How To MULTIPLY Your Income Without WORKING HARDER | Rory Vaden & Lewis Howes

automation is to your time what compounding interest is to your money just like compounding interest takes money and it turns it into more money automation takes time and it turns it into more time right i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness really there's been a lot of anxiety and stress and overwhelm in the last years for people with hustle culture with uh needing to grow needing to have more needing to accomplish more and achieve more faster comparison of what other people are doing and this desire to create and grow and build and yet people say i feel like i don't have enough time i don't have enough time to do all the things i want to do it's a very first world problem i don't have enough time and today we want to talk about the habits of high performers and how they can increase their productivity and multiply their time and is there a way with all the tools and all the distractions and all the social media and all the apps and and all the responsibilities that we have in our life is there a way to multiply time and to become more productive yeah yeah there is so i mean this is what you just described was my life i mean this is this this was pretty much like all the things we study i was not trying so much to solve a work the problem for the world i was trying to solve a problem in my own life just busy buried behind overwhelmed stressed frustrated no matter how fast you work you just never feel caught up um no matter how many hours you didn't sleep you felt tired and you were working sluggish and trying to get it all done everything yeah you just can't it's there's this frustration of like am i am i ever going to have peace like am i ever going to have margin am i ever going to have space and just feeling like things are under control and so we started looking at this and we started profiling uh people that at the time we called ultra performers which were the top one percenters in different industries and is this top one percent earners top 100 accomplishments yeah i mean just what it's kind of used that term loosely but like you know if it's church leaders it's large you know large church leaders if it's athletes it's professional athletes if it's if it's financial advisors they're probably top earners sure sure so um it's just from different walks of life and what we found is there is a new type of thinker that has emerged that is we call them a multiplier because most people are trying to manage time right like you even hear this you go i need you know i need to be better at managing my time time management but you know what's funny about that is there is no such thing as time management there is only self-management right you cannot manage time there's their time ticks on second by second i can't fast forward time i can't stop it i can't pause it and so what we're what this conversation really about is managing ourselves managing our decisions managing our use of time but even that is is kind of a is a first shift that needs to happen is it's not like i'm this helpless victim that is subject to the world around me who is unfairly blasting me with all this stuff no you're in charge like you everything that exists in your life you either said you said yes to it in some way so it is your responsibility and and you created the problem but that also means that you are in charge of fixing it right that you have the power to change it but what we started to realize is that most of what people have learned and uh think about time management i went so far and as the opening line in my ted talk is i said everything you know about time management is wrong it's wrong because we have been taught to think about time in a very you know linear way and the world today is much more like multi-dimensional um when you mean linear where do you mean focusing on our priorities yeah so so a little bit about that so if you if we talk um we love to take people on a quick like history of time management theory okay so era one time management thinking uh was very one-dimensional um we refer to arrow one thinking as efficiency so that was the strategy was i got 10 things on my to-do list how do i crank them out faster and time management and productivity as a body of work really develops like it comes on in the scene in like 1950s 60s so you know it's the manufacturing era where it's conveyor belts and engineering and just doing things faster that also reflected in our mindset was how can i be more efficient now efficiency is good all things being equal doing things faster is great the problem is that there is a point of diminishing returns to using efficiency as your only strategy for productivity right um which is that no matter how fast we move the the amount of busy work always expands to fill the amount of time available right so it's more like quicksand this is kind of like the faster you go or the more that shows up doesn't mean you shouldn't be fast it's just not going to get you what you're looking for um then uh in the late 80s dr stephen covey wrote a book that changed the world um seven habits of highly effective people i'm sure you're familiar with it and sold tens of millions of copies and dr covey pretty much single in single-handedly introduced a new era of time management thought um that we were you know the world refers to as prioritizing yes but we would classify prioritizing as error-2 thinking which is still to this day the predominant strategy that most people use in terms of how they think about time and so here's here's what prioritizing is it's to focus first on what matters most super powerful super relevant dr covey had this thing called the time management matrix that you know he explained of like urgency and importance and basically he taught us to score our activities so that we could reorder them and say ah it's not just about getting these done faster it's saying hey item number seven needs to be pushed to item number one which is valuable and so that's super valuable um prioritizing is important is as important today as ever before but what i noticed in my own life because i was a student of dr covey and several books sometimes i mean there's there's no shortage of books on time management there's no shortage of apps there's all these tips and tricks and tools and technology that exist to help us with this problem of feeling so busy and yet the majority of us are still overwhelmed right so it's like there's something missing and what we started to notice in these these ultra performers that we now refer to as the multipliers is that they're they are doing a different type of thinking it's like evolution like their their thinking has evolved um from for almost all of them it was subconscious and they weren't even aware of it not even aware of it it wasn't something that someone taught them to do they did it instinctively you know like instinctually they they they figured out and and most of them couldn't explain it they couldn't explain it to me and they couldn't explain it to most people if they said why are you how are you so productive right like how does you know how do you become a billionaire in 10 years when like most people work for 40 years and you know they they can barely retire right um it's a it's a it's a different type of thinking and one of the things this is true in many areas of our life the next level of results always requires the next level of thinking so here's what it is so era 3 time management is multiplying it's not efficiency it's not prioritizing it's multiplying and it's all based on what we call the significance calculation so it's really uh it's not uh it's adding on like dr covey's work as an example so he you know present this two-dimensional figure like a square where the y-axis is important and the x-axis is urgency but what multipliers are doing is they're making a third calculation which we call significance so it's kind of like if you're doing algebra it would be the z-axis it would turn the square into a cube three-dimensional three-dimensional thinking era three thinking or three-dimensional thinking and so here's the difference urgency is how soon does this matter most of us live in a world of urgency it's all about what needs to be done right now importance is different importance is how much does this matter but significance is even different still significance is how long is this going to matter so how is what is the impact of this activity in the future 10 years out 20 years out even 10 days out yeah it's it's it is breaking free of the paradigm of one day and instead thinking about tomorrow yeah and the next day and the significance calculation changes everything because this is how it's possible to multiply time uh so let me i'll just tell you in one sentence okay so if you say rory how is it possible to multiply time this is the answer so right you want to write that write this part down you don't want to miss this the way you multiply time is by giving yourself the emotional permission to spend time on things today that create more time tomorrow you do you do there's certain things you do right now that create more time in the future that's the significance calculation um so when i say multiply time people often think i'm exaggerating or that it's like a marketing hyperbole right as i'm like i'm sensationalizing a concept when when we say this we're not exaggerating we mean this literally now it kind of fries your brain because you go you've been told your whole life you can't time is the one thing you you can never get back it's the one thing you can never get more of um and it is true that there's nothing that we can do there's nothing i can do to to give you more time inside of one day so one day is finite and we're all limited by the same 24 hours which by the way is 1440 minutes or 86 400 seconds okay so i can't teach you to create more i don't have control over time right there's no such thing as time management there's only self management but that's exactly the problem is most of us think about our activities in the paradigm of one day we wake up and we say what's the most important thing i can do today and it's not that that's a bad question it's just not the question that multipliers ask multipliers don't say what is the the most important thing i can do today multipliers ask what are the things i can do today that create more time tomorrow what are the things i can do now that make the future better you're literally breaking free of the urgency paradigm of just what matters right here right now and you're introducing the significance paradigm of what is going to have impact over the long haul right how do you know which actions to focus on urgently that will have impact over the long haul yes when you've got everything's significant yes so uh well there's there's a tool called the focus funnel yeah um that we developed here to help people apply this so so there's only one big idea in this whole conversation which is spend time on things today that give you more time tomorrow that's how you multiply time um then and then you go how do i do that and there's five five there's five core methods strategies we call them uh permissions yes because there's an emotional side what we've also learned is that most people treat time management logically but it's actually an emotional conversation um for most of us it's it's not just our calendar and our inbox and our to-do list it is our our under underlying feelings of guilt and fear and anxiety and worry as well as ambition and are our our drive to be successful and feel valued and important and to make you know impact in the world these underlying emotional drivers dictate as much as uh dictate how we spend our time and the choices that we make as much as anything on our to-do list what do we feel most guilty about we feel most guilty um about not doing something that we want to do about delaying something about wasting our time i would say the guilt so guilt corresponds with the first of the the five permissions which is eliminate okay so if you if you were to picture a funnel okay so if i was gonna draw this out right like you think of all of the stuff there is to do comes into the top and then the focus funnel is our attempt to create a visual illustration that codifies the thought process that multipliers go through intuitively in their own brain so that the rest of us can kind of like see it and follow it so the very first question is can this be eliminated um so give me an example of your life or someone's business or career or whatever it might be there's tons of things i mean in your personal life i mean i i used i like the example of tv because it's it's it's hilarious how people will in the same dinner conversation talk about how they're so busy and married and overwhelmed and then talk about the three series on netflix that they have binged in like the last month right and uh it took 20 hours of their life yeah and so it's like okay i'm not saying you shouldn't watch tv by the way i'm not telling you anything you're shooting or shouldn't do i'm just introducing the framework for you to decide how to spend your time but if you're saying you're too busy and overwhelmed check to where you're spending your time the most that's right and and nielsen says that six hours on instagram a day and you're not being uh you know not creating something of significance and you're just browsing or if you're 20 hours a week on tv and you're i'm overwhelmed and tired and exhausted then just look at where you're spending your time yeah and nielsen ratings you know this was this is from a few years ago but they said the average american watches 27 hours a week of television a week a week it's a part-time job so 27 hours a week how much is that a day i mean so you know seven seven times like four hours a day four hours a day of tv like four hours a day that's a time that's a lot of time i mean you could build a big side hustle in a couple hours every day even if you just cut half of that down and you watch two hours a day of tv and you spend two hours on your side hustle or something else your health your relationships imagine the the benefits you would have down the line so yeah there's anything eliminate is the first opportunity to multiply because anything i say no to today creates time in the future how it's preventing me from doing something that i would have otherwise been doing had i not given myself the permission to eliminate like had i not said no so basically this is is saying no and people really struggle with saying no um in businesses this happens all the time people have all these so you know at brand builders group we do personal brand strategy right so we're coaching all these like people on uh building and monetizing their personal brand well they have like 100 business models it's like i want to have a video course and a membership site and a live event and consulting i want to do keynote speaking and and i want to get a book deal and and you know and sponsorships and brand deals and and it's like when you have diluted focus you get diluted results so you have to by saying no to some things you power your ability to focus on the few significant things that will multiply time so you you have to say you have to say no but this is something that people struggle with yeah i struggle with it you know well especially when you get to a certain level of success where there's a lot of opportunities and cool things and exciting things and new shiny objects we want to do lots of things yeah high achievers people that have gotten out of the weeds of their life and they have different problems which are opportunity problems again first world problems it's how do you focus your time and energy and making the decisions that you want to focus on now for your future and that is a challenge in just making decisions decision fatigue is a thing for people and learning how to place importance on the things that you want to spend your time on is going to be key for you totally and a lot of people the decision fatigue what happens is they it it it does wear on you and so a lot of people don't make conscious decisions so what happens is they make what emotional decisions reactions yes they're unconscious emotional impulses right and if you're not consciously saying no to the things that don't matter you end up unconsciously saying no to the things that do matter what if everything matters to you so you know that that's what i said actually so i um in in um so we were you know this became the procrastinate on purpose book so this was my second book um when we're profiling all these people i was doing interviews and i told one of the multipliers i said i don't like this one i i got to where i am by being a yes man by like doing a lot of things and doing them well and like saying yes to meetings and meeting people all the time and they said rory that is the dumbest thing i've ever heard and i was like oh okay and here's what they said they said you're trying to go through life without saying no which is admirable because you're a nice you're you're a nice guy but what you failed to realize is that you are always saying no to something anytime you say yes to one thing you simultaneously are saying no to an infinite number of other things so even when you think you're saying yes everything is important to me no nothing is important to you nothing is important enough for you to focus on and you don't have a method for for focus and focus is power so that most of us are losing because we're wandering we're meandering through a bunch of insignificant trivial tasks feeling productive when when really we're just diluted right um so if you that's the first one eliminate um now if you can't eliminate the task then it drops down to the center of the focus funnel which is automate the permission to invest and this is this is so powerful because anything you create a process for today saves you time in the future yes now we if i set up a process for it or a system or if i write code you know there's a lot of automation like actual technologies and things that you can deploy if i if i take the time to set it up today then tomorrow the system or the process is doing the thing instead of me so it's multiplying time um now here's the challenge is that most of us are aware that those tools exist but if you ask someone lewis i mean like if you ask the average business owner or you know whatever a you know achiever or you know somebody pursuing greatness are you aware of tools and systems and processes and technologies that you could implement or deploy or improve inside of your goals that would would automate things they would all say yes but if you said why haven't you done it yet what do you think they'd say uh it's it's it takes too much time it takes too much time it's easier to do it myself right now just a couple minutes every day as opposed to building a digestive system figuring out the software learning it going through the training hiring someone teaching them all the time and energy i might just do it myself right now bingo yeah so it's like they they it's so ironic because the the the two excuses we would use for why we haven't automated things is we would say i either i don't have the time or i don't have the patience money the money the patience the patience we'll talk about in a second when we talk about the time or the money i don't have the time or the money and it's wild because the the those two excuses we would use for not automating something are exactly the opposite of how it is when you make the significance calculation because if you did do automate you would save time or you would multiply time and you'd earn more money yeah from your time doing something else yeah so an easy example is bill pay you know that's a quick example right so if you had two hours open in your day today and i said louis you know what's the most important thing you could do today you'd have a list of things that you would do and if i said hey i think you should consider setting up online bill pay for most of us we would be like uh no like that is not important that's not significant that is seems totally trivial but if you look at this the way a multiplier would you go okay if you spend two hours today setting up online bill pay and it saves you 30 minutes every month from paying your bills in the future then after four months time you will have broken even 30 30 30 30 you will have broken even on those initial two hours and then every month thereafter you'll get something that we call roti return on time invested because now the system is doing the thing that you would have otherwise been doing another way that we say this i know this is one of your one of your favorite rory-isms is that automation is to your time exactly what compounding interest is to your money right automation is to your time what compounding interest is to your money just like compounding interest takes money and it turns it into more money automation takes time and it turns it into more time right just like nobody has extra money to invest i mean not nobody there's some people are so rich it's like that's all they do but the average person doesn't have you know an extra 10 grand just laying around to be like i'm going to invest it usually you have to sacrifice something in the short term you don't go on a trip you don't buy the car you don't buy the tv and that is where you create the margin to reinvest into you know whatever the stock market mutual funds like real estate real estate whatever you whatever you do that is also how time is nobody has extra time to set up a system you know marketing automation is one of the big things we teach our clients i know you guys do a lot of it here um we're experts in marketing automation one of the reasons we became experts in it is we realized oh my gosh if i can build a a funnel you know which is just a sequence a series of emails and you know automating trust basically giving value to people then that system basically becomes like an employee for me that works 24 hours a day seven days a week it's always out there but i don't have time to build it and yet you only say that in the absence of significance and that's what happens in the absence of the significance calculation we inadvertently overweight the urgency calculation and we doom ourselves to a lifetime sentence of always feeling busy because we're constantly making decisions only about what needs to get done today and never thinking ahead via the significance calculation of tomorrow so how do we know what is most significant today yeah so do we make a list of everything that's on our minds or on our to-do list do we step back and actually say okay where could i do i analyze my times where i'm spending the most of my time every day every week every month and say okay where can i pull this back and what should i putting it towards like how do we figure out what is significant yeah so good question now and next year so significance in some ways is an is an internal assessment right but um you know when we the word significant is a little bit tricky because it's got the double entendre of significant meaning like profound but significant how i'm using it here is not multiplying time it's just literal it's like what's what's the impact so so actually i think a way to go to figure this out is to go how do i figure out what's important because significance is a part of the importance calculation as is urgency i'm not telling you that you can nor is it realistic that you would never do things that are more urgent but if there's no significance calculation all you only ever do is what's urgent you only fall victim to the fires you feel always busy overwhelmed stressed never having enough time bingo that is that that and that was me right and then that was we did a study and then it was like oh my gosh you know we need to write a book on this which becomes the book procrastinate on purpose which then becomes a ted talk ted talk goes viral and it's like i don't even teach productivity like i teach influence right brand builders group we study the psychology of influence now i would say that self-management is influencing yourself so this does fall in that category um as well as you know the other stuff we do around self-discipline is kind of influencing self so before you can influence others you should influence self so that it does fit the context but anyways i say that to say i never set out to write a book about this right it happened as a result of going oh my gosh i'm doing this this wrong so so to your question here's here's an exercise simple you list everything out you have to do and on one column it is the urgency column which is how soon does this need to be done rate it one to ten the next column is the significance call column which is how much is this is the completion of this task going to matter in the future if you were just doing it on time based you would say a scale of one to ten how much time will this task make me in the future that's significance so it's a significance is a natural counter balancing force to urgency then multiply the two numbers together and that'll give you your important score and then rearrange the activities in order of importance so it's it's kind of you know it's building on what dr covey was doing right he was teaching us number one not all tasks are created equal right number two you should score the tasks um and number three you should focus first on what matters most but what he didn't give us which he there wasn't as much of a need to in 1989 right i mean in 1989 we didn't have cell phones we didn't have technology we didn't have internet social media social media would have these apps we didn't have all these other tools that the world uses today and you didn't have the perpetual communication constant messaging yeah when you left work you left work you didn't have a way to talk to anybody and people had to call you on a landline you pick it up off the wall right yeah or you just didn't pick it up yeah you weren't getting constantly messaged vibrated in your right thigh of like another distraction opportunity friend whatever yeah so press press hit you know something and and here's what what i would say right is is go you can't solve today's time management challenges using yesterday's time management strategies right but most people are for most people you know importance and urgency like dr covey's thing is is the predominant method i mean it's probably the most you know stolen or like copyright abused technique that there is and it doesn't make this new calculation of significance so all you're doing is adding to it and you're you're breaking you know sounds so cheesy to say a paradigm shift but you're you're shifting from a lens of what matters in the next 24 hours to what matters in the future and it's multiplying yes um so automation is to your time what compounding interest is to your money yes and you as you give yourself the permission to invest in building the system it compounds over time now if you can't automate it eliminate automate then that task drops down to the bottom of the funnel which is delegate delegate anytime you train somebody else to do something then in the future that person is doing it so it's multiplying time they're doing it instead of you again it's the same short term problem i don't have time like so if i if i asked you i said are there things you're doing louis every day that you somebody could you could train somebody how to do for you i know you're you're pretty good at this but yeah let's just say like the average entrepreneur yeah you know or or executive or even mom like a mom like a mom who works at home there's a bunch of stuff that she's doing um and you know it's it's easier to put your three-year-old's shoes on for them than to stop and teach them and make them do it right right but if you teach them to do it then then now every day for them right so um and i say that because i have a four-year-old you know aj and i we got a four-year-old and a two-year-old so this is like real real talk uh at the vegan house right now now you your your thinking is really good though because you go gosh comments are important to me so so one of the things we've had a lot of our clients do with comments that have lots of followers is we just write out a series of like the first four responses yes and then if if someone comments like more than five times they move it over into the primary inbox so that like me as an example i will i will personally reply now the first couple responses are standard but i wrote them they are what i would say if i were there right in that moment so the fact that someone else is copying and pasting it it's like it is what i would say you write out a decision tree of how the conversation's going to go now if somebody makes it through that i never want someone to pretend they are me and and i'm not trying to outsource my personality but most people it's like hey how's this or they have a quick question and it's like great we're responding faster than even if it was me and it is the thing i would be doing anyways yeah so you can do exactly you can do both when you think this way yes when you break the paradigm yeah and you're thinking long term now so to delegate um the uh that's the third step yeah do we have time for the 30x rule or yep so this is this is big because a lot of people struggle with going it's just faster for me to do it myself and then teaching someone else on how to do this then teaching someone else and so there's a great rule that um we discovered and then we we we included it like we wrote it in the book called the 30x rule and it this is what it says you should spend 30 times the amount of time it takes you to do a task once on training someone else to do a task for you right so let's just say there's a task that takes you five minutes every day the 30x rule says that you should spend 30 times 5 30 x 30 times 5 which is 150 minutes it says you should be willing to spend 150 minutes training someone to do a task that only takes you five which is where some people i i you know we do lose them because they go rory that doesn't make any sense like why would i spend 150 minutes that's like a couple two and a half hours training someone just to i could just do it in five and the answer is it never makes sense to trade 150 minutes for five unless you make the significance calculation yes because you're not doing that task for five minutes you're doing it five minutes a day which means it's five minutes the next day and the next day and the next day if you look at this calculation through just one year of significance which is like 250 working days it's really 5 times 250 which is 1250 minutes it's not a five minute task it's a 1250 minute task every year right so now the decision is different the decision is not should i spend 150 minutes to save five it's should i spend 150 to save 1250. the answer is just as obvious as it was before but it's the opposite decision that we would have originally made and notice the task hasn't changed the people haven't changed only one thing has changed that person's thinking the only thing that has changed is their thinking the next level of results always requires the next level of thinking so when you make the significance calculation it almost never makes sense for you to to do that activity it's never based on time alone it's never faster for you to do it it is faster to do it once maybe twice but again if you look at significance calculation and you think longer term eventually that person is going to figure it out well here's what everyone will say i already know what people are thinking well no one can do this action as good as me this is my skill or i'm i've done this for years i know the way i like it i know the way i want it to be done i've tried training someone in the past it took me five hours they still couldn't get it it was only 70 or 80 percent as good as me so i just took it back myself and was resentful of the whole process happens all the time so how does someone get over the fact that no one can do it as good as them potentially in the first six to twelve months extend the horizon yeah it is frustrating it is scary like don't hear what i'm not saying i'm not saying it's easy like you usually have to go through a couple assistants before you find the right one right like you spend a few minutes but if you do a good job your assistant that you hire will create a training manual so that the next one picks up where that one left off um but and again if you want to get to the next level in anything in your life it's going to require a new level of thinking and a new level of evolving internally yes you're going to need to develop a growth mindset you're going to need to overcome resentments and emoting grudges and frustrations you're gonna have to learn the uncomfortable things that keep you stuck in that place from saying i'm just gonna do this myself you gotta start to really evolve as a human in order to get to this next level yeah and i would say it's it's personal development right it's plugging into this show it's it's it's reading reading the procrastination on purpose book go get it it's freaking awesome it's joining coaching groups and surrounding your it's like getting accountability and then it is it is being surrounding yourself with like-minded people is a huge part of this yes because what we're talking about on this episode like this is not for the masses it's not easy like very few people will ever even entertain this is pretty high level stuff we're dealing with here so you gotta you gotta find a community of people that you can be around on a regular basis who are going to hold you accountable and push you to go no no no no you have to delegate because you know to what you said about growth um is the the reason delegate is hard is because for most of us we became leaders by being achievers by being great right like you got here by being a perfectionist and by doing everything with speed and efficiency and pulling all-nighters and yeah whatever it takes yes but what got you here as a performer won't get you there as a leader that's true if you don't learn to do this you are you know giving yourself a lifetime sentence of having to do it all yourself and one of my other favorite um things that came out of one of these interviews was one of the multipliers said you know eighty percent done right by someone else is always better than a hundred percent done right by me so this is why we call this one the permission of imperfect because the you have to give yourself the permission of short-term imperfection which is very hard for chronic over-achievers who have been you know demanded perfection for themselves which is one reason why they sometimes great performers don't make great leaders is because they assume everyone else will be like them and they'll get it the first try and they're not they don't have grace and compassion for like most of humanity are average students it takes a minute to learn and that doesn't mean they're stupid it's like it takes a minute and you have to you have to give yourself the in them flexibility some time some grace some some space to go yeah mess it up it's all right we'll we'll fix it you'll figure it out and then you'll learn it and then you'll master it and then you'll teach and then one day you'll teach it to somebody um andy stanley uh has a great do you know andy stanley no oh man he is one of the best communicators in the in the world um he's actually a pastor of a church but anyways he does all this leadership stuff and he has this one quote that i love he says leadership you have to remember leadership is not about getting things done right leadership's about getting things done through other people and and people are imperfect we're all imperfe we're all imperfect the art is not how do i just get perfect stuff it's how do i work through imperfect people like me through imperfect processes to create something beautiful that the world can benefit from that i didn't have to do all of the work on myself i didn't even spend all my time making it solo that's right because you can't you can't scale your impact if if you have to do everything yourself you're not going to scale your impact right so we got eliminate automate delegate yeah okay so so so now we're now we're at the bottom so if it if you if you can't eliminate it automate it or delegate it then that task falls out the bottom of the focus funnel um and there is one key remaining question which is must this task be none now or can it wait until later so if the task must be done now that is how you know it's significant you know it's a thing that multiplies your time it must be done it must be done by you and it must be done right now we call that the permission to protect which is basically where you you know you focus in on that thing in fact um the my my first book take the stairs really was more about that so procrastinate on purpose funny enough isn't actually a sequel to take the stairs it's more of a prequel yeah yeah so it's like how to identify what to do and then take the stairs as how to get yourself to do the thing you don't feel like doing which is where to take the stairs metaphor comes from so that's concentrate and there's a lot that's been written on it i know you've had cal newport on uh you know he's got good stuff like yeah deep work greg mcewen stuff on essentialism or um i think you've had the one thing all of those to me really center in around like okay now go after it but to me what there's been less written on is the other way is you go okay if the task must be done and it must be done by you but then you say must it be done right now and the answer is no then it goes out the other side of the focus funnel and that is where we're encouraging you not to eliminate automate delegate or concentrate but to procrastinate on purpose which is where the title of the book came from so give me an example of something that you've been procrastinating on purpose in the last year or a couple years okay so cleaning out my inbox is a great example so we're in we're in startup mode right now so brain builders i mean we're getting out we're getting out of that mode we're like three years in but we also have a four-year-old i mean the last four years was like we had a baby sold a company started a new company had a new had another baby moved into a new house moved into a house so it was like yeah i'm not gonna try to have a zero inbox at this particular moment like this season of my life yes and that's that's permission that's the emotional side is people to allowing you to say this isn't done right now this is messy it's messy i know i want to get it done but i'm not going to put it's not the most significant thing right now for me to do this i've got to be a dad i got to be i got to get kids we got to earn money we got to do these things the inbox is not the most important thing even though it might be a pattern of the past that we all done it's there let me just do this for 20 minutes and then that 20 minutes every day is not used for something significant just like replying to comments on social media or watching netflix or whatever it is procrastinate that thing and wait till later yeah yeah you we call it pop procrastinating on purpose so you pop so you pop it back to the top of the focus funnel can i eliminate it is there a way to automate it yeah so it goes into that holding pattern exactly and that's the process yeah so that's the whole process and it's meant to be simple because it's meant to be dynamic and fluid um and you know at the end of the day all that really matters here is that you're spending time on things today that give you more time tomorrow and then the last thing i would say on this lewis is this is important is once you have identified your next most significant priority until you accomplish that thing everything else is a distraction so if i have a messy room i shouldn't go clean my room first and then get to my homework it depends it's all relative to the other stuff i can't i'm not gonna say that it's all relative it's relative so that's why it's like i can't tell you what to do in your life all i can offer you is here is a system of thinking that these people do and and i do want to i i want to edify like this takes time you have to keep learning this you have to stay plugged into people who are thinking like this you got to join groups and be a part of communities where you you're surrounded by people who think like this yeah and this is the keys this is the habits of of high performers and having a productive life business uh and everything and what you just said right there is it's it's hard to do anything on your own it's hard to apply this it's hard to learn a new skill on your own it's hard to delegate on your own you've got you got to consistently be willing to invest in learning invest in education and invest in accountability for me i have so many accountability uh partners in my life that i pay for that i invest in yeah business health relationships therapy everything i'm constantly investing in it because there's only so much discipline and motivation i have on my own i can be the one of the hardest workers in the gym one time maybe five times in a week but there's gonna be that one day that i'm like i'd rather just sleep in today but if i know i'm invested and accountable to a coach that i've paid for and they're going to be there and show up for me i'm going to give a little bit more and i'm going to do it i'm going to be more consistent this is why we have greatness coaching and we want to let people know they can apply for that lewishaus.com coaching if you haven't applied yet make sure to do it this is for people that are high achievers that want to have accountability and a group every month to be supported by with a coach to help you follow through on things like this in your business and in your life so if you guys haven't applied yet go to lewishouse.com coaching and apply for that so you can learn more about greatness coaching it's a year of accountability and coaching with a lot of other good stuff included in there if you want to learn more about the focus funnel and really how to be more productive and multiply your time make sure you guys get this book game change your book procrastinate on purpose five permissions to multiply your time by my friend rory vaden uh we're doing a series with rory about a few different things right now and personal branding and and uh motivation and some other thing confidence as well so make sure you subscribe uh follow rory on social media rory vaden everywhere check out brand builders group if you want to learn more about that as well and get the book if you want to learn how to multiply time and give this to a friend as well rory it's been amazing man i'm excited for this series with you yeah and we'll talk to you soon love you brother appreciate it if you're looking for more greatness in your life make sure to check out this video right here you've done so much over the years with what you were just saying is science-based research what else was it against science-based science evidence-based and highly actionable it's got to be both of those right like i want i want science-based ideas but i also want them to be practical and easy to implement and i mean either one is is useful but if you haven't vote together it's a really powerful comment and you kind of got started in what personal finance and personal development and yeah i wasn't personal finance was never really a big part of my story although i find it interesting for myself i wrote about small business marketing and stuff early on um so and then i transitioned after i learned how to build an email list right i transitioned to jamesclear.com which is what i've been doing for the last five or six years now and that's been mostly focused on performance strength training uh productivity and really like just habits in general and how we can use them to live better lives what would you say is your core audience is it entrepreneurs is it just everyday individuals looking to improve their life it started and there were like pockets of people that were really interested like i had a pocket of venture capitalists and investors that were really interested because you're doing business and marketing maybe well i one of the phrases i use i have this in the book is that habits are the compound interest of self-improvement so it's like the same way that compound interest you know accrues through finance your the effects of your habits multiply over time and so often these choices that you make these little one percent improvements for you or against you each day and they're very easy to overlook on a daily basis right like what what really is the difference between eating a burger and fries or a salad and chicken for lunch you don't really taste a lot better yeah right yeah it tastes amazing at the moment that's actually a crucial point that i cover in the book which is that habits that are immediately satisfying are more likely to be repeated and so pretty much any behavior produces multiple outcomes across time right like if you eat a doughnut right now it's tasty and it's so good but in the long run you gain weight and so the the immediate outcome is favorable the long-term outcome is unfavorable with good habits it's often the reverse right like you go to the gym right now and it takes effort you sweat you have to work hard to sacrifice your time for netflix and chill to go train the immediate outcome is unfavorable but the ultimate outcome you're in shape and in you know a year or month or whatever is favorable and so the challenge for building good habits and breaking bad ones is often finding a way to pull the long-term consequences of your bad habits into the immediate moment so you feel a little bit the pain right now and want to avoid it and the long-term rewards of your good habits into the immediate moment so you have a reason to repeat it again in the future so is it kind of like okay i'm going to go to the gym and eat donuts at the gym so i feel good but also realize this is going to help me long term so in the book i talk about this concept i call identity based habits and essentially what you're the ultimate form of immediate gratification is the reinforcement of your desired identity so you go to the gym and you're reinforcing the identity of i'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts or you show up to write and you're reinforcing the identity of i'm someone who writes every day and so you get a little bit of immediate satisfaction from being that person and being aligned with your identity your values your principles but you also get the long-term rewards from showing up every day and so what you don't want is some kind of immediate reinforcement like eating a donut at the gym where you're casting votes for two different identities right it's like i showed up at the gym i'm casting the vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts the type of person who's healthy but then i eat a doughnut so now i'm casting a vote for being an unhealthy person so right so you want you want reinforcements that align with your principles and values so you essentially have to form your identity first is that what i'm hearing so who you want to be i think that your habits are the way that you embody an identity right so like each time you uh make your bed you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized each time you go to the gym you embody the identity of someone who's fit each time you sit down to write you embody the identity of a writer so you can sort of think of it as like each behavior casts a vote for the type of person that you want to become and if you cast enough votes for that type of identity you start to believe that about yourself right like if you you go to church for 20 years you believe that you're religious you study spanish every tuesday for 30 minutes you believe that you are studious so in that way your habits provide evidence of your desired identity and i think that that is probably the ultimate reason that habits are so important it's true like habits can help you earn more money or be more productive or lose weight and all that stuff is great but in addition to the external results that habits provide they also shape your sense of self they like are the at the engine or the avenue through which you learn to believe things about yourself like sometimes people will say stuff like fake it till you make it but fake it till you make it is asking yourself to believe something without evidence for it and you can do that for a little while you could do it for a day or week but eventually i mean there's a word for beliefs that don't have evidence behind them it's delusion right and if you're deluding yourself then eventually you give up on that but the power of doing a better habit each day or casting a little vote for that type of person is that now you have evidence to root your belief in yeah so now i've done it for six months yeah right like i mean now you have a lot of evidence that you're a podcaster or a good interviewer you know like you do this over and over again each time you cast a vote for believing that about yourself and you don't just you aren't delusionally believing that you're a good interviewer it's because you've shown up and done it hundreds of times right um and so i think that that's true for any habit large or small that they provide evidence of the desired identity or the type of person that you are what are the five non-negotiable habits for you on a daily basis oh that's a good question so obviously this is gonna depend on your goals for me specifically uh i think there are a few core habits that are gonna serve everybody and certainly serve me well so exercise is a huge one um i don't do it daily but i exercise i train four times a week yeah and i feel like if i didn't exercise i don't know that i would be an entrepreneur like i don't know if i could handle the psychological rollercoaster without the physical outlet yeah the release the you probably feel that as like an athlete too you know like i for being an athlete for so many years i feel like i need to push myself physically in addition to mentally if it's just mental it doesn't do it for me i need to have a physical outlet so exercise exercise one the other the ultimate meta habit is reading because if you build a habit of reading you can solve pretty much any other problem you know you want to learn how to be a better podcaster you can read about that you want to learn how to meditate you can read about that you want to learn how to make more money you can read about that um and so what you need is to develop a habit of reading and then whatever problem you're facing at the time you can you have a method for solving that okay um writing for me is huge i don't actually know what i think about something until i write about it i find that if your ideas you get it out if you ask me something right now that i haven't written about before what is really happening is i'm just talking my emotions so what i mean is that you'll ask me something and i'll get an implicit feeling about what what that topic is i'll have some intuition a gut feeling about it and i'll say whatever that feeling is driving me to say but i don't actually know if that's what i really think what i deeply think until i have the time to sit down logically go through it because a lot of the time you know if you would ask me the same question next week i might have a different feeling at that time so i'm talking different emotions so i think i actually need to to have time to sit with it a little bit and write write it through to learn what i actually think writing's third accent exercise reading writing um i don't know i would say that those are probably my main three uh if i was gonna pick five and the other two that i would add going for a daily walk would be a huge one that's one that like i kind of aspire to because i don't do that every day um but anytime i do it really benefits me in what ways well you see this with a lot of anybody who does creative work in particular that something about getting outside and walking i think there's this is just me spitballing i don't actually have science by this idea but um when your body is moving it's very hard for you one to not be active mentally like if you think about someone who's shut down mentally what does their body language look like they're usually closed off their arms like they're sitting they're not moving very much try to be closed off mentally and be dancing physically it's very hard to do if your body is moving like that it's really hard for your mind to be shut down so that's one thing it kind of gets like the juices flowing the second thing and this is where i'm spitballing i don't know if this is actually true but i wonder about your non-conscious mind being like a bottleneck sometimes and so if you're if you're moving if you're walking it gives your non-conscious mind something to do so you're like it gets out of the way and now you can actually like have this stuff arise or think um in a different way than if you're sitting um so i don't know i think that those are two yeah that's cool okay so that'd be the fourth thing sleep is the fifth one um and this is one that i actually am pretty good about uh so my cardinal rule is that i don't cheat myself on sleep um so if i stay up late and work till midnight uh i'm gonna sleep too late or not sleeping in yeah like i'm not gonna get up early because i don't wanna cheat myself on that but um yeah i think that those are are kind of the core things it's funny sometimes people ask like oh how can i double my productivity or something like that and you'll see articles like that all the time like follow this one five minute trick to double your productivity but the real answer to most of that stuff is like get eight hours of sleep a night exercise don't eat like crap and then instantly you have this boost of productivity and motivation you have energy the fundamentals are covered 90 of it yeah exactly um you said this you said you do not rise to the level of your goals you fall to the level of your systems uh what are the systems you've created to be successful beyond those kind of core habits right there yeah so this is a really good question i think first i just want to talk a little bit about that that point that you do not rise to the level of your goals you fall to the level of your systems what do i mean by that so often when we set about to change something or to achieve something the first step is almost always setting a goal uh and this is coming from someone like i was very goal-oriented for a long time right like an asset yeah i was like goals for the things i wanted to do in sports the goals the grades i wanted in class the goals for how much money i wanted to make in my business and sometimes i would achieve those but then sometimes i wouldn't and so i had this question like well clearly i'm setting goals for both so like that can't be the thing that determines it and you see this a lot that the the winners and losers in a particular domain often have the same goals like every olympian wants to win a gold medal sure uh every job candidate wants to get the job so if the winners and the losers have the same the same goal then the goal cannot be the thing that distinguishes the two and the thing that distinguishes them is the process the system behind the goal this is also important because achieving a goal often only changes your life for the moment it's like you know say you're um do just take like a simple example say you have a messy room you know and you set you get motivated and you set the goal to clean your room well you can do that in an hour and then you have a clean room but if you don't change the sloppy habits that led to a messy room in the first place then you just end up with a dirty room again yeah so it's like treating a symptom without treating the cause and habits are a better solution in that case because if you fix the inputs the outputs fix themselves automatically right you don't have to fight to have a clean room if you have clean habits and i think that's true in a larger sense as well right people want outcomes they want to earn more money or lose weight or be more productive or reduce stress but the outcome is not the thing that needs to change it's the system that precedes it so give me the let's let's bust the myth of how many days it takes to set a habit because there's 14 days 28 days 60 days a year right if you do something every single day and maybe it changes for each person but what's the science or the uh the statistics say about how long it takes to form a positive or negative habit i guess so 21 days is the thing you hear all the time 30 days hundred days whatever right now 66 days is making the rounds is the latest in another book what was that book well there was one study done that found that 66 days was the average uh for how long it takes and as a rule of thumb i don't think it's terrible like you should remind yourself yeah this is going to be months of work it's not just going to be something quick but even within that study the range was quite wide so if you did something simple like drink a glass of water at lunch each day it would take like three weeks if you did something more difficult like go for a run after work every day that would be like seven or eight months but i think actually that question to begin with is sort of a there's like a broken mentality the wrong question yeah it is because if you ask that question the implicit assumption is when do i have to stop working or when is this done um and is it automatic after a certain period of time well the honest answer to how long it takes to build a new habit is forever because if you stop then it's no longer a habit it's a constant choice and a decision right i think people often look at habits as like a finish line to be crossed but it's actually a lifestyle to be lived and if you look at it as a lifestyle change then you're saying okay okay what's something small and sustainable i can stick to right what's something that can actually last over time so it is true that you can actually map this through research that a habit will become more automatic with practice but this reveals another important point which is that there's nothing about the amount of time elapsed that leads to habits being built you could practice something once in 30 days or you could practice it a thousand times what actually leads to a habit becoming automatic and becoming learned and ingrained is repetition so the phrase that i like to use is not 21 days to 30 days but put in your reps i mean that's the real thing is you need to you need to practice and if you put in your reps then your brain starts to automate how that process works yeah what makes you an expert on habits oh man based on lots of other people that are talking about habits why are you talking about it differently and what have you discovered that's different than everyone else okay so two questions there so the first one is expertise um and i think that and i've said this many times before i'm just going through this with everybody else uh i consider my readers my peers uh in the sense that we're all just trying things out the only difference is i write about what i learn and share it each week and but we're all just learning along the way early on i had a feeling like that i was like who am i to you know i'm just a guy who am i right about this and i had a friend tell me the way you develop expertise is by writing about it every week so i wrote a new article about habits every monday and thursday for three years and that was how i developed the expertise on the topic by writing about it i did research you said here's what i found here's what i tried here's what worked what didn't work it's a combination of me reading the scientific literature and reading the research and then trying to distill practical insights from that and testing things out in my own life as a weightlifter a travel photographer a writer an entrepreneur and seeing what that looks like and then the two together i think you need both like i don't want to be some new age version of an academic who's in an ivory tower just like theorizing about ideas is different what it looks like to put ideas into practice right like imagine you're a peak performance coach and you show up to coach like an mba team these guys are like dude you need to step on the court if you know it right to see what it's actually like so you need to have both to have a firm understanding of that so you were researching and you were applying it into your life and what was the second part of the second question which i think is probably the more interesting one which is what makes my angle different or what makes this different than every other book out there about habits so you can broadly put books about habits into two categories the first book the first category is what i'll call motivation models so motivation models are about what sparks a behavior how do you get started how do you get motivated the second category is what i'll call reinforcement models so how does a habit stick how does it last why do certain behaviors get reinforced and sometimes books will touch on one but focus primarily on the other a lot of the time they'll just kind of live in separate worlds that's what i would say is happening in like the self-improvement space then you have the academic space so psychology or neuroscience or whatever and a lot of those books are focused on the why but not the how they'll tell you um they'll tell you why something happens why a particular neuron fires why a particular biological process works the way it does but they don't tell you how to implement it in your daily life and so what i wanted to do was try to combine the two why and how yes why in a book that is both why and how um why do habits form the way they do why are they important and then how do they actually work and my hope is that atomic habits was able to do that largely because of the framework that i put together so in the book i lay out these four stages that all habits go through and i felt like we needed a new model because most of the models right now are either a motivation model or a reinforcement model but not both okay and you need to understand what both sparks a habit and what makes a habit maintains it yes if you want to be able to understand how they work and how to make them last and what are those four frameworks so the first stage of every habit is a cue the second stage is a craving or some kind of prediction that your brain makes i'll give you an example of these in a second the third stage is the response and then the fourth stage is the reward so you walk into a the question i had that that no model i could find could solve in in any good way or explain in any good way was why can the same person respond to the same cue in a different way so let's say you get into the habit of going to the gym at five o'clock every day but then sometimes work gets busy and you don't go to the gym at five o'clock current models don't explain that very well because it's like well the queue is five you should be going to the gym right now it says you the routine falls automatically after the queue um or why why does someone walk into the kitchen and see a plate of cookies and then they automatically want to eat it but you could just as imagine just as easily imagine that you just got done eating dinner in the other room and you're stuffed and you're full and you walk in you see a plate of coke and you're like i'm stuffed i don't want to eat anything so what's going on there and i think these four stages explain it which is you see the cue or you experience a cue and then your craving or your prediction differs based on your current state so the way that you interpret the cues in your life is contingent upon the current state that you're in the way you're feeling right and also other things like your beliefs or your identity the social group that you're part of right so like if you're in a different group then maybe you interpret things in a different way um you know you can imagine one group they practice a particular religion they walk into a butcher shop and see pork and they know they're like oh we can't eat that right another person walks in and they're like oh yeah i have a pork sandwich because it's obvious and easy and right there um so what you choose is contingent upon how you interpret the cues in your life um how do we change what we interpret yes good question all right so this is a key point in the book which is that social norms society leans heavily on us all so uh if you they're just broad examples of this so pressure religious pressure media pressure all kinds of steel pressure yes um let's say so just some broad examples uh you walk into an elevator and you turn around to face the front you have a job interview and you wear a suit and tie or a dress or something nice there's no reason it has to be that way right like you could face the back of the elevator you could wear a swimsuit to a job interview but you don't do that because it violates the shared norms of the group right it violates the shared expectations of what that society has but that's not that's true not only in a broad sense that we're part of these tribes like big tribes you know what it means to be a christian or to be american or to be uh australian or whatever but it's also true in the small tribes that we belong to what it means to be a neighbor on this street or a member of your local crossfit gym or to volunteer for a local organization all of those tribes all those groups that you belong to have a set of shared expectations a set of shared norms and the key if you want to build habits that last if you want to change the way that you interpret cues is to join a group where your the desired behavior is the normal behavior right like there are there are plenty of people who they want to work out but going to the gym feels like a lot to them it feels hard feels like a sacrifice but there are also people who go to the gym every week and it's just normal it doesn't feel like an obligation that's the desired behaviors the normal behavior their lifestyle right same thing for uh musicians you know like if you want to learn an instrument hang out with people who play all the time you know like if you hang out with a bunch of musicians it's like well yeah so we do all yeah we play four days a week if we play seven days a week because it just happens that's that's what the tribe does the caveat to this and the thing that i don't see people mention a lot is that the reason social norms influence our behavior so much is because we want to belong to the tribe we want to be friends with those people and so we don't want to lose the friendship or lose belonging over violating the norms yeah you're not going to hang out with a bunch of vegans and have pork right and just like be the only one eating that you won't hang out with them for very long because you're not going to be friends with them anymore they'll kick you out so you want to rise to the standard of that group of that community so the key i think is to join a group where your desired behavior is a normal behavior and you already have something else in common with that group so uh steve cam is a good example of this so like steve runs nerd fitness right and all these people want to get in shape who are coming into this community but they also love star wars or batman or spider-man or you know all these other things that nerds are into and if you show up it can be intimidating to want to get in shape or you know work out the first time but if you can connect with the group over your mutual love of star wars then you're like oh well i'm friends with these people and now i also want to pick up those other habits with them because i want to belong with the group because we're already friends and so i think you can apply that methodology to most new tribes that you join don't just join a new tribe because they have the desired behavior also try to find a way that you can overlap with them find some shared context some other stuff too yeah that you can bond over and then it's easier to adopt the habits musicians that like to be healthy yeah right you want to do both right sure finding that even subgroup it's like hey we love you know we love playing music and then also you're going to start eating better because we all want to eat healthy exactly yeah interesting okay so that's the second part the cue and then the desire habits yeah right the craving cue craving response reward okay what's the response so this is mostly about making it easy um so this is the habit itself and the easier a habit is the less friction there's associated with a habit the more likely you're going to be to do it so the way that i like to describe this imagine you have like a hose right and there's a bend in the middle there's a little bit of water trickling out if you want to increase the amount of water going through the hose you have two options you could either crank up the valve and force more water through or you could just remove the bend and let it flow through naturally and a lot of the time advice is centered on cranking up the valve it's like you need to try harder you need grit you need perseverance you need motivation you need to overcome the obstacles in your life and all those things are fine but i think they're all short-term solutions you might be able to do that for a day or a week but i've never consistently seen someone stick to positive habits in a negative environment it's really hard to fight that day in and day out so the solution i think is to reduce friction there are a ton of ways you can do this um one way is just to scale the habit down make it as easy as possible so people have heard things like this before start small small steps whatever but even when you know you should start small it's still really easy to start too big so you know say you want to get in shape and you're like all right i want to run a couple days a week but i know i should start small so i'll only run for 15 minutes but even that is like way bigger than what i'm talking about i mean it should be so small that you in the book i called the two minute rule but you should downscale any habit to fit within two minutes so it's like all right i want to go for a run three days a week my habit is i put on my running shoes and i step out the door anything else that happens after that is just bonus is a success now sometimes people resist that because they're like well this sounds kind of like a mental trick right like i know the real goal isn't just to put my shoes on i know the real goal is to go for a run so if you feel that way my suggestion would be only do the first two minutes for the first few weeks because what you need to do is master the art of showing up like i had a i had a reader who ended up losing over 100 pounds and one of the things that he did was he went to the gym but he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes so he would show up be there do like half an exercise five minutes ago he'd leave he did this for like six weeks wow now it sounds ridiculous it sounds silly because the odds just work out for a half hour yeah yeah but what he was doing was mastering the art of showing up and a habit must be established before it can be improved right if you don't establish the habit there's nothing to optimize if you're not showing up at the gym every day you don't even who cares about what workout you're doing you're not even there don't start running an hour a day if you've never run in a long time be the person who shows up and puts their running shoes on every day before you worry about how far you're running what kind of workout you're doing and all that type of stuff um a lot of that was the art of showing up first before going all in on the desired goal you want i think that's right i mean you can find examples of people who flip a switch and transform their lives or have an epiphany and do it overnight but i think that it's rare i think that the more sustainable strategy the more reliable strategy is to scale it down to the first two minutes focus on that establish it master the art of showing up and then go from there so really you should like usually when people think about building better habits they optimize for the finish line right it's like how much weight do i need to lose how much money do i need to make you know how when can i finish this book it's all focused on the result but i think instead if you optimize for the starting line make it as easy as possible to start scale it down organize your environment so all that stuff is set up this is another strategy for making it easy which is that you can prime your environment to make the future action easier right like if you chop up a bunch of vegetables and fruit on sunday it's now easier to have a healthy snack during the week if you set your workout clothes out the night before it's now easier to get into the workout the next day but doing all that stuff to make it easy to show up that is probably the more important piece early on there's also like all these they're all these logistical details for building a habit that nobody thinks about in the beginning like what well like take the example of uh my reader who went to the gym there it's like okay what gym are you gonna go to how are you gonna get there are you going by yourself are you going to go with friend do you need to what time are you going to go yeah what time are you are you going to have your own water bottle or is there a water fountain at the gym and that stuff sounds like silly and small but when someone's starting that's right yeah the fact that like oh the gym doesn't have a water fountain and i always forget to bring my own that's enough friction for someone to quit um so by focusing on just the first two minutes you figure all that stuff out and then once you've got that piece mastered now you can worry about how long the workout is and what program you do and all that stuff so figuring out the logistics first is an important step i think that's something that just comes naturally with scaling a habit down if you figure out what's required to show up because you're not worried about the results or the outcome or how long you worked out or judging yourself for you know for running 30 minutes when you should run 45 or whatever got it okay so this is the response still right okay and what's the fourth the fourth one and this is crucial for getting a habit to stick is the reward or the outcome so every behavior is followed by some kind of outcome this is just basic cause and effect um and if the immediate outcome is favorable is enjoyable you have a reason to repeat it in the future it's kind of like doughnuts yeah exactly right just like that example if you if you um if you feel good if you feel satisfied right after you do something then it's like this positive emotional signal and it's like yeah i should do this again yeah so you can see this actually business is a really interesting example with this there are a lot of products and some of the most successful products have some type of immediate satisfaction that is layered into them so toothpaste is a very common example there's no reason a toothpaste needs to taste like mint but it does because the minty flavor and the refreshingness of it and make sure it gives your mouth this clean feel it's more satisfying so you have a reason to do it again in the future um i heard an interesting one recently about car manufacturers that some of them are adding a fake guttural roar to the the car or the truck when you press the accelerator because it just adds to the actual natural sound of the engine so it makes it more satisfying to step on the gas and to drive the car so there are a variety of examples like this but if you can add and the key is it needs to be immediate right so like this is um in the book i refer to this as the cardinal rule of behavior change which is behaviors that are immediately rewarded get repeated behaviors that are immediately punished get avoided and it's really about the speed of how quickly you feel successful if it feels good you have a reason to do it again is that why video games do so well video games are masters at this they're masters at it so um their master's actually at a variety of of aspects related to habit formation so one is they're really good at this immediate satisfaction there are all kinds of things you're actually constantly getting feedback in a video game even if you're just running you hear the pitter patter of the steps it's that's gratifying it's yeah the jingles of like picking up another power-up or um you know seeing a kill or something like that whatever the game is you're always getting constant feedback sound uh things that are on screen they're really good at dripping out watching the the score increase in the top corner that is immediate feedback so they have all these different ways of making you feel satisfied and when you see that progress you have a reason to continue in the future this is one of the one of the most effective forms of immediate satisfaction is progress as soon as you feel progress you have a reason to continue it feels really good to see that you're making headway now why do some people make all this progress let's say they lose the weight they lose 100 pounds but then they get it back two years later yeah they've got this progress they achieve the desired goal but then how come it didn't stick it's a good question i mean it's a complicated thing a hard thing but um i'll give a couple potential uh reasons so one is it comes back to the social norms that we mentioned before um there's a story that i tell in the book about vietnamese soldiers american soldiers in during the vietnam war so they wrote in vietnam and these two congressmen went over and found out that the heroin usage among the troops was incredibly high it was like i think they first thought it was like 10 or 15 but then they found out it was actually over 20. so you know one in five troops is addicted to heroin or trying heroin using it while they're over there and they're like this is a huge problem we need to figure this out so they created this whole committee to investigate things or whatever and eventually the war ends and the soldiers come back and what they were shocked by is that um 90 of the soldiers that were addicted to heroin in vietnam were not addicted when they returned and the main reason it makes so much sense but it upended our understanding of addiction at the time they completely changed the context right in in vietnam they're in a war zone they're highly stressed they're surrounded by other users heroin is present and easy to get they come home they're in totally new environment it's not a war zone anymore they're not surrounded by other users they don't really know where to get heroin so they have to figure that out too you layer all this stuff together and suddenly it becomes much easier to not do that whereas previously they thought oh it was an addiction they were doing it for other reasons right this same thing is true but usually in the reverse right typically you have an addict who gets hooked on a drug goes into rehab this is the equivalent of leaving your environment behind not having any of those triggers but then you send them home to the same place they got addicted in the first place right so now they're surrounded by all their old friends all the same cues it becomes very hard to resist that and i wonder if when people rebound from habits after they've achieved some level of success whether it's losing weight or getting clean or whatever if it's the return of the environment that causes a lot of that i think that's what it is well i don't know if it's always that i don't think i could say it it is universally but um i think that it's definitely it definitely plays a role i mean because we're influenced by people's uh pressure either way like you said yes peer pressure can either be positive or negative yeah the communities we surround ourselves with we rise to that community right you know if you're around vegans all day and there's only vegan food available you're gonna eat probably mostly vegan right if that's what you want or if you're trying to eat healthier if you go back home and everyone's eating donuts all day that temptation is gonna be hard to say no to after months you can do it for a little while but it's just really hard to do so environment is a huge factor that's what i'm hearing i think both social and physical we haven't talked that much about physical environment but that's another key component you know so like um i'll give you an example of a good habit and a bad habit so for good habits you want the physical environment to make it obvious and easy for you to do the behavior you know so like i um like have a pull-up bar in your room exactly trying to do a hundred pull-ups a day right like have it hanging over your door as opposed to even if you had one but it was in the closet because you just half the time you wouldn't want to take it out or it's at the gym upstairs or down the street no um you know i have a friend who he wanted to practice uh guitar more and so he left his guitar in the middle of his living room and that just so he'd walk past it a hundred times a day and becomes much easier right bad habits are the same way um so but in reverse instead of making it obvious you want to make it invisible um you know take like which is just talking about video games a lot of people feel like they watch too much spend too much time watching tv or playing video games or watching a screen but if you walk into pretty much any living room where do all the couches and chairs face they all face the television so it's like what is that room designed to get you to do turn it on yeah so you can restructure that environment to make it less likely that you'll fall into that habit and there are a variety of things you could do you could take the remote control and put it inside like a drawer so you don't see it you could put the television behind a wall unit or cabinet so that it's less visible but you could also increase the friction with the tasks so you could like unplug your tv after each use and only plug it back in if you can say the name of the show that you want to watch so you can't like mindlessly pull up netflix and just find something um or you could take the batteries out of the remote control so that it's an extra like five to ten seconds to turn on and maybe that's enough time to be like do i really want to watch something right now i'm just doing this mindlessly yeah um if you really want to be extreme don't have a tv yes you could get rid of the tv entirely or take it off the wall and put in the closet and only take it out when you really want to watch something for four years when i lived in columbus i um i removed the tv for four years i didn't have a tv in my place because i was like i want to earn money right i want to build my business and i have nothing so i need to work i need to focus on this to build you know the habit that i wanted for my business and it was the best thing for me because i would spend hours just mindlessly watching and now i was like okay if i want to watch something i'm going to go to the sports bar and watch the game i'm going to go to a friend's house and watch this specific thing or i'm going to go to the movies and take a break right as opposed to three hours a day of tv what's brilliant about that and it's a really good example is that we i think about that a lot with phones as well so every day i try to leave my phone in another room outside of my office at least until lunch because then i get like a four hour block of time in the morning where i can just work without any distraction yeah and um it's funny how quickly you don't like if my phone was on me in the morning i would check it like you know every five minutes or whatever but when it's out of the room i don't even find myself wanting to i never walk up the stairs to go check it even though it's only 30 seconds away wow so it's it's interesting how little we actually want to do these things but we just do them all the time because they're obvious and easy and i think the key is to invert that take the things that are the bad habits the distractions the procrastinations the unproductive uses of time and make them more invisible reduce exposure and less less easy to do and take the things that are good habits and make it the equivalent of having your phone on you all the time right make it right in front of you make it obvious make it easy make it you know frictionless yeah if you're looking to write have your do you write with your journal or your computer i write on the computer all right in evernote it's gotta be faster yeah and you have to transfer it later and all these things yeah okay um if you were coaching someone who said i have no clue what i'm supposed to do with my life i'm i'm lost i have all these bad habits i smoke i drink i eat donuts every day i have no job my room is sloppy and i'm just depressed what would you say to them to get started with changing their life around in the form of better habits well you just need to pick one thing first of all i think that i just mentioned a few minutes ago one of the most powerful forms of motivation is progress so seeing some progress i mean it could be as simple as make your bed each day right like but just doing that embodying the identity of someone who's getting better who's making progress just pick one thing and use that as this is true i mean louis this is something you've probably seen with a lot of people that you've talked to but habits are the foundation for mastery so if you you know say take a take a sport like basketball um you need to be able to dribble with both hands without thinking before you can worry about what strategy you're running on offense or what kind of you know strategic play you're gonna run or what your defensive scheme is or all this other stuff right like you need to automate the fundamentals of the craft before you can worry about the next level of performance same thing is true for chess you know like you need to know how the chess pieces move automatically without thinking about it before you can get into all right what is the strategy going to do and i'm going to do this and they're going to do that and so i think this is true not just at the peak levels of performance that you integrate these habits and use habits as the foundation for the next level performance but also true when you're getting started just build one small thing carve out a one percent change a one percent improvement and use that as a stepping stone to the next level and what about self-control because what if we have this desire for something um what's the other word for self-control will power perseverance what about willpower how much willpower do we have so you hear this a lot i mean it's very common especially in self-help motivation self-improvement you need to be motivated you have to have willpower grit and perseverance are huge and important and it's not that those qualities are not important it's just that the way to develop them is different than what most people think so most people think i need willpower so i should just try harder there's an interesting body of research i mentioned it in the book i think it's in chapter seven on self-control and willpower which is that the people who appear to have the greatest self-control actually are just tempted the least so they face temptations less frequently and therefore have the reserves and the resources to resist it when it occasionally comes up and i think that this is actually like the lever to pull or the pressure point to push on is that the way to get better willpower is to design an environment that tempts you less not to say let me just try harder right yeah set yourself up to win and you have uh a chapter that talks about the power of accountability partners i talk about accountability and coaches all the time i hire coaches for everything because i use sports as my life yeah for my life and i know that i couldn't have gotten to where i wanted to be as an athlete without great coaches and accountability yeah so how important is accountability towards habits as well yeah it's huge so i recently hired a powerlifting coach he's great he's worked like 12 world champions and had columbus has he's not based in columbus actually but columbus is great for strength culture it's you know i mean obviously there's the arnold but then west side barbell and a bunch of other stuff yeah it was awesome um but your point about coaches is a crucial one which is that um having a coach forces you to be aware of things that you would otherwise overlook right like as you this is what i call the downside of building good habits which is you build habits and in the beginning you develop fluency and skill and ability and things become easier but after a little while once a habit has been established the downside of having a habit is that you can do it good enough on autopilot which means that you start to overlook your mistakes and not think about how to get better and so what you need is a coach to keep you on that razor's edge so that you you keep building habits but it also forces you to stay aware of what the next level performance is and that's kind of the challenge of continuous improvement it's like a cycle you know it starts with awareness if you're not aware of what your habits are or what your behavior is you don't have a chance to change it then from that awareness you go to deliberate practice where you have to effortfully try and work to get better and eventually the thing that you were deliberately practicing becomes a habit and becomes automatic but once it becomes automatic that's not the end you have to return to awareness and see where you're at now how to start the cycle again huh and what about what if you can't afford a coach how do you find the right accountability partner that's where i think we come back to the social component that we talked about earlier join the group join the community that's probably the best way to do it and the great thing about the you know the internet and the web is that you can find those people before where you couldn't find them previously you know it used to be uh that you had to hope that the people in your local community or on your sports team or at your you know uh organization were also interested in the same things and now you can find those people and find anywhere online and what's the uh the downside of good habits so this is what i was mentioning with this fact that like you start to overlook your mistakes there's a um there's an interesting study that was done on surgeons where they found that early on in residency they were getting better and then they continued to improve as they became a surgeon in practice for a few years and then they hit some kind of peak and then their performance actually declines slightly because they stop overlooking their mistakes or stop looking for ways to get better um and so you need to be on that on that edge of paying attention my favorite example of this is actually a surgeon himself at wandy and um he hired a coach a previous surgeon who was retiring to review the video of his surgeries and tell him where he could improve and what he could do better and um i think that's a brilliant example of how to have a coach even if you're not in sports or not you know not a competitor or something we can all benefit from feedback and the tighter the feedback cycle the faster you learn that's powerful i love it man this is powerful stuff um i'm going to ask you a couple final questions yeah sure this one's called the three truce uh if you could only share three lessons with humanity in the world and no one they didn't have access to your writing or your blog or your books but you only had three lessons you could share what would those three lessons or three truths be yeah uh that's really tough so the first one i would say is about reading i mentioned earlier that reading is sort of like this meta habit that helps you solve all your other problems so i guess my lesson for reading would be start more books uh no would be yeah start more books quit most of them read the great ones twice so if you start more books you'll be exposed to more ideas if you quit most of them if you quit the ones that aren't relevant to you or aren't that good or just are in a high quality bar then you'll have the chance to start even more and when you find the great ones read them twice because the advice is incredible and it's potentially life-changing okay all right so the first one i would say is reading the second one is some kind of something to do with physical movement and strength training um you cannot every human has a body and every human has like a physical presence so learn to use your body in some way to be more alive and to experience what that's like to be human if you just spend all day in your head or all day staring at the screen you only kind of get half of what it means to be alive so i would say physical strength is another one and then the third one has to be something along the lines of community connection serving others i don't know what exactly that would be um personally i have felt most engaged when i've been working on a shared mission with a group of people face to face which is interesting coming from someone who you know my business is built online right i spend most of my time sending emails to you know half a million people whatever but i think actually i find more satisfaction and more purpose in connecting with people face to face um so maybe that would be it uh talk to someone face to face every day that's cool yeah well i gotta acknowledge you man for all the work that you're doing to make an impact on people i think your writing has really helped transform lives whether you know how impactful it is or not but half a million people is a lot of people and i know people are doing the action steps that you provide for them so you constantly doing the work constantly doing the research and showing up for people is making a big impact so i acknowledge you for that um where can we get the book and where can we follow you and everything else yeah thanks man so the book is called atomic habits an easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones and it's at atomichabits.com uh if you go to that page there is a secret chapter that's not included in the actual book there are some exercises and templates that help people kind of implement some of the ideas that we talked about more and i also have chapter by chapter audio commentary from me on like why i wrote this chapter and what some of the research is behind it um and a variety of other resources that's actually just a few of the things but anyway all of that stuff is available at atomichabits.com i like it man yeah you've got a lot of actionable things in here which is really cool so and even more at atomics.com so they get on amazon barnes noble everywhere else as well right you got it everywhere books are sold and your website jamesclear.com that's right you can subscribe there are you on social media at all yeah so if you go to jamesclear.com uh you'll see instagram twitter and facebook on there uh and you can also just poke around in the articles like i have most of my writing organized by topic or category so people can just check out what's interesting do you hang out on social media i use twitter mostly um that's one that i found most useful social media is kind of interesting because the people you follow it's like creating your own little city and so you get to choose who the citizens are you should be very careful about who you put in your city because it changes what you're exposed to all the time yeah so i've spent more time cultivating twitter and who i'm following and that really has changed like i find it very useful now i come across good ideas all the time that's correct um instagram and facebook i use less but both can still be useful if you follow that same strategy yeah that's cool huh all right i like it man um when's the book out what's the date they can pre-order right now that's right it's available now uh launches on october 16th and um yeah i'm excited to share it with the world it's gonna be great man uh final question for you actually two final questions what's the one bad habit you wish you could break for yourself so i'm working on new habits all the time there's always something uh currently the one that keeps eluding me is it's not sleep is not the problem i'll sleep long enough the problem is powering down early so i like i have trouble shutting off you know like i don't know if you feel this way but i i'm always interested in what i'm working on and so then i get to you know there's usually a i work really well in the morning and then i work really well late at night i think it's just because that's why i'm not interrupted and you know like i kind of have the space to think but it'll get to be 10 and i'm like oh well maybe i should just dig into that for a second and then of course you know yeah exactly then i'm like i should have gone to bed two hours ago so that's one that i keep okay powering down or finding down time all right cool uh last question what's your definition of greatness i think greatness is contributing your little bit to the world that's it you know like the thing that has advanced humanity over the broad span of time is the collective knowledge that we've all accumulated what we've added together it's like we've had a real it started out as a very small snowball and just keeps rolling on this endless hill as humanity continues and the accumulative knowledge gets bigger and bigger there have been i think the numbers are there have been 107 billion people who've lived throughout history really and there are 7 billion alive right now so the dead outnumber the living 15 to 1. when you were born you inherit all the lessons from those 107 billion people right like i have a little niece she's two years old she's gonna be taught things in school that i was not taught there's a little some stuff that i was taught we found out was wrong and now we got rid of it and some stuff we learned that was new and right and now we're adding it and that's true all the way down the line right like we the next generation always gets to advance based on this like ever-growing bundle uh that we acknowledge that we come up with and so if you at some point throughout your life can add just a little bit to that bundle the rest of humanity is better for it james brother you want to create a real transformation in people's lives they have to invest something they have to give something there but i also say since you're so smart and you know everything you don't need to make money um can you show me one major influencer thought leader person you admire today one show me one who hasn't focused on building their brand in business

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 290,898

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation

Id: Rk8nOs6qIjU

Length: 95min 33sec (5733 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 14 2021