- Thanks to Brilliant
for sponsoring this video and supporting my channel. Every year, millions of people
try to build new habits. Some adopt new exercise programs, others pick up that instrument they've been meaning to learn, and still others decide
to finally get serious about reading every day. And some of these people will succeed in getting their new habit to stick, while others well
quickly give up and fail. But all of them will
learn the same lesson, building a new habit is hard. Whether you wanna chuck it up to laziness, or our overly busy schedules,
or the fact that our phones tend to suck up a ton of our time, tempting us in much the same way that a slot machine temps a gambler, the conclusion is the same. If you wanna adopt a new habit, you better prepare yourself
for an uphill battle. Luckily, one of the things
that you can always count on in our market-driven economy
is that when there's a problem, people will inevitably try
to create solutions for it. Necessity is the mother of all invention as people like to say. And our publishing industry
is no exception here. Having pumped out more
than a handful of books aimed at helping you build better habits. But of all these books, my absolute favorite one is
James Clear's, Atomic Habits. And that's not just because it mentions my Twitter wake-up system on
page 210 that is pretty cool, but seriously, more than any other book that I've read on habits, I found the ideas in Atomic
Habits to be incredibly helpful for adopting the mindset required to actually stick to
habits over the longterm. So I would absolutely
recommend reading this book in its entirety if you have the time. Today, what I wanna do is
share three of those key ideas, starting with the principle that Clear calls 1% better every day. This idea has its roots
in the compounding effect, which you'll probably
recognize most readily if we're talking about compound interest. Albert Einstein once
called compound interest the eighth wonder of the world, and for a pretty good reason, given a good amount of time, the interest on your interest
can result in huge returns. Compound interest is why
you can invest $100 a month, and if we assume a modest 7%
return of the stock market, you'll end up with over
$122,000 after 30 years, even though during that time, you only contributed $36,000
of your money into that fund. And it turns out that
this compounding effect also applies to the world of skill building and habit formation. If you pick a skill and you focus on just getting
1% better at it each day, your cumulative skill growth and the rewards you read from it accelerate faster and faster over time. Atomic Habits illustrates this idea using a metaphorical graph, which shows the difference
between small daily actions in both positive and negative directions. At first, the results are minuscule, but over time, they ramp up just like that investment balance. Now, this all sounds great
in theory, but unfortunately, as you probably well know, the
level of consistency required to maintain this growth over time is really difficult to maintain,
especially in the beginning when you're just starting
to build a habit. Big dramatic changes, as
overwhelming and as unsustainable as you and I know they
could be, are exciting because they seem to propel
us forward really quickly. And our mammalian brains really love short-term exciting rewards. And meanwhile, the much
more reasonable 1% role simply doesn't do a whole
lot for us in the short term, which is what we're often concerned with, even if we don't like to be. For example, let's say you wanna
learn how to produce music. And you decide to do that by
spending at least some time every single day learning and
practicing and making songs. If you start this new goal on January 1st, then by the end of the first
month using Clear's model, your daily 1% gains only
result in a 37% gain overall. And that's progress to be sure,
but it's nothing dramatic, and you're still producing music that was only barely outside
of your grasp before, and that to the average listener, it sounds like it was made on
like a preschool piano thing from Walmart. After six months of effort, you're now doing a bit
more than six times better than when you started when you have those
numbers seem to line up. Now, this is actually
pretty good progress, but we are not done yet because of the company pounding effect has only just begun to show
how powerful it can be. Keep pushing on and suddenly, a 1% improvement every
day since you started, gets interesting because
at the end of the year, you've somehow reached a
mind bending 37 times better than when you started. The first six months gets
you to six times better, but the second six months
adds an extra 31 times. Now, obviously we cannot
literally measure out 1% skill changes in most cases, but the concept still works
here and the results still come. As Clear writes in the book, "These small improvements
or declines compound and suddenly you find a very big gap between the people who make
slightly better decisions on a daily basis and those who don't." Of course, this is all easy
to agree with in theory, but as we mentioned before, longterm consistency
is a lot easier planned than maintained. As you well know, most new year's resolutions
don't even make it to February, so they can't even go through the example that we put out here. Just as many people fail to
remain disciplined enough to keep investing for 30 years, and hence will never see
those amazing returns. Now, part of this might
be straight up difficulty, or life circumstances, or simply boredom, but even an incredibly simple, easy habit can be difficult to stick to longterm if it goes too far against
how we view ourselves. So if we wanna make longterm change, that change has to become
part of who we are. We'll have to build up sense of what I'm going to call
identity habit harmony. Picture yourself out for a run, and imagine that it's really hot outside, or maybe it's really cold, or maybe it's a torrential downpour, whichever of those is the
one that you like the least. And now picture you're only halfway through a particularly
difficult last mile, and you're now feeling the
desperate urge to quit. In that moment ask yourself, who are you? Well, if you consider
yourself to be a runner, then this scenario is not a big deal. The occasional hard mile
is part of the territory. In fact, it only reinforces your strength and your pride as a runner, as an athlete, so as a result, you push through. But on the other hand, if you see yourself not
as an athlete or a runner, but as more of a homebody just trying to get in shape
because you're supposed to or because you have this
light desire to do it, then you're gonna start questioning why you're doing what you're doing when things get difficult. You're gonna ask, "Why am
I doing this to myself? This isn't who I am." And one day, you're gonna decide to quit. I think this is one of the biggest reasons why people fail in building habits, they don't build a harmony
between their identity and the habit they're trying
to make stick longterm. That's one of the biggest
ideas in this book. See, people will go to great lengths to protect their self image. It's part of this consistency principle, which is also talked about in Robert Cialdini's book, "Influence." Just try arguing with somebody about a dearly held belief they have, and you're gonna find
just how hard we all work to keep our self image intact, even if it's to our own detriment, even if we argue against
what would be good for us. And it's because of this, that Clear suggests we
pay closer attention to what that image is when we're trying to change
something about our lives. As he says in the book, "Your behaviors are usually a
reflection of your identity. Whatever you do is an indication of the type of person
you believe that you are, either consciously or non-consciously." But there's also a bit
of a feedback loop here. As he says just a bit later on, "Whatever your identity is right now, you only believe it because
you have proof of it." In short, longterm habit changes come more easily with
longterm identity changes. And to get those, you'll have to give yourself
as much evidence as you can that your new identity is
really who you're becoming. So if you wanna run that 5k someday, take a second to think
about the kind of person who might do that sort of thing
automatically, or naturally, that person would be a
runner or an athlete. Then whenever an opportunity
to reinforce that identity in yourself comes up, ask yourself, "What would a runner
do in this situation?" Eventually by acting like
a runner, you become one. And if that identity makes you feel good, then you won't wanna lose it, and you'll work that
much harder to keep it. The longer you fight for it,
true that identity becomes, and the harder it is to go
back to who you were before. And I've personally found
this whole philosophy and mindset change to be extremely helpful for taking side projects
more seriously as well. Let's take guitar, for example. If I don't think of myself as a musician, then whenever I get busy with work, or if I have something stressful pop up surprisingly in my life, then I'm gonna tend to let guitar practice go by the wayside because
it's just a hobby, right? So it's important it gets overshadowed by whatever urgent thing
has come up in my life. But if being a musician
is part of my identity, then I'm gonna see guitar practice as something much more important. I'll be a lot less likely
to throw it by the wayside when something does come up. In other words, I won't make time for it because that is what a musician would do. Of course, this process
of assuming a new identity and taking it seriously isn't always easy. When you start a new habit, you often have that novelty factor, that initial surge of motivation
and energy working for you, but those two things inevitably
run out pretty quickly. And when that happens, you're probably gonna have to
deal with your first failure some point soon after. And it can be hard to get
over that when it happens, especially if you tend to
have perfectionist tendencies like I do. And dealing with just this situation is where the third big idea
from Atomic Habits comes in. So let's call it the
democracy of the self. See, in an election, there are almost always going
to be votes for both sides. Given enough people in the voting pool, it's not plausible for
anything, no matter how right, no matter how obviously superior,
to get 100% of the vote, there is always going to be that troll that just wants to see the world burn so they hit the down-vote button. But luckily, that doesn't matter. To win an election, you
don't need every single vote to be cast in the exact same
way, you just need a majority. And as Clear helpfully points out, "Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become. No single instance will
transform your beliefs, but as the votes build up, so too does the evidence
of your new identity." So maybe today you voted for lazy you, you didn't go for that run,
you didn't practice guitar. Well, that's okay because
tomorrow, you get another vote, and you can make sure that
vote is cast correctly. If you keep at that, making sure your successes
outnumber your setbacks, that is how longterm habits are built. In other words, focus
not on never failing, but on never letting failure
become a habit of its own. Clear actually has a term for this, he calls it the second mistake. You wanna avoid making the second mistake. And if you can do that, then your first mistake
just remains a failing vote, it remains an outlier. Now, there's a bit of a
hidden insight that I found in the interplay between
identity habit harmony, and this whole democracy
of the self-concept, which is that if you
haven't cast enough votes for a particular identity, then you may not know if it's possible to assume that identity
in the first place. And a lot of people assume
that many identities are simply not for them. How many people do you know who think that learning a
foreign language is not them, becoming a musician is not for them, learning complex math or engineering is simply not for them. I remember this was a big
problem for me in high school, especially on that issue of learning engineering and complex math. I had a tough time in calculus, so I naturally assumed I
was not cut out for calculus and not cut out for engineering school. This is actually one of the big reasons that I chose to go to business school. And while I don't really regret going to business school in general, I do regret having that belief at first. And I now know that if I had
simply cast enough votes, if I had simply put in daily
effort to learn complex math, to get a better grade in calculus, I would have absolutely been
able to become an engineer if I wanted to do that. So if you ever have these
doubts in your head, if you ever feel like an
identity is not for you, ask yourself, "How many votes have I cast? Have I started building this habit or if I simply assumed that
this identity is not for me?" And if the latter is true,
then start casting some votes. Of course, if something like
engineering and complex math is something that you want to learn, then using better learning resources is also really gonna
help you make progress. And one of those great learning
resources is Brilliant. Brilliant has over 60 in-depth courses that can help you master your abilities in math, science, and computer science. And they help you learn efficiently with a focus on active learning. Instead of just passively
going through text or watching videos like a lot of traditional
educational sources, you're instead thrown
into logically sequenced, bite-sized, yet challenging,
interactive problems that compliment any of those
more traditional sources you're using. And because you're wrangling
with the material right away, you learn more efficiently, you progress faster, and you
also keep your interest up as you're going through it. Additionally, because
you're solving problems the entire time, your universal problem-solving
skills improve along the way. Whenever we apply our skills
to a specific challenge, we often reap more universal benefits. Now, if you've heard me talk
about Brilliant in the past, you'll know they have a
comprehensive math suite, ranging from the basics of number theory, going all the way up
to very complex topics like differential equations and high-level probability and statistics, along with science courses, including classical mechanics
and gravitational physics and computer science courses like their Python programming course. But recently, they came up
with a brand new course, all about knowledge and uncertainty, which is all about the math
that we use to quantify and get precise about how uncertain we are about questions we have, which is very important in
making better decisions. And I think if you have
any interest in math or probability or statistics, or maybe investing or simply
making better decisions, this is gonna be a really
interesting course to take. So if you want to take that course or any of the other
courses in their library, you can go over to
brilliant.org/thomasfrank and sign up. And if you're one of the first 200 people to use that URL and sign up, you're gonna get 20% off their
annual premium subscription, which is a pretty great deal. Thanks as always for watching. Hopefully you enjoyed this video. If you did, hitting that
like button is a great way to tell the YouTube algorithm that this content is worth watching, which can cause it to push
it out to more people, so it's a great way to
support the channel, and huge thank you to you if you do that. And if you haven't subscribed already, make sure you hit that
subscribe button right there because later this month, we are making another video all about the actual
habit-building process outlined in Atomic Habits. Again, pick this book up and
read it if you have the chance. It's a great read, but I hope you also come
back to check out that video, which will be a little
bit more in the trenches and practical, hopefully. Beyond that, if you haven't followed me
on Instagram @Tomfrankly, you might wanna do so as I'm making little
Q&A videos every week. So if you have a question that might not constitute a
huge video here on this channel, which takes many, many,
many hours to make, ask it to me in the comments
below or over on Instagram, and I might make a
little IGTV video for it. Beyond that, I'm gonna
have a playlist right here of additional videos on this that can help you build
your self discipline. So if you enjoyed this video, you might enjoy some of
those videos as well. Otherwise, I'll put my
music channel right there. And if you don't wanna to
click any of these things, don't do that, go drink a
gallon of coffee for all I care because as always, I'm not your dad.
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Love this, this is my favorite kind of post on this subreddit. OP, what are yours? :)
I would love any recommendations people have on getting any of the below to stick, especially in view of some of the techniques in the video. I may need to do some reevaluation...
Habits I'm building:
Habits I want to build in the near future:
Also because I'm proud of myself, here are ones that I've successfully implemented this year:
I’m working on building my piano practice habit and my music production habit. Next up is to get my writing into a routine
Some daily habits that I'm building-
Journaling everyday- I used to keep a diary before but it was just full of stuff that I used to write when I was hurt or crying. So in this journal I write everyday and make notes about each day- how it was, if it was productive, the weather, and I end it by writing some affirmations about how I can be whatever I want me to be.
Doing yoga/easy exercises everyday
Writing a poem or a chapter for a story on alternate days.
Not eating anything oily.
Not drinking coffee
Drinking 10 glasses of water everyday
Washing my face with a facewash twice a day.
I've been doing these except the coffee one since mid-july. And my skin is amazing, no new pimples unless it's period time, I've lost a lot of inches, and reading my journal now feels good rather than depressing. Some habits that I'd like to start are going on runs or walks, I don't like gyms and simple yoga/stretches doesn't really make me feel like I'm doing anything. One other is learning calligraphy, I want to pretty up my bujo 😄.