Optimizing Our Beliefs: A conversation with unicorn entrepreneur and founder of Impact Theory, Tom Bilyeu
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There’s a word that gets thrown around so much these days, many falsely assume it’s a flakey term straight out of the New Age book section. The word is mindset.
Mindsets are actually a well-studied phenomenon, supported by hundreds of peer-reviewed studies. Also called “cognitive commitments” or “belief effects”, they refer to shorthand beliefs or assumptions which, once adopted, point us toward certain expectations. The amazing thing about the mind-body connection is that those expectations, in turn, are tied to real, measurable outcomes.
Scientists first became interested in them via the well-known placebo effect. But while drug companies are required to compare treatments to placebos, they aren’t incentivized to examine the larger, far more interesting, question: why do placebos work at all? This is where modern mindset research has started to fill the gap. To take a few examples out of Dr. Alia Crum’s Mind & Body Lab at Stanford:
- In one study, participants who were told the milkshake they were about to drink was indulgent and high calorie, their levels of ghrelin (the “hunger hormone”) dropped 3 times more than that of a control group.
- When housekeepers in hotels were told their work tasks actually constituted high-quality exercise, they lost weight, and their blood pressure decreased.
- When people were told that stress is good for them, various biomarkers improved compared to a control group that was told the opposite.
Unfortunately, mindsets also work in the negative. Dr. Ellen Langer’s lab at Harvard showed that patients who are told they are positive for a disease at the edge limit of the diagnostic threshold had outsized negative health outcomes compared to patients who test just below on the same threshold. Doctors agree that such a small difference shouldn’t lead to such a variance in outcomes – but again, expectations and how we label our reality matter greatly.
This growing body of research strongly suggests that humans don’t just experience the world as an objective rendering of purely physical laws.
Rather, our reality reflects our beliefs back to us in ways which can be both helpful and detrimental. This opens up a fascinating, and tricky, line of inquiry: how do we optimize our beliefs for positive effects while maintaining a commitment to truth and accuracy?
The answers are in the nuances of how we use language to craft our beliefs, and how we choose to direct our attention.
Learning to do this effectively requires shifting from theory to practice.
My guest in this episode of the podcast, unicorn entrepreneur and educator Tom Bilyeu, has been exploring mindsets from a different perspective.
He guided his nutritional bar business – Quest Nutrition – to a billion-dollar exit and has since founded Impact Theory, an online educational content platform that has impacted millions of lives. He credits much of his success to subtle shifts in belief and attention management he’s discovered along the way – usually on the heels of negative experiences:
You're having a biological experience, and once you understand you're having a biological experience, then you can begin to go, okay, this is a game of neurochemical management. And so how do I do that? And self-belief, self-narrative that which you repeat. These are all things that feed extraordinarily powerfully into how you feel, into whether you're managing your neurochemistry well. And so it's really been a lot of small realizations, often born of pain and suffering. The great news is when you have a failure, you go through something that hurts if you're willing to reflect on it. Ray Dalio has a phrase: pain plus reflection equals progress. And so if you're willing to like, God, that hurt, that sucked. I did not like that, but it's going to make me focus. And if I really look at this, I'm more likely to learn and remember it and then you can move forward.
While researchers like Langer and Crum focus on quantifying the measurable impact of mindsets and understanding their inner mechanisms, people like Tom offer a practitioner’s approach, linking life experiences to practical learning and ensuing growth. The basic pattern Tom has followed is scalable and can be useful to people in a wide variety of settings.
We had a great time discussing the educational system, the meaning of success, and the power of stories.
Hope you all enjoy and learn something useful from this episode – in the meantime, here’s a little clip on the immense utility of properly framing our beliefs around failure.