What's up, everyone? This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew.

Welcome back to Founders Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you the business builder,

the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business,

a team, or a new product. Today, I talk about why we procrastinate and how we can fight back.

Let's hop into it.

We eat junk food, even though it's bad for our bodies. We doom scroll through Twitter,

and yes, I'm talking about myself, even though we should be working. We commit to dry January

and then drink a beer two days in. Why is it that we treat our future selves like absolute shit?

So I have good news and bad news for you. The good news is your behavior or lack of willpower

is not unique to you. The bad news is that it is a very, very difficult habit to break.

Not only do most of us treat our future selves poorly, but we've been behaving in this way for

thousands of years, at the very least since the times of Plato and Aristotle. In his dialogue

Protagoras, which sounds very formal, Plato asks a very simple question. If one judges action A to

be the best course of action, one would do anything other than A, and based on our perennially

irrational behaviors, the answer to that question is yes. You see, the Greeks actually name this

human condition, Accrazia, which basically means lacking self-control or acting against one's

better judgment. Now, as much as I'm a fan of the ancient philosophers, I want to get practical

with this. And I want to answer two very simple questions. First, why is it that we act against our

better judgment or lack willpower? And second, what can we do to combat it? So let's start with the first.

And my short answer in two words is cognitive bias. I recently did this Founders Journal episode

on cognitive biases, which we'll link to in the show notes, but basically what it is is a specific

flawed way of thinking that causes us to make irrational decisions or behave in an irrational way.

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