What have you come to believe about the difference between willpower and motivation and discipline? How how do kind of all of these fit together in your mind? Yeah, so willpower and tenacity um are related to motivation, but they're not quite the same. I think we should think of motivation as a um as the verb state that moves us from um let's just say apathy to tenacity. Okay, so it's it's the verb function that moves us along that continuum. a apathy at one end, u tenacity and willpower, strong um exertion of willpower at the other end. Um one of the most interesting structures in the entire nervous system is one that gets very little coverage unfortunately. Um in fact, most neuroscientists aren't aware of what its function is and it's called the AMCC, which is the anterior midsulate cortex. You have one on each side of the brain. The name isn't really important, but we want to, you know, to to the credit of the of the structure, we should name it the AMCC. The AMCC receives inputs from a lot of interesting brain areas related to reward, related to autonomic function, so how alert or sleepy we are, to prediction, to prediction error. It's a hub for many many inputs and outputs, hormone systems, etc. Beautiful experiments done by my colleague Joe Pervvisy at Stanford have shown that if you stimulate this brain area tiny little brain area in a human, they immediately feel as if some challenge is impending and they're going to meet that challenge. It's a forward center of mass against challenge response. This has been seen in independent subjects. They do controls where they then tell them they're stimulating but they're not actually stimulating and they're like I don't feel anything. You can turn on and off tenacity and willpower. So, there's literally a hub for this. Now, here's where it gets really interesting. I'm going to list off a bunch of peer-reviewed published results in rapid sequence, and I'm happy to uh point out the the um substantiation for this or the references. Okay? Individuals that are dieting or resisting some sort of tempting behavior and are successful in doing that, the size and activity in their AMCC goes up over time and the structure gets bigger. Dieters who fail flat or downward trajectory of the size and activation of the AMCC. This can be taken too far. Individuals with anorexia nervosa, the most deadly of all psychiatric disorders where a dep self-deprivation of food activates excessive reward. There's this kind of loop of reward. Their AMCC's are significantly greater size than others. So there's, you know, this can be taken too far. super aagers, which is a bit of a misnomer because these individuals are people who maintain healthy cognitive function similar to people in their 20s and 30s into their 70s, 80s, and 90s. Their AMCC maintains or increases in size into their later years. Typical agers, the size of we always hear that you lose brain mass across your lifespan. Well, most of it is from the AMCC. And beautifully, and this is two of my favorite results that really bring this around to a protocol or a takeaway. If people are given an easy task, the AMCC isn't activated. If they're given a hard task, in particular, a hard task, physical or cognitive, that they really don't want to do, the AMCC levels of activity go through the roof. And here's what's really cool. They gave aging, let's, you know, people age 60 to 79 the task of adding 3 hours extra per week of cardiovascular exercise. Now, that's a lot, right? three one-hour they call them aerobic classes but getting their heart rate up to about 65 70% of of maximum so it's getting into like zone threeish area yeah people can look up zone three but you nailed it zone three the size of their AMCC increased across that six-month protocol and offset the normal age related decline in this in this brain area in terms of its size the theory that's starting to emerge is that the AMCC isn't just about tenacity and willpower to push through hard things that it may actually be related to one's will to live, one's will to continue living. And I think this is these are some of the most important results. By the way, I didn't participate in any of the research that I just described. I spent a lot of time with that literature, but I think it's so important. I mean, we hear about the amydala, the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, all of very important brain structures, but um if nothing else, hopefully this convercitally could create your will to live is the one that's being overlooked a little bit. And and it can be and what's interesting about this structure is that it's involved in generating tenacity and willpower for all things, not just for one situation. And what's really wonderful, I think, about the the research literature on this is it's so clear what we need to do. we need to do. Let's say like me, you you're a person who enjoys weightlifting and you love running. I love those two activities. Well, guess what? Those activities, even if they're hard, like a hard run that I'm really enjoying or some hard sets in the gym, not going to increase the size or activity of the AMCC. People love to over um romanticize the utility of those final two reps. Sure. Okay. Pushing to failure, great. You know, running hard till your lungs burn, great. But if you enjoy that, you're not increasing your amount of tenacity and willpower. At least according to the research data, what's going to do it is doing something what I call micro sucks or macro sucks, you know. And so micro sucks could be all the little things that you don't want during to do during the day. Macro sucks could be the larger things, but of course you don't want to do things that are going to damage you psychologically or physically. Of course. Of course. But everyone, I believe, would benefit from um picking a few micro sucks. What are some of your micro sucks or macro sucks that you could sprinkle throughout the day? Okay, so on a household maintenance level, um, you know, I I maintain a very clean home. I I I'm constantly throwing things away as well, but there are a few things like once I exceed a certain number of dishes in the sink, it becomes this, okay, I'll I'll load the dishwasher later type thing. Like a micro suck for me would be like especially if something's been in there for a while and it's kind of gross and you got to like work through it. And of course I try and put each dish away as as I you know dirty them up. But um so little things the things like the the I really don't want to deal with that right now. That's the kind of thing those harder tasks where you have to breach some barrier some resistance to put it into you know Steven Presfield language or um our friend David Gogggins right you know that this idea that one has to callous the mind. I mean, David said that, right? He's probably got an hypertrophied AMCC that's bigger than most people's probably. And and the the beauty of having a an AMCC that's highly, you know, available for activation is that, you know, through the micro and the macro sucks of the day, you you have this thing, it's like an engine that you can devote to other things. So then you can devote the AMCC to other endeavors.