The Jordan Harbinger Show - 21: Benjamin Hardy | What to Do When Willpower Doesn't Work

Episode Date: March 26, 2018

Benjamin Hardy (@BenjaminPHardy) has been the number one writer on Medium since 2015, is nearing the completion of his PhD in organizational psychology, and is the author of Willpower Doesn't Work: Discover the Hidden Keys to Success. "If you have to use willpower, it's because you actually haven't made a choice yet." -Benjamin Hardy What We Discuss with Benjamin Hardy: Your personality doesn't shape your behavior; your behavior shapes your personality. If you can't create and control your environment, your environment creates and controls you. What automaticity is and how it frees you up to be mindful of what matters. The four sources of willpower and why willpower doesn't work. Your identity is not fixed: how changing your behavior changes how you evaluate yourself -- and who you are. And much more... Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course!  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!  Full show notes and resources can be found here.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Your personality and your identity are actually very fluid. And if you start changing your behaviors in dramatic ways, and especially if you start consciously shaping environments around that, you can change who you are. And I think anyone who seeks self-improvement and anyone who's actually made dramatic changes in their lives would say, oh, I agree. Welcome to the show.

I'm Jordan Harbinger. As always, I'm here with my producer, Jason DeFilippo. On this episode, we're talking with Benjamin Hardy, author of the book, Willpower Doesn't Work. This episode, one of my favorite topics, all about using your own psychology against yourself, against bad habits, against distractions. Today, we'll discover that your personality doesn't shape your behavior. Your behavior shapes your personality, which is, of course, shaped by the environment.

We'll also learn how this is all about the environment and how to construct an environment that shapes your behavior in the way that you want it to, because, as we'll discover, it's impossible to change ourselves without changing our environment first. and we'll explore the idea that mindlessness when it comes to our environment means you're leaving your development up to chance. And that, of course, is dangerous. As usual, we have worksheets for today's episode so you can make sure you solidify your understanding of the key takeaways here from Ben Hardy.

That link is in the show notes at jordanharbinger.com slash podcast. All right, here's Ben Hardy. Well, thanks for coming on the show, man. I appreciate that. Yeah, man. I'm glad that it worked out. All right. So one of the key concepts in the book that I enjoyed quite a bit was that our personality doesn't shape our behavior. Our behavior actually shapes our personality. And of course, our behavior is shaped by our environment. So I would love to hear you expound on this. In fact, I want to spend the bulk of the show talking about the environment, our environment or environments, because I know a lot of people are trying for willpower. We always try to get up earlier. or go to the gym, you know, every day or more than we already are,

or eat the right things. But we start by trying to force ourselves to do that, or we try to set alarms or things like that. But really, according to your research, these are all things that are shaped by our environment. And this show, in large part, is about using psychology against bad habits or distractions or to create behavior change.

And it sounds like that's the concept that you're championing here, is that the environment is really the best way to do that. Absolutely. I'll sketch out a couple core concepts. So first off, I'll start with Ellen Langer's work. Ellen Langer is a Harvard psychologist. If anyone is truly interested in really high-level, really good psychology study, there's two books of hers.

One's mindfulness and the other's counterclockwise. Those books, above all others, I've found, help the reader think like a psychologist. And she kind of was the queen of mindfulness. and really what mindfulness is is it's awareness of context. It's aware of the context around you and how that context is influencing you. And so that's really what mindfulness is. It's awareness, you know, but it's become a popularized topic.

And so it's kind of gotten watered down. Her work is incredible. A quote from Ellen Langer is this, that social psychologists, you know, basically argue or that it's our perspective that at any one time who a person is is a product of their context. But then the question becomes, who creates, the context. Once a person realizes that they can control their environment or they can shape the context, then they actually can have the power or the ability to change. And she's done a lot of really interesting research. You know, in her book, Counterclockwise, basically what she did is she took

a bunch of people, and this study actually happened back in the 70s. So back in the 70s, she took a, like a group of eight men from, and they were all in their 70s, and they created a context. They created an environment that matched the 60s, or the 50s. So it matched 50 years earlier. They had magazines from the 50s. There were a bunch of movies from the 50s. And basically what these guys had to do, and a lot of them came in, like, on crutches and stuff and is they put them in the environment and told them to act as if they were, they were themselves 20 years prior. Like, they couldn't talk, they had to talk about them, their lives, their work, everything, as though they were themselves 20 years younger. So as if they were like men in their 50s and they couldn't talk about anything that happened after the 19,

So they were talking about current events as if it was the 50s and stuff like that. The people who were running the study, the graduate students and stuff, were just treating them like they were men in their 50s, not men in their 70s. And basically what happened was is almost all of their biology, like their biochemical and stuff, it changed. They had a lot better eyesight. Some of the guys who came in walking in on like canes and stuff left with, you know, walking on their own two feet. Some of the graduate students and stuff had to like carry up their cane, I mean, their bags and stuff on the way in. like these men had biological transformations. Their eyesight was better.

Their dexterity was higher. Since then, she's just done a ton of really cool research on how context really does shape the individual. And then, you know, since then there's all sorts of research on epigenetics and neuro, you know, brain plasticity and about all of these basically signs or things that are showing that your biology is a lot more fluid than fixed. And that the cells, you know, the genes that are expressed are mostly based on the environment you're in. And, you know, obviously, as we'll go into, from a psychological perspective,

almost all of your behavior is shaped by your environment. What we say is, is it's outsourced by the environments. The easiest example for me is just an airplane. Like, you're not going to smoke a cigarette on an airplane. Maybe back in the 70s, you could have done that because that's kind of how the culture was back then. But at least the rules, you know, of culture and norms and how that stuff works today is you just don't do that. And so even if you are a smoker, chances are you won't even think about it because it's not an option. What they call that is actually it's called automaticity. So like if you start learning how to drive a car, in the beginning, your behavior is completely conscious.

You have to think about the pedal, how soft or hard you're pushing it. You've got to think about every movement. And then once you get better and better at it, it becomes subconscious. And they call that automaticity. And that's kind of one of the core concepts of mastery is that once you get so good at something, you overlearn it, then you can do it subconsciously. And when you're at the subconscious level, you just operate more on instinct rather than governed behavior. So pulling willpower into all of this, willpower can't happen on the subconscious

level. Like by nature's willpower is conscious control. Like you have to control it. You have to think about your behavior. That's why willpower is there. If something is subconscious, it doesn't require willpower. And so in the book, I talk about how willpower comes from four different sources. either you haven't actually made a committed decision. So once you make a like a firm choice, then you no longer have to debate inside your head if you're going to do it. So the Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen said, 100% commitment is easier than 98% commitment.

Because if you're 98% committed, then you have to decide what you're going to do in almost every situation. So if you're like, I'm going to go, I'm going to eat healthy, but you're at a wedding and there just happen to be serving your favorite cake, you know, then like you have to make a decision, there's willpower. So Michael Jordan said, once I made a decision, I never thought about it again. So step one is if you have to use willpower, it's because you actually haven't made a choice yet. You're still leaving it up to situations and generally situations that you don't want to be in.

Number two reason why willpower doesn't exist is, you know, and this kind of links with the first, is just that you don't have enough motivation. Like the why is not strong enough for whatever you're trying to do. And so you're still trying to convince yourself one way or another. Right. Like I should be in shape, but I'm married, so maybe I really don't care that much anymore, hypothetically. Yeah, I mean, if you don't have a firm why, you know, if you're not heavily motivated to do something, of course it's going to take willpower to go to the gym. You know, if you don't have a compelling reason to get you there, and if you haven't made a committed decision to doing it, then of course it's going to take exerted effort and attention. You know, I know that obviously this is a pretty heavy psychological podcast, but just some basic definitions.

Willpower, they kind of basically sum it up in the research as like it's a finite resource. It's a muscle. It's something that you can only use so much of and it depletes with use. One of the different terms they use for it is decision fatigue. So kind of one of the things that I'm talking about right now is making decisions to cut off decisions. You know, you say you're going to do this. You're 100% committed so you don't have to think about other things. There's a book called The Paradox of Choice.

and it's all about how, you know, more options is not good. What you want to do is you want to make committed decisions and then cut off alternative so you don't even have to think about them. And so, you know, number three reason is actually, I think, what influences the other two. And this is where we can start talking about how your behavior shapes your identity or it shapes your personality. And the third one is investment.

So this is one of the ideas we go into the, in the book, and it's the idea of throughout my doctoral research, I studied the differences between wannabe entrepreneurs, people who claimed that that's what they wanted to do with their career, I interviewed a bunch of those people, and I interviewed a bunch of people who are already, you know, entrepreneurs who are running a company and who are doing it. I asked them all the same sets of questions.

And I really did it Brunee Brown-style. So it was qualitative research, just interviewed a bunch of people over and over asking the same questions. One of the questions I asked was, have you ever had a point of no return? And nearly all of the wannabe entrepreneurs said no. And almost all of the actual entrepreneurs said yes. And a lot, and I've even asked Seth God,

in that question and, you know, the answer is yes, multiple times for people who have, you know, ratcheted up or who have created higher levels of commitment. So in aviation, basically, what happens is when you're flying, let's just say you're flying over the ocean and you only have so much gas. Like at some point, you pass what's called the point of safe return where you actually don't have enough fuel to go back to the prior destination and you must go forward. So psychologically, you cross this point where it's like, you know, you're no longer going back. You've crossed this threshold of decision. And for most of the people, what that was that it was actually money. Once they started investing money in something, in this case in their business, they started to become really committed

to it. And there's an idea in economics called escalation of commitment. It's really tied to another concept called sunk cost bias. Sure. And basically what it is, it's just the more skin in the game you have or the more invested you've become in something, you start to really tie your identity around that thing. And so what most of the research looks at it is, is they look at it in a negative light. They always say, you know, say no, get out of that, you know, like uncommit. Like, that's always been the focus is like, you're probably committed to the wrong thing. You're tied to the wrong relationship. That's almost always how the stuff on escalation of commitment and sunk cost bias has been framed. You know, what I was finding was kind of the reverse is also true, is that, you know, when you

start really investing big in something, you can reach that level of decision and you can then increase your why. You can find that why and you can put yourself in conditions, which is really what the book is all about, where you have to go forward. You create these conditions of necessity. And then obviously the fourth one just ties it all around. And that's like your environment, everything around you has to be in alignment with your decision. And if there's a conflict between what you're trying to do and the situation around you, then you're going to have to use willpower. I just wanted to do a quick overview of, hey, look, willpower is not where it's at. it doesn't really work. It either doesn't exist in certain forms or it just doesn't do the trick.

And the investment thing, though, I wanted to sort of dispense with this because, yes, it works in a way, but is it not a little dangerous? Because we see people kind of, I don't know if recommending is even strong enough a word saying that go all in, you got to go all in, you got to do this. But honestly, whenever I hear, I go to a lot of events where people pitch and stuff like that. And I'm just thinking some of these ideas are genuinely terrible. And so I don't want somebody who's 22 years old to quit college, start their terrible idea business because they think it's a really good idea. It might work for them as some sort of side hustle, and they can ratchet it up to that if they need to.

But I don't know if people need to invest these sort of make or break amounts of money. It works for some people, but is there not a sort of survivorship? bias here in that, yeah, you know, when I committed and I went all in and it really worked and I followed my dreams and there's like 98 other people that went, yeah, I went all in and I worked and it followed my dreams and I worked really hard and then I ended up on my mom's couch. But I don't have a microphone or a platform so I only, you know, you can't tell that story, right? We only hear from like Mark Cuban and Damon John. We don't hear from the other guys who were in their aunt's basement like, hey, this didn't

work for me. Too bad I spent all my money on Bitcoin minor stuff, right? right? No, no, no, no. I mean, I think you're absolutely right. You can't just frivolously, you know, spend your money and expect that that's going to do anything. I think that the point of investment is very heavy into the ability to make big decisions. So I actually think it is a requirement, but I never actually said an amount of money. So like for myself, I started blogging in 2015. And a lot of it had to do with the fact that I became a foster parent. But a lot of it also had to do with the fact that I actually started investing money in it.

So I wanted to be a writer from 2010 to 2015, and I never did anything about it. I just didn't have any stake. I just assumed that one day it would happen, but time kept ticking. And basically what happened was is in January of 2000, it could have been January, February of 2015. I was like, okay, I really got to get going on this. And a lot of it was influenced by the fact that we had just become foster parents. And so I was getting this feeling like time's going to start moving fast.

If I don't start moving on this now, I'm probably not going to. And so I asked her my wife if we could spend the $800 to buy the domain named Benjamin Hardy.com. And at the time, graduate student, I was making about $12,000 per year. That's kind of where I was at in 2015. Totally enough for you, your wife, and four foster kids. Yeah, three. So, you know, three.

So we couldn't handle it. But if we had four, it would have been way, way too, not enough. So $800. was like, you know, she was, she had heard me talking about it because we got married in 2013. She had heard me saying I wanted to be a writer ever since she knew me and didn't really see me doing anything about it. And so she's like, are you sure? Like, this seems like a fad. I definitely want this to be sure. So she let me do it, bought the domain name. And then a couple months later, I bought the online course from John Morrow. He wrote a guest blogging course. It was

$197. And in that course, I only went to the first three modules. It taught me how to write headlines and it taught me how to structure my articles and it taught me how to pitch articles. And one of the things that Cal Newport talks about in his book, so good they can't ignore you is the idea of developing skills and abilities, you know, rather than pursuing your passion, what you should do is be a craftsman where you're seeking to actually develop something that can be useful. And once you develop skills, then then confidence comes. And once confidence comes and you start doing it, then like passion is a lot more healthy. And there's two types of passion in psychology. There's what's called harmonious passion. and then there's another form of passion that's more impulsive and that kind of wrecks your life.

But harmonious passion is a passion where it resonates and it aligns with and it supports the other areas of your life. It's not impulsive. It's congruent and it's intrinsic, not based on trying to seek approval. That's kind of what happened to me. Like I had been studying psychology, self-improvement, all sorts of things for years. But once I started to take this course and actually develop skills and abilities, then I actually had confidence.

And that's part of this whole personality thing is that it's that it's a lot of, It's not confidence that creates success. It's actually successful behavior that then creates confidence. Confidence is a byproduct. It's not the cause. It's an effect. And so once you start developing skills and abilities and you have to do that through action, then confidence comes.

And then obviously that confidence can then, you know, be a healthy wave of producing further successes. But, you know, if your behavior doesn't match what you're wanting to do, then you're incongruent. Then you can't have confidence. So once I started pitching articles, basically what I did from, you know, about May to June, May and June of 2015 was I wrote about 50 or more articles. And I was just applying what I was learning. I was pitching them all over the place. And then one of my articles went viral. And ever since then, I've just been writing a lot. But it was just a few of those investments.

You know, what I'm talking about is less than $1,000 right now. You know what I mean? I'm not talking that I like sold my house. I didn't leave graduate school. But I was starting to invest money. And then that's when I started to move forward. So this is classic self-help marketer stuff, right? It's like, well, if you don't invest this, it means you don't care about yourself. You don't want it enough. And look, here's this thing. It says you just got to buy this course and it's all about investing in yourself. That's why we can't do a discount on this particular thing. I mean, it's just classic marketing. So the concept may be correct. And yet it's one of the most co-opted and abused in marketing, I think. Oh, it is for sure. I mean, I think that there's a lot

of truth behind it, but it's something you can use to manipulate people who either aren't ready for the investment. I mean, the investment itself isn't enough. You've got obviously kind of be prepared. I kind of look at it as a continuum. Like, there's this progression. And I'm just thinking about it in terms of the people I interviewed, like, you know, someone who goes from just saying having the idea that they want to be an entrepreneur versus someone who's really been like thinking about it and starting to invest energy, thought into it. At some point, obviously, they need to start putting their money into it. Right? Like, at some point. point you, if this is going to actually become a real thing, you've got to start investing yourself

in it. But I agree with you that it's a really good way as well to trick people. Yeah, it's, it's always, this is kind of always the debate, right? It's, is this concept valid in this case or is it not? And whenever you're trying to get people to invest in something, even if it's themselves, you've got to be a little bit careful. I want to start focusing on how our environment shapes us because in willpower doesn't work, we discuss or you discuss why goal setting doesn't work for more than a small subset of behaviors and how we can outsource our behaviors to our environment and how we can't change ourselves without changing our environment. And I think these are fascinating concepts because obviously we're talking about

habit change. We're talking about productivity. We're talking about achievement. I mean, these are near and dear topics to the Jordan Harbinger show audience. And so if we can construct an environment that shapes our behavior in the way that we want it to, we can start to really take off without willpower, without motivation, per se. Let's dive into this a little bit. You explained initially that when you started fostering kids, you changed and curated their environment. Tell me a little bit about, I mean, this is personal, so if I cross the line, just let me know.

But obviously, who you are and what you do is a function of the people around you, what you consume. tell me how your kids change, because I assume foster kids didn't come to you because they were just really happy where they were and they decided for a change of pace was in order, right? Usually that there's some unusual circumstances that lead to this particular situation. Yeah, definitely. Well, actually, truth be told, we adopted these kids about a month and a half ago, so I actually have a lot more leeway to talk about this than I did when I wrote the book. Congratulations. I'll give a little bit of background. So there's a really big study.

that's called the equality of opportunities. I forget fully what it's called. It's a big Harvard study on economics. And basically what it did is it framed out a person's ability to improve their economic status in America. And they framed it based on whatever county you lived in. And the county that I grew up in was actually in the 91st percentile, which means that if you live in this county,

your chances, even if you grew up poor, to improve your financial, I mean, your economic situation. is actually very high just because that's what's happening around you. Well, where our kids grew up in South Carolina, where like the county adjacent to where I was getting my Ph.D., their county was in the ninth percentile, which means that if you're born poor in that county, your chances of changing your situation are almost zero.

And you just, if you drove through it, you wouldn't be surprised. but so our three kids when we got them basically what their situation is they grew up in a very small trailer type place you know there were actually five kids because they had two half siblings which we didn't end up getting who all slept in one room clothes piled high you know food all over the place their parents would you know they just sat in front of the tv all day so i mean one of the reasons why they were in foster care is their parents were on drugs and they were neglected so their parents would stick them in front of a TV, TV for hours, and they weren't going to school.

And so the state kind of said, well, why aren't these, you know, what's going on with these five kids that have missed 50 days of school in a row? And their parents would give them cough syrup to put them to bed. Oh, gosh. Yeah, so, you know, you're giving your kids medicine to go to bed at night, and then you just stick them in front of a TV and eventually they pass out. And so we get these kids who don't know how to go to sleep, and it takes us six months to actually train these human beings to go to sleep without asking for medicine.

But, you know, the behavior was nuts, you know. And so I'm in my first year of grad school. My wife was doing a master's as well in social work. And we've never had kids before. I've never read a book on parenting before. Way to start with the easy stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, well, and one of the big things I talk about in the book, you know,

and we'll go into this is adaptability, you know, and about how quickly human beings can adapt to change, especially when you're committed and invested. And it doesn't have to be financial. We kind of already hit that. But in this case, you know, the three-year-old boy and some of these details I couldn't write about in the book at the time because we were foster parents and you have to follow all these rules. But the three-year-old boy, every once in a while, he would just get these anxiety attacks where literally he would lose ability to move his limbs. Like he would just start just shut down.

He would just, he would emotionally shut down. He would lay down on the ground and I'd say, you know, we'd be like, we're walking out to our car. You know, like, Logan come like walk to the car and he literally physically couldn't. And it would happen all the time he would shut down. The five-year-old girl who's now eight, and she was very, you know, so much anger issues. We had to take her out of the public school because she had what is called oppositional defiance disorder. You know, all of our kids ended up having like five or more diagnoses. There's a really, really important book out now called The Body Keeps the Score and it's all about trauma.

And really what it explains is that, you know, most of the disorders that these kids get diagnosed with are actually all. tied just to trauma and really it's more just PTSD. Anyways, you know, this girl would would just throw the biggest anger, you know, and she was, she was unreachable, you know, it was just really intense. Like, we would have to sit with them through their anger and a lot of times you lose your patience after, you know, sitting through it for a long time. I openly admit I lost my, you know, never obviously in a physical way, but like at some point, you know, you just, you lose it.

I have no patience. You don't have to justify yourself. No patience. Yeah, no, I mean, it was, you know, at some point, I'm telling you, you know, when it becomes your life and it's just like there, there seems to be no joy, you know, unless you get them in front of the TV like seriously or like get them a treat. And like they, they get five minutes of dopamine. But so for the first six months, I avoided being home. I allowed myself to kind of just enjoy work and stuff. And over time, I really had to invest myself in the kids. And I have some serious victory stories now. But if you saw our family now, you would. would never imagine where we came from. We ended up having all three of our kids in Montessori School's public education system. The environment just was too structured for these three kids, given where their background was. And Montessori School provides a ton of, you know, self-directed learning. They can go out and, like, do gardening. Our little girl was able to, like, go to, like, younger kids and kind of mentor them. She really loves nurturing. And so, like, that situation was a godsend for these

kids. And then obviously we've just spent countless hours one-on-one helping them with their schooling. They were all at least a year behind when we got them, got them into sports, you know, giving them healthy food during 2017. We went sugar-free as a family. And really some of the core components of this environment are like having a stable and regular evening routine and morning routine. Like, you know, as basic as that is, like, we have dinner together and like they know what to expect. The stability and the consistency allowed them after. months to like put themselves to bed and one thing we didn't know is that kids you know under the age of like nine or eight even need like almost 12 hours of sleep a night we didn't know that but

our kids have been getting 12 hours of sleep ever since we've got them like our six year old he's been going to bed at 6 p.m. every night since we've had him nice that's a lucky you no trust me we do it for ourselves just as much I mean our even our 10 year old he still goes to bed at seven my wife and I have always had like two or three hours a night just to kick it and our kids wait up and they've had 12 hours of sleep. Without cough syrup, go figure. I mean, you had to design all of this, right? You had to create all of this out of not just a blank slate, like a kid that you had that grew up around this, somebody or a set of people who were programmed by a chaotic, traumatic environment.

And it must be pretty difficult to change that up because not only did you have one kid where you're like, okay, I got to unlearn all this. stuff, you have three. And so one might unlearn something. The other one doesn't. They're around each other. So that could be a negative influence or at least a contrary influence. So you really had to, they outnumbered you and they were programmed in a way that wasn't going to serve them. And you had to undo all of that with environment. Oh, 100%. Yeah. So I mean, the core quote that comes from the book is from Marshall Goldsmith, you know, and it's if you do not create and control your environment, your environment creates and controls you. And some are kind of the just kind of fundamentals of, of the book is, you know, there's a reactive, either you're being reactive about your environment

or you're proactively creating an environment that you want to influence you. In the case of these kids, yeah, I mean, we just, we knew, I mean, I had been studying psychology for a long time. I understood adaptability. I understood these things. But yeah, I mean, it takes time. Like, just an example, I met a woman once on an airplane who had 19 kids. Obviously, they weren't all her own. She actually had eight kids her own. And then they were asked by some people to mentor this sibling group of four kids, ended up adopting them. And she talks about how whenever you take a system, because a lot of this has to do with system syncing, like when you change a part of any system, you have to change the whole

kind of thing. When they brought in these four kids, it kind of really shattered everything because actually it changed the sibling, like the birth order, because some of these siblings, like mixed in with some of her kids. And so like the kid who was the youngest now has like a younger brother. You know what I mean? Like the kid, you know, and so like it changes everything about the role. you're in. And she talked about how it took about two and a half years for homeostasis to

redevelop in their environment where they all kind of melded into their new roles. And then they ended up shattering the system again by taking on another sibling group. But they understood, they kind of understood a lot more how to control and set that up. But there's always going to be a shattering of the system when you do something like this. And then there's this new normal. You know, and even with finances, you know, you win the lottery. Eventually it becomes boring. Like there's just this idea that no matter where you are, you're going to adapt. No matter how successful you become, it eventually becomes normal. No matter, you know, even if you lose your leg, you know, like eventually you're going to get

used to it, even if it sucks. Like one of the big ideas that kind of really turned me on to that was actually Victor Frankel, you know, in his book, Man Search for Meaning. I was listening to it and he was talking about sleeping comfortably on the bed with next to nine other people. And that just really struck me. I was just like, this is so weird. And then he even says in the book, yes, a person can get used to any.

just don't ask us how. And he said the most surprising thing about being in the concentration camp was how quickly, you know, you went from being horrified by watching someone get shot next to you to just going to being apathetic about it because it's just the normal. You're just used to it. And so with that in mind, I think one of the big ideas in the book is that people could take on a lot more if they were willing to create situations that would force them to rise up. The historian Will Durant said that the ability of the average man could be doubled if their situation demands. demanded it. And basically what psychologists call that is they call it the pygmalion effect. Either you rise up to or you fall to the expectations of your situation. You don't act according

to your value system. You act according to the norms in your environment. So most people, they believe and they have the value of being healthy. They want to be healthy. They want to be successful and happy, but their environment is really what determines what they do. And what they do, obviously, determines who they be because your behavior shapes who you are. So essentially, the design of the environment then is at the core of who we choose to be. And so we really have to be cognizant of the environment. Like this is, this isn't, well, make sure your environment set up so that you're productive or make sure that you don't have any distractions or make sure there's no junk food in the fridge. This is like the most important thing, not a piece of it. It's the piece of it. Because if you control your environment, you can control your emotional states because environments trigger emotional states. They allow us to do or not do certain things. based on availability of resources and things inside that environment. So I'd love to talk about environmental design. And I think you just mentioned this earlier,

that if you don't control your environment, it controls you. But most of us are just mindless, right? In our environment, we sort of leave our development up to chance because we leave our environment up to chance. And you've got this story actually about Matt and Eric that kind of illustrates this really well. Would you mind going through that? You could take us through that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. Just one more caveat is the reason why we ignore the environment is actually because our culture conditions us to. We're very individualistic. We're very self-absorbed. We don't focus on what's around us. That's why willpower mindset. All of these individualistic traits are so popular is because that's what our environment values is individualism. And so it's just a product.

It's funny. It's a product of our culture to ignore the culture around us. Huh. As far as this story, Matt and Eric, I believe, these are actually people who. who I did know and still know. But basically the story is this. I have a friend who was on an amazing path in life. He was working his way towards a career he loved,

was in a happy marriage, had kids, etc. And would justify to himself spending a few nights a week, you know, playing video games with a friend who actually, in a lot of ways, I believe, was subliminally training him to not love his wife. Wow. This other friend would talk, you know, garbage on this friend's wife. Here's what's really interesting is when you see something from a

distance, you can see things that a person can't see themselves. Because we are always changing day to day. A person is never the same person. You know, if you see a person and then you see them six months later, even though they seem the same, they are slightly different. And especially if they're putting themselves in unusual or unique situations, you know, because output creates input. I mean, even the most popular self-improvement stuff in the world, if you really go into it, it says that. You know, they say it's all about mindset, but then they say, you know, garbage in, garbage out. That's why you got to listen to Zig Zig Ziglar 50 times, you know. But, and so they say it's all about mindset.

But then what they're saying is, but you have to program yourself because what goes in actually is who you become. You know, if you go to the gym every day and you really start working out and stuff, you'll start to see changes over time. But if I, if I'm with you, you know, and that I don't see you for a year, like, I can see the changes that you might not see in yourself. Because for you, the changes are so incremental and day by day, you're looking at yourself. in the mirror all the time. And so sometimes, like you're saying, we can be mindless of the fact that we're being changed by our environment. It's unconscious to us because, again, most behavior and identity, they become subconscious. It's called automatic. Everything becomes automatic based on the situations you consistently put yourself in. So why I was so intrigued by this is because I would spend

time with these guys maybe on, like, every six months. I was really busy going to school and things like that. and I'm very aware of the environments I place myself in. And I would just notice a lot of shifts in one of my friends, you know, he never used profanity and things like that before. And all of a sudden it was just his common language, you know, and it was just like, it wasn't things that, like, totally threw me off. I was just like, oh, that's interesting. But the thing is, I was able to predict, you know,

I was like, you know, if this is kind of the pattern that he's moving towards, there's no way his marriage is going to last. And I just started to see shifts in his behavior because I was at a distance enough and I was seeing him at, you know, big enough spaces of time that I could actually sense the starkness of what was going on, potentially what he couldn't see in himself. And there's a concept in psychology. It's called the fundamental attribution error. So if someone cuts you off on the road, chances are you're going to be upset at that person and think they're a bad person. But chances are there's some situational factor happening because that person probably doesn't drive like that all the time. Some people obviously, you know, do. And it's probably because they put themselves in bad situations.

basically what the fundamental attribution error says is that when you attribute the cause of something to the person rather than the situation around them, that's like the biggest mental mistake you can make. And, you know, like it's the fundamental attribution error. Like, there's situational factors playing a whole role. And if you're not going to pay attention to those and you're just going to say, that's just who that person is, then that's probably one of the biggest mental mistakes you can make. And so I was watching this guy and I was watching the situations he was putting himself in. And this is why it was unconscious, is because if you had asked this guy five years ago, would you like to see yourself divorced and jobless? He would have absolutely said no.

He would never have wanted that. But it's exactly what happened. It was because he was mindless about what was happening and the fact that he was being shaped subconsciously by an environment that opposed his goals and his values. And over time, his goals and his values changed. And then his marriage changed, you know, and then other things changed. And then you find yourself in the situation, you're like, how the heck did I get here? little influences over time change your identity.

So I'll go into self-signaling now because this is a really cool idea. And basically what self-signaling is is it's this idea that you don't necessarily know who you are. You know, we think we know who we are, but we don't really know ourselves as well as we think we do. We judge and evaluate ourselves and our identity and who we think we are the same way we evaluate other people. You know, we do it based on behavior actually. And we still, you know, we don't really realize that the behavior in a lot of ways is based on what's around us and who's around us. But once you start changing your behavior, you start to change how you evaluate yourself. So if you start listening to like podcasts or if you start

reading books, you know, eventually you'll start to evaluate yourself as a reader or as someone who learns. And so the idea is just that your identity is not some fixed characteristic. Even though if you have this belief system, you know, this fixed mindset that it is, it's going to be harder to see yourself as fluid. But generally, if you start running, you're going to start to see yourself as a runner, you know. And so you just evaluate yourself based on your behavior. And so your personality and your identity are actually very fluid. And if you start changing your behaviors in dramatic ways,

and especially if you start consciously shaping environments around that, you can change who you are. And I think anyone who seeks self-improvement and anyone who's actually made dramatic changes in their lives would say, oh, I agree. Yeah, I agree with this 100%. Changing, when I used to live in Los Angeles, I would work. out of my office. And it was really depressing and negative and I didn't like it at all. But I didn't really notice it because, you know, boiling frog type thing, you know, the changes you don't really

see in yourself. And then I ended up meeting who's now my wife. And I moved out and moved into her condo that she was no longer using because she had already moved out of there as well. And so I started to change because I'd started to just be sort of in a different environment or at least the absence of negativity, even though I was a loan more, was just a strong contrast. Then I moved up to San Francisco and eventually ended up separating from my company that I used to run with the, and used to have run this show. And now, even in a short period of time, I look at the team and myself not working with people, even remotely.

And everyone's a lot happier, more productive. The quality of the show has gone up. And it's kind of amazing because your environment isn't just the room you're sitting in. It's the people around you as well. And I think that's worth highlighting because when we think environment, we think, okay, well, yeah, I got to set up the lighting in here a la Ari Maizel really well and make sure that my desk is set up and my phone's off. That's all fine and good. But if you're getting pinged on slack by people who are trying to bring you down or make you feel like crap or tell you your work isn't valuable or distract you, that's just as environmental because it's just more a psychological environment. unless you just, what do you think about that? Do you agree that the environment is partly

psychological, not just the physical area where you are? Oh, yeah. I mean, I don't go too deep into that in the book, but yeah. So, I mean, if you think about, for example, your relationship with your wife, you guys are defined by that relationship. You know, how you guys see each other, it's the relationship between things. That's the context that actually determines who you are in that situation. So, I mean, it's very psychological. I mean, really what we're talking about here is how the external environment actually influences the psychology. You can't separate the two. You know, like who you're around shapes how you feel and the thoughts that you have. Your show is a lot different now that you're not around certain people and now that the situation's different. Now the

characteristics of your your podcast are different. You have different emotional experiences and you have different abilities to run the show how you want to. You know, it's not about your talent and ability. You're the same person technically-ish that you were back when the show is different. But now that the situation's changed, you can be different. And so the environment outside of you fundamentally is a part of what's going on inside of you. You get to a point where you think more holistically and you just realize that the two aren't separated. Yeah, of course. And cutting negative people out of your life, something that you wrote about in willpower doesn't work, requires detaching ourselves from comforts that we have now. You know, well, the show's making this

and then we got these products. You know, it's really hard to sort of break out of that. So sometimes changing our environment might involve a little bit of, I don't want to say pain, but maybe that's what it is. Maybe it is a little bit of pain. It always does. Yeah. It always does. I mean, think about going from want to be entrepreneur to entrepreneur, you've got to give up

what you've got for what you want. You know what I mean? And that's a, your environment literally holds you together. So there's a story that I didn't include in the book that my wife really wanted in me to. So do you know what a blobfish is? No. Sounds kind of gross.

So if you go, yeah, it's funny. So if you Google the world's ugliest animal, you're going to see a really ugly pink fish. And there's actually T-shirts and all sorts of hilarious things about blobfish because they're so ugly. But if you look at a blobfish down at, you know, several thousand feet below sea level, it would actually look like a very normal fish because the pressure, water pressure down there literally holds the fish together. And then when you pull the blobfish up, you know, the pressure shrinks eventually its mouth ejects out of its stomach and it becomes this hideous looking thing. And so the idea is that, you know, in certain situations, you are a blobfish. Like in certain, around certain people, you're not going to be able to be who you need to be.

Like around other, you know, and so one cool point is the whole pressure component. And I talk about the need of pressure to move yourself forward. But the real idea is that your environment literally is holding your identity together. Who you are right now is based on all of the things outside of you, holding it together, your relationships, your commitments, all of these things are what's holding yourself together. And so when you actually truly change anything, you actually have to change everything. Like if you actually make a fundamental change, it has to happen to everything around you. And interestingly, I was just rereading the alchemist.

And in the book, it talks about how once something evolves, everything must evolve around it. And if you actually make a change and you actually want to do something different, of course you have to disrupt your environment. Like, if you don't, then you're not going to actually be able to make that change and you're going to be living in internal conflict. And that's the whole willpower cycle all over again. But the biggest, hardest component of all of this is disrupting your relationships because their identities are also held together based on their relationship with you. I was recently talking to a guy named Sean Stevenson. He's a really cool speaker.

He's a friend of mine. Yeah, yeah. Sean's amazing. So Sean was born with a, I forget what they call it. Yeah, osteogenesis imperfecta. Essentially what it is is his bones are like chalk. So he can bump his knee on something. He can't walk.

He's in a wheelchair, but he could bump his knee or his arm on something, and it could just shatter the whole thing. Yeah, exactly. And so, like, he's been in a wheelchair his whole life. And then, you know, he goes through all this personal development. And one of the things he actually talks about, interestingly, is that when he was surrounded by other people with the disease, he was super depressed.

And I think he actually got mentored. by Tony Robbins and Tony said you can no longer surround yourself with those people because they're going to enable you and you're going to die sooner. He was supposed to die before age 18 and so he surrounded himself with a lot of mentors and, you know, he's alive 20 years longer than his than he was supposed to. But one of the crazy things that's happened to him recently. So he ends up going on to become this pretty famous public speaker and he speaks all over the world.

He's got mastermind groups. He's a transformational hypnotherapist guy and he's actually really amazing. very brilliant guy, but the situation has been is that he has been in business, like his whole business has been set up so that his parents have managed it. However he does it, his parents are involved. And he had this epiphany. So he was out in Africa in some village sometime back in 2017. And one of the important concepts I talk about in the book is that a lot of the big a haas

you're going to get are not actually going to happen in your routine environment. They're going to happen while you're outside your environment, you're recovering, while you're not in kind of the hustle and bustle of everything going on when you actually give yourself space. So there's a lot of good science behind the idea of taking a sabbatical or mini retirement or taking an off day and fully unplugging. Usually that's where your biggest a haas are actually going to happen. Only 16% of creative ideas are going to happen while you're sitting at work. Usually, you know, it's just like fitness. You're going to, you're going to grow while you recover. You're going to get your best ideas while you're resting because your mind is

actually allowed to wander when it can't do that when it's focused on one thing but when it wanders it can connect things and that's where that's where a ha's come in but anyways he was in africa and he was surrounded by all this poverty and he just had this idea that like he wanted to go to the next level in his business and there's no way he could do it if he stayed with his parents because they didn't want to move it forward and to make matters even more interesting he watched the movie the founder yeah so so he was having all these ideas like oh man i i i want to go the next level and I can't do it with my family. Then on the flight home from Africa, he watches the founder on the airplane. And he realized that his parents were like the two McDonald's

brothers who didn't want to take the business any further. Like they, that's where their mindset was at. That's where they were at. And he would always be stuck there if he was with them. Anyways, he came to the conclusion that he had to do this and it ended up leading to this hideous, ugliest legal battle. And it destroyed the relationship between him and his parents. It was a really ugly battle. But he said that it was actually in going through this process that he feels like for the first time in his life, he feels like a man because he can actually do what he wants now. And he also believes that this actually is the best thing that could have ever happened for his relationship with his parents because his relationship at the time was not based on who he

wanted to become, not based on moving forward. Like actually the relationship was enabling everyone to stay stuck. And so, you know, there's a lot of fear that people have in wanting to get to the next level or wanting to do something different and knowing that they're going to have disrupt relationships. And the truth is, is that if you're wanting to keep things the same because you don't want to ruin what you've got in the past, then you have an attachment that's based on the past. And that's going to keep you stuck in the past. There's a really good quote from Dan Sullivan. He's the founder of strategic coach. And he says, it's better to surround yourself with people who remind you more of your future than your past.

Because if you surround yourself with people who remind you of your past, your attachment is not based on where you're going and who you want to be. It's attached on something from the past. And so that's where you live and that creates patterns. And as you can see, the behavior keeps you, I mean, the environment keeps you stuck. But if you surround yourself with people who remind you of your future, people who are where you want to be or who are doing things that you want to be doing, then you don't need to to use willpower to be who you want to be because the environment makes it organic.

It makes it natural. Automaticity or just subconsciously being who you want to be so you don't have to consciously control your behavior becomes natural. And actually it can grow very fast, obviously. So, you know, just to your point about the fact that, yes, you absolutely have to change your relationships. Yes, it is going to be painful. There's a lot of pain involved in all of this. And I think that's actually one of the components of the book is dealing with unhealthy emotions. One of the big problems with positive psychology is that it's based on a hedonist,

worldview. And basically what hedonism presents, it's a philosophical perspective that says that, you know, you should pursue pleasure and avoid pain. Like, and basically the fundamental component of most of positive psychology is the idea that only positive emotions matter. That's why there's this huge emphasis on being happy, which obviously we all want. There's a different perspective of, of happiness in philosophy called eudamonia. And that's kind of more what Ryan Holliday and those kind of people study, that's more like pursuing meaning or virtue or doing hard things, you know, and living a meaningful life. In that approach to happiness, absolutely you're going to have to go through hard things. Absolutely, you're going to have to go through loss. Absolutely,

you're going to have to, and that you can actually get a lot of positive outcomes psychologically by going through hard things, by dealing with even negative emotions. Negative emotions can produce very positive things. And I think when you hear that, it's very obvious. I think that's one of the big things about this book that's different is that I'm not going to just tell you to have a positive mindset and the things are going to work. I actually know you have to change your life and it's going to be hard. It's going to be painful. But it's the only way to get to that place where you want to be because you and your environment are one. And if you want to change anything, you ultimately have to change everything.

I love the environment shaping our behavior, shaping our personality concept. So I'd love to wrap with some nuts and bolts on how to create what you refer to as high pressure environments. And so first of all, what pressure? High pressure? I don't want a high pressure environment. Do I? That sounds bad. What's going on here?

Yeah, okay. One of the concepts I go into and I'll jump into the nuts and bolts really fast is this idea of enriched environments. Basically, what an enriched environment is is when you're fully engaged in what you're doing. So most environments have not been set up for flow or for full engagement. And so, you know, if you think about most people's jobs, there's high distraction, there's not necessarily consequences for failure. There's not immediate feedback. All these things that trigger flow. And when people are at home, there's distractions as well.

You know, smartphones just chilling when you're trying to be engaged with your kids. There's, you know, very few people fully unplug. And there's an idea in business psychology, and it's called psychologically detaching from work. And basically what it means is that if you don't allow yourself to fully like let go of work, physically, mentally, mentally, emotionally, like, it's actually very hard to fully re-engage. So it's super healthy to let go to unplug and get actual rest and recovery. and very few people experience either of these type of environments. But the one we're talking about right now is high stress. So there's high stress and there's high rest.

So high rest is unplug, relax, sabbatical. High stress is, if constructed properly, actually good for us. Oh, 100%. Yeah. So it's the U stress. You know, it's the type of stress that leads to growth, not to distress and decay. You know, if you're going to the gym, a high pressure environment would be that you're working out with someone

who's totally motivated, who expects a good workout. You may even be hiring a, you know, a trainer. In any case, it's not on you to just do the workout by yourself. Like, there's some external factors involved that your performance matters. So, yeah, the idea is, is you want to be in a situation that's forcing you to succeed. And so in the book, I tell the story of a pianist named John Burke. He's actually really cool. He's from Atlanta.

He's 29 years old. He's written, I think, seven or eight albums. and one of his recent albums got nominated for an Emmy. And he told me his whole process for creating a pressure which pushes him forward to succeed. So basically when he comes up with an idea that he's like, okay, I want to do an album. He doesn't actually know what the album's going to be yet,

but he wants to put all the factors or all the things in place that will ensure that it actually does get done. And so the first thing he does is he actually calls his sound engineer and he gets himself on the schedule like six months in advance, three to six months in advance, gets himself on the schedule so that he's actually on the guy's clock and he pays for that time so he's financially invested. And then he scheduled out his whole schedule so that he has creation time on the schedule.

Because, you know, if any creative who's listening to this knows, it's really easy to not write or not do whatever you're going to do. He puts it on his schedule. And if there's a gig or an opportunity that comes up during his creation time, he just says he's busy. He's got an appointment. That appointment's with himself. Then he tells all of his fans that he's working on a new album and he says when it's going to come out. You know, and one of the things he talked to me about is that he really, really cares about what his, like, that his fans trust him and that, like, they have this positive expectation. He loves creating an expectation. And it's similarly, very similar to what Michael Jordan did. You know, like, if you actually study Michael Jordan, he would always talk trash and they would say it wasn't for the other person. It was for him. Because once he talked trash, like, then he really had to show up, you know, he created pressure. And so, like, John Burke just, like, does all of it. of these things, which then put him in a position where he feels like he has to go forward.

But really just the idea is, is, does your work matter? If you go to work, for example, and it doesn't really matter what you do. Like, it doesn't matter if you just took the day off or if you were just kicking it half the time not distracted. Like, for example, like Jordan, like we're on a podcast right now. You kind of have to be engaged. You know, like, you're totally listening to this right now because you've got to have something decent to say after I'm done.

Like, you're not distracted right now, I would say. might be, and I've been on podcasts where some people are distracted, but like, my guess is that when Jordan is actually doing his work, he's there. When he's not doing his work, you know, he's not there. Like in this case, how his job is set up, like he's in this moment. And that's essentially what this means is just that you're in a situation where what you do actually matters, you get immediate feedback, that there's some form of external pressure that's moving you forward. Okay. So we're creating that. deliberately, and it's not just have your phone on airplane mode, right?

You've got ways to create things like forcing functions and other concepts, punching above your weight was an example you gave for working out with a trainer or somebody who's highly motivated. What other ways can we create these forcing functions, decisions that eliminate other decisions, like deleting Facebook from your phone to keep from having to decide whether to check Facebook every five minutes? I love the idea of forcing functions, and I love the idea that, If we're not shaping these enriched environments that, for lack of the better word, outsource the type of behavior we want, we end up having to remain conscious about what we're doing, aka use willpower, which is exhausting, limiting, and not a long-term solution.

Yeah, no, I mean, I love that the book conveyed the ideas because as you're talking to me, I'm like, okay, he gets this. Yeah, so basically forcing functions that were one of my favorite ideas to present in the book. and basically a forcing function in design thinking is what people do when they design software or even when they design stuff like microwaves. Think about a microwave. You can only open a microwave one way. It's a forcing function. Like you can only open it one way.

And the reason is it is because they designed it to remove error. So on certain softwares, for example, there's a lot of constraints. There's things you can't do so that you don't do something stupid. And so the idea is to engineer these type of forcing functions into your life or into your situation to remove your own humanness, to remove your errors. And so some of the examples I gave, and again, you know, you'll see it throughout the book. And I know that we've already talked about it, but one of the things of really good forcing function is is financial investment.

Once you, you know, and this doesn't have to be that you bought someone's product. I'm just saying if you've got skin in the game, you're going to be more, there's more, you're more likely to be, there's more likely to be pressure. I mean, so in the book, The Millionaire Next Door, they talk about how the most successful people are those who get paid based on incentive or based on performance. So if you're the owner or if you're someone who gets paid based on your performance, that's a key forcing function. If you just have some salary or if you're not getting paid based on what you do or if there's not really a big consequence for what you do, then chances are your environment is not enriched for high performance. another example of a forcing function, and this kind of just taps into Parkinson's law. Basically, Parkinson's law is just this idea that work fills the space that you give it.

So like a forcing function could be like, let's just say I have an assignment that I'm working on, a project I'm working on. If I told my research advisor that I would have it to him next week. And if that actually mattered, like, to the relationship, like, I don't want to let her down, I better do it. And I just created that constraint. Like she didn't put it upon me. I put it upon myself. It wasn't due next week, but I told her I would have it to her next week. So one of the things that Dan Martel does, and he's a very successful entrepreneur,

I think he's started and sold like five companies. He really believes in this idea of forcing functions, and he's actually written a few cool blog posts on it. But one of the things he does, he has two forcing functions that I wrote about in the book. One of them is he purposefully creates scenarios that force him to focus. So one of the things he does is he goes and works at offices or workspaces or libraries, and he purposefully leaves his power cable at home. And so he knows his laptops only got two or three hours of battery.

And so he knows when it dies. He's done. And he's got to go home. And so he does that so that he doesn't trail off on the internet and stuff. Like he's got two hours. His battery's going to die. That's how much time he's got to work. And so those two hours are worth a lot more than someone who's distracted for five.

Another thing he does is he told his wife that he would pick up his kids from school. And so his work day ends at like 3.30 in the afternoon. So he says his afternoons are extremely productive because he knows they end early because then he's going to go pick up his kids and he's done for the day. Those are just a few simple things that he's done to create conditions that force him to be focused. Novelty can be a forcing function where you're just doing something new. So that's actually one thing that John Burke, the pianist, does a lot is he's always trying something new. He's always trying something he's never done before. A novelty is a flow trigger.

when you're doing something new, then chances are you're not adapted to it, so you're not bored of it. On that album that actually got nominated for an Emmy, he wrote a song on it, and this is actually why I wanted to interview him in the first place. He wrote a song called Earthbreaker, and if you Google John Burke Earthbreaker

and watch it on YouTube, it's pretty amazing what the heck that song is, because it's played so fast, and what he wanted to do is he wanted to create the experience of an earthquake. But when he wrote that song, and he wrote a bunch of music that was different. It had different influences than he had ever integrated in. But he also created sheet music that was actually beyond his skill level.

So that's kind of like punching beyond your weight. He wrote a song that he couldn't play. That's what really inspired me by him. And then he had to figure out how to play it. He had to increase his own skill level. So he created conditions for himself where he had to advance in his skills to actually do what he wanted to do for this album. But you want to have autonomy in what you're doing.

You want to actually control it. You know, rather than being controlled by your environment, you want to control your environment. And so if you have the ability to put these things upon yourself, then you're going to enjoy it. You know, like John doesn't get mad at it. He's not upset at the difficulty that he's facing because he's purposefully engineered that difficulty into his own life. You want to have difficulty, but then you need rest and recovery. I mean, Sean White said something really, really cool at the Olympics. He was asked, how have you been able to compete at this level for so long?

He said, I spend a lot of time away from the sport. He's like, he's a skateboarder. He's in a rock band. He's like a businessman. And the cool part about winter sports is that, like, unless you're traveling all the time, like half the year, you can't do it anyways. And so, you know, Sean is a freaking amazing example of this. He's totally recovering and resting from snowboarding when he's not doing it.

And when he's doing it, he's freaking competing. in the Olympics. Like, obviously there's a lot of pressure. He's got coaches. He's worried about his nutrition when he's training. It matters. So he's an optimal example of someone who is in a high pressure environment and then a super relaxing recovery environment.

I love all the anecdotes that you have in the book. There's so many practicals and takeaways about changing our environment especially. Most environments are optimized for distraction instead of optimized for helping us punch above our weight, helping us. get into that environment of or that state of eustress instead of distress. So I highly recommend the book if you are wanting to make sure that you are more productive, that you're more focused, instead of just trying to shoehorn your behavior in or change your personality or stay motivated,

willpower doesn't work. It's literally the title of the book and it will show you how to organize your environment in very different ways. And frankly, look, if this has worked for entrepreneurs and three foster kids that were raised in a hellish environment, it can work for a distracted entrepreneur or a mom that wants to get something done on the side or career folks. There's all kinds of stuff in the book that apply to everyone. So I just want to make sure that people know it's not just for the entrepreneur that works from home. It's not just for the person who's an executive that wants to rearrange

their office. The environment has to do with arranging ourselves in our lives such that it changes our behavior, which changes our personality and changes who we are at a fundamental level. So thank you very much for coming on the show and breaking all this down for us. Yeah, man. Thanks for facilitating it and keeping it focused. All right, Jason. I mean, we knew environment was important. We knew that we could use it to our advantage. I didn't really realize, though, that you could not really make significant changes without doing that. It just, it seems like, I didn't realize maybe that it was an absolute requirement. I just thought it was a nice to have. Or maybe this is for optimizers. I didn't realize

that it was a frequent prerequisite to make any significant change. No, definitely. We've definitely had a change of environment recently, so it's a good thing, though. Yes, it could be the best thing that ever happened, right? Especially if you set it up correctly and deliberately, regardless of what precipitated the change in the first place, of course. Great big thank you to Benjamin Hardy. The book title is Willpower Doesn't Work, and that'll be linked up in the show notes.

Of course, if you enjoyed this, don't forget to thank Ben on Twitter. That'll be linked up in the show notes for this episode as well. always at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. And tweet at me your number one takeaway here from Benjamin Hardy. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on Twitter and on Instagram at Jordan Harbinger as well. Don't forget we have worksheets for today's episode. If you want to make sure you can apply everything you heard today, go grab that worksheet.

That link is in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com slash podcast. This episode was produced and edited by Jason DePhilippo. Show notes are by Robert Fogarty. Booking Back Office and Last Minute Miracles by Jen Harbinger, and I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Review us and iTunes. Share the show with friends. Look, subscribe. Jordan Harbinger.com slash subscribe if you want to figure out how to write a review or subscribe on insert whatever app you use here or your friend or your mom.

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