It’s that time again when your new year’s resolutions are probably a distant memory and you’ve resumed all your normal misbehaviors.
Sustained intentionality is really hard because you fall into natural cycles as your tired brain constantly looks to save effort and energy. Duke researchers have found that habits - your default routines - account for about 40% of your day. So how can you ensure that the autopilot is headed toward the destination you want? Good recommendations come from Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit and James Clear’s Atomic Habits.
Duhigg presents research that all habits come down to a simple pattern: some sort of cue prompts a craving that leads you to a routine resulting in a reward. His fundamental contention is that you can’t resist cravings - instead, you have to redirect them.
To do that, break down the pattern, starting with discovering and isolating the cue: where are you? What time is it? Who else is around? What just happened? How are you feeling? Once you identify the specific prompt, you can decide to do something else instead.
Figure 1. You’re in a pool hall. It’s midnight. You’re surrounded by strangers. You just gambled away your last dollar. You’re feeling drunk, tired, bitter. And there it is, what always starts the downward spiral: the cue (stick).
To determine what to do instead, you need to pin down why you do what you do - why is the reward appealing? Is your mid-afternoon hankering for sweets in actuality just a desire to get a break from work that you can solve by going for a walk in a nearby park? Or is it really about wanting to talk with friends at the canteen - something you can do without candy? Or do you just need some calories - which you can accomplish with some fresh fruit? Alcoholics Anonymous is built on this insight: whenever members feel the desire to drink, they call their sponsor instead and hopefully achieve whatever they wanted to with alcohol - companionship, working out a problem, relief. Your goal is to experiment with alternatives to know what satisfies instead of your undesired routine.
Figure 2. Perhaps you don’t even like the drugs, you just like your dealer - maybe see a movie together instead?
James Clear builds on that framework with four simple principles outlined below.
First: make good habits obvious and bad habits invisible. At its most basic, store your healthy foods at eye-level in your refrigerator or in highly visible places around your home while burying the unhealthy in some dark corner, perhaps ideally of your trash can. When you shut down your computer for the evening, leave open only the work you want to do, exiting out of any distracting websites. Take that exercise machine out of the unopened box in the garage, that guitar out of its dusty case in the closet, those crafts out of the drawer and put them smack down in the middle of your daily path through your home.
Figure 3. As painstakingly demonstrated here, I’ve drawn an invisibility cloak covering your most tempting bad habit. But for your day to day needs, there are probably easier ways to hide it.
At an advanced level, reconsider your environment for cues to do the right thing - especially helpful when you frame a decision as an “if...then” statement to make your action as automatic as possible. If you get handed a menu, then you’ll order the best salad. If you have a meeting on any floor lower than eight, then you’ll take the stairs. If you get a financial bonus, then you’ll put 50% of it in an index fund.
Or make your plan glaringly obvious on a big white board that you see everyday: state exactly what you will do exactly when exactly where - and you’ll double your chance of doing it. “At 6 AM, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday I will go to the gym on 5th and Union and run the treadmill for 2 miles.” Clear’s call to arms is that “Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity.”
Figure 4. Initially skeptical, Jace put his intention on the office whiteboard and immediately discovered it worked - way ahead of schedule.
Second: make good habits attractive and bad habits repulsive. Stake your identity on what you’re doing. Or as Clear puts it, “Decide the type of person you want to be. Prove it to yourself with small wins… Does this habit cast a vote for the person I want to be?” Clear cites a friend who lost over 100 pounds asking herself throughout the day, “What would a healthy person do?” “She figured if she acted like a healthy person long enough, eventually she would become that person. She was right.”
Along the way, use peer pressure to your advantage: “join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. New habits seem achievable when you see others doing them every day.” Meet your favorite gym rat everyday for a jog. Sign up for a Bible study with serious devotees. Volunteer at your favorite charity.
Meanwhile, reframe your action: you’re not tiring yourself out by exercising, you’re getting stronger, healthier, more attractive. You’re not missing your favorite television shows, you’re finding favorite books. You’re not sacrificing by saving money, you’re enjoying the freedom of financial security.
Third: make good habits easy and bad habits hard. This may be the most important point I can emphasize. When you’re in the stage where you are determined to be better, don’t just resolve that you’ll make the right decision when the time comes. If you want to do less of something, add as many points of friction as you can think of. If you want to do more of something, identify and remove every point of friction. Sleep in your exercise clothes, pre-schedule a 5.45 AM Uber to the gym, hire a trainer to meet you there - and harass you if you flake. Hide your remote and its batteries in separate distant locations in your house, have your spouse create a complicated password for Netflix that you have to retrieve and enter every time, plug your TV into a timer that turns off at a certain time every night. When you’re tired, when your willpower is drained, it’s too much to resist easy temptation. Get creative and outsmart yourself. Design your environment so that the default option is the one you always wanted to do.
Figure 4. Since going to prison, Roger values time with his family more than ever, tidies up everyday, never checks his phone, spends practically nothing, and has even learned a new hobby in manufacturing license plates
Understand that you don’t need to pursue radical and immediate change to get better: “changes that seem small and unimportant at first will compound into remarkable results if you’re willing to stick with them for years… if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero.” When you’re starting something new, just make it easy. Do five push-ups a day. At 1% daily improvement, you’ll upgrade to 6 push ups in 20 days. You’ll get to 10 push-ups only at day 76. But at the end of the year, you could do nearly 190!
Figure 5. But why stop there? Just over 2.5 years in, you could beat the world record with over 46,000 push ups in a day!
Fourth: make good habits satisfying and bad habits frustrating. Jerry Seinfeld once advised a young comedian to mark each day on a calendar with a big red X when he wrote jokes - and to write everyday so that he wouldn’t break the chain. Clear references a salesman who “began each morning with two jars on his desk. One was filled with 120 paper clips. The other was empty. As soon as he settled in each day, he would make a sales call. Immediately after, he would move one paper clip from the full jar to the empty jar and the process would begin again.” He made 120 calls a day to feel the satisfaction of filling that second jar - and ended up a star.
The trick here is to try and figure out how to get an immediate boost from doing the things you want to do and an immediate ding from doing the things you want to avoid. Whenever you don’t make an impulsive purchase, put the money you would have spent in a marked bank account for something you really want. Auto-schedule a small donation to a repulsive cause every morning if you don’t wake up in time to stop it. Use a swear jar.
Figure 6. Before contracting Quitters, Inc., please consult your spouse
The bottom line: resolutions aren’t enough. When you come to the conclusion that you need to do something different, the best thing you can do is put in the work to alter your incentives. If you do, your autopilot can take you to heights you never dreamed possible.
Figure 7. Click here to buy James Clear’s Atomic Habits, 8/10. An articulate, practical encouragement to make good habits easy and bad habits hard.
Figure 8. Click here to buy Charles Duhigg’s the Power of Habit, 6/10. The core framework is useful, but Duhigg is more interested in telling stories from around the world about habits than directing practical advice. Still, the stories can be interesting - I especially enjoyed reading about how Tony Dungy coached teams to the Super Bowl by teaching players to recognize behaviors in opponents as cues that prompted certain prescribed responses that would collectively win games.
Thanks for reading! If you’ve enjoyed this email, forward it to a friend: know anyone trying to exercise more or lose weight? How about someone with a goal to save money or read more? Or anyone who has ever fallen short of their goals?
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