183 - Building & Changing Habits with James Clear of "Atomic Habits"

hey everyone welcome to the drive podcast i'm your host peter etia hey james thanks so much for making time to sit down today it's been a while i've i've wanted to sit down and chat with you yeah of course thank you so much for thinking of me i'm excited to talk more so i'm trying to think when i first read your book because i i read it twice and like all good books you get more out of it i think the second time in part because i think the deeper you get down the rabbit hole of trying to create habits whether it's in yourself or helping others form habits the more you realize how challenging it can be but maybe for folks who haven't read it because i suspect there's going to be a bunch of people listening to this who have read it and i want to be able to go deeper for them and and i think there's going to be some people who haven't read it um maybe give us a bit of the history as to why this even appealed to you um yeah well first thank you for saying that i feel like that's the ultimate measure of whether a book is good or not is um is it worth rereading and uh that's a high bar there aren't many books i've reread but uh yeah i really appreciate you taking the time to do it twice um so what excited me about habits i think there are a few things um the first is you're building habits all the time whether you're thinking about them or not so you know depending on which study you look at somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of our behaviors seem to be automatic and habitual but most of the time those studies are looking at things that are like you know more or less automatic brushing your teeth tying your shoes unplugging the toaster after each use but i think the true influence of your habits is even greater than that because a lot of the time the behaviors that you're taking are shaped or influenced by the habits that preceded them so you can imagine standing in line at you know the grocery store or having three or four minutes free in your kitchen and you habitually pull your phone out of your pocket well you know the next five or ten minutes might be spent thinking carefully about what email you're responding to or the video game you're playing or scrolling social media but that conscious you know maybe non-habitual behavior was shaped or set by the habit of pulling your phone out so um the the reach of our habits is very wide and it's influencing our behavior all the time so that's one reason why it's important and i think that if you're going to be building habits anyway you might as well understand like what they are and how they work and how to shape them [Music] so that you can be the architect of your habits and not the victim of them a lot of people feel like their habits are happening to them like they don't get a whole lot of influence on it and partially i think it's just because you know it's this process your brain is going through all the time to try to automate and make behaviors more efficient but if you don't really know what's happening or where to adjust it then it kind of feels like it's happening to you rather than happening for you and then i would say the second thing that kind of really got me diving in deeper and thinking about it more carefully is just the realization that most of us in life want some kind of results you know we want to get better at a skill or we want to lose weight or to make more money or reduce stress and gain peace of mind and whatever the results are that you're looking for most of the time your results are a lagging measure of the habits that preceded them so you know your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits your weight is a lagging measure of your nutrition and training habits your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits even like the clutter on your desk at work or in your garage is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits and so um you know habits are not the only thing that influence outcomes in life you know you have luck and randomness you've got misfortune but by definition randomness is not under your control and i think the only reasonable approach is to focus on what's in your control and over long time horizons your results tend to bend in the direction of your habits and so i think because your brain is building habits all the time anyway and because your results are heavily influenced by the habits that you repeat those are two primary reasons that i feel like got me interested in the topic but also just good reasons for anybody to be fascinated with habits i'm guessing there's a lot of sort of well probably evolutionary rationale for why we're creatures of habits right i mean i think the presumably the less energy we had to devote to things that would help us survive and procreate the better and obviously that's why we have an autonomic nervous system that allows us to function you know things like breathing and having your heart go from you know beating fast or beating slow to be completely out of your voluntary control i'm curious as to whether or not we have a sense of you know ancestrally what types of habits were people ever trying to deliberately change maybe it's not an answerable question i don't know if you ever contemplated that like when did this idea of being proactive in either breaking a habit or creating a new habit do you get the sense that that is a recent luxury of our species yeah i i kind of um so i don't know the answer to the question but i do have some thoughts on it and i feel like it probably does skew somewhat recent for one particular reason which is generally speaking our ancestors lived in what was primarily an immediate return environment the majority of the decisions that you would make that meaningfully impacted your survival were ones that were relatively immediate in nature so taking shelter from a storm or avoiding a lion on the savanna or foraging for the next meal in a berry bush these are things that like had a pretty quick payoff in your life if you fast forward to modern society though and we could define that however you want but probably say the last 500 years or something like that certainly the last hundred years modern society seems to have created quite a few structures that favor not an immediate return environment but a delayed return environment so you go to work today so that you can get a paycheck in two weeks or you study at school today so that you can graduate in four years or you save for retirement today so that you can you know not have to work a couple decades from now and there are a lot of structures that are like that in modern society that that tend to reward delayed gratification and so i think in a sense we're kind of walking through this modern society that rewards uh ourselves for patients and we still have this like paleolithic hardware where we prioritize instant gratification and immediate returns in a lot of ways in some kind of evolutionary sense and you can see how there's a little bit of a mismatch there and i wonder if it's that modern mismatch that has led to the desire to to change our behavior and to adjust habits and perhaps it wasn't something that we thought about as carefully or cared about as much in you know a thousand years ago or 5000 years ago or longer it is interesting though to say that um some aspects of modern society are mismatched with that uh with that ancestral wiring but uh some of them are not like why do we care about delaying gratification to get a phd or delaying gratification to save more money primarily because it affords some form of status which is very hierarchical and very we think you know evolutionarily wired in so there's there's still connections there it's just that not all of it is aligned yeah it seems that the the um the vehicles that we would have used to attain status earlier were much quote-unquote simpler and today that's probably we're looking at other ways to do it um you know hearing you talk about habits that way makes me compare two activities i like very much and contrast the challenges of learning each of them so one is riding a bike and the other is learning to swim so if you took um a 20 year old who had never done both and admittedly it's easy to find a 20 year old that's never swum it's probably hard to find a 20 year old that's never ridden a bike but i would pause it that it's really easy to teach a 20 year old to ride a bike if they haven't done it and let's assume for a moment this isn't someone who had never been able to do it before but some you know you sort of found somebody who'd never ridden a bike at 20. and the reason i would argue that is in a bike the the object is balanced right it's really about balance and you get your feedback immediately so you know the second you're out of balance on a bike because you're in the environment of the air and the air has a density such that it's not forgiving you basically out of balance you're going to fall conversely although most people don't think of it this way swimming is also about balance in the water you're you're trying to balance yourself this way versus this way most people would naturally sink feet first and you're trying to balance yourself this way so that you can breathe and those things are not easy to do because the feedback loop is very long and it's very hard to make the connection that you're out of balance it also doesn't hurt as much when you fail so when you fall off your bike it's very uncomfortable but when you're out of balance and swimming you just have to work harder but you don't realize why you're working harder anyway that's why i think it's very hard to learn how to swim and it's not very hard to learn how to ride a bike and therefore it requires much more deliberate practice to learn to swim than it does to ride a bike at least at some basic level that's a fascinating question it's really good raises a lot of interesting um details about why we form habits and how they form so first i'll kind of give a roundabout answer here but i'll come back to your question so um what is it that determines whether a habit is good or bad you know we use these phrases a lot of the time in conversation we say oh it's a bad habits good habit and sometimes people will ask me like well why do i repeat this habit if it's bad for me you know if it's so terrible then how come i keep coming back to it and um i think we can divide you know in a sense some you know if you want to get really pedantic about are really academic about it some researchers don't even like to use the word good or bad because they're just their habits and they all serve you in some way so we could just say basically adaptive or maladaptive right yeah and i i think we could make a um a meaningful division uh in the sense of how we use it in most conversation and say that pretty much all behaviors produce multiple outcomes across time and broadly speaking we could lump it into an immediate bucket an immediate outcome and an ultimate outcome and what you find is that for most bad habits the immediate outcome is actually pretty favorable like you know the classic example smoking a cigarette but if you smoke a cigarette outside the office at 10 a.m with a friend well then immediately you get some socialization maybe it curbs your nicotine craving or just lets you like de-stress for a couple minutes or get a break from work there are all kinds of things that you might be benefiting from it's only two or five or ten years later that the ultimate outcome is negative with the good habits especially the first time you perform them it's often the reverse like the first week of training in the gym your body looks the same in the mirror you're sore you don't really have much to show for the effort that you're putting in you feel kind of stupid in there you're wondering if people judge you or if you're doing it the wrong way there are a lot of upfront costs and it's only two or five or ten years later that you get the outcome that you're looking for and so in a sense the cost of your good habits is in the present the cost of your bad habits is in the future and that misalignment between when you feel rewarded and when you feel punished um helps to explain why we tend to fall pretty easily into a lot of things that we would categorize as bad like eating donuts or smoking a cigarette or whatever and fall less easily into things that we would categorize as good or you know feels like i have to force myself to write or whatever now that's very similar to what you just mentioned about this like the immediacy of the feedback you know bad habits are giving you pretty immediate feedback kind of like riding a bike good habits are giving you pretty delayed feedback maybe you know a little bit analogous to swimming i think that example of the medium that you're in air versus water it's fascinating to think about water as being a like a feedback dampener but there is another element to it which you also mentioned which is the strength of the feedback so you know falling on the ground off a bike and skinning your knee is like pretty painful you learn quite quickly technically making a bad stroke in the water you don't really pay too much of a cost if you're being sloppy with your form and so it's unlikely that you rectify that quickly and this is a phenomenon that i think is so critical or so important to behavior change i called it the cardinal rule of behavior change in atomic habits which is behaviors that get immediately rewarded get repeated behaviors that get immediately punished get avoided and it's really about the speed and the intensity of that feedback and generally speaking the quicker you can get feedback and the more too intense is maybe a bit much but you know at some point you need it needs to be high enough to move the needle can't be so low that you know it doesn't register so you need both meaningful feedback and quick feedback if you want behavior to change yeah and well actually i want to come back to that topic because i think therein lies one of the themes of your book right which is that will power is not a great long-term strategy um but before i get to that i want to kind of talk a little bit about you personally at least before you came to these realizations are you someone i mean i know you're an athlete in your book you write about this horrible accident you had when you were playing baseball i believe that was high school or was it in college yep sophomore year high school during that period of your life were you someone that others and your peers would have looked at you and said oh god that james that guy is so disciplined i mean he just has what it takes to always get the job done and he you know never sort of indulges in the wrong things and always does the right things like were you were you one of those guys that was just a beacon of quote-unquote discipline or were you a normal guy or were you someone who had a hard time doing what was right um well i wasn't someone who had a hard time but i do think uh it depends on the context so you know i um let's let's let's keep it simple like homework sports yeah kind of those things so uh with school definitely i i always liked school um i was like the nerdy kid on the sports teams i was on but you know in the science lab or something i was like the jock which is kind of funny how you change based on the room that you're in and so i always felt like i kind of played that middle ground between those two i think it helped me learn how to get along with both groups and you know was helpful socially and all that but earlier in my life i think i thrived more in school than i did in sports i was never you know like i barely got to play in high school um you know that's one of the punchlines of that early uh story in the book is i've ended up playing a total of 11 innings in high school now i kind of blossomed once i got to college and ended up being an academic all-american by the time i graduated but that came much later so it really sort of depended on the context but generally speaking i would say yeah people probably thought that i was disciplined but i do think it depended on where we were if it was just looking at school then i think people would say that if you're looking somewhere else then maybe not was there an area that you struggled with from a behavior standpoint to be honest there were areas that i avoided because i thought i would struggle so i think it was i think it was uh more about me being fearful and avoiding anything i thought i would be bad at than it was about watching him and being like oh look at him floundering around and i think i had to kind of overcome that wiring over the course of a decade or two it took me a long time to start to take more risks and take on things that i didn't think i would be good at uh rather than just trying to like stack the deck and just knew do what i thought i would do well i don't know how much you've paid attention to the sort of discussion debate around free will i have always sort of assumed we have free will you know this is one of those things that is kind of an anthem to me to imagine a world under which i'm not completely under control of my own will my behavior uh but my good friend sam harris who i don't know if you were familiar with sam's work but he's he's written yeah i did an episode on his podcast as well okay so you're familiar with the fact that he's written extensively and spoken extensively about the idea that we actually don't have free will that this is an illusion there are examples that i can conjure up to make that case for example he uses a very clever thought experiment which is if i tell you to think of a movie the first movie that pops into your head you have no control over what that's going to be um conversely there's uh there's a part of me that thinks okay but there are lots of things i have free will over um you know my desire to or my my my ability to go and do something right whether it be an act you know take an action go and exercise or something like that but the deeper i get into this thinking the more i start to realize well wait a minute that may still be innate right this ability that i have using myself as an example to really have an easy time exercising it requires virtually no effort to exercise in fact it usually requires a lot of effort to sometimes not exercise but requiring a lot of effort to mind what i eat uh and and i know people for whom that's not the case right i know people for whom they just have an easy time eating what's healthy but maybe they don't like to exercise that much so when you i guess before i go any deeper into my question let me just pause and ask you for your reaction to that overall line of inquiry and how do you think about free will as it pertains to what we're going to talk about today yeah um well first i think i'm probably similar to you in the sense like exercise has always been on the easier side for me nutrition's always been on the harder side which is kind of interesting there i don't know exactly what you know what that reveals but it's just interesting to think about where you have certain inclinations and maybe not others um with respect to free will i understand the argument like and once you start to walk through it's like okay yeah there's this very long chain of atoms that are essentially colliding and leading us inevitably to you know the next action or the next thought or whatever and if we could map them all out then uh perhaps we could just predict everything that's about to happen um so i i get that as a thought experiment uh i tend to when i'm living my daily life fall in the same space that sounds like you fall in which is well i'm gonna continue to act as if i have free will um and ultimately the more that i think about it i usually come down on that side where it's like listen the truth is nobody knows the answer one way or another we have we have good arguments perhaps for each but nobody knows for sure if it is all predetermined then it kind of doesn't really matter i'm going to do this this anyway and if it isn't predetermined i might as well choose the thing that you know i think best serves me so whether i'm making that actually getting to make that choice that best serves me or whether it was predetermined that i'm gonna make the good choice it kind of doesn't really matter to me like i i might as well choose to act that way um so i don't know i would be very curious to hear what sam's thought on that is but i i don't from a practical standpoint i don't see a reason to not choose the best option that you can uh in the event that you do have free will you'll be glad that you chose it in the event that you don't have free will you didn't get a say anyway so who cares yeah and the other the other thing i i guess i would add to that is it might be that free will or the absence of free will is what determines a person's maybe call it genetic propensity to change habits or form habits there may be some people for whom that is easier than others but that's probably a spectrum and it doesn't imply that a person who struggles with a given behavior can't learn to master it uh just as a you know so again using an example i'll never be a michael phelps like ever right there was no there was no scenario under which i was going to be as good a swimmer as michael phelps so even if he hadn't started swimming until he was 15 and my parents threw me in the water at two i was never going to be that good but it doesn't mean i couldn't learn to swim uh and similarly had he never been thrown in the pool we would never have heard his name so uh i i guess that's how i kind of rationalize it which is there are going to be people for whom it is easier to go through the exercises that we're going to talk about and there are people for whom that's just going to be more difficult and in the end you're sort you can't change that part of it that's the part i guess that is sort of set yeah and i a couple thoughts to add on to that so um i thought of this when you first brought this up a few minutes ago i don't know if you're familiar with david epstein very much sports gene and range and so on so david's great and a good friend of mine a really nice guy um and just very thoughtful with the way he puts arguments together which i always appreciate um and i was having a conversation with him about some of this stuff and uh he said one of the things that surprised him when he was researching the sports gene is that characteristics that he thought would be um uh mostly genetic like you know strength and speed and things like that turned out to be heavily influenced by training and choice and a lot of other stuff and qualities that he thought would be a choice like uh grit and perseverance and um desire to train turned out to have a much higher genetic component than he realized i always loved the example there's i think this is in sports gene he talks about steffi graff just happened to be in a tennis study when she was young she was like 14 or something and she was part of this cohort of young germans that were you know being studied and she not only tested the highest for physical abilities like strength and speed and quickness and so on but also tested the highest for competitiveness and desire to train and all these other things and you just i just love when combinations like that come together like think about how pointless this is to compete against her not only is she better than you she also wants it more and so i do think that there's a heavy genetic component to some of the mental characteristics that would make you more likely to train some of these aspects or more interested in some things than others to your point about phelps and you know whether he had ever been dropped in the pool or not that i think is a um on the surface it seems like something that would make you less motivated it would you would say oh well why even try i'm never going to be michael phelps or if jeans play such a large role what's the point but i actually think that's the wrong lesson to take away the primary lesson i think is that genes don't [Music] they don't tell you not to work hard they tell you where to work hard or they don't tell you not to have a strategy they just inform your strategy this is another line that david told me in a conversation once where he said um i was saying you know a lot of people talk about grit and perseverance and discipline but what if that is just your natural propensity based on the thing that you're working on like what you know what if i just happen to look kind of gritty uh in my terms of um you know weight training or uh working at writing a book compared to the average person but i just look that way because i happen to like those things and he said yeah there's this whole line of thinking but like grit is fit and so actually the way to increase your perseverance and discipline is to find areas or categories or skills where you're highly interested in them you know it's very hard to beat the person who's having fun because they're going to want to keep working longer than the person who's suffering so grit is fit i think is one way in which you can maybe try to stack the deck or stack the odds in your favor and get your genes aligned with the things that you're working on and then you know there are going to be things like you know michael phelps in a pool where you're like listen this body was just designed to do this thing you know it's it's very hard to find somebody who's more optimally designed to move through the water than him and not all of us are going to have the good fortune of discovering whatever that thing is for us in our lives at age four or six or whatever but i don't think that means you should stop searching this is one of the benefits of trial and error you know the person who is curious and willing to explore a lot of things is more likely to come across an area where they are fascinated or they are interested and it also is a really good fit for their natural abilities or propensities or whatever and um that's kind of the primary lesson that i take away from the genetic side of things is you know similar to what you said anybody can improve doesn't mean anybody can be michael phelps but you can always improve your ability and let's try to find that thing that i'm fascinated with that i'm interested in so where it doesn't feel like i'm suffering in the same way that other people are when they're trying this thing and you'll often be surprised how far you can go and how willing you are to build habits and improve skills if you find some of those things that you're truly fascinated by yeah two comments that add to that one completely trite but but amusing which is um you know not only does phelps have the perfect chassis and engine for what he does but just as you described steffi graf i i've seen phelps race at meats that meant nothing right so you know like total throwaway meats he's not shaved he's not tapered he couldn't care less to be there and you know he's swimming like a 200 i am and he is it doesn't look like he's going to win at all and yet somehow in the last 15 meters he out touches everybody and i've seen this on enough occasions that i just think like this is a guy who hates losing so even though he's not necessarily in shape at this moment even though this meet means nothing for him he's training through it and half the people he's competing against this is their pinnacle he hates losing so much um so it is the same takeaway watching the last dance when you know it's like you see these clips of michael jordan they had that there was that one summer where he was recording space jam and they set up like a tent for him outside the movie studio and all the nba players came in like each night to play pickup games and it was basically just like he you know he just got done filming like 12 hours a day but he just could not handle losing a pickup game it would just bother him so much to not get it right to not win and um yeah i i got to think that that is maybe not exclusively but at least largely just he can't turn it off he doesn't know any other way to be you know that's personality or genes or whatever you want to call it it's just that's just how he's wired um and i actually love it when i see that characteristic in any domain um maggie rogers who's a musician she had this post she put on instagram where uh it was all of her notes on a particular song that they were working on and like you know hey i think we need to bring the symbol in you know a second earlier here and you know a bunch of other stuff and then she shared a little clip of her listening to it with her producer and so on and you could just tell that she cared so much about the details it would bother her if the song was not as good as it could possibly be and you know that's uh maybe that's the musician's version of hates to lose and um i love it when i see that characteristic i it just like it kind of lights me up it makes me want to be that way about whatever thing i'm working on you just if you can find that area where it would bother you for it to not be right i gotta think you're gonna get much better results there than most people because most people get bored or move on or you know get tired or frustrated and the person who just will not stop unless it's right is going to end up with better results it sounds simple to say the way to have great results is to not lower your standards but in a lot of ways it turns out to be more true than you would expect yeah and i i agree with you i i love watching this in the best of the best and you know formula one is one of my favorite sports and uh especially you know historically you know my my hero is this guy named arton sena and to hear him i watched senna that documentary i'd never heard of him i know very little about formula one i it was awesome after watching that i was like completely hooked it was a fascinating sport yeah well and you gather from the from that documentary i mean that his i mean he was a perfectionist even amongst his peers he took it to a level that exceeded that uh it actually cost him his life i don't think the documentary fully explains how much that that need to win killed him because the day he died he was trying to do something in a car that shouldn't have been done at a time when it shouldn't have been done um but it's amazing when in a sport like that where the stakes are so high for trying to to do something at the expense of you know maybe a mechanical limit or a limit of the car but yet all drivers will tell you like they're they're going to go for it if there's a gap there they're going to take they're going to go for the gap and um you know there was there was a debate in the 90s in formula one because that was before you know so sena's death changed the sport forever because that's really what changed the imposed safety in the sport um but the debate prior to that was look we'll just tell the drivers to drive slower you know they don't have to drive this fast they're you know they can choose to drive 10 slower which of course was nonsense right i mean the head of the fia at the time who has just recently passed away made a point which was like that's the dumbest thing you could ever say they will all choose to have a less safe car if it goes faster because you're talking about the 20 most competitive drivers on the planet now there was another point i was going to make that was so we you talked about oh yeah here was the point um for most of us we will never know what it's like to be the top thousand in the world of anything right like i could if i think about all the things that i love driving a race car shooting my bow and arrow you know exercising i mean i'm multiple orders of magnitude beneath even the most lowly ranked professional of those things and this gets into something else which is for me at least the joy is not in the absolute comparison of myself to others but the relative comparison of where i was before um do you think that's a universal thing is it universal that people are mostly engaged by how much they are making progress relative to their own performance or do you think that there are some people who are only capable of finding pleasure when being compared to others in an absolute basis the second half of that question i'm not sure of i generally i think both of those things are universal i think one it's universal that the one of the most motivating feelings to the human mind is the feeling of progress and i think it's fairly universal that progress feels good uh you know we are in a sense at the most base level we are goal-directed organisms in the sense that you know we have a goal to get food or water or to procreate or to be safe and um we want to move toward those things and resolve the tension the gap between that goal and our current state as much as possible and you know now with our complex brains and modern society we come up with many other goals that are outside of just our basic needs like food and water we have goals like getting a promotion at work or you know losing 10 pounds or whatever it is but that same tension between where you are currently and where you want to be we want to have that resolved and the more progress that you feel like you're making toward one of those things i think that generally feels good so i feel like that's pretty universal i also do think it seems to be fairly universal that we have some uh bias towards status some bias toward prestige and rank and hierarchy and it feels good for pretty much anybody to win the game or to have the best score on the scoreboard or to climb the leaderboard and the more that you see yourself occupying a higher rung relative to those around you whether it's with wealth or money or fame the better that feels too and it probably is a spectrum or maybe each of those is a spectrum and some people have the dial turned up real high on the status part and maybe lower on the internal measures and other people have it you know the reverse but i generally think we all have them to some degree and you probably will find yourself feeling good if you happen to succeed on either of those metrics and how much of it do you think is for lack of a better term journey versus destination focused because if you talk about your example of weight loss right that is generally a very destination based metric i want to lose 10 pounds i'm not going to be happy until i lose 10 pounds the process of how i go about doing it changing the way i'm eating changing my exercise accepting the fact that you're not going to lose 10 pounds linearly it's going to look like this you know those are details that i'm going to will i'm willing to tolerate but i want to lose those 10 pounds or i want to fit into this piece of clothing that i used to fit into contrast that with i want to learn to speak italian and i'm enjoying this process of learning a few new words every day and learning how the structure of this grammar works relative to my native tongue and i'm never going to be perfectly fluent in italian but you know i know that in some point i'm going to be completely functional but it's it's more that this this journey of learning this new language or learning how to play this instrument that's what's giving me the pleasure and does i don't know if that distinction makes sense but sure i think you know this is first i should say this is coming from someone who's been very goal oriented for most of their life you know like i would set goals for the grades i wanted to get in school for the weight i wanted to lift in the gym for the numbers i wanted my business to hit and at some point i actually found this sheet that i made my sophomore year of college for the goals that i wanted to hit by the time i graduated it was funny looking back on it like 10 or 11 years later because you know about half of them i hit the other half i didn't and i was like obviously setting the goal was not the thing that made the difference right like i if it did i would have hit them all so something else is going on here and i kind of had to like it was like a little remedial training session for myself or something realizing that you know goals are not the primary thing that drives results and in fact if you look at the performance in most domains the winners and the losers have the same goal presumably every formula one driver has the goal of winning the race when they take off from the starting line you know if you have a job opening and 100 candidates apply for the job presumably every candidate has the goal of giving the job so the goal is not the thing that makes the difference in the performance and if the winners and the losers have the same goal then it cannot be the distinguishing factor maybe it's necessary perhaps there's an argument it's necessary for success but it's not sufficient for it and so that got me thinking more like well what is it then that drives it and i in the book the way that i describe is the difference between systems and goals and so you know your your goal is your desired outcome your target the thing you're shooting for your system is the collection of daily habits that you follow you know it's like all these little gears in this overall machine and if there's ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits if there's ever a gap between your goal and your system your daily habits will always win right almost by definition your current habits are perfectly designed for your current results so whatever system you've been running for the last you know six months or year or whatever you talked about shooting a bow and arrow presumably whatever system of movements you have going on there pre-shot routine how you draw it back everything it kind of is inevitably carrying you toward the result of where the arrow ends up and you know sort of the irony of all this is we also badly want better results in life you know we also badly want to make more money or to reduce uh stress or lose weight or whatever but the results are not actually the thing that needs to change it's kind of like fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves and um there are some areas like shooting a bow where that is the connection is quite obvious but there are other areas where for whatever reason we we don't see it as clearly but i think that the pattern is still there which is let's adjust the habits let's get this machine running in a more fluid fashion and you'll find that the results kind of come naturally so i think just appreciating that helped rewire my mindset a little bit i was so focused on outcomes and goals for a long time and now uh realizing that actually the way this is driven is with the system that helped me shift from you know what i would say now is like goals are for people who care about winning one time you set a goal to run a half marathon and you train for three months and you do it and you complete the race but then maybe you stop training after that but systems are for people who care about winning again and again and if you care about sustaining that success then you're like hey you know i'm a runner i care about the system that i'm building for how i train how many miles i'm getting in and all kinds of other stuff and whether i have a half marathon three months in the distance or not it doesn't really matter because like i'm going to be running my system either way and so making that mental shift i think can be useful for sustaining results so let's talk about habits now because i think that's the that's the thing that as you said basically shapes the nature of what we're going to do there's there's a saying that many people have said and i i won't even try to paraphrase it because at the moment it's escaping me but the gist of it is like you you you don't rise to the level of your what is it you don't rise to level of your training you fall to the level are you you fall to the level of your training and right the original the original quote i think is from arca locus um i believe a greek philosopher and said you don't rise to the level of your expectations you fall to level of your training and in atomic habits i uh tweaked that or adjusted that to say you don't rise to the level of your goals you fall to the level of your systems and so it's actually your habits that kind of create that baseline so why is it called atomic habits i think i remember when i first saw the title my assumption was atomic must be huge explosion like big habits which of course is exactly not what it means so so well it's it's good actually it's interesting which means people pull out when they see it because so i chose the phrase atomic habits for three reasons um the first meaning of the word atomic is tiny or small like an atom and i do think habits should be small and fairly easy to do especially in the beginning the second meaning of the word atomic is the fundamental unit in a larger system and that's the one that people often overlook you know like atoms built into molecules molecules built into compounds and so on and your habits are kind of like that each little habit is like a you know a little atom in the overall routine of your day you put them all together and you end up with your lifestyle or your daily routine and then the third and final meaning is the one that you mentioned you know the source of immense energy or power and i think if you put all three meanings together you sort of understand the narrative arc of the book which is make changes that are small and easy to do layer them on top of each other like units in a larger system or atoms in a molecule and collectively you can get some really powerful or remarkable results and so i feel like the phrase atomic habits not only encapsulates that kind of small change in the system that you're looking to build but also the powerful results that can emanate from that so you talk about three different types of change right there's sort of the outcome change the process change we've touched on a little bit of those but the one we haven't really touched on is this identity change and that's that was something that when i read your book really resonated because it provided i think a very decent explanation at least for why exercise comes naturally to me which is it's so hardwired into my identity and why maybe certain other habits i've tried to create over time don't come easily to me because i haven't fully identified with them yet so explain a little bit what you know first of all what you know expand on that but but also how you kind of came to realize that yeah so uh two things before i unpack the idea a little more fully first is uh of all the ideas in the book this is probably the um least scientific there are actually some studies which i cite in that chapter and it's not like there's no science behind it but the majority of the book i try to be very uh robust in the you know way that i was thinking about like how do we build habits and what actually gets them to stick and there also are just a bazillion you know social psychology and cognitive psychology studies that you know illustrate a lot of the examples that i talk about um but this is more of a mindset i would say or a philosophy on how behavior change works uh second thing is it's um maybe the only unique idea that i have pretty much everything else that i share is you know stuff that's been widely covered by other people or you know things that we've known for hundreds if not thousands of years um but i felt like this was something that you know maybe i could contribute to the conversation and part of the reason i started thinking about it is i started asking like why do habits really matter you know why do we we seem to care about them a lot as a society it's something a lot of books get written about something we talk about a lot there's clearly some kind of deeper importance to them so what is it and the surface level answer is that we care about habits because they uh get us these external things that make us more productive and more fit and so on and habits can help you do all that stuff which is great but i think the real reason the deeper reason that habits matter is that they are a signal internally to ourselves about who we are and what we care about and you know they're kind of a signal of like the story that we're telling ourselves so in a sense every time that you perform a habit you are embodying a particular identity like when you make your bed you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized when you shoot a basketball for 30 minutes you embody the identity of someone who is a basketball player and you know you do those things once or twice it doesn't radically transform the story you have about yourself but if you keep showing up and shooting a basketball every day for six months or two years or you know at some point you cross this sort of invisible threshold where you're like yeah being a basketball player is like part of who i am you know it's some aspect of my identity and so your habits provide evidence they provide proof of the story that you're telling yourself and that i think is a very powerful thing a very deep personal thing that habits can provide and perhaps the real reason why they matter so to come back to your question about process versus outcome versus identity and kind of where how we change usually when people set out to make some kind of change they start by thinking about the results or the outcome that they want so they say i want to lose 40 pounds in the next six months and then from that outcome they back into a process or a plan so they say all right if i want to lose 40 pounds then i need to follow this nutrition plan i'm going to need to work out four days a week and maybe there are details to those plans and everything but that's usually kind of roughly where it stops and then the assumption is if i do those things and i lose that weight then i'll be the kind of person that i want to be and the argument that i try to unpack in that chapter is what if we worked backwards from this what if instead we said who is the type of person i wish to be what is the identity that i'd like to have and in fact we could even ask like um the person who has that identity what kind of habits would they have and then we use that identity to inform the process the habits and we let the outcomes come naturally and there are a variety of examples of this i one reader of mine she lost a bunch of weight i think it was 110 pounds in total and she kept she's kept it off for over a decade and the question that she sort of carried around with her as she was starting her weight loss journey is what would a healthy person do and that's very much aligned or oriented with that identity piece it's like okay would a healthy person take a cab or would they walk four blocks in the next meeting would they order a salad and chicken at lunch or would they have a hamburger and fries and she could just kind of carry that question around with her to every context she was in and make a choice that she felt like aligned with the identity that she wanted to have rather than worrying necessarily about you know something specific like the number of macros she's getting or you know whatever now i should say i think it can work both ways like i count my macros and works really well for me um but uh i think that's partially because it aligns with the identity uh that i already have and uh if you aren't if you don't have that shift in internal story yet it's hard for the behavior to follow suit you know like imagine imagine you went up to two people and you said hey would you like a cigarette and the first person says oh no thanks i'm trying to quit and the second person says oh no thanks i'm not a smoker now technically they've done the same thing they've both turned down the cigarette but the second person kind of has signaled a shift in identity change like they the first person is trying to be something they're not no thanks i'm trying to quit and the second person is saying i'm not a smoker it's just not something that i do and i think once you get to that stage that shift and identity you're in a much more powerful place from a behavior change standpoint because you're not even really trying to change anymore you're just acting in alignment with the type of person you see yourself to be so we can talk about ways to do that but that's kind of the the quick version on identity versus outcome tell me what you think the difference is in identity between the woman you gave the example of and say yourself so you're both striving to the same objective which is a healthy weight but she accomplished it by focusing on what would a healthy person do in this situation you accomplish it again just pertaining to nutrition at the moment presumably by saying you know i don't know what your macro goals are but these are you know these are the aspirations that i have and i'm going to stick to these so tell me a little bit about the difference between those approaches and how can a person know which will be better for them outside of just empirically trying them both well i think in this particular case the primary difference is i had an internal story or have an internal story that i am a healthy person already and so just doing things that are aligned with that like counting macros feels totally fine whereas for her at that early stage she did not feel that way and did not genuinely believe that about herself this is also i should say it's possible to have an epiphany and to change you know cold turkey or to just flip a switch and suddenly start acting in a different way i i do think it's possible i think sometimes people have experiences like that um ironically i think it rarely happens with some kind of bolts of lightning inside i think one of the most common ways it happens is by reading books i think people will sometimes read a book that really changes their world view uh and they start to do things completely differently after that you can imagine a bunch of nutrition examples like somebody reads a book that convinces them that you know carbs are the devil and the grain is terrible and all of a sudden the next day like they want to throw out all the bread in the house and you know like it's very very quick uh switch has been flipped so um i do think it's possible however i don't think that changing through an epiphany is a very reliable way to change and i don't know that it's a it's something you can bank on or can plan around or strategize for it might happen to you a couple times in your life but i don't think that it's an efficient way to try to build a new habit so if you can't change or hope to change through an epiphany then what are your options if you want to change your identity and i think the the best avenue that you have is to cast votes with your actions so in a sense every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become so no doing one push-up does not radically transform your body but it does cast a vote for i'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts and no writing one sentence may not finish the novel but it does cast a vote for i'm a writer and i think this is like a meaningful difference between my approach or what i recommend and what you often hear like you often hear something like fake it till you make it and i don't necessarily have anything wrong with fake it till you make it it's asking you to believe something positive about yourself but it's asking you to believe something positive without having evidence for it and we have a word for beliefs that don't have evidence we call that delusion right like at some point your brain doesn't like this mismatch between what you're saying and what you're actually doing and so to bring it back to your question about my friend who lost all this weight i think you have to genuinely believe that story about yourself in order for the actions to start to feel aligned and what do you do if you don't genuinely believe you're a healthy person or don't genuinely believe that i'm the kind of person who would track my macros or whatever well i think you have to start with these very small habits you have to start by proving it to yourself in some little way maybe it's just that you did walk the three blocks to the meeting and didn't take the taxi or maybe it's just that you did order a salad for lunch and not a burger and fries and none of those things individually are going to change your body or even the story right away but if you keep casting votes for that behavior and keep casting votes for that identity then eventually you get to the point where it's like the basketball example you kind of have to admit that you're a basketball player because you've been shooting hoops for the last two years and like this is just part of who you are now so um i think that that's the primary difference between the two of us is that i already kind of had that story and early on she didn't now she does so who knows maybe now she could just track her macros just as easily or even easier than i can i don't know yeah i wonder how that process changes in this person after 10 years i mean you know most people understand that losing weight is actually not that hard but keeping weight off is exceptionally hard so what your friend did yes losing 110 pounds is remarkable but the fact that she's kept it off for a decade is actually what's remarkable and i'm curious as to what the temporal sequence of events is where hey for the first year it was a daily struggle of what would the healthy person do what would the healthy person do what would the healthy person do and at some point that transitions into i'm a healthy person this is what i do i'm a healthy person this is what i do and and and then it becomes so autonomic that you can even slip you can slip up for a day and it feels wrong like it's it's like god that cotton candy's horrible like i don't ever want to eat that again yeah well you said something similar to that a few minutes ago about how like it bothers you to not work out sometimes you know and nerl who also has written about habits has kind of a little measure for that where he's like his measure for whether it's a habit or not is does it bother you when you don't do it and um i think that's a signal that it's kind of aligned with your identity it's like i kind of feel like i'm not being me if i if i don't do this and to your point about it taking a long time it can take much longer than you would think i mean my friend told me she had to lose 60 pounds before the first person noticed before she ever heard anything from somebody else wow and you know that's that's a lot of that's a lot of wait a long time to be working in essentially what feels like a vacuum feels like you're just doing it for yourself no external feedback from the world so um you know this comes back to a lot of things we've already talked about about process and falling in love with the system and you know there are a lot of a lot of things that go into it but it definitely is an internal journey and it definitely will take longer than you would imagine in a lot of cases one of the most common examples that i hear of in my practice for the epiphany behavior change that sticks is the person who quits smoking the day their child is born and i've always found this interesting right because the day before their child is born they clearly know how bad smoking is right there's nobody who's smoking you know who doesn't understand the risks of it and by the same token who doesn't uh as you pointed out earlier enjoy the benefits of it in the short run right very rewarding in the short run very damaging in the long run so that's that's completely understood intellectually on day x they have a child and they decide i'm done with this i'm not going to have smoke in my household because i also know the benefits of secondhand smoke or the harm rather secondhand smoke and i'm not going to expose my child to this and yet amazingly i mean over and over and over again i hear these stories from patients saying yep you know my i grew up in a household where my parents were incredible smokers and the second i was born they stopped they stopped and that was 40 years ago and they've never had a cigarette since what do you think is going on in an example like that is it is there a transference process here where because it involves the life of another person it's easier to make this change stick possibly i mean i'm sure there are a lot of variables that go into it but it does align with there's like this whole category of behaviors that i feel like if you wanted to hack a radical change in your life you want to figure out a way to get like you said this epiphany to stick massive environment changes or lifestyle changes are a good way to do that perhaps the you know one of the strongest ways to do that so having a kid getting married changing jobs moving to a different city even something small like getting a dog can lead to a rapid behavior change and i think one of the things that is really crucial about it is that most of those decisions tend to be irreversible um or at least very hard to reverse i had one that i struggled with for a long time sometimes people ask me you know what habits have you struggled with or whatever and i i tend to be pretty good about getting enough sleep um i almost always get eight hours or even nine if i'm training hard and um but i would fall into this pattern where it'd be like nine or ten o'clock at night and i would kind of get a second wind and i'd be like well maybe i'll just send a few emails or something and of course it's never just a few you turn around and it's midnight or one and you're like okay am i gonna sleep for eight hours because if so that means i'm not getting up till nine and i know that i prefer to get up early i know that i feel better throughout the rest of the next day so you know 10 pm james is kind of ruining things for tomorrow james by staying up late and i tried a bunch of different things there's a little device called an outlet timer you can buy for like 10 bucks on amazon and uh you plug it into an outlet and you can set the time for when it kills the power from that outlet and so like if you plug your internet into it then like the internet shuts off at 10 pm or you know whatever you set it for and so i tried different things like that you know but then you could just pick your phone up and you know kind of like get around it but the thing that finally made it stick was getting a dog because the dog is going to get up at 7 am whether i whenever i go to sleep it doesn't matter and i need to go take it for a walk and you can only do that for a few days before you're like all right i'm not going to play this game anymore i'm going to bed at 10. and um it's because it was fairly hard to reverse they got it to stick and i think you know in the case of having a kid like they're gonna be there every day now and so maybe you could rationalize it a bunch of times before that but like that change is not gonna or that's not going to change they're going to be around and weirdly because you know presumably this person's wife was pregnant so they obviously saw that throughout the whole pregnancy but that didn't get them to change but once the child is there man it's really immediate you know like you're taking a puff and you have those little eyes looking back at you and so the feedback loop is even tighter than before so i would imagine both of those things probably play a role but more generally speaking those kind of irreversible or hard to reverse lifestyle changes also tend to be big drivers of quick behavior change you know i can only think of one dramatic habit i changed that has stuck and it is the silliest thing but i always bit my nails growing up i i mean i would bite them non-stop and you know invariably what happens is you'd get a little infection because you bite too close and it was like my mom was always like god that is such a disgusting habit like you you have like it's just it looked horrible and the day i decided to change it was the day i got my first interview for med school um so you know you applied to medical school and then all of a sudden the envelopes start coming in and you you've got these interviews and just as i got that first envelope and i realized oh i'm actually going to go and be interviewing because you don't at least for me i didn't interview to go to college this was the first time i had to do an interview and i don't know just something came over me i was like wait a second dude you can't be the guy that's showing up to an interview with these horrible looking nails you have to cut this out you are going to get a nail clipper and you are going to start clipping your nails like a civilized human being and that was you know i don't know 25 years ago and today i sometimes like when my nails get long i'm i'm a guy who likes short nails so i'm always sort of trimming them but like i can't imagine that i once bit them it just seems so strange to me um that's fascinating but it's just it's a example come up there well it i don't think it is actually because there's you know um we all have habits that are like that and i think there's two things that made me think the first is it connects to our conversation about identity from a few minutes ago which is you started to take pride in it you know you cared about how you presented and the more that we take pride in certain elements of our identity uh or aspects of who we are certain parts of our story the more strongly that behavior starts to stick you know like you can imagine um a woman who takes pride in how her hair looks she probably has all kinds of hair care habits and products and things that she does and um you know she probably doesn't have to convince herself to do them the same way that we talk about convincing ourselves with a lot of other habits oh i wish i could write or i wish i would work out or whatever it's just an element of her identity she takes pride in and shows she does it like fairly consistently or the guy who gets complimented on the size of his biceps and so he just never skips arm day in the gym because it's an aspect of his identity that he takes pride in and so that connection of you know when we talk about identity change what i'm kind of getting at is like what parts of your story do you take pride in and once you start to take pride in it man you'll fight for it pretty hard to keep it and in many cases you'll find yourself doing it somewhat naturally or at least internally motivated to continue doing it so that was the first piece the second piece and this is something that since atomic habits has come out i think is even more important than i realized when i was writing the book which is the influence of the social environment on your habits so in your case the med school interviews it was actually the image in your mind the expectation about what other people might think and how you would present in that interview and so on the judgment of others essentially that help drive that change and if you look at behaviors that really stick the ones that tend to stick for you know 10 or 20 or 30 years a long time there's often a strong social component involved so for example we are all part of multiple tribes some of those tribes are large like what it means to be american or some of those tribes are small like being a member of your crossfit gym or being a neighbor on your street and you know like if you take the neighborhood example you might walk outside and see your neighbor mowing their grass on you know wednesday night or something and think oh i need to cut my lawn and you'll stick with that habit of mowing your grass for you know 20 or 30 years or however long you live in that house like we wish we had that level of consistency with most of our other habits and why do you do it like partially you do it because it feels good to have a clean lawn but mostly you do it because you don't want to be judged by the other people in the neighborhood for being the sloppy one and so it's actually that social norm that expectation for what it means to be part of this neighborhood and how you act in this group or this tribe that helps get the habit to stick i think the practical takeaway there if you really want a behavior change to last is to join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior because if it's normal in that group it's going to seem much more normal and typical for you to do it i mean you know peter i'm sure you're part of multiple groups that do what most people would determine are like weird habits like i'm sure there's a group of friends who are really into driving cars and there's probably another group who's like really into bow hunting and archery and there are all kinds of habits that these little tribes do and it might seem strange to the normal person but it's probably very casual or typical or easy relatively for you to stick to those habits especially when you're part of those groups or talking with those guys because it's just part of something that you know it's it's part of what they do and i think maybe the deeper lesson here is that we don't just do habits because of the results they get us we also take behaviors because they are a signal to the people around us that hey i get it i fit in i understand how to act in this group and most people if they have to choose between having the habits they want to have but they kind of go against the grain of the group they like don't really fit in well they get ostracized or having habits that they don't really love but they get to go along with the crowd they fit in they get praised for being part of the group most people will choose belonging over loneliness like the desire to belong will overpower the desire to improve and so you want to make sure you get those two things aligned to join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior yeah it's interesting i i wonder if part of the cue for me was buying a suit and it was the first suit i had so it was sort of like that that was sort of a uh you know wait a minute like you're wearing a suit think of the trouble you're going to to get this thing and then this tie that you're going to wear and blah blah blah all this sort of stuff but it's interesting and and then clearly it just became a part of my identity which is i'm a person who has nice fingernails you know i present well from the fingernail standpoint at least yeah hasn't translated to all of my habits but um okay so let's talk about the four laws because these four laws are kind of the central tenets to what we speak about and they can be inverted as well which i think is important as we think about creating call it adaptive habits versus breaking maladaptive habits so what's what's the first law yeah so um real quick before we get into these four i just want to explain the framework a little bit um because in particular for for this um episode or this show because i feel like your audience will appreciate it more than than most audiences so i like to divide a habit into four stages and as you said those four stages kind of have four different what i call the four laws of behavior change that come out of it but when i was working on atomic habits and researching this framework and trying to understand like why do behaviors happen and how do they happen how do habits form i had a couple questions that i felt like previous frameworks did not answer that well um so while researching the book i was able to find 40 different models of human behavior that biologists and neuroscientists and psychologists bunch of different you know industries had come up with over the last say about 150 years and broadly speaking those human models of human behavior tended to fall into one of two categories the first category are what i would call like motivation models so they explain things like internal drives and motivations and cravings and kind of like what compels us to act and then the second category were what i would call reinforcement models and so they described like the rewards that we get from behaviors and how those things kind of reinforce our behavior and essentially what happens like after an action and what i wanted to do was try to come up with a model that i felt like accurately described both the motivation that may come before and the reinforcement that may come after and how those things influence the actions that we take and there were a variety of what i thought were fairly simple questions about human behavior that weren't totally answered by the previous models so things like what causes somebody to try a habit in the first place you know like you haven't experienced the reward at that point so why would you take the first bite of a pancake or the first smoke of a cigarette like what what would motivate you to do that or um you know we say that uh habit's a very common you know started with bf skinner stimulus response reward and then charles duhigg and power of habit kind of popularized his cue routine reward but we say okay habits are a cue and then there's the action there's some kind of outcome well how come two people respond differently to the same thing like why would one person see a cigarette and feel like oh i have to smoke and another person's like i've never smoked a day in my life i'm not interested at all because if it's just the cue that leads to the action you would think they would do the same thing um and even why would the same person respond differently to the same cue how come when i walk in my kitchen at 7am i see a loaf of bread and i think i'm gonna make some toast for breakfast but then i walk in at 4 pm and i see that same cue and i don't think anything of it i just move on so to summarize all of this i think the one of the meaningful distinctions about the four stages that i put together and why i feel like it accurately describes human behavior and sort of the insight that i came across as i was researching there's a neuroscientist named lisa feldman barrett and she has a bunch of studies and you know a couple books on this topic one book in particular that was useful for me while i was researching is called how emotions are made and the key insight is that we often think that human behavior is reactive in the sense that somebody does something and i respond or somebody says something and i feel a certain way but in fact human behavior is mostly predictive um you were kind of endlessly going through your uh your experience in life predicting about what to do next and it's actually this prediction that i think was the key thing that was missing from a lot of the previous models of habits and behavior so with that as a primer um the four stages are cute before we do i think you wrote about this in the book which was that the dopaminergic surge comes more from the anticipation of the reward than the actual behavior that gives the reward is that did i remember that correctly right so you know there's a bazillion studies on dopamine of course and um also i should say like i think if you only talk about dopamine you're kind of uh you know it's not the full story about habits like there's you know there are many neurochemicals that are involved in the process and dopamine is just one part of the overall picture but it does play a very important role and for a long time we thought it was about reward and satisfaction and enjoyment but in fact it seems that the crucial role dopamine plays is about prediction and anticipation and so the first time that you take a bite of a pancake you don't know what to expect and so you take that bite and then afterwards you get a surge of dopamine almost as if to like mark the experience or to teach you hey that was favorable you should do that again next time like if you happen to see a pancake again that was a really great outcome and so then the next time around you know what to expect and in fact what we find is that dopamine tends to spike before you take a bite not after and there are a bunch of studies that show this like you know gamblers get a spike before they roll the dice not after drug addicts get a spike before they take a hit of cocaine not after and so dopamine i think probably the more accurate way to describe it in this context is it's a teaching molecule it's a learning molecule and it helps you it helps mark experiences that are favorable so that you'll remember them next time and then when you come across a similar situation it spikes in anticipation so after you see the cue you get this craving and it's actually that craving or anticipation or prediction that motivates you to act and drives the response and then there's an outcome and presumably again using your example there are lots of there's lots of diversity between individuals right so you take 10 people who've never smoked a cigarette let's just to make the math easy say well seven of them have no desire to so they walk away three of them are like yeah i'll give it a try they take a puff one of them starts hacking and says that is the most disgusting thing i've ever done i never want to do that again and they never do the one of them says you know i kind of like that i'm going to do this socially like any time i'm going to have a drink i'm going to have a cigarette and one of them goes on to become a chain smoker now what explains that distinction how much of that is neurochemical yeah it's fascinating and there i mean there are you know examples like that for alcohol and drugs and all kinds of things and um you know i'm not an expert on addiction and i didn't write the book about addiction so i don't want to speak out a turn or step out of my lane or anything but so i don't know that i have a good answer to it but from what i understand and from what i've seen as i was researching the book it does seem to have a strong basically genetic or neurochemical component um you know there's it seems like um in a sense drugs kind of hack the system you know it's like you know this is i think one way to define an addiction which is the process of learning is actually broken you know addicts know that the behavior does not benefit their lives in a lot of ways but they still can't get themselves to stop doing it even though they know it doesn't benefit them and i think part of the reason that happens or perhaps the primary reason is the drug kind of hacks the system it like gives you this spike of dopamine even though you shouldn't be getting it usually your brain would not be doing that it would not be trying to teach you to repeat that but you're artificially spiking it by taking the substance and so then you know the process of learning breaks i also find it interesting that different people will get that pleasure from different things when i'm not in a good place when i'm unhappy about something it's never my tendency to have a drink so alcohol would only be associated with something i want to do when i feel good to begin with i would never want to have a drink when i don't feel good but when i don't feel good i i would i would happily binge on junk food right like that would be the thing that provides comfort uh and of course there are people who would who when they're unhappy they would never want to eat even let alone have junk food and again it's hard to know i i find it interesting to at least contemplate how much of that is genetic how much of that is learned and what else is going on in sort of understanding that because that does sort of factor into falling to the level of our habits because we fall to these levels when things are not going well typically i think you know i do think there's a genetic component some people are more sensitive to certain substances than others or at least it appears to be so um however it does strike me as like very possible that a good chunk of it is learned and that now you have a story that junk food is the way that i cope or the way that i you know um uh soothe myself when i need that and you could imagine like in a sense your habits are these solutions to like recurring problems that you face so say you have somebody who comes home from work and they feel exhausted and one person like that's a recurring problem that they feel often and so one person comes home and they play video games for 30 minutes and another person comes home and they go for a run and a third person smokes a cigarette and all of them are solving the same underlying recurring problem but they're choosing different methods through which to do that and i wonder about like how the grooves kind of get formed once we learn that a certain method is effective in solving that problem we tend to default to it even if it's not the only way to solve that even if yeah going for a run would make me feel better but i'm just used to smoking cigarettes now and then we start to develop a story around it uh it starts to become a little bit of our identity we start to you know kind of like use it as a crutch and so i do think there's definitely a learned component to that as well all right well i interrupted you before you were just about to launch into the four laws yeah yeah okay so um the four stages are cue craving response and reward the queue is uh something that you notice so for example you see a plate of cookies on the counter that's a visual cue starts the habit of eating a cookie the craving is the prediction or the meaning that you assign to that cue often happens relatively automatically or quickly so you see the plate of cookies and you think um oh that'll be sweet sugary tasty enjoyable it's that favorable meaning that leads to that dopamine spike that we talked about and that motivates you to take the third step which is the response you walk over you pick the cookie up you take a bite and then finally there's the reward oh it is in fact sweet sugary tasty satisfying now not every behavior in life is rewarding right sometimes things have a cost or a consequence sometimes they're just kind of neutral and don't really mean a whole lot but if a behavior is not rewarding then it's unlikely to become a habit because you don't have any reason to repeat it again in the future you need some kind of positive emotional signal associated with the the behavior um for you to stick with it at least as we've already talked about an immediate signal now is there is there some evidence to suggest if i remember back to like my psych 101 class which is obviously pretty elementary that some of the most addictive behaviors are variably reinforcing and i i sort of remember this example of why slot machines are you know particularly addictive because the pattern with which they produce a win is actually random and therefore you really don't know when it's going to come you know it's going to come you have to have belief that you know you'll see other people win and you've won in the past but that's somehow even more addictive whereas the cookie in theory is not variably reinforcing it's pretty much reinforcing the same way every time i mean presumably only subject to the tastiness of the cookie yeah so it's even more there's been tons of studies done on variable rewards and the basic answer is yes you're right variable rewards tend to accelerate or intensify behavior it can get even more twisted than that in the slot machines example because what they have found is that the sweet spot tends to be right around 50 50. and so if you you can imagine getting a reward at uh very different schedules like you could get it 95 of the time or you could get it five percent of the time well if you only get it five percent of the time then you learn pretty quickly like hey this isn't a very fruitful action maybe i should stop doing this but if you get it around 50 50 and it works tends to work out for you a lot but not every time and it still is coming at like a roughly a random pattern even if you know over 10 000 trials it works out to be about 50 of the time man you will just keep pressing that slot machine button over and over and over again and um you know there are studies there have been studies done on mice where they would get a like a squirt of sugar water when they poke their nose in a box and if they did it at a variable reward schedule they would do it i can't remember the exact number i want to say it was like 6 000 times in an hour or something but it was it was you know many many times and um you know we laugh at it thinking about mice but we're not that different the average slot machine player will press the button like 800 times in an hour and so we're just basically you know doing the same thing so that um that variable reward getting the reward but not knowing exactly when it's going to happen it gets you to do it more frequently and you can think about examples like this in everyday life imagine a remote control where the battery's dying and you press the power button but it doesn't turn on right away and you're like did that work and then you press it again a little harder and then maybe pressing it a third time now if you do it you know eight or nine or ten times you're like okay the batteries are dead but if on the second try it turns on then like the variable reward got you to do it again or got you to try the behavior more so um yeah that uh that variable reward schedule is definitely something that can intensify behavior you remember anchorman i assume you've yeah this might actually mean that there is truth to the statement that 50 of the time it works every time [Laughter] incredible reference yes fantastic little did we know that uh will ferrell was a um a cognitive psychology fan well i think that was paul rudd's line wasn't it when he wasn't yeah when he used black panther the cologne yeah yeah yeah yeah amazing fifty percent of the time it works every time um i'm gonna be honest with you that smells like pure gasoline it's got bits of real panther in it it's made by odeon that movie so okay so those are the four stages um and what i like to do and what i consider to be the hallmark of like my work you know i am i'm just interpreting the research like you know i'm just pretending to be an academic i'm not actually an academic and my i think the value that i try to provide is to make these ideas actionable and to turn them into something that we can operationalize or apply to daily life and the four laws of behavior change are how i have attempted to do that so if we understand that a habit has those four steps and how do we actually change our behaviors we can follow these four laws and there's one for each stage so the first law of behavior change is to make it obvious you want the cues of your good habits to be obvious available visible easy to see the the easier it is to see or get your attention the easier it is to notice the more likely you are to act on it the second law is to make it attractive so the more attractive or appealing or exciting a habit is the more likely you are to feel motivated to do it so again this is about anticipating it or something you you anticipate more feel more motivated the third law is to make it easy the more easy convenient frictionless simple a habit is the more likely behavior is to be performed and then the fourth and final law is to make it satisfying the more satisfying or enjoyable pleasurable a habit is the more likely you are to repeat it in the future and so those four laws give you like a high level overview of how to build a good habit so make it obvious make it attractive make it easy make it satisfying you don't need all four every single time but the more that you have those four things working for you i think the more likely it is that the good behavior will stick or that you'll find a way to start on it if you want to break a bad habit then you just invert those four so rather than making it obvious you want to make the queue invisible unsubscribe from emails reduce exposure to the queue if you're trying to be on a diet don't follow food bloggers on instagram so just you know like reducing exposure to the thing that starts the process rather than making it attractive make it unattractive rather than making it easy make it difficult so increase friction put more steps between you and the behavior and rather than making it satisfying make it unsatisfying layer on some kind of immediate consequence or a cost to the behavior and so those four make it invisible make it unattractive make it difficult make it unsatisfying give you a high level framework for how to break a bad habit now how often is a certain behavior the combination of breaking a habit and creating a habit again it seems like a lot of the ones we default into talking about are the hard ones like nutrition we all eat we're all going to eat all the time it's not something you can opt out of or into you just you know we all eat so presumably if a person says again i hate coming back to weight because it's such a stupid example relative to say overall health but but let's say health actually i want to be a much healthier person so i need to change the way i eat so those are that's two things right you have to start eating better and stop eating poorer it is two things but i view them as two sides of the same coin uh in many cases you know we can come up with edge cases or examples where you know like the behaviors start to get more specific but um you know generally speaking i think there are three ways to break a bad habit you can eliminate it entirely so you can just go cold turkey cut it out never do it again you could curtail the behavior to the desired degree so you can reduce it a little bit you still do it sometimes but you you know instead of drinking a beer at dinner every night you just have it maybe once a week and then you could also replace it so rather than you know you know drinking a beer you replace it with water or whatever now when i'm thinking about myself personally when i actually am changing behavior i don't usually think about breaking bad habits that often in fact most of the time i'm focused on building or establishing new good behaviors which necessarily um displace the old ones like for example with eating it is a bit of a zero-sum game i mean not entirely i guess you could just keep eating more and more and more but generally if you say i'm going to eat more good things it kind of drives down the bad things is that the way it normally works then i think a lot of the time it does and that's why i tend to focus on that for my personal life is that it's kind of like two plants you know like one plant if it grows a little bit more and you know spreads its leaves a little further it starts to crowd out the other plant you know it just soaks up more energy and resources in sunlight and your good habits are kind of like that i mean we all in some sense it is zero sum in the sense that we only have 24 hours in each day and so you know if you have somebody who says even if they're unrelated habits they say hey i want to start doing something healthy i'd like to start you know working out for an hour each day and i also want to watch less tv i just feel like i watch netflix too much well you know if you usually watch netflix for three hours each evening and you decide to insert your workout from 6 to 7 p.m by definition you're not watching netflix while you're doing that and so you know you start to crowd out the bad behavior just by focusing on building uh workout habit even if you don't think about the tv thing at all so my sort of general approach is look i'm trying to spend my 24 hours in the highest leverage way possible the best way possible the way that is you know moving me toward whatever i'm optimizing for and so let me just try to continually think about how to upgrade those behaviors i also like that mindset more than the breaking the bad habits one because it gives me a reason to improve even once i have good habits you know like i'm continually looking for the higher leverage action even if what i'm doing is already good okay fine how can i make it great now and uh so i tend to focus um on that style rather than thinking about breaking bad ones but they definitely are related to answer your question and i guess like the example that we come back to is smoking so it's hard to think of because smoking doesn't really take that much time so it's hard to say i'm just going to introduce a new habit that will force smoking out are there other examples though of habits where you really do focus on how to break the bad one yeah so to take the smoking example um i think it's helpful to divide it into the specific instances in which it happens so you know we kind of lump smoking into a single habit but the truth is it actually might be a collection of like a dozen habits throughout the day it might be that you have a habit of smoking when you get in your car for the morning commute and then you also have a habit of smoking around 10 30 when you take a break with your coworker and then you also have a habit of smoking you know after dinner on your porch and all three of those are gonna have their own cue craving response and reward and so you in a sense you kind of have to intervene in like 12 different places to try to come up with a solution for each one of those so you might find that like for the morning commute maybe instead of having a cigarette um you know you come up with something else that you can do on the morning commute while you're that fulfills that you know um that desire maybe maybe even just a cup of coffee is what wakes you up instead of a cigarette but that may not work for the 10 30 session with your friend maybe there you actually need like an e-cigarette to start because you want to have the socialization of feeling like you're smoking with a friend so you may need to like kind of take it in different stages and break it down to a more a degree where it's easier to have a line of attack the environment seems to be so potent you know again david foster wallace writes about er when in his commencement speech this is water he talks about the ubiquity of water and also the fact that you don't even realize it's there and that's what makes it so profound right is the heat referring to certain thoughts but i think the same is true of these cues right i mean we for most of us we we're not actually that aware of what it is you know it can be pointed out to you and you can say oh yeah come to think of it i am a fish swimming in water or yeah i come to think of it every time i get in the car it's the act of getting in the car and driving to work that signals a change in my where i'm going and that's what forces me to light up but you know the example of having the cigarette at 10 30 with your co-worker is a very powerful one because of the connection in the environment and i remember in my residency when people would come into the hospital with abscesses from iv drug use so very you know in baltimore which is right in my residency there was you know just rampant iv drug use and you'd be amazed at how much that habit and that addiction could cause a person to do something that at the surface doesn't seem that logical you know use dirty needles and needles would break in their abscesses and and so you'd be down there and you'd be sort of draining a huge baseball sized pus filled abscess that's got broken needles in it and this person is very sick i mean this is a person who's now risking their life due to this and they would be back in a month with the same thing in a month and a month later the same thing over and over again and tragically eventually a lot of these people would die but i remember at some point saying to these folks this was the best advice i could offer which was not very helpful was i don't think you can go back to the same place you live like i think you need new friends now that's not a very helpful thing to offer somebody who probably doesn't have many choices but the point was like how could you expect this person to go back to the same place that they were living in the same environment with all of the same people doing the same things and say well you just got to resist it it doesn't make sense right you you know presumably someone who decides they want to stop drinking alcohol really ought not go into a bar that much anymore despite unless your environment is like a form of gravity yeah you know like it just pulls on you and you can resist it for a little bit uh but you know maybe a day or week or a month but at some point it just starts to drain on you and uh you know sucks you back in and to your point about you know going back to this environment that prompted the behavior in the first place i mean this is one of the stories i share in atomic habits but it was the surprise that we saw from the vietnam war which is so many soldiers were getting addicted to heroin and drugs when they were over there and then they came back and we were like what are we gonna do with all these addicted soldiers and it turns out that 90 of them or more uh ended up being fined because they didn't go back to the place where they got addicted they went home to their friends and family and like they didn't have all the same signals that were prompting them to pick up the habit and so they were able to drop it much more easily than we thought they would and compare that to the typical drug addict who does the reverse they go into rehab and that's where they leave all of their cues and influences behind and then we you know once they get clean and they detox we send them back to the same place where they got addicted before and that is a much much harder uh uphill battle so environment i think it's kind of like the invisible hand that drives our behavior i mean we as you said it's kind of like water you know fish and water we don't realize it but we all have these things that we say are important to us oh i would like to lose weight or i'd like to build a business or i want to finish a book but then you look around the spaces where we live and work and the cues of those habits are not a big part of the environment and you know we all are busy strapped for time uh you know minimal energy we have kids to take care of or parents to do chores for or friends to see and whenever we have limited capacity or limited time or we're low on energy or exhausted what choice do we make we often choose the thing that is most obvious in the environment we choose the thing that uh is the easy choice or the path of least resistance and so you know if i'm recommending a place to start for changing behavior it's usually either the first law or the third law it's making it obvious and making it easy because you know we can talk about making it easy but scaling habits down obviously makes it more likely that you're able to complete the task and making it obvious uh essentially creates an environment where the good choices are right in front of you where they're the path of least resistance and individually i think it's easy to overlook the importance of this because individually one change to the environment does not usually meaningfully move the needle or change your behavior but collectively making a dozen or two dozen or 50 little choices to how your office is laid out and how your living room is laid out and how your kitchen is laid out yeah now all of a sudden you're working and thriving in a space that is stacking the odds in your favor that's making it more likely that you will just choose the good thing because the healthy food is on the counter and the tv is behind a wall unit and a cabinet where you're less likely to see it and the remote control is inside a drawer and there's a book in its place and you have a couple books that are scattered around in your desk waiting for you to pick them up and open them you can do it with digital spaces too like when i wanted to start reading more i took audible for audiobooks and i moved it to the home screen on my phone and took all the other apps and moved them to the second screen that's a very small thing and it doesn't guarantee the behavior but it's another way to stack the odds in my favor that whenever i open up my phone i'm reminded to listen to an audio book for a few minutes rather than browse instagram and the more that you do those kind of things the more likely good behaviors are to uh to arise so one thing i want to park for later once we get through the laws is a very specific question around the challenges that some people face and that they don't control their environment and again i come back to food because i think for most of my patients and for myself food is such a struggle because again it's always around us you have to do it it's not a behavior you can just opt out of and i think those of us that have kids not to throw our kids under the bus but i haven't met too many people whose eating habits get better once they have kids if they're if they're generally inclined to be healthy people because at some point you sort of start losing the battle of how much you know non-crap you can have in the house due to time constraints and the other constraints which is look kids are going to eat things that are probably not so bad for them but i shouldn't be eating and uh you know wheat fins my kids love wheat fins uh i love wheat fins i think the difference is they can get away with eating a lot more wheat thins than i can so i've lost the wheat thin battle like we have a pantry that is full of wheat fins and i'm never at least for the foreseeable future going to get those wheat fins out of there so now every time i walk in the pantry i'm staring down the barrel of wheat fins and i would love to get those wheat fins in the trash but every time i do my wife says understandably hey if you want to be in charge of feeding the kids every meal knock yourself out chef but if you're not let me handle food and our kids eat well but they're going to eat wheat fins and a few other things that you don't want to eat isn't it kind of fascinating like you know i mean you're someone that i think most people are described as disciplined and high performing and you know talented and skilled and you like look at yourself with that and you're like wheat thins beat me every time you know it's like i i think about myself i was doing an interview with somebody else a couple weeks ago and he was joking about how the number of cookies he can eat is either 0 or 30 because if they're there then he's going to eat them all and i'm exactly that way one of the best hacks that we've come up with is i love chocolate chip cookies and my wife will make them but she'll like make the balls of dough and then freeze them and put them in the freezer and at night after dinner we'll take them out and just take out two and put them on the pan and warm up the oven and put them in and it's actually a better experience because you get to eat like fresh baked warm chocolate chip cookies but you'll only eat two because all the rest of them are frozen and it's just enough friction to know that this is going to take another 15 minutes if i want to take two more out and heat them up and you're like i don't actually need another cookie like i just wanted but what what limits you from putting five on the on the uh on the on the tray great question we just haven't gotten in the habit of doing that so hopefully this uh that question won't wreck my psyche and now we'll be doing that every night but um is part about the accountability though between you that like at least she's gonna say she'd be like come on yeah for sure and i i think we've seen that um we've seen it's interesting the ways in which uh you know there's a whole discussion we can have about habits in marriage and like relationships and how that influences things because you soak up each person soaks up a little bit of the other partner but um we've seen it work in a very positive way for training which is there are going to be some days where i just like don't feel like working out after you know a full day at work but she's like all right we're going to go to the gym and you know then i'm like okay i'll change you know and then other days i'm like okay i'm ready and she's like all right you know and she didn't feel like it and uh that's really helpful uh for the long term consistency but i've talked to other couples who've said you know my nutrition habits actually got worse because like one day i won't feel like cooking and i'll be like hey can we just order out and she'll be like okay fine and then the other day she won't feel like cooking like hey why don't we pick up something from and you're like okay fine and so you can see how uh it goes in both directions and i don't um i don't have a good way to describe these kind of upward and downward spirals that we often get into uh where the momentum once it's moving in that direction you just kind of like it becomes your default behavior and you just sort of keep rolling with it but that there's something very powerful about that in life that if you get on a nice trajectory and you got a good spiral working for you then that momentum just kind of carries you and if you start to get in a downward spiral you really got to find a way to just reverse course and gain a foothold even if it's a really small thing just to get the momentum moving in the other direction um but anyway well and that's actually something i feel like i've i've also noticed with my patients and myself which is it seems that the people who are able to be more self-forgiving when they slip up and get back on course have an easier time than uh people who approach it through a very perfectionistic lens and once they make a mistake they get into the cycle of self-judgment and beating themselves up and i say them like it's me too right we all do this sure and yeah all of a sudden a blown meal turns into well forget if the day's over i mean i've screwed this day up so i'm just gonna eat whatever i want and then you wake up the next day and you probably feel like crap both physically and emotionally and that reduces your drive to continue to do what you set out to do and you sort of you you just you have the spirals and you make a point about that in the book right which is don't you know if you're going to miss a workout miss a workout but don't miss two yeah yeah never miss twice is the idea that i try to the little mantra i try to tell myself you know it's like okay stuck to the diet for nine days uh binge eat a pizza on the tenth day well wish i hadn't happened but never missed twice so let's make sure the next meal is a healthy one and um you know i think we all know this kind of implicitly from going through life but it's easy to forget in the moment which is it's rarely the first mistake that ruins you you know it's like usually the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows that's the real problem it's like letting slipping up become a new habit that's the real issue and if you can cut that off at the source if you can never miss twice then you know you get to the end of the year and those mistakes are just like a little blip on the radar but it's really about getting back on track quickly and i think actually you see this with top performers in many different industries like you know think about any athlete i mean this is something that like nick saban's teams at alabama pride themselves on the screw up a play or have a bad drive throw an interception for a touchdown or something but the the focus is on the very next play and i'm making sure that you don't let that mistake become another mistake and the teams and the athletes that are really good at doing that and having a short memory and getting right back on track they end up having you know really successful careers and you can scale that down to your own life gretchen rubin actually has this i thought it was a clever little idea which is divide the day into four quarters so you got like morning afternoon dinner and night or evening and night and um if you make a mistake keep it contained to that quarter so you know you don't lose the day you just lose the quarter and then the next one you get back on track and if you can you know keep your failures small like that if you can contain the damage then um i just think it's easier to get back on track quickly and to maintain the momentum build consistency all the other positive benefits that we've talked about and to your point about judging yourself or feeling guilty or you know turning this into like some kind of like self-berating session um playing the victim never makes it better you know it never it doesn't make any of it easier you can i think generally in life we all have things that happen to us some of them are yeah some of them are terrible things and you can be the victim but i don't know that it ever benefits you to play the victim to accept that role you know like bad things can happen to you but that doesn't mean you have to start to identify as someone who is worthy of them or someone who is you know it's inevitable for that to be part of your story and so the more that you can like cut the judgment out of it cut the um the guilt out of it the story the narrative piece and take that away and just accept the event for what it is and move on to the next uh instance that i think probably the better off you'll be yeah this is probably an area where a habit that is probably desirable for many people also becomes a tool to help and that's mindfulness meditation which i think is one of the more powerful tools to help people observe the judgment without judging it which sounds a bit you know odd to someone who hasn't practiced that but that becomes very powerful and it certainly made a difference as i've kind of released the need to be perfect um which doesn't i mean again that's just it's it's really a continuum and there's there's a there's a spectrum of efficacy here which is um like on monday we traveled the whole day and we got back and i really wanted to work out you know i just hate ever missing a workout but the reality is once we got home and the kids were exhausted and my wife was tired and it just felt like sort of a shmucky thing to do to go and work out and leave her with decompensating kids and a whole bunch of stuff that needed to be unpacked and actually part of the judgment was letting go of that letting go of the fact that i wasn't going to work out that day and that was okay now that's you know you can do that on anything i think if you can come to be flexible and say you know what you're stuck in the airport with your kids the food sucks it is what it is today and you're not horrible because of it uh but i think this idea of get back on the horse as quickly as possible is is really powerful again anecdotally i always bring everything back to driving a race car it is so rare that you make a mistake and crash in a car because of what you did at that moment and not because of what happened earlier so you know if you spin at corner four the mistake usually started at corner two and sometimes you don't realize it and sometimes you do realize it but you you arrogantly think that you don't have to make any adjustment going forward because of it at least for me that's been an incredible incredibly humbling experience with how you know mistakes compound rapid course correction is probably a deep like deeply applicable lesson for many areas of life you know i mean the world is complex and situations evolve life is dynamic it's not static and your preferences also evolve what you optimize for or want is different today than it was ten years ago and probably will be different five years from now or ten years from now and given that many changing dynamics it's not possible for someone to predict the optimal course of action and even if you could it is very unlikely that it will remain the optimal course of action so given that things are going to be changing you're going to be off course at some point and the ability to correct for that and to correct for that quickly i mean it might be one of the all optimal life skills um you know the ability to assess where you are in the moment see what the next step is going to be keep in mind where you ultimately want to go and then correct as needed uh is possibly the path to like living a great life um i heard recently this i thought it was a great little um framework which is a b z came from sean perry he's a entrepreneur and basically said you need to know your abz a is where you are right now it's like the truth of the situation the reality b is your next step and z is where you want to go ultimately it's where you want to end up and i think the key this is me talking now not him um for me the key is working backwards it's knowing z first knowing what you're optimizing for and then jumping back to a and being honest about the situation what is the truth of the situation what are the resources i have the skills i have what are my strengths what are my weaknesses what's reality say and then knowing that i want to head towards z and knowing honestly where i am today what's the next step i actually don't need to know c through y right now i don't need to have the whole thing planned out perfectly but i do need to make sure that my next step is directionally correct and if it is then you can just keep running that abz process over and over again until you finally get there yeah annie duke talks about this in a slightly different way and she refers to it as back casting and i find it to be uh an incredibly powerful tool again to be contrasted with forecasting right forecasting is i'm just going to stand here and i'm going to tell you i got to do b and then c and then as opposed to saying no this is where i am that's the desired outcome let's start working the steps backwards uh this what you've described is slightly different but i think it preserves this idea of of taking stock of where you are and most importantly understanding where you need to be and not trying to do what i think stochastically is really hard but predict every step going forward yeah the only thing i'll add to that which i like annie's framework and i think working backwards is it's a really powerful thing particularly if you can um not be your own bottleneck in the process a lot of people i the phrase i like is work backwards from magic so you know what would the magical outcome be what would the ideal outcome be and then let me work backwards from that and a lot of people have trouble with that brainstorming part of the process because they think well if it's unrealistic why would i even try and the point is like listen it's way too early for that you know like most people most people become their own bottleneck long before reality prevents them from doing it which is kind of this great irony we're like oh you know why would i attempt this like super impossible thing and it's like well the world hasn't even told you it's impossible yet you have so um i think work backwards from the magical outcome but my key is i want to be very clear about where i'm going but very flexible about how i get there so i don't need it to happen if i work backwards i don't need it to happen only through that chain of potential that potential path because if you can only have one way to get there you're actually kind of brittle and you become hostage to the you know things working exactly in that way but if i know where i want to get to with a very clear vision i'm flexible in how i get there well now i can start to spring on opportunities as they arise and just take whatever the most fruitful path seems to be but i do think that that whole process starts with working backwards so it's a i think a more fruitful way to think about where you want to go than just trying to predict before we leave the first law what advice do you offer for people if they aren't quite clear what the cues are again in the spirit of trying to even displace um you know a habit that's maladaptive and create new ones again is this something that's just empirical uh or is it is it are there are there i hate to use the word but are there tricks for identifying what the cues are yeah no i think there are exercises or strategies you can use so um it's a good question and i think you you sort of hinted at this a few minutes ago and i meant to say it but i forgot which is the process of behavior change like strategically changing your behavior that you know we need to make a separation here a distinction between um the types of behavior change because people change their behavior all the time we're always responding to the situation we're in or the circumstance or the conversation we're having this is like one of the great myths about behavior change which is behavior change is hard actually it's one of the easiest things that you do like your brain is designed to change your behavior to match the situation that you're in so you're you're making adjustments all the time the question is can you um reliably change your behavior can you design your behavior in a fashion that you want and if you want to design it if you want to be in control of it more i think it almost always starts with the process of self-awareness and that's kind of what this question is getting at hey i don't even know what the truths are i don't even know what my habits are so the two exercises i recommend the first one i call the habit scorecard and you just go through your day and you list out every habit that you already do and try to get as detailed as possible so usually there's a big lump in the beginning like i wake up i take a shower i step on the scale i brush my teeth i go to the bathroom i get dressed like there's all this stuff that you do to start your day and then there's you know things for breakfast and starting your work day and on and on and on and the more that you have that list you're again the goal is not to judge yourself it's almost like you're at the zoo looking at animals and you're you're one of the animals it's like oh how interesting that they would do that you know like just kind of you're just trying to get a lay of the land and see how do i actually spend my time what habits am i actually doing if i'm being honest about it and then the second so that's just to understand what habits you have to figure out what the cue is there's a just basically you're just asking like five questions who what when where why you know you're essentially just trying to get a lay of you know what's going on so let's say that you're like man i eat a lot of candy bars but i don't know why i do it or i don't know what the queue is well each time that you find yourself eating a candy bar just pull up a note on your phone or have an index card or a notebook or whatever somewhere to record it write down what time is it where are you at right now what's the what's the context what's the environment who are you around are you near the do you eat these by the same kind of people what were you doing just before this you know was it a break from writing emails or you know doing something else and the more that you start to answer those questions about the context the better you'll you'll start to understand hey maybe that was the cue and i bet if you do that exercise for whatever the particular habit is that you're working on just do that for you may not even need to do it for a week but if you do it for five days or seven days or something you're gonna start to develop a good sense for what it is that's prompting the behavior yeah that's that's a great exercise and i mean is there any concern that when a person does that that the hawthorne effect kicks in and they basically start deviating from the natural behavior because of the observation in other words is the act of going through this exercise potentially uh making it harder for them to transparently see what's happening um maybe i think it's uh i i'm not gonna say it's not a risk i'm sure it's it's a possible risk but um i think what's more likely to happen is rather than not being able to see what's going on assuming you're being honest with yourself i mean you know it's it's it can be hard to honestly observe your own behavior you know we have a lot of biases and stories for why we do what we do so but assuming you're doing that to the best degree possible i think you're probably still going to get a good idea of what the cue is what i think is more likely to happen if there is some influence on your behavior is you may find yourself changing the behavior anyway just because you're tracking it and there are quite a few studies that show this like with nutrition for example there are some studies about food journaling people who just keep a food journal they're not even trying to stick to a certain calorie level or a certain macro profile or anything they just are tracking what they're eating tend to change their eating habits and eat less just because they're tracking it even if they don't have a specific program they're trying to follow so the mere act of observing something or measuring something often changes the behavior associated with it and you may find that to be the case here you're like well i keep right now when i have candy bars so i'm like maybe i'll skip this one and i think that's probably the more likely outcome but who knows there could be other biases as well yeah i these devices here these continuous glucose monitors they they are a remarkable tool for both insight because it you know when you first put them on you're sort of learning oh my god like i didn't realize eating that thing would have this response in my glucose but once you sort of saturate the insight part of that equation which you know can be three months six months depending on the complexity of your your life it becomes forever a behavioral tool you sort of you know you don't want to eat a certain thing if it's going to raise your glucose because you've at least bought into the thesis that you don't want to have your glucose skyrocket the way it does when you eat m m's so uh it's interesting it becomes kind of an accountability partner and i and i find some of the most interesting and sticky devices do that right the wearables that offer an insight that's not obvious that but is objective tend to be the things that we really like coming back to whereas the ones that are kind of obvious like how many steps you take that doesn't that's not very sticky because we sort of have an intuitive sense for what that is like everybody once they've you know spent enough time walking 10 000 steps a day they don't really need a device to tell them that anymore it becomes easier to do on their own it's interesting i have this kind of this is a side comment but i have this like theory about technology and innovation um and that the way in which we the technologies that most radically change the world or change our behavior are all just kind of different forms of vision so like you know you have obvious examples like x-rays which you know allow you to see the broken bone or um you know mris or whatever that allow you to see some tissue in a way that you couldn't see before and so that gives you information that then you can act on and make a diagnosis and you know make some kind of uh change but the glucose monitor is like another example it's just like now you can see the spike you know see in a very broad sense and because you can see it uh you change your behavior um and you know even stuff like the number of email subscribers to my website you know because uh my email platform tracks that and i can see how many people are signing up each day i make a change to the form and you know conversion and so on and i do think there's some deeper lesson there about behavior change and about what drives human behavior which is if you can visualize your progress in some way maybe it's a chart on a screen maybe it's you know an actual printout maybe it's something that you actually see like you know looking through lenses or something but if you can actually visualize it then the behavior often follows suit and that's why even simple strategies like a habit tracker where you just put an x on each day seems very um rudimentary very basic but it can still be meaningful because it gives you a way of visualizing your progress yeah this idea of what gets measured gets managed is is is a great tool um about six months ago i started going to the water meter of our house every tuesday and recording it and then i've got a little spreadsheet that says okay this is how many gallons we've used this week this is what it would project to for a monthly usage et cetera et cetera and you just can't believe how much our water usage has come down in six months because i mean again in texas water is not that expensive actually compared to california but just it became something i was obsessed with which is like we're not going to waste any water like i just don't want to waste any water and it's now become a game for me it drives my family nuts but it is a game like we are going to have the lowest water bill ever in austin no one is going to use less water than us and i mean i'm obsessed with that spreadsheet it's kind of like an adult version of i spy you know you like walk in you're like i spy the red thing and then all the red stuff in the room lights up and you're like right now you're like i spy water and everywhere i go is that's what i see and uh you know you find opportunities and you find ways to change it oh yeah when i'm giving my kids a shower like once i'm lathering them up the water i got to turn the water off and they're like daddy why are you turning the water off i'm like because we're just putting soap on right now you don't need the water it's just it drives everybody nuts but what the hell [Laughter] okay so let's talk about the second law yeah so the second law is making attractive um and i think there's a simple example i could give here which is let's imagine that you wake up tomorrow and you're like all right i listen to this guy talk about habits all day today so uh tomorrow's gonna be the day i'm gonna wake up and i'm going to go for a run so you set your alarm for 6 am and 6 am rolls around but your bed is warm and it's cold outside and you're like well i'll just press snooze and sleep in like maybe i'll do it tomorrow but if you rewind the clock and come back to today and you text a friend and you say hey you want to meet at the park at 6 15 and go for a run well now 6 a.m rolls around and your bed is still warm and still cold outside but if you don't get up and go for a run you're jerk because you leave your friend at the park all alone and so you've kind of simultaneously made it more attractive to get up and go for a run and less attractive to press news and sleep in now you haven't made the run itself any easier like that's still going to be as difficult as it was before so the habit the difficulty is kind of the same but you have changed the calculus that's going on in your mind about like whether you should do this or not or how attractive it seems so you know there are a bunch of examples strategies like that and stuff that i talk about in the book and that you could use to kind of make habits seem more attractive than they otherwise are um but that's sort of what it comes down to on a short term basis for making habits attractive on a long term basis i think it's about what we've already discussed about the social environment and being part of a tribe where your desired behavior is the normal behavior because that those behaviors become very attractive even a year or two or five from now if they help signal that you're part of the tribe yeah you brought up crossfit earlier but i always thought that crossfit was one of the best examples of this i never did crossfit myself you know there's lots of criticisms of it etc but the reality of it is it was certainly it and is something that really creates a community of people who have a certain belief about who they are and what they do and uh again for all the people who knock crossfit i've seen it take a lot of very inactive people and turn them into some pretty impressive people yeah i think the social side the community side of it is their the strongest piece of the whole thing um you know it's the uh it's the part that's hardest for any other exercise program to replicate that's for sure and um it does it gets people to stick to it i mean it becomes uh you know it sounds extreme to call it a form of a religion but it becomes kind of like that for them i mean the the box is like their church in a lot of ways you know they go six days a week instead of one day a week and um so there yeah there are a lot of strong community elements there you also see crossfires pick up a bunch of habits they didn't even expect like they thought they were going to start working out but then six months later they all are buying the same brand of knee sleeves and they have a certain type of weight lifting shoe and uh they're all eating paleo and it was like we didn't even plan on doing that stuff i just was gonna go to a gym to work out but uh all of those are part behaviors that signal what it means to be part of that group and again once you start to build friends in that group and start to you know become um ingrained in that society here in that tribe you start to soak up some of those other behaviors as well yeah it's really a great example i guess we'll go to the third and fourth law but i want to take a step back and ask you where you put nudging into this right so so richard thaler's book nudge which was probably the first book i ever read on this subject matter um i mean it seems so obvious which is what makes it so interesting and insightful right sometimes the most brilliant things in retrospect seem so entirely obvious but it was i think reading richard's book circa i i don't know call it maybe 2012 probably nearly 10 years ago that this idea of the default food environment sort of came to me and i use that term with our patients as you know the more you can control your default food environment the more healthy you can be right so so if your default food environment sucks you're going to be relying on willpower a lot and that's really really hard if your default food environment is at one extreme end of the spectrum you have a perfect default food environment and you could you could be the healthiest person in the world even if it's not enjoyable you know at some point like if you were locked in a room and all you had were the you know the best foods to eat you're going to end up being healthy and you're going to be kind of like oh if i eat one more macadamia nut and have one more avocado and salad but you know nudging obviously refers to a cue but it also refers to this environmental change it doesn't seem to really capture the idea of making it attractive or does it i think it's more about making it obvious i would lump it more in the first law design the environment to make the good habit the obvious one to make the good habit the path of least resistance some other nudges that are you know very popular people talk about is like default choices on you know forms or whatever so you know the the very famous example being the 401k oh yeah yeah yeah and 401ks set also yeah you know so default opting in every employee to a 401k and making them opt out uh is a nudge and uh i think that's also another example of making it obvious or we could also say making it easy yeah it's sort of one nothing's easier than letting it ride so i all of those are examples to your point about um about default food environment daria rose who writes a nutrition blog um she's got a great concept i just like it it's kind of sticky home uh home court habits and away court habits and you know the argument is like try to optimize your home court habits first you know like what's what's the environment where it's your kitchen it's your apartment like you're you know you get to set the tone and let's just try to prime all that whatever happens at a restaurant or when you're at a hotel traveling or whatever let's don't worry about that as much right now let's just optimize the home court and i like that if you can build a home court advantage for yourself then you get in a good you know situation you start to build some momentum you handle the thing that you're probably going to be doing 70 of the time or 80 of the time and then after that you can move on to the you know to the way court stuff so one of the other things you talk about is the idea of accountability it's come up now several times and i think everybody would agree that the moment you have somebody else in this thing with you the better it gets is there any evidence about the type of accountability partner so an example you gave was your wife great accountability partner for you guys to work out would that be more or less effective than if you were matched with a person who you didn't know but who had similar aspirations where you'd be less comfortable and perhaps more inclined to hold yourself to a higher standard again it kind of comes back to this idea of how we're wired to be you know seeking the approval of others and all those sorts of other things is there is there any research to support this idea yeah you know i don't know of any studies that like distinguish clearly between those two it's quite possible there are plenty out there i just may not know of them but man i can see it working well on both sides and i also see complexities on both sides so a lot of the time when people talk about accountability partners they join a facebook group or they join a course or a program or something and they get matched up the way that you described but i can actually see that form of accountability kind of falling apart fairly quickly for a simple reason which is it's a stranger and you don't really bear much cost for them you know thinking you did a bad job or you may not really value or care that much about their opinion compare that to the example i gave you know earlier which is you walk outside and your neighbor sees that your lawn is very sloppy and you haven't mowed the grass in three weeks that actually you may care pretty deeply about because you don't want to be judged by the other people in the neighborhood and you don't want to have friction with your neighbor and so on and so there's much more of a cost there and that form of accountability is a lot stronger because there's you know some reason why you really want to follow through on it now you could say that that same thing is true for you know for example a marriage a relationship is that you know i don't want to let my partner down i don't want them to think poorly of me and so on but you have to remember in that particular case you're so close that there are actually a lot of additional complexities there like you want to be fairly forgiving of your partner because you're living with them all the time or even if it's not someone you're married to say it's you know your brother or your parents or whoever like there's just a lot going on in those relationships and so um is the other person really gonna become like uh an enemy just over you skipping your workout routine on tuesday because like you guys got to get dinner together on wednesday night and you have to babysit their kids over the weekend and like there's a lot of other stuff that's involved there and so in those cases i think the relationships are so tight or so complex that that person may not actually want to be a strict accountability partner because of the other costs that they may need to bear so you're kind of in this weird situation where you don't want there to be other things on the line that would influence their ability to be to hold you accountable but you do actually want to care about their opinion and to bear some kind of cost if you don't follow through perhaps this is the reason why having like a coach is a good example because that's somebody that presumably you want to do a good job because you're going to see them repeatedly but even if it's not as dicey as the neighbor situation where like you do bear some social cost for it you probably bear a financial cost because you may be paying your nutrition coats you know 500 or a thousand dollars or whatever and the more that there's some kind of painful cost associated with it probably the more that you're going to be willing to follow through on that accountability and speaking of a coach just more broadly how does a coach or how do the best coaches if you have insight into this sort of uh thread the needle of creating accountability uh but also creating encouragement when you fall short boy that's a big question and you know i'm not a coach i've had i've been fortunate to have some good ones and i've also had a bunch of you know mediocre ones too and thinking about the difference between them there's just you know we could have a whole conversation about coaching and about the art of that because there is a really fine balance there and i think there also is a big difference in the i'm going to use athlete but of course you can have a coach for many things but there's a big difference also in the intensity that the athlete might have i mean you know you can imagine i so i was into olympic weightlifting for a time and it was kind of the main way i was training and i had the fortune of training with a really great team i was very average but um you know holly mangold was on that team and she competed at the olympic games in london in 2012 and watching just watching the interactions between the coaches and her and what was required for her to make it to the olympics was interesting to see you know like there's there there is every element of a tight relationship there i mean there's tough love and there's like you know actual love and there are some days where you have to be really harsh and some days where you have to be really soft and there's all the dynamics of the athlete's internal mindset like you know there are days when you go out and you feel like you're a world killer and like nobody can touch you and then there are other days where you just feel completely broken and you're like can i keep this training up for another six months and so the the more intense the objective is that you're trying to achieve i think the more detailed and balanced and nuanced all of that becomes um you know and then you have like just your standard crossfit coach who's coaching a 35 year old dad of two who just wants to get in better shape and that i think may be you know a totally different relationship so i don't know that i have a good answer there but i do think it's a really important thing and that there are great coaches are incredibly valuable and they're rare by definition that's why they're great and uh it's probably much more complicated than a lot of us realize so you said rule number one and rule number three were probably the most important rule number three is now make it easy yeah so if i could only recommend like one thing if i had if you forced me to say hey where's the one place i would start i would say start with this start do you hate being asked that question by the way if you could just do one yeah just because i mean you know yeah like you know how it is you know like if somebody said what was the one thing i would do to get healthy you'd be like okay come on this is like a very big picture you know there's there's a lot of stuff here um and uh same same story here like you know i do think this is a good place to start though and so if i had to pick i would say follow the two-minute rule which says take whatever habit you're trying to build and scale it down to something takes two minutes or less to do so read 30 books a year becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat and sometimes people hate that because they're like okay buddy you know like i know i'm not actually just trying to take my yoga mat out i know i'm actually trying to do the workout so if this is some kind of mental trick and i know it's a trick then like why would i fall for it basically and i get where people are coming from but i have this reader his name's mitch and i mentioned him in atomic habits and uh he lost a ton of weight another guy i think he lost definitely over 80 pounds i think it was probably over 100 and um kept it off for a long time he uh he had this interesting rule for himself though where when he went to the gym for the first six weeks they started working out he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes so he'd get in the car drive to the gym get out do half an exercise get back in the car drive home and it sounds ridiculous you know it sounds silly you're like obviously this is not going to get the guy the results that he wants but if you take a step back what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up you know he was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week even if it was only for five minutes and i think this is like a deep truth about habits something that peop we often overlook which is a habit must be established before it can be improved you know it has to become the standard in your life before you can optimize and scale it up into something more if you want you can come up with a better theory like you could come up with a perfect plan but unless you're acting on it it doesn't do you any good it's just a really good idea and so you know for whatever reason we get like really all or nothing about our habits we tend to have this this tendency to be like well if i can't do you know the full marathon training program then why go for a run at all or if i can't you know follow through on the perfect like lean startup business framework then like why bother starting a company but i think you know the two-minute rule kind of helps you get over that tendency of perfectionism and just start to master the art of showing up find a small way to establish the habit make it part of your new normal and then you can gain a little foothold and start to scale up and expand from there it reminds me of that there's that great quote from ed lattimore where he says the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door and you know that's true for a lot of things in life i mean the the hardest part is getting started so let's master that and make it part of your lifestyle and then once you're the kind of person who's showing up consistently we have all kinds of options for how we can improve and optimize and so on i think meditation is another great place where that uh that two-minute rule really helps i think it can be really daunting the first time you decide for the first time let's say you buy the idea that hey you know what there's probably real value in this i i i'd be better served to go on a silent retreat for seven days or meditate 40 minutes every day it's like that's a real big step for someone who's never done it how about two minutes every single day you you you meditate and you know maybe in a few weeks it's three minutes a day but yeah you have to sort of lay down that track to to say hey i'm a person who meditates and b this is the actual muscle memory of what it looks like to sit down it's also surprising how uh few people actually have two minutes in their day where they stop and do nothing except breathe i mean that that alone would deliver more value than you might expect and there are a whole host of other behaviors that go along with this you know like you think meditating for two minutes sounds very small but if you start to back out of it you realize oh there's you know you got to pick a space where is it going to happen what time of day is it going to occur is this something you're going to do before work or after work do you do it on your lunch break are you going to like try to do it with somebody to so you have a little bit of social accountability or is this just like a private thing that you're going to do in the corner do you need a pillow to sit on or are you fine to sit on the floor like what's your flexibility like um are you going to get interrupted by your kids if you do this at 7am it might be nice to get it done in the morning but is that when you're getting them ready for school and getting them dressed there's like just a lot of little questions like that that people don't think about and so finding a very small version of the habit allows you to get all of that other stuff kind of handled figure out the logistics of it and just to do it for a minute or two and then once you get all that stuff handled and you don't have to decide anymore you have a little bit more mental capacity and energy to actually focus into okay let me scale this up a bit and do it maybe in the way that i was hoping i would so how do you make them satisfying because that's the fourth law yeah so this is the final piece um and it's really about just making a habit that's pleasurable enough that you want to return to it giving you some you know some reason some emotional signal that hey this is worth it and there are a bunch of different ways you can do this you know some of them are short-term some of them are long-term like the short-term stuff is mostly about reinforcement so you know the classic examples are things like oh you can reward yourself with a bubble bath or with ice cream or you know buying uh you know something that you wanted or whatever i think the key with those short-term reinforcements is you want to make sure that the reinforcement um also aligns with the long-term identity that you're trying to build right ice cream wouldn't be a great reward for learning you know getting in better shape yeah right like you go to the gym and you do a workout and then you eat a bowl of ice cream it's like okay you're casting votes for two different identities or um let's say that you're trying to get your finances in order and so you're like okay i want to budget um you know consistently and save money for retirement well if you reward yourself with that by you know like buying a leather jacket then it's kind of like okay on the one hand you're trying to be a saver on the other hand you're being a spender so i like to pick things that we feel like are aligned so like in the um in the fitness example you could say well if i don't miss any workouts this week then i'm going to reward myself with a bubble bath in kind of like an hour alone of peace and quiet on the weekend and that's like a vote for taking care of your body and so you know that seems pretty aligned or if i um if i save consistently for retirement this month and i make a contribution each week then at the end of the month i'm going to reward myself with a hike in the woods and that's like another example of you know a lifestyle of freedom and of controlling your time and you know like having uh having financial control of you know how you're spending your time so anything that's uh that you feel like is aligned or reinforces that story you're trying to build i think that can make a great immediate reinforcement in the long run the way to feel rewarded uh the kind of ideal form of making it satisfying is when the behavior starts to feel like it reinforces your desired identity so if um if you're the kind of person who feels like yeah i'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts then in the middle of doing a set of squats you can feel satisfied because you're being the kind of person you want to be and so this comes back to kind of the point you made a little bit ago about i just don't want to miss a workout like i kind of feel off i feel like i'm not being myself if i miss and so just getting the reps in that alone is it's satisfying in the moment and that's sort of the the ultimate version of making it satisfying because you don't even need to wait for the reward it's just it's happening as you're in the middle of performing the behavior so make it obvious make it attractive make it easy make it satisfying those kind of those four laws and you know the various ways to intervene and do that increase the odds that you're going to follow through on a good habit now let's take a step back from all this when when someone picks up your book presumably there's a selection bias that exists which is this is a person who either through luck or you know or through some recommendation or friend or whatever has made a decision that they at least want to examine the habits in their lives and or potentially change them what do we know or what can we extract from this about a scenario that's different which is you know i'll use my example like you have a patient who you're trying to help and that you know helping that patient requires some intervention they're going to have to make a change now that change can be at one level really simple i think the simplest change medicine has to offer is take a pill and there's a time and a place for pills i i kind of i think it's a bit silly when people assume that everything modern medicine has to offer is bad pills are bad you know obviously that's not the case so you know taking your medicine for your blood pressure your cholesterol these things if it's warranted that's a really important thing to do and we also know by the way that even something as quote unquote simple as taking your medicine is actually really hard for a lot of people most people are i think studies demonstrate you know sort of in the neighborhood of 60 to 70 compliant with something as simple as take a pill but it only gets harder from there right so getting someone who's not sleeping well to sleep well that's a real big set of behavior changes getting someone who's not eating well to eat well getting someone who's not exercising to exercise getting someone who's not taking care of their mental health to take care of their mental health all of these things require enormous change and if a person says on the surface yes i want to be better like i accept that i want this outcome of being healthier but they haven't specifically had the need or desire to change the way they eat or exercise or sleep or whatever it adds a layer of challenge or friction to this process what what advice would you offer to me in a situation like that for trying to implement um your insights into us into that scenario to a person who hasn't fully selected into wanting to change habits yeah it's a great question i the point about people self-selecting by picking up the book is interesting because you know sometimes it's like you so you're sort of only helping the people who already uh you know want to be helped in that sense it's kind of like uh it's interesting to think that um most of the time the people who most need to read the book are not the people who pick it up to read it you know it's like the people who read about habits are usually the ones who have like fairly decent habits and are pretty interested in it and like want to optimize it more the people who need it the most like they've never read a book on habits and they don't want to read it and you know they're not interested so anyway there's a whole something interesting about that but um i think you know the points you bring up are very true and challenging and you know changing your own behavior is hard enough changing other people's behaviors like a whole another level of difficulty a whole another order of magnitude of difficulty i'll offer maybe three ideas that could apply so the first one and we've already talked about this in various ways but i do think you have to make it really small um you know and so you said you know like taking a pill is the smallest version but it doesn't always have to be that it could be you know if you're trying to get them to exercise it could literally be doing one push-up or you know walking around the block one time or something and this is that version of like can i just go to the gym for five minutes sort of thing let's just scale it down make it super simple along with that it is very hard for it to be simple if people are being pulled in multiple directions and so i think you know if you're giving people a plan that has five things on there for them to do can we eliminate four of those for now can that be state phase two and can we just do one right now let's take one thing and scale it down and stay focused and just try to get a little bit of momentum going on that and then once we've established that and started to gain a foothold there and get a little bit more consistency with that one thing we can take that momentum and transfer it into the next one so yeah ideally probably a lot of patients will be doing these five things or these 15 things but it doesn't mean you need to do all of them right now let's pick one and stay focused so that's the first thing is try to keep it as simple as possible pretty obvious answer but i still think a useful one the second thing again fairly obvious and we've talked about it a bit but still i think useful is the environment design piece you know even the laziest person even the person who has zero interest naturally in these topics is a product of the environment that they're in and as you mentioned earlier you know if you were in some imagine this like lab experiment where you're locked in a room that only has healthy food options even the laziest person is going to eat healthy there they have no other choice and you know that doesn't mean that they need to change everything in their home so that that it's that kind of like control lab experiment feel but look there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that can be done here that you don't actually need someone and this i think is one of the reasons why i like environment changes you don't actually need someone to be motivated every day to do this you really just need them to be motivated for like one afternoon so that they change the environment a bit and that can actually serve them in some cases it can serve them for months but in most cases even food related cases it could serve them for the next three days or five days or seven days just by getting junk food out of the house that serves them for the next you know a couple days and so you only need little pockets of motivation and if you can direct that pocket of motivation toward a high leverage action like redesigning the environment then it can continue to serve even a lazy person for a good chunk of time so that's probably the second same thing so make it small optimize the environment and then the third thing and this is maybe more of like a coaching thing as someone who deals with patients or you know has clients or whatever the general strategy is easy to say but very hard to follow which is praise the good ignore the bad and it goes against the grain of what we want to do because they're like you're telling me i just want to ignore the mistakes that they're making and you know certainly there's a place for rectifying mistakes and i don't mean that every problem should just go unresolved but especially early on the thing that you really want to build is momentum and you want to reinforce the good behaviors and as we talked about a good plant crowding out another a way to encourage that is by praising the good and ignoring the bad there was a hilarious op-ed that was written i think it was in the new york times this wife who her husband would never throw his dirty clothes in the laundry hamper and it was driving her nuts and you know occasionally he would do it but it was like pulling teeth all the time to get him to do this consistently and she tried everything she you know she tried nagging him she tried annoying you know whatever just all kinds of different put the laundry hamper in a different place don't even have it in the closet just have it out on the floor in the bedroom and he still wouldn't do it sometimes he'd throw the clothes next to the hamper she's like you're already throwing it over there just put it in and um eventually what she settled on doing was that every time that he happened to put it in the hamper she would make a huge deal about it she'd run over give him a kiss give him a hug say thank you be like oh you're making my life so much easier thank you so much and over the course of about a year she effectively trained him to always put the clothes in the hamper because every time that happened something good happened he got praised it felt good and you know it's almost like training a dog in a sense which is all kinds of organisms dogs and humans love feeling praised we like feeling good we like being rewarded and so if you praise the good actions and ignore the bad actions it's again almost like a form of gravity people naturally gravitate toward the things that they get rewarded for the things they get praised for and you'd be surprised how often people don't do something like this or in fact do the opposite like you can imagine you know the quiet kid in the household who um comes down for dinner with the rest of the family and it's like oh look who showed up or you know they decide to share something about their day and it's like oh you know finally some you know a fact about your life and you can imagine a parent or somebody saying something sarcastic like that and all of a sudden you're punishing the very behavior that you wanted to see and um so praise the good ignore the bad i think it applies in a lot of situations and can be more powerful than you realized the tricky part is it requires a lot of patience you got to do it for six months or a year or three years and it's hard it's hard to stick with that in the long run um last example of this is a weightlifting one um i was at the gym on a friday night one time and uh i was there with a friend we were doing a quick workout and uh it's probably like 20 25 minutes we got done and we're putting our shoes on and this guy who's just kind of a jerk uh went over and was talking to her it was like a quick workout for a friday night and you know like she just kind of moved on but that's like exactly the opposite of the type of uh feedback you want to be getting especially if you're someone who's like new coming into the gym or feeling kind of uncomfortable there you know what people should be saying is oh it's great that you got in here even though you know it's the weekend and um a little cutting comment like that is all that people need to not show up again the next day and so the more that you can be lavish with praise is you know maybe stating it even too strongly but it doesn't really cost you very much to be kind and um you know you may not even remember it but it's the kind of thing that might be enough to get that person to show up again the next time and so in the long run praising the good and ignoring the bad can count for a lot so james you're working on another book right i am yeah and working is the correct term uh so i'm currently kind of slogging and battling against the manuscript i seem to find whatever way requires the most suffering to write books atomic habits the first draft was like 720 pages and then i cut it down to 250 eventually which for the finished version this manuscript's like 600 and something right now so i'm in the in the trimming phase what's this book about um it's a book about strategy and choices and decision making and how we direct our attention uh i'm still kind of finding it and discovering it in a lot of ways but you know one question that you could have after finishing atomic habits is okay that's great i know how to build better habits but which habits should i be focusing on what's the high leverage action how do i figure out where to direct my energy and attention and so those are a lot of the questions that i'm exploring now well i can't wait to have you back to discuss that after i read it twice which i will do i'm sure um thanks very much james this has been really great to sit down with you and uh again i this is almost like reading the book a third time and i i've picked up a lot of things that i hope readers or listeners have also and i look forward to implementing it both personally and professionally that's great thanks peter appreciate the opportunity thank you for listening to this week's episode of the drive if you're interested in diving deeper into any topics we discuss we've created a membership program that allows us to bring you more in-depth exclusive content without relying on paid ads it's our goal to ensure members get back much more than the price of the subscription to that end membership benefits include a bunch of things one totally kick-ass comprehensive podcast show notes that detail every topic paper person thing we discuss on each episode the word on the street is nobody's show notes rival these monthly ama 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Channel: Peter Attia MD

Views: 160,829

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Id: Tn1w7Kw8x5E

Length: 154min 23sec (9263 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 08 2021