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2: The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal
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I did make a big mistake though Mike.
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What's that?
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I decided that based off of GTD,
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I was going to consolidate a bunch of inboxes into my email.
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That was fun.
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How'd that turn out?
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Well, I end up with about 300 emails in a day,
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apparently, and it's fun.
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You have to set aside at least an hour to get through it all.
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But that means that I'm not checking Twitter,
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I'm not checking a bunch of this other stuff repeatedly throughout the day.
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So it ends up as a good thing.
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Nice.
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Any massive changes to your GTD system after rereading the book last time?
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Not any major changes, but what reading the book did for me
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is it made me realize that I had fallen off the wagon to a certain degree.
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So I've been trying to do a much better job of making sure that everything,
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absolutely everything is captured,
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and then I'm a little bit more consistent and thorough with my reviews.
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So I'd say in the last couple of weeks,
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those have been taken up a notch,
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but I definitely still have some room for improvement.
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Yeah, that sounds...
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I had to do a big, like, brain dump,
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I guess, the mind sweep process.
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I had to do a bunch of that.
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And one of the interesting pieces I had to incorporate
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was making sure I did that on a regular basis,
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just because it was...
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Like you're saying, it's too easy to just get on the train of...
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collect things as they come,
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and then you're putting it into the system and running with it from there,
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but then you always have to make sure you take a step back and say,
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"Okay, what's on my mind that I'm not getting out of my mind right now?
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And what do I do about it?"
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That was kind of my difficulty and the thing I wasn't doing,
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so that would be...
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I don't know, that's been a big step for me,
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is to try to get that back on track.
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Yep, as they say in movie "Zoolander,"
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"What do we do when we fall off the horse?"
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"We get back on!"
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And to me, the book that we go through,
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that we just finished reading,
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that we're gonna go through today,
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I thought this was a good next step
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after getting things done,
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because getting things done,
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for me, was a lot about remembering the things I need to do,
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freeing up that mental ram and accomplishing things.
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And today's book, "The Willpower Instinct,"
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by Kelly McGonagall,
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it kind of helps me go to that next step and focus on,
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"Okay, how do I have the self-control to do the things that are on those lists?"
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If that makes sense, how do I actually make sure that I'm doing the stuff that I've set
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aside from the getting things done system?
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I've been calling it TWP.
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How do I actually accomplish that and make sure I'm on task?
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Does that make sense?
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Does that, I don't know, they were interestingly connected to me.
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They definitely, "The Willpower Instinct," to me, I saw immediate gains when I read this,
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and part of it was the application of actually following through
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and doing my reviews and making sure that I'm capturing everything the way that I'm supposed to.
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Like we talked about when we did getting things done,
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because I don't know, reading this book was kind of like a little bit of a pep rally.
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It's like, "Yeah, you can do it sort of a thing," and you get done reading a chapter,
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and you're like, "Oh, this isn't that hard."
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Like, "I understand how this works now. I can put this into action in my own life."
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Yes, it's one of those things. I really wanted each chapter to be
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consolidated down into a paragraph so that I could just read one of those every day,
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because every time I put the book down, I was like, "Okay, I'm gonna go take on the world now,"
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because I feel like I could accomplish a whole lot.
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But before we get too far here, so "The Willpower Instinct,"
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it's by Kelly McGonagall, the violin on this, how self-control works,
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why it matters, and what you can do to get more of it.
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And to be honest, Mike, whenever I picked up the book, so I ordered it from Amazon,
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you know, the classy thing to do. And I didn't really know what,
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like, I didn't even know what that violin was until I showed up at the door.
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So I picked it up. I was reading the back of it, and I realized
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that I had listened, not listened, but I had watched Kelly McGonagall has done a TED talk,
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and it's about stress, which she doesn't talk about a whole lot here in "The Willpower Instinct,"
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but she does have a lot of research that she's done on stress, and I think that's kind of her
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correlation of stress kind of combats willpower or self-control. And she's really good about
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explaining how do you deal with that. And this, I think, was one of her first steps,
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like it's the step before you get into the stress side of things. And to be honest,
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reading the first, like, the introduction of this made me want to be done with it right away,
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not because I understood everything she was going to go through, but I wanted the tips and tricks,
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like, already figured out. It's like, okay, how many of these things am I failing at, and
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how many things am I thinking that I'm really good at, and I'm good at accomplishing, and I'm good at,
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I guess, controlling my mind to focus on the right thing, and yet I'm not
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reaching that. I kind of had the same thing when I read this book right away when I dove in,
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she gives you some quick wins. So from a marketing perspective, she did a great job
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using the first chapter. She's, oh, you can do this, and you can do that, and you can do this
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to increase willpower, and then she gets into really the why behind willpower, and how self-control
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works and stuff like that, further on in the book. But one of the things that she highlighted
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right at the beginning, which I thought was really interesting, was that the average person
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thinks that they make about 14 food-related decisions a day, when in reality, it was like 227.
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I know, I know. I ended up, so I do this whole book index thing on the back, and there are so
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many of those. I had this little fun tidbits thing that I was highlighting and marking up tons of
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those things, and there was so many of them. How many things do we, like, for example, one of them
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was that dieting tends to help most people increase weight. You end up gaining weight from most
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diets. It's like, what? Yeah, and the way that she explains it, it's kind of like, well, yeah,
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I can totally see why that would happen. Who in their right mind would try to actually embark on
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this diet, but a lot of people do because they don't understand the process. So that was really
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helpful for me, understanding the process, and really understanding the three different types
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of willpower. She defined them as, "I will, I won't, and I want." And if you do the book the way you're
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supposed to, and I didn't do it this way, you probably didn't either because of the time frame
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that we read it, but she teaches this stuff as a class at Stanford. So it's broken down into,
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you choose your willpower challenge at the beginning, and then you go through it as like a series of
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10 different lessons. And so she talks about how your willpower challenge at the beginning,
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if it falls into one of these categories, it's not going to be as effective, but she doesn't tell
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you that. So you get to like chapter four or five. So she kind of reveals stuff as she goes, but
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it was really interesting to see why some things will work if we view it through, "I will versus,
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I won't," and vice versa. And I think that is really the trick for a lot of people who struggle
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with this stuff is they want to go to the gym consistently, but it's just in the way that they're
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framing that. Just looking at it from a different angle or a different perspective,
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the exact same thing, that might be enough to help you follow through and actually take action on that.
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Right. And there was a lot of tips that she goes through on each of those. And
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the one piece of this whole thing that stood out to me was that your brain actually can,
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because she does a ton of the studies, whereas last time we were talking about getting things
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done in that chapter on science and how it was rather lacking, I didn't dig into the studies on
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this one near as much as I did on that one simply because the first two that I looked at,
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they're rock solid. Kelly is really good about finding the really well-done studies, I guess.
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Every chapter is basically about that. She pulls together two or three, sometimes five studies,
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and then explains how they apply to your life. One of those was how you can physically grow
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a certain part of your brain, which was fascinating to me because I've never really thought about,
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like the example I think she gave was about memory. You remember those card games where you had the
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card's length face down and you had to flip one up and try to match the two of them,
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and you had to memorize where everything was at so that you could make those matches.
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She simply said that if you do that for about 10-15 minutes every day, you play that game every
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single day. The part of your brain that helps you work on memory physically does grow and get
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bigger and gets better and the connections are strengthened in your brain physically.
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Even simple things like self-control or in that case memory, you can physically work on those
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and make them bigger and make your brain better at those. That blew my mind a little bit.
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That means if I find ways to practice self-control, which she gives probably hundreds of tips on how
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to do that in here, if you can find ways to do that that work for you, then you can actually grow
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your brain in the self-control muscle. She literally makes that correlation of you can treat your
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brain like a physical muscle. We've heard that in the past. You hear those, hear people talk about
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your brain as a muscle, but I've never thought about it as actually physically growing whenever
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you do that. One of the things that she mentions that you can do is meditation, but the way that
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she framed that section, I thought was really interesting because she's used examples of people
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who thought that they were terrible at meditation, which I would fall into that category. I've tried
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it in the past and not been great at it, but I just assumed that it wasn't for me that I was
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doing something wrong. I cut out the practice of that, but she basically says that it's okay if you
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suck at it. The fact that you're doing it, even if you can't pay attention or you can't do it the
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way that you think you're supposed to do it, you catch your mind drifting and things like that,
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that's okay because the effectiveness of it isn't coming from you being able to focus on those things.
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It's just putting in those reps with your brain. Some of the things that she said meditation
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improves are like attention, focus, stress management, impulse control, self-awareness. One of the
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things kind of going out of order, sorry, but one of the things that I'm trying to do here is I have
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this app on my iPhone. It's called Meditation Studio. I'm trying to get back into it. It's got a whole
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bunch of guided meditations, which range anywhere from two minutes to I think there's so many,
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like as long as 20 minutes. I'm going to try and start doing these consistently and I'm hoping that
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I'm going to see the results that she says I'm going to see. I believe I will because like you said,
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this whole thing has so much research behind it. It can be overwhelming, but kind of like you,
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like when she would refer to a study, I recognize some of the names, like she mentions Ray Baumeister
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and stuff like that. But she does it often enough that when she does it, you're just like, yep,
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okay, you know what you're talking about. Let's get to the results. One of the things she mentioned
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at the beginning was that there was a study where people who are distracted are much more likely to
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give in to temptation. So the study itself was with students who were trying to remember a phone
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number. Do you remember this one? - Vaguely. - We're going on our Nettle Trigger.
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Yeah, so students who are trying to remember a phone number were 50% more likely to not have
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the willpower to choose fruit at the snack cart and give in and get chocolate cake instead.
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- Yeah. - Just because they're trying to remember a phone number, which going back to like the
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food related decisions that people make, like actually being 227 instead of the 14 that they think,
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that was a big thing for me was recognizing and I kind of knew this already, but it really
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reinforced it and made me aware of it again that I make a lot of decisions throughout the day
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that I maybe shouldn't be making and it's depleting my willpower. So how can I make sure that I
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conserve enough willpower for the things that really matter by pushing off or doing them earlier,
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whatever, like the other things that don't really matter, like what am I going to eat today?
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Not that that doesn't matter, but you get what I'm saying. Like for example, you have to choose
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what you're going to wear in the morning. Well, you could do that the night before when you're
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getting ready for bed. That's an easy win then and you don't have to make that decision when you first
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get up as an example. - Yeah. And I think that correlates to you hear of people like Steve Jobs,
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Mark Zuckerberg, who they wear the same thing every single day. Like they just have this wardrobe
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that they always wear. I think there's some of that here with that decision fatigue
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process that we hear about and that's that, you know, and the concept there is that you
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limit the number of decisions you need to make on some of the mundane things so that you can focus
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your mind on making the decisions on the more important or the bigger ideas. And I think this is
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partially why because you need to push off some of those willpower draining functions that when
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you're working your self-control, like you're trying to do too much with it because the more
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that you work that muscle, it's just like, you know, any part of your like if you're working your
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legs or your arms, you're doing bench presses, you're eventually going to wear out. Well, it's
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the same thing with self-control is you're you're working that muscle and over time it does get
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tired and you can't keep going. I think about whenever we have our structures and our systems
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in place, the more that we try to say that we're going to we're going to get so much done today
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or as she's talking about, I'm going to get a ton of things done tomorrow. It's always the
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elusive tomorrow person who's going to do it. The more I can give to them, the more I'm pushing myself
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to do that. The less I'm able to accomplish today. And we tend to associate the things that the
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bigger grander things that we want to do. Like I'm going to accomplish 10 new podcasts today. Well,
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no, no, you're not. There's not even enough time to do that. You're not going to have the mental
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energy. You're not going to have the focus to do that. And if you think that you're going to do
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that tomorrow, you're really not because you're going to feel the same way tomorrow. And then
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it's the next day. And this is where the procrastination circle kicks in.
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Yeah, that part was really interesting. She basically said that we have a psychological
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tendency to predict the ideal scenario for the future. But in reality, that ideal scenario
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never really materializes exactly like that. And even though people knew that, they were more likely
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to commit more time or more resources to something in the future, because they still believe it at a
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cycle at a psychological level that they would be able to better handle their their time in the
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future. For example, like, if you were going to commit to a service project, you'd give
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X amount of time right now, maybe it's 15 minutes, but two weeks in the future, you'd be willing to
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give 30 minutes. And then she was digging into like, why is that that people think that in the
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future, they're going to be better stewards of everything. I thought that was really interesting,
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because she also talks about how the further we go into the future, the more we kind of double
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down on that on that effect, even though it can be proven that that's not not what usually happens.
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Right. You know, if you were to actually measure two weeks from now, how much time do you want to
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commit to this thing? It's actually less than the 15 minutes you have today. But even though you're
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armed with that data and you see the patterns playing out in your own life, you it's like you
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feel that you can beat that, even though that's ingrained in there, like you have enough. I don't
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know. It's not even really willpower. It's just like, I am going to overcome the laws of nature.
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And I'm going to do this differently. But it's just not being realistic with ourselves. So
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recognizing that that kind of stuff happens was really good for me, because I definitely see how
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I can I overcome it to stuff a lot of times, because I'm like, Oh yeah, I'll have an hour where I
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can squeeze in next week to do this thing. And then my kid has to go into the ER to get stitches,
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you know, or fill in the blank. It's always always something. But you would think that, you know,
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you learn from that stuff and you start to see the pattern, but we don't. We just always project
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the ideal, even though that's never what actually happens. Exactly. And I think this is kind of the
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the moral licensing piece that she was talking about. This is easily the one that I struggle with
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the most, I think, because I'm really good at saying that if I work really hard on something
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today, or say this morning, so this morning, I'm doing a ton of reviews and I'm doing a lot of
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writing and I'm accomplishing a lot. Well, then I go to lunch and I come back from lunch and
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because I feel like I had a highly productive morning, it's kind of giving me permission
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to do the easy goof off type of tasks in the afternoon or none at all. And that's what she's
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referring to with moral licensing. If I do good now, I can do bad later. And she correlates that
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again. She uses the example of food and smoking and drinking quite a bit. And I think that's partially
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because in her class, that's usually the the self control and the willpower challenges that
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people take on as those type of those difficulties that people deal with. And for me, it's usually a
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productivity challenge of if I do a lot of good things this morning or I have a good morning, it
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kind of licenses me to goof off on YouTube in the afternoon. And she even takes that
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the step further where if I have time tomorrow to accomplish something that I don't want to do today
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or I just think I can do tomorrow, I'm going to be able to write 100 pages tomorrow.
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Absolutely no way is that going to happen. But say I'm going to write 100 pages tomorrow,
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well, that means that I can skip the 20 that I'm going to write today. So just because I know
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that I have that time tomorrow, well, then when tomorrow comes, of course, I don't have the strength
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to do that because I haven't been working myself hard enough to build up the endurance and the
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strength to do that. So I'm not going to write the 100 tomorrow, I might get 30, but it's like,
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okay, I'll do 120 tomorrow. You see, you see how this goes, you end up just continually building
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this whole licensing process of is if I have time in the future, and I don't want to do it now,
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well, that gives me permission to skip it now. And now we're back down that procrastination path.
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Yep. And this is, this is in line with the big thing that I liked about this book was
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understanding how this stuff all works. So she explains in that section of the book that there's
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really two different selves who are at constant odds. There's the self that wants to sit down and
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write, you know, in your example, because that they know that that's what's going to help them
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achieve their long term goals is going to make them productive, it's going to provide all these
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benefits. But then there's the other self, which just wants to veg out and watch TV or not be
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productive in any way, shape or form. So recognizing that those two things are always battling against
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each other is important because just like you said, the moral licensing, we take one step forward,
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and then we feel like, okay, we can now take two steps back. And that's why the dieting stuff
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doesn't work. You know, because you're like, Oh, well, I ate, I ate well for this one meal. So,
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for lunch, maybe I had a salad. So for dinner, I'm going to make up for it quote unquote,
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by getting the biggest steak I can and having chocolate cake for dessert. And you completely
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undo all of the forward progress that you made previously. And this concept, she called it
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goal liberation, I believe. So it's basically we've been working on this one thing. And so that
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progress that we made can actually cause us to abandon our goal by granting permission for the
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other self to have their way. And usually it's it's come back, it comes back in multiples where you
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take like it's a one step forward, and then you end up taking two steps back when you let that,
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that happen. So the cool takeaway I got from that was that you can always push through,
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just like she used the analogy of like runners, they will hit, they will hit a wall. And if you're
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a really good runner, she talks about how you know that wall is going to come, but you know,
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that's not the actual wall, you know that you can push through that. Just by recognizing that
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your body is telling you this, this is just your body is telling you these signals, it's telling
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you this message, but it's not true. And recognizing it being able to push through that the same thing
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can be done with willpower. Because I know in the past, like I've, I've encountered that
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where it's like, Oh, I just, I can't deal with this anymore. Yes, you can deal with it. You need to
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recognize that you feel like you've come to the end of yourself, but there's actually a glass
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ceiling there that you can break through and you do have more in the tank. And I've seen all
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ready a couple times where I recognize that and be like, Oh, no, you got this, you know, you push
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through and you you tackle that thing. But I see that paying huge dividends in my own life.
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Yeah, I was looking up because she, she talks about how fatigue really shouldn't be considered a
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physical event, but she refers to it as an emotion or a sensation. Right. I thought that, I mean,
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that caught me off guard a little bit. Because I've always thought of fatigue as, because I'm a runner
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from time to time, more of a fair weather runner. And whenever I do that, I tend to sense that fatigue
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point. And like you're saying, you can break through that, but I never really thought about
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that fatigue isn't necessarily a real physical thing. Essentially, what's going on is that your
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mind is projecting forward and saying, okay, if you keep up this pace, we're eventually going
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to wear out. But the thing is that your brain wants to get to that point way before your body
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actually will give out. So you end up getting that sensation, that emotion of fatigue well
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before your body actually will give up. And she's saying that self control is the same. We get this
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sense that we just can't keep going. We can't keep resisting. We can't keep on task,
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because we're going to wear out, but you actually can. I think the examples she gave was if you're
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resisting a chocolate bar, and if you are about ready to give in, you've used up all of your
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self control to prevent yourself from eating that chocolate bar. And then she steps in and says,
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for a hundred bucks, I'll give you a hundred bucks if you don't eat that. Well, all of a sudden,
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you've got a lot more self control all of a sudden, it just immediately shows up at that point.
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And it's just that process of you can dig deep, you can find that extra self control if you're
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willing to search for it and you're willing to just realize that, yeah, I'm getting tired of this,
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and I just can't keep going. But yes, yes, you can.
00:25:24
Yep, absolutely. And there was another thing that I thought was really interesting, kind of in that
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same vein is the what the heck effect. Where if you don't follow through with stuff, if you give in,
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that indulgence will lead to regret or guilt, whatever you want to label it. And that's actually
00:25:52
going to lead you to greater indulgence. So it's like, once you slip up, and once you fall off the
00:25:59
path, even a little bit, you're at a very precarious point, because you could very easily
00:26:05
continue to fall down that hill if you don't catch what's going on. And I can totally see myself
00:26:11
doing that, especially with food. I don't know why. But when I don't eat well, the tendency, and she
00:26:18
says this in the book, is to just keep eating. And it's like, if you sit down and think about it,
00:26:22
why am I, why am I eating this? You know, I had a whole pizza, I am sandwich, like a bag of potato
00:26:29
chips. Why am I eating this apple pie? But it's like a vicious shame spiral, and you just can't,
00:26:35
you can't get out of it. It's like, Oh, well, the day's gone anyways. Like, I'm so far gone now,
00:26:39
I may as well just keep going. Yeah, it's hilarious. Now did you get, I think that's kind of like the
00:26:46
dopamine piece that she got into. Maybe it's just me, like, but I've always thought of
00:26:53
dopamine as the actual reward in your brain. So you, you go pick up that chocolate bar and as
00:27:02
soon as you eat it, you know, you eat that slice of apple pie, and then that's what gives you that
00:27:07
dopamine shot in your mind. And that's the way I've always thought of it. And she completely
00:27:13
contradicted that in the book. And maybe that's just my misperception in the past. But essentially,
00:27:20
what she was getting at with the dopamine piece was that that is, it's not the reward itself. It's
00:27:28
the expectation of a reward. So it's that desire for something. So your mind is given that dopamine
00:27:37
whenever you're expecting the apple pie, so it makes you want it. And it's that process of,
00:27:45
I want it and it will continue to pound at you until you give in. But once you give in,
00:27:51
that wanting piece is gone, it stops pushing that desire. So once you give into it, it's past that.
00:27:57
And then your brain is no longer excited about it. And it's like, okay, well, what, why did I just
00:28:03
do that? I don't know. It doesn't feel near like what I thought it was going to. So you end up with
00:28:09
that expectation of something that's going to bring you that joy or that reward. And then it just
00:28:14
completely falls short. Yeah. And I thought it was really interesting where she talked about the
00:28:20
different brain chemicals. And I don't know exactly what any of these do. But dopamine is the thing
00:28:26
that people get addicted on, but it always leaves them wanting more. So what did she say? She says,
00:28:35
dopamine hit promises us that we're going to feel better, but it always lets us down. And so
00:28:40
dopamine, I believe is the pleasure chemical in the brain. But that's different than like serotonin
00:28:49
or oxytocin, where like dopamine is almost like an artificial substitute. Like serotonin, I believe,
00:28:57
and again, I'm going to probably mess up the science here, but serotonin, I believe, is more
00:29:03
like the happiness chemical. So you could say pleasure happiness, they're kind of related, but
00:29:08
pleasure is just like what feels good right now, whereas I view happiness as more long term good.
00:29:14
And so she talks about like effective stress relievers are not the ones that release the
00:29:19
dopamine. Those are the ones like the rats in the story that got addicted to the thing that was
00:29:24
actually hurting them. Right. But it's so it's it's not the way that you feel when you do these
00:29:30
stress relievers, it's more so the long term results. And that can be a little bit tricky,
00:29:35
because we can't sometimes see the long term results. But you can kind of tell like the rats in the
00:29:40
in the story, we're always looking for that next dopamine hit. It's like the Pavlovian dog response.
00:29:45
Whereas the serotonin just translates into better mental well-being, better, you know,
00:29:54
mental adjustment, like a general general, generally feeling more happy, more satisfied. Like, I think
00:30:02
if you were to actually sit down and say, how am I really feeling right now, you would be able to
00:30:08
articulate the difference between, you know, my dopamine is wearing off and I got to figure out
00:30:13
where the next one's coming from. And yeah, yeah, I'm feeling very satisfied right now. You know
00:30:18
what? No matter what happens, I'm good. So that was a really big thing for me. And then,
00:30:24
Yeah, and she she did correlate that with technology today, which I was really glad she did that,
00:30:32
because I kept wondering as she was going through this potential for reward delivery mechanism,
00:30:39
I really feel like so much of the the apps out there are really designed to do that specific thing,
00:30:47
where you're expecting it gives you that expectation of a notification or someone liked it. I mean,
00:30:57
how many teens get addicted to seeing how many likes are on their Instagram photos? I mean,
00:31:02
you see all these different addictions that come from that. And it's not so much that
00:31:07
the actual like on say, take that example, a like on Instagram, the like itself isn't the thing
00:31:15
that's giving you the pleasure. It's the expectation that there might be one that's giving you that.
00:31:22
And whenever these apps are built to play off of that, they really become that addiction. It
00:31:29
literally is an addiction to expecting something different. You become that rat who has the dopamine
00:31:35
trigger right in your pocket all the time to try to give you that desire all the time. And you just
00:31:40
can't put it down at that point. And you really have to to break it, break that cycle of just realizing,
00:31:48
and this is the part that I really enjoyed about this book, Mike, is that she doesn't just give you
00:31:53
these studies and give you the the issues. She actually does give you the tips and tricks on how
00:31:58
to overcome them and how to break the cycles and the difficulties that come with this. Yeah. And in
00:32:03
that particular case, it's just a noticing idea, the mindfulness, like you're saying the meditation
00:32:12
and the mindfulness process of how do I focus or in this case, how do I just realize that I'm not
00:32:19
focusing? And just realizing that with take the phone example with that, I have to realize that,
00:32:27
yes, I'm expecting something new. And because I'm expecting something new, when it does come,
00:32:34
when that like does happen, how do I feel at that point? You start to notice how you feel about it.
00:32:42
And slowing it down and saying, okay, well, now that it came through, now that that reward is here,
00:32:47
what's my expectation? What what comes next? Am I just looking for the next one? Am I hoping for
00:32:54
the next one? If that's all there is, then what is the point of this circle? Right. And why am I
00:33:00
doing this? Is there something bigger that I'm supposed to be looking forward to? Because it's
00:33:05
something that small and mundane really doesn't make a lot of sense. Yeah. And that one kind of
00:33:10
falls squarely in the domain of the I want willpower. But another similar strategy that she talks about
00:33:19
at the end regarding the I won't willpower is to surf the urge, she calls it, which I thought was a
00:33:26
really cool strategy where you're you're being tempted to do something that you've declared,
00:33:34
I don't want to do this thing anymore. And so the process that she outlines is to recognize that
00:33:41
the temptation is there and accept the thought or the feeling that it's generating without arguing
00:33:49
with it, which is completely counterintuitive to just about everybody that I've heard prior to
00:33:55
this teaching on this stuff. Yep. You know, she uses the example of don't think about white polar
00:34:01
bears. And then that's the only thing you can think on. I was telling my wife about that. And she
00:34:07
she was like, I don't ever want to think about white bears ever again. Right. It's totally true,
00:34:13
though. I've heard it said in in golf, the illustration of this principle would be,
00:34:18
you have to focus on where you want to hit the ball as opposed to where you don't want to hit the
00:34:24
ball. So if you're thinking don't hit it in the water, don't hit it in the water, your brain can't
00:34:28
discern do or don't. And so it's focusing on the water. So most of the time, in that case,
00:34:35
your ball will go into the water if that's your focal point. So I really liked that strategy that
00:34:43
she presented because I think that's a much more effective way to battle those things. So number
00:34:47
one, recognize a temptation. Number two, accept the thought or feeling without arguing. Number three,
00:34:53
this is the key part. And the thing that I am going to apply to my own life is to step back and
00:34:58
realize that you can control whether you act on those feelings and act on that temptation. And then
00:35:06
fourth, remember your goal. So the why, for example, which is relating to food, because she used that
00:35:14
example a lot. When you say, Oh, I've been good today, I'm going to go ahead and have that piece
00:35:19
of chocolate cake. It's because you've forgotten your why you've forgotten your goal. If you always
00:35:25
have that goal in front of you, it's a lot easier to say no, because you can more clearly see how
00:35:30
eating that chocolate cake is not going to help you reach your weight goal or fit into your
00:35:34
pair of pants that you want to fit into or whatever. So having that in front of you as much as possible
00:35:41
is really key when you're dealing with the I won't brand of willpower.
00:35:48
Yeah, I think this is one of the reasons that I'm so bent on doing reviews all the time,
00:35:52
is I struggle a lot with making sure that there are tasks and the things I'm doing each day or
00:35:59
the right ones. We were just talking about that last time on the GTD show. And whenever I sit down
00:36:07
to figure out what it is I'm going to do for the day or what projects am I going to do that day,
00:36:13
a lot of times I have to look at my goal for the week or the month or the upcoming quarter.
00:36:19
I really have to keep those in mind literally every day, because otherwise I'm just,
00:36:24
I end up doing the one that looks interesting that day. And like she's getting at you end up
00:36:31
off-base, off-track, and you're doing things that you really shouldn't be or have chosen not to do.
00:36:39
Then you end up derailing so many of your own intentions at the end of the day that you end up
00:36:46
in this place where you're continuing these cycles and you're continuing to put things off or you're
00:36:52
now gaining weight instead of losing weight even though you're on a diet and
00:36:55
you end up feeling terrible about yourself. And that's the beauty here is you, there are things
00:37:03
that you can do to overcome that. And one of these, because one of these is the chapters that she
00:37:09
goes through, and it's intended that you read one of these chapters and then take a week and try
00:37:13
to notice them. Obviously we didn't do that. But just in the short amount of time that I've spent
00:37:19
with this, one of them was how these different challenges, these I will, I won't, or I want
00:37:27
challenges, they're contagious. I thought that was really interesting. It gives a lot of credence to
00:37:33
the phrase of choose your friends wisely. Because so many of the things that we see and do every day,
00:37:44
the people that we hang out with, you literally do mirror the things that they're doing. So if you're,
00:37:49
take for example, if you're going out to eat, let's go to a restaurant and someone there orders
00:37:55
chocolate cake. Just because they ordered chocolate cake might lead you to ordering something similar,
00:38:02
may not be as bad as that, but it would be more than you would normally do on your own. And she was
00:38:08
showing a lot of these studies that show how like obesity and fitness and whether it's positive or
00:38:15
negative, it didn't matter. But it would literally spread like an epidemic where it would just spread
00:38:21
out through a network of people, just from who they associated with. And the more I thought about that
00:38:27
and started to pay attention, just like yep, the more times that I've seen people hang out around
00:38:31
other folks that go to the gym, then their friends start to go to the gym. Or if someone
00:38:37
starts gaining weight, it seems like their friends tend to do the same. But I had never,
00:38:42
never really thought about it a whole lot. But yeah, it really does have a lot of,
00:38:46
and she goes through the science and the details of how that actually works in your brain and how
00:38:52
that operates from the chemical standpoint. But I thought it was kind of interesting that
00:38:57
you can catch just like a sickness, if you will, you can catch some of these challenges.
00:39:03
Yeah, she talks about how you can catch willpower weakness is how she termed it from other people.
00:39:10
But she also mentioned this phenomenon called a goal contagion, which is the same sort of effect
00:39:17
where she said that it's surprisingly easy for you to catch someone else's goals for yourself.
00:39:24
That I thought was really powerful and probably explains a lot of stuff that people do, especially
00:39:31
in regards to email. You know, you were talking earlier about how you consolidated inboxes and
00:39:36
you've got 300 messages you got to get through. Yeah, one of the things we talk about regards to
00:39:40
email or radiation efficiency all the time is it's somebody else's demands and ideas for how you
00:39:47
should spend your time. So every time you go in to your email, I embrace this mindset. You know,
00:39:54
it's like a warrior getting ready to go into battle. You know, you're just going to say, no,
00:39:58
this is the way things are going to be. I'm not going to let the enemy advance, so to speak.
00:40:04
And I think a lot of people accept other people's goals and they never stop to think about, well,
00:40:11
what do I really want to get out of my life? What do I really want my life to be about? What do I
00:40:18
really want my family's life to be about? And that can be really powerful, but it's really scary too
00:40:25
to think that you can just absorb somebody else's goals by default if you're not being intentional
00:40:32
about that kind of stuff. Yeah, it's interesting to me how many of these,
00:40:36
because the recurring theme that she has throughout the book is pay attention. And
00:40:43
so much of that, that's hard to do. I mean, you really have to take some time over multiple weeks
00:40:52
and months of continually working at things. And obviously, I haven't spent that long with this,
00:40:57
but it's just easy to see that there are so many locations in your day and in your life, and within
00:41:05
your social interactions and relationships that you'll notice these things going on. That was the
00:41:11
interesting thing with this is it just revealed like half the battle is knowing,
00:41:16
just knowing what's going on and starting to notice that little bit can make a huge difference
00:41:25
time it's said and done, because you end up noticing when these things happen, and then you can start
00:41:29
to do something about it. Even in the two weeks that I've spent with this book, I've been able to
00:41:34
get a lot more done, because obviously for me and likely for you, Mike, so many of the challenges
00:41:39
that I deal with are staying on task and accomplishing the things that I want to do. And procrastination
00:41:46
is probably one of the most difficult challenges that I deal with. I'm not an overweight person.
00:41:52
I'm probably told I need to gain weight more than anything. So that's obviously not something I deal
00:41:57
with. And the exercise thing I feel like I have under control. So some of the things that she's
00:42:01
using as core challenges in the book, they don't really apply to me. But she does bring up the
00:42:08
procrastination bit and focus for her amounts. And those are the ones that I feel like I
00:42:13
fail at more than anything. And it's just noticing and paying attention to what are my triggers.
00:42:22
Why did I do that? Why am I putting it? Why do I feel like I can put that off? Just being
00:42:27
able to put words to it and understand it can really provide a lot of power to overcoming that.
00:42:32
Yeah, she said it this way in the book. She said, "Towards the end, feel what you feel,
00:42:38
but don't believe everything that you think." Yeah. So it's recognizing that your body, your mind,
00:42:46
whatever is telling you one thing, but then knowing enough that that signal could be not true.
00:42:55
And what she said, knowing is a big part of it. Do you remember, I think you're probably old enough
00:43:03
Joe, to remember the G.I. Joe cartoons from back in the day? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I'm not that young.
00:43:08
So at the end of the cartoons, they would always have this little two-minute thing where
00:43:14
this kid's riding his bike down the sidewalk. He doesn't have his helmet on. And so the G.I.
00:43:18
Joe characters would be like, "Hey, you need to wear a helmet." And they always end it with,
00:43:21
"Now you know, and knowing is half the battle." So that's what I was thinking of the entire time
00:43:26
I was reading this book. It was like, "Oh, yeah, now I know. Now I gotta do something with it, though."
00:43:30
Yeah. Yeah. I kept thinking about because, so I'm ADHD. And one of the interesting things that
00:43:40
comes with that, the psychologist that I've met with over it, has told me time and time again to
00:43:46
get into meditation and mindfulness. And with him, I've kind of been, I guess, rejecting that ADHD
00:43:54
label and calling it a racecar brain more than anything, just because I don't see it as a negative
00:43:59
thing. So many people try to fix it and they want to do the medication thing and alter it. I get it.
00:44:05
Some people need that. It's bad enough that some folks do need that. But for me, it's more of a,
00:44:11
I have a ton of inputs and I love a fire hose of information. And the more that I can bring in,
00:44:17
the more I tend to focus on and I float from one to the next. And the problem for me is that
00:44:21
I float back and forth between topics way too fast. And for me going through the willpower instinct,
00:44:30
it really gave a lot of tools for someone that's easily distracted. It's easy to find the tips
00:44:37
and tricks that can help with that so that you're able to downshift a little bit and pinpoint and
00:44:44
stay on task with something. And that's where a lot of her mindfulness pieces and the meditation
00:44:50
pieces, noticing, paying attention, those do correlate to some of the treatment methods,
00:44:56
quote unquote treatment, methods that they give for ADD and how to not be distracted, I guess.
00:45:03
It did surprise me how much overlap there is with some of the things that they've been
00:45:08
telling me I need to do for that side of things as well. So I did think there was a lot of interesting
00:45:13
overlap. Yeah, definitely. There was a lot of stuff that I felt like I could take this and I could
00:45:22
learn from this. But kind of specifically, if you want to go over to the action items now,
00:45:28
I guess what I got out of this was to alter my daily routine because I'm a big believer in that
00:45:38
it's not necessarily the goals that you set. I think when a lot of people set
00:45:45
goals, like I'm going to be able to do this or I'm not going to do that, especially in terms of
00:45:50
willpower, they approach it from the typical cascading or waterfall project method or project
00:45:58
management method, where it's like, well, this is my cutoff point. And if I don't make it by that
00:46:03
point, I'm going over the waterfall. But what ends up happening is you procrastinate on that,
00:46:10
you have that goal for six months down the road and you're like, Oh, I got time. I don't need to
00:46:14
start running now if I want to run that half marathon in September. You know, so you kick
00:46:19
kicking the can down the road. So I didn't want to do that when I read this, even though there are a
00:46:23
lot of opportunities I felt where I could say, okay, I'm going to apply this in this way. What I
00:46:28
wanted to do is I wanted to make small adjustments to my routine or my rituals, which I would argue
00:46:35
is a more effective way to produce the results is more like the agile approach to this. So like
00:46:39
for the next sprint, you know, the next week, two weeks, whatever, I'm going to do this thing
00:46:45
every day. And the two things for me were to start doing the meditation, like I mentioned earlier,
00:46:54
on a daily basis, I really do believe that that's going to pay off big in terms of self control
00:46:59
and willpower. And then the other thing is that I really want to make sure that I am being aware.
00:47:08
And I want to make sure that I am journaling the right things every day. I want to make sure that
00:47:14
I'm not just going through the motions. And when I get to my journaling prompts, it's just automatic,
00:47:21
it's a habit. And what am I feeling right now? I want to actually force myself to pay attention
00:47:25
throughout the day and recognize like what is actually happening so that I can make proper
00:47:31
adjustments instead of adjusting to whatever I happen to be feeling at that particular moment,
00:47:36
if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. And it's interesting because your action items are identical to mine.
00:47:44
Because knowing that the meditation and mindfulness piece helps in so many ways. And I have to stop
00:47:53
and think of that so much of the technology piece might be, and I have zero evidence of this mic.
00:47:59
But I kind of wonder if the technology piece and the way that we operate with computers in
00:48:05
general tends to drive us towards a need to slow down and learn how to develop that self-control
00:48:13
and develop the willpower through the mindfulness piece. And that's one that I know for me I need
00:48:19
to pick up. So like you, I'm big on the rituals morning and evening. And that's one of the steps
00:48:26
I've been trying to do the last few days of picking up that meditation piece in the morning.
00:48:30
I feel like that's the perfect time because it's quiet in the house and I can count on it.
00:48:34
I don't have to worry about being interrupted at that time. And that's the last thing I want
00:48:39
to be doing is sitting there trying to be quiet and focusing on my breath and there's kids running
00:48:45
around in the house. It's just not going to work well. So that's the time that I want to do that.
00:48:50
The other piece is like you're saying the journaling and I've been doing that for a while. It's pretty
00:48:55
easy for me to do that any evening to just say, "Hey, how did the day go?" And I've been doing
00:49:00
specifically for that. I've been doing like, what are the three positives? What are the three
00:49:06
growth areas that I need to do today? But one of the things I haven't done that it seems like Kelly was
00:49:13
kind of driving at it in one of the chapters was compare the things you did that day,
00:49:18
the habits or the willpower challenges that you're trying to overcome, compare those to how the
00:49:23
day went. So in other words, how am I working towards my goals and are the things that I did today
00:49:31
in line with those? Or did I completely detract and did I completely fail? And do I need to do
00:49:39
anything different tomorrow? Because one of the things that she brings up towards the end is
00:49:44
just be okay with failure. You need to be okay with having a misfire here and there because
00:49:51
otherwise you're going to be focusing on the negative. And then like we were talking earlier
00:49:55
with the white bears, you end up focusing on the negative and then it's the only thing you can
00:49:58
think about and then you're continually failing and then you end up in this binge cycle. What
00:50:02
the heck? Let's just do it all and like you end up in that hit. So trying to compare what I did
00:50:10
today to those goals and then being okay with missing out on those. And then I think the piece
00:50:17
that we're, we've been alluding to quite a bit here is just pay attention and just take the fact
00:50:22
that we understand some of the science now. I'm a big Y person. So whenever I understand why
00:50:28
and how my brain operates, then it makes it a lot easier to just notice those that are going on
00:50:33
and do something about it. Yep, absolutely. And that actually lines up with the other thing
00:50:42
that I got out of this book was the delayed discounting. And I think it couples nicely with
00:50:49
notice and pay attention because if you can keep your why in front of you, if you can keep your
00:50:55
motivation in front of you, it allows you to overcome that need to or that want anyways,
00:51:03
to go ahead and take action on that thing that just happens to be right in front of you. So
00:51:09
this is another thing and I have to still kind of work out specifically how I'm going to apply this.
00:51:14
But I want to become better at recognizing that a delayed reward is going to be better off. And the
00:51:23
whole idea of behind delayed discounting is that the longer you have to wait for that reward,
00:51:28
the less it actually means to you. But I want to make sure that I keep my why and my family's why
00:51:36
at the forefront because I know I do this kind of stuff for a living over at Asian
00:51:43
efficiency. Like I believe in the effectiveness of rituals. I teach this stuff to people. But
00:51:49
keeping that in front of you can make it easy. I'm believing it's going to make it easier
00:51:55
to consistently take those small actions that compound and produce the results that you want.
00:52:00
So noticing and paying attention and then recognizing that I'm going to have a bias towards that
00:52:06
delayed discounting and catching myself when that happens and saying no, the end goal is actually
00:52:14
worth it. Just stick with it. I think that's a great way to end this. There's so many things that
00:52:20
she points out and a lot of tips. I do highly recommend picking the book up and reading it just
00:52:27
because it helps you understand how our brains operate. And there's just a lot of little stuff
00:52:36
that adds up, I think. And unlike the science chapter in the GTD book, the science here is
00:52:42
very well done. Yeah, it's awesome. This is from a literary standpoint. It's very, very different
00:52:49
than the GTD book where GTD was a lot of quotes, which I love quotes. And those quotes, they tend
00:52:58
to strike a chord with you and you're like, yeah, yeah, that's exactly it. But a lot of those quotes,
00:53:03
David Allen wasn't writing. He was taking them from other people. Whereas I don't think I wrote
00:53:11
down a single quote from this book, but I wrote down a whole bunch of ideas and principles.
00:53:18
So it's very, very different in that regard. And pretty much every page, every other page,
00:53:25
she's referring to some scientific study. Yeah. And I agree with you on the literary standpoint.
00:53:31
She has a very, he has a good writing style, in my opinion. She's very easy to read,
00:53:37
despite there being a lot of science, there's a lot of difficult scientist names to go in here.
00:53:45
And obviously there's a lot of the neuroscience and chemicals and stuff that she's talking about,
00:53:50
which I for one am pretty good about picking up. But I felt like this is, it's very easy to read.
00:53:58
It's very simple. It's very approachable. You don't have to be a graduate student at Stanford to
00:54:03
understand the way that she presents these things. Yeah. And I think that's partially because,
00:54:09
I mean, it was designed as a 10 week class. I mean, that's the way that this was
00:54:13
designed. And she simply took that class and the best learnings that she got from it
00:54:19
and turned it into a book. So it was, you know, lay people going to her class time and time again.
00:54:25
I don't know how many times she's put it on now, but she does teach this to, you know,
00:54:30
everyday people. It's not like it's designed for academics and PhD students. So it's very well
00:54:36
done. I really enjoyed it. I would have no issues picking up something from Kelly again in the future.
00:54:41
To the point where I think I added one of those to our list, Mike. So yeah, that's, yeah,
00:54:48
in the end, it's a good read and would highly recommend it.
00:54:52
So out of five stars, what do you rate it?
00:54:57
Oh, I suppose I should have thought about that beforehand.
00:55:00
Yeah, I put you on the spot. I know, right. So going through it and the pure
00:55:05
being able to comprehend how things operate because there were so many revelation points in this.
00:55:12
I would put it at a five simply because it was so easily approachable. And there were a ton of
00:55:20
things that were very applicable specifically to me in everyday life. So I'd put it at a five.
00:55:26
Nice. I would also put it at a five. And like you said, I would recommend this to just about
00:55:30
anybody. I think no matter where you are in life, you can read the first chapter and you'll be
00:55:37
saying, yeah, I can see how that plays out in my own life. So she has a really good job right at
00:55:41
the beginning, articulating the problem, gives you some easy wins with some different practices
00:55:47
and things that can actually give you immediate gains to willpower. And then the rest of the book
00:55:52
lays out a very compelling case for this is actually what's happening here. And here's some better
00:55:57
long term strategies to help you build up that willpower muscle so that you have the self control
00:56:02
in those situations where you actually need it. So five out of five for me as well.
00:56:07
So the books we have coming up, the next one on the list is The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield.
00:56:14
So that's when we're going to jump into next. We've kind of been alternating who's picking
00:56:20
which book. So I'm the one that grabbed The War of Art. Mike, if you thought about the one you want to
00:56:24
do after that at all? I have not. I've got several in my stack.
00:56:30
Yeah, let me get back to you on that one. I've got a couple ideas, so stay tuned.
00:56:38
But the next one up, we're going to do The War of Art and whatever Mike decides will be the
00:56:44
next one on the list after that. So we're grateful for everybody stepping in to listen to us this
00:56:49
time around and we will catch you next time.