The Science Of Setting Goals You Actually Achieve with Emily Balcetis | 141

In the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Michael Phelps dove into the pool for his eighth gold medal race, the race that would make him the greatest Olympian in history. Then his goggles started leaking. He couldn't see the wall. He couldn't see the finish. He won anyway. NYU psychologist Dr. Emily Balcetis explains what he did, why it worked, and how the same mental mechanism is what separates elite performers from everyone else.

Emily is one of the world's leading researchers on how what we want changes what we see. Her TED talk has nearly 4 million views. She has spent twenty years studying Olympic athletes, marathon runners, and highly ambitious people, and she has found something most of us get backwards: elite performers are not seeing more. They are seeing less, on purpose.

In this conversation we cover the science of narrow focus, why vision boards fail without an action plan, the Steve Jobs "reality distortion field" through the lens of behavioral psychology, why ambitious people who never savor a win eventually burn out, and the one question every high performer should ask before they set the next goal.

If you have ever set a mark, hit it, reset it higher, and wondered why nothing lands, this one is for you..

⏰ TIMESTAMPS

00:00 The Cold Open
01:08 Meet Dr. Emily Balcetis
01:45 The Leader In Your Head (And Why It Isn't You)
04:38 What Olympic Athletes Do That The Rest Of Us Don't
07:48 The Gorilla Your Eyes Refuse To See
11:18 Why Evolution Built Us To Miss Things On Purpose
13:07 Attention Addiction Machines
15:44 The Real Reason To Keep Your Phone Out Of Your Bedroom
19:14 Why Highly Ambitious People Almost Never Do This
24:03 Steve Jobs, The Reality Distortion Field, And What The Science Says
29:16 The Planning Fallacy
32:32 The Microsoft Study That Should Change How You Work
36:06 The Vision Board Lie
37:15 She Played Warp Tour At 18
40:53 The One Thing Michael Phelps Did That Nobody Else Did
44:30 Where To Find Emily

🔗 GUEST LINKS
Dr. Emily Balcetis:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/emilybalcetis/
NYU Faculty Page: https://as.nyu.edu/faculty/emily-balcetis.html
SPAM Lab (Social Perception Action and Motivation Lab): https://www.spamlabresearch.com/
Book, Clearer, Closer, Better: How Successful People See the World: https://www.amazon.com/Clearer-Closer-Better-Successful-People/dp/1524796468
TED Talk, "Why some people find exercise harder than others": https://www.ted.com/talks/emily_balcetis_why_some_people_find_exercise_harder_than_others

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Take a second and think about what a leader looks like to you. You're gonna come up with a mental image, and then I can ask: does that look like you? The mental image that we have in our mind changes whether we think we belong in that space too.

SPEAKER_02 0:11

How does having a goal that's clear and precise affect the way that we see the things visually pertaining to that goal?

SPEAKER_00 0:20

I had a chance to explore that by starting to work with Olympic athletes. They choose a goal, they choose a fixation location, almost like there's blinders, almost like there's a spotlight shining in just one location. They were almost blind to those distractions. So a great example of this is Michael Felt. He was slated to do something that no Olympian has ever done in the history of the Olympic Games. When he dove into the pool, his goggles started leaking. But for him, he didn't have the no experience because he had trained for that. He just started counting his strokes because he knew exactly how many strokes it would take for him to get from one end of the pool to the other and win that eighth gold medal and do what nobody had ever done before.

unknown 1:08

Dr.

SPEAKER_02 1:08

Emily Balchettis, welcome to the Grateful Podcast.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

So glad to be here.

SPEAKER_02 1:13

I'm so excited to have you. I mean, you have written books, you've done so much work around the idea of perception as it relates to our goals. And I'm just fascinated that we can perceive our exterior world differently depending on how we think about our goals. Why is this important in the world that we live in today?

SPEAKER_00 1:38

Maybe I'll start with an example, which is a question that all of your audience can also, we can play along at home right now, which is take a second and think about what a leader looks like to you. What does a leader look like? You're gonna come up with a mental image, you can imagine it, but it'll be concrete, right? You can imagine their hair, their nose shape, their skin tone, their eye color, what clothes they're wearing. And I could give you a box of crayons or markers or an avatar app and say, like, what you see in your mind, show it to me, show it to me, draw it, create it for me. And you can do that, and we've done it with thousands and thousands of people, with teenagers in particular. Um, and then I can ask, does that look like you? And that's where things get wildly different. Some people are like, yeah, I had me in mind, or yeah, I had my best friend in mind as I was choosing the crayon to match their skin tone, or as I was thinking about their hairstyle, I was trying to model it off of what I want for myself. But some people are like, oh, no, that doesn't look like me at all. They they look old, they look like not my gender, they look like not my race, they look like not my, not my vibe. And say, oh, well, why is that? And they don't realize it. That's the interesting thing, is that that mental image that they have in their mind of what a leader looks like sometimes looks like them, and that might be intentional, but oftentimes it doesn't. That can be influenced by what they see in the world around them. For younger people, uh, it's we are inspired by those heroes that might be 18, 19, 20 years old that are changing the world. But it's really hard to be that kind of a person, that young in life, and getting that kind of attention. So more often than not, we're seeing older people who don't look like us, who don't share our demographics, that are the ones that are in charge, and that changes what we think about, the mental image that we have in our mind, and that changes whether we think we belong in that space too. So we might have goals to lead, to change the world, to create something that no one else has ever created. And as we think about whether we can get into that space, whether I belong, whether I have a good chance of succeeding or not, we often compare ourselves to that image of success that shows up in our minds that may or may not already look like us and may or may not um represent what we think is true, but is informed by what we see around us.

SPEAKER_02 3:57

Huh. So we're constantly judging what we want to do based on our already preconceived image of what we've seen others do in that position that we're striving to kind of accomplish, I guess.

SPEAKER_00 4:11

Absolutely. And that might be happening outside of our awareness, which is even more challenging then. If you don't realize that you are not entering a space, you're feeling like an imposter, you think you don't belong here, that you shouldn't even try because there isn't a match between who you see yourself as and who you see as a prototype of success in that space, that disconnect between the mental image you have and how you see yourself, you might throw in the towel even before you've started the workout.

SPEAKER_02 4:38

Interesting. How does having a goal that's clear and precise affect the way that we see the things visually, physically, uh pertaining that goal?

SPEAKER_00 4:50

I had a chance to ask this question uh and to explore that in a research capacity by starting to work with Olympic athletes. They happen to be um training at an armory, so an old military, decommissioned military base over in Brooklyn, just across the river from where we are now. Um, and they were training alongside uh, you know, moms pushing their kids in strollers out to get outside, you know, to get out of the house on a cold winter night, some people who are training for their first 5K. Um but then there's these Olympic athletes that are sitting on the side of the YMCA track alongside them. They've been the fastest people out of Trinidad and Tobago. Several of them had won Olympic gold, silver, and bronze medals. Um, and their trainer introduced me to this group and said, I think you're gonna find something really interesting about how they see the world. Now, I am nowhere near that level of uh performance success. Nowhere near and never will be. Uh I tripped on my own feet when I was learning how to play basketball and pushed my own teammate out of bounds and then was uh told to never come back to the team in fifth grade. Um, so athleticism, not necessarily my forte, but I was so excited to talk to these guys. They were all men in this case. And um, I thought when they look at the world, I bet they have like superpowers of perception. I bet, like a predator, they can sort of like track everything around them. They know where their competition is, they know the space that separates them from their finish line, and they know what separates the space that separates them from second in line relative to where they are. I bet they can just like take in the whole world and like do math on it and and triangulate the best route to success. And I was totally wrong. That is not at all what they do.

SPEAKER_01 6:31

Really?

SPEAKER_00 6:31

Yeah. Instead, what they were telling me is that they choose a goal, they choose a fixation location and they hold on to it. Almost like there's blinders on the sides of their head, almost like there's a spotlight shining in just one location and they hold on to it until they hit that space, they pass it and they reset the goal. Now, these guys were like, you know, 400-meter runners, 1600-meter distance runners, so relatively short distances. But that eyes on the prize strategy of honing in on a goal and not paying attention to peripheral cues is something that elite marathon runners use as well. Uh, Joan Benoit Samuelson is the first woman who won the marathon in the uh in the Olympics as a woman in the 80s when they finally let women compete in the in the Olympics for marathon. Uh, and that's a strategy that she uses too. She said she would focus on the shorts of somebody who was ahead of her, the pink shorts until she passed that person. She would choose the next shorts or she'd choose the next stop sign or whatever. So she was constantly setting these smaller goals, focusing just on those until she passed by. They were not utilizing what could be superpowers of perception. They weren't taking in all the greater surroundings. In fact, they were almost blind to those distractions.

SPEAKER_02 7:48

I found that really fascinating. The first thing that comes to my head, and when I've heard you say this previously, is are you familiar with those videos where they like a lot of times teachers will show them in school where they say focus on like the people throwing the ball back and forth. And then there's some gorilla that walks through the middle, and everyone's like, How many of you saw the gorilla? and no one raises their hand because they're so super focused on the thing happening. Oftentimes I found that teachers and people that are showing that video say if you don't see that thing, it's almost a negative. Like you should be aware of all of the things happening around you. But what I hear you saying is the opposite. That intense focus on one goal, on one thing ahead of you, is actually what is it's a factor in greater success and higher performance.

SPEAKER_00 8:37

That is a great connection to make. Um, yeah, so a classic demonstration, so fun for your audience to go look it up. It seems unbelievable that when there's this mess of people throwing a basketball around, there's some players who are wearing white jerseys, some that are wearing black jerseys. You're told to count the number of times a player in white passes the ball to another player in white. So the demonstration asks you to focus on white. And people do that. And in the middle of this mess of basketballs being tossed around among players, a gorilla walks through the middle. It's ridiculous. And like the vast majority of people don't notice. They don't see that gorilla walk through. And you ask, like, hey, anything weird happened in that basketball game? They're like, well, that was a weird basketball game, but like, no, besides that, they're like, what about that gorilla? And they're like, what?

SPEAKER_02 9:24

And that's what gorilla?

SPEAKER_00 9:26

Exactly. Gorilla? What are you talking about? It's really amazing. And that is from intense focused concentration of focusing on players in white because that's what the task required of you. That's what was asked of people who followed that demonstration. Now, you're saying like that teachers will sometimes say, like, that's a bad thing. That if you can't take it all in, then you're doing something wrong. I don't think we're doing something wrong. It's actually a great example about how vision works and how attention works. That when we do want something, when we do want to be able to accurately count the number of times a basketball passes hands and when it's hard to do that, we can focus up. We can keep distractions at bay. We can separate what's the noise from the signal. We know what matters and we can put to the side what doesn't. In this case, it was people or animals or a guy dressed up in a gorilla costume wearing the wrong color. And I'm pretty sure any teacher would also say being able to ignore distractions so you can focus on what's important right now is a valuable skill. And that is one of the superpowers of perception that we can all hold on to. So when you try that demonstration, which I encourage everybody to do, go find that gorillas in the mist sort of video, you'll see that you can do that too, although it'll be harder now because we gave it away of what your what what the surprise is. But our brains can do that. We can separate out and almost be blind to the things that are not relevant to our task right now. Knowing that is a tool that we can leverage when we need to, like these Olympic runners, like the marathon runners, who can choose to engage this focused attention. It's not to say they don't have peripheral vision, it's that they are choosing to not use it now because they know it doesn't serve them well. But if being able to pay attention to what was on the sides did serve them well, of course they can do that. It's about knowing which tool to use and at what time to use it.

SPEAKER_02 11:20

Why is this something that humans do evolutionarily?

SPEAKER_00 11:24

Yeah, how we see the world is critical for evolution. If we couldn't see the world, then we would be eaten by tigers and we'd fall off cliffs, we'd never find the berries and we wouldn't find community to help keep us to learn how to build fires on a cold winter night, right? So being able to see the world is really important. But if we think about like the world that you and I are having a conversation in right now, New York City, right off of Times Square, it is visually overwhelming. A lot of it is important for us to pay attention to. Which way are the cars going? What color are the lights right now? Is it my turn to walk? Is it not? When there's 300 people on this side of the street gonna cross and 300 people on this side, how do we how do we interweave so nobody bonks into each other?

SPEAKER_01 12:05

It's a game.

SPEAKER_00 12:06

My God, it's just like Frogger, honestly. Um those are things that were really important. But how tall is the building doesn't really matter to me when I need to cross the street. If I've just had lunch, it doesn't matter that there I can go get tacos over on that street corner. That's irrelevant right now. I should be, I should be able to keep that at bay. I I don't need to pay attention to it, so I have more attentional capacity for the thing that matters right now. So, yes, you can argue that from an evolutionary perspective, it's really important to see the world the way that it is and to see the things that matter to us. But it's also important for us to be able to put the distractions aside so that we have more resources to devote to making sense of the things that really matter right now.

SPEAKER_02 12:51

I find that people do that less than ever. Social media with distractions are literally everywhere. And I wonder, is there any research on the skill of focus and the skill of being able to visually, not just in your head, but visually perceive only one thing and focus on that? Is that a diminishing skill at all?

SPEAKER_00 13:14

I I appreciate your question. And I it worries me if people think along those lines of the question and feel like this is about willpower. That if I am feeling distracted, if I am feeling like it's a deep, dark rabbit hole, if I open up social media, I can't pull myself out of it, or I thought I would give myself 15 minutes and it's been two hours, and then you feel guilty over that, and you feel like I don't have willpower to be able to navigate this. These systems are designed to leverage addictive tendencies that all people have, whether they're children, whether they are adults or somewhere in the middle. They are attention addiction machines. Everything about the way that social media and phones in particular are designed is meant to gather and hold and capture and make sticky your attention because that's how they make money, right? It's by holding on to your attention. So it's challenging, it's not helpful to think about this as my problem with willpower and that I can't somehow resist the machine that has leveraged the way that the brain works to create an addiction in the same way that cocaine can function in our brains and bodies. The the surge of dopamine and the neurotransmitters that you can get when you hug somebody can be experienced when we engage with social media because of how they leverage different aspects of the engagement system. So we don't need to be mad at ourselves if we find that this is an issue that we struggle with. It's about how do we put constraints on? That means that I don't have to try to engage the willpower to subvert the addictive tendencies that they're trying to leverage. So rather than saying, like, I just need to work harder, I need to convince myself that this is a bad thing, I need to find ways to not want it, that's a losing battle because you have a whole industry who knows that's your approach and they're working against it. So, what can we do to take the choice out of it or the personal shame that we might have or dissatisfaction with ourselves out of it? Um, and so that gives us a lot more opportunities about how do we want to craft our social media environment space and the way that we use the technology so I don't have to try to use willpower, but I set my world up in a way where the willpower comes automatically.

SPEAKER_02 15:34

Love that you said that. It's something I've been thinking about and talking a lot about recently. It's us versus trillions of dollars. Right. It's a battle we're never going to win, and they want us to be fighting.

SPEAKER_01 15:44

Right.

SPEAKER_02 15:44

And we have to try to curate our environment to just have less of that and take small steps. So, on the small steps aspect of it, how can someone use the idea of just looking at the shorts ahead of us and setting smaller incremental goals to maybe try to get out of a rabbit hole of social media and distraction?

SPEAKER_00 16:02

Well, one easy thing that we can try to build as a habit is not looking at our phone when we wake up first thing in the morning. And that is a habit that we can build and that our brain will actually reward ourselves for committing to. When you look at your phone, the way that the visuals are set up, the color of the light that emanates from it, the way that the vibrations or the visuals that pop up are engineered is to provide your neurological structure with a feeling of reward. In the same way that you eat something delicious like chocolate, your body is like, hmm, that's really good. That feels good. Let's try that again. The same thing happens when we look at our phones. The coloring of the light, the way that the apps are designed, um, gives us a dopamine rush. But you actually don't want to wake up and have that rush of positive feelings. You don't, it's not good for us to do that. You don't want to wake up and eat an entire chocolate bar. You want to give your stomach a little bit of time to wake up to truly enjoy it, right? The same is true with the reward system and what the phone can offer us and what social media can offer us. Because if we wake up and we spike at a dopamine level that's really high, um, that means that any other, uh any other type of experience, we're going to habituate to that level of dopamine. It's gonna take a lot more spending time with friends in real life. It's gonna take a lot more beautiful art or hikes in nature to meet that same rush that we've trained our body to expect just by waking up in the morning. So that just means that we've upped the ante on the kinds of experiences we have to curate for ourselves to experience the same sorts of thrill or happiness or excitement because we've trained our mind and our body to get that just by waking up first thing in the morning. So when people say keep your phone outside of your bedroom, it's more than just because we keep doom scrolling at night and it's hard to put it off and say, like, okay, I can go to bed now. That is a challenge, but it's also because of what happens when we wake up in the morning. If it's the first thing that is there for us to grab, we most likely will. And that means that we're training ourselves to need more happiness to feel even a small amount of it.

SPEAKER_02 18:15

That last line is so powerful. I think people these days feel like there needs to be some type of extravagance in their life in order to feel satisfied with it. And I that's the whole reason that I started the Grateful Podcast, because our life is the lens through which we see it. And our experience is how we're seeing it. And if we believe that we need some type of extravagance to feel grateful or happy, then we will. But oftentimes the happiest people are the ones with that less because they realize that we have all the key ingredients already to our happiness, to our fulfillment in our life, and you don't need some extravagant lifestyle for it. I'm curious, in terms of your work relating to this, with extremely ambitious people who continue to set the bar, get there, set the bar further, get there, set the bar further, get there endlessly. How do they perceive the world in terms of their actual vision and their goals?

SPEAKER_00 19:18

You've brought up so many interesting ideas in what you just shared now. And I'm gonna try to give a simple answer that stitches together a couple of the important points that you've made. Um, and I would imagine that people who are like what you've what you've suggested that that set a mark, they hit the mark. They reset the next mark, they hit that mark. Um, how do they keep doing that? How do they sustain that commitment and that perseverance? I would hope that they experience gratitude and that they savor the wins. I think so many times for highly ambitious people that keep resetting the next mark, um, there's we are so eager to push through, to reset, to push through, to keep going up the ladder that we don't take a moment to do what's really important, which is to stop and savor that experience and savor that win. But um there's a really great researcher. Uh, her name is Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia, and she studies happiness. And how can you spend your money to maximize happiness? That question in itself could be controversial. Like, what do you mean? Like, spend my money to buy happiness. I bought a new pair of shoes, and as soon as I get the first scuff mark, it's already disappointing, right? So, like, oh, that was a waste of $100. But you can, you can spend your money. It's about how. And a lot of that comes down to savoring. Spend your money in a way that allows you to savor an experience. When she directs people to take a bite of this chocolate and savor it, really try to feel it. The chocolate tastes so much more delicious. Use this money and go spend it on somebody else and have them tell you what they bought or what their experience was like. Getting to see somebody else's happiness and take a moment to see what your investment in somebody else has done for their happiness brings a happiness to you. So it's the savoring element that often is cut short, especially for highly ambitious people, but is really critical for feeling happy. And that feeling of happiness is motivating. We want more happiness. So, how do we make sure that we get happiness to then be able to reinvest in ourselves to get even more happiness? Savoring is a key ingredient in that.

SPEAKER_02 21:26

For these highly ambitious people, when they are setting a goal and setting a goal and setting a goal, and they're narrowly focused on achieving that goal itself, does that goal become the only thing that they're really seeing in their mind's eye? And is that maybe the reason that they'll let relationships and other important human things fall by the wayside?

SPEAKER_00 21:47

I think it's rare that anybody gets the luxury of pursuing one goal in their life at a time. And I think, like you've suggested, it's far more likely that there are multiple domains of our life that have. Goals in which we set goals that really matter to us. Like it's not enough to just be a highly successful CEO of a Fortune 500 company if you're going it solo without any friends or family. So the other goals matter too, which means that we are constantly trying to juggle how do we prioritize the multiple very important goals that we have. And that's that's the challenge. You could think about a goal mapping structure. If I were to give you a piece of paper and a pen, and I would write, and I would say, like, write down all the goals that really matter to you and now structure them. Do they relate to one another in any particular way, or is one more important and one is less important to you, or are they equally important? There's different ways that people can draw those maps about their goal system. And one way to try to be able to juggle multiple highly important goals is to think about them as interrelated. If you can do one thing, but it leads to progress on more than one goal, that's an efficient system. When people think about their goals as more intertwined rather than separate or hierarchical, more like clustering of goals, you're more likely to find choices, actions, behaviors, decisions that could satisfy more than one goal at a time. So is there a way to integrate personal and professional life in a way that is productive for both? I just met this fascinating couple over the weekend that are super happily married, even with young kids. And uh and just a few years into a business developing a product that had never existed before that they saw a need for. And although they were not designers in that sense, and they had never navigated international shipping markets and production lines, they were so excited to take that on, and they were so excited to take that on by doing it together. And so it was reinforcing both a personal and a professional goal by finding a synergy with the process that allowed them to be div to dive in on both fronts at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 24:03

It's really cool. Have you ever read Steve Jobs' biography by Walter Isaacson? No. Okay. So a fascinating part of it is a lot of the people around him that worked with him talked about this thing they called Steve's reality distortion field. So basically, Steve would ask a team to like, can you get this certain task done in 12 months? And they'd be like, Yeah, it seems ambitious, but sure. It's like, okay, then we'll do it in four months. And he using Parkinson's law, which is the idea that a task expands to fill the time that's allocated for it. And people always said that Steve had this reality distortion field where he thought that everything was much easier, much more achievable than everybody else around him. He viewed reality differently because he was so focused on the goals and the outcomes that he wanted. And reading this, I'm really curious to know how that relates to your idea that when you are narrowly focused on a goal, it seems closer. Someone that is dieting perceives an apple to be bigger. Someone that is more fit that perceives a hill to be less steep than someone who is less fit. I'm wondering, obviously, Steve Jobs is not around anymore. And we can't go back and think about what was going on. We can't really like see what was going on in his head. But if you had to guess, what was some of the mechanisms underlying this reality distortion field that he had?

SPEAKER_00 25:27

Yeah, uh fascinating combination of topics that you brought up, and you are right in the way that you summarize the research that we are doing. That we when we are narrowly focused, like those Olympic athletes were that I met over in Brooklyn, we we do contract space. It can be the physical distance, it could be time, um, but it seems more achievable when we focus on some, when we focus on just one thing at a time. It gives a feeling of self-efficacy. We have higher beliefs that we can get the job done. It doesn't seem as challenging when we focus on just one thing. Uh, it feels like it's gonna hit home or we'll reap the benefits of it sooner than might otherwise be the case. And if we just take a step back, um, that what I was describing about those runners' experiences of like almost as if there's blinders, there's a spotlight shining on just one target. I'm sure as we were talking about that, you can envision that. It's not hard to think about what would that experience be like if I worked in a world where everybody just kept putting a spotlight on the thing I should be focused on. I can envision what that is like, even if I'm not an Olympic runner. And what we found was that we have worked with thousands of people who uh are some are more serious and more experienced and successful runners and some who aren't. Everybody can understand that difference in like, do I take in everything? Do I pay attention to what's in the periphery, or do I focus up and keep my eyes on the prize? They can learn those strategies and they can employ them at the right time. And what we found in the context of exercise was that helped people to walk and run faster than they might otherwise, and to experience the exercise as uh less painful. So even though it was all exactly the same, we held that constant. Um, but that feeling of like, I think I can do this, I don't think that that's that far away, um, actually translated into better performance because it induced a misperception, like you're talking about, this like erroneous um illusory experience. It did have that impact. Narrowly focusing on a target leads people to misperceive it as closer than they would otherwise. And that perceived proximity of feeling like this thing I'm trying to hit is actually closer to me than it looks to other people, makes me think, I think I can get there. I think I can run that far. Let's do this. And it's energizing, which is the source of the motivation that leads them to perform better. And then it defies their expectations, so it's mutually reinforcing. Oh, let's go do that again. So there can be these misperceptions that happen by being myopically and narrowly focused for sure. Um, the relating that to Steve Jobs, I think, can be problematic for people who are not Steve Jobs. Uh, I mean, there's clearly a reason why somebody wrote a memoir, you know, multiple people multiple people wrote biographies about him and didn't write them about me or about your neighbor or something like that, right? Is because he's exceptional. What what he created in this world is exceptional. That exceptionality of who he is as a thinker and a leader led to an exceptional amount of resources. Um, and by exceptional, I mean truly exceptional that that's not true for most people. So we can find these stories of our heroes and like somebody living out the American dream as inspirational, but we need to make sure that we're not using that exclusively as a role model for ourselves, because there are a lot of aspects of his life story that may not be applicable to the vast majority of other people. So I worry about using that as our guiding light all of the time because there may not be, when we do that, we fail to recognize the systemic differences and opportunity that are afforded to some people that are not necessarily afforded to others. So when somebody says, when you say to somebody, I think I can do it in 12 months, and they say, Well, then I think you can do it in four, you can question that. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 29:17

Um at some capacity. If it's your boss and they say it, like, can you really? You can decide. But do you internalize that expectation? Um, that's something that we can leave on the table because the planning fallacy is far more common of a problem for people to deal with.

SPEAKER_02 29:33

What is that? The planning fallacy?

SPEAKER_00 29:35

Yeah. The planning fallacy is something that almost everybody experiences uh uh in from the at the individual level and at the institutional level. It's the idea that we think we can get things done much sooner than we actually can. Because it's not part of our general practice to think about all the obstacles that we might experience along the way and to plan for them so that should we encounter them, we can pivot quickly and easily. There's always things that happen that we weren't able to foresee. That's just par for the course. But the planning fallacy is we don't factor in enough time to deal with what will be the inevitable things that that we're likely to experience because it's the unknown unknowns. I don't know what I don't know about the future. So of course that's hard to put into place. There's like so many examples of this: the Brandenburg Airport in Germany, the Sydney Opera House, Boston's big dig of trying to bury the highway system. All of these were tens of or hundreds of millions of dollars over budget and decades late because of the planning fallacy. And so that's happening at the institutional level when we're talking about huge budgets at stake or the infrastructure of major cities is at play here, and we can't get it right. Because at the individual level, we do that all the time. We do it all the time of thinking like, this is what I'm gonna get done today. And we almost never get done all of the things that we want to get done today because that's just not how time works. It's a limited resource. And there will be challenges or things that pull us off guard, and it's difficult for us to foreshadow all of those. So, more often than not, I would say somebody who says I can get this done in 12 months and I want to tell them four months, maybe there needs to be a discussion and we split the difference somewhere down the middle.

SPEAKER_02 31:13

Yeah. Yeah, I find that fascinating, especially as it relates to AI in the workplace nowadays, where there's um uh a ton of automation going on and a ton of time-saving uh practices going on. I'm currently working, I'm interning with a man named Chris Shembra, um, and we do a lot of work with big companies and the uh around the human and the gratitude aspect in the workplace. And what we find and what a lot of different studies are finding is something called Jevin's paradox, where when you um actually have free time, it's most likely to be replaced with more of the same. And so as we're freeing up time and we have this more time, I imagine it contributes to the planning fallacy that we tend to fill new time with more of the same old things we were doing, no matter how effective or efficient that was. And sometimes freeing up time actually doesn't get you what you think it might.

SPEAKER_00 32:05

Right. Yeah, especially in a world that is, you know, that we define success by accomplishments and by like, you know, uh like tally marks on on what we were able to prove that we created. What I might suggest is as we think about like, oh, here was an opportunity where time was saved. All right, let me go back to the to-do list or let me expand the to-do list or let me go like see how I can fill the space. Maybe we shouldn't fill the space. Because now, right? Maybe the downtime is actually okay. Microsoft's Human Factors lab, embedded within Microsoft, did a study on this of like, how can we increase efficiency and reduce burnout and and and make people feel more resilient and hold motivation high? Um they they actually did this study internally on their own employees because they had people wearing EEG caps, so little electrodes that are uh that are picking up on the electrical signals in their brain, indicating how much are is are people working, and it can also, by different patterns of these EEG signals, indicate stress. So, how much stress are they experiencing? During one uh chunk of the day, these employees had the caps on as they were taking meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting to meeting. These were intense uh working groups, they were intense meetings, and so as um from the beginning to the end of a meeting, you could see from the EEG recordings that stress was going up in the meeting, but then stress was continuing to go up throughout the course of the day. So the stress level that they started at the beginning and the stress level at the end of the day was like astronomically different from what the neurological signals were suggesting. In comparison, they took the same kinds of employees, the same kinds of teams, and high performance expectations for this group, the same daily structure for what their meeting schedule would look like, but they added in five-minute micro breaks. So a 30-minute meeting lasted 25 minutes, there's a five-minute break. And then the next 30-minute meeting, which only lasted 25 minutes. They encouraged the employees who are still wearing the EEG caps to use those five minutes mindfully to not do things that they thought would produce efficiencies. Do not check your email in those five minutes to see what did I miss in the last 25 minutes. Do not go look at your texts or try to make a dinner reservation. They asked them to engage in mindful relaxation breathing exercises in that time. So, what you saw from those EEG recordings was that in a meeting, stress went up because this is a high-performing team with high expectations and stressful meetings. But that five-minute break let their stress levels go down and reset so that now stress goes up in the meeting, but they get a five-minute break. That's all it takes to reduce that stress to a meaningful point where the next minute, the next meeting, stress goes up, but it's starting at a lower place. So, cumulatively, over the entire day, the full extent of their stress levels remained relatively low compared to the group that didn't take those five-minute breaks. So, what sh how should we fill our time? I think it might be counterproductive that we shouldn't fill that time. That can help us reduce the likelihood of burnout, keep stress lower, and that is a source of energy and motivation that we can leverage to throw back into the job when we're ready to return refreshed.

SPEAKER_02 35:17

Well, I think the thing to add on to that is like we need to show people and train people and educate people on what not filling the time looks like. Because if they didn't have any structure around it, then they would go check their email and they would go do things that they think are productive because that's what they're trained to do.

SPEAKER_01 35:36

Right.

SPEAKER_02 35:37

Visualizing this, what I see is like almost like someone with a bucket. Uh each group has a bucket, right? And there's being water consistently poured into it throughout the day. And the group that takes a break is actually dumping that bucket out with water. But the other one, at some point, it just overflows and it's constantly piling up.

SPEAKER_00 35:56

Right, that's a great visual.

SPEAKER_02 35:57

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I like I like that that popped into my head. The next place I want to go with this interview is the idea of manifestation. Because a lot of people and I I find in this world of people that I'm interviewing in it talking to, there's almost like two camps. There's the people that believe that whatever, your goals only come from like being Your own your goals only get accomplished by actually taking action toward your goals. And there's people that believe that you can actually get closer to your goals by clearly planning and visualizing your goals. You do work around vision and goals. What's your take?

SPEAKER_00 36:33

Uh, I'm on one side of this camp. I'm pretty polarized in this opinion. Because I can just think about it personally. You know, there have been points in my time where I in my life where I really want something. I really want this thing. I'm telling everybody, I'm dreaming about it. I know that this is what my life is supposed to be. When I was 18, I wanted to be uh a rock star. Like literally, I wanted to be a rock star. I had I was in a band. Um, I I have a strong background in music. I had a chance to have my band merge with another band who was a big deal. And we played the warp tour and outside music festival, 15,000 people in the audience. It was amazing. I loved it. Um, I really wanted that to be my life, but I don't have a single tattoo. I don't do drugs. Um, and like that just wasn't gonna be the life for me. Like I wasn't set up for that to be success, even though I really wanted it. I can think about later in life when I that itch didn't really go away. And I thought I need I used to be cooler than I am now. Life has changed. I had a baby, that was the problem. Um, and now like nothing interesting when people are like, oh, what's going on? All I can talk about is somebody else's poop. My baby's poop, right? And it's like, that is so not interesting. I want to become more interesting, I want to become a rock drummer, I'm gonna do that again. And I really wanted it. And I told everybody, I told my book agent, I told my publisher, and they said, fine, you're gonna, you gotta become a drummer. And I said, I'm gonna become a drummer, but I didn't put in the time for that because I couldn't, because because of the other things that were on the path. So just wanting something isn't enough to get that something manifesting, putting those positive vibes of like, I want to be a drummer for me, or or even if there's goodness in the world, because I think my drumming skills will bring something to humanity, that's not enough to make it happen. Even if you believe in karma, even if you believe that like putting a positive vibe out in the world, it will re it'll be returned to you in some way, that's not enough to teach you how to drum. It's not enough to make me a rock star just by wanting something for good or noble reasons and for being kind to other people. It's not gonna make it happen. You have to do the work. You're not gonna learn another language unless you start speaking that other language, right? Yeah. I think you've mentioned that that might be true. So if we don't do the work for a lot of things, it's not gonna just come to us. Most of us are not that lucky that what we really want in life just falls in our lap. That's not most people's experience on most of the things that they really want. So vision boards are great, dream boards are great. Having a guiding light for what are you working toward is great because just knowing what do I want can be a challenge for a lot of people. Yeah. What am I working towards, right? So taking some time to effortfully put together that thought of what would success for me look like, what would bring me satisfaction is an important step. But we have to move beyond that in order to actually increase the odds that we realize that dream for ourselves. Um, and that takes it out of the realm of daydreaming and puts it in the realm of concrete goal setting and planning and thinking concretely about what is it gonna take for me to get that job done.

SPEAKER_02 39:37

So visualizing a goal and getting clear on that is very it it has utility in the fact that you become clear on the action that you need to take to then get that goal, but it doesn't get you the goal itself, right?

SPEAKER_00 39:48

Right, yeah. So, I mean, what do you need to do? Sure, make that vision board, journal about what you want your stretch goal to look like. Um, but then when you're excited about that, because that is fun to think about, oh my God, this is what my life could be like. If once I get here, um, that's fun. We know from neuroscience and behavioral science that when we're in in positive moods, we're our most creative selves, we're our most expansive kinds of thinkers. That's called the broaden and build theory of emotions. That is a cool thing that we have control over, that if we want to feel more creative and figure out ways to innovate and solve problems, being intentional about fostering a positive emotional experience is one tool that we have available to us to help in that respect. So when we're thinking about like what do I want from myself, in that same moment, we should also start thinking, okay, okay, nuts and bolts. What do I need to do this month? What do I need to do this week? What do I need to do this day? And are they scaffolded? Is doing this going to be a step in the right direction for the week's goal? Is that week goal going to be a step in the right direction for the month's goal? But also, and this is perhaps most counterintuitive, in those moments, we also need to be foreshadowing failure. We need to be thinking about what are the obstacles that I might experience along the way and design the backup plan. Because when we hit an obstacle, especially because as we've already talked, we may not be able to know what it is in advance. Um, but having gone through that effort, creatively thinking about, well, this could be a challenge, this could be an obstacle, this is how it might go wrong. And if that does, and here are three different ways that I might move through it, it gives us a safety net. Because at those moments of challenge, we are not usually in happy moods. Yes. We aren't able to think most creatively about how are we going to navigate this, and people throw in the towel. So if we want to push through those obstacles that we'll likely experience and not have that be what leads us to quit in that moment, we need to have done the hard work in advance of designing safety nets, about thinking how will I pivot should this thing come up? And even if it's not exactly the problem or not exactly the pivot, it's at least a brainstorming um suggestion for getting it started. So a great example of this is Michael Phelps, right? He's legendary. He is uh legendary in the pool and for all different other kinds of reasons. But in 2008, he was hitting the Olympic stage for the first time in a really big way. He's an incredible swimmer, always has been, but now the world is recognizing. And in the Beijing Olympics in 2008, he was slated to do something that no Olympian has ever done in the history of the Olympic Games, which is win eight gold medals in a single Olympic Games. And it looked like he had a good chance of being able to do that. What was incredible was that seven gold medals in, he just had one race left to achieve what no one else had achieved before. And it was uh the 200-meter freestyle, which is like his jam. That is what he is famous for. So it seemed like a shoe-in, except when he dove into the pool, his goggles started leaking. No. So yeah. Thank you. As I heard that story too, I was like, oh, no. And but for him, he didn't have the no experience because he had trained for that. He and his coach had thought about what are all the ways that that this could go wrong, even if this is my area of expertise, even if I'm like the best guy in the world to do this job right now, what could happen? And they trained for that. So the yad trained for what happens if your goggles malfunction. There's a story, whether true or not, I'm not sure, that once his coach ripped his goggles off his head and smashed them on the pool floor so that he couldn't even go pick them up and put them back on, and he had to practice swimming without being able to see. So, in that moment, when his goggles started leaking and he had one length of the pool left to go to win the gold medal and win his eighth gold medal and do s and and be the overall Olympic gold medal champion of all time, he just started counting his strokes because he knew exactly how many strokes it would take from him to get from one end of the pool to the other. When you think about what is the the time between first and second place, we're talking about hundredths of a second. Like less time than it takes for me to do that snap that you probably couldn't even hear. That can be the difference between a gold and a silver medalist, which means he doesn't have time to be thinking about, like, oh geez, this is unexpected. What am I gonna do now? I can't see. I would prefer to wear my goggles. So what's my backup plan? If he had done all of that, he wouldn't even be sixth place, right? So it's because they had worked diligently to think about where there could be obstacles, what could be the challenges, and let's set ourselves up for set success in the rare instance that we might experience it. He was able to, he did do that with the help of his coach. He had practice for that, so he could instantly pivot to plan B and win that eighth gold medal and do what nobody had ever done before.

SPEAKER_02 44:30

That's fascinating. I actually mentioned Michael Phelps in like in my my 10x speech. He was one of my main people for a completely different reason, but I love uh I love tying it back to him.

SPEAKER_01 44:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 44:43

This has been just a wonderful conversation. I feel like I could literally talk to you for like 10 hours and not get bored of asking questions. Like what you do is so fascinating, and I'm so excited to continue to read what you're putting out into the world and learn more from you. So thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 45:01

Thank you. This has been such a great conversation. You have asked such good questions, and I hope your audience enjoys it too.

SPEAKER_02 45:07

Thank you. Um, where can my audience find you before we end this?

SPEAKER_00 45:11

Um, you can find me, um, you can find me on Amazon where some of my books are. You can find me on LinkedIn and try to post free content there. Psychology Today. There's also pieces that I've written there that you people can learn more.

SPEAKER_02 45:23

Amazing. All right. Thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_01 45:26

This has been the Grateful Podcast.