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visit vsl probiotics dot com to unlock hot girl digestion and a thriving gut because hot girls deserve happy guts period now back to the show hopefully with less bloating and more thriving you're listening to ted talks daily where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day.
I'm your host, Elise Hugh.
Emmy -winning host and producer Emmanuel H .O.
already made a name for himself as a football player before he went on to tackle a different cause, rethinking how we accomplish big things.
H .O. is against goal setting.
He also doesn't like the idea of New Year's resolutions.
Why? Well, he hashes it all out with journalist and bestselling author David Epstein in a 2025 conversation recorded just a couple weeks into the new year.
You're hearing it now.
I'm going to jump in giving you the hard, easy question, which is, you know, by the way, last Friday was apparently Quitter's Day by which most, the day supposedly by which most people have quit their resolutions.
So I was wondering, David, I was like, wait, is there a national Quitter's Day?
I know we have national holidays for everything.
I miss Best Friends Day.
I didn't realize. Apparently, apparently.
So New year's resolutions, good or bad?
Give me your take. I think they're terrible.
I think they're terrible because I think why do you need to set a date to start something?
If you want to start becoming a better version of yourself, why don't you just start immediately?
Why is there an arbitrary date that you have to set?
You don't need to wait on a date.
If your goal is extrinsically motivated, thus based on a date, then I think extrinsic motivation, it will fall short much sooner than intrinsic motivation, which is simply like, hey, I want to be better from within.
So simply put, I don't believe in New Year's resolutions.
I do not set New Year's resolutions.
I do not subscribe to New Year's resolutions because it's simply an arbitrary date.
And I'd rather intrinsic motivation than extrinsic.
And so you might be, resolutions aside, you might be the most anti -goal -setting in general person that I know, which might be surprising given your accomplishments.
Can you talk a little bit about where that animosity toward resolutions and goals came from?
What's the origin story there?
It's pretty common.
One specific incident, probably the greatest pain of my life.
It was February of 2012.
I am doing a job interview in front of 32 billionaires with a B, 32 of the richest men in the world.
I played in the National Football League.
And so I'm doing the NFL Combine in front of 32 of the NFL owners, every owner, obviously, being one of the wealthiest individuals.
And I was running the 40 -yard dash.
And David, this is a true story.
After three years in college, you can leave early to enter the National Football League.
I'm going to speak to everyone as if they have no level of knowledge about pro sports whatsoever.
So once you're in college for three years, I went to the University of Texas.
That's my alma mater.
Once you're in college for three years David you can go pro well I wanted to go pro after my third year but NFL scouts they told me hey Emmanuel Ocho you won't be drafted where you desire to be drafted it's best you go back to college for one more year to increase your draft status in the NFL there are seven
rounds of the draft roughly 254 players get drafted there are roughly 1 .7 million college high school football players you're more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to be drafted in the National Football League.
And so, David, I committed and set a goal to going back to college to increase my draft status.
True story, David. I put a sheet of paper above my bedpost.
And every morning I woke up, I looked at it.
And every night before I went to sleep, I looked at it.
And it just set the simple goal, hey, increase your draft status.
Well, David, at the NFL Combine, running the 40 -yard dash, I hear boom, boom, boom, boom.
David, I think my heels were clicking.
So I keep running. I hear boom, boom, boom.
It was my quad being torn off of the bone.
I didn't end up getting drafted where I wanted to be drafted.
I fell to the sixth round of the NFL draft.
Remember there are only seven drafts, seven rounds.
And so David, while sitting in Indianapolis where the combine took place, laying there on the ground with ice on my quad, I committed to myself to never setting another goal because I realized in that moment, I was doing much more damage to my self -esteem.
I did much more damage to my self -advocacy than I ever did good.
So it was in that moment that I stopped setting goals.
That's an amazing story.
So resolution to never set goals again.
We got it. So you're pro resolutions that are anti -resolution.
I want to devil's advocate you a little bit.
I mean, I think the pro side for New Year's resolutions is this so -called, in psychology, this finding called the fresh start effect, where we think of any kind of change, new job, new year, new week, can sometimes lead people to to start behavior changes that said I think it's unclear if those things
really really stick so we can talk about that but I want to I want to offer that maybe you made a bad goal because I used to make those kinds of bad goals I was an 800 meter runner in college and every season every race I would have some stretch goal for the time that I wanted to run and for several
years you know these were always stretch goals and so I would pass the finish line, you know, puke or catch your breath or whatever, and then go look back at the clock and say, did I make that time or did I not?
And it just led me to be happy or sad and usually sad because those were stretch goals.
Right. And eventually I realized this wasn't doing anything for me actionable.
So I changed, I got rid of those time goals and started setting goals for experiments.
So instead of saying, I want to run X time, it was next race, try moving hard with 300 meters to go and that that gave me something actionable so maybe that's not even a goal it's more of an experiment and as i was reading so i think i think that as i was reading some of the research about goal setting
and i think you know first i'd say it's an interesting place you're in because in kind of the mid -20th century psychologists felt that goals didn't matter at all that it was the only thing that motivated people's behavior was carrot and stick all external no internal and then that changed with goal
setting theory saying like no you know what you actually can set internal motivations.
And so now we're sort of being more fine grained about what works and what's not.
But I think one of the most important takeaways from that research is those goals or objectives or whatever you want to call them have to be really granular.
Like they have to tell you something that you should do, as opposed to being this kind of goal that's just either you're happy or sad at the end.
So there's an operative word there.
You said stretch goals.
What's the word stretch mean that prefaces before goals?
Yeah, I mean, for me, in this instance, it meant things that were often didn't reflect reality of where I was in my training at that point.
And so it's something that I didn't have a great chance of making because I thought that was the way you were supposed to do it.
Set these set these big goals and they were often vague.
And I think a lot of the reason that New Year's resolutions fail is because they tend to be very vague.
like it's just time to set some notion as opposed to setting something that gives you a behavior that you can try so i prefer to think of i i use this like also my my book of small experiments where at least every other month i have something i want to learn or try and i force myself into an experiment
it's like here's a thing i am going to try and reflect on so i don't know if that's a goal or not but that's how i go about it what do you if you don't do goals what do you replace goals with?
Well, it's twofold.
First, I will answer the why I ultimately had the urge to replace goals, because it's not that, David, goals have absolutely no value.
That's not what I'm suggesting.
What I'm suggesting is that the damage and the side effect of goals outweighs the value of goals.
I believe that goals are like a prescription medication.
The dilemma is the world which subscribed us the drug of goals did not tell us about the warning signs they did not tell us about the side effects i was drafted into the national football league by the cleveland browns again i suggest you are more likely to be struck by lightning than you are to be drafted
in the nfl one plus million people play high school football roughly 20 30 or 40 000 play college football and again 250 are drafted but david because i failed at that goal i don't reflect on being drafted positively.
I only look at the fact that I didn't achieve my goal.
Thus, my self -efficacy was completely undermined.
Thus, my self -esteem was completely undermined.
So it's not to say that goals don't have value.
I think those watching right now, maybe you set the goal of being married by 26, 27.
Maybe you set the goal of having your first home by 30.
Maybe you set the goal of starting a family by 30.
And maybe you haven't checked off any of those boxes.
So thus, though you have a career you're happy with, though you have an apartment or a townhouse that you're content with, though you have so many good things going on in your life, you can't think about them positively because the only thing you focus and fixate on is, man, but I didn't do this or I didn't
do that or, David, I didn't do this.
And that is really, I would suggest, is the thesis statement of the dilemma.
So what I do instead, simply put, I focus on an objective without limitations.
Small difference in words, but I think it has a major impact on our lives.
An objective is energy aimed in a direction.
A goal is an end towards which energy is aimed, quite literally by definition.
So why in the world would I set a goal and start something with the end in mind as opposed to having an objective and simply putting my energy in a direction?
If I want to live a healthier lifestyle, I will put my energy into a healthier your lifestyle, as opposed to I want to lose 15 pounds in the first three months of the year.
So then when you lose eight pounds, you're like, dang it, I failed.
I want to read one book every three weeks or one book a month, as opposed to I want to become a more avid reader.
I want to put my energy into becoming a more avid reader.
I want to challenge myself mentally.
I want to stimulate myself mentally.
When we draw these hard lines in the sand, it only leaves us focusing on falling short of the line that we didn't cross, which we set in the sand.
So I think you're getting more behavior change.
How do we make proximate behavior change on sort of a daily basis?
And I think that gets at some of this research about when do objective or goal or whatever you want to call it, setting work, when it really tells you what you should be doing in the morning.
That's why I favor this approach of the book of small experiments, where it's like when I was writing my last book and I wanted to experiment with a different kind a structure.
So, well, what's an experiment that can that can give me some of that?
And I took a said, take a beginner's online fiction writing course, specific action.
And in that course, we had to write stories with only dialogue and stories with no dialogue.
And the story with no dialogue, I was so much better at.
And it gave me all these new different ideas for structure.
So I didn't have a specific goal of like, how do I want to write this next book?
But I was doing these experiments that I thought were sort of short term enough that I'd have an opportunity to reflect on them because I think it's really reflection is where a lot of the game is right so the kind of goals I set for the 800 and you set for the NFL draft are the kind where the reflection is very
kind of binary like I made it or I didn't doesn't really teach you a lot about what to do whereas this when I was writing my first book The Sports Gene I spent some time talking to a woman named Raya Elfrin Gemzer in the Netherlands who followed soccer players and football players and for for everyone
who's not american um from the age of 12 and looking at what led some of them to become elite and there were physiological characteristics like if a kid couldn't hit seven meters a second in a sprint like they weren't going to go to the top level at the same time there were behavioral traits where you'd
see these kids you had video of them from 12 all the way up to some of them the national team where they would be going to a coach say you know what are we working on this i think my weakness is i think i need to work on this other thing like why are we doing this?
And they would take accountability for their learning called self -regulatory learning.
And what Mariah told me was there's thousands of pages of papers on self -regulatory learning, but what a lot of it boils down to is reflection.
This loop of identifying something you want to improve or change, come up with a way to test that, execute, reflect on it, and adjust going forward.
This sort of loop of experiments, reflection, reflection, reflection.
I think a lot of our, especially New Year's resolutions, the reflection is just you missed it or you didn't, And it's not really actionable reflections.
I'm curious if that fits or doesn't into kind of your framework.
I think that absolutely fits the model.
That is a similar model, I believe, to James Clear Atomic Habits.
He he focuses on the small steps.
He references focusing on the small steps, the habits, as opposed to, hey, you know what, I need to do this.
And if I don't do this, well, then I didn't do anything to me.
I love what you're saying about experiments as opposed to goals.
When you were talking about running the 800 meters, you mentioned at the start, you said, hey, I want to focus on maybe kicking at the 300 meter mark.
That's focusing on energy.
That's focusing on, hey, let me make an energetic and an actionable item as opposed to if I don't do this, then what is the punishment?
And though there might not be a literal punishment, there might not even be a worldly punishment, I do think there is a psychological punishment.
And you know what, David, I'll take it even one step further, and I would suggest, and I ended a previous conversation speaking on this with, the goal you achieve is the penalty you receive for setting a goal in the first place.
Because say, David, you set a goal to lose 10 pounds in the first three months of the year?
And say you lose those 10 pounds in the first three months of the year.
What if you could have lost more?
Say you actually set this goal and you think that this goal was the greatest, most grandiose accomplishment of your life.
What if you actually could have done greater?
What if you actually could have gone further?
What if there actually was a greater level of success, happiness, familial, spiritual, educational, or monetary reward that was to be garnered, But because you drew a line in the sand, you were so fixated on that line that what if there was actually greater for you out there?
I suggest if I would have achieved the goal of being drafted earlier in the NFL, I might have clung to an NFL career for longer instead of moving on.
And now I've written four books and done all the other things that I believe have added greater value not only to my life, but hopefully have added greater value to society in large.
What if you actually do achieve that goal you set, David?
I would suggest that wasn't even potentially the greatest thing for your life.
I think you're getting at something profound that I saw you say in another interview.
I can't remember exactly which one it was, but you talked about, you know, how a goal or an objective, whatever we're calling it.
First of all, I like your framing of goals as medicine, right?
Because we don't often think of the trade -off, like what are the adverse side effects?
I really like that framing to kind of attune us to what that might be.
I think you said, you know, some of these these things you try, it should be a comma, not a period.
And I think that gets at some of the issue where, you know, it reminds me again of to bring in some of the psychology research.
You've got me thinking about this thing called the end of history illusion, which is this finding that people, you know, if you ask, have you learned a lot about what you want to do, what your skills are, et cetera, what motivates you?
Everyone's. Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Well, do you think you'll you'll change a lot, you know, in your values and those things that you believe going forward?
Now I'm pretty much, now I'm pretty much finished.
And people always underestimate future change.
So the fastest time of change, you know, unsurprisingly is about 18 to 28, but it never stops.
And at every time point in life, we underestimate future change.
Some of this stuff is silly, like, you know, you can look back to your old haircut, and you know that like your, you know, your feelings have changed about style.
But like, people will say that, you know, they'll say that they're willing to pay a certain amount of money, if they take their favorite band today, I'm willing to pay X amount of money to see that band 10 years from now.
And then they're asked, well, how much would you pay to see today your favorite band from 10 years ago?
And it's like way, way less because they underestimate how much their taste is going to change.
And so I wonder if some of what you're getting at and what I'm getting at is when we think of these goals as kind of a period, you're not really being open to sort of the opportunistic pivots.
You're almost choosing a goal for a person you don't know yet.
Yeah, it is so rapid.
Matthew McConaughey, who became a friend of mine over the last four years after COVID.
And I asked him, you know what?
he said this and then I asked him later about it, but he said it publicly.
I encourage you all after this conversation to Google it after he won his Academy Award, the ever elusive and ever evasive Academy Award for best leading actor.
I believe he won it for he went up there on the stage holding this this Oscar trophy.
And he said, who is my hero?
Speaking about a goal, if you will.
And he said, my hero is the 10 year from now version of me.
He said, I'm constantly chasing the person I'm going to be 10 years from now.
And he said, the beauty of that goal is you'll never catch it.
He said, because I'm always adjusting.
I'm always moving. I'm always changing.
I'm ever evasive. He said, so my hero is actually, and my goal is actually 10 years ahead of me because I'm never going to catch that person because I'm always in this constant form of, of shedding my outer shell and, and a constant form of transformation.
And, and I think, David, you've kind of hit the nail on the head in that goals at times and resolutions at times, they put you in a box and they're too rigid.
They do not allow for elasticity.
They do not allow for you to actually mature into probably a better version of yourself because you're so fixated on chasing a goal that you set as a former version of yourself.
so again that's in the that's in the side effects panel about goals that we don't read where this is something you're not we're not usually attuned to kind of especially around let me share a story that you might find fascinating it's um my best friend we actually read your book sports gene i think
maybe she read it sent it to me or or vice versa back in 2018 olympic gold medalist in the rio olympics and here's a fascinating story because in order to go to the olympics and the 100 meters or the four by 100 meters rather david you know this but for those watching who don't, you need to finish top
four at your country's trials, your country's Olympic trials.
So at the USA Olympic trials, my best friend, she finishes fourth at the Olympic trials.
And curious, she ran the trial meet before we were as close.
Curious, I was like, what was your mindset going into that race?
Because David, I'm fascinated and I'm a curious person.
I said, what was your mindset going into the most important race of your life?
And she said, well, the three women that I was running next to were all faster than me.
It was Tiana Bartoletta.
It was Tori Bui, God rest her soul.
And it was a woman named English Garner.
She said they were all faster than me.
So my goal was to get fourth place.
And now, David, what place do you think she got?
She got fourth place.
And I was like, I wonder what would have happened if either you didn't set a goal or you set a goal that could not have been improved, thus first place.
I said the goal you achieved was a penalty you received for setting the goal.
You set a goal to get fourth place.
And getting fourth place is exactly what you did.
But there was third place, there was second place, and there was first place.
So I only wonder what would have happened if you would have set the goal of either getting first or what would have happened if you would have had an objective with no limitations?
If you would have set your energy into standing atop the podium, what would have happened?
And I just think the goals put her in this instance inside of a box.
Now, ultimately, if you finish top four, you get to run on the four by 100 meter relay because it's four people running that 400 running that one lap, if you will.
So she was still able to go to the Rio Olympics and run the anchor leg in the preliminary round and finish with a gold medal.
But that was also confirmation, David, like, yo, warning label, read the warning signs.
If you set a goal, you might just achieve that goal.
And what is that achievement actually costing you in the long term?
Or is it costing you anything at all?
Simply something to consider.
I love that. We're kind of coalescing around this idea of rigidity and kind of the downsides of making goals.
What would your sort of one piece of advice give?
Because I think mine would be, again, that from the literature on self -regulatory learning, we just do not reflect enough.
Our goals are often set too far in advance.
So they're too vague and not telling us kind of what our behavior should be.
And so, again, I'm going to flog it.
The Book of Small Experiments, it's Alice, Curiouser and Curiouser, but gives you something, these reflection points.
So even if you did set New Year's resolutions, you know, I would argue that come March and someone this economist Tim Harford was was I'm taking some of his idea here.
Come March, it should be like reflection time, because if you just leave it out and it's just I made it or I didn't, you're not doing that really important part of what did I learn and how is that going to tell me to pivot?
It. So that I think would be, we do not do, we think intuitively that we get all of the information about ourselves, our interests and abilities from just going through an experience.
But I think it's pretty unequivocal that we don't do enough explicit reflection, reflection.
Like you can even look at, you know, cardiac surgery teams.
There's some experiments where some will do a certain procedure, a hundred percent of a given time, and others will do 80 % procedures and 20 % talking amongst themselves and reflecting, and the errors will go down in the 80, 20 group more.
So I think reflection, reflection, reflection, building it in explicitly would be my most important single piece of advice for goal setting because that's going to make you make more granular goals and take lessons in a much shorter duration.
David, let me ask you a question here because I think part of this is the unhealth with goals in that oftentimes goals do not afford you the luxury of reflection.
Meaning, what's the benefit of reflection in that instance?
When I didn't get drafted where I wanted to get drafted in the NFL, David.
Reflection was not going to do me any good.
It's over. It's done.
I lost about $3 million in that one day.
I've torn my quad. There is not another NFL draft that I could submit to.
At the point in which I wanted to be married by 30 and I'm not.
30 not coming back.
The next birthday, 31.
And the one after that is 32.
I could reflect on, hey, is it me?
Is it society? Do I need to put myself out there more?
Should I try dating gaps?
Do I need to get this and that?
Maybe I should spend more time at the grocery store, whatever the case may be.
But I do not know in today's ultra -competitive society, David, that goals and reflection are related.
Because oftentimes, if you set a goal to hit this monetary mark in your business and you don't hit it, that fiscal year is over.
So yeah, you could hit it next year, but you missed it last year.
Speak to that. I don't know, at least in my experience, obviously, though, I was in the athletic industry.
In the athletic industry, it is a zero -sum game.
Do you believe that goals and reflection are actually related?
Because once you fail at that goal, you have failed.
Door closed, on to the next.
Yeah, that's a great point.
I mean, I think if the goal is too nebulous, then you're not going to fix it with reflection.
So I think something that's a specific behavior that you can test, you know, in experiment, an opportunity to pivot.
And there was a question.
There was someone, a question, I think it was Shanta, who asked how we can create goals that are flexible enough to adapt to unexpected changes, but keep moving and being motivated and focused.
And I think that gets to that balance of rigidity and flexibility where I think we should be setting those experiments, right?
You have in my head, like I'll have some sort of vague goal.
It's just that I can't help it, but I don't know if that's going to actually help me get to it.
And it's much smaller.
Here's what's interesting.
Who asked that question, David?
Shanta. Shanta. What's fascinating, then, David, then I think we're just using the word goal because we're comfortable using it.
Fair enough. In the event that our goal is ever changing and our goal is extremely fluid and and our goal for the end of the month could be to lose three pounds.
But now we ain't lost the three pounds.
So now we're going to say, you know what?
My goal was to lose one pound or now we ain't lost the three pounds.
So, you know, let me lose three pounds by the end of three months.
That wasn't a goal.
Now, now it is you're doing what I would suggest, which is just putting your energy in a direction.
Goals are finite. Goals are lines in the sand.
Goals are an end towards which energy is aimed.
So if you are and we are constantly adjusting our goals, then we're only using the word goal and we're only using the word resolution and we're only using these words because society has conditioned us to use this particular verbiage, which I think we should toss out.
because it's not actually a goal if we are constantly modifying the behavior of said goal the moment we don't meet the goal.
Fair. I mean, that's why my preferred language is experiment.
But what would you say for someone whose goal comes from some kind of performance goal, you know, from a boss or some higher up or something like that, and they're tasked with changing their behavior to meet it, and they don't really have a choice?
Great question. So early on, I said Goals do, there is benefit to goals.
If there is no higher level of achievement, then I do not have an issue with setting a goal.
For example, let's use the track and field analogy.
And I relay race. The primary objective is to get the baton around the track.
If you do not get the baton around the track, and if for some reason the baton hits the ground and goes into the infield, I will spare you all some of the more minute rules, then you fail.
So because getting the baton around the track is of the utmost importance and you can do nothing greater than getting the baton around the track, yes, set the goal of getting the baton around the track.
What I do not suggest doing is setting a time goal because the time can always be improved.
Getting the baton around the track is pass, fail.
You can set a goal for that because there was no higher level of achievement.
So in the event you have goals dictated by your boss, if it's pass fail, by all means.
If you have to meet a deadline, then heck yeah, your goal better be to meet that deadline, because if you do not meet that deadline, you failed.
But selling goals, like if you need to sell for those that are in selling industries, if you want to sell X amount of units or X amount of dollars, that's when I suggest, man, you might have been able to sell more if you did not set a goal.
I would rather do what David, you were suggesting with experiments, what James Clear suggesting.
And I would rather commit to actions daily, not some sort of goal that cannot be improved.
But I would rather commit a goal that can be improved.
David, I would rather commit to actions daily, which are let me be more outgoing or let me be energetic on every call, every sales call, or let me start with a greeting and end with a greeting, whatever the case may be.
I would rather commit to the habit as opposed to the end.
I like those. And I think just as semantics, I would call those experiments.
I'm going to open up the call like this and see how it goes.
And since you, you know, mentioning habits and James Clear and, you know, Charles Duhigg has written a lot about habits.
And I want to bounce this idea off you because last year, this is going to sound funny, but I was studying some of the rhetorical techniques of Martin Luther King, Jr.
And he uses certain sort of analogies and frames really beautifully, repeatedly.
And one of them is Odysseus versus Orpheus.
So Odysseus, to prevent himself from succumbing to the beautiful song of the sirens, had his shipmates lash him to the mast, right?
So he restrained himself.
So it's an avoidance strategy.
Whereas Orpheus, who was this legendary musician, when he faced the sirens, he played his own beautiful music over them.
He's like, I'm not going to restrain myself.
That doesn't work in the long run.
I mean, again, this is metaphorical, not lashing to the mast.
I'm going to replace it with something better.
And King would use that to say, you know, we can't just go for the avoidance of hate.
We need to replace it with love.
And I think that really comports with some of the research that approach goals are better than avoidance goals.
But people usually set the avoidance, you know, I'm not going to eat this or that thing.
And some of that has to do with habits, right?
And to bring it back to habits, as Charles Duhigg sort of wrote about some of this in The Power of Habit, that there's this sequence of a cue that sets you to do something, a behavior that you then take, and a reward.
So say you're sitting at your desk, you want to get up, and it's a certain time of day, you go to the cafeteria, you eat a cookie, and the reward is this sugar rush.
And what he argued is let's not focus on changing the cue, like trying to get rid of the cookie.
Let's not focus on changing the reward.
Let's try to change the behavior in the middle based on what you think the reward really is.
So for him, it was like, actually, I need a few minutes break and to socialize.
I don't need a cookie.
The cookie's still there.
The time of day is still the cue, but he tried replacing that getting a cookie with going and talking with some of his colleagues instead.
And I think there's some wisdom in that, that the cue can be very difficult to change, depending on how much flexibility you have in your situation.
The reward, not necessarily always sure what it is, but you can try different behaviors to replace instead of just restraining yourself.
What do you think about that?
That's one incredibly fascinating.
I think that is tangential to an extrinsic motivation.
Because the reward is extrinsic.
I am doing this so that I can get said reward.
But one, I always believe in changing from within.
The outer shell of something is only a result of the inner shell of something.
It's only a result of what is from within.
It will inevitably flow outward.
I believe that truly, if we want to see the changes that we desire to see in our life, it has to come from within.
It cannot be, oh, well, some sort of extrinsic motivation, whether it's money, whether it's a shiny object at the end of the tunnel, whether it's the pot of gold.
I believe we have to get to the root of the why, because the root of the why will dictate a motivation that will never run dry.
The root of the why will dictate a motivation that cannot be extinguished, that will not be relinquished.
So I love that, David, because to me, that's addressing the root of the why, as opposed to simply focusing on some sort of external motivation that inevitably we'll just stop caring about sooner than later.
I think you're, I think this dovetails well to some of the user questions, because some of the questions were a little more philosophical and Ben.
So I think we should switch over to a few of those, because I think you naturally kind of went there.
One of the goals from Fadwa was, I mean, sorry, one of the questions from Fadwa was, how can we balance ambition with well -being, especially in a high pressure world?
And I kind of think I have sort of an intellectual hero in that regard, and a fun story.
Like I I read my kindergartner, the Phantom Tollbooth, if people know that book.
And there's a character called the Senses -Taker.
You know, it's a play on Senses -Taker, but Senses -Taker.
And his job is to help people find things they weren't looking for.
And to me, that is like, in our algorithmic life, it's never been easier to find things that you weren't looking for and to have ambitions that really weren't yours.
And kind of someone who made a big impression on me, an intellectual hero, was Herbert Simon, who was one of the founding fathers of AI, one of the founders of cognitive psychology.
And one of his most powerful ideas was satisficing as opposed to maximizing.
He said, people often want to maximize.
They want to make the optimal decision, meet the perfect goal, you know, only the gold medal, not the silver medal in their respective life.
He wasn't talking about sports, but you can never really maximize because we have limited brain processing capacity.
You can't know the alternative possibilities.
You can't process enough information to compare all of those, you know, brooms on Amazon and find out which is the best one.
And it turns out that the maximizing tendency is almost always a bad thing to be for psychological health.
And so Simon himself said he was a satisficer.
He had a certain pair of shoes he wore in one season, another in another season, a certain hat, and he'd only get one when it ran out because he wanted to save all of his cognitive bandwidth for his work, where he really wanted to dive in.
And in other areas, he's satisficed.
And you could almost accuse him of having, you know, low ambition if he hadn't won the Nobel Prize, the Turing Award and like the Lifetime Psychology Award, right?
If not for his trophy case, you might accuse him of having low ambition.
But I've kind of taken that and set areas in my life where I'm proactively going to satisfy and say this is good enough.
So when I'm writing a book, for example, it's got to be an eight, nine or 10.
When I send out a newsletter, you know, if that's a six or a seven or six and a half, that's an okay place for that to occupy in my life.
And that was a very foreign idea to me.
So that idea of satisfying, I really like is sort of a personal philosophy.
What do you think of it?
Because it can sound sort of like you're just snapping good goals.
That's beautiful. And I'm going to steal that.
I do not know. Who asked that question again?
That was Fadwa. Fadwa.
I do not know Fadwa if you can balance ambition with well -being.
I went to the Paris Olympics this past year.
Track is my first love, though I played American football.
I went to the Paris Olympics this first year.
What I will challenge all of you all to do the next time you're watching a Olympic type of race or an Olympic caliber race, look at the silver medalist, those that finish second versus the bronze medalist, those that finish third.
The bronze medalists are often happier than the silver medalist.
Now you ask yourself.
And they live longer.
Why in the world? And David, you may have studied this or written about this.
Maybe I'm taking it from you.
I do not recall. Why in the world are the bronze medalists happier than the silver medalist?
because the bronze medalists they're just happy to have made the podium and gotten a medal but the silver medalists they are upset that they did not get gold ambition gold medal well -being happy verse sad if you will to take the most basic form of that conversation one individual is so ambitious that they
all wanted gold but because one got silver they're like dang it i could have got gold.
One got bronze and they're like, man, I could have got fourth.
And that to me is the tension and the dichotomy between ambition and well -being.
I wanted to be drafted in the first three rounds of the NFL draft.
I got drafted in the sixth round of the NFL draft.
So I'm sitting there out of seven rounds.
So I'm sitting there like, man, I should have got drafted higher.
But the undrafted player is like, man, I wish I would have got drafted.
Or the player that got drafted in the seventh round is like, whew, thank God I got drafted.
Whereas I am like, dang it, I would have wished I would have got drafted higher.
Ambition versus well -being, I at least have not figured out how to navigate both of those from a micro sense properly.
Macro sense, zooming out at the lens of my life, sure.
I've done a lot of great things.
Micro sense, that silver medalist, maybe two, three, four, five years later, they're happy they got of metal, but in the macro sense, but in the micro, I don't know how you do it, David.
I don't know how you do it.
They do an aggregate, live shorter.
And it seems to be that sort of disappointment.
I mean, I think you're kind of, well, first takeaway is obviously that you used to have good taste and then you switch from track to football, but everyone needs pointing out since it's so obvious.
But I think you're kind of giving a treatment of this sort of modern model of the brain is called predictive processing, where it's like, your happiness is going to be the difference between what you expected, and what happened.
And the difficulty there is right, exactly what you've been saying, you set that certain goal, like, yeah, I think you should write the FDA warning for goals, you know, to get all the side effects down.
The difficulty there is you set a high goal, you want to be ambitious, you fall short, you're really unhappy, you don't want to set no goals right and so i think it maybe comes back to that that idea of of not having too rigid goals and trying to find goals that direct your energy as opposed to the ones
that are just this end point where you're going to be happy or sad um whether you meet them so i really like how you framed that um let me see the there's another uh uh great question here have you from alexandra have you encountered situations in which you've questioned the perspectives you're sharing right
now? And if so, what do you believe happened in those moments that sort of caused you to falter?
I'll just say I'm an inveterate flip -flopper.
Like, I would not make it in politics.
I flip -flop all the time because I think when we learn something, we should update our behaviors.
And I think has something changed?
I mean, right now, since we're sharing this perspective, I wouldn't say between starting this talk and now that a perspective has changed, but my perspective certainly changed about goals in general, where, like, when I was a teenager, I had all these long -term goals and I ended up doing none of those
things. And every project in my life that has mattered has been an opportunistic pivot to something I didn't expect.
And so that's kind of a way that my perspective changed.
What about you, Emmanuel?
I believe in always evolving and always changing.
One of my favorite books by Chuck Klosterman, but what if we're wrong?
And so I'm constantly asking myself, hey, what if I am wrong about this?
What if I am wrong about that?
As it pertains to my lack of goals, I think that an objective with no limitations, it is the safest, healthiest, and most efficient way to operate.
Again, there is value in setting goals.
There's just a cost that I personally am no longer willing to pay.
I have also lived a much more maximal life by letting go of goals because I'm no longer stuck in this box.
I believe this question is from Alexander.
So, Alexander, I'm no longer stuck in this box.
Now I have the freedom to create.
Now, okay, sure, I'll write music.
Okay, I'll write animated shorts.
Okay, I'll write books.
Okay, I'll do sports shows.
It's no longer like I have to play football and get drafted here.
So I am constantly evolving, but as it stands now, for me, an objective with no limitations, it gives me the room for the evolution that I need within this freedom of no limitations as opposed to what is finite in the goals of it all.
Related question to that from Maximiliano, who asked, what's one belief about success that you've had to unlearn yourself and how has it changed your approach?
that one's easy to me.
I think that's the so -called arrival fallacy where I kept having this idea of, if I write a bestselling book, if I, you know, make it to Nationals, the 800, all this stuff, like then I will have arrived.
And then I can do all this other stuff about like trying to be a happy person and cultivate friendships and all this stuff.
Because I just got to arrive at that thing and you never arrive.
Like you do that thing and you're still you.
Right. It's like go to the top of Mount Everest, you're still you.
Or like, I always think about it like, you know, these experiences can, can change you, of course, but I think that idea that there'll be somewhere where you arrive, you get into the right college, uh, you, you get the promotion and suddenly all those things that were plugging you, like, now it's fine.
Now I can relax or do the things I want to do.
I think that's just usually, um, uh, not realistic and not so helpful.
So I had to unlearn the arrival fallacy because I really had this idea that I would do certain things, just get those off my plate.
And, uh, you know, then I can focus on some of these other things I want to do.
But if you do something well, your plate only gets more full and so at one point i had a uh you know i enlisted some help out of virtual assistants sort of helped me manage some of those things and i realized that that trying to be more productive in some of these opportunities i had was sort of a trap
because i was the bottleneck like my brain was the bottleneck i could not get to all these things and and and having them seeing knowing where they were like having an abcd list for email was actually worse because if i saw them I felt like I needed to do it.
And so I kind of got rid of that and try to focus on sort of the most important things.
And don't look at email first thing in the morning, because then it'll be hard for me to focus on, on some of my most important projects.
But that sense that I'll arrive, you know, and then everything will be good, I think is just not realistic.
What do you think? What's something you had to unlearn?
I mean, obviously, you had this very dramatic story about goal setting.
No, that's well said.
I would suggest, I would suggest success is one of the most dangerous words in the English language.
I would suggest that because success can make you a prisoner.
I was having a conversation one time.
I'm getting a haircut.
My phone rings. It's Oprah.
And she called me and she didn't really have anything to say.
And so I was like, well, you called me.
So now I'm just going to take all the time that I can take.
We're talking for like 52 minutes or something.
That's how long my haircuts take, David.
I don't know why so we're talking for like 52 minutes man and um we start talking about michael jackson because that was one of her greatest interviews it was the like highest watched non -super bowl event of like the 1990s michael jackson sit down and michael jackson told her how forever he was trying
to chase thriller thriller sold like 182 million copies worldwide one of the greatest hits of not even our generation, one of the greatest hits in the history of the world.
And Michael Jackson was forever trying to chase thriller and not being able to catch thriller as it pertained to global impact and sales weighed him down.
So I asked Oprah about that.
I said, you did the Oprah Winfrey show, but like, there will be nothing greater than the Oprah Winfrey show.
And she spoke on being significant more than being successful.
and so I subscribe to chasing significance over chasing success because once you chase success you will find yourself being a prisoner to that success David you write a best -selling book and then you're like well I gotta write a number one New York Times best -selling book but then when you write a number
one New York Times best -selling book now every book after that it better hit the New York Times list because if you don't hit the New York Times list then you're like dang That sucks.
I failed. And I found myself a slave to success.
But as opposed to now, if I put out a book, did it make an impact?
Was it significant?
It may not have made the New York Times bestsellers list, but somebody came up to me in Austin with tears in their eyes because of that content saying how I had changed their husband's life.
If I come out with another episode of Uncomfortable Conversations, it might not win an Emmy award, but someone might come up to me and say how they sat down with their kids and they watched it and it had an impact on the trajectory of their future success is a dangerous dangerous dangerous dangerous
word and I used to be a prisoner of success but I found the key and now I'm trying to find a way to get all the way out success I don't subscribe to success that that one that word success, David, it has kept me up way too many hours of the night.
It's interesting, because we're obviously coming from, you know, a fortunate vantage point and having accomplished some of these, some of these kind of creative goals.
Sorry, creative objectives, just done things that, that we've had freedom over some of the things that we've accomplished.
And, you know, you hit a, you hit a sort of nerve that sent like a bolt of, of fear through me about, you say, you know, the next book has to be a bestseller, because I'm finishing up one right now and really feeling that pressure.
And the way I sort of tried to take some of that off myself was instead of viewing it as like I have to live up to the sales numbers of the last one, which I fortunately was reasonably good at not tracking very well.
You know, it's like you got to lose your password sometimes.
And I said, my experiment this time is I've never written a book with an external architecture that starts before I write the book.
So this sort of structure that I'll write to.
And so I created one this time and it caused me to write in chronological order, which I've never done.
So, you know, after more than a decade, suddenly I have this new process.
And so I'm feeling anxious about it because it's not the formula I was used to.
And I wouldn't feel anxious about it if I didn't think it raised the chances of my failure compared to last books.
But I think my feeling, again, you know, if I satisfy some of the sales standpoint, you know, there's a there's a limit.
the experiment is something that I really, really wanted to do that's meaningful to me to see if it's a better kind of writing that I can do.
And if it fails, I'm for sure going to be using that as feedback if it turns out it fails.
But I'm feeling very anxious about it currently.
But I think, David, it's tough because again, transparently, like Sports Gene, I believe, was the first book of yours I read.
Don't know if it's your first book.
First book of yours I read.
Was Reign your second book?
Yes. Yep. So after I read Sports Gene, I'm like, David, you set the bar high.
I'm quoting your work.
Obviously. I will not obviously.
I do a sports television show every day for two hours.
And so I need to fill a lot of content.
I'm getting into arguments with people about your models of of Michael Phelps had the ideal swim body type.
And this athlete and African American individuals by often their torsos are shorter, whereas this people.
So I mean, I'm you set the bar high.
So now when I read range, I'm like, well, I better be as good as sports gene.
You know what I mean?
Like, that is the dilemma, I believe, of success.
And whether or not you cared about Emmanuel's opinion does not stop Emmanuel from having an opinion.
Whether or not I care about sales does not stop sales from either occurring or not occurring.
I can try to limit myself from caring about success.
But somewhere, someone is weighing my success based upon some metric.
Whether or not that metric is of importance to my life, that's the question.
So that gets at a question from Cephas.
I apologize if I'm mispronouncing your name, who asked, what practical steps can we take to shift our focus from external achievements to internal fulfillment?
I think that's tough.
You know, in some ways, I think that's maybe tougher than ever because, boy, are we living in a golden age of being shown things that you should desire that you didn't really desire.
here right so I think I mean to me and I think this is a trend it started actually before like social media and algorithms because you can look at these I think it was starting kind of in the late 60s these these surveys of young people in America on well not just young people but on locus of control
which basically psychology speak for are you um are you kind of behaving in a way would you feel like you have control over your fate do you feel like you have agency or not And internal locus of control means you're being driven by things that you want to achieve, things that you want to try.
External locus of control is, you know, X amount of money, things that are less in your control.
Not that they have no control, but less in your control.
And the people shifted from internal to external locus of control like very steadily over time.
And so we're much more externally motivated now.
And I think some of that just has to do with it's so much easier to have FOMO because of all the stuff we see.
So I feel like, you know like when i remember when there was some talk about like mark zuckerberg talking about the metaverse and he's like we can all have like our own individual world and i'm like oh man so we can all like optimize all that sounds terrible to me like i want some embodied experience
including with strangers where i'm not thinking about all the things that i'm that i'm missing on the internet so actually one of my current experiments was this year i want more because writing can be very solitary i want more embodied experience with strangers so dance class with strangers.
So just started, just took the first one.
And that was something that's important to me that I realized I was missing out on.
But sometimes I think you just got to turn off the algorithm and just like maybe take social media off your phone for brief periods and then you can put it back.
The dance class, salsa, hip hop, waltz.
Shuffle. You know, so the book I'm working on is about how constraints can be useful.
Actually, maybe we should dovetail to that and talk about what we're working on now because we only have a few minutes left.
So I'm finishing up a book about how constraints can be useful instead of just limiting from the form of a haiku.
why does it prompt creativity rather than squelch it?
To technological innovation, to the structures in society that made strangers' behaviors more predictable so that we could trade with people that weren't our kin or our friends.
And I got interested in this kind of dancing because it was invented in...
I saw a documentary about it.
It was invented in clubs in Melbourne that were really crowded and people wanted to be able to move and do a lot of things in a very confined space.
So they had to come up with these moves.
So it kind of dovetailed with my interest constraints.
So shuffle. I like that.
I like that. I guess right now, obviously we're running out of time.
I think I'll leave with two thoughts.
I'll leave with the thought of one, really hammering something and I haven't suggested yet, which is if the focus for me and if what I'm submitting to everybody is to have an objective instead of a goal, then I'll leave you by saying your objective, it should be subjective and it should be subject to
people's interpretation.
communication. Simply put, right now I want to be considered, David, one of the most creative people the industry has ever seen.
That is how I navigate my life.
My objective, being one of the most creative people, one of the most creative people the industry has ever seen, it is subjective.
It's subject to people's interpretation.
David might be like, wow, Emanuel Acho is very creative.
Others might be like, nah, it's not for me.
Whereas a goal is finite and everybody can say you passed or you failed.
My objective is now it's subjective.
Thus, there is no way for someone to say that I failed.
It is simply, hey, it's subject to your interpretation.
As for kind of current works, man, I'm constantly creating.
Because I am chasing being a creative, my next book will likely be a book about grief, an uncomfortable conversation about grief.
I want to move into that space as I continue to navigate aspects of mental health.
I think I'm also currently just working on different types of creation.
I'm working on different types of songs and different types of animated shorts.
I'm working on continuing to put content into the world because if my objective is to be one of the most creative people the industry has ever seen, not only must I create, but I must also create a wide variety of things to both please my desires and hopefully satiate some mental appetites in society.
I love it. Last thing, we're going to do lightning round, two sentences each.
The two tips you'd most leave people with.
Mine are book of small experiments, you know, for yourself and for a kid.
Like I take it to my kid, I, you know, I don't tell him what to do, but when he does something, I try to heighten the reflection, the amount he learns from having done that thing.
You know, what worked, what didn't, what did you like?
And second one, pick spots in your life to satisfy, make it a practice.
You don't need to maximize everywhere.
Some people do that naturally, but a lot of us could, I think, be more productive if we picked the spots where it's okay to satisfy since maximizing for a finite individual is limited anyway.
I love that. I will share something I heard most recently.
Focus more on how your life feels to you than how it looks to other people.
I think that suffices the entirety of the conversation we're having.
If your goals are extrinsic, then oftentimes it can be about how it feels, how it looks to other people than how it feels to you.
Focus more on how your life feels to you than how your life looks to other people.
And lastly, I would suggest be the change you want to see.
Be the change you want to see.
Rather than kind of doing the change that you want to see, quite literally be the change.
David, I've never drank a day in my life.
I don't have an issue with people that do drink.
I just don't drink.
When a bartender comes up to me and says, hey, would you like to drink?
I'm like, no, I don't drink.
I'm not drinking. I don't drink.
And so those that are setting these goals or objectives or experiments, whatever the case it may be, be that.
Don't just do that.
Be that, because there is a difference.
So you were sober when you switched from track to football, which is surprising.
You know, to each their own.
Thanks for the great questions.
Really enjoyed the end your questions.
Sorry if we didn't get to all of them.
Thank you all. That was Emanuel H.
O. and David Epstein at a TED membership event in 2025.
If you're curious about TED's curation, find out more at ted .com slash curationguidelines.
And that's it for today's show.
TED Talks Daily is part of the TED Audio Collective.
This episode was produced and edited by our team, Martha Estefanos, Oliver Friedman, Brian Green, Lucy Little, Alejandra Salazar, and Tonsika Samarnivon.
It was mixed by Christopher Fazy -Bogan.
Additional support from Emma Taubner and Daniela Ballarezo.
I'm Elise Hugh. I'll be back tomorrow with a fresh idea for your feed.
Thanks for listening.
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