I'm a big believer in the power of mindset. My journey as an entrepreneur has demanded it. Building a business from scratch forces you into deeper work on self-inquiry and meta-cognition. It has pushed me to examine my assumptions and deliberately fortify my inner life.
So when I sat down with Nir Eyal, author of the new 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: evolving my own belief system. 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 years writing a previous book, he found that some readers had engaged with the material but not implemented the ideas. That honest self-reckoning led Eyal and his coauthor — his wife, Julie Lee — to six years of research, which resulted in Beyond Belief. The central argument is deceptively simple: 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.
We know what to do, Eyal argues. In an era of 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. Faith is a conviction that requires no evidence. 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."
For leaders, the implications are immediate. Eyal points to a major company's approach as a master class in organizational belief design. Employees are encouraged to operate with a fresh perspective. "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 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."
The research Eyal cites to support this is striking. In one study, people were given a newspaper and asked to count the photographs. One group took much longer than another because they missed a key piece of information. "Our beliefs determine literally what we are able to see," Eyal says. Entrepreneurs 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. A few years ago I discovered open water swimming, and signed up for a trip that included a challenging ocean crossing. I had seen the fine print about an option to do it as a relay. And I had quietly decided I would take that option. But then the day came, the guides didn't mention it, and I swam the whole thing.
When Eyal asked what I'd told myself to get through it, my answer surprised even me: "Suspend judgment." Not "I can do this." 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." 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. 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.
As technology advances across every industry, Eyal's framework becomes especially urgent. When I pressed him on whether human capacities like imagination and creative risk-taking could be affected, his answer reframed the question entirely.
"In times of rapid change, beliefs become your rudder," he said. "How you believe new technologies will affect you will change what you do with them." If leaders approach change as a threat, 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. 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.