âI was never afraid of making things longer if they needed to be. As long as you feel really good about it and itâs actually furthering the agenda and as long as itâs highly valuable then thatâs how long your book needs to beâ.
âIâm glad I did it. I think the whole process is testament to how you can change your desires. When I first got the kids, I didnât really want to be a dad. But I learned to want it and I learned to love it and now itâs a huge priority for meâ.
"You can't train yourself to do something that you don't want to do but I could see that being a Dad fitted with the values and beliefs of my future self. It was something I valued enough to become good at being a Dad".
âThe future is the easiest way to explain who the person is in the presentâ
âYou could come up with a million different futures but itâs ultimately your choice which one future you chooseâ
âItâs really good to ask yourself what would your future self want rather than what your present self wants. Thinking about who is the person you want to be versus who is the person youâre choosing to be can clarify the direction which you should move towards so that you are in a position in the future where you want to beâ
"You can't assume that your future self will be motivated by the same things that you are currently motivated by"
âI wouldnât say my goals would change, the process to get towards those goals would change. I would pour money into ads rather than going onto podcasts because selling my books matters to me financially to support my family. If I had all the money in the world, my motive would still be to sell the book because I do want to get these ideas into peopleâs handsâ
âFor me, my writing is always thinking about whatâs it targeted towards. What is the reason for doing it? I do enjoy just writing but to me itâs more enjoyable if there is an aim to that writingâ
âYou can use technology but if you overly use it, then it might actually harm your memory and so I think you need to have a mix and not REALLY on a second brain entirely. It's a healthy mixâ.
âThere are two things human beings want â a bigger future and a better pastâ
âIn my opinion, trauma is a meaning. Memory is always interpreted from the present and so I know that my views of the past are always going to change and itâs up to me to choose the meaning. Trauma is a meaning and you can choose to change the meaning and get a different perspective. So in my opinion trauma is a meaning that you gave it based on certain emotions at the timeâ
âPeak experiences are any experiences that change how you view the world and how you approach your life. It can lead to us reframing the meaning of former things. You can turn little things into peak experiences but they are more likely to happen when you are seeking somethingâ
"Man's mind, stretched to a new idea, never goes back to its original dimension" Oliver Wendell Holmes
"The goal is flow. Flow is generated from being where you are and having a clear idea of where you are. You can get a lot of joy from measuring your current self on your former self".
"Flow is not destroyed by having goals. Flow is increased by having goals. The goal gives you something to experience flow towards".
"It's difficult to appreciate the present without thinking about the context of the past and the future".
âI firmly believe you should never spend any of your time being the former anythingâ - Condoleezza Rice
âWe are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by clear paths to lesser goals. The true definition of decision is to remove options and you commit more to what you want by removing options (or lesser goals). By closing off options, you free up space in your brain and have more willpower to make better decisions towards your one goal. Decision fatigue will burn you out unless you actively try to eliminate itâ.
âSometimes you have to question the desires of your former self. I had to face a hard reality where it became painfully obvious that what I wanted for a decade now didnât have the same meaning and so I had to reframe itâ.
âIf you focus so much on your former self, you limit your capacity to think about what your future self could achieve"
âItâs false to assume that your future self will make the same decision as your current selfâ
"Measure the gain not the gap â rather than measure yourself against your ideal, you should measure yourself against your former self. If you do this then you are always going to be measuring progress which will make you feel better. Just because you havenât yet got to where you want to, it doesnât mean you have to be upset in the presentâ
âThat being said, the future does give you purpose. In Man's Search for Meaning Viktor Frankl said that if you don't have a purpose towards your future then your present lacks meaning. He talks about the people in concentration camps and says that those who lost hope and purpose towards a specific future, their present lost meaning and purpose, it lost context. So you need a future to stretch and struggle for - he said that what man needs is not a tension-less state but a striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal. It gives you something to get out of bed forâ.
âThe prevailing narrative now is that your future is driving your present. Even if you donât see them as goals, the future does direct your present. But you do get to choose the future that directs your present and ultimately, whether you call it goals or not, your behaviour is fundamentally driven by our goals and future plansâ
âOur goals are limited by the information that we have. Constantly learning and exposing yourself to new things will broaden your horizons as to what you can do. Desire is not innate â it can be trained and taking in more information can help you to work out what is valuable and important for youâ.
âItâs very difficult to direct your attention if you donât have something to direct your attention towardsâ
âI think the argument against goals goes against human nature. Every human behaviour is to produce an end. In psychology it is called prospection â if I didnât visualise the future, all my behaviour would be reactive. What makes my decision-making powerful is because I can imagine a future that I want to create and then I can use that future to dictate what I want to do now. I get the idea that goals can be limiting but why not be honest about what you want to achieve. Motivation is a lot more easily created if you are clear about your outcome and flow is easier to achieve if you have that one outcome to focus onâ
âGoals that are ten times bigger goals are actually better than those that are two times bigger because it forces you to think outside of the box and think creatively.â
âIn psychology, for both hope and motivation, you need three things â the outcome, the belief and the pathway and part of giving yourself a deadline with a goal forces you to find a pathwayâ
âGoals give your brain a reason to process the information you take inâ.
âI send emails probably three times per week which is usually an article but the key thing that made a difference for me was an idea from Dean Jackson called the super signature which is basically a P.S at the bottom of every one of your emails. So I now put a âsuper signatureâ at the bottom of every email which is basically a call to action. I missed out on a lot of things for years just because I didnât have this P.S at the bottom of my emailsâ.
"When I started on Medium it was a very open platform and things had a lot higher chance of going viral but as they tried to become profitable, it was harder to use. When I first started I was getting 20,000 emails every month from people following the links at the bottom of my article. Medium then changed that but I'd achieved my goal of getting a book deal and so itâs not as useful to me as it once was. The key for me was transforming readers into email subscribers and now over 700,000 people have followed the links to my landing pageâ.
âIn Western culture we are very individualistic but the book is all about how context is more important than the individual. The situation matters more than the individual. The book teaches you how to eliminate crap from your environment as well as how to put yourself in a situation to achieve your goalsâ
âWe can all change our environment in many ways and that's what's most important"
"Organisational psychology is very different to being a therapist. I study team dynamics and leadership â how to motivate people and things like that. Many people who get my degree end up becoming consultants and trainers".
Dr. Benjamin Hardy is an organizational psychologist and bestselling author of Willpower Doesnât Work and Personality Isn't Permanent.
His blogs have been read by over 100 million people and are featured on Harvard Business Review, Forbes, Fortune, CNBC, Cheddar, and many others. He is a regular contributor to Inc. and Psychology Today and from 2015-2018, he was the #1 writer in the world on Medium.com.
đĽWebsite / đĽŠMedium / đ¤Twitter / đ¸Instagram
Ali is a doctor, YouTuber and podcaster. His day job used to involve saving lives, but as of this week he's making videos about productivity, tech, education and lifestyle stuff.
đŹYouTube / đPodcast / đť Website / đ¤Twitter / đ¸Instagram
Personality Isn't Permanent by Benjamin Hardy
Willpower Doesn't Work by Benjamin Hardy
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
The Courage to be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi
Happy by Derren Brown
Dan Sullivan's Strategic Coach website
Dan Gilbert's TED talk The Psychology of your Future Self
00:55 Dr Hardy Introduction
01:40 What is Organisational Psychology?
03:30 Willpower Doesn't Work Discussion
04:55 Writing and Using Medium