Life-changing ideas and insights from some of the world's greatest thinkers.
Because of this, I’ve developed a motto I now use for any tribulations I face: ‘No problem, no story.’ Every story has a complication. A point where unplanned events make our life uncertain and challenging. If we shy away or pay to eliminate those, we remove challenge and gain certainty. But we also learn less about ourselves and don’t become the hero of our own journey.
The takeaway from all these experiments is this: In the human brain less equals bad, worse, unproductive. More equals good, better, productive. Our scarcity brain defaults to more and rarely considers less. And when we do consider less, we often think it sucks.
Everyone likes to focus on developing good new habits. But I want to know how we can resolve the behaviors that hurt us most. Because here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter how much gas we give good new habits; if we don’t resolve our bad ones, we still have our foot on the brake.
As we learned, the scarcity loop arose to concentrate our attention and encourage persistence in behaviors that helped us survive, like finding food. But scarcity brain evolved other elegant machinery to make the most challenging searches the most rewarding.
We need to ask the deeper question and consider how we can find enough. Not too much, not too little.
The single best stimulus to make more and fresh mitochondria is exercise—but even your mitochondria can’t outrun a bad diet.
More than any other tactical domain we discuss in this book, exercise has the greatest power to determine how you will live out the rest of your life.
I felt myself falling into a different rhythm. I realized then that to recover from our loss of attention, it is not enough to strip out our distractions. That will just create a void. We need to strip out our distractions and to replace them with sources of flow.
The study found that ‘technological distraction’—just getting emails and calls—caused a drop in the workers’ IQ by an average of ten points. To give you a sense of how big that is: in the short term, that’s the same knock to your IQ that you get when you smoke cannabis. So this suggests, in terms of being able to get your work done, you’d be better off getting stoned at your desk than checking your texts and Facebook messages a lot.
So if you spend your time switching a lot, then the evidence suggests you will be slower, you’ll make more mistakes, you’ll be less creative, and you’ll remember less of what you do.