#200 — Creatures of Habit
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Summary
James Clear is the author of the book Atomic Habits, which has been repeatedly recommended to me over the years. It's an analysis of habit formation, and what it takes to discontinue bad habits and form good ones. In this episode, we talk about how James came to think about habits, and how he learned to break bad ones. And he tells the story of a near-death experience involving a baseball bat and a broken nose that changed the course of his life, and led him to believe that habits are the key to becoming a better human being. He talks about how he re-learned how to form new ones, and the challenges he faced when he had to rebuild his life after being hit in the face with a bat by a classmate's baseball bat in a baseball accident. He also shares how he managed to get back on the field and resume playing baseball at a high school he had never even thought about playing before the accident, even though he couldn t remember much of what happened the day before it happened. If you want to learn more about habits and habits, you ll have to listen to this episode of The Making Sense Podcast by talking to James Clear, who is an expert at breaking bad ones and breaking good ones, which is a skill that can be taught to us by anyone who has ever had to do it. Thanks to Sam Harris for coming on the show, and for being willing to share his story and share it with us! making sense of it all. Thanks also to the people who helped him make it all happen. and for supporting the podcast and making it all the best he can be heard on the best possible way he can do it, no matter where he can get it even if he can, no questions asked or not thanks to you can t do it . thank you, Sam Harris, and thank you for being a good friend Thank you for listening, and thanks for listening and supporting if you re listening and sharing you re making sense, and you re good enough, thank you Thanks, and good day to you're listening, good day, good morning, and Good morning and good night, good night bye, bye bye bye Sarah, bye, and bye, Bye Bye, bye. - MYSELF, MRS. - Sarah - Sarah, Caitlyn, Elyssa
Transcript
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James is the author of the book Atomic Habits, which has been repeatedly recommended to me.
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Many of us go through life aspiring to acquire good habits and aspiring to lose bad ones,
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and we treat that process as though it were fundamentally mysterious.
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But, as it turns out, some people have thought a lot about habit formation, and James is certainly
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So I wanted to get him here on the podcast to talk about it.
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So, really, anything you want to accomplish in life that depends on your behavior, in
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any sense, is almost entirely dependent on the kinds of habits you can form, whether they're
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around work, or diet, or fitness, or relationships, or a practice like meditation.
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It's really all a matter of acquiring good habits.
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So you wrote this book, Atomic Habits, that was recommended to me many, many times before
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I picked it up, it's a great analysis of habit formation and what it takes to discontinue
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And there's a lot of detail here that I want to get into, but you have an interesting personal
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You really, you had an experience of having to rebuild your life in an impressive way.
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How did you come to think about habits and how was this forced on you by the whims of
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Well, I grew up in a family that played a bunch of different sports.
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He played in the minor leagues for the St. Louis Cardinals.
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And I played a variety of things growing up and sports played a big part in my childhood
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until I was about 16 and the final day of my sophomore year of high school, I suffered
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this very serious injury where I was hit in the face with a baseball bat.
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A classmate of mine took a swing and the bat slipped out of his hands and sort of rotated
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kind of helicopter style through the air and struck me right between the eyes.
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So broke my nose, broke the bone behind my nose, your ethmoid bone, which is like fairly
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I looked down, I had spots of red and blood on my clothes.
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I had one classmate who literally took the shirt off his back and gave it to me to kind
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of plug up the blood coming from my broken nose.
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And I was sort of unaware of how seriously I had been injured.
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We kind of started making the long march down back into the high school.
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And I got to the nurse's office and started to answer questions, but I didn't answer them
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And I think the third question they asked me was, what's your mom's name?
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So the swelling in my brain got to the point where I lost consciousness, you know, taken
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out of the high school on a stretcher, went to a local hospital.
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When we got there, I started to struggle with basic functions like swallowing and breathing.
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A couple minutes later, I lost the ability to breathe on my own.
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Around that time, I had my first seizure of the day.
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And so the doctors conferred and decided it was too serious to handle at the local hospital.
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So they had to air care me to a larger facility.
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We fly to this larger hospital in Cincinnati and we land on the roof of the hospital and
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a team of, I don't know, a dozen doctors and nurses come out, wheel me into surgery,
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take my mom off to a waiting room where she meets back up with my dad.
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And as I was getting ready to undergo surgery, I had another seizure.
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And so I guess they decided that I was too unstable at that time.
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So they placed me into a medically induced coma.
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And around this time, a priest comes up to my parents and actually this particular facility,
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this particular hospital, they were familiar with it because about a decade before my sister
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had been diagnosed with leukemia at the age of three.
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And this was the same hospital where she had received her chemotherapy treatment.
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So it turns out it was the same doctor, uh, or the, sorry, the same priest that had met
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with them a decade prior that they also talked to that day.
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Thankfully, the story, you know, has a, a good ending.
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So I spent the next day in that medically induced coma about 24 hours later, my vital signs
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had stabilized to the point where doctors decided to release me from the coma.
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So I wake back up and, um, the process of healing sort of begins.
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And this, the reason I tell this story, the reason I think it's related to the
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discussion we're having now is this was a time in my life, you know, all humans have
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I mean, we're building them from the time that we're born, but this was the first
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time when my hand was forced and I had to start small.
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I couldn't just flip this switch and go back to the normal, young, healthy person that I
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All I really wanted was to get back on the baseball field, get back to, you know, living
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But my first physical therapy session, I was practicing basic motor patterns, like
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Uh, I couldn't drive a car for the next nine months.
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And so I started by just doing these small, simple things that almost now, like, as I
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talked to you now, it almost seems insignificant.
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You know, like I went to bed at the same hour each night or prepared for class for an hour
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This is the first time in my life after physical therapy was done that I started training consistently
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So, you know, first once or twice a week, and then eventually three or four times.
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And they were small habits, but they gave me a sense of control over my life again, something
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And so gradually I started to build confidence, rebound, recover.
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I never ended up having a successful high school baseball career.
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I got, was the next year when I went out for the team, I was cut.
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It was the only junior to be cut from the varsity team.
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Senior season, I made the team, barely got to play.
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But I did manage to kind of weasel my way into a college team and continue to build those
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And my senior season, I ended up being named the Academic All-America team, which is about
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And, you know, I never played professionally, but I do feel like I was able to maximize my
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potential and kind of make the most of the circumstances that were pushed my way.
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And I think that's really kind of the lesson for many of us with habits and the role that
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You know, I kind of broadly see three major pillars or things influencing our outcomes
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I mean, you got luck and randomness, which by definition is not under your control.
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You have your habits, the behaviors that you practice and the actions that you take.
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And you have your choices, the strategy that you follow.
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And you can't control luck and randomness, but if you can control the other two, if you
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can make good choices and build good habits, then you can often kind of get luck to sort
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You can increase your surface area for good things to happen, despite the randomness that
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And that's kind of, I feel like the punchline of my story.
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You know, I don't really know that there's anything legendary or heroic about it.
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We all face challenges in life, and this was just one that I faced, but it did teach me
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about the importance of small habits and how they can help you rebound from challenges if
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you're willing to stick with them for months or years.
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Was your ability to rebound obvious from the start, or was there a period where you kind
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of tipped into depression or despair and took some significant period of time to even find
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your way toward growing your way out of this predicament?
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Well, the first thing I said when I woke back up and sort of was cognizant of what was going
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And I think a lot of people feel that way when challenges kind of come their way.
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It's like, you know, why me or stuff like that.
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So I'm sure that I did have a period where, you know, it was hard.
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Looking back on it now, what I remember is trying to be very positive about it.
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There's this interesting, I've been thinking about this more recently.
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You maybe you've seen this in your own life as well.
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There's this, they're like positive and negative feedback loops throughout life.
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And there's this, this interesting thing where stuff kind of feeds on itself in either
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direction, you know, like you're a little bit overweight and that makes you feel a little
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And so then you feel like sitting on the couch more and eating your feelings away.
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And then you get more overweight and just kind of this downward spiral.
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And then the same is also true on the upward side, you know?
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And so I, for whatever reason, I think as I was rebounding from that, I tried to focus
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on some small win, some little foothold that I could get to push off of and move the momentum
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So maybe, you know, that first physical therapy session, that was something like, you know,
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being able to successfully complete each exercise or to do the number of reps that were prescribed
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But that is a very small, tiny thing, but gave me a little foothold and I could use that
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to propel a little momentum into the next thing.
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And it weirdly, if you're, if you're willing to do that, if you're willing to look at life
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that way and to continue to try to drive that momentum, you do sort of get this flywheel
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And pretty soon you're almost surprising yourself by what you're doing.
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And I think that small habits do sort of compound on each other in that way.
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I'm struck by the fact that many of us don't spend a lot of time thinking about habits
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We think about our health, our finances, our careers.
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There's the distance between our moment to moment experience and the experience we imagine
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And when you look at that distance, when you look at the quality of any aspect of our lives,
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we are quite obviously inheriting the consequences of our habits moment to moment.
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It's at the New Year's resolution moment that people think about actually getting behind
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themselves and pushing to change something they're doing in their lives or not doing.
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Well, there's a couple of different ways to define it.
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The way that you would usually hear it defined is, you know, a behavior that's been repeated
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But I think there are a couple other interesting lines of attack or lines of explanation that
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So they are these automatic, relatively mindless behaviors, almost like you're playing a cognitive
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You know, you like pick up your toothbrush and then you play the toothbrushing script or
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you put your shoe on and you play the shoe tying script.
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But another way to define a habit would be a behavior that is tied to a particular context
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So I think that's kind of interesting because it reveals that you cannot have a behavior outside
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And habits are often heavily influenced by the environment that we're in.
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So like your habit of watching Netflix might be tied to the environment of your couch at
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Or your habit of journaling each morning might be tied to the coffee shop across the street
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And so those behaviors linked to the context around them.
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I think that's another interesting way to think about it.
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And then the third way, there's a researcher, behavioral economist too, I think his name
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And anyway, I like the way that he defined to have it.
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He said something to the effect of they are solutions to recurring problems in your environment.
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And I like that idea because you could imagine, for example, somebody comes home from work
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So you kind of have this recurring problem around, say, 530 each evening where you're feeling
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sort of exhausted and stressed and tired from the day.
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And the brain wants to come up with solutions and automate those as best as possible.
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So one person might fall in the habit of playing video games for a half hour, and that's how
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And a third person might go for a walk with their spouse.
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And you can start to see that even though the underlying or root cause is the same or similar,
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we can come up with very different solutions to that same problem.
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And so I think in, to a large degree, people sort of stumble into their habits, sometimes
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Like we, you know, just stumble across the solution that, you know, this happens to be
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the information that came your way throughout life.
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Often you're imitating the habits that your friends or your family or your parents or somebody,
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So you sort of inherit the habits of the people around you.
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And then at some point you get to be 20, 25, 30 years old, and you have to like step outside
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and above yourself and realize, okay, I have all these recurring problems, these things
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that come again and again that need to get resolved throughout my life.
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And I have this set of habits that I use to resolve those problems.
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But what are the odds that the habits that I have now are the optimal solution to the problems
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It's probably very unlikely in the universe of options that you have that you happen to
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And I think as soon as you realize that, you start to see that your habits are more of your
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You know, it's your choice as an adult how you respond to these recurring problems.
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And if you have the option to build habits that solve those things in a healthier or
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more productive or more fruitful way, then that's your responsibility to try to build those.
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So I think all of those different lenses give you kind of a various ways of describing a
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habit and what it is, but that's kind of roughly the role that they play in our lives.
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Is there a difference that you can generically state between acquiring a good habit and discontinuing
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So first, I should say, I think it can be very useful to look at your bad habits because
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and I think we all have had this experience, bad habits seem to form so readily, so easily.
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And yet good habits can be kind of difficult to build and to last.
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I think it's interesting to ask, like, why is that?
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What qualities of a bad habit make it so readily formed?
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And so there are quite a few insights that I discuss in atomic habits that sort of came
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from that opposite lens, from looking at the inverse.
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So I'll discuss some of those in a few minutes as we kind of get deeper into the conversation.
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But to answer your question, what's the difference between a good habit and a bad habit?
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Some people are like, well, if it's bad, why would I do it, right?
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Like, if I know this isn't good for me, why do I keep coming back to it?
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And depending on which experts you talk to, some habit experts don't even like the terms
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good and bad because they're like, well, all behaviors serve us in some way.
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So they, I don't know, there's kind of this philosophical or semantic discussion about it.
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It goes back to Socrates, essentially, that no one knowingly does bad.
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Everyone has a story about why what they're doing is good, at least for them.
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But from a practical standpoint, from a useful standpoint, I think we can define what a good
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And the way to do it is to consider that behaviors produce multiple outcomes across time.
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So broadly speaking, let's say there's like an immediate outcome and an ultimate outcome.
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Now, the immediate outcome of most good habits is, or sorry, most bad habits is pretty favorable.
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Like the immediate outcome of eating a donut is great, it's sweet, it's sugary, it's tasty,
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It's only the ultimate outcome if you keep repeating that behavior for a year or two years
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Same story kind of with like smoking a cigarette.
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The immediate outcome of smoking a cigarette is, you know, maybe you get to socialize with
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a friend outside the office or you curb your nicotine craving or you take a break from
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It's only the ultimate outcome that's unfavorable.
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Like the immediate outcome of going to the gym, especially that first week or first month,
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It's only the ultimate outcome a year or two years from now that is favorable.
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And that misalignment between the immediate outcome and the ultimate outcome, I think is
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one reason why it's so easy to slide into bad habits because they feel good in the moment
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and can be difficult to build good habits because a lot of the returns are delayed.
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And I think this comes back to some sort of, you know, evolutionary wiring.
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I mean, from the vast majority of human history, humans have lived in what scientists would call
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Almost all of your choices had some kind of immediate or near-term impact on your life.
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Do I forage for berries in that bush for my next meal?
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And then now, really just the last 500 years or so, you know, we could debate exactly how
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much time, but relatively short in human history.
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We live in this modern society where a lot of the greatest returns that we get now are
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You go to work today to get a paycheck in two weeks, or you go to class today to get a
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You save for retirement today so that you can be retired and free in a decade or two.
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And so we have this weird shift where increasingly the payoff of delaying gratification or of making
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long-term choices is greater and greater because the institutions and society and culture we've
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set up, and yet our paleolithic minds seem to be wired to prioritize the immediate outcome.
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And so I think all of that together helps explain sort of what the difference is between a good
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What does that behavior get you in the long run, the ultimate outcome?
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And also why it's like kind of easy to build bad habits and fall into them, slide into them so
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So I like to summarize that by just saying, the cost of your good habits is in the present.
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And I think that kind of helps describe the difference between the two.
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It relates to a few other issues we should discuss here, and that is the difference between
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focusing on goals and focusing on process because that has significant consequences.
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I know you're familiar with Danny Kahneman's work, and he's famous for many things, but
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one of his useful distinctions is between the remembering self and the experiencing self.
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And the experiencing self is your moment-to-moment experience of your life, and just integrating
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all the data under that curve is what it's like to be you.
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And if we could ping you randomly 20 times a day in an experience sample from you, asking
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you how you feel in each moment, we would get some measure of what it's like to be you.
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And you'd report back your well-being, such as it seems to you, in a window that's very
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But the remembering self is who comes online when anyone's asked how they feel about their
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life in a much more global, retrospective sense.
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And it's the remembering self that is the one that tends to make decisions about what to
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do in life, what kinds of goals to pursue, which in this case, what kinds of habits to
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And there is, you know, Danny has noticed and more or less surrendered to this fact that
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there is a reliable mismatch between the remembering self's account of what is good and what is
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worth doing and who it's becoming and what its life is like, and the experiencing self's.
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So you can think you had a terrible time over the last week, but the sampling would say otherwise
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And he thinks there's really no way to get the remembering self and the experiencing self
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I mean, we have a sort of an ongoing disagreement on this front.
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But I'm wondering what you think about this distinction between what you're doing with your
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mind when you're making some kind of global assessment of who you are and how it seems
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and where you want to go and what it's like to be you really moment to moment throughout
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And then how this relates to this effort to change habits and whether we could prioritize
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a focus on goals where we want to get to versus a focus on process or the kinds of systems
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So let me take the remembering self versus experiencing self first, and then we can come
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And, you know, my main takeaway from a lot of these discussions, and you'll hear him say
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this as well, a lot of the time, basically, it comes down to like, you will not be the
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exception, you know, we'll talk about all these biases, and just knowing about them does not
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shield you from them, you still can be the victim of all of these things.
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And so my practical takeaway when it comes to building habits is, you don't want to go against
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the grain of human nature, you want to work with it.
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And that's one reason, for example, a large part of my philosophy is around making good
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habits, the path of least resistance, because what you find is that regardless of what your
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remembering self or your most strategic self would think, if you sit down and try to design
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out your ideal day or remember what your best performances are like, the truth is moment
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to moment, when you're sitting there and about to make the next decision, we often choose what
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is easiest or what is the path of least resistance?
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What is the action that requires the least energy?
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And so we want to design environments, design a lifestyle and situations that make those
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good actions as easiest and as obvious as possible.
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And so for that reason, I think that's kind of my main practical takeaway from it.
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There are a lot of interesting, you know, theoretical or things to just kind of consider.
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Some of the discussion about the remembering self versus experiencing self reminds me a little
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bit of I think Ray Dalio has like a little division where he basically says like, you're both
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the strategic controller of your life and you're the in the mix, like operator as well.
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You know, you're, you're both the CEO and the frontline worker, you're both the general
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And sometimes we kind of alternate back and forth between those selves.
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And I think what the best plan that the general can come up with is often very different than
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what it's like to be on the battlefield as the soldier.
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And I, I don't know, I don't know how it may be possible to get those fully aligned, which
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Even doing so might be very hard or maybe it's fleeting.
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That's kind of how it feels to me is that occasionally I have moments where I can glimpse
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that and it's like how I'm acting or what I'm thinking in the moment is maybe more aligned
00:24:20.480
But then I get distracted or my attention goes somewhere else or somebody walks in the room
00:24:25.720
or new project arises and I had it, but I had it only for a moment, almost like chasing
00:24:32.120
It's different than flow, but it's similar in the sense that it doesn't last all the
00:24:38.800
That's just, those are kind of my thoughts off the cuff about it, but happy to talk more
00:24:45.880
So how do you think about the difference between a focus on goals versus a focus on systems?
00:24:53.480
And one thing that jumps out to me is that goals are really just ideas and even when
00:24:59.840
they're realized, I guess there are different kinds of goals and some can seem more durable
00:25:04.220
than others, but many are, even in their moment of fulfillment, are enjoyed very briefly.
00:25:11.100
Let's say you decide to, you know, you form the goal that you want to run a marathon and
00:25:18.820
Well, you know, that took, you know, if it's your first, it probably took, you know, five
00:25:22.400
or six hours, but however long it took, the moment of fulfilling it, of crossing the finish
00:25:27.200
line, then you have that fulfillment and then, you know, thereafter you have this memory,
00:25:32.800
you have this idea that you met your goal and you can try to wring out whatever satisfaction
00:25:40.480
But the process is the life of being someone who is now a runner, who, you know, who trained
00:25:47.620
for the marathon and hopefully continues to like running thereafter.
00:25:52.200
So they're very different in terms of duration and most of life is clearly the process and
00:25:57.700
our goals are these brief landmarks on the landscape of our moment-to-moment living.
00:26:03.160
But I know from your book, there are other consequences to focusing on one versus the
00:26:09.340
So how do you think about goals and process or systems?
00:26:12.600
So, yeah, that's a great entry point to this discussion, this point.
00:26:15.780
This is one of the core ideas in Atomic Habits, which is that you do not rise to the level of
00:26:23.520
And the reason I, you know, bring that up or feel like it's so such a central thing is
00:26:28.020
that often when people discuss behavior change, when they talk about habits that they want
00:26:32.820
to shift, it usually is centered around some kind of goal.
00:26:36.340
They start with like, oh, I want to lose 40 pounds or I'd like to double my income or I
00:26:43.660
And so the implicit assumption behind that is if I can just achieve this thing, then I'll
00:26:51.260
Then I'll have, you know, the life I want to have.
00:26:53.220
And so there's this focus heavily, heavily, we are heavily focused on outcomes, but, and
00:27:00.120
this sort of comes back a little bit to what you mentioned near the beginning of the conversation
00:27:03.240
where you said, you know, we have habits all the time, but we don't think about them that
00:27:07.300
And yet they're kind of in the background influencing all these outcomes that we have.
00:27:11.960
And so the way that I would describe that is most of your outcomes in life are lagging
00:27:18.640
So for example, your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits.
00:27:25.100
Your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits.
00:27:29.120
Your physical fitness is a lagging measure of your eating and training habits.
00:27:33.280
Even the clutter on your desk at work or in your garage or your bedroom is a lagging measure
00:27:40.220
And so if you get really motivated and set a big goal, like I have the goal to clean my
00:27:45.220
my room, and then you spend a couple hours doing that, you have a clean room for now.
00:27:50.600
But if you don't change the sloppy, messy habits that led to a dirty room in the first
00:27:55.560
place, then you turn around two weeks later and you got a dirty room again.
00:27:59.300
And so we often think that the outputs are the things that need to change, but it's not
00:28:05.480
It's like fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.
00:28:08.560
And that's kind of this, this language of systems versus goals.
00:28:12.560
I first heard that, that specific phrase from Scott Adams, but you hear it in many different
00:28:19.160
It's been discussed, you know, ad nauseum for centuries, but to put a little finer point
00:28:24.020
on it and to link it back to habits, this is how I would describe it.
00:28:31.560
Your system is the collection of daily habits that you follow.
00:28:35.220
And if there's ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, there's ever a
00:28:41.540
gap between your system and your goal, your daily habits will always win, right?
00:28:45.400
Like almost by definition, your current habits are perfectly designed to deliver your current
00:28:51.560
Like whatever system you've been running, let's say the last six months or last year, whatever
00:28:56.180
collection of daily habits you've been following have carried you inevitably to this place that
00:29:02.760
And, you know, there, again, you know, I mentioned this earlier in the conversation, there are of
00:29:08.160
There's luck and randomness and so on, but I think largely speaking, we could say that
00:29:12.740
that is true, that you're, that the, the things that you repeat day in and day out, the system that
00:29:20.440
And so for the, all of those reasons, I think we should focus much more on the daily habits
00:29:26.080
on the system than we do on the goal and the outcome.
00:29:29.500
And as you mentioned, there's sort of these downsides or, you know, these negative effects
00:29:34.680
that come from focusing too much on, on the goals.
00:29:37.360
So the first one is that, as you mentioned, achieving a goal really only changes your life
00:29:43.320
You know, like it's only, it's only a momentary thing.
00:29:45.740
It doesn't make, it's not like, this is one of my challenges when people talk about like
00:29:49.820
a 30 day challenge for habits or, you know, 21 days and then the habit is formed or whatever.
00:29:54.360
It's like habits are not really a finish line to be crossed in that sense.
00:29:58.200
You know, they're not, it's not like just do this for a little while and then you'll
00:30:01.600
And achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment.
00:30:04.960
The second thing though, and I thought this was so interesting when I first came across
00:30:08.520
it is that the winners and the losers, so to speak, in any given domain, they often have
00:30:15.800
So, you know, say you're at the Olympics and you've got 25 people competing in an event.
00:30:20.560
Presumably all of them have the goal of winning the gold medal, right?
00:30:24.020
It's not the goal that makes the difference in their performance.
00:30:26.260
Or if you have a job opening and a hundred people apply for a job, presumably all of them
00:30:31.580
all of the candidates have the goal of getting the job.
00:30:34.620
And so a goal might be necessary, but it's not sufficient for success.
00:30:39.840
What you really need is the daily habits, the preparation, the behaviors that lead to
00:30:45.500
Now, now that I've criticized goals a little bit, I should say, I do think they can be useful.
00:30:49.800
And two of the things that I think they can be useful for.
00:30:52.780
So one is clarity, setting a sense of direction.
00:30:55.440
If you have a clear goal, you know what direction you want to row in.
00:30:57.860
Or in the case of a team, what direction you want the whole team to row in, get everybody
00:31:04.720
If you have a goal and somebody comes to you with an opportunity and they say, hey, would
00:31:11.600
Or can I, you know, are you interested in this?
00:31:13.880
You can run it through that filter of your goal.
00:31:16.240
And it's easier to say no, if it's like, oh, no, that doesn't help me achieve my goal.
00:31:20.680
But short of that, I think that it's much more useful to focus on the habits in the system.
00:31:27.300
And most of the time we probably spend, I don't know, 80% of our time, let's say, talking about
00:31:32.380
outcomes and goals and what we want to achieve and what the future should look like.
00:31:40.420
Now let's put the goal on the shelf and focus instead on the system and the daily behaviors.
00:31:44.940
Yeah, and another way to merge these two ways of thinking is to recognize that the real
00:31:52.540
goal that you want to achieve, a more rational goal, is to find a way to do it.
00:32:00.620
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