התמלול המלא של Why Willpower Doesn't Work

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Why do we not do the things we know we should do?
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Is that a rhetorical question?
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I was expecting you to answer, Drew.
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I was expecting you to resolve a 2,500-year philosophical conundrum.
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Why don't we do the things we know we should do?
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It's a simple question.
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Why do we know we should do something and then not do the thing?
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Right.
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How is that even?
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Right.
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Know exactly what to do.
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Yes.
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Information must not be the problem or I don't know.
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You know, it's interesting.
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I don't know if you remember this, but I actually started writing a book called Why Don't I Do It?
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And the entire book was – the goal was to answer this question.
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Like, why do we not do the things that we know we should do?
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Like, how is it that our behavior gets divorced from our knowledge to such a large extent?
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And that book, it –
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Anyway, I didn't end up writing it.
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But I did do some interesting research for that book when I was writing it.
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And this problem is as old as civilization, obviously.
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The Greeks referred to this as akrasia.
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And they took it very seriously as a philosophical problem.
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Like it didn't make sense to them that if you know something is good, why should you be capable of doing anything to the contrary?
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Like why should there be any resistance towards doing it?
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And it's interesting because the major Greek philosophers had, they each had kind of a different angle at which they tried to answer this question.
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Socrates...
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just rejected the premise outright.
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So in the dialogue, Protagoras, he argued that it was actually impossible to not do the thing that you wanted to do.
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He said that if you experience a discrepancy between what you want to do and what you actually do, he just said you don't actually want to do it, which to me feels like a cop-out.
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That's very circular, right?
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It's like, well, if you wanted to do it, you would.
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And the thing you did, it's because you wanted to.
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It's like, well, yeah, that's not very helpful, Socrates, but thank you.

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Thank you for your participation.
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It denies the real emotional experience of the whole thing too, right?
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Yes, it does.
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Plato was really the one that kind of nailed this.
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And he had this metaphor.
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He called it the tripartite soul.
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He basically said that the human soul is divided into three parts, and the three parts are all wrestling for control at any given time.
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And those three parts basically boil down to kind of our impulses and instincts, our animalistic side, our emotions and our passions, and then our rationality and our higher level decision making.
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And it turns out.
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Psychology has largely borne Plato's model to be true.
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I mean, there's some nuances and a couple little changes here and there, but we generally have these different parts of ourselves and they're generally wrestling against each other for control.
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Anybody who has struggled to follow through with something they want to do has experienced this where you intellectually understand what's happening.
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I should get off the couch.
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I should go to the gym.
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I should hire a trainer.
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But emotionally, you're like, these potato chips, they sure do taste good.
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So Plato had this metaphor to describe this, which is that our soul or basically our psychology is like a chariot rider trying to control two horses.
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So one horse is our animal instincts and our urges, and the other horse is our emotions and our passions.
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The chariot rider, which is our rationality, his goal is to control the horses and point them in the correct direction.
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But the interesting thing about this metaphor is that it shows us that ultimately feelings are what drive our actions and our decisions.
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And when it comes to changing ourselves, to trying to be a new person, ultimately that is a...
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emotionally based problem.
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Like the reason we don't do things that we know we should do is simply because we don't feel like it.
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It's not that we don't know we should do it.
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It's because we don't feel like doing it.
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The reason you don't get off the couch and go to the gym isn't because you don't know it's good for you.
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It's because you don't feel like doing it.
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And so identity change, becoming a new person is ultimately an emotional process, which fucking sucks because emotions are hard.

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They're like, they're hard to identify, they're hard to understand, and they're hard to deal with.
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They're hard to change.
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They're hard to change, and it's hard to do something contrary to your emotions.
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If I'm angry at somebody, it's hard to be nice to them.
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If I'm sad about something, it's hard to be enthusiastic and motivated.
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So the whole difficulty around change is fundamentally boiled down to this.
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How do you do things that you don't feel like doing?
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All this is to say is that behavioral change is primarily an emotional problem, not a rational problem.
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The information is the easy part.
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You know, as my friend Derek Sivers likes to say, if change was as easy as more information, we would all be billionaires with six packs.
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But we're not.
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Because the difficulty is getting our emotions to align with what we know is better for ourselves.
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As the chariot riders in our brains, getting our horses lined up and pointed in the right direction.
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Now, most people assume that the way to do this, the way to handle an emotional problem, is to just brute force it.
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Is to just summon as much willpower as possible, to push down any doubts or reservations and just like...
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almost like abuse yourself until you do the fucking thing.
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And that can work in bits and spurts.
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But as we're going to discover, willpower is generally overrated and overemphasized because it turns out that the human mind, we are very influenceable and susceptible to external triggers and influences within our environment.
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And so if we're smart about using our environment and if we're smart about utilizing the triggers around us, we can actually make it easier to adopt the behaviors that we want to adopt.
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Yeah.
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So by the end of this chapter, everybody's going to understand why simply knowing what to do and trying to force yourself to do it through willpower is not an effective solution.
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We're going to actually give everybody specific concrete tools to change their environment, to create triggers for themselves so that the right behaviors become automatic and far easier than they would be otherwise.
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But to begin, I want to tell a story about a checklist.
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Okay.
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And how it saved 1,500 lives.
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So in 2003, doctors at one of the best hospitals in the world were unintentionally killing their patients.
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What's worse is that the whole time they knew what they should be doing.
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They just weren't doing it.
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So the problem was is that a large amount of patients were dying from what is called central line infections.
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So central lines are simply a catheter that are inserted into a large vein.
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They're super common in ICUs.
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They're like, basically, you see them happen everywhere.
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But the problem was that the ICU was so chaotic and so crazy that inevitably some of these steps would be skipped.
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And then the patients would develop an infection.
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And then they would die.
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So the doctor, Peter Provenos, noticed this.
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And he said,
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He decided to address it.
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He addressed it in the most stupidly simple way possible, which is he created a checklist.
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It was just a physical piece of paper with the five steps that all the doctors and nurses already knew that they should be doing.
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And then he just made one change, which is that he gave all the nurses permission that if they noticed a doctor skipping any of the steps, that they could stop him and intervene.
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And within 18 months, deaths from central line infections dropped to zero.
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In fact, the checklist became so successful that hospitals across the United States started adopting it everywhere.
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Now, the interesting fact about this checklist is it didn't teach anybody anything they didn't know.
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It didn't force anybody to do anything they shouldn't already be doing.
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It didn't motivate them or, you know, completely change the system.
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It simply created an environmental nudge.
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It basically created a design within the environment that made it easier to follow the protocol than it was to not follow the protocol.
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And this is what we see time and time again, is that people change their behavior when it becomes more painful to not change the behavior than it becomes to change it.
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We like to imagine that it's more complicated than this, that there's like all these, I don't know, philosophical, emotional childhood trauma issues associated with it.
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But at the end of the day...
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If you can create circumstances and situations within your environment, if you can design the world around you to nudge you into a behavior so that it feels easier than not doing that behavior, something as simple as a checklist or a visual reminder or not putting junk food in the fridge, whatever it is.
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This is the 80-20 of behavioral change.
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Now, this is not a sexy or exciting thing.
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I think what happens is that when people want to change, we tend to think of the final order effect of that change, right?
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So it's like if I want to get healthier or if I want to fix my relationships, I'm not thinking about...
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the next meal I'm going to have or the next date I'm going to go on.
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What I'm thinking about is like me being married with kids and having a six pack, right?
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I'm like, my brain is immediately jumping five years in the future after I've done 10,000 different things to make that outcome come true.
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And so,
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A natural cognitive bias that we have is that we assume that we need to change much more in our life than we actually need to change.
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It turns out that not only are behavioral changes easily instigated by small alterations in our environment, like a simple checklist, but you don't have to change nearly as much as you think you do to create an outsized effect on it.
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down the line five years in the future or whatever.
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Now, this is a mistake I've made a million fucking times.
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Like, I can't tell you how many times I have convinced myself that I have to reorient my entire life.
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I'm going to start waking up at 430 and I'm going to go to the gym for 90 minutes every day and I'm going to start meditating for 30 minutes and I'm going to sign up for this new program that costs $1,000 and I try to do it all at once and of course I do it for three days and then I fail.
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Whereas what has actually worked for me is something as simple as
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putting my gym shoes by the front door so that it reminds me, hey, you're supposed to go run, asshole.
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That's why your shoes are there.
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For me to put my shoes on, it is easier to just walk out the door than it is to not walk out the door.
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That has probably done more for me than all of the drastic major changes I've ever tried to make in my life.
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Every change requires a certain amount of energy, especially if you're exerting willpower.
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There's almost like a budget of...
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emotional energy that you can dedicate into something i mean what makes this error worse too is that if you if like all those changes right if you just took them one at a time right accomplishing the first one will make the second one that much easier right so it's like if you just address your sleep
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Simply by going to bed an hour earlier, waking up an hour earlier, you're going to be more rested, have more energy.
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Your metabolism is going to function better.
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So you're going to make better decisions.
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You're not going to be as tired during the day.
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So you're going to have more energy to actually go to the gym when you want to go to the gym, right?
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So people should line these up sequentially rather than trying to do them all at once.
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Yeah, but that doesn't feel as sexy, does it?
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No.
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Like we're looking for the big change.
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We're looking for the montage.
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Right.
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Right.
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I think what people, what happens in this stage is people will, if you tell them, you know, just focus on one of these, let's say going to bed earlier or doing a workout every day.
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It doesn't matter what it is.
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Just go do the workout.
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Sure.
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What happens is it starts looking like you're kind of just running in circles.
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It doesn't feel, you know, it doesn't have that energy behind it.
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Like you're saying.
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It's boring.
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It's boring.
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And it feels like you're running in circles, but if you like step back a little bit, actually what you're doing is you're kind of like climbing the spiral staircase, but you're looking at it from the top a little bit, you know, and it looks like you're, it looks like you're just kind of running in a circle.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Um, so it's, it's slower and it's not as sexy, but if you step back and you're like, Oh wait, I've.
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I've.
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I've gotten 30 minutes more sleep for the last month.
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Like that right there is a huge, huge win.
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And you probably, maybe you haven't even noticed, but you have better energy.
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You have better emotional regulation.
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You are, your diet's better because you're not as tired and you're reaching for food for emotional regulation.
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Yeah, the boringness of it or the sexiness of like some big dramatic change.
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Like that's a piece of it.
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I also think people have misguided expectations in terms of like,
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what the result of change should be.
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Like, I think people imagine that it's going to be like this euphoric,
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people cheering confetti falling from the rafters, like you're a new person.
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Oh my God.
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You're never going to be the same again.
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And that's just not the case.
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What change actually feels like is you start waking up an hour earlier and you start exercising 50% more.
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You feel 20% better day to day.
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You have a little bit more energy every day.
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You have a little bit more patience in your relationships.
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You make slightly better decisions.
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It's like,
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barely above the threshold of perception.
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It's not a ticker tape parade, right?
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There's no applause for you.
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Nobody's showing up and handing you a medal or a certificate at your front door.
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It's just like, okay, yeah, you're just a slightly more functional human being.
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Good job.
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I also think it comes back to something I said earlier, which is life is practice, right?
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And it's those little practices you do
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every day consistently.
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And then when you do have something like big that comes up, you can, you do handle it a lot better.
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I've noticed this in my life, I guess, you know, once I did start working out more and just get healthier.
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Now, anytime I do have an actual like physical challenge of something, I need to stay up for, I don't get as much sleep.
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Because I need to take care of something in my life that's going on, I can handle that a lot better.
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Again, that's almost not noticeable, though.
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You just get better at the bigger thing because you practice a smaller version of it over and over and over and over again.
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Right.
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And it's boring as fuck.
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You're right.
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It's just so boring.
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And so nobody wants to do it.
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It's not sexy.
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Yeah.
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Hey, still hungry?
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Yeah, that's the whole point.
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The full video episode is on Spotify right now.
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Search for Solved with Mark Manson.
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It's the last podcast episode on this topic you will ever need to hear.