Nir Eyal

And that's the goal of these liberating beliefs.

It's not necessarily to prove a fact, it's to decrease your suffering and increase your motivation.

No, it may not have any purpose to it.

But the fact that you have used that belief to decrease your suffering and increase your motivation to persist, it did its job.

That's beautiful.

I mean, I'll tell you, I think the biggest impact of going deep into the psychology of beliefs has been in my relationships.

And so can I share this?

Please.

It's a difficult story to tell.

Every time I tell it, even though I've told it a few times now, it's hard to still tell because it's, well, I'll just tell it.

So a few years ago, my mom had her 74th birthday and I wanted to do something nice for her.

So I wanted to send her some flowers.

The problem was I was in Singapore and she was in Central Florida where I grew up.

And I stayed up very late at night to try and call the right florist and make sure that they would deliver on time and that she'd get the flowers she wanted and all this rigmarole and spend a bunch of money.

I went to bed at one in the morning.

I patted myself on the back and thought, Nir, you're a good son.

She's going to love the flowers.

She's going to call you tomorrow and tell you about how great of a son you are.

That didn't happen.

And what happened instead was that I called her the next morning.