Your outcomes in life are often
a lagging measure of your habits. We think the thing that needs to change is the bank account or the test score
or the number on the scale but actually the thing
that needs to change are the habits that
precede those outcomes. Rather than making the goal the default, the thing that you focus on
almost exclusively let's make the system the default and then only check in
on the goal occasionally to see if we're moving
in the right direction. Achieving a goal only changes
your life for the moment it's actually not the thing
that you're looking for. We think the results are the thing
that needs to change but it's actually the process
behind the results. Like if you have a messy room,
let's say your bedroom is mess and you set a goal to clean that room you can get motivated
and do it for two or three hours and then you turn around
you have a clean room for now. If you don't change the messy habits that
led to a dirty room in the first place then you turn around two weeks later
and you have a messy room again. And so actually you don't need a clean
room you need better cleaning habits and then your room will always be clean. You don't need to lose weight
you need better eating habits and then your weight will always be
around where you want it to be. You don't need more money
you just need better financial habits and then you'll always have enough money
to manage the thing that comes up. And umm... I think that's one of the reasons
why small habits matter so much they don't necessarily transform
your life overnight, right, right away, like doing one pushup
does not transform your body but it does cast a vote for being the type
of person who doesn't miss workouts. Or meditating for one minute might not give you an immediate
sense of calm in your life but it does cast a vote
for being a meditator. The real goal is not to run a marathon,
the goal is to become a runner. The goal is not to write a book,
the goal is to become a writer. Because once you have
adopted that identity you're really not even pursuing
behavior change anymore you're just kind of acting in alignment with the type of person
you already see yourself to be. It's kind of like true behavior change
is really identity change because once you've changed
that internal story it's way easier to show up each day, you're not even really motivating
yourself that much to do it you're just like this is who I am now. There's sort of this like yo-yo effect you know, like someone trains for
a half marathon and then they run the race and that race motivated them to train
for the last three or four months. And then the race ends
and they stop and take a week off than a week turns into two weeks
than two months and so on and then they turn around
like four months later like, man, I haven't ran in months like I need to
sign up for a new race or something. Because if it's all about the goal as soon as the goal is achieved you
don't have that motivating you anymore. But if instead it's about being a runner then even once,
even once you finish the race you still have a reason
to show up again the next week because you're like, well,
I just, that's what I do is I run, - that's who I am.
- Right? And so I think that that's a more... in pretty much any domain true long-term thinking
is really goalless thinking. It's much more about being that person, developing
that identity, following that system and then you just happen to realize
your potential along the way. So what you come to realize is that your habits
reinforce a particular identity and sometimes this can be positive
and sometimes it can be negative the story could be things like, I'm bad at math or I'm terrible at
remembering people's names or I'm not good at remembering directions. And all of those stories... that's just
an internal story that you tell yourself but each time you have
an experience that reinforces that the story gets solidified. And so I think the method,
the- the takeaway here is that every action you take is kind of like a vote for the type
of person that you want to become. And if you can master the right actions,
if you can master the right habits then you can start to
cast votes for this new identity this desired person that you want to be. Good habits become easy habits when you can learn
to find joy in delaying gratification. There's no rush build for the long term guys. It's as if they're standing at the foot
of a mountain, they can see the summit they can see the thing they want,
I want to make an impact what they don't see is the mountain. This large immovable object you can go up fast, you can go up slow
I don't care but there's still a mountain. What they don't understand is that life, that relationships and career fulfillment are a journey. There's no app for that. I got nothing you've got to go through the slow
plotting, annoying, meandering process called career and life. Everything in my life,
when something got hard, I quit. I wasn't great at reading,
I wasn't great at writing so I just quit. I couldn't catch on as fast as you, I had to work harder than you, so I quit. Like man, if I could just go
that distance, that extra mile to just go, ju- just to finish I want to feel victory and victory for me
wasn't winning, it was just finishing. This is one of the things that's
challenging about building better habits is that they're very easy
to dismiss on any given day right like what is the difference between eating a burger and fries
for lunch or eating a salad not a whole lot on any given day your body looks basically the same in
the mirror, the scale hasn't really changed. It's really easy to dismiss it in your mind
and say, "Oh, this is kind of insignificant" but you know you turn around
2 or 5 or 10 years later and you realize, "Oh, wow,
those daily choices really did add up." It's just much harder to see
on a granular basis. The cost of your good habits
is in the present and the cost of your bad habits
is in the future. And the fact that we prioritize
the present over the future ends up making a lot of habit change
difficult for that reason. The ultimate form
of intrinsic gratification is a reaffirmation
of your desired identity. So if you... if your desired identity is I'm the type of person who doesn't
miss workouts or I'm an athlete. Every time you're doing a squat literally,
you can be in the middle of the rep and you're already getting gratified because you're acting in alignment
with the type of person you want to be. It's like, "Oh, I just did that rep,
I didn't miss this workout, that feels good" Umm, now, I do think it takes
a little while to get to that point where that actually feels like you. You know, you can imagine somebody goes to
the gym for the first week or the first month they don't quite identify that way yet because they haven't
spent enough time there. Steven Pressfield I think it's in "The War of Art"
he has a piece where he talks about a wolf and how the wolf
develops a territory right? But the only way that
it develops a territory is by being there, by walking around
the terrain every day and then it starts to feel like
this is mine, this is my home. And he talks about
writers doing that by like you make the chair and the computer
and the desk in your office your territory, becomes your terrain. And I think that that is true
for most habits too like when you walk into the gym
for the first time you feel very uncertain it's not your territory,
you don't feel like it's your terrain. But once you show up again
for a week or month or year at some point you cross
this invisible threshold where it starts to feel like,
"Yeah, this is for me" or "I belong" and that I think...
once you've crossed that stage it becomes more likely that you can get
that kind of reaffirmation of your identity and start to instantly feel gratified. But there are other things
that you can do in the short term to feel more gratified while
you're working on those habits. So here's just one little tactic, let's say that you're either trying to work out or build
a habit of meditating or something and so each time you do
your habit of meditating for five minutes you have this little jar of marbles
and you've got like 100 marbles in there and 90 are red and 10 are blue and after each instance of your habit you walk over and you pull
a marble out of the jar. And if you pull out one of the 90
then nothing happens it's just like a pat on the back, good job
you did what you're supposed to. But if you pull out one of the 10 then you get some kind of
reward, that's exciting to you maybe you get to watch Netflix
for an hour and not feel guilty or go for a walk outside
or take a bubble bath or buy yourself a new jacket,
whatever it is, like something that that feels rewarding. And what you just did was you introduce
an element of immediate gratification and of like surprise and delight
to the whole process. And so... yeah, that first week
when you're meditating you still might not identify
as a meditator or you still might not have
a sense of calm watch over your life but you have this other interesting thing
that is rewarding right away that maybe gets you to stick with it while you're waiting for those
long-term rewards to accumulate. Well, so we do have and this definitely
plays an important role in habits we do have a bias toward the present and that makes sense, right? That example I gave about
like finding a berry bush you know, 100 meters away. Well, you should in fact
go get the food that's close by and not the food that's on
the other side of the mountain because that just makes logical sense,
you'd rather have it now especially when we were not
in modern society, right? For 99.999% of human history we're just trying to survive
like every other animal. And so, umm... you should try, you should prioritize immediate food, immediate shelter,
immediate water, immediate safety. And in fact our brains are
wired to do that. But modern society
is a whole different ballgame because we have all these things that actually you should prioritize
delayed outcomes. So you go to college now
and then you graduate in four years. You save for retirement today
and then you retire decades from now. You show up at work this week
and then you get a paycheck in a month. And so, it's actually like there are all
kinds of things we do in modern society that require you to delay gratification and that runs a little counter to what our wiring is
or what our pref- biological preference is. There's a sort of
an a misalignment of rewards that often happens with habits. So there's an immediate outcome,
an immediate reward and then an ultimate reward. And for your bad habits, one reason bad habits stick so readily
that they they form so easily is because bad habits often
the immediate reward is favourable. Right? Like what's the immediate
reward of eating a doughnut it's kind of great.
It's sweet, it's sugary, it tastes good. It's only the ultimate reward if you repeat that habit for 6 months
or a year or two years that is unfavorable. Meanwhile, good habits
are often the exact opposite the immediate reward of going to the gym
or going to the gym for like a week isn't really that great
your body's probably sore. You don't have much to show for it,
your body looks the same, the weight hasn't really changed but if you stick to that for
6 months or a year or two years then the ultimate reward is favorable.
