The 4 Steps To NEVER BE LAZY Again! | Rangan Chatterjee

it's not about just being lazy it's about saying what is the right and best way to do the work that you came here to do and she has never missed a week of her walking since she's been doing that it's not your fault if you inherited unhelpful habits or unproductive habits but it is your responsibility to try to figure out how to adjust those and how to improve those in some meaningful ways the challenge i think is is to treat competing priorities as somehow equally valuable it's where you start to say it's all essential it's all important it's all a priority i mean this is one of my favorite little tidbits of research but the word priority came into the english language in the 1400s and according to peter drucker it stayed singular for the next 500 years so it wasn't until the industrial revolution where people started speaking with you know no sense of irony at all saying here are my 34 priorities uh and they all have to be done now or even yesterday and so that shift in our language i think illustrates a weakness in our thinking and our logic that says look if i can just fit it all in somehow i can have it or you know if everything is if i treat everything is important then it will all work out uh and and in fact life isn't even close to you know that doesn't approximate reality at all uh what is far closer to reality is that a few things are essential and almost everything is trivial noise and so it's more like uh waking up you know you you've spent your whole life thinking you were in a um and i don't say this in any way disparaging but you're in a you think you're in a coal mine uh and and and you've lived your life in that way it's productivity get more stuff done and then you wake up and you say i've never been in a coal miners all the time it's been a diamond mine as actually my whole job is different than i thought it was my the whole job of life is different it is to actually explore what is essential find those diamonds that's the most important thing all the rest doesn't matter find those things invest in them protect those things and and and we know that this approximates reality because when people uh you know look from anything like a long-term perspective they recognize that only a few things mattered at the very end of people's lives when they're looking at the totality of their life they don't say oh my goodness i wish i'd spent more time on email oh i wish i'd spent more time you know on social media and so on and no one no one thinks that no one says that they they can see you with a bit more perspective a few things mattered and i lost that perspective in that moment and uh in an attempt to try and just sort of keep everyone happy and deal with all those pressures so it's that the job of life is to figure out the essential few uh to eliminate the non-essential and then to make it and design it so that the essential things happen as automatically and as easily as possible so that you don't have to use extraordinary or superhuman effort to make sure you remember the essential things and do them you want the default to be the essential things as i think about your work and you know i see where do i see people commenting on this on social media a lot of it has been people in the business world or the productivity world but i actually think your work goes far beyond that because what you're asking what you're writing about are fundamentally existential human questions and actually i think there's almost a spiritual undertone i think that on one level you need self-awareness to be able to apply the principles in your books but at the same time i think simply by applying those principles in your life is going to give you a lot of self-awareness so i i think it works both ways and you know i can't help shake the feeling that these principles are going to be just as relevant for i don't know let's say a single mum in her life trying to bring up her children trying to make ends meet maybe there's a lot of struggle in her life i think these principles could really help her as well so you know i'd love to understand your perspective on this well i don't feel like either books um i i'm asking a business question i'm asking a human question and i also think it those human questions are relevant to businesses because all businesses are just humans uh trying to figure out how to serve other humans so you know it applies there as well um but i i think it really is human first questions as you say and i actually do think that uh that a deeper reading of of essentialism and effortless is about your spiritual life and about what is guiding you as a friend of mine put it are you trying are you being led by your scared self or your sacred self uh you know the scared self will tend to operate in a certain way endlessly the fear of missing out and what other people are doing and competing and comparing and and living in that state but the the sacred self will guide you differently and so asking better questions will help reveal better answers i'm thinking now of somebody um of a working mum in england who reached out to tell me her story so she after reading you know some of the stuff i'd written i started asking this question every day what is the most important thing i need to do today that's a simple question but she asked it every day she wrote it up and she asked it every day at first the answers she got were to do with the business that she was trying to run uh you know which key client to work with what project was due and so on but over time the answers evolved as she evolved and it became well self-care you know you actually you need to sleep better because you're not sleeping enough you're not protecting yourself you are burning yourself out but then one day she gets a call from her dad and he said he said look nothing to alarm you here mum's in the hospital again you know it's nothing serious just wanted to keep you in the loop and she said in that moment she asked the question that day she knew exactly what the answer was it was so clear to her it was almost like time stood still and she remembers the weather and the room she was in and she just knew she had to go to the hospital that day that was the priority yeah and so she did now that's like a two-hour drive so she's really committing the rest of the day to this it's not completely trivial i'll just go across the street for 10 minutes thing and she goes and she sees her mum she says mom i love you i'm glad to be here mother says oh you know i love you too um an hour after that conversation her mother falls into a coma and very unfortunately uh never recovers from that you know a year uh i mean a week later excuse me um joe has the unfortunate job of turning off the life support machine and she reached out to me just wrote to me to tell the story because she said if i had not been an essentialist that day how differently things would have worked out i wouldn't have had that moment i would have missed that and for something inane and so so that was to me a very encouraging moment because you know i felt like well you know i can't change the hospital moment but for her she was able to make a better trade-off and so as people ask better questions as they change and evolve the answers will change and evolve uh and so i do think that essentialism and now effortless can help people go in in different levels uh when they're ready as they're ready uh and that's what i'm going for it's beyond just business it's i guess it's like a any skill the more you do it especially if you're intentional each time you do it you're getting better at it so the question you may ask yourself on monday off i don't know the first monday of 2020 the first monday of 2021 you are going to be a much better skilled person at answering that same question if you've been practicing it so i mean obviously greg you have written these these two wonderful books what is the most essential thing for you to do in any given day yeah i mean that that does change from day to day because what matters is what's important now and that's a nice acronym i think you know the acronym is win you know what you've got to win this day and that means getting clear each day and it does change it depending on the circumstances um i mean today in this conversation uh the most important thing today is my relationship with my wife anna uh you know like that and and maybe that should be true every day but it feels true today there's lots of things going on and making sure that today i actually create enough space for us to uh to go on a walk we don't do that every day sometimes through the pandemic we got to the point where it was pretty much every day and it really mattered no agenda just listening sharing talking and that became a really important practice but when that isn't happening every day it it doesn't work as well and so and so to me that would be the priority today so that again doesn't mean that is the only thing you do today or the only thing i need to do it's not my only responsibility but knowing that at the beginning of the day means that i can try to you know design the day differently when the trade-offs come up i can make the trade-offs differently uh and and so that would be you know that would be my answer today it's not that isn't the answer every day but it is today what i love about that answer greg is there there's a there's a flexibility within it that there's not this kind of rigidity that we can then be feel chained to that answer oh i said the most essential thing was for me to meditate for 20 minutes every day but today i don't have time and i can't do it you know it's i think sometimes when we are trying to better our lives and better ourselves we can go to these extremes i certainly know i've been guilty of that in the past and it's something i feel i'm i'm sort of evolving in my own practice of prioritization of essentialism of self-care is actually you know what i i i feel i can change things from day to day depending on what my needs are on any given day so i really like that flexibility that's sort of built into the way you answered that well i've been on this seven-year listening tour it's been the most extraordinary opportunity to listen to people you know literally the world over talk to me about what is essential for them and what the challenges are for them to live that in practice and one of the things that has has been like a an endless theme is the assumption that the essential things have like not even have to be the essential things are the very hardest things to do and and i've i've found that a little confusing at times especially when i've heard it so often because what it feels like people are doing is they're taking essentialism and they're saying well i need to be a perfectionist about it and i'm like well that doesn't sound like a very essentialist way to become an essentialist but in it's like they've got this new language this new relatively new idea to them and then they're bringing a bunch of old ideas to how to change to it yeah in fact one person told me one day they said they said i loved essentialism but it should come with a warning this will be the hardest thing that you will ever do and it really especially in hindsight i listen to that and i think that's just that just means we're going about it wrong you know there's a different way to do this so even after somebody says i'm really committed now to pursue what matters most in my life you've got to it's literally now i see it as equally important to say well what's the right way to do it yeah if you try to do the essential things the right things but do them in the wrong way you'll still be burned out you in fact you you still be discouraged and maybe even more discouraged than before because you're so aware of all the gap between where you are where you want to be and what's essential and what's not essential and so when i now think about essentialism i'm thinking of it as a lifestyle a way of living a way of being and so the way we do it really matters and and and being careful not to beat ourselves up because we haven't achieved some idealistic state that we've identified for ourselves immediately it is is important that the courage to be rubbish for example is something that i now hold as quite as quite sacred in its own right the idea of like oh i'm going to be an essentialist in some mistake-free way i'm going to just be perfect at this what what a nonsense one unhelpful idea what a way to to to exhaust yourself depress yourself even in the act of trying to be better and so if you can if you can get out of that and say how can how could it be easier is there a gentler way to pursue the things that are essential what if i could get out of the no pain no gain mantra that idea that you've prioritized what's important in your life but you're going about it the wrong way i think it's very novel it's very fresh it's i mean it's it's one of the core ideas i think that certainly i gleaned from your new book effortless is that oh the way you do it is is just as important as the prioritization do you hear that this gets misunderstood and have you got any examples of people who have prioritized but they've gone around they've got about their priority in the wrong way yeah i mean absolutely this is it when when i say it's what i hear from people i don't mean like oh every so often i hear it from people i hear it all the time absolutely all the time but not in the way it might sound like i'm saying it's not like people explicitly just say um yes i tried to prioritize but i'm doing it the wrong way or i prioritize it it's just so hard it's it's it's not even that it's like this it's like i just was uh just started a new uh us to be on a committee and the person who was initiating this group uh said is that of concluding speech as they were launching this thing they just said now this is so important what we're doing this could help millions of youth around the world this could just be so beneficial it's going to be hard i mean it's going to be really hard but it's going to be worth it and that no one challenged it nobody said anything about it i i've heard those speeches and conversations like it everywhere it's everywhere it's it's like embedded as a dominant assumption that's just invisible to people people just believe the essential stuff is the hard stuff the trivial stuff is the easy stuff and those are your options just talking to somebody who's trained in the military i mean this yesterday or day before and when he was being trained in the military one of his you know leaders said to him uh listen you know you can either do it the easy way which is the wrong way or you can do it the hard way and that's the right way it was like these two options where it's a false dichotomy of course there are times that the right way is the hard way the easy way is that is the wrong way of course that can be true but is it not possible there's a third alternative what would it mean what would it mean if you could find a way to make the most essential things in your life the easiest things yeah or at least just so much more doable than they were in the past the consequence would change everything it does change everything because suddenly you can suddenly you'll do it and you'll do it consistently because it isn't so it isn't so costly to take that path yeah i mean not not only is it going to be more enjoyable to experience life on a day-to-day basis if it feels easy or effortless but it's also going to be more effective i know we have a mutual friend and bj fox and object was on your podcast recently um and you know me and bj have had multiple conversations about this about you know you make something easy people will do it so in terms of habit change we want to make things that we want to do easy and you're kind of saying a very similar thing in a kind of a slightly different arena that whatever the essential thing is in your life if you can make it easier and feel effortless it's much more likely that you're going to do the thing that you've already identified is the priority thing for you to do totally what happens is that people identify what is essential they know most people have a sense at least even if they haven't been very clear about it and maybe they ought to be but they have a sense of the things that are really important that they're not getting to uh and and they just are in this endless loop they just think about that essential thing they feel guilty about it it overwhelms them so then they just jump into the dark playground of social media of tv of something else that's trivial and appears easy to them and they just jump back and forth between those two things they intermittently do the thing that's essential it's too hard it's too much it just exhausts them it overwhelms them and then they jump back into something else and this can happen sometimes multiple times on the same day but but often what i find is that people just they start and it reinforces by the way the sensation the belief rather that the essential thing must be incredibly hard because why else aren't i doing it it must exercise must be hard how many people have i talked to about exercise who who like i tried to take it running and every so often i go back to it well do you love running no i hate running i hate it but i have to do it well why don't we just find a different way what what if there's something else that you you like to do you like swimming oh i like well let's do that then like let's find a you know let's not distrust the easy you're you're you you this idea of effortless and that the things that we love the things that we want to do can feel easy and effortless really it's a narrative that is swimming against the tides of the common popular i was going to say western narrative but i think it's everywhere that narrative that anything good has to be hard what what is it you know um nothing good comes easy you'll never get anywhere in life if you don't work hard right we're we're sort of surrounded by this i mean you've got kids your kids are a bit older than my kids um monica really sort of ten and eight but even at that age you see this kind of narrative being um i think i don't think with any malice it's you know i think i think everyone feels that that's the way to succeed in life you have to work hard and i'm not sure you're not saying you don't need to work hard in fact what are you saying for people who might sort of misinterpret that what are you saying because you're not saying never work hard are you well i believe in work and i have four children uh aged 18 to 12 and and of course we want them to work uh we want them to be productive we want them to take initiative uh we we value that we don't we we we don't want them to be spoiled all of those things are real and our children have many responsibilities in our home um but let's give an example so um you know we have a whole series of rituals around eating together uh not maybe every night but most nights and so we'll we'll like you know we'll raise a glass to each other kind of experience we'll we'll cheer each other on uh a lot of fun in those conversations but our trouble happens afterwards uh which is the the dinner cleanup what do you do now that my children are just like like silent ninjas they're just gone i turn around all four of them have like quietly slipped off to a room to whatever and then my job is cat and mouse trying to get them back to do the cleanup uh and uh and so basically this is a chore now how do you handle that what do you do you can say well look you know life is hard and you just have to do the hard things and that's one approach and that is a speech that i have definitely had but what if you could what if you could change the experience what if you could uh turn it into a ritual a ritual is a little different than a habit a ritual is like a habit with a soul a habit is like what you do a ritual is how you do it and so so we said okay first i said well we'll try and make it effortless by dividing up responsibilities really clearly what does done look like for our for for the cleanup of the kitchen okay that that matters uh dividing at roles and responsibilities who is doing what that mattered but really it wasn't until one of my children my eldest daughter um added music she just put on like basically karaoke music loud in the kitchen and that just was like the tipping point moment so as soon as we and even now if we forget that ingredient it just is back to drudgery it's back to like yeah well you know it's important but it's hard and now if as soon as someone puts on the right music it just changes it you start someone starts singing someone starts and and the feeling changes and people want to be there and they want to be part of the little party and and the work gets done that to me is an illustration of the of the the difference here so what if you didn't just have to endure the essentials oh it's just harder just push and so on and relentless what if you could enjoy it what if you can make it into something that the experience of life is better then the important things get done and you you you've built relationships rather than burn them down a bit yeah it reminds me of um one of the things i love to do on sunday afternoons at the moment which is make butternut squash soup now it's just it's something my my wife taught me her recipe a few months ago i love making it i love the process but what happens on a sunday afternoon is that i'm like okay cool this is going to take a couple of hours from start to finish and so i will put on one of my favorite cds uh i'm i'm still pretty old-school i've got a cd player i choose an album that i really want to listen to i love it i put it on i clean up the kitchen i you know i sort of go through the very sadis put the butternut squash in the oven get everything and i i i love those two hours those two hours on a sunday have been transformed now i could have looked at it oh man i've got to cook this so the family have got to prepare it what a hassle but actually oh i get to actually enjoy one of my favorite albums every sunday afternoon in peace and i get to and it it's the same thing it's like you guys clearing up after dinner it's the same you know technical thing that you're doing but the flavor of that experience is completely different if listening to you share that the way that you're like your body language the energy talking about it you are literally describing a ritual like you i could i know that you get it in that experience you you it it's it's it's not duty yeah there's a duty to it you're you're you know you're cooking for your family you're cooking you're cooking something healthy for them like of course it's essential in that sense but the experience has changed it's something you look forward to doing it's something you want to do now it's part of a routine that actually you know the experience of doing it gives to you it's not just the output the experience itself is better you you reduce the space between the lag indicator the thing you want and the experience itself if you can reduce that space then you then you're just you're going you're far more likely to continue doing it yeah you know week in and week out and what a difference that is if you could be consistent in it what a difference that makes to the family culture you know once you've done it 10 times 100 times this becomes part of their experience the children growing up seeing you doing it seeing you enjoying it and and learning that lesson too i love it as a medical doctor i think about your work greg and i feel it has incredible relevance to health even though that may not be explicitly obvious from the outside to some people i think there is such relevance to health because there is no question in my mind that stress is the number one factor that drives people in to see me in some ways stress is related to a good 90 80 to 90 of what i see you can make a case that stress is impacting uh people's health their well-being so they end up at my door whether that's you know anxiety mood problems insomnia feeding glow about their life relationship problems i actually genuinely believe and have seen that if people can apply these principles to prioritize their life you know i think the benefits are incredible yes for their productivity yes for their relationships but also for their health is this something that you've been asked about a lot have you seen the impact on people's health um and you know i'm just interested is this is this being reported back to you as well because this this is not just about productivity no way yeah it i i actually don't even think about what i do as productivity at all um i i sometimes it's put in that category you know amazon will put it in that category and i would i have no control over that and it's not like i lose a lot of sleep over that or anything but i just don't think about this work that way you know essentialism is about not doing more things that's productivity it's about doing more of the right things and effortless is about doing them in the right way so that you can create a an experience in life a lifestyle that really works for you um i got um a note from someone who'd read my stuff and she sent a photograph of herself before and after i actually never seen anyone do this because again you know it's not like a weight loss book or a you know that's not you know it's not that kind of approach but this was it in the first picture she looked like on death's door i can't really even do this justice without just having it shown maybe maybe you put it in the show notes or something like well we can do for sure yeah perfect we'll do it the before and after of her like it's a like a different person and and so that's you know i'm writing for her yeah i'm writing for somebody um who who's just you know they're highly engaged they're motivated they want to work it's not those aren't the issues it's just that they've they've thought that life has to be in a certain done a certain way um another story uh um who uh a woman who is a manager at a university at brigham young university and she is um she is the type of person who's up till four a.m in the morning uh photo shopping for the for her youth class at church the next day she feels guilty if she eats lunch not if she takes time away for lunch if she even eats it she feels guilty but she definitely believes and wrote to me to say so that she feels if she's not exhausted she is not doing enough uh and and so i was trying to work out like how to help her what can i do what what's the path forward because again you don't want to give a prescription that's so overwhelming that you add to the problem as i say look what i want you to do is basically invert your whole life using one question when you just forget don't worry about all the hundreds of things you could do or maybe do just one thing a question a new question i said just ask the next time someone asks you to do something the next time you take on a project just say how could this be effortless what is the simplest way to do this what what what if i stripped away any sort of extra expectations i'm putting on it what would it look like so she gets a call from a university professor says i'd love you to get your videography team to come here uh and and and record my class for the semester um and she is just ready to jump in i mean she is such a well-oiled machine with this she's ready to achieve over engineer it to make it happen i'm gonna wow him that's his so what she's thinking i'm gonna get my a whole team of people there we'll have multiple camera angles we'll edit the whole thing together we'll have music we'll have graphics inter you know spliced into the whole video every time we'll have intros outros all of it and then she remembers okay the coaching invert always invert let's have a new question okay how could this be effortless so she starts talking to about it what's the easiest solution to this it turns out it's for one student who's going to miss a few classes for athletic commitments so the solution they come up with together is that another student in the class will just video it on their phone and just send it to them on whatever class they happen to miss the professor had not thought of that solution was delighted to come up with something that was so easy for him to have to navigate he didn't want to have to coordinate with a whole videography team he doesn't he just wants to solve this problem yeah and so he's happy and she gets off the phone it's been a 10 minute conversation that saved her four months of headache and that was like a game changer for her she's like what what if i've just if it's not a motive problem what if it's not a work ethic problem why is this just a mindset problem yeah i'm just i'm just over complicating overthinking being too much of a perfectionist and this is producing stress to a level that is affecting the whole experience and you know and health of my life that question you know what would it look like if it was effortless but also it's that earlier question about you know what does done look like right because by by really intentionally understanding well what is the goal of this project what actually does what problem does it need to solve then you find that actually to solve that problem actually doesn't need five camera angles and multiple edits it's just an iphone recording it you you you've told a similar story or similar principles about i think was it your son and scouts i wonder if you could share that story because i think again just just hearing these different examples in different settings really just highlights the point that i would love to get across in this conversation that this material is essential for everybody it doesn't matter who you are what you do in your life what you do in your job these principles that you write so beautifully about will absolutely help you the the story of my son is that he'd set a big goal uh 12 years old he came to me said he wants to to do scouting he wants to get his eagle scout by the time he turns 14 which is you know normally your goal is by the time you turn 18 you have to do it literally by your 18th birthday or they won't it's just like 100 but no no zero tolerance after that that time but he set the goal and so we started working on it together uh you know the whole experience was pretty good positive experience um and good excuse to spend time together everything was going pretty much according to plan including the final big project that you do he he got a whole group of people to help him build 180 foot fence paint it do it into one big day together it was like fun experience there was one final thing to do and that is to write up the report about the final project and that doesn't sound like such a big thing but i personally know of someone who did everything but that final report and eventually years after they'd completed it the the the you know everything else in the program tried to hand it in a day after their 18th birthday and they didn't get their eagle so they didn't get the eagle scout they didn't complete it because they didn't get that final thing over the over the line and we started being like those people i mean it's like first it's days where we're just going to get this little you know this report done and then it became your weeks and we start moving into months and i got got them together i said okay listen why is this taking us so long why is it taking you so long why is it taking me you know long to help you what's going on and we just realized that we just we're just over complicating it all we had seen ourselves other other examples of people who had built the most spectacular final reports you know in wooden boxes carved and and beautifully designed and you know i might say this way sort of parent projects rather than the scout projects uh it seemed at play but there's like a hundred hours of work some of these things and they you know they're amazing yes um but we said well what what if we what does done look like for us well it just means we have taken this to the scout office and they have stamped approval well what are the minimum steps to completion what what's the minimum we need to do to get this job done we need to a small three-page essay it doesn't have to be 20 pages it's three pages that is what the requirement is to do the requirement okay we need to put a few photographs in there and write down we don't need an essay about all of them just a little one-liner from him for every picture get what's the very first obvious step we can take instead of worrying about the 100th step what's the very first one get a binder i mean drive to the shops and buy a binder that is the first thing we can do and as soon as we started asking these different questions the action uh just became it's like a physical change in you when's when when when you know what the next action is and it's doable your whole body changes it's like yeah i can do that we can do that we can go to the shops right now and we can buy that and we did okay what's the very next step well we can we can select a few photographs that were taken on the on the day on the phone and and so it got done after that really fast within the next week handed off and completed and he was able to uh get his eagle you know one week before uh before his 14th birthday so it worked but it didn't work because we tried to go the second mile on everything we just said we're just gonna do the first smile and we're gonna do it uh and and that my life has been so many of the mistakes i've made in my life have been not because i didn't try but because i was trying too hard because i was trying to go the second mile and i hadn't gone the first and so that's where i think perfectionism really can can hinder our ability to start projects and our ability to finish them uh because we're just adding on stuff that that no one is actually asking for that nobody needs us to do that's kind of the key there greg isn't it it's not that you're saying never go the extra mile i'm what i hear is you're saying go the extra mile when it matters when you've identified that it really matters to you for what you're trying to do but when it doesn't matter don't waste your energy your cognitive loads um you know because i think people could misinterpret this potentially and say well it's i'm not going to work hard anymore i'm only going to do the minimum that i ever need to do which is of course not how we want to bring up our children it's not how we want to the message we want to give a society so how do you how do you help people find that sort of middle lane between those two extremes well i think that again this is about making the essential things easier that alone gets you closer to the middle lane it's not just about living an easy life it's not about just being lazy it's about saying what is the right and best way to do the work that you came here to do [Music] maybe we've got to broaden out what we recommend to people say you know it doesn't matter um how you move your body you just want to move it more and and find what actually works for you but are there any sort of universal principles when it comes to movement that actually do work for all of us in terms of getting us to move i mean i again i go back to the simple i mean my my you know i think there's two again two basic impetuses that have you know over over millennia have been the basis for how and why people move and one is because it's necessary and the other is because it's fun and for most people fun involves social um um so uh sometimes you know sometimes going for a run by yourself or a walk by yourself is meditative and it's nice to be by yourself and you can think through a problem but for most of us you know we like to be with other people and so that's why park run is so successful it's social here in cambridge we have the november project every wednesday people do these wonderful runs and they run up the stadium and they do all kinds of great stuff we have you know all around the world there are various kinds of of social events they're you know dancing is social um uh playing a game of you know soccer or football is social i mean the list goes on right um and um and there are many ways to do it socially and i think so so that's critical um but but that's never going to be enough for some folks and and and you know exercise physical activity used to be necessary in our lives and that was the impetus that people had to get out and in every day and and do work and so we need to find ways without coercing them unethically uh to make exercise to make physical activity necessary and and because it's not appropriate to tell adults that you can't they can't have the benefits of society unless they exercise right we need to help people help help themselves and i think the way to do that is through what's called a commitment contract so let me go again back to education in education we have education works on a commitment contract basis for adults right so i'm a professor in a university where people pay ghastly sums to go to harvard right i mean i think the tuition is and and room and board and all that costs like 60 to 70 thousand dollars a year that's full of course most students don't end up paying that i mean the vast majority get financial aid so so don't worry most of my students are not fabulously wealthy actually many of them are first generation students because we have we're lucky we have really good financial aid but anyway somebody's paying 60 to 70 thousand dollars every year for them to go to school and there's some commitment from them to go to school and what are they doing they're having people like me torture them right i make them take exams i make them read books i make them stay up late at night studying and if they don't do well i give them a bad grade which you know which you know stigmatizes them for the rest of their life and and and um but they do it willingly because because they've signed a kind of a commitment contract whereas whereas they're paying money for me to make them do stuff which they know is good for them which they otherwise wouldn't do for themselves and we do all kinds of other commitment contracts in our in our in our world and and i think exercise is should be part of that we should we should find exercise you know there are many so there's a wonderful program called stick.com it's a website run through uh some economists they used to be yeah i'm not sure if they're still at yale where you can basically pick either a stick carrot or a stick right and i described this in the book because yeah because there's a friend of mine in in san francisco who was who has been trying to lose weight and she uh gave stick.com i think two thousand dollars so not not a small amount of money and every week she agreed that she was going to walk a certain number of miles and if she didn't get those number miles in and her husband was a referee if she didn't do those miles as affirmed by her husband they would automatically send fifty dollars that week to the national rifle association that's the big association that tries to prevent uh gun control laws in the united states and she is very very much hates the nra and wants to see gun and she has never missed a week of her walking since she's been doing that so she signed a commitment contract put some money behind it now that's a kind of an extreme one but there are other ways we can do it just through a friend i mean a lot of my early morning runs i don't you know at 6am i do not want to run i promise you i mean nobody i want to be in bed with my wife right but i often meet a friend of mine who's a cardiologist and he's at 6am he doesn't want to be there either but we kind of agreed the day before that we were going to meet each other at 6 a.m to go for a run and usually we're just like irritated at each other and we don't even speak for the first you know 10 minutes um and then slowly we warm up and i'm never unhappy that i did that run at the end but i i did it because i coerced myself to a commitment contract yeah very very practical and pragmatic approach i guess what you're saying is that the way we've typically encouraged physical activity has been you know very prescriptive you have to do this um you know if you don't do it you're not really looking after yourself you sort of have to rely we're very much putting it down to individual motivation individual willpower and what you're saying i i guess is that this is not working right we've not evolved to exercise we we're now living in a society where we simply don't have to anymore that necessity has gone so you need to find a way to make it necessary and the way you found of doing it is you're meeting someone so if your buddy has gone to the trouble of getting up early in the morning and goes to your agreed spot and you don't show up there is a bit of you know you have social pressure to show up which is why so many movement programs talk about you know doing it with other people right because if you're leaving up to yourself to motivate yourself there's going to be times i know when i got into park run i remember thinking at the time i wasn't really a runner right and we can we can uh let let me put another way i didn't perceive myself as a runner whereas now i do but i still went because i did it with my son uh is reason one and reason two is there was this big community there this really friendly community at park run so i just had to make sure that my son and i were at the start line by five to nine on a saturday morning and if that was if if i got there i would complete a 5k but if i had to do that myself even if i had to do that myself with my son i bet you some saturdays we wouldn't do it and so i think that accountability pieces is i think it's really interesting now you mentioned you're not a fan of coercion yet you write a very surprising certainly surprising to me you write about is it the swedish uh is it beyond the swedish underwear sportswear manufacturer and i was mesmerized reading that story so i wonder if you could tell that and because that's actually taking a quite different approach right yeah i had so much fun in that so i i was in i was thinking about this you know because i the last section of the book the last quarter of the book is really about how to apply the sort of natural history of exercise to the modern world and i was interested in this idea of coercion and i wanted to see if i could find an example of people who are forced to exercise adults i mean we force kids to exercise in school but nobody nobody blinks an eye at that because we force kids to do all kinds of stuff and i think it's totally acceptable because children can't make up their you know children aren't responsible for their own decisions but adults are and as i was i was searching throughout the world i was looking i was thinking about like monks in asia who were forced to do things and whatever and i was i wanted to you know i'm very into participant observation i like to try what i study and so that's why i've tried barefoot running and i've you know i tried i tried so i've chased animals on you know done done races against horses and you know i'm into that i like i like we're gonna come to all that believe me i like to put myself in the shoes of the or the of the the people i'm studying and um and so i i found on the web a few articles about the bjorn borg company is a company in sweden that makes mostly underwear but other kinds of sports clothing um it's no longer actually no longer owned by bjorn borg but it's um and and you know you know how those companies have those like little contact me thing so i you know late at night i remember telling my wife i'd found this company and i'd read some articles and she said well contact them so i i i got on the contact page and i said you know dear bjorn board company i'm a professor at you know whatever i mentioned in this topic and i'm kind of curious to learn more and i remember going to bed and saying to hurry up i'm sure i'll never hear from them and then the next morning in my inbox was an email saying come and come and join sports hour come anytime you want what would be happy to show you so i uh so i was on sabbatical i had some time so i got on an airplane and i went to you know they were very kind and they told me when to show up so i i um i showed up and they basically said i could talk to anybody in the company and you know i had to go to sports hour because at bjorn borg company everybody has to exercise it's it's it's a requirement and there's a sports hour every friday i think it's 10 a.m and and there's no excuses unless unless you're injured right whatever or something like that if you're a board member or if you're a visitor it doesn't matter who you are if you sweep the floors if you're the ceo doesn't matter you go to sports hour and so i went to sports hour which is a really hard kind of crossfit workout it was great it was exhilarating i mean you could do it as hard as you want or as light as you want and and then they have all kinds of other events where they you know instead of a christmas party where everybody gets drunk they run through the streets of stockholm and have hot chocolate afterwards you know i mean it's a it's a delightful environment but of course you know not everybody liked it and some people left the company but some people were in the company love it and i just talked to folks about it and see to see how it worked and to my surprise it was that it was actually pretty popular um and um uh the people actually kind of realized that it was a beneficial thing but i should also say these are people who've drunk the kool-aid as we say in the united states right that you know everybody who really hated it has obviously left the company you know you wouldn't be in that company if you didn't think this was acceptable but um but you know the fact of the matter is that's as far as i can tell the only company in the world that does that and we're not going to find you know that's just not going to work in most places and we have to find other ways to make exercise necessary what what's interesting about that company for me and you know you're absolutely right there is there's that inbuilt bias isn't there because people i guess some people if they know that about the company and that's not their kind of thing they may not even apply for a job in the first place if they start working there and they think this is a good idea but then they feel it's too much pressure there's you know there's some sort of camera camaraderie that they don't like or they don't thrive on they might leave um but it's an interesting model and i appreciate this cannot be rolled out across society there's a kind of ethical point there i think as well but you know i i wonder what you think about the ethics of that where a company says hey look we and again i'm not speaking for that company because i don't know the the ideology behind it but let's say a company felt that well we know fiscal civilians is important because it will help the employees that will help them with their health and well-being it's going to help them concentrate focus be more productive it's a great way of bonding um you know i guess what what would happen if companies started to some companies were like well this is part of the culture here and if you want to work here this is sort of what we would be supporting it's quite a tricky one ethically isn't it because it could be done in a way where it's very supportive and it's like well if you just want to walk for that hour around the gym that's fine you know there's gonna be no pressure on you from your manager or from the boss you know i know i know it you'd have to demonstrate that there was no discrimination by doing that but it's working there i mean could that be could that be you know you're saying that we need to take personalized approaches so could that work for some companies well i mean let's um let's uh let's let's select the question and ask did that used to work for some companies so so in the united states um as in every every you know in europe um universities are kind of like companies and every university until recently required students to exercise in the united states physical activity physical education was a hundred percent every single university in the country harvard included required physical education um and and you know going back to to the ancient you know greek philosophers and then you know the traditions in india and china everywhere in the world where you had educational systems which of course were for elite people right because our peasants didn't go to go to school but but but wealthy aristocrats did with no exception educ exercise became part of people's education because people understood that there was a relationship between exercise and you know the body and the mind right mental health and physical health and that exercise is good for students and um that was dropped in the united states since starting basically in the 70s so harvard for example got rid of its physical education requirement in the 1970s um and now you know we see the see the results but these are adults you know these are 18 plus year old people and it was required and um uh so you know i think this is and of course until recently everybody had to be physically active to get to work they had to you know walk to get to work they didn't have elevators to get them to their floor you know i mean we could go on with all the things that have changed in the world so we've kind of shifted our our our workplace and shifted our our schools without shifting the the the kind of how we approach our bodies and so maybe bjorn borg company is going back to something very ancient in a new way um but um but you know we the fact that we're so uncomfortable with it i think it's interesting um we're we're just so worried about about about about coercion and people's rights and and for good reason um but we're also um i think i think sometimes we you know we also i'm gonna probably get myself in trouble now um but look i think it's as you can already tell i'm very opposed to body shaming and fitness shaming right it's it's it's unacceptable um but sometimes i think because we're so worried about body shaming and fitness shaming we we go we go to the extreme and basically turn off the whole system yeah and and i wonder if the if if we can't have our cake and eat it too so to speak right can we find a way to help people be physically active without engaging in body shaming without engaging in fitness shaming and i think we can and again i'm going to go back to my commitment contract model because if let's just say you're you're unfit you're overweight you're struggling you hate to exercise but you want to you want to get you want to exercise now if i told you i had you had to go to a crossfit you know workout every week and you know do 150 burpees with the with this you know highly muscled you know you know nut case in front of you who's your boss you you'd hate it right but if you could just walk 20 minutes a day climb the stairs right pick your own goal and work towards that you know that would fit your your fitness level your your your your you know you could do it on your own you could do it with friends etc not in a way that is we can find ways for people to be more physically active that can accommodate every disability can accommodate every level of fitness can accommodate you know but but we we as a society we've been very uncreative about it we're we're we're not really willing to put in the time and the money and the effort to make it happen yeah and i think a lot of people get put off by gyms for example they've sort of been sold this idea that jim's if i want to get fit whatever their interpretation of this is you know i want to i want to do my physical activity then it has to be at the gym it has to have a particular name it has to have particular clothes that i wear because if i don't it doesn't count and i for me as a doctor i find myself trying to break down that barrier with patients all the time i've often said now i didn't know about the these sort of tribes and these cultures for years who've danced but i've often said to to patients i said look do you like dancing they go yeah like dancing i said okay well let's start there why not you know just before dinner every night for 10 minutes have a dance in the kitchen put on the tunes and dance go yeah but do i need something more i said well let's start there and i've seen i've seen families bond over i've seen people's mood get better just from the act of dancing every day and you know a lot of people are conditioned to think oh no it needs to have you know i need to go to this particular class and then i need to buy the latest outfits and it's again that's the commodification commercialization of exercise right it's if it's a it's now a product and you have to spend money on it and you know you have to uh you know and there's some there's there are people there to to to advertise to us that you know you can't run unless you wear these fancy shoes and you you have to have your fancy watch and all this sort of stuff and frankly i i enjoy fancy shoes in my fancy watch when i go running but we don't need it actually um and and it works for some people but it obviously is not working for the for everybody and so yeah again i think we need to we need to kind of step back from our western medicalized commercialized attitude towards exercise and take a broader view a broader perspective and if we just simply do that which is what my book tries to do we'll we'll we'll come up with all kinds of other wonderful solutions dancing is just one of them going for going for walks with your your like why for example do we have so many boring meetings where we sit around in chairs or now we sit glued to our bloody zoom screens right why can't we can we get up and walk right and have meetings on the hoof right um yeah there's so many examples of ways in which we could we could we could just encourage physical activity in a way that will make it both necessary and fun yeah now daniel a lot of the research you you did for this book has has taken you to wonderful places around the world to do what sound like from from where i'm sitting incredible things you know uh in tanzania you know you've stayed with hunter gatherer tribes you've i think hunted kudu you've ran with horses and i'd love to sort of explore some of those because these are things that many of us have never done and i think there's something to be to be learned from that so i was going to ask you what has been some of the most surprising things that you've learned when you've gone and lived alongside indigenous tribes and and communities you've mentioned dancing did that surprise you and was there anything else that you discovered that you didn't previously know well i mean i i'm really lucky person i have a i'm such a you know fortunate to have a great job that you know i get paid to go have fun and travel around the world and study things that interest me i'm i'm a i'm a ridiculously lucky person and i would say that um you know what surprised me the most is really i mean quite literally it's the story i tell in the beginning of the book which is um so i so which is that no people in these in these societies don't think what they're doing is exercise and for me that was the that was the that was the spark that started this book because i it was 2012 and i was finishing my previous book which is called the story of the human body and and in that book the kind of message of that book is we didn't evolve to be healthy and that book is about mismatched diseases how the how the modern world that we're live in is we're very poorly adapted to it in some respects that makes it get us sick in various ways but um um so i was finishing up that book and i went to highland mexico so i went to the iron man competition in kona um this is a true story i'm not exaggerating anything here it was i was part of the medical conference that's at that precedes that this incredible race which is just amazing you know people do a 2.4 mile open water swim then they do a 112 mile bicycle ride across the desert and then they do a full marathon in like 90 degree heat it's insane right and the people who win like do it in like a little over eight hours i mean they're they're like cyborgs they're not real human beings like you know they're this just it's astonishing and then i got back you know working on the book and then went to highland mexico where i hired a guy to help me um go to really really remote areas to study the tarahumara who are so famous for their running and um and you know i'd read about how they barefoot run and do these long distances and what i discovered was that first of all i didn't see anybody running barefoot whatsoever anywhere and i was traveling all over the place and and um when i asked people about their running they were like well people did run in these traditional races um but other than that they didn't run and i had this like list of questions being a good anthropologist i had a i had a questionnaire which i had you know designed carefully and one of the questions was you know how do you train for your running and my translator couldn't you know was struggling to figure out how to ask this question because there was no word for for train in the native american language robbery and so she was trying to you know you practice you know she was just trying to explain to these and there was this one 70 something year old guy she asked and i remember him because he was really he was really he wasn't i don't know maybe that 10th or 12th person i was i sort of was measuring and studying and and he was kind of very serious fellow um he was he was a runner too by the way and the vast majority of people don't run very much he was a runner and he through the translator asked me why would anybody run if they didn't have to and he at first i was thinking this question i wrote is really bad i mean i wrote the wrong question and then i realized actually this is telling me something that that that you know people there run when they need to and they're but exercise is just not part of their their lexicon you know um training is not part of their lexicon and that kind of just permeated my brain as i started you know i took every opportunity i could to to do something where i you know i was in i was in the western ghats we were looking for barefoot runners and we were you know looking for people who were running there we were you know been into greenland and various places in africa etc you know every place i've gone i've noticed that people who are very physically active don't think of what they do in any way whatsoever as exercise um and to me i think that's been most surprising uh that was initially most surprising yeah i mean it's very powerful even though i've read that to hear you explain it is very very powerful because it gets to the heart of what the problem in society is about getting us to move more right it's it's like these these communities don't have words for exercise or training it just doesn't exist because it's i guess it's necessity driven or it's or or you know what's really beautiful in the tarahumara when they run their long-distance races it's a form of prayer for them i mean that's to me that's really beautiful it's spiritual right they run because they believe it makes them closer to god um what if we adopted that attitude right i mean it's such a beautiful thought right and it and and and and it does right and for them actually the concept of chase actually i have one of the balls over here actually this is one of the the balls they use in their in their foot race um and when they chase this ball the ball gets dirty etc and it gets lost and for them that kind of the randomness is like a metaphor for for life and for the vagaries of life and and it's it's really beautiful what they do and and and that's true of of of the a lot of the sacred dances that people do and and the list goes on when would they kick that ball around and follow it is that what would happen somewhere they kind of flick it with their foot and it as far as they can and then they chase it and they find it again and they flick it and they chase it they find it and they flick it and they'll do this there are two teams doing this and they'll do it until one team laps the other in a course yeah and sometimes the race can be 10 miles and sometimes the race can be 50 miles and and it depends on how they set up the race and what they agree on beforehand um but and they're betting wildly so you know they're it's a big social event and and it's fun it's it's but it's also a form of prayer yeah this is something i explored in a conversation with sanjay rawal i don't know how many episodes ago who he was the director on a film called 3100 um if you've not seen it i i just i've seen snippets of it but i have not had a chance to sit down and watch the whole thing but having read your book i think i can almost guarantee you would love this documentary because it's really in many ways showing tribes around the world how running is you know it is about transcendence it's a spiritual practice it's not for calories burned how many miles have i gone you know uh what did my heart rate do all this kind of stuff that again nothing necessarily wrong with it it's it's to get them closer to you know i guess being at one with the world sort of finding themselves and it's really really interesting that because the way we do it here in the west by and large and of course everyone is different does seem to be quite far removed from that um it's interesting because you have been termed the barefoot professor in the past um and you mentioned when you went to mexico you didn't see that many people there thought i think you've been to other cultures like in kenya and india where you have seen a lot of people barefoot so what's the deal there well there's a story behind it if you don't if they have time i've got plenty of time and this is probably one of the things i'm most interested in so and i've got a sort of professor of barefoot running in front of me so you can go as you want here so here's the story so in 2004 dennis bramble and i published the border run paper um that was the title in nature born to run and and um and i it was fun i got invited to give all kinds of lectures and i gave a lecture uh the night before the boston marathon i think it was 2005 and it was a dark and stormy night literally i mean there was an incredible rainstorm that came in the just before the marathon everyone's worried about you know the rain and all that and it was packed audience and there was a guy sitting in the front row who i never i'll never forget him because i remember he looked kind of like a bum uh from harvard square and he had like his he had socks on that were wrapped in duct tape and he was very intent on the lecture and afterwards he came up to me and asked you know if people evolved to run um um um you know what did they run barefoot and is there any problem with that and i said well of course they ran barefoot because shoes were invented fairly recently and um and you know i don't know really very much about barefoot running um but you know and i started and i realized so at the time we were studying head stabilization now when you run when when your body hits the ground your head jiggles right and we were interested in how the body stabilizes the head you know how you prevent that jiggling from occurring so it doesn't blur your vision and most of the runners we were looking at were heel strikers right they'd land on their heel and their head would jiggle and i remember there was a few runners occasionally would come into the lab and they would be forefoot strikers they'd land on the ball of their foot and their head wouldn't jiggle as much and i remember thinking they're like you're ruining my experiment and you know because you know we're not getting the hedgehog we wanted to to measure and um so this guy comes in and his name is barefoot jeffrey um and uh he runs he owns a bicycle shop here in the area and he came in and we set up you know the equipment and he just ran light as a feather no head jiggling whatsoever and and you know he landed on the ball of his foot and i asked him why he landed on the ball of his foot he said well it doesn't hurt uh if you land on your heel it hurts and so we started doing some experiments and realized that that's how people ran when they barefoot they you can't slam into the ground like you can in the shoe because you have all that cushioning in the shoe you have to run lightly and gently and so we got to studying barefoot running and of course i've been working in africa for for many decades and i've seen people in africa you know running barefoot but i never really measured them so we went out and started measuring them and you know published another paper in nature with about the biomechanics of barefoot running but i always like to try what i study and we realize that that to me it's not about whether you're barefoot or not to me it's about how you run to me running as a skill just like swimming or climbing a tree or all many other things that we do and there are better and worse ways to run and and and what barefoot running does is that it helps us learn the skill of running that i think i think there are advantages to not crashing into the ground and relying on some technology in your shoe to make that uh comfortable and so to me it's not about you know to me i think you know you can run beautifully in shoes and you can run terribly in shoes you can run beautifully barefoot you can run terribly barefoot but what really matters is how you run and that barefoot running gives us information and and sure shoes are comfortable and i i mostly wear shoes when i run i also wear minimal shoes and i also i agree with everything you just said you can't just throw away your shoes or transition your shoes and and and immediately change your gait you have to transition gradually and slowly and you have to learn the skill of running but if you do the evidence suggests that there's a lot of benefits and you don't destroy your knees and you can you can do all kinds of good things in your body and and um you know there's a lot of evidence and there's mounting evidence i think that that supports that but it's of course it's still controversial because there's a lot of money in the in the in the in the you know in the shoe industry and and there are people who like what they do and they get upset if you tell them that you know they should be doing something different and you know for many of them they shouldn't you know if it ain't broke don't don't fix it but but many people are injured and they might benefit from changing the way they run yeah i mean that's certainly echoes what i've seen in my clinical experience and even a really good friend of mine actually who has very much been enamored with my journey to minimalist shoes he sort of transitioned to pretty much everything apart from running until maybe six months ago he you know he'd wear minimalist shoes for work for walking for going out with his family at the weekends and he really likes the connection it gave him he sort of felt it was he was moving differently but he said i've got no real reason to change the way i run because i can do it you know i don't get injured but something changed about six months ago i think just on that journey he was quite interested to go well what is it like if i actually try running so he went super slow you know he could only do 3 or 4k i think initially but now he's uh you know he's a badge wearing sort of barefoot runner and i think i think all these things become quite reductionist don't they it's like barefoot running good or bad you know minimal issues good or bad it's like well it kind of depends on the context a little bit doesn't it yeah absolutely and you know almost all the world's great best runners are i have what i call a barefoot style um and yet it's funny that there's some people get really mad like you know like you tell me i have to be a four-foot striker it's like no you don't have to be a four-foot striker um but you know some of the world's best runners are for strikers you might you know there's nothing wrong with it so people are very um people are tribal right just like in the united states you know you've got the republicans versus democrats you know forefoot strikers versus rear foot strikers it's crazy um um i mean i think actually uh it's interesting people often ask me what kind of shoes i wear well i wear many different kinds of shoes you know today i wore one pair but tomorrow i'll probably wear something other maybe thursday i'll go barefoot i mean you know why do we have to categorize ourselves and just do one thing um it's it's a fascinating um fascinating insight the other thing that's interesting to me about barefoot running is how out of touch we are with our bodies a lot of people they just the idea just makes them cringe like are you serious i mean well you like you're gonna cut your feet what about all the hypodermic needles and glass out there and you know i've heard it all right and and and and all these people haven't tried they have no idea and you know i think everybody should just try just you know go for a few hundred meters take your shoes off and run for just a few hundred meters down a street don't don't you know make sure it's a smooth street and you know don't do it at night so you can see the glass and the hypodermic needles depending on where you live right but you'll discover that it's actually kind of fun um but don't do too much too fast because you will injure yourself if you do too too much too fast but but people are just out of touch with how their bodies work i guess even just if people are lucky enough to have a garden or a backyard you know even just start by walking in your backyard are going to just get used to that feeling again you know i i've always i'll tell you what i've always it's always fascinated me so i you know my parents uh immigrants from india to the uk my dad came over in the early 1960s and you know in asian culture certainly in indian culture you don't wear shoes inside the house right it's just it's just not done so i grew up we never wore shoes inside the house we'd always leave it outside or in the porch then you go in either in your socks or barefoots and it's only you know when you get older and you start interacting with your friends and go around to their houses you go i remember thinking oh well these guys wear shoes in their house oh wow you know because my norm was that you don't wear shoes in your house and it's just interesting how culturally things are different i'm not saying that necessarily plays out as we get older but it is interesting that i've certainly noticed some of my uh some of my friends growing up um one of my best mates in particular i remember he you know even at university going around he'd always like getting ready in the morning having a shower shaving would be putting his shoes on even if he was inside the house and i guess culturally these things are different i remember going to india every other summer when i was a kid we used to go to a city called kolkata or what used to be called calcutta for six weeks um and i remember my playing with my cousins and my my cousin who's about four years younger than me he'd always want me to come and play football i would go down to the to the apartment uh just underneath all the apartments there was a bit of a bit of land and they were all playing barefoot like properly tackling you know going in hard and i started playing it i found it really difficult at first but by the end of the summer you're used to it so it's it's different everywhere right in terms of how much they actually wear shoes right yeah i mean i've also had those experiences i don't obviously haven't gone to india as much as you have but i've had those experiences and actually one of my favorite moments and was playing um i didn't didn't make it into the book but i remember playing qriket with a bunch of kids in in in that in a tiny little village in like in the got mountains um and what was terrifying was not being barefoot it was those bowlers boy they they were terrifying but but but the way in which we but you used a very important term there which is this cultural these cultural ideals and they ex they translate into so many other ways in which we use our bodies so another example is sitting or another or sleeping right the idea that that it's you know that this one of the western ideas we have is that you should sleep in us in a quiet dark room with a soft comfortable mattress with nobody around you and no sound and no light and no nothing is kind of you know um stimulus-free environment that's a cultural norm too right and until recently even in the west people nobody did that right and and and yet people feel like they can't sleep properly unless they're in that kind of environment which is which is again it's a it's what you get used to it's a cultural norm and then and then if you're not in that kind of environment then you get you get stressed and your cortisol levels go up because you're you're anxious about sleep and of course that prevents you from sleeping in the first place uh how we sit like we're told you know we have to sit and chair with a particular posture that's also a cultural norm that's completely made up in the 19th century by german orthopedic surgeons who who for some reason opined that when you sit you should have the same curvature in your spine as when you stand there's no evidence to support that whatsoever it's completely made up and in fact there's plenty of evidence that that doesn't support that i could go on we have all kinds of cultural norms that we there's nothing wrong with them because you can't not have a culture i mean we all grow up in a particular culture but sometimes we need to step back from what we're told and question it or ask you know does that work for me particularly in our modern world in which which often it doesn't [Music] when you focus on what you don't have you lose what you do have that was i mean yeah let me see i'm gonna say it again because it's it's it's such an important line here if you focus on what you lack you lose what you have thank you for repeating it that's what the first time you said it and i have heard you say this before but first we said in this conversation again i i felt it deep inside me you know i felt that tingle around my heart because there is such deep truth in that and actually that phrase helped me this this morning um there was you know as i shared before we we we were we started recording uh i i sort of exerted myself a lot yesterday and didn't sleep well last night and have been pretty exhausted for most of today yes and you know when we haven't set well you know we're a bit more emotionally reactive less resilient and something you know something bothering me in work that i haven't done yet or hadn't managed to do and i was focusing on that and then i thought and it's great because i was researching this conversation yes that phrase shapes everything i thought well wrong you know what you kind of do a lot you're getting a lot done you've you know you know you're sort of you've not missed a wednesday with this podcast since the first week of last september you know through christmas and new year it's kind of like you're doing a lot already you're doing you know you don't need to worry about not doing the extra one or two percent so first of all thank you because that phrase was very helpful this morning it instantaneously it instantaneously changed my perspective because a lot of what you're talking about is is perspective right you're talking about the same situation but just a different experience off that same situation um so i think that quote might be going up on the wall as well i love this and at the point of being irritating i want to just take the whole quote again because it's not one line it's two lines if you focus on what you lack you lose what you have if you focus on what you have you gain what you lack sorry to interrupt if you're enjoying this conversation there's loads more like it on my channel please do press subscribe and hit that bell now back to the conversation so it's the combination that to me is such a for me personally was such a game changer and i love that it was useful to you today it's useful to me many times but of course what you're saying is right if if you focus on what you have suddenly it all floods to you oh my goodness i've got all the books i've got all the podcasts i've been doing i've got all this preparation in life i've got the whole you know i'm a doctor i've got all all of my life's experience is at my disposal in this moment yeah and suddenly it it puts you it hopefully at a better state of like i can handle this yeah you know i don't have to worry about every possible degree of preparation for this but i was just talking to a to a to a friend who says that one of his effortless hacks is on his team he'll just say look let's just be light in prep like let's just do our prep lightly so that we can sort of show up either with sometimes no preparation now again that is a dangerous message if someone is not someone who's a high achieving challenging person who's trying to achieve a lot that's who this book is for it's for highly engaged capable people who are on the edge of exhaustion but if someone is in that category as you just described you feeling just today at least that the message needs to be different the message is like hey it's completely fine you can have this conversation because you've been preparing it for years you've got all that you need all you have to do is show up you know what today was preparation light because of my um my state right because of my state which was a bit foggy in my head tired um and i i'm a morning person right so because you are west coast we're recording this conversation you know at 4 p.m uk time you know i i'm i typically will go to bed at 8 30 9 o'clock i'm sort of winding down i get up at 4 4 30 and writes up before the kids get up right so today i thought and it's something i've discussed with um my my sort of close team around the podcast before say well you know what i do it's sometimes almost an old relic of how i used to cram for exams that i will artificially create stress on myself before i'm on the mic um but i realized a few months ago i thought well i'm gonna hold on a minute you kind of you've never been short of things to say as my wife definitely testified um i've been having conversations my entire life as a doctor for 20 years i have conversations every day that is what i do i listen my goal when i'm with a patient is to listen really make sure that person feels heard uh good body language be connected and then respond appropriately to actually what has been said to me and i've realized over the last few months that that's kind of the approach i take on the podcast i kind of feel that's sort of like my gp consultations just expanded out on a microphone with people who are not coming to me for health uh help do you know what i mean so it was helpful in the sense of actually i don't need to make this hard i've read his work before i'm familiar with it you know and again focusing on what not what we lack what we have i'm like wangan this is a guy who has sold a gazillion books he hit the zeitgeist six or seven years ago i have the luxury of two hours with him to pick his brain and discuss things that i'm passionate about what are you complaining about what is wrong with your life that sounds like a pretty good day to me you know same situation but but gone into it with a different intention yeah i love what you're saying because because that that the extra the okay i've got to push i've got to do i've got to cram for the exam mentality like you don't want to be cramming all the time i mean i'm not even sure it's great to be cramming ever but certainly as a lifestyle it is counterproductive for people who are high achievers who are on the edge of exhaustion if they try to cram it in their life if they're trying to push it into force it then they won't just get to diminishing returns where every extra unit of effort produces less result than the last unit of effort it actually gets to negative returns where every unit of effort is actually making everything worse you know you'd be if you stop you will definitely be getting a better return on investment than trying an extra unit and and i just think that this is kind of part of the great discovery don't push yourself past a point that is helpful over exertion makes it harder to achieve the results that you want i remember a time listen to this i remember when i was i had a client come to me and say i want you to do three leadership presentations for our tech company it's a global brand but one that was in a high growth state they say well we want you to come we saw a presentation that you you'd created and we just want you to come and do this three times for us and then really what we want is a two-year engagement with you where you help us to scale and so on is this a fantastic opportunity and so everything is set like i all i have to do i've already sent them the materials i've already sent them the work i've already done this presentation for a different client all over the world like it is set it is done it is agreed it is good money it is everything is right and then the day before i go it's like cramming mode i'm like yeah but what if i could do a really something special for them what if i could just push it you know and i go well you know i've been doing this new thinking maybe i could just do it on the new thinking and i get going into this mode and it's like this is all like after hours so this is when i should be done for the day but i'm like okay well let me just let me just fiddle with these slides maybe i'll do the slides and then let's do a different handout and i spent hours and hours on that i i didn't do an all-nighter but it was that sort of a feeling it was just went hours and hours later and later i i am the next morning i wake up i am foggy i'm like literally driving to this appointment i'm emailing them right before i'm driving saying oh new slide new slides here they are can you print these these documents out at the you know at the facility all of that's unprofessional so now it's already worse and i go to the to the presentation i start giving the presentation and i keep having to turn around to look at the slides because i'm not familiar with them and i'm foggy and then somebody challenges me on one of them that i don't understand that i don't really buy that and i'm so unprepared there's this new content and and i'm stressed because i'm tired and i don't handle that well either the whole thing is it is like seriously a disaster one of the worst experiences i've had teaching ever and they cancelled the other two presentations and of course there's no two-year experience i mean like that is that is a of course that doesn't happen every day to us but that is an example to me of how like over exertion and doing that the pushing beyond the healthy helpful you know sweet spot can cost us a lot uh you're doing the right things and even for the right reasons but the over exertion makes it harder to achieve the result that was already there for for for the taking were you a a crammer as a kid at school yeah i i think i probably was a bit of a crammer but i was but let me tell you about my experience uh in education my parents didn't um didn't go to university and so they emphasized education but they didn't teach me the skills of it you know like this is how to write an essay or this is how to go to the teacher and talk about what's going on and what you're you know if you're missing something so i just had i just hit education with like motivation and work my best friend growing up sam bridgestock he questions this story but but i remember it very distinctly is that he would always do better than me in education but i always felt like i was trying harder than him and it wasn't until years later like so he got you know sort of two a's and a b and his a levels at the time and and uh and and i'm like okay how what what are you doing differently to me and he said it it took me years to actually figure it out the simplest answer he said just you just do exactly what the teacher asks you to do nothing more nothing less you just do exactly you just do what they ask you to do and that was like news to me from that point on i just i just did i would just read exactly what they wanted and not go above and beyond it i would just do what they asked and that was actually sufficient from then i got ace i literally hardly ever had not had an a ever since then right that was true in undergraduate i went to graduate school at the stanford right is and same thing there just do what you're asked to do not more if you don't know how to do what they are asking go and ask how to do what they are asking it's like that is was was the breakthrough it's like education in a sense is a bit of a game and if you i was the kind of guy that would go and get other books that weren't even on the curriculum i just want to learn so much about this that's a good principle if you want to become deeply educated in subjects fine but in terms of just actually getting the results in an educational system that's dependent on the social approval of that teacher you're just going to learn that to do what they ask and nothing else yeah it's it's so fascinating because if you just did what was asked of you with your two books right okay i don't know how does that apply to you writing these unique books that have struck a chord with millions of people around the world i mean let's apply let's just talk about how to apply effortless to the writing of efforts some ways i succeeded some ways i didn't in applying it but like ways first of all let's talk about how i made it harder than it needed to be first my fails i i worried to the point of fear and i don't see literally any upside to fear with it i can see taking responsibility i can see wanting not to fall into some um some bad habits that not habits but but typical paths that happen uh in the publishing world it's quite typical that after a book that's been successful the next book just dies on the vine um so i wanted to avoid that my mantra um i thought actually a fairly helpful mantra was like don't write a rubbish book uh you know like just don't don't don't just you know take responsibility for it that seemed to be healthy but when it gets into fear that's not making anything better when you're fearful about what you're doing you're just you just you can make it worse in your attempt to make it better here here's another sort of success and fail with the book um i found that if i wrote two hours in a day first thing in the morning similar to what you described i could write two average pages which by the way is you know for most writers for those listening or watching this is is actually pretty fast um if i wrote three or four hours i couldn't write three or four pages of the same quality i could write you know maybe i would get sort of two and a half for three if i go five or six hours or more i'm making the whole manuscript worse than if i hadn't started writing it at all that day like there is a point at which i am going back to stuff i've written that is perfectly fine or even is like well edited and i'm just oh but what if i did it this way and i'm just poor judgment is just pouring all over the manuscript at this point you've got to stop and so i learned that i needed to have a pace that had not just a lower bound okay every day right on the book at least five days a week right on you know open the google doc and write something uh the upper bound was uh was like don't write more than two pages you know like you have an upper bound where you say look don't push yourself beyond what is actually optimal for that day and so that pace helped me to keep enjoying it and to keep making progress going forward that's something that worked um something else that worked that made it made the experience a bit more effortless was just having a great team have the same editor i had before yeah uh brought in jonathan cullen who was a great researcher and helped with the book bringing in things and there were moments that the experience felt magic because i mean i actually described it sort of almost a harry potter type experience because we go into this google doc and you can see other people writing my editor going through something i've written i'd see uh jonathan bringing in a story i'd asked him to to gather and put together and he'd bring something in and i could watch it all happening while i'm working and i thought that was just so enjoyable that when we were done um we literally all of us have said to each other that we miss doing that going into the dock every day and just working together and seeing this progress and so so having the right people you know having having people that have you know um the three eyes uh which is uh is warren buffett uses three were you know three criteria to select who he works with high integrity uh high intelligence high initiative integrity intelligence and initiative and if you don't have integrity then the other two hurt you uh so those are the those are what i'm looking for in the little team that i had working on this together are so high in those three areas it just was a pleasure to work together so those are things that that i have you know those are examples there mixed together of ways i made it harder than it needed to be but also ways that that were that were more effortless and and so i think it's about some self-awareness where you keep on going a final thought on this with with in terms of the book itself is you have to have the courage to be rubbish to even begin uh you know i i came yeah we started using the term zero draft not even first draft zero draft like this is rubbish but i'm starting yeah this is a rubbish version of this story this is a rubbish version of his account it's okay zero is draft zero and sometimes i might write that and not even put it into the google doc just to get something out then you work on it and so in a consistent pace you make it less rubbish and less rubbish and less rubbish and eventually it becomes good and then a little better and hopefully it gets the point where it's great and it's polished so it's just but none of that happens in one crammed experience you aren't going to make something great in one fell swoop and when we try to do that what happens is that you get so burned out you spend a whole weekend a whole nothing but this is like you can't even think about it after that for a while and so it's about this to me it's about an effortless pace yes you still want it to be excellent your standards haven't changed high standard people don't just suddenly lose their standards you are not going to suddenly lose your standards the question is can we construct a life that allows us to get that high standard work done in a way that continues to be sustainable enjoyable so that we can do it for the next 10 20 30 40 50 years yeah rather than just kind of all at one moment and then we get burned out and then the next book is rubbish because we were so burned out and we felt rushed and so on so i think the the effortless pace is a big part of being able to still try to achieve excellence but in a way that isn't so costly and i think that's the key point for me it's we can all do a lot in certain ways if we want to now and again we can we can burn the candle if we need to but what's the cost of doing that sort of the cost of success many people who people look up to who are successful aren't necessarily happy maybe they're never seeing their kids or their partner um and and you know something i'm deep in writing at the moment is the difference between success and happiness and you know that when we conflate the two that's where sometimes the problem starts to arise there's an amazing essay written by tennessee williams who is the playwright behind the glass menagerie and others and the essay was published in the new york times and it's called the catastrophe of success and it's a really beautifully written piece just about what his experience was on the other side of having put glass menagerie out it's a big hit everyone he's meeting oh this was so impactful to me wow you've done something so beautiful and it sent him on a path that took him away from the work itself from the from the simple pacing of writing you know every day write the next thing you know don't overdo it but don't just stop doing it and and he talks about what followed in his life and how unhappy that existence was so so that's that's that's on this like success can be a catalyst for failure if we're not careful uh it will it will undermine the very things that led to success in the first place it will eat up and consume all sorts of more important relationships without even thinking about it so success you you know can be as bill gates put it a very poor teacher uh so so you know success makes a good servant but not a great master so that's sort of on the the we've got to be careful to make sure that we do things that will help us to get to the next level of success and that doesn't mean just more of the stuff that got us to this level the second point here is now now on on what to do once you are successful right once things and actually everybody watching this and listening this is successful if you take anything like a proper perspective about it you know the fact that they're that they they you know are alive today in the world the chances are you know they are in far better position than the vast majority of the people that have ever lived so you know they're going to be more uh more educated they're going to be have a better chance of of of a healthy life and so on right like of course there's loads of problems but we're successful if they're listening to this that they've got the time to listen to this if they have the technology to listen to this they're successful so they have to figure out what to do now that they are and the i think the thing that was most personally challenging and eureka for me as i was researching effortless was the the final section of the book this idea of effortless results the diff effortless results is about creating systems that produce results for you rather than producing results through your own direct individual effort a linear result is one that you achieve yourself you do a thing you get paid for doing that thing residual results are you build the thing that produces a result again and again for you and the difference isn't small it is it is it's absolutely massive think about a friend of mine jessica jackley who had gone to a presentation by uh by muhammad yunus at the crimean bank and she was starting to think more like systems and then she was on a trip in africa she meets this this woman she's an entrepreneur she is selling produce she's selling vegetables on the side of the road and every day she has to she has to be there to survive this is how she gets just enough to survive for her for her children and to buy you know this produce from from what turns out to be a middleman and so jessica says well why don't you go to the original you know to the to the you know to the farmers to the people that actually you know sell this originally you'd make a far better profits yeah absolutely i just cannot afford to leave my post to go do that and so jessica's looking at this and she said well how much would it cost for you to to make the transition she said 500 which of course isn't a huge amount uh in in the developing world developed world and she said she said she had that thought she's like well i could just get 500 and give it to her and i would help her and that would matter but instead she built what eventually became she and others built what eventually became kiva kiva.org where that money wasn't just a micro loan once it wasn't just a loan or a gift it was a micro loan that didn't just get paid back once but gets reinvested and then other people could start it as well she built a system that produced residual results to the order of like 1.3 billion dollars now of loans which are still being reload that people repay it about 97 of these loans are repaid she could have given 500 she built something that produced results that flowed the other people she wanted to help and now 1.3 billion dollars later that's the difference between a linear result and a residual result and to me it's an absolutely massive opportunity and and my test in my life and for you too is where are the systems of my life developed and where is it just me doing it again and again like how much of the results are you getting is just you pushing making it happen versus i have built a system that produces results for me and i use a little harshly but i use the death test for this which is like okay so if i die today which things continue yeah which things could continue without me and to start having a vision i just had a conversation with a friend yesterday he's just i don't even think he's fully human this guy the way he talks the way he thinks and the systems he's created uh uh uh have like blown my mind but he he talks like this just this is like in one sentence he's like yeah i'm just trying to build um i'm trying to invest for like the next 500 years that's really my vision point and i've created a family bank that can be in existence for the next 500 years so that and in the documents he sent me he said this 50-page document called the rhythm of experience and it's his system for how he's trying to he he makes sure that his life is in flow all the time and it just puts me to shame watching listening to all this and learning all this i think so much of what i'm doing is still one ounce of effort to get one result instead of thinking and building stuff that just continually perennially perpetually almost eternally could be producing results coming back and back so this to me is actually probably the most single most exciting idea in effortless and and how powerful it can become [Music] i think um you know behavior is this is i think one of the common myths about behavior change people say um oh you know behavior change is so hard it's so difficult to change habits whatever the truth is we're changing all the time uh one of the primary functions of your brain is to change your behavior whenever the environment shifts or whenever the context shifts so you're very capable of change and you're kind of doing it constantly however in order to change in an intentional way in order to be in control of that change and not just having it happen to you i think you have to start with some kind of awareness so the point that you just made about the book is actually about self-awareness it's actually about understanding yourself better it's actually about seeing some of the behaviors that you're usually blind to that i feel like is an essential first step if you want to be in control of that process in any way a lot of people feel like they're the victim of their habits but i think if you want to become the architect of them you need to have some kind of self-awareness you need to be able to identify what am i actually doing right now what is the truth of this situation and where do i want to go what is the truth of what i want to become or what to achieve and then you can start to bridge that gap once you have a better clearer understanding of where you currently stand and where you want to go is there an argument that we shouldn't use the term good and bad when it comes to habits now i i look i get it you know most of us would consider you know i don't know moving our bodies more uh you know a inverted commas good habits but it it you know you you describe so beautifully how all behaviors really are playing a role in our lives in some way and in some ways assigning good and bad to them might be you know layering on a level of judgment which can often actually get people even more stuck so i wonder if you can unpack that a little bit for us yeah you can sort of twist this either way like on the one hand you know i do think there's an argument for just saying listen there aren't really good or bad habits there are effective habits in the sense that they are effective at solving the problem that you're facing in that moment and having some additional layer of judgment or feeling guilty about that probably isn't serving you it's not really helping you move forward so maybe we could dismiss that on the other hand i think we all sort of implicitly understand what we're saying when we say it's a good habit or a bad habit but i have wrestled with this a little bit more because there are some academics or some researchers who kind of adamantly say uh that there is no such thing as a good or a bad habit and here's where i've come down on it um pretty much all behaviors in life produce multiple outcomes across time so broadly speaking let's say there's an immediate outcome and there's an ultimate outcome and with your bad habits or things that we commonly call a bad habit usually the immediate outcome is favorable like the immediate outcome of eating a donut is great it's sweet it's sugary it's tasty it's enjoyable it's only the ultimate outcome a year or two years from now or if you keep eating donuts that's unfavorable um with a good habit or something we commonly call a good habit like say going to the gym the immediate outcome is often kind of unfavorable like the immediate outcome going to the gym for the first week is your body looks the same in the mirror the scale hasn't changed if anything you're a little bit sore it's only the ultimate outcome you know a year or two or five later that is favorable and i think first of all this is i feel like this is an important point for a couple reasons first it helps to explain a little bit why we continue to repeat habits that we consider to be bad for us the reason is because they serve you in the moment you know even something like smoking a cigarette the immediate outcome might be that you get to socialize with friends outside the office or you curb your nicotine craving it's only the ultimate outcome that is unfavorable and um we tend to have brains that are wired for immediate returns and that you know that makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint like you would rather have a brain that takes shelter from a storm now than one that doesn't you would rather have a brain that prioritizes getting the next meal than giving equal weight to a meal that you might have in two weeks um and so it serves us usually to be immediately focused but in modern society it comes back to hurt us a little bit uh when it comes to a lot of these bad habits with good habits however um it's a lot about finding ways to delay gratification um or to pull the long-term rewards of those good habits into the present moment so you feel good right now in you know in ancient history or in prehistory our ancestors largely grew up in environments that were immediately focused like i said taking shelter from the storm or getting the next meal or something like that avoiding predators but modern society has become increasingly focused on delayed rewards you go to school now so that you can graduate in a few years you show up at work this week so you can get a paycheck in a month you save for retirement now so that you can have financial security a decade or two or three from now and so modern society asks us to make more delayed return decisions than our ancestors did and so i think we have a little bit of friction with a lot of the good habits that we want to build are more delayed than what maybe our biological underpinnings are wired for so there's a little bit of a challenge there but i think the summary of this is that if i were to define what is a good habit what is a bad habit i would say the cost of your good habits are in the present the cost of your bad habits are in the future and it's really that gap between immediate outcome and ultimate outcome that i think helps define what is good or bad your good habits are the ones that serve you in the long run your bad habits are the ones that don't serve you well in the long run and um that i think is a you know maybe a simplistic way of viewing it but it kind of gives us a clean division for how most of us actually use the word in conversation yeah i really like that and i think it just i think the way you've come down there is it's really helpful because i think sometimes we can in science and academia sort of get a bit lost sometimes in terms of what technically is something you know how can we define it and of course i understand the value in that but it also has to be translated for the layman in terms of well what does that mean for me you know there's value in being precise but there's more value in being useful and so i'd rather be i would rather have a useful definition than a precise one um and uh this is maybe one example of that you're preaching to the converter i'm all for things like that it's about you know you know you wrote a book you you come up with these concepts you write i've got to say i want to talk about your newsletter at some point it's it is just a brilliant newsletter and it guys thank you i would encourage anyone to sign up for it uh the 3c1 newsletter it's it's one that i read on most weeks i won't say i read it every week because i don't but i i see it everywhere i i don't read them more than just happy that you're showing up at all man i think it's great thank you no i actually don't know how you produce that level of content on a weekly basis uh you must have some in fact let's go there now how you must have some pretty good habits or systems in place to produce such high quality output on a weekly basis so i wonder if you're able to share some of them thank you for for saying that um you know pretty much every thought we have is downstream from what we consume and so i think the first step for me is trying to choose good pieces of information to consume um almost all of my like reading is kind of like fuel for me the way that i think about it is um i had this this little challenge this little uh challenging point in my career where after about a year or two my my audience had started growing and i thought oh people are paying attention now now i need to be really good you know and so i thought well if i just spend more time writing then that's how i can make it even better i need to put more effort in but actually i think it ended up making it worse because what i didn't realize is that if i don't have good ideas to write about i don't need to write more i need to read more and so it's kind of like driving a car and reading is like filling up the tank with gas and writing is like going on an adventure and going on a journey and getting somewhere and the point of having a car is not to just stay at the gas station and fill it up with gas all day like you're supposed to actually go somewhere so if you only consume that's not beneficial but if all you do is try to drive and put stuff out then at some point you run out of gas and so i need a balance between the two um i get that in a couple different ways trying to select good books to read of course is you know a big part of that but i have found twitter to be really useful i've spent what probably would be considered an unreasonable amount of time uh curating my twitter feed and like i would say it might be over 100 hours at this point that i've spent looking at different profiles should i follow this person or not what about people i really like who do they follow and like just kind of doing this endlessly you know over and over again i sort of do this kind of it's like bulking and then cutting basically but for twitter so i kind of like bulk up and add 100 accounts that i'm gonna follow and then i sit with that for a couple weeks and i cut again and you know only keep the ones that are really useful really high signal low noise but the end result of that is that essentially i'm crafting my information flow because i log in there you know for an hour or two every day and that's determining what i'm seeing in my timeline what's popping up in my feed and i would say at this point every day i probably get at least three ideas from my twitter feed probably more that i take notes on and maybe spark me to go read something more go down a rabbit hole or something like that so i really feel like that's probably the most important part in my process is crafting information flows and figuring out what to read and then the ideas sort of come bubble up naturally when you're getting that much inspiration um i have more practical or tactical stuff like we have a big spreadsheet that i keep where i dump all my ideas into it and i dump any interesting quotes i have into it and eventually those you know we go back through those and i select my favorites and those kind of make it into the newsletter so there's sort of like an additional round of curation that goes on but uh but i do think reading is probably the most important part of the process yeah what's interesting about that for me james is we started off this conversation talking about our social environments and we we're quite lit we sort of we've kind of evolved into your social media environments which which certainly is part of our social environment the way humans now live and consume information and interact with people is done online it will you know a lot of it's done online a lot of it's done through social media and i really like that idea i've been sort of talking on my instagram uh as it happens about this for a while to people say look you've really got to take control over who you're following you know the way you're gonna think the work your ideas of the world but also how you feel like if you're struggling with stress and anxiety i sort of think well if you are you following people who make you feel more stressed make you feel more anxious whose whole persona is on calling other people out and therefore it's going to be a whole divisive um type of feed you're following or are you or do you want to spend time following you know people who make you feel good positive um you know compassionate you know what whatever it is you want it's not for me to say what people should or shouldn't follow i guess you've found what you need from twitter and you've not just left it up to chance which kind of goes to your central theme in the book as well which is about you know we're results of the habits we're following but half the time we don't even know that these are habits that we've been actually following until we shine a light on it and it's the same principle that you're using with twitter right you're you're being really intentional about who you're following but would you recommend giving given how important our environment what we surround ourselves with is would you almost say that that is something that all of us should be considering when we go online oh i i think so you when you choose the people that you follow online you are sort of like it's like you get to pick the citizens for your own little city you know you're getting to create that and you want to be very careful about who you led into your city about who you're you're allowing to be part of that information flow because essentially what you're choosing is you're choosing the people who are shaping your thoughts and that's one of the most important choices that you can make so i agree with you i think a lot of the time behavior on social media is somewhat mindless we just well we follow someone because we've been following them for a long time and we you know look at their posts because we always look at the post when we log into instagram or twitter or wherever and we don't really think carefully does this actually benefit me like does this is this giving me good things to think about do i feel better about myself after i look at this i had one friend who she told me she was like i just deleted instagram because i felt worse about myself after i logged in every time and it took her a while to realize that and i don't think that's necessary i mean i have an instagram account but i do think that you need to be careful about who you follow so curating that is a big part of yeah you're not only choosing who to follow you're choosing what your future self will think and um you want to make sure that you're giving yourself the opportunity to have good future thoughts yeah i think if you've seen the social dilemma that's come out recently on netflix uh i haven't seen it but i know tristan and have been familiar with his work for a little while yeah i mean it's i certainly think it's one of the most important documentaries i've seen in a long time it definitely warranted me plugging in uh waiting for the box to load for five minutes before i could press play on that but it really has made me think and you know we've not spoken about identity yet i really want to i really want to get into that but what was interesting about the social media algorithms and the way they were explaining in the documentary is that actually they're actually changing the way that we think and therefore changing the way that we behave and if if we really take that put that at the forefront of our minds if the people you follow and the algorithms which are then tracking that and then feeding you more content have the potential to change how you think and then how you behave well what could be more important than curating your online world intentionally one thing i was doing before i think it makes a difference on instagram when you follow someone you can actually go in and actually um add them to a close friends list and that's what i started doing maybe there's 10 or 20 people they're not all close friends but i've added them to close friends because i'm like i really like these people's content i actually want to see their content when they post it and that's that's that again it's just another practical thing that i think it helps people take control a little bit yeah i would agree it's uh choosing information flows social media being probably one of the primary ones for all of us is a huge crucial thing for kind of shaping your future thoughts so jason but you've got these four laws these these four laws of change of behavior change i guess and i wonder if we could go through them i guess we've touched on a couple of them in sort of passing so far but before we start that i wonder if you could define what a habit is what an atomic habit is and then we can maybe sort of expand upon these four laws so there are a couple different definitions of a habit you know the one that's most common or is something to the effect of a habit is a behavior that you've repeated enough times to be more or less automatic or you know something fairly mindless automatic routine behavior so brushing your teeth tying your shoes unplugging the toaster after each use like you just kind of do these things automatically they take 30 seconds or a minute or you know they're pretty quick um there are some other ways to define a habit though and i like to use some of these alternate definitions because i think it helps reveal a little bit more nuance about what habits are and where they live in our lives so for example another way to define a habit is it's a behavior that is repeated in a particular context so you start to realize that the environment matters a lot in habits like your couch at 7 pm might be where you watch netflix and so it's actually the behavior watching netflix is tied to that context if you're somewhere else at 7 pm then you probably won't perform that same habit and so you start to realize how much your behavior is linked to the environment or the circumstance around you a third definition of a habit which i really like um jason rhea who's a behavioral scientist he has something he says something to the effect of habits are solutions to recurring problems in your environment and what i like about that is it speaks to habits serve a purpose they are effective at solving some kind of problem and if you start to unpack that a little bit more you see that there can be quite a variety in the habits that people build for example you finish the work day and it's like 6 p.m and you're exhausted and tired from a long day of work well in a sense that's a problem that your brain needs to solve and one person might solve that problem by playing video games for an hour and another person might solve it by smoking a cigarette and a third person might solve it by going for a run and you can see pretty quickly that there are some solutions that are more effective or optimal or healthy than others and i think the question to ask yourself you know early on when you're a child you inherit these solutions you kind of inherit you soak up the habits that you see role model by your parents or your friends or whatever experiences that you happen to have in your narrow sliver of the universe but what are the odds that the habits that you inherited from your childhood the experiences you had and the things that you saw done are also the optimal solution to the the problems that you face yeah it's very unlikely that whatever you happen to stumble across is actually the optimal way to do it and if you realize that then you come to discover that as you become an adult and you're more in control of your habits and your environment it becomes your responsibility to assess what are the problems and challenges i face repeatedly the things i'm trying to solve and what would be a better way to do that what are the optimal solutions so it's not your fault if you inherited unhelpful habits or unproductive habits but it is your responsibility to try to figure out how to adjust those and how to improve those in some meaningful way all right so that's kind of my long definition of what is a habit now what is an atomic habit i use the phrase atomic because i think it has three meanings and all three kind of apply to building better habits so the first meaning of the word atomic is tiny or small like an atom and that is part of my philosophy habits should be small and easy to do and not very difficult and convenient the second meaning of the word atomic is the fundamental unit in a larger system so atoms built into molecules molecules built into compounds and so on and we mentioned this earlier but your habits are kind of like the fundamental unit of the overall system that you run each one's like a little gear in the overall machine and collectively you put all those little units together and you end up with your daily routine or your lifestyle and then the third and final meaning of the word atomic is the source of immense energy or power and i think that if you combine all three of those meanings you make changes that are small and easy to do and you layer them together like units in a larger system you can end up with some really powerful results and those three kind of different meanings of atomic i think if you apply those to building better habits you can end up with a really powerful system of better habits and behaviors and so that's kind of where the phrase atomic havoc came from and how i feel uh or think about using it in that context yeah well no thanks for that really a really useful way to think about habits so trying to think about habits through the lens of health let's say meditation is a habit so i should say meditation is a practice that many people struggle to do consistently many people have the the desired outcome of i want to meditate i want to be a meditator i read about all these benefits but i just can't do it and wonder if it might be useful to try and unpick why it's difficult but through the lens of those four laws i wonder if you'd be game for that to see if we can maybe to make it super practical for people yeah sure of course let me just give a summary of the four laws first and then we can kind of dive into using that example so if you want to have a stick you kind of roughly have four different things that if you can get them working for you they're sort of like levers and if they're in the right positions building good habits is easier and if they're in the wrong positions you're kind of fighting an uphill battle so the first thing is you want to make your habits obvious um most habits are preceded by some kind of cue and so you want the cues of your habits to be obvious available visible easy to see the easier it is to see or get your attention the more likely you are to stick with the habit or perform it the second one is to make your habits attractive if you want your habits to be motivating if you want them to be compelling then you need to be attractive in some form the third law is to make it easy so the easier more convenient frictionless your habits are the more likely likely you are to perform them we've talked a little bit about that with environment design already and the fourth and final thing is you want to make it satisfying so the more satisfying or enjoyable a habit is the more likely you are to stick with it now not every behavior in life is satisfying or rewarding right sometimes things have a cost or a consequence sometimes they're fairly neutral but if a behavior is not rewarding if it's not enjoyable at least to some degree then it's unlikely to become a habit it needs to have some kind of positive emotional signal associated with it that kind of tells your brain hey that felt good you should repeat this again next time so just so real quick summary the four laws behavior change make it obvious make it attractive make it easy make it satisfying i think that sort of gives you a high level framework for getting a good habit to stick i'll just kind of make a note of this right here we don't have to get into it in detail but i just want to mention it which is those four help you build a good habit if you want to break a bad habit then you just invert those four so rather than making it obvious you want to make it invisible unsubscribe from emails or reduce exposure to the queue rather than making it attractive you want to make it unattractive making it easy make it difficult increase friction add steps rather making it satisfying make it unsatisfying add some kind of immediate cost or consequence to the behavior so that's like the high level view for breaking a bad habit uh and obviously the book goes into many more examples of like how to do each of those but um we can talk about the how to apply it to meditation now yeah so someone's listening to this or watching it on youtube and they go right okay i'm bought in gonna get james's book i'm gonna start a meditation practice where should i begin um how would you advise them using your sort of framework of these laws so usually if i if i say okay we've got to start in some place what's the first thing i should do i actually typically recommend what i call the two-minute rule and the two-minute rule is part of that third law which is making it easy um and the two minerals says take whatever habit you're trying to build and scale it down to something takes two minutes or less to do so do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat or meditate for you know 15 minutes a day becomes meditated for two minutes um and sometimes i say that and people resist it a little bit because they're like okay you know i know the real goal isn't just to take my yoga mat out right and i know i'm actually trying to do the workout so this is some kind of mental trick and like why would i fall for it basically and i get where people are coming from but so i have this reader his name is mitch and uh he lost a bunch of weight kept it off for over a decade but for the first um six weeks that he went to the gym he had a rule for himself where he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes so he'd get in the car drive to the gym get out do half an exercise get back in the car drive home and it sounds ridiculous right it sounds silly you're like obviously this is not going to get the guy the results that he wants but if you take a step back what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up right he was becoming the type of person that went to the gym four days a week even if it was only for five minutes and i think this is a much deeper truth about habits that often gets overlooked which is a habit must be established before it can be improved it has to become the standard in your life before you can optimize and scale it up and for whatever reason we get very all or nothing with our habits you know it's like i have to find the perfect workout program or the ideal business plan or the best diet to follow before i can take a first step and i can imagine in this um meditation example there are probably many people who are like well what is the best form of meditation like that would be one of the first first things they would ask themselves then they'd spend hours researching on youtube and whatever and you know a lot of the time we put off action because we think i need to learn more but usually the best way to learn is by taking action and so the two-minute rule kind of helps you overcome that tendency to have this like perfectionist spiral in research too much and encourage you encourages you to just get started so i think that's step number one is let's take meditation and let's just scale it down to something you can always do we're just going to meditate for say 60 seconds and then we can start to apply some of the other laws so let's say we've got the first law make it obvious well uh there are a couple different things that you could make meditation obvious you could if you're gonna do it on your phone if you're gonna download one of the meditation apps like calm or waking up or headspace or something like that you could take that app and put it on the home screen the way that i mentioned earlier in this interview about moving audible there so you can make it the most obvious app on your phone if you don't care about that or you're just going to do it like in your house or in a room or something you need to figure out where is that going to occur so this is one of this is something i mentioned in the book i think it's in chapter five i talk about implementation intentions and implementation intentions are when you state your intention to implement a particular behavior at a certain time in a certain place on a certain day so it's like when do i meditate i meditate on mondays at 7 00 am in my guest room or whatever you know like you just you have to have a space where that actually happens and um maybe you have a meditation pillow so you set that up and that's all you know the environment the space is primed you know it could be just in the corner of your living room or something but there needs to be some space where that habit lives and it's very clear when and where to do it a lot of people feel like what they lack is motivation but what they really lack is clarity they lack a very clear understanding of when and where the habit's going to live so honestly i think just those two things so that's the first law make it obvious deciding when and where it's going to occur and this and the third law make it easy scaling it down and just doing it for 60 seconds or two minutes or whatever those two things alone would go a long way in getting people to to stick with a new meditation habit yeah that's really really helpful james and i just want to share with you a patient's story from i'm gonna guess seven eight years ago and you know i i've often said this but as a medical doctor i mean i can definitely put my hands up and and say very clearly that my patients have taught me a lot more than i taught them because i often say this when i'm teaching dots as well really listen to your patients listen to what they're telling you that will often tell you why something's working why it's not working and one thing i've observed i've been really curious as to why does the same advice work for one patient and not work for another patient why does one patient go with that and sort of implement it all and come back like a different person literally a different person not just different health a different person which we'll also talk about um and why why does someone else really really struggle i remember this case uh this lady who i think stress and and chronic unremitting stress was driving a lot of her symptoms her headaches her insomnia her mood issues and we tried all kinds of things and she actually wanted to meditate but she said she tried before but when i sort of probed her a little bit she said it's just not for me doc i've tried i've tried the apps you know i've tried youtube videos it's just not for me and when you when you probed when i sort of delved a bit deeper she'd actually made it really hard she wanted to do 20 minutes consistently and because she hadn't met that bar she and her head is not a meditation so i said to her i said hey look what do you think you could commit to every day could could you do 10 minutes she doesn't know i could try but i don't think so i said okay how about five she thought about it she said i don't know i said okay okay how about one minute she said well yeah i could do one minute but will it make any difference i said well hold on a minute let's just make a commitment here right so i and actually you know it's a lot of a lot of young girls adults about that and i said so i'll tell you whatever you commit to doing i will also do it i write it in a diary and when you when when you come back to see me next week we'll compare right so i added that sort of accountability piece with her but she started off doing one minute and we we also defined when she was going to do it was going to be first thing in the morning before she did anything else that one minute you know after a couple of weeks became five minutes not because i asked her to but because she as you would say she was mastering the art of showing up you know i didn't know how to articulate it i didn't know the science of behavior change back then i was sort of just going on intuition as a clinician how can i help that lady do what she tells me she wants to do and now she's meditating for 20 minutes a day locked in right and it's so if anyone is skeptical about your two-minute rule i would sort of concur as a clinician that this stuff works you know you just gotta commit to it right you know one of the most motivating feelings for the human mind is the feeling of progress yeah if you're making progress you have every reason in the world to continue you know it's like oh we're moving forward i'm you know i'm making progress on the goal that i'm hoping to achieve and so there's this weird trick that we can play on ourselves in our brain where we're like well i want to meditate for 20 minutes and if she would have done it for one minute she would have felt like a failure if that was her expectation right but somehow just by shifting it and saying no i'm only going to try to do this for one minute if she does it for two minutes she feels like she crushed it you know and so this it's this very strange thing and i i think um that's a good argument for especially in the beginning starting with keeping the bar low and you need to get in your reps and this is true i think for almost any kind of habit that you're building like you need the repetitions whether it's meditating for one minute or writing one sentence or reading one page it doesn't matter that it's it's almost always better to do less than you had hoped than to do nothing at all and um the two-minute rule kind of helps nudge you toward that direction nudge you toward the direction of getting in your reps getting it done and mastering the art of showing up even if it's in a small way and then using that as a foothold to advance to the next level and kind of build some momentum and get that feeling of progress yeah now you sort of frame that with two of the four laws but i really like the fourth law uh make it satisfying what are some of the ways that people can make things satisfying as you were talking about before how can you often the problem is with good habits or you know in adverse economics good habits the problem often is is the the the design effect is somewhere in the future how can how can people bring that into the presence well i think the ultimate form of a reward is feeling like you're showing up as the type of person that you want to be that it's reinforcing your desired identity but as you mentioned the problem is it takes a long time for that to be true like the first time you meditate you don't identify as i'm a meditator and it feels good to do this because that's part of who i am and part of my identity it might take you a year or two or who knows how long before you actually start to adopt that feeling i mean i didn't identify as an author until i actually had a published book like even when i was writing it i didn't feel like i was an author so that that can take a long time um i think the key though is that in my opinion there are kind of two things one you want some kind of a reward that is immediate and i think the speed of it is actually quite important you need to feel that positive emotional signal right away so that you have a repeat a reason to tie that behavior to feeling good and you have a reason to repeat it again in the future when the same situation arises so there are a couple different ways you can do this you know one very simple way that applies to almost any habit is to use a habit tracker so i'd like to use my dad as an example here so both of my parents like to swim but one of the challenges with swimming is that your body looks exactly the same when you get out of the water as it does when you jumped in and so you have no evidence that that workout was worth it right you have no evidence that this is actually getting you what you want and so what my dad does is after each workout he pulls out a little calendar and he puts an x on that day and it's a small thing but that x in the moment is something that matches the frequency of the habit every time he swims he also gets to put an x down and it gives him a signal of visual progress we just mentioned that progress is one of the most motivating feelings for the human mind you need to have some way to visualize that some way to see that you're progressing because if you can't see the change in your body or there's no change on the scale yet you need something else that says hey that was the right thing to do this feels good to show up and do the thing i want to do so a habit tracker is one very simple one the other thing though and people talk about external rewards all the time um and so you know like oh i went to the gym and so i'm to reward myself by getting an ice cream cone or something but my little nuance or argument here is i think you want to choose external rewards that align with the internal identity that you're trying to build so if you reward yourself for going to the gym by getting an ice cream cone that's kind of like casting votes for two different identities like on the one hand you're casting vote for being a healthy person on the other hand you're casting a vote for eating ice cream or whatever so instead you could do something like reward yourself you know any week when you don't miss a workout you reward yourself with a bubble bath at the end of the week and that's sort of like a an external reward that also is a vote for taking care of your body and so that kind of aligns with that identity that you're trying to build through working out or say any month that you hit your target of saving for retirement you some people might say oh well you could reward yourself by buying a leather jacket but that doesn't really align with the financial saving mentality you're trying to build so instead i would say well any month that you hit that target you could reward yourself with say a free hour where you get to take a walk in the park or free time to do whatever you want because really what you're trying to get to with retirement is freedom and so you're kind of aligning with that same internal identity that you're trying to build but i do think that the faster so the immediacy part the faster you can get a positive reward that's a really powerful thing and the more that your external rewards can align with the internal identity you're trying to build that's an important thing to keep in mind as well yeah i mean we we at home use uh tick charts on the wall to try and get that sort of progress going so my wife me my two kids we we've all got a tick chart on the wall we've chosen you know this is this is basically what my last book was about where we've chosen a mind heart a mind body and hearts health snack a day so something for your mental health something for your physical health something for your emotional health they all take under five minutes and my kids do them initially at least to get their tick right so that was actually the motivator for them to do it and i think what you said there about the speed at which you um get the reward i think that's really important because i found that often the kids sometimes if they would forget to put their tick and i say oh you know you can do at the end of the day when you're back from school you can put your ticks on you start to lose the connection right between [Music] behavior and reward and i wonder for you james like i've heard i've heard you say in a previous interview that's you know when you when you send out your weekly newsletter you know within an hour you start to get replies and you're getting that feedback so you've you've got that loop going oh i've done something i start to to to hear and experience how that's impacting people how did that go for you when you were writing a book which obviously takes a long time and you're not getting that immediate reward did that make it harder to stay focused and to stay motivated definitely i think you know sort of the the topic that we're kind of circling right now is basically like immediate feedback or having some kind of having feedback loops in your behavior and how those influence your actions and so you're right you know whether you post a tweet and you kind of start seeing likes trickle in you know within the first few minutes or whether you send out a newsletter in my case and you get replies within an hour those feedback loops are very fast and very motivating because it feels good to get that to get those signals to feedback those signals of progress and that's enough to get me to show up again the next day and like let's work on next week's article or let's work on the next tweet or whatever um but with writing a book the feedback cycle the feedback loop is so long you one of the great challenges of writing a book is you sit down and work on something it's this huge manuscript 200 pages 300 pages whatever and it's a total mess and you work hard for eight hours and it's just as much of a mess as when you started there's nothing and you have to continue to do that for like two years before it actually turns into something and like starts to congeal and clarify itself um and i didn't realize that that was going to be such a challenge for me because atomic habits was my first book but when i was in the middle of it it was very hard and i didn't i don't need a million people to read my work when i'm working on it but i do need somebody to give me some feedback and say hey you're on the right path and so eventually the way that i solve that was by hiring an editor to send drafts to and just get a little bit of feedback from them and you know iterate on my ideas and that was really crucial because that first year was very hard for me i felt like i was kind of lost um i have another point that i want to add to this kind of feedback loop conversation and it came up when you were you were mentioning something a minute ago this is true it's it's feedback loops like that are powerful immediate feedback is powerful not only for solidifying good habits for kind of making us feel motivated and getting these signals of progress but it also will curtail bad behavior if you have a very immediate consequence or punishment to the behavior so two of my favorite examples um danella meadows who's a was a great systems thinker and engineer she had an idea where she said uh if we want to reduce pollution any manufacturing facility that produces waste and like lets the wastewater out into the river they should be required to take up water for their facility downstream so that the very first place that feels the effects of the pollution is the place that is producing it yeah um another one that i really liked apparently boeing when they were working on their planes when they first made the switch i think this is in the 1990s when they first made the switch from a fully manual wing to one that was fully software driven the engineers who designed the software were required to be on the first test flight and it's such a partially that's because they wanted to test some things but it's such a great alignment of incentives you know like you better get this right because you're going to be the one who pays the cost and um the more those are two just beautiful examples of immediate feedback loops in this case an immediate consequence and the faster that consequence or reward is delivered the more immediately it's associated with a behavior the more likely it is the behavior is going to change and this is something in atomic habits i refer to this as the cardinal rule of behavior change which is behaviors that are immediately rewarded get repeated behaviors that are immediately punished get avoided and it's really the speed that is kind of the key factor there if you enjoyed that conversation i think you are really going to enjoy the one i had with the former monk jay shetty on the simple things that you can do to train your mind it's right there give it a listen and let me know what you think the monk mindset is about pursuing your truest goals your truest self and your most authentic aligned goals

Channel: Dr Rangan Chatterjee

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Keywords: the4pillarplan, thestresssolution, feelbetterin5, wellness, drchatterjee, feelbetterlivemore, ranganchatterjee, 4pillars, drchatterjee podcast, health tips, nutrition tips, health hacks, live longer, age in reverse, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, health interview

Id: RzD-Fhjfefs

Length: 146min 35sec (8795 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 18 2021