How to Change Your Life, Solved
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What is the layered system of personality and behavior?
Drew, did you notice?
Notice what?
I'm a new person. Completely new. I did not notice this. Completely new. Top to bottom. I can't believe you didn't notice.
Okay. Tell me.
Did you see the white wall? Yeah. Okay. New studio. This is my wall. All right. I replaced my black wall with my white wall. Okay. So brand new studio. Yes. New microphone. Yeah. New jacket. I shaved. Which you haven't done in a while, I've noticed. I'm a new person.
I think it's a little more complicated than that.
If you were as superficial as I am. Oh, okay. There is no soul within this walking meat robot known as Mark Manson.
Sitting across from me now.
Therefore, the fact that I changed my jacket and shaved and sat us in front of a new wall is the entirety of myself.
What does constitute change? That's a good question.
You know, the Buddha said there's no such thing as self. Can you change that which does not exist? Can you just read the intro, please? Okay. All right, I'll read the intro. Here we go.
Welcome to Solved, everybody. I am Marc Manson, and today we're talking about ch-ch-ch-changes. I'm going to take a not-so-wild guess and say that if you're listening to this, you have tried at some point in your life to make a big change. You've read the books, you've done the courses, you've woken up at 4 a.m. like a pale-faced Victorian factory owner and journaled your intentions into a leather-bound notebook while the rest of the world slept. Why do I let you write the intros? You have tried, dear listener. Nobody can say you have not tried. And yet, you are still the same you, still caught in the same patterns that you have tried to escape, and you're still in the same petty feud with your mailman since 2009.
I've never met my mailman, for the record. Fortunately, I have some good news, but I also have some bad news. The good news is, all of that fruitless effort is not evidence that you're a lazy sack of shit. Or it might be, actually. We'll get to that. You're not uniquely doomed to always be the same hapless lost soul you think you are. You can change. Change is just really fucking hard. But the bad news is that you can't change everything about yourself, and you definitely cannot change all of the things at once. There is a subtle art to change, and we're here today to uncover how all of it works. And here's what most people get wrong. Most people don't fail at change because they lack discipline or commitment or the right morning routine.
They fail because they keep aiming at the wrong target over and over for years on end. What we're going to discover is that who you are is actually a layered system. And if you don't know which layer you're dealing with, it doesn't matter how hard you try. It doesn't matter how many tactics or tips you implement. It's just not going to work. You can be a genuinely motivated person solving the wrong problem. So in this episode of Solved, we're going to talk about why your brain is actively working against you every time you try to change and why insight, self-awareness, and understanding your patterns on its own can be almost completely useless. We're going to talk about why the most popular personality tests in the world, taken by millions of people every year, predicts almost nothing useful about you and what actually does.
We're going to talk about the real reason you revert to your old self every time you go home for the holidays and why it has nothing to do with how triggering your parents are. We'll discuss how the world came to misunderstand the most famous psychology experiment about self-control and what the researchers were actually arguing for. We'll get into why trying to suppress a bad habit is one of the most reliable ways to make sure it sticks. We'll talk about the one category of change that is faster, deeper, and more permanent than anything else in psychology and the four-step pattern behind every single case of it. And we'll talk about why harrowing traumatic events often lead to the most durable change in your life.
This and much, much more. The argument that we're going to make in this episode is that you're not stuck because you're a lazy sack of shit or cosmically cursed, but because you've spent years heroically trying to change the wrong layer of yourself.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the layered system of personality and behavior?
0:00–11:25
2
How does change relate to personality traits and behaviors?
11:25–12:28
3
What are the common misconceptions about change?
12:28–1:42:46
4
How do environmental factors influence our behaviors?
1:42:46–1:43:44
5
What adaptations do we develop in response to our environments?
1:43:44–1:44:56
6
How can we effectively replace maladaptive behaviors?
1:44:56–3:16:54
7
How can adopting professional behaviors help with personal change?
3:16:54–3:18:07
8
What role does willpower play in achieving lasting change?
3:18:07–4:58:23