Nir Eyal

It turns out that people who can persist the longest are the ones who are more likely to succeed.

When I did interviews for this research, I talked to billionaires and I talked to people who were broke.

And you would expect that people who don't succeed in life, that they would have more failures.

That's actually the opposite.

People who are more successful are the ones who failed more because they were more persistent.

And when they persevered, even though they failed more times, eventually if they hit it, sometimes they hit it big.

So what happens if day after day, week after week, year after year, we constantly recite a script about our limitations, about our labels, about what we can't do?

It becomes physiologically as well as psychologically true.

Really?

If you have positive views about aging at 30, studies have found, there's a study at Yale that found that people who had those positive views at 30 lived on average seven and a half years longer.

That is more of an effect size than quitting smoking, than diet.

We see this all the time.

And the myth is that in order to succeed, you have to be the smartest.

That's the defining trait.

And in fact, in some ways, I think that being too smart can be a liability.

Really?

Because you start looking for facts.

So facts are very different from beliefs.

A fact is an objective truth.

And in school, we're graded by how many facts we can regurgitate onto a piece of paper.