Francesca Hayes cited a Cosmopolitan magazine tip that visualizing yourself doing something makes you 10 times more likely to do it — which she applied to learning to ride a bike.
Where this was said
At 32:10 · chapter starts 31:40
The episode pauses for a sponsor block. Monarch is pitched as a personal finance app that tracks accounts, investments, goals, and spending — with a summer-travel framing and a half-price first-year offer ($50) using promo code MOTH. OneSkin promotes its OS-1 peptide moisturizer, citing over a decade of longevity research and the claim that up to 80% of aging is caused by sun exposure. Between the two sponsor reads, hosts Jill Schlesinger and a co-host tease their upcoming podcast Money Moves, promising actionable personal finance guidance and social-media myth-busting.
Francesca Hayes learned to ride a bicycle for the first time at age 22, secretly practicing at 3 a.m. on a tiny turquoise Mongoose called 'Little Thunder' to avoid witnesses.
It had to be 3 a.m. It had to be dark. No one could witness a 5'9" adult in a purple helmet on a tiny turquoise Mongoose bike. But when Francesca Hayes pedaled and stayed upright, she laughed, cried, and heard something she'd never heard before: the sound of wind passing her face.
A helmet-free hipster cyclist passed Francesca in the dark and muttered that she shouldn't be riding if she was that drunk. She burst into happy tears. His dismissive comment was the first external confirmation she was actually riding a bike — and she took it.
Inspired by secretly learning to ride a bike at 22, Francesca Hayes went on to work for Bike New York and taught over 1,000 adults in New York City how to ride a bicycle.
Spencer Greenberg and Jeremy Stevenson analyzed almost 500 self-improvement techniques and found they all reduce to just 12 underlying psychological drivers.
Cold exposure has good short-term alertness benefits but the evidence base for long-term health benefits is much weaker than popularly believed.
In a randomized study of 20 habit-formation techniques run on hundreds of people, almost none of the techniques produced statistically meaningful results.
People given a tiny-habit fallback option (e.g. 10 squats instead of gym) were actually MORE successful at completing the full habit, not less.
The most effective habit-formation technique was 'habit reflection' — recalling a past successful habit, writing down what helped, then applying those lessons to a new habit.
A study found that simply scheduling enjoyable activities was as effective as standard cognitive behavioral therapy for depression, leading to its own therapy called behavioral activation.
The 'worry time' technique — deferring all worries to a designated time of day — helps people realize they have more control over worry than they thought and reveals it is less useful than it feels.
A study found that participants told to try to stay awake while in bed fell asleep faster than participants told to try to sleep — illustrating the paradox of direct effort.
Spencer Greenberg reduced his severe social anxiety dramatically in roughly 6 months through a structured exposure therapy hierarchy, culminating in asking strangers for hugs.
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