Nir Eyal

I'm not good at this.

This relationship will never change.

She's always like that.

All these limiting beliefs that we keep repeating to ourselves, why do we do this?

It's because fundamentally the brain is trying to keep you as far away as possible from your actual limitations.

Because evolutionarily, the brain doesn't care about your flourishing.

Evolution does not care if you're happy and flourishing.

That's not evolutionarily useful.

What's useful is that you're alive.

So good things are nice, bad things will kill you.

So your brain is trying to keep you really far away, right?

Remember those rats with the 60 hours, that's when they actually were exhausted.

But their brains were telling them at 15 minutes, give up, right?

Because it was trying to protect them.

Ironically enough, they actually died because they gave up too soon.

For most of us, most of our lives,

That's what the brain is trying to do, is to keep us as far away from potential harm.

Now, there are some circumstances where we definitely should quit, but we quit far too soon that's good for us.

So how do we know?

When do we quit?