The Surprising Power of Small Habits by James Clear

thank you good morning all right I'd like to start with a story and the story is about Team Sky which is Great Britain's professional cycling team sometime in the mid-2000s around 2010 they hired a man named Dave Brailsford and at the time Team Sky had a very middle-of-the-road record when it came to performance on the world stage they had won about 1 gold medal in the last 100 years from 1908 to 2008 they had never won a Tour de France the premier event in cycling and when they hired Dave Brailsford they said we would like to change this we'd like to improve our performance we'd like to reach a higher level of performance what's your plan to help us do that and when they hired Brailsford he said I have this strategy called the aggregation of marginal gains and the way that he described it was the 1% improvement and nearly everything that you do and so they started by looking at a lot of things you would expect a cycling team to look at they improved their bike tires made them slightly lighter they put a more ergonomic seat on the bike they had their riders wear biofeedback sensors so they could see how each person responded to the training and practice that they did each day they had their outdoor riders wear indoor racing suits because they were lighter and more aerodynamic but then they did a variety of things that you wouldn't expect a cycling team to do they split tested different types of massage gels to see which one led to the best form of recovery they taught their riders how to wash their hands to reduce the risk of infection keep them healthy they even figured out what kind of pillow led to the best night's sleep for each rider and then brought that on the road with them to hotels so Brailsford said if we can actually execute on this strategy if we can aggregate all these small changes these little 1% improvements then I think we can win the Tour de France in about 5 years he ended up being wrong they won the Tour de France in three years and then they repeated again the fourth year with a different writer and then just last year they won for the third time in four years and Brailsford strategy really came to fruition at the Fix in London in 2012 when they won 70% of the gold medals available and so what I'd like to start us off with is the idea that small improvements actually can add up to a very significant change in a relatively short period of time and this is just basic math all right if you get one percent better each day over 365 days you end up 37 times better at the end of the year if you get one percent worse you take yourself although it almost all the way down to zero and this idea that one percent improvements are not just nice to have or not just a nice little bonus but actually something significant that adds up to a very substantial increase in the long run is the places I'd like to start us at today now you might say ok well 1% improvements are nice but clearly no one is going to get 1% better every single day so is that ever enough to accumulate to anything considering that we're not going to be perfect all the time and I would argue yes in fact you can get 10 times better if you get 1% better 5 days a week 46 weeks a year so it's about 230 days in total that gives you 6 weeks off for holidays illness laziness and just generally not getting things done but you're still 10 times better at the end of the year and what I would like to propose is that the way to do this is not by setting better goals for ourselves or at our organizations but by building better systems and obtaining better habits in fact you could say that the system had always been there for Brailsford and Team Sky there the goal had not had always been though the goal would never changed they wanted to win a Tour de France each year they wanted to win Olympic gold medals it wasn't the goal that made the difference instead it was their system the way that they applied those improvements in a 1% basis day after day so the remainder of this talk is about how to do that how to do that for ourselves how to do that in our organizations how do we make those 1% changes tangible possible and real in the environments that were in each day the key idea here is that the biggest surprise about these small systemic changes about these tiny habits is that they add up to something very significant and meaningful in order to do this to talk about how to build these better habits how to build these better systems I'm gonna take what I'm gonna call an inside out approach we'll start by focusing on the psychology of the individual thus college of you and we'll gradually work out from our mindset and the things that we believe in the way that our mind works to the environment that we had that we surround ourselves with each day and the team members that we're surrounded by at work in an organization's I want to thank a few people who've influenced my work in a substantial way BJ Fogg leav about nearly all Kelly McGonigal Dan party and Scott Adams their work has influenced everything that I'll share in this presentation I think it's important to cite them and I also have a long list of other people who have influenced my work at James Kirk comm slash Thanks so part one mindset there was a study done at Yale University on the psychology of aging and it was a 23-year study they talked to people and they basically went into it one of two cohorts the first cohort had positive views of Aging so when they asked them how they felt about Aging or what their expectations were for old age they had relatively good things to say you know I would be moving into the prime of my life or I'll be smarter than I've ever been before they were very positive about it the second group was very negative about it my body's gonna wear down I don't have much to look forward to everybody gets sick we'll all die at some point that type of thing what they found was that of the 660 adults in the study the ones with positive views of aging lived on average seven point six years longer and that actually is a very significant number things like exercise and diet don't account for 7.6 years and life expectancy so why if your view is positive the reason is because you'll take healthy actions as a result and if your view is negative you'll assume that deterioration of your health is inevitable if you have a positive view of aging you'll say something like well I should continue to eat healthy and work out because I feel good about moving into old age of a lot to live for whereas if you have a negative view of aging you'll say something like what's the point in me exercising I'm gonna get sick anyway I'm expecting to get old and so on the point here is that there's a deeper level of behavior change and habit formation than what we often discuss in the way that I would describe it is this the outer layer of behavior change are the results that we get the outcome the goal so that's the outside layer often we say we need better goals we need better outcomes we need better results we need to hit new sales numbers and so to do that we take one step in on behavior change when we talk about our actions now the actions and the results are usually where we stop when it comes to habits and behavior change we say how can we build better habits how can we take action on this particular goal how can we take an action to get a result but I would argue and that Yale study would prove this that there's a deeper level of behavior change as well and that level is identity or belief or mindset and take your pick of what you'd like to term it but the identity that we hold drives the actions that we take and the results that we get so in the Yale study the people have a positive identity when it comes to aging they believe that they should take positive actions and thus they get better results in the long run will take a common example when it comes to personal habits weight loss so losing 20 pounds or 10 kilos over the next six months that'll be the outer layer okay that will be the result that you're going for in order to lose those 10 kilos you need to move in to the actions that you've taken so that would be something like working out three times a week or eating healthy but most people stop there and they don't get the underlying identity that drives the behavior so for example in this case the identity might be I want to become the type of person who doesn't miss workouts and my argument is if we focus just on the identity if you become the type of person who doesn't miss workouts if you become the type person who exercise it consistently and only focus on the core of behavior change it ripples out to the other layers anyway so the key idea here is that a shift in mindset leads to a shift in daily choices and a shift in Jayla daily choices leads to significantly better results in the long run alright part two priorities I actually think this is the most texts I'll have a nice slide I think it's a great quote the word priority came into the English language 1400s it was singular it meant the first or very prior thing and it stayed singular for the next 500 years only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities illogically we reasoned that by changing the word we could bend reality and somehow we would now have multiple first things you hear about this a lot in organizations they'll talk about priority 1 priority 2 priority 3 priority for everything is a priority everything is an urgency even though it's not possible for us to focus on more than one thing at a time so this second section on priorities I would you could also call it ruthless elimination and when it comes to building better habits and changing behavior in organizations and in our personal lives we have to be ruthless about the things that we focus on so in order to talk about this some more and talk about the importance of simplifying why should we only have one priority than three or four or five I'd like to talk about a psychological concept called the Zeigarnik effect the Zeigarnik effect is best illustrated by a story from Germany in the 1920s there are a group of men that went into a restaurant and there were about four of them they sat down to have lunch and their waiter came up and took their orders and remembered them all without writing any of it down and it was a relatively complex order so when he came back and the food was wonderful and it was exactly what they ordered they were impressed they're impressed that he could remember everything that they had told them for the order and so they finished their meal they got up out of the restaurant and walked down the street and one of the men realized that he left his wallet at the restaurant so he turned around went back in and flag down the waiter and said I'm sorry I forgot my wallet do you know where it is I'd leave it at the table and the waiter looked at him said I'm sorry who are you and he said you just waited on us we were really impressed with your memory you remembered our entire order we were just here and the waiter said oh I only remember each order until it's filled and the lesson here is that the Zeigarnik effect is this tendency that we have to experience intrusive thoughts about something that we're working on an objective that was once pursued and left income so if you have projects at your work that are half-finished these things are open loops in your mind and they're it's like a nagging brain right it creates this curiosity gap or this gap in your brain for all the things that you have not finished yet and I would argue that our brains are often like it's like a computer there's only a certain amount of memory available right and so for each open task that is left unfinished you drain the percentage of memory that you have available for the other tasks that you're working on so the more unfinished tasks that you have available the more priorities that you have any one time the more open loops that you have the less percentage of memory and power and attention and focus that you can deliver to the thing that you're working on at any given time it's the Zeigarnik effect in action we actually have some good data on this there was a study of a Parole Board judges there were about a thousand of them a thousand cases that they looked at in this particular research study and the parole board judges would have criminals come out they would sit before the before the parole board and then they would vote on whether or not they would be released from prison or would have to go back in what they you would think what you would hope is that in order for a criminal to get released from prison it should be based on the time they serve the type of crime that they did whether or not they had good behavior all sorts of things built into the criminal justice system in fact what they found the single biggest factor on whether or not someone was released on parole or whether they had to go back into prison was the time of day that they were seen so this is a map of the judges decisions throughout the day you can see that in the beginning of the day it starts around 60% likelihood that a criminal would be released on parole as the morning goes on the judges get fatigued their willpower depletes and the odds of you getting a favorable hearing decreases that first dotted line is lunch so they take a break the judge's decision making spikes right back up to where it was before then goes back down they take another break in the afternoon and then pretty soon just falls off the cliff in the day ends now this idea is a psychological concept called decision fatigue or ego depletion sometimes he recalled and the point here is that the more decisions that we over the course of the day the more your willpower and focus gets fatigued it's kind of like a muscle right if I were to pick up that weight and do curls for a little while I can do them for a minute or two but if you catch me 30 minutes from now I'm not gonna have much left and that's how our willpower works as well so you can basically say that our motivation level fluctuates throughout the day so if we're looking to build better habits in our organizations if you have a project that you or your team is trying to work on you have one of two decisions you can make you either can take a very difficult thing to work on and hope that you stack it at the correct time of day when your willpower is high enough to perform that action or you can pick a habit that's so easy that you can't say no to it regardless of how depleted or exhausted or tired you are throughout the day so the solution is either to maximize the time at which you try to do a difficult project or to break things down into a simple manner that you can actually stick with regardless of where your willpower is at any given moment so the key idea here is your brain only has so much capacity to provide your willpower is like a muscle and similar to muscles it gets fatigued so we need to understand this about ourselves and about the people on our teams if we want to stick to good habits and build consistent systems in the long run the way that I would describe it is that we often assume that as humans we are like a tree and we can grow wider and taller and bigger we have infinite energy to give to things we take on more projects we take on more priorities we take on more responsibilities but in fact we're much more like a rosebush a rosebush is relatively confined in its shape and size it's not that big and it can't grow wider and taller and in order for a rosebush to fully blossom for a few of the flowers to actually bloom to their full potential and flourish you have to trim away many of the buds and so by trimming away good ideas you make room for the great ideas to flourish we're much more like a rosebush than we are like a tree all right let me give you some practical ideas on how to do this how do we it's great to say that we need to simplify but how do we actually make that happen in the real world so Warren Buffett one of the most famous investors of our time he adheres to a concept of called the twenty five five rule and this story comes from a man named Ike Flint whose warren buffett's private pilot Mike Flint has flown multiple US presidents he's also the pilot for Warren Buffett so he's had a very successful career and he came to Warren Buffett one day and he said Warren I would like to fly this particular type of plane I think whenever we upgrade we should get this new one and he said Mike you know if you're working for me in ten years when we buy a new plane then I probably have failed you as a boss so here's what I'd like you to do and this exercise that I'm about to share you can do on any level you can do it for your career you can do it for the things that you or your team need to get done this month you can do it for the things that you need to work on today or this week and you said I'd like you to take the 25 things that you want to achieve in your career and write them down on a list so Mike Clint goes away writes downs twenty-five things he gets done and he says alright great I want you to circle the top five things on that list so spend some more time he circles the top five priorities and says all right tell me what your strategy is at this point Mike Flynn said well I have my top five things so I'm gonna work on those first and he said great what about the other things on your list he said well those will be the things I do on nights or weekends or when I get tired or bored or you know a project stalls I'll work on that and Warren Buffett said Mike got it all wrong the things that you have circled are your priorities the other items on your list number six through 25 this is your never do under any circumstance list and the reason is because it's so easy for us to rationalize spending time on things that are good uses of time but not great uses of time its items that six through twenty five on your list that take up time and space and energy because we can justify why we need to do them they're on the list for a reason they just don't happen to be the best uses of our time and so I would encourage you to take that exercise and think about how you can apply it to the work that you're doing or the professional or personal priorities that you have there's another way that we can do this and I have a digital version of this if you want to download it it's free it's just a Google spreadsheet that lays out these four grids just at James com /e box but it's called the Eisenhower box Dwight Eisenhower well was a US president who used this concept way back in the 1940s and 1950s and basically we have four quadrants that we can define our tasks in we have things that are urgent and we have things that are not urgent and we have things that are important and things that are not important now if something's urgent and important if it's in the do box it's very easy to know that you need to do it it's urgent so you're gonna work on it right away and it's important so there's not much debate however the things in Quadrant two the things that are important but are never agent these are the things that are really hard to convince yourself to do because you know that you should be doing them but they're never enough to make it onto your to-do list so for these we need to decide or schedule a time for to do it for the things that are not important but their urgent these are the things that take up our time and space the fires that we try to put out each day the things that come into your inbox and you end up responding to someone else's agenda rather than your own these are the things that we need delegate or to at least box if we're not gonna delegate to someone else let's delegate it to a different time of our day so that we're in control of it rather than being the victim of the things that come into our lives the urgencies and emergencies that are they're thrown into us and then finally we have things are not urgent not important and I would imagine most people in this room don't have a lot of those because you're fairly productive but there are plenty of things that end up creeping into our lives that don't serve us and so we need to delete those out of our out of our daily schedules now the key idea here is that Bizzy does not equal important urgent is not the same thing as necessary so we need to filter out the fluff whether it's through the 25:5 rule or just recognizing the Zeigarnik effect in our own lives so that we can focus on what matters now part three let's talk about triggers I call this the three r's of habit formation you'll see it you'll see it labeled with different terms depending on where you're at or what you're reading this is mentioned the power of habit which is a good book a good primer on this little loop but the basic idea is that no matter what habit you're working on there are three main steps based on the research the first step is the prompt or the cue or the trigger it's like a reminder the thing that signals that we should do something so if my phone buzzes for example that's a trigger the next piece is the routine this is the behavior itself the actual habit that you're gonna perform so my phone buzzes that's the trigger I answer the phone that's the routine the third piece is the reward so this is the benefit that you get for doing the behavior and it's important to note that all habits good or bad have some kind of benefit reward associated with them take smoking for example people will often label smoking as a bad habit so what's the benefit what's the reward of it well there's some kind of physiological reward there's a hit of nicotine that's associated with it and then there are often social rewards so I get to share smoke with a friend or a colleague something like that so regardless of how we label habits or behaviors the important thing is to note that all of them have some kind of benefit neurologically associate with them now so my phone rings that's a reminder I answer the phone that's the routine and then I get to satisfy my curiosity or find out who's calling that's the benefit and what ends up happening is that if that reward is positive then it tells your brain hey remember next time this reminder happens next time this trigger comes along we should repeat that pattern and once you make it through the cycle enough times it becomes a habit it becomes ingrained so how can we leverage the first part of this the trigger or the reminder well there are five types of triggers in our lives time location preceding event emotional state and other people now let's go through how to structure your day and some of these triggers to make new habits more likely to make it more likely that will follow through in the long run so what the first distinction that I'd like to make is between a cold trigger and a hot trigger a cold trigger is something that you're told to do or something that's supposed to trigger new behavior but you cannot act on it right now so for example if you're walking down the street outside of this building and you see a sign that says go visit James clerk ahhmm you can't go there right away you need to remember next time I get in front of a computer I should go visit James clear calm so it's a cold trigger you can't act on it meanwhile if I send you a text message and hey did you see this link at James clear calm and send you a link to the article you can click on it right away that's a hot trigger a hot trigger can be acted upon immediately the important thing to note is that as much as possible in our teams and in our personal lives we should try to build hot triggers for the tasks that we are asking people to do because hot triggers can be acted on right away if you just give people cold triggers for the tasks that they're asked to do it's hard for them to take action and this also has a very widely applicable point for consumer behavior and consumer psychology I know we have a variety of people working on tech companies here if you imagine a user coming to a particular user interface or to a particular piece of software you need to give them hot triggers that allow them to act upon right away whatever the thing is that you're asking them to do so BJ Fogg who's a professor at Stanford says in his estimation this is the key to behavior change put hot triggers and the path of motivated people and that's all you really need to do if you want to drive behavior in a significant way alright let's talk about how to do this so this is what I call the T chart exercise it's very basic exercise you're gonna have a piece of paper and you'll have two columns in the first column you're gonna list out all the things that you do each day without fail so usually there's a big group of behaviors in the beginning of your day for example I wake up I go to the bathroom I take a shower I get changed I brush my teeth I eat breakfast and make my morning cup of coffee and so on there's another batch of behaviors usually when you get into work and around lunchtime you may have like a bedtime routine or dinner behaviors but whatever it is you're gonna try to in as much detail as possible write out all the things that you do each day without fail then in column 2 next to it you're gonna write all the things that happen to you each day without fail so the Sun rises the Sun sets a traffic light turns green a traffic light turns red you receive a text message a song comes on the radio somebody sends you an email all of these things that are happening to you finally what we're gonna do is think about the new behavior that you want to instill in your team in yourself your personal life whatever it is and then find the trigger on the list that best match is with the new behavior that you're trying to build and what I mean by match is not the same type of behavior but it's in this proper sequence to add the behavior in so let me give you an example let's say that I wanted to start meditating okay I could say I write out all the things that I'm doing each day and they're happening to me today and then I realize all right in the morning I make a cup of coffee and so for this new behavior I could say when I make my morning cup of coffee I will meditate for 60 seconds and so the current behavior the things that you're already doing they're listed on this T chart become the trigger for the new behavior that you're trying to build and the reason that this is important is that your current behaviors things that are already habits have this neurological Network built into your mind they're already they're already have like an on-ramp in your brain and so you're just kind of tapping into that so you can tag the new behavior and link it to something that's already strongly correlated in your mind all right let's talk about other ways to make building new habits easier I think David Allen spoke at stretch last year or two years ago and he has a concept that he calls the 2-minute rule and the way that he describes it is the two-minute rule is anything that takes less than two minutes you should do it right away so making a phone call back you've been putting off sending that email that you've been avoiding throwing the laundry in washing the dishes whatever it is if it takes less than two minutes just do it right away take out the trash and so on now I think we can adapt that rule for habits and behavior change there is no habit that we're gonna work on that takes less than two minutes to do but nearly any habit can be started in under two minutes so if you take exercise for example you know often people will get home from a long day of work and they say oh I'm too exhausted to go for a run or try to exercise so I never get around to doing it because I think about oh I have to run you know five kilometres or whatever some long amount some long distance it seems overwhelming to me so rather than focus on the whole thing that you need to do I would encourage you to focus on just the first two minutes so what's the first two minutes of that habit I put my running shoes on I get out the door and I lock the door and if you do just that it doesn't matter if you take another step but what you find is that motivation of often comes after starting not before we often think that motivation is something that we're supposed to have before we do work but motivation will come as a result of doing some small bit of work and then we can trust that the rest of the process will flow easily another way that we could put it is that you basically start with this three-step process start with the habit that is incredibly easy for you so small that you can't say no to it then increase your habit but in a very small way and third keep it easy and break down the habit as needed this also is from BJ Fogg his program tiny habits is free I believe if you want to check it out I think it's pretty good it does a good job breaking down some of these behavior change principles but the point here is that the motivation needed to complete a habit is at its peak at the beginning of a behavior the greatest amount of friction for any type of task is that in the beginning is in the starting but as soon as you start to have it it's so much easier to fall through let's take that running example that I was just giving you know how hard is it to start running when you haven't started at all compared to after you've already run three kilometres and you're running five in total well once you're halfway there you're like I might as well run back I got to go back anyway right there's no I mean you need almost no motivation to finish the task once it's begun once it's begun so the point here is that by reducing the amount of friction in the beginning of the behavior with the two-minute rule you make it more likely that you actually fall through with the whole thing in the long run so the key idea is make it so easy that you can't say no all right here's another way to do this it's concept called pre commitment it's been very well researched and I call these kind of like instant willpower improvements there's things that seem very simple but we often ignore or don't put into practice and if we do put them into practice they result in immediate boost in willpower and I'll share a couple studies showing that so basically we're often paralyzed by having too many choices if everything available to us then we freeze because we don't know what the best choice is and so we say well rather than make the wrong decision I'll just wait not make any decision we can use pre-commitment to overcome this here's one study a random sample of a business with 3272 employees the business wanted their employees to get their annual flu shot now to do this they sent them a flyer that said you need to get your flu shot but then they send this in another version and that other version said you need to get a flu shot your appointment has already been scheduled for April 22nd click here or you know write send us a little message here to choose the time that you want to attend and what they found was just by selecting a date just by picking the day when people would get it there were 2.4 times more likely to fall through but then they sent a third version and they said you need to get your flu shot you've already been scheduled for 1 p.m. on April 22nd if you need to change the time you can click here and do so and the people who have the exact time and date schedule for them were four times more likely to follow through simply because they were pre committed and we often think oh we should give people more options we should let them choose whatever they want to do but if we're trying to incentivize behavior of trying to make it more likely for people to follow through pre-commitment is a bait great device for doing this alright so in other words setting this default behavior led to a 12% increase in flu vaccinations overall for the whole company okay so implementation intentions is another method very similar to pre commitment but slightly different and this is the study that I that I like that that shows this so there was a study that looked at different groups in their motivation and ability to stick with exercise so there were three groups in this study the first group that brought in and they said we want you to track how often you exercise over the next two weeks so that's Group one group two they said we want you to track how often you exercise and we're gonna show you this motivational video about the benefits of exercise why you should do it so Group two was the motivated group all right then there's group 3 group 3 got the exact same treatment as group - they were told to track their exercise they were given the motivational speech they were equally motivated but they did one thing differently and that one thing is they filled out this sentence that said during the next week I will partake in at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on this day at this time at this place and what they found when they looked at all the analysis at the end of the study is this is what happened group 138 percent of them worked out over the next two weeks and control group no motivation group to remember they were the motivated group and the motivation faded almost as mediately as soon as they walked out of the out of the research lab so 35 percent of normal worked out and group 3 it was almost double or even triple the odds that they would work out over the next two weeks 91% of them start to exercise and the only difference was that they filled out this little sentence and it seems so basic but by pre committing ourselves to things we make it much more likely that we fall through if you're interested implementation intentions which is what this is called this is an implementation intention there are over hunt there are hundreds of studies on this so it's been proven in a bunch of different contexts it's very simple and something that actually leads to real results alright so the important idea here is that you need to pick a time and a space for your goals to live right pick a date pick a time choose a place make this a reality in your world and in your schedule now you may be saying alright that's great I should just pick times and places for everything I want to work on but in fact we can get really overloaded by the amount of things that we want to improve right there are all sorts of things you may want to improve upon so how do you decide where to start again I'm big on simplicity I'm big on eliminating most of the choices that you can focus just on the very best uses of your time and if you're thinking how do I decide what to focus on after this presentation I would say focus on the keystone habit and a keystone habit is a routine or ritual that ripples into the rest of your life it creates a cascade of good behavior and so for myself my keystone habit is working out I know that if I work out I get the benefits of exercise sure but I also tend to focus better I have this period of like high focus the post-workout high for an hour or so afterward I sleep better that night because I am tired and exhausted and have worked myself physically which means I wake up the next day with better energy which means I focus better then and I also tend to eat better just because I feel like I worked out so I don't want to waste it so I actually eat worse when I don't work out any better when I do now at no point was I trying to build better nutrition habits or better focus or better sleep habits or improved energy but all those things happen as a side effect as a result of the one Keystone habit some other common examples of Keystone habits CEOs will often talk about their daily meditation habit they get 10 or 20 minutes of meditation in then the rest of their day flows more smoothly artists really big on a daily walk if a there are tons of famous artists there's a great book called daily rituals that talks about the habits and behaviors of many famous artists and scientist and it's interesting how many of them had a daily walk as part of their routine and then visualization you'll hear from comedians or performers that often will visualize before they step out on the stage but these are some examples of if you just do this one behavior you can trust that it will ripple into other areas of your personal and professional life all right part 4 choice architecture the basic idea here that I want to share with you is this idea of designing for laziness okay so BJ Fogg the professor that I have mentioned throughout this presentation from Stanford University he likes popcorn he enjoys eating popcorn he just didn't want to eat that much of it and so he took the popcorn out of his kitchen walked down the hallway and into the storage room into his garage climbed up on a ladder and put the popcorn on the highest shelf in the garage now if he really wants to eat it he can just go out and get it it's only gonna take 60 seconds but if he's designing for his lazy decision for his default action he's not gonna go get the popcorn and so the idea is how can we design the spaces we live in and the places we work so that the default action the lazy behavior is a better choice I'll give you one example of a place that did this Massachusetts General Hospital they so this is a drawing of the cafeteria inside the hospital so the pinkish or reddish boxes those are refrigerators that have soda or pop or Coke in them okay and then the squares that are not colored in those are food tables and then the two black squares in the on the sides are refrigerators with water inside of them right so this is what the the cafeteria looked like before the researchers came in then they changed it so that it looked like this and I'll switch back and forth now basically they added water stands around the food and then they added water to the four refrigerator's by the cashiers register now it's important to note that they did not remove the coke or the soda entirely all right the pop was still available but they just added water to the fridge so that's it that's all I did and what they found was that soda sales decreased by twelve percent over the next three months and water sales and water consumption increased by twenty five percent over the next three months so they changed people's behavior in habits they never talked to anyone they never incentivized anybody they didn't motivate anyone they just changed the environment or people ate and often we come up with reasons afterward for why we do things you know if you were sitting in that cafeteria and you were drinking a coke and I came up to you and asked you why you would probably say oh well this is what I felt like drinking but the truth is we often just pick up whatever is in front of us or placed in front of us because we're presented with that choice so what choices are you presenting yourself or your team with at work or in your kitchen counter at home or in the spaces that you surround yourself in each day there's a very famous equation called luhan's equation about this it basically just says behavior is a function of the person in their environment and we can summarize habits in that way the moral of this story of the key idea is that I've never seen a person can six consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment if you're trying to fight the environment that you live and work in all the time it's gonna be very very hard to stick with the things that are important to you all right part five the final part measurement there's a man named Trent Durr Smid and he's a reader of mine my site and so I was how I was put in touch with him and he had a very interesting story when he started his career he was about 20 to 23 years old and he was a stockbroker and no one was really expecting a whole lot of his performance he was new at this bank that he was working at he was young but he ended up building over five million dollar book of business with a very simple strategy and the simple strategy is what I call the paperclip strategy so Trent would come in to work each day and he had two little bins on his desk and in one bin he had a hundred and twenty paperclips and then he would make a sales call and he would take a paper clip and put it in the other bin and they'd make another one and do it every day until all 120 paper clips were moved over and that was it that was how he tracked his whole day he didn't read analyst reports he didn't look at the weather the news he didn't talk to other analysts about their investments or what was working well or poorly for them he just focused on making sales calls and I would argue that no matter what type of job you're working in no matter what type of craft you or your company are focused on we all have some kind of core behavior that we should be tracking like that something that isn't sexy that's not gonna get the attention of everybody that doesn't make us feel like we're learning new things that's just the work but if you do the work consistently you end up getting much different results so this is Trent's quote about it he just says every morning I'd start with 120 paper clips in one jar and I keep dialing the phone until I'd moved tomorrow the second jar so what is keep dialing the phone for you right what is that behavior in your job or your startup or your business where you just need to be focused on doing the work repeatedly and more consistently than the rest of your peers Trent had plenty of people he worked with that were smarter than him that had more experience than him but they didn't make the same number of sales calls each day simply because they weren't focused on the volume and the behavior to the same degree that he was so the other thing that we're talking about here is what I would call habit automaticity and the basic idea is that the more repetitions that you perform the more likely something becomes a habit and a behavior that you stick to in the long run you have to perform a certain number of reps to get a new behavior to stick and eventually you cross the have it line on average if you're wondering how long does that take on average it takes about 66 days to build a new habit but the range can be very wide it can differ from 18 or 21 days for something small like drinking glass of water at lunch or it can be really really long like 8 months for a very complex habit like exercising 5 days a week all right I'd like to give you two final strategies for how to do this for how to stick to this the first strategy is what I call the Seinfeld strategy Jerry Seinfeld very famous comedian in the u.s. he was opening up or he was a he was on tour doing a comedy tour and there was a young comic named Brad Isaac who was opening for Seinfeld onstage that night and he caught Seinfeld backstage before the show he said mr. Seinfeld what you know I'm an aspiring comic I'm a young comic what tips do you have for young comic on how to succeed and Seinfeld thought for a minute he said well the secret to being a better comic is to write better jokes and the secret to writing better jokes is to write everyday so here's what you should do get a wall calendar where you can see every day of the month in the year mapped out on one page then each day that you stick to your behavior of writing for 10 minutes or 15 minutes writing jokes I want you to put an X on that day at the beginning you'll do it every now and then but eventually at some point you're gonna get a string going 5 6 7 8 9 days in a row you'll have a chain and at that point your only goal becomes don't break the chain it doesn't matter how good or how bad that behavior is it doesn't matter whether the writing makes it into the performance that you do it doesn't matter how you feel about the jokes all the matters is that you stick to the behavior and this idea that sticking to the things that we want to measure over a consistent basis is what makes the biggest difference is something that I think ties into the point I tried to make at the very beginning of this which is that 1% gains when aggregated add to add up to very significant results in the long run so the final idea that I like to share so counting and measuring is important and the final idea that like shares about feedback loops there's a sign I'm not sure if they have these in hungry they have them in the US they're called your speed signs so if you're driving down the road it'll be like a radar and they'll say you know this is the speed that you're going right so that sign is a feedback loop and that those feedback loops have been proven researchers have shown that it decreases speed by about 10 percent on average all right so and it sticks with drivers for miles or kilometers down the road they stick with this behavior of the long run and even better if you see it three months or six four months from now even though you've seen it before you're still gonna have that type of behavior you don't get fatigued by it it still continues to work time after time so this feedback loop the reason it's important some type of measurement like that is that it acts as a trigger for your next behavior it's a readout and that says here's where you're at right now and then it prompts you to perform the next habit so for whatever the habits are that you're focused on building if you're gonna do some kind of measurement like the Seinfeld strategy or the paperclip strategy it's important to have a feedback loop built in so that it prompts the next behavior that you're working on here are some examples so I had a friend who wanted to work on posture and standing upright really hard to track that because you're just gonna be start talking and you know unless you're thinking about it every second of every day eventually you start to slouch again so what he did was he assumed good posture and put a piece of tape across his shoulder so that each time his shoulders would sag it would tug and he would come back again so it was a feedback loop for that there's an outlet timer that you can buy there I don't know ten dollars or so and you plug it into the outlet and then you plug your device into the timer and you can set it for a particular time when it will shut off so for example if you're working late too many nights in a row you can set it for 10 p.m. and when it gets to 10:00 p.m. the power is cut off and so you basically are creating a feedback loop it says this was important to you remember now this is cut off you can't work anymore I in my car I have a green light on the dashboard that whenever I'm driving in a fuel efficient manner it becomes more and more green and whenever I'm accelerating or driving in a non fuel-efficient manner it changes to white and so it acts as this feedback loop is trying to prompt good behavior and then there's another one called the glow cap that basically when you're supposed to take your medication it will glow to remind you that you need to open the bottle and take the medication on average these feedback loops create a 10% improvement and so I would encourage you to think about how can we build feedback loops into the systems and habits that we're trying to build in the teams and in our personal lives the morale the story here is the best way to change long-term behavior is a short-term feedback it's been a privilege to talk to you we've only were only able to cover a certain amount of information and the top small window that I had if you're looking for more I have a 45 page PDF that just kind of highlights a lot of these core concepts and add some additional exercises on building new habits and behaviors you can get that at James Stewart comm slash habits and how are we doing on time do we have time for questions I don't know where we're at yeah I think we have time for questions we put the slider up please guys we have - oh there we go on the aging study what was the percentage of positive thinkers out of the 660 people in the sample good question I don't know the exact number off top of my head but I can send that out and I actually you know what I'll put together a link it'll just be a James Kirk aam /sc for stretch conference and I'll have the links to the studies there if you'd like to read them so James Kirk aam /sc I'm wondering how to change reactions under stress or let's see like being under stress or bored I'm eating chocolate checking nine gay yeah okay good question so it's interesting that you phrase the question that way one of the common triggers for bad behaviors or negative behaviors is stress boredom or some type of loneliness and so the best way to achieve not doing those things is by trying to look at the underlying cause of the stress or the boredom or the fatigue or loneliness and how you can address that but assuming that that's a very complex issue that you don't want to think about or deal with right away I'll give you a little hack that works so basically it comes down to behavior design in a digital environment so I talked about things like putting the paper clips on your desk at work or changing the environment of your kitchen counter at home you can do the same thing on your screen so let me show you the home screen if not everyone will see this obviously but if you're in the front row so what's here on my home screen is just the icons at the bottom of the screen and then nothing else okay so if I want to get to anything oh there we go this is great on the who's doing that but good work so if I want to get to any apps like Instagram or whatever I need to slide to the next screen to get to them and then I have them nested inside of a folder and then I even stuff I use even less I just having this extras folder on the third screen but the point is in order for me to use Instagram or Facebook or Twitter or whatever I need to actually open up the phone and say I want to go there one swipe to and then click and so I'm putting just a little bit more friction between me and the mindless behavior rather than just opening up the phone and being able to click it right away so how can you increase the number of steps between you and mindless behaviors or unproductive behaviors and then the second thing that you can do is install a couple pieces of software that will actually block those for a significant period of time so the one that I use is called freedom and it's just at freedom dot t-- o-- and you can set up a recurring block so i have my email blocked from 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. every morning so I can't answer email until after 11:00 a.m. which means I get to spend the early hours of my day working on the things that are important to me rather than responding to everybody else's agenda I also have a block set up so I used rescue time to track the top 50 websites that I visit over any given amount of time so that I use it for a few months then I took those top 50 websites dump them all in to freedom and created a recurring block from 6:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. and then it's open from 11:00 to 1:00 so around lunch I can browse and look at things and then from 1:00 two-six it's blocked again so during the period of time during Monday through Friday when I'm supposed to be working all of those sites are blocked and there's something about taking the decision out of your hands and using software to make it more likely that you'll stick to those habits that makes it less fatiguing for yourself because it's not a decision to resist it's just oh this is the environment that I'm in so I might as well do the work how do you handle triggers that make you unfocused like starting our build you have to wait for five minutes and then open the news page for ten minutes yeah so triggers that make you unfocused I think that you know when I talked about priorities and simplification and elimination being ruthless about focusing on those five things rather than the twenty five things that's the first step for me often when I'm unfocused I find it's because I have like a brainstorming mind rather than a focused or narrow mind on the task at hand so being really clear about the priorities makes it much easier for me to stick to the thing that I'm trying to work on as far as triggers that make you unfocused so it's about simplification of the environment so you know the strategy I just mentioned about eliminating those digital triggers that's one but physical triggers is another important thing for me I don't have a photo of it sometimes I'll show in a presentation of my desk and it's pretty boring I mean there's nothing on it to prompt my behavior drive me in a different way I usually don't listen to music while I'm working so it's basically trying to eliminate the amount of noise or signal in the environment so that I can just stay focused okay is that James thank you thank you really really want

Channel: James Clear

Views: 36,482

Rating: 4.9392405 out of 5

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Id: Cve8MmZ7ub4

Length: 50min 41sec (3041 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 07 2017