YouSaid · the spoken record

Emily Balcetis

lines on the record: 89
first: 2022-12-13
most recent: 2022-12-13
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Being happy. And it sounds so cliche, corny, but just being happy, appreciating what I have, not striving for something that isn't possible for my life. Just, you know, just yesterday, my husband, we were talking about skiing for some reason. And I would love to ski. I think he was mentioning a friend that is a very humble friend and he didn't realize that every couple months he gets to this friend gets to jet off with his sister to go ski the Italian Alps followed by the French Alps before he comes back to work. Oh, I want that life. I want that life and that will never be my life. Is looking at somebody else's life and wanting it, even if you don't really want it or you can't have it. And that leads to a failure to appreciate all the good that is available in our own situations.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trying to get everybody to like me. I think, you know, that's probably, I can't believe I just said that to you and to the audience who's listening. But like that's, I think, but I think we can all relate to that. So I think being honest about that is something that probably a lot of people can resonate with. People just have different personalities and different styles and different value systems. And one doesn't having one doesn't mean the other is right or wrong, but they may not be compatible. And so that may mean that, you know, we don't get along. And that's okay. So the effort doesn't need to be spent trying to have us be friends, but instead to be productive if it's a relationship that you have to maintain, even if you wouldn't choose to maintain it.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I just try to remind myself of the positivity of it, that I like playing Legos. You like playing Legos. Right now, you think that you need to be analyzing this data. Right now you think that you need to be jumping back onto this work call that you know is going on, but you've committed yourself to playing Legos right now to stay in the moment, right? Enjoy the Legos because in a year from now your six-year-old might not like Legos anymore and you might not play, he might not like, well, he probably will like Legos, but he may not like playing with you anymore. So stay present, stay in this moment and enjoy this moment because you know you can't do two things at once. So enjoy the one that you are doing.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Multitasking doesn't work for me. I have to remind myself of that, that I'm not a good scientist and mom to a seven-month-old at the same time. Those are incompatible. She doesn't understand what I'm saying, so I can't explain multiple regressions and statistics to her to work on the thing I need to work on and also be a good mom. So these things don't work together sometimes. And so it's about being patient and compartmentalizing and then just trying to carve out enough time to in the course of a day or in the course of a week, you know, put on each of these hats and make progress and being patient with that.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, be patient. You know, I think my biggest source of stress just comes from trying to juggle too many things at one time that I have a six-year-old and a seventh old, and I'm a director of an international research lab with 40, 50 people that I'm responsible for. And I'm a wife and I'm a daughter and I'm a sister. Like, you know, we all have all of these identities that are really important to us. And they are often in conflict with each other. And so that's the source of my stress is like, you know, I don't doubt my ability to be a really good mom. And I don't doubt my ability to be a really good scientist or a communicator or daughter, whatever. I know that I can do a really good job at all of these things. That's not the source of my stress. But knowing that it's hard to figure out how to do them all at one time, well, do a couple of them at one time. And I just have to be patient with myself.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, you know what? I am happy about this because this is where the world is telling me it's time to check in, that I need to change something. I got to switch it up. I got to try something else out. And let's see. Let's see what else I can do because something about this, one of these pieces of the puzzle didn't come together quite right. So let's for the next three weeks, let's try something else, right? Here's an opportunity for creative self-exploration. And don't feel like failure for ourselves because what are you supposed to do with that? Just feel like crap, but that's not helpful, right? It's not helpful to just feel that way. And instead, I think people would be a little bit more excited if we tried to rid ourselves of using that word and instead consider it a diagnostic moment for evaluation”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that it seems really like a black and white label that gets permanently tattooed onto ourselves. That's how we tend to think about failure. In contrast, you can think about it as a learning opportunity. Anytime you fail at something, it means that something didn't work out, right? And so maybe rather than thinking about that as a failure, those are the moments where we need to start introspecting that this is a debriefing moment, okay, what did work? What didn't work? What did I learn about this? Maybe it's about the level of difficulty with the goal itself. Maybe it's about how I used my calendar. Maybe it's about the social support I did or I didn't have. Maybe it's about how I checked in with my own progress over the course of time. That rather than thinking about these moments of failure where you didn't hit the goal in whatever specified time at whatever level you set it at, we don't decide to put those labels on ourselves. Instead, we're like...”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, for sure. That would be a different way to set a goal rather than thinking about in six months' time, what do I want to accomplish? It's about setting it today. What do I want to accomplish today? Another thing that I could think that's relevant to that question is about the mindset that we bring to when we experience obstacles or challenges or setbacks or not hitting our mark, whatever timeframe we've used as that mark, that check-in point is that oftentimes we think about it as failure. We use that word failure a lot. I'm a failure. I failed at this, and that's sometimes why people also stop working on the goal is that they feel like they failed and they avoid that. They don't want to feel like a failure. They don't want that label put on them. That can be really challenging. And I think the problem is because we think about it as failure. We think of it as diagnostic about something about us or our ability us or our ability to meet this goal.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so once time becomes thinner, what are you going to do if you can't hit the gym every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon? What's the backup plan? If you miss a moment, if you miss one of your pre-slotted, pre-committed times in your calendar that you had set a week in advance, what's the backup for that? Do you have a backup time scheduled in your calendar that you've already worked the rest of your schedule around? So those are some things that we can do to help us move past that Valentine's Point of destruction that a lot of people experience.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not the realm of impossible, but it's a moderately challenging and still feasible way to set a goal. Great. Think concretely about what you can do each week. That's going to help make progress. How will you hold yourself accountable? What's a motivating strategy for accountability for you? Oftentimes it's social support for people. That's a great motivator. So how can you keep that social support network up? How can you be a better accountant for yourself as well, knowing that we have faulty memories? And what about obstacles? What obstacles might you expect? And what can you do about it? You know, January for some people is lighter as things start to ramp up again, but by February, full bore. Kids, you know, soccer schedules are in full effect. Your work schedule is now like all the goals are hardcore. You've got your own personal family responsibilities.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The problem may have been that we set a goal that was really too hard. You still lost three pounds. That's great. Maybe we don't understand enough about how our body works. And it's requiring more than just, you know, walking more or eating differently, but we're going to have to change the way that our body and all of our circuitry is working together. We might need to give ourselves some goals rather than saying by June, I'm going to lose 40 pounds. You say by the first six weeks I want to go down, not up. And that I will consider to be a success, right? And then you set the next goal after you've seen, yeah, you've gone down by three, three pounds. So we need to be thinking about those sub goals intentionally as well and creatively about what would constitute success at this sort of micro moment within the length of the goal that we're working on and also that three-step planning that we've already talked about set that big goal. Sure, if you decide that really 40 pounds in six months is reasonable for you.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can do that for us. So we can make it easier. That's part of the reason why people break New Year's resolutions. And in fact, the vast majority of people break New Year's resolutions by Valentine's Day. We give up pretty quickly into the year because of these things that we've talked about is that we've made it really difficult for us to sustain that motivation. We set goals at a level that's impossible New Year's resolutions often start with, I'm going to lose 40 pounds before swimsuit season. Is that really reasonable? When have you ever lost 40 pounds before? Maybe you've set a goal that it's impossible. And so you work on it for the first six weeks, which is a really long time to stay committed to something. And you've seen a drop in weight of like three pounds. Right. And you're so disappointed. I spent all this time, you know, I put in six weeks worth of effort and I haven't seen these kinds of, you know, the changes that I would like. So then you throw in the towel because it just seems like it's too challenging.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's no simple answer, and a lot of what we talked about already, I think, is part of the problem, that we're using the wrong strategies to motivate ourselves. We try talking to ourselves in encouraging ways. We try to constantly remind ourselves of the importance of the goal. And those are really effortful. They are a goal and of themselves to find the ways to best motivate yourself, to be the person who's always going to be the cheerleader for yourself every day. That takes a lot of work in and of itself, which is why I find value in trying to think about how can we set up habits, taking advantage of this perception, behavior, automatic link that we have so that we don't have to do that work of reminding ourselves. If we can form a new habit to leave our running shoes at this part of our closet, that's nearer to the door that we open all the time rather than this part of the closet that we hardly ever look into. And that's really quite dark, we don't need to remind ourselves that we need to go out for more steps. We need to take another walk.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“See if we start thinking about ways to more intentionally engage our eyes with our surroundings, we can nudge ourselves in pretty incredible ways.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The garden, clean the bathroom, or whatever, and kept that on the fridge to try to encourage me to meet whatever the goal was, probably getting quarters to go play ski ball at the arcade. That was what was motivating for me. But we can do that to ourselves as adults also. And that's helpful in a couple ways, getting that visual feedback about our progress can be useful. It can help us be better accountants of our own progress because, again, some of us may be more oriented to thinking about our failures or about the obstacles and not give ourselves enough credit for our successes and as a result be pretty bad personal accountants thinking we haven't made as much progress as we actually have if we were keeping data on ourselves through a star chart or something like that chore chart that maybe you've seen with children so when we do that then we can be more accurate about assessing our own progress on whatever goal it is that we're interested in again because there's a lot of power in what we”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, you can take those examples and think about what that means for my own life. How do I stock my fridge? What do I put in my pantry? But beyond just eating, we can think about, too, what do we do in our bedroom? Where do we put things in our bedroom? Do you have your slippers at the edge of your bed or do you have your running shoes at the edge of your bed? You know, do you have your workout clothes, you know, right on the top of your dresser or have you left your pajamas from the night before your robe the night before? Are you visually queuing yourself to get up and exercise? Are you visually queuing yourself to relax in the morning? We can also think about like outside of the fitness context of how can we hold ourselves accountable. We probably have had this done to us as children. We might be doing it to our own children now, but using stars, you know, to visually reward doing chores. I had that, you know, chore chart for the week. I could put a star on every time that I weeded.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are as one of the perks. So, is it really feasible to say, oh, no, for the sake of your health, who are taking away all of the snack stations? Probably not. Too drastic, too dramatic. But what they did change was the visual layout of those snack stations. And they put some of the less healthy options like the M&Ns in opaque containers that you couldn't see through, not clear glass, but frosted glass. They put the unhealthy drinks at the bottom of the cooler rather than at eye level at the top. And then they had the people who restock the pantries each week report on what was being consumed. And so pre-test to post-test, what they found was that just by changing what it is that people could see easily, they changed consumption patterns.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't bring them into the house. First of all, don't buy them at the grocery store. But if you do, if they're in your house because other people are enjoying them and eating them or that's the challenge for you, don't make them as accessible, visually accessible. Because there are, of course, moments when we're mindlessly eating. We feel three o'clock or four o'clock nudge, you know, like we need a snack right now. We go to our pantry and we're going to feel pulled by the things that we see. In fact, you know, Google did a really compelling demonstration of this experiment on their own Googlers, their own employees at Google with all of the different locations that they have for snacks at their company. And around every corner, there's a little cafe or pantry or a snack station. And what they were noticing is that the accessibility of all these snacks was doing a disservice to their employees. They were putting on weight. Now, Google is known for their free food. A lot of tech companies”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mean, we can extrapolate from that too and think about maybe more general concept of visual sparks that going back to that, you know, what started my interest in this, the perception behavior link, what you see predicts what you do, we can be intentional and mindful about that, about crafting a visual environment that's going to spark the kinds of actions that we want to encourage in ourselves. So you're trying to eat less unhealthy foods.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Meal. She's supposed to have five or six ounces of food in my seven month old daughter has eight ounces of food. So how can you, part of it is tricking yourself, especially at the beginning, tricking yourself into knowing like this is enough. This will be enough for me right now in my life. And so she uses small plates. She uses the little appetizer plates or like a teacup saucer for her full meal so that, and then of course eats very slowly and mindfully and makes sure that she's choosing the right kinds of food, but she's using that perceptual trick to trick her brain into making what's a really radical life change, like believing that this is going to be enough for me. She feels like she's having a full meal by having induced that illusion that you're talking about.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you know, that harkens back to a classic visual illusion, which is about context. If you have a circle that's surrounded by really tiny circles or that same circle surrounded by very large circles, our experience of that center circle is going to change. It either looks smaller, it looks bigger than it otherwise would in a different context. you know, we can use that idea of contrast or of surrounds to try to change our experience of something. On a more personal note, my mom is like living this experience right now that she had a cancer scare and she's had to have part of her stomach removed in order to deal with that. So she has to eat small portions now. And probably other people have had this experience too. They've had this kind of surgery. There's several reasons why one would have it. She has to eat less than what my seven month old daughter eats.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, again, our brain is a really sophisticated cognitive processing system. It's based on the idea of like, I've learned something, I'm going to apply what I've learned. If I've learned that this world is generally safe and happy and conducive to good things for me, then yes, you can extrapolate safely from that data that you have available. But somebody who's grown up in an entirely different context whose brain has learned a different, you know, set of parameters or contingencies about how things work would have a different set of expectations and memories that would lead them to have a different belief system. So those are a couple sort of high level explanations about why are some people a half full, half empty mentality.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, exactly, right? And you just wish that that person never got a copy of your book for sure. Yeah. So why do people see it as half full and half empty? We probably all have a tendency to ruminate over the negative. That's what I'm saying. But then some people can put that into check. They've noticed that about themselves and they're actively working to maybe circumvent what might be a natural tendency for people to engage with the negative more strongly than the good. It can also come from past experiences too, because part of our part of our thinking is based on our memories, like I was saying at the beginning of our conversation memory informs perception, not only of what our eyes are doing, but our beliefs about the world, our memories inform that. So if we've had a lot of unfortunate negative experiences, we come to expect them moving forward. People have had a lot of positive experiences. You come to expect that moving forward. And there's nothing wrong with that.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like much more tuned in to things that are harmful, that could hurt us, or that are the insults, if you will, than the things that could do us good.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know one sentence that's a compliment should be just as powerful as one sentence, that's an insult. But we can probably all think of one compliment we've recently received in one insult and we probably feel much more anger about that insult than we do good about that compliment. You know, that's the idea that the bad looms larger than the good. Now, why would that be the case? And people start speculating about that, that we needed to be attuned to the things that could cause us harm or the threats that our environment to evolutionarily keep us alive. Yeah, there's something to that. But if we weren't paying attention to all the good things like the food, the love, the warmth in our world, we'd also die. So, you know, there's also that. But maybe it's about the severity that anything that could cause us harm could do us more harm more quickly than missing out on an opportunity that could provide warmth or food or growth or something like that. And so that's created this negativity dominance where our brains”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's such a big question. Which way to tackle that? Well, and okay, so one perspective that people have resonated with is the idea of negativity dominance that things that are negative pack a bigger hedonic punch, that we feel them more strongly.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or rooms thought they orient really quickly to where those spiders are. They have this, you know, almost like a sixth sense for where are they that their eyes gravitate to that. Now, you know, and then that sort of fosters their belief or their phobia that, you know, these environments, these are dangerous spaces because they have the things that are really threatening to me. I can see them. Like, what do you mean? You can't see them. I see them. And they are seeing them. They're seeing them faster there and they're holding on to them more so than people who don't have that same kind of phobia. So there is some work suggesting supporting what you're saying that are maybe our negative states that we may not wish that we have are changing our visual experience and then that feedback that understandably feeds back into reifying or supporting our belief that we live in a sad dangerous world.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, true. Yeah, so that has jogged my thinking on some maybe more direct evidence to your first question about the visual experience part that there has been research done by clinical psychologists. I'm not a clinical psychologist in that I don't deal in therapeutic context and I don't diagnose people with mental health disorders. But I'm aware of some research that does look at people who have depression and anxiety and they have found some visual orienting effects that people who have depression or anxiety or specific kind of phobias are quicker to notice and then at times can fixate on the things that are the source of that depression anxiety or the phobia you know concretely people who are spider phobics you know if you show them sort of you know photographs of different environments or space”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do they really know who I am? That's not who I am. So that idea of self consistency is important for people. You know, sometimes even at a detriment to, you know, getting a compliment that can make you feel better.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's really deep. I'm not sure that I have a convincing answer for that, especially as it relates to the visual experience. But there is something called self-consistency theory that we want to hold consistent understandings of who we are. It can lead to some counterintuitive findings, which is how this idea has been demonstrated and supported by other researchers, which is that sometimes counterintuitively, we would rather get negative feedback about ourselves than positive feedback. We relish that if it's consistent with what we think is true about ourselves. That getting something that maybe is even positive or at least neutral that isn't part of our self-schema can be challenging for people. It can be, you know, a little bit weird for somebody to think you're good at something that you have forever thought that you're bad at. You start to second guess them. Maybe they aren't a good assessor of people's abilities. Are they really paying attention?”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here and now it's about feasibility. So that's often why we overcommit is that there's probably a lot of things that we really want to do that feasibly when it comes down to thinking about what can I actually get done today isn't possible. That's where a lot of the overcommitment comes from.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and that comes down to a different mindsets that we have also that when we become more psychologically distant, it can be in terms of time. In this case, it's in terms of time that further removed time. We start thinking about what we want to do. So most of us want to get coffee with this person. When we're thinking more temporally, more locally about what's today, you know, yes, I love that person, but today is so busy. I don't want to do it today because it's not feasible. We start thinking about what's feasible when we're in a more psychologically close point in time or a moment of consideration. And we're thinking about what's desirable when it's further removed from time. So that's just another tactic we have to sort of take back control of our brain is knowing that when we have a greater distance from something, we start thinking about do I want to do this? Is this related to something that would be of interest to me?”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Forget that or scrap that or blow it off. And we can use that same sort of philosophy when we're thinking about the things that matter to ourselves personally, scheduling time for ourselves further out in advance. We'll make sure that we stick to that. We can hold ourselves more accountable to actually spending the time if we plan for it further out than we usually do.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, why would that be? I mean, it probably seems obvious now, but your calendar seven days out is much freer than your calendar today, right? Because things come up that need instant attention and they fill up any free spots that you have in your calendar. The second thing is that we prioritize what we see. And so if we have a block of time in our calendar seven days out that we've already scheduled something, even if it's just for ourselves, we work the rest of our life around it. So seven days out, our calendar is much more open. But if we can fill it with one or two blocks for those things that are like, you know, our nagging to-do list items or the things that we just think like, okay, I'll just get to that when I have a free moment. You'll never have a free moment in your day if that's the way that we operate. Our days end up usually being filled with much more than we had planned for or that we really can accommodate. So, you know, so, you know, if like you had a meeting with your boss in the calendar, you wouldn't just.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Task or at least carve out time for even the unknown or unforeseeable actions that they might have to take. And they slotted that into their calendar, even up to seven days out. Same as before, at the end of every day, they reported on how much time did they spend working on that goal. And what we found was that over the course of a week, when people had spent, had planned time in their calendar a week in advance when they thought more big picture about time allocation, they found two and a half more hours to work on their goal in contrast to when people were thinking myopically about the day. Now, it's not to say thinking about the day wasn't helpful and that slotting time into their calendar wasn't helpful. That's not what I'm saying, but it was even more helpful to be able.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not going to see the fruits of those labors for quite some time. How do I manage that? So everybody thought about what their unique personal goal was. For one week, we woke up, thought about today. What can I do today that's going to make progress on this goal and when can I slot it into my calendar? And then at the end of every day, report it on how much time did you spend working on this task or any part of it, whether it was even something different than you had planned, but how much time did you spend on this big goal for yourself? And they did that for seven days. In contrast to what I think is problematic, at least my problematic approach to managing my own calendar was that we had people wake up on Sunday, they thought about this big goal that they have. They thought about all the concrete actions that they could take that would help them make progress on that bigger, bigger goal. And then they planned out the next seven days. They slotted in times into their calendar for when they might be able to work on a particular”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Experiment where we were testing the impact, how many the impact of different ways about using our calendar, looking at the day, which is what we all tended to do when things got really stressful, planning our day versus planning a longer time frame. In this case, we tested a week. Now what we did was have people think about a goal that they were working towards that was important for them. Somebody in this team was working on producing her first film and she was nearing the end, but it wasn't going to happen in a month. There was still maybe about three or four months of work that's left. Somebody else was trying to launch a new social organization and other people are trying to finish up a novel that they were writing on. So big projects that were personally important. The problem wasn't about investment. It's not about motivation. They all wanted to get it done, but it's about how do I find the time for these big projects that require daily or at least every couple days persistence and effort, but I'm.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't know that I have a prescription about that necessarily what to do, but instead what not to do. I think that a lot of us, especially I, I am not immune to this, even though I know the science and I have tested myself on this science, it's still a challenge to implement that when things get really hairy, when there's a lot that you've got managing, we often start thinking myopically just about, I got to get through the day, got to get through the day. You know, when's my next moment today to take a break, you know, to go to the bathroom even or, you know, to try to troubleshoot what's next for me, or even if we know we're about to have a hectic day, we wake up and we just look at the day. Now, that is problematic because the day just keeps going and the next day just keeps going. And we need to take some time to plan strategically about how we're going to get the things done that we need to get done. So within my team, we designed this.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That sort of loses saliency if it no longer is at the ready and available to you, it's not going to be an effective backup plan.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and that's, I mean, a testament also to how quickly he was able to pivot, right? So it's not just coming up with that backup plan, but I think important in this story is that he had practiced it so that he could do that quick pivot, you know, not even, you know, not even miss a beat, not even miss a breath. But, you know, if there had been a moment of like, what do I do? Plan B, then he would have been done for, you know, that kind of less than a second moment in time could have been enough to throw him off or to pull him back from first place, but he was able to almost instantly pivot to that plan B because he had practiced it. So in the course of, you know, trying to pursue our goal, we need to keep that in mind too, that like, yeah, a month ago, a year ago, you could have gone through this mental activity, this exercise of planning big picture, pairing it with concrete actions, checking in on your progress, knowing whether to look forward or look backwards and planning for the obstacles. But if”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Count his strokes. He had practiced that counting his strokes. He knew exactly how many strokes it takes for him to get from one end of the pool to the next. He wasn't paying attention to the competition on the sides because he literally couldn't see them. He just turned to his plan B. He won that 200-meter fly. He won his eighth gold medal and he would go on to win 15 more in his career. So an incredible athlete, of course, but a message that I think can resonate with us all is that like here is a compelling example of having planned for these obstacles. And so when they crop up, he just instantly was able to turn to his backup plan and still make good on this very amazing goal that he had set.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think the most compelling example to me is Michael Phelps that this is something that he routinely And by the time he had just one length of the pool left, they were completely filled with water and he was essentially swimming blind. If this had happened to me, I would have sunk to the bottom. I mean, I wouldn't be in the situation anyway. I can hardly swim at all. My six-year-old son is much better at swimming than I am now after one summer of really trying. But I would have panicked. And I think a lot of people might have that intuition too, that, well, that's the end, right? He did, he got seven. That's great. He's tied up, but he isn't going to have won the eighth. But that was something that he had foreshadowed. He and his coach had talked through the possibility that his goggles malfunctioned. What are you going to do about it? And so they had practiced that. What's the plan B if your goggles fail you? In fact, so the story goes that his coach would sometimes rip his goggles off his head just as he was about to dive in and then smash them on the side of the pool. I don't know why for dramatic effect or something, but like he really can't be swimming with his goggles. So what is he going to do?”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have to then pause when you might not be able to pause to try to think about which way am I going to get out of this? How do I get out of this? What do I do? You've already done that hard work. And so you can think about it as a safety net in advance of starting a goal at the planning stages of a goal, you've already foreshadowed the ways that it could go wrong and you have your backup plan. You have your safety net, your very well prepared to move forward and you're well supported because you've got plan B and plan C in the works.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Experience these obstacles, that's usually the time when we don't have the mental bandwidth to think about ways to push through them that we're short on time, we don't have the resources or the support, something is taking up more of our mental space now, this thing we're trying to troubleshoot our way out of. And we're not able to figure out a solution when you're in the bunker, when you're in the sandpit, if this was a golf analogy, it can be hard to see what the green looks like above you when you're down in that sandpit. Instead, if you had had the opportunity to create sort of a mental map of what that hole looked like, then you're going to have a better idea of which way should you try to hit it out of the bunker. If you've already been thinking about should this happen, I'll do this. If this happens, then I'll do this. It's easier to pivot. You already know what the next steps will be and you don't have to.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, am I going to go left or am I going to go right? Which way do I even start? How do I take the first steps here? And third is that in again these brainstorming sessions, we need to start thinking about the obstacles that we might experience along the way. Now, when I say that and say that that actually will help us better reach our goals, it's a form of motivation that can seem counterintuitive people to some people. When I start saying like, yeah, dream big, you know, what do you want your life to look like? What's perfection for you? Or what is it that you're striving for? And think about all the things that are going to stand in your way that are going to make it hard for you. And then they're like, how would that motivate me? It just makes it seem like I'm not excited anymore, but it's going to be really, really hard. And maybe even impossible. It could if that's the way that you think about it. But instead, I encourage everybody to think about it as like coming up with a plan B or a plan C because when we”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Professional life, there's a side note there was a study done by TD Bank of small business owners and the vast majority, over three quarters of people say that they use vision boards or think that they would be effective for motivating their workforce and clearly communicating where they see their company going. So even if you're not into scrapbooking and that you don't do that, probably some version of this big picture thinking you do integrate into your planning. But what's important is that when we have these sessions where we are planning, what does five years out look like? What is our ideal life look like? What's on our bucket list that we need to couple those brainstorming sessions with concrete action planning. We need to be thinking about what can I do this week? What can I do this month that's going to help me to advance progress in that area so that you can tie the big vision with the concrete actions so that you basically know”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Towards. Now, a lot of times what people put into these vision boards or these dream boards reflects like, you know, they're farthest out, most loftiest goals. Like, what would my perfect life look like? That might be at that level of impossibility that we're talking about. you know, you might think that it's motivating. You think it might help you have a vision for where you want to be. But if those things reflect things that right now feel impossible, it might not actually be motivating. It might be depressing. The other thing is that it doesn't give you concretely the steps that you need to take in order to make it, to hit that big vision that you have for yourself. And so, you know, it's not to say that vision boards or dream boards are not effective. And even if the way that I've described it doesn't really resonate with you, some version of it of thinking big picture is really commonly used in personal life.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so we can sort of liken this conversation to something that's a really commonly used tactic vision boards. People like vision boards, dream boards, if those words don't resonate with you, it's the idea of collecting visual icons that reflect what would your ideal life look like in this space. What does it look like to have met your health goals? What will you look like? What would life be like, or your professional goals? What would it look like if your business reaches the goals that you've projected out for the next five years? What's that going to look like? The idea here is you collect all these visuals, sort of scrapbook them together into this combination and then put that somewhere that will motivate you. Maybe it's the backdrop or the desktop on your computer screen. Maybe if you've cut out images from magazines, you put it next to your mirror in the bathroom to remind yourself each day of where it is that you want to be. What is it that you're working?”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Realm of possibility for me. So that's one part of how setting sub goals can help is that it changes our cognitive thinking about the difficulty of this particular goal. Two goals that would be like kind of hard to do is going to be more motivating than one goal that seems impossible because I'm not even going to try for it if my investment is if there's no chance that that investment would pay off. And the other thing about that narrowed focus of attention that we've been talking about is that it can do that sort of perceptually, psychologically. It could take that goal that maybe is immovable when you're not setting a sub-goal, but bring it in, give the illusion of proximity that then might gear us up to take the next step or to find that energy that those rats and mice found when they thought that they were close to the finish line.”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think there's a couple things that are implicated here is that if we have a goal that seems impossible. And colleagues of mine at New York University have found that when we construe goals at that level, when they feel at that level of impossibility, we give up before we've even gotten started. They've looked at systolic blood pressure as a physiological indicator of our psychological readiness to do something. And they have found that systolic blood pressure goes down when people set goals that feel impossibly hard to accomplish. It's as if their bodies are giving up before they've even gotten started. And so what's setting sub-goals can do is sort of pull that appraisal of the difficulty of the goal into this almost like Goldilocks, you know, just right and just that sweet spot of being just right where if I know I'm going to need to harness something here to get the job done, but it's not, I'm not thinking about this as something that is totally beyond the”
2022-12-13 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · Emily Balcetis: Setting and Achieving Goals · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT