Did you win?

Did you lose?

What's a letdown?

What's a celebration?

I think one of the most important findings in the last few years in neuroscience is that the molecule dopamine is associated with reward.

It's more about motivation and craving.

When I say the common currency is dopamine, what I mean is the molecule dopamine, when secreted in the brain, makes us pursue things, build things, create things, makes us want new things that we don't currently already have.

It's a way of tabulating where we are in our life.

Are we doing well or are we doing poorly?

And that happens on very short timescales.

But do you wake up feeling good or do you wake up feeling kind of low or on long timescales?

If you're halfway through a long degree or you're halfway through your life, how are you doing?

How do you gauge that?

Well, it has everything to do with how much dopamine you were releasing in the previous days and weeks and years.

What's cool is that once you make these processes conscious, once you understand a little bit about how dopamine is released and how it changes our perspective and our behavior, then you can actually work with it.

This example, the person that's not motivated, that can't get off the couch, that doesn't want to do anything.

Well, this is the problem.

They are effectively the rat with no dopamine, but they can still achieve some sense of pleasure by consuming excess calories, by consuming social media.

And look, I'm not judging.

I do this stuff, too, right?

Scrolling social media.

If you've ever scrolled social media and you're like, I don't even know why I'm doing this.

It doesn't really feel that good.

And I can remember a time where you'd see something that was just so cool or you see something online.

I remember this when TED Talks first came out.

I was like, this is amazing.

These are some, at least some of them are really smart people sharing really cool insights.

And then now that they're like a gazillion TED Talks, I remember spending a winter in my office when I was a junior professor, cleaning my office finally and binging TED Talks in the background, thinking this is a good use of my time.

Pretty soon, they all sucked to me.

I was like, this isn't good.

So what you need to do is stop watching TED Talks for a while, wait, and then they become interesting again.

And that's this pain pleasure balance.

And so for people that aren't feeling motivated, the problem is they're not motivated, but they're getting just enough or excess sustenance.

So they're getting the little mild hits of opiate.

It becomes an opioid system.

And if you think about the opioid drugs as opposed to dopaminergic drugs, dopaminergic drugs make people rabid for everything.

You know, drugs of abuse like cocaine and amphetamine make people incredibly outward directed.

They hardly notice anything except what they want more of.

More, more, more, more, more.

It's very, it's bad because those drugs trigger so much dopamine release that they become the reward.

It's very circular that only the drug can give that much dopamine.

Nothing they could pursue would give them as much dopamine as the drug itself.

And then there's the kind of opioid like effects of constantly indulging oneself with social media or with video games or with food or with anything to the point where it no longer evokes the motivation and craving.

And this is really the new evolution of the understanding of dopamine in neuroscience, which is that dopamine itself is not the reward.

It's the buildup to the reward.

And the reward has more of a kind of opioid bliss like property, which itself is not bad if it's endogenous, released from within.

But when we can just sit there like the rat with no dopamine, gorging ourselves with pleasures, so to speak, what you end up with is somebody that feels really unmotivated.

And those pleasures no longer work to tickle those feel good circuits.

And so there's no reason for them to go out and pursue anything.

And that's a pretty dark picture.

So the keys are to pursue rewards, but understand that the pursuit is actually the reward.

If you want to have repeated wins, the celebration has to be less than the pursuit.

And that's hard for some people to do.

If you can start to identify the craving as its own internally released drug, this thing dopamine, that is a source of motivation.

Then what you realize is that capturing the reward is wonderful, but attaching dopamine to the reward is actually a little bit dangerous.

Celebrating the win more than the pursuit, it actually sets you up for failure in the future.

And so this gets us right into something called dopamine reward prediction error.

And reward prediction error is basically if you expect something to be really great and then it's not quite that great, your dopamine baseline lowers.

And now understanding what we know about dopamine, that means that not only did you feel as if you lost because it wasn't as much a celebration as you thought it would be, but it also means that you're starting from a lower place, meaning you are less motivated.

Anytime you have a bunch of dopamine and you're in pursuit, pursuit, pursuit.

After you achieve a win, now this could be a business win, a relationship, a win of any kind, but inevitably there's going to be a tipping back of the scale on the pain side.

And that pain side is always going to go a little bit higher than the dopamine side.

So this is what you would feel if you pursued a goal like building a big company.

Here it comes, here it comes, the big sale.

And then there's the, well, what now, the kind of let down.

Now, if you wait, if you simply wait and stop pursuing dopamine for a short while, the scale starts to reset.

The problem is a lot of people immediately roll right into the next pursuit.

And then what happens is that scale starts to get stuck on the pain side a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more.

And pretty soon, no amount of seeking will allow you to experience that craving and motivation.

So what does this mean in terms of an actual tool?

Well, first of all, if people can do what you do, they're going to be in a much better position in life.

Doesn't matter if it's school, sport, relationship, any domain of life.

If you can start to register that craving and that friction and that desire, that almost kind of low level of agitation, sometimes high level of agitation.

That is that I'm trying to impose my will on the world in a benevolent way.

We hope that's dopamine.

It's working with its close cousin, which is epinephrine, which is adrenaline.

They are very close because, in fact, dopamine manufactures epinephrine.

A lot of people don't know this, but adrenaline is actually made from the molecule dopamines.

OK, so those two are hanging out together.

It's like crave work, crave work, crave and work, crave and work, crave and work.

And then you get the win.

And some people allow the big peak in dopamine to be associated with the win.

And smart people learn to adjust their celebration internally.

Right.

This is all internal.

You could throw the biggest party in the world.

But as long as you're kind of laid back and looking at this, not letting yourself get manic crazy, you won't necessarily crash as hard.

And pretty soon your system will reset.

So you take the day, you clean up the dishes, you relax, you go, what now?

I'm feeling a little low.

Well, rather than going out and spiking your dopamine again, just wait.

Understand that the scale will reset again.

Give yourself a few days where you're going to feel a little kind of underwhelmed.

Things aren't going to be as interesting.

It's going to be hard to trigger that big release because you just had the peak.

Well, if you adjust that, you relax, you understand there's always a little bit of a postpartum depression.

We sometimes hear about postpartum depression.

That's a clinical thing.

But there's always that kind of today's not as exciting as the previous days.

What am I going to do with my life?

But then if you let it start ratcheting up again, then what you realize is your capacity to tap into dopamine as a motivator, not just seeking dopamine rewards.

That is infinite.

And I can say with great certainty that this is how you were able to build a big company and sell it, how you've been able to build a successful podcast and sell it, how you constantly seeking because seeking is the reward.

And I think for most people, we think of the reward as the finish line.

And so the key is to get to the finish line, step into the end zone, but no end zone dance.

It's just like, yep.

And now I'm going to go do it again.