We live in a very outcome-focused society, even if you are talented you can't succeed without having great 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 They are the portion of your life that you can influence You can do the architect of your habits rather than the victim of them The things that are on your desk at home your office at work They influence your behaviors If you can restructure your physical environment, then you're more likely to actually stick with the right habit But the question to ask is what are those one or two things that tend to pull the rest of my life in line? You can just build that one habit and you know that there's gonna be a lot of good side effects because of it Every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you want to become Once you've changed that internal story, you're just like this is who I am now The world is changing inspiration is everywhere It has never been so easy to connect share and bring people together We're learning from others and finding the best in ourselves Challenging our beliefs Sharing our vulnerability overcoming our fears Transforming ourselves so we can transform the world How far can we go this is a little too real I'm Brian Rose my guest today's Did you realize that the results in your life are a measure of your habits What do you do every single day to be successful that determines who you are? And if I look at your habits right now I Can tell the person that you want to become and it's a hard thing to really think about but what are you doing every single? day for your health your lifestyle your diet your business those little 1% changes can have a massive effect over time and that's what our guest is here to talk about today. Mr James Claire atomic habits and he really structures it all out to get you what you want And he also says that we don't rise to our goals. We fall to the level of our systems What systems do we have in place to get our lives to the next level? And I love this book atomic habits There's all sorts of vital information in there about how you can put routines in place that make you feel good that make them Repeatable and they can really change the course of your life. So I know you're gonna enjoy my time with James He's got a whole structured layout of how you can change your life starting today This is London real I am Brian rose, my guest today is James clear the writer entrepreneur speaker and New York Times bestselling author You spent years educating millions of readers on the importance of habits decision making and continuous improvement You're a regular speaker at Fortune 500 companies and your work is used in the NFL NBA and MLB your new book atomic Habits details your system of building good habits and breaking bad ones showing how small changes can have a transformative effect in Every aspect of your life James welcome to London real. Thank you. Good to talk to you It's great to have you here first. Would love to get your impressions on this city. We call London What do you think about this place? I love London I could definitely live here. I see All kinds of opportunities, you know think they're fascinating people It doesn't really matter what industry you're interested in finance fashion publishing whatever it is You can find somebody cool to hang out with great food, which I am all about I basically have ate my way around the city for the last few days Yeah, I love visiting and you said you'd recently been to New York in Los Angeles in Tokyo? But you wouldn't necessarily live in those cities. I love all those cities. I love visiting them But I feel like I could carve out a life in London and like call it home, you know And I don't know what it is. There's something a little less stressful about walking around in London to me You can then all the neighborhoods are different. You can find one. That's the right fit for you Yeah, I don't know. It just feels more cozy to me Yeah, it really is this grouping of neighborhoods Maybe like 30 or 40 Neighbourhoods and you could say Manhattan is it's like Chelsea and the West Village and Upper East Side but to a normal Civilian when they go there it kind of looks the same Yeah here you kind of have vibes and restaurants and attitudes and yeah I find it lemons fairly spread out. Like it's a fairly large city whereas New York naturally is contained, right? Manhattan in particular and it has to be on the island LA is pretty spread out and Tokyo is massive, but Yeah, I don't know for someone who was born in America. I feel like London would be a interesting fit for me I feel like I could call it home and it would still be fascinating and all kinds of other ways. Yeah good to hear I think you could I came here 17 years ago and just haven't left since But it is it's weirdly it some people describe it as like LA New York and DC rolled up in one because in one city You've got government Finance media, you know advertising in one place So it doesn't have a vibe that just kind of over arches the other too much so it's kind of weird in that sense it kind of cool it's also I mean for me as an American pretty much everywhere in Europe is interesting to travel to and You couldn't have much of a better jumping off point than London. You can get non-stop to anywhere So that part would make it exciting too, you know Like you could see the rest of this interesting part of the world very easily Yeah, you can be in some very different places in about two hours. Yeah, right, like really different places different realities. So cool Well, welcome to that. You know, I'm really excited to talk about these habits with you because I've had over 500 people sitting in that chair and After the first two or three hundred I started asking myself What makes this person get in this chair as opposed to the person I just walked by on the sidewalk or the person that drove my bus or the person that served me coffee and I'm always like what makes them do and I came to this conclusion that there are no high-performance people just high-performance habits but when I tell people that and when I tell my students in our Academy that a lot of times it just goes over their Head and they're like, oh, yeah sure, but I think somehow deep down inside. We always equate it with like a talent You know that person's a billionaire or well, they were always going to be that way That person is a great actor a great athlete But from what I've seen it usually comes down to great habits, and if you really dissect their behavior It turns out that they're doing some really pretty pretty granular things than they're doing You know, I haven't met too many people that wake up at 5:00 a.m That actually do great things, you know, a lot of times those people are actually doing things I don't know many people that wake up at 5:00 a.m. And then watch Netflix I mean, there's usually and I know Jocko willing the Navy Seal and like he's getting up at 4:00 a.m And put posting pictures of his watch but a lot of times those people are being effective And so I really do think habits are important So I hope everybody listening really plugs into what we're gonna say because it's not just about being high Performance or getting what you want? It's I think it's about having a great life Correct me if I'm mad Yeah, so, you know I think there there actually are I agree with that point but it's I think even deeper then than that So it's not that luck and randomness and uncertainty. Don't play a role in life they do you know luck luck is a part of all of our lives to a certain degree both good fortune and bad but By definition you don't have control over luck and your habits also matter and I think that the reason they're so worthwhile To focus on and understand is that they are the portion of your life that you can influence that also determines your outcomes It's not just luck. It's not just habits, but one of those you have control over and so it makes sense The only reasonable strategy is to focus on what you can control if you spend all of your time focusing on things you can't control Then you're just gonna end up frustrated And so I think habits are maybe the best lever for that now something that I say deeper in the book that I also think is true is that talent and genes They play a role. Like I have a chapter think it's chapter 18 or 19 it's like the role of genes and habits and how they interplay and It's important, you know, people have natural predispositions to things that make them better But what you find is that nearly always when someone is a great performer in a particular domain They are both well suited so if naturally talented or have some kind of predisposition to that area and Well trained and so even if you are talented You can't succeed without having great habits to execute and to fully realize the potential that you have. All right So those were we talking I think habits play a crucial role. Yeah, we've all heard the story of the coach That just is shaking his head because that one kid had so much talent, but he never showed up to practice I think sometime late babe all the way through college and I think sometimes I would rather be an Athlete that's at like the 90th percentile of physical talent, but like the 95th of execution and habits then the other way around because if you don't have the habits and the practice routines and rituals to actually realize your potential a Lot of the time it's just not enough. It's enough at lower levels, but once you get to the top of any field Everybody's talented and so the only the thing that is separates you is often not the physical gifts But your ability to practice get out of your own way your mental approach all that type of stuff Anyway, so those are some more nuanced points But I think the central thing that you were getting at is true your outcomes in life are often a lagging measure of your habits you know like a Lot of the time people talk about you know I want to have more money or I want to lose weight or I want some kind of result, but the truth is Your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning and reading habits and so it's actually 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 right and even more so your your Identity and sense of self a lot of times is all rolled up into your habits which is even a crazier kind of a Messing with your brain and that these little things you do that you might ignore all the time could change who you actually are So I had this question while I was researching the book I think identity plays a crucial role but my question was like well, how do we come to believe things about ourselves? Because when you come into the world as a baby, you don't have any preset beliefs or notions That's not to say the again. Your don't matter They certainly matter in some sense like your your height might be more or less baked into your DNA But we all realize that if you grew up in a different culture or a different religion or a different community or household You could adopt completely different beliefs if that was what you're raised in and so I was like well, how does that happen? right How do how does this internal story that we tell ourselves our identity become shaped and formed? and I realized that it's mostly through the repetition of that story and 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 remembering people's names or I'm not good at directions Please yeah and all of those store 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 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 and 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 and This is why one of the things I say in the book like 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've 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 changes 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 Yeah And we'll get into that because the difference between goals and systems and kind of touches on this little bit which is important You know a couple years ago I was we were teaching in our Academy we're teaching people how to start their own podcasts and how to start businesses from their profile and and someone said to me Brian Can you teach me stuff that's non-business related? And so I looked at my life and over the past four or five years I had picked up all of these habits from the guests that had sat in that chair from habits on how to meditate and do Affirmations and do like a low media diet and movement practices and eating habits And I actually hadn't even thought about it But by being around them and watching them I started practicing them and I picked up all these like amazing habits And I also had some bad habits like about 10 or 15 years ago. I had drug addictions I had all this of the stuff that I kind of talked about last year one of my movies So it'd be good to kind of explore You know how these things get put in place How you can maybe choose the good ones or the bad ones and then identify a lot of the psychology behind this stuff? so I'd love to jump in and Again that we've got there's so much IP in this book. It's an amazing book I'd love to talk about some of the fundamentals some of the definitions what's a habit and then I'd love to get into some of your sections about how to make it have it obvious how to make it attractive how to make it easy how to make it satisfying sure and then maybe we'll have some chance to go into some of The advanced stuff like you said with DNA and things like that. So start it all off Well, first of all, what does a habit and why did you get obsessed with this? Yeah okay, so two different questions, so let's just do the definition first, so The technical definition of the habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to be more or less automatic so things that you can do pretty much without thinking about them unplugging your toaster after each use or tying your shoes or Brushing your teeth things that you're pretty much just going autopilot when you do them now we often use the word habit to mean different things than that and we can get into this more like you might say things like I want to give them the habit of working out or I want to get in the habit of writing every day I know what you mean when you say that right you mean I want to make it a regular practice I want to make it this daily ritual that I follow But you're never gonna go like on autopilot and forget what you write for an hour, right? Like it's it's a more effortful conscious thing And so we can talk about some of that distinction particularly with making habits easy What you really want to do is make the beginning easy an automatic and the rest of the routine can follow naturally even if you're consciously thinking about it, but Anyway, so so that's what a habit is. It's this automatic response. Now, why does the brain build them? What role does it play? well as You go through life You need energy to survive and this is true. Not just for humans, but for all organisms needing some kind of energy to survive and getting energy requires energy you need to eat food to be able to walk around and find the next meal and Using energy is expensive because the more energy you use the less you have Available for the other things that life throws at you And so your brain is looking for ways to conserve energy to conserve energy whenever possible and habits are a great method for doing that so for example when our ancestors were roaming around the savanna if there was a berry patch a hundred meters from you it made sense to Go to that berry patch rather than one that was like on the other side of the mountain right, you would choose the path of least resistance and Eventually what your brain learns is Oh whenever I'm by this tree, that means the berry patch is 100 meters away And so the tree becomes a signal that hey food is over there and your brain is always picking up on these signals throughout life that indicate where things are at and the more that you come across those signals the more you automate your response and pretty soon you're taking A right when you get to that tree, even though you're not even thinking about it You're just doing it automatically and it makes that whole process of finding energy Solving the problems of life and getting through things easier It requires less energy and attention and effort than it did before it's like an algorithm the brain built for itself I think yes, I think that's a good way to describe it. It is it's like an algorithm that you can rely on It's a cognitive script a mental shortcut that you can pull out whenever the situation is, right, and that's true Not just for things like finding food, which is essential for our survival But also for daily tasks because all these daily tasks take energy as well. So something like tying your shoes Your brain learns the context of when I have a shoe on my foot and the shoe string is untied That means I do this little routine where I tie the the shoe and shoelace into a knot and so on and the first time You do it it takes energy and then but after you do it a hundred times or a thousand times or 10,000 times Pretty soon you're doing it just like turning right at the tree You can have a conversation with somebody else or listen to a podcast or think about your to-do list for the day you free up That energy and attention to be used elsewhere And you have this is perhaps the biggest thing that they do you have less wasted energy Rather than fumbling with the laces and trying hard to do it You can do it more quickly in fluently, and that saves you energy in time for the next task So that's why your brain builds them and what a habit does and then as far as why I got interested in them I Started to realize similar to what I've hinted at a moment or two ago that both luck and habits play a role in life But that you have control over your habits And the funny thing is we're building them all the time But a lot of people don't feel like they have control over their habits they feel like their habits are taking control of them that they're like a Victim of these bad routines and once you start to dive in a little bit and like uncover the layers And realize what a habit is and how it works Then you start to develop a little more control over it and I think if we're gonna be building habits anyway Then it makes more sense to be able to understand how they work and how to structure them. So that You can be the architect of your habits rather than the victim of them Okay, and you break them down into this cue craving response or reward which is kind of not their traditional way But maybe it's good to jump into that. And I think most people when they think habits they probably think of their bad habits Right, most people not reward themselves for their good habits and a critical of their bad habits and some of these aren't even habits So I choose that for stage model cue craving response reward There's a lot of science behind it. Three of those four stages are very common cue response and reward started in like the 19 billion 1900's but 1930s it got popularized with BF Skinner which his model with stimulus response Reward and then Charles Dickens book power of habit has kind of brought it back to the forefront cue routine reward Basically the same thing just different words and the idea and there's you know a hundred years of behavioral psychology research behind this that if you show someone the right cue and They take an action and then you follow it with a reward you can train them to do that thing whenever the cue arises again whenever this stimulus happens, so If whenever the light in the the lab turns on the monkey gets a squirt of juice Then it knows whenever the light is on I should go over and you know put my mouth underneath the nozzle to get some juice Or whatever and you can do that for all kinds of things and it's works for for human behavior as well in many ways But then there was the second wave of research with cognitive psychology over the last probably 50 to 75 years That shows that not only do external cues and external rewards influence our habits but also internal moods emotions feelings thoughts beliefs those influence our behaviors, too and So that's why I added that fourth stage of craving and I think actually it's really important because it answers I just had a couple like basic questions that I thought when I was dealing with this kind of breaking habits down and why should It be organized in a particular way. How do we understand them? And one of the questions is well if it's Q response reward How come people have different responses to the same Q there has to be something going on there? so you have two people that walk into a room and There's a pack of cigarettes on the counter and one person sees it and they feel this craving to smoke and pull a cigarette out And the other person is never smoked today in their life, and they see that same visual cue But they think oh just packed cigarettes they move on and what what happens in the key for that craving stage is that it's really about the Prediction or the meaning that you assign to the cue that determines whether you get a craving or not? So it comes back to that internal mood states emotions feelings. And so interesting you bring that out because there's a book called a Alan Carr's easy way to stop smoking just now dot Now-dead and I read this 20 years ago. And so man it actually worked and it was weird How what you're saying now is the pack of cigarettes used to cue. Okay I got a smoke and then after reading a book like that it cued I'm not gonna poison myself anymore and I understand the trick. It's playing on me So I mean this is kind of your like probably the fourth or fifth person that's told me about that book now. Yes and So I think this is actually quite hard to do for breaking bad habits Which is rewiring the story in your brain for what a cue means but in the long run that is actually I think a very Robust way to break a bad habit is to learn to teach yourself that that cue means something new say you walk down stairs and you see a loaf of bread on the counter each morning and you're like Oh, I should make some toast for breakfast So now that cue of the loaf of bread means make toast But then you read a diet and nutrition book that convinces you that like grain and carbs of the devil, right? well now you go downstairs and you see that same loaf of bread and it means something totally new similar to you like oh now The cigarette means I'm poisoning myself. Now. It means oh I shouldn't eat that. That's bad for me and It's really the story that you're telling the thing that's happening in that second stage of the the craving the prediction about what it is That changes your response. So the to summarize the reason I chose those four stages is that I was trying to create a model that I felt like accurately described both all of the robust research that is true about behavioral psychology and The research from cognitive psych and the influence of internal states So my hope is that those four stages accurately describe a habit and how both the internal world and the external world Influence our behaviors, okay Talk about goals and systems. Maybe this is the time to get into that because You know setting goals. It's kind of a popular thing to talk about the last few years I'm actually a fan of them as well. But also I'm an engineer by training so systems come naturally to me So for me, it's always like ok Yeah, and then I'm already thinking about the systems but a lot of people aren't so can you define that? Well, so first of all before I like criticize goals a little bit I should just say one This is coming from someone who was very goal-oriented for a long time, right? I set goals for everything right like what I the grades I wanted to get in school the weights I wanted to lift in the gym the revenue numbers. I wanted to hit my business it was all goal oriented and then I turned around a couple years later and I realized I've only achieved some of these maybe 10 20 % so clearly setting the goal was not the thing that Determined whether I move forward or not because the majority of the time I'm not achieving them And so then I have this question like well, what is it now before I? Describe the systems approach. I should say goals do serve a purpose right? It's not that they're useless They are good for setting a sense of direction and clarity So figuring out where do I direct my attention and they're good for? Filtering and what I mean by that is it's very easy as you go throughout life For people to come to you with a different opportunity or you find out about a new Area that you're interested in and you start to say yes to things because oh this is a new and exciting but if you have a goal, it's much easier to say no to the things that intrude right so if you're training for the Olympics and your friends want to go to The bar you it's very easy to say. No because your goal gives you a much cleaner filter to determine does this Move me in the direction. I want to go or not So those are the things goals do well but some of the things that goals do poorly systems are actually much better for and so the way that I would describe it is a goal is focused on the outcome a System is focused on the process. So it's the the series of habits or steps that you take to get to that ultimate goal and So a couple examples if you are a basketball coach your goal might be to win the championship But your system is the way that you recruit assistant coaches and players the drills that you do at practice each day The process you have for reviewing game film and prepping for the next game. That's your system If you are a writer your goal might be to rest write a best-selling book But your system is the writing process that you follow each day and like getting your butt in the chair It's your research and how you come up with new ideas to write about The way that you interview potential Clients or candidates or people you're thinking about putting in your book things like that? Now the question I had was what if you ignored the goal? Right, if you say forget about the goal and focused only on the system if you were the basketball coach You said we're not going to talk about the championship at all this year. We're only gonna focus on the way We recruit the way we practice the way we train would you still get results? and I think for the most part you probably would and this I think is the the hard part the thing that often gets overlooked is that we live in a very outcome-focused society things are only news stories or shared on social media once they're a result so the results of success are very visible and easy to view, you know, you're never going to see a story that's like man eats chicken and salad for lunch today It's only going to be a story a or later when it's like man loses a hundred pounds It's only the outcome that is visible for us also to process that thought right? It's like oh I get it something important happened I prioritize it because it's this. Oh this event was accomplished, right? 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 two or five or ten 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. So A-all I'm really calling for here is not to say that goals are useless or we should totally ignore them. But instead 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 Okay And also just kind of realize and admit that we all have a bias towards goals and that we see them everywhere that we go and that we need to maybe kind of De-emphasize them a little bit and just get back to look at the system underneath it may be I think De-emphasize is a good workout You know, like we're goals are in front of us all the time outcomes and results are always in front of us So maybe we just shift the attention a little bit more to the process and the habit. Yeah, and it's funny That's what I was talking about When people come in this chair, I get to spend two hours with them and once you deconstruct your life You actually see the systems and that's why when they sit in the chair They'll see Eddie Izzard a famous comedian or the 50 billion dollar man or the champion boxer and oh wow But when you go into there you realize that They've gone in and done the work when they didn't want to do it they pushed through the difficulty that all that stuff and then you see oh There's the system's there because they're rarely as a result without a system Well, that's one of the things that is a little bit surprising about goals Is that 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 of 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 so it's really the habits that need to change not the the result and that's why hitting your goal sometime can be really Anticlimactic and also can mess with people's lives because they shoot for that goal They get it and then they stop achieving they stop their systems 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 to the last three or four months and then the race ends and they stop they 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 when even once you finish the race, you still have a reason to show up again the next week 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 in pretty much any domain true long-term Thinking is really gold las' 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 Okay talking about this 1% everyday You know when people hear that in their minds, they're just like, oh, it's so tiny. It doesn't matter mm. Well What is the thought process behind this 1% every day? Well, so just a quick story that I like that I feel like illustrates the point So we're in The UK and for many years the British cycling team was very mediocre They had never won a Tour de France, even though the race had been around over a hundred years They had won I think a single gold medal back in 1908. And so they brought in this new performance director 2003-2004 and he believed in this concept that he called the aggregation of marginal gains And so he described as like the one percent provement in all the areas related to cycling and so they started by making 1% improvements that other teams were probably looking at to put slightly lighter tires on the bike They had their riders wear these electrically heated over shorts to keep their their legs warm so they could ride for longer they Had different biofeedback sensors that each rider would wear in them. They adjusted the programs to each individual But again competitive field a lot of teams are doing that So then they did a bunch of 1% changes that nobody else was thinking about like they hired a surgeon to come in and teach Them how to wash their hands to reduce the risk of catching the cold or getting a flu They split tested different types of massage gels to see which one led to the fastest form of muscle recovery They they even figured out the type of pillow and mattress that led to the best night's sleep for each Rider and then they brought That on the road with them to big events like and when they were in hotels for the Tour de France and things like that and so Brailsford said all right, if we can the coach that if we can actually do this Right execute on all these little 1% changes then I think we can win a Tour de France than 5 years right now He must had to really sell people on this because you can already see the naysayers and we're in Britain as well Where they're gonna be like come on, this is ridiculous. Right? Well and it just No, single change seems like very much, right? so one of the changes they made was they had their Outdoor riders switch to indoor racing suits because they tested them in a wind tunnel and turns out the indoor suits were a little more Aerodynamic which you know, you think all right, whatever. I got like basically skin tight clothes on either way How is this gonna make much of a difference? Anyway, so they did in fact execute on all these little changes and they won the Tour de France not in five years But in three years and then they repeated again the fourth year with a different writer and then after one year off they've now won The last three in a row against they've won five the last six now after having never won it for more than a hundred years It's definitely an obvious. Anomaly you look at it, and you're like what? Because it's not like we have a cycling culture here or anything It was just a big anomaly when we saw them massively improved And so I bring that story up not because I think you know cycling is the perfect example or anything But just because it's a good story that showcases the power being committed to making those small improvements each day, and I think that it's not just Nice to have it's not just like a little cherry on top of your performance to make these 1% changes But they actually can compound and add up in a really significant way in the long run and habits are a lot like that They're they're not exactly like compound interest, you know where you kind of like it hit that hockey stick portion of the curve But they really feel like that a lot. You know, like we were saying just a few moments ago It feels insignificant on any day But then you turn around 10 years later and it's actually you're surprised by where you end up and that's a hallmark of any compounding process that the greatest returns are delayed and so Habits are like that too. You know, they they don't feel like much on any given day But they really add up over the months and years and most of us Overestimate what the significance of the short-term stuff and we underestimate the potential of the long-term, right? Is that just a human another cognitive bias? Yeah, I don't I don't know why we do that but we do tend to feel like you know We overestimate when you've done the day underestimate in a year or a decade You think it's cuz we used to have shorter lifespans where maybe this stuff didn't play out I mean because this got us somewhere, you know, we evolved this point 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 a 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 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 delay the 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 Preferable aaja chol preferences, right? Okay. I just caught thought of the term like caveman whenever someone talks like a caveman doing something It's like the caveman just thinking like okay meaty for gratification What do I got to do now to survive and we've now pretty much reverse-engineered all that stuff out? Yeah, it makes sense that our brain is like that but we just start kind of in a mismatched environment a little bit And so to bring this back to habits there's a sort of an 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 favorable, right? Like what's the immediate reward of eating a doughnut? It's kind of great. It's sweet and sugary it tastes good It's only the ultimate reward if you repeat that habit for six 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 your weight Hasn't really changed but it's if you stick to that for six months or a year or two years then the ultimate reward is favorable and so a lot of the balance are a lot of the challenge of building good habits and breaking bad ones is figuring out how to Pull the long term costs of your bad habits into the present moment so you feel a little bit that pain right now and ever reason to avoid it and Pull the long-term rewards of your good habits into the present moment So it feels good and you have a reason to kind of make it through that like valley of death in the beginning and stick With it while you're waiting for those delayed rewards to accumulate. I think we could just summarize that whole cognitive bias or mismatch misalignment of rewards by saying 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 Does that mean you have to go deeper into that? Identity in order to bring those future things forward or is it just about realizing them now? You know, it's a good question I think so You're on the right track because I think that 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 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 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 the writer he wrote lore of art. Yeah. Yeah, so he I think it's in the word Bart 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 a month or a 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 that once you've crossed that stage It becomes more likely that you can get that kind of reaffirm ation 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 workout 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 got like a hundred marbles in there and ninety are red and ten or 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 Pat in the back We do what you're supposed to But if you pull out one of the ten 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 Hmm and the variable reward is that an important part of that? Yeah, so that does introduce a variable reward for that one, right? and so for people listening if you're not familiar that the term variable reward is It's been widely studied in psychology Actually the way they discovered it was an accident BF Skinner the researcher came across it was running low on food pellets so he the rats that he was training he would give them a pellet whenever they did the thing that he wanted and he Was running low on them. He had to hand press them each time And so he thought well maybe I'll just give him one every other time and it turns out that actually Increased the rate that the rats would act and do the thing because they didn't know if they were gonna get it or not So they were like something must be wrong like I need to press this lever even more because I thought I was supposed to get one every time and it turns out that that actually leads to a spike in activity and so a variable reward can be a good way to increase the Frequency with what you do a habit now. It's worth noting. It's not like a panacea it doesn't you can't just take something you don't want to do and then make the reward very and then be like Oh now I'll do it. The good doesn't work that way But if you already want to do it then it'll increase the rate at what you do, right? There's a great book called hooked by near I oh, yeah, he talks about that And if you work in Silicon Valley, you're very familiar with variable reward because a lot of our apps are based on that Maybe we can talk about that at the end um, some of those become really obvious is it feels like well I think all of life is a game between your conscious and subconscious and it feels like Part of these habits are almost like tricking your subconscious into thinking I am this person And part of the way it does that is when you repeat these habits your subconscious So I guess I I'm a runner if I'm running four days a week Are there other ways to like hack into that and I'll throw you a curveball but there's this concept of affirmations you know what people Say out loud every day what they are with it with the hopes that they become that person Is this a way to maybe hack into some of this habit-forming stuff? And what are your thoughts on it? Yeah, so affirmations or visualization or The kind of idea of like fake it till you make it I don't think there's anything wrong with those things There's nothing wrong with being more. If you get to choose what story you tell yourself you might as well choose a positive one, right? but I do think that my method differs a little bit from Positive affirmations or from fake it till you make it in the following way. So fake it till you make it is asking you to believe something about yourself without having evidence for it yet right you say I'm a Healthy person. I'm a healthy person even though you haven't gone to the gym yet or whatever And we have a word for beliefs that don't have evidence. We call it delusion right like at some point Your brain doesn't like this and this match between what you're saying and what you're doing and so the only nuance the difference and in my argument is that I think that we should let the behavior lead the way so let the behavior drive the belief rather than the Belief drive the behavior and to be clear it can work both ways and it does throughout daily life Like people adopt a new belief and then they take a new action because of it But I think that if you're trying to get yourself to latch on to a new identity or tell yourself a new story It's more powerful to let the behavior lead the way because the behavior provides immediate evidence that you are that kind of person So if you say I'm a healthy person you might be able to It's like a short term strategy You might be able to amp yourself up or motivate yourself in the moment But if you do five push-ups you immediately have proof I I'm a person who works out and There's something about that evidence that I think makes it easier for you to root that new story in something it gives you a reason to actually hold on to it and So for that reason, I think it's more useful to start with the small habits Build up some evidence and proof of that new identity and then the more that you do that the bigger the pile of evidence becomes the more reason you have to actually believe hey that Is me? Yeah, maybe some combination of both. There's something when you were talking about the working out story I kept thinking than just Arnold Schwarzenegger quote for movie pumping iron when he was like he was like every rep I was Smiling because I was getting me one step closer to mr Olympia and then you look at him and you're like, okay I can see why Arnold would think that but most people every rep is pain. Hmm, and they don't see it But is that a way of him kind of hacking forward does the future pay outs? I think um I think that is similar to what you mentioned earlier about like all cigarettes are poison or the story about the bread like Oh, Carbs being unhealthy or whatever is that he was finding a different way He was developing a new meaning for the same experience, right? Usually it's the meaning you ascribe to that experience is my muscles are burning. This is painful I'm not enjoying this it requires sacrifice and he Twisted that around to say this is great the pain means I'm growing it means I'm moving forward I'm getting closer to my goal and so on and I think there's something powerful about Good habits become easy habits when you can learn to find joy in delaying gratification right and so he was finding a way to get pleasure out of the process of putting in the work and that Can be a really powerful motivator in the long run. It's that called reframing yeah Yeah, and I I think that there's I've thought about writing about this more I I haven't written a ton about it yet, but I think that there are Strategies and a few different mindset reframes that you can go through that can really change The likelihood that you stick with a habit if you learn the right story to tell yourself It becomes easier to maintain that over the wall To continue watching the rest of the episode for free visit our website London real TV. 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