Nir Eyal

Why did you choose to start here?

okay so let me just share the study so people hopefully will be as blown away as i was when i first read it in the 1950s kurt richter decides to do a very simple experiment he wants to figure out how long can a wild rat swim in a container of water all right pretty simple so he takes a wild rat puts it in a cylinder of water filled halfway up there's no way out of that cylinder and he just stands there with a stopwatch and times until the rat gives up now you can't do this kind of experiment today it's pretty unethical

but the rat's already dead so we can learn from it and so what richter concludes is that it takes a wild rat about 15 minutes to give up and die and sink under the water now what's interesting is that the rat wasn't necessarily exhausted it just gave up for some reason then he had a second experiment he wanted to figure out what he could do to extend the rat's persistence could he somehow condition the rat to swim longer here's what he did he took a new group of rats

He put them in a cylinder.

There was a lot of rats back then.

He put them in another cylinder of water.

And this time, at the 15-minute mark, when he knew the rats would start giving up, he reached in, took out the rat, dried it off, let it catch its breath, and then plunk back inside the water it went again.

He wanted to determine how much longer the rat could swim for after he did this intervention a few times.

And so you know the answer.

But most people, when I tell them the study, they know there's some kind of surprising result.

And so I asked them, well, how much longer did the rat swim for?

People guess double, triple.

Maybe if they're feeling super optimistic, four times longer.

The rat went from 15 minutes.

to 60 minutes, to a whole hour of swimming, which is, if you think about it, absolutely crazy.

That's remarkable.

If you could have some kind of intervention that made you four times more persistent, being able to study for that big exam four times longer, working on those sales calls four times longer, having four times the patience with relationships that's frustrating a person that's annoying you, having four times the persistence to run a marathon for four times longer, that would be incredible.

That would be an unprecedented intervention.

But that's not what happened.

that what happened is that the rats did not swim for 30 minutes or 45 minutes or even 60 minutes.