How Micro-Discipline Compounds Into Elite Success | Andy Stumpf & Dr. Andrew Huberman

Small Acts Of Discipline

00:00Every single decision that you have in front of you in your life will have a slightly easier and a slightly harder choice. Make the slightly harder one more often than the slightly easier one. And the thing I liked a lot about McCraven's messaging around the bed is that it started your day with an act a small act of discipline that could seem meaningless, but then what if you pair another small one with that and then another small one with that?

00:20I think that can really set you up for success in your day. And yes, at the end of the day, boom, your bed's ready to go and you can hop back into it. just feels better to get into a main bed. It took me a while to realize that most of the people that I could tell were really squared away in their jobs and because I happen to know their personal lives too.

00:40Also, their personal lives, they're pretty tidy people. Yeah. Uh whether by sheer will or by reflex, they're just pretty tidy. I don't think it's ever by reflex. I think it's always by always by will. And it's not fun. And I'm, don't get me wrong, I'm not I'm not perfect at it, but if I can look back at my lives or my life at times where things were a little bit less effort involved in and being successful or making traction, it wasn't in chaos.

01:11It was in a little bit more of a controlled environment by me again controlling what I can control, which is my actions in the morning. you know it if you sit down in front of a desk and you can't even find the thing that you're looking for to do the work on it how I don't know anybody who has become ultra successful in life with that model but I think we could both sit down and talk about some people who are nailing it and I think the vast majority of them would fall into that tidy category or disciplined category but it's micro discipline that can make it seem as if you have this macro

01:43discipline but that's not actually what

Social Pressure To Be Average

01:44it is it's the little things that nobody sees that's what leads you to that end state it's interesting saying earlier we were talking about social pressure and um alcohol and social media. You know, it's interesting to me that there seems to be some degree of social pressure to not do the slightly harder thing.

02:04You know, like what what we're describing now. I I never get into uh thinking about what the comments would be, but I I'd be willing to bet one pinky that a fair number of people are either thinking or commenting directly. Yeah. Like that's really neurotic.

02:20Like, loosen up. Yeah. Take a picture of your [ __ ] room and send it to me. It looks like [ __ ] [laughter] Exactly. My dad's first generation immigrant from South America. And I'll never forget when uh in it was in the mid 90s, he probably took me to a movie in an attempt to repair our relationship and eventually it worked.

02:37Dad, we're doing great. [laughter] Talk to him today. I called him today. We're on such great

Decline Of Public Standards

02:41terms. It feels good to be able to say it. And I'll never forget, we were at the movies and there were these people walking by and they were wearing kind of like um baggy sweats and flip-flops or something. And he stopped me and he's a very orderly guy and he said, "See that?

02:56That's the beginning of the end." And I said, 'What do you mean?' [laughter] And he said, I come from a third world country. When people start going into the movies in their pajamas, it's the beginning of the end. And I thought, this is like you couldn't be more out.

03:11He's I I actually think he's right. What he was talking about is that the the when the social pressure is not sufficient to like keep people feeling as if they need to show up as if they're in public. Yeah. Right. and he might have been a bit extreme but you know when when that social pressure isn't there then the social pressure eventually erodess around what people can say what they can do and then I do think that era of kind Jerry Springer daytime television where people would watch people who were way more screwed up than them so they could feel a lot

03:38less screwed up what's it called shouten fruit when you take pleasure in other people's pain yeah well I think that there's that's that's the word for it for sure but I think this is kind of adjacent to that where it's it's like giving yourself license to not feel that bad because like like either they're just so neurotic that I don't want anything to do with that kind of world where everything's right angles or like well at least I'm not in total squalor and this is where I think that you know we hear so much about oh everyone's presenting them bestel the their best

04:08selves on social media also a problem to seem perfect because no one's perfect but I do think that there is this drift where we go well like it's not going to crush my life of the toilet paper thing like if it were going to cost me my relationship or you know my allowance you know you guys might think about it differently right yeah but so I think but what I got from your book this this section of your book is that it's because the consequences are so small at the individual level but the upside is so big yes when you you know collect these things together that the real incentive to do

04:43the slightly harder thing is there I mean the toilet paper is not going to cost you your life if it does I'm going to need a case study on how that happened because I'm fascinated at this Right? But what if it the we'll call it what it is. Either the lack of discipline or the laziness in the moment changes the trajectory of your life because you apply that to everything in your life because that's how you start your day and how you end your day.

05:04I get it. People I I'll take a picture of my room and send it out. Guess what? It's not hospital corners on the bed and there's probably something in the corner. I'm not saying that I'm perfect in this, but it's not being neurotic. It's doing the work that nobody sees.

05:22And for the people who com, you know, say, "Oh, that's, you know, that seems too neurotic for me." Like, let's let's have a cup of coffee. Where do you want to be in your life? And where are you at in that journey? I would I'm fascinated by And then, like we were saying, internet's the best worst thing.

05:35People can find this conversation and then critique us to death and say that we're being neurotic. But I'd also love to connect with somebody and say, "Listen, why do you have your an allergic reaction to that particular statement? Is it because perhaps you're living it?

05:53And if you are, let's talk about the potential impact that it's having." Because again, I didn't create this. I'm

How You Do Anything Is How You Do Everything

05:59passing along, you know, one of the mantras in the teams. How you do anything is how you do everything. there. There's so many stupid small things that you do specifically in training that have nothing to do with anything except doing the stupid small thing.

06:15That's that's it. I mean, you know, this the uh two-mile swim, you have a KBAR knife in one of your hands and a CO2 cartridge in another and you're wearing your life jacket and we are like got a jeweler's loop out looking at the, you know, the little uh twistin section of the CO2 cartridge.

06:34God help you if I find a grain of sand or a fleck of rust. Guess what? the jacket's still going to function even if both of those things still exist because it actually has nothing to do with the knurling of the CO2 cartridge and everything to do with I told you to have nothing in this to make sure it was basically brand new because you have to follow the procedure because the procedure is what's going to save your life.

06:58Can you even when you're exhausted and you don't want to and you have limited time do what I told you to do because of the impact that it'll have. I mean that exists in that community everywhere. So it's not me. I'm just telling you the most successful people that I have encountered are not becoming successful in chaos.

07:17Now of course there will be an uh somebody that can point to something and say well what about this person? I'm not saying that there's not a what do they call it? A white elephant or a black elephant whatever it may be. Does that scale? No it doesn't.

07:28So, if you're trying to replicate that, oh, they did it through chaos, so I'm going to as well. Live your life however you want to, but maybe you and I aren't being neurotic. Maybe we're just trying to help. Yeah. Uh, you said even when exhausted and limited uh in time, those are the two times when these little I guess I used to think about them as extras.

07:50I'm trying to start thinking about them as foundational. That's when they become really tough. It's when they matter the most though because if you I mean [laughter] it's like this toilet paper roll weighs 2,000 lbs. There's no way I can get it to the garbage of this tire.

08:04That's exactly like the days you don't want to work out. Those are the most important days. Even if you do less, the mental

Neuroscience Of Doing Hard Things

08:11victory there in my mind at least, and I'm not an expert in any of this, far outweighs any of the physical aspect. It's the fact that you did and you didn't want to. If you stack that up over a lifetime, you're going to blow people away with what you can can accomplish.

08:26Yeah. And the uh generalizability of what you just described is definitely supported by science. People have perhaps heard me say this before, so I'll make it very brief, but there's this brain area, the anterior midsulate cortex, which most neuroscientists that teach neuro anatomy, including me, didn't know what it did until a few years ago.

08:42And a guy at Stanford, Joe Parveves, he's a neurosurgeon. He was stimulating this brain area and regions adjacent to it looking for epileptic fosi in a patient. That's how they find out where the where to burn out the seizure site and he's stimulating in the singulate cortex and then he gets to this anterior mids singlet cortex and in every patient where he taps this region electrically the person feels and reports I feel like there's a storm coming and I want to lean into it.

09:07I know I can go through it. Someone else might describe it as I feel like there's this like big thing about to happen but I I'm going to persevere. So is amazing right? So this anterior mids singulate cortex turns out hypertrophies well it grows in volume per maybe in number of connections etc number of neurons maybe but certainly grows in volume when people successfully diet when they take their existing exercise program and just add three 30 minute uh sessions of cardio.

09:40But here's the caveat. if they hate cardio. [laughter] If you love the ice bath, this your anterior mid singular cortex, which by the way predicts successful dieting, predicts successful completion of any of other hard things. All of that relates to whether or not the thing that you're introducing is something that you do not want to do in the moment that you do it.

10:01And so there's real science to this. Now, there's a long review that I can put a link to in the in the caption if people want to get into the science. So this is in human studies and it goes just on and on. So it's not the thing, it's the thing you don't want to do.

10:15Yeah. And so when people say, "I love working out and the final two reps of that set that teaches me how to be hard in life." You're like, "Do you like working out?" They're like, "Love it." And you're like, "Ah, it's not doing anything for your entering single cortex."

10:24So I think

Key Trait Of Superagers

10:26this is very important science, which is why I keep bringing it up on multiple podcasts. And and I think the toilet paper roll. So your kids have this amazing opportunity. Uh other people have to uh I don't know do whatever. Um you know, they seem like very hard driving kids.

10:40um the way you describe them. Anyway, so it turns out that for them the the the toilet paper thing and no uh your dad didn't pay me to say this, the toilet paper thing turns out [laughter] to be the the route to anterior midsulate cortex growth which then translates to by the way growth of this structure is the defining feature of what are called superagers.

11:01bit of a misnomer because these are people who maintain cognitive ability and many of their physical abilities relative to their peers into their 80s and 90s. That makes sense. It's so it may even be related to the will to live. It may be the the tenacity structure in the brain which people who successfully push back against certain you know life confrontations and things and on and on.

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