If you knew it would work, would you try harder?
I actually know the answer.
Even mice do.
Nir Eyal, in Beyond Belief, describes this famous experiment on learned optimism. Researchers took wild mice and dropped them in water. Left alone, at first, most gave up within 1 to 15 minutes. But when the researchers pulled some mice out, dried them off, let them recover, then put them back in, those same mice swam for up to 60 hours.
60 hours!🤯
The researchers replicated this.
Different animals exposed to different kind of suffering kept fighting when they had reason to believe rescue was possible. Or that their own effort could save them.
Humans are no different.
When we believe our efforts can actually work — we try harder. We last longer. We push through the moments that would otherwise make us quit.
It gets a bit more interesting for us humans, though.
We don’t need the direct experience of making it that the mice needed.
We don’t need to be rescued first before we’ll believe rescue is possible.
We can choose what we believe by choosing where we direct our attention.
All the people who succeeded before us with fewer resources. Or all the people who failed.
We get to decide which story we’re gathering evidence for.
Nir’s Motivation Triangle makes this very clear.
To get motivated — and stay motivated — 3 things need to line up:
knowing what to do,
knowing what benefit you’ll get,
and believing your efforts can actually get you there.
Remove any one of those 3 legs, and the whole thing collapses.
So if you’re struggling to keep going — 2 days into a diet, months into a business with no traction, weeks into trying to sleep better or improve your self-talk — ask yourself, Do I actually believe this can change things for me?
Not “do I hope.” Not “do I wish.”
Do you believe?
Nietzsche famously said,
“He who has a strong enough why will bear any how.”
But I think the quote is missing something important.
The why only carries you through if you also believe that how can help you reach it.
THE WHY + THE HOW + YOUR BELIEF = CONSISTENT ACTION
Over to you, dear reader,
What story of disbelief are you telling yourself, the one that makes you drown in minutes when you have what it takes to go for hours?