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

[Music] jerry seinfeld very famous comedian in the us he was on tour doing a comedy tour and there was a young comic named brad isaac who was opening for seinfeld on stage that night and he caught seinfeld backstage before the show he said mr seinfeld you know i'm an aspiring comic i'm a young comic what tips do you have for a young comic on how to succeed and seinfeld thought for a minute he said well the secret to being a better comic is to write better jokes and the secret to writing better jokes is to write every day so here's what you should do get a wall calendar where you can see every day of the month in the year mapped out on one page then each day that you stick to your behavior of writing for 10 minutes or 15 minutes writing jokes i want you to put an x on that day at the beginning you'll do it every now and then but eventually at some point you're gonna get a string going five six seven eight nine days in a row you'll have a chain and at that point your only goal becomes don't break the chain it doesn't matter how good or how bad the behavior is it doesn't matter whether the writing makes it into the performance that you do it doesn't matter how you feel about the jokes all that matters is that you stick to the behavior the basic idea here that i want to share with you is this idea of designing for laziness so bj fogg the professor from stanford university he likes popcorn he enjoys eating popcorn he just didn't want to eat that much of it and so he took the popcorn out of his kitchen walked down the hallway and into the storage room into his garage climbed up on a ladder and put the popcorn on the highest shelf in the garage now if he really wants to eat it he can just go out and get it it's only going to take 60 seconds but if he's designing for his lazy decision for his default action he's not going to go get the popcorn and so the idea is how can we design the spaces we live in and the places we work so that the default action the lazy behavior is a better choice the key idea is that i've never seen a person consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment if you're trying to fight the environment that you live and work in all the time it's going to be very very hard to stick with the things that are important to you the two-minute rule there is no habit that we're going to work on that takes less than two minutes to do but nearly any habit can be started in under two minutes so if you take exercise for example you know often people will get home from a long day of work and they say oh i'm too exhausted to go for a run or to try to exercise so i never get around to doing it because i think about oh i have to run five kilometers or whatever some long distance that seems overwhelming to me so rather than focus on the whole thing that you need to do i would encourage you to focus on just the first two minutes so what's the first two minutes of that habit i put my running shoes on i get out the door and i lock the door and if you do just that it doesn't matter if you take another step but what you find is that motivation often comes after starting not before we often think that motivation is something that we're supposed to have before we do work but motivation will come as a result of doing some small bit of work and then we can trust that the rest of the process will flow easily but the point here is that the motivation needed to complete a habit is at its peak at the beginning of a behavior the greatest amount of friction for any type of task is that in the beginning is in the starting so the key idea is make it so easy that you can't say no here's another way to do this it's a concept called pre-commitment it's been very well researched and i call these kind of like instant willpower improvements they're things that seem very simple but we often ignore or don't put into practice and if we do put them into practice they result in immediate boosts in willpower here's one study random sample of a business with 3 272 employees the business wanted their employees to get their annual flu shot now to do this they sent them a flyer that said you need to get your flu shot but then they sent another version and that other version said you need to get a flu shot your appointment has already been scheduled for april 22nd click here or you know right send us a message here to choose the time that you want to attend and what they found was just by selecting a date just by picking the day when people would get it they were 2.4 times more likely to follow through but then they sent a third version and they said you need to get your flu shot you've already been scheduled for 1pm on april 22nd if you need to change the time you can click here and do so and the people who had the exact time and date scheduled for them were four times more likely to follow through simply because they were pre-committed and we often think oh we should give people more options we should let them choose whatever they want to do but if we're trying to incentivize behavior trying to make it more likely for people to follow through pre-commitment is a great device for doing this implementation intentions is another method very similar to pre-commitment but slightly different and this is the study that i like that shows this so there was a study that looked at different groups and their motivation and ability to stick with exercise so there are three groups in the study the first group they brought in and they said we want you to track how often you exercise over the next two weeks so that's group one group two we want you to track how often you exercise and we're gonna show you this motivational video about the benefits of exercise why you should do it so group two was the motivated group then there's group three group three got the exact same treatment as group two they were told to track their exercise they were given the motivational speech they were equally motivated but they did one thing differently and that one thing is they filled out this sentence that said during the next week i will partake in at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on this day at this time at this place and what they found when they looked at all the analysis at the end of the study is this is what happened group one 38 of them worked out over the next two weeks the control group no motivation group two remember they were the motivated group and the motivation faded almost immediately as soon as they walked out of the research lab so 35 of them worked out and group 3 it was almost double or even triple the odds that they would work out over the next two weeks 91 of them stuck to exercise and the only difference was that they filled out this little sentence and it seems so basic but by pre-committing ourselves to things we make it much more likely that we fall through implementation intentions which is what this is called this is an implementation intention there are over hunt there are hundreds of studies on this so it's been proven in a bunch of different contexts it's very simple and something that actually leads to real results now you may be saying all right that's great i should just pick times and places for everything i want to work on but in fact we can get really overloaded by the amount of things that we want to improve there are all sorts of things you may want to improve upon so how do you decide where to start again i'm big on simplicity i'm big on eliminating most of the choices that you can focus just on the very best uses of your time and if you're thinking how do i decide what to focus on after this presentation i would say focus on the keystone habit and a keystone habit is a routine or ritual that ripples into the rest of your life it creates a cascade of good behavior so for myself my keystone habit is working out i know that if i work out i get the benefits of exercise sure but i also tend to focus better i have this period of like high focus the post workout high for an hour or so afterward i sleep better that night because i am tired and exhausted and have worked myself physically which means i wake up the next day with better energy which means i focus better then and i also tend to eat better just because i feel like i worked out so i don't want to waste it so i actually eat worse when i don't work out any better when i do now at no point was i trying to build better nutrition habits or better focus or better sleep habits or improved energy but all those things happen as a side effect as a result of the one keystone habit some other common examples of keystone habits ceos will often talk about their daily meditation habit if they get 10 or 20 minutes of meditation in then the rest of their day flows more smoothly artists really being on a daily walk there are tons of famous artists there's a great book called daily rituals that talks about the habits and behaviors of many famous artists and scientists and it's interesting how many of them had a daily walk as part of their routine but these are some examples of if you just do this one behavior you can trust that it will ripple into other areas of your personal and professional life i call this the three r's of habit formation but the basic idea is that no matter what habit you're working on there are three main steps based on the research the first step is the prompt or the cue or the trigger it's like a reminder the thing that signals that we should do something so if my phone buzzes for example that's a trigger the next piece is the routine this is the behavior itself the actual habit that you're going to perform so my phone buzzes that's the trigger i answer the phone that's the routine the third piece is the reward so this is the benefit that you get for doing the behavior and it's important to note that all habits good or bad have some kind of benefit or reward associated with them take smoking for example people will often label smoking as a bad habit so what's the benefit what's the reward of it well there's some kind of physiological reward there's a hit of nicotine that's associated with it and then there are often social rewards right you get to share smoke with a friend or a colleague something like that so regardless of how we label habits or behaviors the important thing is to note that all of them have some kind of benefit neurologically associated with them now so my phone rings that's a reminder i answer the phone that's the routine and then i get to satisfy my curiosity or find out who's calling that's the benefit and what ends up happening is that if that reward is positive then it tells your brain hey remember next time this reminder happens next time this trigger comes along we should repeat that pattern and once you make it through the cycle enough times it becomes a habit it becomes ingrained so how can we leverage the first part of this the trigger or the reminder let's say that i wanted to start meditating i could say all right in the morning i make a cup of coffee and so for this new behavior i could say when i make my morning cup of coffee i will meditate for 60 seconds and so the current behavior the things that you're already doing become the trigger for the new behavior that you're trying to build and the reason that this is important is that your current behaviors things that are already habits have this neurological network built into your mind they already have like an on-ramp in your brain and so you're just kind of tapping into that so that you can tag the new behavior and link it to something that's already strongly correlated in your mind warren buffett one of the most famous investors of our time he adheres to a concept that i'll call the 25 5 rule and this story comes from a man named mike flint who was warren buffett's private pilot mike flint has flown multiple u.s presidents he's also the pilot for warren buffett so he's had a very successful career and he came to warren buffett one day and he said warren i would like to fly this particular type of plane i think whenever we upgrade we should get this new one and he said mike you know if you're working for me in 10 years when we buy a new plane then i probably have failed you as a boss so here's what i'd like you to do and this exercise that i'm about to share you can do on any level you can do it for your career you can do it for the things that you or your team need to get done this month you can do it for the things you need to work on today or this week and he said i'd like you to take the 25 things that you want to achieve in your career and write them down on a list so mike flint goes away writes down 25 things he gets done he says all right great i want you to circle the top five things on that list so spend some more time he circles the top five priorities and says all right tell me what your strategy is at this point mike flynn said well i have my top five things so i'm going to work on those first and he said great what about the other things on your list he said well those will be the things i do on nights or weekends or when i get tired or bored or you know a project stalls i'll work on that and warren buffett said mike you've got it all wrong the things that you have circled are your priorities the other items on your list number six through 25 this is your never do under any circumstance list and the reason is because it's so easy for us to rationalize spending time on things that are good uses of time but not great uses of time it's items that six through 25 on your list that take up time and space and energy because we can justify why we need to do them they're on the list for a reason they just don't happen to be the best uses of our time this video is sponsored by blinkist reading books is great but i've talked about this many times before many books are written very inefficiently and should be much much shorter than they are not only that sometimes you just don't have the time to read a whole book or you might want to just go back and review the main ideas without reading the whole thing again this is why i use and recommend blinkist it's a great app that takes information from the best books and condenses it to 15 minutes that you can read or listen to for someone looking to learn i really think this might be one of the best apps out there right now i recommend starting with a summary for any book on the fight mediocrity beginners reading list or any of the books that are in my blinkist library right now if that sounds good head over to blinkist.com fightmediocrity or click the link in the description below you can give it a try for seven days completely free and if you don't want to continue you can cancel at any time as a fight mediocrity viewer you'll also get 25 off if you decide you want the full membership thanks for watching

Channel: FightMediocrity

Views: 739,723

Keywords: atomic habits, james clear, billionaire advice, millionaire advice, tiny changes remarkable results, tiny changes big results, tim ferriss, productivity, atomic habits audiobook, atomic habits book summary, change your life, ali abdaal, matt d'avella, thomas frank, warren buffett, investing, business, millionaire habits, marketing, psychology, how to get rich

Id: vTQ0q0FsUFY

Length: 14min 3sec (843 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 23 2021