How Little Experiments Can Lead to Big Success | Emmanuel Acho and David Epstein | TED

I'm going to jump in giving you the hard easy question which is you know by the way last Friday was apparently quitters Day by which most the day supposedly by which most people have quit their resolutions so I was wondering David I was like wait is there a national quitters day I know we have national holidays for everything I miss Best Friends Day I didn't realize apparently so New Year's resolutions good or bad give me your take um I think they're terrible because I think why do you need to set a date to start something if you want to start becoming a better version of yourself why don't you just start immediately why is there an arbitrary date that you have to set you don't need to wait on a date if your goal is extrinsically motivated thus based on a date then I think extrinsic motivation it will fall short much sooner than intrinsic motivation which is simply like hey I want to be better from within so simply put I don't believe in New Year's resolutions I do not set subscribe to New Year's resolutions because it's simply an arbitrary date and I'd rather in intrinsic motivation than extrinsic and so you might be a resolutions aside you might be the most anti-g goal setting in general person that I know which might be surprising given your accomplishments can you talk a little bit about where that animosity toward resolutions and goals came from what the origin story there one specific incident probably the greatest pain of my life it was February of 2012 I am doing a job interview in front of 32 billionaires with a be 32 of the richest men in the world one does um I played in the National Football League and so I'm doing uh the NFL combine in front of 32 of the NFL owners every owner obviously being one of the wealthiest individuals and I was running the 40-yard dash and David this is a true story after three years in college you can leave early to enter the National Football League I'm going to speak to everyone as if they have no level of knowledge about Pro Sports whatsoever so once you're in college for three years I went to the University of Texas that's my Alma aitor once you're in college for three years David you can go pro well I wanted to go pro after my third year but NFL Scouts they told me hey Emanuel AO you won't be drafted where you desire to be drafted it's best you go back to college for one more year to increase your draft status in the NFL there are seven rounds of the draft roughly 254 players get drafted there are roughly 1. 7 million college high school football players you're more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to be drafted in the National Football League and so David I committed and set a goal to going back to college um to increase my draft status true story David I put um I put a sheet of paper uh above my bed post and every morning I woke up I looked at it and every night before I went to sleep I looked at it and it just said the simple goal hey increase your draft status well David at the NFL combine running the 40-yard dash I hear Boom Boom David I think my heels were clicking so I keep running I hear Boom Boom it was my quad being torn off of the bone I didn't end up getting drafted where I wanted to be drafted I fell to the sixth round of the NFL draft remember there are only seven drafts seven rounds and so David while sitting in IND ianapolis where the combine took place laying there on the ground with ice on my quad I committed to myself to never setting another goal because I realized in that moment I was doing much more damage to my self-esteem I did self-efficacy than I ever did good so it was in that moment that I stopped setting goals that's an amazing story so resolution to never set goals again we got it so you're you're Pro resolutions that are anti-r olution I wanted Devils Advocate you a little bit I mean I think the proide for New Year's resolutions this so called in Psychology this finding called The Fresh Start effect where we think of any kind of change new job new year new week can sometimes lead people to start Behavior changes that said I think it's unclear if those things really stick so we can talk about that but I wanna I want to offer that maybe you made a bad goal because I used to make those kinds of bad goals I was an 800 meter Runner uh in college and every season every race I would have some stretch goal for the time that I wanted to run and for several years you know these were always stretch goals and so I would pass the Finish Line you know puke or catch your breath or whatever and then go look back at the clock and say did I make that time or did I not and it just led me to be happy or sad and usually sad because those were stretch goals right and eventually I realized this wasn't doing anything for me actionable so I changed I got rid of those time goals and started setting goals for experiments so instead of saying I want to run X time it was next tribe moving hard with 300 meters to go

and that gave me something actionable so maybe that's not even a goal it's more of an experiment and as I was reading so I think the some of the research about goal setting I me I think you know first I'd say it's an interesting place here in because in kind of the mid 20th century psychologists felt that goals didn't matter at all that it was the only thing that motivated people's behavior was carrot and stick all external no internal and then that changed with goal setting Theory saying like no you know what you actually can set inter motivations and so now we're sort of being more fine grained about what works and what's not but I think one of the most important takeaways from that research is those goals or objectives or whatever you want to call them have to be really granular like they have to tell you something that you should do as opposed to being this kind of goal that's just uh either you're happy or sad at the end so question there's an operative word there you said stretch goals what's the word stretch mean that prefaces before goals yeah I mean for me in this instance it meant things that were uh often didn't reflect um a reality of where I was in my training at that point and so it was something that I didn't have a great chance of making uh because I thought that was the way you were supposed to do it set these big goals and they were often vague and I think a lot of the reason that New Year's resolutions fail is because they tend to be very vague like it's just time to set some notion as opposed to setting something that gives you a behavior that you can try so I prefer to think of I I use this I call this my book of small experiments where at least every other month I have something I want to learn or try and I force myself into an experiment it's like here's a thing I am going to try and reflect done so I don't know if that's a goal or not but that's how I go about it what do you if you don't do goals what do you replace goals with well it's twofold first I will answer the why I ultimately had the urge to replace goals because it's not that David goals have absolutely no value that's not what I'm suggesting what I am suggesting is that the damage and the side effect of goals outweighs the value of goals I believe that goals are like a prescription medication The Dilemma is the world which subscribed us the drug of goals did not tell us about the warning signs they side effects I was drafted into the National Football League by the Cleveland Browns again I suggest you are more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to be drafted in the NFL one plus million people play high school football roughly 20 30 or 40,000 play college football and again 250 are drafted but David because I failed at that goal I don't reflect on being drafted positively I only look at the fact that I didn't achieve my goal thus my self efficacy was completely undermine thus my self-esteem was completely undermined so it's not to say that goals don't have value I think those watching right now maybe you set the goal of being married by 26 27 having your first home by 30 maybe you set the goal of starting a family by 30 and maybe you haven't checked off any of those boxes so thus though you have a career you're happy with though you have an apartment or a townhouse that you're content with though you have so many good things going on in your life you can't think about them positively because the only thing you focus and fixate on is man but I didn't do this or I didn't do that or David I didn't do this and that is really I would suggest is the thesis statement of the Dilemma so I do instead simply put I focus on an objective without limitations small difference in words but I think it has a major impact on our lives an objective is energy aimed in a direction a goal is an end towards which energy is aimed quite literally by definition so why in the world would I set a goal and start something with the end in mind as opposed to having an objective and simply putting my energy in a direction if I want to live a healthier lifestyle I will put my energy into a healthier lifestyle as opposed to I want to lose 15 pounds in the first three months of the year so then when you lose eight pounds you're like dang it I failed I want to read one book every three weeks or one book a month as opposed to I want to become a more Avid Reader I want to put my energy into becoming challenge myself mentally I want to stimulate myself mentally when we draw these hard lines in the sand it only leaves us focusing on falling short of the line that we didn't cross which we said in the sand so I think you're getting more Behavior change how do we make proximate Behavior change on sort of a daily basis and I think that gets it some of this research about like when do objective or goal or whatever you want to call it setting work when it really tells you what you should be doing in the morning that that's why I favor this approach of the book of small experiments where it's like when I was writing my last book and I wanted to experiment with a different kind of structure so well what's an experiment that can give me

some of that and I took a said take a beginner's online fiction writing course specific action and in that course we had to write stories with uh only dialogue and stories with no dialogue and the story with no dialogue I was so much better at and it gave me all these new different ideas for structure so I didn't have a specific goal of like how do I want to write this next book but I was doing these experiments that I thought were sort of shortterm enough that I'd have an opportunity to reflect on them because I think it's really really reflection is where a lot of the game is right so the kind of goals I set for the 800 and you set for the NFL draft are the kind where the reflection is very kind of binary like I made it or I didn't doesn't really teach you a lot about what to do whereas this in when I was writing my first book The Sports Gene I spent some time talking to a woman named Ry elfren gemer in the Netherlands who followed soccer players and football players and for everyone who's not American um from the age of 12 and looking at what led some of them to become Elite and there were physiological characteristics like if a kid couldn't hit 7 meters a second in a Sprint like they weren't going to go to the top level at the same time there were behavioral traits where you'd see these kids she had video of them from 12 all the way up to some of them the national team where they would be going to a coach say you know what are we working on in this Dr I think my weakness is I think I need to work on this other thing like why are we doing this and they would take accountability for their learning called self-regulatory learning and what Mariah told me was there's you know thousands of pages of papers on self-reg learning but what a lot of it boils down to is reflection this Loop of identifying something you want to improve or change come up with a way to test that execute reflect on it and adjust going forward this sort of loop of experiments reflection reflection I think a lot of our especially New Year's resolutions the reflection is just you missed it or you didn't and it's not really actionable reflection I'm curious if that fits or doesn't into kind of your framework I think that absolutely fits the model that is a similar model I believe to um James clear Atomic habits he focuses on the small steps he he references focusing the habits as opposed to hey you know what I need to do this and if I don't do this well then I didn't do anything to me I love what you're saying about experiments as opposed to goals when you were talking about running the 800 meters you mentioned at the start you said hey I want to focus on maybe kicking if the 300 meter mark That's focusing on energy that's focusing on hey let make a energetic and an actionable item as opposed to if I don't do this then what is the punishment and though there might not be a literal punishment there might not even be a worldly punishment I do think there is a psychological punishment and you know what David I'll take it even one step further and I would suggest and I ended a previous conversation speaking on this with the goal you achieve it's the pen penalty you receive for setting a goal in the first place because say David you set a goal to lose 10 pounds in the first three months of the year and say you lose those what if you could have lost more say you actually set this goal and you think that this goal was the the greatest most grandiose accomplishment of your life what if you actually could have done greater gone further what if there actually was a greater level of success happiness famili IAL spiritual educational or monetary reward that was to be garnered but because you drew a line in the sand you were so fixated on that line that what if there was actually greater for you out there I suggest if I would have achieved the goal of being drafted earlier in the NFL I might have clung to an NFL career for longer instead of moving on and now I've written four books and and done all the other things that I believe have added greater value not only to my life but hopefully have added G value to society and large what if you actually do achieve that goal you set David I would suggest that wasn't even potentially the greatest thing for your life I think you're getting at something profound that I saw you say in a in another interview I can't remember exactly which one it was but you talked about you know how a goal or an objective whatever we're calling it first of all I like your framing of goals as medicine right because we don't often think of the trade-off like what are the adverse side effects I really like that framing to kind of a us to what that might be I think you said you know some of these things you try it should be a comma not a period yeah and I think that gets it some of the issue where you know it reminds me again of to bring in some of the psychology research you've got me thinking about this thing called the end of History illusion which is this finding that people you know if you ask have you learned a lot about what you want to do what your skills are Etc what motivates you everyone oh yeah absolutely well do you think you'll change a lot you know in your values and those things that you believe going forward no now I'm pretty much finished and

much now I'm pretty much finished and people always underestimate future change so the fastest time of change you know unsurprisingly is about 18 to 28 but it never stops and at every time point in life we underestimate future change some of this stuff is silly like you know you can look back at your old haircut and you know that like your uh you know your feelings have changed about style but like people will say that you know they'll say that they're willing to pay a certain amount of money if they take their favorite band today I'm willing to pay x amount of money to see that band 10 years from now and then they're asked well how much would you pay to see today your favorite band from 10 years ago and it's like way less because they underestimate how much their taste is going to change and so I wonder if some of what you're getting at and what I'm getting at is when we think of these goals as kind of a period you're not really being open to sort of the opportunistic pivots you're almost choosing a goal for a person you don't know yet yes change is so rapid I um Matthew mccon became a friend of mine over the last four years after covid and I asked him you know what he said this and then I asked him later about it but said it publicly I encourage you all after this conversation to Google it um after he won his Academy Award the ever Elusive and ever evasive Academy Award for best leading actor I believe he won in four he went up there on the stage holding this Oscar Trophy and he said who is my hero speaking about a goal if you will and he said my hero is the 10 year from now version of me he said I'm constantly chasing the person I'm going to be 10 years from now and he said the beauty of that goal is you'll never catch it he said because I'm always adjusting I'm always moving I'm always changing I'm ever evasive he said so my hero is actually and my goal is actually 10 years ahead of me because I'm never going to catch that person because I'm always in this constant form of shedding my outer shell and in a constant form of transformation and I think David you've kind of hit the nail on the head in that goals at times and resolutions at times they put you in a box and they're too rigid they do not allow for elasticity you to actually uh mature into probably a better version of yourself because you're so fixated on chasing a goal that you set as a former version of yourself so again that's in the side effects panel about goals that we don't read where this is something you're not we not usually attuned to kind of especially let me share a story that you might find fascinating it's um my best friend we actually read your book Sports Gene I think maybe she read it sent it to me or vice versa back in 2018 Olympic gold medalist in the Rio Olympics and here's a fascinating story because in order to go to the Olympics and the 100 meters or the 4x1 100 meters rather David you know this but for those watching who don't you need to finish top four at your country's trials your country's Olympic trials so at the USA Olympic trials uh my best friend she finishes fourth at the Olympic trials and curious she ran the trial meet before we were as close curious I was like what was your mindset going into that race because David I'm fascinated and I'm a curious person I said what was your mindset going into the most important race of your life and she said well the three women that I was running next to were all faster than me it was um Tiana balletta it was Tor buoy God Rest her soul and it was a woman named English Garner she said were all faster than me so my goal was to get fourth place and now David what place do you think she got fourth place and I was like I wonder what would have happened if either you didn't set a goal or you set a goal that could not have been improved thus first place I said the goal you achieved was a penalty you received for setting the goal you set a goal to get fourth place and getting fourth place is exactly what you did but there was third place there was second place and there was first place so I only wonder what would have happened if you would have set the goal of either getting first or what would have happened if you would have had an objective with no limitations if you would have set your energy into standing a top the podium what would have happened and I just think the goals put her in this instance inside of a box now ultimately if you finish top four you get to run on the 4X 100 meter relay because it's four people running that uh 400 running that one lap if you will so she was still able to go to the Rio Olympics and run the anchor leg and the preliminary round and finish with a gold medal but that was also confirmation David that like yo warning label read the warning signs if you set a goal you might just achieve that goal and what is that achievement actually costing you in the long term or is it costing you anything at all simply something to consider I love that we're kind of coalescing around this idea of rigidity and kind of the downsides of making goals what would your sort of one

piece of advice give because I think mine would be again that from the literature and self-regulatory learning we just do not reflect enough our goals are often set too far in advance so they're too vague and not telling us kind of what our Behavior should be and so again I'm going to fog it the book of small experiments it's Alice curiouser and curiouser but gives you something these reflection points so even if you did set New Year's resolutions you know I would argue that come March and someone I'm as economist Tim Harford was uh I'm taking some of his idea here come March it should be like reflection time because if you just leave it out and it's just I made it or I didn't you're not doing that really important part of what did I learn and how is that going to tell me to Pivot so that I think would be we do not do we think intuitively that we get all of the information about ourselves our interests and abilities from just going through an experience but I think it's pretty unequivocal that we don't do enough explicit refle reflection like you can even look at you know cardiac surgery teams there's some experiments where some will do a certain procedure 100% of a given time and others will do 80% procedures and 20% talking amongst themselves and reflecting and the errors will go down in the 8020 group more so I think reflection reflection building it in explicitly would be my most important uh single piece of advice for goal setting because that's going to make you make more granular goals and take lessons in a much shorter duration D let me ask you a question here because I think part of this is the unhealth with goals in that of often times goals do not afford you the luxury of reflection meaning what's the benefit of reflection in that instance when I didn't get drafted where I wanted to get drafted in the NFL David reflection was not going to do me any good it's over it's done I lost about $3 million in that one day I've torn my quad there is not another NFL draft than I could submit to at the point in which I wanted to be married by 30 and I'm not 30 not coming back the next birthday 31 and the one after that is 32 I could reflect on hey is it me is it Society do I need to put myself out there more should I try dating gaps do I need to get this and that maybe I should spend more time with the grocery store go whatever the case may be but I do not know in today's ultra competitive Society David that goals and reflection are related because often times if you set a goal to hit this monetary Mark in your business and you don't hit it that fiscal year is over so yeah you could hit it next year but you missed it last year speak to that I don't know at least in my experience obviously though I was in the athletic industry it is a zero sum game yeah do you believe that goals and reflection are actually related because once you fail at that goal you have failed door closed on to the next yeah that's a great point I mean I think if the goal is too nebulous uh then you're not going to fix it with reflection so I think something that's a specific behavior that you can test you know in experiment a an opportunity to Pivot and there was a question there was someone uh a question I think it was uh Shanta who asked how we can create goals that are flexible enough to adapt to unexpected changes but keep moving and being motivated and focused I think that gets to that balance of rigidity and flexibility where think we should be setting those experiments right you have in in my head like I'll have some sort of vague goal it's just that I can't help it but I don't know if that's gonna actually help me get to it and it's smaller here's what's interesting who asked that question David Shanta what's fascinating then David then I think we're just using the word goal because we're comfortable using it fair enough in the event that our goal is ever changing and our goal is extremely fluid and our goal for the end of the month could be to lose three pounds but now we ain't lost the three pound so now we're going to say you know what my goal is to lose one pound or now we ain't lost the three pound so you know let me lose three pounds by the end of three months that wasn't a goal now it is you're doing what I would suggest which is just putting your energy in a direction goals are finite goals are lines in the sand goals are an end towards which energy is aimed so if you are and we are constantly adjusting our goals then we're only using the word goal and resolution these words because Society has conditioned us to use this particular verbiage which I think we should toss out because it's not actually a goal if we are constantly modifying the behavior of said goal the moment we don't meet the goal fair I mean that's why my preferred language is experiment but what would you say for someone whose goal comes from some kind of performance goal you know from a or some higher up or something like that

and then they're tasked with changing their behavior to meet it and they don't really have a choice great question so early on I said um goals do there is benefit to goals if there is no higher level of achievement then I do not have an issue with setting a goal for example let's use the track and field um analogy and I relay race the primary objective is to get the Baton around the track if you do not and if for some reason the Baton hits the ground and goes into the infield I will spare you all some of the more minute rules then you fail so because getting the Baton around the track is of the utmost importance and you can do nothing greater than getting the Baton around the track yes set the goal of getting the Baton around the track what I do not suggest doing is setting a time goal because a time can always be improved getting the Baton around the track is pass fail you can set a goal for that because there was no higher level of achievement so in the event you have um goals dictated by your boss if it's past fail by all means if you have to meet a deadline then heck yeah your goal better be to meet that deadline because if you do not meet that deadline you failed but SE selling goals like if you need to sell um for those that are in selling Industries if you want to sell x amount of units or x amount of that's when I suggest man you might have been able to sell more if you did not set a goal I would rather do what David you are suggesting with experiments what James Clear is suggesting and I would rather commit to actions daily not some sort of goal that cannot be improved but I would rather commit a goal that can be improved David I would rather commit to actions daily which are let me be more outgoing or let me be energetic on every call every sales call or let me start with a great greting and end with the greeting whatever the case may be I would rather commit to The Habit as opposed to the end I like those and I think just as semantics I would call those experiments I'm gonna open up the call like this and see how it goes yes and since you know mentioning habits and James CLE and you know Charles doig has written a lot about habits and I want to bounce this idea off you because last year this is GNA sound funny but I was studying some of the rhetorical techniques of Martin Luther King Jr and he uses certain sort of analogies and Frames really beautifully repeatedly and one of them is Odus vers Orpheus so Odus to uh prevent himself from succumbing to the Beautiful song of the sirens had his Shipmates lash him to the Mast right so he restrained himself so it's an avoidance strategy whereas orus who was the this legendary musician when he faced the sirens he played his own beautiful music over them he's like I'm not going to restrain myself that doesn't work in the long run I mean again this is metaphorical not lashing to the mask I'm going to rep it with something better and king would use that to say you know we can't just go for these the avoidance of hate we need to replace it with love and I think that really comports with some of the research that approach goals are better than avoidance goals but people usually set the avoidance you know I'm not going to eat this or that thing and some of the that has to do with habits right and to come to bring it back to habits as Charles doig sort of wrote about some of this and the Power of Habit that there's this sequence of a cue that sets you to do something a behavior that you then take and a reward so say you're you know sitting at your desk uh you want to get up and you it's a certain time a day you go to the cafeteria you eat a cookie and the reward you know is this sugar rush and what he argued is let's not focus on changing the queue like trying to get rid of the cookie let's not focus on changing the reward let's try to change the behavior in the Middle based on what you think the reward really is so for him it was like actually I need a few minutes break and to socialize I don't need a cookie so the cookie still there the time of day is still the queue but he tried replacing that getting a cookie with going and talking with some of his colleagues instead and I think there's some wisdom in that the queue can be very difficult to change depending on how much flexibility you have in your situation the reward not necessarily always sure what it is but you can try different behaviors to replace instead of just restraining yourself what do you think about that that's one incredibly fascinating um I think that is tangential to an ENT extrinsic motivation right because the reward is extrinsic I am doing this so that I can get said reward but one I always believe in changing from within the outer shell of something is only a result of the inner shell of something it's only a result of what is from within it will inevitably flow outward I believe that truly if we want to see the changes that we desire to see in our life it has to come from within it cannot be oh well some sort of extrinsic motivation whether it's money um whether

it's a shiny object at the end of the tunnel whether it's the pot of gold I believe it has to we have to get to the root of the why because will dictate a motivation that will never run dry cannot be extinguished that will not be relinquished so I'm I love that David because to me that's addressing the root of the why as opposed to Simply focusing on some sort of external motivation that inevitably will just stop caring about sooner than later I think you're I think this dovetails well to some of the user questions because some of the questions were a little more philosophical in bent so I think we should switch over to a few of those because I think you naturally kind of went there one of the goals from fadwa was I mean sorry one of the questions from F was how can we balance ambition with well-being especially in a high pressure world and I kind of think I have sort of an intellectual hero uh in that regard and a fun story like I read my kindergarten or the Phantom toll booth if people know that book and there's a character called the senses taker you know it's a play on senses taker but senses Taker and his job is to help people find things they weren't looking for um and to me that is like in our algorithmic life it's never been easier to find things that you weren't looking for and to have Ambitions that really weren't yours and kind of an someone who made a big impression on me an intellectual hero was Herbert Simon who was one of the founding fathers of AI one of the founders of cognitive psychology and one of his most powerful ideas was satisficing as opposed to maximizing so people often want to maximize they want to make the optimal decision meet the perfect goal you know only the gold medal not the silver medal in their respective life he wasn't talking about uh sports but you can never really maximize because we have limited brain processing capacity you can't know the alternative possibilities you can't process enough information uh to compare all of those um you know brooms on Amazon and find out which is the best one and it turns out that the maximizing tendency is almost always a bad thing to be for psychological health and so Simon himself said he was a satisficer he would wear uh he had you know a certain pair of shoes he wore in one season and another in another season a certain hat then he'd only get one when it ran out because he wanted to save all of his cognitive bandwidth for his work where he really wanted to dive in other areas he satisficed and you could almost accuse him of having you know low ambition if he hadn't won the Nobel Prize the Turing award and like the lifetime psychology Award right if not for his trophy case you might accuse him of having low ambition but I've kind of taken that and set areas in my life where I'm proactively going to satisfice and say this is good enough so when I'm writing a book for example it's got to be an eight n or 10 when I send out a newsletter you know if that's a six or a seven or a six and a half that's an okay place for that to occupy in my life and that was a very foreign idea to me uh so that idea of satisfy saying I really like is sort of a personal philosophy what do you think of it because it can sound sort of like you're just good goals that's beautiful and I'm gonna steal that um I do not know who asked that question again that was uh fadwa I do not know fadwa if you can balance ambition with well-being um I went to the Paris Olympics this past year track is my first love though I played American football I went to the Paris Olympics this first year now what I will challenge all of you all to do the next time you're watching a Olympic type of race or an Olympic caliber race look at the silver medal medist those that finish second versus the bronze medalists those that finish third the bronze medalists are often happier than the silver medalists now you ask yourself and they live longer why in the world and David you may have studied this or written about this maybe I'm taking it from you I do not recall why in the world are the bronze medalists happier than the silver medalists because the bronze medalists they're just happy to have made the podium and gotten a medal but the silver medalists they are upset that they did not get gold ambition gold medal well-being happy vers sad if you will to take the most basic form of that conversation one individual is so ambitious that they all wanted BR gold but because one got silver they're like dang it I could have got gold one got bronze and they're like man I could have got fourth and that to me is the tension and the dichotomy between ambition and well-being I wanted to be drafted in the first three rounds of the NFL draft I got drafted in the sixth round of the NFL draft so I'm sitting there out of seven rounds like man I should have got drafted higher but the undrafted player is like man I wish I would have got drafted or the player that got drafted in the seventh round is like who thank God I got drafted whereas I am like dang it I wish I would have got drafted higher ambition versus well-being I at least have not figured out how to navigate both of those from a micro sense properly macro sense zooming

out at the lens of my life sure I've done a lot of great things micro sense that silver medalist maybe two three four five years later they're happy they got a medal but in the a macro sense but in the micro H I don't know how you do it David they do in aggregate live shorter and it seems to be that sort of disappointment I mean I think you're kind of well first takeaway is obviously that you used to have good taste and then you switch from track to football but everyone barely even needs pointing out since it's so um but the I think you're kind of giving a treatment of this of the sort of uh modern model of the brain is called predictive processing where it's like your happiness is going to be the difference between what you expected and what happened and the difficulty there is right exactly what you've been saying you set that certain goal like I think you should write the FDA warning for goals uh you know to get all the side effects down um the the difficulty there is you set a high goal you want to be ambitious you fall short you're really unhappy you don't want to set no goals right and so I think it maybe comes back to that idea of not having too rigid goals and trying to find goals that direct your energy as opposed to the ones that are just this endpoint where you're going to be happy or sad um whether you meet them so I really like how you framed that um let me see the there's another uh great question here have you en from Alex Andra have you encountered situations in which you've questioned the perspectives you're sharing right now and if so what do you believe happened in those moments that sort of caused you to falter I'll just say I'm an inveterate uh flip-flopper like I would not make it in politics I flip-flop all the time because I think when we learn something we should update um our behaviors and I think has something changed I mean right now since we're sharing this perspective I wouldn't say between starting this talk and now that a perspective has changed but my perspective certainly changed about goals in general where like when I was a teenager I had all these long-term goals and i' ended up doing none of those things and every project in my life that has mattered has been an opportunistic pivot to something I didn't expect um and so that's kind of a way that my perspective changed what about you uel um I believe in always evolving and always changing uh one of my favorite books um by Chuck closterman but what if we're wrong and so I'm constantly asking myself hey what if I am wrong about this that as it pertains to my lack of goals I think that an objective with no limitations it is the safest healthiest and most efficient way to operate again there is value in setting goals there's just a cost that I personally am no longer willing to pay I have also um lived a much more maximal Life by letting go of goals because I'm no longer stuck in this box I believe this question is from Alexander so Alexander I'm no longer stuck in this box now I have the freedom to create now okay sure I'll write music okay I'll write animated shorts okay I'll write books okay I'll do Sports shows it's no longer like I have to play football and get drafted here um so I am constantly evolving but as it stands now um for me an objective with no limitations it gives me the room for the evolution that I need within this freedom of no limitations as opposed to what is finite in the goals of it all related question to that from maximiliano who asked what's one belief about success that you've had to uh unlearn yourself and how's it changed your approach that one's easy to me I think that's the so-called arrival fallacy where I kept having this idea of I write a bestselling book if I you know make it to Nationals 800 all this stuff like then I will have arrived and then I can do all this other stuff about like trying to be a happy person and cultivate friendships and all this stuff because I just got to arrive at that thing and you never arrive like you do that thing and you're still you right it's like go to the top of Mount Everest you're still you or like I always think about it like you know these experiences can change you of course but I think that idea that there'll be somewhere where you arrive you get into the right College uh you get the promotion and suddenly all those things that were plugging you like now it's fine now I can relax or do the things I want to do I think that's just usually um uh not realistic and not so helpful so I had to unlearn the arrival fallacy because I really had this idea that I would do certain things just get those off my plate and uh you know then I can focus on some of these other things I want to do but if you do something well your plate only gets more full and so at one point I had a uh you know I enlisted some help out a virtual assistant to sort of help me manage some of those things and I realized that trying to be more productive in some of these opportunities I had was sort of a trap because I was the bottleneck like my brain was the bottleneck I could not get to all these things and and having seeing knowing where they were like having an ABCD list

for email was actually worse because if I saw them I felt like I needed to do it and so I kind of got rid of that and try to focus on sort of the most important things and don't look at email first thing in the morning because then it'll be hard for me to focus on some of my most important projects but that sense that I'll arrive and you know and then everything will be good I think is uh just not realistic what do you think what's something you had to unlearn I mean obviously had this very dramatic story about goal settings no that's well said um I would suggest I would suggest success is one of the most dangerous words in the English language I would suggest that because success can make you a prisoner I was having a conversation one time I'm getting a haircut my phone rings it's Oprah and she called me and she didn't really have anything to say and so I was like well you called me so now I'm just gonna take all the time that I can take we're talking for like 5502 minutes or something that's how long my haircuts take David I don't know why so we're talking for like 52 minutes and um we start talking about Michael Jackson because that was one of her greatest interviews it was the like highest watched non Super Bowl event of like the 1990s Michael Jackson sit down and Michael Jackson told her how forever he was trying to chase Thriller sold like 182 million copies worldwide one of the greatest hits of not even our generation in the history of the world and Michael Jackson was forever trying to chase Thriller and not being able to catch Thriller as it pertained to Global impact and sales weighed him down so I asked Oprah about that I said you did the Oprah Winfrey show but like there will be nothing greater than the Oprah Winfrey Show and she spoke on being significant more than being successful and so I subscribe to chasing significance over chasing success because once you chase success you will find yourself being a prisoner to that success David you write a bestselling book and then you're like well I got to write a number one New York Times bestselling book but then when you now every book after that it better hit the New York Times list because if you don't then you're like dang that sucks I failed and I found myself a slave to success but as opposed to now if I put out a book did it make an impact was it significant it may not have made the New York Times bestsellers list but somebody came up to me in Austin with tears in their eyes because of that content saying how I had changed their husband's life if I come out with another episode of uncomfortable conversations it might not win an Emmy Award but someone might come up to me and say how they sat down with their kids and they watched it and it had an impact on the trajectory of their future success is a dangerous dangerous word and I used to be a prisoner of success but I found the key and now I'm trying to find a way to get all the way out success I don't subscribe to success that one that word success David it has kept me up way too many hours of the night it's interesting because we're obviously coming from you know a fortunate vantage point in having accomplished some of these kind of creative goals uh sorry creative objectives just done things that where we've had freedom over some of the things that we've accomplished um and you know you hit a sort of nerve that sent like a bolt of a fear through me about you say the next book has to be a bestseller because I'm finishing up one right now and really feeling that pressure and the way I sort of tried to take some of that off myself was instead of viewing it as like I have to live up to the sales numbers of the last one which I fortunately was reasonably good at not tracking very well um uh you know it's like a you gotta lose your password sometimes um and I said my experiment this time is I've never written a book with an external architecture that starts before I write the book so this sort of structure that I'll write to and so I created one this time and it caused me to write in chronological order which I've never done so you know after more than a decade suddenly I have this new process and so I'm feeling anxious about it because it's not the formula I was used to and I wouldn't feel anxious about it if I didn't think it raised the chances of my failure compared to last books but I think my feeling again you know if I satisfy on the sales standpoint you know there there's a limit the experiment is something that I really wanted to do that's meaningful to me to see if it's a better kind of writing that I can do and if it fails I'm for sure going to be using that uh as feedback if it turns out it fails but I'm feeling very anxious about it uh currently but I think David is tough because again transparently like sports Gene I believe was the first book of yours I read don't know if it's your um was rain your second book yes yep so after I read sports genan I'm like David you set the bar High I'm quoting your work obviously I well not obviously I do a sports television show every day for

two hours and so I need to fill a lot of content I'm getting into arguments with people about your models of Michael Phelps had the ideal swim body type and this athlete and African-American individuals by often their torsos are shorter whereas this people so I mean I'm you set the bar high so now when I read range I'm like well it better be as good a sports Gene you know what I mean like that is the dilemma I believe of success and whether or not you cared about emanuel's opinion does not stop Emanuel from having an opinion whether or not like truly whether or not I care about sales does not stop sales from either occurring or not occurring I can try to limit myself from caring about success but somewhere someone is weighing my success based upon some Metric whether or not that metric is of importance to my life that's the question so that gets a at a question from um cus I apologize if I'm mispronouncing your name who asked what practical steps can we take to shift our Focus from external achievements to internal fulfillment and I think that's tough you know in some ways I think that's maybe tougher than ever because boy are we living in a golden age of being shown things that you should desire that you didn't really desire right so I think I mean to me and I think this is a trend it started actually before like social Medan algorithms because you can look at these I think it was starting kind of in the late 60s these surveys of young people in America on well not just young people but on locus of control which basically psychology speak for are you um are you kind of behaving in a way would you feel like you have control over your fate do agency or not and internal locus of control means you're being driven by things that you want to achieve try external locus of control is you know x amount of money things that are less in your control not that they have no control but less in your control and the people shifted from internal to external locus of control like very steadily over time and so we're much more externally motivated now and I think some of that just has to do with it's so much easier to have fomo because of all the stuff we see so I feel like you know like when I remember when there was some talk about like Mark Zuckerberg talking about the metaverse and he's like we can all have like our own individual world and I'm like oh man so we can all like optimize all that sounds terrible to me like I want some embodi experience including with strangers where I'm not thinking about all the things that I'm missing on the internet so actually one of my current experiments was this year I want more because writing can be very solitary I want more embodied experience with strangers so dance class with strangers so ju just started just took the first one and that was something that's important to me that I realized I was missing out on but sometimes also I think you just got to turn off the algorithm and just like maybe take social media off your phone for brief periods and then you can put it back the dance class salsa hip hop Waltz ballet Shuffle you know so I'm the book I'm working on is about how constraints can be useful actually maybe we should Dove tail to that and talk about what we're working on now because we only have a few minutes left so I'm finishing up a book about how constraints can be useful instead of just limiting from the form of a haiku why does it prompt creativity rather than squelch it to technological innovation to um the structures in society that made strangers behaviors more predictable so that we could trade with people that weren't our kin or our friends and I got interested in this kind of dancing because it was invented in I saw a documentary about clubs in Melbourne that were really crowded and people wanted to be able to move and do a lot of things in a very confined space so they had to come up with these moves so it kind of dovetailed with my interest and constraints so Shuffle that's I like that um I guess right now if obviously we're running out of time I think I'll leave with two thoughts I'll leave with the thought of one really hammering something that I haven't suggested yet which is if the focus for me and if what I'm submitting to everybody is to have an objective instead of a goal then I'll leave you by saying your objective it should be subjective and it should be subject to people's interpretation simply put right now I want to be considered David one of the most creative people the industry has ever seen that is how I navigate my life my objective being one of the most creative people the industry has ever seen it is subjective it's subject to people's interpretation David might be like wow Emanuel acho is very creative others might be like nah it's not for me whereas a goal is finite and everybody can say you passed or you failed my objective is now it's subjective thus there is no way for someone to say that I failed it is simply hey it's subject to your interpretation um as for kind of current works man I'm constantly creating um I because I am chasing being a creative um my next book will likely be a book about grief an uncomfortable conversation about grief I want to move into that space as I continue to

navigate aspects of mental health I think I'm also currently just working on different types of creation I'm songs and different types of animated shorts I'm working on continuing to put content into the world because if my objective is to be one of the most creative people the industry has ever seen not only must I create but I must also create a wide variety of things to both please my desires and hopefully um satiate some mental appetites in society I love it last thing we're going to do lightning round two sentences each the two tips you'd most leave people with mine are book of small experiments you know for yourself and for a kid like I take it to my kid I you know I don't tell him what to do but when he does something I try to heighten the reflection the amount he learns from having done that thing you know what worked what didn't what did you like and second one pick spots in your life to satisfy make it a practice you don't need to maximize everywhere some people do that naturally but a lot of us could I think be more productive if we picked the spots where it's okay to satisfice satisfy since maximizing for a finite individual is limited anyway I love that I will share something I heard most recently um focus more on how your life feels to you than how it looks to other people I think that suffices the entirety of the conversation we're having if your goals are extrinsic then often times it can be about how it feel how it looks to other people than how it feels to you focus more on how your life feels to you than how your life looks to other people and lastly I would suggest be the change you want to see rather than kind of doing the change that you want to see quite literally be the change um David I've never drank a day in my life I don't have an issue with people that do drink I just don't drink when a bartender comes up to me and says hey would you like to drink I'm like no I don't drink not I'm not drinking I don't drink and so those that are setting these goals or objectives or experiments whatever the case it may be that don't just do that be that because there is a difference so you were sober when you switched from track to football which is surprising know to each their own um thanks for the great questions really enjoyed the mandor questions sorry if we didn't get to all of them thank you all