The Peter Attia Drive - Building & Changing Habits ｜ James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)

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

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00:00:58.020 head over to peteratiyahmd.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to a special New Year's

00:01:05.960 episode of The Drive. For this week's episode, as we're nearing a new year, and a lot of you are

00:01:10.520 probably going to be thinking about your New Year's resolutions, we wanted to re-release one of our most

00:01:14.800 popular episodes, my discussion with James Clear from November of 2021. James is an entrepreneur,

00:01:20.440 photographer, and the author of the New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits, an easy and proven way

00:01:26.320 to build good habits and break bad ones. I wanted to interview James after reading his book for the

00:01:31.260 second time, and I realized that it was such an important part of what we try to do in our practice,

00:01:35.200 and of course, what most of us try to do in our own lives, which is change behaviors. And behaviors

00:01:39.760 can easily be distilled into habits. In this conversation, James and I really focus on the four

00:01:44.360 components of what go into forming behavioral habits. We break those apart, and we focus on how you can

00:01:49.820 learn new habits or unlearn bad habits. I think you'll enjoy this episode if you've ever wanted

00:01:54.680 to change a behavior or create a behavior, which basically I think is all of us. So without further

00:01:59.200 delay, please enjoy or re-enjoy my conversation with James Clear, and we hope you all have a wonderful

00:02:04.600 New Year. Hey, James. Thanks so much for making time to sit down today. It's been a while. I've wanted

00:02:14.780 to sit down and chat with you. Yeah, of course. Thank you so much for thinking of me. I'm excited to talk

00:02:18.840 for. I'm trying to think when I first read your book, because I read it twice, and like all good

00:02:23.720 books, you get more out of it, I think, the second time, in part because I think the deeper you get

00:02:29.420 down the rabbit hole of trying to create habits, whether it's in yourself or helping others form

00:02:35.060 habits, the more you realize how challenging it can be. But maybe for folks who haven't read it,

00:02:41.040 because I suspect there's going to be a bunch of people listening to this who have read it,

00:02:43.920 and I want to be able to go deeper for them and think there's going to be some people who haven't

00:02:47.080 read it. Give us a bit of the history as to why this even appealed to you.

00:02:51.080 Well, first, thank you for saying that. I feel like that's the ultimate measure of whether a

00:02:54.240 book is good or not. Is it worth rereading? That's a high bar. There are many books I've

00:02:58.740 reread, but yeah, I really appreciate you taking the time to do it twice. So what excited me about

00:03:04.000 habits? I think there are a few things. The first is you're building habits all the time,

00:03:08.880 whether you're thinking about them or not. So depending on which study you look at, somewhere

00:03:14.000 between 40 and 50% of our behaviors seem to be automatic and habitual. But most of the time,

00:03:21.540 those studies are looking at things that are like more or less automatic, brushing your teeth,

00:03:26.180 tying your shoes, unplugging the toaster after each use. But I think the true influence of your habits

00:03:31.700 is even greater than that, because a lot of the time, the behaviors that you're taking are shaped

00:03:37.800 or influenced by the habits that preceded them. So you can imagine standing in line at the grocery

00:03:43.880 store or having three or four minutes free in your kitchen, and you habitually pull your phone

00:03:50.120 out of your pocket. The next five or 10 minutes might be spent thinking carefully about what email

00:03:55.400 you're responding to or the video game you're playing or scrolling social media. But that conscious,

00:04:02.200 maybe non-habitual behavior was shaped or set by the habit of pulling your phone out. So the reach of

00:04:09.720 our habits is very wide, and it's influencing our behavior all the time. So that's one reason why

00:04:14.660 it's important. And I think that if you're going to be building habits anyway, you might as well

00:04:20.940 understand what they are and how they work and how to shape them so that you can be the architect of

00:04:27.480 your habits and not the victim of them. A lot of people feel like their habits are happening to them,

00:04:32.460 like they don't get a whole lot of influence on it. And partially, I think it's just because,

00:04:36.240 you know, it's this process your brain is going through all the time to try to automate and make

00:04:40.740 behaviors more efficient. But if you don't really know what's happening or where to adjust it,

00:04:44.880 then it kind of feels like it's happening to you rather than happening for you. And then I would say

00:04:49.840 the second thing that kind of really got me diving in deeper and thinking about it more carefully is

00:04:54.400 just the realization that most of us in life want some kind of results. We want to get better at a

00:05:01.420 skill or we want to lose weight or to make more money or reduce stress and gain peace of mind.

00:05:07.960 And whatever the results are that you're looking for, most of the time, your results are a lagging

00:05:14.000 measure of the habits that preceded them. So your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial

00:05:19.880 habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your nutrition and training habits. Your knowledge is a

00:05:27.120 lagging measure of your reading and learning habits. Even like the clutter on your desk at work or in

00:05:33.020 your garage is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits. And so habits are not the only thing that

00:05:39.040 influence outcomes in life. You have luck and randomness, you've got misfortune, but by definition,

00:05:45.760 randomness is not under your control. And I think the only reasonable approach is to focus on what's in

00:05:51.440 your control. And over long time horizons, your results tend to bend in the direction of your

00:05:58.880 habits. So I think because your brain is building habits all the time anyway, and because your results

00:06:04.800 are heavily influenced by the habits that you repeat, those are two primary reasons that I feel

00:06:11.420 like got me interested in the topic, but also just good reasons for anybody to be fascinated with habits.

00:06:16.640 I'm guessing there's a lot of probably evolutionary rationale for why we're creatures of habit.

00:06:23.760 Presumably the less energy we had to devote to things that would help us survive and procreate,

00:06:30.940 the better. And obviously that's why we have an autonomic nervous system that allows us to

00:06:36.120 function. Things like breathing and having your heart go from beating fast or beating slow to be

00:06:42.220 completely out of your voluntary control. I'm curious as to whether or not we have a sense of

00:06:48.700 ancestrally, what types of habits were people ever trying to deliberately change? Maybe it's not an

00:06:56.080 answerable question, but I don't know if you ever contemplated that. When did this idea of being

00:07:01.620 proactive in either breaking a habit or creating a new habit, do you get the sense that that is a recent

00:07:08.220 luxury of our species? So I don't know the answer to the question, but I do have some thoughts on it and I feel

00:07:13.960 like it probably does skew somewhat recent for one particular reason, which is generally speaking, our

00:07:21.960 ancestors lived in what was primarily an immediate return environment. The majority of the decisions that

00:07:28.880 you would make that meaningfully impacted your survival were ones that were relatively immediate in nature. So

00:07:35.100 taking shelter from a storm or avoiding a lion on the savannah or foraging for the next meal in a berry

00:07:40.840 bush. These are things that like had a pretty quick payoff in your life. If you fast forward to modern

00:07:46.680 society though, and we could define that however you want, but probably say the last 500 years or something

00:07:51.600 like that, certainly the last hundred years, modern society seems to have created quite a few structures

00:07:58.100 that favor not an immediate return environment, but a delayed return environment. So you go to work

00:08:04.700 today so that you can get a paycheck in two weeks, or you study at school today so that you can

00:08:11.000 graduate in four years, save for retirement today so that you can not have to work a couple decades

00:08:17.540 from now. And there are a lot of structures that are like that in modern society that, that tend to

00:08:22.640 reward delayed gratification. So I think in a sense, we're kind of walking through this modern society

00:08:28.940 that rewards ourselves for patients. And we still have this like paleolithic hardware where we

00:08:35.120 prioritize instant gratification and immediate returns in a lot of ways, in some kind of evolutionary

00:08:39.740 sense. And you can see how there's a little bit of a mismatch there. I wonder if it's that modern

00:08:46.140 mismatch that has led to the desire to change our behavior and to adjust habits. And perhaps it wasn't

00:08:53.960 something that we thought about as carefully or cared about as much a thousand years ago or 5,000

00:08:58.360 years ago or longer. It is interesting though, to say that some aspects of modern society are

00:09:04.200 mismatched with that ancestral wiring, but some of them are not. Why do we care about delaying

00:09:11.200 gratification to get a PhD or delaying gratification to save more money? Primarily because it affords some

00:09:17.780 form of status, which is very hierarchical and very, we think evolutionarily wired in. So there's

00:09:24.600 still connections there. It's just that not all of it is aligned.

00:09:28.320 Yeah. It seems that the vehicles that we would have used to attain status earlier were much

00:09:33.780 quote unquote simpler. And today we're looking at other ways to do it. Hearing you talk about habits

00:09:39.240 that way makes me compare two activities I like very much and contrast the challenges of learning each of

00:09:46.880 them. So one is riding a bike and the other is learning to swim. So if you took a 20 year old

00:09:51.880 who had never done both, and admittedly, it's easy to find a 20 year old that's never swum. It's

00:09:56.020 probably hard to find a 20 year old that's never ridden a bike, but I would posit that it's really

00:09:59.840 easy to teach a 20 year old to ride a bike if they haven't done it. And let's assume for a moment,

00:10:05.080 this isn't someone who had never been able to do it before, but found somebody who'd never ridden a

00:10:09.380 bike at 20. And the reason I would argue that is in a bike, the object is balance. It's really about

00:10:16.040 balance and you get your feedback immediately. So, you know, the second you're out of balance on a

00:10:22.060 bike, because you're in the environment of the air and the air has a density such that it's not

00:10:28.340 forgiving. You basically are out of balance. You're going to fall. Conversely, although most people don't

00:10:32.880 think of it this way, swimming is also about balance in the water. You're trying to balance yourself this

00:10:37.640 way versus this way. Most people would naturally sink feet first, and you're trying to balance yourself

00:10:43.180 this way so that you can breathe. And those things are not easy to do because the feedback

00:10:48.260 loop is very long and it's very hard to make the connection that you're out of balance. It also

00:10:52.960 doesn't hurt as much when you fail. So when you fall off your bike, it's very uncomfortable, but when

00:10:57.680 you're out of balance and swimming, you just have to work harder, but you don't realize why you're

00:11:01.820 working harder. Anyway, that's why I think it's very hard to learn how to swim and it's not very hard to

00:11:06.780 learn how to ride a bike. And therefore it requires much more deliberate practice to learn to swim

00:11:12.740 than it does to ride a bike, at least at some basic level. I'll kind of give a roundabout answer

00:11:17.680 here, but I'll come back to your question. So what is it that determines whether a habit is good or

00:11:22.400 bad? You know, we use these phrases a lot of the time in conversation. We say, oh, it's a bad habit.

00:11:27.180 It's a good habit. And sometimes people will ask me like, well, why do I repeat this habit if it's bad

00:11:31.500 for me? You know, if it's so terrible, then how come I keep coming back to it? And I think we can divide

00:11:37.540 in a sense, if you want to get really pedantic about it or really academic about it, some researchers

00:11:41.880 don't even like to use the word good or bad because they're habits and they all serve you

00:11:45.240 in some way. So we could just say basically adaptive or maladaptive, right? Yeah. I think

00:11:50.800 we could make a meaningful division in the sense of how we use it in most conversation and say

00:11:56.240 that pretty much all behaviors produce multiple outcomes across time. Broadly speaking, we could

00:12:03.040 lump it into an immediate bucket, an immediate outcome and an ultimate outcome. And what you find

00:12:09.420 is that for most bad habits, the immediate outcome is actually pretty favorable. The classic example is

00:12:15.480 smoking a cigarette. But if you smoke a cigarette outside the office at 10 a.m. with a friend,

00:12:19.500 well, then immediately you get some socialization. Maybe it curbs your nicotine craving or just lets

00:12:25.080 you like de-stress for a couple minutes or get a break from work. There are all kinds of things that

00:12:28.920 you might be benefiting from. It's only two or five or 10 years later that the ultimate outcome

00:12:34.640 is negative. With the good habits, especially the first time you perform them, it's often the

00:12:40.180 reverse. The first week of training in the gym, your body looks the same in the mirror. You're sore.

00:12:46.100 You don't really have much to show for the effort that you're putting in. You feel kind of stupid 1.00

00:12:50.000 in there. You're wondering if people judge you or if you're doing it the wrong way. There are a lot of 1.00

00:12:53.940 upfront costs and it's only two or five or 10 years later that you get the outcome that you're

00:12:59.300 looking for. In a sense, the cost of your good habits is in the present. The cost of your bad

00:13:05.420 habits is in the future. And that misalignment between when you feel rewarded and when you feel

00:13:11.680 punished helps to explain why we tend to fall pretty easily into a lot of things that we would

00:13:17.100 categorize as bad, like eating donuts or smoking a cigarette or whatever, and fall less easily into

00:13:23.700 things that we would categorize as good or feels like I have to force myself to write or whatever.

00:13:27.740 Now, that's very similar to what you just mentioned about the immediacy of the feedback. Bad habits

00:13:33.560 are giving you pretty immediate feedback, kind of like riding a bike. Good habits are giving you

00:13:37.340 pretty delayed feedback, maybe a little bit analogous to swimming. I think that example of the medium that

00:13:43.080 you're in air versus water is fascinating to think about water as being a feedback dampener. But there is

00:13:49.920 another element to it, which you also mentioned, which is the strength of the feedback. Falling on the

00:13:55.060 ground off a bike and skinning your knee is pretty painful. You learn quite quickly. Technically,

00:13:59.560 making a bad stroke in the water, you don't really pay too much of a cost. If you're being sloppy with

00:14:04.120 your form, it's unlikely that you rectify that quickly. And this is a phenomenon that I think is

00:14:10.600 so critical or so important to behavior change. I called it the cardinal rule of behavior change in

00:14:15.420 atomic habits, which is behaviors that get immediately rewarded, get repeated behaviors that get

00:14:21.520 immediately punished, get avoided. And it's really about the speed and the intensity of that feedback.

00:14:26.740 And generally speaking, the quicker you can get feedback, too intense is maybe a bit much, but

00:14:31.980 you know, at some point it needs to be high enough to move the needle. Can't be so low that doesn't

00:14:35.920 register. So you need both meaningful feedback and quick feedback if you want behavior to change.

00:14:42.160 Actually, I want to come back to that topic because I think therein lies one of the themes of your book,

00:14:48.020 which is that willpower is not a great long-term strategy. But before I get to that, I want to

00:14:53.440 kind of talk a little bit about you personally, at least before you came to these realizations.

00:14:58.300 I know you're an athlete. In your book, you write about this horrible accident you had when you were

00:15:02.940 playing baseball. I believe that was high school or was it in college? Yep. Sophomore year of high

00:15:07.480 school. During that period of your life, were you someone that others and your peers would have looked

00:15:12.420 at you and said, Oh God, that James, that guy is so disciplined. I mean, he just has what it takes

00:15:18.420 to always get the job done. And he never indulges in the wrong things and always does the right

00:15:23.920 things. Like, were you one of those guys that was just a beacon of quote unquote discipline or were

00:15:27.720 you a normal guy or were you someone who had a hard time doing what was right? Well, I wasn't someone

00:15:32.340 who had a hard time, but it depends on the context. Keep it simple, like homework, sports,

00:15:37.900 those things. So with school, definitely. I always liked school. I was like the nerdy kid

00:15:44.400 on the sports teams I was on, but in the science lab or something, I was like the jock, which is

00:15:50.600 kind of funny how you change based on the room that you're in. And so I always felt like I kind

00:15:54.740 of played that middle ground between those two. I think it helped me learn how to get along with

00:15:58.940 both groups and, you know, was helpful socially and all that. But earlier in my life, I think I

00:16:04.300 thrived more in school than I did in sports. I barely got to play in high school. That's one

00:16:09.300 of the punchlines of that early story in the book is I've ended up playing a total of 11 innings in

00:16:14.140 high school. Now I kind of blossomed once I got to college and ended up being an academic all

00:16:18.980 American by the time I graduated, but that came much later. So it really sort of depended on the

00:16:25.060 context, but generally speaking, I would say, yeah, people probably thought that I was disciplined,

00:16:29.720 but I do think it depended on where we were. If it was just looking at school, then I think

00:16:35.020 people would say that if you're looking somewhere else, then maybe not. Was there an area that you

00:16:38.820 struggled with from a behavior standpoint? To be honest, there were areas that I avoided

00:16:45.020 because I thought I would struggle. So I think it was more about me being fearful and avoiding

00:16:51.220 anything I thought I would be bad at than it was about watching him and being like, oh, look at him

00:16:56.360 floundering around. I think I had to overcome that wiring over the course of a decade or two.

00:17:01.360 It took me a long time to start to take more risks and take on things that I didn't think I would be

00:17:06.380 good at rather than just trying to like stack the deck and just do what I thought I would do well.

00:17:11.620 I don't know how much you've paid attention to the discussion debate around free will. I have always

00:17:18.080 assumed we have free will. This is one of those things that is kind of an anthem to me to imagine a

00:17:24.560 world under which I'm not completely under control of my own will and my behavior. But my good friend

00:17:31.180 Sam Harris, who I don't know if you were familiar with Sam's work. Yeah, I did an episode on his

00:17:35.360 podcast as well. You're familiar with the fact that he's written extensively and spoken extensively

00:17:39.400 about the idea that we actually don't have free will, that this is an illusion. There are examples that

00:17:44.240 I can conjure up to make that case. For example, he uses a very clever thought experiment, which is

00:17:49.700 if I tell you to think of a movie, the first movie that pops into your head, you have no control over

00:17:57.440 what that's going to be. Conversely, there's a part of me that thinks, okay, but there were lots of

00:18:02.540 things I have free will over. My ability to go and do something, take an action, go and exercise or

00:18:07.500 something like that. But the deeper I get into this thinking, the more I start to realize, well, wait a

00:18:12.380 minute. That may still be innate. This ability that I have, using myself as an example, to really

00:18:19.380 have an easy time exercising, it requires virtually no effort to exercise. In fact, it usually requires

00:18:26.420 a lot of effort to sometimes not exercise, but requiring a lot of effort to mind what I eat. And I

00:18:33.060 know people for whom that's not the case, right? I know people for whom they just have an easy time

00:18:36.860 eating what's healthy, but maybe they don't like to exercise that much. Before I go any deeper into my

00:18:41.760 question, let me just pause and ask you for your reaction to that overall line of inquiry. And how

00:18:47.320 do you think about free will as it pertains to what we're going to talk about today?

00:18:52.260 Well, first, I think I'm probably similar to you in the sense like exercise has always been

00:18:56.040 on the easier side for me. Nutrition has always been on the harder side, which is kind of interesting

00:18:59.780 there. I don't know exactly what that reveals, but it's just interesting to think about where you have

00:19:03.260 certain inclinations and maybe not others. With respect to free will, I understand the argument.

00:19:09.680 Once you start to walk through, it's like, okay, yeah, there's this very long chain of atoms that

00:19:13.960 are essentially colliding and leading us inevitably to the next action or the next thought or whatever.

00:19:18.600 And if we could map them all out, then perhaps we could just predict everything that's about to

00:19:23.740 happen. I get that as a thought experiment. I tend to, when I'm living my daily life, fall in the same

00:19:30.500 space that it sounds like you fall in, which is, well, I'm going to continue to act as if I have free

00:19:35.440 will. And ultimately, the more that I think about it, I usually come down on that side where it's

00:19:39.700 like, listen, the truth is nobody knows the answer one way or another. We have good arguments perhaps

00:19:44.500 for each, but nobody knows for sure. If it is all predetermined, then it kind of doesn't really

00:19:50.460 matter. I'm going to do this anyway. And if it isn't predetermined, I might as well choose the thing

00:19:56.380 that I think best serves me. So whether I'm making that choice that best serves me or whether it was

00:20:02.860 predetermined that I'm going to make the good choice, it kind of doesn't really matter to me.

00:20:07.040 Like I might as well choose to act that way. So I don't know. I would be very curious to hear what

00:20:11.700 Sam's thought on that is, but I, from a practical standpoint, I don't see a reason to not choose

00:20:18.220 the best option that you can in the event that you do have free will. You'll be glad that you chose it

00:20:23.540 in the event that you don't have free will. You didn't get a say anyway. So who cares?

00:20:27.440 I guess I would add to that is it might be that free will or the absence of free will is what

00:20:33.540 determines a person's, maybe call it genetic propensity to change habits or form habits.

00:20:40.000 There may be some people for whom that is easier than others, but that's probably a spectrum. And it

00:20:45.920 doesn't imply that a person who struggles with a given behavior can't learn to master it. Again,

00:20:52.460 using an example, I'll never be a Michael Phelps ever. There was no scenario under which I was

00:20:58.340 going to be as good a swimmer as Michael Phelps. So even if he hadn't started swimming until he was

00:21:03.200 15 and my parents threw me in the water at two, I was never going to be that good, but it doesn't

00:21:10.200 mean I couldn't learn to swim. And similarly, had he never been thrown in the pool, we would never

00:21:15.680 have heard his name. So I guess that's how I kind of rationalize it, which is there are going to be

00:21:21.020 people for whom it is easier to go through the exercises that we're going to talk about. And there

00:21:26.740 are people for whom that's just going to be more difficult and you can't change that part of it. That's

00:21:31.540 the part I guess that is set. Yeah, a couple thoughts to add on to that. I thought of this when you first

00:21:37.220 brought this up a few minutes ago. I don't know if you're familiar with David Epstein, his work on

00:21:40.640 sports gene and range and so on. David's great and a good friend of mine, a really nice guy, and just very

00:21:46.620 thoughtful with the way he puts arguments together, which I always appreciate. And I was having a

00:21:51.140 conversation with him about some of this stuff. And he said, one of the things that surprised him

00:21:55.840 when he was researching the sports gene is that characteristics that he thought would be mostly

00:22:02.020 genetic strength and speed and things like that turned out to be heavily influenced by training and

00:22:07.140 choice and a lot of other stuff and qualities that he thought would be a choice like grit and

00:22:13.120 perseverance and desire to train turned out to have a much higher genetic component than he

00:22:18.900 realized. I always love the example. There's, I think this is in sports gene. He talks about

00:22:23.400 Steffi Graf just happened to be in a tennis study when she was young. She was like 14 or something.

00:22:28.600 And she was part of this cohort of young Germans that were being studied. And she not only tested the

00:22:34.700 highest for physical abilities, like strength and speed and quickness and so on, but also tested the

00:22:39.760 highest for competitiveness and desire to train and all these other things. I just love when

00:22:44.580 combinations like that come together. Like think about how pointless this is to compete against

00:22:48.280 her. Not only is she better than you, she also wants it more. So I do think that there's a heavy

00:22:53.780 genetic component to some of the mental characteristics that would make you more likely to train some of

00:23:00.280 these aspects or more interested in some things than others. To your point about Phelps, whether he had

00:23:05.400 ever been dropped in the pool or not on the surface, it seems like something that would make you less

00:23:10.440 motivated. You would say, Oh, well, why even try? I'm never going to be Michael Phelps. Or if genes

00:23:15.120 play such a large role, what's the point? But I actually think that's the wrong lesson to take

00:23:20.200 away. The primary lesson I think is that genes don't tell you not to work hard. They tell you where

00:23:26.500 to work hard, or they don't tell you not to have a strategy. They just inform your strategy. This is

00:23:32.380 another line that David told me in a conversation once where he said, a lot of people talk about

00:23:36.320 grit and perseverance and discipline, but what if that is just your natural propensity based on the

00:23:43.100 thing that you're working on? What if I just happened to look kind of gritty in my terms of

00:23:48.020 weight training or working at writing a book compared to the average person, but I just look

00:23:53.740 that way because I happen to like those things. And he said, yeah, there's this whole line of thinking

00:23:58.520 that like grit is fit. And so actually the way to increase your perseverance and discipline

00:24:03.420 is to find areas or categories or skills where you're highly interested in them. It's very hard

00:24:09.340 to beat the person who's having fun because they're going to want to keep working longer than the person

00:24:14.240 who's suffering. So grit is fit. I think is one way in which you can maybe try to stack the deck or

00:24:20.340 stack the odds in your favor and get your genes aligned with the things that you're working on.

00:24:24.460 And then there are going to be things like Michael Phelps in a pool where you're like, listen,

00:24:30.460 this body was just designed to do this thing. It's very hard to find somebody who's more optimally

00:24:36.100 designed to move through the water than him. Not all of us are going to have the good fortune of

00:24:41.800 discovering whatever that thing is for us in our lives at age four or six or whatever. I don't think

00:24:48.720 that that means you should stop searching. This is one of the benefits of trial and error.

00:24:52.240 The person who is curious and willing to explore a lot of things is more likely to come across an

00:24:58.020 area where they are fascinated or they are interested. And it also is a really good fit

00:25:02.700 for their natural abilities or propensities. That's kind of the primary lesson that I take

00:25:07.400 away from the genetic side of things is similar to what you said. Anybody can improve. Doesn't mean

00:25:12.220 anybody can be Michael Phelps, but you can always improve your ability. And let's try to find that

00:25:17.480 thing that I'm fascinated with, that I'm interested in. So where it doesn't feel like I'm suffering

00:25:22.220 in the same way that other people are when they're trying this thing. You often be surprised how far

00:25:26.900 you can go, how willing you are to build habits and improve skills. If you find some of those

00:25:31.620 things that you're truly fascinated by. Two comments I'd add to that one completely trite,

00:25:35.920 but amusing, which is not only does Phelps have the perfect chassis and engine for what he does,

00:25:42.420 but just as you described Steffi Graf, I've seen Phelps race at meets that meant nothing.

00:25:48.460 So total throwaway meets. He's not shaved. He's not tapered. He couldn't care less to be there.

00:25:55.320 He's swimming like a 200 IM. It doesn't look like he's going to win at all. And yet somehow in the

00:26:00.820 last 15 meters, he out touches everybody. I've seen this on enough occasions that I just think like,

00:26:06.660 this is a guy who hates losing. So even though he's not necessarily in shape at this moment,

00:26:11.140 even though this meet means nothing for him, he's training through it. And half the people he's

00:26:15.820 competing against, this is their pinnacle. He hates losing so much. So it is, it's really the

00:26:21.140 perfect combination. I have that same takeaway watching the last dance. There was that one

00:26:25.480 summer where he was recording space jam and they set up like a tent for him outside the movie studio

00:26:30.260 and all the NBA players came in like each night to play pickup games, just got done filming like 12

00:26:35.340 hours a day, but he just could not handle losing a pickup game. It would just bother him so much

00:26:40.020 to not get it right to not win. I got to think that that is maybe not exclusively, but at least

00:26:46.400 largely just, he can't turn it off. He doesn't know any other way to be personality or genes or

00:26:51.540 whatever you want to call it. It's just, that's just how he's wired. And I actually love it. When

00:26:55.660 I see that characteristic in any domain, Maggie Rogers, who's a musician, she had this post she put 1.00

00:27:01.940 on Instagram. It was all of her notes on a particular song that they were working on. And like, you know,

00:27:06.740 hey, I think we need to bring the symbol in second earlier here and a bunch of other stuff. And then

00:27:11.560 she shared a little clip of her listening to it with her producer and so on. And you could just tell

00:27:16.720 that she cared so much about the details. It would bother her if the song was not as good as it could

00:27:23.260 possibly be. And maybe that's the musician's version of hates to lose. I love it. When I see

00:27:29.060 that characteristic, it kind of lights me up. It makes me want to be that way about whatever thing

00:27:33.340 I'm working on. If you can find that area where it would bother you for it to not be right,

00:27:38.880 I got to think you're going to get much better results there than most people, because most

00:27:42.680 people get bored or move on or get tired or frustrated. And the person who just will not

00:27:47.360 stop unless it's right is going to end up with better results. It sounds simple to say the way to

00:27:53.640 have great results is to not lower your standards, but in a lot of ways, it turns out to be more true

00:28:00.180 than you would expect. I love watching this in the best of the best. Formula One is one of my

00:28:05.600 favorite sports. And historically, my hero is this guy named Mayartan Senna. And to hear him speak-

00:28:12.000 I watched Senna, that documentary. I'd never heard of him. I know very little about Formula One. It was

00:28:15.920 awesome. After watching that, I was like completely hooked. It was a fascinating sport.

00:28:20.600 And you gather from that documentary, I mean, he was a perfectionist, even amongst his peers. He took

00:28:25.960 it to a level that exceeded that. It actually cost him his life. I don't think the documentary fully

00:28:30.700 explains how much that need to win killed him because the day he died, he was trying to do

00:28:35.980 something in a car that shouldn't have been done at a time when it shouldn't have been done.

00:28:40.520 But it's amazing when in a sport like that, where the stakes are so high for trying to do something

00:28:46.240 at the expense of maybe a mechanical limit or a limit of the car, but yet all drivers will tell you

00:28:52.320 they're going to go for it. If there's a gap, they're going to go for the gap. And there was

00:28:56.780 a debate in the nineties in Formula One. So Senna's death changed the sport forever because that's

00:29:01.660 really what changed the imposed safety in the sport. But the debate prior to that was, look,

00:29:07.880 we'll just tell the drivers to drive slower. They don't have to drive this fast. They can choose

00:29:13.140 to drive 10% slower, which of course was nonsense. The head of the FIA at the time, who has just

00:29:18.540 recently passed away, made a point, which was that that's the dumbest thing you could ever say.

00:29:22.760 They will all choose to have a less safe car if it goes faster, because you're talking about the 20

00:29:31.000 most competitive drivers on the planet. Now, there was another point I was going to make that was,

00:29:37.320 for most of us, we will never know what it's like to be the top thousand in the world of anything.

00:29:43.240 If I think about all the things that I love, driving a race car, shooting my bow and arrow,

00:29:46.820 exercising, blah, blah, blah. I mean, I'm multiple orders of magnitude beneath even the most lowly

00:29:56.680 ranked professional of those things. And this gets into something else, which is, for me at least,

00:30:02.880 the joy is not in the absolute comparison of myself to others, but the relative comparison

00:30:09.580 of where I was before. Do you think that's a universal thing? Is it universal that people

00:30:15.520 are mostly engaged by how much they are making progress relative to their own performance,

00:30:22.020 or do you think that there are some people who are only capable of finding pleasure when being

00:30:27.500 compared to others in an absolute basis? The second half of that question, I'm not sure of.

00:30:32.860 Generally, I think both of those things are universal. I think one, it's universal that one of the most

00:30:38.380 motivating feelings to the human mind is the feeling of progress. And I think it's fairly universal that

00:30:43.980 progress feels good. In a sense, at the most base level, we are goal-directed organisms in the sense

00:30:49.920 that we have a goal to get food or water or to procreate or to be safe. And we want to move toward

00:30:56.520 those things and resolve the tension, the gap between that goal and our current state as much as possible.

00:31:03.980 Now, with our complex brains in modern society, we come up with many other goals that are outside of

00:31:09.340 just our basic needs like food and water. We have goals like getting a promotion at work or losing 10

00:31:14.700 pounds or whatever it is. But that same tension between where you are currently and where you want

00:31:19.880 to be, we want to have that resolved. The more progress that you feel like you're making toward

00:31:25.120 one of those things, I think that generally feels good. I feel like that's pretty universal.

00:31:29.480 I also do think it seems to be fairly universal that we have some bias toward status, some bias

00:31:36.620 toward prestige and rank and hierarchy. And it feels good for pretty much anybody to win the game or to

00:31:43.080 have the best score on the scoreboard or to climb the leaderboard. And the more that you see yourself

00:31:48.520 occupying a higher rung relative to those around you, whether it's with wealth or money or fame,

00:31:53.980 the better that feels too. And it probably is a spectrum or maybe each of those is a spectrum.

00:32:00.620 And some people have the dial turned up real high on the status part and maybe lower on the internal

00:32:06.220 measures and other people have it the reverse. But I generally think we all have them to some degree.

00:32:12.300 And you probably will find yourself feeling good if you happen to succeed on either of those metrics.

00:32:18.800 And how much of it do you think is, for lack of a better term,

00:32:21.640 journey versus destination focus? Because if you talk about your example of weight loss,

00:32:27.000 that is generally a very destination-based metric. I want to lose 10 pounds. I'm not going to be happy

00:32:32.620 until I lose 10 pounds. The process of how I go about doing it, changing the way I'm eating,

00:32:37.840 changing my exercise, accepting the fact that you're not going to lose 10 pounds linearly,

00:32:42.640 it's going to look like this. Those are details that I'm willing to tolerate, but I want to lose those

00:32:47.620 10 pounds or I want to fit into this piece of clothing that I used to fit into.

00:32:51.040 Contrast that with, I want to learn to speak Italian. I'm enjoying this process of learning

00:32:57.720 a few new words every day and learning how the structure of this grammar works relative to my

00:33:02.980 native tongue. And I'm never going to be perfectly fluent in Italian, but I know that in some point

00:33:09.100 I'm going to be completely functional. This journey of learning this new language or learning how to

00:33:13.960 play this instrument, that's what's giving me the pleasure. And I don't know if that distinction

00:33:17.580 makes sense. First, I should say, this is coming from someone who's been very goal oriented for

00:33:22.080 most of their life. I would set goals for the grades I wanted to get in school, for the weight

00:33:27.380 I wanted to lift in the gym, for the numbers I wanted my business to hit. And at some point,

00:33:33.520 I actually found this sheet that I made my sophomore year of college for the goals that I wanted to hit by

00:33:38.780 the time I graduated. It was funny looking back on it like 10 or 11 years later, because about half of

00:33:44.640 them I hit, the other half I didn't. And I was like, obviously setting the goal was not the thing

00:33:49.540 that made the difference. If it did, I would have hit them all. So something else is going on here. 0.91

00:33:54.480 It was like a little remedial training session for myself or something, realizing that goals are not

00:33:59.860 the primary thing that drives results. And in fact, if you look at the performance in most domains,

00:34:08.180 the winners and the losers have the same goal. Presumably every Formula One driver has the goal of

00:34:13.440 winning the race, but when they take off from the starting line, if you have a job opening and 100

00:34:18.100 candidates apply for the job, presumably every candidate has the goal of getting the job.

00:34:22.580 The goal is not the thing that makes the difference in the performance. And if the winners and the

00:34:27.200 losers have the same goal, it cannot be the distinguishing factor. Maybe it's necessary.

00:34:32.460 Perhaps there's an argument it's necessary for success, but it's not sufficient for it.

00:34:36.780 So that got me thinking more like, well, what is it then that drives it? And I, in the book,

00:34:41.460 the way that I described is the difference between systems and goals. Your goal is your

00:34:45.140 desired outcome, your target, the thing you're shooting for. Your system is the collection

00:34:50.340 of daily habits that you follow. All these little gears in this overall machine. And if there's

00:34:55.720 ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, if there's ever a gap between

00:35:00.980 your goal and your system, your daily habits will always win. Almost by definition, your current

00:35:07.180 habits are perfectly designed for your current results. So whatever system you've been running

00:35:12.960 for the last six months or year or whatever, you talked about shooting a bow and arrow, presumably

00:35:17.520 whatever system of movements you have going on there, pre-shot routine, how you draw it back,

00:35:22.740 everything, it kind of is inevitably carrying you toward the result of where the arrow ends up.

00:35:28.440 The irony of all of this is we also badly want better results in life. You know, we also badly

00:35:33.680 want to make more money or to reduce stress or lose weight or whatever, but the results are not

00:35:40.560 actually the thing that needs to change. It's kind of like fix the inputs and the outputs will fix

00:35:45.020 themselves. There are some areas like shooting a bow where that is, the connection is quite obvious,

00:35:49.840 but there are other areas where for whatever reason we, we don't see it as clearly, but I think

00:35:55.140 the pattern is still there, which is let's adjust the habits. Let's get this machine running in a more

00:36:02.060 fluid fashion and you'll find that the results kind of come naturally. I think just appreciating that

00:36:07.960 helped rewire mindset a little bit. I was so focused on outcomes and goals for a long time. And now

00:36:13.300 realizing that actually the way this is driven is with the system that helped me shift from what I

00:36:19.220 would say now is like goals are for people who care about winning one time. You set a goal to run a

00:36:25.160 half marathon and you train for three months and you do it and you complete the race, but then maybe you

00:36:30.480 stop training after that. But systems are for people who care about winning again and again.

00:36:35.680 And if you care about sustaining that success, then you're like, I'm a runner. I care about the

00:36:40.020 system that I'm building for how I train, how many miles I'm getting in and all kinds of other stuff.

00:36:44.520 And whether I have a half marathon three months in the distance or not, it doesn't really matter

00:36:49.860 because I'm going to be running my system either way. Making that mental shift, I think can be

00:36:55.160 useful for sustaining results. So let's talk about habits now, because I think that's the thing

00:37:01.380 that, as you said, basically shapes the nature of what we're going to do. There's a saying that

00:37:08.100 many people have said, and I won't even try to paraphrase it because at the moment it's escaping

00:37:11.400 me, but the gist of it is like, you don't rise to the level of your training, you fall to the level

00:37:14.940 or you fall to the level of your training. And the original quote, I think it's from Archelokas,

00:37:19.580 I believe a Greek philosopher and said, you don't rise to the level of your expectations.

00:37:25.000 You fall to the level of your training. And in atomic habits, I tweaked that or adjusted that

00:37:30.960 to say, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.

00:37:35.320 And so it's actually your habits that kind of create that baseline.

00:37:38.800 Why is it called atomic habits? I remember when I first saw the title, my assumption was atomic

00:37:44.160 must be huge explosion, like big habits, which of course is exactly not what it means.

00:37:49.460 So it's interesting, which meanings people pull out when they see it. So I chose the

00:37:54.500 phrase atomic habits for three reasons. The first meaning of the word atomic is tiny or small,

00:38:00.100 like an atom. And I do think habits should be small and fairly easy to do, especially in the

00:38:05.540 beginning. The second meaning of the word atomic is the fundamental unit in a larger system.

00:38:11.760 And that's the one that people often overlook. Atoms build into molecules, molecules build into

00:38:15.740 compounds and so on. And your habits are kind of like that. Each little

00:38:19.240 habit is like a atom in the overall routine of your day. You put them all together and you end up

00:38:24.260 with your lifestyle or your daily routine. And then the third and final meaning is the one that

00:38:28.600 you mentioned, the source of immense energy or power. And I think if you put all three meanings

00:38:34.260 together, you sort of understand the narrative arc of the book, which is make changes that are small

00:38:40.160 and easy to do layer them on top of each other, like units in a larger system or atoms in a molecule

00:38:46.240 collectively, you can get some really powerful or remarkable results. And so I feel like the phrase

00:38:51.520 atomic habits, not only encapsulates that kind of small change in the system that you're looking to

00:38:57.100 build, but also the powerful results that can emanate from that.

00:39:00.100 So you talk about three different types of change, outcome change, the process change.

00:39:04.740 We've touched on a little bit of those, but the one we haven't really touched on is this identity

00:39:09.020 change. That was something that when I read your book really resonated because it provided, I think,

00:39:17.180 a very decent explanation, at least for why exercise comes naturally to me, which is it's so hardwired

00:39:24.920 into my identity and why maybe certain other habits I've tried to create over time don't come easily

00:39:33.640 to me because I haven't fully identified with them yet. So expand on that, but also how you came to

00:39:39.880 realize that. Two things before I unpack the idea a little more fully. First is of all the ideas in

00:39:45.600 the book, this is probably the least scientific. There are actually some studies, which I cite in that

00:39:51.440 chapter and it's not like there's no science behind it, but the majority of the book, I try to be very

00:39:55.900 robust in the way that I was thinking about how do we build habits and what actually gets in the stick.

00:40:00.920 And there also are just a bazillion social psychology and cognitive psychology studies that illustrate a

00:40:06.300 lot of the examples that I talk about. But this is more of a mindset, I would say, or a philosophy on how

00:40:12.940 behavior change works. Second thing is it's maybe the only unique idea that I have. Pretty much everything

00:40:19.480 else that I share is stuff that's been widely covered by other people or, you know, things that

00:40:23.640 we've known for hundreds, if not thousands of years. But I felt like this was something that

00:40:27.740 maybe I could contribute to the conversation. Part of the reason I started thinking about it

00:40:32.120 is I started asking, why do habits really matter? We seem to care about them a lot as a society.

00:40:38.500 It's something a lot of books get written about, something we talk about a lot.

00:40:42.260 There's clearly some kind of deeper importance to them. So what is it? The surface level answer is that

00:40:48.580 we care about habits because they get us these external things that make us more productive

00:40:53.160 and more fit and so on. Habits can help you do all that stuff, which is great. But I think the real

00:40:59.860 reason, the deeper reason that habits matter is that they are a signal internally to ourselves about

00:41:06.540 who we are and what we care about. And they're kind of a signal of like the story that we're telling

00:41:11.240 ourselves. So in a sense, every time that you perform a habit, you are embodying a

00:41:18.400 particular identity. When you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and

00:41:23.400 organized. When you shoot a basketball for 30 minutes, you embody the identity of someone who

00:41:28.980 is a basketball player. You do those things once or twice. It doesn't radically transform the story

00:41:34.280 you have about yourself. But if you keep showing up and shooting a basketball every day for six months

00:41:39.400 or two years, or at some point you cross this sort of invisible threshold where you're like,

00:41:43.740 yeah, being a basketball player is like part of who I am, some aspect of my identity. And so your habits

00:41:49.640 provide evidence. They provide proof of the story that you're telling yourself. And that I think is a

00:41:55.400 very powerful thing, a very deep personal thing that habits can provide and perhaps the real reason why

00:42:01.020 they matter. So to come back to your question about process versus outcome versus identity, where how we

00:42:07.680 change, usually when people set out to make some kind of change, they start by thinking about the results or the

00:42:14.280 outcome that they want. So they say, I want to lose 40 pounds in the next six months. And then from that

00:42:19.980 outcome, they back into a process or a plan. So they say, all right, if I want to lose 40 pounds, then I need to

00:42:26.580 follow this nutrition plan, I'm going to need to work out four days a week. And maybe there are details to those

00:42:32.000 plans and everything, but that's usually kind of roughly where it stops. And then the assumption is, if I

00:42:38.220 do those things, and I lose that weight, then I'll be the kind of person that I want to be. The argument

00:42:43.620 that I try to unpack in that chapter is, what if we worked backwards from this? What if instead we said, who

00:42:49.600 is the type of person I wish to be? What is the identity that I'd like to have? And in fact, we could even

00:42:55.420 ask the person who has that identity, what kind of habits would they have? And then we use that identity to

00:43:03.040 inform the process, the habits, and we let the outcomes come naturally. There are a variety of examples of this.

00:43:10.320 One reader of mine, she lost a bunch of weight. I think it was 110 pounds in total. And she's kept it off for over a 0.67

00:43:17.420 decade. And the question that she sort of carried around with her as she was starting her weight loss journey is what

00:43:22.740 would a healthy person do? And that's very much aligned or oriented with that identity piece. It's

00:43:28.580 like, okay, would a healthy person take a cab? Or would they walk four blocks the next meeting? Would

00:43:33.300 they order a salad and chicken at lunch? Or would they have a hamburger and fries? And she could just

00:43:38.280 kind of carry that question around with her to every context she was in, and make a choice that she felt

00:43:43.500 like aligned with the identity that she wanted to have, rather than worrying necessarily about something

00:43:49.480 specific, like the number of macros she's getting or, you know, whatever. Now, I should say, I think it

00:43:54.520 can work both ways. Like I count my macros and works really well for me. But I think that's partially

00:43:59.540 because it aligns with the identity that I already have. And if you don't have that shift in internal

00:44:05.200 story yet, it's hard for the behavior to follow suit. Imagine you went up to two people. You said,

00:44:11.160 hey, would you like a cigarette? And the first person says, oh, no, thanks. I'm trying to quit.

00:44:15.200 And the second person says, oh, no, thanks. I'm not a smoker. Technically, they've done the same

00:44:20.600 thing. They both turned down the cigarette. But the second person kind of has signaled a shift in

00:44:26.040 identity change. The first person is trying to be something they're not. No, thanks. I'm trying to

00:44:30.620 quit. And the second person is saying, I'm not a smoker. It's just not something that I do. I think

00:44:36.780 once you get to that stage, that shift in identity, you're in a much more powerful place from a behavior

00:44:42.980 change standpoint, because you're not even really trying to change anymore. You're just acting in

00:44:47.760 alignment with the type of person you see yourself to be. So we can talk about ways to do that, but

00:44:52.880 that's kind of the quick version on identity versus outcome. Tell me what you think the difference is in

00:44:58.480 identity between the woman you gave the example of and say yourself. So you're both striving to the

00:45:04.620 same objective, which is a healthy weight, but she accomplished it by focusing on what would a 0.98

00:45:11.680 healthy person do in this situation? You accomplish it, again, just pertaining to nutrition at the

00:45:17.000 moment, presumably by saying, I don't know what your macro goals are, but these are the aspirations

00:45:22.340 that I have and I'm going to stick to these. So tell me a little bit about the difference between

00:45:26.360 those approaches and how can a person know which will be better for them outside of just empirically

00:45:30.720 trying them both? Well, I think in this particular case, the primary difference is I had an internal

00:45:37.060 story or have an internal story that I am a healthy person already. And so just doing things that are

00:45:43.520 aligned with that, like counting macros feels totally fine. Whereas for her at that early stage,

00:45:48.560 she did not feel that way and did not genuinely believe that about herself. It's possible to have

00:45:54.780 an epiphany and to change cold turkey or to just flip a switch and suddenly start acting in a different

00:46:00.100 way. I do think it's possible. I think sometimes people have experiences like that. Ironically, I think

00:46:04.940 it rarely happens from some kind of bolts of lightning inside. I think one of the most common

00:46:09.260 ways that happens is by reading books. I think people will sometimes read a book that really

00:46:13.660 changes their worldview and they start to do things completely differently after that. You can imagine

00:46:18.280 a bunch of nutrition examples, like somebody reads a book that convinces them that carbs are the devil

00:46:23.740 and the grain is terrible. All of a sudden the next day, like they want to throw out all the bread in

00:46:28.160 the house and it's very quick switch has been flipped. So I do think it's possible. However,

00:46:34.940 I don't think that changing through an epiphany is a very reliable way to change. And I don't know

00:46:40.980 that it's something you can bank on or can plan around or strategize for. It might happen to you

00:46:46.200 a couple of times in your life. I don't think that it's an efficient way to try to build a new habit.

00:46:51.360 So if you can't change or hope to change through an epiphany, then what are your options if you want

00:46:57.160 to change your identity? And I think the best avenue that you have is to cast votes with your actions.

00:47:03.520 So in a sense, every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you wish to become.

00:47:10.120 So no, doing one pushup does not radically transform your body, but it does cast a vote for

00:47:16.420 I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And no, writing one sentence may not finish the

00:47:21.960 novel, but it does cast a vote for I'm a writer. I think this is like a meaningful difference between

00:47:28.040 my approach or what I recommend and what you often hear. Like you often hear something like

00:47:33.660 fake it till you make it. I don't necessarily have anything wrong with fake it till you make it.

00:47:38.480 It's asking you to believe something positive about yourself, but it's asking you to believe

00:47:43.860 something positive without having evidence for it. And we have a word for beliefs that don't have

00:47:49.600 evidence. We call that delusion. Like at some point, your brain doesn't like this mismatch between

00:47:54.220 what you're saying and what you're actually doing. And so to bring it back to your question

00:47:59.120 about my friend who lost all this weight, I think you have to genuinely believe that story about

00:48:04.720 yourself in order for the actions to start to feel aligned. And what do you do if you don't

00:48:09.900 genuinely believe you're a healthy person or don't genuinely believe that I'm the kind of person who

00:48:14.260 would track my macros or whatever? Well, I think you have to start with these very small habits.

00:48:18.060 You have to start by proving it to yourself in some little way. Maybe it's just that you did walk the

00:48:23.360 three blocks to the meeting and didn't take the taxi, or maybe it's just that you did order a

00:48:27.640 salad for lunch and not a burger and fries. And none of those things individually are going to

00:48:32.640 change your body or even the story right away. But if you keep casting votes for that behavior

00:48:39.700 and keep casting votes for that identity, then eventually you get to the point where it's like

00:48:44.620 the basketball example. You kind of have to admit that you're a basketball player because you've been

00:48:48.600 shooting hoops for the last two years. And like, this is just part of who you are now.

00:48:52.100 So I think that that's the primary difference between the two of us is that I already kind

00:48:56.740 of had that story and early on she didn't. Now she does. So who knows, maybe now she could just

00:49:01.080 track her macros just as easily or even easier than I can. I don't know. But I think that that

00:49:06.060 shift there. Yeah. I was kind of curious to ask about that because I wonder how that process changes

00:49:13.580 in this person after 10 years. I mean, most people understand that losing weight is actually not

00:49:19.260 that hard, but keeping weight off is exceptionally hard. So what your friend did, yes, losing 110

00:49:24.740 pounds is remarkable. But the fact that she's kept it off for a decade is actually what's remarkable.

00:49:29.740 And I'm curious as to what the temporal sequence of events is where, hey, for the first year,

00:49:38.000 it was a daily struggle of what would the healthy person do? What would the healthy person do? What

00:49:43.080 would the healthy person do? And at some point that transitions into, I'm a healthy person. This is what I do.

00:49:48.540 I'm a healthy person. This is what I do. And then it becomes so autonomic that you can slip up for a

00:49:53.520 day and it feels wrong. Like, oh God, that cotton candy is horrible. Like I don't ever want to eat

00:49:58.560 that again. Yeah. Well, you said something similar to that a few minutes ago about how like it bothers

00:50:03.840 you to not work out sometimes. Nir Eyal, who also has written about habits, has kind of a little

00:50:09.040 measure for that where he's like, his measure for whether it's a habit or not is does it bother you

00:50:13.140 when you don't do it? I think that's a signal that it's kind of aligned with your identity. It's

00:50:17.120 like, ah, I kind of feel like I'm not being me if I don't do this. To your point about it taking a

00:50:21.860 long time, it can take much longer than you would think. I mean, my friend told me she had to lose

00:50:26.160 60 pounds before the first person noticed, before she ever heard anything from somebody else.

00:50:30.980 That's a lot of weight and a long time to be working in essentially what feels like a vacuum.

00:50:35.080 Feels like you're just doing it for yourself and no external feedback from the world. So this comes

00:50:39.640 back to a lot of the things we've already talked about, about process and falling in love with the

00:50:43.020 system and a lot of things that go into it. But it definitely is an internal journey and it definitely

00:50:48.140 will take longer than you would imagine in a lot of cases. One of the most common examples that I

00:50:53.500 hear of in my practice for the epiphany behavior change that sticks is the person who quits smoking

00:51:01.900 the day their child is born. And I've always found this interesting, right? Because the day before

00:51:06.860 their child is born, they clearly know how bad smoking is. There's nobody who's smoking who

00:51:13.280 doesn't understand the risks of it. And by the same token, who doesn't, as you pointed out earlier,

00:51:18.880 enjoy the benefits of it in the short run. Very rewarding in the short run, very damaging in the

00:51:23.620 long run. That's completely understood intellectually. On day X, they have a child and they decide,

00:51:29.380 I'm done with this. I'm not going to have smoke in my household because I also know the benefits of

00:51:34.120 secondhand smoke or the harm rather of secondhand smoke. And I'm not going to expose my child to

00:51:38.120 this. And yet amazingly, I mean, over and over and over again, I hear these stories from patients

00:51:42.800 saying, yep, I grew up in a household where my parents were incredible smokers. And the second I

00:51:48.360 was born, they stopped, they stopped. And that was 40 years ago. And they've never had a cigarette since.

00:51:52.080 Is there a transference process here where because it involves the life of another person,

00:51:56.860 it's easier to make this change stick? Possibly. I mean, I'm sure there are a lot of

00:52:00.860 variables that go into it, but it does align with, there's like this whole category of behaviors

00:52:05.620 that I feel like if you wanted to hack a radical change in your life, you want to figure out a way

00:52:10.700 to get, like you said, this epiphany to stick massive environment changes or lifestyle changes

00:52:16.820 are a good way to do that. Perhaps one of the strongest ways to do that. So having a kid,

00:52:22.400 getting married, changing jobs, moving to a different city, even something small, like getting a dog

00:52:28.860 can lead to rapid behavior change. And I think one of the things that is really crucial about it is

00:52:36.100 that most of those decisions tend to be irreversible or at least very hard to reverse.

00:52:42.280 I had one that I struggled with for a long time. Sometimes people ask me, you know, what habits have

00:52:45.860 you struggled with or whatever? And I tend to be pretty good about getting enough sleep. I almost

00:52:51.080 always get eight hours or even nine if I'm training hard, but I would fall into this pattern where it'd be

00:52:57.060 like nine or 10 o'clock at night and I would kind of get a second wind and I'd be like, well, maybe

00:53:00.520 I'll just send a few emails or something. And of course it's never just a few. You turn around and

00:53:04.480 it's midnight or one and you're like, okay, am I going to sleep for eight hours? Because if so,

00:53:08.200 that means I'm not getting up till nine. And I know that I prefer to get up early. I know that I feel

00:53:13.760 better throughout the rest of the next day. 10 PM James is kind of ruining things for tomorrow,

00:53:18.200 James by staying up late. And I tried a bunch of different things. There's a little device called

00:53:24.180 an outlet timer. You can buy it for like 10 bucks on Amazon. You plug it into an outlet and you can

00:53:28.800 set the time for when it kills the power from that outlet. And so like, if you plug your internet into

00:53:34.780 it, then like the internet shuts off at 10 PM or whatever you set it for. So I tried different

00:53:39.340 things like that, but then you could just pick your phone up and get around it. But the thing that

00:53:43.420 finally made it stick was getting a dog because the dog is going to get up at 7 AM. Whenever I go

00:53:48.780 to sleep, it doesn't matter. And I need to go take it for a walk. And you can only do that for a few

00:53:52.780 days before you're like, all right, I'm not going to play this game anymore. I'm going to bed at 10.

00:53:56.400 It's because it was fairly hard to reverse. They got it to stick. And I think, you know,

00:54:01.840 in the case of having a kid, they're going to be there every day. Now, maybe you could rationalize

00:54:06.840 it a bunch of times before that, but that's not going to change. They're going to be around.

00:54:10.400 And weirdly, because presumably this person's wife was pregnant. So they obviously saw that

00:54:15.860 throughout the whole pregnancy, but that didn't get them to change. But once the child is there,

00:54:21.200 man, it's really immediate. You're taking a puff and you have those little eyes looking back at you.

00:54:25.900 The feedback loop is even tighter than before. So I would imagine both of those things probably play

00:54:30.880 a role, but more generally speaking, those kinds of irreversible or hard to reverse lifestyle changes

00:54:36.600 also tend to be big drivers of quick behavior change.

00:54:40.400 I can only think of one dramatic habit I changed that has stuck. And it is the silliest thing,

00:54:48.400 but I always bit my nails growing up, bite them nonstop. Invariably what happens is you'd get a

00:54:55.080 little infection because you bite too close. And it was like, my mom was always like, God,

00:54:58.640 that is such a disgusting habit. Like it just looked horrible. The day I decided to change it was the

00:55:05.420 day I got my first interview for med school. You apply to medical school and then all of a sudden

00:55:09.880 the envelopes start coming in and you've got these interviews. Just as I got that first envelope and I

00:55:15.440 realized, oh, I'm actually going to go and be interviewing. At least for me, I didn't interview

00:55:20.000 to go to college. This was the first time I had to do an interview. And I don't know, just something

00:55:23.820 came over me. I was like, wait a second, dude, you can't be the guy that's showing up to an

00:55:28.100 interview with these horrible looking nails. You have to cut this out. You are going to get 1.00

00:55:33.260 a nail clipper and you are going to start clipping your nails like a civilized human being. And that

00:55:38.560 was, I don't know, 25 years ago. And today, like when my nails get long, I'm a guy who likes short

00:55:44.160 nails. So I'm always sort of trimming them. I can't imagine that I once bit them. It just seems so

00:55:49.760 strange to me. It's a silly example. I don't think it is actually. We all have habits that are like 0.87

00:55:55.880 that. There's two things that made me think. The first is it connects to our conversation about

00:55:59.820 identity from a few minutes ago, which is you started to take pride in it. You cared about

00:56:04.800 how you presented. And the more that we take pride in certain elements of our identity or aspects of

00:56:11.300 who we are, certain parts of our story, the more strongly that behavior starts to stick. You can

00:56:16.700 imagine a woman who takes pride in how her hair looks. She probably has all kinds of hair care habits 1.00

00:56:22.200 and products and things that she does. And she probably doesn't have to convince herself to do 0.63

00:56:27.460 them the same way that we talk about convincing ourselves with a lot of other habits. Oh, I wish

00:56:31.900 I could write, or I wish I would work out or whatever. It's just an element of her identity.

00:56:36.060 She takes pride in and shows she does it like fairly consistently or the guy who gets complimented

00:56:41.340 on the size of his biceps. And so he just never skips arm day in the gym because it's an aspect of his

00:56:46.280 identity that he takes pride in. What I'm kind of getting at is like, what parts of your story do you

00:56:50.880 take pride in? And once you start to take pride in it, man, you'll fight for it pretty hard to keep

00:56:55.780 it. And in many cases, you'll find yourself doing it somewhat naturally, or at least internally

00:57:01.260 motivated to continue doing it. So that was the first piece. The second piece, and this is something

00:57:06.320 that since Atomic Habits has come out, I think is even more important than I realized when I was

00:57:12.420 writing the book, which is the influence of the social environment on your habits. So in your case,

00:57:19.340 the med school interviews, it was actually the image in your mind, the expectation about what

00:57:25.040 other people might think and how you would present in that interview and so on, the judgment of others

00:57:30.340 essentially, that helped drive that change. And if you look at behaviors that really stick, the ones

00:57:38.140 that tend to stick for 10 or 20 or 30 years, a long time, there's often a strong social component

00:57:44.800 involved. So for example, we are all part of multiple tribes. Some of those tribes are large,

00:57:51.320 like what it means to be American, or some of those tribes are small, like being a member of your

00:57:56.580 CrossFit gym or being a neighbor on your street. Take the neighborhood example. You might walk outside

00:58:02.740 and see your neighbor mowing their grass on Wednesday night or something and think, oh, I need to cut my lawn.

00:58:08.640 And you'll stick with that habit of mowing your grass for 20 or 30 years or however long you live

00:58:14.380 in that house. Like we wish we had that level of consistency with most of our other habits.

00:58:19.300 And why do you do it? Partially you do it because it feels good to have a clean lawn,

00:58:24.420 but mostly you do it because you don't want to be judged by the other people in the neighborhood for

00:58:29.340 being the sloppy one. And so it's actually that social norm, that expectation for what it means to be

00:58:35.720 part of this neighborhood and how you act in this group or this tribe that helps get the habit to

00:58:40.540 stick. I think the practical takeaway there, if you really want a behavior change to last,

00:58:46.320 is to join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior. Because if it's normal in that

00:58:52.580 group, it's going to seem much more normal and typical for you to do it. I mean, Peter, I'm sure

00:58:58.080 you're part of multiple groups that do what most people would determine are like weird habits.

00:59:02.580 Like I'm sure there's a group of friends who are really into driving cars and there's probably

00:59:06.500 another group who's like really into bow hunting and archery. And there are all kinds of habits

00:59:10.820 that these little tribes do. And it might seem strange to the normal person, but it's probably

00:59:16.700 very casual or typical or easy relatively for you to stick to those habits, especially when you're

00:59:22.620 part of those groups or talking with those guys, because it's just part of something that

00:59:26.700 it's part of what they do. And I think maybe the deeper lesson here is that we don't just do habits

00:59:33.900 because of the results they get us. We also take behaviors because they are a signal to the people

00:59:40.200 around us that, Hey, I get it. I fit in. I understand how to act in this group. Most people,

00:59:47.020 if they have to choose between having the habits they want to have, but they kind of go against the

00:59:53.440 grain of the group, they like don't really fit in well, they get ostracized or having habits that

00:59:59.160 they don't really love, but they get to go along with the crowd. They fit in, they get praised for

01:00:05.020 being part of the group. Most people will choose belonging over loneliness. Like the desire to belong

01:00:11.900 will overpower the desire to improve. And so you want to make sure you get those two things aligned

01:00:17.600 to join groups where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.

01:00:20.660 I wonder if part of the cue for me was buying a suit and it was the first suit I had. That was

01:00:28.840 sort of a, wait a minute, you're wearing a suit. Think of the trouble you're going to, to get this

01:00:34.540 thing. And then this tie that you're going to wear and blah, blah, blah, all this sort of stuff.

01:00:39.620 But it's interesting. And then clearly it just became a part of my identity, which is I'm a person who

01:00:45.340 has nice fingernails. I present well from the fingernail standpoint, at least. Hasn't translated

01:00:51.280 to all of my habits, but let's talk about the four laws because these four laws are kind of the central

01:00:56.620 tenets to what we speak about and they can be inverted as well, which I think is important as

01:01:02.560 we think about creating, call it adaptive habits versus breaking maladaptive habits. So what's the

01:01:08.300 first law? Real quick, before we get into these four, I just want to explain the framework a little bit

01:01:13.340 in particular for this episode or this show, because I feel like your audience will appreciate

01:01:18.260 it more than most audiences. So I like to divide a habit into four stages. And as you said, those

01:01:24.400 four stages kind of have what I call the four laws of behavior change that come out of it.

01:01:28.420 But when I was working on atomic habits and researching this framework and trying to understand

01:01:32.880 why do behaviors happen and how do they happen? How do habits form? I had a couple questions that I

01:01:38.460 felt like previous frameworks did not answer that well. While researching the book, I was able to

01:01:44.560 find 40 different models of human behavior that biologists and neuroscientists and psychologists,

01:01:50.480 bunch of different industries had come up with over the last, say, about 150 years. Broadly speaking,

01:01:56.720 those models of human behavior tended to fall into one of two categories. The first category are what I

01:02:02.740 would call like motivation models. So they explain things like internal drives and motivations and

01:02:09.220 cravings and kind of like what compels us to act. And then the second category were what I would call

01:02:15.500 reinforcement models. And so they described the rewards that we get from behaviors and how those

01:02:21.260 things kind of reinforce our behavior and essentially what happens like after an action. And what I wanted

01:02:27.140 to do was try to come up with a model that I felt like accurately described both the motivation that may come

01:02:32.280 before and the reinforcement that may come after and how those things influence the actions that we

01:02:37.700 take. And there were a variety of what I thought were fairly simple questions about human behavior

01:02:44.000 that weren't totally answered by the previous models. So things like what causes somebody to try a

01:02:50.320 habit in the first place? You haven't experienced the reward at that point. So why would you take the

01:02:55.260 first bite of a pancake or the first smoke of a cigarette? What would motivate you to do that?

01:02:59.400 I started with BF Skinner, stimulus response reward. Charles Duhigg and power of habit kind

01:03:04.860 of popularized as cue, routine reward. But we say, okay, habits are a cue and then there's the action

01:03:10.000 and there's some kind of outcome. Well, how come two people respond differently to the same thing?

01:03:15.020 Like why would one person see a cigarette and feel like, oh, I have to smoke. And another person's

01:03:19.300 like, I've never smoked a day in my life. I'm not interested at all. Because if it's just the cue that

01:03:23.420 leads to the action, you would think they would do the same thing. Why would the same person

01:03:27.660 respond differently to the same cue? How come when I walk in my kitchen at 7am, I see a loaf of bread

01:03:33.860 and I think, oh, I'm going to make some toast for breakfast. But then I walk in at 4pm and I see

01:03:38.440 that same cue and I don't think anything of it. I just move on. So to summarize all of this, I think

01:03:44.040 one of the meaningful distinctions about the four stages that I put together and why I feel like it

01:03:48.920 accurately describes human behavior and sort of the insight that I came across as I was researching,

01:03:54.800 a neuroscientist named Lisa Feldman Barrett. She has a bunch of studies and a couple books on this

01:04:00.900 topic. One book in particular that was useful for me while I was researching is called How Emotions

01:04:05.540 Are Made. The key insight is that we often think that human behavior is reactive in the sense that

01:04:11.720 somebody does something and I respond or somebody says something and I feel a certain way.

01:04:15.500 But in fact, human behavior is mostly predictive. You are kind of endlessly going through your

01:04:22.360 experience in life predicting about what to do next. It's actually this prediction that I think

01:04:27.740 was the key thing that was missing from a lot of the previous models of habits and behavior.

01:04:32.440 So with that as a primer. Before we do that, I think you wrote about this in the book, which was that

01:04:37.360 the dopaminergic surge comes more from the anticipation of the reward than the actual

01:04:44.540 behavior that gives the reward. Did I remember that correctly?

01:04:47.980 There's a bazillion studies on dopamine, of course. Also, I should say like, I think if you only talk

01:04:53.660 about dopamine, it's not the full story about habits. Like there's many neurochemicals that are

01:04:57.900 involved in the process and dopamine is just one part of the overall picture, but it does play a very

01:05:02.740 important role. For a long time, we thought it was about reward and satisfaction and enjoyment.

01:05:07.980 But in fact, it seems that the crucial role dopamine plays is about prediction and anticipation.

01:05:13.700 And so the first time that you take a bite of a pancake, you don't know what to expect.

01:05:18.980 And so you take that bite and then afterwards you get a surge of dopamine, almost as if to like

01:05:24.160 mark the experience or to teach you, hey, that was favorable. You should do that again next time.

01:05:29.160 Like if you happen to see it a pancake again, that was a really great outcome.

01:05:32.740 So then the next time around, you know what to expect. And in fact, what we find is that

01:05:38.020 dopamine tends to spike before you take a bite, not after. And there are a bunch of studies that

01:05:43.000 show this. Gamblers get a spike before they roll the dice, not after. Drug addicts get a spike before

01:05:48.660 they take a hit of cocaine, not after. Dopamine, I think probably the more accurate way to describe

01:05:53.960 it in this context is it's a teaching molecule. It's a learning molecule and it helps you

01:05:59.340 mark experiences that are favorable so that you'll remember them next time. And then when you come

01:06:04.700 across a similar situation, it spikes in anticipation. So after you see the cue, you get

01:06:10.560 this craving and it's actually that craving or anticipation or prediction that motivates you to

01:06:16.220 act, drives the response. And then there's an outcome. Presumably, again, using your example,

01:06:20.600 there are lots of diversity between individuals, right? So you take 10 people who have never smoked a

01:06:26.180 cigarette. Let's just, to make the math easy, say, well, seven of them have no desire to. So they

01:06:31.520 walk away. Three of them are like, yeah, I'll give it a try. You take a puff. One of them starts hacking

01:06:36.260 and says, that is the most disgusting thing I've ever done. I never want to do that again. And they

01:06:39.160 never do. One of them says, you know, I kind of like that. I'm going to do this socially. Anytime I'm

01:06:44.400 going to have a drink, I'm going to have a cigarette. And one of them goes on to become a chain

01:06:47.560 smoker. Now, what explains that distinction? How much of that is neurochemical? There are examples like

01:06:53.660 that for alcohol and drugs and all kinds of things. And I'm not an expert on addiction and

01:06:59.120 I didn't write the book about addiction. So I don't want to speak out of turn or step out of my lane or

01:07:03.160 anything, but I don't know that I have a good answer to it. But from what I understand and from

01:07:07.980 what I've seen as I was researching the book, it does seem to have a strong, basically genetic or

01:07:13.420 neurochemical component. It seems like in a sense, drugs kind of hack the system. This is, I think,

01:07:19.380 one way to define an addiction, which is the process of learning is actually broken. Addicts

01:07:24.960 know that the behavior does not benefit their lives in a lot of ways, but they still can't

01:07:29.840 get themselves to stop doing it, even though they know it doesn't benefit them. And I think part of

01:07:34.940 the reason that happens, or perhaps the primary reason is the drug kind of hacks the system. It

01:07:39.660 gives you this spike of dopamine, even though you shouldn't be getting it. Usually your brain would

01:07:43.820 not be doing that. It would not be trying to teach you to repeat that, but you're artificially

01:07:48.280 spiking it by taking the substance. And so then process of learning breaks.

01:07:52.640 I also find it interesting that different people will get that pleasure from different things.

01:07:59.500 When I'm not in a good place, when I'm unhappy about something, it's never my tendency to have

01:08:06.280 a drink. So alcohol would only be associated with something I want to do when I feel good to begin

01:08:11.680 with. I would never want to have a drink when I don't feel good. But when I don't feel good,

01:08:15.860 I would happily binge on junk food. That would be the thing that provides comfort. And of course,

01:08:22.000 there are people, when they're unhappy, they would never want to eat even, let alone have junk food.

01:08:26.100 I find it interesting to at least contemplate how much of that is genetic, how much of that is

01:08:29.940 learned, and what else is going on in sort of understanding that. Because that does sort of

01:08:34.120 factor into falling to the level of our habits, because we fall to these levels when things are not

01:08:39.740 going well, typically. I do think there's a genetic component. Some people are more sensitive to

01:08:44.160 certain substances than others, or at least it appears to be so. However, it does strike me as

01:08:49.740 like very possible that a good chunk of it is learned and that now you have a story that junk

01:08:54.700 food is the way that I cope or the way that I soothe myself when I need that. And in a sense,

01:09:00.800 your habits are these solutions to like recurring problems that you face. So say you have somebody who

01:09:06.700 comes home from work and they feel exhausted. And one person, that's a recurring problem that they feel

01:09:12.440 often. And so one person comes home and they play video games for 30 minutes. And another person

01:09:17.080 comes home and they go for a run. And a third person smokes a cigarette. And all of them are

01:09:22.320 solving the same underlying recurring problem, but they're choosing different methods through which

01:09:28.100 to do that. And I wonder about how the grooves kind of get formed. Once we learn that a certain

01:09:34.160 method is effective in solving that problem, we tend to default to it, even if it's not the only way

01:09:39.840 to solve that, even if, yeah, going for a run would make me feel better, but I'm just used to

01:09:44.160 smoking cigarettes now. Then we start to develop a story around it. It starts to become a little bit

01:09:48.620 of our identity. We start to use it as a crutch. I do think there's definitely a learned component

01:09:53.180 to that as well. All right. I interrupted you before you were just about to launch into the four laws.

01:09:58.480 Yeah, yeah. Okay. So the four stages are Q, craving, response, and reward. The Q is something that

01:10:05.660 you notice. So for example, you see a plate of cookies on the counter. That's a visual cue

01:10:09.940 starts the habit of eating a cookie. The craving is the prediction or the meaning that you assign

01:10:15.980 to that cue often happens relatively automatically or quickly. So you see the plate of cookies and you

01:10:22.500 think, Oh, that'll be sweet, sugary, tasty, enjoyable. It's that favorable meaning that leads

01:10:27.880 to that dopamine spike that we talked about that motivates you to take the third step, which is the

01:10:33.720 response. You walk over, you pick the cookie up, you take a bite. And then finally there's the reward.

01:10:39.320 Oh, it is in fact, sweet, sugary, tasty, satisfying. Now, not every behavior in life is rewarding.

01:10:46.420 Sometimes things have a cost or a consequence. Sometimes they're just kind of neutral and don't

01:10:51.180 really mean a whole lot. If a behavior is not rewarding, then it's unlikely to become a habit

01:10:57.300 because you don't have any reason to repeat it again in the future. You need some kind of positive

01:11:01.120 emotional signal associated with the behavior for you to stick with it. At least as we've already

01:11:06.820 talked about an immediate signal that says, Hey, that was enjoyable. Is there some evidence to

01:11:12.140 suggest if I remember back to like my psych one Oh one class, which is obviously pretty elementary

01:11:17.620 that some of the most addictive behaviors are variably reinforcing. I sort of remember this example

01:11:24.120 of why slot machines are particularly addictive because the pattern with which they produce a win

01:11:31.540 is actually random. And therefore you really don't know when it's going to come. You know,

01:11:36.260 it's going to come. You have to have belief that you'll see other people win and you've won in the

01:11:39.760 past, but that's somehow even more addictive. Whereas the cookie in theory is not variably reinforcing.

01:11:46.040 It's pretty much reinforcing the same way every time. I mean, presumably only subject to the

01:11:50.700 tastiness of the cookie. It's even more, there've been tons of studies done on variable rewards.

01:11:55.440 The basic answer is yes, you're right. Variable rewards tend to accelerate or intensify behavior.

01:12:00.700 It can get even more twisted than that in the slot machines example, because what they have found is

01:12:05.780 that the sweet spot tends to be right around 50, 50. You can imagine getting a reward at very

01:12:10.700 different schedules. Like you could get it 95% of the time, or you could get it 5% of the time.

01:12:15.540 Well, if you only get it 5% of the time, then you learn pretty quickly like, Hey,

01:12:19.640 this isn't a very fruitful action. Maybe I should stop doing this. But if you get it around 50, 50

01:12:24.060 tends to work out for you a lot, but not every time. And it still is coming at it like a roughly

01:12:28.540 a random pattern. Even if you know, over 10,000 trials, it works out to be about 50% of the time,

01:12:33.440 man, you will just keep pressing that slot machine button over and over and over again.

01:12:37.800 There've been studies done on mice where they would get a squirt of sugar water when they poke their

01:12:42.820 nose in a box. And if they did it at a variable reward schedule, they would do it. I can't remember

01:12:48.400 the exact number. I want to say it was like 6,000 times in an hour, many, many times. We laugh at it

01:12:53.840 thinking about mice, but we're not that different. The average slot machine player will press the

01:12:57.820 button like 800 times in an hour. And so we're just basically doing the same thing, getting the reward,

01:13:03.720 but not knowing exactly when it's going to happen. It gets you to do it more frequently. And you can

01:13:08.580 think about examples like this in everyday life. Imagine a remote control where the battery's dying

01:13:13.680 and you press the power button, but it doesn't turn on right away. And you're like, God,

01:13:17.200 did that work? And then you press it again a little harder and then maybe you press it again a third

01:13:20.180 time. Now, if you do it eight or nine or 10 times, you're like, okay, the batteries are dead.

01:13:24.000 But if on the second try, it turns on the variable reward, got you to do it again or got you to try

01:13:29.460 the behavior more. So that variable reward schedule is definitely something that can intensify behavior.

01:13:34.960 You remember Anchorman? Yeah. I assume you've seen. Yeah. This might actually mean that there is

01:13:39.640 truth to the statement that 50% of the time it works every time.

01:13:42.920 Incredible reference. Yes. Fantastic. Little did we know that Will Ferrell was a

01:13:49.320 cognitive psychology fan. Wait, I think that was Paul Rudd's line, wasn't it?

01:13:53.040 Was it? Yeah. When he used Black Panther, the colonel. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Amazing.

01:13:58.040 50% of the time it works every time. I'm going to be honest with you. That smells like pure gasoline.

01:14:04.220 It's got bits of real Panther in it. Oh, it's made by Odeon.

01:14:08.020 So those are the four stages. What I like to do and what I consider to be the hallmark of

01:14:14.360 my work, I'm just interpreting the research, like pretending to be an academic. I'm not actually an

01:14:19.120 academic. I think the value that I try to provide is to make these ideas actionable and to turn them

01:14:25.960 into something that we can operationalize or apply to daily life. And the four laws of behavior change

01:14:31.320 are how I have attempted to do that. So if we understand that a habit has those four steps

01:14:36.980 and how do we actually change our behaviors, we can follow these four laws. And there's one for

01:14:41.780 each stage. The first law of behavior change is to make it obvious. You want the cues of your good

01:14:46.980 habits to be obvious, available, visible, easy to see. The easier it is to see or get your attention,

01:14:54.060 the easier it is to notice, the more likely you are to act on it. The second law is to make it

01:14:58.480 attractive. So the more attractive or appealing or exciting a habit is, the more likely you are to

01:15:04.540 feel motivated to do it. So again, this is about anticipating it or something you anticipate more,

01:15:09.440 feel more motivated. The third law is to make it easy. The more easy, convenient, frictionless,

01:15:16.000 simple a habit is, the more likely behavior is to be performed. And then the fourth and final law

01:15:21.640 is to make it satisfying. The more satisfying or enjoyable, pleasurable a habit is, the more likely you

01:15:28.180 are to repeat it in the future. So those four laws give you like a high level overview of how to build

01:15:33.920 a good habit. So make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying.

01:15:39.420 You don't need all four every single time, but the more that you have those four things working for

01:15:44.840 you, I think the more likely it is that the good behavior will stick or that you'll find a way to

01:15:49.240 start on it. If you want to break a bad habit, then you just invert those four. So rather than making it

01:15:56.040 obvious, you want to make the cue invisible. Unsubscribe from emails, reduce exposure to the

01:16:01.420 cue. If you're trying to be on a diet, don't follow food bloggers on Instagram. Reducing exposure to the

01:16:06.760 thing that starts the process. Rather than making it attractive, make it unattractive. Rather than

01:16:12.280 making it easy, make it difficult. So increase friction, put more steps between you and the behavior.

01:16:18.560 And rather than making it satisfying, make it unsatisfying. Layer on some kind of immediate

01:16:22.960 consequence or a cost to the behavior. Those four make it invisible, make it unattractive,

01:16:28.360 make it difficult, make it unsatisfying, give you a high level framework for how to break a bad habit.

01:16:34.720 Now, how often is a certain behavior, the combination of breaking a habit and creating a

01:16:40.760 habit? Again, it seems like a lot of the ones we default into talking about are the hard ones like

01:16:45.240 nutrition. We all eat. We're all going to eat all the time. It's not something you can opt out of

01:16:51.260 or into. We all eat. So presumably if a person says, again, I hate coming back to weight because

01:16:56.840 it's such a stupid example relative to say overall health, but let's say health actually. I want to be 0.62

01:17:01.900 a much healthier person. So I need to change the way I eat. That's two things, right? You have to

01:17:08.160 start eating better and stop eating poorer. It is two things, but I view them as two sides of the same

01:17:14.940 coin. In many cases, you know, we can come up with edge cases or examples where the behaviors start to

01:17:20.540 get more specific. But generally speaking, I think there are three ways to break a bad habit. You can

01:17:25.140 eliminate it entirely. So you can just go cold turkey, cut it out, never do it again. You could

01:17:30.480 curtail the behavior to the desired degree. So you can reduce it a little bit. You still do it

01:17:35.500 sometimes. Instead of drinking a beer at dinner every night, you just have it maybe once a week.

01:17:39.920 You could also replace it. So rather than drinking a beer, you replace it with water. When I'm thinking

01:17:45.680 about myself personally, when I actually am changing behavior, I don't usually think about

01:17:50.500 breaking bad habits that often. In fact, most of the time I'm focused on building or establishing

01:17:55.700 new good behaviors. Which necessarily displace the old ones. For example, with eating, it is a bit of a

01:18:04.520 zero sum game. I mean, not entirely. I guess you could just keep eating more and more and more. But

01:18:08.620 generally, if you say I'm going to eat more good things, it kind of drives down the bad things. Is that

01:18:14.460 the way it normally works then? I think a lot of the time it does. And that's why I tend to focus

01:18:19.860 on that for my personal life is that it's kind of like two plants. One plant, if it grows a little

01:18:24.740 bit more and spreads its leaves a little further, it starts to crowd out the other plant. Just soaks

01:18:30.160 up more energy and resources and sunlight. And your good habits are kind of like that. I mean, we all,

01:18:35.080 in some sense, it is zero sum in the sense that we only have 24 hours in each day. And so if you have

01:18:41.040 somebody who says, even if they're unrelated habits, they say, Hey, I want to start doing

01:18:44.920 something healthy. I'd like to start working out for an hour each day. And I also want to watch less

01:18:50.140 TV. I just feel like I watch Netflix too much. Well, if you usually watch Netflix for three hours

01:18:55.060 each evening and you decide to insert your workout from six to 7 PM, by definition, you're not watching

01:19:01.840 Netflix while you're doing that. You start to crowd out the bad behavior just by focusing on building

01:19:06.600 a workout habit, even if you don't think about the TV thing at all. So my sort of general approach is

01:19:13.220 look, I'm trying to spend my 24 hours in the highest leverage way possible, the best way possible,

01:19:19.100 the way that is moving me toward whatever I'm optimizing for. Let me just try to continually think

01:19:24.580 about how to upgrade those behaviors. I also like that mindset more than the breaking the bad habits

01:19:29.840 one, because it gives me a reason to improve. Even once I have good habits, I'm continually looking

01:19:35.180 for the higher leverage action. Even if what I'm doing is already good. Okay, fine. How can I make

01:19:39.540 it great now? I tend to focus on that style rather than thinking about breaking bad ones, but they

01:19:44.940 definitely are related to answer your question. The example that we come back to is smoking because

01:19:50.340 smoking doesn't really take that much time. So it's hard to say, I'm just going to introduce a new

01:19:54.040 habit that will force smoking out. Are there other examples though of habits where you really do focus

01:20:00.280 on how to break the bad one? Yeah. So to take the smoking example, I think it's helpful to divide it

01:20:08.020 into the specific instances in which it happens. So we kind of lump smoking into a single habit,

01:20:14.460 but the truth is it actually might be a collection of like a dozen habits throughout the day. It might

01:20:18.880 be that you have a habit of smoking when you get in your car for the morning commute. And then you also

01:20:23.900 have a habit of smoking around 1030 when you take a break with your coworker. And then you also have a

01:20:28.640 habit of smoking after dinner on your porch. And all three of those are going to have their own

01:20:34.820 cue, craving, response, and reward. In a sense, you kind of have to intervene in like 12 different

01:20:39.700 places to try to come up with a solution for each one of those. So you might find that like for the

01:20:45.340 morning commute, maybe instead of having a cigarette, you come up with something else that

01:20:49.940 you can do on the morning commute that fulfills that desire. Maybe even just a cup of coffee is what

01:20:54.900 wakes you up instead of a cigarette. That may not work for the 1030 session with your friend. Maybe

01:21:00.280 there you actually need like an e-cigarette to start. Want to have the socialization of feeling

01:21:05.400 like you're smoking with a friend. You may need to like take it in different stages and break it down

01:21:10.120 degree where it's easier to have a line of attack. The environment seems to be so potent. You know,

01:21:16.900 again, David Foster Wallace writes about his commencement speech, this is water. He talks about

01:21:21.140 the ubiquity of water and also the fact that you don't even realize it's there. And that's what

01:21:25.680 makes it so profound, right? Is the heat referring to certain thoughts. But I think the same is true

01:21:30.620 of these cues. For most of us, we're not actually that aware of what it is. It can be pointed out to

01:21:35.880 you and you can say, oh yeah, come to think of it, I am a fish swimming in water. Or yeah, I come to

01:21:41.020 think of it every time I get in the car, it's the act of getting in the car and driving to work that

01:21:46.400 signals a change in where I'm going. And that's what forces me to light up. But the example of

01:21:52.820 having the cigarette at 1030 with your coworker is a very powerful one because of the connection

01:21:58.800 in the environment. I remember in my residency when people would come into the hospital with

01:22:05.460 abscesses from IV drug use. So very Baltimore, which is right at my residency, there was just

01:22:10.440 rampant IV drug use. You'd be amazed at how much that habit and that addiction could cause a person

01:22:17.160 to do something that at the surface doesn't seem that logical. Use dirty needles and needles would

01:22:22.300 break in their abscesses. And you'd be down there and you'd be sort of draining a huge baseball size

01:22:27.680 pus filled abscess that's got broken needles in it. And this person is very sick. I mean, 0.95

01:22:32.740 this is a person who's now risking their life due to this. And they would be back in a month with the

01:22:37.880 same thing in a month and a month later, the same thing over and over again. And tragically,

01:22:41.300 eventually a lot of these people would die. But I remember at some point saying to these folks,

01:22:45.020 this was the best advice I could offer, which was not very helpful, was, I don't think you can go

01:22:50.140 back to the same place you live. I think you need new friends. Now that's not a very helpful thing to

01:22:55.780 offer somebody who probably doesn't have many choices. But the point was like, how could you expect

01:23:00.760 this person to go back to the same place that they were living in the same environment with all of the

01:23:06.200 same people doing the same things and say, well, you just got to resist it. I mean, it doesn't make

01:23:10.880 sense. Presumably someone who decides they want to stop drinking alcohol really ought not go into a

01:23:16.900 bar that much anymore. Environment is like a form of gravity pulls on you and you can resist it for a

01:23:23.260 little bit, but maybe a day or week or a month. But at some point it just starts to drain on you,

01:23:29.020 sucks you back in. And to your point about going back to the environment that prompted the behavior in the

01:23:35.520 first place, I mean, this is one of the stories I share in Atomic Habits, but it was the surprise

01:23:39.600 that we saw from the Vietnam War, which is so many soldiers were getting addicted to heroin and drugs

01:23:44.440 when they were over there. And then they came back and we were like, what are we going to do with all

01:23:48.800 these addicted soldiers? And it turns out that 90% of them or more ended up being fined because they

01:23:55.080 didn't go back to the place where they got addicted. They went home to their friends and family and they

01:23:59.160 didn't have all the same signals that were prompting them to pick up the habit. And so they were able to

01:24:04.640 drop it much more easily than we thought they would. And compare that to the typical drug addict who

01:24:10.060 does the reverse. They go into rehab and that's where they leave all of their cues and influences

01:24:16.220 behind. And then once they get clean and they detox, we send them back to the same place where

01:24:21.400 they got addicted before. That is a much, much harder uphill battle. So environment, I think it's

01:24:27.820 kind of like the invisible hand that drives our behavior. As you said, it's kind of like water,

01:24:32.220 you know, a fish in water. We don't realize it, but we all have these things that we say are

01:24:36.760 important to us. Oh, I would like to lose weight or I'd like to build a business or I want to finish

01:24:40.600 a book. But then you look around the spaces where we live and work. The cues of those habits are not

01:24:47.320 a big part of the environment. We all are busy, strapped for time, minimal energy. We have kids to take

01:24:54.580 care of or parents to do chores for or friends to see. And whenever we have limited capacity or

01:25:01.520 limited time or we're low on energy or exhausted, what choice do we make? We often choose the thing

01:25:07.400 that is most obvious in the environment. We choose the thing that is the easy choice or the path of

01:25:12.460 least resistance. And so if I'm recommending a place to start for changing behavior, it's usually

01:25:18.800 either the first law or the third law. It's making it obvious and making it easy because we can talk

01:25:23.860 about making it easy, but scaling habits down obviously makes it more likely that you're

01:25:27.820 able to complete the task. And making it obvious essentially creates an environment where the good

01:25:33.480 choices are right in front of you, where they're the path of least resistance. Individually, I think

01:25:38.960 it's easy to overlook the importance of this because individually, one change to the environment

01:25:44.220 does not usually meaningfully move the needle or change your behavior. But collectively, making a

01:25:50.320 dozen or two dozen or 50 little choices to how your office is laid out and how your living room is

01:25:55.680 laid out and how your kitchen is laid out. Yeah. Now, all of a sudden you're working and thriving

01:25:59.680 in a space that is stacking the odds in your favor. That's making it more likely that you will just

01:26:05.400 choose the good thing because the healthy food is on the counter and the TV is behind a wall unit and a

01:26:10.580 cabinet where you're less likely to see it. And the remote control is inside a drawer and there's a book in

01:26:15.440 its place. And you have a couple books that are scattered around in your desk waiting for you to

01:26:19.960 pick them up and open them. You can do it with digital spaces too. When I wanted to start reading

01:26:24.880 more, I took audible for audio books and I moved it to the home screen on my phone and took all the

01:26:30.400 other apps and move them to the second screen. That's a very small thing and it doesn't guarantee

01:26:35.280 the behavior, but it's another way to stack the odds in my favor that whenever I open up my phone,

01:26:40.540 I'm reminded to listen to an audio book for a few minutes rather than browse Instagram. And the more

01:26:46.160 that you do those kinds of things, the more likely good behaviors are to arise. So one thing I want to

01:26:51.400 park for later once we get through the laws is a very specific question around the challenges that

01:26:59.620 some people face and that they don't control their environment. And again, I come back to food because

01:27:03.100 I think for most of my patients and for myself, food is such a struggle because again, it's always

01:27:09.040 around us. You have to do it. It's not a behavior you can just opt out of. And I think those of us

01:27:14.480 that have kids, not to throw our kids under the bus, but I haven't met too many people whose eating

01:27:19.060 habits get better once they have kids. If they're generally inclined to be healthy people, because

01:27:23.660 at some point you sort of start losing the battle of how much non-crap you can have in the house

01:27:29.680 due to time constraints and the other constraints, which is look, kids are going to eat things that are

01:27:35.620 probably not so bad for them, but I shouldn't be eating. Wheat thins. My kids love wheat thins.

01:27:41.540 I love wheat thins. I think the difference is they can get away with eating a lot more wheat

01:27:45.760 thins than I can. So I've lost the wheat thin battle. We have a pantry that is full of wheat

01:27:51.380 thins and I'm never, at least for the foreseeable future, going to get those wheat thins out of there.

01:27:55.440 So now every time I walk in the pantry, I'm staring down the barrel of wheat thins and I would love

01:28:00.900 to get those wheat thins in the trash. But every time I do, my wife says, understandably,

01:28:04.740 hey, if you want to be in charge of feeding the kids every meal, knock yourself out, chef. But if

01:28:10.840 you're not, let me handle food. And our kids eat well, but they're going to eat wheat thins and a

01:28:15.040 few other things that you'd want to eat. Isn't it kind of fascinating? Like you're someone that I

01:28:18.680 think most people have described as disciplined and high performing and talented and skilled.

01:28:23.140 And you like look at yourself with that and you're like, wheat thins beat me every time.

01:28:26.260 I think about myself. I was doing an interview with somebody else a couple of weeks ago,

01:28:30.260 and he was joking about how the number of cookies he can eat is either zero or 30, because if they're

01:28:36.660 there, then he's going to eat them all. And I'm exactly that way. One of the best hacks that we've

01:28:42.240 come up with is I love chocolate chip cookies and my wife will make them, but she'll make the balls 1.00

01:28:48.600 of dough and then freeze them and put them in the freezer. And at night after dinner, we'll take them

01:28:53.100 out and just take out two and put them on the pan and warm up the oven and put them in.

01:28:58.740 And it's actually a better experience because you get to eat like fresh baked, warm chocolate chip

01:29:02.920 cookies, but you'll only eat two because all the rest of them are frozen. It's just enough friction

01:29:08.500 to know that this is going to take another 15 minutes. If I want to take two more out and heat

01:29:12.360 them up, I don't actually need another cookie. Like I just wanted to eat it.

01:29:15.740 What limits you from putting five on the tray?

01:29:18.080 We just haven't gotten in the habit of doing that. So hopefully that question won't wreck my psyche.

01:29:22.700 And now we'll be doing that every night.

01:29:24.560 Is part about the accountability though, between you that probably you say, I want five, at least

01:29:28.920 she's going to say, she'd be like, come on. Yeah, for sure. It's interesting. The ways in which

01:29:33.700 there's a whole discussion we can have about habits and marriage and relationships and how

01:29:37.380 that influences things. Cause you soak up, each person soaks up a little bit of the other partner,

01:29:41.680 but we've seen it work in a very positive way for training, which is there are going to be some

01:29:46.560 days where I just like, don't feel like working out after a full day at work, but she's like, 0.90

01:29:50.680 all right, are we going to go to the gym? And then I'm like, okay, I'll change. And then other

01:29:54.800 days I'm like, okay, I'm ready. And she's like, all right. You know, and she didn't feel like it.

01:29:59.160 That's really helpful for the long-term consistency. But I've talked to other couples

01:30:03.380 who've said my nutrition habits actually got worse. Cause like one day I won't feel like cooking.

01:30:08.520 I'll be like, Hey, can we just order out? And she'll be like, okay, fine. And then the other day

01:30:12.000 she won't feel like cooking. Like, Hey, why don't we pick up something from, and you're like, okay,

01:30:15.220 fine. And so you can see how it goes in both directions. And I don't have a good way to

01:30:20.320 describe these upward and downward spirals that we often get into where the momentum,

01:30:26.560 once it's moving in that direction, you just kind of like, it becomes your default behavior

01:30:30.360 and you just sort of keep rolling with it. But there's something very powerful about that in

01:30:34.800 life that if you get on a nice trajectory and you got a good spiral working for you, then that

01:30:39.640 momentum just kind of carries you. If you start to get in a downward spiral, you really got to find a

01:30:44.800 way to just reverse course and gain a foothold, even if it's a really small thing, just to get

01:30:49.940 the momentum moving in the other direction. But anyway, there are a lot of potentials there.

01:30:54.420 And that's actually something I feel like I've also noticed with my patients and myself, which is

01:30:59.420 it seems that the people who are able to be more self-forgiving when they slip up and get back on

01:31:08.580 course have an easier time than people who approach it through a very perfectionistic

01:31:14.660 lens. And once they make a mistake, they get into the cycle of self-judgment and beating themselves

01:31:22.900 up. And I say them like it's me too, right? We all do this. And all of a sudden a blown meal

01:31:30.220 turns into, well, forget it. The day's over. I mean, I've screwed this day up, so I'm just going to eat

01:31:35.380 whatever I want. And then you wake up the next day and you probably feel like crap, both physically 0.96

01:31:39.920 and emotionally. And that reduces your drive to continue to do what you set out to do and 0.57

01:31:47.540 hit the spirals. And you make a point about that in the book, which is if you're going to miss a

01:31:51.020 workout, miss a workout, but don't miss two. Yeah. Never miss twice is the idea that I try to,

01:31:55.320 the little mantra I try to tell myself. Stuck to the diet for nine days, binge ate a pizza on the 10th

01:32:01.140 day. Well, I wish that hadn't happened, but never miss twice. So let's make sure the next meal is a

01:32:06.580 healthy one. And I think we all know this implicitly from going through life, but it's

01:32:12.300 easy to forget in the moment, which is it's rarely the first mistake that ruins you. It's like usually

01:32:17.580 the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. That's the real problem. It's like letting slipping

01:32:21.620 up become a new habit. That's the real issue. And if you can cut that off of the source, if you can

01:32:27.580 never miss twice, get to the end of the year. And those mistakes are just like a little blip on the

01:32:32.400 radar. It's really about getting back on track quickly. I think actually you see this with top

01:32:37.940 performers in many different industries. Like, you know, think about any athlete. I mean, this is

01:32:41.720 something that like Nick Saban's teams at Alabama pride themselves on the screw up a play or have a

01:32:46.820 bad drive, throw an interception for a touchdown or something. But the focus is on the very next play.

01:32:52.240 And I'm making sure that you don't let that mistake become another mistake. And the teams and the

01:32:58.340 athletes that are really good at doing that and having a short memory and getting right back on

01:33:02.380 track, they end up having really successful careers. And you can scale that down to your

01:33:07.780 own life. Gretchen Rubin actually has this, I thought it was a clever little idea, which is

01:33:11.920 divide the day into four quarters. So you've got like morning, afternoon, dinner and night

01:33:17.040 or evening and night. If you make a mistake, keep it contained to that quarter. So you don't lose the

01:33:22.820 day, you just lose the quarter. And then the next one, you get back on track. If you can keep your

01:33:27.420 failure small like that, if you can contain the damage, then I just think it's easier to get back

01:33:33.480 on track quickly and to maintain the momentum, build consistency, all the other positive benefits

01:33:37.880 that we've talked about. And to your point about judging yourself or feeling guilty or turning this

01:33:42.440 into like some kind of self berating session, playing the victim never makes it better. It doesn't make

01:33:48.020 any of it easier. I think generally in life, we all have things that happen to us. Some of them are

01:33:53.320 terrible things and you can be the victim, but I don't know that it ever benefits you to play the

01:33:59.400 victim, to accept that role. Bad things can happen to you, but that doesn't mean you have to start to

01:34:04.400 identify as someone who is worthy of them or someone who is, you know, it's inevitable for that to be

01:34:09.520 part of your story. And so the more that you can like cut the judgment out of it, cut the guilt out

01:34:15.900 of it, the story, the narrative piece, and take that away and just accept the event for what it is

01:34:21.220 and move on to the next instance, I think probably the better off you'll be.

01:34:25.600 Yeah. This is probably an area where a habit that is probably desirable for many people also becomes

01:34:30.440 a tool to help. And that's mindfulness meditation, which I think is one of the more powerful tools to

01:34:35.780 help people observe the judgment without judging it, which sounds odd to someone who hasn't practiced

01:34:42.240 that, but that becomes very powerful. Made a difference as I've kind of released the

01:34:47.640 need to be perfect. It's really a continuum. And there's a spectrum of efficacy here, which is

01:34:53.360 like on Monday, we traveled the whole day. We got back and I really wanted to work out.

01:34:58.320 I just hate ever missing a workout. But the reality is once we got home and the kids were exhausted and

01:35:04.260 my wife was tired and it just felt like sort of a schmucky thing to do to go and work out and leave 1.00

01:35:09.540 her with decompensating kids and a whole bunch of stuff that needed to be unpacked. Actually, part of

01:35:14.760 the judgment was letting go of that, letting go of the fact that it wasn't going to work out that day

01:35:18.220 and that was okay. Now you can do that on anything. I think if you can come to be flexible and say,

01:35:24.100 you're stuck in the airport with your kids, the food sucks. It is what it is today. And you're not

01:35:29.860 horrible because of it. But I think this idea of get back on the horse as quickly as possible

01:35:34.940 is really powerful. Again, anecdotally, I always bring everything back to driving a race car.

01:35:39.540 It is so rare that you make a mistake and crash in a car because of what you did at that moment and

01:35:46.260 not because of what happened earlier. If you spin at corner four, the mistake usually started at corner

01:35:53.640 two. And sometimes you don't realize it. And sometimes you do realize it, but you arrogantly

01:35:58.680 think that you don't have to make any adjustment going forward because of it. At least for me,

01:36:03.340 that's been an incredibly humbling experience with how mistakes compound.

01:36:09.620 Rapid course correction is probably a deeply applicable lesson for many areas of life.

01:36:14.720 The world is complex and situations evolve. Life is dynamic. It's not static. Your preferences also

01:36:21.060 evolve. What you optimize for or want is different today than it was 10 years ago and probably will be

01:36:26.440 different five years from now or 10 years from now. And given that many changing dynamics,

01:36:31.460 it's not possible for someone to predict the optimal course of action. And even if you could,

01:36:37.820 it is very unlikely that it will remain the optimal course of action. Given that things are going to be

01:36:42.800 changing, you're going to be off course at some point. And the ability to correct for that and to

01:36:48.860 correct for that quickly, I mean, it might be one of the all optimal life skills. The ability to

01:36:54.400 assess where you are in the moment, see what the next step is going to be, keep in mind where you

01:36:59.840 ultimately want to go. And then correct as needed is possibly the path to like living a great life.

01:37:06.580 I heard recently this, I thought it was a great little framework, which is a BZ came from Sean

01:37:12.420 Puri. He's a entrepreneur and basically said, you need to know your ABCs. A is where you are right

01:37:19.200 now. It's like the truth of the situation. The reality B is your next step. And Z is where you want

01:37:25.780 to go. Ultimately it's where you want to end up. And I think the key, this is me talking down on him.

01:37:30.520 For me, the key is working backwards. It's knowing Z first, knowing what you're optimizing for.

01:37:35.920 And then jumping back to a, and being honest about the situation. What is the truth of the situation?

01:37:41.700 What are the resources I have? The skills I have? What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses?

01:37:45.520 What's reality say? And then knowing that I want to head towards Z and knowing honestly where I am

01:37:51.640 today, what's the next step? I actually don't need to know C through Y right now. I don't need

01:37:57.080 to have the whole thing planned out perfectly, but I do need to make sure that my next step is

01:38:01.060 directionally correct. If it is, then you can just keep running that ABC process over and over again

01:38:06.560 until you finally get there. Yeah. Annie Duke talks about this in a slightly different way. And she

01:38:11.100 refers to it as backcasting. And I find it to be an incredibly powerful tool again, to be contrasted

01:38:16.960 with forecasting, right? Forecasting is I'm just going to stand here and I'm going to tell you,

01:38:20.580 I got to do B and then C and then as opposed to saying, no, this is where I am. That's the

01:38:25.840 desired outcome. Let's start working the steps backwards. What you've described is slightly

01:38:29.720 different, but I think it preserves this idea of taking stock of where you are and most importantly,

01:38:34.300 understanding where you need to be and not trying to do what I think stochastically is really hard,

01:38:39.620 but predict every step going forward. The only thing I'll add to that, which I like Annie's

01:38:44.280 framework and I think working backwards is, it's a really powerful thing, particularly if

01:38:49.020 you can not be your own bottleneck in the process. The phrase I like is work backwards from magic.

01:38:55.620 What would the magical outcome be? What would the ideal outcome be? And then let me work backwards

01:38:59.880 from that. And a lot of people have trouble with that brainstorming part of the process because they

01:39:04.320 think, well, if it's unrealistic, why would I even try? And the point is like, listen, it's way too early

01:39:09.300 for that. Most people become their own bottleneck long before reality prevents them from doing it,

01:39:14.680 which is kind of this great irony. We're like, oh, you know, why would I attempt this like super

01:39:18.700 impossible thing? And it's like, well, the world hasn't even told you it's impossible yet. You have,

01:39:22.840 I think work backwards from the magical outcome. But my key is I want to be very clear about where

01:39:28.640 I'm going, but very flexible about how I get there. I don't need it to happen. If I work backwards,

01:39:34.080 I don't need it to happen only through that chain of that potential path, because if you can only have

01:39:39.080 one way to get there, you're actually kind of brittle. You become hostage to things working exactly in that

01:39:44.280 way. But if I know where I want to get to with a very clear vision, I'm flexible on how I get there.

01:39:48.960 Well, now I can start to spring on opportunities as they arise and just take whatever the most

01:39:52.720 fruitful path seems to be. But I do think that that whole process starts with working backwards.

01:39:58.460 So it's, I think, a more fruitful way to think about where you want to go than just trying to

01:40:02.000 predict. Before we leave the first law, what advice do you offer for people if they aren't quite

01:40:08.100 clear what the cues are? Again, in the spirit of trying to even displace a habit that's maladaptive

01:40:15.920 and create new ones. Again, is this something that's just empirical or is it, I hate to use the

01:40:20.940 word, but other tricks for identifying what the cues are? I think there are exercises or strategies

01:40:25.900 you can use. So you sort of hinted at this a few minutes ago and I meant to say it, but I forgot,

01:40:31.820 which is the process of behavior change, strategically changing your behavior. We need to make a

01:40:37.900 separation here, a distinction between the types of behavior change because people change

01:40:42.660 their behavior all the time. We're always responding to the situation we're in or the

01:40:46.660 circumstance or the conversation we're having. This is like one of the great myths about behavior

01:40:50.820 change, which is behavior change is hard. Actually, it's one of the easiest things that

01:40:54.680 you do. Like your brain is designed to change your behavior to match the situation that you're

01:40:59.300 in. So you're making adjustments all the time. The question is, can you reliably change your

01:41:04.680 behavior? Can you design your behavior in a fashion that you want? And if you want to design

01:41:09.740 it, if you want to be in control of it more, I think it almost always starts with the process

01:41:13.940 of self-awareness. And that's kind of what this question is getting at. I don't even know what the

01:41:17.760 cues are. I don't even know what my habits are. So the two exercises I recommend, the first one I

01:41:22.860 call the habit scorecard, and you just go through your day and you list out every habit that you already

01:41:28.400 do and try to get as detailed as possible. So usually there's a big lump in the beginning,

01:41:32.260 like I wake up, I take a shower, I step on the scale, I brush my teeth, I go to the bathroom,

01:41:37.540 I get dressed. Like there's all this stuff that you do to start your day. And then there's things

01:41:41.580 for breakfast and starting your work day and on and on and on. And the more that you have that list,

01:41:46.880 again, the goal is not to judge yourself. It's almost like you're at the zoo looking at animals

01:41:52.420 and you're one of the animals. It's like, oh, how interesting that they would do that. You're just

01:41:55.860 trying to get a lay of the land and see how do I actually spend my time? What habits am I

01:42:00.040 actually doing? If I'm being honest about it. So that's just to understand what habits you have

01:42:04.140 to figure out what the cue is. Basically, you're just asking like five questions, who, what, when,

01:42:09.340 where, why you're essentially just trying to get a lay of what's going on. So let's say that you're

01:42:14.520 like, man, I eat a lot of candy bars, but I don't know why I do it. I don't know what the cue is.

01:42:18.620 Well, each time that you find yourself eating a candy bar, just pull up a note on your phone or have

01:42:23.960 an index card or a notebook or whatever, somewhere to record it, write down, what time is it?

01:42:28.060 Where are you at right now? What's the context? What's the environment? Who are you around?

01:42:32.280 Are you near the, do you eat these by the same kind of people? What were you doing just before this?

01:42:37.240 Was it a break from writing emails or doing something else? And the more that you start

01:42:41.560 to answer those questions about the context, the better you'll start to understand, Hey,

01:42:46.320 maybe that was the cue. And I bet if you do that exercise for whatever the particular habit is that

01:42:50.820 you're working on, just do that for, you may not even need to do it for a week, but if you do it for

01:42:54.920 five days or seven days or something, you're going to start to develop a

01:42:58.060 good sense for what it is that's prompting the behavior.

01:43:01.420 Yeah. That's a great exercise. Is there any concern that when a person does that,

01:43:05.220 the Hawthorne effect kicks in and they basically start deviating from the natural behavior because

01:43:12.040 of the observation? In other words, is the act of going through this exercise potentially

01:43:16.440 making it harder for them to transparently see what's happening?

01:43:20.100 Maybe. I'm not going to say it's not a risk. I'm sure it's a possible risk,

01:43:23.360 but I think what's more likely to happen is rather than not being able to see what's going

01:43:28.700 on, assuming you're being honest with yourself, it can be hard to honestly observe your own

01:43:33.620 behavior. You have a lot of biases and stories for why we do what we do. So assume you're doing

01:43:38.040 that to the best degree possible. I think you're probably still going to get a good idea of what

01:43:42.460 the cue is. What I think is more likely to happen if there is some influence on your behavior is you

01:43:48.180 may find yourself changing the behavior anyway, just because you're tracking it. And there are

01:43:52.940 quite a few studies that show this, like with nutrition, for example, there are some studies

01:43:56.600 about food journaling. People who just keep a food journal, they're not even trying to stick to a

01:44:01.480 certain calorie level or a certain macro profile or anything. They just are tracking what they're

01:44:06.520 eating, tend to change their eating habits and eat less just because they're tracking it. Even if

01:44:11.860 they don't have a specific program they're trying to follow. So the mere act of observing something

01:44:16.600 or measuring something often changes the behavior associated with it. You may find that to be the

01:44:21.860 case here. You're like, well, I keep right now when I have candy bars. So I'm like, maybe I'll skip

01:44:25.220 this one. I think that's probably the more likely outcome, but who knows? There could be other biases

01:44:29.780 as well. These devices here, these continuous glucose monitors, they are a remarkable tool for both

01:44:35.720 insight. When you first put them on, you're sort of learning, oh my God, like I didn't realize eating

01:44:39.560 that thing would have this response in my glucose. But once you sort of saturate the insight part of

01:44:44.660 that equation, it can be three months, six months, depending on the complexity of your life. It

01:44:49.700 becomes forever a behavioral tool. You don't want to eat a certain thing if it's going to raise your

01:44:55.800 glucose because you've at least bought into the thesis that you don't want to have your glucose skyrocket

01:45:00.560 the way it does when you eat M&Ms. So it's interesting. It becomes kind of an accountability

01:45:05.100 partner. And I find some of the most interesting and sticky devices do that. The wearables that

01:45:11.220 offer an insight that's not obvious, but is objective tend to be the things that we really

01:45:17.660 like coming back to. Whereas the ones that are kind of obvious, like how many steps you take,

01:45:21.580 that's not very sticky because we sort of have an intuitive sense for what that is. Like once they've

01:45:26.560 spent enough time walking 10,000 steps a day, they don't really need a device to tell them that

01:45:30.240 it becomes easier to do on their own. This is a side comment, but I have this like theory

01:45:35.560 about technology and innovation and that the technologies that most radically change the

01:45:40.380 world or change our behavior are all just kind of different forms of vision. You have obvious

01:45:45.020 examples like x-rays, which, you know, allow you to see the broken bone or MRIs or whatever that allow

01:45:50.640 you to see some tissue in a way that you couldn't see before. And so that gives you information that

01:45:55.160 then you can act on and make a diagnosis and, you know, make some kind of change. But the

01:45:59.760 glucose monitor is like another example. It's just like, now you can see the spike and because

01:46:03.900 you can see it, you change your behavior. Even stuff like the number of email subscribers to my

01:46:09.160 website, because my email platform tracks that and I can see how many people are signing up each day.

01:46:14.840 I make a change to the form and, you know, conversion and so on. And I do think there's some

01:46:20.120 deeper lesson there about behavior change and about what drives human behavior, which is if you can

01:46:26.440 visualize your progress in some way, maybe it's a chart on a screen, maybe it's, you know, an actual

01:46:31.820 printout, maybe it's something that you actually see looking through lenses or something. But if you

01:46:36.640 can actually visualize it, then the behavior often follows suit. And that's why even simple strategies

01:46:42.540 like a habit tracker, where you just put an x on each day, seems very rudimentary, very basic,

01:46:48.980 but it can still be meaningful because it gives you a way of visualizing your progress.

01:46:52.600 So anyway, the glucose monitor is an interesting one. Yeah. This idea of what gets measured gets

01:46:57.240 managed is a great tool. About six months ago, I started going to the water meter of our house

01:47:02.940 every Tuesday and recording it. And then I've got a little spreadsheet that says, okay, this is how

01:47:08.700 many gallons we've used this week. This is what it would project to for a monthly usage, et cetera,

01:47:13.500 et cetera. And you just can't believe how much our water usage has come down in six months

01:47:17.940 because in Texas, water is not that expensive actually compared to California, but just it

01:47:23.300 became something I was obsessed with, which is like, we're not going to waste any water.

01:47:26.460 I just don't want to waste any water. It's now become a game for me. It drives my family nuts,

01:47:30.440 but it is a game. Like we are going to have the lowest water bill ever in Austin. No one is going

01:47:37.260 to use less water than us. I'm obsessed with that spreadsheet. It's kind of like an adult version

01:47:43.060 of I spy walk in. You're like, I spy the red thing. And then all the red stuff in the room lights up.

01:47:47.400 Right now you're like, I spy water and everywhere I go, that's what I see. And

01:47:51.380 you find opportunities and you find ways to change it.

01:47:54.480 Oh yeah. When I'm giving my kids a shower, like once I'm lathering them up the water,

01:47:58.240 I got to turn the water off. And they're like, daddy, why are you turning the water off? I'm

01:48:00.880 like, because we're just putting soap on right now. You don't need the water. It drives everybody nuts.

01:48:07.020 Okay. So let's talk about the second law.

01:48:09.160 Yeah. So the second law is making it attractive. And I think there's a simple example I could give here,

01:48:13.540 which is let's imagine that you wake up tomorrow and you're like, all right, I listened to this guy

01:48:19.060 talk about habits all day today. So tomorrow's going to be the day I'm going to wake up and I'm

01:48:23.280 going to go for a run. So you set your alarm for 6am and 6am rolls around, but your bed is warm

01:48:30.280 and it's cold outside. And you're like, well, I'll just press snooze and sleep in. Like maybe I'll do

01:48:35.080 it tomorrow. But if you rewind the clock and come back to today and you text a friend and you say,

01:48:40.720 Hey, you want to meet at the park at 615 and go for a run? Well, now 6am rolls around. Your bed is

01:48:47.060 still warm and still cold outside. But if you don't get up and go for a run, you're a jerk because you 1.00

01:48:51.500 leave your friend at the park all alone. And so you've kind of simultaneously made it more attractive 0.99

01:48:57.700 to get up and go for a run and less attractive to press snooze and sleep in. Now you haven't made the

01:49:04.020 run itself any easier. That's still going to be as difficult as it was before. So the habit,

01:49:07.980 the difficulty is kind of the same, but you have changed the calculus that's going on in your mind

01:49:12.460 about like whether you should do this or not, or how attractive it seems. So there are a bunch of

01:49:17.220 examples, strategies like that and stuff I talk about in the book and that you could use to kind

01:49:21.320 of make habits seem more attractive than they otherwise are. But that's sort of what it comes

01:49:25.660 down to on a short-term basis for making habits attractive on a long-term basis. I think it's about

01:49:31.040 what we've already discussed about the social environment and being part of a tribe where your desired

01:49:35.320 behavior is the normal behavior, because those behaviors become very attractive even a year or

01:49:40.820 two or five from now, if they help signal that you're part of the tribe. Yeah. You brought up

01:49:46.080 CrossFit earlier, but I always thought that CrossFit was one of the best examples of this.

01:49:50.040 I never did CrossFit myself. You know, there's lots of criticisms of it, et cetera. But the reality of it

01:49:54.620 is it was certainly, it was and is something that really creates a community of people who have a

01:50:01.340 certain belief about who they are and what they do. For all the people who knock CrossFit, I've seen

01:50:06.760 it take a lot of very inactive people and turn them into some pretty impressive people.

01:50:11.060 Yeah. I think the social side, the community side of it is the strongest piece of the whole thing.

01:50:16.040 It's the part that's hardest for any other exercise program to replicate. That's for sure.

01:50:20.440 It does. It gets people to stick to it. I mean, it becomes, it sounds extreme to call it a form of a

01:50:24.740 religion, but it becomes kind of like that for them. I mean, the box is like their church in a lot of

01:50:29.160 ways. You know, they go six days a week instead of one day a week. There are a lot of strong

01:50:32.720 community elements there. You also see CrossFit pick up a bunch of habits they didn't even expect.

01:50:37.820 Like they thought they were going to start working out, but then six months later, they all are buying

01:50:42.780 the same brand of knee sleeves and they have a certain type of weightlifting shoe and they're

01:50:46.760 all eating paleo. And it was like, we didn't even plan on doing that stuff. I just was going to go to

01:50:51.480 a gym to work out. But all of those are behaviors that signal what it means to be part of that group.

01:50:57.600 And again, once you start to build friends in that group and start to, you know, become

01:51:01.620 ingrained in that society here in that tribe, you start to soak up some of those other behaviors as

01:51:07.080 well. It's really a great example. I guess we'll go to the third and fourth law, but I want to take

01:51:11.580 a step back and ask you where you put nudging into this. So Richard Thaler's book, Nudge, which was

01:51:17.260 probably the first book I ever read on this subject matter. I mean, it seems so obvious, which is what

01:51:22.760 makes it so interesting and insightful, right? Sometimes the most brilliant things in retrospect

01:51:27.300 seem so entirely obvious, but it was, I think reading Richard's book circa, I don't know, call

01:51:33.040 it maybe 2012, probably nearly 10 years ago, this idea of the default food environment sort of came to

01:51:38.820 me. And I use that term with our patients as the more you can control your default food environment,

01:51:44.300 the more healthy you can be. So if your default food environment sucks, you're going to be relying on

01:51:49.580 willpower a lot. And that's really, really hard. If your default food environment is one extreme end

01:51:54.980 of the spectrum, you can have a perfect default food environment. You can be the healthiest person

01:51:58.380 in the world, even if it's not enjoyable. If you were locked in a room and all you had were the best

01:52:02.940 foods to eat, you're going to end up being healthy and you're going to be kind of like, oh, if I eat one

01:52:06.700 more macadamia nut and have one more avocado and salad. But nudging obviously refers to a cue,

01:52:12.320 but it also refers to this environmental change. It doesn't seem to really capture the idea of making it

01:52:17.700 attractive or does it? I think it's more about making it obvious. I would lump it more in the

01:52:22.940 first law. Design the environment to make the good habit the obvious one, to make the good habit the

01:52:29.260 path of least resistance. Some other nudges that are very popular people talk about is like default

01:52:34.460 choices on, you know, forms. The very famous example being the organ donor study. Default opting

01:52:40.880 in every employee to a 401k and making them opt out is a nudge. I think that's also another example of

01:52:46.800 making it obvious. Or we could also say making it easy. Nothing's easier than letting it ride.

01:52:51.860 All of those are examples. To your point about default food environment, Daria Rose, who writes

01:52:57.280 a nutrition blog, she's got a great concept. I just like it. It's kind of sticky. Home court habits 0.80

01:53:02.280 and away court habits. The argument is like, try to optimize your home court habits first.

01:53:06.540 What's the environment where it's your kitchen, it's your apartment. You get to set the tone and let's

01:53:12.460 just try to prime all of that. Whatever happens at a restaurant or when you're at a hotel,

01:53:16.540 traveling or whatever. Let's don't worry about that as much right now. Let's just optimize the

01:53:20.480 home court. I like that. If you can build a home court advantage for yourself, then you get in a

01:53:25.220 good situation. You start to build some momentum. You handle the thing that you're probably going to

01:53:29.460 be doing 70% of the time or 80% of the time. And then after that, you can move on to the away court

01:53:34.800 stuff. So one of the other things you talk about is the idea of accountability. It's come up now

01:53:40.440 several times. And I think everybody would agree that the moment you have somebody else in this

01:53:45.980 thing with you, the better it gets. Is there any evidence about the type of accountability partner?

01:53:53.100 So an example you gave was your wife, great accountability partner for you guys to work

01:53:56.960 out. Would that be more or less effective than if you were matched with a person who you didn't know,

01:54:04.880 but who had similar aspirations where you'd be less comfortable and perhaps more inclined to hold

01:54:12.740 yourself to a higher standard? Again, it kind of comes back to this idea of how we're wired to be

01:54:18.580 seeking the approval of others and all those sorts of other things. Is there any research to support

01:54:22.700 this idea? I don't know of any studies that distinguish clearly between those two. It's quite

01:54:28.560 possible there are plenty out there. I just may not know of them. But I can see it working well on both

01:54:33.420 sides and I also see complexities on both sides. So a lot of the time when people talk about

01:54:38.760 accountability partners, they join a Facebook group or they join a course or a program or something and

01:54:43.840 they get matched up the way that you described. But I can actually see that form of accountability

01:54:49.040 kind of falling apart fairly quickly for a simple reason, which is it's a stranger and you don't really

01:54:54.900 bear much cost for them thinking you did a bad job or you may not really value or care that much

01:55:01.340 about their opinion. Compare that to the example I gave earlier, which is you walk outside and your

01:55:07.760 neighbor sees that your lawn is very sloppy and you haven't mowed the grass in three weeks.

01:55:12.020 That actually you may care pretty deeply about because you don't want to be judged by the other

01:55:15.920 people in the neighborhood and you don't want to have friction with your neighbor and so on.

01:55:19.880 And so there's much more of a cost there. And that form of accountability is a lot stronger

01:55:24.380 because there's some reason why you really want to fall through on it. Now you could say that that

01:55:30.560 same thing is true for, you know, for example, a marriage or relationship. I don't want to let my

01:55:35.200 partner down. I don't want them to think poorly of me and so on. But you have to remember in that

01:55:40.860 particular case, you're so close that there are actually a lot of additional complexities there.

01:55:46.360 Like you want to be fairly forgiving of your partner because you're living with them all the

01:55:50.620 time. Or even if it's not someone you're married to, say it's your brother or your parents or

01:55:55.720 whoever. There's just a lot going on in those relationships. And so is the other person really

01:56:01.240 going to become like an enemy just over you skipping your workout routine on Tuesday? Because you guys

01:56:08.180 got to get dinner together on Wednesday night and you have to babysit their kids over the weekend. And

01:56:12.880 there's a lot of other stuff that's involved there. And so in those cases, I think the relationships are

01:56:19.260 so tight or so complex that that person may not actually want to be a strict accountability partner

01:56:25.400 because of the other costs may need to bear. You're kind of in this weird situation where

01:56:29.900 you don't want there to be other things on the line that would influence their ability to hold you

01:56:35.500 accountable. But you do actually want to care about their opinion and to bear some cost if you don't

01:56:41.760 follow through. Perhaps this is the reason why having like a coach is a good example, because

01:56:47.380 that's somebody that presumably you want to do a good job because you're going to see them

01:56:51.160 repeatedly. Even if it's not as dicey as the neighbor situation where like you do bear some

01:56:56.880 social cost for it, you probably bear a financial cost because you may be paying your nutrition

01:57:01.800 coats $500 or $1,000 or whatever. And the more that there's some kind of painful cost associated with

01:57:09.300 it, probably the more that you're going to be willing to follow through on that accountability.

01:57:13.340 And speaking of a coach, just more broadly, how does a coach or how did the best coaches,

01:57:19.840 if you have insight into this, thread the needle of creating accountability,

01:57:24.900 but also creating encouragement when you fall short?

01:57:27.980 Boy, that's a big question. I'm not a coach. I've been fortunate to have some good ones. And I've also

01:57:34.260 had a bunch of mediocre ones too. And thinking about the difference between them, we could have a whole

01:57:39.580 conversation about coaching and about the art of that because there is a really fine balance there.

01:57:44.980 And I think there also is a big difference in the, I'm going to use athlete, but of course you can

01:57:51.000 have a coach for many things, but there's a big difference also in the intensity that the athlete

01:57:55.720 might have. You can imagine I was into Olympic weightlifting for a time and it was kind of the

01:58:00.700 main way I was training. I had the fortune of training with a really great team. I was very average,

01:58:05.340 but Holly Mangold was on that team and she competed at the Olympic games in London in 2012. 0.94

01:58:10.780 Just watching the interactions between the coaches and her and what was required for her to make it

01:58:16.240 to the Olympics was interesting to see. There is every element of a tight relationship there. I mean,

01:58:22.020 there's tough love and there's actual love. And there are some days where you have to be really

01:58:26.540 harsh and some days where you have to be really soft. And there's all the dynamics of the athlete's

01:58:32.140 internal mindset. There are days when you go out and you feel like you're a world killer and like

01:58:37.340 nobody can touch you. And then there are other days where you just feel completely broken. And

01:58:41.540 you're like, can I keep this training up for another six months? The more intense the objective

01:58:46.300 is that you're trying to achieve. I think the more detailed and balanced and nuanced all of that

01:58:51.000 becomes. And then you have just your standard CrossFit coach who's coaching a 35 year old dad of two

01:58:56.140 who just wants to get in better shape. And that I think may be totally different relationship.

01:59:00.680 I don't know that I have a good answer there, but I do think it's a really important thing.

01:59:04.600 Great coaches are incredibly valuable. They're rare by definition. That's why they're great.

01:59:10.000 It's probably much more complicated than a lot of us realize.

01:59:13.120 So you said rule number one and rule number three were probably the most important. Rule number three

01:59:17.240 is now make it easy. Yeah. So if I could only recommend one thing, if you forced me to say,

01:59:23.280 hey, where's the one place I would start? I would say, start with this, start with me.

01:59:26.480 Do you hate being asked that question, by the way? If you could just do one thing.

01:59:30.860 You know how it is. You know, like if somebody said, what was the one thing I would do to get

01:59:33.480 healthy? You'd be like, okay, come on. This is like a very big picture. There's a lot of stuff

01:59:36.720 here. Same story here. I do think this is a good place to start though. And so if I had to pick,

01:59:41.760 I would say follow the two minute rule, which says take whatever habit you're trying to build

01:59:46.160 and scale it down to something that takes two minutes or less to do. So read 30 books a year

01:59:51.700 becomes read one page or do yoga four days a week becomes take out my yoga mat. And sometimes people

01:59:58.000 hate that because they're like, okay, buddy, I know I'm not actually just trying to take my yoga

02:00:02.500 mat out. I know I'm actually trying to do the workout. So if this is some kind of mental trick

02:00:06.720 and I know it's a trick, then like, why would I fall for it? Basically. And I get where people

02:00:10.720 are coming from, but I have this reader, his name's Mitch. And I mentioned him in Atomic Habits.

02:00:15.620 He lost a ton of weight. Another guy, I think he lost definitely over 80 pounds. I think it was

02:00:19.260 probably over a hundred kept it off for a long time. He had this interesting rule for himself

02:00:23.860 though. When he went to the gym for the first six weeks, they started working out. He wasn't allowed

02:00:28.920 to stay for longer than five minutes. So he'd get in the car, drive to the gym, get out, do half an

02:00:34.120 exercise, get back in the car, drive home. And it sounds ridiculous. It sounds silly. You're like, 0.95

02:00:38.980 obviously this is not going to get the guy the results that he wants. But if you take a step back,

02:00:44.200 what you realize is that he was mastering the art of showing up. He was becoming the type of person

02:00:49.040 that went to the gym four days a week, even if it was only for five minutes.

02:00:53.800 And I think this is like a deep truth about habits, something that we often overlook, which is a

02:00:59.520 habit must be established before it can be improved. It has to become the standard in your life before

02:01:04.600 you can optimize and scale it up into something more. If you want, you can come up with a better

02:01:09.480 theory. Like you could come up with a perfect plan, but unless you're acting on it, it doesn't do you

02:01:14.780 any good. It's just a really good idea for whatever reason we get like really all or nothing about our

02:01:20.580 habits. We tend to have this tendency to be like, well, if I can't do the full marathon training

02:01:24.900 program, then why go for a run at all? Or if I can't follow through on the perfect lean startup

02:01:29.800 business framework, then like why bother starting a company? The two minute rule kind of helps you get

02:01:34.420 over that tendency of perfectionism and just start to master the art of showing up, find a small way

02:01:39.760 to establish the habit, make it part of your new normal. And then you can gain a little foothold

02:01:44.840 and start to scale up and expand from there. There's that great quote from Ed Lattimore, where

02:01:49.360 he says the heaviest weight at the gym is the front door. That's true for a lot of things in life.

02:01:53.900 The hardest part is getting started. So let's master that and make it part of your lifestyle.

02:01:58.140 And then once you're the kind of person who's showing up consistently, we have all kinds of

02:02:01.840 options for how we can improve and optimize and so on. I think meditation is another great place where

02:02:07.500 that two minute rule really helps. I think it can be really daunting the first time you decide

02:02:12.700 for the first time, let's say you buy the idea that, Hey, you know what? There's probably real

02:02:16.600 value in this. I'd be better served to go on a silent retreat for seven days or meditate 40 minutes

02:02:21.680 every day. It's like, that's a real big step for someone who's never done it. How about two minutes

02:02:26.240 every single day you meditate and maybe in a few weeks it's three minutes a day, but yeah, you have to

02:02:32.840 sort of lay down that track to say, Hey, I'm a person who meditates and B this is the actual

02:02:38.140 muscle memory of what it looks like to sit down. It's also surprising how few people actually have

02:02:43.640 two minutes in their day where they stop and do nothing except breathe. That alone would deliver

02:02:48.600 more value than you might expect. And there are a whole host of other behaviors that go along with

02:02:53.620 this. You think meditating for two minutes sounds very small, but if you start to back out of it,

02:02:59.380 you realize you got to pick a space. Where is it going to happen? What time of day is it going to

02:03:03.600 occur? Is this something that you're going to do before work or after work? Do you do it on your

02:03:07.520 lunch break? Try to do it with somebody to, so you have a little bit of social accountability or is

02:03:12.040 this just like a private thing that you're going to do in the corner? Do you need a pillow to sit on

02:03:15.820 or are you fine to sit on the floor? Like what's your flexibility? Like, are you going to get

02:03:19.480 interrupted by your kids? If you do this at 7am, it might be nice to get it done in the morning,

02:03:23.320 but is that when you're getting them ready for school and getting them dressed? A lot of little

02:03:27.660 questions like that, that people don't think about. And so finding a very small version of

02:03:32.660 the habit allows you to get all of that other stuff kind of handled, figure out the logistics

02:03:37.400 of it and just to do it for a minute or two. And then once you get all that stuff handled and you

02:03:42.700 don't have to decide anymore, you have a little bit more mental capacity and energy to actually

02:03:47.420 focus into, okay, let me scale this up a bit and do it maybe in the way that I was hoping I would.

02:03:51.700 So how do you make them satisfying? Because that's the fourth law.

02:03:56.280 Yeah. So this is the final piece. It's really about just making a habit that's pleasurable

02:04:00.100 enough that you want to return to it, giving you some reason, some emotional signal that,

02:04:04.000 hey, this is worth it. And there are a bunch of different ways you can do this. Some of them

02:04:08.180 are short-term, some of them are long-term. The short-term stuff is mostly about reinforcement.

02:04:13.560 So classic examples are things like, oh, you can reward yourself with a bubble bath or with ice cream

02:04:19.200 or buying a, you know, something that you wanted or whatever. I think the key with those short-term

02:04:24.640 reinforcements is you want to make sure that the reinforcement also aligns with the long-term

02:04:31.580 identity that you're trying to build. Right. Ice cream wouldn't be a great reward for getting in

02:04:36.780 better shape. You go to the gym and you do a workout and then you eat a bowl of ice cream. It's like,

02:04:40.320 okay, you're casting votes for two different identities. Or let's say that you're trying to get

02:04:44.500 your finances in order. And so you're like, okay, I want to budget consistently and save money for

02:04:48.740 retirement. Well, if you reward yourself with that, buying a leather jacket, then it's kind of like,

02:04:53.520 okay, on the one hand, you're trying to be a saver. On the other hand, you're being a spender.

02:04:57.080 So I like to pick things that we feel like are aligned. So like in the fitness example,

02:05:01.600 you could say, well, if I don't miss any workouts this week, then I'm going to reward myself with a

02:05:05.760 bubble bath and kind of like an hour alone of peace and quiet on the weekend. And that's like a vote

02:05:10.520 for taking care of your body. That seems pretty aligned. Or if I save consistently for retirement

02:05:16.200 this month and I make a contribution each week, then at the end of the month, I'm going to reward

02:05:20.200 myself with a hike in the woods. And that's like another example of a lifestyle of freedom and of

02:05:26.080 controlling your time. So anything that's aligned or reinforces that story you're trying to build,

02:05:31.500 I think that can make a great immediate reinforcement. In the long run, the way to feel rewarded,

02:05:36.960 the kind of ideal form of making it satisfying is when the behavior starts to feel like it reinforces

02:05:43.800 your desired identity. So if you're the kind of person who feels like, yeah, I'm the type of

02:05:48.180 person who doesn't miss workouts, then in the middle of doing a set of squats, you can feel

02:05:53.020 satisfied because you're being the kind of person you want to be. And so this comes back to kind of

02:05:57.680 the point you made a little bit ago about, I just don't want to miss a workout. Like I kind of feel

02:06:01.860 off. I feel like I'm not being myself if I miss. And so just getting the reps in that alone is

02:06:07.260 satisfying in the moment. And that's sort of the ultimate version of making it satisfying because you

02:06:12.200 don't even need to wait for the reward. It's just happening as you're in the middle of performing

02:06:15.820 the behavior. Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. Those four laws

02:06:21.980 and the various ways to intervene and do that increase the odds that you're going to fall through

02:06:26.200 on a good habit. Let's take a step back from all of this. When someone picks up your book, presumably

02:06:31.720 there's a selection bias that exists, which is this is a person who either through luck or through

02:06:39.440 some recommendation or friend or whatever has made a decision that they at least want to examine the

02:06:44.700 habits in their lives and or potentially change them. What do we know or what can we extract from

02:06:49.480 this about a scenario that's different, which is I'll use my example. You have a patient who you're

02:06:57.060 trying to help and helping that patient requires some intervention. They're going to have to make a

02:07:03.180 change. Now that change can be at one level, really simple. I think the simplest change medicine

02:07:08.060 has to offer is take a pill. There's a time and a place for pills. I think it's a bit silly when

02:07:12.340 people assume that everything modern medicine has to offer is bad. Pills are bad. Obviously,

02:07:16.920 that's not the case. Taking your medicine for your blood pressure, your cholesterol, these things,

02:07:20.880 if it's warranted, that's a really important thing to do. And we also know, by the way, that

02:07:24.100 even something as quote unquote simple as taking your medicine is actually really hard for a lot of

02:07:28.020 people. Most people are, I think studies demonstrate, you know, sort of in the neighborhood of 60 to 70%

02:07:32.380 compliant with something as simple as take a pill. But it only gets harder from there.

02:07:37.200 Getting someone who's not sleeping well to sleep well. That's a real big set of behavior changes.

02:07:42.860 Getting someone who's not eating well to eat well. Getting someone who's not exercising to exercise.

02:07:47.380 Getting someone who's not taking care of their mental health to take care of their mental health.

02:07:50.540 All of these things require enormous change. If a person says on the surface, yes, I want to be

02:07:57.240 better. I accept that I want this outcome of being healthier, but they haven't specifically

02:08:04.780 had the need or desire to change the way they eat or exercise or sleep or whatever. It adds a layer of

02:08:12.480 challenge or friction to this process. What advice would you offer to me in a situation like that

02:08:19.000 for trying to implement your insights into that scenario to a person who hasn't fully selected into

02:08:26.260 wanting to change habits?

02:08:28.280 The point about people self-selecting by picking up the book is interesting. Sometimes it's like

02:08:33.320 you're sort of only helping the people who already want to be helped in that sense. It's interesting

02:08:38.900 to think that most of the time, the people who most need to read the book are not the people who pick

02:08:44.920 it up to read it. The people who read about habits are usually the ones who have fairly decent habits

02:08:49.160 and are pretty interested in it. The people who need it the most, they've never read a book on habits

02:08:52.640 and they don't want to read it. They're not interested. Something interesting about that. But I think

02:08:56.700 the points you bring up are very true and challenging. Changing your own behavior is hard

02:09:02.680 enough. Changing other people's behavior is like a whole nother level of difficulty, a whole nother

02:09:06.880 order of magnitude of difficulty. I'll offer maybe three ideas that could apply. The first one, and we've

02:09:13.600 already talked about this in various ways, but I do think you have to make it really small. So you said

02:09:18.180 taking a pill is the smallest version, but it doesn't always have to be that. It could be, you know,

02:09:21.980 if you're trying to get them to exercise, it could literally be doing one pushup, walking around the

02:09:27.160 block one time or something. And this is that version of like, can I just go to the gym for five

02:09:31.720 minutes sort of thing? Let's just scale it down and make it super simple. Along with that is very hard

02:09:37.640 for it to be simple if people are being pulled in multiple directions. And so I think if you're giving

02:09:42.080 people a plan that has five things on there for them to do, can we eliminate four of those for now?

02:09:47.900 Stay at phase two. And can we just do one right now? Let's take one thing and scale it down and

02:09:53.560 stay focused and just try to get a little bit of momentum going on that. And then once we've

02:09:58.900 established that and started to gain a foothold there and get a little bit more consistency with

02:10:02.920 that one thing, we can take that momentum and transfer it into the next one. So yeah, ideally,

02:10:09.340 probably a lot of patients will be doing these five things or these 15 things, but it doesn't mean

02:10:13.820 you need to do all of them right now. Let's pick one and stay focused. So that's the first

02:10:18.060 thing is try to keep it as simple as possible. Pretty obvious answer, but I still think a useful

02:10:22.380 one. The second thing, again, fairly obvious, and we've talked about it a bit, but still I think

02:10:27.700 useful is the environment design piece. Even the laziest person, even the person who has zero

02:10:34.260 interest naturally in these topics is a product of the environment that they're in. Imagine this lab

02:10:39.940 experiment where you're locked in a room that only has healthy food options. Even the laziest person

02:10:45.240 is going to eat healthy there. They have no other choice. And that doesn't mean that they need to

02:10:50.160 change everything in their home so that it's that control lab experiment feel. But look, there's a lot

02:10:56.360 of low hanging fruit that can be done here that you don't actually need someone. And this I think is

02:11:01.920 one of the reasons why I like environment changes. You don't actually need someone to be motivated

02:11:06.580 every day to do this. You really just need them to be motivated for like one afternoon so that they

02:11:12.380 change the environment a bit. And that can actually serve them. In some cases, it can serve them for

02:11:17.040 months, but in most cases, even food related cases, it could serve them for the next three days or five

02:11:22.480 days or seven days just by getting junk food out of the house that serves them for the next couple

02:11:26.800 days. You only need little pockets of motivation. And if you can direct that pocket of motivation

02:11:32.660 toward a high leverage action, like redesigning the environment, then it can continue to serve

02:11:38.300 even a lazy person for a good chunk of time. So that's probably the second same thing. So make it

02:11:43.480 small, optimize the environment. And then the third thing, and this is maybe more of like a coaching

02:11:48.620 thing as someone who deals with patients or has clients or whatever. The general strategy is easy to

02:11:55.900 say, but very hard to follow, which is praise the good, ignore the bad. It goes against the grain of

02:12:01.240 what we want to do because they're like, you're telling me, I just want to ignore the mistakes

02:12:05.740 that they're making. And certainly there's a place for rectifying mistakes. And I don't mean that every

02:12:10.640 problem should just go unresolved, but especially early on, the thing that you really want to build

02:12:16.040 is momentum and you want to reinforce the good behaviors. And as we talked about a good plant

02:12:21.940 crowding out another, a way to encourage that is by praising the good and ignoring the bad.

02:12:26.860 There was a hilarious op-ed that was written. I think it was in the New York times,

02:12:31.120 this wife who her husband would never throw his dirty clothes in the laundry hamper. 1.00

02:12:35.940 And it was driving her nuts. Occasionally he would do it, but it was like pulling teeth all

02:12:40.540 the time to get him to do this consistently. She tried nagging him. She tried annoying it,

02:12:44.580 you know, whatever, just all kinds of different, put the laundry hamper in a different place.

02:12:47.620 Don't even have it in the closet, just have it out on the floor in the bedroom. And he still

02:12:50.660 wouldn't do it. Sometimes he'd throw the clothes next to the hamper. She's like, you're already

02:12:53.840 throwing it over there. Just put it in. Eventually what she settled on doing was that every time that

02:12:59.140 he happened to put it in the hamper, she would make a huge deal about it. She'd run over, give 0.99

02:13:03.320 him a kiss, give him a hug, say, thank you. Be like, Oh, you're making my life so much easier.

02:13:07.200 Thank you so much. Over the course of about a year, she effectively trained him to always put the

02:13:12.960 clothes in the hamper because every time that happened, something good happened. He got praised.

02:13:17.220 It felt good. Almost like training a dog in a sense, which is all kinds of organisms, dogs and

02:13:24.400 humans love feeling praised. We like feeling good. We like being rewarded. And so if you praise the good

02:13:30.140 actions and ignore the bad actions, it's again, almost like a form of gravity. People naturally

02:13:35.360 gravitate toward the things that they get rewarded for the things they get praised for. And you'd be

02:13:40.640 surprised how often people don't do something like this, or in fact, do the opposite. You can imagine

02:13:46.860 the quiet kid in the household who comes down for dinner with the rest of the family. And it's like,

02:13:51.440 Oh, look who showed up. They decide to share something about their day. And it's like, Oh,

02:13:55.660 a fact about your life. And you can imagine a parent or somebody saying something sarcastic like

02:14:00.600 that. And all of a sudden you're punishing the very behavior that you wanted to see. So praise the

02:14:05.380 good, ignore the bad. I think it applies in a lot of situations and can be more powerful than you

02:14:10.120 realized. The tricky part is it requires a lot of patience. You got to do it for six months or a year

02:14:16.340 or three years. It's hard to stick with that in the long run. Last example of this is a weightlifting

02:14:21.600 one. I was at the gym on a Friday night one time, and I was there with a friend and we were doing a

02:14:27.080 quick workout. It's probably like 20, 25 minutes. We got done and we're putting our shoes on. And

02:14:32.720 this guy who's just kind of a jerk went over and was talking to her. It was like quick workout for a 1.00

02:14:37.760 Friday night. She just kind of moved on, but that's like exactly the opposite of the type of feedback you

02:14:43.420 want to be getting. Especially if you're someone who's like new coming into the gym or feeling kind

02:14:47.660 of uncomfortable there. What people should be saying is, oh, it's great that you got in here,

02:14:51.520 even though it's the weekend. And a little cutting comment like that is all that people need to not

02:14:57.400 show up again the next day. The more that you can be lavish with praise is maybe stating it even too

02:15:03.900 strongly, but it doesn't really cost you very much to be kind. And you may not even remember it,

02:15:09.740 but it's the kind of thing that might be enough to get that person to show up again the next time.

02:15:13.420 So in the long run, praising the good and ignoring the bad can count for a lot.

02:15:17.440 So James, you're working on another book, right?

02:15:19.360 I am. Yeah. And working is the correct term. Currently kind of slogging and battling against

02:15:24.440 the manuscript. I seem to find whatever way requires the most suffering to write books.

02:15:30.440 Atomic Habits, the first draft was like 720 pages. And then I cut it down to 250 eventually,

02:15:36.220 which for the finished version, this manuscript is like 600 and something right now. So I'm in the

02:15:41.120 trimming phase. What's this book about? It's a book about strategy and choices and decision-making

02:15:48.340 and how we direct our attention. I'm still kind of finding it and discovering it in a lot of ways,

02:15:52.960 but one question that you could have after finishing Atomic Habits is, okay, that's great.

02:15:58.540 I know how to build better habits, but which habits should I be focusing on? What's the high

02:16:02.920 leverage action? How do I figure out where to direct my energy and attention? And so those are a lot

02:16:07.640 of the questions that I'm exploring now. Well, I can't wait to have you back to discuss that after

02:16:11.960 I read it twice, which I will do, I'm sure. Thanks very much, James. This has been great to

02:16:17.460 sit down with you. And this is almost like reading the book a third time. And I picked up a lot of

02:16:21.400 things that I hope readers or listeners have also, and I look forward to implementing it both

02:16:25.520 personally and professionally. That's great. Thanks, Peter. Appreciate the opportunity.

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The Peter Attia Drive - December 30, 2024

Building & Changing Habits ｜ James Clear (#183 rebroadcast)

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