so the first chapter in this book is all about motivation which automatically
captured my attention Charles Duhigg the author says that he found through his
research there are actually two ways that you can grow your own motivation
and the first starts with something that the Marine Corps implemented sometime
during the 20th century more and more people started signing up to join the
military and that meant a wider spectrum of people who needed to be trained one
leader in the military decided to many unmotivated people were joining the
Marines and he wanted to get to the bottom of how to create self motivation
so he contacted many psychologists and started implementing new systems to
create self Drive and internal motivation in these new recruits so what
did he change well actually he changed a lot of stuff but they all had one thing
in common all of the changes had the effect of increasing the internal locus
of control within the recruits so an internal locus of control locus LOC u.s.
means an internal feeling that what someone does has a direct influence and
effect on their own destiny basically they taught the Marines that
their actions mattered the opposite of learned helplessness which is a
psychological condition in which people think that no matter what they do their
circumstances will not change so what about the other part of the motivation
well I have to tell you a story about a group of people who suddenly lost their
motivation so psychologists started researching and found a group of people
throughout history who once have been superb driven and self-motivated but one
day they just lost their spark like literally no motivation to do anything
they were still there mentally they could do math they could do things they
could do before but they just lost their motivation some of these guys went from
running a million dollar business to watching TV all day or literally staring
at a wall for hours on end so after some x-rays and other tests the psychologist
concluded that all of these people had little tiny pinpricks and there's striae
de which is the plural word for the part of the brain that controls rewards and
habits they had a super small amount of bleeding in their brain and some of the
people reported things when they lost her motivation and some of these people
reported things when they lost their motivation such as a wasp sting falling
and hitting their head and a few other traumatic events so the conclusion is
that these people had brain bleeding in the part of their brain that controlled
motivation but something significant happened to one of these people one guy
and his wife were known for being super driven all throughout their
marriage for the past 40 or 50 years when the husband lost his motivation the
wife got super frustrated and I mean I would too she tried to everything and
after a few years she started offering him choices you want to wear this shirt
or that shirt honey pancakes or waffles little stuff like
that and eventually he started to get more motivated he started talking to
more people on his own cleaning up after himself and the psychologist found out
that choices increase our own motivation levels because it reminds us that we are
in control and humans we love that feeling we love knowing that we are in
control and now that I think about it my mother gave me tons of choices when I
was young asking me do you want to wear this shirt
ooh that shirt before starting the day for school or what would you like for
breakfast and even you have to do a chore but do you want to do this to her
that chore and I'm so blessed that my mother gave me that ability through her
parenting thanks mom anyways the psychologist did another
test on the drive less people he put them in an fMRI machine to measure their
brain activity during a game and the game was really simple it was that these
people had to guess if a random number was higher or lower than 5 so they
either said higher or lower and then the computer generated a number each number
was between 1 and 10 but they had to guess if it was higher or lower than 5
it's pretty simple right well for some reason these people who loved the game
like they really loved it they liked the fact that their choices were a game and
their striatal it up the part of the brain with motivation lit up in the MRI
machine so the psychologist started another game where the number was
generated by a computer and instead they didn't pick higher or lower and he found
that when they had no decision to make no choice in whether they want to lost
the game the striae de was dormant so having a choice
increases our motivation have you ever been sitting in a line that takes
forever or even on the highway during a traffic jam and you see that exit over
there you could take it and you know that it'll take longer for you to get
home but you take it anyways because that's you exercising your choice muscle
and ultimately increasing your self-drive so to increase our motivation
levels we have to do two things understand our own locus of control that
what we do actually has an impact on our destiny and also make lots of choices in
fact even if the choices are bad or defiant like a teenager going over the
speed limit or an elderly person rearranging their nursing home room
which they weren't allowed to do which was actually in the study will increase
their drive Wow 800 words so far and I'm only in the first chapter I guess I'll
make the next chapters a little bit quicker so chapter 2 is about teams and
teamwork after studying a whole bunch of group
projects basically the one factor that makes a great team is something called
psychological safety psychological safety is a term for when a group has a
shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking it can be
defined as being able to show and employ oneself without a fear of negative
consequences of self-image status or career so basically create an
environment where nobody harshly judges anybody else's idea as the best thing I
got out of chapter 2 chapter 3 is about focus charles describes focus as a
flashlight that we can shine it very dimly over a wide range of things or we
can zoom in to be super focused on one thing and there are benefits to both but
in most emergency situations our focus would get super intense on the wrong
thing and this is called cognitive tunneling cognitive tunneling can cause
tons of errors like even an airplane crash after listening to the black box
of an airplane that crashed we can usually determine the major reason of a
crash by listening to the narrative of the pilots in the book Charlo shows how
cognitive tunneling between two pilots caused an airplane crash and how they
panicked and focused on the wrong thing many other people do the same thing when
they panic but some specific people like firefighters emergency response teams
and even some military trainees don't panic so what's the difference well
Charles Duhigg found out it's something called mental modeling so have you ever
played out a conversation in your head before it happened or thought about
working on something while laying in bed at night visualizing how you are going
to do it tomorrow well this is called mental modeling and Charles says by
doing it we are keeping our flashlight super intense and getting better at
focusing the flashlight on what we desire so when panic comes we are better
able to move it around to what it actually needs to be looked at it's
basically your brains way of anticipating what's next and if you do
it enough you'll get better and be able to think more clearly in difficult and
emergency situations this is why visualizing is so important in so many
ways chapter 4 is probably the last one I'm going to be able to talk about but
it's about goal so we've talked about SMART goals before
but if you've never heard of them they were basically proved as part of
the perfect goal-setting experience and I'll give you a basic rundown so smart
is an acronym for how you should set up your goals they are important because
Duhigg says they turn vague aspirations into concrete plans something you can
actually do to get to where you want to be so S stands for specific I will run
five miles M stands for measurable like can you actually measure the goal yes
you can actually measure five miles a stands for actionable for example is
five miles something you can actually do or is it theory yes it is something you
can actually do R stands for realistic so basically don't be aiming for 50
miles a day make it realistic and T stands for time bound or timeline so
make a goal for each day and hopefully by the end of the month or after a
specific amount of time you'll be able to improve and reach your goal so the
second part of the perfect goal equation is the stretch goal Jack Welch the CEO
of GE at the time wanted to find a way to travel around Tokyo faster than a
train basically he said he wanted something to go 120 miles an hour and at
the time the engineers said anything over 60 miles an hour would make the
train tip over when it was going around a turn anything over 70 would be
impossible they said well he gave them this stretch goal and throughout time
they figured out a way to get it done basically to tunnel through the earth if
they hadn't have had this stretch goal they would have never innovated enough
to come up with this new super efficient way of traveling Duhigg says that when
we make stretch goals with SMART goals we can operate at peak goal setting and
achieve more than we would without such goals my stretch goal is to hit 10
million subscribers and to spread my love and knowledge of psychology well
that's all I have time for today I hope you guys learned something from my
little interview and if you want more don't forget to subscribe thank you so
much for watching