5 Things You Need to Understand to Stop Being Lazy – Atomic Habits by James Clear

one of the places i like to suggest starting is with what i call environment design so basically the things that are on your desk at home your kitchen counter your office at work they influence your behaviors and if you can restructure your physical environment or your digital environment then you're more likely to actually stick with the right habit so as an example a lot of people feel like they watch too much television so walk into pretty much any living room where do all the couches and chairs face and they all face the tvs like what is this room designed to get you to do now i'm not saying you have to restructure your entire house but there are a range of choices you could make right you could take the chair and turn it away from the television and have a face a coffee table with a book on it or you could put the tv inside a wall unit or a cabinet something behind doors so you're less likely to see it you could also increase the friction of the action in the environment so you could like unplug the tv after each use and then only plug it back in if you can say the name of the show that you want to watch so you're not allowed to just like turn netflix on and find something so that's an example of curtailing a bad habit with environment design but you can also use it to promote good habits so for example i used to buy apples and i would put them in the crisper at the bottom of the fridge and i wouldn't see them because they were tucked down there and so then two weeks later they would go bad and i get annoyed because i'm throwing food out throwing money away and so i bought a big display bowl and i put it right in the middle of the counter and put the apples in there and now they're gone in like three days just because it's obvious there's a study that i mentioned in the book from massachusetts general hospital they went into the cafeteria at the hospital they added water to all of the fridges and they also added some of those little rolling carts that have water in it by the food stations in the cafeteria and that was all they did they didn't talk to anybody they didn't motivate anybody and then six months later water sales are up 25 so the sales are down 11 and i always think that's interesting because if you were to go up to any person in that room and be like why are you drinking a coke it'd be like i wanted a coke why do you have water this is what i felt like having but the truth is some percentage of them chose it just because it was obvious just because of what the environment nudged them toward as far as making habits easy there are a variety of things you can do but the simplest one is just to scale your habits down to something that is very easy to do and i like to recommend the two minute rule which basically says you take whatever habit you're trying to build and you scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do so do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat or read 30 books a year becomes read one page and sometimes people resist that a little bit because they're like okay i know the real thing i want to do isn't take my yoga mat out right i know i actually want to do the workout like i'm just looking to build this habit of taking this mat out all the time so if it's a mental trick and i know it's a trick like why would i fall for it and if you feel that way then my recommendation would be well actually in the beginning for the first few weeks limit yourself to only two minutes all you do is put your shoes on running shoes on step out the door and lock the door and then you walk back inside or all you do is take your yoga mat out it sounds funny but like for example so i had a i had a reader who he ended up doing this he lost a lot of weight lost over 100 pounds and for the first six weeks he only went to the gym for like five minutes and then he would leave 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 right it's not that you're like okay clearly this is not going to be the thing that gets this guy in shape but when you step back for a second you realize he was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week he was mastering the art of showing up and i think that this is like a really deep truth about habits that gets overlooked a lot which is a habit must be established before it can be improved right it has to become the standard in your life your new normal before you can worry about optimizing it or expanding it from there if you don't become the type of person that goes to the gym for five minutes you don't have a chance to be the person who stays for 45 minutes five days a week so i think so often we're we're so focused on finding the perfect diet plan or the ideal workout program we're so focused on optimizing that we don't give ourselves permission to show up in a small way but even if it's only for you know five minutes or five push-ups or one uh sentence that you write do something so that you can master the art of showing up and make it your new normal and then once you become that person well then you have a lot of options for expanding and improving from there there's this great story that i mentioned in the book about twyla tharp the famous dance choreographer and instructor and she trains for still even now she trains for two hours a day she's you know 50s 60s she's been training for a long time dancing her whole career but she doesn't actually focus on the exercise habit the habit that she focuses on building is i put on my workout clothes and my sweatshirt and i hail the cab on the side of the street and if i've done that then i've completed the habit and i think the the insight that she realized is that habits are often the entry point not the end point they're the cab not the gym they're like an entrance ramp to the bigger routines in your life and if you can master that habit that like little decisive moment that determines what happens in the next chunk of time then the rest of it kind of falls in line i have this moment each morning where either i open up evernote and i start writing the next article i'm going to work on or i go to espn and i check the latest sports news and what happens in the next hour is really determined by what happens in the first like 30 seconds because if i go to espn then the next hour is kind of shot but if i start writing the article if i master that entry point then i'm kind of speeding in the right direction and the momentum carries me into the rest of the task and i think that for me that's a little bit inspiring when it comes to building habits because what you realize is that there's actually not that much to change there may be five or ten of those little decisive moments those little entry points throughout your day that determine whether the next chunk of time is productive or not and if you can organize your environment or join a community or restructure your habits so that those entry points are mastered then you're much more likely to live a good productive day so many of our habits are socially reinforced i have a whole chapter in the book but even though i wrote a whole chapter on it i think i undersold the importance of social environment and how important it is for building your habits so you have a job interview and you wear a dress or a suit and tie in not a bathing suit or workout clothes or something just because you know that's the expectation of the other people in the group or you uh walk onto an elevator and you turn around to face the front even though you could face the back or the side or whatever but that's not what people do so you do what everybody else does or you move into a new neighborhood and you walk outside on tuesday night and you see that all of your neighbors have their recycling bins out you're like oh we need to sign up for recycling because i guess that's what people like us do in this neighborhood and then you stick to that habit for 20 years right mostly because it's socially reinforced and so they're all kinds of things the things we do at work the way we dress the things we do at school the religion we do or don't practice they're all reinforced by the people that are around us so i think the punch line to this is that you want to join a group to join a tribe where your desired behavior is the normal behavior because if it's normal in that group then it's going to give you a reason to stick to it because your habits are going to be a signal to the people around you hey i belong too right like i get it i fit in i'm part of this tribe as well so social environment is a big driver of whether you stick to habits for the long run and joining groups that have your desired habits i think it's a great way to reinforce those for good [Music] one reason bad habits stick so readily that they form so easily is because bad habits often the immediate reward is favorable right like what's the immediate reward of eating a donut it's kind of great it's sweet it's sugary it tastes good it's only the ultimate reward if you repeat that habit for six months or a year or two years that is unfavorable meanwhile good habits are often the exact opposite the immediate reward of going to the gym or going to the gym for like a week isn't really that great your body's probably sore you don't have much to show for you your body looks the same your weight hasn't really changed but it's if you stick to that for six months or a year or two years then the ultimate reward is favorable and so a lot of the challenge of building good habits and breaking bad ones is figuring out how to pull the long-term costs of your bad habits into the present moment so you feel a little bit of that pain right now and have a reason to avoid it and pull the long-term rewards of your good habits into the present moment so it feels good and you have a reason to kind of make it through that like valley of death in the beginning and stick with it while you're waiting for those delayed rewards to accumulate but there are other things that you can do in the short term to feel more gratified while you're working on those habits so here's just one little tactic let's say that you're either trying to work out or build a habit of meditating or something and so each time you do your habit of meditating for five minutes you have this little jar of marbles and you got like 100 marbles in there and 90 are red and 10 or blue and after each instance of your habit you walk over and you pull a marble out of the jar and if you pull out one of the 90 then nothing happens it's just like pat on the back good job you do what you're supposed to but if you pull out one of the 10 then you get some kind of reward that's exciting to you maybe you get to watch netflix for an hour and not feel guilty or go for a walk outside or take a bubble bath or buy yourself a new jacket whatever it is like something that that feels rewarding and what you just did was you introduced an element of immediate gratification and of like surprise and delight to the whole process and so yeah that first week when you're meditating you still might not identify as a meditator or you still might not have a sense of calm wash over your life but you have this other interesting thing that is rewarding right away that maybe gets you to stick with it while you're waiting for those long-term rewards to accumulate

Channel: FightMediocrity

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Keywords: atomic habits, james clear, discipline, atomic habits book summary, atomic habits audiobook, habits, motivation, ali abdaal, rich roll, matt d'avella, london real, tiny changes remarkable results, the surprising power of small habits, thomas frank, joe rogan, joe rogan experience, productivity

Id: qHUFgFYdJck

Length: 9min 51sec (591 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 28 2020