Nir Eyal

He gets a new group of wild rats.

He puts them in the same cylinders of water.

And now at the 15 minute mark, he reaches in, pulls out the rat, dries it off, lets it catch its breath, and then plunk back into the cylinder it goes.

And this time he wants to measure how long, how much longer the rat will swim for.

And he does this a couple of times.

And so when I present this study to folks and I ask them, okay, guess, the rat started at 15 minutes.

How much longer after this intervention, after the rat saw that hope is possible, that salvation might occur, that maybe this hand will reach in and save it,

how much longer did the rats swim?

So people guess, oh, maybe 100% longer.

They went from 15 minutes to 30 minutes, which would be amazing.

And then some people would take a wild guess and they say, maybe 60 minutes.

Wouldn't that be amazing?

If you could persist four times longer, you could run that race four times longer.

You could persist on that difficult project you're working on four times longer.

That would be amazing to be four times more persistent.

But the rats didn't swim for 60 minutes.

The rats swam for 60 hours.

60 hours of nonstop swimming from 15 minutes originally.

And they died at 15 minutes.

They gave up.