The Peter Attia Drive - #183 - James Clear： Building & changing habits

00:00:00.000 Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Atiyah. This podcast,

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00:00:41.720 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Now, without further delay, here's

00:00:48.080 today's episode. My guest this week is James Clear. James is an author, entrepreneur, and photographer.

00:00:55.280 He is the author of the New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits, an easy and proven way to build

00:01:01.660 good habits and break bad ones. I wanted to interview James after reading his book for the

00:01:06.240 second time, at which point I picked up even more from it the first time. And I realized

00:01:10.260 this is such an important part of what we try to do in our practice. And of course, what most of us

00:01:16.520 try to do in our lives, which is change behaviors and behaviors can really be distilled into habits.

00:01:21.780 In this episode, we talk about his background, why this is an interesting topic to him, but mostly

00:01:26.520 we just dive really deep into the four components of what goes into forming behavioral habits.

00:01:33.200 And then of course, breaking those apart, how can you unlearn or learn de novo new habits?

00:01:40.000 So I think you'll enjoy this episode if you've ever wanted to change a behavior or create a behavior.

00:01:43.820 So without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with James Clear.

00:01:47.720 Hey James, thanks so much for making time to sit down today. It's been a while I've wanted to sit

00:01:57.780 down and chat with you. Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for thinking of me. I'm excited to talk

00:02:01.560 more. I'm trying to think when I first read your book, because I read it twice and like all good

00:02:06.440 books, you get more out of it. I think the second time in part, because I think the deeper you get

00:02:12.140 down the rabbit hole of trying to create habits, whether it's in yourself or helping others form

00:02:17.780 habits, the more you realize how challenging it can be. But maybe for folks who haven't read it,

00:02:23.700 because I suspect there's going to be a bunch of people listening to this who have read it,

00:02:26.660 and I want to be able to go deeper for them and think there's going to be some people who haven't

00:02:29.800 read it. Give us a bit of the history as to why this even appealed to you.

00:02:33.780 Well, first, thank you for saying that. I feel like that's the ultimate measure of whether a book is

00:02:37.280 good or not. Is it worth rereading? That's a high bar. There are many books I've reread. But yeah,

00:02:42.440 I really appreciate you taking the time to do it twice. So what excited me about habits? I think

00:02:47.580 there are a few things. The first is you're building habits all the time, whether you're thinking about

00:02:52.640 them or not. So depending on which study you look at, somewhere between 40 and 50% of our behaviors

00:02:59.520 seem to be automatic and habitual. But most of the time, those studies are looking at things that are

00:03:06.280 like more or less automatic, brushing your teeth, tying your shoes, unplugging the toaster after each

00:03:11.320 use. But I think the true influence of your habits is even greater than that, because a lot of the

00:03:17.120 time, the behaviors that you're taking are shaped or influenced by the habits that preceded them. So

00:03:23.500 you can imagine standing in line at the grocery store or having three or four minutes free in your

00:03:29.300 kitchen, and you habitually pull your phone out of your pocket. The next five or 10 minutes might be

00:03:35.760 spent thinking carefully about what email you're responding to or the video game you're playing

00:03:40.800 or scrolling social media. But that conscious, maybe non habitual behavior was shaped or set by

00:03:49.560 the habit of pulling your phone out. So the reach of our habits is very wide, and it's influencing our

00:03:55.300 behavior all the time. So that's one reason why it's important. And I think that if you're going to be

00:04:00.460 building habits anyway, you might as well understand what they are and how they work and

00:04:06.400 how to shape them, so that you can be the architect of your habits and not the victim of them. A lot of

00:04:13.040 people feel like their habits are happening to them, like they don't get a whole lot of influence on it.

00:04:17.460 And partially, I think it's just because, you know, it's this process your brain is going through all

00:04:20.960 the time to try to automate and make behaviors more efficient. But if you don't really know what's

00:04:26.200 happening or where to adjust it, then it kind of feels like it's happening to you rather than

00:04:29.900 happening for you. And then I would say the second thing that kind of really got me diving in deeper

00:04:35.660 and thinking about it more carefully is just the realization that most of us in life want some kind

00:04:41.460 of results. We want to get better at a skill or we want to lose weight or to make more money or reduce

00:04:48.220 stress and gain peace of mind. And whatever the results are that you're looking for, most of the time,

00:04:54.940 your results are a lagging measure of the habits that preceded them. So your bank account is a

00:05:01.200 lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your nutrition and

00:05:06.680 training habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits.

00:05:12.800 Even like the clutter on your desk at work or in your garage is a lagging measure of your cleaning

00:05:17.920 habits. And so habits are not the only thing that influence outcomes in life. You have luck and

00:05:24.200 randomness. You've got misfortune. But by definition, randomness is not under your control.

00:05:30.780 And I think the only reasonable approach is to focus on what's in your control. And over long time

00:05:37.300 horizons, your results tend to bend in the direction of your habits. So I think because your brain is

00:05:44.400 building habits all the time anyway, and because your results are heavily influenced by the habits that

00:05:50.620 you repeat, those are two primary reasons that I feel like got me interested in the topic, but also

00:05:56.540 just good reasons for anybody to be fascinated with habits. I'm guessing there's a lot of probably

00:06:01.720 evolutionary rationale for why we're creatures of habit. Presumably the less energy we had to devote to

00:06:10.580 things that would help us survive and procreate, the better. And obviously that's why we have an

00:06:16.600 autonomic nervous system that allows us to function, you know, things like breathing and having your

00:06:21.540 heart go from beating fast or beating slow to be completely out of your voluntary control. I'm curious

00:06:27.860 as to whether or not we have a sense of ancestrally, what types of habits were people ever trying to

00:06:36.840 deliberately change? Maybe it's not an answerable question, but I don't know if you ever contemplated

00:06:40.940 that. When did this idea of being proactive in either breaking a habit or creating a new habit,

00:06:49.460 do you get the sense that that is a recent luxury of our species? So I don't know the answer to the

00:06:53.980 question, but I do have some thoughts on it. And I feel like it probably does skew somewhat recent

00:06:59.220 for one particular reason, which is generally speaking, our ancestors lived in what was primarily

00:07:07.180 an immediate return environment. The majority of the decisions that you would make that meaningfully

00:07:12.980 impacted your survival were ones that were relatively immediate in nature. So taking shelter

00:07:18.520 from a storm or avoiding a lion on the Savannah or foraging for the next meal in a berry bush. These

00:07:24.040 are things that like had a pretty quick payoff in your life. If you fast forward to modern society

00:07:29.980 though, and we could define that however you want, but probably say the last 500 years or something

00:07:34.300 like that, certainly the last hundred years, modern society seems to have created quite a few

00:07:40.360 structures that favor not an immediate return environment, but a delayed return environment. So

00:07:45.800 you go to work today so that you can get a paycheck in two weeks, or you study at school today so that you

00:07:53.540 can graduate in four years, save for retirement today so that you can not have to work a couple decades

00:08:00.260 from now. And there are a lot of structures that are like that in modern society that, that tend to

00:08:05.360 reward delayed gratification. So I think in a sense, we're kind of walking through this modern society

00:08:11.660 that rewards ourselves for patience. And we still have this like paleolithic hardware where we

00:08:17.840 prioritize instant gratification and immediate returns in a lot of ways, in some kind of evolutionary

00:08:22.460 sense. And you can see how there's a little bit of a mismatch there. I wonder if it's that

00:08:28.160 modern mismatch that has led to the desire to change our behavior and to adjust habits. And perhaps it

00:08:36.440 wasn't something that we thought about as carefully or cared about as much a thousand years ago or

00:08:40.640 5,000 years ago or longer. It is interesting though, to say that some aspects of modern society are

00:08:46.940 mismatched with that ancestral wiring, but some of them are not. Why do we care about delaying

00:08:53.920 gratification to get a PhD or delaying gratification to save more money? Primarily because it affords

00:09:00.280 some form of status, which is very hierarchical and very, we think, evolutionarily wired in. So

00:09:06.780 there's still connections there. It's just that not all of it is aligned. Yeah. It seems that the

00:09:12.200 vehicles that we would have used to attain status earlier were much quote unquote simpler. And today

00:09:18.600 we're looking at other ways to do it. Hearing you talk about habits that way makes me compare two

00:09:24.040 activities I like very much and contrast the challenges of learning each of them. So one is

00:09:30.280 riding a bike and the other is learning to swim. So if you took a 20 year old who had never done both,

00:09:35.840 and admittedly, it's easy to find a 20 year old that's never swum. It's probably hard to find a

00:09:39.480 20 year old that's never ridden a bike, but I would posit that it's really easy to teach a 20 year old

00:09:44.020 to ride a bike if they haven't done it. And let's assume for a moment, this isn't someone who

00:09:48.640 had never been able to do it before, but found somebody who'd never ridden a bike at 20.

00:09:53.220 And the reason I would argue that is in a bike, the object is balance. It's really about balance

00:09:59.200 and you get your feedback immediately. So, you know, the second you're out of balance on a bike

00:10:05.040 because you're in the environment of the air and the air has a density such that it's not forgiving.

00:10:11.400 You basically are out of balance. You're going to fall. Conversely, although most people don't

00:10:15.600 think of it this way, swimming is also about balance in the water. You're trying to balance

00:10:19.640 yourself this way versus this way. Most people would naturally sink feet first and you're trying

00:10:25.000 to balance yourself this way so that you can breathe. And those things are not easy to do

00:10:30.060 because the feedback loop is very long and it's very hard to make the connection that you're out of

00:10:35.080 balance. It also doesn't hurt as much when you fail. So when you fall off your bike,

00:10:39.020 it's very uncomfortable, but when you're out of balance and swimming, you just have to work harder,

00:10:43.240 but you don't realize why you're working harder. Anyway, that's why I think it's very hard to learn

00:10:47.840 how to swim and it's not very hard to learn how to ride a bike. And therefore it requires much more

00:10:52.900 deliberate practice to learn to swim than it does to ride a bike, at least at some basic level.

00:10:58.920 I'll kind of give a roundabout answer here, but I'll come back to your question. So

00:11:02.080 what is it that determines whether a habit is good or bad? You know, we use these phrases a lot of the

00:11:07.680 time and conversation. We say, Oh, it's a bad habits, good habit. And sometimes people will

00:11:11.900 ask me like, well, why do I repeat this habit? If it's bad for me, you know, if it's so terrible,

00:11:15.460 then how come I keep coming back to it? And I think we can divide in a sense, if you want to get

00:11:21.820 really pedantic about it or really academic about it, some researchers don't even like to use the

00:11:25.660 word good or bad because they're habits and they all serve you in some way. So we could just say

00:11:29.760 basically adaptive or maladaptive. Right? Yeah. I think we could make a meaningful division

00:11:35.420 in the sense of how we use it in most conversation and say that pretty much all behaviors produce

00:11:41.840 multiple outcomes across time. Broadly speaking, we could lump it into an immediate bucket,

00:11:48.040 an immediate outcome and an ultimate outcome. And what you find is that for most bad habits,

00:11:54.680 the immediate outcome is actually pretty favorable. The classic example is smoking a cigarette. But if

00:11:59.320 you smoke a cigarette outside the office at 10 a.m. with a friend, well then immediately you get

00:12:03.700 some socialization. Maybe it curbs your nicotine craving or just lets you like de-stress for a

00:12:08.860 couple minutes or get a break from work. There are all kinds of things that you might be benefiting

00:12:12.440 from. It's only two or five or 10 years later that the ultimate outcome is negative. With the

00:12:19.080 good habits, especially the first time you perform them, it's often the reverse. The first week of

00:12:24.600 training in the gym, your body looks the same in the mirror. You're sore. You don't really have much

00:12:29.680 a show for the effort that you're putting in. You feel kind of stupid in there. You're wondering if

00:12:33.740 people judge you or if you're doing it the wrong way. There are a lot of upfront costs and it's only

00:12:38.960 two or five or 10 years later that you get the outcome that you're looking for. In a sense, the cost

00:12:44.800 of your good habits is in the present. The cost of your bad habits is in the future. And that

00:12:50.160 misalignment between when you feel rewarded and when you feel punished helps to explain why we tend to

00:12:57.320 fall pretty easily into a lot of things that we would categorize as bad, like eating donuts or

00:13:02.200 smoking a cigarette or whatever, and fall less easily into things that we would categorize as good

00:13:08.040 or feels like I have to force myself to write or whatever. Now, that's very similar to what you

00:13:13.180 just mentioned about the immediacy of the feedback. Bad habits are giving you pretty immediate feedback,

00:13:17.840 kind of like riding a bike. Good habits are giving you pretty delayed feedback, maybe a little bit

00:13:22.120 analogous to swimming. I think that example of the medium that you're in, air versus water,

00:13:27.260 is fascinating to think about water as being a feedback dampener. But there is another element

00:13:33.320 to it, which you also mentioned, which is the strength of the feedback. Falling on the ground

00:13:38.020 off a bike and skinning your knee is pretty painful. You learn quite quickly. Technically,

00:13:42.420 making a bad stroke in the water, you don't really pay too much of a cost if you're being sloppy

00:13:46.620 with your form. It's unlikely that you rectify that quickly. And this is a phenomenon that I think

00:13:53.120 is so critical or so important to behavior change. I called it the cardinal rule of behavior change

00:13:57.980 in atomic habits, which is behaviors that get immediately rewarded get repeated. Behaviors that

00:14:03.980 get immediately punished get avoided. And it's really about the speed and the intensity of that

00:14:09.020 feedback. And generally speaking, the quicker you can get feedback, too intense is maybe a bit much,

00:14:14.460 but you know, at some point it needs to be high enough to move the needle. Can't be so low that

00:14:18.320 doesn't register. So you need both meaningful feedback and quick feedback if you want behavior

00:14:23.660 to change. Actually, I want to come back to that topic because I think therein lies one of the themes

00:14:30.280 of your book, right? Which is that willpower is not a great long-term strategy. But before I get to

00:14:35.840 that, I want to kind of talk a little bit about you personally, at least before you came to these

00:14:40.240 realizations. I know you were an athlete. In your book, you write about this horrible accident you

00:14:45.160 had when you were playing baseball. I believe that was high school or was it in college?

00:14:49.220 Yep. Sophomore year of high school.

00:14:50.820 During that period of your life, were you someone that others and your peers would have looked at

00:14:55.280 you and said, oh God, that James, that guy is so disciplined. I mean, he just has what it takes to

00:15:01.520 always get the job done and he never indulges in the wrong things and always does the right things.

00:15:06.860 Were you one of those guys that was just a beacon of quote unquote discipline or were you a normal

00:15:10.820 guy or were you someone who had a hard time doing what was right? Well, I wasn't someone who had a

00:15:15.540 hard time, but it depends on the context. Keep it simple, like homework, sports, those things.

00:15:22.180 So with school, definitely. I always liked school. I was like the nerdy kid on the sports teams I was on.

00:15:29.200 But in the science lab or something, I was like the jock, which is kind of funny how you change

00:15:34.400 based on the room that you're in. And so I always felt like I kind of played that middle ground

00:15:38.600 between those two. I think it helped me learn how to get along with both groups and, you know,

00:15:42.660 was helpful socially and all that. But earlier in my life, I think I thrived more in school than I

00:15:49.040 did in sports. I barely got to play in high school. That's one of the punchlines of that early story

00:15:53.820 in the book is I've ended up playing a total of 11 innings in high school. Now I kind of blossomed

00:15:59.260 once I got to college and ended up being an academic All-American by the time I graduated,

00:16:03.700 but that came much later. So it really sort of depended on the context. But generally speaking,

00:16:09.420 I would say, yeah, people probably thought that I was disciplined, but I do think it depended on

00:16:14.260 where we were. If it was just looking at school, then I think people would say that if you're looking

00:16:18.960 somewhere else, then maybe not. Was there an area that you struggled with from a behavior standpoint?

00:16:24.060 To be honest, there were areas that I avoided because I thought I would struggle. So I think

00:16:30.020 it was more about me being fearful and avoiding anything I thought I would be bad at than it was

00:16:36.900 about watching him and being like, oh, look at him floundering around. I think I had to overcome

00:16:41.660 that wiring over the course of a decade or two. It took me a long time to start to take more risks

00:16:46.540 and take on things that I didn't think I would be good at rather than just trying to like stack the

00:16:51.620 deck and just do what I thought I would do well. I don't know how much you've paid attention to

00:16:55.860 the discussion debate around free will. I have always assumed we have free will. This is one

00:17:03.200 of those things that is kind of an anthema to me to imagine a world under which I'm not completely

00:17:08.960 under control of my own will and my behavior. But my good friend, Sam Harris, who I don't know if

00:17:15.500 you were familiar with Sam's work. Yeah, I did an episode on his podcast as well.

00:17:18.880 You're familiar with the fact that he's written extensively and spoken extensively about the idea

00:17:22.720 that we actually don't have free will, that this is an illusion. There are examples that I can conjure

00:17:27.720 up to make that case. For example, he uses a very clever thought experiment, which is if I tell you

00:17:34.100 to think of a movie, the first movie that pops into your head, you have no control over what that's

00:17:40.580 going to be. Conversely, there's a part of me that thinks, okay, but there were lots of things I

00:17:45.500 have free will over, my ability to go and do something, take an action, go and exercise or

00:17:50.220 something like that. But the deeper I get into this thinking, the more I start to realize, well,

00:17:54.860 wait a minute, that may still be innate. This ability that I have, using myself as an example,

00:18:00.980 to really have an easy time exercising, it requires virtually no effort to exercise. In fact, it usually

00:18:08.720 requires a lot of effort to sometimes not exercise, but requiring a lot of effort to mind what I eat.

00:18:15.600 And I know people for whom that's not the case, right? I know people for whom they just have an

00:18:18.860 easy time eating what's healthy, but maybe they don't like to exercise that much. Before I go any

00:18:24.040 deeper into my question, let me just pause and ask you for your reaction to that overall line of inquiry

00:18:29.660 and how do you think about free will as it pertains to what we're going to talk about today?

00:18:34.300 Well, first, I think I'm probably similar to you in the sense like exercise has always been

00:18:38.760 on the easier side for me. Nutrition has always been on the harder side, which is kind of interesting

00:18:42.500 there. I don't know exactly what that reveals, but it's just interesting to think about where you have

00:18:45.980 certain inclinations and maybe not others. With respect to free will, I understand the argument.

00:18:52.980 Once you start to walk through, it's like, okay, yeah, there's this very long chain of atoms that are

00:18:56.780 essentially colliding and leading us inevitably to the next action or the next thought or whatever. And if we

00:19:01.700 could map them all out, then perhaps we could just predict everything that's about to happen.

00:19:07.280 I get that as a thought experiment. I tend to, when I'm living my daily life, fall in the same space

00:19:13.560 that sounds like you fall in, which is, well, I'm going to continue to act as if I have free will.

00:19:18.680 And ultimately, the more that I think about it, I usually come down on that side where it's like,

00:19:22.640 listen, the truth is nobody knows the answer one way or another. We have good arguments perhaps for

00:19:27.460 each, but nobody knows for sure. If it is all predetermined, then it kind of doesn't really

00:19:33.180 matter. I'm going to do this anyway. And if it isn't predetermined, I might as well choose the

00:19:38.820 thing that I think best serves me. So whether I'm making that choice that best serves me or whether

00:19:45.240 it was predetermined that I'm going to make the good choice, it kind of doesn't really matter to

00:19:49.580 me. Like I might as well choose to act that way. So I don't know. I would be very curious to hear

00:19:54.240 what Sam's thought on that is, but I, from a practical standpoint, I don't see a reason to

00:20:00.040 not choose the best option that you can in the event that you do have free will. You'll be glad

00:20:05.560 that you chose it in the event that you don't have free will. You didn't get a say anyway. So who cares?

00:20:10.460 I guess I would add to that is it might be that free will or the absence of free will is what

00:20:16.280 determines a person's maybe call it genetic propensity to change habits or form habits. There may be some

00:20:23.460 people for whom that is easier than others, but that's probably a spectrum. And it doesn't imply

00:20:29.540 that a person who struggles with a given behavior can't learn to master it. Again, using an example,

00:20:36.480 I'll never be a Michael Phelps ever. There was no scenario under which I was going to be as good

00:20:42.080 a swimmer as Michael Phelps. So even if he hadn't started swimming till he was 15 and my parents threw

00:20:48.520 me in the water at two, I was never going to be that good, but it doesn't mean I couldn't learn

00:20:53.660 to swim. And similarly, had he never been thrown in the pool, we would never have heard his name.

00:20:59.560 So I guess that's how I kind of rationalize it, which is there are going to be people for whom it

00:21:04.540 is easier to go through the exercises that we're going to talk about. And there are people for whom

00:21:10.320 that's just going to be more difficult and you can't change that part of it. That's the part,

00:21:14.600 I guess, that is set. Yeah. A couple of thoughts to add onto that. I thought of this when you first

00:21:19.940 brought this up a few minutes ago. I don't know if you're familiar with David Epstein,

00:21:22.820 his work on sports gene and range and so on. David's great and a good friend of mine,

00:21:27.160 a really nice guy and just very thoughtful with the way he puts arguments together,

00:21:32.040 which I always appreciate. And I was having a conversation with him about some of this stuff.

00:21:36.120 And he said, one of the things that surprised him when he was researching the sports gene is that

00:21:41.160 characteristics that he thought would be mostly genetic strength and speed and things like that

00:21:47.020 turned out to be heavily influenced by training and choice and a lot of other stuff and qualities

00:21:52.260 that he thought would be a choice like grit and perseverance and desire to train turned out to

00:21:59.520 have a much higher genetic component than he realized. I always love the example. There's,

00:22:04.160 I think this is in sports gene. He talks about Steffi Graf just happened to be in a tennis study when she

00:22:09.360 was young. She was like 14 or something. And she was part of this cohort of young Germans that were

00:22:13.920 being studied. And she not only tested the highest for physical abilities like strength and speed and

00:22:20.280 quickness and so on, but also tested the highest for competitiveness and desire to train and all

00:22:25.320 these other things. I just love when combinations like that come together. Like think about how pointless

00:22:29.720 this is to compete against her. Not only is she better than you, she also wants it more.

00:22:34.160 So I do think that there's a heavy genetic component to some of the mental characteristics

00:22:39.500 that would make you more likely to train some of these aspects or more interested in some things

00:22:45.280 than others. To your point about Phelps, whether he had ever been dropped in the pool or not,

00:22:50.560 on the surface, it seems like something that would make you less motivated. You would say,

00:22:54.500 oh, well, why even try? I'm never going to be Michael Phelps. Or if genes play such a large role,

00:22:59.000 what's the point? But I actually think that's the wrong lesson to take away. The primary lesson,

00:23:04.700 I think, is that genes don't tell you not to work hard. They tell you where to work hard. Or they

00:23:10.660 don't tell you not to have a strategy. They just inform your strategy. This is another line that

00:23:15.940 David told me in a conversation once where he said, a lot of people talk about grit and perseverance

00:23:19.840 and discipline. But what if that is just your natural propensity based on the thing that you're

00:23:26.220 working on? What if I just happen to look kind of gritty in my terms of weight training or working

00:23:32.320 at writing a book compared to the average person? But I just look that way because I happen to like

00:23:37.680 those things. And he said, yeah, there's this whole line of thinking that like grit is fit.

00:23:42.780 And so actually the way to increase your perseverance and discipline is to find areas

00:23:48.000 or categories or skills where you're highly interested in them. It's very hard to beat the person who's

00:23:52.960 having fun because they're going to want to keep working longer than the person who's suffering.

00:23:58.100 So grit is fit. I think is one way in which you can maybe try to stack the deck or stack the odds

00:24:03.720 in your favor and get your genes aligned with the things that you're working on. And then there are

00:24:09.260 going to be things like Michael Phelps in a pool where you're like, listen, this body was just designed

00:24:14.980 to do this thing. It's very hard to find somebody who's more optimally designed to move through the

00:24:20.160 water than him. Not all of us are going to have the good fortune of discovering whatever that thing

00:24:26.500 is for us in our lives at age four or six or whatever. I don't think that that means you

00:24:32.000 should stop searching. This is one of the benefits of trial and error. The person who is curious and

00:24:36.660 willing to explore a lot of things is more likely to come across an area where they are fascinated or

00:24:42.580 they are interested. And it also is a really good fit for their natural abilities or propensities.

00:24:47.620 That's kind of the primary lesson that I take away from the genetic side of things is similar to what

00:24:53.000 you said. Anybody can improve. Doesn't mean anybody can be Michael Phelps, but you can always improve

00:24:57.200 your ability. And let's try to find that thing that I'm fascinated with, that I'm interested in.

00:25:02.620 So where it doesn't feel like I'm suffering in the same way that other people are when they're

00:25:07.180 trying this thing. You often be surprised how far you can go, how willing you are to build habits

00:25:12.360 and improve skills if you find some of those things that you're truly fascinated by.

00:25:15.700 Two comments I'd add to that. One completely trite, but amusing, which is not only does Phelps have

00:25:22.040 the perfect chassis and engine for what he does, but just as you described Steffi Graf, I've seen

00:25:28.480 Phelps race at meets that meant nothing. So total throwaway meets. He's not shaved. He's not tapered.

00:25:36.000 He couldn't care less to be there. He's swimming like a 200 IM. It doesn't look like he's going to win

00:25:41.680 at all. And yet somehow in the last 15 meters, he out touches everybody. I've seen this on enough

00:25:47.900 occasions that I just think like, this is a guy who hates losing. So even though he's not necessarily

00:25:52.740 in shape at this moment, even though this meet means nothing for him, he's training through it

00:25:57.280 and half the people he's competing against, this is their pinnacle. He hates losing so much. So it is,

00:26:03.420 it's really the perfect combination. I have that same takeaway watching the last dance. There was that

00:26:07.960 one summer where he was recording space jam and they set up like a tent for him outside the movie

00:26:12.560 studio and all the NBA players came in like each night to play pickup games, just got done filming

00:26:17.580 like 12 hours a day, but he just could not handle losing a pickup game. It would just bother him so

00:26:22.320 much to not get it right, to not win. I got to think that that is maybe not exclusively, but at least

00:26:29.120 largely just, he can't turn it off. He doesn't know any other way to be personality or genes or whatever

00:26:34.440 you want to call it. It's just, that's just how he's wired. And I actually love it. When I see

00:26:38.900 that characteristic in any domain, Maggie Rogers, who's a musician, she had this post she put on

00:26:44.800 Instagram. It was all of her notes on a particular song that they were working on. And like, you know,

00:26:49.500 Hey, I think we need to bring the symbol in second earlier here and a bunch of other stuff. And then

00:26:54.260 she shared a little clip of her listening to it with her producer and so on. And you could just tell

00:26:59.440 that she cared so much about the details. It would bother her if the song was not as good as it could

00:27:05.980 possibly be. And maybe that's the musician's version of hates to lose. I love it. When I see

00:27:11.780 that characteristic, it kind of lights me up and makes me want to be that way about whatever thing

00:27:16.060 I'm working on. If you can find that area where it would bother you for it to not be right. I got to

00:27:22.180 think you're going to get much better results there than most people, because most people get bored or move

00:27:26.440 on or get tired or frustrated. And the person who just will not stop unless it's right, is going to end up

00:27:32.900 with better results. It sounds simple to say the way to have great results is to not lower your standards.

00:27:38.980 But in a lot of ways, it turns out to be more true than you would expect.

00:27:44.400 I love watching this in the best of the best. Formula One is one of my favorite sports. And historically,

00:27:50.920 my hero is this guy named Mayartan Senna. And to hear him speak-

00:27:54.440 When I watched Senna, that documentary, I'd never heard of him. I know very little about Formula One.

00:27:58.340 It was awesome. After watching that, I was completely hooked. It was a fascinating sport.

00:28:03.300 And you gather from that documentary, I mean, he was a perfectionist, even amongst his peers. He took

00:28:08.680 it to a level that exceeded that. It actually cost him his life. I don't think the documentary fully

00:28:13.420 explains how much that need to win killed him, because the day he died, he was trying to do something

00:28:18.960 in a car that shouldn't have been done at a time when it shouldn't have been done.

00:28:22.580 But it's amazing when in a sport like that, where the stakes are so high for trying to do something

00:28:28.960 at the expense of maybe a mechanical limit or a limit of the car, but yet all drivers will tell

00:28:34.840 you they're going to go for it. If there's a gap, they're going to go for the gap. And there was a

00:28:39.640 debate in the nineties in Formula One. So Senna's death changed the sport forever because that's really

00:28:44.560 what changed the imposed safety in the sport. But the debate prior to that was, look, we'll just tell the

00:28:51.520 drivers to drive slower. They don't have to drive this fast. They can choose to drive 10% slower,

00:28:57.400 which of course was nonsense. The head of the FIA at the time, who has just recently passed away,

00:29:02.660 made a point, which was that that's the dumbest thing you could ever say. They will all choose

00:29:07.480 to have a less safe car if it goes faster, because you're talking about the 20 most competitive

00:29:15.220 drivers on the planet. Now, there was another point I was going to make that was for most of us,

00:29:21.300 we will never know what it's like to be the top thousand in the world of anything. If I think

00:29:26.520 about all the things that I love, driving a race car, shooting my bow and arrow, you know, exercising,

00:29:30.500 I mean, I'm multiple orders of magnitude beneath even the most lowly ranked professional of those

00:29:40.980 things. And this gets into something else, which is for me, at least the joy is not in the absolute

00:29:48.820 comparison of myself to others, but the relative comparison of where I was before. Do you think

00:29:55.120 that's a universal thing? Is it universal that people are mostly engaged by how much they are making

00:30:02.180 progress relative to their own performance? Or do you think that there are some people who are

00:30:07.240 only capable of finding pleasure when being compared to others in an absolute basis?

00:30:13.380 The second half of that question, I'm not sure of. Generally, I think both of those things are

00:30:17.300 universal. I think one, it's universal that one of the most motivating feelings to the human mind is

00:30:23.060 the feeling of progress. And I think it's fairly universal that progress feels good. In a sense,

00:30:28.860 at the most base level, we are goal-directed organisms in the sense that we have a goal to get food or

00:30:34.860 water or to procreate or to be safe. And we want to move toward those things and resolve the tension,

00:30:42.120 the gap between that goal and our current state as much as possible. Now, with our complex brains in

00:30:48.880 modern society, we come up with many other goals that are outside of just our basic needs like food

00:30:53.480 and water. We have goals like getting a promotion at work or losing 10 pounds or whatever it is.

00:30:58.540 But that same tension between where you are currently and where you want to be, we want to

00:31:03.940 have that resolved. The more progress that you feel like you're making toward one of those things,

00:31:09.180 I think that generally feels good. I feel like that's pretty universal. I also do think it seems

00:31:14.580 to be fairly universal that we have some bias toward status, some bias toward prestige and rank and

00:31:20.820 hierarchy. And it feels good for pretty much anybody to win the game or to have the best score on the

00:31:26.720 scoreboard or to climb the leaderboard. And the more that you see yourself occupying a higher rung

00:31:32.800 relative to those around you, whether it's with wealth or money or fame, the better that feels too.

00:31:39.180 And it probably is a spectrum or maybe each of those is a spectrum. And some people have the dial

00:31:44.720 turned up real high on the status part and maybe lower on the internal measures and other people have it

00:31:51.180 the reverse. But I generally think we all have them to some degree. And you probably will find

00:31:57.060 yourself feeling good if you happen to succeed on either of those metrics. And how much of it do you

00:32:02.160 think is, for lack of a better term, journey versus destination focused? Because if you talk about

00:32:07.900 your example of weight loss, that is generally a very destination based metric. I want to lose 10

00:32:13.900 pounds. I'm not going to be happy until I lose 10 pounds. The process of how I go about doing it,

00:32:19.200 changing the way I'm eating, changing my exercise, accepting the fact that you're not going to lose

00:32:24.060 10 pounds linearly. It's going to look like this. Those are details that I'm willing to tolerate,

00:32:29.240 but I want to lose those 10 pounds or I want to fit into this piece of clothing that I used to fit

00:32:33.460 into. Contrast that with, I want to learn to speak Italian. I'm enjoying this process of learning

00:32:40.460 a few new words every day and learning how the structure of this grammar works relative to my native

00:32:45.920 tongue. And I'm never going to be perfectly fluent in Italian, but I know that in some point I'm going

00:32:52.060 to be completely functional. This journey of learning this new language or learning how to play

00:32:56.900 this instrument, that's what's giving me the pleasure. And I don't know if that distinction

00:33:00.300 makes sense. First, I should say this is coming from someone who's been very goal oriented for most of

00:33:05.120 their life. I would set goals for the grades I wanted to get in school, for the weight I wanted to lift in

00:33:10.920 the gym, for the numbers I wanted my business to hit. And at some point I actually found this sheet

00:33:17.820 that I made my sophomore year of college for the goals that I wanted to hit by the time I graduated.

00:33:22.680 It was funny looking back on it like 10 or 11 years later, because about half of them I hit the

00:33:27.960 other half I didn't. And I was like, obviously setting the goal was not the thing that made the

00:33:32.680 difference. If it did, I would have hit them all. So something else is going on here. It was like a

00:33:37.960 little remedial training session for myself or something realizing that goals are not the primary

00:33:44.220 thing that drives results. And in fact, if you look at the performance in most domains, the winners

00:33:51.560 and the losers have the same goal. Presumably every Formula One driver has the goal of winning the race

00:33:56.800 when they take off from the starting line. If you have a job opening and 100 candidates apply for the

00:34:01.900 job, presumably every candidate has the goal of getting the job. The goal is not the thing that makes

00:34:07.460 the difference in the performance. And if the winners and the losers have the same goal,

00:34:11.900 it cannot be the distinguishing factor. Maybe it's necessary. Perhaps there's an argument it's

00:34:16.320 necessary for success, but it's not sufficient for it. So that got me thinking more like, well,

00:34:21.180 what is it then that drives it? And I, in the book, the way that I described is the difference between

00:34:25.840 systems and goals. Your goal is your desired outcome, your target, the thing you're shooting for.

00:34:30.840 Your system is the collection of daily habits that you follow. All these little gears in this

00:34:36.040 overall machine. And if there's ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits,

00:34:42.380 if there's ever a gap between your goal and your system, your daily habits will always win.

00:34:47.260 Almost by definition, your current habits are perfectly designed for your current results.

00:34:53.440 So whatever system you've been running for the last six months or year or whatever,

00:34:58.420 you talked about shooting a bow and arrow, presumably whatever system of movements you have going on

00:35:02.540 there, pre-shot routine, how you draw it back, everything. It kind of is inevitably carrying

00:35:08.460 you toward the result of where the arrow ends up. The irony of all of this is we also badly want

00:35:14.040 better results in life. You know, we also badly want to make more money or to reduce stress or lose

00:35:19.920 weight or whatever, but the results are not actually the thing that needs to change. It's kind of like

00:35:26.060 fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves. There are some areas like shooting a bow where that

00:35:30.880 is the connection is quite obvious, but there are other areas where for whatever reason we,

00:35:36.080 we don't see it as clearly, but I think the pattern is still there, which is let's adjust the habits.

00:35:41.340 Let's get this machine running in a more fluid fashion. And you'll find that the results kind of

00:35:47.460 come naturally. I think just appreciating that helped rewire mindset a little bit. I was so focused

00:35:53.780 on outcomes and goals for a long time. And now realizing that actually the way this is driven

00:35:58.400 is with the system that helped me shift from what I would say now is like goals are for people who

00:36:04.620 care about winning one time. You set a goal to run a half marathon and you train for three months and

00:36:10.580 you do it and you complete the race, but then maybe you stop training after that. But systems are for

00:36:16.320 people who care about winning again and again. And if you care about sustaining that success, then

00:36:20.980 you're like, I'm a runner. I care about the system that I'm building for how I train and how many miles

00:36:25.280 I'm getting in and all kinds of other stuff. And whether I have a half marathon three months in

00:36:29.920 the distance or not, it doesn't really matter because I'm going to be running my system either

00:36:34.520 way. Making that mental shift, I think can be useful for sustaining results. So let's talk about

00:36:41.900 habits now, because I think that's the thing that, as you said, basically shapes the nature of what we're

00:36:48.340 going to do. There's a saying that many people have said, and I won't even try to paraphrase it

00:36:53.180 because at the moment it's escaping me, but the gist of it is like, you don't rise to level of

00:36:56.500 your training. You fall to the level or you fall to level of your training. And the original quote,

00:37:01.040 I think it's from Archelokas, I believe a Greek philosopher and said, you don't rise to the level

00:37:06.860 of your expectations. You fall to the level of your training. And in atomic habits, I tweaked that or

00:37:13.020 adjusted that to say, you don't rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your

00:37:17.240 systems. And so it's actually your habits that kind of create that baseline.

00:37:20.800 Why is it called atomic habits? I remember when I first saw the title, my assumption was atomic

00:37:26.880 must be huge explosion, like big habits, which of course is exactly not what it means. So

00:37:32.440 it's interesting which meanings people pull out when they see it. So I chose the phrase atomic

00:37:37.820 habits for three reasons. The first meaning of the word atomic is tiny or small like an atom. And I do

00:37:44.560 think habits should be small and fairly easy to do, especially in the beginning. The second meaning

00:37:50.300 of the word atomic is the fundamental unit in a larger system. And that's the one that people

00:37:55.300 often overlook. Atoms build into molecules, molecules build into compounds and so on. And

00:38:00.340 your habits are kind of like that. Each little habit is like a atom in the overall routine of your

00:38:05.160 day. You put them all together and you end up with your lifestyle or your daily routine.

00:38:09.260 And then the third and final meaning is the one that you mentioned, the source of immense energy or

00:38:13.560 power. And I think if you put all three meanings together, you sort of understand the narrative arc of the

00:38:20.300 which is make changes that are small and easy to do, layer them on top of each other like units in a larger

00:38:27.180 system or atoms in a molecule. Collectively, you can get some really powerful or remarkable results. And so I feel

00:38:33.760 like the phrase atomic habits not only encapsulates that kind of small change in the system that you're looking

00:38:39.680 to build, but also the powerful results that can emanate from that.

00:38:43.380 So you talk about three different types of change, outcome change, the process change. We've touched on a

00:38:48.420 little bit of those, but the one we haven't really touched on is this identity change. That was something

00:38:53.600 that when I read your book really resonated because it provided, I think, a very decent explanation,

00:39:01.460 at least for why exercise comes naturally to me, which is it's so hardwired into my identity and why

00:39:10.300 maybe certain other habits I've tried to create over time don't come easily to me because I haven't

00:39:18.240 fully identified with them yet. So expand on that, but also how you came to realize that.

00:39:23.760 Two things before I unpack the idea a little more fully. First is of all the ideas in the book,

00:39:28.680 this is probably the least scientific. There are actually some studies, which I cite in that

00:39:34.160 chapter, and it's not like there's no science behind it, but the majority of the book, I try to

00:39:38.060 be very robust in the way that I was thinking about how do we build habits and what actually gets in

00:39:43.200 the stick. And there also are just a bazillion social psychology and cognitive psychology studies

00:39:47.980 that illustrate a lot of the examples that I talk about. But this is more of a mindset, I would say,

00:39:54.040 air of philosophy on how behavior change works. Second thing is it's maybe the only unique idea

00:40:00.440 that I have. Pretty much everything else that I share is stuff that's been widely covered by other

00:40:04.540 people or, you know, things that we've known for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But I felt

00:40:09.320 like this was something that maybe I could contribute to the conversation. Part of the reason I started

00:40:14.020 thinking about it is I started asking, why do habits really matter? We seem to care about them a lot

00:40:20.280 as a society. It's something a lot of books get written about, something we talk about a lot.

00:40:24.980 There's clearly some kind of deeper importance to them. So what is it? The surface level answer

00:40:30.680 is that we care about habits because they get us these external things that make us more productive

00:40:35.860 and more fit and so on. Habits can help you do all that stuff, which is great. But I think the real

00:40:42.560 reason, the deeper reason that habits matter is that they are a signal internally to ourselves about who we

00:40:49.560 are and what we care about. And they're kind of a signal of like the story that we're telling

00:40:53.960 ourselves. So in a sense, every time that you perform a habit, you are embodying a particular

00:41:01.500 identity. When you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized.

00:41:06.900 When you shoot a basketball for 30 minutes, you embody the identity of someone who is a basketball

00:41:12.260 player. You do those things once or twice. It doesn't radically transform the story you have about

00:41:17.520 yourself. But if you keep showing up and shooting a basketball every day for six months or two years,

00:41:22.860 or at some point you cross this sort of invisible threshold where you're like, yeah, being a

00:41:27.500 basketball player is like part of who I am, some aspect of my identity. And so your habits provide

00:41:32.820 evidence. They provide proof of the story that you're telling yourself. And that I think is a very

00:41:38.300 powerful thing, a very deep personal thing that habits can provide and perhaps the real reason why

00:41:43.740 they matter. So to come back to your question about process versus outcome versus identity,

00:41:49.980 where how we change, usually when people set out to make some kind of change, they start by thinking

00:41:55.880 about the results or the outcome that they want. So they say, I want to lose 40 pounds in the next six

00:42:00.720 months. And then from that outcome, they back into a process or a plan. So they say, all right,

00:42:07.300 if I want to lose 40 pounds, then I need to follow this nutrition plan. I'm going to need to work out

00:42:11.700 four days a week. And maybe there are details to those plans and everything, but that's usually

00:42:16.440 kind of roughly where it stops. And then the assumption is if I do those things and I lose

00:42:22.580 that weight, then I'll be the kind of person that I want to be. The argument that I try to unpack in

00:42:27.620 that chapter is what if we worked backwards from this? What if instead we said, who is the type of

00:42:33.080 person I wish to be? What is the identity that I'd like to have? And in fact, we could even ask the

00:42:39.040 person who has that identity, what kind of habits would they have? And then we use that identity

00:42:45.420 to inform the process, the habits, and we let the outcomes come naturally. There are a variety of

00:42:52.060 examples of this. I, one reader of mine, she lost a bunch of weight. I think it was 110 pounds in total,

00:42:58.020 and she's kept it off for over a decade. And the question that she sort of carried around with her

00:43:03.540 as she was starting her weight loss journey is what would a healthy person do? And that's very

00:43:07.740 much aligned or oriented with that identity piece. It's like, okay, would a healthy person

00:43:12.480 take a cab or would they walk four blocks the next meeting? Would they order a salad and chicken

00:43:17.760 at lunch or would they have a hamburger and fries? And she could just kind of carry that question

00:43:22.040 around with her to every context she was in and make a choice that she felt like aligned with the

00:43:27.520 identity that she wanted to have rather than worrying necessarily about something specific,

00:43:32.580 like the number of macros she's getting or, you know, whatever. Now I should say, I think it can

00:43:37.360 work both ways. Like I count my macros and it works really well for me, but I think that's partially

00:43:42.260 because it aligns with the identity that I already have. And if you don't have that shift in internal

00:43:47.920 story yet, it's hard for the behavior to follow suit. Imagine you went up to two people, you said,

00:43:53.880 Hey, would you like a cigarette? And the first person says, Oh no, thanks. I'm trying to quit.

00:43:57.920 And the second person says, Oh no, thanks. I'm not a smoker. Technically they've done the same

00:44:03.320 thing. They both turned down the cigarette, but the second person kind of has signaled a shift in

00:44:08.760 identity change. The first person is trying to be something they're not. No, thanks. I'm trying to

00:44:13.340 quit. And the second person is saying, I'm not a smoker. Uh, it's just not something that I do.

00:44:18.900 I think once you get to that stage, that shift in identity, you're in a much more powerful place

00:44:24.740 from a behavior change standpoint, because you're not even really trying to change anymore.

00:44:29.540 You're just acting in alignment with the type of person you see yourself to be.

00:44:33.420 So we can talk about ways to do that, but that's kind of the quick version on identity versus outcome.

00:44:39.340 Tell me what you think the difference is in identity between the woman you gave the example of

00:44:44.100 and say yourself. So you're both striving to the same objective, which is a healthy weight,

00:44:49.780 but she accomplished it by focusing on what would a healthy person do in this situation.

00:44:56.900 You accomplish it again, just pertaining to nutrition at the moment, presumably by saying,

00:45:01.960 I don't know what your macro goals are, but these are the aspirations that I have. And I'm going to

00:45:06.160 stick to these. So tell me a little bit about the difference between those approaches and how can a

00:45:10.460 person know which will be better for them outside of just empirically trying them both?

00:45:14.440 Well, I think in this particular case, the primary difference is I had an internal story

00:45:20.400 or have an internal story that I am a healthy person already. And so just doing things that

00:45:26.120 are aligned with that, like counting macros feels totally fine. Whereas for her at that early stage,

00:45:31.280 she did not feel that way and did not genuinely believe that about herself. It's possible to have

00:45:37.500 an epiphany and to change cold turkey or to just flip a switch and suddenly start acting in a different

00:45:42.820 way. I do think it's possible. I think sometimes people have experiences like that. Ironically,

00:45:47.320 I think it rarely happens from some kind of bolts of lightning inside. I think one of the most common

00:45:51.980 ways that happens is by reading books. I think people will sometimes read a book that really

00:45:56.360 changes their worldview and they start to do things completely differently after that. You can imagine a

00:46:01.160 bunch of nutrition examples, like somebody reads a book that convinces them that carbs are the devil

00:46:06.440 and the grain is terrible. All of a sudden the next day, like they want to throw out all the bread in the

00:46:10.980 house and it's very quick switch has been flipped. So I do think it's possible. However, I don't think

00:46:18.520 that changing through an epiphany is a very reliable way to change. And I don't know that it's something

00:46:24.260 you can bank on or can plan around or strategize for. It might happen to you a couple of times in

00:46:29.580 your life. I don't think that it's an efficient way to try to build a new habit. So if you can't change

00:46:35.620 or hope to change through an epiphany, then what are your options if you want to change your identity?

00:46:41.320 And I think the best avenue that you have is to cast votes with your actions. So in a sense,

00:46:48.380 every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become. So no, doing one

00:46:54.700 pushup does not radically transform your body, but it does cast a vote for I'm the type of person who

00:47:00.300 doesn't miss workouts. And no, writing one sentence may not finish the novel, but it does cast a vote

00:47:06.640 for I'm a writer. I think this is like a meaningful difference between my approach or what I recommend

00:47:12.680 and what you often hear. Like you often hear something like fake it till you make it. I don't

00:47:18.260 necessarily have anything wrong with fake it till you make it. It's asking you to believe something

00:47:22.660 positive about yourself, but it's asking you to believe something positive without having evidence for it.

00:47:29.340 And we have a word for beliefs that don't have evidence. We call that delusion. Like at some

00:47:34.720 point, your brain doesn't like this mismatch between what you're saying and what you're actually

00:47:39.060 doing. And so to bring it back to your question about my friend who lost all this weight, I think

00:47:44.600 you have to genuinely believe that story about yourself in order for the actions to start to feel

00:47:50.200 aligned. And what do you do if you don't genuinely believe you're a healthy person or don't genuinely

00:47:55.360 believe that I'm the kind of person who would track my macros or whatever? Well, I think you have

00:47:59.300 to start with these very small habits. You have to start by proving it to yourself in some little

00:48:03.220 way. Maybe it's just that you did walk the three blocks to the meeting and didn't take the taxi,

00:48:08.240 or maybe it's just that you did order a salad for lunch and not a burger and fries. And none of those

00:48:13.740 things individually are going to change your body or even the story right away. But if you keep casting

00:48:20.800 votes for that behavior and keep casting votes for that identity, then eventually you get to the

00:48:26.720 point where it's like the basketball example. You kind of have to admit that you're a basketball

00:48:30.460 player because you've been shooting hoops for the last two years. And like, this is just part of who

00:48:34.320 you are now. So I think that that's the primary difference between the two of us is that I already

00:48:39.180 kind of had that story and early on she didn't now she does. So who knows, maybe now she could just

00:48:43.800 track her macros just as easily or even easier than I can. I don't know. But I think that that shift

00:48:49.300 there. Yeah. I was kind of curious to ask about that because I wonder how that process changes in

00:48:56.600 this person after 10 years. I mean, most people understand that losing weight is actually not that

00:49:02.160 hard, but keeping weight off is exceptionally hard. So what your friend did, yes, losing 110 pounds is

00:49:08.080 remarkable, but the fact that she's kept it off for a decade is actually what's remarkable. And I'm

00:49:13.080 curious as to what the temporal sequence of events is where, you know, Hey, for the first year, it was

00:49:21.180 a daily struggle of what would the healthy person do? What would the healthy person do? What would

00:49:25.920 the healthy person do? And at some point that transitions into I'm a healthy person. This is

00:49:30.840 what I do. I'm a healthy person. This is what I do. And then it becomes so autonomic that you can slip

00:49:35.800 up for a day and it feels wrong. Like, Oh God, that cotton candy is horrible. Like I don't ever want to

00:49:41.120 eat that again. Yeah. Well, you said something similar to that a few minutes ago about how, like

00:49:45.860 it bothers you to not work out sometimes near a y'all who also has written about habits has kind of a

00:49:51.640 little measure for that where he's like his measure for whether it's a habit or not is, does it bother

00:49:55.640 you when you don't do it? I think that's a signal that it's kind of aligned with your identity. It's

00:49:59.840 like, Oh, I kind of feel like I'm not being me. If I don't do this to your point about it taking a long

00:50:04.740 time, it can take much longer than you would think. I mean, my friend told me she had to lose 60

00:50:09.260 pounds before the first person noticed before she ever heard anything from somebody else.

00:50:13.680 That's a lot of weight and a long time to be working in essentially what feels like a vacuum

00:50:17.620 feels like you're just doing it for yourself. No external feedback from the world. So this comes

00:50:22.360 back to a lot of the things we've already talked about, about process and falling in love with the

00:50:25.740 system and a lot of things that go into it, but it definitely is an internal journey and it

00:50:30.600 definitely will take longer than you would imagine. A lot of cases. One of the most common examples

00:50:35.700 that I hear of in my practice for the epiphany behavior change that sticks is the person who

00:50:43.820 quits smoking the day their child is born. And I've always found this interesting, right? Because

00:50:48.360 the day before their child is born, they clearly know how bad smoking is. There's nobody who's

00:50:54.620 smoking who doesn't understand the risks of it. And by the same token, who doesn't, as you pointed out

00:51:01.060 earlier, enjoy the benefits of it in the short run. Very rewarding in the short run. Very damaging

00:51:06.100 in the long run. That's completely understood intellectually. On day X, they have a child and

00:51:11.120 they decide, I'm done with this. I'm not going to have smoke in my household because I also know the

00:51:16.380 benefits of secondhand smoke or the harm rather of secondhand smoke. And I'm not going to expose my

00:51:20.500 child to this. And yet amazingly, I mean, over and over and over again, I hear these stories from

00:51:25.140 patients saying, yep, I grew up in a household where my parents were incredible smokers. And the second

00:51:30.920 I was born, they stopped, they stopped. And that was 40 years ago. And they've never had a cigarette

00:51:34.140 since. Is there a transference process here where because it involves the life of another person,

00:51:39.580 it's easier to make this change stick? Possibly. I mean, I'm sure there are a lot of variables that

00:51:44.280 go into it, but it does align with, there's like this whole category of behaviors that I feel like

00:51:49.020 if you wanted to hack a radical change in your life, you want to figure out a way to get,

00:51:54.440 like you said, this epiphany to stick. Massive environment changes or lifestyle changes are a good

00:52:00.480 way to do that. Perhaps one of the strongest ways to do that. So having a kid, getting married,

00:52:06.520 changing jobs, moving to a different city, even something small, like getting a dog can lead to

00:52:12.760 rapid behavior change. And I think one of the things that is really crucial about it is that

00:52:19.020 most of those decisions tend to be irreversible or at least very hard to reverse. I had one that I

00:52:25.940 struggled with for a long time. Sometimes people ask me, you know, what habits have you struggled

00:52:28.940 with or whatever. And I tend to be pretty good about getting enough sleep. I almost always get

00:52:34.340 eight hours or even nine if I'm training hard, but I would fall into this pattern where it'd be like

00:52:39.960 nine or 10 o'clock at night and I would kind of get a second wind and they'd be like, well, maybe I'll

00:52:43.360 just send a few emails or something. And of course it's never just a few, you turn around and it's

00:52:47.340 midnight or one and you're like, okay, am I going to sleep for eight hours? Cause if so, that means I'm

00:52:51.260 not getting up till nine. And I know that I prefer to get up early. I know that I feel better

00:52:56.740 throughout the rest of the next day. 10 PM. James is kind of ruining things for tomorrow. James

00:53:01.380 by staying up late. And I tried a bunch of different things. There's a little device called

00:53:06.900 an outlet timer. You can buy it for like 10 bucks on Amazon. You plug it into an outlet and you can

00:53:11.520 set the time for when it kills the power from that outlet. And so like, if you plug your internet

00:53:17.140 into it, then like the internet shuts off at 10 PM or, you know, whatever you set it for. So I tried

00:53:21.800 different things like that, but then you could just pick your phone up and get around it. But the thing

00:53:25.980 that finally made it stick was getting a dog because the dog is going to get up at 7 AM.

00:53:30.780 Whenever I go to sleep, it doesn't matter. And I need to go take it for a walk. And you can only

00:53:34.700 do that for a few days before you're like, all right, I'm not going to play this game anymore.

00:53:37.760 I'm going to bed at 10. It's because it was fairly hard to reverse. They got it to stick. And I think,

00:53:44.440 you know, in the case of having a kid, they're going to be there every day now. Maybe you could

00:53:48.880 rationalize it a bunch of times before that, but that's not going to change. They're going to be around.

00:53:53.120 And weirdly, because presumably this person's wife was pregnant. So they obviously saw that

00:53:58.580 throughout the whole pregnancy, but that didn't get them to change. But once the child is there,

00:54:03.880 man, it's really immediate. You're taking a puff and you have those little eyes looking back at you.

00:54:08.600 The feedback loop is even tighter than before. So I would imagine both of those things probably play

00:54:13.600 a role, but more generally speaking, those kinds of irreversible or hard to reverse lifestyle

00:54:18.800 changes also tend to be big drivers of quick behavior change. I can only think of one dramatic

00:54:25.880 habit I changed that has stuck. And it is the silliest thing, but I always bit my nails growing

00:54:33.260 up, bite them nonstop. Invariably what happens is you'd get a little infection because you bite too

00:54:39.280 close. And it was like, my mom was always like, God, that is such a disgusting habit. Like it just

00:54:43.800 looked horrible. The day I decided to change it was the day I got my first interview for med school.

00:54:50.600 You apply to medical school and then all of a sudden the envelopes start coming in and you got

00:54:55.000 these interviews. Just as I got that first envelope and I realized, oh, I'm actually going to go and be

00:55:00.540 interviewing. At least for me, I didn't interview to go to college. This was the first time I had to do

00:55:04.660 an interview. And I don't know, just something came over me. I was like, wait a second, dude, you can't

00:55:09.240 be the guy that's showing up to an interview with these horrible looking nails. You have to cut

00:55:13.920 this out. You are going to get a nail clipper and you are going to start clipping your nails like a

00:55:19.140 civilized human being. And that was, I don't know, 25 years ago. And today, like when my nails get long,

00:55:25.920 I'm a guy who likes short nails. So I'm always sort of trimming them. I can't imagine that I once bit

00:55:31.140 them. It just seems so strange to me. It's a silly example. I don't think it is actually.

00:55:37.120 We all have habits that are like that.

00:55:39.240 There's two things that made me think. The first is it connects to our conversation about

00:55:42.520 identity from a few minutes ago, which is you started to take pride in it. You cared about

00:55:47.520 how you presented. And the more that we take pride in certain elements of our identity or

00:55:53.380 aspects of who we are, certain parts of our story, the more strongly that behavior starts

00:55:58.400 to stick. You can imagine a woman who takes pride in how her hair looks. She probably has

00:56:03.660 all kinds of hair care habits and products and things that she does. And she probably doesn't

00:56:08.420 have to convince herself to do them the same way that we talk about convincing ourselves with a

00:56:13.400 lot of other habits. Oh, I wish I could write, or I wish I would work out or whatever. It's just an

00:56:17.760 element of her identity. She takes pride in and shows she does it like fairly consistently,

00:56:21.560 or the guy who gets complimented on the size of his biceps. And so he just never skips arm day in

00:56:27.200 the gym because it's an aspect of his identity that he takes pride in. What I'm kind of getting at is

00:56:31.960 like, what parts of your story do you take pride in? And once you start to take pride in it, man,

00:56:36.680 you'll fight for it pretty hard to keep it. And in many cases, you'll find yourself doing it

00:56:41.380 somewhat naturally, or at least internally motivated to continue doing it. So that was the first piece.

00:56:47.120 The second piece, and this is something that since atomic habits has come out, I think is even more

00:56:53.360 important than I realized when I was writing the book, which is the influence of the social environment

00:56:59.400 on your habits. So in your case, the med school interviews, it was actually the image in your

00:57:05.700 mind, the expectation about what other people might think and how you would present in that interview

00:57:11.000 and so on the judgment of others, essentially that helped drive that change. And if you look at

00:57:18.880 behaviors that really stick, the ones that tend to stick for 10 or 20 or 30 years, a long time,

00:57:24.520 there's often a strong social component involved. So for example, we are all part of multiple tribes.

00:57:32.660 Some of those tribes are large, like what it means to be American, or some of those tribes are small,

00:57:37.940 like being a member of your CrossFit gym or being a neighbor on your street. Take the neighborhood

00:57:43.320 example. You might walk outside and see your neighbor mowing their grass on Wednesday night or

00:57:49.160 something and think, Oh, I need to cut my lawn. And you'll stick with that habit of mowing your

00:57:54.500 grass for 20 or 30 years or however long you live in that house. Like we wish we had that level of

00:57:59.300 consistency with most of our other habits. And why do you do it? Partially you do it because it feels

00:58:05.760 good to have a clean lawn, but mostly you do it because you don't want to be judged by the other

00:58:11.020 people in the neighborhood for being the sloppy one. And so it's actually that social norm, that

00:58:16.460 expectation for what it means to be part of this neighborhood and how you act in this group or this tribe

00:58:21.520 that helps get the habit to stick. I think the practical takeaway there, if you really want to

00:58:27.300 behavior change to last is to join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior,

00:58:33.320 because if it's normal in that group, it's going to seem much more normal and typical for you to do

00:58:39.780 it. I mean, Peter, I'm sure you're part of multiple groups that do what most people would determine are

00:58:44.280 like weird habits. Like I'm sure there's a group of friends who are really into driving cars and there's

00:58:49.020 probably another group who's like really into bow hunting and archery. And there are all kinds of

00:58:53.140 habits that these little tribes do. And it might seem strange to the normal person, but it's probably

00:58:59.420 very casual or typical or easy relatively for you to stick to those habits, especially when you're

00:59:05.320 part of those groups or talking with those guys, because it's just part of something that it's part of

00:59:09.840 what they do. And I think maybe the deeper lesson here is that we don't just do habits because of the

00:59:17.580 results they get us. We also take behaviors because they are a signal to the people around us that,

00:59:24.740 Hey, I get it. I fit in. I understand how to act in this group. Most people, if they have to choose

00:59:31.080 between having the habits they want to have, but they kind of go against the grain of the group,

00:59:36.940 they like don't really fit in well, they get ostracized or having habits that they don't really

00:59:42.840 love, but they get to go along with the crowd. They fit in, they get praised for being part of

00:59:48.200 the group. Most people will choose belonging over loneliness. Like the desire to belong will

00:59:54.860 overpower the desire to improve. And so you want to make sure you get those two things aligned to

01:00:00.640 join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. I wonder if part of the cue for me

01:00:06.240 was buying a suit and it was the first suit I had. That was sort of a, wait a minute,

01:00:13.680 you're wearing a suit. Think of the trouble you're going to, to get this thing. And then this tie that

01:00:19.720 you're going to wear and blah, blah, blah, all this sort of stuff. But it's interesting. And then

01:00:23.920 clearly it just became a part of my identity, which is I'm a person who has nice fingernails.

01:00:29.240 I present well from the fingernail standpoint, at least hasn't translated to all of my habits,

01:00:35.020 but let's talk about the four laws. Cause these four laws are kind of the central tenets to what

01:00:41.560 we speak about and they can be inverted as well, which I think is important as we think about

01:00:45.880 creating, call it adaptive habits versus breaking maladaptive habits. So what's the first law

01:00:51.600 real quick, before we get into these four, I just want to explain the framework a little bit

01:00:56.080 in particular for this episode or this show, because I feel like your audience will appreciate

01:01:00.980 it more than most audiences. So I like to divide a habit into four stages. And as you said, those

01:01:07.120 four stages kind of have what I call the four laws of behavior change that come out of it.

01:01:11.180 But when I was working on atomic habits and researching this framework and trying to understand

01:01:15.600 why do behaviors happen and how do they happen? How do habits form? I had a couple questions that I

01:01:21.160 felt like previous frameworks did not answer that well. While researching the book, I was able to

01:01:27.280 find 40 different models of human behavior that biologists and neuroscientists and psychologists,

01:01:33.200 bunch of different industries had come up with over the last, say about 150 years. Broadly speaking,

01:01:39.440 those models of human behavior tended to fall into one of two categories. The first category are what I

01:01:45.460 would call like motivation models. So they explain things like internal drives and motivations and

01:01:51.940 cravings and kind of like what compels us to act. And then the second category were what I would call

01:01:58.220 reinforcement models. And so they described the rewards that we get from behaviors and how those

01:02:03.980 things kind of reinforce our behavior and essentially what happens like after an action. And what I wanted

01:02:09.860 to do was try to come up with a model that I felt like accurately described both the motivation that may come

01:02:14.980 before and the reinforcement that may come after and how those things influence the actions that we

01:02:20.420 take. And there were a variety of what I thought were fairly simple questions about human behavior that

01:02:27.540 weren't totally answered by the previous models. So things like what causes somebody to try to have it in the

01:02:33.460 first place? You haven't experienced the reward at that point. So why would you take the first bite of a

01:02:38.560 pancake or the first smoke of a cigarette? What would motivate you to do that? Started with BF Skinner,

01:02:43.900 stimulus, stimulus, response, reward. Charles Duhigg and power of habit kind of popularized his cue,

01:02:48.840 routine, reward. But we say, okay, habits are a cue and then there's the action and there's some kind of

01:02:53.380 outcome. Well, how come two people respond differently to the same thing? Like why would one person see a

01:02:59.080 cigarette and feel like, oh, I have to smoke and another person's like, I've never smoked a day in my life. I'm not

01:03:03.580 interested at all. Because if it's just the cue that leads to the action, you would think they would do the

01:03:07.960 same thing. Why would the same person respond differently to the same cue? How come when I

01:03:13.220 walk in my kitchen at 7am, I see a loaf of bread and I think, oh, I'm going to make some toast for

01:03:17.940 breakfast. But then I walk in at 4pm and I see that same cue and I don't think anything of it. I just

01:03:23.360 move on. So to summarize all of this, I think one of the meaningful distinctions about the four stages

01:03:29.720 that I put together and why I feel like it accurately describes human behavior and sort of the insight

01:03:35.600 that I came across as I was researching. A neuroscientist named Lisa Feldman Barrett. She

01:03:40.640 has a bunch of studies and a couple books on this topic. One book in particular that was useful for

01:03:46.300 me while I was researching is called How Emotions Are Made. The key insight is that we often think that

01:03:51.820 human behavior is reactive in the sense that somebody does something and I respond or somebody

01:03:56.520 says something and I feel a certain way. But in fact, human behavior is mostly predictive. You are kind

01:04:03.100 of endlessly going through your experience in life predicting about what to do next. It's actually

01:04:09.080 this prediction that I think was the key thing that was missing from a lot of the previous models

01:04:13.560 of habits and behavior. So with that as a primer. Before we do that, I think you wrote about this in

01:04:18.880 the book, which was that the dopaminergic surge comes more from the anticipation of the reward than the

01:04:26.680 actual behavior that gives the reward. Did I remember that correctly? There's a bazillion studies on

01:04:32.460 dopamine, of course. Also, I should say like, I think if you only talk about dopamine, it's not

01:04:37.620 the full story about habits. Like there's many neurochemicals that are involved in the process

01:04:41.500 and dopamine is just one part of the overall picture, but it does play a very important role.

01:04:46.320 For a long time, we thought it was about reward and satisfaction and enjoyment. But in fact, it seems

01:04:52.060 that the crucial role dopamine plays is about prediction and anticipation. And so the first time that you

01:04:58.420 take a bite of a pancake, you don't know what to expect. And so you take that bite and then afterwards

01:05:03.700 you get a surge of dopamine, almost as if to like mark the experience or to teach you, hey, that was

01:05:10.100 favorable. You should do that again next time. Like if you happen to see a pancake again, that was a

01:05:14.320 really great outcome. So then the next time around, you know what to expect. And in fact, what we find is

01:05:20.520 that dopamine tends to spike before you take a bite, not after. And there are a bunch of studies that show

01:05:25.880 this. Gamblers get a spike before they roll the dice, not after. Drug addicts get a spike before

01:05:31.360 they take a hit of cocaine, not after. Dopamine, I think probably the more accurate way to describe

01:05:36.660 it in this context is it's a teaching molecule. It's a learning molecule and it helps you mark

01:05:42.740 experiences that are favorable so that you'll remember them next time. And then when you come

01:05:47.420 across a similar situation, it spikes in anticipation. So after you see the cue, you get this craving

01:05:53.880 and it's actually that craving or anticipation or prediction that motivates you to act, drives the

01:06:00.020 response, and then there's an outcome. Presumably, again, using your example, there are lots of

01:06:04.980 diversity between individuals, right? So you take 10 people who have never smoked a cigarette.

01:06:09.960 Let's just, to make the math easy, say, well, seven of them have no desire to. So they walk away.

01:06:15.300 Three of them are like, yeah, I'll give it a try. They take a puff. One of them starts hacking and says,

01:06:19.400 that is the most disgusting thing I've ever done. I never want to do that again. And they never do.

01:06:22.440 One of them says, you know, I kind of like that. I'm going to do this socially. Anytime I'm going

01:06:27.160 to have a drink, I'm going to have a cigarette. And one of them goes on to become a chain smoker.

01:06:31.220 Now, what explains that distinction? How much of that is neurochemical?

01:06:35.140 There are examples like that for alcohol and drugs and all kinds of things.

01:06:39.680 And I'm not an expert on addiction and I didn't write the book about addiction. So I don't want to

01:06:44.020 speak out of turn or step out of my lane or anything, but I don't know that I have a good answer to

01:06:48.400 it. But from what I understand and from what I've seen as I was researching the book, it does seem to

01:06:53.960 have a strong, basically genetic or neurochemical component. It seems like in a sense, drugs kind

01:07:00.140 of hack the system. This is, I think, one way to define an addiction, which is the process of

01:07:05.840 learning is actually broken. Addicts know that the behavior does not benefit their lives in a lot of

01:07:11.540 ways, but they still can't get themselves to stop doing it, even though they know it doesn't benefit

01:07:15.560 them. And I think part of the reason that happens, or perhaps the primary reason, is the

01:07:20.880 drug kind of hacks the system. It gives you this spike of dopamine, even though you shouldn't be

01:07:24.960 getting it. Usually your brain would not be doing that. It would not be trying to teach you to repeat

01:07:29.240 that, but you're artificially spiking it by taking the substance. And so then process of learning breaks.

01:07:35.360 I also find it interesting that different people will get that pleasure from different things.

01:07:42.020 When I'm not in a good place, when I'm unhappy about something, it's never my tendency to have a

01:07:49.120 drink. So alcohol would only be associated with something I want to do when I feel good to begin

01:07:54.400 with. I would never want to have a drink when I don't feel good. But when I don't feel good,

01:07:59.280 I would happily binge on junk food. That would be the thing that provides comfort. And of course,

01:08:04.720 there are people, when they're unhappy, they would never want to eat even, let alone have junk food.

01:08:08.320 I find it interesting to at least contemplate how much of that is genetic, how much of that is

01:08:12.660 learned, and what else is going on in sort of understanding that. Because that does sort of

01:08:16.840 factor into falling to the level of our habits. Because we fall to these levels when things are

01:08:22.260 not going well, typically. I do think there's a genetic component. Some people are more sensitive

01:08:26.580 to certain substances than others, or at least it appears to be so. However, it does strike me as

01:08:32.460 very possible that a good chunk of it is learned, and that now you have a story that junk food is the

01:08:37.980 way that I cope, or the way that I soothe myself when I need that. And in a sense, your habits are

01:08:44.160 these solutions to recurring problems that you face. So say you have somebody who comes home from

01:08:50.060 work and they feel exhausted. And one person, that's a recurring problem that they feel often.

01:08:55.920 And so one person comes home and they play video games for 30 minutes. And another person comes home

01:09:00.260 and they go for a run. And a third person smokes a cigarette. And all of them are solving the same

01:09:06.180 underlying recurring problem. But they're choosing different methods through which to do that.

01:09:11.560 And I wonder about how the grooves kind of get formed. Once we learn that a certain method is

01:09:17.900 effective in solving that problem, we tend to default to it, even if it's not the only way

01:09:22.560 to solve that. Even if, yeah, going for a run would make me feel better, but I'm just used to

01:09:26.880 smoking cigarettes now. Then we start to develop a story around it. It starts to become a little bit

01:09:31.340 of our identity. We start to use it as a crutch. I do think there's definitely a learned component

01:09:35.900 to that as well. All right. I interrupted you before you were just about to launch into the

01:09:39.860 four laws. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So the four stages are Q, craving, response, and reward. The Q is

01:09:47.700 something that you notice. So for example, you see a plate of cookies on the counter. That's a visual Q

01:09:52.660 starts the habit of eating a cookie. The craving is the prediction or the meaning that you assign to that

01:09:59.080 cue often happens relatively automatically or quickly. So you see the plate of cookies and you

01:10:05.220 think, Oh, that'll be sweet, sugary, tasty, enjoyable. It's that favorable meaning that leads

01:10:10.600 to that dopamine spike that we talked about that motivates you to take the third step, which is the

01:10:16.440 response. You walk over, you pick the cookie up, you take a bite. And then finally there's the reward.

01:10:22.040 Oh, it is in fact, sweet, sugary, tasty, satisfying. Now, not every behavior in life is rewarding.

01:10:29.220 Sometimes things have a cost or a consequence. Sometimes they're just kind of neutral and don't

01:10:33.900 really mean a whole lot. If a behavior is not rewarding, then it's unlikely to become a habit

01:10:40.020 because you don't have any reason to repeat it again in the future. You need some kind of positive

01:10:43.840 emotional signal associated with the behavior for you to stick with it. At least as we've already

01:10:49.540 talked about an immediate signal that says, Hey, that was enjoyable. Is there some evidence to

01:10:54.860 suggest if I remember back to like my psych one-on-one class, which is obviously pretty

01:10:59.860 elementary that some of the most addictive behaviors are variably reinforcing? I sort of

01:11:06.040 remember this example of why slot machines are particularly addictive because the pattern

01:11:11.700 with which they produce a win is actually random. And therefore you really don't know when it's

01:11:18.200 going to come. You know, it's going to come. You have to have belief that you'll see other

01:11:21.260 people win and you've won in the past, but that's somehow even more addictive. Whereas

01:11:25.780 the cookie in theory is not variably reinforcing. It's pretty much reinforcing the same way every

01:11:30.720 time. I mean, presumably only subject to the tastiness of the cookie.

01:11:34.640 It's even more, there've been tons of studies done on variable rewards. The basic answer is

01:11:39.160 yes, you're right. Variable rewards tend to accelerate or intensify behavior. It can get even

01:11:44.340 more twisted than that in the slot machines example, because what they have found is that the sweet

01:11:49.200 spot tends to be right around 50, 50. You can imagine getting a reward at very different

01:11:53.740 schedules. Like you could get it 95% of the time, or you could get it 5% of the time.

01:11:58.300 Well, if you only get it 5% of the time, then you learn pretty quickly, like, Hey, this isn't a very

01:12:02.940 fruitful action. Maybe I should stop doing this. But if you get it around 50, 50 tends to work out for

01:12:08.320 you a lot, but not every time. And it still is coming at it like a roughly a random pattern. Even if you

01:12:12.760 know, over 10,000 trials, it works out to be about 50% of the time, man, you will just keep

01:12:17.920 pressing that slot machine button over and over and over again. There've been studies done on mice

01:12:22.140 where they would get a squirt of sugar water when they poke their nose in a box. And if they did it

01:12:28.160 at a variable reward schedule, they would do it. I can't remember the exact number. I want to say it

01:12:32.320 was like 6,000 times in an hour, many, many times. We laugh at it thinking about mice, but we're not

01:12:38.180 that different. The average slot machine player will press the button like 800 times in an hour. And so

01:12:42.780 we're just basically doing the same thing, getting the reward, but not knowing exactly when it's going

01:12:48.060 to happen. It gets you to do it more frequently. And you can think about examples like this in

01:12:52.720 everyday life. Imagine a remote control where the battery's dying and you press the power button,

01:12:58.140 but it doesn't turn on right away. And you're like, God, did that work? And then you press it

01:13:00.940 again a little harder. And then maybe you press it again a third time. Now, if you do it eight or nine

01:13:04.460 or 10 times, you're like, okay, the batteries are dead. But if on the second try, it turns on

01:13:09.040 the variable reward got you to do it again or got you to try the behavior more.

01:13:13.380 So that variable reward schedule is definitely something that can intensify behavior.

01:13:17.640 You remember Anchorman? Yeah. I assume you've seen. Yeah. This might actually mean that there

01:13:22.220 is truth to the statement that 50% of the time it works every time.

01:13:27.280 Incredible reference. Yes. Fantastic. Little did we know that Will Ferrell was a

01:13:32.040 cognitive psychology fan. Wait, I think that was Paul Rudd's line, wasn't it?

01:13:35.760 Was it? Yeah. When he used Black Panther, the cologne.

01:13:38.580 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing.

01:13:40.740 50% of the time it works every time.

01:13:43.320 I'm going to be honest with you. That smells like pure gasoline.

01:13:46.900 It's got bits of real Panther in it. Oh, it's made by Odeon.

01:13:52.360 So those are the four stages. What I like to do and what I consider to be the hallmark of

01:13:57.080 my work, I'm just interpreting the research, like pretending to be an academic. I'm not actually

01:14:01.680 an academic. I think the value that I try to provide is to make these ideas actionable and to

01:14:08.180 turn them into something that we can operationalize or apply to daily life. And the four laws of

01:14:13.320 behavior change are how I have attempted to do that. So if we understand that a habit has those

01:14:19.020 four steps and how do we actually change our behaviors? We can follow these four laws and

01:14:23.940 there's one for each stage. The first law of behavior change is to make it obvious. You want

01:14:28.660 the cues of your good habits to be obvious, available, visible, easy to see. The easier it

01:14:34.400 is to see or get your attention, the easier it is to notice, the more likely you are to act on it.

01:14:39.860 The second law is to make it attractive. So the more attractive or appealing or exciting a habit is,

01:14:46.000 the more likely you are to feel motivated to do it. So again, this is about anticipating it or

01:14:50.420 something you anticipate more, feel more motivated. The third law is to make it easy. The more easy,

01:14:56.400 convenient, frictionless, simple a habit is, the more likely behavior is to be performed. And then

01:15:03.280 the fourth and final law is to make it satisfying. The more satisfying or enjoyable, pleasurable a

01:15:09.220 habit is, the more likely you are to repeat it in the future. So those four laws give you like a high

01:15:14.580 level overview of how to build a good habit. So make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy,

01:15:20.580 make it satisfying. You don't need all four every single time, but the more that you have those

01:15:26.540 four things working for you, I think the more likely it is that the good behavior will stick

01:15:30.920 or that you'll find a way to start on it. If you want to break a bad habit, then you just invert

01:15:35.940 those four. So rather than making it obvious, you want to make the cue invisible, unsubscribe from

01:15:42.120 emails, reduce exposure to the cue. If you're trying to be on a diet, don't follow food bloggers on

01:15:47.360 Instagram, reducing exposure to the thing that starts the process. Rather than making it attractive,

01:15:52.840 make it unattractive. Rather than making it easy, make it difficult. So increase friction,

01:15:58.640 put more steps between you and the behavior. And rather than making it satisfying, make it

01:16:03.640 unsatisfying, layer on some kind of immediate consequence or a cost to the behavior. Those four

01:16:08.900 make it invisible, make it unattractive, make it difficult, make it unsatisfying, give you a high

01:16:15.100 level framework for how to break a bad habit. Now, how often is a certain behavior, the combination

01:16:21.420 of breaking a habit and creating a habit? Again, it seems like a lot of the ones we default into

01:16:26.380 talking about are the hard ones like nutrition. We all eat. We're all going to eat all the time.

01:16:32.260 It's not something you can opt out of or into. We all eat. So presumably if a person says, again,

01:16:38.320 I hate coming back to weight because it's such a stupid example relative to say overall health,

01:16:42.720 but let's say health actually. I want to be a much healthier person. So I need to change the

01:16:48.240 way I eat. That's two things, right? You have to start eating better and stop eating poorer.

01:16:54.620 It is two things, but I view them as two sides of the same coin. In many cases, you know, we can come

01:17:00.060 up with edge cases or examples where the behaviors start to get more specific. But generally speaking,

01:17:05.300 I think there are three ways to break a bad habit. You can eliminate it entirely. So you can just go

01:17:10.060 cold turkey, cut it out, never do it again. You could curtail the behavior to the desired degree

01:17:15.880 so you can reduce it a little bit. You still do it sometimes. Instead of drinking a beer at dinner

01:17:20.120 every night, you just have it maybe once a week. You could also replace it. So rather than drinking

01:17:25.700 a beer, you replace it with water. When I'm thinking about myself personally, when I actually am changing

01:17:31.000 behavior, I don't usually think about breaking bad habits that often. In fact, most of the time I'm

01:17:36.800 focused on building or establishing new good behaviors. Which necessarily displace the old

01:17:43.560 ones. For example, with eating, it is a bit of a zero sum game. I mean, not entirely. I guess you

01:17:49.340 could just keep eating more and more and more. But generally, if you say I'm going to eat more good

01:17:53.940 things, it kind of drives down the bad things. Is that the way it normally works then? I think a lot

01:18:00.340 of the time it does. And that's why I tend to focus on that for my personal life is that it's kind of

01:18:04.920 like two plants. One plant, if it grows a little bit more and spreads its leaves a little further,

01:18:10.100 it starts to crowd out the other plant. Just soaks up more energy and resources and sunlight.

01:18:15.320 And your good habits are kind of like that. I mean, we all, in some sense, it is zero sum

01:18:19.440 in the sense that we only have 24 hours in each day. And so if you have somebody who says, even if

01:18:24.980 they're unrelated habits, they say, hey, I want to start doing something healthy. I'd like to start

01:18:29.060 working out for an hour each day. And I also want to watch less TV. I just feel like I watch Netflix

01:18:34.400 too much. Well, if you usually watch Netflix for three hours each evening and you decide to insert

01:18:39.780 your workout from six to 7 p.m., by definition, you're not watching Netflix while you're doing

01:18:45.500 that. You start to crowd out the bad behavior just by focusing on building a workout habit,

01:18:50.580 even if you don't think about the TV thing at all. So my sort of general approach is, look,

01:18:56.260 I'm trying to spend my 24 hours in the highest leverage way possible, the best way possible,

01:19:01.820 the way that is moving me toward whatever I'm optimizing for. Let me just try to continually

01:19:06.980 think about how to upgrade those behaviors. I also like that mindset more than the breaking

01:19:11.940 the bad habits one, because it gives me a reason to improve even once I have good habits.

01:19:16.960 I'm continually looking for the higher leverage action. Even if what I'm doing is already good,

01:19:21.200 okay, fine. How can I make it great now? I tend to focus on that style rather than thinking about

01:19:26.480 breaking bad ones, but they definitely are related to answer your question.

01:19:29.960 The example that we come back to is smoking, because smoking doesn't really take that much

01:19:34.400 time. So it's hard to say, I'm just going to introduce a new habit that will force smoking

01:19:38.500 out. Are there other examples though of habits where you really do focus on how to break the bad

01:19:44.380 one? Yeah. So to take the smoking example, I think it's helpful to divide it into the specific

01:19:51.740 instances in which it happens. So we kind of lump smoking into a single habit, but the truth is it

01:19:58.240 actually might be a collection of like a dozen habits throughout the day. It might be that you

01:20:02.740 have a habit of smoking when you get in your car for the morning commute. And then you also have a

01:20:06.900 habit of smoking around 1030 when you take a break with your coworker. And then you also have a habit of

01:20:11.720 smoking after dinner on your porch. And all three of those are going to have their own cue, craving,

01:20:18.660 response, and reward. In a sense, you kind of have to intervene in like 12 different places

01:20:22.940 to try to come up with a solution for each one of those. So you might find that like for the morning

01:20:28.320 commute, maybe instead of having a cigarette, you come up with something else that you can do

01:20:33.180 on the morning commute that fulfills that desire. Maybe even just a cup of coffee is what wakes you

01:20:37.960 up instead of a cigarette. That may not work for the 1030 session with your friend. Maybe there you

01:20:43.520 actually need like an e-cigarette to start. I want to have the socialization of feeling like you're

01:20:48.500 smoking with a friend. You may need to like take it in different stages and break it down

01:20:52.820 degree where it's easier to have a line of attack. The environment seems to be so potent. You know,

01:20:59.620 again, David Foster Wallace writes about in his commencement speech, this is water. He talks about

01:21:03.840 the ubiquity of water and also the fact that you don't even realize it's there. And that's what makes

01:21:08.660 it so profound, right? Is the heat referring to certain thoughts. But I think the same is true of

01:21:13.500 these cues. For most of us, we're not actually that aware of what it is. It can be pointed out

01:21:18.440 to you and you can say, oh yeah, I come to think of it. I am a fish swimming in water or yeah,

01:21:23.460 I come to think of it every time I get in the car, it's the act of getting in the car and driving to

01:21:28.580 work that signals a change in where I'm going. And that's what forces me to light up. But the example

01:21:35.200 of having the cigarette at 1030 with your coworker is a very powerful one because of the connection in

01:21:41.960 the environment. I remember in my residency, when people would come into the hospital with

01:21:48.180 abscesses from IV drug use. So very Baltimore, which is right at my residency, there was just

01:21:53.160 rampant IV drug use. You'd be amazed at how much that habit and that addiction could cause a person

01:21:59.880 to do something that at the surface doesn't seem that logical. Use dirty needles and needles would

01:22:05.020 break in their abscesses. And you'd be down there and you'd be sort of draining a huge baseball size

01:22:10.400 pus filled abscess that's got broken needles in it. And this person is very sick. I mean,

01:22:15.460 this is a person who's now risking their life due to this. And they would be back in a month with the

01:22:20.600 same thing in a month and a month later, the same thing over and over again. And tragically,

01:22:24.020 eventually a lot of these people would die. But I remember at some point saying to these folks,

01:22:27.700 this was the best advice I could offer, which was not very helpful, was I don't think you can go

01:22:32.860 back to the same place you live. I think you need new friends. Now that's not a very helpful thing to

01:22:38.480 offer somebody who probably doesn't have many choices. But the point was like, how could you

01:22:43.120 expect this person to go back to the same place that they were living in the same environment

01:22:47.500 with all of the same people doing the same things and say, well, you just got to resist it. It

01:22:53.300 doesn't make sense. Presumably someone who decides they want to stop drinking alcohol

01:22:57.800 really ought not go into a bar that much anymore. Environment is like a form of gravity pulls on you and

01:23:04.800 you can resist it for a little bit, but maybe a day or week or a month. But at some point,

01:23:10.080 it just starts to drain on you, sucks you back in. And to your point about going back to the

01:23:16.140 environment that prompted the behavior in the first place. I mean, this is one of the stories I share in

01:23:20.320 Atomic Habits, but it was the surprise that we saw from the Vietnam War, which is so many soldiers

01:23:25.260 were getting addicted to heroin and drugs when they were over there. And then they came back and we were

01:23:30.220 like, what are we going to do with all these addicted soldiers? And it turns out that 90% of

01:23:35.180 them or more ended up being fine because they didn't go back to the place where they got addicted.

01:23:39.680 They went home to their friends and family and they didn't have all the same signals that were

01:23:44.540 prompting them to pick up the habit. And so they were able to drop it much more easily than we thought

01:23:49.160 they would. And compare that to the typical drug addict who does the reverse. They go into rehab

01:23:54.620 and that's where they leave all of their cues and influences behind. And then once they get clean

01:24:01.660 and they detox, we send them back to the same place where they got addicted before. That is a much,

01:24:06.440 much harder uphill battle. So environment, I think it's kind of like the invisible hand that

01:24:12.040 drives our behavior. As you said, it's kind of like water, you know, fish in water. We don't realize it,

01:24:17.020 but we all have these things that we say are important to us. Oh, I would like to lose weight,

01:24:21.580 or I'd like to build a business, or I want to finish a book. But then you look around the spaces

01:24:26.340 where we live and work. The cues of those habits are not a big part of the environment. We all are

01:24:32.740 busy, strapped for time, minimal energy. We have kids to take care of, or parents to do chores for,

01:24:40.000 or friends to see. And whenever we have limited capacity or limited time, or we're low on energy or

01:24:46.500 exhausted, what choice do we make? We often choose the thing that is most obvious in the environment.

01:24:52.080 We choose the thing that is the easy choice or the path of least resistance. And so if I'm

01:24:57.540 recommending a place to start for changing behavior, it's usually either the first law or

01:25:02.660 the third law. It's making it obvious and making it easy. Because we can talk about making it easy,

01:25:07.440 but scaling habits down obviously makes it more likely that you're able to complete the task.

01:25:11.620 And making it obvious essentially creates an environment where the good choices are right

01:25:17.320 in front of you, where they're the path of least resistance. Individually, I think it's easy to

01:25:22.280 overlook the importance of this because individually, one change to the environment does not usually

01:25:28.140 meaningfully move the needle or change your behavior. But collectively, making a dozen or two

01:25:33.940 dozen or 50 little choices to how your office is laid out and how your living room is laid out and how

01:25:38.980 your kitchen is laid out. Yeah. Now all of a sudden you're working and thriving in a space that is

01:25:43.780 stacking the odds in your favor. That's making it more likely that you will just choose the good

01:25:48.700 thing because the healthy food is on the counter and the TV is behind a wall unit and a cabinet where

01:25:53.840 you're less likely to see it. And the remote control is inside a drawer and there's a book in

01:25:58.160 its place. And you have a couple of books that are scattered around in your desk waiting for you to

01:26:02.680 pick them up and open them. You can do it with digital spaces too. When I wanted to start reading

01:26:07.600 more, I took audible for audio books and I moved it to the home screen on my phone and took all the

01:26:13.120 other apps and move them to the second screen. That's a very small thing and it doesn't guarantee

01:26:18.000 the behavior, but it's another way to stack the odds in my favor that whenever I open up my phone,

01:26:23.320 I'm reminded to listen to an audio book for a few minutes rather than browse Instagram. And the more

01:26:28.880 that you do those kinds of things, the more likely good behaviors are to arise. So one thing I want to park

01:26:34.420 for later once we get through the laws is a very specific question around the challenges that some

01:26:42.500 people face and that they don't control their environment. And again, I come back to food because

01:26:45.820 I think for most of my patients and for myself, food is such a struggle because again, it's always

01:26:51.740 around us. You have to do it. It's not a behavior you can just opt out of. And I think those of us that

01:26:57.320 have kids, not to throw our kids under the bus, but I haven't met too many people whose eating habits

01:27:02.160 get better once they have kids. If they're generally inclined to be healthy people, because

01:27:06.380 at some point you sort of start losing the battle of how much non crap you can have in the house

01:27:12.400 due to time constraints and the other constraints, which is look, kids are going to eat things that

01:27:18.240 are probably not so bad for them, but I shouldn't be eating wheat thins. My kids love wheat thins.

01:27:24.180 I love wheat thins. I think the difference is they can get away with eating a lot more wheat

01:27:28.480 thins than I can. So I've lost the wheat thin battle. We have a pantry that is full of wheat

01:27:34.100 thins and I'm never, at least for the foreseeable future, going to get those wheat thins out of

01:27:37.980 there. So now every time I walk in the pantry, I'm staring down the barrel of wheat thins and I

01:27:43.040 would love to get those wheat thins in the trash. But every time I do, my wife says, understandably,

01:27:47.540 Hey, if you want to be in charge of feeding the kids every meal, knock yourself out chef. But if you're

01:27:53.680 not, let me handle food and our kids eat well, but they're going to eat wheat thins and a few other

01:27:57.980 things that you'd want to eat. Isn't it kind of fascinating? Like you're someone that I think

01:28:01.600 most people have described as disciplined and high performing and talented and skilled. And you

01:28:06.340 like, look at yourself with that. And you're like, wheat thins beat me every time I think about myself.

01:28:10.140 I was doing an interview with somebody else a couple of weeks ago, and he was joking about how

01:28:14.360 the number of cookies he can eat is either zero or 30, because if they're there, then he's going to

01:28:21.020 eat them all. And I'm exactly that way. One of the best hacks that we've come up with is I love

01:28:26.760 chocolate chip cookies and my wife will make them, but she'll make the balls of dough and then freeze

01:28:32.460 them and put them in the freezer. And at night after dinner, we'll take them out and just take

01:28:37.240 out two and put them on the pan and warm up the oven and put them in. And it's actually a better

01:28:42.400 experience because you get to eat like fresh baked, warm chocolate chip cookies, but you'll only eat two

01:28:47.920 because all the rest of them are frozen. It's just enough friction to know that this is going to take

01:28:52.640 another 15 minutes. If I want to take two more out and heat them up, I don't actually need another

01:28:56.660 cookie. Like I just want to eat it. What limits you from putting five on the tray?

01:29:00.980 We just haven't gotten in the habit of doing that. So hopefully that question won't wreck my psyche.

01:29:05.400 And now we'll be doing that every night. Is part of that the accountability though, between you

01:29:09.300 that probably you say I want five, at least she's going to say, she'd be like, come on. Yeah, for sure.

01:29:14.720 It's interesting the ways in which there's a whole discussion we can have about habits and marriage

01:29:18.700 and relationships and how that influences things. Cause you soak up, each person soaks up a little

01:29:23.420 bit of the other partner, but we've seen it work in a very positive way for training, which is there

01:29:28.720 are going to be some days where I just like, don't feel like working out after a full day at work,

01:29:32.460 but she's like, all right, we're going to go to the gym. And then I'm like, okay, I'll change.

01:29:36.920 And then other days I'm like, okay, I'm ready. And she's like, all right. You know,

01:29:40.480 and she didn't feel like it. That's really helpful for the long-term consistency. But I've talked to

01:29:45.620 other couples who've said my nutrition habits actually got worse. Cause like one day I won't

01:29:50.480 feel like cooking and I'll be like, Hey, can we just order out? And she'll be like, okay, fine.

01:29:53.820 And then the other day she won't feel like cooking. Like, Hey, why don't we pick up something from,

01:29:57.420 and you're like, okay, fine. And so you can see how it goes in both directions. And I don't

01:30:02.100 have a good way to describe these upward and downward spirals that we often get into where the momentum,

01:30:09.300 once it's moving in that direction, you just kind of like, it becomes your default behavior and you just

01:30:13.540 sort of keep rolling with it. But there's something very powerful about that in life that if you get

01:30:18.640 on a nice trajectory and you got a good spiral working for you, then that momentum just kind

01:30:23.060 of carries you. If you start to get in a downward spiral, you really got to find a way to just

01:30:28.260 reverse course and gain a foothold. Even if it's a really small thing, just to get the momentum

01:30:33.100 moving in the other direction. But anyway, there are a lot of potentials there.

01:30:37.140 And that's actually something I feel like I've also noticed with my patients and myself,

01:30:41.360 which is, it seems that the people who are able to be more self-forgiving when they slip up and get

01:30:50.780 back on course, have an easier time than people who approach it through a very perfectionistic lens.

01:30:58.580 And once they make a mistake, they get into the cycle of self-judgment and beating themselves up.

01:31:06.080 And I say them, like, it's me too, right? We all do this. And all of a sudden, a blown meal turns

01:31:13.520 into, well, forget it, the day's over. I mean, I've screwed this day up, so I'm just going to eat

01:31:18.100 whatever I want. And then you wake up the next day and you probably feel like crap, both physically

01:31:22.640 and emotionally. And that reduces your drive to continue to do what you set out to do and give

01:31:30.560 the spirals. And you make a point about that in the book, which is if you're going to miss a workout,

01:31:34.000 miss a workout, but don't miss two. Yeah. Never miss twice is the idea that I try to,

01:31:38.040 the little mantra I try to tell myself. Stuck to the diet for nine days, binge ate a pizza on the

01:31:43.580 10th day. Well, I wish I hadn't happened, but never miss twice. So let's make sure the next meal is a

01:31:49.300 healthy one. And I think we all know this implicitly from going through life, but it's easy to forget in

01:31:55.780 the moment, which is, it's rarely the first mistake that ruins you. It's like usually the spiral of

01:32:01.040 repeated mistakes that follows. That's the real problem. It's like letting slipping up

01:32:04.760 become a new habit. That's the real issue. And if you can cut that off of the source,

01:32:09.820 if you can never miss twice, get to the end of the year. And those mistakes are just like a little

01:32:14.580 blip on the radar. It's really about getting back on track quickly. I think actually you see this with

01:32:19.980 top performers in many different industries. Like, you know, think about any athlete. I mean,

01:32:24.200 this is something that like Nick Saban's teams at Alabama pride themselves on.

01:32:27.360 The screw up a play or have a bad drive, throw an interception for a touchdown or something,

01:32:32.160 but the focus is on the very next play. And I'm making sure that you don't let that mistake

01:32:38.180 become another mistake. And the teams and the athletes that are really good at doing that and

01:32:43.060 having a short memory and getting right back on track, they end up having really successful

01:32:47.720 careers and you can scale that down to your own life. Gretchen Rubin actually has this, I thought

01:32:53.240 it was a clever little idea, which is divide the day into four quarters. So you got like morning,

01:32:58.320 afternoon, dinner and night or evening and night. If you make a mistake, keep it contained to that

01:33:03.560 quarter. So you don't lose the day, you just lose the quarter. And then the next one, you get back on

01:33:08.160 track. If you can keep your failure small like that, if you can contain the damage, then I just think

01:33:15.380 it's easier to get back on track quickly and to maintain the momentum, build consistency, all the other

01:33:19.780 positive benefits that we've talked about. And to your point about judging yourself or feeling guilty

01:33:24.240 or turning this into like a, some kind of self berating session, playing the victim never makes

01:33:29.720 it better. It doesn't make any of it easier. I think generally in life, we all have things that

01:33:34.760 happen to us. Some of them are terrible things and you can be the victim, but I don't know that it ever

01:33:40.960 benefits you to play the victim, to accept that role. Bad things can happen to you, but that doesn't

01:33:46.300 mean you have to start to identify as someone who is worthy of them or someone who is, you know,

01:33:50.840 it's inevitable for that to be part of your story. And so the more that you can like cut the judgment

01:33:56.580 out of it, cut the guilt out of it, the story, the narrative piece, and take that away and just

01:34:01.860 accept the event for what it is and move on to the next instance, I think probably the better off

01:34:07.260 you'll be. Yeah. This is probably an area where a habit that is probably desirable for many people

01:34:12.340 also becomes a tool to help. And that's mindfulness meditation, which I think is one of the more

01:34:17.560 powerful tools to help people observe the judgment without judging it, which sounds odd to someone who

01:34:24.340 hasn't practiced that, but that becomes very powerful, made a difference as I've kind of released

01:34:29.740 the need to be perfect. It's really a continuum. And there's a spectrum of efficacy here, which is

01:34:36.080 like on Monday, we traveled the whole day. We got back and I really wanted to work out. I just hate

01:34:41.600 ever missing a workout. But the reality is once we got home and the kids were exhausted and

01:34:46.980 my wife was tired and it just felt like sort of a schmucky thing to do to go and work out and leave

01:34:52.260 her with decompensating kids and a whole bunch of stuff that needed to be unpacked. Actually, part of

01:34:57.480 the judgment was letting go of that, letting go of the fact that I wasn't going to work out that day.

01:35:01.080 And that was okay. Now you can do that on anything. I think if you can come to be flexible

01:35:05.820 and say, you're stuck in the airport with your kids, the food sucks. It is what it is today.

01:35:11.600 And you're not horrible because of it. But I think this idea of get back on the horse as quickly

01:35:16.920 as possible is really powerful. Again, anecdotally, I always bring everything back to driving a race

01:35:22.040 car. It is so rare that you make a mistake and crash in a car because of what you did at that

01:35:28.280 moment and not because of what happened earlier. If you spin at corner four, the mistake usually

01:35:35.540 started at corner two. And sometimes you don't realize it. And sometimes you do realize it, but you

01:35:40.620 arrogantly think that you don't have to make any adjustment going forward because of it. At least

01:35:45.720 for me, that's been an incredibly humbling experience with how mistakes compound.

01:35:52.340 Rapid course correction is probably a deeply applicable lesson for many areas of life. The world

01:35:57.940 is complex and situations evolve. Life is dynamic. It's not static. Your preferences also evolve.

01:36:04.120 What you optimize for or want is different today than it was 10 years ago and probably will be

01:36:09.140 different five years from now or 10 years from now. And given that many changing dynamics, it's not

01:36:15.120 possible for someone to predict the optimal course of action. And even if you could, it is very unlikely

01:36:21.700 that it will remain the optimal course of action. Given that things are going to be changing, you're going

01:36:27.100 to be off course at some point. And the ability to correct for that and to correct for that

01:36:32.120 quickly. I mean, it might be one of the all optimal life skills, the ability to assess where you are in

01:36:38.680 the moment, see what the next step is going to be. Keep in mind where you ultimately want to go

01:36:43.580 and then correct as needed is possibly the path to like living a great life. I heard recently this,

01:36:50.680 I thought it was a great little framework, which is ABZ came from Sean Peary. He's a entrepreneur

01:36:56.680 and basically said, you need to know your ABZs. A is where you are right now. It's like the truth

01:37:02.920 of the situation. The reality B is your next step. And Z is where you want to go. Ultimately it's

01:37:09.340 where you want to end up. And I think the key, this is me talking now, not him. For me, the key is

01:37:14.240 working backwards. It's knowing Z first, knowing what you're optimizing for, and then jumping back to

01:37:20.800 A and being honest about the situation. What is the truth of the situation? What are the resources I

01:37:25.440 have? The skills I have? What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses? What's reality say? And

01:37:30.700 then knowing that I want to head towards Z and knowing honestly where I am today, what's the next

01:37:35.920 step? I actually don't need to know C through Y right now. I don't need to have the whole thing

01:37:40.600 planned out perfectly, but I do need to make sure that my next step is directionally correct.

01:37:45.260 If it is, then you can just keep running that ABZ process over and over again until you finally get

01:37:50.000 there. Yeah. Annie Duke talks about this in a slightly different way. And she refers to it as

01:37:54.360 backcasting. And I find it to be an incredibly powerful tool, again, to be contrasted with

01:37:59.800 forecasting, right? Forecasting is I'm just going to stand here and I'm going to tell you I got to do

01:38:03.740 B and then C and then as opposed to saying, no, this is where I am. That's the desired outcome.

01:38:09.220 Let's start working the steps backwards. What you've described is slightly different, but I think it

01:38:13.440 preserves this idea of taking stock of where you are and most importantly, understanding where you need to be

01:38:18.280 and not trying to do what I think stochastically is really hard, but predict every step going forward.

01:38:24.420 The only thing I'll add to that, which I like Annie's framework and I think working backwards is

01:38:28.800 it's a really powerful thing, particularly if you can not be your own bottleneck in the process.

01:38:35.560 The phrase I like is work backwards from magic. What would the magical outcome be? What would the

01:38:40.380 ideal outcome be? And then let me work backwards from that. And a lot of people have trouble with that

01:38:45.040 brainstorming part of the process because they think, well, if it's unrealistic, why would I even

01:38:49.440 try? And the point is like, listen, it's way too early for that. Most people become their own

01:38:54.020 bottleneck long before reality prevents them from doing it, which is kind of this great irony.

01:38:59.080 We're like, Oh, you know, why would I attempt this like super impossible thing? And it's like, well,

01:39:02.660 the world hasn't even told you it's impossible yet. You have, I think work backwards from the magical

01:39:07.260 outcome. But my key is I want to be very clear about where I'm going, but very flexible about how I get

01:39:13.440 there. I don't need it to happen. If I work backwards, I don't need it to happen only through

01:39:18.340 that chain of that potential path, because if you can only have one way to get there, you're

01:39:23.180 actually kind of brittle. You become hostage to things working exactly in that way. But if I know

01:39:28.680 where I want to get to with a very clear vision, I'm flexible on how I get there. Well, now I can

01:39:32.140 start to spring on opportunities as they arise and just take whatever the most fruitful path seems to

01:39:36.520 be. But I do think that that whole process starts with working backwards. So it's, I think a more

01:39:42.360 fruitful way to think about where you want to go than just trying to predict. Before we leave the

01:39:46.280 first law, what advice do you offer for people if they aren't quite clear what the cues are? Again,

01:39:54.960 in the spirit of trying to even displace a habit that's maladaptive and create new ones. Again,

01:40:00.400 is this something that's just empirical or is it, I hate to use the word, but other tricks for

01:40:04.900 identifying what the cues are? I think there are exercises or strategies you can use. So

01:40:09.500 you sort of hinted at this a few minutes ago and I meant to say it, but I forgot, which is

01:40:14.960 the process of behavior change, strategically changing your behavior. We need to make a

01:40:20.620 separation here, a distinction between the types of behavior change because people change their

01:40:25.540 behavior all the time. We're always responding to the situation we're in or the circumstance or the

01:40:30.160 conversation we're having. This is like one of the great myths about behavior change, which is

01:40:34.260 behavior change is hard. Actually, it's one of the easiest things that you do. Like your brain is

01:40:38.540 designed to change your behavior, to match the situation that you're in. So you're making

01:40:42.920 adjustments all the time. The question is, can you reliably change your behavior? Can you design

01:40:48.820 your behavior in a fashion that you want? And if you want to design it, if you want to be in control

01:40:53.820 of it more, I think it almost always starts with the process of self-awareness. And that's kind of what

01:40:58.400 this question is getting at. I don't even know what the cues are. I don't even know what my habits are.

01:41:02.160 So the two exercises I recommend, the first one I call the habit scorecard, and you just go through

01:41:08.180 your day and you list out every habit that you already do and try to get as detailed as possible.

01:41:13.080 So usually there's a big lump in the beginning. Like I wake up, I take a shower, I step on the scale,

01:41:18.160 I brush my teeth, I go to the bathroom, I get dressed. Like there's all this stuff that you do

01:41:22.180 to start your day. And then there's things for breakfast and starting your work day and on and on and

01:41:26.920 on. And the more that you have that list, again, the goal is not to judge yourself. It's almost like

01:41:33.080 you're at the zoo looking at animals and you're one of the animals. It's like, oh, how interesting

01:41:37.440 that they would do that. You're just trying to get a lay of the land and see how do I actually

01:41:41.020 spend my time? What habits am I actually doing if I'm being honest about it? So that's just to

01:41:45.540 understand what habits you have. To figure out what the cue is, basically you're just asking like

01:41:50.040 five questions. Who, what, when, where, why. You're essentially just trying to get a lay of what's

01:41:55.280 going on. So let's say that you're like, man, I eat a lot of candy bars, but I don't know why I do

01:41:59.860 it. I don't know what the cue is. Well, each time that you find yourself eating a candy bar,

01:42:04.580 just pull up a note on your phone or have an index card or a notebook or whatever, somewhere to record

01:42:09.080 it, write down, what time is it? Where are you at right now? What's the context? What's the

01:42:13.540 environment? Who are you around? Are you near the, do you eat these by the same kind of people?

01:42:17.820 What were you doing just before this? Was it a break from writing emails or doing something else?

01:42:22.740 And the more that you start to answer those questions about the context, the better you'll

01:42:27.780 start to understand, Hey, maybe that was the cue. And I bet if you do that exercise for whatever the

01:42:32.540 particular habit is that you're working on, just do that for, you may not even need to do it for a

01:42:36.700 week, but if you do it for five days or seven days or something, you're going to start to develop a

01:42:40.620 good sense for what it is that's prompting the behavior. Yeah, that's a great exercise. Is there any

01:42:46.340 concern that when a person does that, the Hawthorne effect kicks in and they basically start

01:42:50.660 deviating from the natural behavior because of the observation? In other words, is the act of

01:42:56.800 going through this exercise potentially making it harder for them to transparently see what's

01:43:01.940 happening? Maybe I'm not going to say it's not a risk. I'm sure it's a possible risk, but I think

01:43:07.280 what's more likely to happen is rather than not being able to see what's going on, assuming you're

01:43:12.460 being honest with yourself, it can be hard to honestly observe your own behavior. You have a lot of

01:43:17.620 biases and stories for why we do what we do. So assume you're doing that to the best degree

01:43:21.780 possible. I think you're probably still going to get a good idea of what the cue is. What I think

01:43:27.020 is more likely to happen if there is some influence on your behavior is you may find yourself changing

01:43:32.120 the behavior anyway, just because you're tracking it. And there are quite a few studies that show

01:43:36.900 this, like with nutrition, for example, there are some studies about food journaling, people who just

01:43:41.620 keep a food journal. They're not even trying to stick to a certain calorie level or a certain macro

01:43:46.300 profile or anything. They just are tracking what they're eating, tend to change their eating habits

01:43:52.060 and eat less just because they're tracking it, even if they don't have a specific program they're

01:43:56.040 trying to follow. So the mere act of observing something or measuring something often changes

01:44:01.780 the behavior associated with it. You may find that to be the case here. You're like, well, I keep right

01:44:06.020 now when I have candy bars, so I'm like, maybe I'll skip this one. I think that's probably the more

01:44:09.840 likely outcome, but who knows? There could be other biases as well. These devices here, these continuous

01:44:14.820 glucose monitors, they are a remarkable tool for both insight. When you first put them on,

01:44:20.020 you're sort of learning, oh my God, like I didn't realize eating that thing would have this response

01:44:23.520 in my glucose. But once you sort of saturate the insight part of that equation, it can be three

01:44:28.880 months, six months, depending on the complexity of your life. It becomes forever a behavioral tool.

01:44:36.140 You don't want to eat a certain thing if it's going to raise your glucose because you've at least

01:44:40.140 bought into the thesis that you don't want to have your glucose skyrocket the way it does when you eat

01:44:44.340 M&Ms. So it's interesting. It becomes kind of an accountability partner. And I find some of the

01:44:49.960 most interesting and sticky devices do that. The wearables that offer an insight that's not obvious,

01:44:56.220 but is objective tend to be the things that we really like coming back to. Whereas the ones that

01:45:02.580 are kind of obvious, like how many steps you take, that's not very sticky because we sort of have an

01:45:07.100 intuitive sense for what that is. Like once they've spent enough time walking 10,000 steps a day,

01:45:11.220 they don't really need a device to tell them that anymore. It becomes easier to do on their own.

01:45:15.640 This is a side comment, but I have this like theory about technology and innovation and that

01:45:20.960 the technologies that most radically change the world or change our behavior are all just kind of

01:45:25.540 different forms of vision. You have obvious examples like x-rays, which, you know, allow you to see

01:45:30.360 the broken bone or MRIs or whatever that allow you to see some tissue in a way that you couldn't see

01:45:35.760 before. And so that gives you information that then you can act on and make a diagnosis and,

01:45:39.860 you know, make some kind of change. But the glucose monitor is like another example. It's

01:45:44.220 just like, now you can see the spike and because you can see it, you change your behavior. Even

01:45:49.080 stuff like the number of email subscribers to my website, because my email platform tracks that and

01:45:54.800 I can see how many people are signing up each day. I make a change to the form and, you know,

01:45:59.780 conversion and so on. And I do think there's some deeper lesson there about behavior change and about

01:46:05.520 what drives human behavior, which is if you can visualize your progress in some way, maybe it's

01:46:12.160 a chart on a screen, maybe it's, you know, an actual printout, maybe it's something that you

01:46:16.460 actually see looking through lenses or something. But if you can actually visualize it, then the

01:46:21.640 behavior often follows suit. And that's why even simple strategies like a habit tracker, where you

01:46:26.740 just put an X on each day, seems very rudimentary, very basic, but it can still be meaningful because

01:46:33.520 it gives you a way of visualizing your progress. So anyway, the glucose monitor is an interesting

01:46:37.640 one. Yeah. This idea of what gets measured, gets managed is a great tool. About six months ago,

01:46:43.060 I started going to the water meter of our house every Tuesday and recording it. And then I've got

01:46:48.640 a little spreadsheet that says, okay, this is how many gallons we've used this week. This is what it

01:46:53.960 would project to for a monthly usage, et cetera, et cetera. And you just can't believe how much our water

01:46:59.140 usage has come down in six months because in Texas, water is not that expensive actually compared to

01:47:04.580 California, but just, it became something I was obsessed with, which is like, we're not going to

01:47:08.080 waste any water. I just don't want to waste any water. It's now become a game for me. It drives my

01:47:12.520 family nuts, but it is a game. Like we are going to have the lowest water bill ever in Austin. No one

01:47:19.760 is going to use less water than us. I'm obsessed with that spreadsheet. It's kind of like an adult version

01:47:25.780 of I spy walk in. You're like, I spy the red thing. And then all the red stuff in the room lights up

01:47:30.260 right now. You're like, I spy water and everywhere I go, that's what I see. And you find opportunities

01:47:35.300 and you find ways to change it. Oh yeah. When I'm giving my kids a shower, like once I'm lathering

01:47:40.260 them up the water, I got to turn the water off. And they're like, daddy, why are you turning the water

01:47:43.280 off? I'm like, because we're just putting soap on right now. You don't need the water. It drives

01:47:47.140 everybody nuts. Okay. So let's talk about the second law. Yeah. So the second law is making it

01:47:53.120 attractive. And I think there's a simple example I could give here, which is let's imagine that you

01:47:58.600 wake up tomorrow and you're like, all right, I listened to this guy talk about habits all day

01:48:02.940 today. So tomorrow's going to be the day I'm going to wake up and I'm going to go for a run.

01:48:07.120 So you set your alarm for 6am and 6am rolls around, but your bed is warm and it's cold outside. And

01:48:14.960 you're like, well, I'll just press snooze and sleep in. Like maybe I'll do it tomorrow.

01:48:18.180 But if you rewind the clock and come back to today and you text a friend and you say, Hey,

01:48:23.880 you want to meet at the park at 615 and go for a run? Well, now 6am rolls around. Your bed is still

01:48:29.940 warm and still cold outside. But if you don't get up and go for a run, you're a jerk because you leave

01:48:34.360 your friend at the park all alone. And so you've kind of simultaneously made it more attractive to

01:48:40.940 get up and go for a run and less attractive to press snooze and sleep in. Now you haven't made the

01:48:46.740 run itself any easier. That's still going to be as difficult as it was before. So the habit,

01:48:50.880 the difficulty is kind of the same, but you have changed the calculus that's going on in your mind

01:48:55.180 about like whether you should do this or not, or how attractive it seems. So there are a bunch of

01:48:59.940 examples, strategies like that and stuff that I talk about in the book and that you could use to

01:49:03.900 kind of make habits seem more attractive than they otherwise are. But that's sort of what it comes

01:49:08.380 down to on a short-term basis for making habits attractive on a long-term basis. I think it's about

01:49:13.760 what we've already discussed about the social environment and being part of a tribe where

01:49:17.520 your desired behavior is the normal behavior, because those behaviors become very attractive

01:49:22.240 even a year or two or five from now, if they help signal that you're part of the tribe.

01:49:27.960 Yeah. You brought up CrossFit earlier, but I always thought that CrossFit was one of the best

01:49:31.500 examples of this. I never did CrossFit myself. You know, there's lots of criticisms of it,

01:49:36.220 et cetera. But the reality of it is it was certainly, it was and is something that really creates a

01:49:42.120 community of people who have a certain belief about who they are and what they do. For all the

01:49:47.780 people who knock CrossFit, I've seen it take a lot of very inactive people and turn them into some

01:49:52.320 pretty impressive people. Yeah. I think the social side, the community side of it is the strongest

01:49:57.200 piece of the whole thing. It's the part that's hardest for any other exercise program to replicate.

01:50:02.220 That's for sure. It does. It gets people to stick to it. I mean, it becomes, it sounds extreme to

01:50:06.720 call it a form of a religion, but it becomes kind of like that for them. I mean, the box is like

01:50:10.860 their church in a lot of ways. You know, they go six days a week instead of one day a week.

01:50:14.600 There are a lot of strong community elements there. You also see CrossFitters pick up a bunch

01:50:19.060 of habits they didn't even expect. Like they thought they were going to start working out,

01:50:22.800 but then six months later, they all are buying the same brand of knee sleeves and they have a

01:50:27.400 certain type of weightlifting shoe and they're all eating paleo. And it was like, we didn't even plan

01:50:32.240 on doing that stuff. I just was going to go to a gym to work out. But all of those are behaviors

01:50:37.500 that signal what it means to be part of that group. And again, once you start to build friends

01:50:42.440 in that group and start to, you know, become ingrained in that society or in that tribe,

01:50:47.360 you start to soak up some of those other behaviors as well.

01:50:50.500 It's really a great example. I guess we'll go to the third and fourth law, but I want to take a step

01:50:54.460 back and ask you where you put nudging into this. So Richard Thaler's book, Nudge, which was probably

01:51:00.120 the first book I ever read on this subject matter. I mean, it seems so obvious, which is what makes it so

01:51:06.180 interesting and insightful, right? Sometimes the most brilliant things in retrospect seem so

01:51:10.660 entirely obvious, but it was, I think reading Richard's book circa, I don't know, call it maybe

01:51:16.080 2012, it's probably nearly 10 years ago. This idea of the default food environment sort of came to me.

01:51:21.720 And I use that term with our patients as the more you can control your default food environment,

01:51:27.020 the more healthy you can be. So if your default food environment sucks, you're going to be relying

01:51:32.100 on willpower a lot. And that's really, really hard. If your default food environment is one extreme end

01:51:37.700 of the spectrum, you can have a perfect default food environment. You can be the healthiest person

01:51:41.080 in the world, even if it's not enjoyable. If you were locked in a room and all you had were the best

01:51:45.660 foods to eat, you're going to end up being healthy. And you're going to be kind of like,

01:51:48.800 oh, if I eat one more macadamia nut and have one more avocado and salad. But nudging obviously refers

01:51:54.360 to a cue, but it also refers to this environmental change. It doesn't seem to really capture the idea of

01:52:00.080 making it attractive or does it? I think it's more about making it obvious. I would lump it more in

01:52:05.540 the first law. Design the environment to make the good habit the obvious one, to make the good habit

01:52:11.820 the path of least resistance. Some other nudges that are very popular people talk about is like

01:52:16.800 default choices on forms. The very famous example being the organ donor study. Default opting in every

01:52:24.140 employee to a 401k and making them opt out is a nudge. I think that's also another example of making

01:52:29.700 obvious or we could also say making it easy. Nothing's easier than letting it ride. All of those are

01:52:35.200 examples. To your point about default food environment, Daria Rose, who writes a nutrition blog, she's got a

01:52:41.760 great concept. I just like it. It's kind of sticky. Home court habits and away court habits. The argument

01:52:46.880 is like, try to optimize your home court habits first. What's the environment where it's your kitchen,

01:52:52.200 it's your apartment, you get to set the tone. And let's just try to prime all of that. Whatever happens at a

01:52:57.680 restaurant or when you're at a hotel traveling or whatever, let's don't worry about that as much right now. Let's

01:53:02.480 just optimize the home court. I like that. If you can build a home court advantage for yourself, then you get

01:53:07.620 in a good situation, you start to build some momentum, you handle the thing that you're probably going to be

01:53:12.300 doing 70% of the time or 80% of the time. And then after that, you can move on to the away court stuff.

01:53:18.760 So one of the other things you talk about is the idea of accountability. It's come up now several times. And I think

01:53:25.080 everybody would agree that the moment you have somebody else in this thing with you, the better

01:53:30.180 it gets. Is there any evidence about the type of accountability partner? So an example you gave

01:53:36.760 was your wife, great accountability partner for you guys to work out. Would that be more or less

01:53:41.680 effective than if you were matched with a person who you didn't know, but who had similar aspirations

01:53:49.460 conversations where you'd be less comfortable and perhaps more inclined to hold yourself to a higher

01:53:56.140 standard? Again, it kind of comes back to this idea of how we're wired to be seeking the approval of others and

01:54:03.120 all those sorts of other things. Is there any research to support this idea?

01:54:06.460 I don't know of any studies that like distinguish clearly between those two. It's quite possible. There are plenty out

01:54:12.420 there. I just may not know of them, but I can see it working well on both sides. And I also see complexities on both

01:54:18.480 sides. So a lot of the time when people talk about accountability partners, they join a Facebook

01:54:23.880 group or they join a course or a program or something, and they get matched up the way that

01:54:27.760 you described. But I can actually see that form of accountability kind of falling apart fairly quickly

01:54:33.520 for a simple reason, which is it's a stranger and you don't really bear much cost for them thinking you

01:54:40.300 did a bad job, or you may not really value or care that much about their opinion. Compare that to the

01:54:46.860 example I gave earlier, which is you walk outside and your neighbor sees that your lawn is very sloppy

01:54:52.620 and you haven't mowed the grass in three weeks. That actually you may care pretty deeply about

01:54:57.000 because you don't want to be judged by the other people in the neighborhood and you don't want to

01:55:00.140 have friction with your neighbor and so on. And so there's much more of a cost there. And that form

01:55:05.160 of accountability is a lot stronger because there's some reason why you really want to fall through on

01:55:11.180 it. Now you could say that that same thing is true for, you know, for example, a marriage or

01:55:16.200 relationship. I don't want to let my partner down. I don't want them to think poorly of me and so on.

01:55:21.620 But you have to remember in that particular case, you're so close that there are actually a lot of

01:55:27.560 additional complexities there. Like you want to be fairly forgiving of your partner because you're

01:55:32.500 living with them all the time. Or even if it's not someone you're married to, say it's your brother

01:55:37.180 or your parents or whoever. There's just a lot going on in those relationships. And so is the

01:55:42.980 other person really going to become like an enemy just over you skipping your workout routine on

01:55:49.240 Tuesday? Because you guys got to get dinner together on Wednesday night and you have to babysit their

01:55:54.340 kids over the weekend. And there's a lot of other stuff that's involved there. And so in those cases,

01:56:00.320 I think the relationships are so tight or so complex that that person may not actually want to be a

01:56:06.800 strict accountability partner because of the other costs may need to bear. You're kind of in this

01:56:11.400 weird situation where you don't want there to be other things on the line that would influence their

01:56:17.120 ability to hold you accountable. But you do actually want to care about their opinion and to bear some

01:56:23.640 cost if you don't follow through. Perhaps this is the reason why having like a coach is a good example,

01:56:29.560 because that's somebody that presumably you want to do a good job because you're going to see them

01:56:33.880 repeatedly. Even if it's not as dicey as the neighbor situation where like you do bear some

01:56:39.580 social cost for it, you probably bear a financial cost because you may be paying your nutrition

01:56:44.520 coats $500 or $1,000 or whatever. And the more that there's some kind of painful cost associated with

01:56:52.020 it, probably the more that you're going to be willing to follow through on that accountability.

01:56:56.480 And speaking of a coach, just more broadly, how does a coach or how did the best coaches,

01:57:02.540 if you have insight into this thread the needle of creating accountability,

01:57:07.620 but also creating encouragement when you fall short?

01:57:10.740 Boy, that's a big question. I'm not a coach. I've been fortunate to have some good ones.

01:57:16.180 And I've also had a bunch of mediocre ones too. And thinking about the difference between them,

01:57:21.240 we could have a whole conversation about coaching and about the art of that because there is a really

01:57:26.440 fine balance there. And I think there also is a big difference in the, I'm going to use athlete,

01:57:33.180 but of course you can have a coach for many things, but there's a big difference also in the intensity

01:57:37.440 that the athlete might have. You can imagine I was into Olympic weightlifting for a time and it was

01:57:43.080 kind of the main way I was training. I had the fortune of training with a really great team. I was

01:57:47.440 very average, but Holly Mangold was on that team and she competed at the Olympic games in London in 2012.

01:57:52.640 Just watching the interactions between the coaches and her and what was required for her to make it

01:57:58.960 to the Olympics was interesting to see. There is every element of a tight relationship there. I mean,

01:58:04.740 there's tough love and there's actual love. And there are some days where you have to be really

01:58:09.260 harsh and some days where you have to be really soft. And there's all the dynamics of the athlete's

01:58:14.860 internal mindset. There are days when you go out and you feel like you're a world killer and like

01:58:20.060 nobody can touch you. And then there are other days where you just feel completely broken. And

01:58:24.260 you're like, can I keep this training up for another six months? The more intense the objective

01:58:29.020 is that you're trying to achieve. I think the more detailed and balanced and nuanced all of that

01:58:33.720 becomes. And then you have just your standard CrossFit coach who's coaching a 35 year old dad of

01:58:38.620 two who just wants to get in better shape. And that I think may be totally different relationship.

01:58:43.760 I don't know that I have a good answer there, but I do think it's a really important thing.

01:58:46.840 Great coaches are incredibly valuable. They're rare by definition. That's why they're great.

01:58:52.740 It's probably much more complicated than a lot of us realize.

01:58:55.500 So you said rule number one and rule number three were probably the most important. Rule number three

01:58:59.960 is now make it easy. Yeah. So if I could only recommend one thing, if you forced me to say,

01:59:06.000 hey, where's the one place I would start? I would say, start with this, start with me.

01:59:09.220 Do you hate being asked that question, by the way? If you could just do one thing.

01:59:13.380 You know how it is. You know, like if somebody said, what was the one thing I would do to get

01:59:16.200 healthy, you'd be like, okay, come on. This is like a very big picture. There's a lot of stuff

01:59:19.440 here. Same story here. I do think this is a good place to start though. And so if I had to pick,

01:59:24.480 I would say, follow the two minute rule, which says, take whatever habit you're trying to build

01:59:28.900 and scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. So read 30 books a year

01:59:34.420 becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat. And sometimes people

01:59:40.720 hate that because they're like, okay, buddy, I know I'm not actually just trying to take my yoga mat out.

01:59:45.640 I know I'm actually trying to do the workout. So if this is some kind of mental trick and I know

01:59:49.860 it's a trick, then like, why would I fall for it basically? And I get where people are coming from,

01:59:54.120 but I have this reader, his name's Mitch. And I mentioned him in Atomic Habits. He lost a ton

01:59:59.040 of weight. Another guy, I think he lost definitely over 80 pounds. I think it was probably over a hundred

02:00:02.620 kept it off for a long time. He had this interesting rule for himself though. When he went to the gym

02:00:08.260 for the first six weeks, they started working out. He wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes.

02:00:13.220 So he'd get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an exercise, get back in the car,

02:00:18.280 drive home. And it sounds ridiculous. It sounds silly. You're like, obviously this is not going

02:00:22.820 to get the guy the results that he wants. But if you take a step back, what you realize is that he

02:00:28.320 was mastering the art of showing up. He was becoming the type of person that went to the gym

02:00:32.760 four days a week, even if it was only for five minutes. And I think this is like a deep truth about

02:00:38.900 habits. Something that we often overlook, which is a habit must be established before it can be

02:00:44.220 improved. It has to become the standard in your life before you can optimize and scale it up into

02:00:49.060 something more. If you want, you can come up with a better theory. Like you could come up with a

02:00:53.860 perfect plan, but unless you're acting on it, it doesn't do you any good. It's just a really good

02:00:58.760 idea. For whatever reason we get like really all or nothing about our habits. We tend to have this

02:01:04.600 tendency to be like, well, if I can't do the full marathon training program, then why go for a run

02:01:09.040 at all? Or if I can't follow through on the perfect lean startup business framework, then like why

02:01:14.120 bother starting a company? The two minute rule kind of helps you get over that tendency of

02:01:18.420 perfectionism and just start to master the art of showing up, find a small way to establish the

02:01:23.760 habit, make it part of your new normal. And then you can gain a little foothold and start to scale up

02:01:28.560 and expand from there. There's that great quote from Ed Latimore, where he says the heaviest weight at the gym

02:01:33.520 as the front door. That's true for a lot of things in life. The hardest part is getting started. So

02:01:38.120 let's master that and make it part of your lifestyle. And then once you're the kind of

02:01:42.360 person who's showing up consistently, we have all kinds of options for how we can improve and optimize

02:01:46.520 and so on. I think meditation is another great place where that two minute rule really helps.

02:01:52.680 I think it can be really daunting the first time you decide for the first time, let's say you buy the

02:01:57.400 idea that, Hey, you know what? There's probably real value in this. I'd be better served to go on a

02:02:01.440 silent retreat for seven days or meditate 40 minutes every day. It's like, that's a real big

02:02:05.820 step for someone who's never done it. How about two minutes every single day you meditate and maybe

02:02:12.160 in a few weeks it's three minutes a day, but yeah, you have to sort of lay down that track to say,

02:02:17.820 Hey, I'm a person who meditates and B this is the actual muscle memory of what it looks like to sit

02:02:22.360 down. It's also surprising how few people actually have two minutes in their day where they stop and do

02:02:28.920 nothing except breathe. That alone would deliver more value than you might expect. And there are

02:02:33.700 a whole host of other behaviors that go along with this. You think meditating for two minutes

02:02:38.900 sounds very small, but if you start to back out of it, you realize you got to pick a space. Where

02:02:44.320 is it going to happen? What time of day is it going to occur? Is this something that you're going to do

02:02:48.200 before work or after work? Do you do it on your lunch break? Try to do it with somebody to, so you have a

02:02:53.340 little bit of social accountability, or is this just like a private thing that you're going to do in the

02:02:56.460 corner? Do you need a pillow to sit on or are you fine to sit on the floor? Like what's your

02:03:00.460 flexibility? Like, are you going to get interrupted by your kids? If you do this at 7am, it might be

02:03:04.960 nice to get it done in the morning, but is that when you're getting them ready for school and getting

02:03:08.320 them dressed? A lot of little questions like that, that people don't think about. And so finding a very

02:03:14.360 small version of the habit allows you to get all of that other stuff kind of handled, figure out the

02:03:19.640 logistics of it and just to do it for a minute or two. And then once you get all that stuff

02:03:24.900 handled and you don't have to decide anymore, you have a little bit more mental capacity and energy

02:03:29.280 to actually focus into, okay, let me scale this up a bit and do it maybe in the way that I was

02:03:33.800 hoping I would. So how do you make them satisfying? Cause that's the fourth law. Yeah. So this is the

02:03:39.640 final piece. It's really about just making a habit that's pleasurable enough that you want to return

02:03:43.860 to it, giving you some reason, some emotional signal that, Hey, this is worth it. And there are a bunch

02:03:49.220 of different ways you can do this. Some of them are short-term. Some of them are long-term.

02:03:52.620 The short-term stuff is mostly about reinforcement. So classic examples are things like, Oh, you can

02:03:59.120 reward yourself with a bubble bath or with ice cream or buying a, you know, something that you

02:04:04.040 wanted or whatever. I think the key with those short-term reinforcements is you want to make

02:04:09.540 sure that the reinforcement also aligns with the long-term identity that you're trying to build.

02:04:15.960 Right. Ice cream wouldn't be a great reward for getting in better shape.

02:04:19.940 You go to the gym and you do a workout and then you eat a bowl of ice cream. It's like,

02:04:23.040 okay, you're casting boats for two different identities. Or let's say that you're trying

02:04:26.980 to get your finances in order. And so you're like, okay, I want to budget consistently and

02:04:30.880 save money for retirement. Well, if you reward yourself with that, buying a leather jacket,

02:04:35.520 then it's kind of like, okay, on the one hand, you're trying to be a saver. On the other hand,

02:04:38.560 you're being a spender. So I like to pick things that we feel like are aligned. So like in the

02:04:43.520 fitness example, you could say, well, if I don't miss any workouts this week,

02:04:46.800 then I'm going to reward myself with a bubble bath and kind of like an hour alone of peace

02:04:50.720 and quiet on the weekend. And that's like a vote for taking care of your body. That seems pretty

02:04:55.320 aligned. Or if I save consistently for retirement this month and I make a contribution each week,

02:05:01.020 then at the end of the month, I'm going to reward myself with a hike in the woods. And that's like

02:05:05.420 another example of a lifestyle of freedom and of controlling your time. So anything that's aligned

02:05:12.100 or reinforces that story you're trying to build, I think that can make a great immediate

02:05:15.960 reinforcement. In the long run, the way to feel rewarded, the kind of ideal form of making it

02:05:22.280 satisfying is when the behavior starts to feel like it reinforces your desired identity. So if

02:05:28.780 you're the kind of person who feels like, yeah, I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts,

02:05:31.960 then in the middle of doing a set of squats, you can feel satisfied because you're being the kind

02:05:37.540 of person you want to be. And so this comes back to kind of the point you made a little bit ago about,

02:05:41.940 I just don't want to miss a workout. Like I kind of feel off. I feel like I'm not being myself if I

02:05:46.500 miss. And so just getting the reps in, that alone is satisfying in the moment. And that's sort of the

02:05:51.980 ultimate version of making it satisfying because you don't even need to wait for the reward. It's

02:05:56.680 just happening as you're in the middle of performing the behavior. Make it obvious, make it attractive,

02:06:01.800 make it easy, make it satisfying. Those four laws and the various ways to intervene and do that

02:06:07.160 increase the odds that you're going to fall through on a good habit.

02:06:09.540 Let's take a step back from all of this. When someone picks up your book, presumably there's

02:06:15.720 a selection bias that exists, which is this is a person who either through luck or through some

02:06:22.400 recommendation or friend or whatever has made a decision that they at least want to examine the

02:06:27.420 habits in their lives and or potentially change them. What do we know or what can we extract from

02:06:32.200 this about a scenario that's different, which is, I'll use my example. You have a patient

02:06:38.520 who you're trying to help and helping that patient requires some intervention. They're going to have

02:06:45.320 to make a change. Now that change can be at one level, really simple. I think the simplest change

02:06:50.460 medicine has to offer is take a pill. There's a time and a place for pills. I think it's a bit silly

02:06:54.860 when people assume that everything modern medicine has to offer is bad. Pills are bad. Obviously that's

02:06:59.760 not the case. Taking your medicine for your blood pressure, your cholesterol, all these things,

02:07:03.280 if it's warranted, that's a really important thing to do. And we also know, by the way, that

02:07:06.800 even something as quote unquote simple as taking your medicine is actually really hard for a lot

02:07:10.640 of people. Most people are, I think studies demonstrate, you know, sort of in the neighborhood

02:07:14.000 is 60 to 70% compliant with something as simple as take a pill, but it only gets harder from there.

02:07:20.020 Getting someone who's not sleeping well to sleep well. That's a real big set of behavior changes.

02:07:25.640 Getting someone who's not eating well to eat well. Getting someone who's not exercising to exercise.

02:07:30.100 Getting someone who's not taking care of their mental health to take care of their mental health.

02:07:33.280 All of these things require enormous change. If a person says on the surface, yes, I want to be

02:07:39.960 better. I accept that I want this outcome of being healthier, but they haven't specifically

02:07:47.480 had the need or desire to change the way they eat or exercise or sleep or whatever. It adds a layer of

02:07:55.200 challenge or friction to this process. What advice would you offer to me in a situation like that

02:08:01.720 for trying to implement your insights into that scenario to a person who hasn't fully selected

02:08:08.320 into wanting to change habits? The point about people self-selecting by picking up the book is

02:08:14.180 interesting. Sometimes it's like you're sort of only helping the people who already want to be helped

02:08:20.060 in that sense. It's interesting to think that most of the time, the people who most need to read

02:08:25.800 the book are not the people who pick it up to read it. The people who read about habits are usually the

02:08:30.360 ones who have fairly decent habits and are pretty interested in it. The people who need it the most,

02:08:34.200 they've never read a book on habits and they don't want to read it. They're not interested.

02:08:37.300 Something interesting about that. But I think the points you bring up are very true and challenging.

02:08:43.640 Changing your own behavior is hard enough. Changing other people's behavior is like a whole

02:08:47.640 another level of difficulty, a whole another order of magnitude of difficulty. I'll offer maybe three

02:08:53.580 ideas that could apply. The first one, and we've already talked about this in various ways, but I do

02:08:58.400 think you have to make it really small. So you said taking a pill is the smallest version, but it doesn't

02:09:03.260 always have to be that. It could be, you know, if you're trying to get them to exercise, it could

02:09:07.440 literally be doing one pushup, walking around the block one time or something. And this is that version

02:09:12.680 of like, can I just go to the gym for five minutes sort of thing? Let's just scale it down, make it super

02:09:17.120 simple. Along with that is very hard for it to be simple. If people are being pulled in multiple

02:09:22.780 directions. And so I think if you're giving people a plan that has five things on there for them to do,

02:09:28.540 can we eliminate four of those for now? Stay at phase two. And can we just do one right now?

02:09:33.860 Let's take one thing and scale it down and stay focused and just try to get a little bit of momentum

02:09:38.740 going on that. And then once we've established that and started to gain a foothold there and get a

02:09:44.240 little bit more consistency with that one thing, we can take that momentum and transfer it into the

02:09:49.380 next one. So yeah, ideally, probably a lot of patients will be doing these five things or these

02:09:54.780 15 things, but it doesn't mean you need to do all of them right now. Let's pick one and stay focused.

02:09:59.960 So that's the first thing is try to keep it as simple as possible. Pretty obvious answer,

02:10:04.240 but I still think a useful one. The second thing, again, fairly obvious, and we've talked about it a

02:10:09.560 bit, but still, I think useful is the environment design piece. Even the laziest person, even the

02:10:16.000 person who has zero interest naturally in these topics is a product of the environment that they're

02:10:21.160 in. Imagine this lab experiment where you're locked in a room that only has healthy food options.

02:10:26.720 Even the laziest person is going to eat healthy there. They have no other choice. And that doesn't

02:10:31.900 mean that they need to change everything in their home so that it's that control lab experiment feel.

02:10:37.080 But look, there's a lot of low hanging fruit that can be done here that you don't actually need

02:10:43.120 someone. And this, I think is one of the reasons why I like environment changes. You don't actually

02:10:48.120 need someone to be motivated every day to do this. You really just need them to be motivated for like

02:10:53.280 one afternoon so that they change the environment a bit. And that can actually serve them. In some

02:10:58.820 cases it can serve them for months, but in most cases, even food related cases, it could serve them

02:11:03.700 for the next three days or five days or seven days just by getting junk food out of the house that

02:11:08.200 serves them for the next couple of days. You only need little pockets of motivation. And if you can

02:11:13.700 direct that pocket of motivation toward a high leverage action, like redesigning the environment,

02:11:19.100 then it can continue to serve even a lazy person for a good chunk of time. So that's probably the

02:11:24.900 second same thing. So make it small, optimize the environment. And then the third thing,

02:11:29.640 and this is maybe more of like a coaching thing as someone who deals with patients or has clients

02:11:34.480 or whatever. The general strategy is easy to say, but very hard to follow, which is praise the good,

02:11:41.560 ignore the bad. It goes against the grain of what we want to do because they're like, you're telling me

02:11:46.300 I just want to ignore the mistakes that they're making. And certainly there's a place for rectifying

02:11:51.880 mistakes. And I don't mean that every problem should just go unresolved, but especially early on,

02:11:57.100 the thing that you really want to build is momentum and you want to reinforce the good

02:12:01.900 behaviors. And as we talked about a good plant crowding out another, a way to encourage that

02:12:07.700 is by praising the good and ignoring the bad. There was a hilarious op-ed that was written,

02:12:12.720 I think it was in the New York times, this wife who her husband would never throw his dirty clothes

02:12:17.480 in the laundry hamper and it was driving her nuts. Occasionally he would do it, but it was like

02:12:22.460 pulling teeth all the time to get him to do this consistently. She tried nagging him. She tried

02:12:26.760 annoying, you know, whatever, just all kinds of different, put the laundry hamper in a different

02:12:29.620 place. Don't even have it in the closet, just have it out on the floor in the bedroom. And he still

02:12:33.380 wouldn't do it. Sometimes he'd throw the clothes next to the hamper. She's like, you're already

02:12:36.560 throwing it over there. Just put it in. Eventually what she settled on doing was that every time that

02:12:41.860 he happened to put it in the hamper, she would make a huge deal about it. She'd run over, give him a

02:12:46.280 kiss, give him a hug, say, thank you. Be like, Oh, you're making my life so much easier. Thank you so much.

02:12:50.620 Over the course of about a year, she effectively trained him to always put the clothes in the

02:12:56.060 hamper because every time that happened, something good happened. He got praised. It felt good.

02:13:01.160 Almost like training a dog in a sense, which is all kinds of organisms, dogs and humans love feeling

02:13:08.720 praised. We like feeling good. We like being rewarded. And so if you praise the good actions and ignore the

02:13:14.020 bad actions, it's again, almost like a form of gravity. People naturally gravitate toward the things that

02:13:20.120 they get rewarded for the things they get praised for. And you'd be surprised how often people don't

02:13:25.840 do something like this, or in fact, do the opposite. You can imagine the quiet kid in the household who

02:13:31.820 comes down for dinner with the rest of the family. And it's like, Oh, look who showed up. They decide

02:13:36.000 to share something about their day. And it's like, Oh, a fact about your life. And you can imagine a

02:13:40.920 parent or somebody saying something sarcastic like that. And all of a sudden you're punishing the very

02:13:45.420 behavior that you wanted to see. So praise the good, ignore the bad. I think it applies in a lot

02:13:50.940 of situations and can be more powerful than you realized. The tricky part is it requires a lot of

02:13:56.080 patience. You got to do it for six months or a year or three years. It's hard to stick with that in the

02:14:01.360 long run. Last example of this is a weightlifting one. I was at the gym on a Friday night one time,

02:14:07.180 and I was there with a friend and we were doing a quick workout. It's probably like 20, 25 minutes.

02:14:12.260 We got done and we're putting our shoes on. And this guy who's just kind of a jerk went over and

02:14:18.220 was talking to her. It was like quick workout for a Friday night. She just kind of moved on,

02:14:22.720 but that's like exactly the opposite of the type of feedback you want to be getting.

02:14:27.220 Especially if you're someone who's like new coming into the gym or feeling kind of uncomfortable

02:14:30.840 there. What people should be saying is, Oh, it's great that you got in here, even though it's the

02:14:34.880 weekend. And a little cutting comment like that is all that people need to not show up again the next

02:14:40.940 day. The more that you can be lavish with praise is maybe stating it even too strongly, but it

02:14:47.980 doesn't really cost you very much to be kind. And you may not even remember it, but it's the kind of

02:14:53.020 thing that might be enough to get that person to show up again the next time. So in the long run,

02:14:57.440 praising the good and ignoring the bad can count for a lot. So James, you're working on another book,

02:15:01.460 right? I am. Yeah. And working is the correct term. Currently kind of slogging and battling

02:15:06.760 against the manuscript. I seem to find whatever way requires the most suffering to write books.

02:15:13.160 Atomic Habits, the first draft was like 720 pages. And then I cut it down to 250 eventually,

02:15:18.940 which for the finished version, this manuscript is like 600 and something right now. So I'm in the

02:15:23.840 trimming phase. What's this book about? It's a book about strategy and choices and decision-making

02:15:31.060 and how we direct our attention. I'm still kind of finding it and discovering it in a lot of ways,

02:15:35.680 but one question that you could have after finishing Atomic Habits is, okay, that's great.

02:15:41.260 I know how to build better habits, but which habits should I be focusing on? What's the high leverage

02:15:45.900 action? How do I figure out where to direct my energy and attention? And so those are a lot of the

02:15:50.540 questions that I'm exploring now. Well, I can't wait to have you back to discuss that after I read it

02:15:55.100 twice, which I will do, I'm sure. Thanks very much, James. This has been great to sit down with

02:16:00.620 you. And this is almost like reading the book a third time. And I picked up a lot of things that

02:16:04.520 I hope readers or listeners have also, and I look forward to implementing it both personally and

02:16:09.060 professionally. That's great. Thanks, Peter. I appreciate the opportunity.

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The Peter Attia Drive - November 08, 2021

#183 - James Clear： Building & changing habits

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