Motivation is not a straight line between what we want and what we do, it’s a triangle. And the third, overlooked leg is belief

I’m a big believer in the power of mindset. My journey as an entrepreneur has, frankly, demanded it. Building a business from scratch forces you into deeper work on self-inquiry and meta-cognition—that recursive question of Why do I think the way I think about this? It has pushed me to examine my assumptions, sit with discomfort, and deliberately fortify my inner life in ways I never anticipated when I started out.

So when I sat down with Nir Eyal, author of the new New York Times bestselling book Beyond Belief, I expected a great conversation. What I got was an inspiration catalyst, a reframe that gave me fresh language and rigorous science for something I’d been doing intuitively for years: evolving my own belief system. Whether or not you’re actively working on yours, Eyal’s central argument will land: Your beliefs are not fixed truths. They are tools. And that distinction changes everything.

Eyal arrived at this insight through a humbling experience. After spending five years writing Indistractable (a meticulously researched guide to managing attention), his phone began ringing with calls from readers who had absorbed every word but acted on none of it.

“They’d waited months to talk to me, and when I asked them to walk me through what hadn’t worked, they said: ‘I read step one. I just didn’t do it,’” he told me, adding, “Then I realized I have books on my own shelf that I’ve read and not acted on.”

That honest self-reckoning led Eyal and his coauthor—his wife, Julie Lee—to six years of research, which resulted in Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results. The central argument is deceptively simple and practically explosive: Motivation is not a straight line between what we want and what we do, it is a triangle. And the third, overlooked vertex is belief.

Behavior, Benefit, Belief

We know what to do, Eyal argues. In an era of Claude and 24-hour access to every conceivable how-to, information is no longer the bottleneck. “You can know exactly what to do, want the benefit, and still not do it,” he says. “What’s missing is belief.”

Beliefs, Eyal is careful to explain, are not the same as facts or faith. A fact is objective and unchangeable. For example, the Earth is not flat no matter what you believe. Faith is a conviction that requires no evidence and rarely shifts. But beliefs occupy the fertile middle ground: They are convictions that are open to revision based on new evidence. That malleability is precisely what makes them so powerful.

“Beliefs are tools, not truths,” Eyal says. “And like a carpenter who only uses a hammer because it once worked really well, we carry around limiting beliefs that may have protected us at one point but no longer serve us.”

Culture Is Codified Belief

For leaders, the implications are immediate. Eyal points to Amazon’s “Day 1” mantra as a master class in organizational belief design. Employees at every level are encouraged to operate as though it’s always the company’s first day: scrappy, cost-conscious, and hungry. Is it literally day one at Amazon? Of course not. But that’s irrelevant. “Culture is codified belief,” Eyal says. “And when a belief is articulable and shared, it drives behavior at scale.”

The opposite is also true. A limiting belief (“just another day at the office”) saps motivation and entrenches mediocrity. Eyal calls this distinction between limiting beliefs and liberating beliefs the practical heart of Beyond Belief: “A liberating belief increases motivation and decreases suffering. A limiting belief does the opposite. And the beautiful thing is, we can choose.”

What You Believe Determines What You See

The research Eyal cites to support this is striking. In one study, self-identified “lucky” people and “unlucky” people were given the same newspaper and asked to count the photographs. The unlucky group spent more than two minutes on the task. The lucky group finished in 11 seconds—because on the second page a large notice announced the total count and offered a reward. The unlucky group processed the page but never read the notice. It didn’t register.

“Our beliefs determine literally what we are able to see,” Eyal says. Entrepreneurs, he argues, have what researchers call “entrepreneurial alertness.” They can spot opportunities others walk right past, not because they’re smarter but because they believe opportunity exists.

I shared my own version of this with Eyal during our conversation. A few years ago I discovered open water swimming, and signed up for a SwimTrek trip that included a crossing from the island of Nevis to St. Kitts—at its narrowest point, that’s 4 kilometers of open ocean. I had seen the fine print before I arrived: Swimmers could do the crossing as a relay if they preferred. And I had quietly decided I would take that option. But then the day came, the guides didn’t mention it, and somehow I forgot to ask. I swam the whole thing—5 kilometers total, given the shifting currents—in just over three hours.

When Eyal asked what I’d told myself to get through it, my answer surprised even me: “Suspend judgment.” Not “I can do this.” Not a pep talk or a performance belief. Just hold off on deciding what’s possible.

Eyal lit up. “That’s a liberating belief,” he said. “The moment you suspend judgment instead of saying ‘I can’t,’ your motivation increases and your suffering decreases. That’s exactly what sustained you.” I had been using beliefs as tools without knowing that’s what they were called.

This maps directly onto creativity. I’ve spent years arguing that the leaders who thrive are those who cultivate both wonder and rigor, the capacity to imagine and the discipline to execute. Eyal’s framework adds a necessary upstream layer: None of that is accessible if you don’t first believe you’re capable of it. If someone says “I’m not a creative person,” he told me, they’d be right, because with that belief they’re not even going to try.

Belief as a Rudder in the AI Era

As AI accelerates cognitive disruption across every industry, Eyal’s framework becomes especially urgent. When I pressed him on whether human capacities like imagination, intuition, and creative risk-taking could be automated, his answer reframed the question entirely.

“In times of rapid change, beliefs become your rudder,” he said. “How you believe AI will affect you will change what you do with it.” If leaders approach AI as a threat (e.g., job-stealing, destabilizing, Terminator-adjacent), they are far less likely to leverage it effectively. But if they approach it as an expansion of human capacity, that belief itself becomes a competitive advantage.

Beyond Belief is a genuinely useful book. It’s rigorous without being academic, and it’s personal without being self-indulgent. For leaders navigating uncertainty, its core insight is both liberating and demanding: You are the architect of your beliefs. That’s not a small idea. That’s the whole game.

View the full article