HOW TO BECOME ADDICTED TO DOING HARD THINGS (with neuroscience)

[0:00]You know exactly what you should be doing.You know, you should learn that skill, you should work on that project, you should study for that exam, but you still do not do it. But believe me, there is nothing wrong with you.Because your brain is literally designed to resist effort. And in this video, I'll explain how it works and the three ways to fix it. My name is Olga. I study computation and cognitive science at the University of Pennsylvania. And in this video, I'll break down how you can finally stop fighting your brain, so you can easily do the hard tasks that life throws at you. There's a key distinction that separates people who easily do hard tasks from those who struggle. So people who struggle with hard tasks, they feel a lot of resistance towards the task. And those who do it easily, they feel way less resistance.And they figured out that the solution is to not push yourself harder and use up all of your willpower. The solution is to design your task in a way that your brain actually wants to do it, that your brain doesn't feel intimidated by the task. But how is that even possible?Well, first we have to understand how your brain handles hard tasks in the first place. And there's two systems for handling tasks.The first one is your basal ganglia and it basically handles all of the automatic behaviors. Such as brushing your teeth, because you stand up, you brush your teeth, and you don't actually think about the angle of the brush. You don't think about how much pressure to apply or to start.It's basically an automatic behavior for you that doesn't require any conscious decision making. For example, if you were to drive a car, if you drove a car for a while, you're going to find it very easy and automatic. But if you just started learning how to drive a car, that would require a lot of conscious decision making. And that brings me to my second system and it's prefrontal cortex, which is located right behind your forehead. And essentially, your prefrontal cortex is responsible for all the actions that require conscious decision making and conscious effort. For example, when you're writing an essay or learning a new skill or you're working on a project that you've never done before. These tasks require a lot of conscious effort and your brain doesn't really want to use the prefrontal cortex too much. Because if you use it a lot, if you work for a very long time on something very difficult, it causes mental exhaustion. So when you think about actually doing the task, your brain runs a cost to benefit calculation. It essentially analyzes whether the reward that I'm going to get from doing this task, whether it's worth the effort that I'm going to put into it. And there's a model that shows exactly how this works, which is called The Fogg Behavioral Model, which was developed at Stanford. So you have two axes and on one side, you see how much effort the task requires. But on the other side, you see how much reward your brain expects right now.And there's a threshold line between them, which is the action line. So if the reward exceeds the effort for a specific task, your brain says yes, and you do it easily. But if the effort exceeds the reward, your brain says no, and you feel that resistance. This is why scrolling Tik Tok is so easy, because it's almost zero effort and you get immediate reward. But if you were to read a textbook, for example, that would require a lot of effort and distant reward, because you're not going to immediately feel the benefit of reading a textbook. But the thing is, you cannot actually control how much immediate reward the task is going to give you. But you can easily control how much effort it requires by intelligently designing your tasks. So the first thing you can design is you can design the size of the task.And essentially, you have to make every step of the tasks absurdly small, so it feels very achievable. For example, when I would be dreading something or I'd be scared to do something, I would make this long checklist of things I have to do to accomplish a certain task. For example, when I was making my first ever YouTube video, it felt very big to me, it felt very scary. So I essentially made this long checklist, where number one, I have to open my computer, two, open Google document, three, write 10 possible titles, four, brainstorm for 20 minutes, ideas for the video. Look, I know it sounds simplistic, but think about video games for a second. Video game designers, they understand human psychology better than any psychologist in the world. They're not going to make you fight a final boss on level one, because they're going to cut the whole game into small, achievable chunks, small, achievable levels. And every time you complete a level, you can move on to the next one, and you feel that sense of accomplishment, and you feel that sense of drive to keep going. And this is how people accomplish extreme things.So Kelly Magol is a researcher, a psychologist at Stanford, and she writes about ultramarathon runners. And these people are crazy.They run for hundreds of kilometers through rain, through mountains, for days. They It requires a lot of grit.Every single one of them reaches a point where they cannot continue. And they all describe the same mental strategy that they use to keep going.And the strategy is to stop thinking about the finish line, to focus just on one single step at a time. And you then take that step.You feel a little bit of a sense of an accomplishment.And then you can think, oh, I just did this step, so I can do another one. And that's how people run hundreds of kilometers.One step at a time. And the second thing you can design is you can design how the task feels, whether it feels like an obligation or whether it feels like a choice. And think about the difference between these two sentences. And the first one is I have to complete this project, versus I choose to complete this project. Like even though you have the same exact task that requires the same amount of effort, both of them they feel completely different. When you feel like something is your choice, you engage more deeply with it. You persist longer and you actually end up enjoying it more. But when you feel forced to do something, your brain generates that resistance. So when you think, I have to write this essay, your brain treats it as an obligation and it pushes back against it. But when you think, I choose to write this essay right now so that I can have the rest of my evening free, this is treated like a decision that you made yourself. Because your brain doesn't actually resist hard work, it resists the work that feels imposed, even if you're the one imposing it. And the third thing you can do is you can design the commitment itself. Because we start things all the time, but the question is, how do you stick with it long enough so it actually leads somewhere? Imagine you're learning a new skill for your career, like coding or design. You feel excited for the first few days, but then you skip one lesson, then you skip another lesson, and eventually you abandon it. And now it becomes another thing on the big pile of things that you started but never finished, which makes you feel like you're a person who cannot follow through with your commitments. And it makes the next hard task even heavier for you. And there's a framework that massively helps with this.And your scientists and Laura Leff in her book Tiny Experiments, she talks about creating a pact with yourself. And a pact is essentially a commitment to do a certain action for a certain duration. So for example, I choose to study coding for 30 minutes a day for the next two weeks.I choose to go to the gym three times a week for one month.I choose to read for 20 minutes before bed for one week. And you should keep in mind that in these tiny experiments, you're not actually trying to succeed. You're trying to experiment with something and you have to commit to actually completing it. And a very important thing is that the commitment, the pact has to be short and it should feel achievable. So it shouldn't be like, oh, I'm going to go exercise every day for the next year.No, that has to be a few weeks or a few months, let's say. So you create this pact with yourself, and once you're done with the pact, you feel like, oh, I actually completed what I set out to do. And every time you complete one of these experiments, your brain tells you that you're actually the person who falls through and you can actually complete hard tasks. And actually, I'm doing this right now.So I've been wanting to learn more about how AI works. So I decided to create a pact for myself.And my pact is, study the course called how AI Works, which is a course on Brilliant for two hours a week for three weeks. That's my pact.And what I love about Brilliant is that instead of long and passive lectures, I learn by interactively solving problems. Each lesson is small and self-contained, so I work through one concept, I get immediate feedback, and before I realize it, I understand the concept that felt intimidating to me five minutes ago. Brilliant helps you build real skills in math, coding, data science, AI, with courses that are designed by educators from MIT, Stanford, Harvard, for anyone from age 10 years old to 110 years old. I just love that it makes you learn concepts by actively solving problems instead of just passively giving you information. To learn for free on Brilliant for a full 30 days, go to brilliant.org/olgaloiek, or you can also click the link in my description or scan this QR code on screen. Brilliant has also given my viewers 20% off their annual premium subscription, which gives you unlimited access to everything on Brilliant. And thank you to Brilliant for sponsoring this video.So to recap, if you're facing a difficult task, design the task to be small enough so that your brain doesn't feel intimidated by it. Secondly, design the framing of the tasks so that you feel like you chose it yourself and it wasn't imposed on you. And thirdly, design the commitment itself by writing these tiny experiments. Hard things do not become easy because you force yourself to do them.They become easy because you design the right conditions for your brain to cooperate. So that's it.Thank you for watching and subscribe if this helped.And, guys, dreams come true because I just got 100,000 subscribers, and I cannot describe to you how grateful I am to be able to share my thoughts with 100,000 of you. And this video actually was inspired by a lot of comments that you wrote about video suggestions.So I take all of the suggestions very seriously. So do let me know in the comments.I keep making videos.I want to make more, and let me know what other ideas you have.Thank you.