We tend to think of genius as something you’re born with — a rare trait possessed by the Einsteins and Teslas of the world. But what if many of the abilities we associate with genius — a great memory, quick problem-solving, mental math, creative insight — are actually trainable skills?

My guest today says that’s exactly the case. His name is Nelson Dellis, and he’s a six-time USA Memory Champion and the author of the book Everyday Genius.

In our conversation, Nelson explains why memory is the foundation of thinking well and why having information stored in your head still matters in the age of ChatGPT. He shares a practical technique for improving your memory, how to read with greater focus and retention, and how to study to actually make information stick. We then talk about the importance of developing “number sense” and how to convert imperial measurements to metric in your head, strategies for solving problems more effectively, and even how to gain an edge in the games of Monopoly and Connect Four. At the end of the conversation, we get into more esoteric territory, including intuition, dreams, and the idea of remote viewing.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Nelson’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #546 — How to Get a Memory Like a Steel Trap
• AoM Article: 10 Ways to Improve Your Memory
• AoM Article: How to Speed Read Like Theodore Roosevelt
• AoM Podcast #385: Learning How to Learn
• AoM Article: Study Tactics of the Successful Gentleman Scholar
• The CIA’s remote viewing program

Connect With Nelson Dellis

• Nelson’s website
• Nelson on YouTube

Thanks to This Week’s Podcast Sponsor

Incogni. Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code MANLINESS at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/manliness

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Transcript Coming Soon

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When we fail to make desired progress in life, most of us put the blame on physical and environmental limits. But my guest says that what’s really holding people back is what’s in their heads.

Nir Eyal is the author of Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results. Today on the show, he argues that much of how we think about ourselves, our abilities, and what’s possible becomes our reality, and that getting what we want in life often comes down to changing how we perceive it. Drawing on research in neuroscience and psychology, Nir shares the three powers of belief, and how they direct your attention, alter your expectations, shape your sense of agency, and determine whether you stick with hard things long enough to see results. Along the way, he shares ways to identify and challenge the limiting beliefs that can sabotage your goals and relationships.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• Nir’s previous appearance on the AoM podcast: Episode #553 — How to Become Indistractable
• AoM Article: How Reframing Builds Resilience
• AoM podcast episode on William James and pragmatism

Connect with Nir Eyal

• Nir’s website

Thanks to This Week’s Podcast Sponsor

Incogni. Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code MANLINESS at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/manliness

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page

Download this episode

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice

Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. When we fail to make desired progress in life, most of us put the blame on physical and environmental limits. But my guest says that what’s really holding people back is what’s in their heads. Nir Eyal is the author of Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results. He argues that much of how we think about ourselves, our abilities and what’s possible becomes our reality. And that getting what we want in life often comes down to changing how we perceive it. Drawing on research and neuroscience and psychology Nir shares the three powers of belief and how they direct your attention, alter your expectations, shape your sense of agency, and determine whether you stick with hard things long enough to see results along the way. He shares ways to identify and challenge the limiting beliefs that can sabotage your goals and relationships. After the show is over, check at our show notes at aom.is/beyondbelief. All right, Nir Eyal, welcome back to the show.

Nir Eyal:

Thanks, man. Great to be here, Brett.

Brett McKay:

So we had you on way back in 2019. You’re out with a new book called Beyond Belief: The Science Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Extraordinary Results. And this is about human motivation, and you think you found a missing factor that we need to consider when we think about motivation. How did your struggle with losing weight lead you to explore human motivation? What’s that story?

Nir Eyal:

Yeah, so let’s go all the way back to the beginning. So for me, I struggled with my weight for a good chunk of my life, chunk being the right word that would’ve been descriptive at the time. I was the kid who never went into the community pool when I was a kid. We had one pool in our condominium complex and all the kids in the neighborhood shared it. And I was the one who never went in without my shirt on because I didn’t want anyone to see my belly rolls. And I was super embarrassed by that, and I finally decided to do something about it. And I wasn’t just overweight, Brett, it was much worse than that. I was actually clinically obese and I started dieting and over the next 30 years, my bookshelf became this graveyard of diet books. First I started with low fat, and I don’t know if you remember those days of low fat everything and Snackwells.

Brett McKay:

Yes, Snackwells the Devil Cake. Yeah, yeah.

Nir Eyal:

Alright, so we’re about the same age, if you remember Snackwells. And I would scarf those down. And then after that we determined that was not a good idea anymore. So I became vegetarian and I ate nothing but tofu and potatoes. And then after that the pendulum swung and now it was low carb everything. And I went keto. And then after that, let’s see what came after that. After that it was intermittent fasting. That was the way to go. And honestly, every diet worked until it didn’t. And I was on this rollercoaster ride of yo-yo dieting because as soon as my belief was shaken in that plan, as soon as someone said, oh, keto is bad for you because it’s bad for your kidneys or vegetarians don’t get all the nutrients they need, or whatever the plan was, as soon as my confidence was shaken, I’d abandoned the plan altogether and I’d go for a slice of pizza thinking, ah, it’s not going to hurt whatever one slice of pizza.

And then of course, the what the hell effect kicked in. That’s the real name of that psychological phenomenon where I would say to myself, what the hell? I already had the slice of pizza. I’ll start on a new plan tomorrow, so let me go ahead and chase it with the french fries to compliment the pizza. And what I realized was that after 30 years of dieting, that I got control of my weight. Finally, I’m 48 years old and it’s the first time in my life that I’m in the best shape I’ve ever been. And I for the first time consistently watch what I eat and see results. It’s because my beliefs changed is that I had a new conviction that I could do something about the next thing that goes in my mouth as opposed to the what the hell effect that kept saying, okay, I’ll start tomorrow, I’ll start next week, I’ll start in the new year, et cetera.

This has led me to this discovery around why we don’t put good knowledge into action. And we see this all the time. We have all kinds of advice books, we have the internet now we have AI to answer our questions around what we should do. And I think the main problem is that it’s not that we don’t know what to do, the answers are all around us. I basically know what to do to diet. You have to eat right and exercise for the vast majority of people unless you have some kind of severe hormone imbalance. That’s pretty much the plan, but we don’t implement it. And so I think before I wanted to read another self-help book that I didn’t do anything with. I wanted to fundamentally understand what was missing and what was missing is that motivation is not a straight line. We tend to think of motivation as if I want the outcome, if I want the benefit, I have to do the behavior right?

It’s kind of a straight line, do the behavior, get the benefit. But there’s definitely something missing here because I can want the benefit and I can even know what to do, what behavior to do. But if I don’t have the beliefs in place to support what I call this motivation triangle of on one side is the benefit, one side is the behavior. At the base of that triangle is the belief. For example, if I don’t believe that my boss has my best interest and is going to give me that promotion, for example, if I don’t believe in my own ability to do the behavior and that the behavior will reach those outcomes, then the behavior triangle falls apart because the beliefs aren’t there. And I think that was what was missing for me, and I think for millions of other people who basically know what to do, and yet we don’t implement what we know is good for us. And I think that is the reason that we miss out on these powers of belief.

Brett McKay:

That’s interesting because I can see that in my own life. So I’ve had instances with my physical practice of weightlifting where I get injured and I’ll go to the physical therapist and they’ll recommend, okay, you need to do this stuff for rehab. And I do it, and I’m like, I’m not seeing anything. This seems so piddly. Why am I doing these little dumb stretches? And I stop believing, I’m like, eh, this is not going to work. And then I stop doing the thing and then I don’t get better. And then finally I have to go back to my physical therapist and he has to tell me, look, I know it doesn’t seem like it’s working in the short term, but I promise you if you keep doing it, it will work. And once I believe him, like, okay, I’m going to trust this guy. I’m going to do the thing, and then the rehab works. It might take a while, but it does work.

Nir Eyal:

Bingo. You really hit the nail on the head here because what you’ve identified is the key determining factor between who reaches their goals and who doesn’t. If you look at, okay, why do people not reach their goals? The number one reason is not that they don’t know what to do. It’s not a lack of resources, it’s not bad timing. The number one reason people don’t achieve their goals is that they don’t persist. How obvious is that. We quit. That’s why we don’t achieve our goals. Why do we quit? Even though we know it’s good for us, even though we know what to do, why don’t we do it? And the reason is, is that there’s a fundamental lack of belief. And so if you don’t know how to use these powers of belief, what I call the power, the first power of belief is attention.

The power to change what you see, power of anticipation, the power to change what you feel, and then the third power, the power of agency, the power to change what you do. If you don’t harness those beliefs and realize how powerful they are, how essential they are to get you where you want to go, you’re going to quit. And that’s what I did year after year, goal after goal. Not that quitting is always bad. I’m not anti quitting. The Lord knows I’ve quit diets, I’ve quit book projects, I’ve quit businesses, I’ve quit relationships. It’s not that quitting is necessarily the wrong thing. It’s that quitting too soon is a problem. That’s terrible when you know persistence could have made a difference and you quit, and now you regret looking back and saying, oh man, if I just had persistent a little bit longer, I would’ve had all these benefits. That’s when we are destroying human capital, and that’s really what I’m fighting against.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so you have this motivational triangle, benefit, behavior, and belief is the foundation of that triangle. How are you defining belief? How is belief different from fact and faith?

Nir Eyal:

Great question. So a fact is an objective truth. It is something that is true whether you believe in it or not. So the world is more round than it is flat. That’s an objective truth. It doesn’t care what you think, sorry, flat earthers, it’s a fact. Faith is the other end of the spectrum. Faith is a strongly held conviction that does not require evidence. So what happens to you in the afterlife? No evidence is required. God rewards the righteous if that’s something that you have faith in, no evidence is required. That is an element of faith. Now, a belief is something different. A belief is something in between a fact and faith. It is a strongly held conviction, open to revision based on new evidence, a strongly held conviction open to revision based on new evidence. And so the big aha, the thing that blew my mind doing this research was that beliefs, unlike facts or faith beliefs are tools, not truths.

I’m going to say it one more time. Beliefs are tools, not truth. So many of our problems, our interpersonal problems, our personal issues, our geopolitical issues as well, it goes all the way up there are caused because far too many people think that the things that they think are facts are nothing more than beliefs. And we are bound by these beliefs that we refuse to look at, that we refuse to consider thinking that they are our facts. And we put ultimate faith in many of these things. Unfortunately, sometimes while we restrict ourselves to have the freedom to take out these tools, look at them, assess them, and say, Hey, are these helping me or are they hurting me? So for example, it’s like a carpenter. Would a carpenter say, oh, this hammer, this hammer is the one and only ultimate hammer? No, a carpenter says, okay, sometimes the right tool for the job is a screwdriver.

Sometimes it’s a saw, sometimes it’s a hammer, but not always. And so what I’ve learned is that being able to look at those beliefs critically and understand which ones serve me and which one hurts me is a life-changing practice. It absolutely has changed my business. It has changed my relationships, it has changed my physical fitness. Certainly all of these things have been revolutionized because I’m now able to get out of my own head, consider the things that were invisible to me. I think in the metaphor to think about your limiting beliefs, and by the way, limiting beliefs are beliefs that sap your motivation. While liberating. Beliefs are beliefs that supply motivation. And the best way to think about these limiting beliefs is that they’re like your face. You carry around your face all day long. Other people see your face, but you can’t see your own face unless you look in a mirror.

You can’t see your own face. And that’s exactly the same case with our beliefs that the beliefs we most need to change are the ones we refuse to question. They’re the ones we can’t even see. We don’t even realize, just like you can’t see your face the way you could see your hands or your feet, you can’t see your limiting beliefs. Of course other people can see them and I can prove it to you. Think about any random person close like somebody, well your family member or good friend, I guarantee you, you could probably think of at least one limiting belief. They have something that saps their motivation to do the things that they know they want to do. We can see them in others, but we can’t see them in ourselves. That is a huge impediment. The good news is we can learn to take out those limiting beliefs, examine them, and then choose the ones that serve us.

Brett McKay:

This idea of beliefs as tools. And you look at your beliefs and ask, is this serving me or limiting me? It reminded me of William James and the American philosophy school of Pragmatism. Are you familiar with pragmatism?

Nir Eyal:

Yes. Yeah, a little bit.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So their whole idea is, I mean the extreme version of pragmatism is truth is determined by what works in the world, but I think you can take a modified view. It’s like, okay, you look at your beliefs and say, does this work for me? Is it allowing me to achieve my goals to live a flourishing life? If yes, that’s a good belief, if not it’s a bad belief, you need to change your belief. I thought that was interesting. I made that connection when in your chapter describing beliefs.

Nir Eyal:

So many good things in modern psychology come from William James. I mean, he’s really the granddaddy of all this. And I think the wisdom there is that the vast majority of the decisions we make in our life, they’re not based on fact, they’re not even based on faith really. They’re based on beliefs. They’re based on these convictions that we stay open to revision based on evidence. Should I marry this person? Should I take that job? Should I move to this city? Should I read this book? These are all not based on facts. We like to think they’re facts, but they’re not. They’re based on beliefs. And so you better choose those beliefs wisely knowing that they have such an outsize impact on all the important decisions we make in our life.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so you mentioned earlier there are three powers of belief are attention, anticipation, and agency. Let’s go deeper into the attention aspect of belief. How do our beliefs shape our attention?

Nir Eyal:

So this research really blew my mind, and it all starts from the fact that we don’t see reality clearly. If there’s one thing I wish people understood about their beliefs, it’s that your perception of reality is a simulation that we all live in a simulation. We don’t live in the same simulation. We all live in our separate simulation. So it’s not quite like the matrix, but we are creating a simulation in our minds every single second because the brain can only process about 50 bits of information consciously. That’s about one sentence per second. 50 bits of information. That’s your conscious attention. However, your brain is taking in, it’s absorbing about 11 million bits of information per second. So 11 million bits versus 50 bits of information. So you’re only consciously processing 0.000045% of the information entering your brain. What kind of information is not being processed, at least not consciously, the sound of my voice right now compared to the hum of the room or the light entering your retinas or the temperature on your skin.

This information is being collected. And in fact, if you focus on it, if you place attention to those things, you will actually experience ’em. They will enter conscious control, kind of like a security camera going through a surveillance of different cameras. You can pay attention to those things. But the problem that the mind has in terms of conscious attention is that it simply is too much information. It can’t process all this information that’s entering the brain consciously. So what it has to do, it has to create a simulation. It has to predict what it’s going to see. This is called predictive processing rather than what actually is. So we all live in the simulation in our own minds and what the brain decides to filter. And here’s really the key takeaway is how the brain decides what 50 bits of information are entering your conscious attention are beliefs, your past experiences, what we call priors, these lenses with which we see the world that determines your conscious attention, all determining this power of belief of attention, which means that two people can see the exact same thing, literally the exact same thing in front of them and come up with completely different explanations as to why they’re seeing.

For example, there’s an optical illusion. It’s not really an illusion, it’s just an image called the coffer illusion. And I can show this image to one person, and based on where they grew up, they will see rectangles. I can show the exact same image, the same exact image to someone else, and they’ll see circles. Okay? We know that people who are on a diet see food as larger people who are afraid of heights see distances as further away. We’ve all probably experienced going to some kind of athletic event, right? A football game and the ref makes a call and one team, all the fans see the call one way and the other team, all the fans see it a different way. Of course, when you think about geopolitics, the same exact thing can happen in the news, and based on your nationality, you’ll have completely different interpretations of what just happened.

So this goes on and on and on. I mean, interpersonal, there was an instance a few weeks ago where I came home and I wanted to have a glass of water and my wife saw that I was looking for a glass of water and she said something like, all the glasses are in the sink. And I immediately felt judged like she was saying something, as if I was supposed to have washed all the dishes, but really she was just saying a statement of fact. But I heard it differently. I experienced that. I perceive what just happened completely differently than how she did. She was just saying a fact and I was seeing it as being judged. So this goes on and on and on. So what we pay attention to what we believe is happening literally can change what we see. And so unless we gain power over that, we are essentially blinded to what is actually happening. We’re blinded to reality.

Brett McKay:

Alright so seeing isn’t believing, believing is seeing.

Nir Eyal:

That’s exactly right. That’s perfectly said, or at least as much we like to say that I’ll believe it when I see it. But really just the opposite is also true that you’ll see it when you believe it.

Brett McKay:

How can our faulty beliefs limit ourselves and create problems for ourselves that don’t really exist or may not exist all the time? 

Nir Eyal:

We have extensive research around how people see problems that aren’t there. There’s some beautiful classic studies. So for example, they showed people angry faces, a series of angry faces mixed with neutral faces, real images of people, and all you had to do was click a button every time you saw an angry face. And in this experiment they showed it’d be angry face, angry face, neutral face, neutral face, neutral face, angry face, right? So some kind of random appearing order. What the participants didn’t know is that they actually reduced the number of angry faces over time, and yet people saw a consistent number of angry faces in this study because they started creating a reality that wasn’t really there. They literally saw things differently. And we’ve seen this repeated time and time again. We want to replicate these studies. We see this when we show people different colors, so based on what they expect to see, they saw a circle that was more purple or more blue because they were different gradients based on what they expected.

I’ll give you another wonderful example that demonstrates this. There was a study done at Dartmouth where they took women and they told them, we are going to do a study on how people treat those with facial disfigurements. And so they created this very realistic scar, realistic looking scar on these women, and they got them all ready and they said, okay, you see this scar? They showed ’em in the mirror. Here’s the scar we put on you. Now we’re going to put you into a room with a study participant, and we want you to observe how you are treated. Okay? Note how you are treated because of this scar. But wait, wait, wait, wait. Before you go to do this, can you just sit back here for just a quick second? We just want to touch up the scar. And what they didn’t know was that the study was on them, was on these women with the scar, not the people they were talking to because in that instant, they actually removed the scar without the participant knowing they didn’t show them what their face actually looked like in the mirror.

So these women went into a conversation with someone they thought they were observing how that person would behave based on their scar that did not exist. There was no scar in their face. And what many of these women reported was what they expected to find. They saw reality differently. They reported that they were discriminated, that people looked at them funny, that some people couldn’t stand looking at their scar and looked away and fidgeted and did all these things that made them feel very uncomfortable because of this scar that didn’t exist. And so in many ways, we see what we believe, we will see, we experience reality in a way that we expect based on what we pay attention to. So many of us unfortunately create problems that don’t even exist.

Brett McKay:

I’m sure people experience this on a personal level. I know public speaking is the biggest fear for a lot of people. And I think what happens is you get really self-conscious about something about the way you speak or the way you look. And so you go into the event thinking, oh my gosh, people are going to be paying attention to my stutter or how I say a lot. And then you’re looking out in the audience and because you have that belief like I am a bad public speaker, you think, oh, that person smiled because they’re laughing at me or that person fell asleep because they’re bored because I’m boring. And usually it’s not that people aren’t really paying attention to those things. In fact, I think studies have shown people in audiences they’re actually rooting for the public speaker. They want you to succeed. 

Nir Eyal:

All the time. That’s so true. 

Brett McKay:

But we have this limiting belief like, oh, these people want to see me fail and they’re going to pay attention to my weaknesses. But that’s not happening.

Nir Eyal:

No, not at all. I mean, one of the first rules I learned about public speaking, which I do quite a lot now, is never apologize to an audience. Most people, they get up on stage, oh, I’m sorry, I have trouble preparing this presentation. I’m sorry to, and that’s not what people want because people want to cheer for you. You’re exactly right. And in fact, what’s so important about this, even if an audience doesn’t like you, I don’t know why. Let’s say you’re delivering bad news and you think, oh, people are going to hate this message. What the research shows, and this is really the takeaway of the book, beliefs are tools, not truths. Even if that is true, let’s say that’s true, and it’s a belief we don’t really know. Does that mean everybody in the room is not cheering for you? No, you don’t have that kind of evidence.

That’s not a fact. But let’s say you have this hunch, it serves you to choose the opposite. It serves you to use these beliefs as tools, not truths and belief. Everybody in this audience wants me to succeed because how much better will you perform? Well change in how you perceive reality and therefore how you act when you believe what serves you. So for example, if you’re running a marathon, is it true that you may not finish? Yeah, that’s true. A lot of people don’t finish marathons, right? So thinking to yourself, I can’t do this. You’re guaranteed not to finish the marathon as opposed to, I can do this, you’re going to persist. So that’s a perfect example of a limiting belief versus a liberating belief. A limiting belief is the one that saps your motivation, whereas a liberating belief is one that gives you more motivation, enhances your performance, helps you persist longer, and of course eventually accomplish that goal. 

Brett McKay:

So something that can amplify these limiting beliefs that will change what we pay attention to and kind of create this vicious cycle of poorer performance is rumination. For those who don’t know what rumination is, what is it? And then how does that just entrench ourselves more in our limiting beliefs?

Nir Eyal:

Yeah, so rumination is when we have an intense focus on some type of past event that we keep thinking about again and again and again. It comes from how a cow chews its cud just to keep chewing and ruminating and chewing and chewing. It turns out the research shows it’s not very helpful. It’s associated with all kinds of bad psychological symptoms to continue to ruminate over and over and over. And the more we ruminate. This also happens with this bad advice that I’m very guilty of venting, where we’ve been told from the popular psychological interpretation out there that you have to get stuff off your chest. You have to tell people how you really feel. You’re not supposed to keep things inside. It turns out, in many cases, that’s terrible advice that in fact, when we vent about people, when we ruminate about how we’ve been injured in some way, it makes us more likely to see those bad elements in people.

Because just like we don’t see reality as it is, we see our beliefs about reality. We don’t see people as they really are. We see our beliefs about people, and we think that’s how people really are. And the really tragic thing is that this happens to the people we are closest to. I see this all the time. I’ll meet somebody who’s so nice, who’s so kind to me as a stranger, and yet when I meet their spouse, when I meet their family, oh my God, they’re so rude to them. They’re rude to the people who they’re closest to because to that person, they see the worst aspects of that person. They don’t see the person as they really are. They see what they have been conditioned over and over. He always does that. She always says that there she goes again. And they’ve built this construct, this effigy of this person that doesn’t really exist.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you have a whole chapter about how this rumination on our negative beliefs can really mess up our relationships. You talk about this experience that was funny with your mother. You sent her some flowers for her birthday.

Nir Eyal:

You want to go there, huh?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Talk about how your faulty beliefs about your mother got in the way of you having a good relationship with her. And then we talk about how can you mitigate our tendency to ruminate on faulty beliefs so that things improve for ourselves personally and with our relationships?

Nir Eyal:

For sure. Yeah. So this has really changed my life in many ways, but it was a long painful road to get there. So a few years ago, my mom had her 74th birthday, and I was in Singapore. She was in central Florida where I grew up, and I wanted to send her some flowers for her birthday. And getting flowers from Singapore is not easy. And so I had to stay up till one in the morning finding the perfect florist with good reviews to make sure they could get it there on time, just the way I wanted it so that I make sure they were, the flowers were fresh and they wouldn’t get burned in the car, in the Florida heat and all that. And I went to sleep at 1:00 AM, I patted myself on the shoulder and I said, okay, Nir, good job. You’re a good son.

I called her the next morning and I said, Hey, mom, did you get the flowers I sent? And she says, yes, I did. Thank you very much. But just so you know, the flowers were half dead and I wouldn’t order from that florist again, to which I saw what she said through a particular lens of belief. And I blurted out something to the effect of, well, that’s the last time I buy you a birthday present. And Brett, that went over about as well as you think, that did not go over too well. And to be honest, I regretted that that was not what I intended to say, but that’s what came out in the moment. So anyway, after the call, my wife turned to me and she said, Hey, would you like to do a turnaround on that? To which I said, no, I don’t want any of your psychobabble hocus pocus nonsense.

I want to vent. I want to tell you how my mom was rude and wrong and how I was right. And yes, maybe I didn’t say the exact right thing, but can you blame me? I mean, come on. You heard what I just said. What mom tells their son that the birthday present they just sent didn’t meet expectations. Clearly, my mom was being too judgmental and hard to please. So I sat down with that for a minute. I didn’t vent because I’d done the research on how venting is not actually all that helpful. And I sat down reluctantly with a piece of paper and a pen, and I did this process called the turnaround, which comes from work by Byron Katie and Byron Katie really channeled thousands of years of practice, even Aristotle, actually, this is a over 2000 year old practice starting with Aristotle of inquiring about your beliefs and seeing are there alternative interpretations.

So here’s how it works. It’s basically four questions that Byron Katie has developed, and I kind of have updated some of them to better suit our needs. But here’s what the four questions are. Question number one starts with, first you write down the belief, okay, the belief is my mother was too judgmental and hard to please. Now, the first question is, is it true? Duh. Did I just tell you what happened? Clearly, I mean, I just told you my mother was very clearly, too hard to please here and very judgmental because of what she said. Okay, next question. Come on, let’s keep moving here. Next question was, is it absolutely true? So in that instance, was she, it absolutely, absolutely means every single time without exception. 

Brett McKay:

Beyond a shadow of a doubt. 

Nir Eyal:

Beyond a shadow of a doubt, no other interpretation could possibly be true, other than my mother was being too judgmental and hard to please. Is that absolutely true? I mean, that’s a tough one, right? Maybe there’s another interpretation. I dunno. Maybe there’s a 1% chance that she was trying to be helpful. Maybe she was trying to not be rude, she wasn’t being judgmental, she was just trying to maybe protect me from getting scammed. Could that be possibly maybe in some kind of alternative universe? True. Okay, alright, fine. Okay, I’ll give it to you. Maybe there’s an alternative explanation. Okay, question number three. Who are you when you hold these beliefs? So how do you feel? What do you become when you hold onto that belief? Well, to be honest, when I held onto the belief that my mother’s too judgmental and hard to please, I was short-tempered.

I can’t say I was nice, I was probably pretty rude. And frankly, I was a little embarrassed that that’s what I said. I regretted that I would prefer to not have said that. And then the fourth question is, who would you be without that belief? And if I could let go of that belief, if I really thought about it, I would probably be at peace. I wouldn’t be so angry with her all the time. I would probably be more myself to be honest. And so what we established was just those four questions, which by the way, you can not only use with relationships, I do this at least once a day in some kind of interpersonal relationship, whether it’s with a client, a business customer, whether it’s somebody on the street who did something annoying to me, it doesn’t matter. You can ask those four questions to very quickly ascertain that the way you saw things, that your belief one may not be true, may not serve you.

And getting rid of that belief and adopting an alternative perspective may benefit you. Okay? So what this does is basically just crack open the possibility that there might be another interpretation of what happened. That’s all it does. So now the next step is to actually do the turnaround. And so the turnaround asks us to think about the exact opposite of that belief. It’s not to change anybody’s mind. You’re not trying to change your mind here. You’re just trying to collect what I call a portfolio of perspective, just alternative points of view, whether or not they’re true, it doesn’t matter if they’re true because again, beliefs are tools, not truths. Okay? So we’re just going to collect a portfolio, other tools in our toolkits. So what’s the opposite of my mother’s? Too judgmental and hard to please. The opposite is my mother is not too judgmental and hard to please.

Okay, so in that instance, could that be right that she was not too judgmental and hard to please? Well, the more I thought about it, I kind of had to admit that maybe she wasn’t being too judgmental and hard to please. Maybe she was actually trying to help me just not get scammed. Maybe that was her real intent. So it could be true. I may not agree with it, but there might be an alternative explanation. Okay, so now let’s do another turnaround. This turnaround might sound something like this. I am too judgmental and hard to please. Oof. How could that possibly be true? I am too judgmental and hard to please not. My mother is too judgmental and hard to please. I am too judgmental and hard to please. How could that possibly be true? Well, if I’m honest, Brett, when I called my mom and she didn’t respond exactly the way I had scripted in my mind that a mother is supposed to respond, I kind of lost it. And so who was being hard to please? I was because I didn’t get the kind of reaction I had rehearsed in my head that I expected. And when that didn’t happen, I was disappointed and I lashed out. I was actually being hard to please. Alright, there’s another turnaround here. There’s a third one,

A third turnaround might sound like this. I am too judgmental and hard to please towards myself. So how could that possibly be true? The more I thought about it, what really happened was that I had these very high expectations of how I was supposed to do things for my mom and how I should do things in general. And when I spent all this time and effort and things didn’t go exactly the way I’d planned, that was a statement on my competency that was a sign that I was not doing a good job at this thing that somehow I was lesser because I had screwed up. And so what really I learned was that I had these unrealistic, it wasn’t my fault that the flowers didn’t appear exactly as I’d wanted. And that doesn’t mean I’m a bad person, it just means sometimes stuff happens. It didn’t have to get worse from there.

I didn’t have to make all these assumptions, all these beliefs that says it’s called a misattribution of emotion, that I was feeling crappy about myself, about something that had happened. And then I had attributed that crappy feeling with the thing that was right in front of me, my mom. And so I had, through my lens of belief, I had misattributed how I was feeling and placed blame on her, which did not help the relationship at all. Now, now I have four beliefs, not just one. That one belief of my mother is too judgmental and hard to please wasn’t serving me. Why? Because the only way out, the only way that I could be happy was if she changed, she had to do something different so I could be happy. That’s not going to happen. The other perspectives now gave me freedom. Now I could stay on my side of the net.

Now I could do something to interpret that situation differently so that it served me rather than hurt me. Even if it wasn’t true, even if it wasn’t true, it doesn’t actually matter. What matters is does it serve me better? And so that type of thinking, that type of practice that now has become part of my daily life has changed everything for my business, for my relationships, for my health and wellbeing. That type of turnaround, again and again, has absolutely brought so much peace, joy, happiness, to my life in a way that I never thought possible.

Brett McKay:

So what these questions do, it gives you a portfolio of perspectives to choose from. And you’d be like, well, that one’s probably better in this situation. I’m going to go with that one.

Nir Eyal:

And again, the beliefs we most need to change are the ones we refuse to question. The easiest thing to do and what the vast majority of us do, the vast majority of the time, is we never question these things because it feels so comforting, right? Of course, that person’s being a jerk. Of course that person messed up. I didn’t mess up that person messed up. But of course it’s our problem. It’s in our head. It’s causing us suffering needlessly. So what I constantly do is to question whether the suffering is needed. And this goes super, super deep. We think about emotional suffering, but it doesn’t stop there. I mean, we have incredible research around how this affects your perception of pain, of physical pain. For the research for this book, I documented these cases of hypno-sedation, which is where patients will go under the knife.

They will have full-fledged surgery. There’s this gentleman that I followed who I saw the entire recording of his surgery, where this guy by the name of Daniel Gissler, 54 years old, I think he was, he had this freak accident. He broke his fibia and his tibula, he had to get metal screws put into his leg, and then a few years later he had to have them removed. And in that time, he learned this practice of hypno-sedation and he managed, he started practicing by just watching a few YouTube videos. And then he started practicing by having this clamp on his hand to test his pain tolerance. And he progressed over time to be able to have these screws wrenched out of his bone, scalpel, cutting into flesh with zero anesthesia, not even local anesthesia, nothing, no general, no topical, nothing. For 55 minutes he went under the knife and he did as much flinch.

And not only does he report that he didn’t experience the kind of pain that you and I would expect to make to experience, we know his vitals never spiked, his heart rate never went up, his blood pressure never went up. All the things you would expect to happen when there was extreme stress didn’t occur. Now, why do I tell this story? Why is this research so important? Because if our beliefs can tune out, the suffering through the power of attention can tune out the suffering of surgery without anesthesia, well then certainly we can learn from that. Certainly when I have this interaction with my mom, I can also choose, wait a minute, is this suffering necessary? Is this something I actually need to suffer from, or is there another belief that can allow me to not have to suffer through this?

Brett McKay:

Alright, so that’s the belief, power of attention, what you believe will determine what you pay attention to. And so we want to make sure we choose our beliefs carefully because it will frame how we interact with the world, whether in a useful or not useful way. You talk about the belief, power of anticipation. What do you mean by that?

Nir Eyal:

So anticipating what we think is going to happen next. So if the power of belief of attention is about what is happening right now, what we see in reality, anticipation is what we expect to happen. It’s about our internal states. So seeing is about what’s on the outside anticipation, what we feel is on the inside. And it turns out that people think that what they are feeling is the truth. I feel the way I feel. I am what I am, right? No more damaging words have ever been uttered than I am what I am. And we hear it all the time. That’s just the kind of person I am. That’s my personality, that’s my identity, that’s who I am. And of course, that has all kinds of terrible consequences as well, because again, that can be a very limiting belief. I am not a morning person. I’m a Sagittarius. I have a short attention span. The list goes on and on and on.

Brett McKay:

I’m an introvert. I hear that one a lot.

Nir Eyal:

I’m an introvert. Exactly. Exactly. And now we see actually all kinds of labels. This is actually bleeding into the third power belief around agency. All these labels that can become our limits, that when we think we are a certain type of person or now, unfortunately, a certain type of diagnosis, oh boy, that can have all kinds of cos. But let’s get back to that in a minute. Let’s talk about the power of anticipation. So this blew my mind when it comes to the physical properties that our beliefs have, how our beliefs can actually become our biology through the power of anticipation. And one of my favorite pieces of research around this has to do with the placebo effects. Placebo effects are fricking mind blowing, but particularly what I think is was a particularly interesting study was how placebo steroids can actually help you put on muscle.

Isn’t that crazy? We think about placebos as helping you with a headache or maybe with insomnia or anxiety, placebo, ster. So people who were told, here’s a steroid, but in reality it was a placebo can actually help you put on muscle. How does that happen? How could that possibly be? It’s not that the placebo has some kind of magical powers, it’s that it directly affects motivation. How? Well in this study where they gave young men a pill, they told them, this is a steroid pill, we want you to follow this workout regimen. And then they had a control group that did not receive the placebo steroid and they had to follow a similar workout regimen. They wanted to then see who would put on more pounds. Now the difference was that the people who took the placebo steroid worked a little bit harder. They told ’em what exercises to do, but they didn’t tell ’em how much to do or how much weight to put on.

They just told them work out for this protocol. And so what turned out to happen was that people who were taking the placebo steroids did another rep, they pushed a bit harder, they added a bit more weight. And at the end of the study, they had packed on more pounds of muscle because they believed that they were on this miraculous steroid, which they anticipated would give them more muscle mass. So it’s not that placebos are some kind of magic, it’s that they can increase the motivation. Again, back to persistence, back to what really separates winners and losers and people who achieve their goals and those who don’t. It’s all about this power of persistence, which was driven from the power of their beliefs.

Brett McKay:

This reminds me of Dumbo’s magic feather, right? Dumbo. He thought the feather, if he had the feather in his trunk, he was going to fly. And then when he didn’t have it, he felt like, oh no, I can’t do it. But the feather wasn’t magic. I mean, you thought it was magic. So you thought you could fly, but you were actually flying. 

Nir Eyal:

And you did. You could do it all along. And you think, okay, this is a Disney movie. Okay, very cute. It is a matter of life and death, Brett. It is literally a matter of life and death. Did you know that people who have positive beliefs about aging? So what does that feel like? So someone who believes aging leads to inevitable decline. Okay? That’s one potential belief versus someone who believes something to the effect of, I can grow at any age. Okay, I can grow and adapt at any age versus aging involves inevitable decline. Now, both of those could be true. Both of those could be true. But which one is a limiting belief? And which one is a liberating belief? Which one gives you more motivation to go outside and go for a walk as you age? Which one gives you more motivation to join the bowling league? Which one gives you more motivation to garden, to do tai chi, to do the kind of stuff that it can extend your lifespan?

And so people who have those beliefs, this came out of a study from Becca Levy at Yale, people who have those positive beliefs about aging live seven and a half years longer, seven and a half years longer. To put that in perspective, that is more of an effect than quitting smoking, than eating a healthy diet or exercise. Okay? Doesn’t that blow your mind that your beliefs, now, again, it’s not magic, but your beliefs do change your biology because when you believe certain things about aging, you behave differently. You’re more likely to sustain that motivation and keep going and do the things that make you healthy. So for all the talk we have about quit smoking and eat right and exercise, we should be thinking a lot more about these beliefs because they have such an outsize impact on our lifespan.

Brett McKay:

Well, you talk about in this section about anticipation, this idea of the experience loop. What is that and how can we use it to supercharge those liberating beliefs and mitigate those limiting beliefs?

Nir Eyal:

So the experience loop goes like this. So first, we believe something, then we anticipate what we think is going to happen. Then we actually feel it. We have that internal sensation and then we confirm it. And this can affect so many different things in our life. There was a beautiful study done around wine where they put people in an FMRI machine, they connected ’em to a little tube in their mouth, and as they were scanning their brain, they gave them a wine and said, okay, now this wine is a $5 bottle of wine. They squirted a little bit of the wine. They said, what do you think of this wine? And people report, it’s all right, it’s a little flat, not that much of a finish, whatever. It’s okay. And then they looked at the blood flow in their brain as they experience this wine.

Then they said, okay, now we’re going to give you a very expensive bottle of wine. Okay, you ready? Here comes the little squirt of a very expensive bottle of wine. What do you think of it? Oh, this one has hints of berry and I can taste the oak. And this is much smoother finish. They had all these very wine snobby pronouncements about the wine. Of course, there’s a trick here. It’s a psychology study. The trick was it was the same exact wine, but because of their underlying beliefs, what was the underlying belief? When you know that something is more expensive, you anticipate because of that belief, you anticipate that it will be better. And because you anticipate it’s going to be better, you feel it as better. These people. What’s so amazing about this study, it wasn’t just a blind taste test and tell us how you feel, right?

And we would expect people to say to the scientists, yeah, expensive wine tastes better. No, we could actually see it in their brain. We could see blood flow increase in their reward centers differently when they tasted the wine that they thought was more expensive. So they weren’t lying. They actually experienced the wine differently. They felt it differently in their brains. And then finally is the confirmation steps. So when you think about wine, wine is a social experience. And many of the things that we do are social experiences where now we confirm, oh, this is a really good wine. And you tell your friends about it, and you look at wine spectator and you look at, so it’s not that nobody’s lying here, it’s not a fraud. It’s that our beliefs shape the actual experience itself. I think many people misunderstand what marketing is for. People think that advertising is about awareness and okay, advertising does increase awareness.

But how does that explain why some brands advertise to death? How many Coca-Cola ads can we see? How many billions of dollars have they spent on those ads? Well, because it’s not about awareness. We all know about Coca-Cola. We’ve tried it already. Well, why do they do that? Because the advertising shapes the belief, which makes you anticipate a feeling, which then you will confirm by seeing this ad of, oh, look how refreshing, look how wonderful, look, how great it actually changed the experience itself. So the point of display advertising is to actually create that sensation in the first place. And that’s what you’re paying for, not just the sugar water.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so with the belief power of anticipation, how you expect something is going to be influences how you feel about it, which influences how you behave, which influences the outcome of something. So if you think aging is going to be awesome and you’re going to stay vital, then you’re going to keep doing youthful things and then you’re going to stay vital. And I can see other applications of this. If I think going into a hard conversation that’ll strengthen the relationship, then I’m probably going to approach it like that and it will nudge me to act in a more positive way and then it will strengthen the relationship. And this also reminded me of that study they did with housekeepers where when they told housekeepers that cleaning constituted valid exercise, they lost more weight because they leaned into the activity more. So let’s talk about the belief, power of agency. How do our beliefs shape our sense of agency or ability to get things done in the world?

Nir Eyal:

Okay, so the power of agency is the power to have an effect in the world. And we call this an internal locus of control versus an external locus of control. So external locus of control is that the world is happening to me, that things are going on that are beyond my control, an internal locus of control. This high sense of agency says that I can control factors in the world that what I do makes a difference. And here’s the kicker. So it turns out that people who have this tendency towards an internal locus of control do better in life in pretty much all metrics. They live longer, they have more friends, they contribute to their community more. All the good things happen when you have an internal locus of control. Here’s what’s really amazing, even when you have every reason to believe the opposite. So even when you are on a low socioeconomic status, even if you’re discriminated against, even if you’ve really drawn a bad deck of cards in life, and you have every reason to say the world has beaten me down and I have challenges that other people don’t have, even if that’s the case, even if that’s the case, you turn out to do better psychologically believing you have a high sense of agency.

Again, beliefs are tools not truth. Isn’t that mind blowing? That your attitude that you’re so much more likely to succeed in life based on these beliefs that if you believe you could do something to get out of that situation to make your world better, guess what? Not a big surprise. You are much more likely to do something about it. And so that’s where we go into some of the research that I talked about a little bit earlier, which I think is absolutely incredible and quite jarring, frankly, about the no SIBO effect. So we talked about the placebo effect. Placebos from the Greek mean I will heal. No, Sibos are the opposite. No Sibos are. I will hurt. And one of the studies that was just incredible that really kind shaped my thinking on this, there’s a guy in the research literature by the name of Mr A. He was anonymized Mr. A. Now Mr. A has this bad breakup with his girlfriend and he decides to commit suicide by taking an entire bottle of pills. At the last minute he takes these pills and all of a sudden he decides to change his mind. He decides he wants to live. He runs over to his neighbor’s house, his neighbor rushes him to the ER room. He takes his bottle of pills, and as he gets into the ER room, he collapses on the floor and all the nurses can hear him say is, I took all my pills. I took all my pills. And he passes out, they put him on a gurney, they rush him into the er, they take his blood pressure, he’s at a critically low level, his heartbeat is plummeting. All these vitals are pointing to the fact that he has a severe overdose.

The problem is that on the bottle of pills, it doesn’t say what medicine he took, what drug he took. All it has is a phone number because Mr. A was part of a clinical trial. And so the doctors have to call this number and ascertain, what was it that Mr. A overdosed on? They call up this number, and it turns out that Mr. A was in a clinical trial for an antidepressant, and he turned out to have been in the placebo group. So nothing that he took had any biological effect. It was a completely inert substance that he took as part of the placebo category of the study. And yet he felt all these physiological symptoms, they tell this to Mr. A and in 15 minutes his heart rate is back to normal. His blood pressure is back to normal, and he’s feeling fine. He’s fully conscious. Is that not mind blowing? Does that not make you think all over your life choices here? Because what this means is that our perception, our beliefs, can have a profound impact not only to the positive. We talked about some of the positive effects, but also to the extreme negative. And I think what we’re doing many times in society, unfortunately, is that we are using these maybe non-pharmaceutical, when we have these labels, when we have these monikers about what kind of person we are and increasingly what kind of diagnosis we have, it is limiting our potential. So we need to be very, very careful. I’m not anti diagnosis, I’m not anti-psychiatry far from it, but I am anti using these labels to define who we are because the common perception is you can’t change who you are. And when your diagnosis becomes your identity, it becomes a limitation. And your labels really do become your limits.

Brett McKay:

You take on a diagnosis if it’s useful. If it’s not useful, then maybe don’t take that on.

Nir Eyal:

It’s a map, not the terrain. So if it puts you on a path to getting to a place that is helpful. wonderful. But you are not the map, you are not the terrain itself.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so we’ve talked about the three powers of belief. There’s attention, anticipation, and agency which shape what you see, feel, and do for good or bad. And I think the big takeaway from our conversation is that beliefs can be tools and we got to figure out whether they’re serving us or not. And as we were talking, I looked up this William James quote that I really like. He said this, be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living and your belief will help create the fact. And I think that applies to a lot of things in life. Well this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Nir Eyal:

Absolutely. Thank you for asking. So on my website, nirandfar.com, Nir is spelled like my first name. We actually have a five minute belief change plan that we’re giving away for free. Anybody can get. It’s one of those things that we couldn’t fit in the final edition of the book, so we decided to give it away. It walks you through day by day by day, a five minute practice that can start you on this path of changing your beliefs and adopting more of these liberating beliefs rather than the limiting beliefs. And so to get that, you go to nirandfar.com/beliefchange. So that’s nirandfar.com. Nir spelled like my first name, nirandfar.com/beliefchange.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well Nir Eyal, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Nir Eyal:

Thank you so much.

Brett McKay:

My guest is Nir Eyal. He’s the author of the book Beyond Belief. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere. You can find more information about his work at his website. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/beyondbelief. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member who you think would get something out of it. As always, thanks for the continued support until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

When it comes to building a happy and meaningful life, most of us rely on a grab bag of strategies — habits and goals around work, relationships, and health. But my guest today would argue that in the quest for true flourishing, there’s a deeper element that not only ties together those efforts, but organizes and energizes them: purpose.

Vic Strecher is a professor of public health, a behavioral scientist, and the author of Life on Purpose: How Living for What Matters Most Changes Everything. We begin our conversation with Vic’s powerful story of how losing his 19-year-old daughter led him to discover how purpose can fundamentally reshape your life. Vic then unpacks the dramatic impact purpose has on your physical and mental health. He shares some guideposts on finding your own purpose, what kinds of aims foster the most fulfillment, why finding purpose isn’t a one-and-done process, and why becoming purposeful can make life feel less like a tug-of-war and more like stepping into a strong current that carries you forward.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• The Purposeful app
• AoM Article:The Power of Purpose
• The 5 Best AoM Podcast Episodes on Finding Meaning and Purpose
• AoM Podcast #1,051: Man’s Search for Meaning, With Viktor Frankl’s Grandson

Connect with Vic Strecher

• Vic’s faculty page
• Vic on LinkedIn

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page

Download this episode

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. When it comes to building a happy and meaningful life, most of us rely on a grab bag of strategies, habits, and goals around work, relationships, and health. But my guest today would argue that in the quest for true flourishing, there’s a deeper element that not only ties together those efforts, but organizes and energizes them: purpose. Vic Strecher is a professor of public health, a behavioral scientist, and the author of Life on Purpose: How Living for What Matters Most Changes Everything. We begin our conversation with Vic’s powerful story of how losing his 19-year-old daughter led him to discover how purpose can fundamentally reshape your life. Vic then unpacks the dramatic impact purpose has on our physical and mental health. He shares some guideposts and finding your own purpose. What kinds of aims foster the most fulfillment? Why finding purpose isn’t a one or done process and why becoming purposeful can make life feel less like a tug of war and more like stepping into a strong current that carries you forward. After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/purpose. All right, Vic Strecher, welcome to the show.

Vic Strecher:

Thank you so much, Brett.

Brett McKay:

So you are a professor of public health and you have spent a lot of time researching and writing about the role purpose plays in our overall health and wellbeing. How did that happen?

Vic Strecher:

Well, I am a behavioral scientist. I think for my whole career I’ve been trying to understand root causes of why we do the things we do. And in public health, of course, we may be helping people quit smoking or manage their stress or their weight or get a mammogram or so many different things. So often we end up scaring people saying, if you don’t do this, bad things will happen. If you don’t quit smoking, you’ll die. If you don’t manage your diabetes, you could lose your legs, blah, blah, blah. And the more I approached behavior in that way, the more I realized that people’s defensive shields just kind of pop up. And naturally I do the same thing. Somebody tries to scare me. I say, well, that’s not like me. That’ll never happen to me. And I start even discounting the person saying it. So I started really thinking more about root causes.

And this is through a lot of experience. A person may come into a smoking clinic I’m running and say, I don’t need this clinic. I don’t need this fancy cognitive behavioral program you’re running. Because my kids just stopped me while I was driving them to school and said, dad, your smoking bothers me so much. And I realized, what am I doing? I’m a dad, I’m a father, and so I don’t need your program anymore. And I used to say something like, well, of course you need it because one little simple motivational event isn’t going to change you. Well, I found that those people change and they change for life. So some deeper root cause, some identity shift or understanding who they really are, understanding and appealing to one’s core values that turns out to be really, really important. And I guess in my own life, I went through a difficult experience that kind of caused me to take a dramatic shift in my own behaviors as well.

Brett McKay:

Tell us about that. You start off the book talking about your daughter, Julia, can you tell us her story?

Vic Strecher:

Sure. Well, my daughter, Julia was born healthy in 1990. She used to like to say “I was a 10 out of 10,” and then six months into her life when she was a little baby, my wife and our older daughter and Julia were in the Netherlands. I was on a research sabbatical there. And so doing intense research with people, but at the same time, our daughter, Julia started losing weight. And you’re not supposed to be losing weight when you’re six months old. You’re supposed to be gaining weight. And so eventually after seeing a doctor, then another doctor finally, she ended up in the hospital. A cardiologist walked by after her being in the hospital for a few days and just thought, she doesn’t look right. They did an echocardiogram on her just to see what her heart was like. And it turned out that her heart was completely ruined.

She had gotten a chickenpox virus out of the blue like most of us do, and it causes a fever and a rash usually for a day or two. But this chickenpox virus attacked her heart and it destroyed it. And we were told that she was going to die within a month. So we literally took her out of the hospital in the Netherlands and the next morning we flew home and the people at home, we went to a medical center where I was a professor at the time, and they said she may actually be eligible for a heart transplant. And of course, I was an assistant professor. What did I know? I was living a comfortable assistant professor life, trying to get tenure, writing grants, publishing articles, the standard stuff, and didn’t really take my life terribly seriously, Brett, just to be honest, I was in my early thirties and I just thought, this is pretty easy and I’m enjoying it, and this is going to be a nice easy go of it as a life is concerned, I guess.

And suddenly everything shifted. I started realizing that our lives are all finite and we don’t know how long any of us are going to live, but also I had to take her life very seriously. So we as a family decided to list her for a heart transplant, and she became one of the early children to get a heart. But looking at the research data, which I’m a researcher, so I look at the data and there wasn’t a lot of data, but what did exist showed that kids who are waiting for a heart, only about 50% of them ended up getting a heart. They died before getting one half of them. And then if you did get one, if you’re that lucky, half, then half of those kids ended up dying within five years. So I thought her chances of becoming even six years old are about one in four.

So in deciding to list her for a new heart, we had to decide what kind of life should we give her? And it became an existential question for our family. How do you live a life? And so I started thinking about it then and we started, she did get a heart and new heart, and it was almost like she got a brain transplant because she had more energy. She just turned alive suddenly as opposed to just shrinking. And we as a family, I’m sorry, I get a little emotional thinking about this . . . But as a family, we started saying to ourselves, look, we don’t know when she’s going to pass away, but then we don’t know any of us when any of us are going to pass away. So let’s live our life as if this may be our last day or our last week.

Let’s live every moment, make every moment we can, filled with gratitude and filled with caring for what we care about. And so we started living very differently and suddenly all of our lives, not just Julia’s life, but all of our lives started turning technicolor as opposed to simply being black and white. And I think I lived a black and white life before then. Quite honestly. Things were pretty easy. And suddenly when they became very difficult and challenging, that’s when life became really interesting, quite honestly. She ended up needing a second heart transplant when she was nine, but when she was 19, well, she wanted to be a nurse. She wanted to give back. She had been in the hospital a lot. Just getting a heart transplant doesn’t mean you’re fully able to do anything that others are able to do. She was in the hospital a lot.

She had headaches a lot. She had issues that she was immune suppressed, so any illness would really be difficult for her. And my wife took a major caregiving role then, but she wanted to be a nurse and give back. She got into nursing school at the University of Michigan, and her first semester was pretty tough, and she was 19 at the time. We decided to go down to the Caribbean just so that she could warm up. We live in Michigan, it’s pretty cold up here. So we went to the Caribbean. We took our older daughter as well. We were all out on the beach having dinner and being grateful for where we were quite honestly. And when we were all going back, we were just very close. And her last words were, I am so happy that I could die now. And she went back to her room and those were her last words, it turns out.

And so when that happened, when she died, I went through a deep grieving process, as you might expect. I almost thought she had some significant future, that she was kind of a miracle child in a way. And my bubble was burst, obviously. And I went through a deep depression. I went up to northern Michigan. We have a cabin up in northern Michigan, right on Lake Michigan, if you’re familiar with that. And Lake Michigan is almost like the ocean if you’ve never seen it before. It usually has great big waves. And this is a few months after she had died. And I’d been by myself for about a month just figuring things out, frankly. But I wasn’t really figuring things out. I was just eating and drinking myself to death. I was falling asleep in front of the TV. I started just watching things that were stupid, just any dumb TV. I started trying to figure out what Kim Kardashian was doing. And to me, I thought, wow, that’s a sure sign that you’re getting ready to die. That’s all you care about what Kim Kardashian is doing or what influencers are doing or what’s on television all the time, or the latest sporting event. Not that they’re not important, and I’m sure Kim Kardashian is a nice person. It’s just why do I care about these things?

And I went to bed and I had been really drunk the night before. I just went to bed. I had this huge dream early in the morning, and I dreamt that my daughter was with me, and she was only nine. And we were in the Netherlands in this little town called Morich where I was working, and it’s a beautiful medieval town, and we’re on rollerblades and rollerblading around the town. And we saw this beautiful, huge, huge building. And it looked like a church. It could have been a mosque, it could have been a synagogue, but it was beautiful. It was beautiful white marble, and it was glowing. And Julia said, we need to go there. And I said, great. It’s beautiful. Let’s go. And we were rollerblading there. And then we went into the entrance and there was this circular staircase in my dream that went down and down and down infinitely it seemed like.

And Julia said, let’s go. And I said, we’re on roller blades, Julia. We can’t just pop down. She said, don’t worry. And we started floating down and we went into this. At the bottom of the staircase was this huge room. And my daughter, who was rollerblading with me, she had passed away when she was 19, but she was nine in my dream. And she looked up and just looked at me. And then I looked out and there were these three beautiful women, and they’re all wearing these beautiful purple dresses. And they all three approached. And suddenly I turned to my daughter and she wasn’t nine anymore, she was 19, and she was wearing the same dresses they were. And she turned to me and said, I’ve got to go. And I said, no, don’t. And she went with these three women and they disappeared. I woke up in the morning and my pillow was soaked in tears. I was trying to get back to sleep thinking I’ve got to get back to sleep. I’ve got to see her again. I don’t know if you’ve ever Brett had a hyper vivid dream where it’s so vivid that you could swear it was real.

And this was very real to me. It turned out to be about five o’clock in the morning, and I looked out and it was still dark outside. I could hear Lake Michigan a little bit, and I just hopped out of bed. I was just in my boxers and t-shirt and jumped into my kayak, which is out on the beach. And I didn’t bother with any sort of life preservation equipment, which is really stupid because it was still springtime.

Brett McKay:

And you’re a public health professor…

Vic Strecher:

And I’m a public health professor, Brett, right. This is dumb as it gets. And I don’t know why I went out there, honestly, but I just hopped in my kayak and it was beautiful. Unlike the way it’s often where it’s like an ocean. It was perfectly smooth, but it was still dark and it was foggy, and the water was like a slurpee. You could still even feel ice crystals in it. And again, just in my boxers, and I jumped in my kayak and I just started paddling like crazy, like a mad person, which I was, I think straight out straight heading toward Wisconsin. And I found myself, I’m guessing around two miles out when the sun came up and I was paddling and paddling. And then when the sun just came up, all of the water started glowing, just these fleck of light everywhere.

It was magical. And I stopped my kayak and I turned and I just looked at the sun coming up. And actually my thinking before the sun came up was to continue kayaking to Wisconsin, which is 84 more miles. Of course, I never would’ve made it. And like you said, I’m a public health person, but that’s where I was in my head. I saw the sun come up, and I don’t know how to express this other than to say Julia was in me, and she was telling me, you have to get over this. You have to get over this dad. And it wasn’t like, you have to get over this. It was like, you have to get over yourself. You have to get over your ego. And at that very moment, I had this epiphany that I really had a choice. It’s almost like if some street sign lifted up right out of the water, which is hundreds of feet deep already and said, death or life, that’s what was happening to me.

I could choose either one. And actually it was kind of freeing to be able to choose what I wanted to do. Before then, I felt like I wasn’t choosing anything and I was just kind of heading toward my death, whether it was drinking myself to death and watching stupid television or actively dying by kayaking to Wisconsin. But of course I’m here talking to you, Brett. And I decided to turn back and I got back and I was kind of dripping. I didn’t feel any cold. I just sat down at the kitchen table again, I’d been by myself. I almost felt like I was looking down from the ceiling of our kitchen and telling myself, I started just saying, Vic, you’re in some deep trouble right now. You’re in really deep trouble and you’re going to die if you continue on this path. You have to fix yourself.

You’re a behavioral scientist. If you can’t fix yourself, what good are you? Anyway, and I almost looked at my therapist self and said, Vic, you’re right. So I’m going to pull out a sheet of paper, which I did. I started writing just very quickly the things that mattered most to me. And I don’t know why I did that. I hadn’t been thinking in that way. I just started writing them down. I wrote my family, my wife, our older daughter Rachel. I started writing my friends names down. I started writing about what mattered to me at work. My students matter, my work matters. I decided to, for some reason, I circled my students and the university had given me a break. They said, you don’t have to teach this semester. You don’t even have to teach next semester if you can’t do it. I mean, you’ve just gone through one of the worst things a person can go through.

But I started thinking about my students, and I called the university that morning then and called my department and said, look, it’s so kind that you gave me the semester off, but actually it’s not the advice that I need. What I need to do now is teach, and I want to teach every one of my students as if they’re my own child. And I got back, I went back. I started teaching my students as if every single student was Julia, looking out at them. I even would take a couple big deep breaths and I would look at them and just see my daughter’s face in all of them and just tell myself, you’re going to be teaching today as if all of these people have their own needs, their own lives, their own concerns. And when I did that, my teaching changed and my life changed.

I was nominated to become the professor of the year, for example, at Michigan. All these things that I didn’t expect, didn’t think I really deserved. Suddenly all these things happened because I started caring so much about my students. I also started taking care of myself because I have hundreds of students, and that’s just grown. So I realized I needed energy for my purpose. So I started sleeping better. I started trying to eat better. I meditate every day. I started doing things that would hopefully give me more energy. I’d walk to work every day. I needed energy because I had a big purpose. And I realized, wow, I’m actually changing my health behaviors because I have a purpose. And I started doing research on this. Have other people found this? And sure enough, it turns out the purpose is this. If it were a drug, it would be a miracle drug. It helps so many different things. So I started treating it as a research topic. Luckily, there is a person in the psychology department who is looking for a mentor for his dissertation. He asked me if I would do this, and I said, of course I’d be happy to. And with him, I started learning so much more about purpose. And since then, and that was a long time ago, it’s about 15 years ago, I’ve just simply devoted my life to helping people find greater purpose and metaphorically getting out on the dance floor of life.

Brett McKay:

Well, thank you for sharing that story. That was really touching. And like you said, I think the takeaway from that, your behavioral scientist, and typically when you read articles from behavioral scientists, they always offer these tips on how you can change your use reframing or use implementation intentions.

Vic Strecher:

Oh, wow. Yes. 

Brett McKay:

All of these things. 

Vic Strecher:

Acceptance and commitment therapy.

Brett McKay:

Yes, exactly. But what you learned from your own experience with your daughter, Julia, twice including that first time when she got her heart transplant, is that if you have this purpose, it’s this lever you can pull that just causes you to change. And then you learn that again a second time with her passing, that if you have this overarching purpose that’s going to do more for you than all these little cognitive behavioral therapy hacks,

Vic Strecher:

It’s pretty amazing. To me. It truly feels like, somebody recently asked me, what’s it like to feel purposeful? And I thought, what a great question. I hadn’t really thought about that. And I thought for just a few seconds and said, it’s like jumping into a river that has a strong current and that current is moving forward. And as you’re moving forward in this, things become easier. You’re not fighting against things and you’re choosing clarity. So suddenly the world becomes much clearer and there’s less conflict in your life. You’re not wondering, what should I do here? Should I play with the kids or should I have that old fashioned? It depends on what your purpose is. Maybe your purpose is to be an alcoholic, in which case you pick the old fashioned, but typically it’s not. Typically it’s I’m going to play with those kids. And so you put off that old fashioned and you also start thinking, how can I be a better dad? Which I think is incredibly important. And then from that river, you may find streams that move off of that river and you say, that stream looks really interesting. I think I may jump into that stream. And that’s been my life for 15 years now, since I found a very strong purpose or set of purposes in my life. I’ve found my life incredibly joyful, quite honestly, and very happy.

Brett McKay:

Well, how do you define purpose personally, but also with your research? What does it mean to have a purpose?

Vic Strecher:

Great question. Thanks for asking that too. So having a purpose is being value driven, first of all. And what psychologists or other people who study purpose real carefully, they like these academic definitions often, and they might say it’s a values driven self organizing framework for determining goals and channeling your energy. So working through that values driven meaning, this is led by our core values, and I’d love to talk about that a bit more, meaning it’s not other organizing. Somebody else is not telling you what you should be doing. And you referred to Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was all about you creating your own purpose in your life. You’re a camel person. You say, educate me of all the joys and the sorrows of the world. And then that camel metamorphosize into a lion goes into the wilderness and finds this dragon that says, thou shalt on every scale.

The lion defeats the dragon, basically saying, I’m going to create my own purpose. I’m not going to listen to what everybody else says. And sure enough, I tell my students in the first day of class, many of whom are freshmen, say, A lot of you come in here essentially with your resume that’s been written by your parents and your back pocket. You’re going to be a doctor, you’re going to be this, you’re going to be that. I want you to pull that resume out, and I want you to tear it up because if you’re going to be a doctor, you need to decide to be a doctor. If you’re going to be a business person, if you’re going to be a lawyer, if you’re going to be whatever, you’re going to be an artist, whatever you’re going to be, you’re going to decide. And that’s essential, or you won’t be happy.

You won’t be successful. You need to create your own purpose in your life. So that’s what’s meant by self-organizing. And then purpose helps you organize your goals. It gives you clarity. In this morass, everyone’s trying to get you to set a certain goal, usually around their own thing, their own cause, their own thing. They’re trying to sell, create your own goals, but those goals come from your values and from your purpose. And that’s where you start channeling this most precious resource that you have, which is your energy and vitality, and you start moving your energy into that. But it becomes easier because sorry for all the metaphors, but you’re in this river with a very strong current and you’re not fighting it, so it becomes easier.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I’d like to return to how people can figure out the purpose, and it involves figuring out values, figuring out goals. But before we do that, let’s talk about the research you’ve done on purpose, because you highlight some really interesting research that shows how purpose affects different facets of our health. And you wouldn’t think, well, why would purpose influence my, I mean, people would understand how it influence your mental health, but my cholesterol, my heart disease. So tell us about that. How does having a purpose affect our health? What does the research say?

Vic Strecher:

Wonderful question. Thank you. So first of all, as I was alluding to before, if you have a strong purpose, you start taking care of yourself more. So we find in many, many, many surveys that if you have a strong purpose, you’re less likely to engage in unhealthy behaviors and you’re more likely to adopt healthier behaviors, you’re more likely to get screened for cancer, for example, for example, getting a colorectal cancer screen, you’re much more likely to get that. You actually then spend fewer days in the hospital because you get sick less. Well, that’s not bad. So we know those things happen. Also, I’m so lucky to know some amazing neuroscientists. One in particular, Emily Falk, who just wrote a great book on, it’s entitled What We Value, but she’s a neuroscientist who studies people’s core values, and we’ve put people into MRI and have them think about their most purposeful core values.

And there’s a part of the brain that lights up that’s very modern. It’s right in the front of our prefrontal cortex, and it’s a part of the brain that relates to executive functioning, meaning executive decisions, high level decisions that we make. It also relates to the self. Who am I? What am I all about? It relates to our core values. Also, when this part of the brain becomes more active and we’re challenged, usually when we’re scared by something, there’s a part of the brain that’s very ancient, very old. It’s called the amygdala. This is our fear center, and that fear center gets very active and it can hijack our brain. When you think about your purpose, this prefrontal cortex gets active and it actually governs down our amygdala. It governs down our fear. If I think about James Bond, for example, in a Bond movie, maybe he’s being lowered into a vat of boiling oatmeal or whatever’s happening, and he’s going at first, oh God, this is going to be terrible.

And that’s what the audience is thinking. But then he finds some way out of it. So first his amygdala is going, but in this Bond-like heroic sequence, his prefrontal cortex starts lighting up. He’s going, I don’t have to be afraid of this. In fact, I have a solution to it. That’s what happens when you’re purposeful. So we know even what goes on in the brain. We also know that purposeful people have less activation in a part of the brain, a region of the brain that relates to conflict. So they’re less conflicted. They know what to do. As I was saying before, there’s other research that we’ve done looking at longevity, and we’ve looked at longevity a little differently. Now, there are literally almost a dozen studies that have shown that people who have purpose live longer, significantly longer. And this is after statistically adjusting for age and gender and income and education and all sorts of things.

You can’t make it go away. But we wanted to look at people’s biological clocks, what are called in scientific terms, epigenetic clocks. And these clocks are looking at how our proteins are expressed by our DNA. And we find that if you have a strong purpose, your proteins, more healthy proteins are being expressed, and unhealthy proteins are less likely to be expressed. And that can all be put together and form what we would call a biological clock. And sure enough, people with stronger purpose have longer biological clocks. This is really exciting for us because parts of our epigenome may even be inheritable to our children. So this is so valuable. I’ve continued to think all along as we do this kind of research, if this were a pill, it would be a gosh, it’d be a multi-billion dollar drug. It would be a magic pill.

Brett McKay:

And you also highlight research. That purpose is also associated with an increase in HDL cholesterol, which is the good cholesterol, and it seems to have something to do with the reduction in inflammatory cell production.

Vic Strecher:

Yes. So we find that, and this is other people’s research too, not just our own, but other people have found that people with a strong purpose in their lives have fewer pro-inflammatory cells and proteins produced very important because while we want some inflammation, it’s good if you get a cut or something, you want that to inflame and close the cut, right, close the wound. But if we have too much inflammation or chronic inflammation, we start getting everything from arthritis to heart disease, some cancers, and certainly all sorts of other problems. We know, as I said before, that people who have strong purpose take better care of themselves, they eat better, which also may contribute to this higher rate of the good cholesterol that’s in our bloodstream.

Brett McKay:

I’m just going to highlight some other things you highlight in the book, because I thought it was really interesting. People who have low purpose in life were 2.4 times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than those with a high purpose in life. 

Vic Strecher:

There are studies where they combine all the studies, put ’em all together because they say, well, one study may be nice, but it’s not going to convince the scientific community, especially something that’s as strange as well. People with stronger purpose are half as likely to develop Alzheimer’s. That seems crazy. How does that work? Now, there are eight studies of it, and they’ve been all put together, and they find that people with a strong purpose are far less likely to develop Alzheimer’s, and they’ve even autopsied people’s brains after this and found that people with strong purpose have fewer lesions, lesions that cause dementia, and, and in addition, there’s a new study that came out very recently in middle-aged men. So this is an important study for you and other middle-aged men listening to this because in middle age, very often, that’s when dementia or Alzheimer’s starts to form.

Purposeful people have much stronger connectivity within their brain, between different brain regions, far more. If you have a low purpose in your life, you tend not to have the connectivity needed. It’s hard to get the right metaphor, but maybe if you consider it kind of like pipelines, moving from one region of the brain to another, or circuitry moving from one region to another, we want that. We want our brains, different regions to be talking to one another. People with strong purpose have that much more. So, boy, I’ll give you one final set of findings, and this is with a good friend of mine, Ethan Cross, who wrote a really amazing book recently that’s out called Shift. And I think you even interviewed Ethan Cross.

Brett McKay:

We did, yeah.

Vic Strecher:

Yeah. So he’s a good friend and colleague. We did some research together. I said, Ethan, you do all this work on different coping strategies, and you have this cocktail of about 16 different coping strategies that a person could pick from. So we decided to look at those coping strategies, knowing some are not great for you. I’m going to drink alcohol when I’m stressed out. Just think about my own past or maybe really good ones. I know this won’t last forever. I’m going to take a walk in nature. I’m going to engage in a family or religious ritual. I’m going to see a big picture. It turns out that those positive coping strategies are strongly associated with having a strong sense of purpose in your life. Whereas negative coping strategies like I’m going to drink too much or eat too much, or vent, things like that, those are negatively associated with having a sense of purpose.

So you see the different things that it does. I was talking to a person who’s writing a new book related to purpose, and she said, I really think that having a purpose reduces entropy. The second law of thermodynamics, this entropic law that says everything gradually dissolves and gets less and less organized. We see a dead deer on the side of the road the next week, we pass that same deer. If it’s not gone, it’s looking a lot worse. It’s more and more disorganized. That’s entropy. What purpose does is it’s almost an entropy rebel. It almost reverses entropy. So I really think purpose is just that important, and we can build it, we can enhance it.

Brett McKay:

So in addition to all those health benefits, it can make you more resilient than some — that research you did with Ethan Cross. It can help you cope better. So it sounds like what purpose does the reason why it provides all these benefits? It sounds like there’s two things going on. One is having a purpose causes you to take better care of yourself. So you’re going to eat right, exercise, sleep, not drink, not smoke. But then also there are some physiological changes going on in your body.

Vic Strecher:

It sure seems like it. Yep, yep. There’s really good data showing that. 

Brett McKay:

That’s amazing. Well, let’s talk about how do we develop a purpose? What does that look like?

Vic Strecher:

Well, one of the ways to find purpose is to do just what I did when I was coming back on my kayak and pulled it in, ran up to my cabin and pulled out a sheet of paper and started writing down the things that mattered most in my life. And that’s a great way to start. If you start writing down the things that matter to you, what do you care about? Philosophers like to talk about caring about what you care about. So start by figuring out what do you care about? And if you want, the easiest way to do that, maybe you even look on your smartphone wallpaper when you open up your smartphone. How many times do we do that? On average, it’s over 60 to 80 times. So for me, when I open mine, I see my granddaughter, Madeline Julia from our older daughter, and she’s just amazing.

And so I look at her every single day, about 60 times, at least a day. So that’s affirming who I am. It’s affirming who I value. It’s affirming who I care about and what I want to be alive for and active for, and devote my energy to and my goals to. So I teach a lot of physicians, and when I train physicians, I ask, what do you do with a diabetic? Who’s newly diagnosed? How do you get them to start doing the things they need to do because they need to manage their weight very often or work out more, eat better, blah, blah, blah, take their medications. And a lot of ’em say, well, we tell ’em they might lose their legs if they continue on the path they’re taking, or they will die early. Well, what does that do? It sets up this defensive wall.

What if you just simply said, what’s on your smartphone? Open it up. If you don’t mind, show me what’s on your smartphone. Chances are it’s something that matters to them. And then you just sit back and say, so what do you want to do about that? Suddenly, it’s a totally different reframing of the issue. So that’s one thing to do. Write down what matters most. Let’s say you write down 10 things, maybe drop it down to five, and then from the five, maybe drop it to three and you say, I’m here for these people. Usually the things that matter most are not things they’re people, but it may be a cause that you care about. Whatever it is. You may say, those are the things that I live for, and I am going to start building a purpose around those things. I’m here to be on this planet to do this, and now how are you going to end up doing those things?

And you start working that through. You start setting goals around those things. So that’s one way to think about finding your purpose, what we call values affirmation. It’s a part of, you’ve mentioned different theories and approaches. It’s part of what’s called acceptance and commitment therapy, where you are accepting the fact that bad things happen to everybody. I’m by the way, nothing special when I talk about things that have happened to me, things have happened to everybody. All you have to do is live a life and you go through adversity and difficult times. But if you let those hijack, you can do that. You can choose to do that, or you can say, what am I committed to? And suddenly these things become less relevant to your commitment to things that are most important to you. It’s almost like swimming in quicksand. The more you try to get out, the more you sink. So it’s important to not let the stressors in life every day. And we all know we have a lot of stressors in life right now, from everything from politics to media, all sorts of things happening in our lives right now. If you say, okay, those are important. I understand them, but I have a purpose. And that purpose may be multifaceted. You may have a purpose around your family. If you have a family, maybe around your work, maybe around your community, all sorts of domains you could build purpose around or purposes, and then you devote your life, literally, your life to those causes, to those purposes, then suddenly these stressors don’t seem quite so stressful.

Brett McKay:

I think this is helpful. I think a lot of people, when they think about finding their purpose, they think they kind of have to pull it out of thin air. But it sounds like finding your purpose is often a matter of looking at what you already do and finding ways to lean into it and be more intentional about it. Maybe you already have this friendship that’s important to you. How can you lean into it? How can you be a better support for your friend? Maybe you’re already a dad. How can you be more intentional about creating a family culture? What can you do to raise the most excellent possible humans in your job? You can find ways to see a real mission in it. So if you’re a doctor, you can find ways to treat your patients so they feel seen and not like a number. You talked about how you started taking teaching more seriously, treating each student like they were your daughter. If you volunteer in a church youth group, how can you lean into that more and make it the best possible group and create the texture of these kids’, childhood and faith? So yeah, it’s really caring about what you care about. And going along with this, you also talk about what can make purpose more powerful and lead to flourishing is finding purposes that are self transcendent. They move beyond the self.

Vic Strecher:

Yeah, yeah. There’s a big discussion about that in the research community, and there are a few people who say, well, it doesn’t really matter if your purpose is very hedonic or very transcending. A purpose is a purpose, and it’s good. Maybe to some extent that’s true, but there’s enough data showing me anyway very clearly that having a transcending purpose, a purpose that’s bigger than yourself actually makes you much happier. So the more you seek happiness through things, I’m going to sit on the beach for the next two weeks, and maybe that’s great. Maybe you need a break. Maybe you need to recharge the batteries, whatever. But if that’s all you’re seeking, then the next vacation, maybe a little less fun. Kind of like if you eat a great meal every single night, what if you had a gourmet meal every night? After a while, you’d start complaining more.

You’d say, I don’t know about that. I think the chef could have done a better job. Or for golfers out there, if you play golf every single day, after a while, it becomes less interesting, probably. That’s my guess. So yeah, just focusing on things that are focused on you and your own hedonic goals, I don’t think helps as much. Aristotle talked about two forms of happiness. One he called Hedonia, and this of course is pleasure. So he was talking about good food, good wine, good sex, good, all of those things, and those are fine. And Aristotle said, no problem. It’s good that we enjoy those things, but if that’s all we care about, then we are like, and I’m quoting him from his Aristotlian ethics. He said, then we’re like grazing animals. He said, we need to be in touch with this inner God, this true self that’s inside of us, almost this angel that then communicates with these higher order Greek gods.

And he called this angel, the Damon and the Damon in Greek. So it’s this true self, this godlike self. So eudemonia, depending on how you want to pronounce it, is being in touch with that true self, that God-like self, that angel self that the Greeks believe was born with you. It’s part of you since your birth. By the way, Hindus believe this as well. Hindus and Buddhists believe that they’re born with his inner shaman, which is this God, this eternal godlike self that lives in you. I love that idea that we’re born with this godlike self and we’re born good, and we have to keep society from kind of beating it out of us. So the idea here is in being eudemonic, is we care more about things that transcend ourselves, our own egos. We transcend just pure simple pleasures. While we enjoy pleasurable things, that’s fine. We also strive for things that are bigger than ourselves. Things like volunteering, working on causes, helping other people, taking care of other people. Those things are eudemonic. And I think, and research has suggested that those things, those kinds of purposes, eudemonic purposes tend to be much better for you than hedonic purposes.

Brett McKay:

So just to recap here, purpose is you start with your values, the things that are most important to you. Ideally, those values are self transcendent. They’re not just, okay, I want to just lay on the beach and whatever. 

Vic Strecher:

You ask yourself, are all my values equally valuable? Are some valuables more valuable? 

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Well, you quote Kierkegaard, one of my favorite philosophers. He says, the thing is to find a truth, which is true for me to find the idea for which I can live and die. So I think that’s a good rubric to use. This value is something I could live and die for, just expend all my life for it. And so once you establish those values, start setting goals for yourself on how to realize those. And again, it has to be self-directed. 

Vic Strecher:

Very much self-organizing framework. And this is what Friedrich Nietzsche talked a lot about. And of course, both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were proto existentialists, meaning they were really framing the existential movement of the early 1900s. Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, all of those people were influenced by Nietzsche and Kierkegaard. And then later, the classic example is Viktor Frankl who went through three concentration camps, but throughout his books, he talks a lot about with great reverence for Friedrich Nietzsche and the importance of finding this bigger purpose that you find and are self-directed.

Brett McKay:

We had Viktor Frankl’s grandson on the podcast. Oh my goodness. That was a great conversation. Yeah, so you talk about purpose isn’t just this one and done thing that you hash out in a cabin after you get out of the kayak. Purpose is a dynamic activity and it’s something you have to live out and you’re constantly refining it.

Vic Strecher:

Maybe can I add to that? Just a second, Brett? Sure. I would say that having a purpose is great. Now, your purpose may well change over time, very much like the rings of a tree. And just think about if you graduate from college, if you get married or not get married, if you get a divorce, if you lose a loved one, if you get sick, if you find a new job, if you retire, all those times may be times you want to rethink and repurpose your life. But what is really ongoing is being purposeful. So you don’t just find a purpose, write it down, put it in your office, tack it up and go, okay, great. That’s all I need. Now. You need to think about applying your resources, your energy to goals that fit with your purpose. Then you become purposeful. And that’s what’s really life-changing. It’s not just simply having a sense of purpose. It’s literally becoming purposeful.

Brett McKay:

What do you tell people? Because I’ve experienced this, people who have a clear sense of purpose, but they have those moments where they’re just like, I don’t have the energy or the mojo or the juice, whatever you want to call it, to keep striving, even if they’re doing things like taking care of their sleep, eating right, exercising. But I feel like I have those moments where it’s like, I just can’t do this anymore where you’re having repeated setbacks or there’s this period happens to all of us. Yeah, periods of stagnation. When you’re trying to pursue your purpose, how do you get the mojo back during these periods?

Vic Strecher:

If I’m in this river that has a strong current in it, in other words, I’m really feeling very purposeful. I’d mentioned this earlier that if you find a stream that’s moving alongside of that purpose, you may want to pop into that stream. You may want to find some new way of still maintaining your sense of purpose and becoming purposeful in just a slightly different domain. You may take up a hobby, you may start to volunteer for something. You may try something that you may even fail in. Purposeful people, by the way, tend to have a more growth mindset. They’re willing to fail, they’re willing to try new things. So going out and challenging yourself I think is really important. When we retire so often, we miss challenging ourselves. So in retirement, very often you need to repurpose your life and provide new, fresh challenges, even if you don’t succeed in those, or even if your body is saying, wait a second, I’m breaking down. I can’t do this as well. Well, you accept that, but you also say, I’m going to continue to challenge myself and continue to maybe risk failure. It’s really essential. That’s a simple answer to it. And I don’t mean to be pollyannish about it. People who stagnate, that’s a tough time. But trying to seek new ways, new purposes, new streams that move off of this river may be an important thing for you to do and consider.

Brett McKay:

So change the purpose, but keep being purposeful.

Vic Strecher:

And one thing, I’m actually working on a new book around purpose. I’ve been asked to write a book that’s almost like a workbook around finding purpose. And one way that’s worked very well for people, especially as you tend to get older, is creating a life narrative. And this is seeing your life as chapters of a book. Literally naming the chapters of your book, like maybe one chapter is Finding my Way. Maybe another one is starting over again. Whatever those things are, they won’t be yours, but those might be chapters. Then identifying turning points in your life as if it’s a book. Then try to learn about the tough times without minimizing the tough times. Learn what the toughest times did to create turning points, finding themes in this book that you have written about yourself. Maybe even name a new chapter. When I wrote my book for Harper Collins, the editor gave me very good advice.

He said, before you write this book, write your book review. I said, I haven’t even written the book. How do I write a book review? He said, write the book review, because then you’ll know what you want people to think and feel about your book. What if you wrote a book review of your life? In other words, you almost wrote your own memorial service. You wrote what’s on your headstone. It may give you certain new ways of thinking about your life to develop a new approach, a new way of thinking about purpose, so it doesn’t stagnate.

Brett McKay:

Well, Vic, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book in your work?

Vic Strecher:

Oh, I appreciate that. Thank you. Well, my book is entitled, Life on Purpose: How Living for What Matters Most Changes Everything. I’ve also spent the last 10 years now developing an application called Purposeful, and you can find this at purposeful.io, and this is an app that really covers just about everything we’ve been talking about. It helps you not only find a purpose, and it uses AI to help you find purpose, but then importantly, it helps you become purposeful. We have real guardrails on this to keep the AI from hallucinating from going off on its own. We didn’t want AI to go into the internet and find things and make stuff up. So everything we put into this is very what we call evidence-based. Very, very carefully done, and we’ve built a framework around helping you become more purposeful as we’ve done in my book as well. So those are two places that I might recommend, and both of them I’ve devoted a lot of time thinking about not just making stuff up, but really making sure there’s a research underlying it, and I just appreciate people like you who have been thinking about these deep thoughts and helping the public think about these deep thoughts as well. I really appreciate this interviewer. You’re a wonderful and very careful interviewer, and I appreciate you.

Brett McKay:

Well, Vic, thanks so much. It’s been a pleasure.

Vic Strecher:

Thank you.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Vic Strecher. That wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Kate and I spend many, many hours searching far and wide for the very best guest and shaping the interviews into episodes that are always worth listening to. If you’ve gotten something out of the show, consider helping more people discover it by leaving a review on iTunes or Spotify, or sharing it with a friend. As always, thank for the continued support, and until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Of all the books in the Bible, Ecclesiastes is arguably the most philosophical. Dark, experiential, existential, and unsparingly honest about the human condition, it wrestles with work, money, ambition, pleasure, time, and death — and it does so in a way that feels uncannily modern. Whether you approach it as sacred scripture or simply as ancient wisdom literature, Ecclesiastes has something to say to anyone who’s ever chased success, gotten what they wanted, and then wondered, Is this really it?

Here to unpack this ancient philosophy is Bobby Jamieson, a pastor and the author of Everything Is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes’ Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness. We discuss why Ecclesiastes resonates so strongly in our age of acceleration and control, why so much of life can feel absurd and unsatisfying, and how the book ultimately shows us how to enjoy — and even embrace — what first appears to be vanity of vanities.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #956: Feeling Depressed and Discombobulated? Social Acceleration May Be to Blame
• Dying Breed Article: Resonance as an Antidote to Social Acceleration
• AoM Podcast #1,100: Money and Meaning — What Faith Traditions Teach Us About Personal Finance
• The Uncontrollability of the World by Hartmut Rosa
• Jerry Seinfeld on saving time

Connect with Bobby Jamieson

• Bobby on X

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Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the AoM podcast. Of all the books in the Bible. Ecclesiastes is arguably the most philosophical, dark, experiential, existential and unsparingly honest about the human condition. It wrestles with work, money, ambition, pleasure, time and death. And it does so in a way that feels uncannily modern, whether you approach it as sacred scripture or simply as ancient wisdom literature.

Ecclesiastes has something to say to anyone who’s ever chased success, gotten what they wanted, and then wondered, is this really it? Here to unpack this ancient philosophy is Bobby Jamieson a pastor and the author of Everything is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness. We discuss why Ecclesiastes resonate so strongly in our age of acceleration and control, why so much of life can feel absurd and unsatisfying, and how the book ultimately shows us how to enjoy and even embrace what first appears to be vanity of vanities After the show’s over, check at our show notes at aom.is/everythingisneverenough. All right, Bobby Jamieson, welcome to the show. 

Bobby Jamieson: 

Thanks for having me. 

Brett McKay: 

So you wrote a book called Everything is Never Enough: Ecclesiastes Surprising Path to Resilient Happiness. Ecclesiastes is a book in the Bible that gets quoted a lot by religious and non-religious people alike. I’m sure people have heard that birds hit song, turn, turn, turn, which riffs off Ecclesiastes. What led you to take a deep dive into this book in the Hebrew Bible?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, so I am a pastor and I preached through it at a church. I used to pastor in Washington DC and it really resonated with me. It really resonated with our congregation. When I got to the end of the preaching series, I just didn’t want to be done with the book. It was like the book had grabbed a hold of me and wouldn’t let me go. It’s a weirdly personal, confrontational, challenging kind of book. It’s pretty dark as we’re going to see together in some of the themes we’ve probably talked about, but I just didn’t want to be done, and for me, it really seemed to resonate with a lot of hopes, dreams, trajectories, we chart for our lives that then wind up not working out and it’s like Ecclesiastes saw it first, got there first, and if you’ve had any experience of frustrated expectations, dreams that didn’t plan out or even frankly that you actually got what you were looking for and then you were like, man, is this really what I wanted or what’s next or is this all there is kind of Ecclesiastes has been to all those places ahead of you.

Brett McKay:

Well, so let’s do some background on Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes is part of the Hebrew Bible’s wisdom literature, which includes Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job. If anyone has ever read the Hebrew Bible, they may have noticed that these books, particularly these three books, they seem really different from the other books in the Bible, like the books of Moses or the books of the prophets. What makes the wisdom literature different from the rest of the Hebrew Bible?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, one thing is it’s in many ways more experiential. It invites you to kind of wrestle with it personally. You have to put work into making sense of it for yourself because it is kind of speaking about all of life from different perspectives. One way to summarize the relationship between Job and Ecclesiastes, Job is somebody who discovered the vanity of all things by losing it all. The author of Ecclesiastes is somebody who discovered the vanity of all things by getting it all and having it all. And so wisdom literature kind of invites you to really reflect on your life as a whole, and you got to kind of earn it. You got to work for it. Proverbs, the book of Proverbs puts contradictory statements side by side and you got to figure out how to reconcile ’em, and Ecclesiastes actually does something similar. So yeah, not these books in the Bible are probably especially maybe familiar to or appealing to even a lot of people who don’t necessarily believe in God or believe that the Bible is holy scripture because they speak so directly to experience, to things like work, money, sex, power, pleasure, all that kind of stuff.

Brett McKay:

It also seems just more philosophical than the rest of the books in the Bible; existential like you were saying.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, that’s true of wisdom literature in general, and I would say it’s even especially true of Ecclesiastes in particular. A lot of people would say Ecclesiastes is kind of the only maybe pure work of philosophy in the Bible, in the sense that it’s observational. It’s even in a way empirical. The author is kind of testing out these different things by experience, and so there’s really sustained reflection on a lot of life’s biggest questions. Is there meaning how can you find satisfaction, what’s worth doing? What is good? There’s a deep relentless quest for answers in a lot of these realms that frankly resonates with different traditions of philosophy and even philosophy as its practice today.

Brett McKay:

And because it hits all these big issues, work, money, love, success, failure. When you read Ecclesiastes in the 21st century as a modern westerner, you read like, wow, I relate to this. It feels really modern.

Bobby Jamieson:

It does feel really modern. That was certainly part of my experience pastoring a lot of young professionals in DC preaching through the book or even just how it spoke to my own challenges and struggles, but even thinking about a bit more, connecting it to maybe some of the challenges and structures in the modern world, thinking about money, thinking about the economy, thinking about issues of justice. Ecclesiastes has something to say about all of those, and I think part of the way it does that is that the author is speaking from the experience of living a whole bunch of different lives in one lifetime. It’s almost a little bit like Winston Churchill or something where you read a biography of Churchill and you go, how did he live so many different lives before he got to the age of 30, you could do a biography of Churchill that would fill massive volumes from any two years of his life. The author of Ecclesiastes is a little bit like that. There’s this full exploration of the potential, the possibilities of work, money, pleasure, power, and so I think in the modern world is in some ways defined by a lot of options. There’s a lot of freedom, there’s a lot of options. There’s a lot of different paths you can follow, and I think one of the main reasons Ecclesiastes resonates so much is basically he’s like, look, I chased this path all the way to the end. Let me tell you where it got me.

Brett McKay:

So who wrote Ecclesiastes? Do we know that?

Bobby Jamieson:

Well, I don’t think we have a kind of confident or certain knowledge. Historically, lots of Christian and Jewish interpreters have held it to be written by King Solomon, David’s son and to be about his own experiences. I think that’s possible. I’m not convinced that’s wrong, but I’m also not convinced it’s right. The book is technically anonymous. The author just introduces himself as the teacher or the preacher. The Hebrew word for that is like, it’s a title, like a job title, and he just introduced himself as the preacher, the teacher son of David King in Jerusalem. So he could have been any number of other kings of Israel. He’s a little bit hard to place. So I think there’s a little bit of a deliberate mystery, a deliberate, you could even say ambiguity where it partially lines up with Solomon. There’s ways you can map it onto Solomon, but I think in some ways the author is making his experience even more accessible by that degree of anonymity.

Brett McKay:

What’s the overall structure of the book?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, well, Ecclesiastes, some books of the Bible have a pretty clear or transparent literary structure. Ecclesiastes, it’s a little bit harder to discern. Discern, roughly speaking. The first half is more his quest for the good life, his quest for the meaning of life and some periodic reflections and kind of look backs on how it’s all gone. That’s about the first six chapters. Then once you get to chapter seven, especially the end of chapter seven, it’s a little bit more collections of wisdom sayings, kind of like the book of Proverbs grouped around different topics and then kind of a poem about death at the very end to cap things off. So there’s kind of a loose literary structure. As I understand the book though, there’s a little bit of a clearer conceptual structure where a whole lot of the book is his observation, his experience, his just saying what he’s lived, what he’s seen, and frankly, you can agree with that just by experiencing the same things or reflecting yourself.

But then there’s these seven passages in the book where it’s almost like his perspective takes a big step up as if he’s moving from kind of ground floor observation to then going up to a second story where you can see farther. And he talks about life as being a gift. He counsels enjoyment, he counsels rejoicing in your work, rejoicing in your marriage, even the toil of your work taking pleasure in it. And so there’s kind of a tone shift from saying everything is vanity or fleeting or absurd. That’s kind of his dominant message in the first half of the book. But there’s these seven times when he ascends to this higher perspective and calls everything a gift and tells you to get busy enjoying all the stuff that he is just told you is meaningless, fleeting, absurd. I mean, there’s even some perspectives that poke through from an ultimate point of view of he believes that there’s a God who created all things.

He believes that there’s a God who’s in charge of all things even though it doesn’t really look like it a lot of the time, and that God will ultimately hold all people to account and even bring about a whole new world in the end. And so that’s a perspective that only comes through in a few places. So I would say there’s this kind of three story building or view from a three story building type of conceptual structure to Ecclesiastes where he doesn’t always give you signposts, he doesn’t always tell you any switching point of view, but there’s these different voices that emerge from the author throughout the book that I think show us that all of life is absurd on the ground floor. Show us that all of life is a gift on the second floor and show us that all of life has a kind of transcendent or even eternal significance that shines through in just a couple places.

Brett McKay:

Those first two floors where everything’s absurd and then everything’s a gift that’s kind like the imminent frames. Well, this is the life now. And then that third floor is like that’s the transcendent frame.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, that’s right. And there’s a sense in which on the second floor to say that life is a gift does kind of puncture the imminent frame. But on the one hand, it also relates then to just how we live day by day, moment by moment, the kind of stuff he’s still focused on enjoying pleasure, enjoying possessions, enjoying even wealth. He says at one point, drink your wine with a merry heart. God has already approved what you do. So there’s a sense in which it’s a little bit more transcendent perspective to say life is a gift from God. But on the other hand, it very much relates to all the stuff of daily life that we experience moment by moment day by day.

Brett McKay:

Alright, let’s dig into what the preacher has to say to us. The book famously starts off with vanity of vanities, says the preacher vanity of vanities, all is vanity. The Hebrew word that got translated into vanity is hevel, what did the Hebrews mean by hevel?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah. Well, it’s one of these words that has kind of a basic or literal meaning, which is breath, breath, wind, vapor. So what are some of the characteristics of breath? It’s here one second, gone. The next, you got to take another breath. If you breathe out on a cold day, you can see a little cloud puff before your face, but then it’s gone. So then as is often the case with a keyword like this, there’s all these metaphorical associations that grow up from that. So hevel as breath, well, it’s also fleeting, it’s here, and then it disappears. It doesn’t last, it doesn’t stay. But Kallet uses this word as kind of his summary statement for everything. So it becomes kind of a term of art. It’s like a one word summary of his whole observation of all of life and some of the situations he applies it to are things where it’s not just something like fleeting that’s here one minute, gone the next, but actually something deeply dissatisfying, something that doesn’t meet your expectations.

Even something that’s deeply wrong, like a case of injustice. If you know somebody’s innocence and they get declared guilty, it’s hard to think of something that’s kind of more wrong in the world than that. And actually Kohe will use the word he to talk about a situation like that. Why? Because it doesn’t fit, it doesn’t match. I would actually say a good kind of modern translation of it is absurd. Even inspired by kind of mid-century existentialist philosophy like Albert Camus, the way he uses the word. I think that’s actually a pretty good fit for what Koal is talking about when he says he, because there’s things that don’t meet our desires. There’s things that don’t meet our expectations. There’s a kind of condition of wrongness or of a misfit between what we want and even what we expect and even what we have a right to demand and then what the world actually pays back.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. I like how you used absurd because I think that’s a better word to describe hevel — that idea that we’re in this world and things don’t go according to how we think they should go, and it’s just like, this is absurd. This is absolutely absurd that this is happening to me.

Bobby Jamieson:

And you often have that experience. It might be slightly comical. I mean, we have a minivan for lugging our kids around and it had to be in the shop for three weeks. It’s a long story. They were trying to fix a door handle. They wound up having to put a whole new door in because there’s not the spare parts to actually just replace the handle on its own, and the thing barely works better than it did before. After three weeks in the shop, we had to have a rental car and all this stuff. I mean, it feels absurd, and that’s a pretty minor instance. That’s a pretty everyday not that big of a deal, even though now the door’s a different color and it looks funny and all this stuff. But then at a much more serious level too, I think to describe even some more of those shocks of life or things that we suffer, there is an absurdity. It doesn’t make sense. Why did this happen? There’s not really an answer. There’s no obvious answer. It’s not written into your life. It doesn’t show up in the mail and say, here’s why this happened. So I think that idea of absurdity actually names kind of an experience particularly of things we suffer that’s hard to get at otherwise,

Brett McKay:

And it’s not even just unexpectedly negative things that can feel absurd like your life’s going great, and then you get a shock medical diagnosis that turns your life upside down. But as you said, getting what you want and then feeling depressed and not satisfied, that can also feel absurd. You feel just like, why not? Why don’t I feel good? I got the thing. I summoned the mountain. Why don’t I feel like I think I should feel?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, absolutely. And that’s maybe the single most relevant insight in the whole book, and it comes from really the biggest extended narrative. Early in the book, he kind of announces his quest for wisdom, and then he talks about this huge project he went on of testing out every conceivable source of enjoyment under the sun, and he gets to the end and he says in chapter two, verse 11, then I considered all that my hands had done and the toil I had expended in doing it and behold, all was vanity and a striving after wind, and there was nothing to be gained under the sun. In some ways, that feels like the ultimate absurdity. When you’ve worked hard, you’ve gotten to the end of it, you’ve attained that summit and it just doesn’t satisfy. It leaves you going, well, why doesn’t this dissatisfied? And oftentimes we don’t really experience a clear answer to that.

Brett McKay:

Everything is never enough.

Bobby Jamieson:

That’s the key lesson of the whole book. Some people experience that after winning a Super Bowl or a major golf tournament. I mean, you hear this again and again, people at the absolute pinnacle, they’re literally the world’s best person at this, their team, their accomplishments, whatever it is. And you often even hear this in an interview right after the fact. Right. Okay, well, what now?

Brett McKay:

Yeah, you also bring the thinking of sociologist Hartmut Rosa into your exploration of Ecclesiastes. For those who aren’t familiar with his work, what’s his big idea?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, he’s got a few really insightful big ideas. One that’s really relevant for my book is that modernity is a project of control. And so he’s got this great slim little book, The Uncontrollability of the World that’s very accessible and really insightful, and he talks about how essentially the modern world is defined by a relentless ambition to control more and more to control all that we can. I’m in a room right now that has been set to 67 degrees, and if it dips below 67 degrees, the heater will kick back on and keep me at exactly the controlled temperature I want. You can think about increasing control over our bodies, over medical conditions, technology, transportation, communication, being able to fly places, artificial lights so you can be working and awake whenever you want. All those kinds of things have created a world in which we live, the world that we experience.

We have a lot higher expectation of being able to control things than probably any society that’s ever lived, any people that’s ever lived, whether it’s more hunter gatherer or agrarian or even more of a hard scrabble. You’ve got this job and you work in an older city and you’re at the mercy of all these different forces. We expect to be able to control a whole lot of stuff, and we’re surprised when we can’t. We’re kind of shocked when we can’t. And yeah, Rosa does a really good job kind of opening up the disconnect that we experience when control runs out. He also has this fascinating insight that I think is really brilliant where actually a lot of the most meaningful experiences in our lives are things you can’t control. Think about falling in love, getting this woman that you’re incredibly into to actually go out on a date with you and how does it go?

Or you’re at the championship game and your team wins by a kind of last minute three pointer, or you’re at the concert that’s your favorite band and they play your favorite song from your favorite album, and it’s just as good as you thought it would be. All those type of peak experiences are things you can’t control. You can’t control the dates, you can’t control the game, you can’t control the concert. And in a way, the more you try to control it, the more the meaning drains out of it. The color drains out of it. And so Rosa also identifies this paradox where the more we try to control, the less we actually kind of enjoy our lives. And his thick concept he’s developed for that kind of enjoyment is what he calls resonance. And resonance is basically any experience in which kind of the invisible wire that connects you to the world is humming.

It could be a really engaging conversation. It could be being deeply engaged in a craft, kind of a flow state of being challenged by the materials you’re working with and applying skill to it, and kind of experiencing those challenges giving way as you figure out how to get this joint to fit into this part or how you get the right tool to work on this part of wood or whatever it might be. Rosa talks about resonance as basically anything in which you light up with a connection to the world. And resonance is only an in the moment reality. It’s not something you can file away and stockpile. It’s not something you could just pull out of the fridge. You might have a great time making this meal or eating those leftovers, but resonance itself is not something you can just do at your beck and call.

It depends upon your own kind of internal condition. It depends upon the conditions of the world out there. And so the tension between control and resonance, I think Rosa is really insightful in showing there’s an inverse relationship. The more you control, the less resonance there is, but we keep trying to control more. One last really helpful kind of paradigm from Rosa is what do you call social acceleration, which is basically if you zoom out and you think about life as a whole, society as a whole, think about the ways we make our living, think about the kind of circumstances of the tools or technology we use on a daily basis. Think about even basics of morality or expected patterns of life. He identifies three phases. In traditional societies, those things are pretty stable. They change a little bit over time, but it’s pretty much like things have gone on the way they always have.

Once you get into the modern world, particularly in Europe and the early modern era, you might have generational change. You might have change that takes place over 30, 40, 50 years, and your kids are grandkids live in a pretty significantly different world than you lived in. But Rosa’s point about our present moment, kind of late modernity is what he calls social acceleration, which is basically all those fundamental conditions, how you make a living, how technology influences your life, even kind of what’s agreed upon morality or ways of being in the world. Those things change quicker and quicker even within the span of a single lifetime, which means all sorts of stuff that you took for granted or a job you were trained in or a tool you used to use becomes obsolete quicker and quicker. And so there’s this sense of the world kind of disappearing from underneath your feet as you’re trying to live it, which I think is a pretty compelling description of a lot of the challenges that we experience in different ways just in the modern world. I don’t know, defined roughly by the last couple of generations.

Brett McKay:

So I want to take that idea of resonance. We’ll table that. I’m going to come back to that because I think the preacher kind of agrees with Rosa there that the antidote for all this he absurdness can be resonance or something like resonance. But these ideas of we feel like in the modern world we want to control everything when it causes frustration and this idea of social acceleration, I think this really goes to what the preacher has to say about why life is absurd. And it sounds like too that modernity, this idea of social acceleration and we can control things, it sounds like it just makes that sense of absurdity of life more acute.

Bobby Jamieson:

I think so. I mean, that’s one of the things that really settled in more deeply for me as I was doing the research of this book, is that I think what Ecclesiastes is describing simply is the human condition. You could live at any time. You could live in any place in the world, and this book would really resonate with you at the same time, because Ecclesiastes is so much about ambition and aspiration, it’s so much about the things that kind of become magnets for our hearts that draw out huge amounts of effort, huge amounts of planning and strategy and the kind of things we sort of build our lives around. I do think Ecclesiastes, while it’s describing the human condition, those kind of things that Rosa is identifying as hallmarks of modernity are actually intensifications, kind of deepenings or they’re making even more vivid a lot of the exact things that Ecclesiastes identifies. So I do think that’s another way of getting at why Ecclesiastes feels like such a modern book, partly because Ecclesiastes is not just analyzing individual experience, but there’s a whole lot of insightful commentary and judgments about how the world as a whole works. So even though he’s in ancient Israel, I think he’s diagnosing problems that would sort of flower and blossom in the modern world.

Brett McKay:

I mean, this idea of controlling how intense it is in the modern world, just look at our health. We have all this technology, these tools to look at our, what’s going on inside of our body. We can measure our blood. We have all these supplements, we can measure our heart rate variability, and then we end up getting some sort of debilitating disease. You’re like, how could this happen? I’m doing all the things. I’m tracking everything, what’s going on? So I think the frustration is just more intense compared to you go back to 2000 years ago, 3000 years ago, if you got a cold, there’s a chance you might die. It’s not great. And it’s sort of heavy. It’s absurd, but it was sort of a given. That’s a possibility. Now these days when something happens that should not happen, got the technology to prevent it from happening. So you just feel even more frustrated.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, that’s a great way to put it. It’s our modern world with the greater degree of control, greater degree of technological sovereignty over our basic bodily conditions. It makes it even harder for us to be reconciled to the realities of accident, injury, illness, ultimately death. If you’re in any kind of pre-modern society, you are just so much more surrounded by death. It’s so much more of a fact of life. It’s a part of the daily fabric of life that’s sad. I’m not saying it’s a good thing, but it also reconciles you to that reality. Whereas we can sort of put death behind this kind of sealed off door. People mostly tend to die in hospitals. We tend to keep it out of you or you’re not around. If a loved one is dying, typically they’re not in their own bedroom in your own home, you’re not the one sitting by them. And so yeah, I think it also makes it easier to persist in the illusion that somehow we’ll be around forever or even if we don’t consciously think that you can just sort of more effectively keep death at bay as a thought, the kind of illusion of your own. It’s just not part of your daily experience. And Ecclesiastes has a lot to say about death.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, we’ll talk about that. And then this idea of social acceleration, I think everyone’s experienced that feeling of they feel like they have to work harder and harder, run faster and faster, but they’re just kind of stand in place and you’re like, what’s going on? I’m doing all this work and I’m not making any progress. This is absurd. This is absolutely absurd. And I have that experience with social acceleration of my own kids. I have a son who’s 15 and he’s trying to figure out what he’s going to do with his future, and he is like, dad, what should I do for work? AI is going to take all of our jobs maybe. And I’m like, man, I don’t know.

Bobby Jamieson:

Honestly, that’s the example that was coming to mind. I’ve got so many friends who work in tech sectors and it just looks like AI is coming to gobble up their jobs. I’m just curious, did you have any advice for your son in the moment?

Brett McKay:

No. I’m like, I don’t know, man. Because when I was trying to figure out my career trajectory, I was able to look at my parents. They did the same thing. It was like, well, you go to college and then you apply for a job. Then you work your way up your career and you’re kind of in the same career for most of your life. My dad was a game warden his entire career for 35 plus years. Me, it’s been a little bit different because the economy’s changed. I’ve had adapt with my career with my kids. I’m like, I don’t know what advice to give you because what worked for me and my parents might not work for you. And it’s tough. That’s an example of social acceleration. You’re like, this is absurd. It should work. It worked before. It should work now, why doesn’t it work?

Bobby Jamieson:

I agree. I think that’s a good example. And even though this wasn’t even really on the radar, I mean, I kind of finished writing the book in 2023. It came out in 2025. I do think AI is the 800 pound gorilla of social acceleration right now, of just, yeah, there could be a career you sort of trained for years in and have put in 10 years of work in and an AI computer coding thing can come over and do in 10 minutes what it used to take you a month to do. Yeah, I think we’re in the early stages of seeing some pretty profound disruptions due to that. And I’m not sure there’s a lot of people out there with great answers.

Brett McKay:

Okay. So Ecclesiastes really speaks to this modern phenomenon of social acceleration where you are trying to do more and more, but we don’t feel any more satisfied. So let’s actually dig into what Ecclesiastes has to say about our relationship to time and feelings of progress and permanence. Let’s read some verses from the book. Some of the most famous verses are in chapter one verses four through nine. Could you read that and then let’s talk about it?

Bobby Jamieson:

Sure. A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever. The sun rises and the sun goes down and hastens to the place where it rises. The wind blows to the south and goes around to the north, around and around goes the wind. And on its circuits, the wind returns, all streams run to the sea, but the sea is not full to the place where the streams flow there, they flow Again, all things are full of weariness. A man cannot utter it. The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing. What has been is what will be and what has been done is what will be done, and there’s nothing new under the sun.

Brett McKay:

How do you think these verses flesh out what the preacher means by hevel?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, I mean, I think one of the key points is that we try to live our lives as if there can just be this linear series of quests. I want this, I plan for it, I strive for it, I attain it, and it will make me happy. But this is kind of a poem of reflecting on nature’s cycles. A generation goes and a generation comes. Everybody who’s alive today is going to die. They’re going to be replaced by their kind of successors in the next generation. The wind blows around from the south, but then when the weather system blows itself out and things return to normal, it’s going to come back around from the other direction. So it is all these images of repeating of something that you had kind of on one setting, but then it gets flipped to the other setting. And so what happens is that there’s finally no gain.

It’s not like the whole system moves forward. The whole system just kind of returns to its original setting. And Ecclesiastes is observing these different patterns in nature to basically preach to humanity. The message that’s going to happen to you, your plans, your hopes, your dreams, your aspirations, they’re all going to get reset. Whatever mark you make on the earth, those footprints are going to get filled in time’s going to wear ’em down, the sand is going to blow over ’em, water’s going to wash ’em away. And so we like to think there’s this linear progression toward a goal towards satisfaction, but there isn’t. What’s happened is what’s going to happen again, and it’s going to wipe out your goals, your gains, your satisfaction, and in some ways the key to understanding why are we wired like this? And again, the idea of the absurd, there’s a misfit.

Why is there a misfit between our hearts and the world? It’s there in verse eight. The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing. We always want more. We always want something more. We always want something better. Our senses are hungry for stimulation, for fulfillment, for something good to come to them. And I think Ecclesiastes would say that’s kind of a window into our deeper condition that there’s something we’re hungry for, there’s something we’re striving for. But the point is there’s this misfit, the world’s not built like that, but our hearts are,

Brett McKay:

Yeah, Kierkegaard said, we’re a combination of the finite and the infinite, and that the way those elements contrast can jar with each other. And that gives us a feeling of anxiety. And then I also think we feel that contrast between the cyclical nature of the world and the fact that we’re very oriented to clock time. I mean, we live by the clock, like, okay, I got to be here at this time. This thing’s got to start at this time. And if it doesn’t start at this time, then things have gone wrong.

Bobby Jamieson:

And clock time obviously enables all kinds of stuff to happen. Time only got standardized in terms of everybody being on the same hour, minute, et cetera, ready, set, go. I think as a kind of international Congress meant to facilitate train travel, it has to be this incredible precision and everybody’s got to be synced up if you’re going to have trains moving at dozens of miles an hour down a track to get to a certain city at a certain time, et cetera. So there are things that it enables this kind of regime of the clock, but it also creates a constant pressure. It creates a kind of constant sort of external accountability, and it can tempt us. Rosa is really insightful on this. It can tempt us to think that we actually have more control over our time. Time is a resource that you can sort of save, spend, invest, reclaim, recoup, not waste time is this kind of commodity that we can do all these different things with.

And in some ways that’s kind of metaphorically valid, but it also tempts you to think, oh, I’m in charge of my time. Time is my thing. I get to spend my way. Whereas actually we’re much more subject to time cycles. We’re much more sort of stuck in time. It only goes in one direction. If you really want to be in charge of time, try to make it run backwards. Try to get a do over for that mistake you just made or try to hit pause when your kid is just having some incredibly sweet, fun, cute thing. You just want to savor. Well, it’s going to end. You wish you could pause it, but you can’t. So I think clock time tempts you. Again, it’s that as you have control to think you have more control over time than you actually do.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. You quote this Jerry Seinfeld bit, we talked about saving times like, oh, I’m saving time. He’s like, where does that time go that I saved? Does it go to the end? He’s like, no, you’re dead. You don’t need to build up that. Save time. You’re going to die. It’s a very Ecclesiastes message there.

Bobby Jamieson:

Totally. And Seinfeld as the kind of prototype observational comic, he resonates so much with Ecclesiastes. I think Kohat is kind of like a standup comic in the way that he squints at the world, looks at it from a certain angle, draws kind of a caricature that then makes you go, oh wow, that actually is my life.

Brett McKay:

So work and making money make up a lot of human life. And you talked about that the preacher talks a lot about work and money. What did he say about work and why did he think it was he or absurd?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah. One of the most revealing statements he makes is in chapter four, verses seven and eight, again, I saw vanity under the sun. One person who has no other either son or brother, yet there is no end to all his toil and his eyes are never satisfied with riches so that he never asks for whom am I toiling and depriving myself of pleasure. This also is vanity and an unhappy business. He’s basically diagnosing the workaholic 2,500 years or 3,000 years before somebody coined that term as a psychologist to describe a typical modern struggle. So yeah, he says, that’s motivated by envy. You want to have more than the person next to you. But I think it’s also our hearts are kind of these bottomless desire factories that work is a way not just to sort of earn your basic necessities, but if you can get more money and if more work can get you more money, and if there’s always more stuff that your money can get you, then you never really have an incentive to quit working.

And I think in some ways, even more subtle than money can be the promise of status. We don’t often talk about status or admit it, but status is basically the legitimacy that some institution or group or person confers on you as being worthwhile having standing. And in our society, the only universal currency of statuses work, what you do in your work is the most definitive aspect of where you stand before other people. And so Ecclesiastes diagnoses envy as the big motive that would keep you running on that hamster wheel, that treadmill of always working. And I think envy in some ways, not just of money or of possessions, but frankly even more so of status is a huge motivator.

Brett McKay:

And then this idea of money, like the preacher, he makes a lot of money and he is like, it’s absurd. I didn’t feel good after making all the money. He even talked about all this money I made. It’s going to go to someone after I’m dead and they’re going to waste it away. They’re going to spend it and this is all going to go away because I’m going to have this spin thrift son or grandson. And it was all absurd. All that work I did was for nothing.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, there’s all kinds of reasons. Ecclesiastes finds money dissatisfying, like you said. One is you got to give it all away and who knows what they’re going to do with it. Another is just, you can’t take it with you personally. You leave this life naked as you came into it. Another kind of famous line from Ecclesiastes that gets reused all the time. Another reason is that the more money you have, it frankly brings more problems. There’s people who want to mooch off you. There’s cares that keep you up at night. There’s more things you got to pay for now that you have this money in this property. And of course, the kind of most basic one, the deepest problem is that you can always want more money. The problem is ultimately your love of money that if you start being motivated by money, it becomes your ultimate good.

And so Ecclesiastes in a couple of places warns about being sort of driven or controlled by the love of money. And so I think that’s hugely relevant. I mean, in our society more than ever, money can get you virtually anything and you can sort of monetize anything. I mean, I think it’s great, Brett, that you have this podcast and all other stuff associated with Art of Manliness where you get to build a living doing this stuff that’s helpful for other people. But there’s also kind of a flip side to the sort of ethic of entrepreneurship. You can always have a side hustle. You can always turn this into a gig. You can always be at the back of your mind thinking, is it okay for me to just be enjoying or having a good time or relaxing when, oh, maybe there’s a way to monetize this. You know what I mean? So there’s, in our society more than ever, there’s infinitely more ways you could be kind of enslaving yourself more to money.

Brett McKay:

That’s something I, throughout my career have had to be aware of and sort of do calculus in my head. Am I taking this too far? We monetize, we have advertisements, we’ve sold some things, but there’s other ways I could monetize that I’m, I could become this walking sandwich board on Instagram pitching products all the time, using myself as a brand to hawk products. And I’m like, no, that doesn’t feel good. I’m not going to do that.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, that’s over the line.

Brett McKay:

So the preacher, he says, okay, money and work – it’s not going to make you happy. So he says, well, instead of doing that, I’m going to pursue wisdom. So he tries to get really wise. How did that work out for the preacher?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, his ultimate problem with wisdom, well, there’s a couple of them. One is that basically you see this in chapter two, verse 16 of the wise, as of the fool, there’s no enduring remembrance seeing that in the days to come, all will have been long forgotten. And then he says how the wise dies, just like the fool. And so if you’re looking for wisdom to give you control, if you’re looking for knowledge as a source of kind of mastery over life, sovereignty over the world, if I can get the right answers, if I can get the right philosophy, if I can get the right outlook, this will give me kind of the crowbar to pry open my desired goods I want to get from the world. He says, it’s not going to happen. There’s no control, there’s no guarantees. There’s no sort of this worldly knowledge that’ll give you power over death or freedom from death. So in a way, he really puts and wisdom in the sense of what you can accumulate humanly speaking, what you can learn, what you can discover. He really puts wisdom to the ultimate test and finds it wanting.

Brett McKay:

And then also I think too, the more wisdom or knowledge you gain, it gives you again, that false sense of control. And then things don’t work the way you think they should work. You’re like, oh, I’m really smart. I’ve studied the books and it should go like this and it doesn’t. Like I’m actually more unhappy now because I had this idea of how it should have worked based on my study and my knowledge, and it’s not working like that, and now I’m actually more unhappy. You know what I’m saying?

Bobby Jamieson:

Absolutely. It’s this funny thing where Ecclesiastes is a wisdom book, is a quest for wisdom. But frankly, okay, part of wisdom. And even an ancient philosopher like Socrates, right? What does he know? Well, he knows that he doesn’t know. And there’s a sense in which Khel is kind of similar. Part of wisdom is learning the limits of wisdom, not just the limits of your own wisdom, but the limits of what wisdom can do for you in this world. And frankly, the wisdom of learning. Sometimes our kind of quest for wisdom is really motivated by a quest for control. It’s motivated by trying to have this position of being in charge, being dominant, being sovereign over my circumstances, that actually there’s no wisdom that’s going to do that for you. You’re just as subject to death. You’re just as subject to accident cancer. You name it. As someone who’s never read a single page of a single book.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so the preacher, he tries to find happiness in work, in money, in wisdom, but he finds that they’re all vanity that they don’t ultimately satisfy. He also tries general pleasure like wine, food, laughter, but he doesn’t find lasting meaning there either. You mentioned earlier that he also talks about death a lot. What did Koheleth say about death?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, boy, he said a lot about death. Oh, I mean, one thing he says about death is basically you don’t know when it’s coming and it happens at an evil time, which is dark, but is also bracing and can help you really appreciate the sort of limited and fragile gift that life is. Chapter nine, verse 12 is a good passage on that. Yeah. One thing he says about death is you can’t bring anything with you through it. That’s chapter five, verse 15, man, he says so much about death. I mean, one thing he says about death is that death is the end. Like you were pointing out, you could amass this fortune. This is basically at the end of chapter two. You could amass this fortune, but then you got to give it over to somebody and you have no further say about what they do with it.

So death is the hard and total limit of every pursuit, every project, every pleasure, all the things that we give our hearts to that we think is the stuff that makes life worth living. Death is just an absolute end to all of it. And especially death doesn’t discriminate. He would agree to that extent with, what is it, Aaron Burr’s song in Hamilton. So death doesn’t discriminate, meaning you cannot guarantee that you’ll have a long life or a peaceful death by how you live in this world. And Ecclesiastes Kheled experiences that as a kind of insult, like what? Death chops us all down to size, and it doesn’t do so according to any particular kind of merit or rhyme or reason.

Brett McKay:

Alright. So yeah, death makes things absurd. Basically

Bobby Jamieson:

Death. Death is the ultimate absurdity.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so he spends the first part of Ecclesiastes saying, you can work, you can make a lot of money, you can get really smart, become really powerful, indulge in lots of pleasures, but you’re still going to die. And it’s all just chasing after the wind. It’s he. And that’s kind of depressing. But then he seems to totally change course. Can you read verses seven through 10 in chapter nine?

Bobby Jamieson:

Sure. Go eat your bread with joy and drink your wine with a merry heart. For God has already approved what you do. Let your garments always be always white. Let not oil be lacking on your head. Enjoy life with the wife whom you love, all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun, because that is your portion in life and in your toil at which you toil under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with your might for. There is no work or thought or knowledge or wisdom and shield which you are going.

Brett McKay:

So it seems like he’s saying, do the things that earlier he said won’t bring you happiness. What’s going on there? How can these things that he said were he actually bring us lasting happiness? What’s the shift?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, what is the switch? I think the fundamental one is he is seeing all these things as gifts of God, and then he means that literally God is the creator. God is giving life. God is the one providing this to you. A lot of people will speak about life as a gift or some peak moment as a gift. And I think there’s a real insight there. I think actually Ecclesiastes would say, yeah, trace that insight all the way down. There’s a real reality there that it’s not from you. It’s not ultimately even from this world, it’s from God. So recognizing that life is a gift means I didn’t ultimately create this. I didn’t ultimately deserve this. My work, my skill may have contributed, may have helped to kind of bring this about. But there’s so many things beyond me and apart from me that had to take place.

If I’m a farmer, I know this intimately because it depends upon soil and sunlight and the weather and rain and all sorts of factors that are just clear beyond my control. And I think Ecclesiastes would say, yeah, actually every good thing in your life is like that. So recognizing the limits of your influence, recognizing the limits of your control, even frankly, realistically recognizing the limits of the good thing itself. It is going to end in death. It isn’t going to last forever. You’re not going to have total control over it and be able to make it perfect. When you recognize that there’s kind of a shift in your stance, your attitude, your grip on the thing, you’re not trying to grip it so tight that you kind of choke it. You’re receiving it with open hands. And so I do think Ecclesiastes commends to us, you could say an ethic of gift, an ethic of gratitude, an ethic of recognizing that life is something much more fundamentally that you receive rather than something that you sort of control or conquer. And so once you stop trying to fill your heart to the brim as if this one thing is going to kind of fully and finally satisfy you, you’re free. You’re free to experience all of these things as small good things, small good gifts. So I do think there’s a freedom that comes from trading control for thankful receiving. That’s maybe my kind of summary way of trying to get at what’s happening in these seven passages where Ecclesiastes tells us to get busy enjoying all these things.

Brett McKay:

What does that gift stance look like towards work, for example? What does that look like for you?

Bobby Jamieson:

That’s a good question. I think it looks like learning to treat whatever work I’m getting to engage in even moment by moment, hour by hour, day by day, to try to be thankful for it, to try to give myself to it fully, to try to be alert to the opportunities of maybe ways it might challenge me or help me grow. And to try to recognize and be thankful for if this work in any way benefits somebody else. And I kind of get any glimpse of that, to be thankful for that and to not make my stance toward my work depend upon some farther off payoff that may or may not happen. And the payoff could even be some hoped for kind of fruit of the work itself. If I persevere in this for X number of years and I get it to this level and it develops in this way, well you literally dunno what’s going to happen.

You literally have no idea what’s going to happen tomorrow. And so I think that we can often, of course, we we’re planning creatures, we’re hoping creatures, you have to have some hope for the future to do any work at all. But I think often we can sort of load up our sense of value or worth or expectations really on the kind of compounding future interest that we hope is going to happen. I don’t just mean financially, I mean in terms of the work, its growth, its influence, its development, whatever it is. So I think for me, trying to learn to be present in the moment to whatever challenges there are, whatever opportunities there are, even difficulties in snags and snares as an opportunity to grow in some way. Personally, one kind of one word summary for it would be trying to have an ethic of craft as much as I can.

I’m influenced here by Matthew Crawford, his book Shop Class as Soulcraft or the sociologist Richard Sennett has a wonderful book on craftsmanship, where craft any job that you can both start and finish any job at all that you can do the whole of yourself and have some responsibility for the finished product. There can be an element of craftsmanship. You can control the process, you can control the tools you’re working with. You can respond to difficulties and challenges as a way to actually grow in your skills. So just for me very personally, I write a lot. I preach and teach a lot to try to apply kind of an ethic of craftsmanship to anything at all that I can. When you do that, you actually find that, yeah, the difficulties you run into are ways to get better at working with whatever the materials you are that you’ve been given with.

Brett McKay:

So focus on the process, not the outcome.

Bobby Jamieson:

Exactly. Try to invest as much as you can and learn to enjoy the process, even the more frustrating parts of it. Learn how to become absorbed in process and care less about outcome.

Brett McKay:

Well, what does that gift stance look like towards wealth? Because the preacher says, yeah, enjoy your wealth, enjoy your money. But a lot of scripture can seem kind of down on money or gives a lot of warnings about money. So what does a gift stance towards money and wealth look like?

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, I do think Ecclesiastes allows you to enjoy the good things of this life, including things that could come with wealth or possessions with a clear conscience with a true heart. Most of the things the Bible says about money are against love of money against excess, against being taken captive by wealth. But there’s even passages in the New Testament where the Apostle Paul talks about God giving us all things richly to enjoy, and that really resonates with Ecclesiastes. So I think there are ways to wisely, responsibly enjoy good things in this world. I think there’s also ways to kind of set disciplines limits boundaries. Can you use those things in a way that’s generous and really freely letting others partake of them? Well, you set limits to your own maybe standards of consumption or keeping up with the Joneses or not letting your sense of aspirational lifestyle expand to fill your whole paycheck or go beyond it. So I do think there’s practical and spiritual disciplines you can put in place to frankly guardians the dangers of wealth. At the same time, Ecclesiastes says, yeah, enjoy it.

Brett McKay:

And he says, you can enjoy other pleasures of this world too. Even though he said before that pleasures can be, he says that there is a way you can truly enjoy them.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, yeah, that’s right. So in chapter six, nine, he says, better is the sight of the eyes than the wandering of the appetite. This also is vanity and a striving after win, which basically says any good thing in front of you from a meal to a conversation to time with your spouse to whatever it is, any good thing in front of you can be the source of enjoyment, but you have to kind of discipline your mind and heart to actually be present to actually, as it were, consume the meal that’s in front of you. There is this thing in front of you, if only you’ll look at it, it’s right before you. But we so often do you kind of look away from the thing that’s right in front of you and your appetite wanders off into all these directions. So yeah, the modern world, your appetite can wander off infinitely indefinitely. You can get whatever you want. There’s actually a discipline of enjoyment that can kind of serve as a bridge from his more dark sayings to the actual ones about enjoyment. Enjoyment actually takes discipline. You somehow have to tie your appetite to this thing that’s right there in front of you, rather than being like, oh, what if it was this? Or, oh, this could be better. Or, oh, this happened last time, or I wish I was here.

Brett McKay:

And I think this all ties in nicely with Rosa, this idea of taking a gift stance towards life. You can’t control gifts, and if you stop grasping for control, it counterintuitively makes the thing more enjoyable.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah, a hundred percent. Rosa even talks about resonance having the character of a gift, and that’s one way to understand the experience of resonance. So I think Rose is really insightful and I think there’s something about even whatever parts of your work life or your various responsibilities might seem to have the most element of toil. If you’ve got little kids, it might be cleaning up their messes, taking care of their bodily needs. There’s aspects of taking care of little kids that are a grind. It’s donkey work, but how can you learn to enjoy even that, both with your kids and the time you get to spend with them, and frankly, enjoy that donkey work for the sake of your kids. It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it. And the fact that you’re getting to do this and having to do this because of these gifts of human beings that are in your life, even that it could allow for a little bit of resonance, a little bit of enjoyment to come through in the toil that might come with say, the care of young children.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I do that a lot. Something my kids do, it’s really annoying, but I’ve had to reframe it in my mind is that they’ll get printer paper out of the printer and then they leave it open. And so when I print something it doesn’t work, and I’m like, ah. And I want to yell at them, close the printer drawer. But then I think I have kids. This wouldn’t happen if I didn’t have kids. They come with frustrations, but I’m so glad I have kids.

Bobby Jamieson:

They’re making creations, man. For me, it’s like when they leave that stack, there’s like three pages they’ve drawn on, but then they leave like 45 spread out over the couch. Right.

Brett McKay:

You have kids. This wouldn’t happen if I didn’t have kids, so enjoy it. I mean, how has Ecclesiastes helped you remember that life is for a living? Cause I think that’s the message that the preacher ends with. It’s like this life is for living. It’s not for scheming and gain and all that stuff. It’s just for living.

Bobby Jamieson:

Yeah. I think in some ways that kind of stuff, we’ve been circling around for the last few minutes, like learning to be present for life’s present goods, both that that’s a gift to be enjoyed, and frankly that it takes a certain discipline. Like you’re at the pool with your kid in the summer, it’s three o’clock on a Saturday. Just be there. That is the only place you can be, and boy is it a great place to be. So whether it’s 3:00 PM on a Saturday in the summer, whether it’s having a bonfire in the fall and just roasting a hot dog in your backyard, whatever it might be, that’s the only moment you have. That’s what Martin Luther was commenting on something in chapter five where he basically said, this is the key statement of the whole book. That the present moment is the only moment you have.

It’s the only one that belongs to you, and there really is a choice of receiving it as a gift, enjoying it. And that takes a kind of self-limiting, it takes shrinking yourself down to fit yourself in. Here’s where I am as a Christian. I believe, here’s where God has put me. Here’s the moment he has for me right now. Maybe for a lot of people, they get to a certain age, maybe 35, 40, or maybe if they’re raising a family, their kids get to a certain age. Some of these lessons start to kind of dawn on you. But I think that Ecclesiastes, that learning how to be present in the presence, and that’s the only way to enjoy it. I think it’s maybe been the biggest sort of deepening of that for me personally in all the years I’ve spent wrestling with the book.

Brett McKay:

Well, Bobby, this has been a great conversation. Where could people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Bobby Jamieson:

Sure. Yeah. I’m on Twitter, Bobby Jamieson, the book has a little website with Penguin Random House. Those would be two ways to connect.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Bobby Jamieson, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Bobby Jamieson:

Thank you so much.

Brett McKay:

My guest day was Bobby Jamieson. He’s the author of the book, Everything Is Never Enough. It’s available on amazon.com. Check out our show notes at aom.is/EverythingisNeverEnough, where you can find links to resources to delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think will get something out of it. Word of mouth is the primary way we grow. As always, thank you for the continuous support. 

Until next time, this is Brett McKay reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but to put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Most of us chase goals — starting a business, running a marathon, getting a promotion — without ever asking: What are the actual odds this will work?

My guest today says those odds aren’t just graspable — they’re hackable.

Kyle Austin Young is a strategy consultant and the author of Success Is a Numbers Game. He argues that every goal comes with a hidden probability of success or failure, and by thinking strategically — rather than just hoping for the best — you can tilt the odds in your favor.

In the first part of our conversation, Kyle explains the three common ways people pursue goals and their potential downsides. We then unpack how to approach your goals through probability hacking. We discuss how to spot the weak links in your plan, how to map out a “success diagram” that helps you avoid common pitfalls and pursue goals more intelligently, and how to use these same principles to know when you should quit a goal.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Podcast #387: Think Like a Poker Player to Make Better Decisions
• AoM Podcast #840: When to Quit
• AoM Podcast #490: Can You Learn to Be Lucky?

Connect With Kyle Austin Young

• Kyle’s website
• Kyle on LinkedIn

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

Download this episode.

Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript 

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here, and welcome to another edition of The Art of Manliness podcast. Most of us chase goals, starting a business, running a marathon, getting a promotion without ever asking what are the actual odds this will work. My guest today says those odds aren’t just graspable, they’re hackable. Kyle Austin Young is a strategy consultant and the author of Success is a Numbers Game. He argues that every goal comes with a hidden probability of success or failure. And by thinking strategically, rather than just hoping for the best, you can tilt the odds in your favor. In the first part of our conversation, Kyle explains the three common ways people pursue goals and their potential downsides. We then unpack how to approach your goals through probability hacking. We discuss how to spot the weak links in your plan, how to map out a success diagram that helps you avoid common pitfalls and pursue goals more intelligently. And how to use these same principles to know when you should quit a goal. After the show’s over, check out our show notes at aom.is/ProbabilityHacking. All right, Kyle Young, welcome to the show.

Kyle Austin Young:

Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

Brett McKay:

So you got a new book out. It’s called Success is a Numbers Game, and in this book you argue that every goal, whether it’s to start a business, get a promotion, run a marathon, find a spouse even, every goal has a hidden probability of success and failure. And once you understand that, you can start hacking your probability of success. Walk us through when you first arrived at this insight.

Kyle Austin Young:

In many ways, it wasn’t necessarily a happy origin story. I think what I can trace it back to most clearly was a couple of layoffs. Early in my career, I had different management level positions at a young age, great opportunities. It was cool to have these leadership roles, and I got laid off twice in 13 months. In one case, I had just bought my first house. The second time we were in the process of adopting our daughter, which is a famously expensive process. And both times I had to go to my wife and say, I lost my income. And so as I thought about how I was going to ultimately replace that income, I was really fortunate. The day after the second layoff, I had four different people offer me positions. And what I learned from that though was that there were a lot of people who liked me.

There were a lot of people who respected the work that I was doing, and yet I was unemployed, right? And so what I ultimately drew from that is just the reality that the projects I was involved in were linked to my own future. It wasn’t enough to show up and do my job really well. If the projects weren’t successful, if the organizations didn’t succeed, I was still going to be at risk of losing my income. So ultimately, when I had those four different offers, I went to lunch with somebody who gave me some really generous advice and said, I hate seeing you have to restart over and over again. What if you took fractional roles with these four different organizations, diversified your income a little bit? So I did that, and one of the ways that I approached consulting was I wanted to do everything I could, regardless of what I was hired for, I wanted to take as much responsibility as I ethically could for that company’s success, for that project’s success.

I wanted them to be in a position where they could pay me for a long time. And so that really became the foundation of the consulting career I launched 10 years ago, and it’s grown since then. That led me to start thinking about every project having a probability of success, a probability of failure, wanting to have a sense of where those odds stood when I took on a new client. And then it was about what can I do to tilt the odds in my favor, make these people as successful as possible and reap the rewards of that shared success.

Brett McKay:

So you argue that when people establish a goal, they typically take three approaches to achieve that goal. The first one is people typically choose goals where they know the odds are on their side. They’re just like, yep, I know I can do that. I’m going to go for that. What are some examples of that and what are the downsides of pursuing this path to success?

Kyle Austin Young:

Yeah, a lot of people want to prioritize goals where they have good odds of success, and I totally celebrate that. In fact, I think that for many people, it’s wise to start with those goals before you pursue some bigger goals because typically success will beget success. The connections or the resources or the experience that you get out of these small wins will often change your odds on more unlikely pursuits. But when it comes to what are examples of people chasing goals where the odds are already on their side, a really famous example is nepo babies, the children of famous or successful individuals will have advantages at their parents’ profession. Most of us don’t identify as a nepo baby. Most of the people that we would call an nepo baby don’t identify as nepo babies. So that’s not necessarily something that’ll relate to everybody, but the reality is all of us have areas of advantage, and it doesn’t have to be an enormous advantage.

Just incremental changes in your attributes can have a huge impact on your odds. So if you’re open to it, I’ll give you an example that has some numbers that has to do with the idea of playing in the National Basketball Association. That’s a goal that a lot of guys have, especially when they’re younger. I had it when I was a kid, I don’t anymore, but that’s a goal that many people have had. And so one of the things that research has found is your height is a huge indicator of how likely you are to make it into the NBA. And so I’ll give you some numbers if you’re shorter than six feet tall, and the average US male is five foot nine, I’m shorter than six feet tall, I’m five 11. If you’re shorter than six feet tall, your odds of playing in the NBA are one and 1.2 million.

Those are terrible odds, one and 1.2 million. But what’s really interesting is if you’re between six feet tall and six three, that’s not a huge difference. Shorter than six feet to six feet tall to six three, your odds go from one in 1.2 million to one in a hundred thousand, and that’s still unlikely. But with this one small change, your outlook just got 10 times better. If you’re between six four and six foot seven, your odds are actually one in 8,000. If you’re between six eight and six 11, it’s one and 200. And if you’re one of the few people who are over seven feet tall, your odds actually according to this data published by the New York Times become an astonishing one in seven. So as we increase a person’s height, we watch their odds of playing in the NBA go from one in 1.2 million to one in seven.

That’s the difference between the total population of New Hampshire and a line at Starbucks. That’s the size of the change. And this all happened with just these incremental differences in a person’s height. So we all have areas where we have advantage. We may not have as much advantage as other people. There can certainly be wisdom in leaning into those goals, especially early in your career, early in your life. But as you’ve mentioned, there is a downside to that. And the downside is the goals where you have the best odds might not be the goals that you’re most energized to pursue. In my case, my dad’s an optometrist. He runs a successful optometry practice. I could have inherited that. Starting at your own optometry practice is a difficult thing to do. He’s done all of that. It’s already in place. I could have inherited that clientele. I could have inherited those systems, that equipment, and I would’ve had great odds at continuing the success of that practice. I didn’t want to be an optometrist. That wasn’t what ultimately made the most sense for me. So even though I have a lot of respect for what he’s accomplished, it wasn’t a goal that I wanted to own for myself. And so because of that, this opportunity where I would’ve had a pretty good chance of success was left kind of untapped by me, and I pursued different things.

Brett McKay:

So there are advantages to pursuing this path. It’s just finding out what your advantages are and capitalizing on them. But I just said, if you just pursue goals where your odds are in your favor, you might be playing it small or you might be pursuing goals you’re not particularly interested in.

Kyle Austin Young:

Yeah, absolutely.

Brett McKay:

So yeah, that takes some reflection. A second path people do when they’re going after goals is chase unlikely goals and hope you get lucky and you say, this is the most popular approach. Why is that?

Kyle Austin Young:

Yeah. And when I say the word popular, a more appropriate word might be common. I don’t think a lot of people are doing it intentionally, but the reality is that most people never stop to consider their odds of success. And I’ll probably get some opportunities while we’re talking to give examples of some of the mistakes we make in our thinking, but they don’t even stop to reflect on what their odds of success are. And most big goals are unlikely to succeed. If we think about even just the statistics that kind of circulate in the public consciousness, I’m not trying to give you numbers to cite in a research study, but it’s pretty well known this idea that nine out of 10 businesses fail. It’s pretty well known that most people who set a New Year’s resolution will fail to accomplish it. I googled that, and it actually says it’s between six and 9% of people who accomplish their New Year’s resolutions.

The vast majority are failing. So what can we take from that? Well, what we can take from that is that most big goals have bad odds of success, and most people are never even stopping to consider their odds. So I wouldn’t say that this is necessarily what most people are intentionally doing, but this is how most people are living their lives. They never stop to actually consider, is this something that I could reasonably expect to succeed at? And then they dive in with no understanding of what their odds are and hope that it goes well. But ultimately, I think that’s why we see such high failure rates to some extent. Some of it is just the inherent challenge level of these goals. Some of it is how little work people are doing to optimize their odds of success. And I’m here to help people try to do that more intentionally.

And I think that where it really starts for a lot of people is just this idea of thinking negative. And I think that’s what so many of us are afraid to do. We’re raised to think positive, we’re raised to believe, well, if it’s meant to happen, it’ll happen. We’re raised to kind of avoid the uncertainty of, in reality, there’s a chance that you’ll succeed. There’s a chance that you’ll fail. So we avoid looking at the potential bad outcomes that could sabotage our success. And when we don’t take those seriously, we don’t really give ourselves a reasonable chance of avoiding them and ultimately getting the outcome we want.

Brett McKay:

All right, so that second approach is just winging it.

Kyle Austin Young:

Yeah, it’s winging it a hundred percent. And I don’t think that people are doing it because they’re lazy, and I don’t think people are doing it because it’s necessarily what they want. I think most people believe their odds are unknowable and unchangeable, that they don’t think that they actually have a path to having a sense of what their odds of success are. And so I wrote this book to give people a way to actually understand here’s how likely I am to accomplish this goal, and then beyond that, to give them a five step framework for improving those odds so that they’ll have a better shot at getting what they want.

Brett McKay:

If I look back on all the big pursuits that I’ve taken on, I would say I was doing that second approach like, oh, that looks like fun to do. I’m going to go for it. And I really didn’t understand if it was going to succeed or fail, and I was just winging it. And I mean, some of them really paid off. So there can be some virtue in that.

Kyle Austin Young:

Totally. And there are some goals that we have a moral obligation to pursue. Even though the odds are terrible, we should try to cure cancer. That’s an unlikely goal. I’m fortunate to be an investor in a company that’s trying to create a new treatment for cancer, but obviously it’s an unlikely goal to try to cure cancer. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pursue it. So I’m not saying that it’s universally wrong to pursue goals with bad odds. I am saying that we have an opportunity typically to live more rewarding lives if we make space for high probability goals. And certainly if we do everything we can to optimize our odds of success at any goal we’re pursuing, regardless of how improbable it might be at the beginning.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so the third way you pursue a goal or unlikely goal is to do so strategically by plain bad odds through multiple attempts. And you say, this is the approach that artists and entrepreneurs often take. What does that look like?

Kyle Austin Young:

Sure. So a 90% chance of failure to many people means a dead end. If I were considering a goal that had a 90% chance of failure, it’s like, okay, well no point in doing that. That could never succeed. In reality, that’s not what that number is telling us. It means that for every 10 attempts, we predict one success and nine failures, but there is a predicted success. And so at a societal level, when we see those types of successes, we say that people got lucky. We say that, well, nine people failed. One person succeeded. I guess that one person got lucky. Not necessarily that person didn’t beat the odds. The odds played out as expected, and they were the beneficiary of those predicted successes. But there’s an opportunity for us as individuals to sort of act like our own miniature society and we can through repeated attempts, experience both the predicted success and the predicted failures.

And so an example of that in entrepreneurship, like you mentioned, would be a perva meta in 2020, it was eight years into the company Instacart, which he had founded, and COVID happened, and it drove thousands of new customers to give grocery delivery a try. And when that happens, he says, we saw five years of growth in a matter of five weeks. Over a span of 10 months, their valuation increased by over $9 billion. That has the appearance of incredibly lucky timing. And to some extent, I’m comfortable with people saying that it is, but it’s not miraculous timing. Meta estimates that he actually launched around 20 businesses before he founded Instacart. He started an ad network for gaming companies, a social media site for lawyers. And so it’s not that shocking that one of his 20 businesses was in the right place at the right time. So there certainly is merit in using multiple attempts to try to accomplish big goals.

And like you mentioned, that is also true in the arts. The goal of trying to create enduring works of art, it’s so unlikely that you would produce something that would still be talked about centuries later, an incredibly difficult thing to do. Some people who have accomplished it, Mozart accomplished it. Beethoven accomplished it. How did they do it? Is it this transcendent amount of talent that they had? Their talent certainly is helpful, but they’re also so much more prolific than we realized. Mozart, maybe five songs by Mozart, that’s probably how many I know. He composed over 600 pieces of music. Beethoven composed over 700 pieces of music, van Gogh painted and sketched so prolifically. He actually averaged roughly one new work of art every 36 hours for 10 years. That’s an incredible rate of production. And when you have so much input going into the world with a certain amount of talent, it dramatically increases your odds of creating something that stands the test of time.

Brett McKay:

You talk about the Miracle on Ice, when the US beat Russia, as an example of gaining success through multiple attempts. Tell us about that because people are like, well, how is it a multiple attempt? They only played Russia once. There’s that one game that decided if you got the gold or not.

Kyle Austin Young:

Sure. So in the context of that single Olympics, there was one game where they faced the Soviet Union. That’s true. What makes this an example of multiple attempts is the fact that the Olympics were played every four years for a long period of time, and the Soviet Union were absolutely this incredible favorite to win that game for nearly 20 years. They owned Olympic hockey, they won four straight gold medals than they got a bronze. And after the bronze, they went on a streak where they had 27 wins, one loss, and one tie. They outscored their opponents 175 to 44. Unbelievable how dominant they were in Olympic hockey. But there were some teams over the course of their full Olympic run that did beat them or tie them. The United States, Czechoslovakia, Canada, Finland and Sweden, those are the five teams that either beat or tied the Soviet Union out of the 17 total countries that the Russians faced.

So 17 opponents, five ever achieved some success. And it looks like a random list at first glance, but it’s not. There’s a common thread with all five of those countries. The Soviets faced the vast majority of their opponents four times or fewer. It was an average of 1.9 attempts, but five countries played the Russians more than three times that average with at least seven official attempts in Olympic play. And what five teams were those? They were the five teams that either beat or tied them. The United States, Czechoslovakia, Canada, Finland and Sweden. I got the really cool opportunity when I was writing this book to interview Jack O. Callahan, a defenseman from that 1980 US team, and he says that before they went out and took the ice coach, Herb Brooks gave a speech and Jack says he doesn’t remember exactly what the speech said. The different players on the team remembered a little bit differently, but he knows that he left thinking if we played him 10 times, they could beat us nine times, but they’re not going to beat us tonight.

And that is I think a reflection to some extent of the fact that the United States by playing them so many times, gave themselves an opportunity to win once they actually won twice. Over the course of that rivalry, the Soviets won the vast majority of the times they played, but there was some success for the United States. And because success begets success, sometimes even just one win can make a big difference. I have some stats in the book that I don’t know off the top of my head, but that show the change in makeup of the National Hockey League All-Star team after the Miracle on Ice, it inspired so many American kids to start playing hockey. And it was something like, it went from no representation on the All-Star team to now quite a few American born players are among the best hockey players in the world, and that all started with one win.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so this pursuing success through multiple attempts, it works. There are odds that are there, and if you do something enough times, the odds will maybe land on you eventually. The downside of that, I imagine, is that it could take a while or you could waste a lot of energy, time and money pursuing bad odds through multiple attempts.

Kyle Austin Young:

Yeah, that’s absolutely true. And there’s some goals where it wouldn’t work at all. If the odds are so bad, then you could spend your entire life pursuing something without ever finding success. Some goals. The nature of it makes it unlikely. Let’s take the goal of trying to graduate from college. There are people in certain circumstances who are going to be less likely to graduate from college. One filter that I show in the book is actually the size of their parents’. Income is a pretty strong predictor of how likely people who enroll in college are to actually graduate because that money that their parents have helps eliminate the risk of potential bad outcomes, being able to pay for tuition. What if my car breaks down? What if I need tutoring? Am I going to have to work a job? So it wouldn’t make sense for somebody who is trying to graduate from college to enroll in four separate universities with the hopes of playing the odds and one of them succeeding. So there are goals where it doesn’t make any sense at all. And in those situations, we certainly have an opportunity to choose goals based on our odds of success. But what I get really passionate about and the foundation of my consulting work is helping people change their odds and take something that might be a predicted failure and turn it into a predicted success.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so that takes us to the fourth way you pursue goals. This is probability hacking. This is what the book is about. But before you can understand probability hacking, you have to understand some rudimentary things about probability. The problem is humans have a really hard time understanding probability. Why is that?

Kyle Austin Young:

Well, I think that the biggest reasons, I just don’t think many of us get any education on it whatsoever. Something that I think is really interesting is that I think almost all of us took a class on trigonometry. Trigonometry is important, really interesting, but it’s for the most part, only used in really specific professions like engineering and architecture. I’ve never used trigonometry in my career. Probability affects all of us all the time, and most of us didn’t get any training on it at all. So I do think it can be difficult to understand. I think that I’ve worked hard to make it as understandable as possible, but I think the reason so many of us are struggling is nobody ever told us.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think I remember one section in middle school math where they talked about probability and then it was really quick and then you didn’t revisit it after that.

Kyle Austin Young:

Sure.

Brett McKay:

So when people try to think about probability, what do they typically mess up when they’re thinking about probability of goals, for example?

Kyle Austin Young:

Yeah, let’s unpack this in the context of an example. Okay, let’s say that you want to run a marathon. That’s a goal that you’ve set, but you’re doing it on sort of short notice. Let’s say you have 90 days to get ready. That’s by most standards, not a lot of time to prepare for a marathon if you’re not already an active runner. So you hire a running coach and she tells you, I can get you there. I can get you ready to go, but you’re going to have to do three things. I’ve got a three step routine. You’re going to need to eat, sleep, and train the way that I tell you to. If you do all three of those things, I can have you ready in 90 days. If you don’t do all three of those things, if you cheat on them or if you only do some of them, or if you’re inconsistent, there’s no way I can get you ready to run a marathon in three months.

So let’s take those three prerequisites to our success. We need to eat the way that we’re supposed to eat, sleep the way we’re supposed to sleep and train the way we’re supposed to train. And let’s put some numbers on it. And I’ve just picked up my cell phone, open the calculator app. This is very easy math, but let’s say that we feel pretty good about each of these things. I’m using made up numbers. Let’s say that we think that we have a 70% chance of sticking with the nutrition plan, a 70% chance of sticking with the sleep schedule and a 70% chance of sticking with the training regimen, going out and actually running. So there’s three things that need to go and we think we have a 70% chance at each of them. What many people do you ask? What are the mistakes that we make in our thinking?

What most people do is what could be called averaging. We look at the prerequisites to our success. We try to get a sense of in our minds how likely we are to accomplish each of those things, and then we typically average them. And so in this case, each of these things we think has a 70% chance of happening. Many people would say, great, I have a 70% chance of successfully running this marathon. Even the people who on pen and paper might get the math problem will still typically do that in their day-to-day thinking. But in truth, you can’t average if you have something that has to go right in order to accomplish a goal, you have to multiply those odds together if you want to get the actual estimate of how likely you are to succeed. So in this case, if we have a 70% chance of eating the way we’re supposed to, a 70% chance of sleeping the way we’re supposed to and a 70% chance of training the way we’re supposed to, we find that we actually have a 34% chance of being ready on race day. That’s a predicted failure. Even though each of these things look good individually, the goal as a whole is not expected to succeed. And I think that’s the number one mistake that people make when they’re thinking about their odds of success.

Brett McKay:

So that’s the key thing. That’s the key point you put there. Your odds of accomplishing a goal could be understood as the odds of each thing that must happen in order for you to succeed multiplied together.

Kyle Austin Young:

Right. And a lot of people miss the fact that the more things that have to go, the lower your odds are going to be. If there’s even one step that is unlikely to happen, then your overall odds aren’t going to be very high. That’s why we have to do what we can to change our odds of success.

Brett McKay:

And going back to that example of the marathon, another point about probability is as you accomplish a step, your odds start to go up. So in the beginning, it’s 34%. If you multiply 70% times 70% times 70%…

Kyle Austin Young:

Right. 

Brett McKay:

Let’s say you successfully stick to the diet plan 100% throughout the thing. Well now your odds go up.

Kyle Austin Young:

Yeah, that’s absolutely true.

Brett McKay:

It’s a hundred times 70 times 70 after.

Kyle Austin Young:

Sure, that’s exactly right. In this case, the hypothetical I’ve set up is sort of poorly constructed for this in the sense that we want you to do all three of these things for 90 days, but let’s flip it. Let’s just for imagination sake say that for one month we need to follow a nutrition plan. Then for the next month we need to follow a sleep schedule. Then for the next month, we need to follow a training plan. If we were to make it through the first month, then we would only have two more prerequisites to our success. And if both of those had a 70% chance of happening exactly what you just said, we would be up to a 49% chance of success. That’s quite a bit better. If we made it through the second month for the last month, we would’ve a 70% chance of success, right? Because we’ve taken care of those other prerequisites. So you’re absolutely right for goals that have a more linear structure, which many of them do, every time you accomplish a step on the path to getting what you want, your odds improve. And if that was an unlikely step, your odds can improve enormously.

Brett McKay:

And going to that idea of an unlikely step, your odds can exceed your most unlikely step.

Kyle Austin Young:

Yeah, your odds will never be better than the least likely step. If there’s something that absolutely has to happen for you to succeed, let’s say that you have to have a certain superior’s approval in order to get a proposal through at work. Without that, it can’t happen. If you only have a 10% chance of getting that approval, then your overall odds are going to be lower than 10% because there’s probably other things that need to happen too. You can never outperform your most unlikely step, and that’s why it’s really important to prioritize those steps when you’re trying to change your odds. It can also be really important to try to front load those steps. If I need somebody’s approval in order to get a proposal passed and there’s only a 10% chance of that happening, it could be smart to start by asking for the approval so that if they say, no, I won’t waste a lot of time on trying to get other team buy-in, creating a prototype, putting pitch decks together, whatever the case may be. If I’m going to fail, it can be good to fail fast so that I can recover faster. Move on to other ideas.

Brett McKay:

Any other big picture ideas about probability that people have to understand before they can start probability hacking?

Kyle Austin Young:

I think the only other one is you need to recognize that the odds of all possible events add up to a hundred percent. If I flip a coin, there’s two possible outcomes, 50% chance of heads, 50% chance of tails in real life, our goals aren’t that simple, but the same principle holds the odds of all possible outcomes are going to add up to a hundred percent. What that teaches us is if we want to improve our odds of success, we have to get away from this idea that we’re going to somehow wish something into existence. A lot of people want to use commitment as this antidote to risk commitment doesn’t de-risk your goal at all, confidence or grit. That’s not going to reduce the risk of bad outcomes. In the case of the marathon, if we need to train for 90 days, what are some potential bad outcomes that could go wrong that could keep us from sticking to the training plan?

Maybe it’s raining on a day when we need to train. Maybe we get shin splints halfway through the 90 days. Maybe we lose our motivation and we just don’t want to get out of bed and go running. Maybe our family events happen in our lives and our schedule becomes too busy. All of those are potential bad outcomes that could keep us from accomplishing the training plan. All of those outcomes, the odds of each of the bad outcomes and the odds of the one good outcomes sticking with the training plan are going to add up to a hundred percent. And so if we want to change our odds of success, we need to think negative. We need to look at what are the bad outcomes that could keep me from getting this? How can I make those less likely to happen so that I can bring those odds over to my side? Probability can be understood a lot like how we’ve traditionally understood matter. The idea that it can’t be created or destroyed, it can just be transferred and rearranged. The odds that you want are hiding in your potential bad outcomes. We need to find those, make them as unlikely as possible and bring the odds over to our side.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so we got some basic principles of probability. I like the idea your odds of accomplishing a goal can be understood as the odds of each thing that must happen in order for you to succeed, multiply it together if there’s multiple steps in your goal, the way you figure out the probability is you figure out the probability of each step and then you multiply those together. And that leads to the idea that the more steps your goal has or more substeps your goal has, the odds are going to go down. True. Your odds of success are going to get harder because you add more things you can multiply. The odds of achieving your goal will never be higher than the odds, your most improbable prerequistie goal.

We talked about that also, commitment doesn’t magically change the odds just by wanting it more. If there’s a risk in something, then that risk still remains. Though. I do think that when commitment shows up as concrete behavior like working harder, prepping better, having a higher toleration for discomfort, it can increase your odds by shrinking specific ways you can fail. So I think those are the big things that people can think about so they can help establish goals and think about their probability of success. With that out of the way, we can start talking about probability hacking. And a key skill for this is success diagrams. So what is a success diagram?

Kyle Austin Young:

So a success diagram is where you map out everything that has to go right in order for you to accomplish a goal. And I know that’s a little bit challenging in an audio format, but you just painted I think a really good picture for us. It’s everything that has to go just lined up one after the other, and then ultimately at the end you can multiply those out and get a sense of your odds of success. And what I do is beneath each thing that has to go right, I write down the potential bad outcomes that I can imagine happening instead of what I want. So in the context of the marathon example, we made up a few for the idea of training that it could be raining on a day when I have to train, I might lose my motivation, I might deal with shin splints.

I put those beneath each. I call them critical points. But each of these prerequisite steps on the path to success. And then the probability hacking framework is really just the very fun, creative opportunity to try to systematically de-risk our goals. What can I do to make each of those bad outcomes less likely to happen if I think that it might rain on a day when I have to train, what can I do about that? Maybe I need a gym membership for the next 90 days so that I’ll have an alternative place to train. Maybe I need a treadmill in my house. If I’m worried about a lack of motivation, what can I do about that? Maybe I need a running partner, somebody who could hold me accountable, help me get through. This may be demanding season. If I’m worried about family or work swamping my schedule, what can I do about that?

Well, maybe I have an opportunity to train first thing in the morning before those things can all go wrong. Maybe I need to buy an extra pair of running shoes and keep those in my car so that if I get a gap in my schedule, I’ll be able to get out there and do this work. So you go through step-by-step potential bad outcome by potential bad outcome, trying to make each of those risks as unlikely as possible. And I want to again, just demonstrate the opportunity here. When we thought we had a 70% chance of accomplishing each of these three things, our odds were 34%. Let’s say that after this creative work of probability hacking, we think there’s a 90% chance we’ll eat the way we’re supposed to, and a 90% chance we’ll sleep the way we’re supposed to, a 90% chance we’ll train the way we’re supposed to. That’s a 73% chance of success. We’ve just taken something that was predicted to fail and turned it into something that was predicted to succeed. And we didn’t do that by really committing and really digging deep and saying, I’m going to run this marathon. That’s not going to prevent the rain. But there are some strategic steps we can take to prepare for that, to respond to that and to improve our odds.

Brett McKay:

Alright, so this is all about considering here are all the things that are going to have to go right. And then for each one of those things, here’s the potential bad outcomes that could keep us from getting what we want. And you just talked about an example where you put real numbers to certain outcomes, and that’s something you can do to ballpark the probabilities of things based on all your specific personal circumstances. And sometimes you can do research for statistics for the probabilities of things like starting a successful restaurant, but some of our goals are so personal that you’re not going to find outside numbers for it. You’re not going to be able to peg the probabilities exactly. But this framework still works to increase your chances for success. So give us another real world example where you haven’t put exact numbers, the probabilities of potential outcomes, but you can still use probability hacking to increase your odds of success.

Kyle Austin Young:

What we just did is something I call a predictive hack, but I also have in the book what I call an easy hack, where it’s not about predicting our odds of success. Predictions aren’t going to be perfect. I don’t have a model for you that’s going to give you perfect numbers. And even if I did, a 99% chance of success still says you’re going to fail sometimes, not often, but you’re going to fail sometimes. And I give some examples of people who have experienced really unlikely failures. I tell the story of a client, Marianne Roach Smith, who got this incredible book deal, did an amazing job writing a book that was so popular the day before it was supposed to be released. It was number 32 in the the entire Amazon store. This book was poised on pre-order to be one of the biggest books that have been released in years.

The next day her book comes out, she’s headed to the dentist when she gets a call from her husband, he’s the editor of a local newspaper, and he said, turn on the television. She turns on the TV, and she watched as a plane crashed into the World Trade Center. She’d launched her book on September 11th, 2001, and at that point, it didn’t matter that they were number 32 in the world the day before. All of a sudden, the media was so consumed by the news cycle surrounding the terrorist attack that there was no opportunity to launch a book. So having good odds of success doesn’t guarantee success, and that’s why sometimes it’s appropriate to even just take the numbers out of the equation. If we don’t know all of the steps that we’re going to have to accomplish, our numbers would be wrong anyway. So lemme give you an easy hack example.

When I graduated from college, I didn’t want to start with an entry level position. I just wasn’t motivated by that. I was 21 years old and I decided I was going to try something really audacious. I was going to apply to become the product development director for a health organization. If I got the job. I was going to be managing people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies, people with PhDs and master’s degrees. I was 21 years old. I had a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of Oklahoma. Pretty ambitious goal, pretty ambitious goal. I was interviewing against people who had so much more experience than I did, but I used the same approach, and this was years before I even started consulting. I tried to identify what are the potential bad outcomes that could keep me from getting this job. The obvious one was, what if they looked down on me because they think I’m too young?

So I took a really simple step in response to that. I just grew a beard. It wasn’t anything magical. It wasn’t anything crazy. I just grew a beard so that I could look significantly older than I looked without a beard to try to lessen some of those concerns. Another potential bad outcome was they might not want to hire me because of a perceived lack of experience. So I tried to change the conversation away from past experience. What I actually did is I wrote a book of everything I was planning to do to turn that department around and make it as successful as possible. I got that book Spiral bound. I handed it out to every person I met on interview day. And so we never talked about my past experience. We talked about here’s my plan for turning the department around. And so they never really saw these kind of glaring holes in my resume in the sense that I was a recent college graduate.

I didn’t misrepresent anything. I just tried to change the emphasis of the conversation. A third thing that I did was the concern that I wasn’t going to fit in with these other team members because they were so much older than I was. That was a potential bad outcome. So I asked one of the members of the team, have you guys as a group read any books lately? And she told me three books that they had read as a department. So I went and read all three books, and I remember one day we had a group interview. It was me and some other candidates. They all had gray hair. I was 21 years old, and I was able to make inside jokes and speak the company’s language because I’d read the same books. One of the books was a book called The Whuffie Factor. It’s about earning trust or social capital in the environment in which you’re competing.

And so when I’m using words like whuffie and my competitors are looking at me like, what on earth is he talking about? And all the internal team members are laughing, I knew that I had done a pretty effective job of hacking that potential bad outcome. The next morning after that group interview, I got an email from the CEO who I’d only met very briefly, but I’d given him a copy of one of my spiral bound plans because I’m crazy. And he said, you’re the most prepared candidate I’ve ever seen. And I knew I had a good shot after that. I ultimately did get the job, became the product development director, held that position for several years. It’s one of the jobs I was ultimately laid off from, but it absolutely positioned me for a career that I don’t think I ever would’ve had, at least not as quickly as I was able to have it without that initial success.

Brett McKay:

Okay. So yeah, so a success diagram, I’ll just recap here for our listeners. You basically establish your goal and then you break that goal into what you call critical points. These are sub goals. And then underneath each critical point or sub goal, you’re going to list out potential bad outcomes for that sub goal. 

Kyle Austin Young:

That’s exactly right.

Brett McKay:

And then once you have that laid out, I mean easy as you said, you can just start looking at the potential bad outcomes and ask yourself, what can I do to eliminate or reduce this potential bad outcome? And that’s going to increase the odds that this critical point is going to be a success.

Kyle Austin Young:

As the odds of your bad outcomes go down, the odds of your good outcomes go up and your overall chance of succeeding can change enormously.

Brett McKay:

So that’s probability hacking.

Kyle Austin Young:

That’s probability hacking.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Well, and then you also talk about something else you can do is not only look at how you can eliminate or reduce the potential bad outcomes of each critical point, but look for ways you can strap a rocket to a racehorse. What does that look like?

Kyle Austin Young:

Sure, there is some truth in that. Generally speaking, the most reliable way to change your odds of success is to go look at your potential bad outcomes. That is generally going to be the most reliable way, because that’s almost always going to work. You’re almost always going to have ways to make bad outcomes, less likely. However, you also have an opportunity, kind of like I alluded to earlier, to design the plan as a whole in a way that will optimize your success. So there might be a prerequisite where you need a person’s approval. Let’s use that again. I gave that example earlier, and we think that we only have a 10% chance of getting it. That’s meaning that our overall odds of success with this current path are terrible. They’re less than 10%. So we have to have this person’s approval and we don’t think we’re going to get it.

So how do you strap a rocket to a racehorse? Well, if we can design a path to that goal that does not require that person’s approval, that’s going to be really important. Is there another way to get around that? Or instead of thinking through the bad outcomes, why is this person likely to reject my proposal? That would certainly be one way to do it. There may be an opportunity to kind of circumvent that and just make a deal with the person. If you back my proposal here, I’ll back this thing that you’re interested in in the future. In that case, the bad outcomes aren’t given an opportunity to materialize because you just sort of took them off the table. There wasn’t really an opportunity to reject the proposal. You made the conversation about something mutually beneficial.

Brett McKay:

That’s another useful aspect of probability hacking, because not only can you see how you can eliminate the risk or reduce the potential bad outcomes, you can look at your plan and figure out, well, how can I rearrange things so that my odds go up? I think it’s a great, and it’ll help you determine whether you should even pursue the goal. Oh, a hundred percent. If there’s a prerequisite that’s like, yeah, that’s just not going to happen. It’s like, well, maybe I don’t pursue this goal.

Kyle Austin Young:

I try to step first.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Even though you could do all the other stuff.

Kyle Austin Young:

Totally. I think a lot of people who are frustrated with some of the results they’ve gotten in life are people who pursued a goal that probably did not have high odds of success. They did it anyway. They didn’t really try to front load the riskier steps. In many cases, we actually avoid the steps that we’re most scared of. And so only after they’d invested significant amounts of time and money did they get to the steps where they were unlikely to ultimately be able to continue forward. And the losses that come from that can be detrimental to our lives for years. And so it’s really important certainly to optimize your odds of success also to, again, front load the steps that are unlikely to work if you have the opportunity to do that. And then to some extent, choose our goal strategically. If somebody told me they were trying to cure cancer, I probably wouldn’t talk ’em out of that. I think that’s a great thing. But if you’re just choosing between should I start company A or company B, I want you to start the company that’s more likely to be successful.

Brett McKay:

So you’ve been working with clients doing consultant work, and you’re doing this success diagramming with them. Are there examples from your own line of work where you saw people who had the same talent or opportunity but then one hacked their odds while the other didn’t?

Kyle Austin Young:

Yeah, I’d be a little bit hesitant to pit clients against each other. But I can tell you something that happened recently that I think is a really good picture of this framework in action. Because again, it all starts with a success diagram. It all starts with getting a bird’s eye view of here’s what’s going to have to happen for me to be successful and realizing that I have an opportunity to take ownership and change my odds. So recently I was hired by a nonprofit that does incredible work, helping the victims of human trafficking, of homelessness, of addiction, hunger, poverty. They’re in a part of the country that has a tremendous amount of need. It takes around 25 million a year for them to do this work. And about half of that money comes in through their thrift stores. They’re able to subsidize it through thrift stores that they own, which is really cool.

The other half comes in through donations, and they had noticed a decline in their donations, and they blamed it on the belief that the newsletters they were sending out were becoming less effective. People were getting bored with it. They thought the content was stale. So they hired different consultants to come in and try to revamp it. And finally they turned to me. When I got brought in really with the goal of creating a new content strategy, I did what I always do. I diagrammed out what’s everything that has to go right for someone to go from subscriber to regular donor for this ministry? And one of the things that was immediately obvious is people need to actually receive the emails. If there’s anything that’s causing them to not get the email where we need them to receive it, then it’s not going to matter how good the content is.

So I did some digging and found that there was actually a glitch in their technical setup that was causing emails to go to spam for a lot of people, and it was a different inbox than what the team was using. So they didn’t know that. They didn’t realize that a huge percentage of their emails were going to spam. I fixed that. And the content that they were already creating already sending out finally reached people and they were able to start to turn around this decline in donations that they had seen. So anytime you’re hacking your odds of success, there’s certainly cases and competitive goals where you have an opportunity to head to head out, maneuver someone else through your probability hacking. I can give some examples of that, but in the context of my client work, it’s usually about what is ultimately keeping us from accomplishing what we want. And a lot of times, it’s not necessarily the thing that I’m getting hired to fix. I go find it anyway.

Brett McKay:

Well, you talk about using probability hacking in competitive head-to-head games, and this is reverse probability hacking.

Kyle Austin Young:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

What is that?

Kyle Austin Young:

Yeah, so reverse probability hacking, we’ll start with the default in probability hacking. I’m trying to make my potential bad outcomes as unlikely as possible. In reverse probability hacking. I’m trying to make my competitors’ potential bad outcomes as likely as possible. I’m trying to bring those bad outcomes to life. I give a couple of examples in the book. One is in the world of competitive swimming, when these super suits, as they were sometimes called, came out, these new swimsuits were designed that were incredibly aerodynamic. And as a result of that, all of these world records were falling. And there was a period of time where most of the top athletes were arguing that the ability to win a gold medal and the ability to set world records had in large part more to do with the swimsuit you were wearing than how talented you were. And I would totally call that an example of probability hacking.

There were people who found a way to minimize resistance in the water, and all of a sudden athletes who maybe were more physically gifted people who were more used to winning these races and setting these records found themselves on the wrong side. There was a really interesting season at the World Championships, I think it was in 2009, where some of the athletes felt so disadvantaged by the swimsuit companies. They had contracts with that they were putting duct tape over the logos of other companies’ swimsuits so that they could try to get away with swimming in what they saw as a faster suit without potentially being sued or fined by their sponsors. So that would be one example. But another one that I talked about in the book is in 2012, the presidential election. So not getting into politics here, certainly a less divisive political time over 10 years ago.

But when Barack Obama ran against Mitt Romney, Mitt Romney was very wealthy, very successful businessman, and one of the real perceived potential bad outcomes for him, both by his own team and by the Obama campaign team, was people might see him as out of touch because of how much money he had, especially in some of the blue collar states where he really needed to compete. So the Obama campaign very strategically did everything they could to further the argument that he was so wealthy that he was going to be out of touch with middle class Americans. And he only won, I believe it was one out of nine battleground states. So many people would argue that that was a successful example of reverse probability hacking.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I went to law school. I have a law background, and you’d see this sort of thing. It’s basically gamemanship is what you’re doing.

Kyle Austin Young:

Sure.

Brett McKay:

You see this in lawsuits when an opposing party makes a discovery request. Well, instead of giving them exactly what they wanted, you just dump as much stuff on them as possible. So they got to spend money and time sorting through all this documentation, and the goal was just to muck things up for them as much as possible. And it sounds like that’s an example of reverse probability hacking.

Kyle Austin Young:

Yeah. I think it is. A potential bad outcome for those people is missing a key insight in the discovery process, and you’ve increased the odds of that happening.

Brett McKay:

How can you use probability hacking and success diagrams to know when you should quit a goal?

Kyle Austin Young:

So this is fairly intuitive, but if you have a good sense of what needs to go right in order to accomplish your goal, and you’ve been able to make estimates that you feel good about when it comes to each of these steps that you’re going to have to accomplish, and again, the success diagram process is designed to really be a gut check for that. This is a similar tool to what leading forecasters use to predict world events, but forcing a person to reckon with, here’s all the things that are going to have to go right. We’re going to stop and really consider what those things are for each one of those things. Here’s the potential bad outcomes that could keep us from getting what we want. And the odds of all of those potential bad outcomes, plus the odd of the good outcome, have to add up to a hundred percent.

Right? The good outcome can only be what’s left over after we’ve accounted for all the bad outcomes. When you do that, you get a more reliable understanding of how likely you are to accomplish a goal. So then you try to probability hack, you try to creatively and systematically de-risk your goal. You try to take out those bad outcomes as much as you can, and if at the end of it you still don’t like your odds of success, then you should really consider potentially pivoting to a different goal. And that doesn’t mean that you’re never going to be to accomplish that goal. I think that’s one of the biggest things that I try to emphasize. Well, there’s two things. One is, again, a success diagram is a path to a goal. It’s possible that you can find another path to the same goal. Maybe you’re not going to be able to accomplish it with this plan, but there might be a totally different plan.

So before you waste a lot of time and money trying to do what you’ve laid out, see if there’s a better way to get that done. But if you can’t think of anything and you ask for input, one of the great things about a success diagram is it’s visual. So you can show it to other people and they can look at it and they can give you feedback. But if you can’t find a way to breakthrough your odds still look bad, then I would encourage you to consider pursuing a different goal. But here’s what I would tell you to do, and I think this is so incredibly important. Don’t throw that diagram away. That diagram is a blueprint for what you’re going to need for your odds to one day change. I think about that in the context of ultimately getting this book published. That was a goal that I had since I was a child.

It’s a weird memory, but as I recall it, I was leaving my great-grandfather’s funeral when my mother asked me, what do you want to do when you grow up? That’s how I remember it. I could be wrong, but she said, what do you want to do when you grow up? And I said, I want to be a writer. And I remember that. I think I was like 11 at the time. It was a long, long time ago that this happened in my mid thirties now. So it took 25 years for me to ultimately accomplish the goal of writing a book. But the goal never left. I knew what I was going to need. I was going to need an agent. I was going to need an audience of people I could sell books to. I was going to need a message. I was going to need some credentials.

Like being a writer for Harvard Business Review and Forbes and Fast Company and Psychology Today, those are certainly things that gave me credibility in a publishing houses’ eyes. And so because I knew that, I was able to very leisurely almost collect those advantages over time to bring this childhood dream to life. So if it is time to quit a goal, if the odds look bad, don’t think of it as quitting it. Think of it as pausing it. Keep that diagram around. And as you live your life, look for ways to rack up advantages in the same way that maybe an under leveled character in a video game might go complete some side quests before they come back to fight the really big boss. You have an opportunity to do that with your goals.

Brett McKay:

I love that. One tip you mentioned, this came from Annie Duke. We had her on the podcast a while back. Instead of vaguely asking, do I think this will happen or not? Ask yourself, would you bet on this? And Annie says, as soon as you start thinking in terms of bets, you’re reminded that each decision has a risk and it forces you to think less vaguely. It’s like, okay, you think this is going to happen? Well, how sure are you? I mean, would you bet on it? And how much money would you bet on it? So it pushes you to be a bit more honest with your probabilities. 

Kyle Austin Young:

Absolutely. Because I recall the Annie Duke book, Thinking In Bets includes a section where she references a study where a group of scientists were asked to make predictions on certain outcomes, and then the next time they were asked to make predictions with some hypothetical money, they were supposed to place bets. And I don’t even think it was real money. I think it was hypothetical money, but as I recall, the study found that they were more accurate when they had even this imaginary money on the line. Again, it’s a gut check. It forces you to stop and really do business with the things that might go wrong.

Brett McKay:

If there was one thing that people could start doing today to start probability hacking, what would it be?

Kyle Austin Young:

Think negative. Think negative. Everybody’s telling you to think positive. I think about the Pixar movie Inside Out 2. There’s the scene where anxiety is sending up all of these potential bad outcomes, and to some extent, they’re kind of dismissive of them. It’s like, well, don’t think like that. No, I say Do think like that, but don’t wallow in despair and fear. Instead, just really practically list out the things that could go wrong and do everything you can to make those less likely. I don’t think that it’s a problem to stop and really visualize the risks associated with our goals, unless we’re just going to let that cause us to give into discouragement. It doesn’t need to. We have an opportunity to respond proactively. So when you think negatively, when you recognize that sort of like how mattered cannot be created or destroyed as we traditionally understood it, your odds of success, you can’t add to your odds of success. You have to go take those odds from your potential bad outcomes. And when you do that consistently in the context of one goal, it can change your outcome over the context of several goals. It can change your career and over the context of a lifetime of goals, it can even change your legacy.

Brett McKay:

Well, Kyle, it’s been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book in your work?

Kyle Austin Young:

Sure. You can find the book anywhere books are sold. You can find it on Amazon, find it on Barnes and Noble. You can find it on the Penguin Random House website. You are more than welcome to come to my website, KyleAustinYoung.com. That’s a place where we can route you out to a lot of those retailers. If you want to connect with me, please also consider reaching out on LinkedIn. Kyle Austin Young.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Kyle Young, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Kyle Austin Young:

Thank you. Enjoyed it.

Brett McKay:

My guest, it was Kyle Austin Young. He’s the author of the book Success is a Numbers Game. It’s available on amazon.com. You can learn more information about his work at his website, KyleAustinYoung.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/ProbabilityHacking, where you can find links to resources to delve deeper into this topic. 

Well, that wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you’ll find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for Art of Manliness Newsletter. We got two options. It’s a daily and a weekly digest. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM. 

And I’d appreciate it if you take one minute to give a review of the podcast on Spotify or your favorite podcasting app. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member you think would get something out of it. As always, thank for the continued support. Until next time, this is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the show, but put what you’ve heard into action. 

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

I finally got around to watching Casablanca this year. I’m a little embarrassed it took this long. I think the delay was due to the fact that I already thought I’d seen it, on account of seeing clips of it so often. It’s part of the ether of pop culture. I knew all the famous lines from the film because they’ve become part of our lexicon: “Here’s looking at you, kid.” “We’ll always have Paris.” “I think this is the start of a beautiful friendship.” 

When I actually did watch the whole thing for the first time, a lot of the beats were indeed familiar. But some things certainly felt fresh, one of them being the themes that jumped out to me. I knew the film centered on a romance, but it turns out to not only be about love itself, but something more profound: the way love can lift a man out of his cynicism and into higher virtues.

Rick Blaine: The Cynical Hustler

The movie takes place in 1941. The world is starting to come apart. Refugees from all over Europe have flooded into Casablanca, a city in French Morocco under the jurisdiction of the Vichy government — the Nazi-collaborating regime in unoccupied France. They’re all hoping to get an exit visa to Lisbon.

The town becomes a waiting room for people trying to escape the chaos of war. You can feel the existential angst there. People can’t go home, and they don’t know how long they’ll be stuck in limbo. The uncertainty breeds anxiety.

While Casablanca is a temporary stop for everyone, for Rick Blaine, it’s home.

Rick (played by Humphrey Bogart) is an American running a popular nightclub and casino called Rick’s Café Américain. It’s the place everyone goes: Vichy officials, Nazi officers, refugees, resistance fighters, and thieves. Everyone goes there because Rick has created a space where anything can happen. He’s taken a hard stance of neutrality on everything going on. As long as you’re a paying customer and behave yourself, you’re welcome to hang out at his cafe.

But to maintain that neutrality, Rick has to keep everything and everyone at arm’s length. He never drinks with customers. He never shows emotion. And, as he says himself, he definitely never, ever sticks his neck out for anyone.

Rick Blaine embodies what some modern film analysts call the ‘Cynical Hustler’ archetype. A deliberate withdrawal from moral participation characterizes it. The Cynical Hustler convinces himself, and those around him, that he is motivated solely by profit and self-preservation.

Rick presents himself as a businessman and nothing more. He keeps conversations short and transactional. When people come to him with problems, he listens just long enough to make it clear he won’t be helping.

Caring, in his mind, is for suckers.

But the interesting thing about Rick is that he wasn’t always like this.

In fact, in a previous life, he was a serial idealist.

In 1935, he ran guns to Ethiopia (a losing cause). In 1936, he fought for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War (another losing cause).

So how did guns-a-blazing idealist Rick Blaine end up as Cynical Hustler Rick Blaine?

The same way all idealists end up jaded and cynical: he got wounded.

What Cynicism Really Is

Cynics often like to talk about their detachment and aloofness as if it were a wise stance to take towards the world.

But psychology doesn’t consider cynicism to be wisdom or intelligence. In clinical psychology, cynicism is sometimes described as a stance that offers a “protective shell of skepticism” that shields an individual from overwhelming emotion, specifically guilt, shame, and heartbreak. Cynicism is the psyche’s way of ensuring it’s never blindsided by disappointment again. Comedian George Carlin summed it up well when he said, “Inside every cynical person, there is a disappointed idealist.”

Rick’s cynicism stems from being a very disappointed idealist.

Before he ended up in Casablanca, Rick lived in Paris. This was 1940, shortly before the Nazis invaded. Amidst the tension of an imminent Nazi takeover, Rick began a love affair with a beautiful, charming woman named Ilsa (played by Ingrid Bergman). Rick had planned for them to leave Paris together via train as the Germans advanced. But on the day they were supposed to depart, Ilsa never showed. Rick waited for her on the platform in the rain until his friend brought him a letter from Ilsa saying she could never see him again, but offering no explanation for this gut-wrenching ghosting.

It devastated Rick and turned him into the Cynical Hustler. Having been heart-stompingly blindsided, he wanted to make sure it never happened again.

Many men can relate to Rick.

A guy goes through a bad breakup or a divorce and comes out the other side with a new philosophy: don’t expect much, don’t invest too deeply, and definitely don’t trust anyone too much. He calls it being realistic.

A guy gives ten years to a company, and then is unceremoniously laid off after a restructuring meeting. From then on, every promise has an asterisk and anyone who still talks about “mission” sounds naïve to him.

A guy watches a church or civic organization implode and decides that getting involved in groups is stupid. He still shows up out of obligation. But he does the bare minimum while offering running commentary about all the obvious problems going on and how it’s all bound to fall apart.

When men turn cynical, it’s usually because they were disappointed by someone or something. And because acting wounded feels weak, a lot of guys take the cynical stance. It makes you feel wise and above it all.

But as Tom Wolfe put it in The Bonfire of the Vanities, “cynicism [is] a cowardly form of superiority.”

Cynicism lets you feel smart and tough — without ever having to put any skin in the game. You get to be the guy ready with the wry comment about how something will never work. You don’t have to commit, or risk being wrong, or look foolish for caring. When you take the cynical stance, you just sit there, arms crossed, slightly amused, waiting for everything to confirm what you already “know.”

Sure, cynicism might spare you another disappointment, but it does so by keeping you on the sidelines, watching other people take the risks that actually make life meaningful. You’re spared the lowest lows, but, you don’t get to experience the highest highs, either.

You Must Remember This: Love Is the Cure for Cynicism

As Casablanca progresses, you slowly see Rick begin to shed his shell of cynicism.

And love is the catalyst for his transformation.

Ilsa shows up at his cafe with her husband, the dashing resistance fighter Victor Laszlo. She and Laszlo are trying to get out of Casablanca before he’s recaptured by the Nazis.

At first, Ilsa’s appearance tears the scab off Rick’s wound, and he becomes even more cynical and jaded. But when Ilsa explains why she stood Rick up back in Paris, Rick softens. He forgives her. And his love for her starts flowing again.

He hatches a plan to get both Ilsa and Laszlo to safety. And in the process, he overcomes his cynicism.

Rick has two letters of transit that allow passage out of Casablanca. Cynical Hustler Rick could have used them to get him and Ilsa out of Dodge and continue their love affair.

But that’s not what he does.

Instead, Rick does the noble thing. The good thing. He sends Ilsa off with Laszlo. He knows she would regret abandoning her husband, he knows Laszlo is fighting for a noble cause, and he knows Laszlo needs Ilsa to continue his work.

Rick gives up the thing he wants most because it’s the right thing to do.

Rick’s love for Ilsa starts as romantic longing, but it doesn’t stay there. It widens into a willingness to sacrifice for her husband, for the fight against the Nazis — for people he’ll never meet. Plato argued that love ascends up a ladder: romantic love can inspire a desire for higher and higher forms of the Good. That’s what love does at its best; it pulls a man out of private desire and toward something larger than himself. 

What Men Can Take From Rick Blaine on Overcoming Cynicism

Rick’s path out of cynicism is one many men could learn from.

Here are a few takeaways:

1. Cynicism usually has a backstory. Most men don’t become cynical because “the world is stupid.” They become cynical because they were blindsided by something. It’s worth asking yourself: When did I start becoming cynical? What triggered it?

Naming the source of your cynicism is the first step in overcoming it.

2. The cure for cynicism is love. Rick doesn’t break out of his shell by talking to himself about it. He does it by opening his heart to love. Once he lets his heart expand in his love for Ilsa, he gains the capacity to love freedom, justice, and honor.

3. Emotional investment is risky, but rewarding. Detachment avoids disappointment. It also avoids meaning. Rick is more alive in the final ten minutes of the movie than he is in the first hour, and it’s because he finally allows himself to feel and express love. Caring about people means you’ll be disappointed sometimes. That’s the cost of love. But there’s a greater cost to never caring about anything at all.

Conclusion

Rick Blaine starts Casablanca as a man who believes detachment is the same thing as strength. He’s cool, controlled, careful . . . and living in the shallow comfort of the cowardly.

By the end, he’s risked his life, lost the woman he loves, and chosen giving a damn over safety.

He learns that while cynicism keeps you protected, it also keeps you on the sidelines. Rick decides he doesn’t want to be irrelevant anymore. He wants his choices to matter for the big, important, and noble things in life. He overcomes his cynicism by taking a chance on love.

If you continue to live within a cynical shell, you’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of your life.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

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We live in a culture that does everything it can to keep death at a distance. We hide it behind hospital curtains, euphemize it in conversation, and hustle through grief like it’s just another item on the to-do list. We don’t want death to get in the way of living.

But my guest would say that making friends with death is the key to fully embracing life. Joanna Ebenstein is the founder of Morbid Anatomy, a project that uses exhibitions, lectures, and classes to explore how death intersects with history and culture. She’s also the author of Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life. Today on the show, Joanna shares why we lost a more intimate relationship with death and the life-stifling consequences of that disconnect. We discuss practices for coming to terms with death and removing our fear of it, including looking at memento mori art, meditating on death, talking to the dead, and simply taking care of the practicalities surrounding our inevitable departure.

Resources Related to the Podcast

• AoM Article: What Man Understands That He Is Dying Daily? (This Is Your Life)
• AoM Article: Memento Mori — Art to Help You Meditate on Death and Become a Better Man
• AoM Article: A Primer on Advance Directives
• AoM Article: How To Protect Your Legacy — A 3-Step Guide to Estate Planning
• Sunday Firesides: Look Into the Tomb
• Sunday Firesides: As I Am Now
• Victorian Memorial Hairwork
• The Dance of Death
• Vanitas art
• The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise by Martín Prechtel
• Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America by Stanley B. Burns
• Death: A Graveside Companion by Joanna Ebenstein

Connect With Joanna Ebenstein

• Morbid Anatomy website
• Joanna’s website

Listen to the Podcast! (And don’t forget to leave us a review!)

Listen to the episode on a separate page.

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Subscribe to the podcast in the media player of your choice.

Transcript

Brett McKay:

Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness podcast. We live in a culture that does everything it can to keep death at a distance while we hide behind hostile curtains, euphemizing a conversation, and hustle through grief like it’s just another item on the to-do list. We don’t want death to get in the way of living, but my guest would say that making friends with death is the key to a fulfilling life. Joanna Ebenstein is the founder of Morbid Anatomy, a project that uses exhibitions, lectures, and classes to explore how death intersects with history and culture. She’s also the author of Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life. In today’s show Joanna shares why we lost a more intimate relationship with death and the life-stifling consequences of that disconnect. We discussed practices for coming to terms with death and removing our fear of it, including looking at Memento Mori art, meditating on death, talking to the dead, and simply taking care of the practicalities surrounding our inevitable departure. After the show is over. Check at our show notes at aom.is/mementomori. All right, Joanna Ebenstein, welcome to the show.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Thank you so much. It’s wonderful to be here.

Brett McKay:

So you founded a project called Morbid Anatomy that explores the different facets of death. You also wrote a book called Memento Mori: The Art of Contemplating Death to Live a Better Life, which is about how thinking about death, meditating on it, making it a part of our lives can actually improve our lives in the West, particularly in America. I think we’re not particularly comfortable with talking about or thinking about death. But what’s interesting, and you talk about this in your book, that wasn’t always the case. There was a time in America where we did have a relationship with death, and this was largely before the 20th century. So what happened? Why did people lose this relationship to death?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, that’s a great question and a really important one. And what I like to say, and I always say this to my students at the beginning of class, the idea that we can deny death at all is a luxury unique to our time and place. So until the late 19th to early 20th century, people butchered their own animals. People died in the home. The idea of a good death was to die at home surrounded by friends and loved ones. The parlor was a place to lay out the body of the dead in the home, and life expectancy was much shorter and many children died before reaching adulthood. And on top of that, we have wars and the Civil War, World War I, and the influenza epidemic. So I think this idea that death is something exotic and far away and something that is possible to ignore just wasn’t present in the 19th century.

That’s brand new. I don’t think any other culture has had that situation in our culture. When someone gets sick, they go off to a hospital, which is where they usually die. We put our old and old age homes. So these are all new developments that push the idea of death and aging further and further from our daily experience. And this was very much not the case in the 19th century. I think watching the movie Gone With the Wind, which many of your listeners out there probably have watched is a great, great example of how death was a part of everyday life in Victorian era in a very prosaic way.

Brett McKay:

My family, we just finished watching Gone With the Wind.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Ah, it’s wonderful. Right, and that scene, I think when we talk about mourning practices, I love to show that scene where Scarlet accepts the dance offer of Rhett Butler when she’s in mourning right. And shocks, everyone’s like, oh my God, you can’t possibly do that. So that shows not only death practices, but also the rigor of mourning for women especially.

Brett McKay:

Well, let’s talk about that. That’s interesting. You talk about it in the book, the rituals and culture that we had around death in 19th century America. It seems like we imported that from Victorian England.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yes, I think that’s true. And from what, I’m not a specialist in this, but from what I have read, it seems to me that death practices in the West had not changed substantially between the ancient Greeks and the Victorians until the present. So this idea of anointing the deceased with oils and dressing them and laying them out in the parlor or in the home for viewing, this was also done from my understanding in the ancient Greek world. So I think in the Western world, the Victorian traditions were very, very longstanding traditions that were probably part of all of Europe is my guess. And that’s how they made their way to the United States. It’s really only with modernization, the beginning of hospitals, the rise of hygiene. And then what many historians also point out is the kind of twin mass death events of the influenza epidemic in World War I that kind of wipe out those old traditions of mourning.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. So before the 20th century, death was just part of the home life. When someone died, they died in their home, and then the funeral and the body preparation, it happened in the home. It didn’t get sent off to a funeral home.

Joanna Ebenstein:

To a professional. It’s that professionalization. Absolutely.

Brett McKay:

And something I learned while reading your book, sort of this transition from the 19th century to the 20th century in our relationship to death, why living rooms are called living rooms.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Isn’t that amazing?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Tell us about that.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, I read about this in, there’s a man in my community called Stanley Burns who is a collector of postmortem photography. Actually, I found his book when I was about 17, I think was a really life-changing event. So postmortem photographs are part of morning practice where people take pictures of their dead loved ones and keep them either as little keepsake say as a locket, maybe with some of their hair or maybe put it in the family photo album or maybe send out to friends, whatever. And he wrote a book on this tradition of postmortem photography where he talked about this. And so yes, I believe it was Ladies Home Journal. I can’t remember exactly the name. It was something like that. And it was in the early 20th century. Somebody wrote an article and they were basically agitating for people to change the name of the parlor to the living room because the parlor had traditionally been a place that you would lay out the bodies of the dead. But now with these new funeral parlors, the parlor was becoming a room for the living, the living room. And that’s where we get the name.

Brett McKay:

And you mentioned hair lockets another weird, I mean, not weird, but it’s interesting for us or weird for us, people would make wreaths out of the hair of dead loved ones.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yes. Living and dead. So if you look up for those listeners who are curious, if you look up Victorian hair art or Victorian hair work, you will see this. There were many, many practices that, again, as far as I’ve seen women did in the wake of a death as part of mourning. And I think of it as both memorializing the dead, creating a work that keeps the memory of the dead alive, but also is a form of mourning. So one of these is working with human hair. And actually here at Morbid Anatomy, we have a teacher, Karen Bachman, who has reverse engineered how hair art was created, and she teaches it for us. And I took this class, and I don’t know if you’ve ever tried, but when you try to work with human hair, it’s really hard and it takes a lot of concentration and it’s very meditative actually.

And by doing this class, I began to think, well, I think all of these women doing this in the wake of a loved one’s death, it wasn’t just about the final product that the final product is beautiful. It’s also about this meditative act that you’re doing with the mortal remains of your loved ones. And interestingly, we think about bone and hair being the two things that live on from our bodies when we die, and these hair works to speak to what you’re saying, these beautiful wreaths that are people create flowers or designs with human hair, sometimes in lockets making different kinds of designs. This hair that was made in the 18th or 19th century still looks beautiful today. So there is this immortalizing aspect to working with hair.

Brett McKay:

So in America, there was a period when death was just part of everyday life. You saw it every day. If you worked with animals, there were sicknesses where people just died, children died. That was a common occurrence. There were wars and people would die there. And in the 20th century, we had this shift where death became something we just hid. It became professionalized. And when you’re sick, you went to a hospital and then you die in the hospital and then your body would get carried off and a professional will take care of it. And it’s all very sanitary, but also impersonal at the same time.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I am glad you brought up the sanitary because I think that’s really part of the drive too, is of course, one of the things that’s happening in the late 19th into early 20th century is changing ideas about what is hygienic and what is safe. So people start to be a little afraid of bodies where maybe they weren’t so much before. And this idea of getting rid of them as quickly as possible, which I think we continue to have today.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so death, we kind of hide it. We pretend like it’s not there. What have been the psychological consequences of having an aversion to thinking about and acknowledging death?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Well, from my point of view, I think there are a lot of very unhappy unrealized people. I know we’re going to probably talk a little bit later more about these kind of practices of how people kept death close at hand. But in my experience, from the different practices that I have spontaneously developed or learned from history, if you are able to come to terms with the fact that your time on earth is limited, it is much easier to make decisions about what you want to do with the time that you have and to live a life that is true to you so that you don’t die with a bunch of regrets on your deathbed. So my husband is a death doula, and so death doulas are practitioners that work with the dying to help them through the dying process. And what death doulas say is that, well, they group it into four different categories.

If you have regret, if you have unfinished business, if you have grief and shame, I think those are the four major categories. But essentially these things hold you back from a good death, from an easy death. Perhaps you haven’t said the words you want to a loved one. Perhaps you’re in the middle of a feud with someone and you wish you’d resolved it, whatever. And so death doulas help work with people who are on the verge or starting to see their end in sight to resolve these things so that they can let go and die peacefully. So I think there’s this not dying peacefully thing. And also in my experience, I think many people that I have seen die suddenly realizing that they wish they had done certain things in their life that they didn’t. And this is regret. And so for me, I feel like by contemplating death and by having practices where I’m constantly saying, okay, what do I want to do with my time on earth rather than What do I want to do?

If you just phrase it with my time on earth, suddenly you can feel that immediately, right? It’s like there’s an urgency and it kind of cuts through the model where everything is clear, that knowing there’s brevity helps, at least for me to see what it is that I prioritize, what my values are, how I want to live my life on earth. So I think when we neglect to do that, we neglect living a full life which might make us bitter or angry or sad or unrealized at the very least. And I think there’s a lot of fear around it, and that fear is really easily manipulated by others, I think.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. What are the benefits of making friends with death? I mean, that’s kind of the whole premise of your book. It’s like, well, if we get more familiar with death, it’ll help improve our lives.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah. Well, I’ll tell a story from my own past, which I think illustrates it. So I have always loved to travel. My family are all travelers. I really enjoy it, but I hate to fly. And anytime there’s turbulence, I freak out. And this is true to this day. And by freak out, I don’t mean jump up and down, I just mean my heart’s beating really fast. I can’t relax. And I used to be so afraid of flying that when I was waiting in line to get onto the plane, I would have these kind of intrusive thoughts where I would imagine the people around me and how they’d be acting if the plane was plummeting down. But I love travel and I wasn’t going to stop because I was afraid of flying. So the way I dealt with it, and this was a spontaneous ritual that I developed, is this is from about the time I was 13 on or something.

I would sit on the plane, I’d fasten my seatbelt, stow my overhead thing, close my eyes and think to myself, okay, if I die on this flight, what do I wish I had done differently with my life? And I’ve been doing that since I was 13. And I was really surprised to find when I was doing research for this book that Steve Jobs had a very similar ritual. So he did a commencement speech for, I think it was Stanford, right after he’d been diagnosed with a certain kind of rare cancer. And he revealed that he did exactly the same thing. He would look in the mirror every day and say, do I want to do what I’m doing today? And if the answer was “no” too many days in a row, he’d make a change. So I think Steve Jobs was saying and did say that by contemplating death, he lived this incredible life that we all remember him for. And I am no Steve Jobs, but I will say that I’ve lived a life that is true to who I am. And so although I do not want to die and I’m not seeking death, I hasten to say that if I did die tomorrow, I’d be okay with it because I did what I wanted to do. And I think that’s the gift that contemplating death gives. It helps one realize with clarity what one really wants to do with one’s time on earth, and also helps you have the courage to achieve it.

Brett McKay:

Something I was struck by is how the work of the psychologist Jung has influenced your philosophy of death. Can you tell us about that?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Sure. I love Carl Jung, and when I first read Carl Jung as a, I guess in my early thirties, a friend of mine, my friend Susanna McDonald, gave me a copy of man and his symbols. And when I read it, I was just thunderstruck and I just thought, wow, this person thinks exactly like I do, but he’s way smarter than me. So what I love about Jung is I feel that Jung creates a bridge to our ancestors. He has real respect for the way people have thought about the world, and he has a wisdom. And part of his wisdom to me is about wholeness, or I would say complimentary duality rather than binary duality. So the way that Jung looks at the world, there are these archetypal polarities. And so you have on the one hand life and on the other hand, death and the mark of a balanced healthy culture would be that we give equal primacy to both sides of that polarity.

And he has this idea of the shadow, which probably everyone’s heard of, and this is the idea that there’s a part of ourselves or part of our culture that is unacknowledged, unrecognized and pushed into the unconscious, where then it can create fear and dis-ease essentially from his point of view. The important thing to do with these polarities is to find balance. And it’s important to go into the shadow and bring it to consciousness. So rather than pretending it doesn’t exist, rather than saying, oh, no, I’m not like that, that person over there is like that trying to say, where is there a part of me that is in what I recoil from? And that just speaks to me. It feels very true and very balanced and young thought that he shared my view that contemplating death is essential to being a mature adult. And that’s something that instinctively, I think I always felt this idea that there’s a real, to me, immaturity, to pretending that we’re not going to die. Everyone who has ever lived has died and every single person will die. And so rather than deny it, it just seems to make better sense to look it in the eye, and then by looking it in the eye, it ceases to be so frightening.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. It sounds like you had to come to terms with death and embrace death in order to become fully human.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Exactly. And that especially as you got older, this is one of the things he said when you were from middle age on that one of our main tasks in life was to prepare for our own death. And part of that was to figure out what we think happens after you die. And he was quick to say that whatever you believe doesn’t mean it’s capital true. And it also doesn’t mean that your opinion won’t change later, but you must have, in his opinion, you must have your own idea of what will happen after you die. And that is part of what will ease you through the death process.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Jung said you had to develop your own myth of death, and it didn’t mean you invented a fairytale about death to comfort yourself, but it was about creating this symbolic framework for yourself. It’s kind of like an inner narrative about what you think about death that will help you approach mortality with meaning rather than fear.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And it has to be what I think is so beautiful about what he said, it can’t be received wisdom. He would say, you can’t be on your deathbed and say, Dr. Yung thought this or that. You have to believe it. It has to be something that comes through your own struggle.

Brett McKay:

Yeah. What you do in your book is you offer readers, practices, exercises that they can do and also suggestions on films, books, art to look at, to help them develop their own myth of death. As you said, it’s not something you can just be told, you have to live it. You actually have to do this stuff. So let’s talk about some of these practices. Let’s talk about the title of your book, Memento Mori. This is a practice that has been done throughout the world and throughout time. For those who aren’t familiar with the practice, what is Memento Mori?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, so a Memento Mori is a practice or an artwork or a ritual that reminds you of your own mortality, your own personal death, so that you can then live the best life possible. That’s how I see it. And there are many, many forms of Memento Mori. The oldest that I know of were in ancient Rome, I’m sorry, in ancient Egypt. That’s the oldest that I’ve heard discussed where I’ve read that at the height of a feast, people would bring out a skeleton or a mummy as a reminder to those feasting that life is short. In ancient Rome, you might be gifted with a larva convivial, which were these little bronze skeletons at a banquet and also some banquet floors. I’m sure many of your listeners will be familiar with. These have skeletons of sorts. And this idea in the Roman tradition is carpe diem, like eat, drink, and be merry for tomorrow, you might die.

Then in the Christian tradition, the meaning is a bit changed, right? It’s kind of the opposite. In the Christian era, you have rosary beads that are half living, half dead, or you have paintings of a skull in an hourglass, which probably many, many of your listeners have seen. And these were intended to remind the viewer that you might die, but in this case, not so you could eat, drink, and be merry, but rather so you could be ready to meet your maker. So a reminder to resist sin and resist temptation in order to live a holy life.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, Memento Mori is Latin for remember, you will die. And in Roman culture and ancient Roman culture, sometimes this is used to push to enjoy life while you had it, the whole carpe diem thing. But other times, especially with the stoics, Memento Mori was more of a moral check for virtue because it was a reminder time short. So be good. And people probably heard this story, which it’s not exactly true, but I think it captures the spirit of this  Memento Mori idea that when a Roman general was paraded through the streets of Rome, after a victory, he’d have a servant next to him who would whisper in his ear, Memento Mori, remember your mortal? And the idea was that it was to help him keep humble, despite having this big victory. Later on in art, you sometimes see carpe diem and Memento Mori paired together like you’d have a skull next to a blooming flower reminding people that life’s brief. So you got to make it count. 

Brett McKay: 

And I want to talk more about Memento Mori art, which has been a theme in art at different times. Any examples of momentum, moori art that really stand out to you?

Joanna Ebenstein:

So there’s many art traditions that draw on this. One is the dance of death. So this was something that came to prominence during the Black Plague, and this is when you see this whole series of images where death is leading off people of different genders and social stations. So you have death in the maiden, you have death and the priest death and the child. Those are really amazing and often these really wonderful looks at a culture at large. There’s another tradition called Death in the Maiden, which comes from what I can understand, not just the dance of death, but also the story of Persephone in ancient Greece. And Persephone was the goddess of the dead, but she started life just as the daughter of Zeus and Demeter. She was kidnapped by Hades, the king of the dead, and became his queen in the underworld, and she was basically abducted from her life.

And so this idea, again, of death in the maiden, there’s this image of a deathly figure taking a very beautiful young woman. Those are pretty amazing, and some of them are quite erotic and very strange if you’re interested in those. I have a book called Death: A Graveside Companion, and I collected as many of those as I could because they’re quite surprising. And they’re from around the 1600s or 1500s. They’re very, very graphic. But then probably my favorite Memento Mori genre are what are called Half Living and Half Dead. And these are images. If you look up half living and half dead on the Internet, you’ll find these as well, half a beautiful young man or woman with clothes that are fashionable in the time it was made and half either skull skeleton or decaying cadaver. And so the idea here is the inextricable relationship between life and death.

Brett McKay:

My favorite genre of Memento Mori art comes from the Dutch Golden Age, the Vanitas.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Oh, yes. Those are wonderful.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, tell us about that.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, so vanitas are kind of a form of still life, and I think it’s really interesting to note that still life in French is nature mort, which is dead nature. So there’s already a memento mori aspect built into the still life, which is shocking. But these are still life that are very explicitly about mortality. So you have skulls or glasses, you have decaying flowers, and you have all these symbols of things that you won’t be able to take with you into the next life. Globes and jewels and card games and all the pleasures of life. So these are beautiful oil paintings very beautifully rendered that you would hang in your home as a reminder of the brevity of all of the things you love.

Brett McKay:

And then you also mentioned that aristocrats in Europe, they would often just acquire skeletons or human skulls and just display them somewhere in their house.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Absolutely. And again, it was a sign of a memento mori. It was a reminder. And you see these in paintings of saints too. You see a saint holding a skull and contemplating it. So this idea of using human remains as a way to remind us of our death, that’s something that continues for a very long time. And I think it’s worth remembering too, that before we had these cemeteries where people would be buried forever, people would be dug up after a certain number of years so as to make more room for more people in the church. And then those bones would be kept often in artistic arrangements or in piles that would then act as a memento Mori as well.

Brett McKay:

That’s something I’m struck by whenever I read history books, even in America in the 19th century, how frequently people just unburied dead people to either move the body or sometimes just to look at the body.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, yeah. Or there’s that wonderful story of the pre-Raphaelite, was it Rosetti? I think it was Dante, Gabrielle Rosetti, who buried his favorite muse with some of his poems, and later in life decided to dig it back up to take the poems, but they decay. So yeah, I think that again, it’s coming back to this idea that I think we’re really afraid of the dead body now. We’re afraid of the dead, and that was not the case for most of human history.

Brett McKay:

An example of that, of a person in 19th century America who unburied a dead loved one that really sticks with me is Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Joanna Ebenstein:

I didn’t know about that.

Brett McKay:

His wife died and he was just distraught, and he decided one day to go to her tomb and open up the casket to look at her, and no one knows why he did it, but it was after he had that encounter looking at his dead wife, and I’m sure she was decomposing at that point. That’s when he quit his job with the church he was at, and he struck out on his own and started doing his essays and lectures on self-reliance and all that stuff.

Joanna Ebenstein:

That’s such a great story. I’ve never heard that, but that speaks to everything we’re talking about. His direct contemplation with death changed the course of his life, and he left the safe comfortable world behind and became someone we remember today.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I think, I mean, we’re psychoanalyzing a guy that’s been dead for almost 200 years, but I wonder if he looked at his wife and just looking at her dead body, he realized she’s not coming back. I have to move on with my life. That’s over. I have to move on.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And it also reminds me in the Christian tradition and in the Buddhist tradition, there are meditations, death meditations that revolve around contemplating the decomposition of the body as a really strong momentum mori as a reminder that you will die of the impermanence of everything that you base your life on. There’s something really profound about that.

Brett McKay:

Yeah, I was speaking of cemeteries. I love going through old cemeteries that were built in the 18th and 19th century because a lot of the gravestones were Memento Mori, my favorite one. You’ll see it every now and then. A gravestone will say, here lies so-and-so, the date of birth, date of death, and then it’ll have a skull or something, and then it’ll say, remember me as you pass by as you are now. So once was I as I am now, so you will be prepare for death and follow me.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And so again, that just shows how long standing the sentiment and the idea that the sentiment is useful to us in some way is

Brett McKay:

Okay. So you recommend people make or collect their own memento mori, put it somewhere in their house and just it’s a reminder of death that you can look at. I think it’s a great practice that people can do. But you mentioned this death meditation as another way of doing Memento Mori. You mentioned the Buddhists have a death meditation, Christianity. There’s a history of death meditations. Walk us through what a death meditation looks like.

Joanna Ebenstein:

There are so many different kinds of death meditations, but one thing I’ll start with by saying is my husband is a longtime meditator, which is how he became a death doula. And what he tells us is that in the eastern tradition, meditation itself is a preparation for death. So the idea is that after the death of the body part of us lives on, and it has to navigate a series of confusing spaces in order to get to the next stage of existence, whatever that might be, many cultures that believe that I should point out on some level or another. But meditation is supposed to help us keep our wits about us in a moment of complete upheaval. So I think that’s a really interesting thing to point out. First, he teaches a death meditation for morbid anatomy, which is really about leaving your body in your mind and then coming back and also talking about what happens to the body as you start to die.

There are these meditations in the Christian and Buddhist tradition in which you meditate on different levels of decomposition of the body, and the Buddhist would even go to the charnel grounds and look at these bodies as a form of meditation and have artworks around it. My personal favorite death meditation comes from the Jungian tradition, and it’s by a woman named June Singer. And I found it so calming to do it, and I still come back to it in times of stress. It’s basically a slow letting go of everything you’re attached to in your daily life. So what really stuck with me is think of your desk and all of the piles of things that you’re working on right now. You can let that go one by one. You let the things you’re attached to go. And by doing that, there’s such a sense of, for me at least, it’s not fear, it’s relief, and it’s this reminder that the things that we find important right now, there’s so many things I imagine, Brett, for you, certainly for me, I have to do this and I have to do that, and I can’t wait.

But when you start to let go, that disappears. It’s not important anymore. You’re moving somewhere else. And if you’ve ever read any near-death experiences, which I really enjoy reading, this is what these people say again and again. So near-death experiences are when people who technically are dead, their brain is dead. They’re flat lining on an EKG. These are often people that are brought back from heart attacks or put into comas for surgery. And while they’re in this state, they have these different experiences and they all, or many of them, report this kind of feeling of letting it all go. And maybe it’s painful to let it go, but then when they have to come back, they really regret it. I think there’s just something really nice to think about that all of the things we think are so important right now that we’re so attached to the feeling of letting it go is a really beautiful feeling.

Brett McKay:

I think one of the scariest things about death is that we don’t know what happens after death. It’s the biggest mystery in humanity. So yeah, we always wonder, do we move to a different realm? Do we get reincarnated or is it we just cease to exist? How have different cultures throughout time thought about what happens to us after death?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, there are so many different particulars, but I’d say the overwhelming feeling of every, it seems to me, every culture until modern scientific culture is that there is some continuation where we go on in some way. And so in ancient Egypt at different time periods, there were a different number of souls, but as many as 12 different souls we had, which all went to different places, one of them goes into a statue, another goes into a mummy, another goes into an underworld. So there’s this tradition of more than one soul. And that’s pretty common. There is the tradition of reincarnation, which is really strong. The idea that we’re reborn or transmigration of souls, they also call it reborn into another human or animal form. There is the idea that we become ancestor spirits, so many, many cultures around the world continue to cultivate a relationship with the dead because it’s believed that they are in a realm where they can continue to assist the living and protect the living.

And I was just talking to a friend of mine who’s an archeologist about, I think he was talking about an African culture where they believe that if you’re separated from the bones of the dead, then you lose this vital protection that is part of how you can successfully live your life. So again, there’s different particulars, but I think the commonality is that we continue on in some way, and I think that’s what makes the last 150 or so years when this idea that I think many elites might’ve had but really trickles into the mainstream, that that’s it, that when we die, it’s zero game over. That’s when that idea really, really comes into our lives. And I think what Jung said, coming back to Carl Jung is that’s why it is our obligation to come up with our own myth of death because maybe for our great great grandparents, those questions were answered by their culture, by their religion. We don’t have that, or I shouldn’t say that. Some of us do, but more of us don’t have that than probably ever before in human history. So whether we’d like it or not, it’s our obligation to come up with our own belief and our own understanding.

Brett McKay:

And I think both beliefs, the idea that the soul continues on or it’s just you cease to exist when you die, whatever idea of death you take, both can be motivating here now as we’re living.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think another thing to that point that I include in the book is information about nurses and death, doulas who have worked with those who are dying and what their biggest regrets are. And I think that’s really interesting to think about. There’s a death doula in our community who says that when she’s working with a dying, the regret she hears the most is, I wish I had said I loved you more. And when you think about that, that’s a really simple thing to remedy if you keep in mind the fact that you’re going to die. So I think there’s so much we can do, again, using this as a God and as an encouragement to live a really good life unique to ourselves.

Brett McKay:

One of the interesting sidebars you had in that chapter about the afterlife and trying to think about what we think happens developing your own myth of death is idea psychopomps. Is that how you say it?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah.

Brett McKay:

What are psychopomps?

Joanna Ebenstein:

I love that word. Psychopomp is one of my favorite words. It’s from the ancient Greek, and it means soul guide, literally. And so a psychopomp could be a deity, it could be a shaman or a priest, and basically a soul pomp is someone who helps you make your way from one realm of existence to another. The figure that I end the book with is a figure called Latote, which is a new folk saint in Mexico, and she takes the form of a female grim reaper. And she is also seen as a psychopomp. She’s not the one who creates death. She’s not the agent of death, but rather she is your guide who takes you to the next realm.

Brett McKay:

We did a podcast back in 2022 with this guy named Christopher Kerr who has researched this phenomenon that happens. You talk about this in the book, I think it’s related to psychopomps, is as people get close to death, they start seeing visions or dreams of people who have passed away before them.

Joanna Ebenstein:

This is true. There’s so much anecdotal evidence or anecdotal suggestion that these old traditions are true, and that’s one of them. Yes, this is very common that people, I hear this from hospice nurses I know too. And not only that, but they say that this is partially how they determine how close to death a person is when they start to talk about loved ones coming to them and their dreams or visions, they know that they don’t have too much time longer.

Brett McKay:

And these people, they talk to them, they talk to these people in the room. And so if you’re in the room with a loved one who is dying, you might see them talking to their grandparent or their parent and you’re looking around and I’m not seeing anything but that person sees that person. This happened with my aunt. She passed away recently. She had some degenerative disease, and a week before she passed away, she started talking to herself, but she was talking to someone else. And when her sons asked her mom, who are you talking to? She’s like, well, it’s the lady in black over there. And they’d say, what are you talking about? And she’d say, well, that’s just between us and we don’t know who the lady in black was. It could have been an aunt, it could have been a grandmother. And what’s interesting is Christopher Kerr guy, he’s a doctor, and he’s not trying to explain like, oh yes, there’s life after death. He’s just trying to report on the phenomenon in an objective way. This happens. And one thing you notice when children are passing away, they typically don’t have anybody that have passed away yet, but if they had a pet that passed away, the pet will show up.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Isn’t that interesting.

Brett McKay:

And be their little guide.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I think this speaks one of the main principles of my book that I start with some main principles, and one of them is, I call it practice versus belief. And this is what I love about these stories. I think there’s a way we can listen to these stories like you’re telling, which are amazing. And tell us something really interesting, and this is what I love about the union end approach as well, is we can say that those stories, whether they’re capital true, whether they reflect in actual reality, we can never know, or at least we can’t know at this realm, but we can know that they’re common and they happen to people, which means they’re real and means they mean something. So whether they’re happening in the psyche or happening with something beyond the psyche, almost doesn’t matter. It’s still a human situation, a human truth towards the end of life. And my feeling is even if that is an illusion from the perspective of science, what a beautiful illusion to have at the end of life. What a beautiful gift, right?

Brett McKay:

Oh, for sure. And it’s comforting to me, and this is something you mentioned earlier, that oftentimes when people have a near death experience, it feels so good to be transitioning out that when they’re brought back to life, a lot of times they’re really disappointed and sometimes just kind of angry, really angry about it. I didn’t want to come back. So it’s nice to know that whatever’s beyond getting there seems to be a really pleasant passage. So let’s talk about how we respond to the death of others. Do we know how long humans have been using mourning rituals when someone dies in their community?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, I think that that number changes all the time. But when I was working on the book, I think at least the Neolithic era, they found graves that have different kinds of offerings for the dead and the dead put into fetal position. So this seems to suggest that we have been mourning for at least that long.

Brett McKay:

Okay, so it’s been a long time.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah. I think it’s a human universal as far as I can see, that we have rituals around ushering the dead into their new realm of existence, however we perceive of that or conceive of that. So

Brett McKay:

How do these mourning rituals that we developed, how do you think they help us process the grief that comes when someone dies?

Joanna Ebenstein:

I think having a ritual that’s held in community helps create meaning around something that can seem chaotic otherwise, and also creates a place where we can share our feelings and our grief with the community, which I think is really essential. Some people think that our lack of proper grief rituals is a real epidemic in our particular culture. I talk in the book about Martine Tel, who unfortunately he’s passed away. He grew up in a Native American tradition and then end up being initiated into Mayan shamanism in Guatemala. And he wrote a book called Grief and Praise, which is really all about where he sees the shortcomings of the affluent Western world’s mourning practices, and in his traditions and indigenous traditions, the ones that he’s from, the ideas that we have to mourn fully to the extent that he says, you have to look bad when you’re done.

That’s what mourning properly means, bawling, shrieking, going through it all in order to get it out of our body, to literally express it, to push it out, because otherwise from their tradition, it can become disease, it can become tumors, which they call solidified tears. So I think there’s, between him, and then I was reading also a lot about, oh my goodness, it’s been a while since I wrote the book. I can’t remember his name, but he was an activist who was in Columbine, and he had been with his best friend when his best friend was shot, and he ended up becoming an opioid addict later in life due to prescription drugs. And he was saying the same thing in his mind, our lack of proper grieving is part of what creates the violent culture that we live in.

Brett McKay:

I’ve noticed this going back to this idea that we’ve tried to hide death in American culture, and we’ve lost a lot of the elaborate mourning rituals that we had that sometimes would take a week, two weeks, months, years even. 

Joanna Ebenstein:

Look in Gone With the Wind, right?

Brett McKay:

Yeah. Gone with the wind. And now what we do instead is like, all right, we got to get this funeral done. And then if you’re feeling sad, well then here’s an antidepressant or sedative. And sometimes people need that for their pain, but oftentimes it seems like they take it because they feel like they have to drug themselves to interact with other people. They feel like they can’t fall apart in front of others. You definitely can’t or scream. So they feel like they have to keep their composure and just move on. And so they need to take the drug to do what’s expected just to get on with life.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I think to get people back to the workforce, I think people don’t really tolerate staying out of the workforce for too long. And it’s also worth mentioning that there’s a multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry that this has helped cultivate.

Brett McKay:

So grieving over a loved one feels awful, but what can that grief teach us about love?

Joanna Ebenstein:

And that’s something that I turn to other people in my community because that’s not the kind of grief I’ve experienced yet. The people that I love and have lost were older, and I got to say my goodbyes, and I was there when they died, et cetera. But there was a woman in our community called Karen Montgomery, and she would come to a lot of our meetings. She was in a lot of my classes, and she was talking about the Treasures of grief. And so I asked her, could I interview you about this? And she was going through a situation where her father was dying of a disease that ultimately meant that he would drown in his own mucus, I think, in his own fluids. And she was watching him become closer and closer to that state. And what she told me that I think was really interesting and really beautiful, that her grief at times was absolutely horrible, but it felt like a cracking open also, and that cracking open allowed in other things.

So she said that she would have these incredibly moving experiences. It felt like she was feeling emotions much more closely. She would cry when someone said hello to her on the street. There was just a sense of the beauty of the world that I think was part of her very real reckoning with knowing she had a limited time with this man that she loved so much. So I think from what I understand, as someone who has not again, experienced that kind of grief, it can be a both and, right? I don’t think it means the grief isn’t present or there’s no pain, but it’s more like that pain opens you up. And I always think of, there’s a Rumi poem that I put in there that Leonard Cohen also drew on the imagery, which is the idea that it’s the crack in us that the light gets in, that the beauty comes in through the wound, through the crack, through the pain.

Brett McKay:

The grief makes the love more poignant. It accentuates it.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yes. And I think this is the other thing that we lose when we lose a contemplation of death. And going back to the vanitas paintings that you love. Part of what makes things so heartbreakingly beautiful is knowing that we will lose them. That’s our condition. That’s the earthly condition. But without that knowing, we would lose it is the beauty is intense.

Brett McKay:

You have a chapter where you talk about how humans have a tendency to communicate with their dearly departed, and even people who don’t necessarily believe in the afterlife will do this. What do you think is behind this desire to stay connected to the dead?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, I love that. And I was really surprised by that research myself. So there’s a guy up at Columbia called Nando who did this research. And what he says in his book, which is called The Other Side of Sorrow, I think, or the other side of grief, which I highly recommend, is that he was a scientist studying grief. And after his father died, he found that he was talking to him and he had no belief. He didn’t believe that there was a man in the afterlife that he could talk to. It was more just like a visceral response to the death. And what he found in his interviews is many people said the same. And in fact, they said, whether it’s capital T, true or not, doesn’t really matter, but they talk to the dead and it makes them feel better. And again, this is what I always want to come back to is this idea of practice over belief.

I spent a lot of time in Mexico and I was talking to a Mexican friend about his grandmother who has died, and I said, tell me about your grandmother. What do you do on Day of the Dead? And he said, oh, on Day of the Dead and on Simon Santa, I go to the cemetery and I talk to my dead grandmother. And then he’s like, well, I mean, I don’t know if I’m really talking to her, but that’s what we do. And I heard this again and again, it’s not, at least with young, educated people, the sense I get is it’s not about belief. It’s about tradition and practice. And I think that’s something we can all learn from. I think one of the biggest challenges to living at this particular time in human history is we have this voice inside us that’s always saying, is that real? Is it not real? Is that true or is it not true? And I don’t think 300 years ago, most of our ancestors had that voice. So I think it estranges us from experience. I talk to the dead, I talk to my cats, I talk to everybody. If I had to answer, do I really think I’m talking to the dead? I don’t know, but I know it makes me feel good. And I think that’s, again, coming back to our own myth of death.

Brett McKay:

I just love the idea of just staying connected to the dead. They’re still with you, even though they’re bodies in the ground decomposing, or maybe it’s been cremated. I mean, that’s why I love the movie Coco so much.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Oh my God, right?

Brett McKay:

It’s my favorite Disney movie. That movie destroyed me when I watched it. The thing that got me was when that one skeleton ghost guy who was about to be forgotten, because there’s only one person in the living world that still remembered him, and then that person died, and then that guy, no one on earth remembered him. And so he disappeared. And I was like, I don’t want that to happen to my grandparents, my ancestors. I want them to be their memory still to be here some way. So I want to stay connected to them somehow. So that’s why I like genealogy. I like looking at old pictures of my family that have died. I just love that idea of making sure that their memory still lives on in some way.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I think that’s a deep, deep human drive. Again, in an age of rationality, we might question it, but that’s what people have been doing for millennia all around the world. It’s a natural part of being human, whether again, there’s an external truth that we’re responding to or it’s just what our brain wants to do. It’s real and it’s comforting, and it’s beautiful.

Brett McKay:

So one thing you recommend people do is to start thinking about their own death. So through Memento Mori, these different practices, getting comfortable with death, coming to terms with it, but also thinking about your own death and what you want it to look like, and there’s this idea of the good death that’s out there. What is the good death?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Well, I think that’s a very personal question. Typically, during the Victorian era, the idea how people wanted to die, what they called a good death was to die at home surrounded by their loved ones, including the children where they could then tell people what they wanted done with all of their property and things, and then dying peacefully. Now, it can be lots of things. I hear a lot of people saying that for them, a good death would be dying in their sleep without pain. So I think that’s a question one needs to ask themselves. What is a good death to you? If you could choose how to die, what would that be? For me, I’d like to be conscious. I’d like to go into the mystery with consciousness. I don’t want to be drugged. I want to experience this mystery, but I think that’s a very personal question. How about you, Brett? What’s a good death for you?

Brett McKay:

I was actually thinking about this while I was reading your book. So I’d like to be aware that I was going and I’d like to be surrounded by loved ones in my house. That’s how I’d like to die.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I think it’s wonderful that more and more people through hospice, et cetera, being able to do that, right? I think that’s wonderful.

Brett McKay:

And then you also talk about different rituals that people have done on different cultures to prepare for their death. One is the Swedish death cleaning. What is Swedish Death cleaning?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah. So Swedish Death Cleaning is, I think it’s amazing, and it’s part of the Swedish tradition from what I understand, where as people grow older, an act of care and love and practicality is to start to get rid of their things. And I can say as someone who’s been on the other side of death in this culture, my ex-boyfriend, his mother died when we were together and emptying out her house was terrible for him. He had an estate sale, and it was so brutal to watch people picking over and trying to bargain on the things his mother loved that are now completely worthless. So the idea is to save your loved ones, this trauma of having to deal with all of your stuff. And so my mother’s going through this right now. She’s emptying her house. She’s going through every bag and every box and getting rid of things. So I think it’s a natural part. It can be at least a natural part of getting older and preparing for knowing that you don’t have that much time left.

Brett McKay:

And then you talked about this too. Even if you’re young and healthy and death is not anywhere near you, you can start preparing, doing your own Swedish death cleaning by taking care of the practicalities of your own death. And it’s just basic stuff that people talked about, life insurance for your family and make sure they’re taken care of when you’re gone. An advanced directive,

Joanna Ebenstein:

Absolutely.

Brett McKay:

What do you want? Want that to look like? A will. Estate planning, that practicality stuff. You don’t think about that, but it’s like the gift you can give your family before you go.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And just to piggyback on that, there’s a member of our community, John Troyer. He’s at the Center for Death in Society in Bath, and he lost his sister and his mother and his father, I believe. And he said if he could have changed anything, it would’ve been having their passwords. So I say that to all your listeners, leave your passwords somewhere for your loved ones. That’s something that I’ve done with my husband as well, a will and your password so that person can get into your bank account. And all of those things, you’d be shocked at how hard that can be once you die.

Brett McKay:

So after years of studying and teaching about death, how has your own relationship to mortality changed?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Well, I would say I’m not afraid of it anymore. And in retrospect, I would say that’s probably why I started this project. I started to have this obsession with looking at the way death was dealt with in different times and places as a way to understand things that could be complimentary to our own view. Growing up in a culture as many of us many are, listeners have, I’m sure, where we’re not given a whole lot of tools on how to deal with death or how to prepare or how to live our lives, really. And I think doing all this work, I’m ready to go. I mean, don’t want to, it’s not my dream, but whenever I start freaking out too much, I just go back to that Jungian dream meditation. And I imagine myself emotionally divesting myself from everything that I care about and how good that feels. And I just come back to that again and again in these times where so much is uncertain and we can only do the best we can and hope to die with the fewest number of regrets.

Brett McKay:

And it sounds like it’s improved your life now you’re happier, you’re more content. It puts things in perspective.

Joanna Ebenstein:

And I would say to an even greater degree, the reason that I’m ready to die is because I’ve lived the life I want to. I’ve taken a lot of risks. I don’t have a huge bank account. I don’t have a lot of security, but I’m doing work that I absolutely love that feels important and vital and meaningful to me and to my community. And that gives me a sense of meaning and satisfaction where I feel like this is what I wanted to do with my life, and I did it. And I’m really, I don’t want to say please, because it’s almost just satisfied. I have satisfaction and I have good relationships with people that I care very much about, and I hope to hold their hand, one of their hands as I go into the next stage of existence. That’s it.

Brett McKay:

Well, Joanna, this has been a great conversation. Where can people go to learn more about the book and your work?

Joanna Ebenstein:

Yeah, you can learn more at morbidanatomy.org if these are the sorts of things that interest you. I do encourage you to come. We have a really vibrant community of people from all over the world who are having conversations about this. We have classes, we have lectures, we have many books, and if you’re in Brooklyn, we have an open to the public research library. I’m sitting in it right now. You can also find us on social media at Morbid Anatomy on Instagram and Facebook.

Brett McKay:

Fantastic. Well, Joanna Ebenstein, thanks for your time. It’s been a pleasure.

Joanna Ebenstein:

Thank you so much, Brett. I’m so glad you enjoyed the book and it’s been a pleasure for me too.

Brett McKay:

My guest today was Joanna Ebenstein. She’s the author of the book, Memento Mori. It’s available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you find more information about our work at our website, joannaebenstein.com. Also, check out our show notes at aom.is/mementomori, where you’ll find links to resources where you can dive deeper into this topic. That wraps up another edition of the AoM podcast. 

Make sure to check out our website at artofmanliness.com where you can find our podcast archives. And while you’re there, sign up for our Art of Manless newsletter. You got your daily option and a weekly option. They’re both free. It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s going on at AoM. And if you haven’t done so already, I’d appreciate if you could take one minute to give a review of the podcast. It helps out a lot. And if you’ve done that already, thank you. Please consider sharing the show with a friend or family member. As always, thank you for the continued support. This is Brett McKay, reminding you to not only listen to the podcast, but put what you’ve heard into action.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

On September 9, 1965, Navy pilot James Stockdale was flying a mission over North Vietnam when his A-4 Skyhawk took anti-aircraft fire. The cockpit filled with smoke. Warning lights flashed red. He ejected, breaking a leg in the process.

As his parachute carried him toward a crowd of villagers armed with machetes and pitchforks and the certainty of captivity loomed, Stockdale had one clear thought: “I’m leaving the world of technology and entering the world of Epictetus.”

You see, Stockdale wasn’t your typical hotshot naval aviator. He was also a philosopher — albeit an accidental one. In 1959, six years before his plane was shot down in Vietnam, the Navy sent him to Stanford to get his master’s degree. There, he met the philosopher Phil Rhinelander, a World War II veteran who introduced him to the Stoic philosopher Epictetus.

Years later, when his plane was shot down and he was imprisoned in the infamous POW camp known as the “Hanoi Hilton,” Epictetus’s Enchiridion would become a survival manual for Stockdale and the men he led. It would also help birth a guiding principle that got Stockdale through seven and a half years — four of them in solitary confinement — of torture and debasement: what’s now called the “Stockdale Paradox.”

The Stoic in the Hanoi Hilton

As the highest-ranking U.S. officer in the Hanoi Hilton, Stockdale became his fellow prisoners’ de facto leader. He organized secret communication systems by tapping on the walls, created a code of conduct for resisting interrogation, and encouraged a culture of courage, or what he called “hard-heartedness.”

Through all the trials and tribulations, Stockdale said, “I lived on the wisdom of Epictetus.”

Stockdale would recite lines from the Enchiridion silently to himself in the dark. He reminded himself that his captors could control his body, but not his will. They could take away everything external, but not his “inner citadel,” as the Stoics called it.

After seven and a half years in captivity and enduring excruciating torture, Stockdale’s war finally ended. On February 12, 1973, he was released as part of Operation Homecoming — the U.S. mission that brought American POWs out of North Vietnam. He was among the first group to leave the Hanoi Hilton.

The men were loaded onto transport planes and flown to Clark Air Base in the Philippines. As the aircraft crossed the Vietnamese coastline, Stockdale later wrote that he felt “a sense of completion — of having seen the worst that man can do, and having come through it with my honor intact.”

When the plane landed, officers and reporters saw a gaunt figure stepping carefully down the ramp, gray-haired, limping, and visibly fragile. He was 49 years old. He saluted sharply and, according to Navy accounts, his first words were characteristically dry: “I’m fine. I’ve been in worse places.”

After a quick medical evaluation, doctors cataloged the damage: a broken back, a fused knee, and other injuries that would keep him from flying again. He began the slow process of physical recovery and reintegration into everyday life. He was awarded the Medal of Honor in 1976 and devoted the next 30 years to leadership, teaching, and public service.  

From 1977 to 1979, he served as president of the Naval War College, where he developed a curriculum focused on ethics and character under pressure. He told young officers that the development of virtue was the foundation of strategy.

After retiring from the Navy as a vice admiral in 1979, Stockdale returned to Stanford as a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution. There, he lectured and wrote about philosophy, duty, and the discipline of command. He published a few books based on his experience as a prisoner of war and how philosophy helped him get through it, including Courage Under Fire: Testing Epictetus’s Doctrines in a Laboratory of Human Behavior.

In 1992, Ross Perot (the guy with big ears and charts) tapped Stockdale as his running mate on the Reform Party ticket. Millions of Americans first met him on live television when he opened the vice-presidential debate by asking a pair of unusual and characteristically philosophical questions, “Who am I? Why am I here?”

It was an opener that summed up a man who’d spent his life asking those questions when the answers held the highest stakes.

After the campaign ended, Stockdale returned to teaching and writing. He never chased celebrity. He knew his mission in life: keep translating Stoic philosophy into a language sailors, soldiers, and ordinary citizens could understand.

The Birth of the Stockdale Paradox

Decades after Stockdale was released from prison, business writer Jim Collins interviewed him for his book Good to Great. Collins asked how he managed to survive when so many didn’t.

Stockdale paused and said:

You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.

That single sentence became known as the Stockdale Paradox.

In practice, it meant living in two opposing realities at once: facing the brutal truth of the moment while maintaining unbreakable faith in the eventual positive outcome.

Stockdale told Collins that the men who didn’t live to see the light of freedom were often overly optimistic. “They were the ones who said, ‘We’ll be out by Christmas.’ Then Christmas would come and go. Then Easter. Then Thanksgiving. And they died of a broken heart.”

Hope unmoored from realism collapses under its own weight.

Stockdale’s insight wasn’t unique to him. In another prison camp two decades earlier, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl made the same observation.

In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl described how prisoners who tied their survival to a specific date — “we’ll be home by Christmas” — often perished when that day came and went. Their hope snapped under the pressure of unmet expectations.

According to Frankl, the individuals who managed to survive often adopted a “tragic optimism.” It meant finding meaning in your suffering so that you could endure it.

Both men discovered that real hope isn’t naïve. You have to face reality squarely. It is only by accepting how terrible things are that the faith to endure can grow. 

Practicing the Paradox in Everyday Life

Most of us will never be POWs, but we’ll all face our own dark nights of the soul: financial setbacks, illness, loss, betrayal, uncertainty. The Stockdale Paradox can help guide you through these moments.

Here’s how to put it into practice:

1. Face the facts. Don’t sugarcoat what’s in front of you. But don’t dramatize it, either. Just call a spade a spade. Your business is tanking. Your marriage is on the rocks. Your kid is struggling. You can’t fix what you won’t look at.
2. Keep faith in the long game. Stockdale never doubted he’d go home. He just stopped pretending it would happen in the immediate future. Real hope doesn’t live on a timetable. Keep faith that things will be alright in the end, accepting that the positive outcome you desire may happen later rather than sooner.
3. Focus on your circle of control. Epictetus’s favorite idea: distinguish between the things you can influence and the things you can’t. Effort, honesty, and attitude are in your control. Outcomes aren’t.
4. Find meaning in the suffering. Frankl said that those who had a why could bear almost any how. Stockdale’s why was leading and taking care of his men and upholding his honor as a soldier. Yours might be keeping your family’s spirits up during a dark time. Find your why.

Desperate Times Call for Rational Insanity

Stockdale once joked that surviving required a form of “rational insanity” — the ability to see how bad things were and still say, “We’ll make it.”

That’s the paradox distilled. You acknowledge the ugliness of your current suffering while still believing that things will work out. You balance the realism of a soldier with the faith of a saint.

You can see the same mindset in everyday life: the single dad putting himself through night school while working and taking care of kids; the woman going through harsh chemotherapy that’s killing the cancer in her body, but also her body at the same time; the business owner scrambling to meet payroll in a struggling business. None of them pretends it’s easy. They just refuse to call it hopeless.

Practicing the Stockdale Paradox means learning to live in the tension between truth and hope, control and surrender.

So face the facts. Keep the faith. But don’t expect to be home by Christmas.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

In the modern world, it often seems like it’s harder than ever to accomplish your goals.

It seems like everyone has already done the thing you want to do — that your idea is already out there, that your niche is beyond saturated.

Thinking about starting a podcast? So is everyone else and their mom. Hoping to write a book? With the advent of self-publishing, you’re not only up against authors approved by major publishing houses, but anyone, anywhere, with a laptop. Want to become a YouTube star? Better hope you get noticed next to the thousands of other folks uploading new videos every day.

There’s seemingly a million graphic designers, a million wannabe filmmakers, a million other, probably more qualified candidates gunning for the same job you want.

And that’s just in the marketplace. In your personal life, the competition can feel equally fierce. In the days of yore, you were just competing against people in your college or church to win the attention of a lady. Now you’re up against every Tom, Dick, and Harry on Tinder. The dating marketplace hypothetically stretches beyond your community to encompass your whole state, maybe even the whole country.

Yes, in both economic and personal spheres, demand seems high, and resources seem scarce. It’s enough to make you decide to give up and not try in the first place.

Yet this feeling of scarcity is just an illusion, a myth.

In truth, there’s never been a more opportune time to live. Not only because it’s never been cheaper and easier to write a book, share your art, or start a business, but because the average person’s ability to execute on the basics has never been in such short supply.

While opportunities to achieve your goals aren’t as scarce as you think, there are areas where true scarcity does exist: in common sense, in social skills, in manners, in reliability. There’s a dearth of people who know, or have the will, to do the stupidly easy stuff to be charming and successful.

Let me give you just one example. Both off the air and on, guests of my podcast will tell me, “I can tell you actually read my book before this interview and I really appreciate that. It’s so rare.” I don’t bring this up to toot my own horn, but rather to point out how ridiculous it is that this might even be something worthy of mention! An interviewer reading someone’s work before asking them questions about it would seem like the barest of bare minimum job requirements — a prerequisite rather than something above and beyond. And yet the majority of podcasters aren’t even taking care of this most basic of basics.

There are tons of people doing what you want to do, but how are they executing? In 90% of cases, not as well as they could be.

That’s your opening. And such openings are absolutely everywhere.

To take advantage of opportunities, people typically concentrate on stuff like building up their resume — going to the best school or getting the right internship. And certainly, these things can help.

But what’s missed is that it’s often doing stupidly easy stuff that’s going to allow you to make friends and land your dream job. It’s doing the stupidly easy stuff that almost no one else is doing that can most readily set you apart from the pack, and up for success.

What is some of that stupidly easy stuff? Below you’ll find a (non-exhaustive) list of the things it’s hard to believe people don’t do more often, and which have a huge ROI because most people can’t be bothered.

1. Write handwritten thank you notes, always and often. Thank you note writing has become such a lost art, and receiving snail mail is so delightful, that sending handwritten appreciation has become one of the most effective ways to set yourself apart from the pack. There’s never a bad time to send a thank you note. Received a gift? Send a thank you note. Job interview? Thank you note. Friend helped you move? Thank you note. Someone went to bat for you at work? Thank you note.

2. Edit your emails/texts before sending. No one ever catches all of the spelling and grammatical mistakes contained within their communications, but giving your texts and emails a couple reads before you hit send will tighten things up. These “clean” missives significantly contribute to making a winning digital impression.

3. Know how to make small talk. We spend so much time behind screens, that when we finally meet people face-to-face, our conversation can often be awkward and stilted. But being comfortable with small talk opens a tremendous amount of doors; sure, it starts out with the superficial, but it’s the on-ramp to deeper discussions — the pathway to relationships with potential lovers, new friends, and future employers. Fortunately, once you know the simple methodology that makes small talk flow, it’s easy to master.

4. Don’t be a conversational narcissist. Related to the above. The only kind of talk many people know how to make these days, is about themselves. Someone who knows how to listen and ask good questions comes off as stupidly charming.

5. Don’t look at your phone during a conversation. In an age of scattered attention, a person who can concentrate their attention on you, and fight the urge to look at their phone while you eat or talk — someone who can make you feel like the most important person in the room — is a charmer par excellence.

Can’t seem to pry yourself away? Check out our complete guide to breaking your smartphone habit.

6. Dress well for a job interview. You don’t have to show up to a job interview in a three-piece suit (unless the position calls for it); overdressing can make as poor a first impression as under-dressing. But showing up dressed just one notch above what current employees at the company wear will immediately set you apart from many other candidates. Well-shined shoes, a pressed shirt, and good hygiene will help too.

7. Come to a job interview prepared to ask questions of the interviewer. Whenever we post this article on “10 Questions to Ask in a Job Interview,” HR folks always weigh in with how “amazed” they are at the number of candidates who stare blankly when asked at the end of an interview, “Do you have any questions for us?” Know some questions to ask going in.

8. Take a woman on a real date. In a landscape of “What’s up”? texts and non-committal hang outs, taking a lady on a real date puts you head and shoulders above other suitors. What constitutes a real date? Watch this video and remember the 3 P’s: Planned, Paired Off, and Paid For.

9. Offer a sincere apology when you mess up. My generation seems to struggle with saying “I’m sorry” when they make a mistake. Numerous times I’ve had my order messed up at a restaurant, and when I bring it to the attention of the waiter or manager, they just shrug, say “Okay,” and fix it, without saying, “I’m sorry about that.” Then the other day an order of mine got messed up, and the manager took a totally different tack — comping my whole meal and bringing me a free dessert. That kind of treatment is so rare, it was unbelievably winning. I even found the manager after my meal to tell her so, and let her know I would specifically make an effort to return because of her gesture.

As it goes in the restaurant biz, so it goes with everything else. Most of your fellow employees will just say “Okay” when an error is brought to their attention. Offering a sincere apology that demonstrates you take responsibility and understand where you messed up and how it affects the company, will easily set you apart (so will immediately trying to make it right and preventing it from happening again).

And in your personal life, apologizing when you stumble is stupidly endearing. You’ll probably mess up again, and often with the same issue, but even when you can’t completely overcome your flaws, showing you’re at least completely aware of them goes a long, long way.

10. Send a thank you text when you get home from a nice party/date. In my opinion, this is the #1 easiest and best way to be a more charming texter. Yet almost no one does it. When someone has you over for dinner, or you take someone out on a date, once you part ways, they typically worry a bit as to whether or not you had a good time. And a party host wants to know their effort to throw the shindig was appreciated. So even if you thank your date/host in person at the end of the evening, once you get home, shoot them a confirming text saying, “Thanks again for the delicious dinner. We had such a good time!” Trust me on this, it’s stupidly, stupidly charming.

11. Follow through. I get a lot of emails from guys who want to do something with the Art of Manliness, like write a guest article or strike up a business partnership. They are excited! They are passionate! They are…MIA. They never follow-up or follow-through on their idea. I’ve often wondered what happens between their excited initial email, and their descent into silence. But whatever it is, it can easily be avoided by those committed to following through.

12. Be reliable. No quality today can more readily set you apart from your peers than reliability. Doing the follow-through just mentioned. Showing up on time (and just plain showing up). Meeting deadlines. Managing expectations and not overpromising. Promptly responding to emails. Keeping your word.

Are freelance graphic designers, artists, video/audio editors, app developers, programmers, contractors, etc. a dime a dozen? Surely. But a reliable creative professional or handyman? A pink unicorn. If you couple talent and skill with reliability, it’s stupidly easy to dominate your competition and your niche.

When you survey the economic and dating markets, they can seem incredibly oversaturated. Demand seems high and resources seem scarce. But when you take a closer look, you’ll find that while there are plenty of people all grasping after the same thing, there are only a few executing well on the attempt. Setting yourself apart isn’t complicated or hard; it often involves simply doing the stupidly easy stuff that everyone else overlooks.

Their obtusity is your gain; see through the myth of scarcity, take care of the basics, and the world is your oyster.

With our archives 4,000 articles deep, we’ve decided to republish a classic piece each Sunday to help our newer readers discover some of the best, evergreen gems from the past. This article was originally published in October 2016.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.

Spend a day toiling as a knowledge worker, and you can leave the office feeling mentally fried. You may not have been that busy, nor done work that was even that cognitively challenging, and yet your brain still feels positively blitzed.

The reason for this cognitive fatigue often isn’t the nature of the work itself. Instead, it’s all the switching it involves.

We’re constantly toggling between different devices, apps, tabs, tasks, and responsibilities. While each jump seems small, together they generate what psychologists call a switching cost — the hidden toll your brain pays every time it shifts gears. When you change focus, your mind must unload one context and load another: new goals, new cues, new rules of engagement. That reorientation burns mental fuel. Do it hundreds of times a day, and you end up depleted; the issue isn’t the amount of work you did, but how often you had to start over.

Paul Leonardi, a professor of technology management and the author of Digital Exhaustion, calls switching a new hidden tax of modern life, and it can have an effect not only on your productivity and the quality of your work, but on the quality of your life outside the office, too; if you’re coming home each day feeling like your mind’s been in a blender, you’re not going to have the mojo to go out with friends, read books, exercise, and pursue hobbies — the stuff that really leads to a flourishing life.

To mitigate this hidden but significant cost, let’s dive into exactly what this switching looks like, why it wears you down, and what you can do about it.

The 3 Kinds of Switching

Leonardi identifies three kinds of switching that drain our mental energy:

1. Mode Switching — Changing How You Think

Mode switching happens whenever you shift between different cognitive gears. You’re changing your mental frame — from reflective to reactive, from creative to administrative, from detail-oriented to big-picture.

Maybe you’re writing a strategic report (deep, generative thinking) when a Slack message pops up. You reply (fast, reactive thinking), then return to the presentation. Or you’re analyzing a dataset (analytical mode) and then switch to coaching a coworker (empathetic, social mode).

These brief detours feel harmless, but your brain just had to unload one mental model and load another. Then when you switch back to the previous task, you have to again change out your cognitive lens. That takes ample mental effort.  

2. Tool Switching — Changing Where You Think

Tool switching happens when you shift between platforms, systems, or interfaces. Modern work often takes place on both phones and laptops and across a dozen apps — email, Asana, Google Docs, text messages, Zoom, and on and on. Within a span of a few minutes, you may be moving between your inbox, ChatGPT, and Slack (with a quick stopover to Instagram).

Each medium has its own rhythms, layouts, shortcuts, and even social expectations; each has its own digital context. Moving between them requires mental translation. You have to remember which keyboard commands work here, which login you’re using there, what tone to strike in this other chat. Your brain must constantly reorient to different micro-environments.

Leonardi’s research shows that even “simple” tool switching can compound quickly. The average worker toggles between applications nearly 1,200 times a day! This keeps your mind in a perpetual state of fragmentation and partial engagement. You’re everywhere at once, but nowhere fully.

3. Role Switching — Changing Who You Are

Role switching happens when you move between identities. Each day you wear multiple hats — boss, teammate, parent, friend, customer, coach — and you repeatedly have to take one off and put one on. In a single hour, you might be leading a team meeting, interfacing with a plumber, and texting your wife about who’s picking up what kid.

Each role carries its own emotional tone and expectations. Each demands a different voice, vocabulary, and demeanor. Significant shifts in roles used to be buffered by space and time — you were in employee mode at the office, had some liminal downtime on your commute, and then stepped into dad mode when you got home. Today, the switches happen instantaneously, in the same chair, on the same screen. Without boundaries, the different emotions from different roles bleed into each other, and having to try to stem that bleed and compartmentalize your mindset around each role tuckers you out.

Why Switching Exhausts You

You may have noticed that while each form of switching can happen independently, they often overlap; we frequently switch between modes, tools, and roles at the same time. This only compounds their frazzling effect.

Whether engaged in separately or together, all three forms of switching draw on the same limited resource: executive control — the part of your brain that keeps priorities straight, suppresses impulses, and directs attention. When that system gets overloaded, you experience fatigue, indecision, and irritability.

You don’t just run out of energy; you run out of coherence. You start to feel scattered because, in a real sense, you are. Your attention has been shredded by a thousand tiny transitions.

How to Cut Down on Switching Fatigue

You can’t eliminate switching altogether — modern life requires it — but you can manage it. The solutions are simple, though of course harder to implement and consistently stick with:

1. Batch Similar Work

Group tasks that use the same mode of thinking. Answer emails once in the morning and once in the afternoon instead of all day long. Make calls back-to-back. Do creative work in uninterrupted blocks. Do a no-switching sprint where you commit to working on one task for something like 20 minutes with zero toggling to anything else. The goal is to stay in one cognitive gear long enough to find rhythm.

2. Minimize Tool Jumps

Audit your digital environment. How many apps do you actually need? Consolidate where you can. Keep your phone out of reach while working on your computer. Disable nonessential notifications so you’re not jerked between platforms.

If you can’t control the number of tools, control how you use them: dedicate windows of time to each rather than hopping constantly.

3. Use Microtransitions to Shift Between Roles

Re-build boundaries between your identities by creating microtransitions that can help you more smoothly segue between your different roles. After work, and before you go home, take a short walk or meditate in the driveway for a few minutes. If you work from home, go to the gym at the end of your work day or change your clothes before you shift into leisure time. Rituals help your mind switch cleanly rather than carry the residue of one role into the next.

I highly recommend listening to this podcast episode about microtransitions to learn how to create them and how they can improve your life.

Embrace Single-Thread Living

If everyone seems tired and burnt out these days, it’s often not because we’re trying to do too much, but how frequently we’re changing what we’re doing.

Every switch carries a cost. Our focus gets fragmented, our attention is pulled in too many directions, and we never fully inhabit our current context. We end up mentally blitzed and do everything in a mediocre way.

Doing our best work, and having enough surplus mental fuel to fill our lives with more than work, requires choosing fewer contexts at a time — less frenetic switching and more steady investing. It requires staying put mentally long enough for depth to form, remembering that it’s only in the deeps that the good stuff happens.

This article was originally published on The Art of Manliness.