Nir Eyal

You want to build a business?

You want to write a book?

It takes effort.

Now, the good news is that pain is not suffering.

This is a super important concept that blew my mind.

It took me a long time to understand.

Pain is not suffering.

Remember we talked about that 11 million bits of information that, you know, war and peace every second that your brain is conscious of, the light entering your retinas, the sound of my voice in your ears, the ambient temperature of the room.

Your brain can take in all that information, but it can't see reality clearly.

And so it's processing all that information.

It's just not aware of it.

Instead, you can use that pinhole of attention to decide what you let in and what you don't let in to your conscious awareness.

That actually is very much in your control.

What that allows you to do is to say that pain, that difficulty of doing that hard thing that gets me what I really want, that's just data.

It's just data.

It's just information.

It's my interpretation of that signal that causes suffering, that causes me to quit, that causes me to give up, that causes me to not get my long-term goals.

And so you think it's just mindset and woo-woo and hocus-pocus.

It's not.

That it literally can define who feels physical pain.