Shadowing Practice: ANYONE can have insane willpower. It's easy. - Learn English Speaking with Video
Creating lesson...
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Did you know, there's a tiny region in your brain right behind your forehead that secretly predicts the rest of your life.
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I can literally point to it on an MRI.
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It's the size of two postage stamps and it tells me exactly what's going to happen.
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Like whether you'll crumble when things get tough or if you have the figurative balls to push through.
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I mean think about it, you have people like David Goggins who can run 39 hours without sleep.
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Then you have people like me who can sleep 39 hours without running.
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To understand this paradox, I did a deep dive into all the research published in the last 50 years
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and I think I've finally figured it out.
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I'm going to break it down for you and teach you the secret science to willpower.
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Without a doubt, this video is going to change how you think about everything.
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First, let's talk about the difference between willpower and habits.
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Habits don't require willpower.
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The neural processes you've already built.
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They're the paved roads you drive on.
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Waking up, brushing your teeth, wiping your ass.
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on the other hand is driving off-road.
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You're cutting through mud and grass, running over bushes and poor baby raccoons.
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It takes more energy.
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You feel the resistance.
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It's why you often say, I don't feel like it because it's freaking annoying.
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But that's the thing, right?
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Unless you've built a solid network of roads, a morning routine, a deep work routine, habits for exercise and kissing your grandma on the cheek,
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most of your day is going to be spent off-roading by default.
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An incredibly inefficient way to live.
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So, what do you do?
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Either build more roads so you rely less on willpower or build a stronger engine that can handle almost anything.
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You know what I say to that?
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Why not both?
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Most people don't think this way.
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They have a fixed mindset on willpower.
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They don't realize you can upgrade the engine of willpower so they rely on motivation instead.
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The power Power of your engine is a spectrum, right?
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You have apathy on one end and grit and persistence on the other.
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Motivation is how hard you press the pedal.
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Feeling motivated is a temporary speed boost you get from flooring it.
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But what happens to your tiny weak ass motor when you constantly floor it?
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You fry the engine.
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Your brain is constantly seeking homeostatic balance.
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There's not just a hedonic treadmill for pleasure, there's one for motivation too.
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The state that got you motivated in the first place cannot keep you in that same state indefinitely.
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First time you listen to that pump up speech, it hits hard.
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You start flooring it.
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But the third time you watch it, the tenth time, it stops working.
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You're back to your baseline chasing the next hit.
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When you think about the neuroscience, it makes sense.
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That speech was just a dopamine hit after all.
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A temporary chemical surge that tweaks your synapses but doesn't change the actual wiring underneath.
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you alter your brain's architecture.
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You're just rearranging deck chairs, playing with neurotransmitters instead of building new neural pathways.
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I'm telling you this because to get the brain you want, you have to pop open the hood and see what's actually going on inside.
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Let's start with the first fundamental question.
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Is willpower a limited resource?
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If willpower is the ability of your car to go off-road and do hard work, doesn't it make sense then that we can only go off-road for so long each day?
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I mean, a car only has a limited amount of fuel in the tank, right?
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That's what scientists initially thought too for over 25 years.
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They call it the theory of ego depletion.
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It describes willpower as this reservoir inside of us that gets drained every time we resist the behavior, ignore our thought, or force ourselves to do something we don't want to do,
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like avoiding the temptation to adopt another baby hamster or calling your ex for a booty call tonight.
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One of the first studies on this topic involved testing the ability to resist eating radishes versus cookies.
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The study found that subjects who had to resist eating delicious cookies persisted for less time when doing a difficult task later,
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which in this case was solving a puzzle that actually had no solution.
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Conversely, subjects who had to resist eating radishes, which is a lot easier to do, persisted longer when trying to solve that same exact puzzle later.
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That jives, right?
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The more hard work I do, the more willpower I spend, and the more spent I feel.
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Like, dude, I just worked off my butt all day.
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It's 8pm.
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Give me a break.
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I just want to sit on my couch and scroll until I pass out.
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It's much easier to give into temptations in this state because the limited resource has been depleted.
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And so, these scientists, confident that they were on the right track, started experimenting to see what this mystical resource was.
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Speaking of willpower, I want to take a quick second to talk about one thing that really drains mind.
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I called some local people to help me move the other day, and it was like a bat signal went up.
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For the next day and a half, I'm getting flooded with robocalls and email spam.
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The ads I'm seeing online even start to shift.
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Random people even start knocking on my door.
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How the heck do they know?
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And that's when I learned your info is being sold to data brokers, and then these data brokers sell your information to advertisers and other shady call centers.
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There's even sites where you type in the name of the person you want to stalk, I mean reconnect with and you find out everything you want about them.
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That's what I did to become friends with my best friend Bob.
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I found out where he lives, his mother's maiden name, and connected on our mutual love for old movies.
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Anyway, I told Bob he should sign up for Incogni given how easy it was to track him down.
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I tried Incogni for myself and found a crap ton of brokers with my information.
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But here's the thing, those data brokers have to remove your name from their database if you ask them to.
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And that's exactly what they do on your behalf 24-7.
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Incogni just saved me 133 hours of time by automating this stuff.
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I get way less spam calls and emails now.
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This way, my brain power is preserved for other stuff like hanging out with Bob.
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Anyway, use code SPOONFEDSTUDY at the link below to get an exclusive 60% off an annual incogni plan.
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For context, the brain is the most metabolically active organ in the entire body.
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It requires a lot of fuel to operate.
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Generating electrical signals, pushing molecules around to create the conditions necessary for action potentials, generating and releasing neurotransmitters.
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There's a lot of work going on.
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Biologically speaking, when you look under the microscope, what is actually fueling all this?
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Glucose, right?
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At rest, the adult brain burns roughly 90 milligrams of glucose a minute.
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Since a teaspoon of sugar is 4000 milligrams, that means every minute that goes by, your brain uses about one grain of table sugar.
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Over 24 hours, you're effectively burning through a quarter cup of sugar just to think, feel, and stay conscious.
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Naturally, if glucose is the preferred fuel source for brain cells, wouldn't it make sense then that glucose itself is the resource that's limiting willpower?
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That's exactly what the scientists thought.
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So they designed a bunch of clever experiments to answer this very question.
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One group was given a 150 the 50-calorie glucose beverage, while the second group was given an artificially sweetened beverage with no glucose at all,
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but matched for taste so you couldn't tell which was which.
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When the first group drank the glucose beverage between one hard task requiring willpower and a second hard task requiring willpower,
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their performance on the difficult task stayed the same or even improved, whereas the other group did noticeably worse.
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When I first heard about this study, I was like, well, is that the secret?
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Just sip on Coca-Cola or juice throughout the day and you'll be a superhuman willpower machine?
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That's what started circulating in the pop science press until a few years later when the story got even weirder.
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A rival group of scientists entered the picture and was like, nah, this explanation feels way too simplistic.
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And so they redid the original experiment but introduced a secret third variable, belief.
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Turns out, only those that believe willpower is the limited resource benefits from this glucose power-up.
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For those who don't believe in that theory, it didn't matter what drink they drank.
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Their performance on each subsequent hard task was good regardless.
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In other words, if you think willpower is a limited resource, it becomes a limited resource.
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If you think willpower is an unlimited resource, it suddenly becomes unlimited.
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The first time I heard this, I was like, no freaking way.
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How is that possible?
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This feels too woo-woo to me.
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It's like using Jedi mind tricks, but on yourself.
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But I kept going down the rabbit hole, right?
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And it got even weirder.
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You know that feeling you get when you do hard work, that feeling of effort and resistance that makes hard work hard?
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What if I told you that But the feeling of effort wasn't actually real.
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The feeling of something being hard was entirely made up, created entirely by your brain.
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A subjective signal in response to work it thinks the body is doing.
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Because what's the implication here?
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That you could do hard things without feeling any of the strain or effort that normally comes with it, right?
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Because that's exactly what the scientists discovered.
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The perception of pain is actually quite flexible and in some cases can be turned off completely.
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In the first study, scientists gave people a painful burn on their arm.
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They told them they could stop the pain faster by using a joystick.
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Which by the way, was a complete lie.
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Despite that lie, it still worked.
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Thinking you could control your pain changed how your brain interpreted that pain.
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Brain scans showed a very peculiar part of the brain lighting up, reducing activation in the areas of the brain associated with pain processing.
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The same regions implicated in this next study.
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This study centered solely on one woman.
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In this paper, she is known as RMB.
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She came to the attention of the scientists because when she turned 50 years old, she suddenly lost the ability to experience the feeling of effort.
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She could still do all the effortful tasks the scientists put her through.
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In fact, she could still do them well and was consciously aware that these tasks were difficult, but fascinatingly felt no mental strain at all.
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This is a direct quote from her.
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Yes, this was a tricky trial.
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It should be more difficult for me.
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However, I do not feel any sensation of difficulty here.
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I know what you're thinking.
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She's faking it.
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Except scientists also measured something called the Skin Conductance Response or SCR.
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It's a probe that goes on your hands that basically measures how sweaty your palms are.
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Normal subjects had significantly higher SCRs, i.e. microscopically detectable sweaty palms when doing difficult tasks, but not RMB.
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Her body generated no detectable physiologic sweat to the difficult task at all.
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Now that's something you can't fake.
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You may be wondering, how did R&B do it?
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Because she wasn't born this way.
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It's actually pretty sad.
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She no longer feels effort because she suffered a stroke to the very particular region of the brain.
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Coincidentally, the same brain region the first group of scientists doing the joystick experiment studied.
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Until I did this deep dive, this brain region was never even on my radar.
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And I graduated medical school.
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I'm supposed to have studied the brain.
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I spent months in neuroanatomy class dissecting actual brains, held this biological supercomputer in the palm of my hand, and yet no one's ever talked about it.
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No wonder the lay public still thinks of willpower as this random fixed thing you're born with.
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It's like you meet some guy named Bob and you think to yourself, wow, Bob has all these traits, right?
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He's kind, he's thoughtful, and he even runs this abandoned hamster shelter, and oh yeah, he's not a quitter.
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He's incredibly disciplined, has amazing willpower.
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They think all the above traits for Bob or equivalent all lumped together in the same category of personality.
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But what if I told you, there's an actual area of the brain responsible for this so-called personality trait.
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The clear and direct neurological equivalent you can point to, track and grow, directly responsible for how likely we are to push.
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From everything like how willing we are to give up on our new resolutions, how likely we are to stomach the grind, to even how likely we are to give up on our dreams.
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Because maybe in the future, we'll have this high-tech brain scan that can measure the size of this area in your brain, right?
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And it'll tell you, hey, this dude only has a 30% chance of making it.
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Because that's what the research seems to be heading towards.
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Either way, this brain region does exist, and it's called the anterior mid-singulate cortex, or the AMCC.
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And it's seriously the key to unlocking everything.
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There's many reasons why scientists now believe the AMCC to be the mecca of willpower and grip.
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First of all, it's in the perfect spot.
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Scientists ripped apart monkey brains and looked at what their AMCC equivalent was connected to and then confirmed it with human studies.
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Without a doubt, it's a major structural hub substantially more connected to the rest of the brain than almost anything,
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maximizing communication between several vital areas we're now going to talk about.
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Think of it like the Grand Central Station in New York City where all the trains link up to.
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This vast interconnectedness allows it to do an incredibly sophisticated life function vital to survival, which we will soon talk about.
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It's fascinating because once you understand it, you will finally understand what willpower fundamentally is and how to grow it.
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In fact, several studies show if you destroy or inactivate certain parts of the AMCC, you massively reduce willpower and in some cases go into a state of complete apathy.
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In this study, rodents had a neurotoxin injected directly into their AMCC equivalent.
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And guess what happened?
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They gave up much more easily when simple barriers were placed between them and their food source.
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This has been seen in humans too, dating as far back as 1937,
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when the neuroanatomist James Pappes realized that patients with tumors pressing on the cingulate cortex showed a profound indifference.
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It wasn't laziness or sadness though.
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They'd lost all spontaneity and emotion, thought, and activity.
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Almost as if the very engine of willpower had been shut down.
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How do we know this?
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Because in 1983, another woman suffered a bigger stroke to another part the cingulate cortex.
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And guess what happened to her?
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She went into an akinetic mute state.
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A-kinetic meaning lack of spontaneous movement and mute meaning absence of speech.
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One month later, when she recovered, she was able to explain what was going on.
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She said she could hear everyone talking to her but felt no will to reply because she had nothing to say.
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Her mind was empty and felt nothing mattered.
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Contrast this to a study done in 2013, when scientists studied the exact opposite situation.
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What happens when you take a functioning AMCC, plant electrodes deep in the brain, and directly stimulate it?
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Luckily, two people underwent this very procedure, and they both described a very similar sequence of events.
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First was the physical sensation, a tangible increase in heart rate, a feeling of shakiness or hot flashes in the chest and the neck.
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then a sudden sense of worry and foreboding.
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The feeling that a difficult challenge was imminent.
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But this wasn't a bad feeling because it was followed by a powerful resolve to conquer that challenge.
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The first patient described it this way.
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I was worried that something bad is going to happen.
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No, I knew I had to fight to make it.
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If I don't fight, I give up.
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I can't give up.
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I actually found the recording for the second patient.
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I'll play it for you here now.
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Let me know what you feel.
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It's almost like you're headed towards this storm that's on the other side of maybe a couple of miles away, Adam.
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And you've got to get across the hill.
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And all of a sudden you're sitting there going, how am I going to figure out how to get over that, through that.
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And that's the way my brain started functioning.
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Well, can you tell me a little bit more?
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What do you mean?
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Let's say if you knew you were driving your car and it was, if one of the tires was half-flat,
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and you're only halfway there and you had no other way to turn around and go back.
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You got to keep going forward.
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That type of a, you know, feeling you have.
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You're like, am I going to get through this?
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Am I going to get through this?
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Was it negative or positive?
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It was more of a positive type thing of push harder, push harder, push harder and try to get through this.
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Is this unpleasant?
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I don't find it at all.
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You don't find it unpleasant?
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No. Okay.
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Is that not amazing?
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It's going to make even more sense when you dive deep into what the AMCC is actually doing.
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The AMCC is the grand central station of the brain.
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What kind of things are connected to it?
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First off, it's very much plugged into your sensory cortex.
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It's receiving data from all your senses, like vision, hearing, touch.
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These are all signals of the outside world.
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But then there's internal body signals too, right?
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Scientists call this interoception.
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The AMCC is constantly receiving updates on our internal state as well, monitoring things like how fast our heart is pumping, where most of the blood supply is circulating,
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how hungry we are, and subjective stuff like how effortful the thing is that we are doing.
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Does that ring a bell?
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It's even plugged into the areas of the brain
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that store our memories of how we think the world works and the emotional centers of the brain too.
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It's also plugged into the executive centers of our brain, getting signals from networks involved in high-level thinking, such as planning, attention, and cognitive control.
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Even connects with regions that prepare the body for physical movement
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while also modulating the internal state of the body to prepare for action through alterations in blood pressure, heart rate, and hormonal responses.
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What is all this starting to sound like?
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Collecting information from both the outside and inside, reference it with all the experiences and memories you've ever had, throw in a few emotions, analyze all the data and run the numbers,
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and then draft out the next plan of attack.
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Mr. President, this is your briefing.
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This is the current situation on the ground.
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These are our current resources.
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We need a course of action.
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Go or no go.
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Your decision, please.
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I've talked about this analogy before.
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It's what I call the brain CEO theory.
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Though you are the CEO of this whole enterprise, your conscious brain has but a small seat at the table.
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All these memos are landing on your desk.
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Information about outside weather conditions.
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Information about how crappy you feel on the inside.
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Bob's ex-wife just broke up with me again.
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I'm feeling quite crappy today.
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The cost of getting out of bed and pretending to be a normal functioning human being is too much.
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Your AMCC runs through all the analyses and decides the best course of action for you today, which is probably a big fat nah,
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and it plugs back into your motor cortex and wills you not to move.
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Because you, the CEO, aren't really used to exercising control over this giant behemoth of a corporation, you listen and you stay under the covers.
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You're like, you know, a little boy in charge of Google.
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You have no idea what you're doing, and so you let this enterprise carry on, run mainly by all these unconscious processes and other low-level managers with all their random agendas.
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Hunger, boredom, annoyance, horniness.
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These get prioritized over the big goals you want to make happen, all linked and coordinated by this unconscious supercomputer known as the AMCC,
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silently living inside of you.
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That's the real puppet master pulling the strings from above while you have become just the mere passenger.
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Okay, being a little bit extra dramatic here, I'm painting a scary picture to get your attention,
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but it does speak to the larger truth of the AMCC's real function, which is to help you survive and make decisions by doing cost-benefit analyses in real time.
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Because the research on the AMCC shows there are three components to this analysis.
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One, what is the cost?
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How difficult is the task in front of me going to take, both mentally and physically.
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Two, what's the reward?
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What do I get out of it by completing the task?
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And three, did I get it right?
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It constantly monitors for errors.
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Was there an error between what we expected to happen versus what actually happened in terms of cost and reward?
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If so, the AMCC lights up even more.
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Hmm, I guess I got it wrong.
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Let me recalibrate the next time or adjust this perception of effort upward or downward in real time.
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I mean, think about it.
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When you lose steam, when you decide, ah, screw it, I'm done, you tried, but then you realize the effort was too great, and that's when you decided to stop.
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Or the opposite, you get a second win, let's say.
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You suddenly realize, wait a second, maybe I can do this, and then you push in the home stretch.
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Makes sense to have this evolutionarily, right?
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The world is constantly changing.
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You need a machine to analyze those changing states
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and figure out what the next best optimal plan is given the new context
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because that plan may need to change depending how we perceive the world in terms of costs and benefits.
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It's deeply plugged in because this thing needs to be super accurate, right?
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This is the concept of allostasis, the important job of allocating the physiologic
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and intentional resources needed to achieve the desired goals the mind or body wants to accomplish.
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This is all in service of efficient energy regulation, which makes sense if you think about it.
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If you were to design a conscious robot.
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You definitely want something in the software to run these calculations
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and divvy up energy appropriately to things that make sense for the long-term survival of this robot.
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Meta-analysis of over 1,000 scientific fMRI brain studies over the past 20 years shows
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that the AMCC is one of the most consistently active regions of the brain.
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That's no accident, right?
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According to the Harvard Business Review, people make on average 35,000 decisions a day.
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These are all really just cost
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and benefit analyses where the brain is deciding what things are worth it for it to devote energy to.
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When you really think about it, the AMCC is basically a crystal ball.
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It's a future state predictive simulator.
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It thinks it knows what the costs and rewards are, but in the end, these are all predictions because there's an inherent subjectivity to it all.
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Is going to the gym worth it?
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Is busting my ass trying to lift these weights going to be a good use of my time?
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If you're single and looking to get laid, then probably yes.
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But if you're not and you really hate the pain of working out to begin with, then maybe not.
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Same goes with any task you decide to do or don't decide to do, especially those that may only come true in the distant, distant future like a long-term goal or plan.
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But what happens when the cost of effort is high and the rewards are uncertain or way delayed far into the future, like most things that matter are?
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What then dictates whether or not you keep pushing?
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And that, my friends, is where the magic lies.
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It's why there's so much variability, why certain people always give up, while a few push through no matter what.
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The people that are gritty, that persevere, actually have a bias in their AMCC.
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This bias falls into three distinct categories.
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They either 1.
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Consistently overvalue rewards, 2.
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Consistently perceive costs to be lower, or 3.
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They perceive their body's resources to be greater, whether that's objectively true or not.
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Call it delusion perhaps, but it's definitely in your best interest to be deluded
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and to have this bias
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because the amcc is not the objective arbiter of truth of
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reality right as you can clearly see with all the studies
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we've talked about you can easily manipulate the amcc to make things cost less
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or increase the drive to push that's why i may get
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a point to actively train all these domains one by one by the way
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if you want a custom action plan
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and how to train your amcc in all these domains and get superhuman levels of willpower i built this incredible diagnostic tool.
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It analyzes your situation and tells you exactly what you need to do.
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And it's completely free.
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My gift to you.
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Link in the description.
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Costs like pain, effort, or strain.
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The science shows that this is all a subjective perception generated by your brain that can be actively manipulated.
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In fact, this study showed by directing magnetic pulses to the SMA, a region strong and connected to the AMCC,
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significantly reduced the perceived difficulty of a physically demanding task, resulting in a greater willingness to exert effort.
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In other words, you can alter hard work in real time to make it feel easy.
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Well, it's not practical to wear transcranial magnetic stimulated on my head, but you can train it the good old-fashioned way, right?
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That's why I push myself to do tough things, daily stuff like cold showers or 15-minute planks, or the experiences I've gone through like pushing through medical school and residency,
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doing 36-hour ICU shifts where you don't sleep.
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I've trained my brain to perceived costs to be lower because I've already dealt with a million tough things before.
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This is why desensitization works.
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When you become desensitized, whatever tough thing
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that is in front of you is actually not so bad anymore
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because you've already done a bunch of similar stuff that was 10 times even more insane.
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Okay, what about number two, your perception of your body's resources?
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This you can train as well.
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One, by optimizing your body through nutrition, sleep, and exercise, right?
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And two, by pushing your perceived limits even further by adopting a growth mindset and using identity-based mindfulness training.
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It's what Goggins said, when you think you are done, you're only at 40%.
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This is how you push your brain to unlock the entire gas tank.
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I did several videos on this.
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Go check it out if you're interested.
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What about rewards?
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That too you can manipulate.
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It's the concept I call the DeLorean technique.
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You can manipulate the salience of rewards and reduce the discount factor that we naturally apply to future rewards.
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I have a video on my channel about that too.
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Point is, your brain is fundamentally neuroplastic, which means it is programmable.
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In fact, the AMCC may be even more neuroplastic than any other brain region.
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Now, this is a direct quote from a study, right?
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As a flexible hub, the AMCC may be better equipped than any other brain region to reshape its connectivity in response to learning.
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In 2017, a group of scientists looked at a bunch of monkey brains
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and found protein receptors important for plasticity to be highly expressed in the AMCC,
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while markers of stability, i.e. cellular factors that inhibit synaptic plasticity, to be much lower.
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It's almost like the AMCC is begging for you to beef it up so it can get to work for you.
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Question is, are you up for the challenge?
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After this deep dive, I now have a completely different perspective on willpower.
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I call it the competing interest theory.
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The AMCC is basically a brain alarm, right?
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It monitors the body's internal state, like pain, hunger, thirst, breathlessness, and directs attention to conflicts that threaten survival goals.
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When the alarm is blaring, like, yo bro, gas is low, get some food in, your brain automatically reallocates resources to fix the problem.
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The prefrontal cortex, which handles conscious control, suddenly has less bandwidth.
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That's why at the end of the day, when you're tired and hungry, the easy, immediately rewarding task wins.
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Not because willpower is a finite resource, you haven't run out of fuel, it's simply a misallocation of neuronal attention.
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The AMCC keeps flagging competing priorities.
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Eat, rest, scroll, and your executive centers have to constantly suppress those alarms to focus.
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Can you imagine trying to work with five different annoying alarms blaring at the same time?
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But that's what's going on in your brain.
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And that's why you have the subjective feeling of I'm out of willpower.
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Neuronally, you are being overwhelmed.
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And after you recover, the system resets, right?
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You're rested, well fed, it's a clean slate.
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When faced with a hard task now, the AMCC runs a quick cost-benefit check and finds no conflicts.
394
Carry on, good sir, it says.
395
All I see is reward and upside.
396
Let's get to work, my man.
397
Willpower feels like it's at an all-time high.
398
And so, it's easy to get to work in this state.
399
Hopefully this all makes sense.
400
The first step is understanding, but what do you do with it?
401
Most people will watch this and be like, oh, okay, that's cool, and scroll to the next video, while their life never changes.
402
And that's why I'm offering you the next step.
403
Think of this channel as The Classroom.
404
The gym where you get to work is actually in a community I run called Level 100.
405
The goal is to make this the best self-development community ever.
406
Every week, we reinforce concepts like this with real actions and challenges, all with real accountability, so you know exactly what the next step is.
407
Why not surround yourself with like-minded people getting it done?
408
This is the concept of normalization, and studies show it actually makes you 65% more likely to hit your goals.
409
And when you take it a step further with regularly scheduled accountability with others, some research shows success even goes up as high as 95%, which is exactly what we do.
410
This could very well be the best investment you ever make.
411
If you're serious about getting the most out of life, I'll see you there.
412
Reserve your spot for the next cohort today.
413
Anyway, hopefully this was helpful.
414
I'll see you in the next video.
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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson
This video has 414 sentences and 5290 words to shadow. The speech runs for 28:00. The speaker talks fast, about 189 words per minute, so expect linked and reduced sounds. 82% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English; the rest is worth studying before you start.
Key vocabulary in this video
15 words from the video worth learning, with pronunciation and meaning:
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| resource noun | /ɹɪˈzɔːs/ | Something that one uses to achieve an objective, e.g. raw materials or personnel. |
| reward noun | /ɹɪˈwɔɹd/ | Something of value given in return for an act. |
| glucose noun | /ˈɡluː.kəʊz/ | A simple monosaccharide (sugar) with a molecular formula of C₆H₁₂O₆; a principle source of energy for cellular metabolism. |
| perceive verb | /pɚˈsiv/ | To become aware of, through the physical senses, to see; to understand. |
| cortex noun | /ˈkɔɹtɛks/ | The outer layer of an internal organ or body structure, such as the kidney or the brain. |
| alarm noun | /əˈlɑɹm/ | A summons to arms, as on the approach of an enemy. |
| generate verb | /ˈd͡ʒɛn.ə.ɹeɪt/ | To bring into being; give rise to. |
| resist verb | /ɹɪˈzɪst/ | To attempt to counter the actions or effects of. |
| conscious adjective | /ˈkɑn.ʃəs/ | Alert, awake; with one's mental faculties active. |
| perception noun | /pɚˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/ | The organisation, identification and interpretation of sensory information. |
| dive verb | /daɪv/ | To swim under water. |
| broker noun | /ˈbɹoʊkɚ/ | A mediator between a buyer and seller. |
| subjective adjective | /səbˈd͡ʒɛktɪv/ | Formed, as in opinions, based upon a person's feelings or intuition, rather than upon observation or purely logical reasoning; coming more from within the… |
| experiment noun | /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/ | A test under controlled conditions made to either demonstrate a known truth, examine the validity of a hypothesis, or determine the efficacy or likelihood of… |
| incredibly adverb | /ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/ | In an incredible manner; not to be believed. |
Phrasal verbs you will hear
| Word | Pronunciation | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| give up verb | To surrender (someone or something); to inform on (someone). | |
| get through verb | /ɡɛt ˈθɹu/ | To overcome; to endure. |
| push through verb | To force (legislation or a plan) to be passed or agreed to or a decision to be reached. | |
| figure out verb | To come to understand; to discover or find a solution; to deduce. | |
| find out verb | To discover, as by asking or investigating. | |
| get out of verb | To leave, exit or escape from; to become free of. | |
| go off verb | To explode. | |
| light up verb | To illuminate, to bring light to something, to brighten. |
Pronunciation to watch
The speaker uses 74 contractions and reduced forms, such as you're, don't, I'm. Say them the short way, as you hear them.
- The “sh” and “zh” sounds: conscious /ˈkɑn.ʃəs/, perception /pɚˈsɛpʃ(ə)n/, motivation /ˈmoʊ.tə.veɪ.ʃən/, emotion /ɪˈməʊ.ʃən/, unconscious /ˌʌnˈkɑnʃəs/
- Long words — get the stress right: experiment /ɪkˈspɛɹ.ə.mənt/, incredibly /ɪŋˈkɹɛdɪbli/, consistently /kənˈsɪstəntli/, motivation /ˈmoʊ.tə.veɪ.ʃən/, manipulate /məˈnɪp.jʊ.leɪt/
How to practise with this video
- Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
- Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
- Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like resource, reward, glucose.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | I've finally figured · you've already built · you've built |
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | be spent · has been depleted · being sold |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | radishes, which is · tell which was · those who don |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.