(adventurous music) - Thanks for the intro, Roy. Good morning, everybody. Thank you all for being here. So I have a question to start this talk. How many of you made a New
Year's resolution this year? Raise your hand. Alright, that's about what I expected. Keep them up for just a second. So actually you can put them down. I'll have you put it
back up in just a minute. Except you, Sam, keep yours up. (laughter) So 40% of Americans on average either always or usually
make a New Year's resolution. Another 17% do so every once in a while. So hands back up. If you made a New Year's resolution and you're still on track
with your resolution keep your hand up. Otherwise put it down. So what percentage of people do you think that make resolutions actually follow through with them? Shout out some answers. The answer is eight. 8% of people who make
a New Year's resolution manage to follow through on
that New Year's resolution and do what they set out to do. So if you had to put
your hands down just now, you're far from alone, that's normal. To give you some context, your odds are about the same
as taking a deck of cards, shuffling it, and pulling
an Ace off the top. Those are your odds of hitting
your New Year's resolution. You have a 92% chance of failure when you set a New Year's resolution. So let's talk about what we can do to shift those odds in our favor. But first, a disclaimer. I want everybody in this room to know that you are a beautiful person just as you are. I'm gonna talk a lot about
health and fitness in this talk. I'm gonna talk about those things because that's my story. That's how I learned all of this stuff. But I'm not telling you
that you need to go out and lose weight or get fit
or doing anything like that. That is a very personal choice that only you can make for yourself and I'll get into why
that is here in a minute. But these principles that
I'm gonna tell you about, despite the fact that I'm talking a lot about health and fitness,
apply to anything. You could take what I'm
gonna tell you about today and apply these principles to anything that you might wanna do in your life. Secondly, if you do wanna lose weight, if you do wanna get fit, I am not a doctor. So don't take anything
I'm about to tell you as the gospel truth. Don't do it because Nick said to do it. When you're laying on the side of the road with a torn achilles, I don't wanna hear anybody say, but Nick said to go run. So that said, let me tell you
a little bit about my story. I'm not sure how visible
it is on the slide, but that's an asthma
inhaler in the background of that title slide. I had asthma as a kid really bad. My mom, when I was talking
to her about this talk, she told me the story of signing
me up for soccer as a kid. I went to soccer and did the practice. And at the end of practice
when she got there, I was doubled over, breathing
as hard as I could, beat red. Could not breathe. She handed me my asthma inhaler and slowly but surely, my breathing returned to normal. Nowadays if kids have asthma, there's all sorts of things they can do. They can do all sorts of
preventive treatments. Back then, not so much. Asthma treatment consisted of here's your rescue inhaler. If you can't breathe, take two puffs. If that doesn't work, go
to the emergency room. Good luck to you. And so because of that, I was a very sedentary kid. I sat out of PE a lot
because of asthma flareups. And I was picked last for every team that ever was for anything. That sort of thing. But I still had the
appetite of a growing boy so I ate pretty much
whatever I wanted, right? And per BMI, which I know is
not a perfect measurement, but per BMI, I had been
obese my entire life. This is me a couple of summers ago. My son was four and my
daughter had just turned one. I don't know how many of
you have multiple kids, but the adjustment from one kid to two is not a doubling of
effort, it's exponential. And that transition was particularly hard for me and my family. Trying to balance a very demanding job and raising two kids and
being a good husband. And so I basically ate my way through it. I stressed-ate all the time. And I had very little time for exercise. My weight topped out somewhere around 230 and that's about what
I am in that picture. I was super out of shape. I struggled to keep up with my son when we were running around kicking the soccer ball around even. But I really, despite all that, wasn't interested in losing
weight or getting fit. I had tried and failed
so many times in my life that I just basically bought into the idea that I was a big person and there wasn't anything that I could do to change my physical
fitness or my weight. Every time I tried it, I failed. But all of my previous attempts had followed a similar pattern. I think this will be familiar
to everybody in here. Ramit Sethi calls this the
cycle of non-finishers. When you decide to do something new, you get super motivated. You're super excited about it. You're gonna do this thing. You're finally gonna lose weight. And so you do the first
thing that comes to mind. You start doing stuff. Doesn't matter what. You run out to the gym and you hop on the
treadmill for 30 minutes because that's the only
piece of equipment in the gym that you recognize. Maybe later when you get brave, you'll try those weight machines out. But for today, man,
the treadmill's enough. And so over time, going
to the gym over and over, hitting the treadmill for 30 minutes, not seeing a lot of results, you start to realize that this was harder than you thought it was. Maybe it's gonna take more work than you thought it was gonna take. And so you start to lose your motivation. Three trips a week to the gym turns into two, turns into one, turns into zero, and you've given up. They say it can't hurt to try but this is proof that sometimes, sometimes it can. Because if you do this over and over. You follow the cycle repeatedly. At some point you start to
believe lies about yourself. You start to believe that
you're not the kind of person that finishes things. You start to believe that you
don't have any discipline. You start to believe that you're lazy. None of those things are actually true. You've just fallen into
the motivation trap. Turns out it's really
difficult to get anything done if you're relying on motivation
or willpower to get it done. We know this because of this
man, Dr. Roy Baumeister. I was first introduced to
him in Charles Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit, which I'll talk more about in a minute. But in 1998, Dr. Baumeister and his team did an experiment at
Cape's Western University that's gone on to become our modern understanding of willpower. What they did is this. They recruited a group
of students to come in, ostensibly for a taste
perception exercise. They told these students, okay here's your scheduled time to arrive, I want you to skip the meal immediately prior to your scheduled time and make sure that you've fasted for at least three hours ahead of time. So these people were hungry. And to torture them,
Baumeister and his team baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies in the experiment room immediately prior to
their subjects' arrival. Now imagine how these
chocolate chip cookies would smell to you if you had skipped the meal
immediately prior to this and you were starving. They must've smelled amazing. So the researcher greeted
them, sat them down at a table. And on this table, on one side were the
chocolate chip cookies that had just been baked,
still a little bit melty. On the other side, everybody's favorite. A bowl of radishes. Now the researches explained
that cookies and radishes had been deliberately chosen because they were at opposite
ends of the flavor spectrum. Chocolate chip cookies
are sweet and salty, radishes are bitter and (mumbles) And they assigned each
person in the experiment either to the cookie cohort
or the radish cohort. Now if you had the good fortune to be assigned the cookie cohort, your only work here was to eat
three chocolate chip cookies. If you were assigned to the radish cohort, your job was to eat three radishes. And the researchers stressed
that it was imperative for the integrity of the experiment that you only eat your assigned food. And then they left the room. And so some of the people
from the radish cohort would pick up a chocolate chip cookie and look at it so longingly,
they would smell it, and then they would put it
down with great resignation and they would eat their radish. Nobody actually ate the wrong food which is pretty remarkable in my mind. But that wasn't the
crux of the experiment. After they ate, the researcher returned and told them that they needed
to wait 15 or 20 minutes for their flavor profile
in their mouth to fade before they could move on to the next phase of the experiment, and oh by the way while you're waiting, would you mind helping us
with another experiment? We're working on problem
solving approaches. Seeing how different
people solve problems. And they put a piece of
paper with this diagram in front of the research subjects. They actually gave them a stack of these, as many as they wanted. Their task was to trace
every line in this diagram without repeating any segments
or lifting their pencil. They told them to try as
long as they wanted to. They gave them a bell so
if you get bored of this, just ring the bell, we'll come
back in here, no big deal. But try as long as you want to. One problem, you can't do it. It's impossible. You literally cannot trace
every line in this figure without lifting your
pencil or repeating a line. And that's what the researchers
on Dr. Baumeister's team wanted to test, they wanted to see if there was any difference in persistence between the people assigned
to the cookie cohort and the radish cohort. So here's what they found. The people in the radish cohort made an average of 19.4 attempts at working their way through this problem. They spent on average eight
minutes and 21 seconds. On an impossible problem,
that's pretty good persistence. The cookie cohort, on the other hand, did 34.3 attempts on average and spent 18 minutes and 54 seconds trying to work their
way through the problem. Now that number is actually
skewed on the low side because the researchers set
a time limit of 30 minutes. They wouldn't let anybody work longer than 30
minutes on this problem. And a number of people
in the cookie cohort had that problem. They were still working at 30 minutes when the researcher came
in to interrupt them. Nobody in the radish
cohort had that problem. And so the conclusion that
Dr. Baumeister and his team drew from this, is that
willpower is a lot like a muscle. It's really easy to work
your willpower to exhaustion just like lifting a weight
over and over again. Eventually, your muscle's
gonna fatigue and give out. And so if you spend all day at work keeping yourself on task, the odds that you'll have
willpower left at night to tackle something significant
in your life, pretty slim. This was my first big realization. Your willpower will fail
you every single time. So you have to plan accordingly. This is what I mean by
the motivation track. When you run out and charge
headlong into something, you're eventually gonna hit the trough where you run out of motivation and you can't keep doing
what you were trying to do. You can't grit your way through
big accomplishments in life. It just won't work. But if you look at the
cycle of non-finishers and you look at these first two items, there's a lot of energy and motivation present in those first two steps. We don't wanna waste that. So how can we channel that
energy more productively? What should we do with that motivation? Well that's where Dr. B.J. Fogg comes in. B.J. Fogg has a term for this. B.J. is a researcher at Stanford and the founder of the Stanford
Persuasive Technology Lab. He's done a lot of research
around human motivation and he coined the term, motivation wave, to describe this initial
rush of energy and motivation that accompanies every time
we decide to do something new. So how does this work? Let's say that you want to learn to surf. You're pumped, you're gonna do it. You're gonna hang ten just like this guy. You can do one of two things. You could, on one hand, head down to your local surf shop, grab the first surfboard
that caught your eye, grab a wetsuit, paddle out a
wave and start trying to surf. If you've learned to surf, you'll recognize how
foolish that would be. On the other hand, you could find a good instructor, book some lessons, rent some equipment. Go check it out, if you like it, put lessons on a regular repetition so that you can get good at surfing. Now the first path is just the cycle of
non-finishers exemplified. That's what we all do when we decide to charge
headlong into something. The second path is what Dr.
Fogg would encourage us to do. Namely, do the important hard
to do mental work up front when you have energy
and motivation to do it. So that following through on
the behavior later is easy. Now when I say hard to
do important mental work, what do I mean by that? Well there's a few things you should do. First of all, you should
look yourself in the mirror. You should look yourself in the mirror and be really honest with yourself. Sorry, my slides are
running out of control. You should look yourself in the mirror and be really honest with yourself. Thinking through your goal
and making a plan to reach it is really hard work. Sorry, my notes are-- there we go, now I'm in the right place. Sorry, everybody. You should look yourself in the mirror and be really honest with yourself. It turns out it's really-- when somebody asks you to do something, it's a lot easier to say
yes than say no, right? Somebody asks you-- even if you don't wanna do it, it's always easier to
say yes than to say no. Well turns out it's easy to
do this with yourself as well. When you decide to do something, it's easier to tell yourself yes, I'm gonna go charge out and do that thing, than to say, I don't know
that I wanna do that. So lots of times we fail because we say yes to
something out of obligation. Weight loss is a perfect example of this. Every one of us who has
tried to lose weight at some point in their life, has said yes to weight loss
out of societal obligation versus actually desiring to
do the hard work ourselves. When you say yes out of obligation, you're way less committed to doing it. And half-hearted commitments
become very expensive when these failures start to pile up. So when you start something new, you have to admit to yourself up front that it's gonna get really hard and you have to decide if
it's really worth pursuing. If you say yes, then you can
make a real commitment to it. And if it's not, just let it go. Don't feel guilty about it. So if you do say yes and you decide to make a commitment to it, what does that look like? You wanna pick your goal and make a plan to get there. Thinking through your goal and making a plan to get
there is really hard work. That's why you should do it
when your motivation is high. Having a plan upfront keeps
you from being the person who goes out and spends a
thousand bucks on a surfboard and then lets it collect dust
in their garage for years. The interesting thing
about all this in my life is that I stumbled into
it all sort of backwards. My journey to better health
began here at Juice Land. It's a staple for juice
and smoothies in Austin. My wife discovered green smoothies here. She would go once a week
to get a green smoothie after her yoga class. And she'd been doing that for months. Trying to convince me the whole time how wonderful they were
and that I should try it. No way, man. Something that green couldn't taste good, there's no way. She finally managed to talk me into it despite my fear of green, leafy vegetables and anything healthy. And I really liked it,
much to my surprise. And so for Christmas 2015-- my wife and I always
decide to buy ourselves something together as
our big Christmas gift. And so for Christmas 2015,
our big Christmas gift to each other was a Vitamix. Now I had always been of the opinion that it would be silly to spend this much money on a blender. Who needs a $400 blender? Nobody. Turns out to have been one of the best investments
I have ever made. And I'll tell you why. In the course of looking for
recipes to make with this giant monument of a blender, I ran across this website
called simplegreensmoothies.com And in December of 2015,
targeting all of us who had just gotten a fancy
new blender for Christmas, they were running a 30 day
green smoothie challenge. We signed up for this thing. They'd send you recipes,
they'd send you shopping lists, and your only job was to make the smoothie and drink it once a day for 30 days. Well that sounded easy
enough for me, right? I knew I wasn't getting enough
fruits and veggies in my diet and I liked green smoothies a lot. Surely I could do that. So that was my first goal. Drink a green smoothie for breakfast every day for one month. Now I didn't know all of
the things that I know now. I hadn't done all of the
research around habits. So I lucked into a a
really good goal here. Because here we are 16 months
after that initial challenge and this is what I have for
breakfast almost every day. It really is that color and it really does taste amazing. So how did it stick? How did I luck into something that stuck for 16 months for me when I really hated healthy
eating up to that point? Well first of all, like I eluded to, the goal is very well structured. It's super simple. I just had to make and
drink a green smoothie once a day for 30 days. Total commitment, five minutes. Lesson number two today. Your initial goal should be so small that you would feel silly not doing it. The reason there's dental
floss in the background here is that B.J. Fogg has a
program called Tiny Habits where he coaches you
through how to set goals and how to hit them. It's a week long program, super short. And his number one recommended
goal for that program has to do with oral hygiene. But it's not floss your teeth. It's floss one tooth. Because if you floss one tooth, it's very low commitment. Anybody can floss one tooth. But what's gonna happen
with you floss one tooth? I've already got the floss out, it's already wrapped around my fingers, I might as well just floss, right? And so setting that tiny goal let's you start building
up a pattern of success. It lets your success begin to snowball and it lets you build momentum that lets you hit other,
more difficult habits. But a good goal was
only part of my success. What else was there about this 30 day green smoothie challenge
that worked so well for me? Well number two, they handed me a plan that made it super easy. In my email every week, I got a shopping list. All I had to do was go
to the grocery store and buy what was on their list in addition to the rest of my
grocery shopping for the week. Every day, just look at the recipe, grab a couple things out of the freezer, toss them in the blender, turn it on. Voila, green smoothie. No thought required on my part at all. So this is what I mean when I say do the work up front to make it easy for yourself
later when you lose motivation. If I was opening the freezer every day and looking, what fruit
do I have in there now, let me make up a recipe, I probably wouldn't
have been as successful as I was with this all laid out and easy to follow step by step. But it turns out there's
another secret weapon here that really made this stick for me. This green smoothie plan had all of the ingredients of a habit. And it's a habit that's
held for me for 16 months. So let's talk about why that is. And this is where we
bring up Charles Duhigg. I mentioned his book, The
Power of Habit, earlier. In it, Duhigg picks apart the biological and practical aspects
of how to build habits. If you wanna make big
changes in your life, this is the book you want. Go out and read this book. I'll start the same place
he does, with biology. So this is a coronal
section of the human brain. What that means is if
somebody took my head and sliced it in half right here, this is what it would look like. Duhigg explains it like this. The brain is like an onion. And the outer layers of that onion are the layers that have
been most recently added from an evolutionary prospective. This is where complex thought takes place. If you paint a painting
or write some code, this is where it's happening. In the outer layers of your brain. Deeper in the center of the brain, we're getting into more
primitive structures. Things that regulate breathing, digestion, your heart rate, things like that. And surrounding the
base of your brain stem on either side is a golf ball sized mass called the basal ganglia. Almost all animal's brains have it. It's a very primitive structure. One of the things that the
basal ganglia does for us is recognize, store, and replay patterns. It does that automatically. And we know this because
of an experiment run by a group of scientists
at MIT in the 1990s involving rats, mazes, and chocolate. So here's Duhigg's
diagram of the experiment from The Power of Habit. They set up a t-shaped maze. They put the rat on when
end of it behind a door and on the other end of it, where it branched out on one side, there was chocolate and on the
other side there was nothing. Now the chocolate was always
in the same place in this maze. They never moved it from
one side to the other. They always left it on the left leg from the rat's perspective. And they took these rats
and they anesthetized them and they inserted inserts in their brain so they could measure their brain activity as they were running this maze and trying to navigate this maze. So when they first open the door, there's a loud click and they could see furious
activity in the rat's brain. The rat would sniff and
it would scratch the walls and it would try to climb up and eventually it would
scamper its way down. It might wander right and
look around a little bit. Finally, it would turn left
and find the chocolate. After they'd done it a few more times, the researchers started
to see the activity in their brains decline. They weren't having to think
as hard to work this maze. They were learning a pattern. A couple weeks later, after the rats had run
this maze hundreds of times they saw a really interesting pattern. As soon as the door clicked open, the rat would immediately
run through the maze, turn left, straight to the chocolate. What they saw was an immediate
spike in brain activity when the door clicked and then nothing. The rat's brain essentially went to idle. And then another spike
in activity at the end when the rat got to the chocolate. The only part of the brain
that wasn't quiet during this was the basal ganglia. This recognition in automation of behavior is called behavior chunking and it's the basis of
what forms habits for us. So how many of you when
you sat down this morning to put your shoes on had to consciously think
about how to tie them? Nobody right? It just happened. How many of you, when you
brushed your teeth this morning thought about putting the
toothpaste on your toothbrush? Like actually consciously
made a decision of oh, before I brush my teeth, I should really put some
toothpaste on this brush? Nobody, you didn't even think
about brushing your teeth. That was automated for you. You walked in the bathroom,
picked up your toothbrush and went to town without
even thinking about it. It's automatic because your basal ganglia has chunked that behavior for you and it replays it automatically on cue. This is what Charles Duhigg
refers to as the habit loop. For our friends, the rats, the
habit loop looks like this. First, there's the cue. When the door clicks open, the rats associate that click with oh, I'm gonna get some
chocolate, let's get after this. And so it triggers their
basal ganglia to kick in and replay this pattern. That's the routine. The rat runs down this
maze and turns left. And the reason the rat runs
down this maze and turns left is because at that end of that
routine there is a reward. That reward is what
triggered the rat's brain to encode this process in the first place. Because it knew that by
consistently following this set of steps, it would be rewarded. Evolutionarily speaking, rats like food, they want to continue living and so they're gonna do this reliably, every time that door clicks. Turns out our brains are doing this encoding
for us all the time, we just don't realize it. Our brains are really lazy. They like to save thought. And the more things that our brains can shove down in the basal ganglia, the more of this critical thinking time our brains can free up for doing more important work. Like when you're tying your
shoes or brushing your teeth, you're thinking about the day ahead. You might be thinking about
a meeting that you have. In my case, you were fretting about a talk that you had to give. It frees your brain up
to do all of that stuff while automating the simple repetitive elements of your life. But that also means your
brain automates things like, oh, I'm really stressed out, what would help that is
a double cheeseburger. It's the exact same mechanism. Significant portions of
our lives are automated by habits that we don't
recognize or understand. This is why the smoothie
thing stuck so easily for me. Every morning, when I saw the
Vitamix sitting on the cabinet I went, ah, smoothie challenge! The decision to make one
was already made for me. No discipline required. I looked at the day's recipe, got the stuff out of the freezer, threw it in the blender, drank my green smoothie and I was rewarded every day by this explosion of flavor in
my mouth that I really like. And that amazing explosion
of flavor immediately reinforced that behavior. It taught my body that
it wanted to do that because when it did that,
when it made a smoothie, it gets something that tastes
really good at the end. And over time, it learned that it made it feel really good as well. It gave it an energy boost. And so my body became accustomed to that. If you want some hands on-- lesson number three is that
deliberately building a habit is far more effective than
just deciding to make a change. If you can build a change
you wanna make into a habit, get yourself to automate it. Making a change doesn't require
any willpower on your part, it just happens. Do you want some hands on
training in doing this? like I mentioned, you should check out B.J.
Fogg's Tiny Habits Program. Just google tiny habits,
it'll be result number one. The program lasts a week. He signs up a new cohort
literally every week. And he walks you through
setting and achieving three very simple goals. If you wanna dig deeper, definitely read The Power of Habit. This brings up another one of
Charles Duhigg's key concepts. The idea of keystone habits. The idea is that some
habits are so powerful that they can trigger
other habits in your life. And green smoothies turned out to be one of those habits for me. I didn't know it. Duhigg says you're more like
to stumble on one of these keystone habits when you do something that's very scary for you. And for me, I know this
sounds kind of silly, but for me, eating healthy
has always been scary. I don't like the way healthy things taste. I never have. I've always liked richer,
fatter, cheesier foods. And so the idea of taking
one of my meals every day and devoting it exclusively
to something healthy, was a little scary for me. And I stumbled on a keystone habit. I started drinking these smoothies once, sometimes even twice a day. I had more energy. I had conquered my fear and I was inspired to do more to get fit. And so I set a long term
goal of losing 50 pounds and a short term goal of
regularly going to the gym. Specifically to spend 30
minutes on the elliptical. There's a very specific reason
why I picked the elliptical. I'll get to that in a second. But the thing about this is the green smoothies are
self-reinforcing, right? I get this wonderful blast
of flavor at the end. This mind-numbing torture
device, not so much. So here's how I went about building the habit of
making myself do this this that I really didn't wanna
do on a regular basis. On Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, I'd change into workout
clothes before dinner. Then after I-- it's like a disco in here. Then after I got my kids to bed, I already had my gym clothes on, I was already committed. So I went to the gym. What about the reward? Well you have to know yourself to be able to pick an effective reward. This is why I picked the elliptical. One of the things that I love
most in life is time to read. And as you can imagine, with two kids I don't get a lot of time to read. Life is a little too crazy
for me to sit down and read on a regular basis. But the elliptical happens
to be a full body workout that I can do while I'm
still reading a book. And so I could convince
myself that it was worth getting on the elliptical for 30 minutes for the sake of reading. If that doesn't work for you, you might try eating a piece
of candy or even a cookie immediately after your workout. It doesn't even matter that
it's counterproductive at first. As long as your positively
reinforcing that behavior that you want to encode in your mind, your brain will code it for you. And eventually you can
ween yourself off of that extrinsic reward, because
your brain will start getting hooked on things
like the dopamine boost that you get from working out. Or if it's say, sitting down and concentrating on
something for 30 minutes, your brain will get hooked
on the feeling of success it comes from doing that. But in order to initially
encode the habit, you may have to cheat a little. You may have to eat some chocolate or some cookies or something. Turns out though that sometimes it's hard to get the habit right. And my elliptical habit failed miserably. Because my schedule was inconsistent. I'd make excuses. I'd have a really hard Tuesday and I'd go, oh I'll just sit down
and watch TV tonight, I could go to the gym tomorrow. I never went tomorrow, ever. Some weeks I only went to the gym twice, some weeks once, some weeks not at all. And I fell back into the same old patterns of beating myself up for not being able to make myself go to the gym. So how do you fix a failing habit? Well habits are just simple systems. We're all software developers, we know what to do with systems. Sam Carpenter has done a lot
of thinking about systems. He's an entrepreneur from Oregon and he's written a couple
of books on systems thinking in both business and
in your personal life. And the book that I read was this one. The Systems Mindset. It's about taking a systems
mindset in your own life. Now before you run out and buy this book, I wanna warn you that it's
a bit of an eccentric read and there's some things in it that I definitely don't agree with. But there's one central
idea that I wanna bring up. And it's this idea that
literally everything in life is made up of systems. What does that mean? The takeaway is that we spend our lives running around fighting
fires in the form of results. For me, I'm not going to
the gym three times a week. Come on self, go to the
gym three times a week. This shouldn't be that hard. When instead what we should be doing is realizing that that's a system. There's a whole set of steps and processes that leads up to us
successfully going to the gym three times a week. And if you're not doing that, ignore the end result. Figure out where your system's breaking. Take a debugging mindset. This is a really powerful
shift in thinking. Going farther on practical applications. How many of you have heard of the idea of a blameless post mortem? So this is another example
of systems thinking. When your system falls
over or something breaks, you have a critical production failure, you set your team down. Not to establish blame, not to figure out who's gonna get fired, but to figure out what
was wrong with your system and what changes you can
make to your overall process to prevent that thing
from happening again. It's a very healthy,
very encouraging process focused largely on learning. And if it's done right, everybody walks away feeling whole and nobody walks away feeling beaten up. The same principles apply when you start applying systems mindset to your own life. Not only am I focusing on the root causes of why I'm not going to the gym, I'm shifting blame from me, from me being lazy or
undisciplined or unable to finish, to my system. It's not that I have a personality flaw, it's that my system's screwed up. No big deal, we can fix the system. Things like procrastination, lack of discipline, become clues not personal failings. And when what you're most looking to do is snowball success into other success, that's a really important thing. So when I looked at my
attempted elliptical habit, I found two problems. Number one, I had given myself
too much of a choice to make and it was a choice that
required me to exercise willpower at the end of the day, specifically when I was
completely out of willpower. So obviously, on a regular basis I'm gonna fail that choice. I'm tired from the day, it's gonna be way easier
to sit down and watch TV, I'm not gonna go to the gym. So how could I take that choice away? Well for me, the answer
was a little extreme. I decided I was gonna
go work out every day. Uncompromising, so that way there wasn't a decision to make. It was just a thing that I did. It turns out that it's a
lot easier to encode a habit when you do something on
a very regular rhythm. Now if that didn't work for me, another thing that I could've done is decided, well I'm gonna go work out Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday, non-negotiable. Because if you do something
on the same day same time, even if it's not every day, it's easier for you to
encode that into a habit. The thing that prevents you
from encoding it into a habit is the trap that I had gotten into of negotiating with myself and telling myself that I
could always go tomorrow. So I went to the extreme end of the scale. I decided that I was gonna
go work out every day. But then there was
another problem with that when I look at it from
a systems perspective. That was a really unrealistic
commitment for me. I had 30 minutes a day to spare, I could get on the
elliptical 30 minutes a day. What I couldn't do, was
drive 15 minutes to the gym, get on the elliptical for 30 minutes, and then drive 15 minutes home. For some reason, psychologically, the need to commit to an hour of time was a huge psychological barrier. But I could make the commitment
to 30 minutes of time especially 30 minutes of reading. So what did I do? I went out and I bought
an elliptical for my house so that I didn't have to drive to the gym. I made this thing that I wanted to do even easier for myself. Now I realize that's sort
of an extreme example, but that's why you have to
look at yourself in the mirror and decide, is this really
something I wanna commit to? Because sometimes if you wanna
make big changes in your life as you're debugging these systems, you're gonna find out
that you have to make some significant investments
in making these things happen. So did it work? Yeah, pretty well. I bought my elliptical
on February the 6th. And that started a 73 day long streak of me getting 30 minutes of cardio a day. As you can imagine, I lost a ton of weight in those 73 days. It turns out that Apple
did something really smart when they implemented this calendar. This is just a glorified
Seinfeld calendar. If you're not familiar with the
idea of a Seinfeld calendar, it's that if you wanna reach a goal what you should do is put
your calendar on the wall and put an x on that
calendar for every day that you do the thing you wanna do. And eventually you'll have a chain that you don't wanna break. When you decide to work out every day to get 30 minutes of cardio every day, this becomes a Seinfeld calendar. And there were definitely
days in that stretch that the only reason the only reason I got on the elliptical is because I had a 20
day streak in front of me that I didn't wanna break. April the 19th, I got a stomach bug. And then work got stressful after that. And I fell off the wagon for a little bit. But I got back on pretty quick. Building this success enabled me to tackle one of my biggest fears, running. Now to understand what a
big deal this is for me, you have to understand how much I've hated running my whole life. I mean, really hated it. I looked at people who enjoyed running and in my mind these people were aliens. I couldn't understand why
anybody would wanna do that. Why would you wanna run when
nothing was chasing you, when you weren't in danger of being eaten. But my wife's a runner, she likes to run. Not a regular runner, but
she ran track in high school and she's always enjoyed running. So this was a way for me to invest in spending time with my wife. Learning how to be a runner. In elementary school, I
would beg my mom for a note on the day that we had
to do the mile run walk for the President's
physical fitness challenge. I would beg her to write me a note excusing me for PE that day
so I didn't have to do it. So September 2016, I started Couch 2 5K. I kept my daily cardio routine, but I just subbed in the Couch
2 5K runs three days a week. In October, I hit the
infamous week five day three, which if you've done Couch
2 5K, you probably know what I'm talking about. It's where your workout ramps up from two eight minute periods of running with a five minute walk break in between to a straight up 20 minute run. That's a pretty big jump. It's pretty intimidating. And I had a plan for failure. If I couldn't do it, then I was just gonna repeat
week five, no big deal. But I did it. I surprised myself. I didn't think that I could do it. And so when I did week five,
day three of Couch 2 5K, I ran the first mile of my entire life. I'd literally never run a
continuous mile until that point. As a 35 year old, I ran
the first mile of my life. I stuck with Couch 2 5K until I could run a continuous but slow 5K. And then I signed up for a race. And I underestimated how motivating that was gonna be for me. So I trained pretty hard for it. I followed an actual training plan. My goal was to get under
30 minutes and I did. I finished in 28 minutes and 40 seconds. Way faster than I expected to. I beat my previous best
by about three minutes. Just last Sunday, I ran
the Cap 10K in Austin. It's one of the most
famous races in Austin. 21,300 runners in this race. My previous fastest 10K was
about an hour and two minutes. So I said an hour is my
goal, seemed reasonable. Seemed like it was gonna be tough on a course this hilly
with 21,000 other runners. I ended up finishing in 57
minutes and two seconds. I got the text message on my phone with my official time and I teared up a little bit. It was one of the biggest
achievements of my life to be able to run a 10K that fast and to look at the work that
had taken me to that point. My runs are now my
favorite parts of the week and race days are some of
my favorite days of the year because I get to go be around
this amazing tribe of people who are all oriented
around fitness and running. It's very reinforcing. So to tie it all up, let's talk about how
to hit your big goals. First, take a long-term view. So I mentioned when I set
into this whole journey when I decided I was gonna get fit, I set a goal of losing 50 pounds. But I didn't tie a date to that. Instead it was just this nebulous thing out in the future that I wanted to get to. What I did tie dates and things to where things like getting to
the gym three days a week, getting on the elliptical
seven days a week, working on my fitness that way. When you take a long-term view, it smooths out the bumps in the road. It lets you find the joy in the process versus being fixated on sprinting
to this goal all the time. Second, set goals along the way that let you snowball success. This is how I became a runner. I did the elliptical thing
every day for 73 days and then I did it again. Running was really scary for me. To be on the elliptical, that taught my body to
seek out endorphins. So when I took away the extrinsic reward, that 30 minutes of reading, I found that the endorphins
were enough for me. I was so hooked on the
small endorphin boost from being on the elliptical, that the big endorphin boost
from the runner's high, oh man, that was immediately
reinforcing for me. I no longer need that extrinsic reward. The exercise itself was enough for me. Third, build habits and then optimize them with a systems mindset. This takes the blame off of yourself. It lets you focus on building the habits and optimizing them and not focusing on things
that you might perceive as personal failures. It takes the responsibility off of you and lets you do what you already know
how to do from your job. You already know how to approach and debug
a system successfully. Apply that skill to your own life. You've worked too hard at building it. You wanna get better at writing code, build habits around reading
and deliberate practice. You wanna get better at concentrating, build habits around
periods of concentration and slowly build on them. Cal Newport's book, Deep
Work, is about exactly that. It's exactly what he
talks about in that book is systematizing and building up patterns of deep thought in your life. So today, I weigh 180 pounds. 50 pounds off my peak weight. I'm at my lowest weight of my adult life and by far the best fitness. I drink one to two green smoothies a day, I get 30 minutes of cardio
six to seven days a week, I've gone from hating running to running an average of 20 miles a week. And all this stuff was
driven by systems and habits requiring very little
willpower on my part. And if you take nothing else away today, that's what I want you to hear. Anybody can do this. You just have to understand that willpower won't get you there and learn how to hack
your way around willpower. Learn how to build systems and habits that will get you to your goals. You can do stuff like this too. I don't have a lot of willpower. I failed at this so many times in my life before I finally figured it out and I know you can do it too. Thanks a lot. (audience applause)
