The philosopher Aristotle once said that we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act but a habit. And this reality is reassuring because it reminds us
that achieving our goals requires lots of little
manageable steps over time rather than one giant Herculean effort. But it's also stressful because it means committing
to changing our behavior on a day to day basis for a long period of time. And whether you're trying
to increase your endurance or learn to play an instrument, to read more, or even do something as simple as take care of a plant everyday, you probably know from experience the process of adding new habits into your day to day life is a difficult one. Now I wanted to know what exactly makes this process so
difficult for different people. So a couple of days ago, I asked over on my Instagram what was the biggest thing
that prevents you guys from adding new positive habits to your day to day life? And I got some pretty interesting answers including some funny ones like pizza, and evil twin of Jorgen Von Strangle that hits me with a whip every time I'm trying
to do something useful? But a lot of the answers
seem to be variations on two key problems. One, actually remembering to do the habit, and the other one, which was
by far the most common answer, pure, unadulterated laziness. So today, I wanna share a little hack that I've been using for quite a while which can help with
both of these problems. This is something that can help you both remember to do those habits and actually make them easier to do. And it involves using if-then logic to bind those habits to
things that you already do every single day. If-then logic crops up everywhere from math to computer programming, to game design, and
it's usually implemented in what are called conditional statements. So let me briefly explain
exactly what these are and how they work using
one of my favorite games Magic: The Gathering. In Magic, you have to
different types of abilities, activated abilities and
triggered abilities. Activated abilities are ones that require you to
take action to use them. So for example, take this
card, Birds of Paradise. This little symbol here is telling me that I have to tap the card in order to use the action printed on it. By contrast, triggered abilities are ones that automatically happen when something else happens. So in the case of a card like Man-o'-War, the ability on the card is going to be triggered automatically when it enters the battlefield. You don't have to do anything. It's a conditional statement. If it enters the battlefield, then you bounce something
back to your opponent's hand. And then your opponent
probably flips the table. So let's move on from there and look at how these
conditional statements might be used in a computer program, say YouTube's recommendation algorithm. Now, this is an incredibly
complicated piece of software and even YouTube's engineers don't know exactly how it works. It's kind of a black box but one thing we know that it does do is change up the recommendations
you see on your homepage based on your behavior. So for example, if you were to click the
like button on this video, then some code would
automatically go into effect to show you more videos like this one. And likewise, if you were
to click the dislike button, you would see fewer videos like this. - [Man] By the way, that's an invitation to
click the like button. - So here's how all this
relates to habit building. What we wanna do is set the
if part of the statement as something you already
do every single day. Or hopefully multiple times a day. And then set the then
part of the statement to the habit that you
wanna start building. In an ideal world, this would mean that you would start to do your new habits automatically regardless of what they were. Going to the gym more often, actually remembering to oil
your cybernetic augmentations, just meditating every single day, whatever it is. There would be absolutely no
conscious effort involved. It would be like that triggered ability on the Magic card. But unfortunately, at
least in this context, we aren't automatons. Our brains don't run on computer code. And as a result, there's
no 100% fool-proof way to build this triggered
ability into our minds. The best that we can do
is try to set things up so that the habit that
we're trying to build is more like that triggered ability like that Man-o'-War card than that activated ability
like the Birds of Paradise. And this actually works out really well 'cause I freaking love jellyfish and my friend had a
parakeet in high school and I hated that thing. Anyway, the best way to accomplish this is through environmental design. You wanna start looking for ways that you can set up your
living space and your tools so that the things you do every single day both remind you to perform your habits and make it easier to do so. And with that, it is
time for some examples. I'm gonna start with the thing that actually gave me the inspiration for this whole conditional statements idea in the first place. Which was putting door frame pull-up bar in my office doorway. That way, every single
time I walk into my office, I do five pull-ups and I get really good
at pull-ups as a result. And I gotta admit, this is not an original idea. My dad used to be in the
military before I was born and he once told me that
to get into the mess hall whether they actually ate lunch and dinner and all those other meals of the day, breakfast, second breakfast,
elevenses, all those things. You had to do five pull-ups before you could actually go in there. And as a result, all the
cadets got really good at doing pull-ups. And doing pull-ups is something that I personally wanna
get really good at, hence the door frame
pull-up bar to my office. I also applied this idea back in college to the task of doing
push-ups every single morning and getting up early
on a consistent basis. And I did this by putting my alarm underneath the coffee table in my room. Not only did that require
me to get down on my knees and reach for the phone to actually turn it off in the morning, which was more moving around, more action that would
actually wake me up, but at that point, I was
now down on the ground and I might as well do some push-ups since I'm down there. And this example is a great illustration of how our brains are not like computers. Because I could easily just get up and not do the push-ups. So it's really all about
putting yourself in the position to make doing the habit easier. It's not about a foolproof method. Now, so far all I've talked about are habits that improve
your physical well-being. But what if you wanted
to write more often? What if you wanted to get
into a journaling habit? Or do NaNoWriMo? Or write the next great
Harry Potter fan fiction that dethrones the current greatest one? Which is clearly Maya Mortal. Well, what if you went into
your computer Startup settings and set it to automatically open up your favorite writing program every time you turned your computer on? And you could pair that up with the application blocking properties of an app like Freedom which could lock down your
browser and your games, making writing the obvious choice whenever you turn your computer on. Now putting all of these ideas aside, you could of course use a task manager or a calendar app to create
reminders to do your habits. But this only solves the
reminding half of the problem. Changing your environment and your tools to create these little if-then pairings, to create these conditional statements actually solves both
halves of the problem. It both reminds you to do the habit and combats the laziness problem that so many of you cited by making it so much easier to do. Now, there are lots of
other methods out there for building strong habits. But for me, using conditional logic was a creative solution that helped me get even
better at doing it. And it's worth remembering
that for any problem, there is almost always a
creative solution out there that hasn't been found yet. So instead of sticking to
the established methods, be they online lists or
even videos like this one, it's often better to analyze the details of the problem yourself and try to come up with
a creative solution. Doing this is a skill that can benefit you both in your personal life with
things like habit building, but also in your career. And if you're wondering how you can start improving that skill, one useful tool you should
check out is brilliant.org. At its core, Brilliant is a tool that can help you learn math, science, and computer science much more effectively than with traditional methods. But along the way, it can also help you
become a more creative and capable problem solver as well. All of Brilliant's courses
prioritize active learning and problem solving right from the get go. So you'll find yourself
immediately improving your analytical and creative capabilities. Whether you're learning calculus, figuring out how
gravitational physics works, breaking down sorting
algorithms in computer science, or tackling any of the other
courses in their library. This also means that you
won't find yourself bored. Because unlike traditional
lecture-style classes, you'll be using what you learn right away. I'm a huge fan of Brilliant's
learning philosophy which prioritizes active
learning and curiosity and allowing for failure. So if you wanna start improving
your problem-solving skills, I definitely recommend
you give them a try. To start learning for free, you can head on over to
brilliant.org/thomasfrank which you'll find in the
description down below and if you're among the first 83 people to click that link and sign up, you're also gonna get 20% off your annual premium subscription. I wanna give a big thanks to Brilliant for sponsoring this video and being a huge supporter
of this channel in general and as always guys, thank you so much for watching this video. If you enjoyed it, clicking that like button
is appreciated as always as we talked about that conditional logic will start to kick in and it helps both you and my channel and if you haven't subscribed yet, definitely do so right there so you don't miss out on future videos. You can also click right over there to get a free copy of my book on how to earn better grades or click right here to see one
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