Derek Thompson

At the 15 minute mark, when the rat is starting to struggle, he reaches in, takes out the rat, dries it off, lets it catch its breath, and then plunk back inside the cylinder it goes.

And this time, he wants to see how much longer the rat can swim for.

And he does this a few times, this intervention.

And you read the book already, so you know the end result of the study.

But when I ask most people, hey, how much longer do you think the rat could swim for?

They say, oh, maybe double.

Maybe it went from 15 minutes to 30 minutes.

Or some people say, no, maybe it went from 15 minutes to 60 minutes, which would be amazing.

That would be remarkable if you had some kind of intervention that could increase your motivation, increase your persistence four times longer.

That would be amazing, right?

Running a marathon for four times longer or sticking with that project four times longer.

That's life-changing.

That's not what happened.

What happened was that the rats didn't swim for 60 minutes.

They swam for 60 hours, 60 hours of nonstop swimming.

Now, what changed?

Their bodies hadn't changed, same rat bodies.

The environment hadn't changed.

It was the same exact cylinder experiment.

What changed?