Beyond Belief: Nir Eyal's Proven Guide to Tapping Into Your Hidden Potential | Mindset | E31

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Hello, my name is Tim Story. Welcome to MiracleMetallity. Remember rooftops, drawing spaceships on the ground. It's for the dreamers, the doers, the believers in something greater. In each episode, I'll invite you to rise above the mundane, to push past the messy and learn to live boldly in the miraculous. Every episode will have practical wisdom, spiritual insight, and my guests will explore what it takes to activate your Miracle Mindset. Remember to subscribe, follow, and like. Welcome to the MiracleMetallity podcast. I love doing this. I love to help people grow to strengthen themselves in all areas of their life. And I'm enjoying so many of the guests that we've been having on. I want to thank you guys for keeping us almost every week in the top 10 on all the categories that we want to be in the top 10. So thank you for that. And today's guest is somebody that I am really, really appreciating the way he thinks, but also who he is. And I think we can grow a lot from him today. His name is Nir Ayal. He's not a person that is unfamiliar to a lot of you. He's sold over a million books. That's a lot. And he's a tremendous speaker and just a tremendous man in helping a lot of people. So I'm going to read a little bit about what he does. He's an author. He's a behavioral science expert and a speaker best known for helping people understand why they get distracted and how to take control of their time, focus and their lives. He's the author of Hooked, which is a best-selling book, also an author of Indistractable. But we're going to talk a little bit about his new book that's coming out very, very soon called Beyond Belief. So welcome to the Miracle Mentality. Good to see you, Ayal. Thank you so much. Good to see you, Tim. You are coming to meet today from where? From Seville, Spain. Seville, Spain. Why Spain? Tell me a little bit about Spain, because I love Spain, but I'm usually in and out of Spain. Why do you like hanging out there? No deep reason. We wanted to come visit. My daughter's taking a gap year, and so we're spending some time with the family, and my in-laws are here as well. I'm doing some book promotion as well while I'm here. You know, it's an interesting thing that a lot of my friends who do well have tried to talk me into, Tim, don't have a house for like a year and just float around to different countries and live. It's kind of a different day with some people thinking that way. Yeah, it's a new reality. It's amazing. I can work from anywhere. My daughter was homeschooled. She's since finished up high school, and she's taking a gap year. So yeah, we've definitely taken advantage of the world as our backyard. I'm going to go to my notes a little bit. I was telling you that I've been doing some research on you the last couple of days, getting ready to interview you, and thank you for taking the time. I know you're busy, and you're very, very good at what you do. So this idea of people feeling overwhelmed as a person that is a therapist, that's my background and also therapist life coach. Man, a lot of people that I work with feel very overwhelmed and having to deal many times with their job, their finances, their family, if they have children. Talk to me about this idea of people being overwhelmed. How do you see that? I actually take quite a different view around that feeling of feeling overwhelmed in that it's a problem, not so much of too many things on your to-do list. I think it's a problem of perspective, and I think that's really changed in my life. I write books not because I know the answer. I write books because I need the answer. I used to be the most distracted person on earth, and so that's why I wrote my second book, Indistractable, and Beyond Belief really changed my mind even further in that what I learned about writing about the power of beliefs was that I had set an expectation for myself that someday I would not feel overwhelmed, that feeling of overwhelmed was something to be suffered through. And then I came across a beautiful quote by the philosopher Schopenhauer, and Schopenhauer defined what it means to be alive. Have you heard his theory on what it is? I have not, no. If you think about it, what defines life? Is it something that breathes? Is it something that grows? Is it a biological organism? What is life? What defines life? Schopenhauer defined life as that which fights entropy. That which fights entropy, and I think that is so perfect, especially in this age where we feel like we are up to our eyeballs in chaos. And so what Schopenhauer tells us is that life is that which fights chaos. When you think about corals putting together intricate designs for these communities of underwater life, when you think about the millions and millions of cells that are operating in your body at just the right orchestrated level to maintain your chemical balance, that is the definition of life, this perfect dance that is choreographed happening at all times within you that you're not even aware of. So what I've since changed my mind around and really has helped me is to embrace the chaos, to never expect there not to be chaos. You know when there isn't chaos? When you're dead. And so what I've changed my mind around is that feeling of feeling overwhelmed, that's going to always be there. That means I'm alive. What's changed is my perspective on thinking that that necessarily means suffering. So the pain might be there, the discomfort might even be there, but the interpretation of that discomfort does not necessarily need to result in suffering. In fact, for me, it results in gratitude. I love the way you're thinking. So I think that when we're children and we have that innocence, I remember waking up as a child, I wanted to be up first of the five siblings. I was the youngest because near that meant that I can turn on my channels and watch my cartoons. When you're younger, you have that innocence of you want to play. Everything's about playing. A lot of men and women that I life coach, as I was telling you, a lot of them feel very overwhelmed because of emails that are coming through, texts that are coming through through the night. How do we work through that feeling when you wake up in the morning and you have a lot of, let's call it, responsibility? Yeah, welcome to being an adult. This is life of a person who is needed. If people weren't emailing you, you're not adding value. If people weren't tugging at your pants, asking you for things, or if your little ones weren't needing you, it means that they've grown up and left the house. These things are blessings, not necessarily curses. I mean, if we want to get really into brass tacks, I think it starts with understanding what is the difference between traction and distraction. So just because you're busy, that's not necessarily a bad thing. Being busy, being overwhelmed is not a problem of having too much to do. It's a problem of prioritization. That's all it is, just a problem of prioritization. But most people never sit down to consider their priorities. They want to do everything all the time. And you can. You can do everything. You can have everything. You just can't do it all and have it all at once. And so one of the best tools, I know every listener wants, okay, well, tell me what to do. Tell me what to do. What you got to do, and people aren't going to like it, is you have to plan your day. I have heard so many people tell me about how, you know, the world is so distracting and I can't get anything done. And what about this? And did you see what's happening in the news? And my boss wants this and my kids want that. And I say, what did you get distracted from today? What did you get distracted from? And they say, oh, I had this and then this and then Twitter happened and this and all the stuff happening in my life. I said, no, no, but what did you plan to do? Because remember, you can't say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. I'll say it again. You can't say you got distracted unless you know what you got distracted from. So if you just have a to-do list, that's a recipe for disaster. To-do lists are one of the worst things you can do for your personal productivity unless you take that to-do list and you put it in your calendar. This is the revolution that needs to happen. People need to stop keeping to-do lists and running their life on to-do lists because you know what you do with it to-do lists. You do the easy stuff. You do the fun stuff. You do the urgent stuff. You don't do the important stuff that moves your life and career forward. So what you have to do is in advance, decide how you will spend your time. And let me tell you, Tim, so few people have experienced the joy, the bliss, the utter relaxation and peace that comes from spending a day the way you planned to spend it. And I know people are thinking, yeah, but I have ADHD and I have this and I have that. Listen, I also have ADHD. I've been diagnosed as well. This is the first thing to do before the pills, before anything else, is to take some basic steps because pills don't teach skills, some basic steps that we all should do, whether you have ADHD or not, is to sit down and plan your day. That is the antidote to feeling overwhelmed is to plan ahead. So what do I do every week? Sunday night, 8 p.m. I sit down with my wife and we make a schedule, right? It's not rocket science and people say, I can't plan my day. What if this happens? My boss needs this. My kids need that. That is your imposter talking. That is the little person inside your brain who is trying to keep you from doing the hard work you know you need to do and preventing you from living the life you know you can live. Because if there's the, what about, what about, what about little voice in your head? Well, that's a great excuse to not have to do anything, right? I need to stay spontaneous. I need to stay creative. What if somebody needs me? They don't. And you won't do those things you said you're going to do unless you plan your time in advance. There's so much wisdom in that because when I work with people who retire and let's say they were high profile CEOs or you know even from sports, what they complain about is what am I going to do? So it's interesting, right? About those complaints of I have too much to do. Then people think that, oh, I can't wait to retire. And then they feel like they do not have enough to do. So before we get into Beyond Belief, which is your new book, I want to ask you a few things that I've been studying on you. You talk about break cycles of distraction, procrastination and burnout. Okay. What is the reason that you got into these particular subjects? Let's say, let's start with distraction. What was the reason why you attacked distraction in such a way that you even wrote a bestselling book indistractable? Oh, Tim, because I was the most distracted person you've ever met. I wrote this book because I had the problem. And so I read every book I could find about it and it kind of fell into two camps. Your brain is broken or the world is broken and technology is hijacking your brain and addicting everyone. Well, neither of those two solutions were actually very helpful. They just made me feel bad about myself and made me want to give up because if you tell people there's nothing you can do about a problem, guess what? They do nothing about the problem. And that wasn't helping me, complaining that Facebook and Twitter and WhatsApp and Instagram and all these products are super addictive and habit forming and we all want to use them all the time. Doesn't solve the problem because it's not our fault. I agree, Tim. It's not our fault. These technology, the world is very distracting. That's not your fault. You didn't invent Facebook. You didn't invent the iPhone. It's not your fault. But it is your responsibility. Who else's responsibility could it possibly be? Are we going to wait for the government to fix this problem? Are we going to wait for the tech companies to fix this problem? No. And so what I needed in my life was not another book telling me why big business was evil and why Mark Zuckerberg is the worst. And okay, we can argue about that. That's a whole other discussion. What I needed was like, what do I do today? How do I help raise a kid? I've got a 17 year old daughter. How do I raise a kid in an age where I want her to be super comfortable and conversant with technology and yet get the best out of these tools without letting them get the best of us? So I needed this for myself, Tim. That's why I wrote the book. And I needed something that actually worked because I tried all these books. I read all the books that said stop using technology. Well, you know what? I put the technology away. I got myself a flip phone. Remember like the kind we used to use in the 90s, right? One of those like Nokia flip phones. And I got myself a word processor with no internet connection. And I sat down and I said, okay, I'm just going to write. Nothing's going to get in my way. I'm not going to get distracted. But you know what? There's that book on the shelf that I've been meaning to finish up and my desk needs some cleaning. I should probably tidy up and, you know, the trash really needs to be taken out. And what I realized to him was that distraction is not about the stuff outside of us. Distraction begins from within. It's an impulse control issue. It's not a moral failing. It's not a character flaw. You're not addicted to technology. It's simply that you haven't learned how to deal with discomfort. And so what do we do when we don't like the way we feel inside? We feel what's called an internal triggers and studies have found that 90% of the time that you check your phone 90% is not because of a ping ding or ring 90% of the time you check your phone is because of an internal trigger. It's because of boredom, loneliness, fatigue, anxiety, uncertainty. That is the reason we check our devices and we feel so distracted because we don't know how to deal with those impulses. So what do we do? We scroll them away. We drink them away. We smoke them away. We click them away as opposed to dealing with that discomfort. So for me, that's what changed my life was realizing that if I was going to get control over distraction, if I was going to get control over feeling overwhelmed or burned out, it had to start with mastering internal triggers, those uncomfortable emotional states, because if you don't master them, they become your masters. So, Nier, let's get into this because I do a lot of teaching on being in the moment. So you see this in a lot of faith, whether it be in the Jewish faith or Buddhist or Christianity, of being fully present, fully feeling fully alive. Okay. I think you would agree with this. A lot of people do not slow down to the speed of life and they're not really present. They could be at their son's or daughter's soccer game. The kids finally score as a goal and they're distracted because they're down texting somebody or they're looking at something on TikTok. Okay. In your opinion, how important is it to be in the moment? And what does that mean to you to be in the moment? It's important to define what distraction really is to answer this question because there's nothing wrong with the tools itself. I think it's super easy to vilify the technology. I don't think that's actually very productive because, frankly, there's nothing wrong with playing video games or going on TikTok or watching YouTube videos or listening to podcasts like you are right now. There's nothing wrong with any of that stuff. As long as you do it on your schedule and according to your values, not someone else's. Certainly not the media companies. So, traction is the opposite of distraction. Distraction is any action that pulls you away from what you plan to do. Where, in contrast, traction is anything you did plan to do. So if you plan to be at your kid's soccer game and to be fully available, that's fine. But frankly, if you just want to be present at your kid's soccer game while you're checking email and you just want to be there so that you could pick up Joey after his soccer practice, that's also fine. So I don't think it's up to me or anybody else to judge other people and how they use their technology. What matters is how that individual wants to use the technology before the fact. So if you say, this is what I want to do with my time, back to what we were saying earlier about keeping a schedule. If you want to go play video games or watch YouTube or TikTok or read a book or whatever, meditate whatever it is you want to do, it's about forethought. It's about intent. It's about planning to spend your time the way you said you were going to spend it. Yes. So this idea of distraction and then we'll move on from this, but I think that this is so good for the listener. Do you feel like it's more prevalent in the days that we live now? 2026, then let's say back in 1970. And if so, what? The distractions have changed. And I think it's easier to get distracted today than ever before. But there's always been distraction. How do I know that? Because we know that Plato, the Greek philosopher, not the 1970s, 2,000 years ago, it was 2,500 years ago actually, was talking about distraction. He called it in the Greek, a krassia, the tendency to do things against our better interests. And people have always talked about how distracting the world was. We know that history is full of people saying, oh, this is the worst time. It's so hard to pay attention, so hard to focus. This is nothing new. In fact, again, changing our beliefs, changing our perception of reality, it's a crazy luxury to even complain about this problem. Because up until a few generations ago, and for 200,000 years of human history, people didn't have time to be distracted because they were trying to fight for their lives. Our grandparents would literally laugh in our face. The generation that fought World War II, defending the world against fascism and Nazism, these people would laugh at us if we said, you know what my problem is? I like to check my phone a lot. That's your problem? You have food? You have medicine? And this is your problem? So we need to keep this stuff in perspective. It's only the very elite, right? The people who had the time for leisure, who would complain about getting distracted in the first place. So I think that perceptual shift is super important to put things in perspective. It's still a problem, but it's a very high-class problem, right? And so I think it's important to realize that technology doesn't solve problems. Technology gives us better problems. And so just like Sophocles, the philosopher said, nothing vast enters the life of mortals without a curse. Or another philosopher, Paul Verrillo, said, when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. So of course, social media is going to give us shipwrecks. AI is going to give us shipwrecks. But that's the process. That's how this whole thing works. If you want the goods of technology, if you want to have the world's information at your fingertips, if you want to never be bored, if you want to connect with anyone anywhere in the world. I mean, I'm in Spain right now. I don't even know where you are, but I'm guessing it's somewhere on the other side of the planet. The price of all this progress is that we have to learn new manners. We have to learn new norms about how to live with this technology. But the worst thing you can do, the worst thing you can do is to have a mentality of giving up that there's nothing I can do. Everyone's addicted. The technology's evil. It's melting our brains. That is a recipe for disaster and passivity. I'm coming from Newport Beach, California, and it's very nice weather in the oceans, not too far away. Okay, I'm talking to near IAL. I love the way you think. And thank you for quoting the greats. I think a lot of these people that have passed away, that had great quotes, great thoughts. Not enough people talk about them. All right, one of the things that you do is you are very successfully coaching and helping big companies and leaders. So I want to address something that I saw a lot online about you in dealing with procrastination and burnout. Let's go to burnout for a second. Okay, is burnout something new or is that something that people have complained about for a long time? Help me with that subject of burnout. Sure, yes. So burnout is not a new problem. We actually know the causes of burnout. There was a beautiful study conducted, I think it was at Cambridge by two researchers by the name of Stansfield and Candy. And they found that burnout has a very distinct recipe that, you know, when you think about what type of jobs lead to higher rates of anxiety and depression disorder, you would think it would be a sad job. Like when I first looked at this study, I thought, okay, well, I bet it's like a mortician or somebody who works at an animal clinic who has to put puppies to sleep. I would be depressed if I had to do that job. That's not true. Turns out that the jobs that are associated with higher rates of anxiety and depression have nothing to do with the job you do and everything to do with the environment you do it in. And so the recipe for burnout is not a difficult job or a hard job. The recipe for burnout is two factors. A condition where you have high expectations coupled with low control. That is the recipe for burnout. High expectations with low control. What's interesting is that if you have high expectations and high control, no problem. That's when people rise to the occasion. It's when we lack agency. It's when we lack control in our circumstances. That's when we burnout. That's when we feel like, well, why do I keep doing this? You know, nothing's going to help. That's that condition that literally promotes burnout. So the solution to burnout is not necessarily to reduce expectations. That is one lever you could use. The other lever you could use, but rather the more effective strategy is to increase control is to increase agency starting with the best lever you can pull is control over your time. That is something that really can drive people crazy when they're interrupted every 30 seconds when their boss won't let them focus on their work and is constantly tapping on them on the shoulder when they're expected to constantly be responsive to email every 30 seconds. What do your best work? I mean, it literally drives you crazy. If you cannot spend the time to focus on what you think is important to get done, that's a recipe for psychological disaster. So rather controlling your time, having agency over your time and knowing, hey, this is the thing I can do to move the ball forward and that it's okay as a company culture to turn off all those pings, dings and rings so that I can frickin' focus. That's one of the easiest things we can do to control and help solve burnout. I'm believing that you're enjoying this podcast, The Miracle Mentality. And so the best way to help other people is to share it with a friend, a family member, or even a colleague. We work hard on getting the right types of guests that will make your life go from the mundane, the messy, the madness into the miracle mentality. Don't forget, your mindset is yours to set. So make sure and share this with someone else. And then tag me at Tim Story Official. That's Tim Story Official. Thank you for making this one of the most listened to and watched podcasts out there in the world. And guess what? Get ready for miracles to come your way. This idea of the work week, help me out with this. So if you're running a company which you do run companies, what do you think about the 40 hour work week versus 50 versus 60 versus 70? What do you think is something that seems to work best for high performance people? 40, 50, 60? How could you answer that question? If there's one thing we've learned from the research into organizational behavior questions like this, is that there are no one size fits all solutions across industries. That what works at one company is a disaster at another. You see, you know, corporate creeds and values and work culture. And it turns out that there is not one cut and paste cookie cutter type solution for all organizations. I think the important question is not necessarily how many hours, but what is the expectation of the employee going in? You know, if you're going to work at a startup, you need to know before you join that startup that you're going to be working a lot. If you're going to go into investment banking, you're going to be working a lot. That is the nature of the job, right? If you're going to go be a doctor in the ER, when you're on call, that's what you're going to do. That's the condition of the job. The problem is not so much that people are expected to work a lot of hours. If that's the trade off you want to make, if that's based on your values, that's it's not up to me to judge. It's up to you and your values to measure what's worth it for you. I think the problem is when people expect one thing and then there's a bait and switch, right? They think, oh, this is a 40 hour work week. And then once they start working there, they realize, oh, it's 40 hours in the office, but then we got to work another 20 hours outside the office answering emails after dinner. That's bad. That's not fair. That's a bait and switch. That's fraud. So I think companies need to be very, very clear with their employees so that before people join a company that they understand, hey, this is the culture. Okay, this is what we do here. If that's not a good fit for you, if you want to spend your time in other ways, you need to know that before you join. What phase of life do you find yourself in? I see it not so much an age, but a stage. What I mean by that is, do you feel like you're in that startup phase? Like when you are starting a new company and you are just out there just plowing the ground, planting the seed, watering the seed, looking for the harvest. I find like for me, in my 30s and 40s, I was really like grinding it out. I've been to 82 countries of the world speaking. I was just grinding it out. I mean, I could go to South Africa, speak to 10,000, fly all the way to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, speak to 6,000. It wouldn't even phase me. But at this stage, not age, because I don't feel tiring, like I'm getting tired. At this stage, it's almost like that thought of it's not how fast you move your feet. It's how big your strides are. At this stage of your life, where do you feel like you're at with this whole, how fast you're moving? How much you're working? You know, I like to remind myself that I'm exactly where I need to be, that comparison is the thief of joy, that whenever I try and benchmark myself to other people, it never works. It never makes me happy, right? Every time. Every time. Exactly. It's always a fool's errand. Whenever I look at somebody who's more successful or, you know, I always try and remind myself to compare to where I've been versus where I want to go. That if I would have asked myself, hey, five years ago, could you imagine where you are today? I'd be like, oh my God, that would have been a dream five years ago. And like, no way could I be where I am now five years ago. That's crazy. And yet here I am. So that's what I try and compare myself to is not other people's benchmarks, because who says that's going to make me happy? I don't know. I don't know if it even makes the people who have what I want if they're happy. So I try and refocus my desires based on principles of gratitude, of patience, of immense love for the people in my life and for the audience who would like to follow me on this journey. To be totally honest, Tim, I don't write my books or do my talks for other people. I hate to say that it sounds so selfish. But to me, I'm on this journey trying to figure out the best I can, how the world works. My daily mantra that I repeat every single morning is to remind myself of my purpose. What am I on here to do? On earth here to do? And my purpose that I repeat every single day is that my purpose is to explain the world so that it can be made better. That's my contribution. Explain the world so that it can be made better. Not make a lot of money, not sell a lot of books, not anything else. My purpose is to explain the world so that it can be made better, because I am genuinely curious. I want to figure this stuff out. I genuinely want to know. When I had this problem for each of my books, when I had the problem, that's what drove me to try and figure out how to solve it. And then the byproduct of that effort was making those books and thankfully they've sold millions of copies and helped millions of people. That's wonderful. I can't tell you how gratifying that is to get emails from people to tell me how they've applied my work. But if I anchor myself to that, it's just too fickle, because I can't control it. I can't control how many people read my stuff. I can't control that. What I can't control is, can I discover the answer that works for me in my life? I love this because millions of people are reading your books and buying your books. And then I look at my notes here where you are working with companies either present or in the past, Google, Microsoft, Stanford programs. These are things that people are really trying to get into these types of groups. But somehow you have the skill set to get into places where people know that they need what you have. What do you think you're bringing to companies like that where they constantly are bringing you in, literally all over the world? I think I constantly look for counterintuitive insights. I think that there's a very large temptation to recycle. I read a lot of business books and some of them are good, but a lot of them are the same stories. If I see the Eisenhower Matrix one more time, if I see the Marshmallow Study one more time, I'm going to throw up. I agree, agree, agree. It's good. It's interesting. It's nice to know. But it's recycled again and again and again. I think the greatest human trait is our ability to adapt. And so what I want to offer, what I want to contribute is a new way to look at things. Counterintuitive, surprising, interesting, curiosity invoking. I think that's step one. Step two is that it's got to actually work. So when I work with companies, it's because my methodologies have made me rich, frankly. I invest based on companies that have used my methodology. And that's, I've made way more money in my investments in those companies like Canva or Kahoot or Duolingo, like those companies who have used my methodology. That's been my pathway more than just the books themselves. And so it has to be different. It has to be something new and novel. It has to be true. And it has to actually work. That's the three part recipe. So I'm going to say something to you from an inner city perspective. So I'm from Compton, California. And I love all kinds of music, but I'm very close to rappers. So you got Jay-Z. You got Kanye. You got Pharrell. You got a lot of different type of rappers. You are a very unusual rapper. And I'm trying to tell you, I know cadence. I know style. I know speakers. I'm known as a pretty damn good speaker. You are good. And you're spitting. I'm going to give you a rap term. You are spitting a lot of original lyrics. I appreciate that. You're right. In this game, a lot of guys are taking stuff from like Norman Vincent Peel or Thinking Girl Rich, and they're just building upon it. Tell me about this originality. What is the genesis of this originality that you're coming from of being uniquely you? Where's that coming from? I think I've always liked to be a bit of a contrarian. I think that's interesting. That's exciting to me to take conventional wisdom and say, is that really true? Is that just something we keep repeating to ourselves? Now that gets me into trouble a lot. But I think it makes for an interesting existence. I mean, again, to explain the worlds that it can be made better, we can't make the world better if we keep buying into myths. And there's so many out there. So many out there. And we can't progress. Like if we can't call right from wrong or at least useful from harmful, right? Even if we don't know, one of the things I talk about in Beyond Belief is the difference between a fact. A fact is an objective truth that is true whether you believe it or not, right? The world is more like a sphere that it is flat. Doesn't care what you think. That's a fact. Then you have faith. A faith is a conviction that does not require evidence. In the Christian Bible, Hebrews says that faith is that which cannot be seen. No evidence is needed. God rewards the righteous. No evidence is needed. That's faith. In between fact and faith is a belief. A belief is a conviction that is open to revision based on evidence. Most of the problems we have in the world today stem from the fact that too many people believe that their faith is a fact and they can use facts for beliefs. And I'm talking about personal problems, interpersonal problems, societal problems. So many of these we can boil down to the fact that people do not understand the difference between fact, faith and belief. Beliefs are tools, not truths. That's the summary of my work over the past six years with this new book Beyond Belief. I want to share what has changed my life, which is this understanding that beliefs are tools, not truths. So, you know, ask, where does this originality come from? I think realizing that in fact, I was always looking for the truth. But most of our decisions in life are not based on fact. Should I start this business? Should I marry this person? Should I buy this thing? You know, all these things, they're based on beliefs. They're not based on facts. They're unknowable in terms of objective truths. Most of our decisions need to be based on beliefs. And so when we understand that beliefs are tools, not truths, we don't hold ourselves to that bar that it has to be an objective fact. And we can release ourselves from that constraint and ask ourselves a more important question, which is, is it useful? Not necessarily is it true? Because we can't know if most of our decisions in life are true. Rather, is it useful? And so that's what I'm hunting for, especially now in this stage of my life. You know, I see a lot of very harmful beliefs out there that we latch onto beliefs that people can't let go of that they carry around like baggage that they just can't set down. And it really weighs us down and inhibits us because we can't see reality as it really is because we are encumbered by these beliefs that literally change what we see, what we feel and what we do. Okay. So number one, I'm very impressed that you could quote Hebrews 11, one and verse two, and you quoted it perfectly. So that's my background. My doctorate's in world religion, and I have over 3000 Bible verses memorized in this brain of mine. I don't have anywhere near that, but you quoted it. You did good, young man. Thank you. All right, so let's go into your new book, Beyond Belief, which is going to be a best seller. Beyond Belief. Thank you. Because you are a bit of a disruptor, tell me something that almost irritates you about how people see belief. Because I don't always get to verbalize it, but some things just irritate the heck out of me, like I'll be at a table and people start talking about manifesting. Oh my gosh, there was a full moon and I decided that I was in alignment and I'm going to manifest. It's like, sir, there's so much more to that than this. So there's certain things that irritate me, even though I don't always voice it. What irritates you about people's thoughts of belief? Oh man, well, first of all, we are cut from the same cloth because that manifesting shit drives me crazy. But you know what's interesting about that stuff? It actually, it works for the wrong reasons. And in fact, sometimes people do it in a way that is actively harmful. There's some amazing research where they took folks and they asked them to manifest. They asked them to visualize the future, you know, bring the universe into alignment to bring you all the things based on quantum, et cetera, et cetera. And here's what happened. They actually found that when they asked them to visualize and manifest, their blood pressure dropped. They became more relaxed. And in fact, after this, they followed these folks and they learned that those people became less likely to take action to get what they had manifested. Isn't that fascinating? Incredible. Isn't it incredible? So there's actually a right way and a wrong way to do this. That positive thinking on its own that just saying, oh, the universe is going to deliver to me what I asked for because I'm vibrating at the right cosmic vibrations. Absolute rubbish. The universe does not care. It's not going to deliver you anything. However, when you visualize what you need to do, the obstacles in your way, that's when it works. So there's actually a right way and a wrong way to do these visualization exercises. And it's very, very important that we don't fall down this trap of passivity to I'm just going to sit here and think good vibes. It's actively harmful. Another reason it's harmful is because what does it mean if bad things happen to you? If you get a disease, if you have an unlucky occurrence, does that mean that you were vibrating wrong? Well, the gurus will tell you, well, you just need to buy my $99 program and I'll fix that vibration for you. That's ridiculous. That's a scam. However, there are a lot of benefits to changing your beliefs to serve you to have these powerful. I'll tell you one thing. You ask what really bugs me. What bugs me today. And again, I have ADHD. I've been diagnosed with ADHD. What bugs me today is that I think we are over medicalizing to a degree that we will look back on and say, what were we doing? One of the most common things I hear when I tell people about indestructible and how my challenge, I will hear from other people with ADHD how it doesn't work for me. It can't work for me. It's impossible that this might work for me. I have this thing. I have this broken brain. And we have become so convinced by the medical establishment that we are broken and there is no check in balance. There's no blood test for ADHD. It's a subjective metric. They ask you on a five point scale, how often do you feel distracted? Sometimes, never often. Well, compared to who? Compared to what? Compared to you. So if anybody, if you ask me, do I feel distracted? Yeah, I feel oftentimes distracted. But does that mean I'm broken somehow? And what if I learn techniques later on that take me from often to almost never? Am I cured? Functionally, if I take that test again, I won't show those symptoms. Whoa, wait a minute. But I thought ADHD was a chronic condition that I can never cure. False, incorrect. So what we're seeing is that we are so quick to label. And so there's, I think the most important chapter of Beyond Belief is this chapter on why your labels can become your limits. Now, labels can be very helpful, right? That if you label a diagnosis of some sort, you know, that you have a particular disease, a sickness of the body, that can be very, very helpful. But when we over label, when we think that's my old age, right? I'm having a senior moment. I'm not a mourning person. I'm a Sagittarius. That's just the way I am. Boy, oh boy, man, you are locking yourself into a prison that you have created. That's what gets my good. I think that is really actively harmful. I love your ideas on labels because as you know, a label denotes the value of something like if something says Prada, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, someone would say, oh, that's high Rolls Royce. So it denotes value. It also denotes your usage, but it also denotes your content. Like it says here that this is Arrowhead water. So I know I'm not drinking Sprite or 7Up. I'm going to drink water. So you're so good. The label creates a language that label creates a language. Talk to me a little bit more about that or even shift up what I just said. No, you're right on. There's in fact, there's a psychological term for this. It's called the Rumpelstiltskin effect. The children's story of Rumpelstiltskin, right? There's the princess made it. And only when she identifies the name of the evil gnome, when she figures out his name, which she does through deception, by the way, she has a spy figure out his name. When she calls him by his name, she gains power over him. And that is a psychological term that we now use called the Rumpelstiltskin effect that in fact, we love these terms. We love having labels. And again, labels do have a place, right? If you have a certain diagnosis, that can be very helpful. It'd be like, ah, that's the disease. Now I can go find the cure. The problem is that it can also become something that the control becomes intoxicating, that the prospect of, ah, now this is who I am. My identity becomes my diagnosis. That's when we grow from something that's helpful to harmful. You are not your diagnosis. You are not your diagnosis. And when we start believing that we are that thing versus something that we are struggling with, that's when it becomes a prison. I tell you, I think we can help some people in the next few minutes with this whole idea of beyond belief because some people that I see out there in social media, they talk a lot about how I was abused. I was abused. And that becomes the label. Or I came from a broken home. Or I was a trailer park kid. But you're really not a kid anymore. You're a 62 year old man who constantly just keeps rehearsing that story of being a trailer park kid. Tell me why that's probably not a great answer to just continue to carry it on from decade to decade to decade. Those labels that you have applied to yourself. We know that the human brain does not perceive reality as it is that in fact your brain right now is taking in about 11 million bits of information. Listening to my voice, the temperature of the room, the fabric of the chair on your body. Your brain is absorbing all this information, but conscious attention can only absorb about 50 bits of information. So 11 million bits that your brain is taking in compared to 50 bits. So you're only processing about point zero zero zero four or five percent of the data that's coming into your brain. So you're not perceiving reality as it is. You're perceiving reality through a tiny keyhole of attention. Now, how does the brain decide what to think about and what not to think about what to absorb and what not to absorb? It absorbs it based on your beliefs. So if you believe that's who I am, you will pay attention to confirming evidence to predict that reality. So if you believe I'm unlucky and we've seen studies on this, people who believe they're unlucky that they're disadvantaged. Interestingly, even if they are, they will find evidence of that. People who are the opposite in the same exact situations, no matter how Don Trotten, no matter what their socioeconomic condition, if they believe they're lucky, if they believe they have what's called an internal locus of control, that they can affect change, they will see opportunities that other people miss. So whatever you believe, that becomes your filter of attention. It literally becomes that tiny keyhole that you see things through. And so it's super important to ask yourself which beliefs are serving you and which beliefs are hurting you. And for most people, and in fact, all people, all people, there is nobody on the face of the earth. And I've talked to billionaires, I've talked to people who are broke. We all have limiting beliefs. We all carry around these limiting beliefs about what we are capable of doing. And in fact, we have no idea. We can do so much more than we ever imagined, because we just can't see more than that keyhole of attention will let us process. I love it. I'm talking to Nier Ayal. He is a behavioral science expert, but also a great rapper. Word. Okay, so let's go a few more minutes. I'm loving the way your brain thinks. I can't wait to meet you. I mean that with all my heart. Likewise. So help us with this beyond belief thing. So I teach about the power of belief, but from a spiritual standpoint, that if you have the right beliefs and then it can lead to the right expectations. Okay. So let me give you an example. My mother said to me when I was a kid, when I was seven, hey, we're going to Disneyland on Saturday. And I said to her, what day is it? She says it's Wednesday. So I remember on Thursday, I said, Mom, Wednesday, Saturday, she goes, it's coming in a few days. The next day I said Wednesday, Saturday, it's coming in two more days. So my belief created an expectation. Talk to me about the power and belief and how that can help with what we expect in life. There are three powers of belief. The three powers of belief are the power to change what you see. We call that attention. The power to change what you feel. We call that anticipation and the power to change what you do. We call that agency. And so it's through these three powers of attention that we construct either our limiting beliefs, the beliefs that sap motivation and the liberating beliefs, the beliefs that provide motivation. So based on the beliefs we choose through agency, anticipation and attention, we can boost or decrease motivation. And that's what it's all about because it turns out that success in life, and you'll see this across the board. Success in life is not about who is a winner and a loser. It's amazing. I'm sure you've seen this too. The most successful people I know, the billionaires that I've met, they have lost way more than the losers I know. Isn't that always the case? They have had more failures in their life than the people who think that they are losers. 100%. 100%. And so the difference between who succeeds and who fails is one thing. Who persists? Who persists? And so that to me is kind of the guiding principle behind Beyond Belief. There was an amazing study, kind of the genesis of the book was this incredible study back in the 1950s by Kurt Richter. Richter was this scientist who did experiments on wild rats and domesticated rats. And he wanted to see how long these rats would swim in a cylinder filled with halfway with water. He took these wild rats who were these big, beefy, natural swimmers. They were ferocious. They were aggressive. And something amazing happened. You would think that the stronger wild rats would out swim the domestic rats, right? The domestic rats were these chubby, little, cute, white lab rats. And the cute little soft white rats swam way, way longer than the wild rats. What was interesting is that the wild rats would give up and they wouldn't even die of exhaustion. They just quit. They just quit. And Richter didn't know why. And so he had a theory. His theory was that it was because the wild rats didn't have any interaction with humans. They hadn't learned that salvation was possible. They didn't learn that sometimes the humans will actually save you. So he did another experiment. He's what he did. He took the wild rats, new set of them, and he put them in this cylinder halfway full of water. And he knew that the average wild rat could survive in a cylinder of water for about 15 minutes of swimming. So right before the 15 minute mark, right before he knew these rats would give up, he took his hand in the, in the cylinder, pulled out the wild rat and dried it off, let him catch his breath for a second and plunked them back in the cylinder. Now he did that a few times and he wanted to see how much longer the wild rat would swim. So originally, remember 15 minutes, he wanted to see how long they would swim once they had tasted salvation, once they had tasted hope. And of course, you know, there's going to be a trick here. There's going to be a surprising result. Most people guess how much longer, right? So most people say 30 minutes. Nope, maybe 60 minutes. Nope. In fact, these rats didn't swim for 15 minutes. They didn't swim for 30 minutes. They didn't swim for 60 minutes. They swam for 60 hours. 60 hours. Incredible. Incredible, right? What had changed? Their bodies didn't change. The circumstances didn't change. Something in their head had changed. And of course, we don't know what the rats were thinking, but clearly something in their minds had flipped like a switch. And their potential that was always there, the 240 times longer swimming, the 60 hours of swimming, was now suddenly unlocked because they had released themselves from this limiting belief. And so that's kind of the genesis of beyond belief is what else are we capable of? Where are we just swimming for 15 minutes when we're really capable of 60 hours? I think you just wrote an essential book. You know, certain books like James Clear, Atomic Habits, it's sold so many. It's an essential book. I think beyond belief is essential. And I want to tell you something, Nir, your mind is beyond, buddy. I appreciate that. I love that. Thank you. I'm honored. Coming from you, that means a lot. You're floating in a whole other dimension, kind of like Pharrell Williams. Nir, what is the best way for my very assertive, aggressive crowd to follow you? What's the best way to follow you? Absolutely. So go, first of all, go to NirandFar.com. That's my website. And we have a free 30 day belief transformation journal. So this will take you step by step, by step, one day at a time, finding those limiting beliefs that every single one of us, everybody has those limiting beliefs. Even if you're good with money and you have no limiting beliefs there, you're probably struggling with your health or working out or family relationships. There's some area of your life that where you have persistent problems, that's where your limiting beliefs lie. So this 30 day belief transformation journal, totally free. It's on the website, NirandFar.com. Nir is spelled like my first name. So that's N-I-R and Pharrell.com. And the book, wherever books are sold is called Beyond Belief. Okay. So let's go there, guys. And let's learn from Nir and what he is teaching. Thank you for taking the time today. And just brilliant. Thanks, but I appreciate that. The best gift to come, you're still a young guy. You got that young face. I love it. And not so young anymore, but I appreciate it. Thank you for saying that. So thank you guys for listening to Miracle Mentality. Thank you for doing what you're doing. You continue to share it with other people. There's like a movement that goes on. And I meet so many of you guys when I'm on the road that are constantly listening to the podcast. Thank you for sharing it. Thank you for subscribing. Thank you for liking and make sure to follow Nir. I think that what a brilliant mind and the fact that he wants to share all the hard work that he has been studying and researching all these years. Let's take advantage of that and get our lives changed. So I just want to end with this little quote as I often say, you may not be what you want to be, but thank God you're not what you used to be. So life is still good. I will see you next time. Thank you for sharing space with me on this episode of Miracle Mentality with Tim Story. If today sparked your courage or helped you understand why you're created for success, I invite you to carry that Miracle Mentality forward. Visit me at timstory.com. That story with an EY on the end. Until next time, walk by faith, embrace possibility, and create your own comeback story.