Name: This Idea Will Make You Unstoppable
Uploaded: 2024-09-18T08:32:40.000Z
Duration: 15 min 5 s
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Do you feel like you're winning? Or do you feel like you're wasting your potential?

Either way, the science behind the so-called winner effect is fascinating and scary. Here's why.

So in a study, they let two mice fight against each other or compete for territory. They drug mouse B so that mouse A is pretty much guaranteed to win. The next fight, they don't drug mouse B, but mouse A still wins with a much higher probability. Because it had more confidence, more testosterone, more wins under its belt. Long story short, this is a vicious cycle that shows up everywhere in life. The more you win, the more likely you are to keep winning.

You see this with rich people who keep getting richer because their wealth compounds. With every success an entrepreneur has, they become more confident, attract better people to work for them, it's easier to build the next billion-dollar empire. We see the same thing in athletes. And even their fans' testosterone increases after a win, even though they didn't do anything. They just got drunk on the sidelines. Men who have a lot of love interest from women become more attractive because of the existing love interest. Winning a competition improves your biochemistry and cognitive abilities to win again. But on the flip side, if things aren't working out, you feel stuck, full of self-doubt, feel like you're losing, you're more likely to lose, which makes you feel worse, which makes things even harder. So the way I think about the winner effect for me is you're either on an upward spiral or a downward spiral. How much positive or negative momentum do you currently have in your life? This is the fifth video in our 90-day goal series. And it's a good time to reflect and see what spiral we're on. Because regardless of the results that we got this year, we can tap into the winner effect at will with just a few simple tweaks. And my uncle, Andrew Huberman, also shared a very good tool to do that. Science, let's do it. This year, I've noticed that I've built up some negative momentum. So last year, 2022, my channel blew up and I got hundreds of thousands of subscribers in a year. But this year,

I've only grown by a fraction of it. I almost went bankrupt. And I went from having a team to parting ways with everyone. And meanwhile, it feels like every other creator is growing exponentially. You can see throughout different times and areas of my life how the results that

I got and the feeling of winning affected my ability to continue to win. Now, here's the exciting part. No matter what results you get, even if you have no track record of winning, the winner effect is all about perception. And this is deeper than just about a book with some interesting studies and a cool concept. It's about developing a healthy relationship with results.

How do you feel about the results that you got this year? When I'm in this negative spiral,

I realize that I tend to forget all the wins that I've had until then. But what's really helped me is just remembering past wins. You know, bathe in it. Take a bath in it. And it's so easy to discount them where that wasn't a big deal. That doesn't really count. That's what everyone does.

It doesn't make it not a win. Maybe you're like, I've done literally nothing in my life. When you look up the word mediocrity, it literally has a picture of me in it. Then just start celebrating tiny wins that you've had. A lot of people were like, no, but what if you don't have any successes? Like, how do you get started? Did you get dressed this morning? Did you get in front of the computer? It's smaller evidence, but you have enough evidence to make the claim that you can do this. Here's the thing. Winning is subjective. Your brain doesn't know the difference between what actually happened and what you think happened. For example, in a recent community call, one of our members, Max, shared that he actually hit his goal for the 90 days, which was get three clients. But it doesn't feel really like a success because I don't feel like I had much control over this result. Because he was trying direct outreach and they just came from different sources. And he wasn't really proud. He felt a bit defeated, even though he's hit his goal. For example, you could lose a boxing match, but still be like, yo, I survived four rounds. Look at these shots that I gave him. Boom, boom, bam, bam. You could get rejected by that hot saucy person that you've been eyeing for so long and go, they must think I'm out of their league of legends. And then you go back to your basement. I don't know. It's all subjective. So the first way to tap into that upward spiral is by building the muscle of acknowledging your wins, even if you have to dig for them. A great habit I found is just writing down three wins at the end of the day.

It's simply repetition until your brain builds the neural connections that then make it automatic.

But wait, there is great danger if you do this wrong. It could destroy your life, your family, your country, the universe. Because celebrating the wrong wins can actually be demotivating.

So I asked my biological uncle, Andrew Huberman, about this. And some of you mentioned, wow, I didn't know he's your uncle. Well, of course he is. And I also did interview him. Many people probably believe that if you tell a child or an adult that they're really good at something, that it would bolster their motivation to engage in that activity. It does not. In fact, the exact opposite happens. A paper from Dr. Carol Dweck, as well as her colleague, Claudia Mueller. They essentially gave feedback that was linked up with a child's intelligence, telling kid they're smart, they're talented, or they gave them what was called effort feedback. You tried really hard on that problem. It was great the way that you applied effort. When they were then later offered problem sets that were either challenging or were of the sort that they knew they could perform well on. First of all, the kids that got the intelligence-based feedback, when they encounter challenges, they are likely to go with the least amount of challenge so that they can continue to get the praise that they had received previously about being smart or talented.

Whereas the kids that got feedback about their strong effort, more often than not, they picked the harder problems that stood to teach them more. And guess what? The kids that are rewarded for effort and that continue to pick harder problems outperform the kids that are given the intelligence praise and feedback by a large margin. As we all give ourselves feedback, rewarding yourself for effort is the best way to improve performance. This is where I realized I have not had a great relationship with results. For example, the last two videos on my channel pretty much had the same amount of work and effort put into them. One of them got 15 times the result in terms of views, and it is a bit demotivating. But I got way more direct messages from friends and from viewers that they really love this one. So which one is more of a win? A healthy relationship with results is all about falling in love with the process and the things you control. There's probably a caveat to the whole rewarding effort thing as well because I know friends who only want to pursue something if it's really hard, if it's really difficult, even though they could get the same result with a workout that doesn't break their legs. But I think it's about defining for yourself what makes this a win that is in my control so that I can reward myself for taking the right actions. Let's be honest, is there ever a point where it's good or productive to feel like you failed or lost? I don't think so. Maybe if you did a really big oopsie, like maybe you used your baby as a projectile weapon in a Roman civil war, that could be seen as an L. But apart from that, what if you either celebrated a win or you celebrated learning a lesson? Which is the cliche of I either win or I learn, but I guess it's how you maintain the feeling of progress and winning. This next one

I found very eye-opening, like my morning alarm when I get out of bed and I eat a haram. The month you were born in plays a significant role in how well you'll perform in sports. Here's why. This is a normal distribution of births and these are the birth months of professional football players.

For the Americans watching, when I say football, I mean the sport where you actually use your foot.

Why were they all born earlier in the year? Because this is the cutoff. If you're born earlier, you're put into a different age bracket. And as a kid, when you're 9 to 12 months older than all the other ones, that makes a big difference. You're bigger, you're stronger, you're maybe less dumb,

I don't know. And therefore, these kids have an easier time, they do better initially, they get more time playing, they get the ball passed more often to them, and it's a repeating cycle that again is the winner effect. And then even into adulthood, when they become professionals, it's because they started out with early wins. I sucked at football even though I played it for a long time. I was put in a team of bullies that were more than a year older than me, and on top of that, guess which month I was born in. Look how easy it would be to break those tiny little legs.

I mentioned this in a previous video that was about learning. Tim Ferriss shared that in order to learn something fast and really well, you have to have early wins. It increases dopamine, testosterone, confidence, and then you're more motivated to practice more, you have more resilience, and you basically get the effects of the winner effect. Most meaningful things are difficult to learn, so you want some of that uninformed optimism that keeps you going through the tough times. A common story we hear from people is that they have failed for years before they succeeded. For example, you have people like Gary Vee saying that he was eating sh** for 10 years. And yes, he was. He also had positive reinforcements early on from his mom and his dad and maybe other people around him. And he's a master at counting wins, loving the process, and that allowed him to stick to entrepreneurship and get him to where he is now. Same thing with Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast was uploading for years, but most people don't know that his first video actually went viral. It was like some random Minecraft one, and that probably spiked his confidence and his dopamine to the point where he was like,

I need to get this again. So long story short, big goals can be daunting. So start with easy early wins and stack them from there. If you're depressed and you're stuck in a rut, just getting out of bed before noon and taking a shower is a big win. And just build it from there. Or maybe as part of your morning routine, arm wrestle a five-year-old. Get that early win. Sucks for the five-year-old, you'll send him down a lifelong spiral of failure, but well, someone's gonna lose, right? Next up, let me know if this sounds familiar to you. I'm gonna get these five things done today, but you only get three things done, and you push the remaining two a day forward. And you keep doing this until you have accumulated this slog of tasks. And with time, you tell yourself, today I'm really gonna get everything done. But in the back of your mind, there's that little voice that says, let's be real here. Not gonna happen. Whenever you make a commitment to a challenge, a to-do list, a friend of yours, and you don't keep it, you lose trust in yourself and your word. Trust in your own word is the most important relationship you have. When you can't trust your own word and commitment, you're in trouble. How much do you currently trust your own word? When you declare something, is it set in stone or are there always excuses that come up later? Think about people that you know in your life. There's a clear difference between people who keep their word and those who don't. As the famous quote goes, the quality of your life is in direct proportion to the quality of your relationship. Oh, man.

How much you stick to or keep your word in your commitments.

The primary purpose of something like the Driven 30 Challenge or 75 Hard, not to build a healthy lifestyle, although that's a nice bonus, but so that you can do something that sucks and is challenging and regain trust in your word and commitments. The next one is going to be a weird point that I'm trying to make, but stick with me here. Imagine this. It's the year 2842. Dimension

C39. In a world where infertility forces humanity to generate people in labs and Nebula Noodle is born in a mature body, brain, and consciousness, he has no memories or life experience and has to learn how things work, societal norms, how to eat, and in his weekly check-in with his integration doctor, he shares. Doctor, something terrible happened. Yesterday, I was eating all this food and this morning, I just had this urge to, and it just came out. And the doctor goes, oh, you made your first stink. What is wrong with me? Why is this happening? Oh, no, that's normal. We all do that. It's so gross. It happens like once a day, usually. But doctor, how can this be normal? It's actually something you can look forward to. It's a silly story. I know. How did I come up with it?

Where in our own lives are we doing that? Where we make a stink, we think it's bad, there's something wrong with us, but it's completely normal, and we just need to adjust our expectations. I've heard so many people say, you know what, I've tried meditation, but I just couldn't stop thinking, so it's not for me. But you're expecting to be enlightened instantly, which usually takes, what, 30 years? Of course you're going to think that's normal, and meditation is just really, really hard for everyone. And you may have actually crushed it.

Same thing with people who put out 10 YouTube videos, and in total, they have 500 views. But that's actually amazing. You're winning, but you think you're losing because your expectations are off. I've mentioned this before somewhere. A lot of problems are only problems because we think they're problems. In other words, oftentimes, we think we're losing, when in reality, we just have to adjust our expectations. And my buddy, Rhian Doris, who was in a second latest video, adjusted my expectations. It's tough because I've been going through a little bit of this as well. The circular sort of rhythm of progression can be painful, you know. The thing I try to remind myself of is that it's like it's a spiral, not a circle. So it feels circular because you come around. Yeah, exactly, but it actually spirals upward. So all these cringy motivational posters, they make sense, except for this one, maybe. What is, what, how did he, what? This final one, I believe, is the most powerful way to tap into the winner effect as well. It's used by Olympic athletes, the U.S.

military. The Navy SEALs we trained with taught us this one as one of the four pillars of mental toughness. And I would say it's the most important practice that I was lucky to learn about when I was at my lowest and I had to achieve what felt impossible at the time. I told the full story a while back on my channel. When I was 20 years old, I was forced to leave Australia because my visa had expired. And I'd been there for a year. I had found a girlfriend, but I promised her to make it back. But the only way I found was to build a business so I could make money online and come back on a tourist visa. And it seemed impossible at the time. I was absolutely clueless about everything and I felt defeated right from the beginning. But I read about visualization and every day I would visualize myself making it back to Australia with so much emotional intensity. And

I brainwashed myself to the point where I would have recurring dreams of being back in Sydney,

Australia, reunited with my friends there, tears of joy streaming down my face. And then I would wake up in the middle of the night and notice my face was actually wet because I was crying in my sleep. Again, your brain doesn't know much of a difference between what's real and what's imagined. And visualizing this positive future again and again had ignited a certainty inside of me that I shouldn't have had, but now I did. And I saw possibilities and opportunities open up that

I couldn't even see before. I'm not talking about some spiritual law of attraction new age stuff here. It creates certainty and confidence where there isn't any confidence yet, which allows you to move forward and get the results that then confirm the confidence that you had in the first place. Everything I've ever visualized repeatedly and deliberately has come true. And I stopped doing it. And I don't know why. If you visualized and celebrated your future wins now, how would you feel? And if you carried that energy into your business or your career, your dating, your relationships, would you show up differently? I hope some of this was useful for you so you can build a healthy relationship with results and get on that upward spiral. Thanks for watching.