- Thanks to Brilliant for
sponsoring this video, and supporting my channel. So last week I did a video summarizing three of the biggest ideas in this book right here. "Atomic Habits" by James Clear. And that's the only Dr.
Seuss's calamity in this video but I just couldn't help it. But like I said, in that video, this is one of the better
self development books that I've ever read, and when it comes to building habits, I think this is the
best habit building book that I've ever read. But while those three big ideas
we discussed in that video do kind of encapsulate
the strategic component of building habits, they aren't the entire picture because as anybody who's
ever studied business will tell you to run
a successful business, you need two things, strategy and tactics. Strategy being the foundational
sort of birds eye view, huge ideas that really form the foundation of everything you're trying to do. And tactics being the
more in the trenches plans that allow you to carry out the strategy on a day to day basis, in addition to dealing with whatever crap life happens to throw your way. And while running a
business and building habits in your everyday life, aren't
completely identical goals, they do have one key component in which they are very, very alike, which is that you need
both strategy and tactics. And luckily "Atomic Habits" also deals with this
more tactical question. In fact clear lays are
four different rules for making habits stick over the longterm and making sure that you
stick with them even when life inevitably gets in your way. So in today's video, we are gonna summarize those four rules, I'm gonna give you my
thoughts on each of them. So let's get started with rule number one, which is to make it obvious. Any habit that you're trying to build, shouldn't come with question marks on it. Where am I gonna do it? How do I do it? When do I do it? If you're asking these questions, you're already getting
off on the wrong foot. One of my favorite quotes from this book is actually one of my
favorite quotes in general which is that, "You do not rise
to the level of your goals, "You fall to the level of your systems." And if your system hasn't
defined a clear picture of what a habit is supposed to be, then you're not really
gonna know what to do. For instance, I will eat
more vegetables is unclear. How do you know on any given day that you've actually completed that goal? Is a single baby carrot enough? Well, if you've set your
system in an unclear way or if you set the bare minimum so low, then on many days you're
gonna find yourself falling to that bare minimum, eating a baby carrot and
saying, "Hey, I ate vegetables." And that's the thing, on really busy days, or days when you're feeling
just really, really tired or unmotivated, you can bet that you
are going to just fall to the bare minimum requirement
that your system has set. And over time, this can
lead to self sabotage because while you are
technically fulfilling your requirements of the system, the results you get through that habit, through that practice are
so infinitesimally small that you don't see real
progress over time. You're basically just kind of stalled out. But you can easily fix this
by making the goal obvious by setting some specific requirements that give you a very clear bare minimum, that's actually gonna get you results. So going back to our vegetables goal, instead of saying, "I
will eat more vegetables," just again, very unclear, maybe say something like, "I will eat one full serving of vegetables "every day at lunch, except for on Sundays "and fries don't count." I don't know who thinks
fries are a vegetable but hey, we gotta be specific here, right? But you can see it's very
clear minimum requirement makes it a lot harder to cheat
yourself in the long term. And it also makes it a lot more obvious what you're supposed to be
doing on a day to day basis. And if you wanna make
this even more obvious, then it's a good idea
to have a written record of your past accomplishments, of your past compliance with
the habit that you're set out. In other words, track your habits. We, human beings have
a very fallible memory. Sometimes it's hard to
remember what we did yesterday let alone two weeks ago. So if you have an actual concrete
record of what you've done you'll often find it motivating
and you'll find it more easy to keep doing this in the future. Now when it comes to tracking your habits, there are a ton of
different methods out there. If you're a fan of pen and paper, I did a video earlier this year about something called the Martin System, which my friend Martin created, and a lot of people seem to like, so I'll have a link in
description for that video, but there are also tons of
habit tracking apps out there, Habitica being my favorite one, because it brings in lots of
video game design elements and video games designers have had probably about
40 years this point to study psychology and figure out what motivates players to
keep playing their games. So you can take those insights, put them into a habit tracking app, And at least in my experience, it makes it a lot more motivating to use. Of course you could also
just mark things off on the calendar, mark each day as you do the habit, which Jerry Seinfeld is very famous for having done with writing jokes, and that's why this is often
called the Seinfeld Effect. But whatever you do,
calendar, app, Martin System, whatever it is, simply tracking your habits is going to make it more
obvious every single day what you're supposed to be doing, because you have a record. Now, this isn't always going to be enough. Just making a habit obvious isn't going to ensure that
you're going to do it. So let's talk about the
second rule on Claire's list which is to make it attractive. The idea here is to pair the habit that you're trying to build,
which is often difficult, requires self-discipline,
requires motivation and willpower with something that
you already like to do. And this can be especially important in the early stages of this habits where again, it's taking mostly
willpower for you to do it because it hasn't yet worn
a well-worn neural pathway that makes it an automatic behavior. Or I guess in definition, a habit. Giving an example, my friend Martin wrote
this script for this video, and like me he doesn't
necessarily like writing especially when it's nonfiction
productivity scripts. But there are two settings
in which he can make himself get into the writing habit and get started by tweaking his environment to make it a little bit more enjoyable. The first one is at home,
he'll clean off his desk, he'll make a fresh cup of
tea, since he's a tea drinker, and he'll light a candle. So he's making his home
environment a bit more attractive as a writing space. Alternatively, sometimes he
actually goes out in his car and we'll park somewhere in nature where he can look at trees and writes a script on his iPad. Personally at a knock at the
allure of riding in my car, I think it'll would be very uncomfortable, but hey, whatever works
for him works for him, and whatever works for
you will work for you. So try to tweak your environment in a way that makes it more enjoyable to get into this habit. You could also create what I
like to call Jedi Councils, which is just my nerdy term
for a mastermind group. I don't really like the
term mastermind group 'cause a lot of those
fake gurus love to use it. So I'm gonna go at Jedi Council, but essentially, a Jedi Council is just a
group of like-minded people who have similar levels of ambition, who agreed to get on a call
every week or every two weeks and support each other. I was on the same Jedi Council call with the same four people
for about four years. And every couple of
weeks we'd get on a call, and we talk about what we had done over the past couple of weeks. Every week, somebody
would be in the hot seat, they would kind of do a deep dive on the struggles they were having, what they were trying
to do in their business or in their goals. We'd all just sort of provide support and encouragement and accountability. At the end of that call,
everyone would say, "Here's what I'm going to
do in the next two weeks, "keep me accountable." One thing I've noticed with friends, is that often friends
are too close to you, they like it too much to really
hold your feet to the fire with a goal. Maybe some friends will actually do it, but a lot of friends
will sort of forgive you when you fall off the horse, which is not always what you need. Sometimes you need to somebody
who's kind of at arms length, who cares about you, but they care about you in a way in which they're going to really
hold your feet to the fire and ask you, "Why did you not do what
you said you were gonna do?" You know, they're not gonna
take it can excuses from you. So it can be very, very helpful
to form a group like this. The accountability
these people provide you might not always be
enough to help you hurdle the difficulties involved in sticking with your habit longterm, which is why sometimes
you need to look for a way to reduce that difficulty. In other words, make it easy. The main thing we're looking to do here is to remove as much friction as possible from whatever positive habit
that you're trying to build. So for an example, let's talk
about guitar for a second. It took me all of two seconds
to go and grab this guitar off the stand over there. Now, when I bought this guitar, when I bought my first guitar in Colorado, they always tell me the same thing. You live in Colorado, which
is a very dry environment. So you need to buy a case and you need to keep
the guitar in the case as much as possible, and you also need to buy
this humidification device which you have to fill with
distilled water every two days, Otherwise guitar is gonna crack over time and become worthless. And I understand what they're
saying and they're not wrong, but here's the thing, I did that at first diligently
when I bought my first guitar here in Colorado, and as a result, I almost never played it, because it was locked in the case, it would take me, you know,
probably 20, 25 seconds to go get the case, unlock
it, take the stupid humidifier out of the strings, and then get myself ready to play. So now I've said, "You know what? "I don't care if my
guitars crack over time, "I will buy a new guitar
40 years down the line, "when my old one has worn itself out." Because in exchange, by keeping my guitars out
all over the house on stands, just ready to play, ready to pick up whenever I have a whim to
play, I play much more often. And as a result, I've seen my
skill grows so much faster. And the funny thing is, I don't even have to make
it obvious for this goal. I don't have to say,
I will practice guitar and do these scale patterns
every single day for 20 minutes. It's just easy. I love to play guitar. It is something that takes work, but because the guitar is right there whether I'm upstairs, whether
I'm down here in the studio, whenever I have a spare moment, I'll often pick it up, and about half the time I pick it up, I'll end up making something up that I really like and wanna record. So, make it easy. Remove the friction involved
in getting into whatever habit that you want to do. Another way to make a habit easy, is to Start with baby steps, or in other words, to set the bare minimum at least at first, at
a level that you know you could accomplish every single day. Even if something weird
and unexpected comes up and interrupts your day, even if life gets in your way. So for example, and Martin put this in the script, I think to annoy me, but if you're trying to meditate, which I don't like to do, and you set your goal and
immediately at 10 minutes per day, you might find that your mind is not used to 10 minutes of meditation. My mind isn't even used for
30 seconds of meditation. It's just not for me. But if you're trying to get
into a meditation habit, it might be more useful to set
a two minute goal to start. Two minutes is something
you can absolutely do, every single day. You probably meditate for two minutes while waiting in line
at the grocery store. And if you can get your mind used to the feeling of
stillness for two minutes, you'll be able to slowly work
yourself up to three minutes, five minutes, 10 minutes, half an hour, whatever people who meditate like to do. I also find this works for writing. When I was writing my book "10 Steps To Earning Awesome Grades." I set my bare minimum
goal at 500 words per day, because I knew if I had to, I could write 500 words
sitting on the toilet. They might not be very good, but I could do it. And in some days I find
myself pushing past that 500 word minimum goal. Some days I would write 3000 words, but I knew if I set my
goal at 3000 words per day, on a lot of days, I was going to fail. So set a baby steps goal, and don't worry about what
your results are right now if you're only sticking
to the bare minimum, as Claire writes in the book, "You should be far more concerned "with your current trajectory, "the direction of which
you're going extrapolated "based on the points of
data you already have, "than with your current results." In other words, ask yourself,
"Where am I headed?" with the steps that you've been making, with the incremental
bumps you've been making, where are you gonna be in the future? Well, if you like how the future looks, then don't worry about
where you are right now, because where you are right now represents your training ground. It's kind of like this
episode of "Dragon Ball" I used to watch when I was a kid, where Goku had to run around with this giant a hundred
pound turtle shell on his back and he could run very, very slowly and could barely jump, but the moment he takes it off, he could jump like a
hundred feet in the air. I thought that was real in fifth grade, and I thought I'd be able to
jump a hundred feet in the air, If I put a turtle shell in my back, or like carried weights
around, that's fake. But the idea is there, isn't? So let's move onto the
fourth rule in the book, which is to make it satisfying. So part of what makes
building a habit so difficult to something that the human brain kind of hasn't wired
itself to fully accept yet. And that's the concept
of delayed gratification. This is when you forego a present reward, a short term reward, in order to get a future
and hopefully better reward. And this comes up a
lot in modern day life, because we love to make big plans. Plans that right now might
cost a lot of effort, money and time, but that potentially won't pay off for a very, very long time. And I say this happens more often now, because in the modern day a lot of us can reliably count on
that future existing. So we go to school, or we start that scrappy
business in our garage, or we save up for that PS5, but for most of human history, we were hunter gatherers who had to rely on what
we can get right now. And while PS5s are very hard to catch, so as the saying goes,
one PS5 in the hand, is worth two PS5s in the book. In other words, if you don't know that
your next meal is coming, then you learn to prioritize
what you can get right now over future potential, maybe rewards. Loss aversion becomes a very, very useful survival mechanism, when the potential
consequence is starvation. And we've never fully
escaped this mindset. This deep seeded brain wiring
takes a long time to change. Our external environment has
changed relatively rapidly. Seems like it's been thousands of years, but in terms of brain wiring, well, that's pretty done quick and the brain just hasn't
had time to catch up. As Claire points out in the book, "Because of how we are wired, "most people will spend all day "chasing quick hits of satisfaction." And you can see how this might
be a little bit productive for building strong habits. Since a lot of habits aren't
immediately satisfying and take a bit of discipline to get you toward their eventual goal. So what we need is some metaphorical way of getting all three PS5s. We need something that motivates you to stick with the habit longterm, but that gives you something
satisfying in the moment. In other words, we wanna bundle some
sort of short term reward with the longterm rewards
gained through the habit. Now there are really
bad ways to set this up, for example, if you are a runner and you're trying to go
on a run every single day, maybe giving yourself an
unhealthy snack as a reward, isn't the best idea. For one, eating as little as three Oreos could actually counteract
the calories burned in an eight minute mile, and well, not everyone's
gonna care about that. That is something worth considering, but number two, you could actually end
up building a bad habit through rewarding yourself
for sticking to a good one. And that's just not really
a good thing to be doing. So instead, find a way to give
yourself a short term reward that is helpful in and of itself. For example, if you go for that run, maybe reward yourself by coming back and listening to an audio book, or spending the time
when you're cooling down, reading a fiction book. That way you also get to reading time in, but you're also rewarding
yourself for going for that run. Another potential short term reward here might be just the simple
and sweet dopamine release of checking off a check box. Personally, I love
writing out my daily plan on my whiteboard, so I can check off those
check boxes as I go. And I briefly mentioned habit
tracking systems earlier, but another great benefit of
marking down your progress is simply having a record of your success and deriving satisfaction
from being able to look back on that record. In any case, finding
these short term rewards or being creative and
coming up with your own, can be especially
valuable in the beginning, because like I said in the last video, the compounding effect of
their skill building journey really hasn't started
to show its power yet. In the beginning, your
daily 1% improvements still might not add up to all that much, and you might be feeling
a little bit discouraged about your results. So if you can pair that with a reward, at least until the compounding effect has really started to show, you're gonna be able to stick it out through that initial difficult period. Additionally, it just feels good to see a long unbroken streak of successes, but if you do end up failing, like I said in the last video, and I feel compelled to reiterate here, don't beat yourself up about it. Avoid what Claire calls,
the second mistake. The secondary data point
that causes a failure to transform from an outlier, an anomaly to something that indicates
a trajectory towards failure. If you can avoid making
that second mistake, if you can avoid starting that trajectory, then a mistake is just
that, it's a mistake. It remains in the past, and it doesn't really
hurt you all that much. So typically summarize this summary, for whatever habit you're trying to build, consider these four rules, make it easy make it obvious, make it attractive and make it satisfying. Implement just one of these rules into any habit you're building, and I think you're gonna
have a much easier time sticking to it over the long term. And if you think about these four rules a little bit more broadly, you can probably see
that they actually apply to more than just personal habit building. And that they're used in a
lot of the products and tools that you use every single day. For instance, if you're
somebody who wants to get better at math or science or computer science, a tool like Brilliant, might
be a lot more easy to use on a day to day basis and to stick to, because the people who build Brilliant understand these habit building rules. Which is why when you get
into one of their courses, instead of having a very
long piece of text to read, you're almost immediately thrown into some sort of bite
sized interactive problem that gets you results right away. And because you're getting
active immediately, and you're getting the satisfaction of using the material to solve a problem, like in the algorithms course, where you learn to drag
different blocks around to make a correctly formatted algorithm, you gain the satisfaction
required to push through. They're using that satisfaction
principle right away. They're using that attractive
principle right away. Of course, there are
a lot of other reasons to use Brilliant,
besides these rules here. For instance, they have more
than 60 in depth courses in their library, including
a full math suite. That starts from the
basics of number theory, and it goes all the way up
to calculus and probability, math for quantitative trading and finance, along with science courses
like gravitational physics, and computer science courses like their Python programming course and the Algorithms course
that I mentioned earlier. And if you're one of the first 200 people to go over to
brilliant.org/ThomasFrank and sign up, you're gonna get 20% off your annual premium Brilliant subscription. So check them out and as always, thank you so much for watching. Hopefully you found something helpful and actionable in this video. Again, I highly recommend reading
this book in its entirety. It is one of the better
self development books that I've read. So, highly recommend this
on link in description down below. And as always, if you did like this video hitting that light bulb is a great way to tell the YouTube algorithm
to push this channel out to more people. So, thank you if you do that, and if you haven't already hit that subscribe button right there, because next month I've got
a couple of great videos coming out specifically on
some personal finance topics. A lot of you've been asking me about investing in credit cards. So I'm working on videos
for both of those topics. So hit that subscribe button and make sure you don't miss out on those. Additionally, I'm gonna
have a couple of more videos in a playlist right here, all about habits and self
discipline, so check that out. Or you can check out my music channel if you are interested in
the whole guitar segment, I'll put a link right there. And beyond that, if you don't wanna do any of this, then I don't know, go skateboard in an
empty pool or something, because as always, I'm not your dad.
hi thomas
His comment that friends may not be always be the best accountability partner(s) prompted me to ask this question:
Who wants to form a group similar to the one Thomas mentioned (Jedi Council)?
I think a group of 3-5 people would work well. Let’s keep it simple; accountability for our systems.
I’m a uni freshman by the way. Send me a pm if you’re interested.