The One You Feed - Alex LIckerman

Episode Date: November 4, 2014

Alex Lickerman is a physician, former assistant professor of medicine and director of primary care, and current assistant vice president for Student Health and Counseling Services at the University of Chicago. He’s also been a secular Buddhist since 1989. His first book is The Undefeated Mind: On the Science of Constructing an Indestructible Self. In This Interview Alex and I Discuss...The One You Feed parable.Neither wolf wins permanently, the battle always goes on.How things that don't kill us can make us stronger but it doesn't happen automatically.Building an indestructible self.How our inner life state has much more to do with how we cope with adversity than the nature of that adversity.Suffering doesn't automatically cause us to grow.Learning to accept unpleasant feelings.How our strategies to avoid pain usually make it worse.Non judgmental awareness of our feelings is often better than resistance.The secret to success is not avoiding pain but carrying on in spite of it.That our internal pep talks have to be believable.The difference between optimistic and pessimistic explanatory styles.How obstacles always arrive on our path.That the last thing we do is look internally to see what we need to change in order to achieve a goal.Sometimes the way to solve a problem is not to fix it but to change how much we allow it to suffer.How suffering ceases to be suffering when it acquires meaning.Using comparison to be a positive force versus a destructive force.The difference between determination and willpower.Alex Lickerman LinksHappiness In This World- Alex Lickerman run siteAlex Lickerman homepageAlex Lickerman on TwitterAlex Lickerman on Facebook  Some of our most popular interviews that you might also enjoy:Kino MacGregorStrand of OaksMike Scott of the WaterboysTodd Henry- author of Die EmptyRandy Scott HydeSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The best kind of encouragement you can get is when someone just like you succeeds and you think to yourself, if they can do it, I can do it. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about

how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest today is Alex Lickerman. Alex is a physician, speaker, and assistant vice president for student health and counseling at the University of Chicago. Alex's book is called The Undefeated Mind on the Science of Constructing an Indestructible Self. Here's the interview. Hi Alex, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, I'm happy that we were able to get you on. I found your book, The Undefeated Mind, really interesting for a lot of different reasons. But I think one of the things that runs through it that we'll explore a lot more is really the idea of transforming what we would talk about as problems into victories. And I think that's such a, it's certainly been something that's happened in my life. And I'm always interested in exploring more. Yeah, yeah, that's great stuff. Happy to talk about that. So our podcast is called The One You Feed and it's based on the parable of two wolves where there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson and he says, in life, there are two

wolves inside of us. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And these two wolves are always at battle. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. And he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you how that parable applies to you in your life and in the work that you do. Sure. It's a very interesting parable. A couple

of things they thought of me. One is the notion that one wins and another loses. I don't quite think of it that way. I think, or I guess I would say I don't think of it that there is a final victory that you get to then stop fighting, but these are the two fundamental forces within all of us that really constantly do battle for supremacy of our behavior, control of our behavior, I should say. But I really like the notion of which one wins at least moment by moment is the one you feed, meaning it really is the action that we take ourselves, the efforts we make ourselves to promote good qualities and good behavior that results in that. And if we don't bother to take that action, we're sort of at the mercy of our environment and we really aren't going to be in control of whether we show up with our good self or our bad self. And so for me,

it really comes down to what kind of person do I want to forge myself into and what techniques do I use to do that? Because it's not just deciding to be good and then being successful at that. That certainly hasn't worked in my case. But there really are very specific techniques or practices that I think people can undertake that either they learn by experience or through, you know, there are studies out there, psychological studies that show really do work. And it's not just, you know, using willpower and deciding to be good or deciding to be bad, but really how you actually leverage psychological principles and the obstacles in our minds to sort of show up as the person you want to show up.

So for me, what that parable really talks mostly about, or at least speaks to me about, is the effort it takes to become the person you want to be. You really have to feed it. You have to make effort. Yeah, exactly. So in your book, The Undefeated Mind, there's a particular line that I'm going to read that I think acts as a good summary of a place to start with the whole book, and we can build from there. And I've used a version of this phrase myself, and I love it, but it says, that which doesn't kill us can make it stronger, but it doesn't happen by itself. So I think your theory is, or what the book is about, is that we're all going to have challenging experiences in life, and how we respond to those determine whether it does make us stronger or it does not make us stronger.

Can you maybe give a brief overview of what some of those key indicators are in that regard and maybe a brief synopsis of what you think an undefeated mind means? Sure. So I guess I'd start by telling you a story that sort of sparked my desire to write this book. And briefly, one day I was in clinics on a general interest. I was in clinic one day seeing a man who came in complaining of a stuffy nose. And what I was struck by was just how devastated he seemed to be by the fact that his nose was constantly stuffy and how he went on and on about how this had impacted his life. And it was sort of ruining his life from his perspective.

And then the very next patient I saw was a woman who was dying of metastatic breast cancer. And she was as poised and as calm as you can imagine. And I was just struck by the obvious contrast between their approach to their respective illnesses and how, you know, it was exactly the opposite of what you would have expected. And it made me realize, certainly we all face adversity in life, but how that adversity affects us is far more determined by our inner life state and the way we approach adversity and think about adversity than the nature of the adversity itself. And the thesis basically is that, you know, resilience, the ability to either, to not just, I should say, survive adversity, but thrive in the face of adversity. And the ability to push on toward a dream or a goal where obstacles arise, as they always do when you're trying to achieve something great, and not become discouraged and continue and keep going and not giving up.

That defines resilience. That defines what I call an undefeated mind. It's not that you don't become discouraged, but you don't allow the fact of your discouragement to stop you. And you don't look at the things, the bad things that happen to you as they inevitably happen to all of us and be so caught up and pulled down into depression and anxiety about those things, but find some way to maintain the confidence that no matter what happens to you, you can get through it and actually come out stronger than when you went into it. That doesn't just happen because you go from something bad and suffer. A lot of times, you know, an adverse experience just causes suffering and that's it.

You don't have to necessarily grow from adversity, but if you understand certain principles and leverage those principles and figure out how to think about adversity in a certain way, absolutely, that which does not kill us will make us stronger. Yeah, you've got a line that says, inner strength doesn't come from the experience of adversity itself, but from the wisdom that the experience of adversity has the potential to impart. Yeah, I think that's really, that's really it. What are some of these basic principles that you were talking about that, that, you know,

I'm sure I've got listeners right now who are listening, who are in the midst of something that seems to be a really terrible experience for them? Where can they start? Yeah, so one place is, there's a chapter that's called Accept Pain, and it talks about this notion of the power of acceptance of unpleasant feelings. So we all experience unpleasant feelings all the time, and I'm not just talking about emotional unpleasant feelings, you know, like anxiety or depression or guilt or anger, but physically unpleasant feelings, you know, pain, physical pain. And we evolved, of course, to avoid pain of all types, physical and emotional. But in fact, we end up causing ourselves often far more suffering by using the strategies we employ to try to avoid pain than the actual experience of pain itself would impart to our lives if we just let ourselves feel it.

There are unbelievable numbers of studies, one after another after another, in so many different contexts that show when you try to avoid pain or suppress pain inevitably, that only makes it worse. And there is some great power in looking upon pain non-judgmentally and with acceptance. So I'll give you a quick example, a simple example. People who are trying to quit smoking or trying to lose weight and trying to avoid overeating. When you train people like that to face food cravings or cravings for nicotine

for the spirit of acceptance and observation, so rather than, oh, I'm feeling horribly hungry, I really want that cookie right now, or I've got to get a bag of that cigarette, I'm going crazy, and they're trying to resist it and push it away. They are paradoxically censoring themselves on that. They're sending their attention on those cravings. If instead they approach those cravings with a spirit of acceptance and non-judgment, so rather than think to themselves, this craving is just unbearable. I really want to eat that cookie.

They sort of become an observer of their own unpleasant feeling. Wow, I'm really craving that cookie, or I'm really craving a cigarette right now. And allow it to sort of pass through them and don't fight it, but accept it, but refuse to act on it. And apparently what ends up happening is those cravings disappear. And they've studied people in both contexts, looking at people trying to avoid overeating and trying to quit smoking and found that those who approach their inevitable cravings with acceptance rather than denial or resistance have much higher rates of success. So this kind of applies in all types of realms when you are trying to achieve a goal.

And there's a particular exercise that I teach and that I talk about in the book. And it is, if you have a dream and you write that dream down on a piece of paper, and then you write down what are the main tasks that you have to accomplish in order to achieve that dream. And then next to those tasks, you write, what are the unpleasant feelings that arise when you even contemplate having to take on those tasks? What you actually end up discovering is that often the greatest dreams that you have, it's actually stopping you from achieving those dreams. It's nothing outside of yourself, but actually the unpleasant feeling that contemplating the task required to achieve the dream pull out of you.

And the strategy of avoidance works, right? So if you are someone who, say, is very shy and you have social anxiety, but you have a desire to, say, have a significant other, a girlfriend or a boyfriend or whatever, one, you know, but asking people out is incredibly anxiety-producing for you. Well, one really successful strategy you can use to avoid feeling anxiety is to not trigger it, meaning don't ask somebody out. And it works. You won't feel that anxiety, but at the same time, you'll also be able to achieve your dream. But if instead you approach those feelings with nonjudgment and also approach yourself without judgment for feeling those feelings,

so rather than say to yourself, I'm such a loser, I can't call up this person to ask him or her out without feeling anxiety, but instead say, I'm feeling terrible anxiety, but I'm going to do this anyway. I'm going to let myself feel this, but I'm not going to let this feeling stop me from taking the action I need to take to achieve my dream. You will find yourself unleashed and capable of accomplishing things you never imagined that you could, and capable of withstanding far more than you believe you can.

And I'll tell you, all of the people we hold up in society as these paradigms of achievement, you know, from anywhere from Abraham Lincoln to Steve Jobs, they all knew the secret, that the secret of success is not avoiding the pain and finding a way to do something, you know, without pain, but carrying on in spite of it and developing themselves so that their goal is not to find a way to avoid pain, to become so strong they can have whatever pain they needed to in order to achieve their dreams. Part of the book talks about Nichiren Buddhism, which I think is where you got some of the strategies to help build an undefeated mind. And there's a couple lines in there that I found

really interesting that I'd like us to talk about. One is that you say that according to Nichiren Buddhism, nothing boosts happiness more than victory or causes more misery than defeat. Can you explain what that means? Yeah, I guess there's different ways to sort of cut, take a cut at life. And people think about right and wrong and good and evil, but I really think about victory and defeat, and that's what Yudhisattva Buddhism focuses on. And by victory and defeat, what the principle really is about happiness and suffering. That's really what it comes down to. And so, victory may look like different things depending upon what it is you're aiming for. It's

not always necessarily achieving a goal, but victory in some sense is always about becoming wiser, happier, and stronger. And so you may actually fail to achieve a goal, but that doesn't mean you lost. You lost if you were defeated, meaning if you began to suffer as a result of failure. But failure sometimes is the very thing you need to actually teach you how to really achieve your dream.

So bottom line is winning and losing really comes down to you win when you have victory over yourself, when you sort of become stronger, happier, wiser. You lose when you allow yourself to become defeated and therefore suffer. You know, this feeling of sort of helplessness, hopelessness, I can't do this, I can't do that, and the suffering that ensues from

being brought into that life state, that's what it means to lose. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like... Why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer.

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Courts are not supposed to decide elections. Courts are not really supposed to play a big role in choosing our elected leaders. It's for the voters to decide. Follow the Big Take podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen. One of the things that listeners will know I explore all the time is the difference between positive thinking and sort of denial. And when is the proper time to give yourself to some degree, the pep talk, right? I can do this, I can get through this, I can versus when is the proper

time to experience the emotions that you're having and process those through in a way that they're not being suppressed. And I know that's probably a terribly difficult question to answer. I'm just kind of curious about how your mind goes about thinking about that. So I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I think that if you're talking now about trying to achieve a goal and maybe running into obstacles and being stopped and experiencing failure and setbacks, and how do you manage those setbacks?

How do you talk to yourself about those things? Number one is I think that, you know, we're human. And so when we fail, it stings. And maybe it stings terribly. Maybe, in fact, we attach our self-worth to our ability to succeed. And when we fail, we start to feel bad about ourselves as people. I think that whatever unpleasant emotion you're feeling, as long as it doesn't become overwhelming

and become sort of pathologically, you become paralyzed with it, like paralyzed with anxiety or paralyzed in depression so you can't even get out of bed, in which case you need to seek treatment. But if we're talking about less severe forms of those emotions that just sort of affect all of us every day,

I think to push them down and to deny them is to give them power. And to push them out of sight is to not recognize what type of damage and influence they can have on you. So if you are discouraged and depressed about something, to sort of deny that, you lose your ability to manipulate it, to deal with it constructively. ability to manipulate it, to deal with it constructively. And at the same time, I think you always have to be giving yourself pep talks, especially when you fail. You have to be pep talks that are believable.

So I talk a bit in the book about there's a difference between what's called a pessimistic self-explanatory style and an optimistic self-explanatory style. The basic difference is people tend to just have styles with which they explain the causes of adverse events. So if, for example, you fail the test, someone with a pessimistic self-explanatory style would say, well, I failed that test because I'm a bad test taker, meaning there's something intrinsically about me

that just is a limit that I can do nothing about. Whereas a person with an optimistic self-explanatory style would say, no, I failed that test because I just didn't study hard enough. And, you know, we leap upon these explanations when bad things happen to us really quickly and sort of typically unconsciously and immediately assume the first explanation we come across is correct. And often, number one, it's not. And number two, that explanation exerts great power over us and controls how we, you know,

how well those pep talks that we want to give ourselves, keep ourselves going, can affect how effective they're going to be. People with optimistic self-explanatory style in general, they look upon the causes of adversity from the perspective of they have the agency or the ability to influence them to try again. And so I think the power of positive thinking is great, but if in fact your style of explaining things to yourself is pessimistic, that's where you really want to intervene and teach yourself, and you can teach yourself to come up with and believe and attach to more optimistic explanations that empower you to take the action that enables you ultimately to succeed. to more optimistic explanations that empower you to take the action that enables you ultimately to succeed. Right, because we are usually making up some sort of story about why things happened.

And it sounds like what you're advocating is that we tell ourselves stories, or at least examine those stories a little bit more deeply to show that maybe what we have tended to think is the cause of things in the past isn't what really is the cause? Well, for one, we certainly often get it wrong. We come up with explanations that we just presume are correct, and we're way off in the field because we don't bother to actually investigate. And two, we do it unconsciously. I'm arguing that we should become mindful of the fact that the stories we use to explain the cause of things are not facts. They're stories. And they are stories that have great power over our future behavior, what we're going to do.

And so I'm arguing to become mindful. Because, in fact, it turns out, studies have shown, you really can train yourself to change yourself, become more optimistic in a way that's really adaptive. Yeah, there's a line you had that I really liked where you said, I find myself thinking about how quickly we pronounce final judgment on the things that happen to us, deciding whether they're good or bad in the first moment they occur, and how in doing so we surrender our own agency, abandoning the belief that we have the power to create meaning out of what happens to us. That's right. Absolutely. Yeah. We just, we say, well, it's done. It's over. You know,

I'm not going to be able to achieve that dream because this thing's in the way. And we surrender our ability and our belief in our ability to take another path. You know, the path towards success is rarely the way we see it at the outset. You know, obstacles always arise. And so how you ultimately get there, if you were to look back, the path ends up inevitably being different from what we foretold. But when moving forward towards it, if it's not the path we foretold, we tend to give up. We tend to think this can't be done because we don't see the other ways.

But sometimes you have to get to that place, to get that fork in the road, to actually see there is a fork in the road and then choose it. You have a line that says that we don't know how to solve the problem doesn't mean it's not solvable. It means we can't solve it if we remain as we are. The idea there is that a lot of the times, not always, but a lot of times, what needs to happen for us to be able to solve a problem is we need to change in some way.

So that may mean that we need to apply an expertise that we don't have. to change in some way. So that may mean that we need to acquire an expertise that we don't have. You know, so if my goal today is to become a professional basketball player, I can't just walk out on the court and do that. I have to train. I have to, you know, acquire the skills that I need to acquire. And maybe even then it's beyond me because I don't have enough natural talent to succeed in the NBA. That may or may not be the case. But a lot of times the issue is we have to change the way we think about things. We have to acquire a different perspective. So, um, the problem may not be an obstacle out in the environment, maybe an obstacle

in ourselves. It may be, for example, uh, we are unable to control our anger in a certain circumstances or we're shy or we're not confident in some way. And that, that, those things, those obstacles are what really prevent us from getting the job we want or whatever it may be. And so in order to sometimes achieve a goal that you're struggling with, often the last thing people do is look inside themselves and ask themselves, how do I need to change? What needs to be different about my approach or me in order to accomplish this goal?

And it's not that as I, the problem isn't that the goal is unattainable. The problem is the goal is unattainable if I remain as I am. And when people first start to look, they first ask themselves that question, suddenly, often for me at least, a whole host of possibilities open themselves up and I realize, wow, yeah, how can I expect to be able to achieve this goal if I keep thinking this way or I keep believing this or I keep doing that? And so it's a really powerful thing because we have much more ability to change ourselves in an adaptive way to acquire an expertise or mastery over something that we don't necessarily first have that opens up a world of possibility to achieve goals that hopefully, or at least

at first glance, seem impossible. Yeah, that's one of the reasons I'm such a big fan. We talk on the show about taking small steps, and that as you take those steps, A, they're easier to take, right? You can take small steps much easier than big steps. But as you move down that path, the view changes, and now suddenly, you can see things that you couldn't have seen, you know, back 10, 20 feet, and moving in the right direction is always a positive, good things come from it. Yeah, that's exactly right. Because what happens is, you think from the outset, you can see all the possibilities and all the doors you might be

presented with that you might have to choose in order to achieve your goal, but you really can't. You have to sort of get down the road and then sort of see what the view is from there before, you know, you'd be confronted with choices or opportunities that you could never have predicted from the outset. And you have to sort of, you know, believe in your heart that even if you can't see the way through from step one, when you get to step 10, you'll see farther ahead, you'll find some way. Because invariably, if you look back at what you have accomplished, that's how it goes. Exactly. There was another line you had that really, really struck me. And it's you say, most of us deem a problem solved when it no longer confronts us. But a different way to look at it is that the problem is solved when it no longer makes us suffer.

Can you elaborate on that a little bit? Yeah. So certainly, you know, the way we all prefer to solve problems is by eliminating the problem itself, but some problems are not solvable in the way we want. So, for example, if we come down with a chronic disease like multiple sclerosis, the way we really want to solve that problem is we want to cure the multiple sclerosis, but that may not be possible. In fact, right now that's not possible. But multiple sclerosis is only a

problem for us to the extent that it makes us suffer. And in fact, there are many people, in fact, many of my patients who have multiple sclerosis aren't suffering because of multiple sclerosis at all. Their function is not normal, but they've learned to adapt. And in fact, it literally no longer makes them suffer. And it's either because they've got enough function with medication or whatever that they're able to deal with it, either because they've got enough function with medication or whatever that they're able to deal with it, or because they change the way they think about it. There's another famous line from Viktor Frankl's book, A Man's Search for Meaning, he says, suffering ceases to become suffering when it acquires meaning.

And it really turns out that how we look at any adversity and how it affects us really is purely determined by what we think about it and what value we think we can gain from it. So, you know, I have patients who have terrible diseases, but either they've adapted to them or they've actually found a way to gain value out of them in some way. And when that happens, the disease, you know, it stops making them suffer. They accept it into their lives, they incorporate it, and they are as happy as many of my other patients. You know, for example, the story I told at the beginning of the podcast

about that woman of mine, a patient of mine who had breast cancer, she was not suffering because of her breast cancer. She had come to accept it. And in fact, interestingly, part of the reason why was because she was terminal, she was able to heal relationships with her loved ones that had been toxic for years.

But when confronted with the fact of her mortality, she sort of realized, I don't have any time left, and just was experiencing this renaissance of emotions and relationships with the people she loved that had just filled her life with great joy. And so in the midst of this terrible problem that she really couldn't solve the way she wanted to, which is, you know, to be cured, she was literally not suffering because of

it. Right. There's, you say at one point that you understand that, you know, part of an undefeated mind is, is understand there's no obstacle which we cannot create some sort of value out of. And I, my, my take on that has always been, you know, I don't believe things happen for a reason. But I do believe we can, we can find a reason or meaning or purpose out of anything that happens to us. And but that's solely our responsibility to responsibility to do the work and the effort to find what that thing is. Yeah, that's right. I really like what you said about, you know,

I also don't believe things happen for a reason from the sense that most people mean it, or in the sense most people mean it, which is that some external force created a circumstance and gave us this experience in order to teach us a specific thing. I don't think the universe worked that way, but I do know that when bad things happen to us, we have a choice about how we're going to respond to those things and what we're going to do about them, even if we don't actually get to choose how we feel about them because we're

not in charge of our feelings that way. But even if the value we're able to create out of a horrible adverse experience is that we become capable of encouraging other people in the future who are going through the exact same thing, and that's a very real thing. And when you talk about people who go through terrible things, you get to encourage others. That really adds great joy and fulfillment to their lives. Even if that's the only benefit you can find from adversity, that's quite a benefit. you can find from adversity, that's quite a benefit. And I'm not by way suggesting that when terrible things happen to us,

that the benefit we gain from them outweighs the loss of the tragedy, with, say, the example I give in the book about parents who lose children, whose children die. Even though studies show very real benefit does occur, and parents report those things, like feeling closer to their surviving children or feeling more courageous or whatever, and those are very real benefits. I'm not permitted saying necessarily that those benefits outweigh the pain of loss that you had to go through in order to realize them, but benefit is still always possible. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast,

our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a floor? We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you, and the one bringing

back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's gonna drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really, No Really, sir.

Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really, No Really. No Really. Go to reallynoreally.com. And register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead.

It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. One of the things I've been particularly interested lately in is the idea of envy or comparison. And you talk a little bit about social comparison. And you say at one point that there's ways that we can use social comparison not to divide us, but to drive us. Can you walk me through your approach to making social comparison? Because it seems to be default, right? It seems like it's almost impossible to avoid. But how can we make it less of a malignant force and more of a positive force? Right, yeah.

And it's a human thing to do. We compare ourselves to others all the time. We kind of can't help it. You can, by focusing your attention on a certain type of social comparison, you can motivate yourself as opposed to discourage yourself. And what it turns out is that when you compare yourself to somebody who has tried to do or succeeded in doing what you want to do, say, write a book and publish a book, if you pick somebody who is similar to you and who it seems that they were able to accomplish the

task through their effort, not because of some special intrinsic ability that they have. Studies show that that type of social comparison is very motivating. I mean, if you compare yourself to someone who you think is beyond you in some way and very different from you and has special gifts you don't have, and they've accomplished something that you yourself want to accomplish. That type of comparison tends to discourage you and should be avoided. And it literally is just where do you put your focus?

The other thing though is if you compare the work of people who succeeded to your work and you compare it to, you know, and this seems a little bit Machiavellian, but it does work. And so if you find someone whose work you think is inferior to yours, but they've succeeded, and you're comparing the work, not the person, but the work, that also could be, for most people, very motivating because you say to yourself, well, if they succeeded with that, I can do this, which I think is better. And you really believe that. That can also be very encouraging. But you really want to be careful because it's very easy to do what's called downward social comparison, to look down on people whose product may be inferior to yours and your view, and to disparage them or to think less of them. And that obviously is more along the

lines of dividing us rather than inspiring us. I had heard somewhere recently that idea that you had of if we are comparing ourselves to somebody who we do think is like us or inspires us, that can be positive because you can always look up or look down from any, you know, nearly any position. And what I find though, is either of those views, I'm not, I'm not really connecting with people. I'm just, I'm measuring myself against them. And it seems to be so, such a painful thing for me to do. Yes. Because if you, you can always find someone who's doing better than you. And it seems to be so such a painful thing for me to do. Yes. Because if you, you can always find someone who's doing better than you. And if you continue to compare yourself against those people, all you'll do is feel inferior or bad about yourself

in some way. Uh, and that's, that's really a mistake. But when you find those people who you feel are just like you, they succeeded that, that is, you know, um, that's really encouraging to people because it makes them feel like they can do it. It's the best kind of encouragement you can get is that someone just like you succeeds and you think to yourself, if they can do it, I can do it. Yeah, exactly. That is powerful. The other thing we talked a little bit earlier about sort of taking those small steps and as you do the road changes, I think that another thing with comparison, particularly when you talk about goals, whether it be writing a book or doing some kind of art, is that it's very easy to compare where we are now with where somebody else is after 10 years of work, for example. And I think it's

really useful to try and keep that in mind as we think about it. Like, oh yeah, here's where I'm at. I'm starting here. And in five, ten years, I will be in a very different place. Yeah, the other thing too is, you know, when you find yourself trapped in that comparison so much as far advanced, you would be discouraged because you're so far ahead. The issue there is you just don't know their full story, right? Because if you actually learn that story and learn about what they were like, what their lives were like when they were sort of where you are now, often it's worse.

You know, you hear, wow, they went through that, and that can also make you feel very better because it's the rare person who just is born with a true silver spoon in their mouth who can sort of leap from success to success without really failing and struggling. And when you really learn what people are to go through and recognize that even if people have great talent, that without hard work and sort of facing obstacles and resisting discouragement, they couldn't have become successful. It, again, makes them seem more like you. That's another way out of that trap is to understand or learn their story if you can. Exactly.

We're nearing the end of our time, but there was one last piece of the book that I wanted to talk about. Maybe we can use this as a place to wrap up. But you talk a lot in the book about the power of determination. Can you share a little bit more about what determination means to you and how we feed that? I think it's important to distinguish between determination and willpower. That willpower is sort of the clenching of the will and the pushing them through an obstacle to achieve a goal is one tool of determination. But I think about determination as a promise or a vow that you make to yourself. So in Buddhism, for example, the type of Buddhism I practice, prayer is really a determination.

Because in Buddhism, you don't pray to an external force. because in Buddhism you don't pray to an external force. You're really sort of mustering up your own life force to gear up to sort of lift the heavy weight, whether it's a literal weight or it's actually to take on a big goal that you have. And it is the commitment that you pull out to do whatever it takes, to become whatever it takes, that often is what is the key to determining success and failure. And when I go after a goal, if it's important to me,

I pause and I really think to myself, what am I willing to do to achieve this goal? How far am I willing to go? What am I willing to lose? How committed am I really to this goal? And I measure it in terms of what I'm willing to give up. And that usually is what helps me figure out if I'm going to be successful or not. Because if I say to myself, I want this so badly, I'll do whatever it takes, and I mean it, and I can find that because I understand why this is so important to me.

I think that's crucial. Why are we doing something? And how does it connect to our personal sense of mission? something? And how does it connect to our personal sense of mission? When you've got a firm sense of why you're doing something, you're able to unleash determination to never give up. And in fact, ultimately what I will sometimes do when I'm incredibly discouraged is my commitment will not just be so much to my goal, but my commitment is to not quitting. That's sometimes easier for me, an easier commitment for me to make and believe I can make than to believe I'm actually going to ultimately accomplish a goal that's seeming too large or there's too many obstacles in my way that I have no idea how to overcome. Because then if you can commit to just not quitting and you just keep going and going and taking action and moving forward, ultimately, in most cases, I think your goal will come within reach.

I think that's a really useful distinction between willpower, which wears out pretty easily, and you talk about that in the book. There's lots of other studies that show willpower can quickly go away, and not confusing that with being determined and how we can lose our willpower and not do something that's important to us, but that doesn't mean that's important to us. But that doesn't mean that we have to quit. And I there, there seems to be so much of, you know, certainly in my life in the past, this, if I can't do it, you know, 100%, I'm just not going to do it at all. Versus saying, all right, this is something that's important to me, I'm going to keep at it, even if for three days last week I didn't.

I fell completely off the wagon last week for three days. The fact that my willpower wore out doesn't mean that I don't have the ability to do this. It just means that maybe my strategies need to be tweaked. Willpower is a moment-by-moment thing. As you rightly say, it fatigues quite easily. But determination, even when you're horribly discouraged and lying in your bed alone on the covers that hold up to your chin and you want to quit,

your determination can still be constant. You allow yourself to feel that way as long as underneath you still feel, you know to yourself, today I'm going to lie in bed and be miserable and want to quit, but tomorrow I'm going to get up and do it again. It's that promise to yourself that you're aiming to fulfill, the desire and the aim to fulfill that promise.

That's where determination lies. Even when your willpower fails and you're discouraged. Alex, this has been a really enjoyable conversation, and I really enjoyed the book. I think there's a lot of great stuff in there, and a lot of things that particularly tie back to themes that come up in the show over and over again. So I'll certainly have links in the show notes to the book for our readers, but thanks so much for taking the time to talk with us.

Oh, thanks so much for having me. I really enjoyed the conversation. All right. Thanks, Alex. Take care. You too. Bye. you can learn more about alex lickerman and this podcast at one you feed.net slash alex