If you’re ambitious but inconsistent, please watch this

2026-09-10 · Podcast or interview · Ali, Nir Eyal · recording, 53:57 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Mindset, motivation and happiness (also: YouTube, writing online and creators) · mode: Conversation and interview · tags: Lesson from a book, Evidence-based framing, Sponsor segment present, His own products discussed

Ali talks with Nir Eyal about his book Beyond Belief: people know what to do but quit because of their beliefs, the third side of Nir's motivation triangle; beliefs are tools, not truths, and a limiting one can be swapped through four questions and a turnaround, with a three-part test for when to quit.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Cold open and why Ali invited Nir Eyal to Hong Kong

★★ Ali says Nir Eyal's book Indistractable personally helped him a lot in overcoming his own tendency to procrastinate. — 00:00:00
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir calls "I am" the most damaging words in English, because whatever comes after them is what your psyche will expect you to become. — 00:00:00
★★ Ali read Nir Eyal's latest book, Beyond Belief, a few months ago and really enjoyed it. — 00:00:29

00:00:57 — Why we know what to do but don't do it: Nir's yo-yo diets, quitting as the number one determinant

★★ Nir Eyal says that in 30 years of yo-yo dieting every diet worked until it didn't, and it always stopped working because he stopped believing in it. — 00:01:41
★★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says the number one determinant of whether you reach a goal is whether or not you quit. — 00:03:09
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says successful people lose more often: they have more failures on their record than people who are not successful. — 00:03:46
★★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says persistence does not guarantee success, but quitting guarantees failure. — 00:04:15

“it's not that persistence guarantees success it's that quitting guarantees failure”
★★ Ali finds "just don't quit" an unsatisfying answer, like telling a depressed person to cheer up or someone struggling to build a habit to just do it. — 00:04:45

00:05:17 — The motivation triangle: benefit, behaviour and belief

★★★ Nir Eyal: Nir's motivation triangle: knowing what to do and why you want to do it is not enough; you also need the belief. — 00:05:58
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says that if you don't believe in your own ability to do a behaviour, you won't persist with it. — 00:06:28

00:07:06 — Wispr Flow sponsor read

★★ Ali sums up the motivation triangle: the benefit is why you want something, the behaviour is what you do to get it, and if the underlying belief collapses, the whole triangle collapses. — 00:07:06

00:08:34 — How beliefs change behaviour: the Yale ageing study and the placebo steroid study

★★ Nir Eyal: Nir cites a study at Yale which found that positive views of ageing increased lifespan by seven and a half years. — 00:09:34
★★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says positive beliefs about ageing work through behaviour, not magic: your beliefs become your biology via behaviour. — 00:10:05

“your beliefs become your biology via behavior”
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir cites a study in which men told they were taking a steroid, though given an inert placebo, gained more muscle and strength than men who got no placebo, because they pushed out another rep in the gym. — 00:12:09

00:12:45 — The rats that swam for 60 hours

★★ Nir Eyal: In Kurt Richter's rat experiment, Nir says, the baseline was 15 minutes of swimming, and Richter looked for how he could make a rat persist for longer. — 00:13:27
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says that in the second version of Richter's experiment the rats swam for 60 hours of non-stop swimming, not 60 minutes. — 00:14:28
★★ Nir Eyal: From the rats that swam far longer once they saw they might survive, Nir draws the lesson to ask where we ourselves are quitting at the 15-minute mark. — 00:14:53

00:16:00 — The formula for burnout and locus of control

★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says the recipe for burnout is two factors together: high expectations coupled with low control. — 00:16:49 · burnout
★★★ Nir Eyal: Against burnout Nir advises raising control, your sense of agency, rather than lowering expectations. — 00:16:49 · burnout
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says people with an internal locus of control make more money, have more friends, contribute more to their community, live longer and have fewer mental health problems. — 00:17:55
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says people who believe they have an internal locus of control still do better even when they are fighting circumstances they cannot control. — 00:18:17
★★ Ali concludes that increasing your agency, or even your perceived agency, is likely to reduce the risk of burnout while you persist with your goals. — 00:18:44 · burnout

00:19:07 — Facts versus faith: beliefs are tools, not truths

★★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says beliefs are neither facts nor faith: a belief is a conviction open to revision based on new evidence, which means beliefs are tools, not truths. — 00:19:43

“which means that beliefs are tools, not truths”
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says you need not hold beliefs to the burden of proof of a fact: you can use them as tools that serve you rather than hurt you. — 00:20:11

00:21:05 — When you should quit: mile marker, still learning, does persistence pay

★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says he is not against quitting, having done a lot of it, but against quitting too soon, because that leads to regret in life. — 00:21:15
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir's mile marker: decide in advance to try a new behaviour or belief for a set number of days and not quit until you reach it. — 00:21:42
★★★ Nir Eyal: Nir's test for quitting: you can quit once you have met your mile marker, you are no longer learning, and persistence doesn't pay in that area. — 00:24:12
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says all three of his quitting criteria need to be true before you quit. — 00:24:36
★★ Ali calls Nir's three criteria a very reasonable framework for deciding when to quit, and admits that people often quit even when they are not all met. — 00:24:36

00:25:05 — The flowers for Nir's mother: four questions, the turnaround, liberating versus limiting beliefs

★★ Ali sums up Nir's point that you can't make up facts, but you can choose beliefs according to whether they serve you. — 00:25:07
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir tells how, when his mother said the birthday flowers he had sent were half dead, he replied that it was the last time he would buy her flowers. — 00:26:09
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says venting about others reinforces your existing beliefs about them, because we see people as we believe them to be. — 00:26:31
★★★ Nir Eyal: Nir questions a belief that causes him suffering with the four questions of inquiry-based stress reduction, starting with "is it true?" and "is it absolutely true?" — 00:27:40
★★ Nir Eyal: The fourth of Nir's four questions is: who would I be without that belief? — 00:28:30
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says everyone has limiting beliefs, however successful, but cannot see them in themselves. — 00:29:25
★★★ Nir Eyal: After the four questions Nir does a turnaround: ask whether the exact opposite could also be true, not to convince yourself of anything untrue but to collect a portfolio of perspectives. — 00:29:53
★★ Nir Eyal: Turning around his belief that his mother was too judgmental, Nir found the truest version was that he is too judgmental and hard to please towards himself. — 00:31:04
★★★ Nir Eyal: Nir defines a liberating belief as one that increases your motivation and decreases your suffering; a limiting belief decreases motivation and increases suffering. — 00:32:02

“A liberating belief is a belief that increases your motivation and decreases your suffering.”
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says pain and suffering are not the same thing, and you can separate the pain from the suffering. — 00:32:30

00:32:51 — Ali on The Work and how culture shapes interpretations

★★ Ali came across the turnaround method in Byron Katie's The Work a few years ago, has experimented with it on and off, and finds it genuinely very helpful. — 00:32:51
★★ Ali says there is no ground truth and there are no true facts, especially about the behaviour of other people. — 00:32:51
★★ Ali says collectivist Eastern cultures put the collective interest above individual liberty, so the same behaviour can be read drastically differently depending on the society you grew up in. — 00:33:50

00:34:36 — The reality objection, pain is not suffering, seeing the suffering differently

★ Ali, who says he is 31, gives as an example that he would be very unlikely to win an Olympic gold medal in swimming. — 00:34:41
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says the real problem is not goals that are too big but that we are capable of far more than we imagine. — 00:35:10
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says the brain tries so hard to keep us from actual exhaustion and our real limits that this protection is called the central governor. — 00:35:55
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says that at the end of the day pain is the reason people quit. — 00:36:50
★ Ali calls the Lifestyle Business Academy the online business school his team has been running for the last six months. — 00:37:43 · Lifestyle Business Academy
★★ Ali finds that the students of his Lifestyle Business Academy and Part-Time YouTuber Academy who succeed are more willing to tolerate discomfort, while others treat the pain as a sign to quit. — 00:38:13 · Lifestyle Business Academy, Part-Time YouTuber Academy
★★★ Nir Eyal: Nir calls seeing the suffering differently the most important life hack for success in any venture, not just in business. — 00:38:42
★★ Nir Eyal: When something is hard, Nir takes a deep breath and repeats his mantra: "This is what it feels like to get better." — 00:39:47
★★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says manifesting and positive thinking, which his book fights against, are actively harmful. — 00:40:42

00:40:43 — Why manifesting backfires and mental contrasting

★★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says athletes visualise what they will do physically and mentally when a barrier is in their way, which is called mental contrasting. — 00:41:36
★★ Ali sums up the useful visualisation: picture yourself winning, then imagine all the obstacles in your way and see yourself overcoming them. — 00:42:04

00:42:33 — Live turnaround on Ali's reluctance to film; old beliefs can expire

★★ Ali says that for the last several years he has felt "in the muck" on filming days before hitting record on his YouTube videos. — 00:42:33
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir tells Ali that his belief "I have to create videos because I'm on a schedule" served him in the past but has now decreased his motivation to keep making videos. — 00:44:22
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir advises taking a belief that served you in the past and setting it aside like a tool that is no longer useful. — 00:44:22
★★ Ali says a belief that is useful in one season of life can be completely useless and actively harmful in another. — 00:46:17
★★★ Nir Eyal: Nir warns that people do not realise how their labels can become their limits. — 00:46:17

“how our labels can become our limits”

00:46:33 — Labels become limits: ADHD, identity foreclosure, imposter syndrome

★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says that when he got his ADHD diagnosis it explained a lot and felt good, but soon became a distraction in itself. — 00:47:04
★★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says that taking a diagnosis as your identity, believing you are a certain type of person, is identity foreclosure and very dangerous. — 00:47:59
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir's liberating belief about his ADHD is now "I'm learning a new skill". — 00:48:43
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says he learned timeboxing and wrote Indistractable because he needed to become indistractable himself, and found it learnable. — 00:49:06
★★★ Nir Eyal: Nir calls imposter syndrome a limiting belief rather than a psychological diagnosis: it is not in the DSM, and the word syndrome makes it sound real. — 00:49:35 · imposter syndrome
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says we are already gaslighting ourselves by choosing beliefs that served us in the past but may not serve us in the future. — 00:50:47

00:51:02 — You're already gaslighting yourself; suffer less, persist longer; outro

★★ Ali concludes that if we are going to gaslight ourselves anyway, we might as well gaslight ourselves into helpful beliefs rather than harmful ones. — 00:51:28
★★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says it comes down to this: people who don't suffer from hard things persist, and people who persist are more likely to meet their goals. — 00:52:11
★★ Nir Eyal: Nir says he is not more joyful than before but suffers much less, seeing things as happening for him, not to him. — 00:52:48
★★ Ali leaves viewers with the question of where in their life they are quitting at the 15-minute mark, when persisting would bring far better outcomes. — 00:52:48
★★ Ali says beliefs are very helpful but not a magic bullet: an empowering belief works well combined with an empowering system. — 00:53:33

Threads in this video

restate · Do you need motivation or discipline to get things done? — Nir's motivation triangle: knowing what to do and why you want to do it is not enough; you also need the belief. (00:05:58)
refine · Do you need motivation or discipline to get things done? — Ali sums up the motivation triangle: the benefit is why you want something, the behaviour is what you do to get it, and if the underlying belief collapses, the whole triangle collapses. (00:07:06)
restate · How do you avoid burnout? — Against burnout Nir advises raising control, your sense of agency, rather than lowering expectations. (00:16:49)
refine · How do you avoid burnout? — Ali concludes that increasing your agency, or even your perceived agency, is likely to reduce the risk of burnout while you persist with your goals. (00:18:44)
restate · When should you quit something? — Nir's test for quitting: you can quit once you have met your mile marker, you are no longer learning, and persistence doesn't pay in that area. (00:24:12)
refine · When should you quit something? — Ali calls Nir's three criteria a very reasonable framework for deciding when to quit, and admits that people often quit even when they are not all met. (00:24:36)
first on record · How do you change a belief that holds you back? — After the four questions Nir does a turnaround: ask whether the exact opposite could also be true, not to convince yourself of anything untrue but to collect a portfolio of perspectives. (00:29:53)
refine · How do you change a belief that holds you back? — Ali came across the turnaround method in Byron Katie's The Work a few years ago, has experimented with it on and off, and finds it genuinely very helpful. (00:32:51)
restate · How do you deal with difficult emotions? — Nir says venting about others reinforces your existing beliefs about them, because we see people as we believe them to be. (00:26:31)
restate · How do you deal with rejection and failure? — Nir calls seeing the suffering differently the most important life hack for success in any venture, not just in business. (00:38:42)
restate · Does positive thinking help you reach goals? — Nir says manifesting and positive thinking, which his book fights against, are actively harmful. (00:40:42)
restate · Does positive thinking help you reach goals? — Ali sums up the useful visualisation: picture yourself winning, then imagine all the obstacles in your way and see yourself overcoming them. (00:42:04)
restate · How do you beat imposter syndrome? — Nir calls imposter syndrome a limiting belief rather than a psychological diagnosis: it is not in the DSM, and the word syndrome makes it sound real. (00:49:35)
restate · How do you cope with mental health struggles? — Nir says that taking a diagnosis as your identity, believing you are a certain type of person, is identity foreclosure and very dangerous. (00:47:59)
looked back · Part-Time YouTuber Academy (2020) — Ali finds that the students of his Lifestyle Business Academy and Part-Time YouTuber Academy who succeed are more willing to tolerate discomfort, while others treat the pain as a sign to quit. (00:38:13)

Mentioned

Central: Beyond Belief · Limiting belief · Motivation triangle · Nir Eyal

Also: People: Kurt Richter

Projects: Lifestyle Business Academy · Part-Time YouTuber Academy

Works: Indistractable

Organizations: University of Oxford · Yale University

Concepts: ADHD · burnout · Identity foreclosure · identity label · imposter syndrome · locus of control · mental contrasting · perfectionism · placebo effect · positive thinking · The Work

Places: Singapore

Only in the description or credits: Byron Katie · Hong Kong · Loving What Is

Also centred on Limiting belief: If you're ambitious but feel stuck, please watch this

Also centred on Nir Eyal: Why You’re Always Distracted - 5 Mistakes Ruining Your Focus · How to Not Waste Your Life (Stop Getting Distracted) · This is actually why you can't focus

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