Growth Mindset Psychology: The Science of Self-Improvement

In 1519, Hernán Cortés landed in Mexico and promptly set fire to his own fleet. By any conventional measure of military logistics, this seems profoundly counterproductive. It wasn't. Matt Higgins — Shark Tank investor, Harvard Business School lecturer, and accidental dropout — has spent his career studying what happens when humans remove their own escape routes. Spoiler: it tends to go rather well...

We are spectacularly good at having ideas and remarkably reluctant to do anything with them. It turns out that the distance between "I've got it!" and "here it is" is not a step but a rather long, occasionally bewildering journey. Not unlike flying a plane. It involves a terrifying amount of fuel, significant faith in invisible forces, and a desperate hope that everything holds together on landing...

Most people think their relationship problems are about the other person. They're not — they're about an 18-month-old version of you who learned the only way to survive. In this episode, psychotherapist Jessica Baum breaks down why your nervous system is still running a programme it wrote in infancy. Attachment styles — secure, anxious, avoidant, disorganised — aren't personality quirks. They're a...

Most anger isn’t about the thing. It’s about what the thing means: “Someone just messed with my control.” When your expectations get violated... plans change,d a process breaks, a person does something “unreasonable”. Your nervous system reads it like a little mugging. And then you get reactance: that hot impulse to push back, prove a point, slam the door, unsubscribe from the whole situation. Wha...

Turns out you don't learn faster when you're stressed, you learn faster when you're happy! So let's talk about treating your brain like a friend, not a factory worker. Muscles respond to stress with pretty linear upgrades; brains don’t. Brains upgrade through meaning, novelty, and attention—especially when something feels like play. That’s why memory champions don’t “grind” digits: they build absu...

In the noble quest to understand our minds, today we take a new angle. We track how grunts turned into gossip, myths, and the weird human habit of blushing when we screw up. You’ll see why your brain is basically a compression algorithm: squeezing an entire inner universe through a tiny mouth-shaped funnel. We go from jellyfish nerve nets to gossip networks, and beyond. How shared stories make mon...

We all love the idea of “potential” until it quietly turns into pressure, guilt, and a weird fear of actually trying. Heather Moyse didn’t start professional sport until 27 and still became a double Olympic gold medallist. Breaking out of her social safety and truly exploring her potential wasn't easy. We dig into behavioral inertia, self‑sabotage, and the invisible “settings” your environment ins...

Most people “learn” by hoarding facts, which doesn't mean you understand them. Then you forget them all anyway... In this episode, learning stops being about cramming and starts being about curiousity. Using Richard Feynman’s four-step technique, you’ll find a mindset that will add joy into your learning whilst also making it effective. We unpack the learning pyramid, why lectures and highlights b...

Most people treat dating like a lottery; swipe, hope, repeat. Jonathan Aslay lost $2 million, his marriage, and his son. What saved him wasn't positive thinking. It was asking one brutal question: "What happened in your marriage?" Not to judge. To observe. Because how someone talks about their ex reveals everything about their emotional maturity. Self-love isn't bubble baths and affirmations. It's...

The algorithm doesn't want you to think; it wants you to react. It wants you to be a character in its story, following a predictable path of outrage and agreement. We are living through a shift where the line between human and bot is blurring. Not because computers are getting more human-like, but because we are becoming more bot-like. We outsource our worldview to gurus, tribes, and mainstream co...

Free will sounds easy until you look closely. Then it turns out to be smaller, stranger, and far more difficult than advertised. We take a cheerful scalpel to the idea that we’re the conscious captains of our lives. With help from psychology experiments, philosophical detours we find out what's really going on. Examining stories involving casinos, concentration camps, meditation cushions, and more...

The idea that you are a blend of the 5 people you spend time with has a dangerous side. In fact, it's not exactly true. In this episode, I break down why the Growth Mindset is actually about autonomy, not assimilation. I share the story of my best friend Laurie—a guy with zero ambition who taught me how to relax and actually saved my career during burnout. I also look at Sahil Lavingia, who blende...

What if the game you're playing isn't yours? Every moment of your life, something is at stake. Ignore your partner, they feel less loved. Choose status over meaning, you'll need a therapist. We inherit these games—LinkedIn profiles that read like eager cover letters, news consumption that convinces us everything's collapsing, social media that demands we perform. But there's another way.  Instead...

Get in control of your life and use your time to build a life of purpose. We have been sold a myth of heroic solutions. Where a single dazzling act will change who we are. But real change is quiet, methodical, and often boring. As a result many people lack agency waiting for some heroic reinvention. This episode explores the architecture of a "Deep Life," a four-month process of reclaiming your so...

You have roughly 4,000 weeks. Somehow, nobody mentioned this at school. This episode takes a cheerful scalpel to modern time-panic—the kind that convinces smart adults that the next app, habit, or color-coded calendar will finally subdue existence. (It won’t.) Time, inconveniently, keeps doing what it has always done: passing. The good news is that this makes it remarkably reliable, like a train t...

Every advanced master nails the fundamentals first. To perform at your best these are the 5 most basic and essential practices you need to return to time and again. A short episode covering the core requirements for good mental health and clarity in life. Whether you love Andrew Huberman, are a skeptic or don't even know who he is. These 5 lessons are science backed legit good advice worth repeati...

How to nurture the best in people with consistency and be remembered for what matters. This is going to be a different episode about a cake my nan used to make. But isn't just a story about cake. It's about the difference between control and nurture. My school thought resilience came from forcing kids to clear their plates (even if they ended up vomitting). They were wrong. My Nan knew that real s...

A boat is safe in the harbor. But that is not what boats are built for. We tend to view our lives as a single, continuous narrative. But in reality, we are a series of temporary selves, each with a distinct beginning and end. The teenager who dreams of adventure is not the same as the retiree who seeks comfort. When we defer our dreams, we aren't saving them for later; we are denying them to the p...

How to master cognitive flexibility by understanding the biases that keep you stuck. In WWI, generals sent horses against machine guns. Cognitive Rigidity mean they couldn't reimagine the battlefield. In this episode, I break down the five mental traps keeping you stuck. We look at why you value your own bad ideas more than good ones (The Endowment Effect) and why you can’t stop scrolling TikTok i...

How the mind blinds us to reality by showing us what we want to believe. We don't see with our eyes; we see with our stories. In 1951, psychologists proved that fans from opposing teams physically saw different fouls during the same game. This is the power and danger of perception. It is the tension between what is real and what we believe is possible. When a doctor gives a patient a placebo, the...

How to make smarter decisions that improve your life by understanding your mind and it's hidden psychology. We are all storytelling creatures, desperate to fit the world into a narrative that makes sense to us. Thus, we build echo chambers not because we are stupid, but because we are afraid. The Confirmation Bias is a shield against the discomfort of being wrong. The Availability Bias shapes our...

Think you konw what you're doing with you money on your mind? Think again. You walk into a cinema and buy the $12 large popcorn because the medium is $10. You think you got a deal, but you actually just fell for the "Decoy Effect."Your brain is wired to latch onto the first number it sees. In this episode, I break down the psychological pricing traps that businesses use to hack your wallet. We als...

Ever caught yourself defending a dumb idea just to look smart? That's your ego controlling your brain. Cognitive biases and ego team up to screw your decisions daily. Picture this: confirmation bias has you cherry-picking facts that stroke your self-image, while ego whispers you're too smart for mistakes. Spot the traps like Dunning-Kruger (overestimating skill) or sunk cost fallacy (throwing good...

You think you're rational? Think again. We love feeling like thoughtful decision-makers, but the truth is we're riddled with cognitive shortcuts. Daniel Kahneman's Nobel Prize-winning work breaks down the systems of our mind. We constantly substitute hard questions with easy ones; e.g. Buying a stock because you like the company, not because you've done the data. This episode cuts through the 300,...

We can try all the things: new habits, different mindsets, therapy, medication, or god save us... self-help books. Yet to no ones surprise: we don't wake up a different person, we don't start doing all the things we keep saying we will eventually do, we don't even lose weight... What is the deal? Are we broken? Is there a way to fix ourselves? It all comes down to a single question. Who are you VS...