The Surprising Power of Small Habits | James Clear | SNAPS Leadership Conference

all right we're going to talk about the surprising power of small habits talk about growth talk about improvement what it takes to get better but to do that or Before we jump into the science of how habits work and the science of how we can change our behavior I want to talk a little bit about self judgment and the reason I want to talk about it is because self judgment is one of the things that can hold us back from growth one of the most common things that can almost back from groceries we have a basketball crowd let's say you're shooting you shoot a free-throw and you miss and the first thing you think is oh that's a bad shot right you start judging the shot it's not it's not necessarily it's not necessarily a good thing because you're preventing yourself from learning from the experience because you're so in your head judging the experience right you're too busy assessing whether or not it's good or bad and I'll be vulnerable I am when I first met brené Brown who's great if you are not familiar with her work she said your experience here today will only be as great as your willingness to be vulnerable and I would say we could say that about this experience as well right the willingness to be vulnerable that you have for this whole thing is going to determine how much you're going to get out of it and so I'll share a little bit how awesome was Steve last night it was great wasn't he awesome and when he got done I was like man I am NOT going to be like that on stage and I felt bad about that for a little bit and so what I was doing there is what you do when you judge yourself after you miss a shot I was I was practicing this self-judgement right I was getting in the way of my ability to do the work and share my own message because I was too busy criticizing myself instead I would like us today to think more about being like a rosebush being a seed right when you plant a seed you don't criticize it for being small for being rootless and stemless and then it sprouts out of the ground it's a little bud you know criticize it from not being a bush yet or not being fully grown but at each step along the way it's exactly what it needs to be and the reason that this is important is because we often judge ourselves right based on where we're at I'm not there yet I'm not a good enough free-throw shooter i'm not a good enough speaker i'm not good enough my business I'm not good enough at relationships whatever it happens to be and we're so busy judging ourselves and this is actually enforced by the way that society treats a lot of things right it's like you never supposed to be satisfied you're never supposed to be done you need to be driven and we often associate being driven and being dissatisfied as being the same thing I don't think that has to be the case though because if you take the rose seed you take the bush it never stops growing because that's just what it does it grows and so I would like us to take that philosophy into this next hour where we don't judge ourselves for a rat we're perfect whatever you know stage of our growth we happen to be in but we never stop growing because that's just what we do we're like the seed right that's just who we are so in order to start this off we want to talk a little bit about Team Sky I met a couple people from the UK last night who are probably familiar with this story in the mid 2000s Team Sky is Great Britain's professional cycling team and they hired a man named Dave Brailsford at the time they had pretty middle-of-the-road record when it comes to performance in the world cycling stage they had never won a Tour de France and they brought Brailsford in they said we want to change that what's your what's your strategy what's your plan and Brailsford believed in this concept that he called the aggregation of marginal gains the way that he described it was the 1% improvement and nearly everything that you do so they started by making 1% improvements in a lot of areas you would expect a cycling team to make they got slightly lighter tires for the bike they built a more ergonomic seat they had their outdoor riders where indoor racing suits which were lighter and more aerodynamic they had their riders were biofeedback sensors they could see how each person responded to the type of training that they were doing but then they did a bunch of things that you wouldn't expect a cycling team to do they taught their team how to wash their hands to reduce the risk of infection they figured out the type of pillow that led to the best night's sleep and then brought it on the road with them to hotels they split tested different massage gels to see which one led to the best muscle recovery and Brailsford said all right if we can execute on the stretch if we can aggravate all these tiny little 1% changes then I think that we can win a Tour de France in about five years he ended up being wrong they won the Tour de France in three years and then they repeated again in the fourth year with a different writer and when Brailsford coach the Great Britain's cycling team at the Olympics in London 2012 they won 70% of the gold medals available and so this idea is central to what we're going to be talking about today this idea that 1% games and getting 1% better each day actually is not just a tiny improvement but adds up to something very significant over the long run and it's just basic math if you look at getting 1% better for 365 days in a row you end up 37 times better by the end of the year meanwhile if you make a slightly worse choice a tiny mistake a little air a small lapse in judgment and make a 1% worse decision each day you almost water yourself all the way down to zero and this narrow gap between 1% better and 1% worse this is the stuff that ends up adding up and making us either champions or standing in second place you're not even in the conversation at all right now getting better every single day is not reasonable even for the most consistent and most you know dedicated of us in the crowd however if you want to get 10 times better at something you just need to get 1% better for 232 days out of the year so that's 5 days a week 46 weeks a year that leaves you six days for holidays vacation being lazy making excuses whatever it happens to be right but if you get better for those 46 weeks a year those five days a week you can take weekends off and if you make one percent improvement you're going to end up ten times better by the end of the year than you would have been the year before now so the key idea here is that small habits and tiny gains actually add up to something very significant in a surprisingly short period of time right they can multiply into meaningful results very quickly if we believe this if we're going to buy into this then the next question is how do we do that right how do we execute on that and that's what the practical part the next phase of this presentation is going to be about we're going to answer three questions so first why does some have it stick and others fail what's the deal how to habits work how can we get into our own psychology why are we able to build some behaviors and not build others second how do I know what to change if I buy into this idea that 1% improvements make a difference then how do I pick right there we can spend our ways our attention and our energy and an infinite number of ways how do I decide what to focus on and third how do I get started in to take action and if you know these three if you know why why and how habits work if you know what you're going to try to change and you know how to take action I don't know what more you could want from a bold man on a Saturday morning right so first I'd like to say thanks to a couple people these are some people who have significantly influenced my work BJ Fogg Lee abouta Neil near y'all damn party Scott Adams coming the conical I just mentioned them because they're researchers they're behind the scenes they often don't get the credit a lot of these people work at Stanford or other universities and I think it's important to cite the sources that have influenced my thinking and work thank you all right so part one why I some have it's taken others fail I like to start by talking about a research study and this for those of you who aren't familiar with my work or haven't read a lot of my articles I this typical flow and the flow of this talk as well is going to be some kind of story we're going to back it up with scientific study or research I try to base the majority of what I talk about and some type of proven academic study and then distill it down to a practical insight something you can take home and actually use and so that's going to be the flow and we're just going to repeat that time after time as we go through this presentation this particular study came from Princeton University and most people are familiar with the story the good samaritan stopping along the side of the road to help help a fallen person help someone in need well Princeton their theology school decided to run this experiment they brought in a bunch of theology students they said alright we're all familiar with the story of the Good Samaritan we're going to break you up into groups and you're going to go teach in different rooms across campus you're going to teach this story and so they started talking about you know how they're going to deliver the presentation and so on they had a couple different cohorts the one cohort they said all right just go ahead and you know go off and and deliver the presentation so they went off to their rooms the second one though they did something interesting they sent the group off but on their way to the well they sent the group off and they said by the way we're running a little bit behind right you don't have very long to get there takes about ten minutes you only got five so we kind of need to hurry you're probably already going to be late so they're in a rush they know they're going to go give this presentation on the way they planted an actor on the on the campus and this actor is laying on the ground hurt moaning in pain and so they scream twice and then they cry out and every single group went right past the person in need to go give a presentation about helping a person in need right the one person even stepped over the guy who was in pain in order to get there now the point of this and what I'd like to start talking about now is the danger of being goal focused and goal oriented these people had a goal right to deliver a presentation and they were so one-sided so narrow minded so focused on that goal that they missed the bigger picture in the perspective of what they should have been doing in the first place and I think that this can be a danger of goals often and so instead I would like to encourage us to focus on systems systems rather than goals here are some examples if you're a coach your goal is to win a championship but your system is what your team does a practice each day if you're a writer your goal might be to write a book maybe even write a best-selling book but your system is how you write each week the schedule that you follow if you're an entrepreneur your goal could be to build a million dollar business or a ten million dollar business but the system is the sales and marketing process that you have the systems are what actually make the difference there would drive the results and what I've seen having goals is great having a vision having a dream is nice it's important to know where you're going and where you're headed so board to have some clarity of focus to know that we're moving in this direction but once you know that having to go on paper makes very little difference and committing to the system and showing up every day drives a lot of results and so I'd like to talk about how we can build these systems and repeat these habits day after day week after week the first thing that I'd like to encourage us think about is how goals and repetitions actually get to you to any outcome that you want so let's say that you have a goal of squatting 300 pounds all right point a might be squatting a hundred pounds and it doesn't take very many repetitions to get there maybe you have to be in the gym for I don't know six months a year whatever it happens to be maybe you can do it right now point B could be squatting 200 pounds is going to take some more repetitions to get there Point C is much further down the line take even more but once you realize this the only thing that you have to do is put your reps in the only thing that it comes down to is committing to the system and performing day after day so habits and this way take you wherever you want to go alright how long does it take this is a common question people have about building habits so there was a study done at University College London they looked at a variety of different habits on average they found that it takes 66 days per new habit to stick 66 days to build a new habit this had a really wide range though sometimes the habits were very small like drinking glass of water at lunch sometimes they were much more significant like going for a run after work each day the lesson to take away from this is that the range was anywhere from three weeks to eight months and so if you're looking to build a new habit if you're looking to install a new behavior in your life then you can pretty much commit to the fact that this is going to take months right this is a lifestyle that we're trying to build it's not 21 days and then you're done it's not a 30 day program then it's like we did it habits built don't need to worry about anymore there's some point which on the vertical axis we have behavior automaticity so how automatic something is how little you have to think about it and then on the horizontal axis the number of repetitions you need to do the more reps you do the more automatic the behavior becomes and at some point you get to that little habit line where it tips over and suddenly this is automatic now so again we're talking about focusing on the number of repetitions that you do the system that you build so you can make this behavior more automatic and more routine there are a lot of different habit models something the people that I mentioned earlier luhan's equation operant conditioning is a very famous one but BF Skinner tiny habits model Lube model who hook model blah blah blah the only reason I list all these here is so that you understand there are a lot of different ways of thinking about habits but we're going to break one down right now the probably the most popular assessment of how habits and behavior work all of these share things in common so if you hear people talking about this is the way to build habits it's a way to think about building habits all right here's one way to think about it I call this the 3 R's this is very similar to what's mentioned in Charles Duhigg book the power of habit which is a good book to read if you'd like a little overview the basic idea is that there are three phases of building any new routine in your life first there's the reminder ok and the reminder is the thing that triggers the habit did the thing that initiates the behavior - Q so for example if my phone rings that can be a reminder the second piece is the reward or is the the routine so the actual habit right the the action that you're performing so phone rings that's a reminder I answer the phone that's the routine the third piece is the reward and this is the benefit that you get for doing the behavior now when we're trying to build new habits or trying to think about how to initiate these things into your life the important piece is to focus on our the reminder and the reward because if you can figure out how to give the right incentive the right benefit for doing the behavior becomes more easy for it to be ingrained and if you can figure out how to trigger the behavior which we're going to talk about in a moment that may be the most powerful way to initiate new behaviors and habits I'm gonna give you multiple examples of that in a moment so let's talk about practical ways to build these new habits first simplicity start incredibly small the reason that we want to start incredibly small is that there is some type of friction in the beginning and the bigger the habit is the bigger the friction is to start that behavior so if you were going to break it down in three simple steps and this comes from the tiny habits programmed by DJ Fogg which is free if you'd like to take it if you really want to geek out on this stuff tiny habits calm is where that's at but start with a habit that's incredibly easy for you increase your habit but in a very small way and then keep it easy and break the habit down as needed sounds super simple sounds really basic in practice it's much harder to do because we often talk ourselves into biting off much more than we can chew right nobody wants to make three free throws today they want to shoot 300 but if you can start with three and increase to four and then increase to five then you can start to build a system of behavior and you focus on building the pattern first rather than focusing on the results and that's what we're talking about when we say put the system before the goal so this is a way of thinking about that friction point in the beginning right the amount of motivation you need to complete a habit drastically decreases as the habit is completed let's say you want to go on a run after work right the hardest part is getting your shoes on and getting out the door once you do that and you start running you know you go the first matter might as well run back and finish it right like I'm already halfway here so the amount of motivation you need at that point is nil you've already you've already done it right the hard part is getting started and so if you can you can do multiple things to make this easier first you can make the habit smaller right that's what we're talking about right now make the habit as small as possible reduce the friction needed so I don't need to rely on motivation and willpower to execute this behavior the second thing that you can do is design your environment to make it easier to get started you want to go for run lay your shoes and your clothes out the night before you don't have to make that decision right just reduce the amount of friction points in front of you for performing that behavior we'll talk about environment design later basically you want to make it so easy that you can't say no to it so when you're building a new habit if it's hard enough that you could possibly not feel motivated you don't have enough willpower to execute on it it's too hard too big in the beginning right make it so easy that you can't say no to start and then escalate and improve from there all right let's talk about habit triggers remember a reminder or cue is the first piece of the habit routine is the first piece of that three-step loop triggers are an incredibly important way to initiate new habits and your athletes and yourself and your you know your co-workers your spouse whoever it happens to be so we have cold hit triggers and we have hot triggers triggers are the cues that prompt behavior a hot trigger can be acted upon right now let's say you're driving down the road and you see a billboard and says go visit James clear calm you can't do anything at that moment because you're busy driving that's a cold trigger meanwhile if I send you a text and say hey here's a link to my latest article you can click on it and read right away that's a hot trigger something you can do immediately so often when we want to build new habits we ask people to do it by trying to trigger them in a cold way if you trigger people in a hot way they can actually do the behavior right then rather than having to remember to perform it later so this is BJ Fogg this is this is how he summarizes building happens he says is all you need put hot triggers in the path and motivated people if you can do that then you can build new behaviors you get the right group in the room who is motivated to perform an action and then you ask them to perform a habit that they have the ability to do right then there are five types of triggers okay I'll give you an example for each first-time so my writing routine I published a new article every Monday and Thursday it doesn't matter how good or how bad I feel about the article it doesn't matter if I think it's going to make it into a book some day it doesn't matter if people like it or if they don't like it it doesn't matter if it's five words or 500 words or 5,000 words it gets published on Monday and three say time is the trigger that's the thing that drives the habit that's the thing that drives the behavior location when I go to the gym each week I get there and I do the same routine I set my gym bag down I take my lifting shoes out I put them on I put on my knee wraps I put on my wrist wraps I go get a drink water I do ten squats without the bar ten squats with the bar and then I start my workout it's the same routine same habit every single time and the gym the location is what drives that habit preceding events when I sit down to dinner each night I have a daily gratitude habit where when I sit in the chair that's the preceding event I say one thing that I'm grateful for that happened that day I didn't think this was going to be an important habit when I started it I've been doing it for three years straight now and it's crazy how that one little thing can reset your entire day and the cumulative effect of always having something to say that you're grateful for how big of a role that plays on your on your day and your psyche and your mindset emotional state this one's a hard one but we often see it with bad habits right you get angry you get frustrated you get upset and the emotional state triggers some kind of response mono was talking yesterday you get frustrated while you're driving get distracted to get busy and all of a sudden you know you're making choices that you didn't think you would or hoping you wouldn't I sometimes find this one I'm holding tension in myself if I feel really tense if I feel uptight if I feel stressed I try to use that emotional state when I'm aware of it as a reason to do my breathing routine and we've talked about breathing exercises a little bit before I do a really simple one it's just breathe in for a count of three hold for one breathe out for a count of five and then I just repeat that for a minute or so so three four or five times if you do that and you can do that anywhere it completely resets the energy that you have so that breathing routine is great other people this one is fascinating the people that we surround ourselves with dictate our habits and behavior even if they're not physically by us there's a really famous study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine and it found that if you have a friend even if they live anywhere within 500 miles of you and they are obese you are 57 percent more likely to be obese yourself you don't even have to be around them you just have to be associated with them so this social network and these ties can Brassica Lee change the type of triggers the type of habits that you form the type of behaviors that you fall into here's an exercise you can use when you go away from here if you're thinking alright how do I make this practical how do I actually use this in my own life so you're going to write two columns just going to do a little tea chart right down the middle of the paper okay on the left hand side I want you to list all the things that you do each day without fail so I brush my teeth I wake up in the morning I take a shower I get dressed there'll be a big batch in the morning when you have your morning routine and all the things that you usually do there would be another batch usually either when you get to work or sometime around lunch you know I get my car keys I walk out to my car you can be as detailed as you want to be usually another batching come home for dinner and then bedtime routine and so on but you're going to go throughout the whole day and list everything you just normally do then in the second column you're going to list all the things that happen to you each day without fail the Sun rises the Sun sets a commercial comes on TV a song plays on the radio traffic light turns green traffic light turns red all the things that are in your normal day that just are going to happen like clockwork what you have at this point once you develop these two comprehensive lists is a list of possible triggers that you can tie a new behavior to so let's say that you wanted to start meditating for example and you solve it on your list in your morning routine you have make a cup of coffee for this new habit you can stack it on top of the old behavior and use the old behaviors the trigger so you say when I make my cup of coffee in the morning then I'll meditate for 60 seconds and so you're trying to tie the new behavior to an old behavior the reason this is useful neurologically you know the line is neurons that fire together wire together and so on you're basically creating an on-ramp to this neural pathway in your brain you've already got this habit built you already make coffee every morning it's already something you can count on and because of that let's go ahead and tie this new behavior to that same neural pathway and build it into your brain so that it's stronger and has more likelihood to stick so select the trigger that best fits the new habit all right so that gives us an overview of habits now let's jump into the practical like how do I actually change how do I get started with all this so part two the first thing I like to talk about is in order to make a change in order to build these new habits in your life we first need to start thinking about what's distracting me this is a concept called the Zeigarnik effect from an awesome researcher with the name of bull maas i garnished in the 1920s there's a story about four or five men walk into a restaurant in germany they sit down to have their meal it's relatively complicated order so they tell they're ordered to the waiter and the waiter just stands there and remembers the ball by memory and then walks off gets the order right brings the food back they're really impressed they work a lot of different things and he didn't mess up anything right it was perfect so they were talking about his memory they eat the food they leave they finish their meal and they walk out one guy realizes about halfway down the street that he forgot his wallet and so he runs back to the restaurant he goes over the waiter and says hey I'm sorry I forgot my wallet I don't know if you know maybe you can help me and the waiter looks at him and says who are you do I do I know you and he was like you just served our party we were really impressed by how great your memory was you remember the whole meal and the waiter looked at him said oh I only remember each meal until it's served and what we're talking about here is the Zeigarnik effect which is the tendency to experience intrusive thoughts or to remember things or to spend our mental energy on things until that objective is completed so we remember things that are incomplete that are pursued and left undone consider for a second what type of role this could play on your life if you're someone who does what I would call half work where you start a project and work on a little bit and then never end up finishing it or you're doing a task and then you leave it undone you look at an email and you leave it unread you use your inbox as a to-do list all these different things these are open loops that you're opening in your brain over and over again you have all this undone work that is taking up mental energy that's using up space you can consider your brain kind of like a like RAM right like in a computer you're you're at 100% and then you start to have to remember things and you drop down to 95 94 and you're taking yourself down and all of a sudden on your average day you only have 75% of your power to put toward a task because you're so busy trying to remember all these open loops and things that you are spending energy on so the curiosity gap is the nagging brain basically and if your brain is constantly nagging you you can't put your energy best toward the next you're trying to perform so here's one exercise if you want to play with this I you know I've struggled with this myself as well and certainly not perfect in any way with this stuff and so I made myself have forced myself to go through my inbox and I was only allowed to read an email once I open it I read it I have to respond to it or archive it it is done I'm not Allah it's like a ticking time bomb so if you want to push yourself with this go ahead and give it a try for 10 minutes just try to respond to as many emails as you can 10 minutes and you're not allowed to do anything else except for respond to it or archive it you aren't allowed to leave the loop open all right so if we understand that we understand that we have all these open loops in our brain we have this multitasking busy you know mindset that word that we're dealing with these things that were struggling with what's the next step that we can take and how do how do we understand how this influences our behavior and decision-making on a daily basis there's a popular study done as written about the New York Times not too long ago they looked at a thousand parole board judges and so the criminals would come in they would be seen by this judge and the judge would decide whether or not the criminal was going to be let out on parole now you would think that the thing that would influence whether someone was let out of prison was the crime that they committed in the way that they served their time but what they found was the thing that had the single biggest impact on whether someone got a favorable parole hearing was the time of day in which they were seen and the reason that this is true so this is what the judges decision-making look like right so at the beginning of the day it started out you had a 65% chance of getting a favorable hearing being released then as they made more decisions and the day went on that slowly went down to about zero then we have this first dotted line this is the lunch break judges get to take some time off get something to eat they come back boom spikes right back up 65% and then make more decisions throughout the afternoon fades back down and given another break and then by the end of the day it's just you know drop it off a cliff and going all the way down to zero this is what's known as decision fatigue the more choices that you make the more things that you force your willpower to be used upon throughout the day the less you have spread around to the other tasks you can think of willpower is like a muscle right the more that you have to use it like I can sit up here and you know rep out curls for a little bit but give me two or three minutes and all the Styles start fading right and this idea is very useful when we think about building new habits and putting our energy toward our best work how can you automate the choices and decisions in your life so you spend less time working on things that will SAP your decision that will take away your willpower and put that more towards the events that are worthy of it the the judges here just to wrap this thought up so one thing that they realized this actually was like a safety mechanism when their willpower faded they're like I don't have the willpower to make a good decision at this point so let me just say no and then make the safe call and keep everybody in prison so that's why the choices started whaling down and we often do this in our own lives when we don't have the willpower to take towards something we say I'm paralyzed I'm just not going to choose it right now another thing I wasn't going to tell this story but since I'm on topic has anybody seen the picture of lion tamers holding like a chair up you know they have like a whip and a chair well the whip is just for show it's just to make a loud noise and good for the crowd but the chair is actually the thing that distracts the lion when you put the chair in front of the Lions face it sees all four legs at one time and so it freezes it a little bit because it doesn't know which thing to move at first right it's like it paralyzes itself we do the same thing in our own lives you have four different priorities you try to work upon it once good luck trying to choose the right one right we get paralyzed at that moment because we're focusing on too many things we're spending our energy and retention in too many different ways so to talk about willpower and decision fatigue let's thought this thing about building a new habit you basically could say similar to the judges choices it goes like this throughout the day right we eV and flow we have some Peaks we have some valleys but your motivation is not the same all the time if you want to build a new habit you have two choices either you have option a which is say alright I'm going to stick with this I'm going to try to build a really hard habit I know this is going to take a lot of energy and effort and willpower and your only choice there is to stack it at the right time of day right do it first thing in the morning when your motivation of willpower is usually high do when you're well-rested don't try to do it right before lunch like the like the judges would because then you have 0% chance of completing them habit or you have option B which is to go back to what we talked about before start with an incredibly small habit a habit that's so tiny that you don't even need the motivation and willpower to complete it doesn't matter what at what point that you are these you're going to be able to stick to it regardless so the key idea here is willpower is like a muscle and like any muscle in the body willpower can get the tea so be careful about how you're using it and when you're asking yourself to do something that requires a lot of willpower to execute on all right this comes back to the point about the lion having too many priorities this is a quote from a book called essentialism I thought was pretty good actually so the word priority came into the English language in the 1400s before that it didn't even exist and for the next five hundred years it was just priority it was only in the last century that we started having priorities and making it plural right and this idea that we can suddenly go from having one most important thing to ten most important things is a complete myth that our busy industrialized technologically empowered culture has started to embrace for some reason but you can't change the laws of physics you can't bend reality as he says right you can only have one most important thing and the way that we operate and the way that we divide our energy and push our energy around has not changed even if we're defining it in a different way so given that how do we decide what priorities to focus on how do we decide what to whittle out and what to cut down warren buffett has a strategy that i find relatively interesting and useful you know Buffett is probably the most famous investor the last hundred years and certainly one of the most successful of all time and this story comes directly from his personal pilot Mike Flint it was telling this story to a friend of mine so Mike Flint it has been Warren Buffett's personal pilot for a while he's also flown Air Force One he's flown multiple US presidents he's an accomplished guy and he was telling Buffett hey Warren you should really get this new plane it's pretty sick I'd like to be able to fly this thing you should buy this at some point and he was like I love to be able to fly in this thing on the next five or ten years and apparently Warren looked at my clinton said if you're still flying for me in ten years then I probably have failed you as a boss because you're not growing enough right you you haven't grown out of this and if I'm serious about developing you then we're going to need to do that so what I want you to do is sit down and write the top 25 priorities that you have for yourself for the next you know 10 or 15 years and this exercise I'm about to share you can do this on a time right you do 25 priorities for your career you can do 25 for this month 25 for this year whatever it works for you so Mike Flint goes off writes downs 25 priorities he comes back and takes local Warren Buffett says here's the list I got he says alright good I want you to circle the top five once you focus on the five probe's are most important you go ahead and circle those take a little bit of time goes often does that brings the list back it's like okay tell me how you're gonna how you're going to deal with this now Mike what are you going to do he says well I've selected my top five most important priorities so I'm going to go ahead and focus on those and then the rest this list will be kind of like my my back-up plan right on weekends or when I have extra time or when a project stalls I'll work on the other stuff and Buffett said no no you got it all wrong this list of number six through 25 is you're never do under any circumstance list and the reason I took me whadda to like grass why this is so important the things that we love that are not the most important are the easiest to rationalize spending time on and distracting us from the things that are really important right the things that are good but not great that's the stuff that ends up taking us off course it's not that we don't really want something it's not that we don't really you know want to improve or we don't know exactly what the most important thing is to us it's that we choose to spend our ways on numbers 6 through our time on number 6 through 25 to often we choose to make these rationalizations for this is a decent use of time not really wasting time right I'm not sitting around watching a bad TV show or something I'm working on something relatively important but that's the stuff that pulls away from greatness so what I like to think about come back to that rosebush if I'm not much of a gardener but gardeners tell me that if you want a rosebush to blossom to fully bloom to become the most they can be you have to prune away buds right you can't just let everything grow on you know unpruned and in order to do that that means you have to cut away buds that could blossom into something they can become a full-grown flower they could look good so these are good ideas that you have to clip away but you have to prune those out of your life if you want to truly be great if you want to focus on flourishing to the biggest degree so pruning away these ideas and using Buffett's strategy of this 25:5 rule is one way to cut out the things that are in your life that are distracting you from greatness another way and this is on a daily basis so you can think of buffets is like a longer timeline is like a strategy and then this Eisenhower box is how do I run my day-to-day activities so if you want I put together a Google Doc where you can like download either PDF version or just use an online version of the Eisenhower box you can download that at James clear comm /e box if you want a copy of it but you can also just write it on your paper the basic idea President Eisenhower used this daily supposedly when he was running the United States and throughout his illustrious career as a military official you have four different boxes right you have important and urgent these are the things the do category stuff you need to get done right today it's always important and it needs to be done it's on fire the next category is not urgent but it is important this is the category that we often overlook these are the things I know I should be doing I know they're good habits I know I should be going to the gym more often but I just can't seem to make time for it this is the stuff that you need to decide when to do it need to just schedule it at some point the next is not important but urgent this is the stuff that pulls us away a lot of the time these are the fires the daily emergencies the things that pop up right I need to go pick my kids up from school somebody got sick I've taken to the hospital there's all sorts of things that are like urgent but not necessarily the most important way to be spending your time and energy then there are things that are not important and not urgent these should just be deleted right the love but a lot of the time we have one or two of these have somehow crept in and we're still spending our time on it because inertia and momentum and we just happen to keep doing that but we shouldn't be so this little box can be a useful way to think about where am i spending my time today and is that in the right right category so the key idea here is that Bizzy does not equal important and urgent is not the same thing as necessary just because something is urgent doesn't mean it needs to get done so filter out the fluff focus on what matters in order to do this so you may be thinking at this point all right I want to focus on the most important stuff but I still have a lot of priorities I still have a lot of stuff that sounds important to me I still would like to build all these new habits how do I decide what to stick to first in this case I would suggest Keystone habits a keystone habit is a type of behavior that you perform that filters into your life and many other ways I'll give you a couple examples so one one case don't happen for me is working out if I go to the gym every Monday Wednesday and Friday all sorts of things happen first I get the benefits of strength training so yes that's good that's what I you know you most people think you're going there for but when I come back I have an hour of solid focus right a kind of post-workout high where you have really clear thinking so my focus is improved I tend to eat better when I work out why I just don't want to waste it I guess you know I could I guess eat ice cream if I wanted but I just kind of feel like I have a good streak going so might as well continue eating well to nutrition improves I sleep better that night because I'm tired and I've worked my body hard I wake up the next day and I have better energy because I slept well so at no point was I trying to build better focus habits nutrition habits energy habits sleep habits but all those things came as a consequence of this one Keystone habit so if you're looking for a way to get started in a very practical way think about what the keys don't have it could be for you some popular examples weight lifting is mine meditation is another one that you commonly hear CEOs talk about I get my daily meditation habit in that everything is much easier for me walking going on a daily walk is a very common one especially for artists if they need some creative time if they do their daily walk each day the rest of it kind of flows visualization is a common one you'll hear comedians say things like you know I rehearse the you know the greatest performance I've had right before I step out onto stage or I visualize having a successful speech right before I step onto the stage so those type of visualization techniques can be useful as well but think about what you do on days when you perform at your best that will give you an insight into what your keys don't have it could be all right part 3 how do I take action one way is pre-commitment pre-commitment is a strategy basically for overcoming this idea that our willpower phase or willpower you know is not always useful or not always at its peak so pre commitment is what I would call an instant willpower improvement and we've talked about how you can be paralyzed by choice this kind of lying in the the chair philosophy and when our willpower is low were less likely to give up choices right we don't have the the option to we don't have the power the strength of the attention the energy to make the right choice so we say I'd rather just not make a choice right now so we can use pre commitment to overcome this let me give you an example so there was a study done they looked at this large organization they had thousands of employees and they sent out a random sample they said our goal is to get more employees to take the flu vaccination each year how are we going to do this how are we going to change their behavior so they found out a couple different options option one just said hey guess what you need to go get a flu shot option two went out to a couple employees that said you need to get a flu shot and we would like you to select a date for when you do that right and so if they just selected a date and said I'm gonna do it on April 22nd then there were 2.4 times more likely to end up getting it because they pre committed to a certain time there were four times more likely however if they got the third option which is to say I will do it on this day at this time so by pre committing to a particular behavior they drastically improve the odds they were at going to perform that behavior then there's another option okay so they sent out another one it said not only do you need to get a flu shot we've chosen the time and date for you so you're going to go there on April 22nd at 1:00 p.m. and if you need to change it you can call this number by pre committing two people to something that they had no role in they still increase behavior by 12% now there are all sorts of ways that we can use this in our lives if you want to use pre commitment what I would suggest is implementation intentions this is a popular study that enjoy citing so you can actually increase your odds of performing a particular behavior by 2 to 3 percent double or triple the odds that you're going to do something just by using what's called an implementation intention there are hundreds of studies and implementation intentions if you feel like seeing more but we'll talk about this one what they did was researchers brought in a group and they they have three different cohorts first cohort they said we want you to track how often you work out over the next two weeks the second group they said we also want you to track off and you work out but we're going to show you this motivational motivational presentation this motivational talk and pamphlets and video on the benefits of exercise so here's the cardiovascular benefits this is why you should do it so group two was the motivated group group three they said we also want you to track how often you exercise and they gave them the same motivational presentation so they're equally motivated as group two and they have them do one other thing and that one thing was fill out this sentence during the next week I will partake in at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on this day at this time at this place so they had to state their intention to perform the behavior and be very specific about it here's what happened so Group one the control group 38 percent of them worked out in the next two weeks group two the motivation group zero impact motivation faded as soon as they left the building one out of three ended up working out Group three ninety one percent of them followed through the only difference was they say to when and where they were going to perform the behavior so if you're looking to build a new habit be very clear about carving out space in your life and when that habit is going to occur so key idea pick a date choose a place give your goals a time in a space to live alright if you're willing to to follow this so far if you're if you're on board with this then you may be thinking how do I get the next level right how do I escalate and improve from here how do I maintain consistency over the long term right anybody can make these 1% changes once or twice anybody can have a good day but how do you show up consistently time after time here's one example and this is going to lead us into what I think is the most powerful way to change behavior which is environment design so the story here is about a guy named Trent ders mid and Trent was a young banker in his early 20s 23 24 in Abbotsford Canada and this is in the 90s Abbotsford still small suburb of Vancouver not a whole lot of banking deals coming through there and he was tasked with being a young sails salesman a young broker and this is the strategy that he followed he had one simple habit every morning I would start with 120 paper clips in one jar and I would keep dialing the phone until I'd moved them all to a second jar so you had a couple 120 paper clips make a sales call move one over repeat 120 times and he did that every single day and over the first two years he grew his book from zero to five million dollars in business he ended up making $75,000 the first year a couple years later he negotiated a didn't do a $200,000 job still in his mid-20s and this is all he did he's like I didn't check analyst reports I didn't check stock reports I didn't check the weather I didn't look at how business and technology scene was doing I just made calls and for every behavior that we're going to perform whether you want to be a better athlete a better musician a better business person there is some core fundamental task that drives results and if you do that task and you do it 120 times a day every day you're going to get a lot of results so think about what that is for you and what that core behavior is that actually drives things rather than getting caught up and have it done enough research have a look to the next analyst report have it learned the latest marketing strategy instead think about what is the behavior that actually drives this performance so another reason that trend strategy works so well is it's a an environmental cue what I would call it visual cue for behavior right he can't lie to himself about whether or not he's performing well on individual basis he has the paperclip sitting right there if he's only made 40 calls he still got 80 paperclips sitting in that jar looking at him right and so often we don't track our behavior in that way we don't have an environment looking at us saying hey are you on track today this is important because environment can actually drive our behavior in very significant ways this study was done by a researcher at Harvard University they their question was can we impact people's behavior can we change habits can we drive growth and performance even if we don't even talk to anybody we don't even say anything to people can we change what they do and what they found was yes they can so the cafeteria at Massachusetts General Hospital looks like this is drawn to scale since I know you're all worried about that so the black boxes on the on the side here the little ones these are just little water refrigerators you know kind of like a mini fridge okay these are on the side of the room the large squares and circle in the middle and so on these are food buffet lines all right where people get food and then the pink boxes these are refrigerators that are larger but they have they have soda in them and they also have water in them okay now what they did and this the only change they made I'm going to flip back and forth here so you can see so they added more water stations that's what all the little circles are and then these big the three big ones that were pink and now are black they didn't take soda out of them they just added more water to them okay so soda is still an option this is all they did to the room they just change the placement of the water what they found over the next three months is sale sales of water increased 26% sales of soda decreased by 12% so people are drinking much less soda than they were before but they didn't even say anything to him nobody even mentioned the change they just put the refrigerators in there think about this for a minute often we assume that our habits are done because of how we feel about something oh why did you pick that soda drink for lunch day well I felt like having it but the truth is 12% of people just body because it was in front of them not because they actually wanted it and this is true of our behaviors across a broad range of life we often choose to do things simply because it's put in front of us simply because the environment is designed that way simply because we're sitting in a place that's tailored to a certain action BJ Fogg one of the professor's I mentioned from Sanford University he used this in a way at his own house he he wanted to eat popcorn but one need less of it like popcorn just one didn't want to use much so he took it out of this pantry in his kitchen walked down the hall when to the garage climbed up the ladder on the highest shelf in the garage and put the popcorn up there now if he really wants it he can just go out and get it only takes 30 seconds but if he's designing for his lazy decision for his default choice he's not going to go get the popcorn how can you design the room around you your work space your work environment your training environment so that the default choice the lazy decision is a better decision and if you can do that then you can make it much easier to fall through with the habits and behaviors that you want to perform this is a Kurt Lewin's equation he actually came up with this in the 30s but what it basically says is behavior any behavior is a function of a person in their environment and so if you can change the environment you can change the person you can change the behavior so the key idea here is that I've never seen at least in my research anyone consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment we often discount this we often think oh you just need more willpower you don't have enough guts you don't have enough courage you don't want it bad enough but the truth is if you design an environment to promote a certain behavior you make it far easier for people to follow through with that so this is a what I would call the Seinfeld strategy and this is a way to stick with this over the long run Jerry Seinfeld very famous comedian one of my favorite comedians certainly one of the most successful comedians of all time and when he was starting his career as his show was getting on air first year two he was still he was still going around and I got go thank you they're giving me a time check so Seinfeld was still still on the road still going around doing his stand-up comedy and at this particular club one night Seinfeld was performing and headlining on stage there was a young comedian named Brad Isaac who was opening for Seinfeld and Isaac got Seinfeld backstage and said you know mr. Seinfeld I'm the young comedian I really want to succeed I'm interested in you know hearing do you have any tips for somebody in my situation in Seinfeld lieutenant said well the secret to being a great comedian is write better jokes and the secret to writing better jokes is to write everyday so here's what I think you should do I want you to get a big wall calendar where you can see every day of the year on the calendar put that on your wall and each day that you do your task of writing jokes for 10 minutes 15 minutes whatever it is I want you to mark an X on that day he's like you may do this once or twice and have a couple false starts whatever but at some point you're going to get 5 6 7 8 days in a row you're going to get some kind of chain going at that point your only goal becomes don't break the chain it doesn't matter how good or how bad your jokes are doesn't matter if they make it into your material at any point all that matters is that you don't break the chain you stick with a consistency I know people who have used that for almost anything you use it for workouts right don't break the chain of your training you can use it for dribbling drills you can use it for if you're a film maker am i working on film for 30 minutes a day whatever the goal is for you don't break the chain and the caveat that I would add to that the one thing that I would change from this is nobody's going to be perfect there's going to be some day where you fall off course but this is the rule or the mental model that I like to keep in mind once that case is never missed twice the thing that separates top performers from everybody else is not they don't make mistakes they make errors they slip-up they make bad choices just like everyone else they have a bad day but they find a way to get back on track quicker than anyone else as fast as possible right they may miss one workout but they're not going to miss two so never miss twice as you're building these chains in your own life the key idea here the phrase I like to use rome wasn't built in a day but they were laying bricks every hour right you don't have to do everything you want today but you do need to lay a brick you do need to keep that chain going day after day brick by brick how do you build a thing that you want to create so I have two stories to finish up here the first is from Southwest Airlines and south popular airline they they're really well-known in the airline industry for being profitable which is something you would hope every company is but throughout the 70s and 80s and into the early 90s Southwest was continuing to post profit every year when a lot of businesses and and airlines were not and so they were so successful to the point where in 1996 they had offers to expand to almost a hundred different cities now think about if you're in this position if you're a business is your goal right like how do we grow as fast as possible so a hundred different cities are asking Southwest to move and instead Southwest turned down 95 percent of the offers and moved into four new places in 1996 this story is told in a book called great by choice by Jim Collins and the reason that Southwest pursue the strategy is they wanted to do things they could sustain in any habit there's some level of effort that needs to be put in and this is what we usually talk about right let's perform harder let's put more effort in let's burn ourselves out and we get to point B which is burn out now you have the opposite which is point a s laziness is very sustainable doesn't require a lot of effort you want to live somewhere in the middle right somewhere in this zone of long-term growth how can you show up day after day time after time I was talking to a few people last night I just recently heard about Kevin Garnett's work ethic and you know he's often known for being super intense and they were talking about what he does when he's in the gym or how he how his strength training has looked for the last decade of his career and what I was told at least is that on any individual day his workouts aren't that insane he just never misses workouts and this idea that he's living in that zone a long-term growth he's not trying to burn himself out each time in the gym but he's never going to miss that's what leads to greatness and that's what I would like us to embrace today so as gift for attending this I have a PDF that you can download if you want is called transform your habits you can get a james clerk on slash habits if you'd like but it covers a lot of this stuff in detail you know I was able to cover a fair amount of stories today but if you like more exercises or if you're interested in how habits are formed feel free to grab that if not no worries I like to finish with one final story and this comes back to the point that we started this off with about self judgment and about being vulnerable and about being one - to move forward there's very famous choreographer named Martha Graham and in the 1940s she was talking to another choreographer Agnes DeMille who's on the screen here and Agnes DeMille had worked on a variety of different plays in her career throughout the 30s and 40s plays that she thought were good that she thought were very solid and they didn't receive much critical acclaim at all nobody really said much about them then in the 40s she did the choreography for Oklahoma which went on to become this massive Broadway success toured all across the u.s. all across the world and she was talking to Martha Graham and she said honestly I kind of don't feel like I'm cut out for this my metric for what good work is is totally off the things that I thought were really good nobody said anything about the things that I thought were okay ended up becoming this huge hit maybe this isn't just the maybe it's just an it isn't the thing for me and Martha Graham looked at her and said you have something inside of you that nobody else has you have a set of experiences a set of beliefs a set of skills and talents that no one else can bring to the world and your job is not to decide whether that is useful or not whether that is compelling or not whether that is valuable or not your job is simply to share that thing and that's what I would like to say to you there are things that we all want to achieve in our lives and your job is not to be self judgemental or to try to figure out if that's valuable and useful for the world your job is to put it out and to let the world decide so I hope that you'll do exactly that thank you very much

Channel: PGC Basketball

Views: 371,063

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Keywords: snaps2015

Id: g2S2mhOisso

Length: 52min 45sec (3165 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 28 2015