Brain by Design

People pay for speed.

I don't agree with everything everyone says. But I'm always asking: What can I learn here? How can I make it my own?

One thing I keep coming back to is speed.

People will pay if you can get them a result more quickly.

So what does that mean for me? I think about it like this: I'm trying to create an experience that transfers knowledge and skills that took me twenty-two years to build, and do it in twelve months.

That's the work. Continuously finding ways to help coaches internalize, digest, and make useful what we do: translate brain and behavioral science into practical coaching tools.

When people ask us what we do, how do we answer that question? The thoughtfulness we put into how we answer matters a fair amount. What's the thing that actually connects, that feels like "Wow, that's interesting. I want to know more" versus "Oh, you're a coach. Cool."

This is a mistake I made early on. I used to try to have the whole conversation in three minutes. What we're actually doing is setting up a real conversation. We're just connecting to see if there's enough interest to have a second conversation or not.

Is there a way to strengthen the ACC and its risk analysis abilities, and not have the DLPFC jump in so quick?

Yes. Let's take a step back into the land of neuroplasticity.

Can you strengthen any area of the brain? Emphatically, yes. The brain is much more malleable than we sometimes realize.

It is about getting the brain to play together well as a high-functioning team.

It isn't necessarily the case that certain areas of the brain are more important than others. The brain has these tensions in it, and it is about the brain working well together. Integrated. An integrated machine.

Dave Eagleman calls the brain a team of rivals, which I like. It brings to mind that the brain has these competing members of the team that can be at odds with each other.

I was using an app called Productive to track my sleep. It was one of the habits I was building at the time. I was trying to get to bed by ten o'clock. The operationalization of the habit was to get in bed by ten o'clock.

Then I hadn't looked at the data. I was just tracking it each day when I did it.

Lo and behold, I look at the data at the end of the month.

It was thirty percent. I had hit the habit thirty percent of the time.

That's really revealing. Brains are like positive illusion factories. They really want you to believe that you're doing better than you are.