Transcription
This will this will be nasty for the people who are listening at home. So learning means same condition, new behavior. So phone rings, you answer the phone, you say ABC. I say cool read this script instead that says def. Phone rings, same condition, you say def you have learned. Same condition, new behavior.
Intelligence is rate of learning. It's speed. It's a measurement of speed. So it means how many times do you need to be exposed to the same condition in order to change your behavior. If I teach someone that script and then on the first try they say def and someone else it takes five tries for them to say defaf, they are not as intelligent as the first person.
Here's why this is interesting. Every person who's listening to this right now has listened to a thousand [ __ ] podcasts and they're in the exact same condition and yet they have not changed their behavior. Which means one they have not learned and two they are dumb. Which also means that if you can control your behavior you can also control how intelligent you are. And so if you want to be a smart cookie then it means that you just decrease the amount of times that you do not change your behavior under the same conditions. And so when I think about this when I teach my team, when I teach anyone, I think in these conditions and so every time you watch or you consume a piece of content or you read a book, if you think what behavior I'm going am I going to change as a result of this, if the answer is nothing, you wasted your time and you pretended to be learning, but you were really entertaining yourself. And so that frame has been incredibly helpful for me to speed up how quickly I take action because I don't want to be a dodo bird.
So that's two two different ones, learning and intelligence. One that I've been thinking a lot about with Dr. K and I, we go back and forth is motivation. So I'll tell you a story and then I'll I'll bring it I'll I'll bring it around. So I had uh I was at an event and a young lady said, "Alex, can you just give me 60 seconds of motivation?" And of course it's like, you know, dance monkey dance. And so I I you know I took a deep breath and I was like define motivation and you know she just like melted. She had no idea, right? I was like so you're you want me to answer a question or make a statement about something that you can't even define. And so how would you have any idea of whether or not I actually did it?
So motivation is the equal opposite of deprivation. So we are we are most motivated when we are deprived of something. I'm most motivated to sleep when I am sleepd deprived. I'm most motivated to eat when I'm deprived of food. I'm most motivated to have sex when I haven't had sex in a while. Now, that logic carries for physiological needs, but then you when you get into psychological things or or intangible constructs. So, like let's think about money. By that same logic, you'd think, oh, poor people should be more motivated because they're deprived of money. But that we don't see that in reality. Many poor people are not that motivated. So it would then follow and I've seen some incredibly rich people who are wildly hungry for money. And so then it would follow that the deprivation comes from our reference point because money is intangible. And so it's how much do we perceive our deprivation around money? And so if all of my friends are billionaires and I'm worth $100 million, then I have a $900 million deficit that I have to come up. I'm $900 million poorer than the person who just is at 5,000 a month who wants to make $10,000 a month. I'm more motivated to make money than they are because I'm more deprived of it. And so in thinking about this, I then think, okay, what am I deprived of that motivates me to go get it? And also, when I want to try and judge the behavior of others or predict their behavior, I have to think, what things are they deprived of? Because I have a much stronger predictive power than trying to say, how do I motivate this person? Look at what they lack.