall kind of in the order you know if you were high in neuroticism as a young person you're probably still going to be high as an older person but you're going to be lower right than you were as a young person it's like the entire tide shifts right your rank of where you are yes though kind of stays the same yes okay so even though you may get less neurotic as you age so as everybody else is around you as too so if you are more neurotic than 99% of people when you're young you're still going to be more neurotic than 99% of people when you're old. But you'll be less neurotic than younger people at that time.

Starting point is 01:23:10 Okay. Yeah. Makes sense. They call this the maturity principle. Okay, where you conscientiousness rises, agreeableness rises, neuroticism go down, goes down. I don't know if it's really a mark of maturity or not, but it does happen. I do think it's important for people to understand this because, again, coming back to understanding what is changeable and what is not is at the core of everything that we can do, right?

Starting point is 01:23:32 Like if you spend your time trying to change something that's not really going to change, or if something changes naturally, that tells us that it has little to do with our effort, I think what happens a lot, I can think of like some friends and family members who have like chilled out as they aged and just naturally become less neurotic. But they attribute it to like all the work they've done or, you know, like some big kind of epiphany that they've had. Like there's some sort of narrative that's created to explain why they've chilled out so much. over the last 10 or 20 years when it's like, yeah, you just got older. And so it is useful to know these things just to understand like, okay, this is the trajectory you're going to be on. These personality traits do drift slowly over the decades. If our goal in this chapter is to really just develop accurate self-understanding, then it's important for us to understand how our personality is going to drift over time so that we can properly attribute it to just the natural

Starting point is 01:24:28 aging process. I can't tell you how many people I've talked to in, say, they're four. 40s or 50s, and they talk about how, you know, something's really different in their life and they're, like, trying to come up with all sorts of explanations for why it's different. And I'm like, dude, you're 45. Yeah. You lived life and you killed out. Yeah, you're not 30 anymore. Like, of course, of course you don't want to do that thing anymore.

Starting point is 01:24:50 Like, that's, it'd be weird if you did. So anyway, I just think the aging thing here is significant and important. It absolutely is. I guess one thing I wanted to bring up, too, though, was that, you know, those types of studies were we do see that. Like, it's predictable. Like, pretty much the entire population moves in that direction. But what about the people who actually do put in a lot more work? Because if we're just doing population level, this is how people change and whatnot. Doesn't that get kind of watered down by the people who just don't even try? And I don't think we've done those studies. I don't think we actually

Starting point is 01:25:21 can't know that. Is the effort, which is what we're going to really be talking about more and more, like, where are you aiming that effort? I still agree it probably shouldn't be at the like, the trait level. You're describing the population at how they how they shift over time. Right. Whereas you might have some outlier individuals who do actually a lot of the work and could change. I don't know. I'm not sure. It could be. Yeah. It may just be that some people are more malleable than others, right? That's probably, yeah.

Starting point is 01:25:47 Maybe that's a personality, another one of those personality traits. Yeah. Like, how malleable are you? Yeah. I mean, we'll definitely get to that in the adaptation section because like, I jump on ahead here. Yeah. Yeah. Like I, because what I have found is that some people are just kind of naturally predisposed to, like, rewrite their own personal story very easily. And then other people, like, really struggle to let go of things. Yes. Okay.

Starting point is 01:26:11 Well, that actually kind of gets so a point that I did want to make. Two, neuroticism, it's high in your teenage years. It goes down as you get older. And conscientiousness goes up, all of that. Why does this happen, though? Like, you were making the cases, you got older, you're chilled out, your whatever, hormonal changes maybe, or, you know, you just experience. life, maybe you're just, maybe you're just tired, right? I'm going to identify with that.

Starting point is 01:26:37 I don't have time for this shit. I get that. As you get older, you take on more of these roles that require you to be more conscientious, to be more agreeable, to be less neurotic. You have more responsibility and you have more people counting on you. So all of those things have to come together a little bit. It makes sense. Like if you want the elder of the tribe, you probably want them to be extremely patient and chill and like not easily flappable. Right. And things like, marriage too. That's going to change you. Having kids, that's going to make you more conscientious, probably, and probably more neurotic to sense. The aging process has a lot of developmental milestones that go along with it, and those can, on the margins, shift your certain personality traits. Why are we banging on this for so long? Like, we're really getting into the weeds on this. And genome-wide association says, yeah, yeah, you think. It is important. And I think the reason that we are spending,

Starting point is 01:27:31 so much time on this is because ultimately the goal of understanding your personality, of understanding who you are, gaining an accurate sense of self-knowledge, it boils down to self-acceptance. It boils down to being comfortable with your own tendencies. And this is particularly a problem in the self-help industry. You see this all the time, like all the major seminars and gurus in this space. They're basically advertising that they can fundamentally change who you are at your core, right? So if you've always been a shy, quiet person in a crowded room, they're advertising to you that they can change you, that you'll stop being that way, that it's your childhood trauma that's made you that way and you just need to like, you know,

Starting point is 01:28:15 heal or whatever. And the science just does not back that up. And what I have personally found in my own life and what I have found with the thousands of people that I've talked to over the years is that real healing quote unquote is just accepting who you are. It's like understanding like I am a quiet person. I am never going to be the person at the center of the room. Sure, I could maybe learn how to do that in brief spurts and moments, but this is who I am and so I should adapt my life to what I'm starting with. It's like imagine if I tried to sell you a seminar telling you that you can make it in the NBA. Like, just follow my 10-step course,

Starting point is 01:29:01 and you two will make it to the NBA, despite the fact that you're, like, 5, 7 or whatever. And, like, it doesn't matter what I teach you. And I could say, you'd be like, it's your childhood trauma that's holding you back. It's your, it's the bullies from school who convinced you that you can't be an NBA player. Like, you just weren't born with it.

Starting point is 01:29:19 Like, I wanted to be an NFL player when I was, that really wouldn't have worked out for me, right? And I accepted very early on, like, that's not going to happen. I 100% agree with that, that the moment you realize that, oh, this is why I'm, and I'm okay with that. Yes. That's, ironically, where you get to change the most. This is very Carl Rogers. Yes, it is.

Starting point is 01:29:42 Right, the positive self-regard and all of that. Yes. It's a weird thing. I didn't feel that in general until, like, my probably mid to late 30s. I started feeling that way. And I even remember talking to some friends where you were talking. and I just said out loud for the first time just kind of not even think about it.

Starting point is 01:29:56 I was like, you know, I'm okay with who I am now. And that was just like, oh, shit, that was... I feel like that's something that really does happen in your 30s and 40s. It's interesting, we did that piece like 10 years ago when I turned 30. Remember, we asked everybody in my audience over 40, like what they wish they knew at 30.

Starting point is 01:30:13 And I distinctly remember so many older readers and fans writing in and saying, getting older's great. You know who you are. You accept your. yourself, like you know how to work with your strengths and weaknesses. And I really do think, like, a lot of our young adulthood is spent both trying to influence who we are a little bit because, you know, at that age, you still are a little bit malleable and you still can

Starting point is 01:30:40 kind of nudge yourself in a certain direction. But also, you're trying to understand who you are. You're trying to figure out, like, okay, am I an extroverted person? Like, if you asked me at 25 if I was extroverted, I probably would have said yes, just because I liked the party and I was dating a lot. I didn't know. I didn't have a clear understanding because I had not lived in enough context enough. So some of this is simply like living enough life to get an accurate perception of who you actually are at a base level. And I don't want to say give up on trying to change that base level, but accept that that base level, right? And then Carl Rogers does have that beautiful quote where he says that it's by accepting myself that I'm finally able to change. Right. It's like

Starting point is 01:31:21 understanding like, okay, this is my starting point. I accept the starting point. Now, how do I work and move forward from here? It's about reorienting the question of what do you want to change? Why do you want to change it? How changeable is it? And if it is something as fundamental as your agreeableness or your conscientiousness or how open you are to new experiences, I would say it's not worth the effort. Like all of the evidence is so fucking stacked against you. The amount of effort, the amount of effort, it takes to move a personality trait, just a tiny bit. That effort is so much better used in other places. You know what I think self-acceptance also gives you actual clarity?

Starting point is 01:32:04 We talked about the personality test, the MBTI and all that, and one of the things we're seeking is clarity against that uncertainty that we have. This is another level of clarity once you hit that self-acceptance. You're like, oh, this is actually who I am, not what this test told me. You know, not what somebody else told me or whatever, when you've actually figured out and internalized it and like, okay, this is actually who I am, then you do have a lot of clarity around that. Now you know what to do. It is in a lot of ways the most fundamental component of our psychology. It's interesting when we were developing purpose. A hill I was willing to die on.

Starting point is 01:32:41 I told the team, I was like, we have to have a Big Five personality assessment in the onboarding itself. Right. So it's like when you sign up for the app, you are put through a quick Big Five assessment. Because I just explained to them, I was like,

Starting point is 01:32:55 simply getting people's, the user's big five personality traits, is it going to immediately make the AI twice as effective as like, you know, chat GPT out of the box. Just because there's so much fucking research around the Big Five

Starting point is 01:33:09 and like all the outcomes it drives in people's lives that just understanding those traits about somebody can like completely alter how you talk to them, what sort of advice you give them, how they should approach a different context. So understanding these things

Starting point is 01:33:23 is like so fundamental and core. And then once you understand them, don't fight them. Like there's nothing wrong with you. You can be a disagreement. person. The world needs disagreeable people. We need people to like be fucking dicks and fight for good things, right? We need low conscientious people. We need people who are just like go with the flow and are easy and are happy to like live in any situation. Like the world needs all types of people. And so

Starting point is 01:33:48 understanding what type of person you are can help you adapt and build a better relationship that you have with the world. So everything in this chapter has been about your traits, the deepest layer of your personality and who you are. It's the layer that is most fundamentally you and what's most unchangeable and inherent about you. But in the next chapter, we're going to get into the next layer, and that starts to get into the layer that we can actually change. But to explain that next layer, we're actually going to end up debunking one of the most popular psychological studies ever done. So our traits are the deepest level of ourselves, at least that we've discovered at this point. I think it's useful to think of them as the playing field that you're working with. So

Starting point is 01:34:31 everything you do has to be kind of on top of them. They define the game that you're playing, even if they don't determine everything you do within the game. But here's what's really interesting is that you can have two people with extremely similar Big Five personality profiles, but completely different lives, completely different outcomes, and they behave completely differently in different contexts and circumstances. And so the next layer up, which is the adaptation layer, which is essentially how people take their internal personality traits and then interpret them and use them in the world is where we get into what really makes us unique as individuals. This is the level of identity. This is the level of worldview and beliefs. This is the level of

Starting point is 01:35:14 routines and habits and rituals. This is actually where we start to get into the stuff that you really can change. And this is some of the most powerful stuff you can change. Digging into some narrative you have about yourself and reinterpreting it and gaining a new understanding of how you relate to the world, you can change these things. And they do have real lasting outcomes for people. So that's what's coming up in the next chapter. Anything you want to add before we go. No, I'm excited because this is where I get super interesting. It gets, yeah. This is where the meat is. This is what they call the work. Yes. This episode is brought to you by,

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Starting point is 01:37:10 slash solved. That's wealthfront.com slash solved. Terms and conditions apply. This is a paid endorsement from Wellfront. Client experiences will vary. Wellfront brokerage is not a bank. base APII is as of January 30th, 2026, and subject to change. For more information, please see the episode description. What if most of what you consider your personality is actually just coping strategies that you forgot about? Like, you think you're out there being authentic and sharing yourself with the world, but it turns out you're just sharing your survival strategies from childhood. So I want to start off this chapter by talking about maybe the most famous psychological study?

Starting point is 01:37:55 I don't like if it's not the most famous, it's top five for sure. It's known popularly as the marshmallow test, right? So Walter Misho was a professor at Stanford. He brought in a few dozen preschool kids into a room, placed a marshmallow

Starting point is 01:38:11 on the table and told them that if they could wait 20 minutes, they would get a second marshmallow for free. He then tracked how long the kids waited and if they could wait the full amount of time. Now, follow-up check-ins with those children found that in general, the children that waited the longest tended to have the best outcomes when they became adults. So they scored the highest on the SAT.

Starting point is 01:38:34 They had the best grades. They had the most confidence. They had the best relationships. So on and so forth. Now, the reason this study gets broadcast so much is because it's simple to understand and it's a very neatly packaged conclusion, which is that delayed gratification in many ways is the key to life. If you can just learn how to delay gratification, then you'll have better outcomes at work and your relationships and so on and so forth. Now, what's fascinating, what never gets talked about, is the fact that Walter Michel, the lead researcher on this study, did not believe that conclusion himself. Because it turns out he had been running variations of the marshmallow test in a variety of different places for many, many years. And the outcome, the outcome.

Starting point is 01:39:18 were not at all consistent with what happened at Stanford. For example, one of the first times he ran it, he was in Trinidad and Tobago, and he brought children into a room, offered them candy, and promised them the double amount of candy if they could wait for a certain amount of time. And what was interesting in Trinidad is that the one variable that correlated the most with the children who could wait versus the ones that couldn't was the children who had fathers in the home. So the conclusion that Walter Mieschel himself came to was that delay gratification and self-discipline as we know it.

Starting point is 01:39:53 It's not a personality trade. It's not something you're born with or not born with. It doesn't necessarily determine your future the way that the big five do. He saw it as an environmental adaptation. His argument was that the children in Trinidad who are not able to wait for the second piece of candy, on some level they were being rational because they had grown up in a chaotic environment where things were not. dependable, where they didn't trust people, where they didn't know if future rewards were actually going to come or not. And so they were justified in taking the original piece of candy.

Starting point is 01:40:24 Whereas if you go to Palo Alto, California, and you bring in a bunch of professors' children from Stanford, which is what he did, kids growing up in very wealthy families in extremely stable environments, and then you offer them double the reward if they can wait. They're growing up in a high trust environment. They've only known a dependability of what is promised today versus what they get tomorrow. And so, of course, they're going to be more likely to be able to wait for the second marshmallow. Yeah, so actually there was a more direct test of this about 55 years later, too, in 2013, Celeste Kid. She replicated this study on a small scale, but still, what she varied in this study was the actual reliability, because that was a hypothesis. Are these kids, are they

Starting point is 01:41:04 really just making decisions based on how reliable they think the adults in the room are? And that's exactly what she found. So she had a reliable and an unreliable condition. and the kids who are in the unreliable condition where the adults lied to them first and then, and then did the marshmallow test or the adults made good on a promise first and then they gave them the marshmallow test. Nearly all of the kids in the unreliable condition took the marshmallow right away. Nearly all of the kids in a more reliable condition didn't. So right there, it's just an experimental setting right in the moment. There's no, there's no personality to vary here. There's no trait that really the kids have. It's just,

Starting point is 01:41:43 do they trust this adult or not, seem to replicate. And then on top of that, in 2018, is really when this kind of all fell apart, or that story fell apart anyway. It was this big study of about 900 kids that studied by Watson colleagues where they found that if you controlled for socioeconomic status, incomes,

Starting point is 01:42:00 everything like that, right? There was no association between delayed gratification and any sort of outcome in the child's life at that point or later on. Wow. It really is just these kids are basing their, strategies on on their worldviews, on the narratives that they've come up with, their experiences, and it's not necessarily set in stone. I feel like there's two takeaways from the debunking

Starting point is 01:42:24 of the marshmallow test. The first is that what we largely consider self-discipline is very dependent on the external variables around us, which we're going to come back to that in the next chapter when we talk about behavior and behavioral change. I think people vastly underestimate how much the factors around them play into how well or they're able to change their behavior or not. But the second piece of this is, like you said, a lot of this is simply happening on an unconscious level. These kids are not sitting down and calculating the expected value of waiting five minutes. From a scale from one to ten, how trustworthy is this adult? Like, oh, a seven, okay, then my expected value. No, it's just a vibe. And it turns out that most of our.

Starting point is 01:43:09 decisions, beliefs, worldviews, we experience them as vibes. They are happening below the surface. Like, if this was a trilogy, this is we're at the unconscious strikes back. Because what happens in our three-layer cake of who you are, right? At the base layer, we are our personality traits. Our personality traits are a range of expected behaviors that tend to happen more often than not. When those personality traits interact with the world, we develop certain if-then patterns. to adapt to the environment around us. If I'm a very low extroversion person, right? I'm introverted. I'm a little bit socially anxious. And I keep being thrown into an environment with a lot of people around me. I'm going to develop certain if-then patterns

Starting point is 01:43:54 in my behavior and my thoughts and my emotions that help me adapt to the environment around me. And because I'm introverted, those adaptations are probably going to look very different than, say, an extroverted person in the same situation. So let's say you're a really, highly agreeable person. That means that you're probably going to be conflict avoidant, right? You're going to be very uncomfortable dealing with confrontation. And let's say that you are in a workplace that is very

Starting point is 01:44:22 confrontational. It's very, a lot of status games going on, a lot of people talking shit, a lot of office politics. You're going to develop an adaptation to that environment as a highly agreeable person. You're probably going to try to stay out of things. You're probably just going to try to keep the peace. You're not going to stick your neck out. You're not going to take sides in any conflicts. And not only are you going to be predisposed to that behavior, but you are going to develop beliefs and emotional patterns that reinforce that behavior for yourself. So you're going to tell yourself things like, I don't stoop to that low of like talking bad about my coworkers. Like, I don't want to get involved. You're going to tell yourself things like, I'd rather just focus on my tasks. You know,

Starting point is 01:45:02 maybe when people in the office start arguing, you like put your headphones in. Like, that's a behavioral adaptation. Like when people are shouting or arguing or things get awkward, it's like you just check out. Or I can give you an example for my own life, right? So I'm low extroversion, so I'm an introvert, but I'm extremely high in openness to new experiences. So I crave novelty. I crave adventure. I crave excitement. And so when I was younger, I wanted to go out and party. I wanted to go on adventures. I wanted to travel. I wanted to do all these things that required me to be around other people quite frequently. But as an introvert, the social aspect of going out all the time felt quite exhausting. And so I developed an adaptation to help me with that to fulfill my need for openness

Starting point is 01:45:48 to new experiences, my need for novelty, while also quelling my introversion. And that was alcohol. I started drinking a lot, right? At first, it was really helpful because not only did it make me less introverted when I was around other people, but alcohol itself is a novel unique experience, right? It's spontaneous, it's exciting, and all sorts of fun. Adventures happen when you're drunk. It helped me fulfill my need for a lot of novelty seeking an adventure,

Starting point is 01:46:17 but at the same time, it kind of made it easier to do it as an introvert. I can identify quite a bit with that, too, actually. Because I feel like I'm, like I always want to go out and have adventures, I want to see the world, I want to do all that, but you're right. I'm just around people. I'm like, but that requires a lot of being around people. That's interesting, too, because like when I quit drinking,

Starting point is 01:46:37 I was like, well, now I'm boring and I just want to stay home and I want to introvert. So we'll get into that. We'll get into changing adaptations later, but I think for now. That's an interesting one, though, because it's different traits. The tension of those two things like comes to a head and you reconcile them in some way and it's not always healthy. That's interesting. Here's another example. So I am relatively low in conscientiousness, not not super low.

Starting point is 01:47:01 low, but like pretty like average. But I'm extremely low in neuroticism. Very, very, very, it takes a lot for me to like get worked up or upset or like super stressed out. And so the result of that was that throughout school, I was highly unorganized. I rarely did homework. And because I had so much need for novelty seeking, I found homework boring and I just wouldn't do it. But because I had low neuroticism, I didn't stress out about tests. So I was actually a really good test taker. So I was always that kid. I was always that kid, that would get like an A minus or a B plus on the test without having the study very much, but like didn't turn in half of his homework assignments.

Starting point is 01:47:39 Interestingly, I kind of developed an identity as an underachiever, even since I was probably like eight or nine years old. Like my whole life, I remember teachers telling me, like, you could do so much better. You have so much potential. If you just cared, if you just tried. And eventually that just became how I saw myself, the underachiever. And interestingly, the beliefs that we developed

Starting point is 01:48:01 about ourselves in particular are some of our most potent adaptations because our beliefs about ourselves impact so many of our other motivations, goals, and behaviors. It really wasn't until I got out of school and I was able to like self-direct the things that I worked on that I realized that I was like, oh, I'm not actually lazy. When I was in school, I just never was in a situation where there was something I wanted to work on. Right. And that's the point that bears repeating here, right, is that the, what we think of is, oh, this is us. This is our base trait that we can't do anything about. It's fundamental.

Starting point is 01:48:36 It's who we are. Nothing we can do about it. These are actually really just adaptations. Yes. And to a certain extent, it's like adaptations all the way down, right? So I think it's probably worth like getting into like what are the different types of adaptation. So I think we talked a little bit in chapter one about how personality manifests in different

Starting point is 01:48:56 ways in kind of these if then situations, right? And I think you can see adaptations is the same way. So the simplest version of this is just behavioral habits, right? You develop certain behavioral habits because it is an adaptation to your environment. You take a job that you need to be up super early in the morning. So you develop habits around waking up early to help facilitate your ability to get to that job. And then next thing you know, those habits just bleed over into the next job you have or, you know, you keep them for years and years. And they just kind of become a part of who you are, even though you don't really think about them.

Starting point is 01:49:29 You don't really put a whole lot of emotional stock into them. It's just like, oh, yeah, I had this job for a few years where I had to get up at 4 a.m. And I just kind of never stopped. The behavioral habits are kind of the simplest and I think most obvious form of adaptation that happens. Very if then in that case, right? Super if then. And it becomes unconscious relatively quickly. It operates at the level below awareness.

Starting point is 01:49:54 So the next form of adaptation is emotional patterns. And this is something that I think anybody who's gone the therapy is probably picked up on. Oftentimes what happens is you grow up in a family where certain emotions are encouraged or discouraged. And because they're encouraged or discouraged, you develop a habit or a pattern at a young age of defaulting to a certain emotion in certain situations. Like in the household I grew up in, anger wasn't really seen as appropriate. So it was seen as unnecessary, just causing problems. And so I learned at a very young age to just not get angry. Like I'm definitely one of those people like I just bottle shit up for a long time and then, you know, lose my mind about once every two or three years.

Starting point is 01:50:39 That's an adaptation. Like I developed that in my childhood as a way to interact with my environment. And I probably adapted it because I too am an agreeable person. And I didn't want to upset my parents and I didn't want to cause problems in my house. And so that's just operated, you know, unconsciously. beneath the surface for a long, long time. I would say to one of the deeper emotional patterns that we have is our attachment style as well, too. And you're kind of touching at that, I think, a little bit.

Starting point is 01:51:08 But this is where attachment styles live is in the emotional patterns layer. So how you relate to other people is very deeply, deeply emotional. And you learn that from a very young age. Yeah. And if you think back to the attachment theory, insecure attachment is very much an if-then thing, right? It's like mom and dad were not. That stable base, right? was not available consistently.

Starting point is 01:51:29 Therefore, I have learned not to rely on it. Therefore, intimacy makes me uncomfortable and my natural tendency is to run away from it, right? So it's, yeah, I would be an avoid an attachment right there. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like, it's happening at a super, super low level. The next adaptation layer is belief systems. And I think this, what's interesting about beliefs is that they're not if then reactions themselves.

Starting point is 01:51:53 They're more like kind of the cognitive reaction to our, if they, then they're like the justifications for our if-than reactions. Yeah, yeah. Well, I'll use my wife as an example. Like, she grew up very poor in Brazil. And so she grew up with some pretty strong views about money and the significance of money and what money meant in relationships and what money means just in general in life. And obviously, that's just a product of the environment that she grew up in.

Starting point is 01:52:19 She needed to have those beliefs to survive her childhood to get out of poverty, essentially. Right. And then what she ran into is that once she became an adult and became successful and was financially stable and secure, a lot of those same beliefs about money were now holding her back, right? Because now they're no longer adaptive. And so this happens all the time to us. I mean, I can probably think of like a dozen times in my life where some belief that I had, you know, made a lot of sense at a certain time of my life. And then 10 years later, I'm like, oh, this is stupid. I should stop believing this, you know. Yeah, I think all adaptations probably at some point, right? If we have these adaptations when we're younger or any point in our life, really. And then at some point they become, they don't become helpful anymore or even they become unhealthy. I feel like a lot of listeners have been asking recently, like, what I've changed my mind about. It's funny, I've always gotten that question, but I feel like it just in the last two or three years, people are asking it a lot.

Starting point is 01:53:17 And I don't know why that is. I don't know. I feel like I changed my mind quite often. Yeah. About a lot of things. Yeah. Yeah. And you think it's a.

Starting point is 01:53:24 some of your belief systems even, too? Do you think it's that deep? Well, it's funny because I feel like I have a meta belief, which is that you should be able to change your mind frequently. Okay. Yeah. See, that's a good one. Yeah. We probably should cover some of the healthier ones, right? Which is very much an adaptation, right? And it's probably also an adaptation that is enabled by my high openness to experience. Ah, right. Right. Because if you're highly open, the new experiences, you're going to have a lot of flexibility in your beliefs. And you're probably going to develop a meta belief. Okay. That belief should be interchanged. And when they're useful, yeah.

Starting point is 01:53:56 Okay. What are some other beliefs, I guess, like these are more global we're talking, right? They're a little bit, like you said, they're not if then. They're more like almost like principles that we view the lenses that we view the world through. Yeah. Yeah. Or just kind of assumptions, right? Like, you know, sometimes they often do a survey where they ask people that they say, do you trust your neighbors, right?

Starting point is 01:54:16 People can be trusted, right? Can people be trusted or not? Can the average person be trusted, right? And it's a shocking amount of people say no. Or like beliefs about luck too, right? Some people are lucky or some people are not, right? Or I'm lucky and... Right, which interestingly, like, has some real effects.

Starting point is 01:54:31 We talked about, on the Resilience episode, we talked about self-afficacy, which is basically simply the belief that, like, I am capable of doing the thing I want to do. And sure enough, in the research, they find that one of the most significant variables to surviving hardship or overcoming a challenge is believing you're capable of surviving hardship or overcoming a challenge. So beliefs do have a very real impact and they really are adaptable. I think they arise as a response to adapting to our environment and I think they fall apart when they start to fail to adapt to our environment anymore. How hard do you think beliefs are to identify though? Sometimes it's pretty easy, I think, right? So I think there's two kind of

Starting point is 01:55:10 difficulties here. One is what is kind of a definitional thing? Like some things are very relative, right? So your idea of trustworthiness might be very different from mine. You know, you run into this a lot when, like, I remember years ago, I remember talking to a woman who was very, like, very driven by money. And I remember her telling me, she was like, I'm worried because I want to have kids, but I don't feel like it's responsible to have kids until I'm financially secure. And I remember thinking to myself, I'm like, well, that sounds very reasonable and mature. And she said, I'm afraid that I'm running out of time.

Starting point is 01:55:46 And I was like, okay. And then she and I started talking and I was like, okay, so what does financially secure mean to you? And it was like having $2 million in the bank and like a summer home and, you know, like being essentially in the top 0.1% financially of the entire population. And I was like, okay, time out here. Like let's look at this definition of financial security because the belief that you should be financially secure is not a problem. Like that's very rational. your definition of financial security is absolutely irrational, right? So I think that's one area where like it can be very easy to kind of be misguided or a belief can kind of lead you astray. That woman, I remember like grew up in poverty, right?

Starting point is 01:56:32 So like that belief was an adaptation. Her definition of security was also probably an adaptation that was not serving her anymore. The second form of this, I think there's just a lot of beliefs and assumptions that we adopted early in our lives and we forget they're there. You know, it's the water we swim in. And it really isn't until one of them fails us catastrophically that we even consider to like stop and ask ourselves like, oh, is this true? Right. Right.

Starting point is 01:57:02 Never thought, I never considered this before. Just absorbed it, never questioned it. Yeah. So the final category of adaptation that we're going to talk about is honestly, I mean, this is, you could even say this is kind of a subset of beliefs, but it's basically our ego, I identity, which is largely a narrative that we tell ourselves about who we are. And there's a lot of different aspects of that narrative. So there's kind of the basic factual level of that narrative, right? It's like, my name is Mark Manson. I was born outside of Austin, Texas. I'm 42 years old, and I'm a podcaster, like all these things. But there's some narratives that that we adopt and we hold on to

Starting point is 01:57:39 that are highly intangible and very abstract, right? You know, it's like, telling myself that I am a selfish person, right? A lot of us internalize a narrative like that at some point, and we often forget that we did. Or telling myself that I shouldn't ever waste my time. I should, like, optimize every moment that I'm awake, every single day. Like, there's a lot of kind of values-based, identity-based beliefs and concepts that we, like, become very emotionally invested in. Freud defined the ego as an adaptation to our environment. Freud was not aware of personality research at the time he was writing, but it is still, I think,

Starting point is 01:58:19 conceptually is still correct. Yeah. Like the ego forms as a way for us to negotiate the gaps between who we actually are, biologically speaking, and then like, in how we get our needs met from the environment around us. I've had, still probably have to some degree to, a narrative around like growing up poor, you know, coming from the trailer house and all that. and then it didn't matter. Nothing I did.

Starting point is 01:58:47 Like, whatever I achieved, whatever relationships I have, whatever success came my way, whatever it was, it was all just like still viewed through that narrative of, yeah, but at the end of the day, you know,

Starting point is 01:58:58 I'm still back in the trailer park. You know? So I think that's part of the narrative. And I've worked really hard at like trying to change that and we'll get to this here and a little bit. But that disconnect you have between reality and your story, that can cause there's a lot of like friction there that pops up.

Starting point is 01:59:13 Yeah, it's a lot of these. narratives, we age out of them, but it's hard to let them go. Yeah. It's really hard to let them. I probably hung on to mine for about 10 years too long at least. Yeah. That narrative probably served you very well.

Starting point is 01:59:25 It was probably a very useful adaptation for many years until it wasn't. And then it's, you know, then you have to go through that whole process. Well, what's interesting, you know, Damick Adams, who did a lot of this research around, like, the layers and he has a slightly different system. We kind of came up with their own. But he talked a lot about, like, narrative. the narrative layer was really where he spent a lot of time. And I think that's really where like a lot of the work happens for a lot of people. And he came up with this idea of redemptive versus contamination narratives, right?

Starting point is 01:59:55 So if a contamination narrative is a narrative where you think, okay, everything was going right and then it all went to ruin, right? Redemption is everything was going right, something bad happened, and I learned from it. And this is what I learned from it. And I grew from it. For a long time, I think my narrative was, you know, the, These things are, everything's going well and whatever. I'm just waiting for the other shoe to drop. And whenever anything bad would happen, I could fall back on that narrative and say,

Starting point is 02:00:19 well, see. What I think I've successfully done most of the time, at least anyway, is turned that into more of a redemptive narrative where I say, no, actually, yeah, that sucked, went through a lot of harrowing shit because of it and came out the other side. And like, I'd never want to go back to that, but I knew if something like that happened, I know it can go through those sorts of things. that's a redemptive arc that I've, that narrative that I've reconstructed.

Starting point is 02:00:44 It took, again, probably a years, if not decade or more to really finish that narrative or to solidify it. And who knows, that narrative will probably fail me at someday too. Yeah. Right? And that I hope I'm a little bit more prepared for now that I know how this works. I don't know. That's how I'm kind of looking at it right now anyway.

Starting point is 02:01:04 It's interesting because if you look at the different therapeutic modalities, Like, they, they all seem to kind of target certain adaptations more than others, right? Like, one of these, like the habits and the emotions and, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, it's- So would you say to, before we get into that, sorry, would you say to, are we kind of, like, going down in depth with each one of these, do you think? Like, you have the habits, like you said, are pretty simple. Then you have the emotional layer.

Starting point is 02:01:27 Then you have the, do you see it like that, or is that too simplistic? I think that might be too simplistic. Okay, okay. Yeah. Yeah, to me, it feels more like a network, right? Like it's like there's a network of emotion, beliefs emotion. It's almost like the CVT framework. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:01:41 You know? Because it's like they all reinforce each other. And you can't really pull at one without dealing with the others. Depending on the person and depending on the adaptation, it might be more useful to pull at one. Yeah. Start with one. Right. You know, there are therapeutic modalities that really just focus on behavior.

Starting point is 02:01:58 Right. It's just like change to behavior. You know, exposure therapy is like the most obvious one. It's just like put yourself in the hard situation. repeatedly until it stops feeling hard. You know, like do the behavior first, the emotions and the beliefs will follow. Other forms of therapy, you know, if you think about like the psychodynamic tradition, it is all about let's dig up your narratives.

Starting point is 02:02:20 Let's dig up the stories you've been telling yourself and let's like pick them up and analyze them, look at them in every different way, ask ourselves, is this true? Is it useful? Is it serving me? What else could be true potentially? And then putting it back. And then you look at something like CBT and it's it's kind of it's more of a holistic model. It's kind of addressing everything at once.

Starting point is 02:02:41 You know, and then some therapies really focus on the emotion, right? It's like it's it's about like helping you access that emotion really feel it. And then once you're feeling it, invite you to kind of reinterpret what it means in your life. Are there other things we can do besides therapy? I mean, I would encourage anybody who is like struggling with this to start there, honestly. It's the most reliable. Yes, it takes a long time, but it's the most reliable way to kind of change your adaptations around any of this, whether it's emotional, whether it's behavioral, whatever. I don't know. What about

Starting point is 02:03:13 like meditation? Where does meditation fit into this? So I think a fun way to view meditation, actually, is training yourself to simply observe your adaptations without relying upon them. Anybody who's been like a meditation retreat, like what happens when you're just sitting on the pillow for hours and hours and hours is like a lot of your mental and emotional tendencies start to like feel separate from yourself. You get a little bit of distance from them and you can observe them and kind of ask yourself like, oh, it's interesting that I'm like sad. I wonder why I'm sad. You know, I always get sad in this sort of situation. I wonder why that is. Like, is that useful? I don't know. You know, like, it allows you to kind of detach to a certain degree and look at it a little bit more objectively.

Starting point is 02:03:53 Yeah, I would definitely agree with that, that disidentification with thought and emotion. Yeah, that disidentification, I think it's like, if you can think about it. If you can think about a time where you realize something you believed was wrong. In that moment that you realized it was wrong, it suddenly doesn't feel like it's yours anymore. It almost feels like this thing you're looking at on the table in front of you, and you're like, I can't believe I believe that. I've gotten pretty good about disidentifying with my thoughts. Disidentifying with emotions is harder for me, I would say. I can do it. It just takes a little more effort. It takes a little more focus and patience and time. But ultimately, that is kind of, that's kind of one of my goals, too,

Starting point is 02:04:35 is to, I think that's part of what they mean by integration too, right? When people talk about integrating all of these and we're integrating our adaptations or integrating whatever, I think part of that is being able to separate from your emotions, but identify them and really sit with them. This is part of what makes changing adaptation so difficult is that it's, sometimes it's hard to know why they're there and what they're doing there to zoom out. Okay. on the whole episode again, right? When people say, I want to change, what they're usually referring to are their adaptations, right? They've got some habit, some emotional pattern, or some narrative identity that is not serving them anymore, but they don't know how to stop doing it.

Starting point is 02:05:11 And then the behavioral side effects of that is downstream, right? It's like the overeating or the inability to sleep at night or not exercising enough. Like all that stuff is happening as a consequence of the faulty adaptation. What people mean when, they want to change, like this section is generally what they're talking about. But I don't think it's possible to completely understand this section until you understand the personality piece and like the traits that are largely movable. The goal with personality is to simply understand yourself and understand this is who you are and come to terms with it, except that the goal with adaptations is to find the most useful adaptations possible. We're going to talk about William James

Starting point is 02:05:56 a little bit later, but, you know, William James had a philosophical school called pragmatism, which he basically argued that you should only believe in things that are useful. I think the approach to your adaptations should be very pragmatist. It should be very much like, is this emotional pattern serving me? If it's not, I should probably find a way to replace it. Or is this belief about the world serving me? Like, is assuming that everybody's untrustworthy? Is that really serving me? Probably not. So maybe I should find a way to, like, like, be more trusty to people. It's a belief that you're not sure about any way you may as well just believe what's the most useful.

Starting point is 02:06:32 Like, I don't know about you, man. Like, I've just seen myself be wrong about so much shit. Oh, yeah. Nothing makes sense. Nothing makes sense. You're wrong about everything. I've been wrong so many times. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:06:40 The older I get, I think that's probably one of the reasons why people tend to get happier as they get older is, is one is that the older you get, the more you've seen yourself bounce back from hardship. So you're like, oh, I can do this. I've been through worse, right? And I think the other piece is just that like once you've seen yourself be a fucking idiot literally your whole life, like you just kind of start assuming like I'm probably an idiot now too. Yeah. And everybody else around me. And everybody else.

Starting point is 02:07:07 It's idiots all the way down. Right. All the way down. Right. But here's the rub. Right. This is where everybody gets stuck. Because let's say you can name your pattern in real time.

Starting point is 02:07:16 You can watch yourself doing it. You can understand exactly where it came from, what childhood trauma caused. It would, you know, that time that your mom, you know, didn't hug you after she picked you up for school, whatever it is. Yet you still can't stop doing it. We've all been through this. It's the classic, like, I know I shouldn't do it. Why can't I stop doing it? In many ways, insight is just one adaptation talking about another adaptation.

Starting point is 02:07:43 Our ability to sit here and talk about our adaptations is just another adaptation. Right. It's just that another set of belief systems that we've developed for ourselves to make our other beliefs a little bit more functional. kind of puts them in a little box. You can compartmentalize this way. Yeah. Oh, yeah. But there's a limit to it, right?

Starting point is 02:07:59 Insight can only take you so far. It can't actually make you behave differently. It can't make you feel differently in and of itself. So why are adaptations so difficult to change? Well, the first reason is that they run on autopilot. So they're automatic. Yeah. They're automatic.

Starting point is 02:08:14 Like you can't, you don't sit around, you know, and ask yourself, what adaptation should I use in this situation? Like your body just has already developed that. if then pattern and habit in an exit. Well, and it's just, that's efficient too, right? It's like from an evolutionary standpoint. You're born into this environment, so

Starting point is 02:08:33 like the rule should be if this happens, then do this. And that's super efficient for your brain and body and metabolism and everything like that, yeah. I've always seen it as like muscle memory, but within your mind. The same way you develop muscle memory for like riding a bike or brushing your teeth. Like you develop muscle memory around relationships, around conflict, around goals and ambitions, around everything.

Starting point is 02:08:57 I think the other reason adaptations are so hard to change is that there's a little bit of an illusion that comes with gaining information. So for example, like, let's say somebody's listening to this right now and like something we've said is like triggered an insight in their mind, that dopamine hit of like, oh my God, I now I understand something I didn't understand before. That feels like change without changing. And this is, I mean, this is just the self-help trap in general is like people get addicted to insight because it constantly feels like they're doing work even though they're not really doing work. They're not, there's no implementation happening.

Starting point is 02:09:35 And if there's no implementation happening, then nothing is actually permanently shifting or being changed. Right. It's like you always say learning is the smart person's favorite way to procrastinate, right? It is. Yeah. It is. Speaking from experience. Yep.

Starting point is 02:09:47 And then I think the last reason that adaptations are so hard to actually address. and change is because they don't exist in a vacuum. They do exist in this vast network of belief systems, emotional patterns, and behavioral patterns, behavioral habits. So like when you're trying to change your eating habits, for instance, right, you think about a diet, you think about maybe tracking your calories. What you don't think about is all of the social meals that you have with people and how that's going to affect your ability to eat well or not, how maybe the way your family connects with you is by like bringing over desserts or going out drinking together, that it's going to alter your social life, how much you see certain friends, the capacity

Starting point is 02:10:29 that you're able to see those friends. How much you emotionally regulate with food maybe to that too? Right? It's like maybe you've got some underlying anxiety that you've like numbed yourself with food constantly. You don't notice it. Yeah. There's like all these knock on effects, all these dominoes going out in different directions that

Starting point is 02:10:46 it's very hard to conceptualize when you're trying to attack a specific. civic adaptation in isolation. Right, because it disrupts the others. Is that what you're saying, right? Just because you've taken care of the habitual part doesn't mean you've taken care of the emotional part or belief part or, yeah. My heavy drinking was an adaptation to my need for novelty seeking, my high openness to experience and my relative introversion.

Starting point is 02:11:09 And that served me really well when I was young. I had all these amazing experiences and I really, like, developed a lot of better social skills and relationship skills and met a lot more people. but by the time I got older, drinking that much alcohol, it was starting to hold me back in a lot of ways. So it wasn't a functional adaptation anymore. And so I quit drinking about three and a half years ago. And this is exactly what happened is like initially I stopped drinking. I was like, I'm doing this to lose some weight, to get healthy.

Starting point is 02:11:37 And I felt so good and it was so transformative that I just didn't go back to it. But what I didn't expect is that I had been using alcohol. to manage a lot of, like, my restlessness. I was using it to kind of, like, quell a lot of boredom that I experienced. The big thing I notice when I stopped drinking is that, like, a lot of the hobbies and activities that I used to think I loved, when I stopped drinking, I stopped loving them. My wife and I used to go out to, like, fancy restaurants all the time. It was like one of our favorite things to do.

Starting point is 02:12:09 When I stopped drinking, I realized that I didn't enjoy it as much. You just like the wine or whiskey, right? I just like fucking getting drunk. Yeah. Right. Okay. Interesting. Okay.

Starting point is 02:12:16 Yeah. So it was like you remove getting drunk and it's like, okay, well, that was good. Was it worth $800? Like, yeah, probably not. Some concerts and music, it kind of went through the same thing. A lot of social situations in general. A lot of social situations, a lot of parties that went to and was like, wow, I'm bored. I'm actually not having fun here.

Starting point is 02:12:35 It actually created a little bit of an identity crisis in that I didn't really know what I found fun anymore. And I didn't know what I wanted to do anymore. and a lot of the things that I cured with alcohol, I started curing with other things. So I started working more compulsively. I started playing video games more compulsively. I started working out more compulsively. And there were all these knock-on effects in my marriage,

Starting point is 02:13:01 and my friendships, my social life, my calendar, that I was completely unprepared for, like did not expect. I've talked to some recovered addicts, and a lot of them have told me, they've said, you know, it's quitting the substance isn't the hardest part. It's the stain off the substance, right? It's, it's those second order of like, oh, well, how am I going to relate to my friends if I quit and they're still using? Or what am I going to do for fun if I can't be drunk? Like, I don't know what I enjoy doing anymore. So I think I went through a lot of that to like a much lesser extent, like with, you know, less extreme, but it does make it very, very challenging. So you, you address kind of the habitual behavior. part, not drinking, but the other kind of adaptations that we've won over the emotional part the beliefs, the narratives, you felt like you didn't address those? Have you addressed those, I guess? I think I have by now. By now you have, okay. The other interesting thing, too, is that it kind of

Starting point is 02:13:58 unearthed a lot of stuff. You know, I was diagnosed with ADHD. I kind of stopped thinking about it or worrying about it. It kind of felt like it stopped being a problem in my early 20s. And I thought it was because I started meditating a lot. Like, I kind of convinced myself that. What's interesting is when I stopped drinking my ADHD got more severe. Oh, really? Oh. Is interesting. So you might have been self-medicating and not even knowing it. Yeah. And it turns out, like I did some research on it. And it's like, yeah, it's like people with ADHD are like more likely to be alcoholics or something like that. I don't remember the exact percentage. Use substances in general. Yeah. Right. Right. And so it's, I was like, huh, yeah, maybe it was self-medicating to a certain degree. Yeah. But, okay,

Starting point is 02:14:38 But you feel like you've got a better handle on that now for the most part. There's a lot more awareness around it. Okay. You've built new adaptations. Build new adaptations, new habits. I think I've come to terms a little bit more. I mean, this is the tricky thing with emotions, like emotional patterns. Like it's not that they go away.

Starting point is 02:14:55 You just kind of make peace with them. Like they stop controlling you. I think that's kind of like what you go for. I think the process here is you identify the adaptation. right, you break the adaptation, you stop doing the old adaptation. The key is you need to replace it with a new adaptation that fulfills, like, can help you get your needs meant in a similar way. But then what's interesting, and this came up in the research for this episode, is that

Starting point is 02:15:26 that old adaptation never completely goes away. It's almost like it just kind of gets ridden over by a new, like a new piece of software or something. It's patched. Yeah, it's patch, right? And people, like, intuitively, you've, you've probably experienced this a lot. Like, if you think about, I don't know, like emotional issues that you had when you were young, it's not that they're gone. You still feel them down there.

Starting point is 02:15:48 But it's just very mild. It's like the volume knob's been turned way down. And there's like all this new emotional machinery that's been built on top of it. I'm kind of in the middle of one of these right now, I guess. If we can dive into that. Because that's where I'm at, I'm like, whoa, where do I replace? I have this adaptation. I've identified.

Starting point is 02:16:06 and I don't know what comes next a little bit. Okay. This is all kind of weird too and I'm a little disoriented around it. So let me know if I'm just going off the rails here. Okay. A little bit. We'll call this segment off the rails with Drew Bernie. That's okay.

Starting point is 02:16:21 Here we go. Okay. I've talked pretty openly about my avoidance. Like I'm an avoidant attachment. This is the way I brought it up earlier. I was like, emotional level this is our agenda. All your female fans in the comments have noticed. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:16:34 Okay. I was emotionally avoidant for a long time. I even knew about it early on. I mean, I studied psychology. I even studied a little bit of attachment science, like early on in my early 20s. So I knew about it. So there's that insight problem. I was like, oh, I know about this.

Starting point is 02:16:50 So it's okay. But the way I was behaving was still consistent with being avoidant, and it was causing a lot of problems in my life. Okay. And it really wasn't until just a few years ago, probably five-ish years ago, that I really got serious about like, okay, I really need to do something about this. And so what I did is I started with kind of the habit, the behavioral part of it, which was when I had like a partner who would come to me and they have, you know, a bid for attention or a bid for affection of some sort. Usually what I would do is kind of shut down and be like, well, you're getting too close. That's not like, that's scary. Don't do that. Right. What I learned to do is kind of flip that on it as says like, okay, wait, catch myself like we talked about. I caught that adaptation in the moment. And I could then respond to them. Okay. I could not be not behavior.

Starting point is 02:17:35 in an avoidant way. I was prepared to come into this podcast and tell you about how, oh, that was my transformation and I am no longer avoidant. And then it really hit me when we were preferring for this. I'm like, oh, I'm actually no more secure in my attachment than I was before. I have just addressed the habit, the behavior associated with the avoidance. I haven't addressed the rest of it. It's kind of bled into the emotional stuff. One thing I noticed, like with a partner that I had who was anxious, She was also, she had a psychology background so we could talk about this in a nerdy, disconnected way, right? And so, okay, we said, all right, we're going to work on this. Okay.

Starting point is 02:18:12 And we did. And I was like, what I realized was, oh, these bids for attention and affection, they're really not that bad. You just, you give them a little bit and they're fine. And then you can return back to your homeostasis, right? That's kind of bleeding into the emotional adaptation layer a little bit. I can handle those emotions. But that's just like in the receiving of it. I still don't express my needs very well because that's scary to me.

Starting point is 02:18:34 And so I avoid them. That's the avoidant part of it. I have not addressed the underlying beliefs around this. I have not addressed the underlying narratives around this at all. I'm no more secure than I was before, but I felt like I was for a long time. But I've had this like recent realization. So I'm in this space right now around what do I replace those adaptations with? And I'm not really even sure because I just identified it.

Starting point is 02:18:56 Like the beliefs slash narrative that I have, I think that's underlying all of this is just a fear of abandonment. That's what it is. I don't want to be abandoned. And so I close myself off. I don't even get involved in that way. You can't leave me. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:19:09 I will keep you out of distance. And so you cannot leave me. Now I'm sitting here like, okay, well, I've replaced the behavior. But that behavior was a coping mechanism for me. And so now I'm sitting in this space where it's like, it feels unsafe. I'm almost feeling anxious. I think I maybe even told you a few times like, I think I'm actually more disorganized than I was. But I think what that really is is I'm just feeling the anxiety that was already there.

Starting point is 02:19:30 There's always been there. Probably. But I was avoiding it before. for. And now I don't avoid it anymore. And now it's like, I don't know what's going on. But you don't know what to do with it. I don't know what to do with it. And like what I want to do, you know, I talked about the contamination versus redemptive arcs. That's recently, that's what I've been thinking. I was like, okay, I need to return this. I need to turn this into a redemptive arc. Because right now it's a contamination one. It's like, um, people leave. People aren't to be trusted. I'm a very independent.

Starting point is 02:19:55 That's why I'm an independent person. I was like, I can take care of myself because you can't rely on other people. And so what do I replace that with? What do I, you know, know, do I try to make a redemptive arc where it's like, no, no, no, those things happen to me like I did with the being poor and all that. Those things happen to me, I survived them and I'll survive them again. I can't just tell myself that, obviously, right? And have it be true. So I don't know. That's where I'm at right now. I'm in the middle of one of these right now, which is just ironic and, yeah. It's tough, man. I'm going to work through it. I know I will. And that's the other thing is that I've decided like, no, I'm going to take this on and

Starting point is 02:20:29 not turn away from it. And I think that's one of the problems that people see that. And they're like, no, I'm running right the hell back, which I almost did that with this time around too. And it's like I would give yourself more credit as well because like you changed the behavior, but it, you didn't actually change the adaptation, right? Like we're going to get to this, but you know, behavior is the entry point. It is that change in behavior that has even opened you up to be able to talk about this and think about this in the first place because it was prior to that behavior, you weren't even, this was not even a discussion.

Starting point is 02:20:58 That in and of itself is a certain amount of progress. But I mean, this is this is the difficult part with adaptations in general, especially the deep-seated ones and the emotional ones. Like they're not changed in months. They're not changed even in years. Like some deeper-seated ones like this. I mean, it is years and years and years and years and years to like actually get to the other side. Yeah, it's been, it's been weird. And I think I've kind of felt it, like building up a little bit.

Starting point is 02:21:29 And then this is all just kind of, you know, it's, it's coming out now. And I'm like, oh, shit. This is like a realization a little bit. Yeah. I just don't know, like, oh, what's the new story I need to build around this? Whether they're the new beliefs and emotional patterns I want to have. And can I be intentional about that even? I was pretty avoidant when I was younger.

Starting point is 02:21:47 And I remember, I mean, even up until the second year I was with my wife, like, I had this belief, this operating assumption that, like, I was never going to get married. every relationship was temporary and be ready to leave at any moment when it's necessary, right? And it just seemed like, in my ex-girlfriends, like they got it way worse than my wife did. By the time I got to my wife, I kind of realized, I'm like, no, I actually like,

Starting point is 02:22:13 I like, I like having a girlfriend and I should probably not be a fucking deadbeat, you know, when I'm with them. So that was progress. But then I think that progress, like, opened me up to when I was with her to at least, stick around long enough that it it started challenging some of those other underlying beliefs.

Starting point is 02:22:33 Right. Okay. Okay. Well, maybe, yeah, maybe I'm, I am capable of this. Maybe I like, maybe this is okay. But I would say those, those beliefs fell away slowly over the course of years with her. The other thing that fell away, too, I had a bad tendency in my earlier relationships of just sabotaging things. I was definitely that guy who would, like, start a fight over like something very stupid. And I did it unconsciously, but I think what it was is it was kind of a triggered avoidant reaction, right? I totally do this too. Yeah. It's like, oh, point something out that just you could just let go, right? Or yeah. And the worst thing is, is that it tended to happen at like the most intimate moments. And, and I remember actually, so Fernanda, it was one of her birthdays. I planned a whole day for her. It was an amazing day. We

Starting point is 02:23:24 were dating. We had been together for, I think, two or three years. Amazing day together. And she was so happy. And we went to this, like, nice sushi dinner. And I don't remember what, but I just started being such a fucking asshole. Yeah. Okay. For no reason. For no reason. And it's, you know, it took me years to realize that, like, that was an adaptation that was stuck. I think you said something there, though, that rang true with me now anyways, that you didn't. You didn't. decided that you were going to you were going to stick with it this time. You decided you were going to actually look at this. And if there's anything I'm good at, it's denial. So that's what I've learned too is that like, even me saying that like, oh, I'm afraid of abandonment. Yeah. That to me,

Starting point is 02:24:07 I would like, I, that makes me just curl up inside and like, well, I don't like that at all. But because it just seems so weak and it seems so, I don't know, immature. But the fact that it makes you want to pew. I know. And that's what I'm saying is now I have to turn to it. It means it's true. I know. And it is motivating a lot of this, which unfortunately, that's the way it usually works. I don't know. That's where I'm at.

Starting point is 02:24:31 That does help, though. And like I said, I am just playing around with the stories now, too. Meditations as actually helped me a little bit with this. Probably need to do some more therapy around it. But yeah. Probably the most useful thing for me is I just, and I was kind of in a similar place when I met Fernanda that like I was aware I had this. I knew I still had it, but I was also like, I kind of don't want to have this. And I remember with her, I just made an agreement with myself because like with my ex

Starting point is 02:25:02 before her, I just like, I was such a shitty boyfriend. And so with her, I was like, it's okay if it ends, but just make sure it ends for a good reason. Like, don't, don't be a shithead. Again, and it was behavior, right? So it was like, I still felt a lot of the things that I used to feel my old relationships. I still had a lot of thoughts and believe. that I had in previous relationships. I still, there were still times I wanted to break up with her for no reason and go party

Starting point is 02:25:30 and sleep with a bunch of girls randomly. But like, I had an agreement with myself of like, just don't fuck this up for a dumb reason. Like, you can break up with her, but it has to be for a legitimate reason. And putting that constraint on myself, I guess just like eventually made me stop being such a wuss. Yeah, it's kind of where I'm out of where I'm at. with my girlfriend right now. I think I thought that I was like Mr. Romantic in this. I thought I was like, this is the most expressive I have ever been. And just part of the impetus of this whole thing is we've, we had a big conversation and a bit of an argument about this. And she was like, you're not that

Starting point is 02:26:08 emotionally expressive. And I'm like, what the hell are you talking about? Like, I feel like I'm just being always gushing your feelings all the time. And it's like, oh, that's how uncalibrated I am. And it comes back to like the relative definitions, right? So it's like in your head, you're 10 out of 10 expressive. And in her head, you're like a 3 out of 10. Sending heart emojis. Come on, man. Like, come on.

Starting point is 02:26:32 I'm pouring my heart out into my iPhone right now. Duh. What else could a woman want? Women. Like, come on. No, I get it. Heart emojis aren't enough for them. Well, I guess this is, I mean, this is a perfect segue into our next section,

Starting point is 02:26:47 which is about relationship as adaptation machines. I mean, we talked about in the emotions episode. how humans co-regulate each other and also our identities, right, how we identify ourselves and our egos are also mutually defined. None of us define who we are in a vacuum. We largely define ourselves relative to the people around us. And it is those social relationships that kind of add, like create the raw material for us to like define who we are and how we see ourselves. So it makes sense that one of the most effective ways to alter adaptations is to put yourself in relationships with people who maybe have more functional adaptations than you, who perhaps can spot some

Starting point is 02:27:31 maladaptive adaptations in you. I mean, there's a real healing power to relationships. Relationships can also be destructive in this sense. So like, you know, you could almost define a toxic relationship as a relationship that amplifies your unhealthy adaptations or itself becomes an unhealthy adaptation between you and the world. I think you make a good point that this is like where it all plays out in our relationships and this is where you actually, like you can change. Like we're calling these adaptation machines. Relationships are adaptation machines.

Starting point is 02:28:02 We can sit here and we can talk like we were just saying. We can talk. You can get all this insight. You can intellectualize all of this. But like putting into practice through relationships is really where these adaptations will shift around and they're most malleable, I think. Relationships are so powerful because. It is one of the few places that you are able to catch all three of the cognitive,

Starting point is 02:28:20 the behavioral, and the emotional simultaneously. If you and I hang out for a weekend and I do something annoying and you're like, dude, that's annoying. I'll be like, oh, sorry, right? Whereas if I'm like living with my wife for 10 years and she's like, you really need to cut this shit out, like this is fucked up, right? It's there's an emotional investment in that relationship that is very deep and powerful that when something is disruptive with her,

Starting point is 02:28:46 like I'm way more emotionally invested in and actually like looking at and addressing, you know, some sort of behavior or assumption or belief. Yeah, there's stakes. There's skin in the game, yeah. You know what this reminds me of? Have you ever seen that documentary

Starting point is 02:29:00 about flat earthers called Behind the Curve? No, I haven't, no. It's so fascinating. There's a flat earth convention. Yeah, I knew of that, yeah. That people get on planes and fly across time zones. to attend. So this documentary

Starting point is 02:29:17 and like started following a bunch of these flat earthers and it is so fascinating because what you really notice as the documentary goes on is that these are intensely lonely people and it's really like the flat earth belief

Starting point is 02:29:33 very much an adaptation to allow them to get some of their basic needs met. Like they are probably very neurodivergent. They're probably some like extreme person personality traits going on.

Starting point is 02:29:45 Maybe some trauma for some of them. A lot of them probably have a lot of embedded trauma. And like they are just not super functional in the day-to-day world. But something about this belief system and coming together online around it, like allows them to feel accepted and admired and appreciated and special and some degree of status or whatever. But it is, the documentary is extremely well done because it's just the way he shows their stories and how they describe. themselves. Like, it is so clear that they, they're, they're just lonely and they just want to feel like they're doing something that matters. And that's a hell of an adaptation. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a version of working on yourself that is perfectly designed to feel like progress, but it produces

Starting point is 02:30:32 no progress. And this is why you're still stuck. It's not because you don't understand yourself. It's because understanding yourself and changing yourself are two completely different skills. Interestingly, there's some research around how change actually takes place. This is very common in the clinical psychology world. So Prokaska and D. Clemente have a model. It's the five-stage model of change. So there's pre-contemplation, contemplation, action, maintenance, and relapse. And pre-contemplation is basically the moment before there's conscious awareness of an issue.

Starting point is 02:31:07 Right. It's just you're like, something's off. Something's off, but you don't know what, and you keep doing a thing and you don't know why and it's you're not sure what the problem is. Contemplation is you think you've identified the problem. I think I know what why I you know why do I keep doing this. This is what I need to change. Action is when you try to change it. Maintenance is making sure that that action is sustainable over a long period of time because as we're going to discover is that change itself is hard. Maintaining change is exceptionally hard. Most people are able to change their behaviors quite often. Most people are not

Starting point is 02:31:46 able to maintain changes in their behaviors over a long period of time. It is exceptionally difficult. So it's the maintenance phase and then there's the relapse phase, which I kind of love how it's just baked in here. I love how they put it into. Yeah. You're going to fuck up. You're going to fuck up. Nobody nails the landing on the first try. It's going to take a few swings and you're going to have to like get back on the horse. How many metaphors can I use here? No, it's like they say in recovery programs, relapses are part of the progress, right? It's part of the process. Is learning how you react in these situations. And when you do fail, how are you going to bounce back? Or are you going to bounce back even? So where would you say you are with the avoidance stuff?

Starting point is 02:32:26 I think I'm between the contemplation and action phases right now. I'm trying to move myself into the action phase a little bit. Well, and it feels like you've taken some action. Okay, yeah. Oh, no, you're right. You're absolutely right. But I think there's more action that needs to be taken. I think what I've realized is I've put in some of the work. I haven't put in all of the work. I think the issue is that you've learned how to perform reciprocation. You're not actually emotionally reciprocating that bid for affection. And so, yes, you are technically behaving in the correct way, but actually the behavior that you need to change has not been accessed yet. That's, yeah, that's probably true. That's probably a good point. Yeah. I just think, this is the story I have in my head right now, okay, is that if I can get through this and I can kind of address those,

Starting point is 02:33:19 what I'm seeing right now is the underlying issue, which is fear of abandonment, right? If I can somehow remove that barrier, I see it as a barrier at this point to something deeper. I don't know what. It's just like if I can remove that, it feels like something's going to come flooding in or out and something's going to break wide open.

Starting point is 02:33:36 The fear you mean? If I can remove that fear of abandonment, yeah. It feels like it's like it's blocking me because another thing, and I think I've mentioned this to you before, just about every girlfriend I've had in my adult life. They've asked me what I want, of course, like everybody, you know, at some point they're going to ask you that. And I just go blank. I just like, I don't know.

Starting point is 02:33:56 I don't know what I want. Like, this seems fun. I like you. What more do I need? Right? And so what I think is going on, what it feels like is going on. This is a story I'm telling myself currently. Again, if I can remove that, then I can finally figure out what I want.

Starting point is 02:34:12 And that will at least give me some clarity. I'm not going to say that's going to fix everything, but that gives me some clarity around what new narrative do I want to build. What new beliefs do I want to build? I don't know. Maybe that's at the same time too systematic and too abstract. I don't know, but. Can I be obnoxious and say a thing that you probably know but don't want to hear?

Starting point is 02:34:33 When have you ever asked me that question? You know this. I know you know this. Okay. I'm good at denial, like I said. Well, and it's one of those things that it's when it's you, it's easy to like miss it. You're not going to get rid of a fear of abandonment. Like, you know, you don't get rid of emotions. You live despite the emotions. And so I think the issue here isn't that you remove the fear of abandonment and then some long-term desire replaces it.

Starting point is 02:35:04 The trick here is, is that you need to find something that is worth wanting enough that you're willing to live with the fear. Okay. Okay. You're right. I do know that. Yeah. Yeah, I think I was, I think you're right. I think I'm looking for some way around it.

Starting point is 02:35:22 Like, no, nope, I can remove that too. Which we all do. I can, I just got to go through a little bit more pain and then I can get that. Yeah. But yeah. We all do. I mean, talking to you about it. And by the way, thank you for being willing to share this on the podcast.

Starting point is 02:35:34 It's almost like knowing all these things can it sometimes be a handicap? Right? Because it's like knowing all this stuff, it gives you all these little escape routes like these other things to think about so that you don't have to think about the main thing. You can kind of obsess about all these details

Starting point is 02:35:49 and it's like, oh, that one study in 1983 said this. So like, let me go read about that. Okay, now you're just attacking me, but okay. All right. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. That was not personal.

Starting point is 02:36:01 No, no. This is what makes this layer so hard. you're almost like pulling at strands in a very complex knot. And not only do you have to know which strands the pull, but you need to know what order to pull them in sometimes. And so you can spend years just like pulling the wrong thing at the wrong time and not knowing why nothing's changing. And then you suddenly start pulling on a different one and it's like, boom, you know, half of it comes undone.

Starting point is 02:36:24 I actually think this is a nice place to segue into the new chapter because, I mean, at this point, we've talked about the personality traits, the things that you're not really going to change. This section, we've talked all about the adaptations, right? All these like multiple layers of ourselves and our ego and our beliefs and all this stuff. We can change them, but it is very complicated and difficult. And ultimately, the access point to changing those adaptations is our behavior, getting ourselves to do the thing that we don't necessarily want to do or we don't know how to do consistently. And that is so much of what we struggle with in terms of changing ourselves.

Starting point is 02:37:01 Like there's so many of us who we know exactly what we want to change and then we just try to get up and do it and it doesn't happen. So in the next chapter, we're going to dive into all the ends and outs of behavioral change. How does it actually happen? How do you make it consistent? How can you give yourself the highest likelihood of success? And what's interesting is that most of our intuitive assumptions about behavior change are not accurate. Because understanding yourself and changing yourself are actually two completely different skills. They're two different problems.

Starting point is 02:37:37 And pretty much everything in the personal development industry, the self-help industry, is selling you solutions to the first problem, promising that it's going to solve the second one. But the next chapter, we're going to solve the second problem. And the answer is so simple that it's probably going to strike people as insulting. This episode is brought to you by Quo. you don't notice your business changing until something breaks. One day you're running everything off your personal phone and it's totally fine. And then the next day, your team's in a Spider-Man meme all pointing at each other about who was supposed to answer that email.

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Starting point is 02:39:14 Is that a rhetorical question? I was expecting you to answer, Drew. I was expecting you to resolve a 2,500-year philosophical conundrum. Why don't we do the things we know we should do? It's a simple question. Why do we know we should do something and then not do the thing? Right. How is that even?

Starting point is 02:39:36 Right. know exactly what to do. Yes. Information as must not be the problem or I don't know. You know, it's interesting. I don't know if you remember this, but I actually started writing a book called Why Don't I Do It? And the entire book was the goal was to answer this question.

Starting point is 02:39:50 Like, why do we not do the things that we know we should do? Like, how is it that our behavior gets divorced from our knowledge to such a large extent? And that book, it, anyway, I didn't end up writing it. But I did do some interesting research for that book. when I was writing it. And this problem is as old as civilization, obviously. The Greeks referred to this as Eccasia, and they took it very seriously as a philosophical problem.

Starting point is 02:40:18 Like, it didn't make sense to them that if you know something is good, why should you be capable of doing anything to the contrary? Like, why should there be any resistance towards doing it? And it's interesting because the major Greek philosophers had, they each had kind of a different angle at which they tried to answer this question. Socrates just rejected the premise outright. So in the dialogue Protagoras, he argued that it was actually impossible to not do the thing that you wanted to do. He said that if you experience a discrepancy between what you want to do and what you actually do, he just said you don't actually want to do it, which to me feels like a cop out.

Starting point is 02:40:59 That's very circular. Right. Right. It's like, well, if you wanted to do it, you would. And the thing you did is because you wanted to. It's like, well, yeah, that's not very helpful, Socrates, but thank you. Thank you for your participation. It denies the real emotional experience of the whole thing, too, right? Yes, it does.

Starting point is 02:41:16 Plato was really the one that kind of nailed this. And he had this metaphor. He called it the tripartite soul. He basically said that the human soul is divided into three parts, and the three parts are all wrestling for control at any given time. And those three parts basically boiled down to kind of our impulses. and instincts, our animalistic side, our emotions, and our passions, and then our rationality and our higher level decision making. And it turns out psychology has largely borne Plato's model to be true. I mean, there's some nuances and a couple little changes here and there,

Starting point is 02:41:51 but we generally have these different parts of ourselves, and they're generally wrestling against each other for control. Anybody who has struggled to follow through with something they want to do has experienced this, where you intellectually understand, I should get off the couch, I should go to the gym. I should hire a trainer. But emotionally, you're like, these potato chips, they sure do taste good. So Plato had this metaphor to describe this, which is that our soul, or basically our psychology, is like a chariot rider trying to control two horses. So one horse is our animal instincts and our urges and the other horses, our emotions, our emotions and our passions, the chariot rider, which is our rationality, his goal is to

Starting point is 02:42:33 control the horses and point them in the correct direction. But the interesting thing about this metaphor is that it shows us that ultimately feelings are what drive our actions and our decisions. And when it comes to changing ourselves to trying to be a new person, ultimately, that is a emotionally based problem. Like the reason we don't do things, that we know we should do is simply because we don't feel like it. It's not that we don't know we should do it. It's because we don't feel like doing it. The reason you don't get off the couch and go to the gym isn't because you don't know it's good for you. It's because you don't feel like doing it. And so identity change, becoming a new person is ultimately an emotional

Starting point is 02:43:16 process, which fucking sucks because emotions are hard. Right. They're like, they're hard to identify, they're hard to understand, and they're hard to deal with. It's hard to change. They're hard to change. And it's hard to do something contrary to your emotions. Right. Like if I'm angry at somebody, it's hard to be nice to them. If I'm sad about something, it's hard to be enthusiastic and motivated, right? So the whole difficulty around change is fundamentally boiled down to this. How do you do things that you don't feel like doing?

Starting point is 02:43:48 All this is to say is that behavioral change is primarily an emotional problem, not irrational problems. The information is the easy part. You know, as my friend Derek Sivers likes to say, if change was as easy as more information, we would all be billionaires with six-packs, but we're not. Because the difficulty is getting our emotions to align with what we know is better for ourselves. As the chariot riders in our brains, getting our horses lined up and pointed in the right direction. Now, most people assume that the way to do this, the way to handle an emotional problem, is to just brute force. it is to just summon as much willpower as possible to push down any doubts or reservations and

Starting point is 02:44:32 just like almost like abuse yourself until you do the fucking thing. And that can work in bits and spurts. But as we're going to discover, willpower is generally overrated and over-emphasized because it turns out that the human mind, we are very influenceable and susceptible to external triggers and influences within our environment. And so if we're smart about using our environment and if we're smart about utilizing the triggers around us, we can actually make it easier to adopt the behaviors that we want to adopt. So by the end of this chapter, everybody's going to understand why simply knowing what to do and trying to force yourself to do it through willpower is not an effective solution.

Starting point is 02:45:17 we're going to actually give everybody specific concrete tools to change their environment, to create triggers for themselves so that the right behaviors become automatic and far easier than they would be otherwise. But to begin, I want to tell a story about a checklist and how it saved 1,500 lives. So in 2003, doctors at one of the best hospitals in the world were unintentionally killing their patients. What's worse is that the whole time they knew what they should be doing. they just weren't doing it.

Starting point is 02:45:49 So the problem was, is that a large amount of patients were dying from what is called central line infections. So central lines are simply a catheter that are inserted into a large vein. They're super common in ICU. They're like, basically, you see them happen everywhere. But the problem was, was that the ICU was so chaotic and so crazy that inevitably some of these steps would be skipped. And then the patients would develop an infection and then they would die. So the doctor Peter Provinoz noticed this and he decided to address it. He addressed it in the most stupidly simple way possible, which is he created a checklist.

Starting point is 02:46:28 It was just a physical piece of paper with the five steps that all the doctors and nurses already knew that they should be doing. And then he just made one change, which is that he gave all the nurses permission that if they noticed a doctor skipping any of the steps that they could stop him and intervene. And within 18 months, deaths from central line infections drop. to zero. In fact, the checklist became so successful that hospitals across the United States started adopting it everywhere. Now, the interesting fact about this checklist is it didn't teach anybody anything they didn't know. It didn't force anybody to do anything they shouldn't already be doing. It didn't motivate them or, you know, completely change the system. It simply created an environmental nudge. It basically created a design within the environment that made it

Starting point is 02:47:13 easier to follow the protocol than it was to not follow the protocol. And this is what we see time and time again, is that people change their behavior when it becomes more painful to not change the behavior than it becomes to change it. We like to imagine that it's more complicated than this, that there's like all these, I don't know, philosophical, emotional childhood trauma issues associated with it. But at the end of the day, if you can create circumstances and situations, within your environment, if you can design the world around you to nudge you into a behavior so that it feels easier than not doing that behavior, something as simple as a checklist or a visual reminder or not putting junk food in the fridge, whatever it is, this is the 80-20 of behavioral change. Now, this is not a sexy or exciting thing. I think what happens is that when people want to change, we tend to think of the final order effect of that change. Right. So it's like if I want to get healthier or if I want to fix my relationships, I'm not thinking about the next meal I'm going to have or the next date I'm going to go on. What I'm thinking about is like me being married with kids and having a six pack. Right. I'm like my brain is immediately jumping five years in the future after I've done 10,000 different things to make that outcome come true. And so a natural cognitive bias that we have is that we assume that we need to change. much more in our life than we actually need to change.

Starting point is 02:48:46 It turns out that not only are behavioral changes easily instigated by small alterations in our environment, like a simple checklist, but you don't have to change nearly as much as you think you do to create an outsized effect down the line, five years in the future or whatever. Now, this is a mistake I've made a million fucking times. Like, I can't tell you how many times I have convinced. myself that I have to reorient my entire life. I'm going to start waking up at 4.30 and I'm going to go to a gym for 90 minutes every day and I'm going to start meditating for 30 minutes and

Starting point is 02:49:23 I'm going to sign up for this new program that costs $1,000. And I try to do it all at once. And of course, I do it for three days and then I fail. Whereas what has actually worked for me is something as simple as putting my gym shoes by the front door so that it reminds me, hey you're supposed to go run asshole that's why your shoes are there for me to put my shoes on it is easier to just walk out the door than it is to not walk out the door that is probably done more for me than like all of the drastic major changes i've ever tried to make in my life every change requires a certain amount of energy um and it's especially if you're exerting willpower there's almost like a budget of emotional energy that you can dedicate into something i mean what makes this error worse too is that if you if you if you like all those changes, right? If you just took them one at a time, right? Accomplishing the first one will make the second one that much easier, right?

Starting point is 02:50:18 So it's like if you just address your sleep, simply by going to bed an hour earlier, waking up an hour earlier, you're going to be more rested, have more energy, your metabolism is going to function better. So you're going to make better decisions. You're not going to be as tired during the day.

Starting point is 02:50:34 So you're going to have more energy to, you know, actually go to the gym when you want to go to the gym, right? So people should line these up sequentially rather than trying to do them all at once. Yeah, but that doesn't feel as sexy, does it? No. Like we're looking for the big change. We're looking for the montage. Right. Right. I think what people, what happens in this stage is people will, if you tell them, you know, just focus on one of these. Let's say going to bed earlier or doing a workout every day. It doesn't matter what it is. Just go do the workout. Sure. What happens is it starts

Starting point is 02:51:03 looking like you're kind of just running in circles. It doesn't feel, you know, it doesn't have that energy behind it, like you're saying. It's boring. It's boring. And it's, It feels like you're running in circles, but if you step back a little bit, actually what you're doing is you're kind of like climbing the spiral staircase, but you're looking at it from the top a little bit, you know, and it looks like you're just kind of running in a circle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's slower and it's not as sexy, but if you step back, you're like, oh, wait, I've gotten 30 minutes more sleep for the last month. Like that right there is a huge, huge win. And you probably, maybe you haven't even noticed, but you have better energy. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:51:37 You have better emotional regulation. You are your diet's better because you're not as tired and you're reaching for food for emotional regulation. Yeah. The boringness of it or the sexiness of like some big dramatic change. Like that's a piece of it. I also think people have misguided expectations in terms of like what the result of change should be. Like I think people imagine that it's going to be like this euphoric people cheering, confetti falling from the rafters. Like you're a new person.

Starting point is 02:52:08 And oh my God, you're never going to be the same again. And that's just not the case. What change actually feels like is you start waking up an hour earlier and you start exercising 50% more. You feel 20% better day to day. You have a little bit more energy every day. You have a little bit more patience in your relationships. You make slightly better decisions. It's like barely above the threshold of perception.

Starting point is 02:52:37 It's not a ticker tape parade. Right. Right. There's like no, there's no applause for you. Nobody, nobody's like showing up and handing you a metal

Starting point is 02:52:45 or a certificate at your front door. It's just like, okay, yeah, you're just a slightly more functional human being. Good job.

Starting point is 02:52:51 I also think it comes back to something I said earlier, which is like, life is practice, right? And it's like those little practices you do every day consistently. And then when you do have something

Starting point is 02:53:01 like big that comes up, you can, you do handle it a lot better. I've noticed this in my life, I guess, you know, once I, start working out more and just get healthier.

Starting point is 02:53:11 Now anytime I do have an actual physical challenge of something, I need to stay up for, I don't get as much sleep because I need to take care of something in my life that's going on. I can handle that a lot better. Again, that's almost not noticeable, though. You just get better at the bigger thing because you practice a smaller version of it over and over and over and over again. And it's boring as fuck, you're right.

Starting point is 02:53:31 It's just so boring. And so nobody wants to do it. It's not sexy. Yeah. Now, there's actually two other mistakes people make around this as. well. This kind of like trying to make a big change, right? One of them, the fresh start effect. Everybody's going to be very familiar with this, right? The New Year's resolutions, the birthday resolutions, the Monday morning resolutions, right? Maybe the, yeah, 8 a.m. resolution

Starting point is 02:53:51 every day, today's going to be different. Yeah, so it's called the fresh start effect, because that motivation is real. It's there, like we're all motivated around those, you know, it creates a good little story, a before and after story. This was me before. Here's the, here's the start point, this is me after, right? The problem is is that we're not actually addressing like the adaptations underneath that. And we have to do that by just targeting the behavior, the single behaviors that we've been talking about. It's funny like that we have a bias towards this. I actually in going through this right now. So about six months ago, I injured my foot. Yeah. And I basically had to stop exercising almost completely for a few months. And I got really out of shape. And of course,

Starting point is 02:54:33 I lost a lot of my habits around exercise and everything. So I just started. I just started to I started exercising fully, I would say maybe like six weeks ago again, but I'm really struggling to like get my habits back. I've definitely lost the consistency that I had for a number of years. And it's funny because I was recently thinking just a day or two ago. I'm like, you know what? I'm going to do a 30 for 30 challenge, which is basically do some sort of exercise or physical activity for 30 minutes for 30 day straight. It can be anything. It could be a walk around the block.

Starting point is 02:55:05 It could be a full-blown workout. It could be a run. It could be like lifting some weights. It could be just stretching and doing a little bit of yoga. But like I promised myself I'd do 30 for 30. And then I looked at the calendar and I was like, ah, shit. It's May 3rd. And then I actually had the thought, should I wait to the first day?

Starting point is 02:55:24 Wait, almost 30 more days. Yeah, yeah. Because it's just so clean in your brain. It's like, oh, if I, just doing the month of May would be such like a nice little bookend, right, to this little challenge that I'm going to give myself. And then, of course, I was like, that's stupid. Just start now. It's the sexiness. It doesn't feel as sexy. It's like if I'm going from May 5th to June 5th, like, that's not exciting. Yeah. Okay. So the other one, though, is what they call ironic process theory. Okay. And we've talked about this a little bit before, I think, but, you know,

Starting point is 02:55:57 just the quick example is, Mark, don't think of a white bear. Right. What do you think about? that white, the Coca-Cola bear. No, white-Cola bear. You're thinking of a white bear. Yeah, yeah. This was Daniel Wagner. He came up with this, you know, and the things that we try to suppress and not do are usually the things that are the most salient to us.

Starting point is 02:56:15 And so we just end up doing them or we ruminate on them too much that we can't get them out of our heads. We obsess over them. And then we just end up doing them even more than we were before. So like trying to stop doing a behavior, a good way to not stop doing it is to try to not do it. Yeah. Right? Like an example of this is really, like in the 60s is when they put the surgeon general warnings on the packets of cigarettes, you know. It's like everybody shows everybody like, you know, this causes cancer. This is back for your health, smoking while pregnant, all of that, right? So something like half of the American population back in the 60s was smoking cigarettes daily. Today it's down to 18%. But, you know, millions and millions of people read those warning labels and nothing happened there, right? There's, there's like telling you not to do it. If it was just information. Exactly. We'd all have six facts.

Starting point is 02:56:59 to that. So that is just one of the weakest ways, I think, to change is to just brute force your way in a not doing it. You know what's a more recent version of that? Did you have to do DARE growing up? Yeah. Yeah. So me too. I don't know if it was nationwide. I think it was nationwide. I think it was in the 90s, yeah. Yeah, people, people who are not 90s kids in the United States, there was this program called Dare, which was drug awareness, something, education. But basically, I mean, it was, it was, well-intentioned, but essentially what happened is that the U.S. government decided we are going to send police officers into elementary schools to teach kids about cocaine and heroin so that they won't do it. And what happened? Drug use among adolescents and minors skyrocketed over the next

Starting point is 02:57:48 10 or 20 years until they stopped doing the DER program and then they came down. So there's a backfire effect to a lot of this stuff. And I imagine that there's something, there's probably something in our neurological wiring that's like, you know, is seen don't smoke cigarettes is also in many ways no different than your brain seeing smoke cigarettes. And so like both of those messages hit at the same time. I know in NLP, there's some ideas around that, like that your brain just kind of ignores like the negative modifier of things. And so you just, it's better to not say something instead of to tell people to not do it. Now in my book, The Subtle Art Not Giving a Fuck, there was a section that I called the Do Something principle. And to me, this is like one of the most

Starting point is 02:58:28 useful frameworks or tools that I've ever learned in my life. And it came from my high school math teacher. Shout out to Mr. Packwood, if he's watching. So what Mr. Packwood told us, there was one day we were all taking a test. And I think everybody was just stumped because all the kids were sitting around, not really writing a whole lot on their exams. My teacher said the simplest thing, but it was like utterly profound, which is that he said, if you find yourself stuck, just start writing the next step of the problem.

Starting point is 02:58:58 Don't try to solve the entire problem at once. Just write the next step of the problem. Just the momentum you build by writing the next step will generate insights and ideas into what could come next. And sure enough, it was crazy. You would just do the next step of the problem. And then something about writing that out would show you what the following step should be and so on.

Starting point is 02:59:20 And it became much easier to do the problems. Once I got to college, I noticed that this applied to writing term papers, right? You start writing an essay for English class. You get stuck. You're like, well, why don't I just write one sentence? Just get one sentence, see where that goes. And then you write one sentence, and pretty soon you've got a paragraph. And then once you got the paragraph, you're like, oh, I actually know where this should go now.

Starting point is 02:59:41 So the do something principle applied to academics. But it turns out it applies to pretty much everything. See, we assume that to change, you need to feel like doing something different. and then that will lead to the actions of something different. But it's actually the other way around. You start with the action and the action itself creates the emotion. We assume that motivation is required to generate the action. No, the action is required to generate the motivation.

Starting point is 03:00:09 So then this raises the question, like, how do you get that first action? How do you start that change? How do you start building evidence of that new identity that you want to adopt for yourself? and the trick is to make that action as small and easy as possible, right? So if you want to have a six-pack, don't focus on having a six-pack. Focus on just putting your fucking shoes on and going to the gym. Or if you want to start a meditation habit, don't think about doing a seven-day retreat. Just sit down on the pillow for one minute.

Starting point is 03:00:40 Just set a clock for 60 seconds, right? And then what happens is you sit for 60 seconds and you're like, well, I'm already here. I might as well do 10 minutes. And then you do 10 minutes and you're like, well, that was nice. Why don't I do five more? Right. And then you start building a little bit of a snowball. The mistake that everybody makes is they try to bite off way too much to begin with.

Starting point is 03:01:02 And I think this is because when we imagine the change we want in our life, when we imagine the new identity we want to have for ourselves, we imagine all of the long-term benefits and consequences of 10,000 tiny decisions instead of thinking about the one small decision. in front of us. You don't think about waking up 30 minutes earlier tomorrow and maybe like having a smoothie instead of a bagel. What you think about is like having a six pack out of beach and like a super hot girlfriend. And that's just that's step 10,000. You're not even paying attention to step one through five, right? So the goal is to narrow our focus to that first step, generate the momentum, start accumulating evidence of a new identity by accumulating new behaviors. Those new behaviors give you the momentum to continue. And then as you continue, you start generating new emotional patterns, new experiences, new ways

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Starting point is 03:02:29 You're among fans. Okay, so what you're saying is most of us want that, those adaptation layer changes right away, if not full-blown identity changes right away. Right. Right? And then, but what we're doing is because we want those emotions to, just be able to fuel us and move us, right? I think I've experienced this a million times.

Starting point is 03:02:48 That's okay. And they call it the overall, we're calling it the overall trap here. What it is is when you jump in, you want to change. You try to change everything all that once. Do 10 things simultaneously. 10 or more things simultaneously. We want to get up early and work out.

Starting point is 03:03:02 You want to eat right from day one. You want everything to just be perfect like to meditate. You want to disown half your friends, become a vegan fly to Timbuktu. Right, yeah, everything. You're trying this identity level change. without any evidence without building the the behavioral foundation underneath that new identity okay okay and so that's just gonna you're you're fighting an emotional uphill battle at that point the you know the same way we talked about how a personality trait is like a center of gravity that you

Starting point is 03:03:30 kind of return to naturally i think your identity is an emotional center of gravity it's your default state right so if you've spent 20 years being a couch potato playing video games all day you're going to have to fight a lot of gravity to escape that basin, that emotional basin. The idea that you can just wake up one day and decide you're a new person and go be a new person, it's extremely unlikely. Right. Okay, so the rest of this chapter,

Starting point is 03:03:59 we want to focus on how do you actually accumulate the most effective behaviors that will eventually lead to actual real change at the adaptation layer, maybe even the trait layer? Correct. Yeah, okay, okay. And interestingly, so we just, didn't talk about Aristotle earlier, but Aristotle's solution for Acragea was habituation.

Starting point is 03:04:21 He said that basically the only way to train yourself to do the things that you don't want to do is to find ways to create habits around it so that it feels automatic, even when you don't feel like doing it. And anybody who is quote unquote super disciplined, if you talk to them, how do you work so many hours, right? Like, how do you get up so early? They don't think about it. Right. Because if you have to think about it, every time you do it, you're going to lose momentum

Starting point is 03:04:50 at a certain point. So, like, James Clear and Atomic Habits has a great framework for this. He has four different kind of mandates for adopting any new behavior. He says, number one, make it obvious. Don't, like, anything complicated, it's, you're probably not going to stick to it. So like, just make it super, super, super, super immediate and obvious, like, what you should be doing. The second thing is he says make it attractive. So make it feel rewarding when you do it.

Starting point is 03:05:16 And you can do this in a bunch of different ways. You can set up an accountability system. You can, you know, do it with a friend. You can post pictures and put it on fucking Instagram and tag all your friends, whatever. The third one is make it easy, which is what we've been talking about, right? Find the minimum viable action, remove as much friction as possible. And then the fourth one is make it satisfying. Allie Abdal has a great take on this, which is he, he actually focuses on making it fun, which as an ADHD person, I really appreciate that.

Starting point is 03:05:47 Like, I love the gamification of things and I love, like, you know, doing things with other people and, like, creating some sort of, whether it's competitiveness or cooperation in some way. The way I would apply this, right, is, like, map out for the next 10 days, one small cooking task I'm going to do each night. prep fully beforehand, like buy all the groceries beforehand, and then maybe create some sort of accountability system, like tell a friend that, hey, if I don't do these 10 things, like I owe you 100 bucks or I got to take you to dinner or something. That would just be one simple example of like, here's how you would effectively start adopting a new behavior

Starting point is 03:06:24 if you really wanted to. Yeah, okay. Okay, so here's my thing about this stuff, though, too. So all of that, I think, is great for like the health, behaviors we talk about. I've implemented these very successfully in my life. For example, like I'm the default option. I don't keep junk food in my house. Yes. I don't need junk food. The workout thing, I have a trigger. Like, middle of the day is workout time for me. That's been ingrained in my body now. I'd like get antsy if I don't go. So that's kind of, it's a little

Starting point is 03:06:51 bit of an abstract trigger, but it works for me. We have been talking a lot, though, about like, I think a different kind of change too. Can we apply that here as well for my avoidance? Yeah. Right. Right. A lot of the behavior. change that people talk about are around. It's like health behaviors, which I agree are very important. And really what you're getting at is you're saying, I want to go, I want to be the type of person who does these behaviors, right? I want to be a healthy person. I want to be a conscientious person ultimately. Like, that's what I want to be, right? What about when it comes to like, and that's all very, very concrete. We can see the results. We can see the process even too. That's a very concrete

Starting point is 03:07:28 process with concrete results. Yeah. But what about when it comes to these like these harder things we've been talking about? Like intangible emotional. Ourselves, yeah. The entry point for me addressing my avoidance was behavioral. Right. Like I was like, okay, I'm behaving in an avoidant way. I don't want to behave that way anymore. And so that's where I started. And it did lead to like, oh, this actually isn't so bad. Right. It's actually maybe a little bit fun to work on this sometimes. It's not that fun, honestly, but it hasn't been so far. But I could see myself like, oh, let's let's kind of gamify this a little bit even too. I could see that. Does it work that way, I guess? I think it can. Right. So like in your context in a relationship, right? Like you could implement something akin to like

Starting point is 03:08:10 a mood tracker, right? Of like documenting say three times a day, like set a little alarm on your phone. Like, you know, 8 a.m., 12 p.m., 8 p.m. Just take 30 seconds and write down, how am I feeling in this moment? And why am I feeling this way? And just do that for 30 days. And then schedule sit downs with your partner and just be like, this is kind of where I'm feeling. And here's what I noticed about myself, right? And like practice that self-disclosure. That's probably not supernatural. Talk to a number of people who have like built-in relationship rituals like that, right?

Starting point is 03:08:45 Where they have a monthly check-in. And they say, like, this is where I'm feeling really loved. This is where I'm not feeling very loved, right? And they, like, give each other that feedback very calmly without any sort of judgment attached to it. Okay. There are certain practices and rituals that you could probably implement to like kind of, kind of like the checklist in the hospital, right? Like enforce those behaviors because you're not naturally predisposed to do it and you're

Starting point is 03:09:10 probably going to find reasons to avoid doing it unless it's kind of thrust upon you. So I think it totally can work. I think in your case, it's the definition of behavior. You're probably still seeing it as like a tangible action of some kind. Yeah. Whereas in your case, the behavior actually is the emotion. Emotional response to it. Right.

Starting point is 03:09:29 Yeah. Okay. My girlfriend is actually suggested check-ins and stuff like that. Your girlfriend is a therapist. Yeah. So you have no excuses. And she's like, and she's like, she's like all excited too. Of course she is.

Starting point is 03:09:40 I'm excited for this. Of course she is. I've gotten on board with it though too. Yeah. Okay. Okay. So that's one example too. I'll give you another example.

Starting point is 03:09:48 For my own life as well, that's not related to all like tangible health stuff or whatever. It's podcasting. For years, I've worked with you. and I've always been behind the scenes and never saw myself as like somebody who's in front of any front facing part of the business, right? And so I kind of just held on to that for a long time. And it hasn't been until, I guess, a little bit more recently where it's like, okay, I need to change something about that. This is like, I'm committed to this, but I still don't have that strong identity around it. And so instead what I've done is I'm like, okay, now I need to go figure out how to be a

Starting point is 03:10:26 better speaker. I need to go figure out how to be just communicate better in general. I need to figure out how to like use my voice better, like all the little, those little behaviors. And they start with just like a go watch a YouTube video and take some notes on it or, you know, and then I'm going to, my plan is kind of to progressively get a little bit more and more into that as I go. And I'm already feeling like, oh, okay, this is actually pointing somewhere. It's going somewhere. There's like the rumblings of an identity change even underneath of it. It's, it's. It's. interesting because I feel like that's kind of an example. Like sometimes identity lags reality. Yeah. You know, like it's sometimes change happens to you. It's not something that you do. And this was

Starting point is 03:11:06 completely unplanned. We never expected you to be on the like co-hosting the podcast. It kind of just like, I wanted to be a producer. That's what I wanted. Yeah. Like we kind of just tried it once and it went really well. And so we just kept doing it. And it's interesting because I think my perception of you has lagged reality. Right. Like for a long time, I still saw you as like. researcher, editor, curator, you know, curator, right? And sometimes when new

Starting point is 03:11:31 experiences and new realities are thrust upon us, there's still a lag time for identity, right? Exactly, exactly, yeah. And you still have to start at the behaviors, right? Yes.

Starting point is 03:11:41 You still have to like, I don't know if it's fake until you make it or whatever, but you still have to like, okay, now I have to engage in these behaviors that are going to lead to that change. Yeah, it's interesting.

Starting point is 03:11:51 What's interesting about adopting new behaviors as well is that sometimes it's easier to substitute one habit with another habit. And you see this come up a lot in like addiction recovery groups. You know, a lot of people will actually encourage people, you know, if you stop drinking alcohol, find something else you can replace it with. Like even if it's junk food, even if it's cigarettes, even if it's something else that's

Starting point is 03:12:14 unhealthy, just make it less unhealthy than the thing you're replacing. And I think this makes sense, right? If you view everything as an adaptation, you can't just rip out that adaptation from somebody's life, it's more effective in many cases to replace the adaptation with another adaptation that can provide a similar role for their life. It'll make the chances of successful change much higher. Okay, I wanted to talk about this, so this is great. I have two examples I want to give. First of all, one for my own life where for a long time, I was waking up and I was reading the news. I just noticed that that's the first thing I was doing. He sounds awful. Okay. Awful. I justified it. I had the

Starting point is 03:12:54 Economist, they have this espresso app it's called and it's just like four or five paragraphs of what's going on around the world. Yeah. Right. Okay. So I'm thinking it's harmless, whatever. But it was wearing on me. And so I was like, I want to stop doing that. I need to replace this with some behavior though.

Starting point is 03:13:07 So what I was actually doing, I think is I was getting up. I would meditate and then I would read the news is like terrible, like two opposite, terrible. There's a terrible pairing. So instead what I started doing is I got rid of the app. I got rid of the service. And I replaced it with reading. I think what it was, my adaptation was, oh, I want to get up in the morning and I want like, you want to feel like I'm getting into the day. Yeah. I'm starting the day off right or whatever. And I don't know,

Starting point is 03:13:31 having that information, you know, it was like when your dad read the newspaper in the morning or something, there's something around that. I don't know. But I replaced it with reading. So it was like, okay, now that's a behavior. I'm reading books that have nothing to do with what's going on the world right now. And it's more about ideas and it kind of gets my mind going for the day because this is what I do. right so that was very successful and it's like that's helped me a lot like my days go my mornings go so much better now yeah just from that one little substitution of behavior i needed something there though yes i tried to just not do it and it fell off it just i felt off yeah yeah so that's a that was a good example another one i just heard recently too um or i've heard it a few times actually um sam par

Starting point is 03:14:12 from uh my first million podcast he's an entrepreneur you know sam right yeah yeah um i didn't know this about him though he was, uh, he was a pretty heavy drinker for a long time. Interesting. He decided he was going to quit drinking. He said he was drinking like 20 beers a day or something like that. Yeah, yeah. I was really surprised by this. And he replaced it with junk food. Yeah. That's how he quit drinking. Yeah. He replaced it with junk food. And I've heard about this like an AA addiction circles. I usually replace their, their, uh, substance with sugar. Yep. You know, that's a very common thing. They still smoke cigarettes and eat sugar. Yeah. I have a family member who did that. And his, his, His doctor even told him, yeah, get fat.

Starting point is 03:14:48 He's like, seriously, go get fat. We'll take care of that once you're done. But right now we just need to get you to stop drinking. So I think there's a lot of situations where that is very, very helpful. Is that always necessary, do you think? Yeah, I think it depends on how ingrained the behavior you're trying to change is. Yeah. If it's like a very fundamental part of your daily routine.

Starting point is 03:15:08 Yeah. And if you're like emotionally dependent upon it in some way, then yes, you probably need to replace it to some degree with something else like in if it's numbing something for you you probably need to replace it with something else that's going to numb you a lot of what marketing is is trying to insert a product as an adaptation into your life right it's like if you think about like newspapers right like at some point somebody some very smart person realize that people want to start their day feeling productive right and so if you convince them to read a paper every morning if you're informed and yeah yeah and then you feel like you're ready to conquer the day like there's just so much stuff

Starting point is 03:15:46 in our life that is ultimately the product of marketers telling us, hey, this is going to make you more adaptable to your environment. So replace this one behavior with this other behavior. Yeah. Yeah. Social media, too. I don't know what you replace that with. I don't really, I'm not on social media that much. So I don't know, video games. Yeah, that's, yeah, that's probably a healthier one, right? Yeah. Like at the end of the day, and then you just keep replacing it at some point or you stop somewhere too and just accept that that's, that's your level. I don't know. But I, yeah, I think. it's fascinating because you do need something to replace it with you you have that adaptation

Starting point is 03:16:20 and that attachment to it that you're absolutely right you're to remove the behavior you've not touched the adaptation at all yeah yeah still have to feed the adaptation totally or change it and it's just easier to feed it so yeah yeah so i think it's probably worth double-clicking a little bit on environmental design you you mentioned really briefly not keeping junk food in the house right no let's dig into that because it's yeah people don't realize this but the structure of your environment around you is making a lot of your behavioral decisions for you. And it's doing it without your awareness for consent. So until you learn how to change that environment in a specific way, you are doomed to follow the path at least resistance. It's funny. You said that you have

Starting point is 03:16:59 trained yourself to work out in midday. Like one thing I did for a long time, I have a home gym. And I noticed that sometimes like it would be easy to neglect going there. And so what I started doing is I just started putting my shoes in the gym. So I couldn't go put my shoes on unless I went to my gym first. And then what started happening was like, like, well, I'm in the gym and I have my shoes on. I should probably pick up something heavy. Right. The store can wait.

Starting point is 03:17:30 Again, it put me in a situation where it's easier to do the thing than the not do the thing. And that was a minimum viable action you're talking to. Correct. There's nothing more basic than that than you could get to around that too. And that's what I always tell people when they're trying to like, especially a workout routine or something, all you got to do at first, especially, just optimize for just showing up. Don't, nothing beyond that.

Starting point is 03:17:51 Like, absolutely nothing beyond that. Just show up. Even if you just go to the gym and sit in there for five minutes, that's a win. Yeah. That's a minimum viable action right there. You know, it's interesting, too, because we, earlier we talked about identity level change being kind of a factor of, like, amassing evidence for being that new person. I think you can actually build evidence in your environment as well.

Starting point is 03:18:10 Stephen Pressfield, which you and I are both a big fan of. of the podcast. He has this great concept just called Going Pro, which what he does, you know, so he teaches a lot of aspiring writers and aspiring creatives. And one of the things that he teaches them is he says that even if you're not professional, even if you're an aspiring screenwriter or novelist or whatever it is, he said, treat yourself like a professional. So go out, put an office in your house, organize your desk, like create a filing system the same way you would if you were, you were a professional. Schedule time on your calendar to sit down and do your craft the same way a professional would do.

Starting point is 03:18:49 Basically, like, adopt all of the behaviors in the environment of a professional, even though you're not a professional. Because his point is that by treating yourself as a professional, you will start behaving like a professional. It will actually become easier to behave as a professional writer than it is to not behave as a professional writer. Because what he has noticed throughout his career is that so many aspiring writers, they see themselves like, oh, well, I'm just, you know, I'm just this aspiring novelist.

Starting point is 03:19:16 Like, nobody's read my stuff. Nobody's going to care. And so they don't take it very seriously because they assume nobody else is going to take it seriously. And his point is like, just start taking it seriously even though you haven't actually done the thing yet. And then the behavior will follow. Love Stephen. Love environmental design stuff. You know, insert the friction where you don't want to do the behavior, remove friction where you do want.

Starting point is 03:19:41 to love all that. That's great. I think there's a little bit though kind of in our industry and just in the larger culture in general. There's like willpower has become a little bit of a bad word. Like oh, don't depend on your willpower, right? It's a depletable resource and, you know, you can't depend on it. It's not reliable. I agree with all that. That's true. But there's still going to be times where you need to just grit through it and do it. You were just talking about how do we get ourselves to do things that we don't want to do, but we know they're good for us. I think at some point,

Starting point is 03:20:13 you know, you're not going to be able to control your environment completely. You're not going to be able to, like, set up your professional office like Stephen wants you to, and it's not always going to work, and there's going to be times

Starting point is 03:20:21 where you just don't want to do it. Yeah. And we've done this before, too. We've talked about, like, the pitfalls of relying on willpower. Again, I think they're true, but I think maybe we've taken that too far sometimes. We say, it's just,

Starting point is 03:20:33 just don't even worry about it. Just don't even try to do it. Like, you still have to do hard things that you don't want to do at some point. right? Yeah. Like how do you, how do you actually see this? Because I'm confused by it a bit, I guess. I see Willpower is like the, the tool of last resort, right? It's like the break in case of emergency. Like if it's your primary tool, you're done. You're going to fail. Yeah. But you're absolutely correct. Like there are going to be day, no matter how well your environment set up, no matter how many nudges and, like, how much friction you remove from whatever your goal is, there are going to be days where you're like, I really don't want to. do this. Right? And that's the moment where willpower kicks in. Right. And it's like, okay, I have to like maintain consistency here. Okay. So it does have a place, but like the goal should be to use it as sparingly as possible. Right. Yeah. Okay. I do like it too. I think you've said this before.

Starting point is 03:21:27 I've seen it in several places, I think, but use your willpower to set up your environment or like when you have it, right? Yeah. That's a good way to go about it too. And this is something James talks about a lot too, right? He says that you don't rise to the level of your goals. He says you sync to the level of your systems. Generally speaking, in that moment, when you are super motivated, yes, that effort is better channeled into building a system that is gonna make the behavior inevitable rather than just doing the behavior a lot

Starting point is 03:21:54 for a short period of time. Yeah, I think it kind of goes back to that too, like life has practice thing as well. Like you're repeating it enough that you will fall back on those systems and at some point you're gonna have to fall back on those systems. And so the practice of it daily. Well, and there's, there are

Starting point is 03:22:10 are ways to make the willpower work for you a little bit, right? So one of the things we haven't talked about yet is social pressure, like the positivity of social pressure, right? So like, you go to CrossFit. Like one of the powerful things about CrossFit is that it leverages social pressure to make you work out harder, right? They put you in teams and you like go for PRs and you compete against each other and it's it's super fun, right? So you get these amazing workouts because you're surrounded by people that you feel like a dick if you're if you're the one slacking. Dude, just the other day I went in, we just did all body weight workouts.

Starting point is 03:22:44 I was like, I could have done this workout at home, but I absolutely wouldn't have. Yeah, absolutely wouldn't have. Yeah. And it's, you know, there's the cliches around, um, you're the average of the five people closest to you. And, um, it, there's a lot of truth to that. There's some research behind that. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:23:00 There's a lot of truth and research behind that. And it's, um, you know, the, generally speaking, the, your, your social relationship kind of set the standard by which you measure yourself. So when it comes to changing your identity or changing how you see yourself, one effective way to do that is to change the people you associate with and to surround yourself by people that you want to become. And then that will recalibrate how you judge yourself and what sort of actions and behaviors you judge as normal and expected and which ones you don't.

Starting point is 03:23:33 The other aspect that I think can make. willpower way more effective. So without getting way inside baseball, which I know you and I could do, there was a school of thought for many years that believed that willpower was fundamentally limited. It was a theory called ego depletion. It was very popular for about 10 or 20 years. It is since not replicated, and so it's kind of fallen out of fashion. But whether willpower is objectively limited or not, let's just all agree that willpower is fucking hard. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. And like you do get fatigued at some point, unless you're David Goggins, there are certain things that you can use to kind of grease the wheels of your willpower, right? So I think social pressure is one of

Starting point is 03:24:16 them. You get a lot more leverage out of your willpower if you're, like, surrounded by people who are rooting for your success or doing the same thing you're doing. I think another thing that, like, leverages your willpower and makes it go much, much further is finding an impactful why behind the change or trying. Yeah, yeah. And this is, this is, this is, this is, this is, this. is something that's very fundamental in motivation that probably doesn't get talked about enough. But like, if you are doing something for very superficial reasons, the emotional fuel that comes with wanting to make that change is going to run out very quickly. Whereas if the motivation for a major change in your life is very deep and profound, that is going to persist over a long period of time.

Starting point is 03:25:03 And so those days that you wake up and you don't feel like doing the thing, you're gonna be much more likely to actually get up and do the thing. I had a great conversation. There's a famous podcaster in the branding and design world and then Chris Doe.

Starting point is 03:25:15 And it was really interesting. I went on his show and he, for some reason, we were talking about exercise. And he was like, I work out every day and I have for like 10 years, but I hate it.

Starting point is 03:25:29 He said, why is that? And I was like, well, that's interesting because most people don't continue to do something they hate for 10 years. So I started asking him a bunch of questions about his motivations or whatever. Short version of the story is that he basically never exercised his entire life. His father, I believe, either died of a heart attack or had a heart attack in a very young age. He has a lot of heart disease in his family. When he had his first kid, he suddenly had this realization of his own mortality and realized, like, oh, my God,

Starting point is 03:26:02 If I have a heart attack the same age, my father did, my kid will be like eight years old. Like my kid won't even be grown up. He might not know his father. And that scared the shit out of him so much that he started exercising every day and he never stopped. I love this story because it's just such a beauty. Like most people when they want to get in shape, they're like, I just want to look good naked. Yeah. Right?

Starting point is 03:26:22 Like, yeah. Or like, like, I want to have good Instagram photos. And guess what? Like, that's a very temporary motivation. It's going to, it's not going to last very long. It's not going to persist on like that like rainy Tuesday morning when you don't want to get out of bed and you don't want to go to the gym. You're going to give up because honestly, who the fuck cares about an Instagram photo? But when you want your kids to grow up and have a father, you're like, fuck the rain, man.

Starting point is 03:26:48 I'm going. There's an intense amount of power in the purpose and the meaning behind what we want to accomplish and what change we want to make. And if we don't have that strong why, I think we're just much more likely to be adrift. No, 100%. I mean, I stumbled upon this in kind of my health journey, I guess, because I didn't start, I was one of those, I just want to look good naked. Yeah. Right. And it did not take very long for that to wear off.

Starting point is 03:27:15 Never worked for me. Yeah, no. Then my parents started having health issues and other people in my family as well. And I kind of like got a little glimpse into my future. And that made me think of, okay, I want to be around and I want to be around for people when I'm old. Right. So I have even been toying with the idea lately is like, I want to live to be 100. Nice.

Starting point is 03:27:37 There's been some old people in my family, not men, the women, but they took care of themselves at least. There's rarely a time where I'm like excited to go to the gym. Usually when I get there and I get to go on, I'm glad I did this and there's like, I feel rewarded after it. I also eat lunch right after it, which is a little, you know, I get my little reward. Nice. There you are.

Starting point is 03:27:54 Right. But the long term vision, the why behind it is much deeper now than it was like at first was just vanity, right? Yeah. health I tried to work out for years for vanity yeah and it never stuck yeah no I never got in shape I never lost my belly like and then I got very unhealthy and I remember when I was 38 I started having chest pains right or no I was 36 I started having chest pains and I remember I went to the right old age of 36 yeah and I'm in I have a lot of heart disease in my family and I remember I went to

Starting point is 03:28:29 I went to a cardiologist and you know I got got a heart scan and everything, it was fine, but he started asking me about my lifestyle. And he was like, you know, have you been stressed lately? Have you been working a lot? What's your diet like? And we just kind of went down the line. And it was just horror show after horror show after horror show.

Starting point is 03:28:46 Told me pretty point blank. He was like, look, your current trajectory, like you're likely to have a heart attack by your mid 50s. Right. If you keep on this same path. And that scared the shit out of me. I was like, no, not doing that.

Starting point is 03:28:58 Yeah, yeah. And that was what changed it. And but that's noticed, that's what, like, Like you start here with the behavior. You have to justify the identity that comes along with it at some point, right? And that you have to have a good story around that. Yeah. And that's where the change kind of comes in with something like this, right?

Starting point is 03:29:12 It's like at a more a more basic fundamental level is you start with that behavior. I'm doing it for whatever reason. Those reasons are probably going to change at some point. And you're going to have to have a solid story around that. It's usually like a strong why you need. Yeah. If you think about it, if your identity is really just a story, it's probably a good story because you've held on to for a long time, right? So the only way you're actually going to sustainably replace that original

Starting point is 03:29:36 story is if you have an equally good or better story to tell yourself. Yeah. Yeah, I think another example of like a good strong why is when you take on a social role too, though. And there's research behind this as well. And I've already mentioned this, right? Like becoming a podcaster, that was a social role I had to take on. But my identity didn't just appear all of a sudden when I said, well, I'm stepping into this role. I had to go through the behaviors. And I'm still going through the behaviors. My identity is still changing around that. But that's like a strong, that's a strong why. Taking on social roles can actually be a very positive and a strong engine for change for people. So like step into the role that you want, the behaviors kind of have to fall into

Starting point is 03:30:16 place at that point. It's parents, right? Like I parenting is a great one, getting married. So many friends who became parents and then immediately got their shit together. Right. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And we talked about the aging too, right? As you age, you take on different social roles. And that's why you probably become more conscientious, less neurotic, more agreeable, is because you're taking on different social roles that require those things of you. And so, yeah, think about the social roles that you're taking on. And that's an engine for change. It's interesting that, like, ultimately impacting others might be a stronger lever for changing yourself than trying to impact yourself. I would agree with that wholeheartedly. Yeah. Fascinating.

Starting point is 03:30:57 So just to review where we are up till now, what we understand is you, us, operates in three layers. There's the trait level layer, right, which is both psychological and biological traits. There's our adaptations, which is the habits, emotional patterns, narratives, identity that we develop to, like, adapt to our environment that we're in. And then there's our actual behaviors, the things that we do regularly in the way. that were known by other people. So you can't really change your traits or your traits will change gradually, slowly over the course of your life,

Starting point is 03:31:35 but if you're over the age of, say, 25 or 30, the ROI on trying to change a trade is not high at all. It's probably, it's better to simply try to identify and accept the traits. And understand, right? Yeah. Adaptations are what we generally understand is ourselves.

Starting point is 03:31:53 And change, like if you want to change your life or change who you are, Generally, what you're saying is you want to change at the adaptation layer. So you want to change those patterns or habits or belief systems that you've adopted at some point in your life to adapt to your environment. That adaptation is no longer functioning well. And so you need a new adaptation to take its place. The way you create that new adaptation is by adopting new behaviors. Because those new behaviors build evidence of a new identity and slowly the narrative of that new identity begins to replace the narrative of the old one.

Starting point is 03:32:26 Now, most people approach these new behaviors through willpower and motivation, but willpower and motivation tend to be short term. What is much more effective is to alter your environment, to make the change inevitable, to find a minimum viable action, remove as much friction as possible, to adopt a useful social role, and find an important why behind the change that you want to make. This, everything leading up until now, there's hours and hours of everything we've talked about, let's call this the slow path to change. Because everything we've just described, it is completely doable.

Starting point is 03:32:59 You've done it. I've done it. Most people watching this have done it. But it takes a long time. It takes months at minimum, in most cases, years, in some cases, decades, depending on how deep-rooted the adaptation is. It's reliable. It's reliable. But it's slow, reliable, path.

Starting point is 03:33:17 It's slow, reliable, and repeatable. Right, right. But there is also a category of change that we still have not talked about yet. And that is the dramatic, massive, instantaneous transformation. Yes, it does exist. You can change without the grinding repetition, without carefully designing every aspect of your environment, without gradual improvements or habituation to new behaviors.

Starting point is 03:33:43 There is such a thing as a dramatic lightning bolt moment. Researchers have documented it. They've even identified a process for it. The catch is, is that you're pretty. probably not going to want to do it. This episode is brought to you by Brain FM. Have you ever tried to change something about yourself and quit? Not because it was hard, but because it was boring?

Starting point is 03:34:04 That's actually one of the most common failure points. Not the start, not the hard part, but the middle stretch where you start doing the work but you just don't really feel any different. You're the same person on the inside just behaving slightly differently, and every day you have to choose to keep going without any real evidence that it's working out for you. This is why I've been using Brain FM for years. Not just as a productivity hack, but as a way to lower the activation energy on the work, I'm trying to make routine. It's functional music built on neuroscience, designed to shift your brain into a focused state within about 15 minutes.

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Starting point is 03:34:59 Brain FM is giving my viewers 30 days of unlimited free access. So head to Brain.fm slash solved. That's brain.fm slash solved. So up until this point in the episode, we've covered what we'll call the slow way of growth. You identify your personality traits, you understand your own adaptations, you deduce the behaviors that are most targeted

Starting point is 03:35:25 towards the adaptation you want to change, and then you build a series of habits and systems to help you implement those behaviors, and then eventually everything will change. Over the course of months, maybe even years, depending on how deep that adaptation is in your consciousness. But this isn't what anybody wants to hear. Nobody, nobody buys a book or gets this far into a podcast

Starting point is 03:35:46 because they're like, yeah, I want to spend the next 18 months, like slowly chisling away at myself. The thing that is always sold to people and that everybody gets excited for is this, idea of spontaneous massive transformation. And this does happen, but I think it happens in the circumstances and in a way that most people don't expect. And if they really understood it, they would not be excited to do it. So for full transparency, this sort of like instantaneous massive transformation, I've really only experienced it once in my life. And it happened when I was

Starting point is 03:36:20 about 19 years old. So a little bit of background. When I was a teenager, I was pretty lazy, spoiled, entitled, depressed a lot of the time, smoked a lot of pot. I wanted to be a musician, but I didn't really have the work ethic to like succeed as a musician. Turns out being a musician is extremely difficult. And I was kind of just floating through life. And I was in music school. It was not going well. I was pretty sure I was going to drop out. And I had a really good friend by the name of Josh. And Josh was much more extroverted than I was. He was very charismatic. He was a year or two older.

Starting point is 03:36:54 So, like, he was a good friend, but I kind of looked up to him. Maybe he was like an older brother type figure. He really helped me get out of my shell. And so it was the summer after I decided to drop out of music school, but I didn't know what I was doing next. And he and I were just hanging out all summer. We were partying together. He was inviting me to a bunch of cool stuff around Dallas, and I would drive up there,

Starting point is 03:37:16 and I would stay with him. and, you know, we were just having a really nice summer together. And he invited me to this lake party. It was kind of this apartment complex built on the side of a small lake, just north of the Dallas-Fort Worth area. And we didn't know anybody there. I think he knew, like, one person there. But we just kind of showed up and, I don't know,

Starting point is 03:37:34 like, Josh was always this guy. He could just show up to any party and, like, immediately make friends with everybody. So we just showed up and started talking to people, and it was going well. It was fun. It was pretty cool. And next to the swimming pool, this was like mid-July,

Starting point is 03:37:46 so it was super hot. next to the swimming pool there was like a maybe a small cliff 20 feet high overlooking the lake and after a few hours people started jumping off that cliff into the lake I had actually wandered away for a short period of time but basically came back out and there was just like police and ambulances and fire department everywhere and the party had stopped and I was like holy shit what's going on and so I started walking around and I'm like wow okay this seems pretty serious like somebody got hurt something happened And I looked around like, girls are crying everywhere, like nobody's talking.

Starting point is 03:38:23 And so I start looking for Josh. And I'm wandering through the crowds, wandering through the police cars and the ambulances and everything. And I can't find them. And after maybe two or three minutes, it like dawns on me of like, oh, shit, maybe he's the person that something happened to. And so it turned out that he had decided to jump off the cliff. The coroners later said that his legs had cramped up, likely from dehydration, from the heat, drinking all day, some drugs. His parents later told me that he was a terrible swimmer, which I had no idea. So basically he jumped into the water, legs cramped up, couldn't swim well.

Starting point is 03:39:04 It was starting to get dark. And so when he started crying for help and he went underwater, nobody could see him and nobody could find him. So he died that day. And it kind of, it shattered my entire life. really in that moment. Up until that moment, I would say that while there were obviously, like, problems in my childhood,

Starting point is 03:39:25 I had never really dealt with any sort of hardship or had to confront my mortality in any meaningful way or had been forced to have any sort of perspective on how lucky I was and how fortunate I was and how much time I was wasting and how much of my potential I was wasting. And like Josh's death, like really, it just forced me to sit with myself for a couple months

Starting point is 03:39:55 and reevaluate everything that I cared about and really question all of my own behavior because there was a very real sense of like, that could have easily been me. And I think anytime somebody experiences a tragic death very close to them like that, it starts, bringing up a lot of those thoughts of like,

Starting point is 03:40:17 am I using my life well? Am I living well? I think if you could point to one event that had more of like where I did a 180 change in my life, it was probably that one. I immediately stopped smoking pot and doing drugs. I immediately signed up for a bunch of business courses at the college. I was attending. I started making really good grades.

Starting point is 03:40:42 I stopped partying as much. I just really got my shit together. And for the first time in my life, like, really thought about my potential and what I was doing with my life and, like, set ambitious goals for myself and, like, really took myself seriously, interestingly enough. It's weird. You know, I've talked about Josh and this story quite a bit publicly. It's in my book. It was an awful and tragic experience, but, like, it was one of the most important things that ever happened to me. And that is the fast way to change.

Starting point is 03:41:14 And this is why I don't think people actually want the fast way to change. Even if it doesn't involve a tragedy, there's actually a few ways it can happen. None of them are particularly pleasant or like easygoing. I think there's a real false impression that's been generated by the self-help industry, that instantaneous transformation, kind of this euphoric epiphany that happens at a weekend seminar, that it's like a party, that it feels like a celebration. It's this out-of-body experience and you go home and just everything's great and you're never the same again. I think that's a myth. And we'll get into the psychological reasons in this chapter. It

Starting point is 03:42:00 largely has to do with the nature of that instantaneous change. It requires a certain amount of collapse of everything that you've known and understood prior. So for you, it was a very clear before and after is what you're saying. You had your life before it, then you had your life after at this one point. It all hinged on that. And you had a very clear, almost break, I would say, and there's like an identity shift there.

Starting point is 03:42:28 A lot of your adaptations, I would say, probably shifted quite a bit. I would say almost all of them. Okay, okay. Yeah. Yeah, we'll dig into that a little bit more. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:42:37 There's like some sort of foundational questioning of everything. even let's say I had gone and done 100 hours of therapy right and like me and the therapist dug that deep to get to that layer I don't think it's something that you can necessarily simply intellectually question or at least not over a short period of time like I do think there needs to be some sort of intense life experience that goes along with it but let's get into the science of it the science itself is interesting and then also what's interesting is how little science there is on it it's just crazy because this is like one of the most fascinating. It's also common. Yeah, and actually fairly common. It's just incredibly hard to study, as we'll see. Yeah, it's shocking. I mean, I imagine a large percentage of people have, like, had some sort of experience in their life that has felt extremely transformational in a short period of time. The experiences themselves are not common, but I think across a lifetime, it's not uncommon. So really, the first person to take this seriously as kind of a scientific subject was William James. And William James is interesting, because,

Starting point is 03:43:42 he also went through a sudden 180 transformation in his life. But his was quite a bit different than mine. So William James, he was maybe the most prestigious American intellectual ever. Definitely one of the most revered American philosophers ever. He's often called the father of American psychology. He's just hugely influential. And interestingly, he came from a very prestigious and influential family. His brother was a famous novelist.

Starting point is 03:44:13 I believe his sister was a famous writer as well. So he came from this family of absurdly high achievers. And he was kind of the black sheep. Like he kind of fucked up at everything he tried to do for like the first 30 years of his life. So originally he wanted to be a painter. His dad highly disapproved of this. He was not very good at it. It didn't really go anywhere.

Starting point is 03:44:36 And he kind of just floundered around into his early 20s until, Finally, his dad was like, you know what, son, you got to, you got to do something with yourself. And of course, like any good father, he went and got him placed in Harvard Medical School. Yeah, right. Wouldn't it be nice? Just shoved him in there. Yeah. Wouldn't it be nice?

Starting point is 03:44:59 Yeah. If all of our fathers, when they disapproved with us, just made a phone call and got us in the Harvard Medical School. So William James got admitted the Harvard Medical School. And then he kind of just bounced around from program to program. Nothing stuck. He didn't really like anything he studied. The medicine at the time, it like made him squeamish. Apparently the first time he saw a cadaver, he fainted. Again, he just felt like a complete and utter failure. It's also worth noting up into this point, like he had suffered a lot of health issues growing up. He had eyesight issues. He had severe back pain. He had been ill on and off throughout a lot of his adolescents. I mean, at this point, he's probably around 25. He has had every advantage and privilege handed to him. nothing has gone well. All he's experienced is suffering and failure. And finally, desperate, he signs up for this expedition to the Amazon.

Starting point is 03:45:51 So it's basically this, like, drastic moonshot sort of project where he's going to go down the South America. He's going to write a boat down the Amazon and chart all of the unexplored territories and stuff that had not yet been charted deep inside the Amazon. It's like a very extreme sort of life decision. So he goes down there, and of course this is the 1860s. And to get to South America in 1860s, as you can imagine, takes months. He gets down there.

Starting point is 03:46:24 He contracts smallpox and almost dies. In fact, it takes him months to recover. By the time he gets home, he is depressed to the point of being suicidal. And he's journaling at this point. And he's journaling about how horrible his life is and how awful everything is and how nothing has ever gone right. And he starts writing down thoughts of ending his own life. And so in his journal, he made an agreement with himself. He said, for the next year, I will take responsibility for everything in my life and I will put all of my effort into

Starting point is 03:47:00 improving my life as much as possible. And if at the end of the year, nothing has gotten better, then I give myself permission. It's, at that point, I have tried. tried everything. And what is interesting is that something in that journal entry crack something open in him because up until that point, he was very much the product of the influences around him, right? He is brilliant siblings who are doing amazing things. He's supposed to go to Harvard. He's supposed to do this amazing expedition. Like, nothing he was doing was really for himself. And in that moment in his journal, he gave himself permission, to just do something for yourself, to just own your own decisions and try to make

Starting point is 03:47:46 lemonade out of whatever lemons life is handing to you in that moment. And much later, he wrote that he attributed this, this moment, this journal entry was the thing that turned it around for him. That was his 180 degree pivot point in his life where the trajectory switched. And of course, he went on and became William James and, you know, all the things that I think. said earlier about him. And that experience would largely influence the school of thought that he became known for, which is pragmatism, which is this idea that you should adopt the beliefs that are most useful to you and most helpful to you. Now, the cool thing about James is that once he did get into psychology, he noticed that there was nothing in the literature that described

Starting point is 03:48:25 what he went through, you know, kind of this like sudden lightning bolt moment where everything turned around for him. And so he decided to research that. And he spent a number of years meeting and studying different people who had had similar experiences. He gave a lecture series in 1901, and then that lecture series eventually became his book called The Varieties of Religious Experience. And I would say to this day, it's probably his best known book. Now, what's interesting about William James' framework around this is that he divided the world up into two types of people. He said that there were the healthy-minded individuals, and the healthy-minded individuals tended to direct their own change slowly over time by altering behavior

Starting point is 03:49:11 and their own beliefs, everything we've talked to up until this point. But then he said there are another group of people, which he called The Six Souls. Sounds like a metal band. Right. And he said that the six souls suffered intensely were kind of like these broken individuals. And it was only under the unbearable weight of their own. suffering that they would have to kind of crack open and have these massive epiphanies and huge transformations that seemingly happened overnight or happened over a short period of time.

Starting point is 03:49:48 And of course, James couldn't help but notice that in many of these cases, that kind of crack open moment was often a mystical or religious experience. And so a lot of what he wrote around this topic had to do with people becoming born again or people having, you know, visions of God or people, you know, having like a deep profound spiritual experience, becoming one with the universe, etc. We're going to come back to that later in this chapter because that is a huge part of this. But I think what's most interesting about James's work is that nobody really picked up the baton and ran with it after him. He did a lot work on this in the early 20th century. And then it just lied dormant for like almost a century.

Starting point is 03:50:37 And it really wasn't until in 1990s, a researcher named William Miller picked up this subject again and decided to start researching where William James left off, essentially. He did pick up. And it was in the 90s. He started getting interested in this. He was at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. And one of the first things he did was put an ad in the newspaper, right? For people, basically, if you've ever had one of these experiences where you've had this very fast, sudden, positive transformation, we want to talk to you. Fifty-five people responded to this ad in, in the paper came in and they interviewed them. So there were people who had been, you know, terrible addicts before that all of a sudden the next day, they weren't.

Starting point is 03:51:18 They were free of their addiction or severely depressed or something just terrible. All of a sudden, they just turned their life around in a day, you know, and started doing everything they needed to What they found from this was kind of these basic characteristics of this experience that happened. One of them was that it was sudden and very unexpected, just like James and all these other people found too. Often literally overnight. You know, it could be maybe a couple days or something like that, but usually, you know, minutes, hours, days at the most. And this sudden rapid change like that. Profound generalized change, too.

Starting point is 03:51:53 Like you talked about with yours, like almost everything seemed to reorganize. Right. And that's everybody described. that same thing too. Everything in my life just reorganized all of a sudden. There's an enduring aspect to it as well. It wasn't just that, oh, I felt this way for a couple of weeks and then it kind of petered out. You know, like a lot of us, when we do try to change, that's what happens. That wasn't the case for them. Another important one, too, perceived that it was externally driven in a way. It came from the outside. This happened to them. Everybody described that

Starting point is 03:52:19 phenomenon. This is something that happened to me. I didn't really have any control over this. It just happened to me. Okay. So they came up with a name for this. They called it quantum change. It's kind of a reference to physics, you know. Like a quantum leap. Right, a quantum leap of sorts. It's this sudden, enduring, lasting change that just happens. They also found two types of this quantum change, too. There's mystical quantum change, which is kind of what more, like James talked about this,

Starting point is 03:52:43 more is the religious experiences or doesn't necessarily have to be religious, but some sort of like deep spiritual. It often involves something like a wind or light or something in the natural world was kind of there. or they had a presence with them, a transcendent presence with them of some kind. Then they had the insightful quantum change, though, too. There were some people who didn't have that necessarily. It was just something all of a sudden clicked in their brains.

Starting point is 03:53:08 Like, oh, God, I've been doing this all along, and it's the exact wrong thing, and I just need to change my entire life, and we're somehow able to do that. Interesting differences, but it doesn't take, like, a spiritual or otherworldliness, you know, force to cause this necessarily. Some people just do it from an insightful vantage point, okay?

Starting point is 03:53:26 Like I said, too, it was enduring. So they did some follow-up work on this. So originally, I think it was 1994 when they published this. And in 2004, they found 30 of those original 55 and interviewed them again. And every single one of them said, yes, that's still the most important thing that's ever happened in my life. And yes, the changes are still real. They're still enduring. They're still here. I'm still that person that changed. There were hints of people kind of poking around this. We've talked before about Debrowski's theory of positive disintegration. My man. Right. That's my man. You love him, right? That's kind of a similar category. Like, he found that people sometimes just everything disintegrates and then rebuilds all of a sudden, too. So he kind of got at this too. Yeah, I mean, to just summarize really quick his work. I mean, first of all, what's fascinating about him is that he was doing work behind the Iron Curtain.

Starting point is 03:54:13 So he was in Eastern Europe, right? He was disconnected from Western psychology. His theory basically positive disintegration, like literally means what it says, which is that it is a positive result of the disintegration of your, understanding of yourself. Right, your identity, yeah. He studied World War II survivors and Holocaust survivors. And what he found was that the majority of the survivors that he interviewed, years later, said that it was one of the most important things that had happened to, like, while it was a horrible experience, it had an incredibly profound positive effect on them.

Starting point is 03:54:45 And it was because it forced this experience of positive disintegration. It destroyed all of their assumptions and identity of who they were before. and so it allowed them to recreate themselves from the ground up in a much more healthy and holistic way. Yeah, and he kind of described like these three stages, the disintegration phase where the existing self-structure, like you said, just goes away. Then there's an emergence of a new consciousness, a new realization that you have, and then a reconsolidation of that identity around it. So very similar to everything with what James saw, what Miller saw, very, very similar. And there's been some work around this where it's like, yeah, there's these people who have these quantities. change events very much matches up with that as well, too.

Starting point is 03:55:26 I just want to hit before we get going, though, too, a couple of things about this. Okay. As you can imagine, this is incredibly difficult. So what they did is, you know, Miller, they put an ad in then paper and has had people come tell us about what happened. They didn't interview anybody before one of these happened, right, and then measured their personality traits or anything. It's all self-report. It's all observational.

Starting point is 03:55:47 Right, right. You know, every now and then they'll try to get other people in their life and be like, is this, can you corroborate this, you know, this change? and is it real and it usually matches up pretty well. But it is a retrospective design. There's some survivor bias too. And people are like, oh, yeah, I've changed. I'll come tell you all about it where the people have, you know, probably failed to change.

Starting point is 03:56:05 Yeah. It won't. We don't have a ton of cases like in the literature either from this. But as you said, it's pretty common. I feel like if it wasn't common, then like just the self-help industry wouldn't exist. Like my sense is that a lot of what is perceived as kind of a sudden transformation in a self-help seminar, it's actually people who are kind of already in this spot, and they're, like, highly influenceable in that moment.

Starting point is 03:56:33 It's interesting. Right, right. So with all those caveats in mind, it's more common than we let onto. We can't predict it very well. It's hard to describe. That's another thing about it is people are like, it's really hard for me to describe this. And so, you know, getting a good handle on, it's been difficult. But one of the things they did notice was that what's really collapsing.

Starting point is 03:56:52 So we've talked about this collapse or this disintegration or whatever it is. What's actually collapsing here are values. Okay? People's values change overnight in these situations, which we did a whole episode on values. It's very hard to change your values intentionally, right? And usually they feel very innate to us. What they found especially in this, like before the quantum change, what people reported, men would rank things like wealth, adventure, achievement, pleasure, being respected as their top values.

Starting point is 03:57:20 women ranked family independence career fitting in attractiveness that was before the change happened after the change though all of the men and women converged on really around just a few things spirituality personal peace family inner peace those kind of like deeper values so all of the just a complete values restuffle overnight and just maybe even just a few minutes too so that adaptation itself is what shifted and then everything else organized around that. I think it's worth double-clicking on the values piece for a moment, because in many ways I do think values are the deepest form of adaptation. Values underpin all of those other things that we talked about. So the way you prioritize your behaviors, the things that you're

Starting point is 03:58:09 motivated to do, the goals that you set for yourself, all of those things are largely dictated by your values, what you choose to find important. Even your emotions are largely a product of your values. Two people can both experience the same thing. One gets really happy. One gets extremely upset. Why? Because they have different values. One person sees the same instance as a good experience. The L1 sees it as a bad experience. Similarly, a lot of our ego and identity and belief systems are largely built and dictated by our values. So the values are kind of like the base foundational layer of all of our adaptations. And so it makes sense that if you go through an experience that causes your values to collapse, essentially causes you to question and doubt what you value in the first place.

Starting point is 03:58:57 Everything exists, you know, all the scaffolding on top of that will just come down with it. So this experience of quantum change, of everything just suddenly changing overnight. I think what has to happen first is that that value structure has to fall apart. And that can fall apart in multiple ways, right? So in my case, it was a traumatic, sudden traumatic experience. You actually see this quite a bit in the literature that there's a concept that we've talked about before called post-traumatic growth. Everybody's heard of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Starting point is 03:59:29 Turns out post-traumatic growth is actually way more common. Most people come out of a traumatic experience believing that they're stronger, that they have more clarity in their life, that they have a stronger sense of what's important to them and what's not important to them. A massive sudden negative event can cause that collapse of your values and cause you to question everything and, you know, reassemble your entire adaptation structure. I think another example is what's these days known as hitting bottom, hitting rock bottom. And I think that's more of like a William James type story. Things just have to devolve slowly over a long period of time.

Starting point is 04:00:09 Like you basically have to watch all of your decisions fail. all of your relationships fail, all of your goals and ambitions fail for an extended period of time. And you have to reach a point of such intense pain and suffering that you're like, okay, I'm willing to just start over from scratch. I'm willing to throw everything out the window and adopt any belief that just gets the pain to stop. Yeah, that's the arena of addicts, right? This is where you see, you know, hitting rock bottom and they talk about how beautiful it can be for an addict even. Yeah. In addiction circles, too, you know, it's like people will suffer intensely, but they still won't drop their base assumptions. Oh, right. Like, they'll still kind of hold on to some of the narratives and adaptations and habits that they have. I think we can all relate to that a little bit. Yeah. And it's interesting because in addiction circles, like, the recovered addicts will say, like, okay, you still haven't suffered enough. You haven't hit bottom yet. Right. Like, bottom, when you hit bottom, it is, everything is distinctions. Like you have nothing left of yourself, of your life, of anything.

Starting point is 04:01:18 And then that's when you can start rebuilding from a new. And then the third way to achieve quantum change is, is through this mystical experience. And this could be a sudden, spontaneous religious experience. It could also be induced through things like psychedelics and meditation. But I think what's interesting when you look at what is happening when somebody has a very spiritual experience or when somebody is all in a lot of psychedelics, what is happening is that there is ego dissolution, right? It's like all of your narratives and understandings of who you are and what's important,

Starting point is 04:01:53 kind of unravel and loosen up quite a bit. And so that creates an opening where you can kind of rebuild in its place. I think this is why psychedelic therapy is like really becoming hot right now because it does seem to be a way that you could potentially shortcut this a little bit and help people reach this place of like letting go of their stories and their beliefs and their values relatively quickly and then and then helping guide them build something up in its place. So yeah, those seem to be the three ways to induce quantum change. Although still not reliably, I'm going, I would say.

Starting point is 04:02:29 Yes. I, correct. You will have a higher chance in one of those situations, but it's not guaranteed. Yes. It's very unpredictable. Yes. Yeah. Two of them require an intense amount of pain,

Starting point is 04:02:40 and then the third requires either some sort of psychoactive chemical or like the fucking hand of God moving you. So this is not exactly a repeatable process. Right. That we can like prescribe to people. Well, as you said, yeah, this has happened once in your life. Yes. For a lot of people, it doesn't happen at all.

Starting point is 04:02:58 Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever experienced anything like this? I don't think I've ever experienced like that real sudden type. I think there are kind of, I don't know what you want to call minor, quantum changes. Maybe that's an oxymoron. I don't know. My mom had a health scare last year. And it was intense. It was intense for the whole family. I went and I helped as much as I could. And I always said I valued family. And there I was. I was valuing family and helping out.

Starting point is 04:03:26 I did notice though, even at this age, I still had some lingering resentments around my parents. Just, you know, like people do. Who doesn't? Who doesn't? Right. Yeah. Like whatever, you did this or didn't do that or all of that and I was still kind of holding on to that. She spent a week in the hospital after that week that was just gone. Like all of that was just gone. There's no resentment for anything they'd ever done, no matter how terrible I thought it was or traumatic somebody else might have thought it was. I just let go of all that.

Starting point is 04:03:56 And that like, that did reshuffle narratives. It reshuffle beliefs. It reshuffled a lot of my behaviors and habits around them. Like that's one of the closer things I think of it had. to that. So it's kind of like a more minor one, which I think that's, that can be more common for people. It's usually with relationships too. It's interesting because if you think about what is the evolutionary role of pain and suffering, it is to get you to change your behavior. Right. Right. Right. And everything we've talked about up into this chapter has been like the pleasant way to

Starting point is 04:04:29 change, right? Here's how to make a gym habit more fun, right? Like here's how to improve your relationships on autopilot, right? But it takes months. And you have to do it for years. Pleasant experiences don't change you nearly at the same rate or intensity that painful experiences do. And that is by design, right? It's like pleasure is nature telling you. It's your biology telling you don't change. You're doing good. Like, stay right here, right? Pain is your biology telling you you need to change, motherfucker, because this is not working. So it makes sense that, rapid, highly intense change requires highly intense amounts of pain to achieve it. So all of these cases of rapid transformational change, they look different on the surface. You know, mystical experiences, traumatic loss, hitting rock bottom. But underneath them all, there is one sequence that runs through them all. So the first one is your initial adaptation structure needs to fail in some way.

Starting point is 04:05:32 It has to stop working. And the consequence of it not working is that you experience a lot of pain and suffering. right? So you're failing to achieve your goals. A lot of the things you believe to be true are actually not true. A lot of your relationships that you thought were good are actually not good. That is what your adaptation structure failing is. It's like fucking suffering. Step two is that there has to be a consequential crisis of meaning.

Starting point is 04:05:56 You watch your adaptation structure fail and then there's this questioning of like, how could I have been so wrong? Like, do I know anything? Is everything I've done meaningless? Right. There's a lot of that. Exactly. Exactly. I would say this was like what I felt intensely after my friend died is I really just sat around for like the next month obsessively thinking about like what have I been doing for years. Like I've been wasting my entire life for years. Step three is that there is a forced reconstruction. They often call this the crisis of step two and existential vacuum. It's basically there's a void of meaning. of like where your understanding of yourself and the world is. And vacuums, they always get filled, right? So at some point, you start to reconstruct meaning in your life.

Starting point is 04:06:48 You start deciding on new values, a new identity, new things that you want to be in the world. Even though you're deciding these things, this is still not really a euphoric thing. It's still, there's a lot of uncertainty, right? It's like, okay, the old me was doing everything wrong. The new me, I have some idea. ideas about how I want to be in the world, but I've never lived this way before. I've never been this person before. So I don't totally know if I'm doing it right. I don't know if this is actually the way I should be. I really experienced this. After I stopped drinking, there was

Starting point is 04:07:23 definitely this extended period of like, I don't know what I like anymore. I don't know what type of people I like going out with anymore. I don't know what my hobbies are anymore. Right. And so then I was like kind of just being like, well, I guess I'll be a surfer. And so, see what happens. Right. Yeah. And then there's this period where you're like going out surfing, you're like, do I like this? I don't know if I like this.

Starting point is 04:07:44 Is this, is this me? Like, am I this person? And so there's this like just this kind of awkward teenage phase that happens, I think, as you kind of reconstruct your identity. And then finally, step four is the reorganization kind of coalesce simultaneously, right? So it's at some point, everything kind of starts slotting together of like new belief systems, new values systems, new relationships, new behaviors. These adaptations exist in a network, in a web.

Starting point is 04:08:16 You can't only get new relationships without also getting new behaviors and new beliefs and new values, right? Like all of them have to change simultaneously. Right. And if it is a value that has collapsed at that point, once you find the value, like everything is built off of that. And it's it's fairly clear, right? When you have a strong value, the behavior.

Starting point is 04:08:37 change instantly, the narratives, the beliefs, everything changes right around that. It becomes a forcing function. Let's say you go through some sort of existential crisis or something or traumatic experience and you come out of it and you decide my family is the most important thing in the world. That prioritization of family, like that becomes the lens by which you make all your decisions, by which you create all your behaviors, by which you generate all your new beliefs. Everything optimizes for that. You just told me the steps. Yes. Right. Why can't we do this on purpose? Why can't we make this happen on purpose? If we know the steps, we can describe it. Like I said, we've just wanted through all these frameworks. I can tell you how it works. Everybody

Starting point is 04:09:21 does, goes through these phases, do these steps. Why can't we do this on purpose? You know, I don't know if we can't. But if we can, I think we can only really do it on like a very minor scale. these massive sudden changes I think part of what makes them so powerful is that they cannot happen on purpose like you said they have to happen to us because the part of you that needs to change the most is the part of you that is the most determined

Starting point is 04:09:49 to stay the same. You can't voluntarily collapse your identity, right? That's kind of what you're saying. Because of your identity, its whole job is to have this like cohesive story about who you are. It's literally there to say, no, this is who I am and I'm not going anywhere.

Starting point is 04:10:03 And so if you're deliberately trying to say, hey, get out of there, like, it's going to rebel right away, right? It's also the thing that's trying to get it out of it. Like, right? Yeah, yeah, right. Who is trying to get rid of your identity? Your fucking identity. He's right. The dog chasing the tail, right?

Starting point is 04:10:19 Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's almost like a survival mechanism, you know, that it's just, that's just not going to happen. You're not going to destroy your own identity just by thinking about it or just by trying really hard to do it. It's just not going to happen. I think another one is the, you know, your values clarification. If you're aiming at, I'm trying to change this value, that's also a story that you tell yourself.

Starting point is 04:10:41 And it's looking for coherence, not truth. And so the narratives all around that, those are there to protect you as well. They're there to just give your life a coherent story, no matter if it's serving you or not. And so dislodging that again, it's like a survival mechanism. We need to make sense of the world. And so just trying to pull a random value out of the mix of all the values and habits and beliefs that you have and narratives and all that, that's very, very destabilizing. And so again, you just have the self-protective function that's just not going to allow you to do that. Yeah, I feel like the value change piece of this, I feel like you can't really change more than one value at a time voluntarily.

Starting point is 04:11:26 right? And then like what we're talking about is just like a complete and other collapse of your entire value system. You know, it's like the entire value hierarchy just just gets inverted or something overnight. That's not going to happen willingly. Right. The closest approaches that we do have, William Miller, the same guy who coined the term quantum change, also came up with he was the co-inventor of what they call motivational interviewing, which is like a less intense kind of like deliberate trying to show people, okay, you say you value this, but. but here you're behaving this way, and now let's get in and do the work in between. It's slow, though. It's not, you're probably not going to get quantum change out of that, necessarily. Meditation or another contemplative practices can kind of get you there as well. It's very intense, very long, probably years, if not decades worth of that. So again, not really quantum change, but, you know, you're aiming at that.

Starting point is 04:12:16 I think psychedelics might be the closest thing we have, but again, it's not guaranteed. It can do a lot of things that don't equate to quantum change. Yeah. Right. And you probably also need to be in the presence of like a very skilled. Yes. Therapist. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:12:32 Who's used to working with people on psychedelics. Yeah. You do a lot of prep work. You do the experience and you do a lot of integration work after. I've experienced ego dissolution on psychedelics. Like I've lost complete sense of myself and became one with the universe and all this stuff. And I came out of it thinking that I was like a new person. I was the same fucking idiot.

Starting point is 04:12:48 Like I just had new things to laugh at. That was pretty much all that happened. Right. Yeah. I think there's a real risk there. of thinking, I've went through this experience, and I've, oh, look at how much I've changed and you haven't. I think that's the risk with psychedelics, so I would caution. Can we just, like, pause for a second? Because that happens all the time. And I think, I think, not just with psychedelics,

Starting point is 04:13:07 too. I think you see. Big change in general, yeah. Yeah, you see it happen. People read a book, and they're like, oh, my God, this book changed my life. And they're doing the same shit. Like, it's endemic, particularly in the personal growth space. I see it all the time with, with people, people become kind of addicted to telling themselves they changed without actually living the change or implementing the change. Or there's also a little bit of a dopamine hit of changing something small in your life, right? Like having like a new smoothie in the morning with a new supplement and then like convincing yourself that that has completely altered your energy levels for the last month straight and you're a new person because of it. It's narratives like that that we want to believe and because we want to believe them, we're more likely. likely to believe them, it's not real.

Starting point is 04:13:55 The thing around psychedelics, like you said, the highly structured, highly intensive work that you do around it, it's not the experience itself necessarily. That's the opening up experience, like you talked about, the dissolution, the eco-dissolution or the identity dissolution. That's what that's there for. It's all the work you do before, around, and after it. They've showed this to, you know, with the terminal cancer patients, Roland Griffiths, a famous researcher who did this work, found that, you know, if you put them through this pretty rigorous

Starting point is 04:14:24 therapeutic protocol involving psychedelics, okay, that you could really get them to, it was around end-of-life anxiety. You could really get them to accept it more and have these big changes. And they were probably a quantum change at some point. Also, in those settings, too, they interviewed people, the people around them. So before, during, and after two to see, and they're like, yes, this person definitely did change. It really did change. But it's a, again, it's a highly structured, highly intensive, very expensive process and quite painful again, too. Yeah. Yeah, it can be scary. And I would argue, too, that like, you probably need to be in a certain amount of pain for it to be susceptible to the benefits of it. One of the things that I run into all the time out

Starting point is 04:15:08 of here is like people are doing psychedelic therapy as like a fucking hobby. It's like going to the doctor and not being injured, right? Yeah. And then being like, this doctor changed. my life. It's like, dude, you weren't injured. Do you know, well, you want to know what the, one of the best predictors of actually coming out with like a powerful mystical experience through psychedelics is? No. Having low expectations. So the people who take into thing, I'm going to get, like, I'm going to go some wisdom or something like that. This life change. It's just going to change your life, bro. But what we said, you know, you had to have some amount of pain. These people, they're on their deathbeds facing cancer. They're like, whatever, give me sure. Why? I have

Starting point is 04:15:46 zero expectations that this is going to work. And for whatever reason, that's like one of the most best, the best predictors that it actually will work. Just from my anecdotal point of view, like most of the people I've met who have done it, like, I can't really see anything that has changed or anything that's different. But I do have one friend that it like seems to have actually made a massive difference in a short period of time. But again, the thing about him is that he was literally on his last resort. Like he was dealing with some issues that had been, going on for years that he had gone everywhere, right? He had gone the therapy.

Starting point is 04:16:21 He had gotten marriage counseling. He had gotten psychiatric medicine. He had tried everything. And he was just like on his last leg. And he was like, fuck it. Let me try this. And then that was the thing that broke through for him. Right, exactly.

Starting point is 04:16:35 It's almost like he was probably pretty close to the bottom to begin with. So maybe it might even be that the psychedelics just accelerate the process. That's if it's already in motion, which is probably. probably true of like the self-help seminars thing, right? Like I think there probably are people that do seemingly have quantum changes at self-help seminars, but they are probably people who are near or already at bottom when they attend. And they're just like, fuck it, what do I have to lose? That's actually what they found too in the in the little research that they've done. Like Miller has found that. It's actually not as sudden as you would think. There's actually this whole big period that builds up to it and it just gets to a breaking point at some. point and for whatever reason all the factors come together and produce it. So that's, that's actually very important. So there's usually a building up period that comes with it. That's the how to change your life in one day, kids. You also, you recently did a YouTube video on this. I encourage

Starting point is 04:17:32 people to go. Yeah. Go check this out too. Yeah. Yeah. So in that YouTube video, I really do take a stab at like, okay, if you can intentionally force this in your life, like here's probably how you would do it. I have this whole idea around an anti-vision and this like exercise and process you go through. It's ultimately to get that really profound lightning bolt moment, you probably don't want to go through what it takes to get it. And if you do go through what it takes to get it, you deserve to have it essentially. Yeah. Yeah. So probably not the conclusion people we're hoping for, but here at the Solve Podcast, we're not in the business of telling you what you want to hear. So up until now, we've we've covered all.

Starting point is 04:18:13 of the mechanisms and processes of changing yourself, how to change your life. There's one more aspect to this topic we still have not talked about yet, and it is arguably the most important aspect of change and how to change your life. And that is the cost and the maintenance of change. What are you going to have to give up to change and how much effort is it going to take to sustain the change? I think a lot of people unreasonably want to change and not give anything up, and that's why they don't change. So in the next chapter, we're going to talk about what is the price of change and how do you know if you're willing to pay it? This episode is brought to you by waking up. Most attempts at changing yourself fail because you can't talk your way into being a different person.

Starting point is 04:18:55 You have to actually do something long enough that the inside of your head starts to change too. And one of the only practices that does this reliably is meditation. Now, I've been meditating on and off for over 20 years and I've tried every app on the market. But the only one that I've stuck with is waking up. It was designed by Sam Harris, neuroscientist and philosopher, and you can feel that in the app. It doesn't treat meditation like a relaxation hack. It's designed for people who actually want to understand their own minds, not just turn them off for 10 minutes. So if you want to change something about how you experience your life from the inside out, this is a practice that can do it. And waking up is giving solved listeners a free 14-day trial. So if you've gotten anything out of

Starting point is 04:19:35 today's episode and want to actually change something about how you live in your own head, this is where I would start. Go to wakingup.com slash solved. That's wakingup.com slash solved. So I think it'd be cool to start this chapter, Drew, with the story of Alcoholics Anonymous. Do you know how it started? No. No. So, okay. So it's actually a fascinating story. And it dovetails with so much of the stuff that we've talked about so far. So there was a guy named Bill Wilson. He was a Wall Street guy in the 1930s and raging alcoholic. Like, we're talking fucking world champion alcoholism here, put himself in the hospital multiple times,

Starting point is 04:20:17 like literally had doctors look him in the face and be like, you are drinking yourself to death. You need to stop. He couldn't stop. He couldn't figure out how to stop. He tried everything. It just kept like, he just kept spiraling out of control.

Starting point is 04:20:29 He lost his job. He lost marriages. He lost his money. He lost everything. Yet he kept drinking. And then one day in 1934, he ended up back in the hospital, yet again,

Starting point is 04:20:41 same hospital he ended up every single time and he had well he had a quantum change mystical experience so he was laying there in the hospital bed suddenly he said that the room filled up with a white light and he felt this the holy spirit blow through the room and he suddenly became intensely aware of what he was doing to himself in the future that he was creating for himself and amazingly he got sober like right then and there never had another drink And he became so profoundly inspired by this event in his own life that he became obsessed with precipitating it in other alcoholics lives. He dedicated his life to figuring out how he could replicate that experience for other alcoholics. And so he went back.

Starting point is 04:21:29 He read William James's work. William James was of the belief that the only way to defeat addiction was religion. He didn't see any other way to do it. So then Bill Wilson started Alcoholics Anonymous, the support group framework that still exists today and has helped millions of people kick alcoholism and addiction. But here's the interesting part about Bill Wilson's story that nobody really talks about, which is that, yes, he got sober. And yes, he helped millions of other people get sober. But he still struggled intensely with depression. He still serially had affairs and cheated on his wife.

Starting point is 04:22:05 he would still go out and disappear for days on end. In many ways, he was still kind of the same person. And so while the alcohol adaptation got completely removed and replaced with other adaptations, the underlying traits of Bill Wilson persisted. And he never really found a way to adapt to them or deal with them. Even decades later, when LSD was invented and they started doing early experimentation on LSD for therapeutic use cases, Bill Wilson was one of the first people that signed up. So he was still searching for a way to fix himself, to change himself, even after being sober for 20 years, even after inventing the most successful addiction treatment program in history.

Starting point is 04:22:50 So this raises a question, which is, did Bill Wilson really change? We kind of mentioned this already. Do you have to replace that behavior or that identity with another one in order for it to be a real change? Is that a real change? Are you still you? What constitutes a change? I don't know. You hear stories like this a lot, though.

Starting point is 04:23:09 People, they'll turn their lives around in a lot of ways, and then there's still them in some way. You know, they still have to find a way to be themselves and live with themselves. Yeah. I think this comes back to the early point in this episode and that there is a certain layer of yourself that is just not going to change.

Starting point is 04:23:30 There is the trait level that no matter what you do, It's going to be down there. And the best you can do is find healthier and more functional adaptations for it. And Bill Wilson seemed to like really nail fixing the alcoholism adaptation. But he still had all these other traits that were causing them problems. And he never really found adaptations for those. Yeah, those drives don't go away. Those are fundamental.

Starting point is 04:23:56 I think you're right. I think their trait level fundamental drives and desires. And I don't know if you could have changed those. And it raises an age-old question, particularly around addiction, which is that do you actually defeat an addiction or do you just re-channel it, right? And you see this all the time, right? It's like former drug addicts. They become endurance athletes or they become obsessive workaholics, you know, or they become junk food addicts or they become junk food addicts or whatever. It's like often the addiction or the compulsion is not defeated.

Starting point is 04:24:28 It is simply just channeled into a new adaptation that's slightly more. functional and healthy. Hopefully healthier. Yeah. Yeah. To me, the point of the Bill Wilson story is that every story you hear of change, right, every time you get online or like watch a movie or an interview, read a memoir and somebody talks about the change in their life, it is always this neatly packaged before and after story, right? It's always this like, I was this person on day one, and then X, Y, Z happened, and then I became a new person on day two. And, and, What's missing in all these stories is the messy, ambiguous middle that happens. Everything is presented as like a clean before and after photo as if it's like...

Starting point is 04:25:12 We love a before and after photo. Yeah, we all love a before and after photo. Yeah. There is a lot of messiness that goes on in between. And while a lot of things do change, there are certain layers and aspects of ourselves that don't. And there's a certain cost and a maintenance that comes with that change that also never really gets discussed. There was this researcher named William Bridges, who was really into this. He was really into that messy middle that you're talking about.

Starting point is 04:25:36 He spent decades studying this and trying to figure out what goes on there. And he came really to the conclusion that editing out that messy middle, that's one of the quicker ways to get people to quit, to stop changing or to not even try, because we don't see that immediate before and after photo. We don't see that right away. And so he said, actually, what we need to do is focus on this part. And so he came up with like these three phases of change, basically. Phase one was the ending, the ending of the old you, the old narrative, the old value, right?

Starting point is 04:26:07 Interestingly, though, what he really spent a lot of time on in this is kind of like the grief aspect of that loss, right? We've talked a little bit about this before, but when you change, you have to leave an old identity behind. You have to leave your old you behind. That's painful. There's a sadness that comes with it. Very much a sadness, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you've experienced this.

Starting point is 04:26:29 Oh, yeah. I've, like, mourned old versions of myself, I feel like. There's also a certain, like, I guess, kind of mortality piece that comes with it as well. Yeah, you're like that I'm never getting that back. Yeah, it's like that's a period of my life that's never going to come back. And while I would never go back there, I do kind of mourn the fact that it's over and that it's a piece of me that I'm never going to get to experience again. Even narratives and identities that weren't healthy. No, yeah.

Starting point is 04:26:57 I can be very sad to even lose those too. Totally. Because that's your story. That's your coherent way you've told your story and who you are. As you know, I partied my ass off through my 20s. And I remember when I finally settled down and I got married and I started focusing on my health more. Like there was this realization of like, I'm never really going to have that again. Or even if I do like, even if I go through a midlife crisis and party a little bit again, like it's never.

Starting point is 04:27:26 going to be the way it was when I was like 24 or 25. And I don't want to go back, but there was like a very deep sadness of like, that's over. I'm never getting that back. You're never going to have that kind of fun again, you know? Yeah, yes. Not that kind. You'll have others and yeah. And even if I go to the same party and do the same drugs and hang out with the same people, like it's not going to feel the same. Yeah. Yeah. The next phase he got into, though, he called it the neutral zone. I think the overall feeling that of this phase, though, is a disorientation that you have around this. I'm here right now, Mark, actually. I'm here right now, so go back to my attachment stuff I've been working on.

Starting point is 04:28:02 Forever I've been disavoidant. This is how I've dealt with that part. These difficult emotions was just to avoid them. I have that. It's a protective mechanism. I get that. That story is fading away. I'm having to grieve that old me.

Starting point is 04:28:18 I don't know what to replace it with right now, though. It's very disorienting. I don't have that, that crush to fall back on, that story to tell myself, that no, no, no, you don't need to get close to people because it doesn't, it's fine. It doesn't matter. But now I'm sitting here and now I have to actually deal with all these emotions. And all these, all these like fears that I have and all that, it's incredibly disorienting just because you don't have that anchor, that story to tell yourself. Right. You have to build new, tools and new adaptations. Yeah. That's phase two. You could call it the void too. Because at this

Starting point is 04:28:50 point, you know, again, your life was organized around those values that you had. You know, for me, I think just remaining safe in a way. You know, like that calm that I could get from that, even though it was a detached calm, I still had a calm. When you organize your life around something like that, and then it's taken away from you. Yeah.

Starting point is 04:29:09 Obviously, it's that vacuum you're talking about. Existential vacuum. I'm just in the process right now. Nothing's filled it yet, and I don't know, don't quite know yet. But it's, yeah, it sucks. It sucks. I'll tell you that right now.

Starting point is 04:29:21 It does. We'll get to that here in a second two, though. But then you have the third phase, which is the new beginning. That probably sounds a little more optimistic than it actually is, to be frank, because really what happens is it's more like you just realize at some point, like, oh, yeah, I'm different now.

Starting point is 04:29:37 There was no, like, bright light moment where this all changed. It was just you're walking down the street and you're like, oh, I don't feel that way anymore. And I have this new value system and that's in place and this is my life now. I don't think it's as romantic as people want to make it necessarily. I mean, my experience with this, so after Josh died, I spent probably a good couple months. I mean, obviously there was a very real component of grief that was going on. And then I would say I was probably in the neutral zone for a few months of like, what am I doing with my life?

Starting point is 04:30:13 Nothing I've done up to this point. Seems like it matters. Who am I going to be? What should I do? When I try to think back to that period of like coming out of that. that. What did that new beginning look like? It's interesting because, you know, I think it's like finding those first things, those first new adaptations that feel exciting that you feel optimistic about. You've just gone through this like multi-month period of like not really being excited about

Starting point is 04:30:41 anything. And so when you do find that first thing, then like, oh, okay, no, this could be, this could be me. This could be like my thing. My recollection is that there is like a pretty like intense excitement around it of like, or an optimism, I guess. And not just an optimism, but like an optimism that that's like being handed a glass of water in the middle of the desert, right? An optimism you have not felt in a long time. Right, right. I get that. I agree with that too. I think a lot of times those changes nearly as, it's probably not as sexy as a lot of people think. And really what Bridges, his whole point was that people don't resist the change necessarily. They resist those transitions. we hold on to those old selves,

Starting point is 04:31:23 whether they were helping us or not, whether they were healthy or not, we'll cling to them, because again, that's, it's safe. We know it at least. There's no uncertainty about it. The phase one, the ending, the grieving space, that's, again, it's disorienting,

Starting point is 04:31:36 and it's painful, and we don't know where we're going with it. People resist that transition. Then they resist getting into the disorienting neutral zone, too. They've, like, had to accept that, okay, that old self has gone, now what? You could easily just go back to where you were. And that's usually what I've done, honestly, up until this point.

Starting point is 04:31:54 My whole point, though, about all this, is that pain is not a signal that you're not growing, right? When you're in the middle of this and you are disoriented, like I'm feeling this right now, and I'm having to face a lot of things that I have avoided for a very long time, it's painful. It's very painful. That pain is not an indication, though, that growth is not happening. It's quite the opposite. it. I've turned away from that. I've been saying this for years, Mark. I've been saying, oh, pain is a great teacher. I need to take my own medicine here. What does that actually mean?

Starting point is 04:32:27 Because, yes, pain is a great teacher. Like you said, it's really the only thing that gets us to change at the end of the day. So if you want to change, you're going to have to sit in that. And it's not fun. It's not easy. This is why most people don't change. It's because they don't want to sit with this pain that you have, of losing yourself, of facing uncertainty, of trying to trying to be somebody you're not right now. That is probably the discomfort of the new beginning phase as well, is that like you feel like you're behaving in a way that's not totally you. You're like,

Starting point is 04:33:01 you kind of feel like you're faking it or you like question yourself. Like, is this really me? Do I really want to be doing this? My avoidance that I've had, it's protected me all these times because I don't got to get close to anybody. I don't get close to anybody. Then they can't leave and it won't hurt. So there's a pain in losing the avoidance part of it.

Starting point is 04:33:18 But then there's also, I got to turn towards the pain of this is, that's just a possibility now. And am I the kind of person who's going to lean into that and try to explore what that is? And it's going to be very, very painful. So it's not only that there's a lot of pain going on right now, it's like there's actually a lot more ahead to. Everywhere you look, the pain train's waiting for you. It is. So yeah, I don't know. That's, that's where I'm out with it right now.

Starting point is 04:33:40 And it's, uh, it's, uh, it sucks. Yeah. It sucks. Yeah. I'm not going to sugarcoat it. Yeah. It sucks. Well, you'll make it.

Starting point is 04:33:49 Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I'll be for that's the other thing, though, too. It's like, I know it'll be fine. Yeah. Let's talk about the social cost of change. Because I think you've summarized, well, the individual cost of changing yourself. But there is a social cost as well. It's the fact that, like, a lot of people in your life really signed up for a specific

Starting point is 04:34:10 version of you. And so if that, that version of you fit into their world in a specific way and they're comfortable with it. And so as soon as you start changing, a lot of people, not everybody, but a lot of people, sometimes they react poorly and they will try to hold you back in different ways. There's this idea of the crab bucket effect, which is if you put a bunch of crabs in the bucket and they start trying to climb to get out, as soon as one crab starts to make it, the other crabs will actually pull it back in.

Starting point is 04:34:43 And there is something innate in us. And I think a lot of this is based in the idea that if we feel stuck, it feels threatening to see somebody we know and care about actually successfully change themselves. Not just because of what it potentially says about ourselves and our own inability, but also I think there's probably a fear of abandonment of like, it's like, oh, well, if Drew figures his shit out, then like, he's going to have no reason to stick around with me. And so they become insecure and they unconsciously try to pull people down. Interestingly, if you look at the research on addiction relapse, some of the most common reasons for people's relapse is social.

Starting point is 04:35:23 It is the people around them tempting them to come back in. Right. Those old environments, those old relationships. Yeah, yeah. There is a very real component of this where it's like, you need to look at the people in your life and ask yourself, like, is this person a good influence on me? Are they helping me become a better version of myself? or are they holding me back in some way? For whatever reason,

Starting point is 04:35:43 this seems to have gotten blown out of proportion on TikTok and Instagram and it feels like people are just like cutting people out of their lives just willy-nilly. Like, oh, you don't like my new shirt? I'm never talking to you again, right? And I think there needs to be a pretty high threshold

Starting point is 04:35:57 for cutting people out. I also just think it like it depends on the severity of your situation, right? Like, if you're a drug addict and all your friends are drug addicts, then like, yeah, you should probably go find new friends. You know, if you're just trying to be a hashtag Fabulous and your friends are being Debbie Downers,

Starting point is 04:36:13 like you probably need a better reason than to cut them out of your life. I've either just not noticed this in my life or I've just had really good friends. And any time I've had tried to change, they've just been supportive around it, even if that's not their thing. There's kind of two clusters in my life where I experienced a lot of this. The first one was when I decided to become an entrepreneur, when I started to start my first business. Everybody I went to university with was like moving into the corporate world and like getting nice corporate jobs.

Starting point is 04:36:45 And I abandoned my corporate job and started a website. There was a lot of condescension. There were some friends who just kind of stopped hanging out with me. There was also a lot of criticism and condescension in my family. So that was really tough. And that was very much a moment where I was like, I know this is right for me. And so if people are not going to support me in this, then like, yeah, it's probably better off that they're not, you know, in my life. The second cluster in my life that this happened around was when my book took off.

Starting point is 04:37:24 And I think this was much more, it was an insecurity thing. I think there were a few people in my life that when suddenly I'm making a bunch of money and achieving a certain amount of, like, fame and success. like things got weird with them, right? I think it's any, any friendship or relationship where there was like kind of a status game, it really brought that status game to the surface. It's not that I like lost a bunch of friendships around that period, but it just, it just made things weird with a number of people. Most of my friends have been very supportive.

Starting point is 04:37:56 Like when I quit drinking, not that they were big drinkers to begin with, I guess. Maybe that was part of it is that, you know, they probably had a normal amount of drinking that they were doing. They're like, yeah, you don't want to drink, fine, that's fine. I think another thing, though, too, is that I've never tried to, like, shove it back in people's faces, too. I think that's something we need to kind of highlight is that when you are going through these changes, like, do be a little bit considerate over other people's where they're at. They're not at the same spot as you.

Starting point is 04:38:22 See a lot of people change, and then they think everybody should be doing this, right? That's going to ruffle some feathers that don't need to be ruffled. Yeah. Let people do their thing. I think it's worth saying, too, like, especially if you experience a quantum change, like, there is a real tend to, to kind of become evangelical. Growing up in Texas, I have a number, I know a number of people who became born-again Christians.

Starting point is 04:38:43 And it's actually a pretty well-known. I mean, if you grew up around in those sorts of communities, it's well-known that, like, the people who are, like, the pushiest with religion are the born-again's, because they see how it saved them, and they assume that everybody else needs to be saved, too, right? So I've definitely seen that with psychedelics in the last five years or so, like, there's a number of people I know who never did psychedelics,

Starting point is 04:39:11 and then they did it in their 30s or 40s, and it was very profound and impactful for them, and now they, like, don't shut the fuck up about it and, like, are literally pushing drugs on people. And I feel like I'm always just the wet blanket who's like, hey, dude, time out, you realize you're, like, pushing illegal narcotics on, like, unsuspecting people who don't know anything about this. And that is a good point, that it can go both ways, right? It can be the people around you can be jealous. They can be insecure. They can be like a little bit resentful.

Starting point is 04:39:40 But also you can kind of get high on your own supply. Yeah. And start thinking everybody needs to do exactly what you did. And everybody should see the world the way you see it. And it's like that's not really the case either. Let's talk about another cost, right? So we've talked about psychological cost. We've talked about the social cost.

Starting point is 04:39:59 There's also a maintenance cost. There's just a, I guess it's another psychological cost. but it's not acute. It's like extended over a long period of time. It's the fact that the most common way people fail to change is not that they fail to start. It's they fail to be consistent. They lose track of the change over, you know,

Starting point is 04:40:19 after two, three weeks and then they relapse. And you see this in the data as well in like fitness apps around New Year's. Like it's actually pretty staggering how many people are able to start a new behavior. It's all equally as staggering how many people are like, have failed by February 1st. It's by far the bigger problem of the two.

Starting point is 04:40:39 I think there's a real argument that the biggest reason people fail to change is simply because they underestimate the maintenance costs of maintaining a change over a long period of time. And the second order effects that that change is going to bring, right? It's like, it's easy to say you want to quit drinking or you want to lose 20 pounds. But when we think about these changes, we tend to only think about the beginning of the change. We don't think about three months in, six months in. How is being in a new career going to affect your social life? How is it going to affect your daily routine? How is it going to affect

Starting point is 04:41:12 your hobbies and interests, right? Like all of these areas of your life are going to be impacted by that change. But if you're not setting aside time to think about the maintenance of that change, you're probably going to get blindsided by it, which is, you know, it comes back to the fact that, like, making a change and maintaining the change are two different skills. And most of the content and advice out there is focused on the making of the change. And very little is about on the maintenance of the change. But even in the research too, Mark, we see that. There's a 2024 systematic review of behavioral change studies and all that. They could only find 19 clinical trials that track outcomes more than a year out. So even like the researchers are just obsessed with like this initial

Starting point is 04:41:58 change phase and not the maintenance phase. It is a big blind spot across the board. It's also just like, what does maintenance, what does change long-term durable change actually require? And how many hours have we just spent talking about that? So like I get it. It's difficult. But the environmental persistence, the environmental design that you have to do, that's tough, right? The roles, we talked about social roles a little bit in there. You take on a social role. You have to maintain that social role. You have to maintain all the second order effects that come with that social role, too. Relationships, we just got some talking about those. There's a big monkey wrench that it can throw off change or reinforce it or derail you at

Starting point is 04:42:36 some point. Your identity. We, you have to, like, take on a new identity too. That's not easy. James Clear talks about this. And if you're going to create a new habit of any kind, eventually it has to become an identity. That's painful like we talked about.

Starting point is 04:42:50 You know, we talked about environmental design and trying to control all of this. There's always going to be some wild card that comes in and it's going to, it's going to to throw you off. So you're, you're going to have to plan for relapses or re-exposure to old environments or old relationships that are going to challenge you and challenge the, the durability of the change that you've made. Change is hard. We just spent all these hours talking about this for a reason, though. I think fundamentally there just needs to be a mindset shift around this of maintenance is the change. It's relatively easy. exciting to start a change, it's difficult and boring and unsexy to maintain the change.

Starting point is 04:43:32 It's probably just useful for people to reorient their perspective to see the maintenance of the change is the actual work. Like that's actually what you're doing and that's actually what you should plan and focus on. Starting a new change is is relatively easy comparatively. That was a lot. If anybody is still watching this, uh, kudos to you. I I hope you change your entire life after this episode. So let me just summarize really quick because we have been through a lot in this, in this episode. I mean, this episode is longer and more thorough than most books in this industry. So we talked about the three different layers of you, the trait layer, which is just the things that are kind of fundamentally ingrained into your biology and your personality.

Starting point is 04:44:24 And they are largely unchangeable, especially after age 25 or 30. And these are actually the most consequential. These are kind of your center of gravity of how you're going to experience the world, how you're going to approach things, what you're naturally going to be good at, what you're naturally going to be bad at, where you're probably predisposed to enjoy, predisposed to hate. The goal with your traits is to gain understanding and acceptance of them, is to not fight them. The first fundamental error of change is trying to fight against your inborn traits. It's, you know, being five foot four and trying to make.

Starting point is 04:44:59 the MBA. It's like, dude, pick another sport. The second layer is the layer of adaptation. And adaptations are the habits, the beliefs, the emotional patterns, in the value systems that result of the interaction between our personality and the environment around us. So our adaptations are kind of if-then patterns that we develop unconsciously to help us survive and thrive in whatever situation that we're in. So adaptations are great. We all need them. We all use them. The danger of them is that it is rare for an adaptation to be useful our entire lives. Generally, what you see is that adaptations that help you at one phase of your life, hold you back at a later phase of your life.

Starting point is 04:45:41 You have to develop this like meta skill of unraveling an adaptation and replacing it with a new one, or overriding it with a new one is a more accurate way to put it. So this overriding of adaptations, that is largely what people mean when they say they want to change their lives or change themselves. But there are two things that make this exceedingly difficult. The first one is, is that a lot of your adaptations are unconscious. You pick them up when you were young. You pick them up without even realizing it.

Starting point is 04:46:12 Maybe it's an old belief system that you've had for so long that you forgot you even adopted it. It's behavioral patterns that are so natural to you. You don't realize that they're weird or that they're hurting you. The second thing that complicates it is that our adaptations are emotionally laden. We are emotionally invested in our adaptations. That is part of what makes them stick. And so when you try to uproot an old adaptation, it is going to be extremely uncomfortable emotionally.

Starting point is 04:46:41 You're going to have a certain amount of pain, anxiety, fear, anger, all the things that are not pleasant to deal with are going to come along with it. And then we have the layer of behaviors, right? Our behaviors are largely how we are understood by those outside of us. And it turns out that behaviors are the levers that help us wedge our adaptations out of our system, right? So if you want to change an adaptation, step one is to change the behaviors around the adaptation. So these three layers, we have two chains going in opposite directions. Who you are is at the base layer, it is your personality traits. These dictate what sort of adaptations you develop for yourself.

Starting point is 04:47:21 Your adaptations then determine the behaviors that you adopt and exhibit throughout your life. and those behaviors that you adopt are largely how you experience your life, how you are seen by others. Conversely, the way you change yourself is you start by changing the behaviors at the top layer, by changing those behaviors repeatedly over a long period of time, you will slowly rewire your adaptations, and by rewiring your adaptations, you will nudge your traits maybe into a slightly different position so that you will be more adaptable and more healthy in your environment. That is the slow path. That is the healthy-minded individual approach to change over a long period of time. It is not sexy. It is frustrating. It requires a lot of diligence and persistence and being very clever with

Starting point is 04:48:08 your environment and your habits and all sorts of decisions that you make. And it is largely what you and I are in the business of teaching. The entire self-help industry is in the business of teaching. And it is what actually works for people consistently. The problem is, is that it's not sexy to market. So what gets marketed is this instantaneous, massive life change that happens overnight. And these quantum changes do happen overnight, but they are not fun, they are not predictable, and you cannot do them on purpose. Not a great sales pitch. Because the truth is, is that any change, because you are inherently uprooting old adaptations, old narratives, understandings of who you are and what your meaning in this world is, it is by nature going to be

Starting point is 04:48:59 extremely uncomfortable and painful and there's going to be a lot of like difficult emotions to struggle through while doing it. So the reason the slow method works is that it just spreads that discomfort out over a long period of time to make it more manageable. The fast method works because you have such an intensely traumatic experience that your psyche has no choice but then to like tear it all down and start from scratch. Regardless of which path you choose or is handed to you, both require maintenance. Both will have social costs and social fallout. Both require some degree of environmental design to maintain the change over a long period of time.

Starting point is 04:49:38 Ultimately, the only bad strategy to changing yourself is to work on the wrong layer at the wrong time. At the top of the episode, we talked about the two fundamental errors. Error number one is trying to change a trait as if it's a behavior. telling myself, you know, I don't want to be such a compulsive ADHD person anymore. Let me try to focus and not play video games six hours a day. That aspect of myself is never going to change. A much healthier way to approach that is to say, I have these traits about myself. I'm compulsive. I'm ADHD. How can I channel those traits into a more effective and functional path? How can I leverage those to enhance my life rather than to hold me back? The second fundamental area,

Starting point is 04:50:21 is to treat behaviors like a trait, which is to say something like, wow, I haven't worked out in the last three months. I must just be a lazy person. There's nothing I can do about it. Or I got a bad grade in math. I must just be stupid. There's nothing I can do about it. Both of these are fundamental errors and people get mixed up because both things are true simultaneously. There are aspects of yourself that you cannot change. They are just who you are. And so you have to learn and accept them and become comfortable with them. But there are aspects of yourself that you can absolutely change anytime you want. It just takes a lot of work and diligence and effort and time. This tension that undergirds our entire space, which is you should learn to accept yourself

Starting point is 04:51:02 because you are great already as you are. There's nothing to be ashamed of. This is true. But you can definitely be better, motherfucker. So you should work on yourself and try to improve at some stuff. That is also true. Both of these things are true simultaneously. because they are operating on different layers of who you are. So the real question is not, can somebody change? People can absolutely change. People change all the time. The real question is, what aspect of yourself needs to change?

Starting point is 04:51:32 And what is the best way to address that aspect of yourself? And are you willing to pay the price for that change? Because ultimately, at the end of the day, I think the reason so many people talk about changing their lives, wanting to change their lives, wishing they could change their lives, but not changing year after year after year, is simply because they want the benefit

Starting point is 04:51:54 without bearing the cost. They want to have the six-pack abs, but they don't want to give up Cheetos and ice cream. Life doesn't work that way. They want to have close relationships, but they don't want to deal with all the icky emotions and vulnerability that comes with it. Yes, 100%.

Starting point is 04:52:12 So this brings me to one final question, and it's a question we have not addressed in this entire episode, but is perhaps the most fundamental and important question, which is, should you even change at all? Is change even the right goal to have?

Starting point is 04:52:29 Because I genuinely believe that a lot of people who think they should change or that they want to change, either A, they don't really want to change or B, it's the wanting to change that is actually hurting them more than the thing that they want to change.

Starting point is 04:52:47 Yeah, there's this really interesting idea from this researcher, Tori Higgins. He identified the three cells, okay? And it's a part of what he calls self-discrepancy theory. You have the actual self, like that's who you are, kind of a lot of what we've already talked about, right?

Starting point is 04:53:02 You have the ideal self, who you want to be. Then he has this third self called the ought self. It's who you think you should be, right? Whether that's from your family or society or culture or school or whatever. He argues that ideal gaps where you have a gap between who you are and who you ideally want to be, that those are kind of like promotion folks. They're very motivational, very healthy ways to motivate change.

Starting point is 04:53:27 The way not to go about doing it is with all of these ought gaps that are created. We have who we are and who we ought to be, who we think we should be. That's where he says all the kind of rub comes in, all the friction, all the conflict. This is where we start something and don't finish it because it's actually not who we want to be. We never questioned it. We never thought about it. It was just we accepted it from everyone around us. You're avoiding failure at that point.

Starting point is 04:53:49 You're avoiding what people might think. Both of them motivate change. His argument is that the ought-driven changes, though, are exhausting, unstable, and ultimately just bound to fail. Because the goal of that is avoiding being seen and being seen poorly by other people. And as soon as that collapses, as soon as that motivation collapses, or as soon as that comes under threat, we just abandon it. Whereas if we're, we're motivated by the ideal self, that's something we can shoot towards, aim towards it. You talked about your entrepreneurship. You're

Starting point is 04:54:22 like, I knew this is what I wanted to do, so it kind of didn't matter. You weren't motivated by the other people in your life, even if they were coming at you, kind of. That's a case of where that's a very ideal motivated change that you can sustain both emotionally and even just in the long run, you're going to be able to do that a lot more easily. I just feel like the word should is such a potentially damaging word in the human language. We like torture ourselves so much with the word should. So many of our ideas of who we should be are not even ours. They're just allusions that we adopted to please somebody or fulfill some like weird fantasy

Starting point is 04:55:02 that we developed at some point. So many of us decide that we should be the ideal version of ourselves without even considering how impractical that is and how impossible that is. is and the results is just this weird sort of form of self-abuse that ironically holds us back from actually changing and improving ourselves it reminds me back when I was doing a lot of meditation I had a Zen master who one time I was on retreat and he said very casually he said you are already perfect as you are and you can always be better that always struck me as a paradox and doing this episode was the first thing that resolved that paradox for me it helped me understand

Starting point is 04:55:39 And no, the self operates on multiple levels. And one level does demand radical self-acceptance. Like that is the healthiest thing you can do for yourself. And only by radically accepting that level of yourself, do you free up the other levels to change and become who they need to become? Like the famous psychologist Carl Rogers has a similar quote. That's amazing. He said the curious paradox is that once I accept myself, only then can I change.

Starting point is 04:56:07 And I think I've experienced that as true. I think the science bears that out as being true. And even though it feels contradictory, it is ultimately necessary for anybody who wants to make a meaningful change in their lives. I'm curious, Drew, as you exist in this neutral space, this latent space, trying to figure your life out,

Starting point is 04:56:31 what was the most impactful thing in this episode for you? Like, what was the biggest takeaway? It really is around the best, pain and the discomfort. That's the sign that you're doing it right. That's where you just have to sit for a while. And this is where these things are figured out. This is where your adaptations are reworked. This is where the new you comes in. It's a painful, painful process. Like I said, I've been saying for years. Pain is a great teacher. I don't think there's any other way to change. At least not for me. I know it's not for me. I don't respond to all the rewards. I respond to pain.

Starting point is 04:57:06 I've been paying lip service to it in a lot of ways. I've done it in other ways too. I've created healthy habits and all of that and built a healthy life for myself in a lot of ways. But there's still, I think, another level of change that requires a degree of pain that I have shied away from to this point. This helps a lot. That layered system helps a lot because it's like, oh, I don't have to go straight into like changing who I am, you know. And so that helps ease into it a little bit, I think. gives me some more strategies around it.

Starting point is 04:57:39 Ultimately, at some point, I'm really gonna have to face a lot of that. Yeah. Yeah. To bring back the point of like traits versus adaptations, right? Like, you are probably, I would guess, you are probably at the trait level, just somebody who is less emotional than most people.

Starting point is 04:57:57 Like, that's probably always gonna be true. Like, there's never gonna be a day where you're like, fucking crying your eyes out on a daily basis. Like, that's just, that is not in the range of exhibited behavior that is probably gonna come out of you. But there is a much more functional version of you, right? That is like built more functional emotional adaptations on top of the traits that you're working with.

Starting point is 04:58:23 That's a good point actually, because during a change, it's painful, it's disorienting, it's discomfort. I also feel incredibly engaged though right now. I'm like sinking my teeth into life a little. bit like I'm digging into it a little bit and it's uncomfortable like I said you're right it's not that like high emotional or even low emotional huge range of everything spilling out of me or anything like that but it is more like a like a heightened sense of being engaged with life that's a big part of it

Starting point is 04:58:54 and it's that's scary and it is painful but you're right for for somebody like me that's kind of the discomfort I have to sit in any final words of wisdom for our audience. Pain is a great teacher. Pain is a great teacher. I'm exhausted. I'm so fucking exhausted. You must be really fucking exhausted. This has been my favorite episode to work on so far. Cool. Hands down. Hands down. The hardest one, the hardest one. Definitely one. The hardest one we've done. My favorite one to work on. Oh, people like it. Awesome. All right, everybody, thank you for making it through the marathon. As a reminder, we do have a PDF guide for this episode. If you go to solvepodcast.com slash change.

Starting point is 04:59:38 You can download it for free. You can get all of our citation sources, reading material. You can go through the material yourself. Please follow the show and leave a review wherever you listen to the podcast. It's actually really important for us in particular because we only do one episode a month. And because we only do one episode a month, we are not going to pop up on your feed unless you follow the show. The next episode should come out the first week of July.

Starting point is 05:00:00 If you love this episode and you found a lot of value in it, please share it with somebody you care about, somebody who needs to change. Anything else? I got nothing much. I got nothing. Drew is on empty. We will be back next month. Thank you all.

Starting point is 05:00:17 I will talk to you soon. Hey, y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if.

Starting point is 05:00:48 Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.cair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home.

SOLVED with Mark Manson - How to Change Your Life, Solved

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