The CCTV Thought Experiment: You Are What You Do, Not Say

In this episode I'm going to share with you an idea that I came up with some years ago and I tell it to all of my coaching clients.

This is a prompt I repeatedly use over and over again and it's very very revealing.

This is the first time I'm sharing it publicly and I call it the CCTV thought experiment.

Okay let's get into it.

So picture this,

An alien research team installs a silent camera above your shoulder for 30 days.

Okay so there's no audio,

No captions,

Just raw footage like CCTV observing you.

Everything,

Screen time,

Calendar,

Where you go,

What you buy,

How you spend your evenings when no one's watching.

And then after a month of compiling this information,

Just watching you without audio,

They get asked in a sort of scientific way,

What do you think this human that you've been observing truly values?

And this is the CCTV thought experiment.

This is very revealing.

So if you were to watch yourself for 30 days on CCTV and someone asked you what does that person value,

Would you feel like that would be aligned with what you say you value?

Dr.

Jordan B Peterson is a somewhat controversial figure.

I hear all the time mixed thoughts and feelings on him.

Think of him what you will.

I do think that he has done a very good job at popularizing certain older psychological and philosophical ideas.

He talks a lot about Piaget and Jung and Nietzsche and so on.

Well he said in one of his talks,

If you want to know what someone believes,

Don't listen to their words,

Watch what they do.

So this CCTV thought experiment goes even a step further.

So it's the idea that if aliens judged your life by the footage alone,

What would they tell from it?

A very cold,

Empirical,

Ruthlessly honest report.

It's probably going to be closer to the truth than any New Year's resolution or mission statement you've written about in your notes.

The Stoics had a nice phrase actually called acta non verba,

Which means actions not words.

It's like as if they kind of already understood this exact point I'm trying to make here.

The reason why this is important is because it helps us primarily stop wasting our time and stop lying to ourselves.

You'll find that most of us we don't suffer because we lack ambition,

We suffer because our behavior doesn't match our values.

Our schedule,

Screen time,

Daily choices,

That is the stuff of our life.

The minutes make the hours,

The hours make the days,

The days make the weeks,

The weeks make the months,

The months make the years and that is the story of our life.

That's our biography.

Our goals list is meaningless.

Carefully curated social media profiles doesn't mean anything.

So when we see the gap between what we say we value and then what we actually do,

That's when we suddenly gain leverage.

We can close that gap and that's where the work can truly begin and we can use combination of Stoicism and behavioral science to achieve that.

The reason this matters is because we live in a destruction casino.

I'll start later is the house winning.

Scroll through social media,

Listen to podcasts,

Join group chats and you'll see the same confession on repeat.

I say I want to train or write or build something but my screen time says I worship the feed.

Meanwhile culture wars rage about whether clean your room is naive wisdom or billionaire propaganda.

My position is really simple.

Personal agency is table sticks.

It's not going to fix the world but it will fix your day and your days stuck together properly become years as I've said and then years become your life.

And this links a lot and I contemplate this a lot.

I have four kids,

Seven-year-old son,

Nine and ten-year-old stepdaughters and a three-month-old baby girl.

The purple belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

I teach Stoicism,

Self-improvement,

Philosophy.

There's lots going on and there's lots I want to do.

My friends will ask can you come and do some online gaming and sometimes I say to myself I just don't have time to do it all.

But the truth is that's a lie.

The I don't have time lie.

Most people when they look at their phones,

The weekly report,

They'll see five to eight hours per day on apps that are engineered to hijack your attention.

If we look at our calendars we see back-to-back meetings,

Zero time for what matters most.

We look through our shopping history,

We're just stacking up the buys to spike our dopamine.

It's not judgment,

It's just basic math,

Basic neuroscience.

In cognitive psychology what we do repeatedly rewires expectation,

Identity and desire.

So the old phrase neurons that have fire together wire together.

Your brain treats repetition as proof of priority.

It doesn't read your mission statement,

It just reads the loops.

So your actions are training your future self whether you mean to or not.

So the person you're becoming is shaped by what you did yesterday and the day before that and the day before that.

Not by what you wish you had done,

Not by what you plan to do eventually,

But by what you actually did.

And there's only one way to break the loop and that's to break the loop.

And then the other part of the lie of I don't have enough time is to realize that most of the time you really are doing exactly what you want to be doing with your time on a fundamental deep level.

But if you didn't want to be doing it,

Why are you doing it?

Unless you are being actually forced in a life or death situation to act in a certain way,

There's a high probability that you are choosing to do the thing that you want to do.

Even obligations,

I have to look after my elderly grandmother.

No you don't.

You don't have to do that.

I can promise you many,

Many,

Many people have abandoned care roles.

Oh but I have to look after lots of young kids.

No you don't.

You don't have to.

You don't have to do that.

A lot of people don't,

Right?

So this,

It's important,

Right?

It's important that we recognize that sometimes we tell ourselves the lie that we have to do certain things,

But really we probably want to do them.

The reward is greater than the punishment.

If we bring it back to Stoicism,

The ancient Stoic didn't certify philosophers by their eloquence,

How well they could talk.

That was sophistry.

They watched how people lived.

I believe Epictetus would have really liked a CCTV test.

Epictetus had sort of like three main parts of his program.

He had perception,

This is sort of where you interpret impressions.

Fantasia,

You see reality accurately.

No excuses,

No melodrama,

A view that's free from distortion.

He also had action or praxis,

Do what virtue commands with resources at hand.

And then will,

Pro hiresis,

Endure what you cannot change,

Keep your standards.

And at the center of this all sits prosoci.

This is sort of like attentive watchfulness or mindfulness.

The discipline is not abstract,

It's visible,

Created every day by your behavior.

Remember that Marcus Aurelius didn't just write about virtue in his journal.

He ruled an empire while the plague ravaged Rome.

He wrote philosophy in a military tent on the Danube frontier and still found time to practice gratitude for the difficult people he would deal with on a daily basis.

And Seneca didn't just philosophize about wealth and simplicity.

He practiced poverty periodically,

Sleeping on hard floors and fasting,

Living like a dog,

Not as a way to punish himself,

But as a form of training.

So the Stoics got it,

Wisdom without embodiment is just decoration.

It's just lying.

From a psychological perspective,

It's important to know what's going on here.

So there's a couple of things.

So the first thing is present bias.

The brain outweighs immediate dopamine over future benefits.

The current addictive feed will beat the book unless you design friction.

We bias what's present,

We bias what's in front of us,

What's immediate.

Another thing is cue craving response reward loops.

So every scroll is like a lever press,

Every notification is a palette.

You're not weak,

You're just in a experiment designed by people who profit from hooking your attention.

And business is extremely good.

Most of the richest people you can probably think of make most of their money from being able to hijack people's attention.

Not all,

But I would say quite a few.

Implementation gaps.

So vague goals like write more,

They don't make it.

What works is specific if-then plans.

7am I write one ugly paragraph at the kitchen table before coffee.

That's a specific goal,

Not a vague goal.

Gonna write more,

Gonna write more.

I really should write more,

I need to write more.

Doesn't make it.

I wanna know when,

I wanna know why,

I wanna know how,

And what's gonna happen if you don't do it.

It's also very good to do a bit of premeditation of adversity with your goals.

Think what could go wrong in pursuing this goal and what could I do about it.

Another one is identity drift.

When promises to yourself are broken,

Self trust erodes.

When you don't trust yourself you have lower effort and then you give more broken promises.

So many of my clients,

They don't trust themselves.

Okay,

This is what we're gonna do this week.

We're gonna go do this,

This,

And this.

Sound good?

Yeah,

I'm definitely gonna do that.

I definitely feel good about it.

They say,

Sounds good in theory,

I just don't know if I will do it.

And I say,

Well,

It sounds like you think it's a good idea.

Sounds like you're pumped up about it.

Yeah,

But I've been in this place before so many times where I've told myself I was gonna do it and then I just don't.

So now it's not a discipline issue anymore,

It's a trust issue.

It's a trust issue with themselves.

None of this means you're doomed,

Of course.

It just means you need systems.

Systems that make it easier to do the right thing and harder to do the wrong thing.

So let's go back to the CCTV thought experiment.

We'll often find this gap between what we say and what our footage shows.

So we might say I value my But we see that we don't really walk much,

We barely make it to the gym,

We sacrifice our sleep,

We drink alcohol.

Another one,

I value writing,

I wanna be a writer.

But then you see someone who barely spends any time actually struggling when they're writing.

20 minutes writing a month,

9 hours choosing a notebook.

Another one,

Family first,

You know,

I really wanna be a family person.

But yet,

When they're having dinner,

They're scrolling,

They're watching TV,

Not making eye contact.

Weekends are too busy,

They do stuff together.

Or I wanna build this exciting new business project.

Really,

They're just obsessed with building to-do lists,

Trying out different apps,

Not actually pushing the limits,

Getting the work done,

Booking the sales calls.

They'd rather spend time on their emails and to-do lists.

Okay,

This is not about self-flagellation.

This is more about evidence.

It's not a criminal trial.

The goal is clarity.

I don't want you to be ashamed.

The gap between what you stake your value and your lived values is probably the single most important metric in your entire life.

And this is where self-deception lives.

It's where potential dies,

And it's where transformation begins.

If you're willing to go there,

Of course.

So now you're probably thinking,

All right,

Okay,

Fair enough.

I'm not living according to my values as much as I thought I was,

But what can I do about it?

Well,

I would say,

Like,

A mantra you can live by is your calendar reveals your priorities.

Values-based time management.

So name your top three values for at least the next three months.

It could be health,

Deep work,

Family,

Relationships,

Financial stability,

Creative expression,

Whatever actually matters right now.

And if you use a calendar,

Look over the last week.

If you don't use a calendar,

You can just estimate this and ask,

Which of those activities match those values?

So the question now is,

Okay,

I get it.

I might be following my values and living them as much as I thought I was,

But what can I do?

Well,

Sometimes just realizing this is enough to give you that push to start putting on your calendar those priorities.

And also it's important to try and build your trust back with yourself so you can make one tiny promise every day to yourself.

And stick to it.

10 push-ups at 4 p.

M.

Or 150 words before breakfast.

Do it super small,

But just non-negotiable.

You can almost track these promises as well and see how many of these little promises you can actually stick to.

You can see this as an integrity bank.

Every kept promise is a deposit.

Every broken promise is a withdrawal.

And the idea is as you watch your balance grow,

You'll develop a lot more self-trust.

A few mindset shifts are important.

Boring consistency is better than heroic bursts.

Consistency rewires your identity.

Big bursts,

They'll just burn you out and potentially cause some self-loathing.

Policy beats your mood.

Phone in the kitchen at 9 p.

M.

Is a policy.

I'll try to scroll less is a hope.

Policies don't negotiate with your 9 p.

M.

Brain.

Every kept promise sends a signal to your nervous system.

I am the kind of person who does what I say.

The more you can feel integrity,

The better you'll succeed,

The better that CCTV footage will be.

Some really quick practical steps.

Number one,

Check your screen time.

Have a look at where all of the leaks are.

How are you spending your time in ways you don't want to be spending your time?

Do you use a calendar?

Look back over your calendars.

What are you doing?

Do a bit of journaling.

What surprised you?

What hurt?

What's obviously waste?

Next thing you can do is think of three values that you want to live by for the next 30 days and block some non-negotiable time,

Even 20 minutes,

To make sure that these values are included and incorporated.

Create if-then plans.

If 7 a.

M.

,

Then do this task.

Not vague,

I want to write more kind of goals.

Make the things that you don't want to do harder to do.

Create more friction.

So you can delete an app,

You can disable the badges,

You can grayscale your screen,

Whatever it is.

The things you want to do,

Make them more obvious,

Make them more attractive.

You could start practicing voluntary discomfort,

The stoic principle.

Cold showers,

Phone-free commutes.

Write first draft without editing.

The more you can lean into this discomfort,

It's going to protect you when you get that present bias in the future.

Commit to doing a stoic evening review,

The classic journal exercise that really does work.

In the evening,

You write three lines.

What did I do well?

Way did I betray my values?

What's the tiny fix tomorrow?

Every day,

Over and over again.

And periodically practice the view from above.

The view from above is not just a way for you to feel less stressed,

It's a way for you to think about what actually counts.

Which two tasks would still match in 10 years,

Which won't.

So that's the CCTV thought experiment.

If aliens watched your life without sound,

What would they see?

A writer,

An artist,

An entrepreneur,

A present parent,

Or a highly trained scroller?

The answer isn't a feeling,

Right?

It's footage,

It's forensic evidence.

Give this thought experiment a try and return to it every couple of months.

I think you'll find it useful.

I certainly do.