Your Brain Prices Effort — Why Drive Is Partly Genetic (Part 1 of 5)

Well, hello there, my friend.

Jonathan Doyle with you once again.

Welcome aboard to The Daily Podcast.

I'm really pleased you're here.

My intention, my goal is to be a blessing to you, to be useful as you move

forward on this great adventure of life.

There are things that are significant for you, things that you want to

achieve, things that you want to change.

That is why this podcast exists, and my deepest desire is simply

to liberate people's potential.

And you are a people.

We are all people, and my desire is to share something with you today that's

gonna just move you fractionally forward on that journey of bringing this amazing

potential within you out into the world.

I have decided that we're gonna do a short series of episodes focusing

on the one great question that has interested me for many, many years.

I've been doing this kind of work for over 30 years, and there's one question

that's always kind of been there for me, that's always interested me, and I

decided that I was gonna try and see what the latest science has to say about it.

And that question is: why do some people seem to be motivated,

passionate, and driven towards their goals and some people don't?

There's so many possible variables, but what actually explains why it is that

some of us wake up each day and we will just endure, and we will keep going, and

no matter what happens, we will find a way to just press on, and yet so many

people spend their lives settling, right?

And this is not a criticism.

This is not saying that anybody is superior, better than anybody else.

But can we at least agree that we have all noticed this, right?

We've all noticed that there are people we encounter who just seem very

focused and very driven, and they just can continue to work and push through

difficult things and go and go and go.

And yet the vast majority of people, as the American writer Henry David

Thoreau famously said, "Lead lives of quiet desperation." So I decided

yesterday that I wanted to get more of an answer to this question.

I wanted to understand what it is.

So I put together a short sequence of five episodes we're

gonna work through together.

So hopefully you're s- here at the start of the journey.

Otherwise, maybe you picked this up somewhere further down the

line, you're coming back to it.

But let's work through this question.

And the first thing we wanna talk about is the way that our brains price effort.

Think about that for a moment.

That our brains, as we present them with challenges and difficult

things that we wanna do, our brains are not passive observers.

They're sort of looking at this, weighing up a whole bunch of different parameters.

And what we do know from the science so far is that genetically,

and in terms of heritable traits, what's passed on to us from our

parents, is that we are different.

And this idea of conscientiousness, do you know conscientiousness?

The ability to, to do the right thing and to keep pressing on and to, and to

make sure that a task gets finished.

That's up to fifty percent heritable, which means you either get it

from your parents or you don't.

Now, at this point, everybody's listening going, "Uh-oh, which

group am I in?" Or you're listening going, "Right, this is great.

So what if I don't have it?

What if I didn't get that fifty percent heritable

conscientiousness gene?" That's okay.

We're gonna… So stay with me because there's really good news

and that basically, we can actually train ourselves in this area.

But as I look deeply into this, there's some really interesting studies that

came out of Vanderbilt University.

I've actually been there Well, I've been at the front door.

It's, uh, it's in Nashville, and I took Karen and the kids there a few years ago,

and, uh, Vanderbilt University was there.

So there is actually a photograph, not that you care, of me standing

outside Vanderbilt University.

I guess that means I can tell people, "Yeah, I've been to Vanderbilt."

"You studied there?" "Well, I studied the sign on the front

gate." Anyway, let's press on.

So in this famous study, there's a person called Treadway who did this huge study,

and what they did was they put all these people through fMRI machines, functional

magnetic resonance imaging, which actually looks at the human brain, and it showed

that people who are motivated, who through all the questionnaires and observations

came across as really motivated people, tended to show great dope- greater

dopamine response in the striatum and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

Can you do this now?

Can you point to your ventromedial prefrontal cortex?

Well, you actually can, because your prefrontal cortex, you probably know,

is just right behind your forehead.

So that, it's really interesting, or well, it's interesting for me, that

the prefrontal cortex is the last thing that we sort of evolved to have.

It's the… You know, you've got your limbic system, your animalian brain.

It's at the base of your skull, near the sort of back of your neck, and

that's the thing that keeps, you know, regulates temperature and homeostasis

and blood pressure and fight or flight.

And then you've got the amygdala, which regulates that sort of stuff.

And then you've got the prefrontal cortex, the executive functioning

center of your brain, which is the thing that allows you to think deeply

about everything that you experience.

It's-- We're absolutely remarkable.

I mean, I still say bet on Team Human, because God has given us this

most remarkable architecture, this incredible architecture that allows

us to just do such incredible things.

So back to Vanderbilt.

They do these studies, and they discover that people who self-report or under

observational studies come across as motivated and passionate seem to

have a lot more dopamine activity.

And if you don't, you, most of you will be familiar with this, but dopamine is simply

the brain's reward chemical, that when you do something pleasurable or something

positive, your brain gives you dopamine.

Unfortunately, you can also get it with cocaine and all sorts of

things that aren't good for you.

So the second your brain senses pleasure or enjoyment, it gives you dopamine.

So what we discovered in these studies is that people who are

motivated, they could see a compelling future and could work towards it.

They got more and more sort of dopamine stimulation in their

ventromedial prefrontal cortex.

So if anybody ever says to you from now on, "How do you do this?

How do you just keep pushing yourself when it's hard?" Well, you go, "It's not me.

It's, it's actually my ventromedial prefrontal cortex."

People are like, "Of course."

How silly of me to ask.

And what they are also discovered in the study is they used this term

which, um… well, they, they, they broke the group eventually into

two groups, which sounds terrible.

There were the go-getters, who had more dopamine action,

and there were the slackers.

You think they could've come up with something better, right?

"What are we gonna call them, Doctor?" "Let's, let's just call them slackers.

Yeah, that'll sell." So what they discovered is that the slackers had way

more activity in something called… well, they had a lot of less activity in the

ventromedial area, but they had a lot more activity in something called the insula.

So there was a… I guess what I'm getting at with all this, I don't wanna lose

you in the science or lose myself in the science, but basically, we saw in these

studies a observable, almost genetic difference in these groups of people.

So the, one of the sort of comments they made in the study was, uh, that,

"Individual differences in dopamine function predict people's willingness

to expend effort for reward."

And then they said these words, "Motivation itself has

a neurochemical signature." Listen to that first line again.

"Individual differences in dopamine function predict people's willingness to

expend effort for reward." That's kind of the key mechanism, the, the predisposition

that you have to expend effort for reward.

So this is kind of the, the mechanism that's gonna begin to

underpin this journey for us, right?

That to become passionate about something, to push yourself when it's difficult,

it's going to be about the relationship that you have in your prefrontal

cortex, in your sort of highest level of thinking, about the relationship

between the efforts that you put in and the rewards that you're likely to get.

And what they find in the so-called slackers, I hate using that

word, not gonna use it again.

Watch, just watch me, watch me not use it again.

But what we find in them is this inability, this hesitance, this

resistance to expending effort for reward.

That's gonna come up again in a couple of days.

We're gonna go a little deeper on that.

But here is the good news The way to understand this, if you're

listening to me going, "Well, how do I know which one I am?" Well,

there'll be some data in your life.

If you look back at your life and you kinda go, are you the kind of

person who tends to push themselves a little bit when they have to?

And maybe you think, "Well, actually, no.

Jonathan, what am I gonna do?" Well, the f- I want, I want you to draw your

attention to something interesting.

Have you noticed what you're listening to?

You're listening to this.

You could be listening to the, you know, the International

Donut Federation podcast.

You know, you could be listening to the International Couch Resting

podcast, where, you know, they, they get the laziest people in the

world on a couch and interview them.

You're listening to this.

That's a good sign that if you're still listening to this kind of content,

there's obviously something in you that is interested in the question,

regardless of whatever you've been handed.

So it's not just genetics.

You know, it's that whole nature-nurture thing.

Nobody is 100% predictable based on genetics alone.

Yeah, they're significant, and yeah, they matter.

I often say, you know, when you meet me personally, I'm never playing in the NBA.

You know, I'm like 5'7.5", 5'8".

I ain't playing professional basketball.

There's nothing I can do about that heritable trait.

It's a thing.

It's not going anywhere.

But your motivation is different.

So the way to think about it all, the kinda key line here, is that biology

prices effort differently, but, and here's the good news, the pricing is trainable.

Listen to this next part.

Your baseline is not your ceiling.

So let's put all that together.

Your biology prices the relationship that you have between…

Well, to a significant degree, not 100%, but it prices the relationship

between effort and reward.

So we've all got some differences there, right?

We all look out at the world, and some of us are like, "Yeah, I'm just

gonna… You know, I know that I can do this, and if I just put my

effort in, I know it's gonna happen."

And some of us are much more hesitant, and it's actually,

part of it is gonna be genetic.

It's gonna be ticking away in the prefrontal ventromedial cortex.

But it is trainable.

That's such an interesting, important line.

Your baseline is not your ceiling.

Your baseline is not your ceiling.

So let's finish up on, on that, that we can train how our brains price effort.

Is that not good news to, good news to you?

We can train how our brains price effort, and your baseline is not your ceiling.

So wherever you are in your life right now, if you want to If you

want to, you can begin to use the skills and tools that we develop

in this podcast to train yourself differently about the relationship

between the efforts that you put out and the rewards that you wanna chase.

So I guess it's like that line from the first Top Gun movie, where they're

all sitting in that room and they've just arrived, and Tom Skerritt, uh,

Viper, walks in, he says that famous line, he says, "You guys are good.

We'll make you better." You know, he's like, "You've come

in here with ability and talent.

We're gonna make you even better." So if God blessed you with amazing

dopamine sensitivity in your ventromedial prefrontal cortex, well, we're gonna

help you get better. And if you're listening to me going… feeling

deflated, going, "Well, I don't know.

I, I don't tend to be the kind of person," well, my friend, as I've

said, you're listening to this.

And if you're listening to this, there is still something in you that wants more.

We are the, we are the creature that wants more.

We are from, from ancient history, we kept looking out at the world going,

"I wonder what would happen if we crossed that ocean. I wonder what

would happen if we crossed over the other side of that mountain range."

That's who we are.

Like, we've never settled, and you don't have to settle either.

So whether you're 15, 50, or 85, there is still so much possibility

for you if you want there to be.

There is, I can promise you.

I've, I have been able to create dramatic turnarounds in my own life

at different stages, and you can, too.

Listen, one more time, your baseline is not your ceiling.

Your baseline is not your ceiling.

So I want you to stay on this journey with me.

We've got four more episodes to go over the next few days.

We're gonna keep digging into this, and the problem that I wanna solve with you is

how do we increase your confidence, your belief that there is more that you can do?

Because if I can help you develop that belief, that's gonna be a powerful,

useful, passionate thing for you, okay?

So what have we learned today?

There's a biological basis.

It's heritable.

50% of people are higher in conscientiousness, the ability to push

through and finish difficult tasks.

Some of us less so.

But biology is not pure destiny.

Is that helpful?

So even if you've been handed a good set of cards, you can get better.

Even if you feel you didn't get the best cards, you can still improve.

So let's take that journey together.

Please make sure you've subscribed.

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And, um, come and follow me on Instagram, jdoylespeaks.

I'm posting there all day, every day, so you can see what I'm literally doing.

And, uh, and, uh, what I, uh, was that a sentence?

Did you hear that?

That was just like a massive word salad.

It's very early in the morning in the studio.

Uh, YouTube, that's what I was trying to say.

Jonathan Doyle Speaks on YouTube and the website jonathandoyle.co.C-O.

Uh, you can book me for speaking events and, uh, there's

executive coaching there as well.

So God bless you, my friend.

I hope that's useful.

This has been the daily podcast.

Come back tomorrow for episode two, and you and I are gonna talk again tomorrow.