How To Build Awesome Habits: James Clear | Rich Roll Podcast

[Music] Congrats on the book yeah thanks you know but uh yeah it was I mean it took me three years from start to finish and then it also just for your first one there's so much learning that goes into it like yeah it pretty much every part of the process I'm flying blind and just I'm learning as I go so there's that once I call Hofstadter's law or it's like everything takes twice as long as you expect even if you take this into account yeah oh my god the timelines on this thing are insane you know so it's quite it's quite something it's a huge accomplishment the book is great and excited to break it down with you yeah cool thanks thanks for coming out here today I think the best way to launch into it is to define our terms I mean let's talk about before we even get into the nuances of all of this like let's just define what a habit is sure so there are a couple ways to think about it but I would say just quick definition a habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to be performed more or less automatically so you can do it pretty much on autopilot but another way to think about it I think this is a useful way to define a habit is that as you go through life you face different problems and some of those problems are big and some of them are small like you needed tie your shoes and whenever you face a problem your brain starts looking for solutions to that and as you come across solutions to the recurring problems in life you start to automate those and so every morning you wake up and you put your shoes on and you got this little problem that you need to solve and pretty soon after you tie your shoes a hundred times or five hundred times or a thousand times you can do it pretty much without thinking and so that's another way of thinking about habits is that they're kind of these like automatic solutions we fall into for whatever the recurring problems are we face right behavior that becomes habituated yeah and you know like they're the interesting thing about this is you don't necessarily have to have the same habit to solve a recurring problem like if you come home from work each day and you feel stressed and exhausted one person might play video games for an hour and that's a way to resolve problem so they get in the habit of doing and they just walk over the controller that I'm think about it another person might go for a run for 20 minutes or meditate for 10 minutes third person might smoke a cigarette and all of those are just solutions to that problem that you're facing and that I think is another powerful lesson is that your original habit is not necessarily the optimal one and once you realize that then it kind of becomes your responsibility to become a little more aware of what those habits are and think about can you shape them or design them right and so a habit is the physical manifestation it's a behavior a physical manifestation of your psychological makeup your your emotional body and your conscious or unconscious mind right like habits flow from what is already built inside of us on some level right so to kind of deconstruct what a habit is how to change it what's a good habit what's a bad habit how to flow from good to bad good it it demands I would imagine and you're the expert here you know a real analysis of like how our brains function you have to look at psychology you have to look at neurology you have to look at the science and understand the human mechanism in its holistic form I think that's true and you bring up a really interesting point and one that I wanted to answer or think about in the book because the so in the book I lay out this four stage model for how habits work and the reason the second stage is there it's all about craving and prediction in other words like you come across a cue or some kind of context and then you interpret it in a certain way and that's where we're getting to this point that you're just making which is that the habit only comes after the habit is the behavior that follows your prediction or your interpretation of how you should act in a given context and you know for one person they might see their couch as the place where they read for an hour each night and so their interpretation of that context is I should open up a book for another person they might see the couch as the place where they turn on Netflix for an hour and eat a bowl of ice cream and so that's a different interpretation of the same physical cue and so in that way habits kind of follow their this lagging measure of how you predict you should respond to the different context now yeah and I like how you couch it in the context of of habits being a solution to a problem they're not the problem themselves necessarily they're a reflection of what's going on inside of us their solution to whatever emotional state it is I mean a habit is a way of adapting to an environment or solving a problem yes right yeah it's a way of solving a recurring problem you come over it again and again and then pretty soon you're falling into that that pattern right so a lot has been written about habit change you know you go to any bookstore certainly in the airports there's no shortage of of self-help primers on how to change our behaviors how to develop healthy effective habits and now you're kind of coming into this sphere with a little bit of a different perspective so maybe it would make sense to kind of canvass conventional wisdom on on habit change and and perhaps your like different take on how we approach this sure so I mean I think there are a variety of little insights in the book that are maybe different or just a slightly slightly different angle on on the common takes but I'll just go over some of the big ones real quick so there are many different fields I draw it on for the book and I think that I like to call myself idea agnostic and what I mean is I don't really care where a good idea comes from as long as it's a good idea or practical or useful so nervous science biology psychology and so on but the most common area that people talk about habits in is psychology and there are kind of two big movements or bodies of research that have happened over the last hundred years the first was behavioral psychology and so this started with classical conditioning like Pavlov's dogs and things like that and then BF Skinner's work with kind of a cue like the light would go on and sign the little suitcase right and then the rat would press a lever and then they'd get a pellet and so this kind of linking the pellet to the light and so you have a cue and then a response than a reward and Skinner defined this as stimulus response reward so once you start to link the cue to the reward they realize they could shape pretty much any kind of action and do Higgs book power of habit and kind of popularized this and brought it back into the modern spotlight and this idea of a cue routine their reward so that's the first kind of major area the second is cognitive psychology and this kind of took often like the 50s and 60s and has continued into the modern day but the psychologists started playing with what Skinner put together and realize that well it wasn't just the cue and the reward that shaped people's behavior also our thoughts and moods and emotions our beliefs kind of our internal states shaped behavior - and this was a question that I kind of had rolling around in my mind when I started working on atomic habits was well how come the same person will respond to the same cue in a different way at different times you know like if I if I walk into the kitchen and I see a plate of cookies it's like a visual cue and in one case I might be like oh those look good I should go eat them but you can just as easily imagine a situation where I just finished eating dinner in the other room and I walk in and I see a plate of cookies and I'm like oh I'm stuffed I don't want to eat anything so what's going on there the cue is the same the reward is the same why aren't you taking the same action and I think it's because of that internal process you're interpreting the cue differently based on your current state and so the model that I lay out in the book of the four different stages that I have it goes through it tries to combine these two major fields it includes the cue and the reward because those are important for shaping our behavior but it also includes an additional stage about our interpretation of the reward because your internal moods and states and feelings can change and as they do your behavior does as well and so I kind of wanted to model that I felt like encapsulated all of that and that's one of the major difference right so you added two steps to this now it's cue craving response for reward right right and so that allows you to kind of more deeply probe into that that aspect of contextualizing these cues it actually brings up to I think important things so the first is the contextualizing bit cue which you just mentioned it allows us to understand like why do you why to ques get you to do anything it's because of how you interpret them if you believe the cue is attractive then you take an action the second thing that it does is it helps clarify what the reward is like why is something rewarding why do you find it rewarding and one of the reasons is because it satisfies the craving that preceded the action so one way to put this is that perceived value motivates you to act actual value motivates you to repeat so it when you buy something on Amazon you don't actually buy the product like you don't you don't buy the book because you don't actually have it yet what you buy is the image the product creates in your mind you buy your expectation or the perceived value of the sales page it's only after you get the book and you read it and you're like oh this is really good that's when the actual value it satisfies that craving you have before and it reinforces oh hey this was enjoyable I should do it again next time so you kind of have both of those on on each side of the the behavior cravings that generally derive from very primal instinctual reptilian brain instincts that we have I mean typically and these function on an unconscious level and in almost everybody I mean when you're when you're surfing Amazon and you hit by on something like you said it's not it's not necessarily driven by this interest in this product advancing you along your trajectory it's probably more likely because you feel uncomfortable in that moment and the dopamine rush of buying that thing will make you feel you know what will change your emotional state and give you some sense of comfort driven by your hormonal state right and this goes back you know you talked about this in the book the book and in the writing that you do like we want people to love us we want to be perceived well by others or we think these material things are gonna you know fulfill that that spiritual hole that we have you know our emotional need and all these drivers function on a level where we're not really aware of how they're impacting our behaviors and habits throughout the day so how do you kind of think about those things well in a sense you could say that every behavior is driven by the desire for a change in state and so when you smoke a cigarette or eat a bag of Doritos or pick up your phone what you really want is not the nicotine or the calories from the Doritos or the the likes on social media what you want is to feel less anxious or to feel approved or to not be bored anymore so it's really the desire to change that state that you're in that motivates you to act and the behavior and in many cases a lot of our modern technology as an example this you didn't we didn't evolve you didn't come out of the womb with like a desire to check Instagram right like there's nothing evolutionarily wired there it's just a modern manifestation of an ancient desire to gain respect and approval or to not be abandoned by the tribe or to feel approved and you know in some of the capacity and so we kind of have those like deeper primal drives and then the secondary layer on top of it is just the modern manifestation of that behavior and how we're resolving it in the moment yeah I mean it's really it's interesting that the the more this is like a subject matter that's so important because the habits that comprise how we behave and navigate our day are determinative of our entire experience as a human being not only do they determine whether we're going to be you know quote-unquote successful or failures they literally dictate every aspect of our of our experience as humans so on some level like there is no subject more important and really understanding how behaviors work so I applaud you for taking on such a monumental like this is not easy to understand and I think also it's it's um it's something that that we can easily kind of fall prey to intellectualizing and feeling like okay I understand this but yet still find ourselves incapable of actually implementing the knowledge into the behavior change that you're trying to you know sort of speak about and and instigate in people hmm yeah well so first of all I totally agree it was an incredibly difficult topic to choose especially for my first book I ended up my solution was just try to like work harder at it I there was a there was a quote from Elaine de Bataan that kind of became my my mantra as I worked through where he says of many books a reader thinks this could have been truly great if only the author was willing to suffer a little more I was like all right my life mantra I guess I just need to suffer a little more yeah but uh but yeah I ended up writing I think like 720 750 pages and then cut it down to the final 250 because it just it ended up the scope of the behavior change and human behavior is just so wide that you know anyway I need I thought like I needed to cover all the bases and then figure out what are the actionable steps and your point that it's easy to just theorize or get kind of like mm caught up in your head about this rather than translating it into something actionable I think that's a crucial thing and it's one thing that I pride myself on my writing is that I try to be scientifically based but also highly actionable and that was the idea of behind the four laws of behavior change that are in the book cuz I wanted to kind of give people up like a set of levers or a toolbox that okay here like the four levers you can pull to try to make habits easier or to make bad habits harder yeah and I want to get into those those for those four laws but before we do that why don't we I want to I'm interested in what got you interested in this subject matter to begin with I find that most people who you know walk that path of becoming obsessed with a certain subject matter or idea tend to be people who are trying to solve that equation for themselves so is that part of the influence in a sense every article i've written and this book is just a reminder to myself hmm my publisher told me there's something to the effect of like we write the books we need ourselves and that's it's funny because you know when I write about habits a lot of people assume that I have my habits so dialed in because I'm the guy writing them right but I'm writing about it to learn about it you know I'm writing about it to try to improve I consider my readers and myself to be Pearce right we're all just kind of experimenting and operating and working on stuff and the only difference is I just share the lessons when I learned them so yeah I I definitely had an internal desire for that and then there have been a variety of areas in my life where I've had to implement that athletics photography writing and building a business of course and all of those have been kind of like test labs for me to put the ideas under prep right so y0 went on this on habits yeah well i think that a little bit of it comes back to what you just mentioned a few minutes ago about how important habits are I didn't know this at first so I was a baseball player for many years and as any athlete can tell you there are all kinds of habits that you have a practice rituals things like that and I was benefiting from that you know my strength coach would tell me to do something or my coaches would hold me accountable to certain habits and that would help pull the rest of my life in line you know I always did better in school when I had sports as well it would it would like give me something to anchor my day around and so I knew that it was working but I didn't have a language for it and so it was only until maybe five years after my career ended and I finished graduate school and I started like looking into this stuff a little bit more that I started to come across the science of habit formation and behavior change and developed a language for it and started write about it so I kind of implicitly know it was important but didn't discover that the actual way to write about until later now the second thing here though is that I as I dug into the topic more I started like unearth these layers and realized wow this is actually even more important than I thought and this comes back to the point that you made a few minutes ago which is that habits are one of the phrases I'd like to use is that pretty much any of the results in your life are a lagging measure of your habits right so you're right weight as a lagging measure of your eating habits your bank account as a lagging measure of your financial habits your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits like the outcomes are just the the manifestation of the behaviors that preceded them right so you kind of get what you repeat in that way well that makes sense people understand that that's important so that's one reason why habits are crucial but there's another thing that habits do that is even more central even more important and that is that your habits are the way that you embody a particular identity so every morning that you make your bed you embody the habits of you embodied the identity of an organized person someone who's clean every time you go to the gym you embody the identity of someone who is fit every time you sit down to write a sentence or a page you embody the identity of someone who's a writer and so in that sense habits are like every action you take is kind of like a vote for the type of person that you believe that you are and as you take these actions you build up evidence of a particular identity and pretty soon your beliefs have something to like root themselves and it's like man you know I've showed up at the gym for four days a week for the last three months I guess like I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts and that I think is the true reason what habits are so important once I realized how beliefs and behaviors are connected that it's like this two-way street then I've started to think alright maybe this is really something not only does it deliver those external results the clean room or the you know bigger bank account but also the internal results of shaping your sense of self image and what you believe right so let's drill into these four laws you've got we'll just break them down okay so I've hinted at this process so far but the four stages that any habit goes through cue craving response reward so there's some type of cue or raw data that gets your attention then you predict or interpret that data in some way which motivates you to act take a response and then somehow that behavior either benefits you or does not benefit you and that's what gets you to close the feedback loop and update your prediction for the next time and decide if you want to continue that although a caveat to that I would imagine is that there is a rule you're saying it either benefits you or it doesn't but isn't there an argument that it's it's benefiting you somehow maybe not in a good way but you're getting something out of that like if you have a habit that's unhealthy some bad behavior and everybody tells you you got to stop doing that you're you're getting some positive result from that even if it's twisted you know or unhealthy there's something inside of you that compels you to act that way because because you're getting something out of it right so that's actual point yeah like it whether it's masking some pain or whatever it is there there's a reason behind that all behaviors those that are repeated service in some way I guess we'd say all habits serve you in some way yeah and one way to think about this is that every behavior produces multiple outcomes across time so if you take a bad habit or an unhealthy habit like eating a doughnut or something the immediate outcome is favorable but sugary it's tasty it's enjoyable in the moment that's how it serves you that's the reason why you repeat it the ultimate outcome if you repeat that every day for the next three months or year or whatever is you end up gaining weight or you're less healthy or so on for good habits it's often the reverse right like sometimes you know the benefit of going to the gym in many people's eyes is the immediate outcomes unfavorable sweat I have to work it's effortful it's hard and sacrifice I don't get to watch TV I got to go there instead these Savini the outcome is unfavorable the ultimate outcome if you repeat that habit for two months or a year or whatever is you're fit and healthy and this is one of the key challenges of building good habits and breaking bad ones is figuring out ways to take the long-term consequences of your good habits or of your bad habits and pull them into the present moment so you feel a little bit of the pain right now so it serves you less and to take the long-term rewards of your good habits and pull those into the present moment so it feels good this is one reason why you know it's great to choose like what's the best form of exercise well maybe it's about the one that you enjoy because if it feels good in the moment now it serves you you have a reason to repeat it yeah humans are not wired to prioritize long term rewards over immediate gratification Ren that's why you know habit change in the interest of setting you on a long term positive trajectory is much more difficult than defaulting to the immediate gratification that's leading you astray and intellectualization of it doesn't really help no it's not like everybody who's smoking knows it's bad for them yes yeah but they can't you know they can't stop even though the long-term benefits of stopping are evident and indisputable for some reason we lack the ability to harness that motivation to implement that behavior change I so I think that's a good way to define what a good habit is and what a bad habit is is that bad habits think about it in the long term good habits serve you in the long run bad habits do not even if they serve you in the moment and so yes they're sorry to interrupt you but is there is there an argument to be had that that we would be benefited from removing judgment on habits altogether and and and kind of avoid classifying them as good or bad into saying these are behaviors they're serving you in a certain way like let's take all the passion and emotion out of this altogether and look at it from just a forensic point of view would that be a good way of helping people I don't know make that make the transition from one to the other have you looked at that I think so and part of the reason is that in order to change behavior design it in any meaningful way you need to be aware of it first but usually when people become aware of their habits or think about them you know like you might smoke or bite your nails or something on autopilot but then if you start to think about it well you guilty about it you know you start to judge yourself as soon as you start to judge yourself then you're not in a great position to change because you what ends up happening a lot of the time this has happened actually with a couple campaigns that have tried to scare smokers into not smoking by showing them pictures of blackened lungs or scare obese people into not eating as much by talking about the the detriments of being overweight what happens is people get really anxious and stress they feel guilty and worried and then they resort amplify they resort to their preferred habit for dealing with that which means they end up smoking more eating more or whatever so yes I think there is a benefit to looking at it in an unemotional forensic way and one way to do that is to say there are no good or bad habits there are just behaviors that serve you in a particular way and the goal is to try to find a behavior that serves you in a better way and I still use the term good and bad because I think implicitly most people know what we're talking about when we say that like and we use it in everyday conversation but from a practical standpoint it's just in the the effort and energy used judging yourself and feeling guilty about things is not well spent or productive and so if that is a way that helps people get over that that I think that's useful yeah there's also certainly a hierarchy of habits to what I see a lot of and I'm interested in in your experience working with so many people on this is people honing in zeroing in on a behavior a habit that they want to change but they're kind of identifying the wrong one like if your goal is to lose 10 pounds or the behavior that you want to change the habit that you want to change is going from sedentary to being a runner for example you're gonna run your first 5k so this goal but you have a victim mentality and you think the world is against you and everything bad in your life is somebody else's fault and you're not addressing and redressing the habits that are fueling that identity you can run as many 5ks or marathons as you want but ultimately you're channeling energy in a rough direction right yeah the the energy is focused on like this the thing that makes the last like 2% of difference not the thing that makes 95% of difference right you see this in all kinds of places I mean the example you just gave is good but just take someone who's trying to get in shape I mean people will what kind of protein powder should I get what nice leaves do I need what are the best weight lifting shoes and all that stuff is like the last 2% a difference that it's mostly like don't miss workouts and get your reps in yeah but ultimately I think that those people aren't even really interested in the answer they're just stuck in analysis paralysis like they they sort of want to change their behavior but they want to have all these questions answered and they want to know exactly what they're doing before they'll even go take a walk right so how much do they really want to change that behavior they're flirting with the idea of behavior change but they're ultimately not at the place where they're ready to commit to anything and so that makes them feel like they're doing something when they're actually just reinforcing that paralysis this is what in the book I call the difference between motion and action action can actually deliver a result but motion is related to that but never will you know like going to the gym and talking to a personal trainer about signing up that's fine that's related to getting in shape but it doesn't matter how many times you talk to a personal trainer you're never gonna get in shape whereas like doing 10 squats that actually can do something that's like talking to the trainers motion doing squats is action yeah and yeah I think a lot of times people get trapped in motion they get trapped in analysis paralysis because it is a way to feel like you're making progress without running the risk of failure right and it's it's more complicated and nuanced than that because going and talking to the trainer is an important step if you've never done anything like that before yeah that's the thing is it's not like you shouldn't do it yeah it's just that it's not the only thing right if that if that's the thing if that doesn't create the momentum to take the additional step and and and set in motion a consistent flow of repeatable actions over time then this is why I think identity such a crucial issue with habits is that true behavior changes really identity change because you're not really looking to go from the type of person who doesn't run to the type of person who can run a 5k that's fine that's good it's the outcome but the goal is not to run a marathon the goal is to become a runner the goal is not to write a book the goal is to become a writer and once you identify as that type of person in a sense you're not even really pursuing behavior change anymore you're just acting in alignment with the type of person that you already believe that you are right now it's like one thing to say I want this it's something different to say I am this yeah you write a lot about this and and we can drill down on goals and the importance or lack thereof of goal-setting but ultimately what really moves the needle is making a decision about the person that you want to be and starting to construct your life in a way that reinforces that identity that you idealize in yourself so it's less about a finish line and it becomes all about process and the journey I think that's right you know like your what I said earlier about how habits are method to embody a particular identity that's really what we're looking to do here is how do I become the type of person that embodies this each day how do I become the type of person who doesn't miss workouts and that's another reason I like small habits because if you have a really busy day and things are crazy and all you can do is five push-ups if you're oriented around the result around the outcome it's easy to dismiss that so why would I even bother doing five push-ups it's not gonna get me in shape but some days it's not about the result of the training some days it's about reinforcing being that type of person you know like yes life was crazy and things were really busy today and the best I could do was getting five push-ups in but I'm still the type of person who doesn't miss workouts even when it's not ideal right and in the long run that can count for a lot which is the kind of twisted thing about small habits which is that even though they're small they can still be meaningful and if they're meaningful they actually are big yeah and and that really gets at the foundation of this whole thing which is that every great achievement is small habits ultimately and you know as our a in this culture in which we live it's all about you know shoot for the moon and like set these huge goals and be audacious and find the shortcut and all of that but every successful person will tell you it's about the tiny little imperceptible non sexy things that they do every single day and have been doing for the last 10 or 20 years that got them from wherever they came from to the place that everyone aspires to be the crazy thing is habits are habits like the foundation for mastery in in any area and it's often the people who are at the peak of a particular area that have the best habits that have like the most things automated and dialed in you know imagine I was think of the story of Josh Waitzkin who wrote the art of learning and his he gave an example of he's doing you know tie push hands this martial art and I when I think about doing something like that I'm like alright I'm gonna be grappling with this person like ah you know I'm fully engaged on the the wrestling component but he had practiced it so many times and knew all the moves so well that he was able to more or less put that part of it on autopilot and he would just focus on his opponents eyes and when they were getting ready to blink then he would make us throw and that was like how he found his advantage that to someone like me who hasn't done that that sounds insane that you could even like get to that level but the point is in order to master any area he has already habitual eyes everything else he knows how to do the throws on autopilot he knows where his feet should be on autopilot he knows where his weight should be shifted and because all of that is habitual eyes he actually has the mental capacity available to focus on the thing that makes the last tiniest bit of difference at the highest level yeah I think that's true for anybody you know I mean think about everything LeBron can do on autopilot I mean he doesn't have to think about shooting dribbling where he's out on the court like all of that is just internalized at this point and he can think about the offensive set or the thing that happened three possessions ago that he did to set them up for what he's going to do now but most basketball players aren't even at that level because they haven't habitual eyes yeah have you seen the documentary free soul oh yeah that just oh you saw it yeah yeah alright good so for people that are that are listening and haven't seen it you should go out and see it immediately outside its Alex Honnold free soloing El Cap and even if you think you know the story I assure you that this movie will leave you with sweaty palms and your mind blown dude those rock climbing documentaries are crazy but this one is next-level and it speaks the reason I bring it up is it speaks directly to what you're talking about which is a level of process and mastery that is is rare even at the highest levels and you think of Alex as a master but when you really get to understand the level of focus and intentionality and the amount of years that went into that accomplishment you understand it on a whole different level and you talk about automation I mean you see when he's climbing that wall he knows every every hold every every maneuver every footstep and there's actually only maybe three or four problem areas up the whole wall that he really had to double down on to make it work and all the rest of it was so wrote for him and if you were to ask him you know he's he doesn't have to he's not he's not intellectualizing this you know it's it's so built into who he is that that the execution of climbing that wall is just a reflection of a lifetime of preparation and focus that's followed in the wake of that success with him going back to his van and doing pull-ups you know because he is somebody that's who he is it's identity it wasn't about yes he had that goal and the goal was audacious and he was successful in that goal but he was he was successful in that pursuit because this is who he is fundamentally at his core I remember hearing a story about Brett Favre with late in his career and there was a particular crossing pattern this guy's running across the field and the linebacker was interviewed after the game who was defending against the pass and he was like 999 times out of a thousand every time this play is run based on my positioning the pass is going to be going in front of the backer and so he saw the play and read it and jumped up to intercept the pass and Favre somehow implicitly noticed all of this and threw it behind him and hit the receiver and stride in the end up getting the first down in this big play right happening in a microsecond yes all of this is you know it for the average person you'd stand out there in the middle of the play and just would look like chaos there who is moving around so fast and the stories like that and like Alex and and these other ones that were telling the only way that you can get to that level of the only way he could even notice that is because every other thing about that play was already on autopilot he had run it so many times that he could see the one thing that was different and make the adjustment on the fly and those stories of course are incredible and inspiring but they also make me realize that I don't know many people fully understand what it takes to be at the top of a field like that to you have to literally live it so that you can internalize all that stuff I mean the higher that you get on the curve it's like the less margin for error that there is and you need to work I mean Olympians will work for four years to shave off to hundreds of a second and that you have to have that level of commitment because the when you're going against the world's best the margin is so small and yeah anyway I think habits play a central role in that I think right they are they are crucial because the more that you can habitual eyes the more you free up your mind to focus on the things that could make that last bit of difference so let's talk about how to change we were attempting to launch into these four laws and we haven't even gotten there break these down okay so there are four laws of behavior change make it obvious so that's about the cue make it attractive that's about the craving make it easy this is the response and then make it satisfying which is the reward and this is all about adopting a quote unquote good hap correct and then you can invert each of those four for breaking a bad habit so for a bad habits you want to make it invisible and make the cue invisible and make it unattractive make it difficult and make it unsatisfying and again these are like a toolbox for thinking about what can we practically do on a daily basis for building good habits and breaking bad ones so obvious so one way to think about this is with a strategy that I call environment design and the idea is just to restructure your physical environment to make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible so let me give you an example both these are two personal examples so I first I realized that for most of my life have brushed my teeth brushed my teeth twice a day but I wouldn't floss consistently and when I looked at the habit there were two issues and one of the problems was the floss was just tucked away in the drawer in the bathroom I wouldn't see it and so because it wasn't obvious sometimes I just would forget the second thing sounds kind of silly but I didn't like the feeling of wrapping floss around my fingers it was just like uncomfortable and so anyway I took the floss out of the drawer bought a little bowl and got some of those pre-made philosophers and put them in the bowl and set it right next to my toothbrush and now I brush my teeth put the toothbrush down pick a floss hurry up do it right away it's obvious and that's pretty much all I needed to do to build that habit now I've been doing it for I don't know five years and never really had to think about it this is the most important thing I think there's a lot of people my friend Dan Buettner included who don't hold a lot of confidence and belief in a single human beings ability to to implement positive behavior changes with sustainable as old long-term results it's just that's why there's so many self-help books people struggle with weight and fitness and you know you name it profession like all of these things it's so hard but the best way to fundamentally address these things is to change your environment so that it's conducive to the healthy choice so whether it's flossing your teeth or re reimagining what an urban landscape is so that's incentivizing people to ride their bikes and not drive cars and not drink sodas but drink water like structural systemic changes in our environment that make the Healthy Choice the the productive choice not only the obvious choice but in some cases the only choice or the choice that is at arm's length at all times and that goes with eradicate eradicating the unhealthy choices removing those from arm's reach so that they become more difficult to access yes it's huge I mean imagine the impact of living in an environment where or working in an environment where there are a hundred little things like that they're all kind of nudging you in the right direction or nudging you away from the wrong direction here's another example for breaking a bad habit so again here you just invert it rather than make it obvious make it invisible I've noticed that if I buy a six-pack of beer and I put it in the front of the fridge like either in the door or like right in the front of the shelf I'll open it up and I'll have one each night just because it's there but if I take it and I put it in the back of the fridge like lowest shelf all the way in the back where I can't really see it when I open the door sometimes it'll sit there for like a month and so it's interesting you know I'm like what did I do I want a beer or not because in a way I do but only if it's really presented to me I moved it like five inches yes really seriously it was probably like yeah it's probably 12 inches back well I could tell you as a recovering alcoholic my drinking days that would not have been there I would have had to take more extreme measures so that actually raises a good point which is that many of these strategies that talk about in the book are very effective for good habits and bad habits even though we just agreed not to use that term but not necessarily for true addictions yeah and this is something I wanted to really get into with you which is the difference the qualitative difference between a quote unquote bad habit and something that would qualify as an addiction I think that line gets blurred and certainly it's a spectrum but I think there's a very different approach that you need to take when somebody is truly you know falling prey to addictive behavior patterns versus something that's just habituated yeah so we'll get back to the four laws behavior Nike by the end of this we will gather so the technical definition for an addiction and by the way I don't consider myself an expert on addiction is a behavior that you continue to repeat despite negative consequences so you know that it's bad for you you know it's not serving you but you still can't stop yourself from doing it and those I do agree it's probably on a spectrum so you know on one side of the spectrum you have a behavior that you do just one time and then the more that you repeat it you car - if down and then at some point maybe you cross over this threshold you get to a habit and then if you go even further you've got behaviors that you keep doing again and again but you don't learn from them and we'll call that an addiction and so it's kind of like the feedback loop is broken you go through the queue you have the craving you take the response but then instead of there being a reward instead of it's serving you in some way really all it does is just satisfy the craving and it did but it's not good for the rest of your life the feedback loop isn't necessarily broken it's just that it doesn't matter mm-hmm you know the cravings addicted is is typically I mean there's you know again denial as a spectrum as well but on some level whether conscious or unconscious they're aware that they're destroying their lives but it simply doesn't matter they're still going to pursue this path of destruction no matter where it takes them and I can just tell you from my own personal experience as somebody who has always prided themselves on having a large capacity to endure work somebody who has a you know a reservoir of self-will who had been successful in many ways by virtue of a strong worth that work ethic I was confounded and brought to my knees time and time again by my inability to leverage these skills that I thought were my secret weapons to this problem and the more that I applied self-will determination decision-making power my ability to dedicate myself to a goal the deeper that hole got like I had to completely upend how I saw the world and come to this place of not just acceptance and breaking that veil of denial but also surrender like understanding that I was power / this thing was really the first base of trying to figure out a new trajectory forward and it's very counterintuitive and weird and it doesn't make sense to most people unless you've gone through this process it's like a letting go as opposed to like a like some sort of driven willingness to like fight it so it was like you could apply determination and grit to any other every other area of my life I've had success using those skills but for some reason and this with this yeah it just it made it worse and worse and worse and worse yeah that's nice further and further isolated me from everybody else because I thought I can solve this I don't need help I'm gonna do this um you know I all these other areas of my life have worked out when I use this strategy there's no reason why this strategy won't work here and it just destroyed me hmm so I mean obviously addiction is very complicated and I don't know that so I just made the distinction of the strategies in the book I think are really good for bad habits not necessarily for addictions although I don't think that it would hurt for to use those strategies for addiction but I don't know that it's gonna be like a little magic would solve the problem well it may help with the denial part at a very minimum mm-hmm yeah so there's a secret chapter to the book that's not included in the final manuscript but that you can get at atomic Abuse calm and it's called the biology of bad behavior and it discusses what scientists are doing to kind of rewire the brain of addicts so some of them are pills like cocaine addicts are using a drug called baclofen that was originally developed for back spasms that some addicts say when they start to take it suddenly their cravings in addiction like have vanished more or less overnight I don't know that it works for all of them and that's kind of the story with a lot of these drugs for addiction right now is that some people have really amazing results but not every patient does then there's a second strategy has been National Geographic covered it last year it's starting to be used in Italy and I think it's making its way around the world where it's this TMS machine this magnetic stimulation for the brain and essentially the if I as I understand it the prefrontal court - the brain is responsible for a variety of decision-making centers and your ability to like resist temptation and in addicts they find that this particular area is kind of deactivated to a certain degree and so when a craving arises you have trouble resisting and so you'll go in for this magnetic stimulation and effectively they place the magnet over that portion or that region of the brain stimulate the neurons there with some electrical impulses and people walk out and they feel like they don't have cravings anymore yeah which is kind of crazy so I don't I don't know where this is gonna go and I I'm very wary to say that like oh this is a magic trick and yeah I mean I think all of that is interesting and I and it's gonna be really cool to see how this stuff plays out there's all kinds of amazing studies happening with psychedelics at the moment and treating addicts with that but I always kind of default to this you know fundamental perspective that you know addiction is fueled as gap our motto would say from some kind of childhood trauma or some psychological framework where a person feels broken in some regard and is compelled to engage in that destructive addictive behavior as a means of state change right which is what we were talking about earlier so you can eliminate the craving and eliminate the behavior or the substance but that predisposition remains and it will continue to find another avenue to satisfy itself with some kind of behavior or whatever to solve whatever that wound is or or that that sense of incompleteness or inadequacy or whatever it is that is that is really the driver behind the addictive behavior because the the substance or the behavior is the solution to the problem and you can and until it becomes the problem itself and you can remove that but you're still left with that fundamental disposition that needs to get addressed do you feel like running or writing has been or something else has been the thing that's there for you yeah they're they're helpful and they're curative in some regard but ultimately they're not the solution for me I mean I you know I've been sober for a long time 12 steps the secret society you know is that's how I've yeah got sober and have States over and I'm still you know and a very very active member of that program and that to this day is still my number one priority and the minute I start to lose sight of that or forget that or take it for granted is when I start to lapse back into into that realm and there's no stasis either and you know this is something you write about and understand well like there's no like oh I conquered that now I'm moving on to this with addiction it's it's it's either regressing or progressing with every thought you entertain or behavior that you engage in so you have to be very mindful of it and engaged in the behaviors and the activities that keep it at bay in order to be healthy and functional so I don't go around thinking about drinking or using drugs very often it rarely occurs to me but I have a whole battery of other negative behavior patterns that will manifest all kinds of character defects that I wouldn't qualify as addictions but our habits that you know I'm constantly trying to master or change yeah well this is kind of an interesting intersection with the second law to bring it back to some of those because so the first law we talked about make it obvious and doing some of these environment design changes the second law is about making it attractive and what I mean by that is when you interpret a behavior excuse me when you interpret a behavior or cue as being attractive as being something you should move toward then you have a reason to perform the action and you're motivated to do it so in many cases the behaviors that are motivating to us that are attractive to us are dependent on the people that we are around so one way to think about this is that we are all members of tribes some of the tribes are big some of them are small like big ones might be what it means to be American or what it means to be French or something like that and small ones could be you know what it means to be a neighbor on your street or a member of your local CrossFit gym or a volunteer at your local Highschool or whatever but all of these tribes large and small have a set of shared expectations that for what it means to be part of the group and when you belong to that tribe when you have friends there when you feel like you want to fit in with that group habits that align with the shared expectations of the tribe are very attractive and you want to do them and habits that go against the grain of the shared expectations are very unattractive and so one of the ways to make habits more attractive is to join a group where your desired behaviors the normal behavior to be with a crew where the habits that you want to build are just normal in every day--for yeah I mean that's that's really an extrapolation of the first law you're extending your physical you're creating a productive physical environment and now you're extending that to your interpersonal environment so you're surrounding yourself with a physical environment that's conducive to the healthy behavior the healthy habit and now you're surrounding yourself with the people that reinforce that and make it more difficult for you to behave otherwise I mean society leans heavily on all of us you know like I mean there's a bunch of habits that people do each day you don't even think about like you get onto the elevator and you turn around to face the front or you you uh made that roll anyway yeah I know right you go to a job interview yeah and you wear a suit and tie or a dress or something nice there's no reason it has to be like that right like you could face the back of the elevator you could wear a bathing suit to a job interview but we don't do that because it violates those shared expectations it goes against the grain of the group and so so many of our choices are like that and in many ways when we're young a lot of our habits are not chosen they're inherited they're passed down to us by whatever group that we're a part of and then you know part of the process of becoming an adult as you grow up and you get into your 20s and 30s and you decide these groups that I inherited these behaviors that I in here are these the ones that serve me or these are the ones that I want and then you know you kind of go through the process of of changing that and in many ways asking people to change their habits is actually asking them to change their tribe and that that can be hard as especially if you have to do it on your own you know I mean that's one of the it helps to have a new tribe to go to because if people have to choose between having the habits they want and being alone or having the habits they don't want and being with people being having friends belonging we'd often rather be wrong with the crowd than right by ourselves yeah and I think we're seeing this being played out culturally in this interesting moment that we're having right now we're across all forms of social media the things that people are saying in the political sphere are as much signaling to their own group to reaffirm their position within their tribe as they are an attempt to convert somebody from another tribe which doesn't work generally but it's interesting to see that social dynamic writ large and because it's at such a heightened state right now but it's really no different than the guy who you know was hanging out with his gym buddies and wants to be part of that crowd and and really wet himself in into that subculture and identify with that and be approved of by that group I wrote an article recently called why facts don't change our minds and humans need a reasonably accurate view of the world of the facts to survive you know like if you couldn't accurately see where the car was moving down the road and then you walked out you get hit by one and wouldn't past your jeans long and so on and so you need to have some reasonable baseline but within that there's actually a fair bit of flexibility and so people don't just hold beliefs because they're true and accurate and factual they also hold beliefs because they can help them belong because they signal to their social allies that hey I belong to this tribe and in many cases being abandoned by the tribe is more of a death sentence than having a belief that is slightly inaccurate that especially one that doesn't impact your personal life right now and so then we fast-forward to modern society and you get this manifesting and kinds of rays right right right alright well on this on this idea of making it attractive and and surrounding yourself with with the people that that affirm and approve of and and encourage the kind of behavior that you're trying to manifest within yourself there are two it seems to me there are two kind of operating systems here there is the the positive reinforcement that you get the approval mechanism but there's also the negative accountability right like if because if you stray then you're gonna be held accountable for that in the same way you're gonna get a pat on the back for toeing the line or being part of the group right is there one that you've seen that is more powerful than the other are they both necessary how does that work yeah that's that's a tough question jonathan hate that I think he's at NYU he has some interesting research on this and I don't know that he's performed with himself but he was the one that I saw presented about the importance of punishments and consequences in societies in general and like we need to know that there is a punishment for breaking the law or something in order for people to stay on course yeah and so I'm not sure exactly how that applies to habits my gut in reaction is that you probably need both in the long run but that extreme punishments and consequences those like fear-driven consequences rather than rewards really get people to move in the intermediate in the short term and belonging and the positive rewards are more likely to sustain standing long time yeah so I would say that's generally how I would bucket them I think it was Tim Ferriss who came up with that case study experiment of creating a gym where I think I think the idea was you pay all the money upfront for the year and they take a picture of you without your shirt on looking terrible and if you don't if you miss a day or whatever like then that image goes on social media you know so this is sort of like the stick you know yeah being more powerful than the carrot at least in the short term I've heard about ones where they you pay like you know I don't know what the exact number would be maybe it's like $150 a month and then every time you go to the gym you get five bucks and so and go everyday for 30 days you pay nothing and you know if you go three days a week you get two so that's kind of similar incentive in the book I think I have an example of this guy Thomas Frank he's this entrepreneur in Colorado and he wanted to build the habit of waking up earlier and so he created a little automated Twitter post that would go out at 6 a.m. every morning or 6:05 I think he wanted to wake up at 6 a.m. and so if he didn't get up at 6 at 6:05 it would posted Twitter and say I'm not up right now because I'm lazy the first five people to respond to this I'll pay pay you $25 and and so then every day to wake up at 6:00 and the first thing you do is push that back to the next day yeah that's a genius I mean you definitely would wake up you know you had some horrible tweet going out that reflected poorly on you and yeah the other example that comes to mind is the I think it's Tim Ferriss as well which was the if you fail like a certain amount of money goes to an organization that you despise their variety of services you do that now that's called beeminder another one is called stick I think it's STI CKK but yeah you put like you know all right my goal is run this half marathon and if I don't train three days a week then I'm putting $500 on the line and you commit it and you can't get the money back unless your friend releases it to you right and if you don't do your training the money goes to a charity that you hate whatever yeah yeah yeah cool all right the next law is it's easy okay so make it easy many of our behaviors are just about convenience you know like I so I've started doing this thing recently where I'll leave my phone in another room outside of my office for until lunch each day so I get a block of three or four hours in the morning where it's not around now these numbers keep going up every year we just get more and more addicted to our phones but the average adult checks their phone over 150 times a day now and if the phone is next to me on the desk I'm like ever else I'd look at it every three minutes or five minutes or whatever but when I keep it outside of my office I have this home office all I have to do is walk up the stairs and go to a different room it's like 45 seconds away but I never go do it which is fascinating to me because it's like well I was checking my phone every five minutes if it was next to me so you would think I wanted to do it but I never wanted it bad enough to walk 45 seconds upstairs and modern society has done this weird thing where so many of the behaviors and technologies are so frictionless now they're so convenient that we find ourselves doing them just with an inkling of desire we don't actually really want them but they're so easy that we'll just fill space with them and so this law of the third law is about trying to get that to work for you when it comes to building good habits so reducing the number of steps between you and the good habits and increasing the number of steps between you and the bad ones so you want to make it difficult for that and one of the metaphors I like to use is a like a garden hose so imagine you have a hose that's like bent in the middle and there's a little bit of water trickling out if you want to get more water through the hose then you have two options the first is you could just crank up the valve and force water through but that increases friction and increases tension in the the system the other option is just to unfold the bend and let the water flow through naturally and that also gets more water to flow through but it reduces tension and reduces friction and so much of the conversation about building better habits and achieving peak performance is all of the mental equivalent of cranking up the valve you need to work harder you need to have grit persevere hustle grind and it's not that those qualities are bad it's just that it increases tension in the system and what you really want is to create a setup where it's easy to do the things that pay off in the long run and you have the mentality of on the type person it will work hard so you wanna do the attention work yeah a more sustainable gentle solution then you know rise & grind versus remove these things that are in your way every single day that actually are pretty easy to remove or create distance between to make it easier for you to do the thing that you're trying to do you're really trying to prime your environment to make the default action easier and sometimes you can do that with environment design stuff that we talked about earlier other times you can do it by taking actions ahead of time that pay off in the future so like say you're trying to build a better sleep habit there are a variety of one-time actions you could take today that make it easier to get better sleep every night after this you could test different mattresses and see which one leads to the best night's sleep and by that one you could purchase blackout curtains so that your room is dark you could buy earmuffs or earplugs so that you can sleep more soundly get a sleep mask so that you you know can sleep on the road or in hotels there are some of those things like the chilli pad or some of the other stuff that you know will cool the temperature of the bed to a more ideal rate or you can get a tent and sleep in your backyard like I do there you go if you could sleep outside you could also buy there's this little device called an outlet timer and it costs like ten dollars on Amazon and my friend near a all he bought one they plugged it into his it's like an adapter you plug it into the outlet and then you plug the device into the timer and so he plugged his internet router into it and set the timer for 10 p.m. each night and it would kill the power to the internet router so then it's like well Netflix doesn't work the I can't browse the web it's time for everybody to go to bed that's interesting and so imagine if you just did I mean I just listed off seven or eight things there but you know imagine if you did five of those well now suddenly you're in an environment where getting better sleep as a habit is much easier and those were all just one-time choices that paid off for you in the future and there's a bunch of stuff like that depending on the habit you know I mean Finance habits are a good example automated savings or automatic deposit into your 401k or stuff like that I mean you know you want to make this brainless so that you can as much as possible so that you have the energy left over to do the hard thing when you do yeah it's weird how we've created this world where now we have to spend so much energy trying to the system's too bad the system - like - like override our DNA and impulses to engage in these things that we think we've created to make our lives better and yet at the same time are creating all these downstream problems I mean you know the the obvious candidate the cell phone it's like this thing is so scientifically devised and designed to captivate us and trigger all of those you know impulses that we so deeply seek that you can't blame anyone from I mean it's like you're scrolling and you're like I didn't even know I was scrolling you know become so bred into us and now we have to go way out of our way and by all these other devices to protect ourselves I just saw the other day I don't know if you saw this somebody came up with these special sunglasses that you can put on and it makes all screens look blank No so when you're wearing that is actually screen yeah I think it just makes everything look white oh man I'm like that's really cool and it's also insane that we have had doing about that you know and I'm he's like or person to spend a thousand hours like building this company team 20 like that this is not what they're worried about yeah you know what I mean yeah I mean this is just a good argument for simplicity and minimalism you know I think being a minimalist which I don't know that I consider myself a staunch minimalist but I definitely adhere to some of the principles it's not about having the least number of things about having the optimal number of things and many of the items that we choose are surrounded by in daily life they give us way more than the optimal number now we're being bombarded by notifications and text messages and all kinds of stimuli that we're just fighting things that we didn't have to fight before yeah it's getting it's getting really tricky and it's weird how this the things that foment these bad habits like the cell phone or you know whatever app that is your favorite app like the amount of money and science that's going into our video games right like it's just all about like keeping you wed to it for as long as possible why is it that we can't channel all of that scientific genius and put that into things that that are producing good habits instead yeah right like all of that you go to a Vegas casino it's completely orchestrated to like keep you there as long as possible right it's it's it's an environment that is promoting a bad habit why can't we create environments with that amount of intentionality and money and science into promoting good habits yeah I mean capitalism I think is the overriding force here you know like it's not just casinos airports for example there are you know really well-paid Airport designers that will come in to lay out a new terminal that will specifically decide where the walkways should be so that you weave through the maximum amount of stores and past the right restaurants at the right time and you know to spend the most money while you're there and so anyway my point is just that capitalism is the overriding incentive for the people who do this stuff and so the person who can figure out how to make a lot of money from good habits will have a strong reason to do it but until people figure that out you end up kind of we work for these companies that do it during the day and then as individuals we want to redesign it for ourselves at night right like all these YouTube is actually like my kids are not watching YouTube right which is you know Steve Jobs didn't let his kids have an iPad and you know that kind of thing right yeah I think and we need more of that I just read the other day as well there was a there's somewhere I think it was I think it might be Russia maybe I'm remembering it wrong but someplace where when you go to the train station or the subway instead of having if you if you did like 10 burpees or something yeah we need more of that yeah that's great I know so anyway all right ok I have one more thing I wanna say yeah I make it easy so the simplest way to do this is to scale a habit down and so in the book I talk about this thing I call the 2-minute rule and the idea is to just take whatever habit you're trying to build and you scale it down to the first two minutes and I had a I had a reader who did something similar to this he ended up losing over 100 pounds and one of the ways that he did it was he went to the gym but he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes so state sounds kind of crazy but for the first six weeks he went and he showed up and did like half an exercise and then he would leave and go home and to most people they hear that and they're like well the you know it's kind of ridiculous you're wasting your time you're not actually getting it in shape from that but the point is he was mastering the art of showing up and a habit has to be established before it can be improved you know like until you become the person who shows up every day there's nothing to optimize we're so worried about figuring out the best diet plan or the best business idea or the optimal way to you know boost my bench press or whatever it would that were we searched for all these perfect plans but we don't do the thing that is fundamental to all of it which is just showing up and the two-minute rule is one way to do that you know you like you want to do 30 minutes a yoga well let's translate that into take out your yoga mat or if you want to read 30 books a year let's translate that into read one page but whatever the first two minutes are the behavior scale it down master that master the art of showing up make it as easy as possible to get started and then once you become that person and you're going to the gym every day or you're reading one page every day well now you have options 98 90 of choices and you can upgrade and improve from there yeah yeah to to observations on that the first is it goes directly to something you talk about all the time which is focusing on and optimizing the starting line versus the finish line right like we all think about the finish line we set goals that are all about the finish line and we overlook how important the starting line is and the more we can kind of we can have in the back of our mind that destination that we're aiming to go towards but the more we can route ourselves in what's required to be at that starting line then then it becomes digestible and doable and sustainable you don't start the race you can't finish it yeah and people are all worried about the outcome I mean everybody wants to you know whatever the outcome is run a marathon earn six figures lose thirty pounds it's all finish line focused but you have to standardize before you optimize it like you have to make it the standard in your life before you have the chance to optimize it and turn it into something more yeah and I think it goes to the second point I was going to make it goes to this idea that I think I think a lot of people they they really overestimate what they can or should do in a single day and they completely underestimate what they're capable of in a long term window and I'm not me I don't mean six months I mean five years ten years but when you when you over when you overestimate the daily routine it ultimately leads to burnout for most people because it's not sustainable right and if you can narrow that down and and and and put it into these small chunks like you're talking about and and create a situation in which you have u8 gradually and you create a lifestyle that's oriented around being able to maintain and build and optimize on that that's where you're gonna see the results way down the line I think that's true and it's hard I mean this I mentioned this in chapter one of the book it's hard to feel that in on a daily basis right like it I use the metaphor if it's kind of like heating up an ice cube you know like you you're in a room it's cold you can see your breath you've got this ice cube sitting on the table in front of you it's like 25 degrees and you heat the room up in its 26 27 28 29 30 nothing's happened ice cubes still sitting there 31 and then 32 one degree shift just like all the other ones before and suddenly you hit this phase transition the ice cube melts and it's not that life is always like that but it often feels like that you know like people put in a little bit of work they scale it down to this little behavior and they think there's nothing happening here it's like seeing an ice cube go from 25 to 27 degrees and so then you get you feel like well I got to do more right I need to try harder I need a bigger goal I need to be more ambitious because then I'll get a bigger result but people don't realize that like showing up and doing something small for three month for six months and then complaining about not having results it's kind of like complaining about heating an ice cube from twenty-five to thirty degrees and not melting Yelp not melting it the the work wasn't being wasted it's just stored you know like you and that that is a hallmark of any process that compounds which is the most powerful outcomes are delayed but when you're in the thick of it when you're in the moment it's really hard to feel that yeah feels like nothing's happening feels like you're wasting the time and that's that's that's why it's so important to understand that this is about identity because if you're only goal focused then you're you're not gonna be able to stay in it because you'll get just you'll get dissuaded or disappointed or whatever but if this is fundamental if you've made a decision that this is who you are I am this person that does this then you're not so wed to the day-in day-out results you're not Tabb you're not tabulating a spreadsheet every day about whether you're moving forward or not so this is maybe a good time to bring up the fourth law of behavior change because this is a perfect example of it so the fourth law is to make it satisfying and what you really need is to make it immediately satisfying and the ultimate manifestation of that is the reinforcement of your desired identity if you are focused on you know losing 30 pounds and you go run for a month and they're like well my body hasn't changed scales the same well not you don't have any rewards to see but if you're focused on becoming the type of person who runs three times a week as soon as you step out the door and take two steps you're reinforcing than identity so you can feel good in the moment and even if it's in a small way that's crucial for getting habits to stick I mean this is something that I refer to as the cardinal rule of behavior change which is that behaviors that are immediately rewarded get repeated behaviors that are immediately punished get avoid it and it's really about the speed of how quickly you feel satisfied or feel good you know it's kind of like if something feels good right after you finish it it's like a positive emotional signal to your brain or it's like hey this was enjoyable you should repeat this again next time and so in that sense positive emotions cultivate habits and negative emotions destroy them and you really want to find a way to feel good to feel successful as soon as you can yeah that's interesting how important is momentum in all of this because I know that as diligent as I am about my training and my working out I think most people would agree if you're in the habit of like going to the gym every day and you've you're you're seeing results you're part of that community and then something happens you got a business trip or some whatever like some some wrench gets thrown in your plans and you miss a day or two or maybe three days then it becomes so hard to go back when it was so easy to go every single day prior to that and that's where you see people completely fall off the wagon and then six months goes by a year goes by and I haven't gone once yeah so psychologically there's something very strange that's going on with that that that makes that momentum something so special and mystical that that really needs to be like respected and cared for because it's so powerful it's kind of like Newton's laws applied to habits you know objects that are in motion stay in motion objects at rest stay at rest but so there's a wise lesson there in what you're you're mentioning which is first of all all habit streaks end at some point you know like everybody slips up at some point and the mantra that I like to keep in mind for that for myself as much as anybody else is never missed twice so if I workout the gym Monday Wednesday Friday and I'm this on Friday because of a business trip or whatever then I need to put all my energy into making sure I get in there on Monday I don't want to miss twice in a row it's pretty much never the first mistake that ruins you it's like the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows so if you can get back on track quickly there I think I have a line in the book something like missing once is a mistake missing twice as the start of a new habit yeah because then it creates its own negative momentum right yes right exactly yeah it's like what's the next right action you know and if you are if you are identity based you'll say well you know I'm a writer so I write this is what I do yeah you don't take two days off I mean this diets are like the most common example is what we're really talking about here is this kind of all-or-nothing mentality that people have where it's like well I did the diet for five days but then my friends wanted to go to happy hour and I've been Jade a little bit and so I guess I'm almost not an age yeah I guess just too hard so I'm just giving up and out of just like well you know what the next time I haven't I'm gonna sit down to eat I'm gonna make a healthy choice exactly and maybe it's not perfect but at least it's not Burger King I wish I hadn't been Jade but never missed twice so I'm gonna make sure that next time I get back on track and eat a healthy meal yeah so I do think momentum plays a role there there's also a second note about momentum and this comes back to like video games and some of the stuff we talked about earlier and to that cardinal rule of behavior change as I mentioned a lot of times the momentum is built on the speed of the feedback cycle so we have so far in this conversation been talking about habits kind of from like this larger macro level of like a habit like going to the gym or writing or something like that but really biologically speaking this process of those four stages your brain is going through this endlessly and all the time and in the fraction of a second so you know take something like turning on the light switch you walk into the room cue the room is dark craving I predict that if I turn the light on it'll be better and reduce uncertainty and I want to be able to see response I flip on the light switch reward the room is now lit and I can see and all of that happens in you know a half a second and so your brain is going through those cycles all the time so in a sense you're kind of always going through these little behaviors and those little micro cycles can build momentum as you go through something if they're tight enough and you have signals of progress you're getting positive feedback and this is what video games are incredible at as you go through any level there are little counters in the corner your score is going up you're collecting more rubies and coins every time you grab a powerup or a weapon or something there's a little jingle or chime even the pitter-patter of steps as you like advance through the scene is a signal that you're making positive progress and what videogames can do that it's very hard to do in daily life is they can keep you right on the edge so your challenge just enough but still making progress you know like if you are really killing it on a certain level they start to take away some of those power-ups and give you more difficult challenges to face if you're struggling they'll give you more coins and rubies and you know like help you along a little bit and so they are always making sure that you're making just enough progress through the level while still being challenged enough to be engaged and that is like uh I mean this has been shown with with research variable rewards and keeping you cut on this razor's edge of difficulty is one of the peak ways to maintain motivation and momentum and want to stay engaged with a habit and technology makes it easier for us to do that which is one reason those behaviors and games are so addictive yeah I mean it's ingenious it's just being channeled for a less than productive you know outcome for a human animal right like it just makes me go back to that point of like why can't we take all of that and create a healthy eating or fitness app or or an or or an app that would work within the structure of a professional organization to enhance productivity so I think we create I think it's possible but I think that it probably won't take the form that people would expect in many cases the most effective behavior change apps actually change behavior through like a trapdoor and this is just me theorizing right now I don't have any proof of this but like if I think about what is the most effective exercise app that's been created in the last decade well it's probably not actually an exercise app it's probably something like Pokemon go because that got people that got millions of people to walk five or ten miles a day but it wasn't an exercise app at all and I think that there's something may be there for people who do have good intentions who want to change the world in a positive way and are really serious about changing behavior think about what those trap doors are what are things that actually motivate people saving money making more money winning the praise and approval and respect to their friends earning a higher score on the leaderboard and if you can figure out how to have a secondary healthy behavior happening as they do that that might actually be something that could really can get millions of people to do something different yeah we explained that idea of the secondary healthy habit so pokemons go the real thing that people are trying to do is collect these pokemons and get a higher score in whatever but the secondary habit is to do that you have to go walk around the right and see where they're hidden throughout the park and all that type of stuff right and so it's not none of the people playing that thing I'm gonna walk five miles today yeah they just think I need to go find with this yeah and it goes back to your your you know original law which is if you know how creating a system that promotes the healthy behavior without people even necessarily being consciously aware of it right that's ultimately how you move the needle it happens all the time you know I mean we've talked about multiple negative or maybe less healthy examples with cell phones and things like that where we we aren't really thinking about like oh I want to sit on my couch and browse Instagram for three hours like nobody's waking up thinking that they're just thinking oh I got more likes and now you know one of my friends up too and blah blah blah so that's kind of a secondary action that comes from that and this is just twisting it or flipping it on its head a little bit and think about how we can have secondary actions that are healthier yeah all right so what's the difference between focusing on creating a good habit versus focusing on eradicating or overcoming a bad habit like where should the focus and intention go yeah that's a great question I haven't been asked that before but I think actually there's there's some important like keys so I'll let me start with a bad habit I think the most effective place to focus on breaking a bad habit is the first and the third stage of my four-step model so the first stage is making it invisible sounds like reducing exposure so you know I talked about like hiding the television for example or really common example people here like make sure you don't have any sweets in the house processed food right or pantry so in many cases again not for true addictions but for just these bad habits that we have we just do them because they're around us so it's like well if you want to spend less my Electronics don't follow all the tech review blogs you know you're constantly being prompted to buy something or if you want to lose weight don't follow a bunch of food bloggers on Instagram you know you're like continually have to overcome that stimuli so the more that you can cut out that stimuli and reduce exposure to the negative cues maybe that bad habit loop just never get started and so that's one effective way I'd skip over the second stage because our interpretation of cues the prediction that we have it happens so fast it happens lightning-fast as soon as you see that food blog on Instagram you immediately think about your mouth watering and wanting to eat something and being able to like shortcut that and circumvent that it's possible the one of the things that you have to do is like kind of reframe your mindset and make that thing that previously meant something mean something else which you can do but it's just it's hard sorry yeah this is operating on the unconscious mind right so you can rewire your neurology over time with new habits that create those new neural pathways but that's a steeper mountain to climb and it takes a long time you know so if you join a you know if you if you previously ate pork but then you join a religion that doesn't allow you to eat pork and you start to belong to that group and you develop friends there and stuff well then yeah maybe at some point you'll see pork is very unattractive so you've like reframed how you interpret that Q but it's it might take a while to do that you need to actually build the friendships and have a strong reason to stick with you know with that new belief system so anyway I'm gonna skip over the second stage cuz it's I think it's more difficult for a bad habit and then the other area where I think you can focus is the third step which is make it difficult in the case of breaking a bad habit and if you can increase the friction enough you won't follow through so one of the examples I like to give Victor Hugo famous writer and author he he signed this book deal to write the Hunchback of Notre Dom and he just kind of like goofed off for a year he had friends over and had a bunch of parties he went and traveled he went out to restaurants didn't really do a whole lot and the publishers got all annoyed with them and they set this all to meet him and they were like listen you need to get this book down six months we're going to cancel a deal so he had his assistant come into his his room and took all of his clothes out of his closet and put him in a chest and they locked him up and the only thing that he was left with was like this large shawl this like robe and so he didn't have any clothes that were suitable for having friends over or for hosting parties we couldn't travel outside of the house he effectively put himself on house arrest and so my point there was he made it difficult to procrastinate he made it difficult to do the behavior he didn't want to do and it ended up working he got the book done like two weeks early he wrote in like five 1/2 months and then he knows now we have the Hunchback of Notre Dom yeah I mean it goes back to to being intentional about your environment I heard a similar story about Jonathan Franzen I think it was when he was writing freedom maybe but he rented like a crappy like the the most unappealing office like little like like almost like a hotel room in a terrible building like Santa Cruz with like no view or any and all it was was like like a horrible table and a really uncomfortable chair and it was like nothing on the walls nothing you know just to go no distractions just right Maya Angelou does something similar I think she for many of her book she rents a hotel room and she leaves her house drives there and writes yes nothing else a lot of writers in Hollywood do that yeah they go to fancy hotels and order lots of room service right yeah I mean that makes sense so so back to this idea of focusing on building good habits versus so that's where I think you should focus for bad habits for good habits I really think all four are effective the stuff that we talked about earlier with making it attractive and joining a new tribe I think that's the most difficult of the four because you're asking someone to change their friend group or to find new friends at least you don't I don't think you have to like abandon the people that are in your currently in your life if you want to change your habits but it's just easier to adopt a new habit if you have some friends that are also doing that new thing is there any research on the difference between an in-person peer group like joining a running or whatever versus like being on a Facebook group where like you're somewhere where that community doesn't exist right but you have this peer group that's available to you through the laptop yeah it's a good question I have not seen Studies on it it's possible something has been done I just haven't seen it but I think that having a group like you know you're a member of a community on reddit or a Facebook group or something like that it's probably better than not having it if nothing else you're kind of like ceding those ideas in your brain that maybe you wouldn't be getting from your your physical environment but what I'm really interested to see and who knows when this will happen maybe will be 10 years maybe will be a hundred but some kind of augmented reality or virtual reality solution I was just talking today I was like calming I was just talking to someone the other day about this she has this this idea of this company where it's a virtual reality and you effectively use it for like self improvement or behavior change so you just throw the goggles on and now you're suddenly in a room with ten other people who are trying to build the same habit the you are so it's like a Facebook group except it feels like you're in person right everybody knows that being in a Facebook group doesn't feel like what it feels like to go to your local gym yeah but what if suddenly it did if it did have more of that feel and it felt almost real then I don't know I'd be interested to know like you could live anywhere you live in the middle of the woods and suddenly have access to what feels like an in-person group and you get the accountability from that yeah well I think there's no way that's not happening yeah agreed I mean there'll be a lot of crazy not-so-good stuff comes with that you know technology but I can see all kind of benefits with that kind of thing yeah what about this idea of the way in which the adoption of good habits begin to crowd out the bad habits so that was gonna be one of the next things I want to add to the the good habits piece there are two two things that's one of them in many cases building a good habit it's kind of like you know how plants can like crowd another out and so as as the good habit is formed it kind of naturally crowds out the bad one so let's say for example that you both want to get in shape and workout more and you wish you watch less TV or something well if you usually watch TV for three hours when you get home from work each day and you just get home from work and changing your workout clothes and go to the gym instead and you just focus on the habit of going to the gym you don't even really need to think about the television one it just doesn't happen automatically because you're at the gym and you're working out during that time so there are lots of times when stuff like that will occur where the creation of a good habit will just naturally crowd out a bad one and another way to think about this is behaviors often come in bundles like they they're related to each other right like you you go to the bathroom and then you wash your hands and then after you wash your hands you dry your hands and drying your hands reminds you that you need to throw the laundry in and then you think about oh we're out of detergents and they need to go to the store and you know like they're all kind of connected and in many cases both bad habits and good habits can kind of come in these bundles and so if you if you start to do something else that like pulls on one thread in the bundle then the whole stack of bad habits like yeah it's not a binary one-to-one equation if you if you start going to the gym and you start to see results then you're gonna be more interested in eating healthy and then you're gonna be more interested in getting a good night's sleep and then hey what's this meditation thing and before you know it like you know your life is completely different that's why I think exercise is like one of my keys don't have it's one of the crucial ones for me because I I have like this post-workout high where I can focus for like an hour and get some good work done or think clearly I tend to eat better naturally just which is weird right you would think oh you work out so then you could waste it but I don't want to waste it that's like kind of feeling I sleep better at night because I'm tired which means I wake up in the morning and I have better energy and at no point was I trying to build better sleep habits or energy habits or focus habits or nutrition habits it all just kind of came as this natural side effect and exercise is a common one I mean it's mine but it's also common to many people what are the other ones well there's so like visualization is one that you hear from a lot of performers like comedians or something they'll go through the same visualization routine or athletes before they step onto stage or step out to perform a daily walk is a really common one amongst creatives there's a book called daily rituals by Maison carrée where he talks about the rituals of a bunch of scientists and composers and writers and probably like 75 percent of it was alcohol and drugs and then the ones that are clean at daily walk is like ones that are still producing at a high level 20 years later you know have you heard of what David Sedaris does no what does he do it's insane he I mean he's bananas in the best way but he has some very weird behavioral quirks and I think this must be driven by some kind of bizarre OCD but he lives like in the English countryside yeah and for some reason he just became obsessed with the amount of like litter that was everywhere so he would he start it out like and this goes back to like creatives taking a walk like he'd go out and any pick up litter and now he he walks every day for like eight hours picking up litter all over the place every single day like it's some weird compulsion where he just feels and when he travels and he goes out of town like he does it in whatever like not for like an hour like eight hours so I was like well there's something very unhealthy about that but at the same time I I was left wondering like how does that inform his creative process like perhaps this is by giving him some kind of steady low state activity it allows him to free associate in a certain way that perhaps contributes to the incredible writing that he does I don't know I don't know the science behind that but I have had similar thoughts to the one you just add which is maybe like going for a walk kind of gives your yeah the steady state or like maybe it even gives your non-conscious something to do and you somehow like get out of your own way a little bit because you're busy doing that stuff and like him making one foot move in front of the other and that opens up the floodgates for an interesting idea to hit you right but okay so I didn't know that that was where you're going with the Sedaris thing but I had heard that at some point that he has this and I heard a great story which is that he so he goes around picking up his garbage for like eight or nine hours and he's done it so much that he got this award from the Queen of England yeah picking it up and he thought that he was gonna have like a private audience with the Queen for it and so he goes to Buckingham Palace and it turns out they're like four thousand other people that were being honored for their civic work as well and anyway he's just talking about like how how he thought he was gonna get to spend like an hour with the Queen and instead she like shook his hand for half a second took a picture in the mail all right anyway where were we we were talking about okay so there was no and the oh well okay let me wrap up the so visualization going for a walk exercise and then meditation is the common Keystone habit that people will talk about especially you know CEOs or whatever they get their ten minutes of meditation in or 20 minutes and they feel like the rest of the day kind of falls in line and then another weird one that I've heard about from some of my readers is budgeting or specifically paying off debt when people pay their debt off it starts to ripple into other areas that like start exercising and suddenly like I um you know this was even part of it but it it seems to know it's such a heavy you know thing to kind of just care it like a dull low-grade you know burden there's ways on you without you even really being consciously aware of it and when you're carrying something like that around or you're under undue financial duress it's hard to be creative it's hard to be your best self because it's just this thing it's weighing on you all the time hmm so so those are some of the keys don't habits the only other point I was gonna make about crowding out bad habits and focusing on good ones is that figuring out ways to feel successful in the moment that immediate satisfaction that's a really strong place to focus for building good habits there are some examples products a really good example those businesses are good at this so like chewing gum for many years chewing gum has been around for a long time but for most of the time it was like this bland resin it was chewy but it wasn't tasty and then Wrigley came along in the late 1800s and they added juicy fruit and spearmint and double mint and black first time what if it didn't have taste I don't know the burbs board I don't know but they anyway so they it was finally tasty right away and all sudden chewing them takes office this worldwide haven't Wrigley becomes the the most popular chewing gum company in the world and in modern society there are still tons of examples of stuff like this recently a couple years ago BMW added this system to one of their cars where it would pump fake engine growl noise through the speakers so whenever you stepped on the gas it would like be more satisfying to read the engine about we're such dumbass unbelievable Ford is doing something similar they have like a this little valve system where usually it's blocked and the car is soundproofed but if you really slam on the gas the valve will open up and will let the engine noise in and you feeling this guttural where aliens should just come and take us over but the the point here and how to apply it to good habits is that if you have some kind of immediate feedback via media positive feedback and feel good in the moment then you have a reason to repeat it and we already talked about identity being one aspect of that like as soon as you go to the gym you can feel like you're the type person who doesn't miss workouts or whatever and that's one little bit of satisfaction habit tracking I don't think you always need to track or measure your habits but for certain areas for the ones that are important to you that can be an effective way to do this too you know like if you the most simple form is just put like an X on the calendar each time you do a workout or whatever well if you do that every Monday Wednesday and Friday as soon as you finish the workout it feels good to record that I mean I write down like all the sets and reps that I do it feels good to close the book and have another workout finished and of course there's a million apps now that do that great thing from Strava to the aura ring and everything in between the point though the central point is just finding small ways to feel satisfied them yeah gives you a reason to repeat the good habit in the future I like this idea of batching you use this example of one way to kind of confront and overcome a bad habit is to combine it with a good habit so there's the example of the woman who who you know wanted to watch Hunger Games but then she's like she's only allowed to watch it if she's doing it while she's at the gym so like creating the the reward mechanism for the quote-unquote like you know less than stellar behavior has to be built into or part and parcel of doing something that is part of the healthy habit that you're trying to bring into your life yeah so this is called temptation bundling and the the researcher Katie milkman who's at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania she's the one who actually had she'd ran the study but she also had that personal example if she liked The Hunger Games but she knew she need to work out more so she was only allowed to read the book at the gym but it's a larger application of what's called pre max principle which is the psychological principle that behaviors that are more likely to be performed will reinforce behaviors that are less likely to be performed if you can kind of combine them together and my favorite example of this there's this engineering student in Ireland and he rigged up his stationary bike at home to his computer so that Netflix would only turn on when he was pedaling right and if you stop pedaling the Netflix app once it goes back to that same thing we've created all these you know now we have so many things that we have to do to overcome the links that we'll go to you know but but in that case Netflix was the more attractive or more satisfying behavior and so who's that to incentivize himself to get on the site again the biking and cycle and it's that delicate balance like if if what he had to do to watch Netflix was too daunting then he just wouldn't watch Netflix hmm right see if it has to be in that like sweet spot where it's uncomfortable but okay I'll do it this is kind of a larger overriding theme of our conversation so far and something that's probably important to keep in mind which is you need to be willing to experiment you know like everybody's running their race in life separately and so you have to you can use science to inform your strategy and that's a good way it's a good way to have educated guesses and kind of like nudge you in the right direction but you have to be willing to perform these n of one experiments to see you know like what is a habit that's right on that razor's edge that's just motivating enough that I'll go ahead and do it but not so hard than like odd just screw it entirely yeah and only you can know that for yourself and I think sometimes that's frustrating for people because they just want to be handed like a book and be like hey here's the answer and as best I could I tried to write that book four habits but the truth is you need to you need to be willing to experiment and run these kind of personal journeys to figure out what does work for you yeah there's no question about that all right let's talk about goals you have some interesting thoughts on goals the traditional conventional wisdom being like hey if you want to score you got to set a goal if you want to know where you're going set a goal no goal is too big don't sell yourself short and what's the problem with goals okay so first before I come off as someone who completely hates goals I I think goals are useful I think they're useful for setting a sense of direction but once you know what direction you're moving in then I think it's best to put the goal on the shelf and focus on the system or focus on the process in the habits and the this was first an idea that was kind of like thrown out to me or I saw this kind of dichotomy between systems and goals by Scott Adams who wrote the the Dilbert comic and I think he's a little more adamant about it than I am I think he says like goals are for losers and stuff like that which I don't think it is entirely true but there is there are a couple interesting problems with goals so one problem is the winners and losers in any particular domain often have the same goals so every Olympian wants to win the gold medal every candidate who applies for a job wants to get the job so if they all have the same goal by definition the goal cannot be the thing that makes the difference between the people who get it and those who don't but you're not gonna win the gold medal if you're if you don't have a goal to win the gold medal so I think we could say that goals are necessary but not sufficient and that's why I think they're useful they're useful for setting a sense of direction you know like every nick saban and Alabama show up they know from day one the goal is to win the national title and this is one of the beautiful things about sports is that it's so I can white like that is so clear-cut that okay we all know what the goal is and now we can just say let's not talk about the national title what practice everyday let's just focus on the process in the system but there isn't really a national championship of tech startups or of you know of a lot of other things in life and so for that it's like a little a little Messier because people often need those milestones to know that they're still pointed in the right direction so I think it's good for that but I think that generally speaking we've become a very goal and outcome obsessed Society and part of that is because that's what the news shows us every day you know like you're never gonna see a news story that is like woman eats salad and chicken for lunch today it's only on story act if she loses a story in the onion yeah but probably from that before you know but it's only after the outcome has occurred that it becomes a story and social media has just like magnified this even more because all we do is just see people's outcomes and results and highlights all day long I think because we are inundated with results and goals we think having a big goal having the result having the outcome is what we should focus on and so we spend 90% of our time thinking about obsessing over planning these goals and only 10% of our time actually worrying about the process and it should probably be reversed well I think what goals do well is they create clarity of purpose right so I yes Sports is a very black-and-white template where goals make sense startup culture well you know what is the goal is it you know it's it's more unclear but I think every successful startup or startup entrepreneur has some kind of true north and that may not be financially rooted it may be in changing the world or whatever it may be but there needs to be a directional guideposts so that the team or the individual can cohere around a trajectory mm-hm so I think it makes sense in that regard because it's a reminder of like where you're going and why but I agree with you that once you set the goal then it becomes about systems like you should sort of forget about it and be and and and focus all of your attention on like what is the next thing that you're doing right rather than like talking about this thing that you know may not happen for 10 years or 20 years I mean you know it may just of the Olympic gold goal but you know the person who wins the gold medal probably set that goal when they were 8 years old right so it's been this true North that's kind of gently guiding them in a certain direction for a very long time yeah I mean just add a couple things of that so let's say that you are that tech startup and you have some clear goals about what you want the culture to be or the the the direction of the company to be where people should focus each day the interesting thing is that the goals can be useful for that clarity but really they don't determine much in the long run your true culture as a company is not the goals that you put on paper or the mission statement that you put on the wall your true cultures the shared habits of the team if it's not a habit among the organization it's not actually part of your culture it's just something you did one time in like a thought building exercise and I think that that kind of puts goals in their proper place which is yes it's very useful for us all to know what direction we're trying to row in but unless we're actually rowing unless we're actually doing the the habits then it's not really part of this and so that's one thing the second thing is that achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment yeah it's temporal right whereas identity has a permanence to it there's a there's an example I use with this for cleaning your room you know like you get really motivated you got a messy room and so your goal becomes to have a clean room so you clean it up but you have a clean room for the moment but if you don't change like the sloppy messy packrat habits that led to a messy room in the first place you turn around two weeks or a month later and you have a messy room again and so we think that the thing that needs to change is the result but actually what we really need to change is the process behind the results we like treat a symptom without treating the cause right well in your example you're actually treating this symptom rather than the root cause it's like taking a blood blood pressure medication without changing your lifestyle habits right right but I think this is really common when people set goals because they think only about the outcome they think about the clean room they think about the million dollar bank account they think about the fit six-pack abs but what they don't think about is what kind of lifestyle do you need to live to get that thing and unless you actually want the whole lifestyle that's associated with that result it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to make it your goal you know but it becomes very easy to get wrapped up in that because all we ever see is the outcome rather than the process yeah you also have this interesting idea about the the sort of peril of good habits and how that can kind of create a comfort zone for people so I think that and we mentioned this early on the habits of the foundation of her I think that habits of the foundation for mastery you know so LeBron or whatever like all those examples of automating as much as you can of the the process but there is a downside to building good habits and that is that at first you become aware of something that you want to change then you like deliberately practice it for a while you put effort in and as you do that you develop fluency and skill and ability and what was previously difficult becomes easy and you have it relies it but once it's a habit the downside is you stop paying attention as much when you can do something pretty good on autopilot you stop thinking about how to do it better and there's actually an interesting study that's been done on surgeons that shows that early on in their career they go through residency they increase fluency and skill they start practicing surgery maybe for a few years and then actually their skills get to a peak and then once they've done it for a while and they're pretty good at it it's not that they drop off a cliff but there's a slight decline in performance because they can do so many of the steps on autopilot they stop thinking about did I make a little error there to make a mistake to I overlook one step yeah there's a rigidity you become less teachable yeah and you become less cognizant of where you might be slipping by I know and so one of my favorite examples of this I mean this is one of the values of having a coach is that coaches keep you aware of your mistake when you are no longer Atul Gawande who's a fantastic writer in his own right and as a surgeon he got us everything oh it's insane is his straight I'm genius thank God ya know he's fantastic I also think complications was his best book and it doesn't get nearly as much press as I think it should but he anyway he hired another surgeon who had recently retired to review the tape of his surgery and tell him like where he was going wrong and what he was you know what he could improve on and I love that because surgeons never get coaches right that's not a thing in that industry but you don't have to be an athlete to have a coach like find a mentor or someone who recently retired someone who's 10 years ahead of where you're at and have them critique what you're up to and that is a really instructive and powerful way to kind of overcome or at least become aware of some of your habits that the downside of some of your habits that maybe you're overlooking yeah or or perhaps develop habits around making sure that you're always tiptoeing outside your comfort zone or habits that encourage you to to always have people around you that will give you that critical feedback and push you nudge you just a little bit yeah yeah from that that comfortable place I mean that so that that maybe is what I'm talking about here as habits are formed they become a comfortable place and usually growth is on the perimeter of that rather than in the middle and so you need some reason or some way to stay on the perimeter of your abilities and keep stretching rather than staying comfortable where do you most people go wrong with all this I think probably the biggest thing is making a habit too big so we talked a little bit about the two-minute rule and that idea of scaling and have it down to just the first two minutes of optimizing for the starting line rather than finish line that's a huge one the second one would be the all-or-nothing mentality where we talked about like never missed twice you know make sure that I you know like get back on track as quickly as possible rather than acting like well if I can't run three days a week and why bother at all you know like doing it once it's fine so that's another huge issue and then in the long run the two things that I think are most crucial are identity adopting that type of identity and casting votes for the person you want to become even if it's in a really small way so you start to see yourself and build up evidence of being that person and then the second one is social environment you know like in the long run it's really hard to stick to a habit if it goes against the grain of the people that are around you whereas if you get praised and respected for it people stick to things even if they don't have a factual basis for them even if they don't have a good reason because the the social component and the belonging is so strong yeah the identity one is huge you know I I think really a huge problem is that people are not adequately in touch enough with themselves and their impulses who they are and where they want to be like they're not connected to their interior landscape to the extent that their choice of identity or goal is necessarily reliable because most people are not engaged in that internal process of trying to really understand what makes them tick and and who they want to be and what I see is a lot of people chasing the wrong thing and they may be very good at executing on that goal or that habit that takes them there only to later discover that that whole pursuit was you know really not what they should have been doing in the first place there's a quite a quote right always like I hope everybody gets everything they ever wanted and realizes that wasn't what they actually needed yes or I can't remember who it was it said this like you know you spend your whole life climbing this ladder only to realize it's leaning against the wrong wall right which becomes a much broader discussion about you know psychology I suppose in general but all right well we got a we got a start to close this thing down but um why don't we if you could leave us with a couple things that people can take away to perhaps you know kind of tweak how they look at and think about the habits that they're trying to change in their own lives and some simple steps to get them started and taking making better decisions sure so I'll give you one mindset shift and one practical application so the mindset shift and this kind of lies beneath the entire conversation we had today is to just try to find a way to get 1% better each day it doesn't need to be something radical it doesn't need to be something huge but habits are easy to overlook both good and bad on any given day because they don't seem like very much the difference between studying Spanish for an hour tonight and not studying at all seems like nothing is like why I still didn't learn the language and the difference between eating a salad versus eating a burger and fries seems like nothing because your body looks the same in the mirror and the scale is the same at the end of the night it's only once your habits have compounded over two or five or ten years that the full impact of those 1% choices one percent better or one percent worse becomes fully apparent and if you can understand that concept and internalize it then you can start to see the importance in your daily actions and in your daily habits and why those are so critical so that's the first thing is just try to find a way to get 1% better and the second thing just a practical application I would encourage you to try to apply the 2 minute rule think about whatever habit it is that you're trying to build and scale it down to just the first two minutes of the behavior what is the thing that you can do that can initiate it don't think about it as like the overall habit think about it like a gateway habit or an entrance ramp to a highway how can you automate the beginning of the behavior and this is this is maybe an important distinction about habits a lot of the time we talk about habits as we use the phrase habit for things that aren't actually habits like we'll say something like I want to build the habit of writing every day technically we define this at the very beginning of this episode a habit is a behavior that can be performed more or less automatically and it's on autopilot writing is about the most effortful concentrated thing that you can do right like you're gonna be thinking carefully you're not gonna be on autopilot so the habit part of that would be I sit in a chair at a desk with a pad of paper in front of me or a laptop the habit is the first two minutes right how can you automate the ritual of getting started and then let the consequence and the the effortful concentrating work follow naturally same way with you know the example I gave about my reader the habit was showing up at the gym you know or for running a lot of people a lot of people have heard stuff like this before like hey take small steps but even when you know you should start small it's still really easy to start too big people are like alright I want to build the habit of running so I guess I know I should start small so I only run for 15 minutes but even that's like way bigger than what I'm talking about scale it down just the first two minutes automate the ritual of getting started putting on your running shoes stepping out the door locking the door and if you can automate that and make that a habit you do a day in and day out and you're the type of person who always gets their running shoes own steps out the door there gonna be a lot of days where you yeah it's great advice it's great advice alright James clear I think we did it this is awesome man thanks rich I appreciate it feel good yeah I feel great anything else you want to say do we say it all we could keep going we could there's a there's a lot in the book that we didn't get to cover which might seem incredible given how much we covered here but book is very thorough oh thank you yeah yeah I'm glad you enjoyed it I there's that there are some sections that I find really interesting like there I have a section on genes and habits and like choosing oh yeah we talked about like genetic factors yeah we can talk about let's do it all right there's a there's like a running joke out on the internet but I always say like alright we're wrapping this up and then I go two hours later alright so here's my thought on genes in many cases the genes that are well we often don't like to talk about genes in biology because it seems like a fixed characteristic right bio is saying that like oh your genetics had seen nobody likes to think like oh what's out of my control why bother but the truth is the usefulness or the applicability of your genes is highly dependent on context so being seven feet tall is an incredible advantage if you're trying to play basketball and it's an incredible disadvantage if you're trying to be a gymnast and just as that is very obvious with physical traits it's becoming increasingly true as we develop more understanding of the link between genes and psychological traits your personality and so for certain personalities certain habits or certain environments might be predisposed to being really successful enjoyable or not the I think there's a lot to improve in this area I think there's like a lot for us still to learn but it's so many ways we might just be in the infancy of understanding this but one of the best measures or most robust measures of personality is the big five in this kind of like mapping personality traits on to five different spectrums the most common one that people know is introversion and extraversion but there are other ones as well agreeableness conscientiousness and so on and each of these five traits has been linked to some kind of genetic underpinning some type of DNA and so one of my favorite studies on this researchers took babies that were in the nursery and they played a harsh noise on one side of the nursery and some of the babies turn toward the noise and some of them turned away and as they track those children as they grew up throughout life they found the ones that turned toward the noise were more likely to grow up to be extroverts and the ones that turned away were more likely to grow up to be introvert yeah the extroverts are in the mosh pit are at home watching Netflix so again I think there's still a lot to learn but there's definitely something going on here people for example who have higher levels of agreeableness tend to have higher natural levels of oxytocin as well and so you can imagine how someone who is high in agreeableness might be more likely or it might be easier for them to build a habit of writing thank-you notes or of organizing social events where people can be warm and hang out and kind and consider it and so on they're that kind of personality and so there may be predisposed to that kind of habit where gets interesting is if you can understand yourself at a more I guess I'll even call a genetic level then maybe you can start to design habits that fit you better or design an environment that fits you better so one of the examples I gave in the book and again I'm just kind of I'm still like toying with some of these ideas is for people who are low in conscientiousness which is one of those five traits that means that they're less likely to be orderly or less likely to be or so if someone is like that if they're predisposed to be that kind of person it might really help them to be in an environment to have an environment designed where things are already orderly or primed or set up because they're going to be less likely to be the type of person that would just remember to do it or to make a to-do list to do it and so on and so maybe if you knew oh I'm low in conscientiousness you should shift more of your energy and attention to environment design yeah yeah that's that's super interesting I mean in the book you talk about you know Michael Phelps who has a physique that's perfectly suited to him swimming very fast and then you have this jicama guru yeah a long-distance runner who they have the same inseam but you know the proportionality of their bodies are completely different and he's well-suited in a long-distance running they could not swap places and the point being that from afar the casual observer will say well of course he's good at swimming like look at his body I can't do that but the greater point that you're trying to make is if we can develop self-awareness around you know what suits us best in our predispositions and gravitate towards those environments and those opportunities then we're putting ourselves in a position where the expression of our genetic makeup can advance us and fuel us and and you know put us in the position that is you know best for us right I don't know if this is going to end up being possible it's but it's possible that there may be a few key traits like the if for measuring intelligence is a hot topic and difficult to do because there are many different types of intelligence but if for example being having winning the genetic lottery and intelligence happens to be like a cheat code and it helps you succeed in any area of life then maybe maybe this what I'm about to say isn't as accessible but what I think could be possible and is a really inspiring notion to me is if we could appropriately map your personality and genes then maybe we could better suit people to environments where they could be excellent and that would be a wonderful thing for everyone to be able to feel and experience what it's like to be excellent at something what it's like to be world-class or to succeed and many ways it's just a matching problem you know like what if Michael Phelps grew up in a family that was all runners and had never swam and he never got exposed to that well there probably is a guy you know yeah ocular brown right now who has a physique that's even better suited for the 200 butterfly and has never been in a swimming pool right it's like we don't know because we're ping pong balls bouncing around and we kind of you know find our own water level eventually some of us do but it leaves you wondering well how many people aren't finding that you know perfect outlet where the world you know you talk about luck you've written about like luck and and you know you use Bill Gates an example like there's a lot of luck involved he was born in America and he was in this you know the timing was right everything was perfect for him to be the person that he ultimately becomes about how many people out there have that potential where the world doesn't converge in a way that allows them to express whatever gift is innate within them and my hope is that there are enough niches throughout the world that there are enough ways for people to fit in and find their their thing where they can be excellent where they're like perfectly suited for that and it's just this matching problem that we don't right now it really is like ping pong balls is just luck is I mean it's it's luck that Michael Phelps grew up in the right in the right environment the right family the right situation for that and that doesn't discount any of the hard work that he did you know I mean he worked he worked his butt off but he was in the he happened to also have been matched with the right thing at the beginning including like the perfect amount of psychological trauma to fuel the competitive nature within him like there it's all of it right and I think we're headed towards a future where AI and genetic testing are going to be able to answer some of these questions for people and that's fraught with all kinds of other perils but there is something interesting about that Israel in the meantime you kind of leave people with this question which is what are you well suited to suffer for right something like that paraphrasing I think it which is a way of kind of prompting that self inquiry a lot of people try to figure out like yes so in that chapter after a set of questions that you can go through to try to figure it out for your what are you most appropriately matched for what what environment would suit you and one of the key questions I think is where's an area where you can handle the pain of the work better than the people around you the area where you are more well equipped to suffer is the work that you were made to do which is an interesting way to think about it right like most people think about oh well where is it just easy where do I succeed but every area requires hard work and effort to achieve some level of success so the question is not where is it easy the question is where can I handle the pain mm-hmm yeah it's a total it's a different lens through which to look at it but I think that that I think that's it I think that's right you know for some people for some for whatever reason people who grow up and you know become great writers they writing is suffering but they can handle it for some reason Navy SEALs like it's not easy to be one but the guys who can make it somehow they can handle the suffering of it yeah they're and they're well suited and and prepared and willing to undergo that for some reason and I think I used that line something similar to that at the end of that chapter which is at the peak of any field what you're going to find are people who are both well suited and well trained it's not just one or the other they have the environment matching and they have the hard work and the effort and the perseverance right habits are the compound interest of self-improvement I love it that's one of my favorite lines I think it encapsulates the core idea right that like if you're willing to build those small behaviors and layer 1% improvements on top of each other they will compound and multiply the same way that money multiplies through compound interests the effects of your habits multiplies you repeat them over time and that can be true for you or against you and that's why it's crucial to understand how habits work so that you can you know make sure that they're they're multiplying in your favor rather than to your detriment you heard it here people right from the source I love it man thank you so much I really appreciate your wisdom the book is fantastic I think it's going to help a lot of people so I'm excited for you are you going out on a big book tour you're going to be around where people can come and hear you talk and stuff like that yeah thank you I'm so grateful and pleased to hear that you enjoyed it so thanks for that and we probably will do a book tour at some point I'll definitely be in New York for the launch on October 16th but in the meantime people can find the book and learn more about it at atomic habit huh right and James clear calm at James clear pretty much everywhere on the Internet yeah yeah pretty much just James clear calm is the place to go check out some of my articles I've got it organized by category so if you want to just bounce around so it would interest you and then there are links to social media and all that others you have this newsletter with like 8 zillion people who subscribe and read your stuff right yeah that's James clear calm slash newsletter but but yeah you can just james clear calm anatomic abaca mental that'll have it all for you cool good talking you man great thanks Richard peace [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 1,092,441

Rating: 4.8581066 out of 5

Keywords: rich roll, athlete, podcast, inspiration, motivation, wellness, mindfulness, self-help, self-improvement, habits, james clear, atomic habits, behavior change, psychology, neurology, bad habits, good habits, goals, goal setting, identity, business, productivity, efficiency, Charles Duhigg, Atul Gawande, Alain de Botton

Id: s9uDVVWN_ZE

Length: 129min 25sec (7765 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 28 2018