1 The Surprising Power of Atomic Habits
Tiny changes compound. What matters most is the direction you repeat over time.
Choose one habit and shrink it to the smallest version you can repeat today.
The amazing power of atomic habits.
One day in 2003, the fate of the British Cycling changed - this association, which runs the British professional cycling, hired Dave Brailsford as a national team coach. At that time, the British professional cycling had endured about 100 years of mediocrity. Since 1908, British cyclists have only won one Olympic gold medal, while Britain has performed worse in the biggest race in the cycling world - one hundred and ten years before none of them won the race.
In fact, the poor performance of British bikers has led to the refusal of a European listing car manufacturer to sell goods to the British team, lest other professionals see that the British use the equipment on the plate, which could have a negative impact on sales.
Blairsford was hired to place the British Cycling on a new track. The biggest difference with the previous coaches is that Blairsford's extraordinary investment in what he calls "the sum of micro-growth" -- the essence of this philosophy is to find a little room for improvement in everything you do. “The whole idea of the principle is that if all the directions on cycling are broken up and each one of them improves by one per cent, all together will grow considerably.”.
Blairsford and his team of coaches made minor adjustments at the beginning, which may be within your mind: redesigning the bike cushions to make them more comfortable; placing alcohol on the tires to increase the grip; requiring the athletes to wear electric tights to keep their muscles at the cravingd temperature while riding; using biorespondent sensors to monitor each player ' s response to different trainings; and testing different fabrics in windholes to make the outdoor players change their interior suits, which are lighter and more in line with air mechanics.
However, they did not stop there. Blairsford and his team continue to seek a one-per-cent improvement where they are neglected and unexpectedly: to test different massage oils and see which can restore muscles as quickly as possible; to hire a surgeon to teach athletes how to wash their hands in order to reduce the likelihood of cold; to identify pillows and mattresses for each player that will bring the best quality of sleep; and even to paint the inner walls of logistics trucks in white, so as to detect the small dust that is often seen to be lost, so that it does not affect the competition cars that are precisely adapted to school.
When hundreds of these modest improvements accumulate, the results come faster than everyone expected.
Just five years after Blairsford took over, the British bicycle team took 60 percent of the gold medals and was in shock at the Beijing Olympic Games in 2008. Four years later, when the olympiad moved to London, they rose again to nine olympic records and seven world records.
In the same year, Bradley Wilkins became the first British player in history to win the Ring-of-Law cycle; the next year, when his teammate Chris Frome won, Wilkins won the 2015, 2016 and 2017 games, bringing the British team to the top five times in six years.
In the decade 2007-2017, British bikers won a total of one hundred and seventy-eight world champions, sixty-six Olympic and Paralympic medals, and five round-of-air bicycles. It is widely recognized as one of the most successful manifestations in the history of cycling.
How did this happen? At first glance, it seems that only a few minor changes can be made, and how can a group of otherwise ordinary athletes become world champions? How can small improvements accumulate such remarkable results? How can you replicate this in your own life?
The compound effect makes small habits very different.
It is easy to overestimate the importance of a decisive moment and to underestimate the value of making small improvements every day. We have often convinced ourselves that great success must come from great action. Whether we lose weight, start a business, write a book, win a crown, or achieve any other goal, we are putting pressure on ourselves to make dramatic progress, which is encouraging.
By contrast, the improvement of 1 per cent is not particularly noteworthy — sometimes not at all — but may be much more significant, especially in the long run. Over time, the changes that small improvements can bring are remarkable. This is the case: if you make one per cent progress every day, one year, you're gonna make thirty-seven times more progress in the end; on the contrary, if you make one per cent decline every day, one year, you're gonna weaken to zero. The initial small victories or minor regressions can accumulate into great differences.
The habit of “self-improvement” is a return to the problem. As money doubles through the compound, the effect of custom doubles when you repeat it. For a single day, the effects of habits seem to be small, but they can have a very significant impact for months and even years. It is only two years, five years, or ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad habits become so obvious.
It may not be easy to understand this concept in everyday life. We tend to downplay small changes because they do not seem to be important at the moment. You're still not a millionaire, you're still in a gym for three days, you're still in a bad shape, and you haven't learned that language for an hour to study French tonight. We made some changes, but the results seemed to have come too fast, so we returned to our previous practice.
Unfortunately, the slow pace of change has also allowed vices to take root. Eating a meal of junk food today does not move too many points on the weight count; tonight they will not blame you for neglecting their families because of overtime; drag the day to the next day and usually have time to finish. Single decisions can easily be ignored.
However, when we repeat, day after day, one per cent of mistakes, copying inappropriate decisions and minor errors, and rationalizing minor pretexts, these small choices become as harmful as compound gains. One percent retreat here, one percent retreat there, and ultimately the problem is the accumulation of many of these faults.
The effects of the change in habits are similar to the results of a number of flights in the rerouting zone. Assuming you're flying from Los Angeles to New York, if the pilot takes off from Los Angeles International Airport and sails three or five degrees south, the plane will not arrive in New York, but will land in Washington, D.C. Such a slight change – a few feet away from the head – was almost undetectable at the time of take-off, but the final landing was hundreds of miles away after a widening distance across the United States.
Likewise, a slight change in daily habits can lead your life to very different destinations. Making a good one-percent or a bad one doesn't seem to be bad at the moment, but by diffusing through life, it will determine who you are or what you can be. Success is made by daily habits, not by a unique transformation.
What matters, however, is not how successful or how unsuccessful you are now, but whether your habits put you on the road to success. You should focus more on the track than on what is currently available. If you're a millionaire, but you can't afford it every month, you're on a bad track, so long as you don't change your habits about spending money, and if you're poor, but you try to save a little money every month, then you're on the road to financial freedom, even if you move faster than you want.
The result is a lag indicator of habits: your property is a lag indicator of financial habits, your weight is a lag indicator of eating habits, your knowledge is a lag indicator of learning habits, and your stuff is a lag indicator of organizing habits. Repeat what you get.
If you want to predict the course of your life, just track the curve of small harvests or small losses, and then see what you can do with a 10- or 20-year daily choice. Do you make more money every month than you spend? Do you go to gym every week? Do you learn new things every day by reading? These little battles will determine what you look like.
Time widens the gap between success and failure and multiplys what you feed it. Get used to being your ally, get used to being your ally.
The habit is a double-edged blade. It's important to know the details. You have to know how habits work and how to design them according to your needs in order to avoid the dangerous side of this blade.
Why is it so difficult to build lasting habits?
Imagine the ice on your desk. It's cold in the room. You're so white. It's 25 degrees Fahrenheit, then the room starts warming very slowly.
Twenty-six degrees.
Twenty-seven degrees.
Twenty-eight degrees.
The ice is still on your desk.
Twenty-nine degrees.
Thirty degrees.
Thirty.
Like, nothing happened.
Then, 32 degrees. The ice began to melt. Once different, there was no apparent difference from previous warming, but significant changes were initiated.
The moment of breakthrough often comes from many previous acts. Those behaviours allow potential to accumulate over time until they are sufficient to release significant changes. Such a pattern can be seen everywhere: cancer is not detectable for 80 per cent of the time, but takes over the whole body within a few months; bamboo is almost invisible during the first five years of its life, with extensive roots derived from the ground, and then swells to 90 feet within six weeks.
Similarly, habits tend to appear to have little effect before you cross a critical threshold and unlock the performance of new levels. The so-called Valley of Disappointment, which you expect to see linear progress, often occurs in the early or medium term of any pursuit, but the results of previous days, weeks and even months have been rather modest and frustrating. You don't think there can be any progress in this way, yet this is the hallmark of any process of compounding: Strong results are always too late.
The difficulty of establishing lasting habits is one of the core factors. We made a few minor changes and decided to give up without seeing tangible results. You're like, "How come my body hasn't changed since I run every day for a month?" Once such ideas emerge, good habits can easily be ignored. However, to make a meaningful difference, you must maintain a habit long enough to break this period of stagnation, which I call “the period of stagnation of latent force”.
If you find it difficult to develop a good habit or to stop a bad habit, it's not because you lose the ability to improve, but often because you haven't crossed the stagnating period. It's like complaining that the ice has not melted from 25 degrees Fahrenheit to 30 degrees. Your work is not wasted, it's just stored. All operations will take place at 32 degrees Fahrenheit.
When you finally get past the stagnation of latent power, you'll say it was an overnight success. The world saw only the most dramatic events, but you knew that it was what you had done a long time ago, when you felt there was no progress, that made it possible to leap forward today.
This is the geological pressure of the human version. The two plates rubbed each other for millions of years, and the tension accumulates; then, one day, they rubbed again, just like any friction in millions of years, but this time, the tension snapped and the earthquake erupted. Change can take years to gestation - then happen in a moment.
Precision requires patience. One of the most successful teams in the history of the United States job basket, the San Antonio Horses, put the words of the social reformer, Jacob Reese, in the player's lounge: “When every effort seems futile, I will go to the stoners to hit the stone. There was probably a hundred knocks, and there was not even a crack on the stone, but it broke in half at the moment. Then I learned that it was not the last one that split the stone in half, but the last one that hit it before.”.
All the big things come from a small beginning. Every customary seed is a small decision, but when that decision is repeated, a habit takes shape and becomes stronger. The roots are stabilized and the branches grow. The task of breaking the vices is like pulling the roots of a strong oak tree inside of us and growing it into a habit, like daily dripping of a precious flower.
What, however, determines whether we can maintain a habit long enough to survive a period of stagnation? Some people are unaware of unwanted vices, while others are able to enjoy the compounding effects of good habits.
Forget the target. Just focus on the system.
The dominant view is that the best way to get what you want in life – to get a better look, to build a successful career, to relax and spend more time with friends and their families – is to set realistic and achievable goals.
Over the years, I have also faced habits in such a way that each custom is a goal to be achieved. I set a goal for what I'm going to achieve in school, how much I'm going to weigh in gyms, how much I'm going to make in business, and then I'm going to succeed in a few things, but I'm not going to. At the end of the day, I found that the results had little to do with the goals I set, but were linked to the systems I followed.
How is the system different from the goal? What I began to recognize was Scott Adams, the cartoonist who created Dibert: the goal is what you want to achieve, and the system is the process by which you get to those results.
If you were a coach, your goal might be to win, and your system would be the way you recruit players, manage assistant coaches and lead teams.
If you're an entrepreneur, your goal may be to create a multi-million-dollar business, and your system will be the way you test product concepts, hire staff and conduct marketing activities.
If you're a musician, your goal may be to play a new song, and your system is the frequency of your practice, the way you break up and deal with difficult parts, and the attitude of the mentors.
The interesting question arises: can it succeed if the goal is completely ignored and only focused on the system? Take the example of basketball coaches: if they don't give a damn what they want to win, do they care about the team's daily practice?
I think the answer is yes.
The goal of any campaign is to achieve the highest scores, but it would be absurd to stare at the scoreboard throughout the game. The only way to truly win is to make progress every day. Bill Walshy, the football coach who won three Super Bowls, said, "Scores will take care of themselves." The same applies to other areas of life. In order to achieve better results, leave the goal alone and focus on the system.
What does that mean? Is the target useless? Of course not. Goals help to set direction, but the system is the best answer to progress. Many problems arise when too much time is spent thinking about objectives and too little time is spent designing systems.
The winner has the same goal as the loser.
Targeting is affected by a serious “survival bias”: we all focus on the last winners (i.e. the survivors), who are mistakenly ambitious targets that create their success without seeing the same group of people who have the same goal and who have failed.
Every Olympic player wants to win, every candidate wants that position. If successful and losers share the same goals, the difference between winners and losers is not one. It is not the goal of winning the Ring of France that drives British bikers to the top. As you can imagine, they also wanted to win the race in the previous few years -- just like all the other convoys. The goal has always been there, but it is not until they have implemented systems that continue to pursue minor improvements that produce different results.
Question two is a short-term change.
Let's say your room is a mess. You set the goal of cleaning up. If you get the power to clean up, you'll get a clean room -- but only right now. If you continue with the dirt hoarding that made the room dirty in the first place, you'll be looking at a bunch of new things for the next wave of cleaning. You can only keep chasing the same results because you haven't changed the system behind you. It's a cure.
Achieving the goal can only temporarily change your life. With regard to improvement, this is contrary to intuition. We feel that there is a need to change the results, but the results are not the problem, and what we really should change is the systems that produce them. From the point of view of results, only a temporary solution could be found; a system approach was needed if permanent improvements were to be made. fixes the input, the output will solve itself.
Question three limits your happiness.
There is an implicit assumption behind any goal: “When it is achieved, I will be happy.” The problem with the priority of the goal is that you will continue to extend happiness beyond the next milestone. I've fallen into such a trap too often, I can't even count. For years, happiness has been dedicated to the future. I promised myself that once I added 20 pounds of muscle, or the company went to The New York Times, I could relax.
Moreover, the Goals create a conflict of “non-A's B”: failure to succeed is disappointing. You're stuck in a narrow sense of happiness. That's a deviation. The real journey of life is unlikely to be exactly the same as it was expected at the beginning. It makes no sense to limit their satisfaction to a particular road.
The system ' s priority mentality provides an understanding drug. When you love the process, not the product, you don't have to wait for your permission to be happy. As long as the system works, you can always feel satisfied. Moreover, the system can succeed in many forms, not just the one that you originally conceived.
Question four contradicts long-term progress.
Finally, a target-oriented mentality can create a “sliding effect”. Many of the runners worked continuously for months, but stopped training after crossing the finish line. When the game is over, the incentives disappear. What can drive you forward when all your efforts are focused on a specific goal and a goal is achieved? It is for this reason that many will return to old habits after achieving a certain goal.
The goal is to win the game, and the system is designed to stay in the game. The real long-term thinking is one that goes against the goal. The focus is not on any single achievement, but rather on a cycle of refinement and continuous improvement. In the end, the sine qua non of progress is an input to the process.
Atomic system.
If you find changing habits difficult, it's not you, it's your system. It's not because you don't want to change it, it's because your system isn't suitable for change.
Your success or failure is not your goal, but your system.
One of the core thrusts of the book is to teach you to focus on the whole system rather than on a single goal. This is also one of the deeper meanings behind the term “atom”. As you may have read here, atom habits refer to small changes, insignificant growth, one percent improvement. However, not all small habits are atomic. Atomic habits are part of a larger system, just as atoms are constituent units of molecules, and atoms are components that construct extraordinary results.
It's like the atom of life, and every habit is the basic ingredient of your overall growth. At first, these little routines seemed irrelevant, but soon they piled up with each other, triggering larger victories; they multiplied and eventually reached levels far beyond your initial investment. Although small and powerful, this is the true meaning of the term “atomic habits”, a small and easy-to-exercise pattern of behaviour or practice, but it is an incredible source of power and an element of a complex growth system.
Overview of this chapter.
The habit of “self-improvement” is a return to the problem. One percent progress every day, long-term progress, impressive progress.
It is customary to be a double-edged blade that can carry a ship, and it is therefore necessary to know the details.
Small changes often appear insignificant before crossing critical thresholds. The strong results of all the compounding processes always come late, and you have to be patient.
Atomic habits are small habits that make up large systems. Like atoms are the constituent units of molecules, atomic habits are the building blocks of extraordinary results.
If you want better results, you can just focus on your system.
2 How Your Habits Shape Your Identity
The most durable habits come from the person you believe you are becoming.
Rewrite one goal as an identity: I am the kind of person who reads daily.
2 The most effective way to change habits is to change identity.
Why is it so easy to pick up vices and to build good habits? Few things are more powerful to influence their lives than to improve their daily habits. However, as of next year, it is likely that you will still do the same, not the better.
It is still difficult to maintain a good habit for more than a few days, even if it is a genuine effort, coupled with occasional impulses. Sports, serenity, cooking and journal writing habits, one or two days, and it's a problem to continue.
However, once established, it seems that it will always be there — especially those that you do not want. However well-intentioned, it seems unlikely that such vices as eating junk food, watching television all day, delaying and smoking will be eliminated.
Change of habits is so challenging for two reasons: first, what we are trying to change is wrong; and secondly, what we are trying to change habits is wrong. I will address the first point in this chapter, and the second in the subsequent sections.
The first mistake is to try to change something wrong. To understand what I mean, you have to know that changes occur in three layers, you can think of three layers of skin onions.
The first level is the result of change. This floor is focused on changing your achievements: weight reduction, book publication, winning. Most of the goals you set are related to changes at this level.
The second level is the process of change. The emphasis on this level is to change your habits and systems: to implement a new training schedule at the gym, to clean up the groceries of the desk so that work can be done smoothly, and to develop a quiet approach for yourself. Most of the habits you built are related to this level.
The third and deepest level is identity change. The focus of this layer is on changing your beliefs: your worldview, your self-image, your assessment of yourself and others. Most of your beliefs, assumptions and prejudices are related to this level.
It's about what you get, about what you do, about what you believe in. The question of creating a lasting habit -- a system that improves by 1 per cent -- is not one level “better” or “better” than the other, and each level of change is useful; the question is the direction of change.
Many people focus on what they want to achieve in the process of changing habits. This will lead us to a practice based on results. The alternative is to create a custom based on identity — in this way, we focus from the outset on who we want to be.
Imagine two people who refuse cigarettes. When someone handed out the cigarette, the first person said, "No, thank you. I'm quitting smoking." Sounds like a reasonable answer, but this man still thinks he's a smoker, just trying to quit. With the same conviction, he hoped that his behaviour would change.
The second person said no, "No, thank you. I don't smoke." Despite the small differences, this expression conveys a shift in identity. Smoking is over and has nothing to do with life. This man no longer considers himself a smoker.
Most people do not consider “change of identity” when they start to improve. And they thought, "I want to get thinner, and if I stick to this diet, I get thinner." They set targets and then determined what should be done to achieve them, without thinking about the beliefs that drive them to do so. They have not changed their way of looking at themselves, nor do they understand that old identities undermine their new plans to change.
Each operational system is backed by a belief system. The democratic system is based on the belief in freedom, majority and social equality; the authoritarian system has a very different set of beliefs, such as absolute authority and absolute obedience. Under democratic institutions, you can come up with a lot of ways to get more people to vote, but it is absolutely impossible to change such behaviour under authoritarian regimes. That was not the system's identity, and voting was impossible under certain beliefs.
Similar models exist, whether we are talking about individuals, organizations or societies. A set of beliefs and assumptions have shaped the system, with an identity behind habits.
Acts incompatible with this identity cannot be sustained. You might want to have more money, but if your identity is a person who tends to consume rather than generate income, you will always be drawn to spend money instead of making money; you may want to be healthier, but if you continue to put comfort in your work, you will choose to relax rather than train. It is difficult to change habits without changing the underlying beliefs that led to past behaviour. You have new goals and new plans, but you haven't changed who you are.
Brian Clark is an entrepreneur from Pod, Colorado, and his story is a great example. "When I remember, I bit my nails." Clark told me, “When I was a kid, I was used to it when I was nervous, and it became an annoying habit. One day I decided to stop biting my nails until they grew a little bit. I did it with my will.".
Then Clark did something unexpected.
"I asked my wife to help arrange my first manicure." He said, “I had the idea that if I started paying for the nails, I wouldn't bite. It does work, but it has nothing to do with money, because nails make my nails look so good for the first time. My nails are very healthy and charming. Suddenly I was proud of my nails. Although this is something I have never cravingd, it has had a great impact. Since then, I have not bit my fingernails, I have barely bit them, because I am proud to take care of them.”.
The ultimate pattern of underlying motives is to make habits part of identity. It's one thing to think that you want it, it's another to think that you want it.
The more specific pride in being identified, the more motivated it is to maintain the habits associated with it. If you're proud of your hair, you develop habits of caring and maintaining it; if you're proud of your biceps, you'll never skip the upper half of your training; and if you're proud of your scarf, you'll be more likely to crochet hours a week. Once you're proud, you do your best to keep your habits.
Real behavioural change is a change in identity. You may be inspired to start a habit, but there's only one reason to keep it: it's part of your identity. Anyone can convince himself to go to a gym or choose a healthy diet one or two times, but it is difficult to sustain a long-term shift as long as the beliefs behind the behaviour remain unchanged. Improvement is only temporary until it becomes part of its identity.
The goal is not to read a book, but to be a reader.
The goal is not to go to a marathon, but to become a runner.
The goal is not to learn an instrument, but to become a musician.
Acts often reflect identity. What you did implies that you believed in yourself, whether conscious or unconscious. Research shows that when a person believes in a particular orientation in his or her identity, he or she is more likely to act in line with that belief. For example, people who consider themselves “vote” are more likely to vote than those who claim that they “want to vote”; similarly, those who have integrated sport into their identities need not convince themselves to train. It is easy to do the right thing, after all, when your behaviour is fully consistent with your identity, you no longer seek change in behaviour. You just believe you're someone and then do what people do.
It's a double-edged blade, like all the orientations that are customary. For you, identity change can be a powerful tool for self-improvement; but identity change can be a curse when it comes against you. Once an identity is accepted, loyalty to that identity may affect your ability to change. Many people spend their lives in cognitive sleep, blindly following stereotypes attached to their identity.
"I have a bad sense of direction.".
"I'm not a morning man.".
"I don't remember names.".
"I'm late all day.".
"I don't know anything about technology.".
"I suck at math.".
...there are other forms.
Repeatedly telling themselves the same story makes it easy for years to fall into this psychological practice and consider it as a fact. At the end of the day, you will start to resist something, because “I am not that kind of person”. An inherent pressure will force you to maintain your image and act in a manner consistent with your own convictions. You'll do everything you can to not contradict yourself.
The more thought or behaviour is linked to your identity, the harder it is to change. It's comforting to believe what your culture believes in (group identity) or to do something that preserves your self-image, even if it's wrong. The biggest obstacle to positive change at any level -- individuals, teams, societies -- is identity conflict. Good habits may be rational, but as long as they contradict identity, you will not practice them.
Any day you may be too busy, too tired, too busy, or for thousands of other reasons to continue to maintain a certain habit; but in the long run, the real reason for failing to do so is to be blocked by your self-image. That's why you can't be too attached to some version of your identity. To advance, we must abandon; to be the best of ourselves, we must constantly edit, revise, upgrade and expand your identity.
This raises an important question: where did faith and worldview begin if they played such an important role in behaviour? How did identity come about? How can an identity be strengthened by a pro-self orientation and gradually removed from it those that hinder it?
Two steps towards identity change.
Your identity comes from your habits. You are not born with a predetermined belief, and every faith, including your own, is shaped by experience.
To put it more precisely, custom is the specificity of identity. Every day you get the bed ready, you get the identity of “a structured person”; every day you write, you get the identity of “a creative person”; every day you exercise, you get the identity of “a sports person”.
The more it repeats an act, the more it reinforces the identity associated with that act. Indeed, the word “identity” in English is derived from the Latin word “sentitas” meaning “existence” and the Latin word “identidem” meaning “duplicate”. The word “identity” literally means “the existence of repetition”.
Whatever your current identity, the only reason you believe is because you have proof. If you go to church every Sunday for twenty years, you have proof that you're a devout person; if you spend an hour studying biology every night, you have proof that you're a good person; if you're going to the gym with snow, you have proof that you're an active person. The more evidence supports a belief, the more convinced you will be.
For most of the early years, I didn't think I was a writer. Ask any of my high school teachers or university professors, they'll say that my writing skills are as high as average as I can. The years before I started writing, I published a new article every Monday and Thursday, and as evidence accumulated, my identity as a writer grew. I'm not a writer from the beginning, I'm a writer through habit.
Of course, custom is not the only factor affecting identity, but because of frequency, they are often the most important. Every experience of life changes your self-image, but it's not likely that one ball will be played as a football player or that a painting will be painted as an artist. But when you do these moves over and over again, the evidence is building up and your self-image is changing. The effects of one-time experience tend to fade away, while the effects of custom grow over time -- that is, custom provides most evidence that can shape identity. In this way, the process of establishing habits is in fact one of its own.
It's a gradual evolution. We are not a single-finger decision to become a brand-new person that can really change, but a day, a little bit, a day, a day, a day, a day, a day, a day in between a habit and a habit, a day in which we continue to experience a micro-evolution.
Every habit is like a hint: "Hey, maybe I'm someone like this." If you finish a book, maybe you're the kind of person you like to read; if you go to the gym, maybe you're the kind of person you like to exercise; if you practice guitar, maybe you're the kind of person you like music.
Every move you take is like a vote for the kind of person you want to be. There is no single example that can change your faith, but as the votes accumulate, evidence of a new identity is gathered. Meaningful change does not require extreme change, which is one reason. By providing evidence of a new identity, small habits can create meaningful differences; when a change makes sense, it is actually a big change. This is the paradox of modest improvements.
Taken together, you will find that habits are the path to identity change. The most practical way to change what you are is to change what you do.
Every time you write a page, you're a writer.
Every time you practice a violin, you're a musician.
Every time you go to the gym, you're a sportsman.
Every time you motivate an employee, you're a leader.
Every habit not only produces results, but also teaches you more important things: trust yourself. You're starting to believe you can really do this. When the votes accumulate, the evidence begins to shift, and the stories you tell yourself start to change.
Of course, it's the same from another direction. Whenever you choose to be a bad habit, you vote for that identity. The good news is you don't have to pursue perfection. Each election will result in a vote for both sides. To win the election, a 100 per cent vote is not required, but a majority vote is required. Vote a few votes for bad habits or unproductive habits, and your goal is just to make good habits win most of the time.
New identities require new evidence. The results that have been achieved by continuing to vote for you will be achieved. Nothing changes.
There are only two simple steps in this process:
Decides what kind of person you want to be.
Prove to yourself through the small victory of life.
First, decide what kind of person you want to be. This applies to all levels - individuals, teams, communities, nations. What do you want to represent? What are your principles and values? What kind of person do you want to be?
These are questions that many people do not know where to start – but they do know what they want: six abs or less anxiety or double pay. This is not a problem, so let's move on from the results to see what kind of talent we want to be. Ask yourself, "What kind of person gets what I want?" What kind of person loses 40 pounds? What kind of person can learn a new language? What kind of person could run a successful start-up company?
For example, “What kind of person can write a book?” may be someone who can be consistent and reliable. Now, your focus has shifted from writing a book (based on results) to becoming the kind of person who has always been reliable (based on identity).
This process may lead to the conviction that:
"I'm the kind of teacher who would stand up for the students.".
"I'm the kind of doctor that gives time and common sense to every patient.".
"I'm the kind of manager who speaks for his staff.".
When you figure out what you want to be, you can start taking a little step forward to strengthen your cravingd identity. I had a friend who was able to lose a hundred pounds by asking himself what a healthy person would do. She's been using this all day as a guide to her behavior: a healthy person who chooses to walk or take a taxi? A healthy man can order burrito or salad? Her idea is that if she acts like a healthy person, for as long as it takes, she becomes a healthy person. She's right.
The concept of identity-based habits is a knock-on brick that brings out another key theme of the book: the way back. It's a two-way street. All habits are formed as a feedback path (a concept that we will explore in depth in the next chapter), but it is important that values, principles and identity must drive this return, not results. The focus must always be on being someone, not something.
It makes you who you want to be.
Identity change is the Arctic star that guides the shift in habits. Next, the book will tell you how to build better habits one step at a time, in a family, in a team, in a company, or anywhere you want. But the real question is, "Are you becoming the kind of person you want to be?" The first step is not what, not how, but who. You have to know what you want to be, otherwise the pursuit of change is no more than a lack of rudder. That is why we have to start here.
You have the power to change faith in yourself. Your identity is not immutable. You have a choice every moment. Through the habits you have chosen today, you can choose the identity you want to strengthen today, which brings us to the deeper purpose of the book and the real reason why it matters.
Building better habits is not about living with all sorts of little tricks, not about taking a cold bath at night or in the morning, or wearing the same clothes every day, or about achieving measurable external achievements, such as making more money, reducing weight or reducing stress. But basically, the essence of the habit is not to have, but to become.
Ultimately, habits are important because they make you the kind of person you want to be. You can develop your deepest belief in yourself through your habits. You really will become your habit.
Overview of this chapter.
Change is divided into three levels: change of results, change of process, and change of identity.
The most effective way to change habits is to focus on who they want to be, not what they want to achieve.
Your identity comes from your habits. Every move is a vote for the person you want to be.
To be the best of yourself, you must constantly edit, revise, upgrade and expand your identity.
The real reason why habits are important is not because you can achieve better results (though it does work), but because you can change faith in yourself.
1 Unconscionable (unconscious / nonconscious) and subscientific (subscientistic) can be used to describe the absence of consciousness or ideology. Even in the academic world, these words are often used interchangeably and are less likely to be exploited. I have chosen the term "nonconscious" in this book because it is broad enough to refer to the mental process that we cannot consciously touch, or simply to fail to notice the moment around it. "Intentional" can be used to describe anything you do not think consciously.
Of course, some orientations in identity will not change over time — for example, considering themselves tall or short. But even if it is a more fixed quality, life experience will determine whether you see them in a positive or negative way.
3 How to Build Better Habits in 4 Simple Steps
Every habit runs through cue, craving, response, and reward.
Take one failed habit and ask which step breaks first.
Three simple steps to make you feel better.
In 1898, a psychologist, Edward Sandek, laid the groundwork for an experiment that allowed us to understand the rules governing the formation and conduct of habits. Sandek was interested in studying animal behavior, starting with cats.
He placed the cat in a device called the "cage." The coop was designed to allow cats to escape from a door “through simple actions such as pulling ropes, pressors or pedals”. For example, one of the cages has an operating pole, which presses down, and the door on one side of the cage opens; as soon as the door opens, the cat comes out and there's a bowl of food waiting.
Most cats try to escape as soon as they get inside. They smell every corner through their noses, stretch their claws into the cracks or grab loose objects. After a few minutes of exploration, the cats happen to press the magic pole, the doors open, and they get out.
Sandek did several experiments to track every cat's behavior. At first, they move around in a cage, but the learning process begins when the pole is pressed down and the door opens. Gradually, every cat knows that the movement of the pressure rod is linked to the reward of escaping the cage for food.
After 20 to 30 experiments, the behaviour is gradually automated and accustomed, and the cat escapes in a few seconds. For example, Sandek records as follows: “The following is the time taken by Cat 12 to escape in successive trials: 160 seconds, 30 seconds, 90 seconds, 60, 15, 28, 20, 30, 22, 11, 15, 20, 12, 10, 14, 10, 8, 8, 5, 10, 8, 6, 6 and 7.”.
The average time taken to escape the first three tests was one and a half minutes; the average time spent on the last three tests was six and three seconds. Through practice, each cat makes fewer mistakes, moves faster and becomes more automatic. Instead of repeating previous mistakes, they started to find solutions.
In his study, Sandek described the learning process as follows: “Acts with desirable consequences are often repeated, and acts with undesirable consequences are less likely to be repeated.” To explore how habits in life are formed, Sandeicher's research provides a perfect starting point and also answers some basic questions, such as: What are habits? Why does the brain create habits?
Getting used to is the psychological space you need to think freely and creatively.
It is customary to repeat so many times as to automate. The process of custom formation begins with a trial error. Whenever you have a new situation in life, the brain has to make a decision: how do I respond? For the first time, you don't know how to solve a problem, like Sandek's cat, and you can only try to see what works.
During this period, the neuroactivity of the brain is very active. You carefully analyse the situation and make conscious decisions about how to act. You received a lot of new information and tried to figure it out. The brain is busy learning the most effective course of action.
Sometimes, like a cat on a pole, you happen to find a solution -- you feel anxious, and then you find out that running out makes you feel calm; you have a hard day's work, and then you find that electric shocks help relax. You keep exploring, exploring, exploring, and then banging, and there you go.
You're gonna change your strategy next time when you happen to meet unexpected rewards. The brain immediately begins to document pre-reward behavior. Wait, that feels awesome. What did I do before that?
This is the path of feedback behind all human behaviour: trying, failing, learning, trying differently. Through practice, useless behaviour fades, while useful behaviour is reinforced and accustomed.
So long as the same problem is repeated, the brain will start automating the solution. Custom is an automated set of solutions to problems and pressures encountered by the rule. As the behavioural scientist Jason Riha said: “Customary is only a reliable solution to recurring problems in the environment”.
When habits are created, the degree of activity in the brain decreases. You learn to focus on the signs that can lead to success, and to keep other murmurs out. In a similar situation in the future, you know exactly what to look for and the need to analyse the situation from every angle no longer exists. The brain skips the trial error process, creating a psychological rule: if that is the case. These cognitive scripts are automatically followed whenever appropriate. Now, when you feel the pressure, you have the urge to run out of the house; when you walk into the house after work, you pick up the video game pole. The choice that once needed to be pursued had become a reality, and a habit had developed.
The habit is a psychological shortcut from experience. In a sense, habits are just memories of the steps you have taken to solve the problem in the past, and as long as the conditions are right, you can resort to them and automatically apply the same solutions. The main reason for brain memory is to predict more precisely what works in the future.
The formation of habits is quite useful because consciousness is a bottleneck in the brain, which can only focus on one problem at a time. So, for the most important task at hand, the brain always tries to keep your conscious attention. As long as circumstances permit, consciousness prefers to assign tasks unconsciously to do without false thinking, which is what happens when a habit is formed. The habit reduces the cognitive load, releases the mental capacity so that you can focus on other tasks.
Despite its efficiency, some still question the benefits of habits, as is probably the case: “Will habits make my life boring? I don't want to limit myself to a lifestyle I don't like. So many routines don't take life's vitality and pleasure?” No. These challenges stem from a false dichotomy that leads you to believe that there is a choice between developing habits and freedom. In fact, the two are mutually reinforcing.
Customs do not limit freedom, but rather create it. In fact, those who fail to master habits often have the least freedom. Without good financial habits, you'll always worry about the next meal; without good health habits, you'll never be alive; without good learning habits, you'll always feel like you can't catch up to others. If you are always forced to make decisions about simple tasks -- when to exercise, where to write, when to pay -- your freedom is reduced. The only way to free the psychological space necessary for free thinking and creativity is to simplify the basics of life.
On the contrary, when you have built habits and managed the basics of life, your mind is free to focus on new challenges and take over the next set of issues. Now that habits have been built, you will be able to do more in the future.
Four steps towards custom formation.
The process of establishing habits can be divided into four simple steps: reminder, craving, response, reward 1. Disaggregating them into these basic components will help us to understand what habits are, how they work and how to improve them.
This four-step model is the backbone of all habits, and each time the brain goes through these steps in sequence.
First, a hint. It's a sign of reward. Our ancestors of the prehistoric era have been paying attention to the signs of the environment, which convey the location of the major rewards of food, water, sex, etc.; and today, we spend most of our time watching the signs of the secondary rewards of money and fame, power and status, appreciation and identity, love and friendship, or personal satisfaction (which, of course, indirectly enhance the chances of survival and reproduction, which are the underlying motives behind all our actions).
Your mind constantly analyzes the inner and the outer environment, looking for the cues of reward. Because cues are the first indicator that we are close to reward, and naturally give rise to hunger.
craving is the second step and the driving force behind all habits. There is no reason to act without some degree of motivation or craving, or craving for change. What you yearn for is not the habits themselves, but the changes in the state they bring. You don't want to smoke a cigarette, you want the relaxing from smoking; it's not the act itself that inspires you to brush your teeth; it's the taste of your mouth; you don't want to turn on the TV; you want entertainment. Every craving is linked to the craving to change the inner state, and we will then explore this focus in depth.
Everyone's craving is different. In theory, every piece of information triggers a craving, but in practice people are not stimulated by the same hint. For gamblers, the sound of the horn-eating tiger machine can give rise to a wave of intense craving, but for those who rarely gamble, the noise in the casino is just background noise. Before interpretation and interpretation, the hint is meaningless and turns it into the thoughts, feelings and emotions of those who craving it.
The third step is to respond. The response is a habit that you do implement, which may appear in thought or behaviour. The response will depend on how stimulating you are and how resistance is linked to behavior. You won't do it if you need more physical or mental labour than you want. In addition, the response depends on your ability. Sounds simple, but habits only work as far as you can. If you want a dunk, but you can't jump up to the basket, well, you're in bad luck.
Finally, the response will be rewarded. The reward is the ultimate goal of every habit. The hint is about the perceived reward, the craving for the reward, and the response is about the reward. We seek rewards for two purposes: first, reward to satisfy us; and secondly, reward to educate us.
The first purpose of the reward is to satisfy aspirations. Yes, the rewards themselves provide the benefits – food and water provide the energy needed to survive, promotion brings more money and respect, and body training improves your health and dating success. However, the immediate benefit is that the reward meets your craving to eat, gain status or gain recognition. At the very least, the reward brings a moment of satisfaction and relief.
Second, to reward us for what we are worth remembering in the future. The brain is a reward detector, and while you live, your sense of the nervous system continues to monitor what behavior can satisfy cravings and bring pleasure. Happiness and loss are part of the feedback mechanism that helps the brain distinguish between useful and useless behaviours. The reward closes the feedback path and completes the flow of habit.
Without one of these four phases, the conduct will not become a habit. Without the cues, habits never begin; without craving, there is not enough motivation to act; behaviour is too difficult to implement; and if rewards fail to satisfy cravings, there is no reason to do so again in the future. The first three steps are missing and the behaviour will not occur; the fourth is missing and the conduct will not be repeated.
In short, the cues give rise to a craving to inspire a response, to provide a reward, to satisfy the craving, to circle around and to link to the reminder. Together, these four steps form a neuro-revenue path -- cues, cravings, responses, rewards; tips, cravings, responses, rewards -- that ultimately leads you to automated habits. This cycle is called the customary circuit.
This four-step process is not an occasional event, but an endless feedback path, which operates at every moment of your life, including now. The brain constantly scans the environment, predicts what happens next, tries different responses and learns from the results. The whole process was completed between milliseconds, and we used it repeatedly, without realizing what had been put into the first minute.
These four steps can be divided into two phases: the problem phase and the solution phase. The problem phase consists of tips and cravings, when you find something to change; the solution phase consists of responses and rewards, when you act and achieve the change you want.
All behaviour is driven by the craving to solve problems. Sometimes the problem is that you notice something good and want to get it; sometimes the problem is that you experience pain and want to get rid of it. Whatever it is, the purpose of every habit is to solve the problems you face.
In the table on the next page, you can see from a few examples what this process might be like in real life.
Imagine you walk into the dark room and turn on the light. This simple habit you've done too many times, so don't even think about it, but in fact, you've gone through four steps in between milliseconds. The strong craving to act can drive you without thinking.
After adulthood, little attention has been paid to the habits that govern our lives. Every morning, one foot of shoelaces is tied, a toaster is pulled out, and home from work is always put on comfortable clothes – most people rarely think about this kind of thing. After decades of psychological coding, we automatically fall into these modes of thinking and action.
Four rules of conduct applicable in any field.
In the next section, we will see again and again how the four steps influence everything we do every day. But before doing so, we must transform these four steps into practical structures that can be used to design habits and to stop them.
I call this architecture “The Four Laws of Behaviour Change”, which provides a simple set of rules that allow us to create good habits and break bad habits. You can see every rule as an operating pole that affects human behaviour, when it's in the right place, where it's easy to build habits; when it's in the wrong place, when it's hard to build habits.
If you want to learn to break bad habits, you can reverse them.
Proclaiming that these four laws are a comprehensive and non-exhaustive framework for any change in human behaviour is a little irresponsible, but I believe that they are not far away. As you will soon see, the four rules of behavioural change apply in almost every field, from sports to politics, from art to medicine, from comedy to management. Whatever the challenges, these laws can be used without creating different strategies for different habits.
Whenever you want to change a behavior, just ask yourself:
How do I make the hint clear?
How can I make habits attractive?
How can I make action easy?
How can I make a reward satisfactory?
If you ever wonder, "Why don't I do what I say? Why don't I lose weight, quit smoking, save for retirement, or start the side business? Why does it seem that I never set aside time for something that is important?" The answers to these questions can be found somewhere in the four rules. The key to establishing good and bad habits is to understand these basic laws and learn to adapt them to their needs. As long as it contradicts human logic, any goal is doomed to failure.
Custom is shaped by the systems of life. In the next section, we will look at these laws one by one, so that you know how to use them to create a system that allows good habits to grow and bad habits to break.
Overview of this chapter.
Customs are acts that are repeated enough to be automated.
The ultimate goal of habit is to solve problems in life with the least energy and effort.
All habits can be broken down into four steps of feedback, including tips, cravings, responses, rewards, etc.
Behavior change is a simple set of rules that can help us to build better habits: first, to make tips visible; secondly, to make habits attractive; thirdly, to make action easy; and fourthly, to make rewards satisfying.
1 Those who read Charles Dustig's "Why do we live, work? " will recognize these words. Dustig wrote a great book, and I intend to follow up on his unfinished part and integrate these four stages into four simple rules that you can use to create better habits in life and work.
4 Behavior Change Begins With Awareness
You cannot improve an automatic behavior until you can see it clearly.
List five automatic actions you did today and mark each as good, bad, or neutral.
The process of behavioural change begins with detection.
Psychologist Gary Klein told me a story about a woman at a family meeting. She was very worried when she came to see her husband at the party where she had been a first aid nurse for many years.
She said, "I don't think you look right.".
Her husband felt nothing different at the time, and he said, "Well, I think you look wrong.".
"I'm serious." She insisted, "You have to go to the hospital now.".
A few hours later, her father had a life-saving operation. The examination found that his aorta was blocked and that there was a risk of a heart attack at any time, which he might not have survived without the intuitive perception of his wife-in-law.
What did this emergency nurse see? How could she have predicted an imminent heart attack?
When the aortic artery is blocked, the body concentrates on sending the blood to vital organs while ignoring the end zone of the skin surface, resulting in a change in the amount of blood distributed to the face. After many years of contact with the heart failureer, she unwittingly developed the ability to recognize the situation. She could not explain what she noticed in his face, but she knew something was wrong.
There are similar stories in other areas. For example, aircraft of their own fleet fly at the same speed as enemy missiles, and the light on radar screens looks almost identical, but military analysts are able to distinguish between them. During the Persian Gulf war, Major Michael Riley of the United States Navy ordered the shooting down of the missile, although it appeared on radar to be his own aircraft, thereby saving the entire warship. He made the right decision, but even his superiors could not explain why.
The director of the museum can distinguish between real works of art and professionally produced fakes, but cannot tell exactly what is different; an experienced radiologist can predict the area where a stroke occurs by looking at a brain scan, even if the obvious signs remain hidden. I've even heard hairdressers feel their hair alone, and I've noticed that their customers are pregnant.
The human brain is a predictive machine that constantly investigates the surrounding environment and analyzes the information encountered. When you go through one thing over and over again -- for example, an emergency nurse sees a face with a heart attack, or a military analyst sees a missile on radar -- the brain starts to focus, to comb through the details, to mark the cues, to record that information for future use.
If you have enough practice, you can come up with a hint of some result. Your brain will automatically encode through experience. We are not always able to explain what we have learned, but learning continues, and your ability to notice the signs in a given situation is the basis of every habit.
We underestimate how much the brain and body can do without thinking. You did not call your hair long, call your heart beating, call your lungs breathing, or call your gastrointestinal digestion, yet most of your body handled these tasks automatically. You're far too conscious.
Think of hunger. How do you know you're hungry? You don't have to see cookies on the counter to know what to eat. The appetite and hunger are unwittingly controlled, and through a variety of feedback pathways, your body gradually reminds you that it is time to eat again and to follow what happens inside and outside. Thanks to the hormones and chemicals that circulate in the body, the appetite for food only surfaces. Suddenly, you're hungry, even though you don't know what triggered this feeling.
This is one of the most amazing insights about habits: to start a habit, there is no need for a hint. There is no need for conscious attention, and you can see opportunities and act. That is why habits are useful.
However, it also makes habits dangerous. When habits are formed, your actions will follow your automatic, unconscious mind instructions. I don't know what's going on yet. You fell into the old pattern. Unless it is pointed out, you will not notice that every time you smile, you apologize before asking questions, or you will be used to intervening when others are not finished. The more these models are repeated, the less you will question your actions and the reasons behind them.
I've heard of a storekeeper who used to cut off a customer's value card when he ran out of balance. One day, the shopkeeper paid off a bunch of customers who used the value card, and when the next customer came up, the shopkeeper swiped the other's credit card and took the scissors and cut the credit card in half -- no doubt. He didn't know what he was doing until he looked up and saw a surprised customer.
At the time of the study, I met a woman who had worked in kindergarten and was transferred to a company. Even when there are adults around now, old habits re-emerge and she often asks her colleagues if they wash their hands. I've heard a man who's been a lifeguard for years, seeing a kid running, sometimes shout, "Go!".
As time passed, the cues of habit became too common and largely invisible: snacks in the kitchen, television remotes by the couch, mobile phones in the pocket. Our response to these reminders has been so deeply marked that the strong craving to act seems to have appeared for no reason. It was therefore essential to carry on the process of behavioural change with awareness.
Before new habits can be effectively established, existing ones must be mastered. It sounds simple and, indeed, challenging, because once habits take root in life, they tend to become automated and unconscious. You can't expect an improvement if habits are never needed. As the psychologist said, “If you fail to realize that you are unconscious, it will lead your life, and then you will call it destiny”.
The custom scorecard helps you to see your habits.
Japan ' s railway system is considered the world ' s top. If you used to take a train in Japan, you'd find a strange habit in the palm.
The train division had the opportunity to perform a ceremony in which different objects were fingered and instructions were called out in the mouth. As the train approached the sign, the driver pointed to it and said, "Now it's a green light." When the train enters or leaves a station, the driver is given the opportunity to shout at a precise speed at the dashboard and before leaving the station at the clock. Other staff members on the platform would do the same. Before the train is ready to move, the staff member will point to the edge of the platform and announce: “The train can go!” Every detail is confirmed, pointed and shouted.
The program, known as "finger confirmation", is designed to reduce errors in the security system,1 which appears to be stupid but highly effective. Fingerprint recognition reduced errors by 85 per cent and avoided 30 per cent of accidents. The New York subway has also adopted a modified version of “No Shout” for less than two years, reducing the incidence of unstopped subway trains by 57 per cent.
Fingerprint confirmation is so effective because of bringing unconscious habits to conscious levels. Train drivers must use both their eyes and ears, so it is more possible to detect problems before mistakes occur.
My wife would do something like that. Before getting out of the house on a trip, she'd open an inventory of the most important items on the list: “I brought the keys. I brought my wallet. I brought my glasses. I brought my husband.".
The more automated an act is, the less conscious we think about it. When one thing is done thousands of times, we start to ignore something, and we anticipate that the next situation will be exactly the same. We are too used to what we have been doing, and we will not stop to question whether that is right or wrong. Many failures can be attributed to a lack of self-awareness.
Awareness and perception of what they actually do is one of the greatest challenges to changing habits. This explains why the consequences of the vices can carry out the raids. In our personal lives, we also need a “fault confirmation” system. And that's the origin of the custom scorecard, which, through this simple exercise, makes you more aware of your behavior. If you want to make your own scorecard, start by listing your daily habits.
If you look at this simple example, you know how to start listing:
Get up.
Turn off the alarm clock.
Look at the phone.
To the bathroom.
Weight.
Shower.
Brush your teeth.
Toothline.
A perfume.
Hang up the towel and dry it.
Get dressed.
Make a cup of tea.
Wait.
When the whole column is over, look at every behavior and ask yourself, "Is this a good habit, a bad habit, or a bad habit?" If it is a good habit, mark the positive sign (+); if it is a bad habit, mark the negative sign (-); if it is a bad habit, mark the equal sign (=).
For example, the list in front looks like this:
Get up.
Turn off the alarm clock.
Look at the phone--.
To the bathroom.
Weight +.
Shower+.
Brush your teeth +.
Tooth +.
Approximate +.
Hang up the towel and dry it.
Get dressed =.
Make a cup of tea +.
What marks are given to a particular habit depends on your situation and target. For those who want to lose weight, it may be a bad habit to eat a peanut butter berries every morning, but the same may be a good habit for those who try to increase their muscles to make them thick. It all depends on the direction you're working on.
There's another reason why it's a little complicated to score customary scores. The labels “good habits” and “bad habits” are somewhat imprecise - there are no good habits or bad habits, only “effective habits”. Effective means an effective solution. All habits work for you in some way, so you repeat them. In the practice of this scorecard, consider the long-term benefits of customary classification. Generally speaking, the end result of good habits is positive and the end result of bad habits is negative. Smoking may alleviate current stress (which is how it works for you), but it's not healthy habits in the long run.
If you still find it difficult to decide whether a habit is good or bad, one of the things I like to say is, "Can this habit help me become the kind of person I want to be?" With regard to my craving for identity, does this habit vote for consent or against?” The habit that strengthens your craving for identity is usually a good habit; and, contrary to it, a bad habit.
The customary scorecard does not require any change, and the goal is simply to notice what actually occurs. Please observe your ideas and actions without evaluation or criticism, and do not blame yourself for mistakes or praise yourself for success.
If you eat a chocolate every morning, admit it as if you were watching people. Oh, that's funny. If you're drinking, just notice that you're eating more calories than you need. If you're throwing your ass off on the Internet, you're wasting your life in ways you don't want.
The first step in changing vices is to pay close attention to them. If it is felt that additional assistance is needed, an attempt can be made to carry out a misdirectional confirmation in life, to speak out about what you intend to do, and the possible outcome. If you want to stop eating junk food and notice you're catching a cookie, say, "I'm about to eat it, but I don't need it. Eating this cookie increases my weight and endangers my health.".
hearing bad habits out there makes the consequences more real. It'll add weight to your behavior, so that you don't think about it. This is a useful move even if it is just to remember something on the to-do list. "I'm going to the post office after lunch tomorrow." Saying that out loud would improve your chances of actually doing it. By doing so, you will admit yourself to the need to act — and this may make everything different.
The process of behavioural change always begins with detection. The focus of strategies such as identification of discrepancies and customary scorecards is to make you recognize your habits and trigger them, so that you can respond in a useful way.
Overview of this chapter.
As long as you have enough practice, your brain will come up with cues for certain results.
Once habits are automated, we don't pay attention to what we do.
The process of behavioural change always begins with detection. They can be changed only if they are aware of their habits.
The “fingerprint confirmation” brings unconscious habits to conscious levels by opening words about their behaviour.
You can use the simple exercise of the customary scorecard to increase your self-awareness.
When I visited Japan, I saw the strategy save a woman's life. Her young son stepped in as the trunk door was closing. The woman on the platform put her arm in and pulled her son, while the train with her arm was leaving the station. However, just prior to the start-up of the train, a staff member was able to prevent the train from leaving the station by pointing fingers and confirming that she had been caught by the door within five seconds. The door was opened, and the tear-eyed woman ran to hold her son; a minute later, the train safely departed.
For readers interested in establishing their own customary scorecard, please refer to Model 1 “Customary Scorecard” at the end of the book.
5 The Best Way to Start a New Habit
Attach the new behavior to something you already do.
Use: After I finish A, I will immediately do B.
Five. Best way to start a new habit.
In 2001, British researchers carried out an experiment to enable 248 people to build better sports habits for two weeks. The subjects were divided into three groups.
The first group is a control group, which only needs to track its own motion frequency.
The second group is the “incentive group”, which, in addition to tracking the frequency of the movement, also reads some information on its benefits. The researchers also explained to the group how the movement reduced the risk of coronary artery disease and made the heart healthier.
Finally, the third group. The group received the same information as the second group to ensure that they received the same level of incentive. However, they need to plan the time and place of the next week ' s campaign. To be precise, each member of the third group will have to complete this sentence: “In the next week, I will have at least 20 minutes of intense movement [sometimes] in [someplaces]”.
Group I and Group II, 35 to 38 per cent exercise at least once a week (and, interestingly, the incentives given to Group II do not seem to have a significant impact on their behaviour), but Group III has 91 per cent exercise at least once a week — more than twice as many others.
The sentence of the third group of testees is what the researchers call an “intention to execute”, a pre-planned when and where you will act; in other words, how you intend to implement a particular custom.
The trigger of a habit is in various forms - the vibrating feeling of a mobile phone in a pocket, the smell of chocolate cookies, the sound of an ambulance's whistle - but the two most common tips are time and place. Both are used in the execution intent.
In summary, the intention of implementation is broadly as follows:
"When the X situation happens, I will execute the Y response.".
Hundreds of studies have shown that implementation intentionionions can effectively cue us to adhere to targets, whether by writing the exact date and time of the influenza vaccine or by recording appointments for the big intestines. It increases the likelihood that people will insist on resource recovery, reading, early sleeping and smoking.
Researchers have even found that voter turnout increases when voters are forced to create implementation intentionionions, simply asking them to answer, “What route should they take to the polling station? What time is it? How many buses do you need to take? Other effective government plans will also urge citizens to make precise regulations for the timely payment of taxes or expired fines.
The conclusion is clear: it is more likely that those who plan precisely when and where to implement a new custom will actually do so. Too many people try to change their habits before they know these basic details. We told ourselves “I'm going to eat healthy” or “I'm going to write more articles”, but never said when and where these habits are going to happen; we gave them an opportunity to expect that we would “accidentally remember to do it” or be inspired at the right time. The implementation intentionion removes vague notions, such as “I want to move” or “I want to be more productive” or “I should go vote”, and replace them with concrete action plans.
Many feel they lack incentives, but what they lack is clarity. The time and place for action is not always clear, and some have spent their lives waiting for the right time to improve themselves.
Once the intention to implement is set, there is no need to wait for inspiration to knock. Should I write a chapter today? Should I be quiet in the morning or wait for lunch? When the time for action came, no decision was required, but only as planned.
The simple way to apply this strategy to custom is to fill in the following sentence:
I'll do it in [time], in [place]. One.
Silence: I'll be in the kitchen for a minute at 7:00 in the morning.
Read: I'll read Spanish 20 minutes in the bedroom at 6:00 p.m.
Exercise: I'll be at the gym for one hour at 5:00 p.m.
Marriage: I'll make a cup of tea for my partner in the kitchen at 8:00 in the morning.
If it is not clear when the new habits will be implemented, try the first day of the year, month or week. People are more likely to act at these points of time, because there is a sense of hope. There is a reason for action if there is hope. A new start would be encouraging.
There is another benefit to the intention to implement. Knowing exactly what you want and how to achieve it can help you refuse to interfere with things that distract you and derail you. We often respond to small requests because we do not know: what else must be done? When your dreams are too vague, it is easy to rationalize small exceptions all day without addressing the precise tasks required for success.
To give you the habit of time and space to exist in the world, the goal is to allow the time and place of execution to become apparent to the extent that there are enough repetitions, even if you can't say why, you have a strong craving to do the right thing at the right time. As the writer Jason Zweig put it: “It's obvious that you can't continue to move in an unconscious state. But like dogs when they hear bells, saliva is distributed, and when you usually go to sports in a day, you may start to sit down.".
There are many ways in which implementation intentionionions can be applied to life and work. My favorite trick was learned from Professor B. J. Fogg of Stanford, and I called this strategy a “crop of habit”.
A complete correction of the custom of "crowding".
The French philosopher Denis Dedero has been poor for almost a lifetime, but this changed one day in 1765.
Dedro's daughter is getting married, but he can't afford to pay for the wedding. Dedro was famous for his encyclopedia, one of the most detailed encyclopedias of the time, despite his lack of wealth. The Queen of Russia, Queen Catherine, heard of his financial distress and felt pity. The Queen was very good at reading and very fond of his encyclopedia, so she offered £1,000 -- more than $150,000 today -- to buy Deedro's private collection 2. All of a sudden, Dedro's got his hands full. He not only paid for the wedding, he added a red robe to himself.
Dedro's red robe was beautiful, and in fact it was so beautiful that he immediately discovered that the robe was incompatible with everything else. Dedro wrote that there was “no harmony, no consistency, no beauty” between the elegant robe and his other items.
Deedro soon had a strong craving to upgrade his possessions. He replaced the original carpet with a carpet from Damascus; he built his home with expensive statues; he bought a mirror on a fireplace and bought a more advanced table; and he threw the vine chair into a leather chair. Every shopping brings the next, like a bone.
Dedro's behavior is not unusual. In fact, every time you buy, there's a name for the next trend: the Dedro effect. The Dedero effect shows that acquiring a new ownership tends to lead to a chain-of-consumer response, i.e., by adding additional purchases.
This pattern is everywhere. A new pair of shoes and new earrings were needed to buy a dress; a couch was bought to start picking up the entire living room; and a toy was added to the child, and it soon became clear that he had bought the whole set. That's the chain response of shopping.
Many human acts follow this cycle. You often decide what you're going to do in the light of what you've just done: go to the bathroom and wash your hands, wipe your hands, and remember to put dirty towels in the laundry basket, and write them in the shopping list. No act occurs alone, and each act becomes a trigger for the next act.
What does it matter?
When new habits are created, the connection of behaviour can be used for you. One of the best ways to build new habits is to identify their current daily habits and then stack new behaviours. It's called custom stacking.
Customary stacking is a special form of implementation of intent - rather than matching new habits with particular times and locations, it is matching new habits with current ones. This technique, created by B. J. Fogg in the Microcustomary Plan, can provide a clear reminder for almost any custom.
The formulas used to stack are as follows:
“After I'm done with my current habits, I'll implement my new habits.” Four.
Some examples:
Silence: I'll be quiet for one minute every morning after I pour coffee into the cup.
Sports: I'll get dressed immediately after taking off my shoes for work.
Grateful: When I sit down to prepare for dinner, I'll say something I appreciate the day.
Marriage: Every night in bed, I give my partner a kiss.
Safety: When I put my sneakers on, I will send a message to my family or friends about where I'm going and how long I'm going to run.
The key is to tie the cravingd behaviour to what is already being done every day. Once the basic architecture is in place, we can begin to combine small habits and create larger stacks. This allows you to take advantage of the inertia of "one behaviour leads to the next" - the positive version of the Deedro effect.
Every morning, the habit of stacking can be similar:
I'll be silent for 60 seconds after I get coffee.
After 60 seconds of silence, I will write down the to-do of the day.
3. Upon completion of the to-do, I will proceed immediately to the first matter on the list.
Or, think of the old habits stacked at night:
After dinner, I will put the dishes directly into the dishwasher.
2. Once the bowl is set, I will wipe the fluid table.
Once the table is cleared, I will bring out the coffee cups for tomorrow morning.
You can also insert new behaviour into the current routine. For example, your current morning routine may be to get up and make the bed and shower. Assuming you want to grow up to read more every night, you can try to expand your habits: Get up and prepare the bed and put a book in the shower on the pillow. As a result, every night in bed, a book is laid there waiting for you.
As a whole, custom piles up so that you can create a simple set of rules that will guide future behaviour, as if you always have an implementation plan for what to do next. And once you can do this on your own, you can do what you want to do to develop a common habit that leads to stacking:
Sport: When I see the stairs, I don't take the elevators, I change the stairs.
Social skills: When I walk into a party, I introduce myself to someone I don't know.
Finance: I'll wait 24 hours to make a decision when I want to buy more than $100.
Healthy diet: I always put vegetables into dishes when I can decide what to eat.
A simple life: when I buy a new thing, I send an old thing (the principle of entry and exit).
The mood: I breathe and smile before the phone rings.
Forgetful: When I leave a public place, I will check the desktops and chairs and confirm that I did not leave anything there.
No matter how you use this strategy, the secret to the successful creation of custom stacks is to find the right cue to trigger behavior. Unlike the intention of execution, which precisely indicates the time and place at which an act is committed, it is customary to stack the time and place. The choice of when and where to place new habits in everyday life is highly influential. If you want to be quiet in your morning routine, but you're in a mess every morning and the kids are in the house, then maybe it's not the right time or place. To think about when it is the easiest time to succeed, do not ask yourself to implement new habits that may be disturbed by other things.
In addition, the frequency of cues should be the same as what you want. It is not a good choice to want to develop a daily habit, but to stack it on a custom that only happens on Monday.
One of the ways to find the right cues for the stacking of habits is to have a brain surge against a current set of habits. You can use the customary scorecards described in the previous chapter as a point of departure, or you can create a two-column table in the first column where you're bound to do it every day. For example:
Get up.
Shower.
Brush your teeth.
Get dressed.
Make a cup of coffee.
Breakfast.
Take the kids to school.
Get to work.
Lunch.
End of work.
Get changed to work.
Sit down for dinner.
Turn off the lights.
Go to bed.
Your list may be longer, but you probably know what I mean. And in the second column, write down what happens every day. For example:
The sun rises.
Message received.
I heard the song.
Sundown.
With this list, you can start looking for the best place to put new habits in your lifestyle.
When the cues are clear and can be implemented immediately, customary stacking can be most effective. Many candidates are too vague, and I myself have made that mistake. When I wanted to start getting used to being a pushover, my habits were stacked up: "I'll do the pushover at lunch break." At first glance it makes sense, but I soon realized that the hint was not clear -- did you do it before lunch? Or after lunch? Where are you going to do it? A few days later, I folded up my habits, and I said, "When I put on a message and was ready to go to lunch, I would stand up ten times by the desk." And there was no ambiguity.
Practices such as “multi-reading” or “healthy diet” are valuable goals, but they do not provide instructions as to when and how to act. Try to be clear and clear: close the door, brush your teeth, sit down at the table. Clarity is important, and the closer the new habits are linked to a clear reminder, the more likely you will notice when the time for action comes.
The first rule of behavioural change is “to make the hint clear”. It was a very practical strategy to create clear signals and to make clear plans on when and where to act, and to implement a stack of intentions and habits.
Overview of this chapter.
The first rule of behavioural change is “to make the hint clear”.
The two most common indicators are time and place.
The strategy of implementing intent can be used to match new habits with precise times and locations.
The formula for implementing the intention is that I will conduct [act] at [time] and [place].
The formula of custom is that after [the present custom] I will implement [the new custom].
1 For interested readers, reference can be made to model 2 “Intention of implementation” at the end of the book.
In addition to paying for the collection, the Lord Catherine asked Didro to keep the books for her and to hire him as a Queen's Librarian on an annual salary.
3 Fergus refers to this strategy as a “microciplinary recipe”, but I would call it a “custom stack formula” in this book.
For more examples and guidance, reference can be made to model 3 at the end of the book, “Customary stacking”.
6 Motivation Is Overrated; Environment Often Matters More
Design your surroundings so the right action is obvious and easy.
Put one good-habit tool in plain sight and move one distraction farther away.
Incentives are overestimated and the environment is often more important.
The doctor at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Anne Sandecker, who had a fantastic vision, believed that the eating habits of thousands of hospital staff and visitors could be improved in circumstances that did not involve willpower or motivation at all. In fact, she had no intention of talking to them at all.
Sandek and his colleagues designed a six-month study to modify the “choice structure” of the hospital cafeteria, the first step of which was to change the way drinks are presented. Originally, there was only a variety of sodas in the fridge next to the dining room counter, and researchers placed a new option in each fridge: bottled water. They also put a basket of bottled water next to the various food areas. The soda is still in the main fridge, but bottled water is now available in all beverage areas.
In the next three months, the sale of soda in hospitals fell by 11.4 per cent and the sale of bottled water rose by 25.8 per cent. They made similar adjustments to the food in the restaurant and obtained similar results. Throughout the process, no one said a word to the eaters there.
People choose a product not because of what it is, but because of where it is. If I walk into the kitchen and see a plate of cookies, I'll pick up a few pieces and start eating, even if I didn't think about eating them at all, and I'm not hungry; if the office table is always full of doughnuts and bagels, it's easy for you to pick one up at once. The change in habits depends on the space you're in, and the cues you have.
The environment is an invisible hand, a shaper's act. Despite the unique character of each individual, certain behaviours can easily recur under certain environmental conditions. In the church, people speak in whispers, and in the dark streets, people wake up and be cautious. Therefore, the most common form of change is not intrinsic but external: we are transformed by the world around us. Every habit depends on the situation.
In 1936, the psychologist Kurt Levin used a simple equation to make a strong declaration that behaviour was a function of people and the environment.
In a few years' time, Levin's equation was tested commercially. In 1952, the economist Hawkins Stern described what he called “recommended impulses to buy”: “The first time a shopping maller sees a product, and imagines the demand for it in his mind, it triggers this shopping phenomenon.” In other words, sometimes customers buy products not because they want them, but because of the way they are presented.
For example, goods that are located close to the floor are easier to sell than those that are high in sight. So you'll find that the more expensive brands in the store are in a position where they can be easily reached, because they bring the most benefits; on the contrary, the cheaper options are mostly stuffed in hard places. The same is true of the so-called shelf -- the shelf at the end of the mall. For retailers, the end shelf is a money-smoking machine, because it is the most visible location where a large number of people can be reached. Coca-Cola, for example, sells 45 per cent of the product from the shelf at the end of each mall.
The more visible and accessible the product or service, the more likely you are to try. We drink beers because they're in every bar; we go to Starbucks because they're on every corner. We like to think that we have control, and if we choose water instead of soda, we think it is because we want it. But in fact, much of our daily behaviour is not influenced by purposeful motives and choices, but by the most obvious options.
Every creature has its own way of feeling and understanding the world. Eagles have extraordinary long-range eyesight, snakes can smell the air with a highly sensitive tongue, and sharks can detect fine electrical currents and vibrations caused by fish in the water. Even bacteria have chemical receptors -- tiny sensor cells used to detect toxic chemicals in the environment.
And human perception is guided by the sensory nervous system. We know the world through vision, hearing, smell, taste and touch, but we have other ways to feel the excitement, some conscious, many unconscious. For example, you can notice a decrease in temperature before a storm strikes, a feeling of pain rising in the stomach during abdominal pain, or a perception of a loss of balance when walking on the rugged ground. Receptors in the body can notice various types of inherent irritation, such as salt levels in blood or thirst for water.
However, one of the strongest of all human sensory abilities is vision. The human body owns about 11 million sensors, almost 10 million of which are dedicated to vision. Some experts estimate that half the resources of the brain are for visual use. Since we rely more on vision than any other sense, it is reasonable to assume that visual tips are the most powerful catalyst for human behaviour. As a result, a slight variation in what is seen can result in significant changes. It can be seen how important it is to fill the living and working environment with signs of productivity improvement and to eliminate what reduces productivity.
Fortunately, there is good news in this: you need not be a victim of the environment, but rather a constructor of it.
How to make a good place to be.
During the oil crisis of the 1970s, Dutch researchers began to look closely at domestic energy use. In a suburban area of Amsterdam, they found that some households used 30 per cent less energy than their neighbours, despite the fact that the house was similar in size and the price of electricity was the same.
The houses in these areas are almost identical, except for one place: the location of the meter. Some houses are equipped with electric meters in the basements and others in the corridors upstairs. You probably guessed that there's less electricity in the hallway. When energy use is visible and easy to trace, people change their behaviour.
Every habit is triggered, and it's easier for us to notice the obvious. Unfortunately, the circumstances in which we live and work tend to make us more vulnerable to inaction, as there is no obvious hint to trigger that behaviour. He was placed in a cabinet, where it was easy not to practice guitars; where it was placed in the corner of the guest room, it was easy not to read; and where vitamins were not seen in food cabinets, it was easy not to eat vitamins. It is easy to ignore when the cues that inspire a certain habit are hidden or not visible.
On the contrary, creating visible visual cues can draw your attention to the habits you want. In the early 1990s, a small fly-shaped sticker was placed by the cleaning team at Amsterdam Schippo Airport in each of the urinal fights, and it was clear that men would aim for what they thought was a little bug before they stood in the pit. The stickers allow users to be better targeted and significantly reduce the situation outside the urinal plow. Follow-up analysis shows that these stickers save 8 per cent of the airport ' s toilet cleaning costs per year.
I myself have experienced the power of a visible reminder in my life. I used to go buy apples, put them in the bottom of the fridge, store them in Gerry, and I left them behind; when I remembered, the apples were broken. I didn't eat it because I didn't see it.
I followed my own advice and redesigned the environment. I bought a big bowl, put it in the middle of the table, and next time I buy apples, I put them in that bowl -- the open space I can see clearly. And the result was magic, just because the apples were in sight, I started eating a few of them every day.
To re-engineer the environment and make more explicit the cues that trigger the habits you want, the following methods can be tried:
If you want to remember to take your medication every night, you can place it directly next to the tap of the bathroom wash.
If you want to practice guitar more often, put it right in the middle of the living room.
To remember to send more letters of thanks, a set of stationery was placed on the desk.
If you want more water, fill up a few bottles every morning and place them at home in places where you usually stay.
To make habits a large part of life, cues become a large part of the environment. The longest-lasting behaviour tends to have a variety of tips, considering how many cases can stimulate smokers to pull out cigarettes: driving, seeing friends smoking, feeling pressure at work, etc.
The same strategy can be applied to good habits. The chance to think of the habit in one day has increased with the introduction of triggers around it. It is imperative that the best choices become the most visible, and that better decisions become easy and natural when the good ones are in front of you.
Environmental design is powerful not only because it affects the way we interact with the world, but also because we rarely do it, and most people live in the world that others create for them. But you can change the space of life and work so that you can be more exposed to positive tips while reducing exposure to negative ones. Environmental design allows you to regain control and become the architect of life. And not only as a customer of your world, but as a designer.
Situation is a trigger for habit.
At first, the hint that triggers a custom may be specific, but as time passes, custom may be linked not only to a single reminder but to the overall context surrounding the act.
For example, many people drink more alcohol in social settings than alone. It is rarely a single tip that triggers this behaviour, but rather a whole situation: looking at friends for drinks, hearing the music of bars, seeing the head of a dragon rolls out of beer.
We will psychologically assign habits to the field where they happen: home, office, gym. Each location develops links to certain customs and routines. You have a specific relationship with something on the desk, something on the kitchen fluid table, something in the bedroom.
The definition of behaviour is not an item in the environment, but our relationship to it. In fact, this is a very useful idea to help us think about the effects of the environment on behaviour. The environment is not considered to be full of objects, but full of relationships. Please consider how you interact with the surrounding space: For one person, the couch is an hour's reading every night; for another, the couch is a place to watch TV with a bowl of ice cream after work. Different people have different memories of the same place - different habits as a result.
The good news is that you can train yourself to connect a particular habit to a particular situation.
In one study, scientists invited insomniars to sleep only when they were tired; if they could not sleep, they would rise up and sit in another room to sleep. For a long time, the tester began to link the situation to sleep, so it became easier to go to sleep quickly. Their brains know that sleeping -- not slipphones, watching TV or staring at clocks -- is the only thing that happens in that room.
The power of the situation also reveals an important strategy: changing habits is easier in the new environment. It'll help you escape the indiscretionary tips that push you back to your existing habits. Go to a new place - different cafes, park benches, little use of rooms - and create a new routine there.
It is easier to connect new habits with a completely new situation than to create new ones in conflicting tips. If you watch TV in the bedroom every night, it may be difficult to sleep early; if the living room is where you play electric, it may be difficult to focus on reading there. But when you get out of the ordinary, you're going to throw those behaviors behind your head. You don't have to deal with the cues in the old environment, and the new habits are not interfered with.
Want to make thinking more creative? Move to larger rooms, penthouses, or spacious buildings. To flee the day-to-day work because that space is also linked to your current thinking pattern.
Trying to make your diet healthier? At the usual supermarket, you're probably shopping without thinking. Try a new grocery store, and when your brain doesn't know where those unhealthy foods are, you might find it easier to resist them.
If it is not possible to move to a completely new environment, the current environment is redefined or reorganized to separate different spaces for work, reading, sports, recreation and cooking areas. I personally find a useful slogan: "One space, one purpose.".
In the early stages of entrepreneurship, I often work on couches or kitchen tables; at night, I find it difficult to get myself off work, without a clear division between the end of working hours and the beginning of private time. Is the kitchen table where I work, or where I eat? Is the couch where I relax or where I send e-mails? Everything happens in the same space.
A few years later, I finally had the money to move to a bigger house where I could use a room as an office. All of a sudden, work is what happens here, and private life is what happens there. When there's a clear line between work and home life, it's easier for me to turn off brain work patterns. Each room has a primary use, kitchens for cooking and offices for work.
If possible, try not to mix one situation with another. When situations are mixed, habits begin to mix -- in the end, it is usually the lighter side that wins. That is why the multifunctionality of modern technology is both an advantage and a disadvantage. You can do all kinds of things with your mobile phone, which makes it a powerful tool; however, when a mobile phone is almost everything, it is difficult to connect it to a particular task. You want to increase productivity, but if you pick up your mobile phone, you can naturally browse social media, look at e-mails, or hitch-and-go, which makes it a hint.
You might think, "You don't understand. I live in New York City, my apartment is no bigger than a smartphone, and every room has to play multiple roles." That's right. If space is limited, the space is divided into active blocks: dedicated reading chairs, dedicated writing desks, special feeding tables. The same is true for electronic space. I know a writer whose computer is used only for writing, and a tablet for reading, and a cell phone for social media and receiving and sending messages. Every habit should have its own home.
If this strategy is upheld, each situation will be linked to a particular habit and mode of thinking that will flourish in this predictable environment. When you're sitting at a desk dedicated to your work, your focus comes off; when you're in a room designed for entertainment, it's easier to relax; when sleep is the only thing that happens in the bedroom, it's easier to sleep. A stable and predictable environment is needed to make behaviour stable and predictable.
A stable environment in which everything takes its place and functions is an environment in which habits can easily grow.
Overview of this chapter.
Over time, small changes in circumstances may result in significant changes in behaviour.
Every habit is triggered by cues. It is easier for us to take note of prominent tips.
The hint of a good habit can be triggered in the environment.
Gradually, your habits are linked not to a single reminder, but to the whole context surrounding the act. The situation became a reminder.
It is easier to develop new habits in the new environment, because old tips are not needed.
7 The Secret to Self-Control
Self-control is easier when you are not constantly standing next to temptation.
Add three extra steps between you and one bad habit.
The secret of self-control.
In 1971, when the Vietnam War entered its sixteenth year, United States Congressman Robert Steele from Connecticut and Morgan Murphy from Illinois discovered a shock to America: When visiting the troops, they learned that 15 per cent of the United States troops stationed there were addicted to heroin. Follow-up studies show that 35 per cent of Vietnamese military personnel have tried heroin, and as many as 20 per cent are addicted - a situation that is worse than they thought.
This discovery led to a wave of unrest in Washington, D.C., and a number of measures were taken, including the establishment of the Office of Special Action for Drug Abuse Prevention under President Nixon to promote prevention and discipline and to track the situation of drug-addicted soldiers upon their return.
Lee Robbins is one of the leading researchers. In a finding that completely subverting the established idea of drug addiction, Robbins found that only 5 per cent of heroin-using soldiers returned home and that, after three years, only 12 per cent had recovered. In other words, about nine out of ten soldiers who smoke heroin in Viet Nam were eliminated overnight.
This finding contradicted the prevailing view that heroin addiction was supposed to be permanent and irreversible. As a result, Robbins found that as long as the environment was completely transformed, addiction would naturally disappear. While staying in Viet Nam, soldiers are all day surrounded by signs of heroin abuse: drugs are readily available, they are swallowed up by continuing war pressure, they are dealing with soldiers who also consume heroin, and they leave home thousands of miles away. However, once they have re-entered United States territory, they find themselves in an environment that is devoid of such cues. Things change and habits change.
A comparison of the situation of Vietnam soldiers with the general drug addicts. A person who is addicted to drugs at home or with a friend, who goes to a clinic for detoxification (where there is no environmental incentive to drug addiction), then goes back to his place of residence, where there are signs of their first addiction, and it is no wonder that the figures show the opposite of those of Vietnam soldiers who are addicted to drugs - usually 90 per cent of them once they return home.
The study of the Vietnamese soldiers runs counter to many cultural beliefs about vice, as it challenges the traditional view of unhealthy habits as moral deficits. If you're overweight, smoking, or being addicted to drugs, someone will always say it because you lack self-control -- even because you're a bad person. A little self-control can solve all problems, a concept deeply rooted in our culture.
However, recent studies have produced different results. After analysing those who are powerful in self-control, scientists find that they are not really much different from those who struggle; on the contrary, the so-called “self-regulating” are simply good at building lives so that they do not need to display extraordinary will and self-control. In other words, they do not often put themselves in seductive situations.
Most self-restraint is usually the least self-resort. It is easier to restrain yourself when you do not need to resort to self-restraint. So, yes, persistence, perseverance and will are all necessary conditions for success, but the way to strengthen these qualities is not to pray for being a more disciplined person, but to create a more disciplined environment.
Once you know what happens when habits are formed in the brain, the concept of anti-intuitiveness becomes even more reasonable. Being built into the mind awaits the right circumstances and is ready to be used. Patti Orwell, a therapist from Austin, Texas, started smoking, often on a horse with her friends; she later quit smoking and successfully sustained it for years. Besides, she stopped riding. After decades, one time she jumped on her horse and found herself wanting a cigarette for the first time in so many years. The internalized hint still exists, and she just hasn't been exposed to it for a long time.
Once habits are established, the craving for action follows as long as the cues in the environment re-emerge. This is one of the reasons why behavioral change techniques can be countered. The pressure on the obese to bomb them with a weight reduction brief is such that many people will regain their favorite coping strategies: over-eating; giving smokers access to photos of the charred black lung will cause greater anxiety, forcing many to reach out to get smoke. Without caution, it could trigger the act you want to stop.
The vice is self-catalytic: the process feeds itself. Bad habits contribute to the feeling of it trying to numb. It felt bad, so I ate junk food, and it didn't feel good. Watching TV makes you feel like you can't do much, so you watch more TV because you don't have the strength to do anything else. Fear of your health makes you anxious, so you use smoking to ease your anxiety, while smoking makes your health worse, and you get even more anxious. It's a downward spiral, a bad habit out of control train.
Researchers refer to this phenomenon as “a reminder of hope”: an external stimulus creates a coercive craving to repeat vices. Once you notice something, you start wanting it. This process occurs from time to time, often without our knowledge. Scientists have found that allowing drug addicts to look at photographs of coca base in 33 milliseconds is sufficient to stimulate reward paths in the brain and thus to stimulate craving. It's so fast that the brain doesn't even know what it's seeing -- drug addicts can't even say what they see, but they want drugs as much.
The conclusion is that you can break a habit, but it is unlikely that you can forget it. Once it's carved into your brain, it's almost impossible to completely remove it -- even if it's been years. This means that resisting temptation alone is an ineffective strategy. In a life full of disruptions, it is difficult to maintain a sense of cynicism and is too much of a cost. In the short term, you can use your will to overwhelm the temptation, and in the long run we are the creation of our environment. To put it bluntly, I have never seen anyone who can remain positive in a negative environment.
The more reliable approach is to address the root causes of vice. One of the most practical ways to eradicate a bad habit is to reduce the hint that exposure can trigger it.
It seemed that one job could not always be done properly, leaving the cell phone in another room for a few hours.
When you think you're not good enough, stop tracking the social accounts that inspire jealousy.
Too much time was wasted watching TV, so they moved it out of the bedroom.
If you spend too much money buying electronics, you can stop reading articles about the latest technology commodities.
Too many electrics, each time used, the plugs are removed and the mainframe is received in the cabinet.
This approach is a reversal of the first rule of behaviour: to make the hint invisible, not obvious. I am often surprised by the enormous effect of such a simple change. By removing a hint, the whole habit tends to disappear.
Self-control is a short-term strategy and does not apply in the long term. You may resist temptation once or twice, but it is unlikely that willpower will prevail over craving every time. Rather than muster the will to do the right thing, energy should be used to optimize the environment. That's the secret of self-control: to make the hint of good habits visible and the hint of bad habits invisible.
Overview of this chapter.
The reverse of behaviour to change the first rule is to “make the hint invisible”.
Once habits have developed, they are difficult to forget.
People with a high degree of self-restraint are not always in attractive environments. Avoiding temptation is easier than resisting temptation.
One of the most practical ways to eradicate a bad habit is to reduce the hint that exposure can trigger it.
Self-control is a short-term strategy and does not apply in the long term.
8 How to Make a Habit Irresistible
A habit sticks faster when it carries a little immediate appeal.
Pair a useful habit with something you already enjoy.
8. How to make habits resistant.
In the 1940s, Dutch scientist Nicolas Dinbergen changed our understanding of motive with a series of experiments. The Nobel reward-winning Dingbergen investigated the black gull, a gray bird that often struts off the coast of North America.
There's a little red dot on the beaks of the black girdles, and Dinbergen picks that red dot when he finds out that the hatching chick wants food. The first step of the experiment was to make a set of fake beaks with cardboard, only bird heads and no body. When the parents of the chicks fly away, he approaches the nest and takes the fake beaks to their eyes. These birds' mouths were fake, and he thought the chicks would ignore them.
However, when the little black gulls see the red dots on these fake beaks, they still peck as if they were the beaks of their mother. They have a clear preference for red dots, as if they were in the genes before birth. Dingborgen quickly discovered that the red dots were bigger and the chicks were pecking faster. Finally, he made a fake beak with three large red dots on it. And when he puts this special fake beak next to the nest, the chicks go crazy and peck the red dots as if it were the best beak in the world.
Dinbergen and his colleagues found similar behaviour in other animals. For example, grey geese build nests on the ground, and sometimes when a mother moves near her nest, an egg rolls into the nearby grassland. In such a situation, the grey geese walk in swing and drag their eggs back into the nest with their mouth and neck.
Dingbergen found that the grey geese would drag any spherical object nearby, such as a pool or a light bulb. The larger the ball, the greater their response, one of the grey geese also struggled to roll a volleyball back into the nest and sat on it. Like the black pecker chicks, the gray geese follow their own instincts: seeing a spherical object nearby, I must drag it back to the nest. The bigger the ball, the more I try to get it.
Every animal's brain is as if it were pre-loaded with a code of conduct, and once it's in an exaggerated version of the code, it shines like a Christmas tree decoration. Scientists call these exaggerated tips "extraordinary stimulation". Superstitious stimulation is an enhanced version of reality – for example, three red dots of bird beaks, or eggs as big as volleyball – that triggers a stronger response than usual.
It is also easy for humanity to take the exaggerated version of reality seriously. For example, junk food drives our reward system crazy, because after hundreds of thousands of years of hunting and collecting food in the wilderness, the human brain evolves to give special importance to salinity, sugar and fat. These high-density calorie foods are very rare in the steppes where our ancestors lived, and it is an excellent survival strategy to eat as much as possible when it is not certain that the next meal will arrive.
Today, however, we live in an environment full of calories, with enough food, but your brain still cravings calories as if it were rare. The focus on salinity, sugar and fat is no longer good for health, but longing persists, as the reward hub for the human brain has remained unchanged for about 50,000 years. The modern food industry is committed to extending the human instincts of the old stone age beyond its evolutionary purposes.
One of the main objectives of food science is to create products that are more attractive to consumers. Almost any package, box or canned food is reinforced in some way, even if it merely adds a taste. Businesses hit millions of dollars to find the most satisfactory brittle of chips, or the ideal bubble of soda, to invest in the whole sector, in order to optimize the sense of the product in your mouth – the so-called taste. French fries, for example, are a powerful combination - the appearance of gold, soaky and smooth inside.
Other processed foods increase dynamic comparisons, i.e. they provide mixed sensory incentives for commodities, such as soft and soft. Imagine a sticky cheese melted on a pizza brilliance, or a soft-touched olio cookie. Eating unprocessed natural food, you often experience the same sensory irritation over and over again -- how does the 17th kale taste? In a few minutes, the brain loses interest and is fully fed up; on the contrary, dynamically contrasted food keeps the experience of eating interesting and encourages you to continue eating.
In the end, this strategy has cueed food scientists to identify the exact combination of each product - salt, sugar and fat - so that the brain can get excited and you can go back and buy it. And, of course, the result is that you eat too much, because super-favourable food is more attractive to the human brain. As Stephen Kirnet, a neurologist specializing in eating behavior and obesity, said, "We've become too good at pressing our own buttons.".
The modern food industry and the resulting over-eating habits are precisely the second rule of behaviour change: making habits attractive. The more attractive the opportunity is, the more likely it is to develop habits.
Looking around, society is filled with highly designed realities that are far more attractive than the world in which our ancestors lived. In order to promote the sale of clothes, the shopkeepers put on a fake with an exaggerated hip; in social media, in less than a few minutes, you get more “acclaim” than you get at home or in the office; online porn cuts the scenes together at a rate that is impossible to replicate in real life; advertising combines perfect lights, professional makeup and graphics techniques - even models are fixed to look like themselves. These are the extraordinary stimuli of the modern world, which exaggerate the characteristics that attracted us and drive us crazy in instincts, forcing us to grow into over-shopping, over-informing social media, over-watching porn, over-eating food and many other habits.
If history guides, future opportunities will be more attractive than they are today. The trend is towards greater enrichment and more attractive incentives. Garbage food is a calorie condensed pattern compared to natural foods; liquor is a alcohol condensed pattern compared to beer; and video games are entertainment condensed patterns compared to table tours. Compared to nature, these experiences of pleasure are difficult to resist. We have the brains of our ancestors, but we have to fight the temptations they have not faced.
To increase the probability of an act occurring, it must be made attractive. Throughout the discussion of the second rule, our goal was to learn to make habits irresistible. While it is not possible to turn every habit into a hyper-stimulation, we can make any habit more attractive. To that end, we must first understand the nature of our craving and the way it works.
The first step is to examine the peak of dopamine, which is a common characteristic of all customs.
Dopamine-driven feedback routes.
By measuring a neurotransmitting substance called Dopamine 1, scientists can track the exact moment of craving. The importance of dopamine was known in 1954, as neurologist James Oz and Peter Millner exposed through an experiment the neurology process behind thirst and craving. Researchers implanted electrodes in the brain of rats, blocking the distribution of dopamine, and scientists were surprised that they had lost all their will to survive. They don't eat, they don't have sex, they don't want anything, and a few days later the rats die of thirst.
In follow-up studies, other scientists also suppressed the area of dopamine in the brain of rats, but this time they dropped a few drops of sugar in the mouth of those mice lacking dopamine. Taste the good stuff, the little mouse's face is brightened with joy. Even if the dopamine is blocked, they like sugar as much as they used to, but they don't want it anymore. The ability to experience pleasure still exists, but without dopamine, craving dies; and when there is no craving, behaviour stops.
When other researchers reverse the process, and dopamine is replete with a reward system for the brain, animals are used to it at an extremely fast pace. In one study, rats receive a powerful wave of dopamine every time they reach their nose in a box; a few minutes later, they develop an extremely violent craving to reach their nose 800 times an hour into the box (humans are no different, on average, the gamer who eats the horn tiger sets 600 times an hour).
The habit is that dopamine drives the feedback route. The high levels of dopamine are associated with behaviour that is extremely easy to develop - drug use, eating junk food, playing video games, browsing social media. The same applies to our most basic habits, such as eating, drinking water, sex and socialization.
For many years, scientists have assumed that dopamine is only about pleasure, but now we know that dopamine plays a central role in many neurology processes, such as motivation, learning and memory, punishment and disgust, and spontaneous behavior.
When it comes to habits, the key point is that the brain is not only circa dopamine when you experience pleasure, but also when you expect pleasure. The peak of dopamine for gambling addicts appears before the bet, not after the win; cocaine addicts see the powder surge, not after the consumption. When you expect an opportunity to be rewarded, dopamine concentrations rise in anticipation; when dopamine increases, so does the motivation for behavior.
Let us act with expectations, not with rewards.
Interestingly, the reward system that was activated in the brain when the reward was received is the same as the system that was activated when the reward was expected. This is one of the reasons why it is often better to expect an experience than to gain it. When I was a child, I thought that Christmas morning might be happier than the actual opening of gifts; when I grew up, Imagining the coming holidays might be more enjoyable than the actual holidays. Scientists say this is the difference between "want" and "like".
Your brain is allocated more nerve circuits than you like. The centres in the brain that control “want” are large: brain stem, nucleus, abdominal cover, back tattoos, almond cores, and parts of the frontal lobe. Compared to that, the centre that controls “likes” is much smaller. They are often called “happy hot spots”, scattered around the brain like islands. For example, researchers have found that 100 per cent of the approvals are activated in the “wanted” process; but only 10 per cent of the approvals are activated when “like”.
The importance of this process is all the more evident when the brain allocates so much precious space to the cravingd areas. craving is the engine of behaviour, and each act occurs in response to expectations prior to the action. It is because of craving that there is a response.
These insights reveal the importance of behaviour changing the second rule. We must make habits attractive, because what inspires us to act at first is the expectation of rewards. At that point, it was time for a strategy known as seduction binding.
How to use seduction to bind and make habits more attractive.
Ronan Byrne, an electrical student in Dublin, loved Netflix, but he also understood that he was not sports enough. So Byrne used his own electric expertise to re-engineer the gym bike and connect it to a wire and television. He wrote a program that allowed Netflix to play only when the gymnastic bicycle was stepped at a certain rate; as long as the pace of the step was slowed down, the show he was watching would be suspended until he stepped again at an accelerated pace. One of the fans described Byrne as "the one who kills obesity with a chase.".
Byrne uses temptation to bind and make sport more attractive. Induced to be tied up in a way that binds the things that you want to do with what you have to do. In the case of Byrne, he tied Netflix together with the cycling that he had to do.
Businesses are even better at seduction. For example, the American Broadcasting Corporation, commonly known as ABC Television, has engaged in a large-scale seduction bundle when it launched Thursday night television programmes from 2014 to 2015.
On Thursdays, the company airs three albums written by the author, Sandra Lems - " Internship Doctors ", " The scandal " and " The Introduction to Murder ". The TV company sold it as “ABC's TGIT” (TGIT means Thank God It's Thursday, “Thank God it's Thursday”). In addition to publicity programmes, ABC encourages viewers to prepare popcorn with red wine and enjoy Thursday night.
ABC's programme director, Andrew Kubitz, described the idea behind the campaign as follows: “We think Thursday night is an opportunity to raise the ratings of couples and single women who want to sit down and escape, drink red wine and popcorn, and have fun.” The trick of this strategy is to link what ABC needs its viewers to what they want to do (to watch their show), to what they want to do (relax, drink, eat popcorn).
For a long time, people began to link watching ABC with the feeling of relaxation and entertainment. If you drink red wine and popcorn at 8:00 a.m. every Thursday night, then at the end of the day, "Friday at 8:00 p.m." means relaxing and entertaining. rewards and tips are linked, and the habit of turning on television becomes even more attractive.
If you can do one of your favorite things at the same time, you are more likely to find an act attractive. Perhaps you want to know the latest celebrity gossip, but you need to exercise, so you can use the temptation to tie yourself up to read gossip and reality shows at the gym; maybe you want to fix your toenails, but you have to empty your e-mail folders, so the solution is to fix your toenails only when processing late work mail.
Stigma binding is an application of the “Plus principle” of psychological theory. In other words, if you do not really want to handle delayed work mail, if it means you can do something in the process that you really want to do, you will train yourself to do it.
You can even create a set of rules that lead to behaviour in combination with the temptation to bind and the habits mentioned in chapter V.
The formulas that are used to stack and lure bundles are as follows:
1. After [current] practice, I will implement [the habits I need].
After I have finished [the habits I need], I will implement [the habits I want].
If you want to read the news, but you need to be grateful:
1. After I finish my coffee in the morning, I will say something that made me grateful yesterday.
After saying something that gives me gratitude, I will read the news.
If you want to watch sports, but you need a business call:
1. Upon return from the lunch break, I will call three potential clients (needs).
2. After calling three potential clients, I will open the ESPN channel.
If you want to browse Facebook, but you need more exercise:
1. When I take out my cell phone, I'll do a ten-bit Bobby jump.
2. When I'm done, I'll look at Facebook dynamics.
In the end, I hope you'll start looking forward to a business call or a Bobby jump, because that means you can know the latest sports news or look at Facebook dynamics. To do what needs to be done means to do what needs to be done.
At the beginning of this chapter, we discussed the reality of extraordinary stimulus, an enhanced version that increases the craving for action. And by connecting to what we would like to do, seduction can create an enhanced version of any habit. Designing a truly irresistible habit is a difficult task, but seducing this simple strategy to bind can almost make any habit more attractive than it was.
Overview of this chapter.
The second rule of behavioural change is “making habits attractive”.
The more attractive an opportunity becomes, the more likely it is to develop habits.
The habit is a dopamine-driven feedback route. The rise in dopamine increases the motivation for behaviour.
Let us act with expectations, not with rewards. The greater the expectations, the higher the dopamine peak.
Stimulation is a way to make habits more attractive by matching “want” behaviour with “need”.
1 Dopamine is not the only chemical substance that affects habits. Each behaviour involves multiple brain regions and neurochemicals, and anyone who claims that “habituals are related only to dopamine” omits many important parts of the process. Dopamine is just one of the key elements of habit. However, the reason I'm focusing on this chapter is that it allows us to look at the biological basis of craving, thirst and motivation behind each habit.
9 How Family and Friends Shape Your Habits
Your group quietly teaches you what feels normal.
Spend time with people who treat your desired habit as ordinary.
How family and friends shape your habits.
In 1965, the Hungarian Razlo Polja wrote a series of strange letters to a woman named Clara.
Lazlo was convinced of the value of the effort; indeed, that was the only thing he believed: he totally rejected the concept of natural talent. He argued that children could become genius in any field through deliberate practice and development of good habits. His motto is: “Genius is not born, but is taught and trained.”.
Lazlo's conviction was so strong that he wanted to test his own child that he wrote to Clara that he “needs to be willing to board the ship together”. As a teacher, Clara was not as strong as Lazlo, but believed that appropriate guidance would enable anyone to improve their skills.
Lazlo thought that chess would be a suitable field of experiment, and then developed a plan to raise the child as a chess child: His children will study at home, which was rare in Hungary at the time; they will be full of chess-related books and photographs of famous chess players, and children will often compete with each other and participate in the highest possible level of competition; and they will compile the most detailed files of all the opponents they meet in the competition. They will devote their lives to chess.
Lazlo successfully pursued Clara. Within a few years, two of their daughters: Susan, Sofia and Judy.
The eldest girl Susan started playing chess when she was four. Six months later, she beat adults on board.
The next woman, Sofia, is even better. She was a world champion at 14 years old, and a few years later she won the title of a master.
Judy is the best of three. When she was five years old, she defeated her father, became the youngest chess player in history of 100, and then became the youngest chess master in history at the age of 15 and four months – younger than Bobby Fisher, who kept the world record. She has ruled the chess arena for 27 years in the form of the world's number one chess woman.
In any case, the Bulja sisters' childhood is not normal. But if asked, they would say that their way of life is attractive and even enjoyable. In media interviews, the Polja sisters said that their childhood was fun and not exhausting them. They love chess, not enough. It was reported that Lazlo found Sofia hiding in the bathroom in the middle of the night playing chess, and drove her daughter to bed: "Sofia, put down the chess!" And Sofia said, "Dad, they won't let me go!".
The Polja sisters grew up in a culture in which chess was the absolute priority -- a reward for chess and a reward for chess. In their world, it's normal to be obsessed with chess. And then we're going to find that being seen as normal in our culture is the most attractive behavior.
It's a social habit.
Man is a community animal. We want to be part of a group, to build relationships with others and to win peer respect and recognition. This tendency is necessary for survival. For most of the time in the history of human evolution, our ancestors lived in tribes, separated from tribes — or worse, exiled by tribes — equals the death penalty. "The lone wolf shall die and the wolves shall live.".
In comparison, those who work with others and establish relationships enjoy better physical security, mating opportunities and access to resources. As Darwin has pointed out: “In the long history of mankind, those who learn to cooperate and who are the most resilient will always gain advantage.” Thus, “attribution” becomes one of humanity's deepest cravings, and this ancient preference still has a strong influence on the behaviour of modern human beings.
Our earliest habits were not from choice, but from imitation. Families and friends, churches or schools, local communities and society as a whole pass on the script, and we follow it. Every culture and group has its own expectations and criteria - should we get married, when we should get married, how many children we should have, what holidays we should celebrate, how much we should spend on a birthday party. These social norms are, in many ways, invisible rules that guide your daily behaviour, even though they are not always in your mind. It is often natural for you to follow the habits of the culture in which you live, not to think, not to question, and sometimes not even remember. As the French philosophies wrote, “In life, we are swept away by the customs and customs of society”.
For most of the time, the flow does not make people feel burdened. Everyone wants a sense of belonging. If you grow up in a family where you're rewarded with chess skills, chess seems to be an attractive thing; if everyone wears a fancy suit at work, you're likely to throw money into a suit; if all your friends are playing a game that only they know or using a new word, you want to do it, so they know you're great. The behaviour that helps us integrate into the group is attractive.
In particular, we will imitate the habits of three groups:
Close people.
2. Majority.
3. Strong people.
Each group provides an opportunity to use behaviour to change the second rule, making habits more attractive.
Imitation of close people.
The degree of proximity has a strong influence on behaviour. As we have seen in chapter VI, this applies to the physical environment, but also to the social environment.
We get used to learning from people around us. We follow the way parents deal with disputes, the way peers flirt, the way colleagues do what they want; you try to see a friend smoke marijuana; and if the wife does check the door for real locks before sleeping, you will become that habit.
I find myself often mimicking the behaviour of people around me in an unconscious state. When I talk, I automatically pose in the same position as the other; when I go to college, I talk in the same way as my roommate; when I travel to another country, I do not want to do that, I do it unconsciously.
Generally, the closer to someone, the more likely it is to follow some of the other's customs. A groundbreaking study, which continued to track 12,000 people for 32 years, found that “if a friend gets fat next to him, the chance of a person becoming obese increases by 57 per cent”; and vice versa that found that one spouse or couple gets thinner, while the other has one third. Families and friends provide some kind of invisible peer pressure to pull us in their direction.
Of course, peer pressure is not bad unless you're surrounded by bad friends. Astronaut Mike Massimino, while studying at MIT, took a small class of robotics. Of the 10 students in the class, four later became astronauts. If your goal is to go to space, it's probably where the surface provides your best culture. Similarly, a study found that the higher your best friend's IQ at age 11 or 12, the higher your IQ at age 15. We will absorb the characteristics and habits of those around us.
One of the most effective ways to create better habits is to join a culture that sees what you want as normal. When you see others doing it every day, new habits seem feasible. If you're surrounded by healthy people, you're more likely to view fitness as normal; if you're surrounded by jazz lovers, you're more likely to believe that it makes sense to play jazz every day. The culture in which you live determines what you expect to be “normal”. Let those around you who have the habits you want grow up together.
To make habits more attractive, you can further implement this strategy.
The culture in which you join should have two characteristics: first, the behaviour you want to behave is normal; and secondly, you have something in common with this group.
Steve Cam, a New York City entrepreneur, runs a company called the “bookhead fitness network”, whose purpose is “to help nerds, incompetents and weirdos who are skinny and become strong and healthy” and whose customers include video-players, movie freaks, and ordinary people who want to develop good bodies. Many people find it uncomfortable to go to the gym or try to change their diets for the first time, but if you have something in common with people in the group — for example, you love Star Wars — change becomes more attractive, because people like you are already doing it.
Nothing supports motivation more than the feeling of belonging to a group, which transforms an individual's quest into a common one. Until then, you were on your own, and your identity was single: you were a reader. You're a musician. You're a sport man. When you join a book club, a band or a bike team, your identity is linked to those around you, and growth and change are no longer a personal quest: we are readers. We're musicians. We're bike riders. Some have begun to reinforce your personal identity, which is why it is essential to maintain habits to remain within the group after reaching the goals. It is friendship and community that can perpetuate new identities and perpetuate behaviour.
Imitation of the majority.
In the 1950s, the psychologist Solomon Ash did a series of experiments that are now compulsory for many university students. At the beginning of the experiment, the subjects entered a room with strangers. The testees did not know that the other participants were actors placed by researchers, and that they would give predetermined answers to certain questions.
The group would first see a card with a straight line on it and then a second card with several lines on it. Everyone is asked to select the line closest to the length of the first card on the second card. This is a very simple task, and the figure below is an example of two cards from the experiment:
The experiment started in the same way. First, researchers ask simple questions, and everyone picks the same line correctly; after a few rounds, researchers throw out an answer that is as obvious as it was before, but differently, this time those actors deliberately pick the wrong answer. In figure 10, for example, actors would say "A." Every actor would say two lines are as long as they are different.
Those tested without knowing the trick will soon find themselves confused and wide-eyed to cover up the tension with a smile. They will again confirm the responses of other participants, and when participants give the same wrong answer one after another, the frustration of the testees rises. Soon after, the tester began to doubt his eyes and finally gave an answer that he knew clearly was incorrect.
Ash did the experiment many times in many different ways. He found that the greater the number of actors, the greater the audience of the subjects. If there is only one testee and one actor in the room, the choice of the testee is not affected at all, he can only think that the other is an idiot; if there is a testee and two actors in the room, the impact is still small; however, when the number of actors has increased from three to four to eight, the testees are increasingly inclined to question themselves. By the end of the experiment, almost 75 per cent of the respondents agreed with the group's answer, even if it was clearly wrong.
When we don't know what to do, we rely on group-led behaviour. We look around and think, "What are the others doing?" We look at the assessments on Amazon, Yelp or TripAdvisor because we want to follow the best shopping, eating and tourism habits. It's usually a smart strategy, and the numbers make sense.
However, this strategy also has shortcomings.
The normal behaviour of communities tends to overwhelm the behaviour that individuals want. For example, one study found that one of the chimpanzees had learned an effective way of breaking nuts and was then transferred to another group, and found that other chimpanzees in this new group had broken nuts in a relatively poor way. In order to be part of a group, it would avoid using that better method.
The same applies to human beings, who are subject to the inherent pressure of group norms. Often the reward for being accepted is greater than the reward for winning the debate, being wise or seeking the truth, and most of the time we prefer to be wrong with everyone and not alone.
The human mind knows how to get along with others and wants to get along with them. This is our natural set-up, and you can ignore it — you can choose to ignore groups or the views of others — but that requires effort. Contrary to the common sense of the culture in which we live, additional effort is needed.
When changing habits means challenging communities, change is not attractive; when changing habits means integrating communities, change becomes attractive.
3. Imitation of powerful people.
All human beings seek strength, prestige and status. We want the coat to be full of medals of honour, we want to have the title of president or partner, and we want recognition and praise from others. Such tendencies may seem vain, but they are clever. Throughout history, people with power and status have more resources, less fear of survival and more attractive maters.
Acts that help win respect, recognition, appreciation and status attract us more. We want to be violent in gyms, either by popping out the most difficult chords, or by giving birth to the most successful children, because these things can set us up in groups. After integration, we started to figure out how to highlight it.
We are therefore very interested in the habits of efficient people. We are trying to emulate the behaviour of successful people, because we are also eager to succeed. Many of your daily habits come from imitating people you admire: you replicate the marketing strategies of the most successful businesses in the industry, you use the recipes of your favorite baker, you use the narratives of your favorite writer, you learn how to communicate with your boss. We'll imitate the person we envy.
People of high standing enjoy the recognition, respect and praise of others. It also means that we find an act attractive if it gives us recognition, respect and praise.
In addition, we have the incentive to avoid acts that diminish status. We trim the hedges and organize the grass because we don't want to be rat shit in the community; we clean the house before the mother visits because we don't want to be criticized. We've been thinking, "What do people think about me?" And then we're going to fix what we do with the answers.
The Polja sisters, the chess children mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, are proof of how powerful and far-reaching society's influence on behaviour is. The extraordinary efforts of the sisters, who spend many hours a day in the skills of chess, have continued for dozens of years, but these habits and behaviours have been able to maintain their appeal, partly because of the cultural importance they attach to chess. There is much reason to continue their efforts, from parents' praises to such achievements and identity marks as masters of chess.
Overview of this chapter.
The culture in which we live determines which behaviour is attractive to us.
We are inclined to develop a habit of cultural praise and acceptance, because we have a strong craving to integrate and belong to communities.
We tend to imitate three types of people: people close (family and friends), the majority (community) and the powerful (persons of standing and prestige).
One of the most effective ways to build better habits is to join a culture that has two characteristics: first, that you want to behave normally; and second, that you have something in common with this group.
The normal behaviour of communities tends to overwhelm the behaviour that individuals want. Most of the time, we'd rather be wrong with everyone than alone.
If an act is recognized, respected and praised, we find it attractive.
1 It is a pleasure to quote from this book the line "Long of Ice and Fire: Game of Power.".
10 How to Find and Fix the Causes of Bad Habits
Bad habits often solve a real need; replace the solution, not only the behavior.
Name the need behind one bad habit and choose a healthier substitute.
At the end of 2012, I was sitting in an old apartment in Istanbul, just a few blocks from known Independence Avenue. I was on a four-day tour in Turkey, and my guided Mike was sitting a few feet away in an old armchair.
Mike wasn't really a tour guide, he had lived in Turkey for five years from Maine and offered to take me to visit the country. That night, I was invited to dinner with Mike and several of his Turkish friends.
Of the seven, everyone but me used to smoke at least one pack a day. I asked one of the Turks how he started smoking. "Just friends." He said, "It must all start with friends. When you see a friend smoke, you try.".
What's really interesting is that half of the people in the room have quit smoking. Mike at the time had not smoked for several years, and he said that everything was due to a book called " Ten million people say it works ".
"The book helped you to get rid of the psychological burden of smoking." And Mike said, "The book tells you, "Don't lie to yourself again, you know you don't really want to smoke, you know you don't really enjoy smoking. That book makes you feel like you're no longer a victim, you start to understand you don't need a cigarette.".
I never smoked, but I read the book out of curiosity. The author uses an interesting set of strategies to help smokers overcome their aspirations. He systematically reconstructed all the tips associated with smoking and gave them new meaning.
The following are some examples:
You think you're quitting smoking, and you're not doing anything because cigarettes don't do you any good.
You think you need a cigarette to socialize, but it's wrong. You can socialize without a cigarette.
You think smoking can help you with the stress, but you don't. Smoking doesn't relax your nerves. It only destroys them.
He said that again and again. He said, “Let your head be clear, quit smoking and you lose nothing, but instead enjoy the best positive growth in health, vitality, money, confidence, self-respect and freedom; and above all, the length and quality of your future life increases.”.
When you finish that book, you think smoking is the most ridiculous thing in the world; and when you don't expect anything from smoking, there's no reason to smoke. That is the reverse of behaviour changing the second rule: making habits unattractive. Yes, I know that it sounds too simple to think about it, so that it can stop smoking. However, please take some time to listen to me.
Where does the craving for action come from?
Each of these acts has a underlying underlying underlying underlying craving and motivation. I often have the same craving: "I want tacos." If you asked me why I wanted to eat tacos, I wouldn't say, "Because I need food to survive." But in fact, deep down, the motivation for me to eat burrito is really because I want to eat to survive. Although the cravingd target is Mexican burrito, the underlying motive is access to food and water.
The following are some of the potential motives of humanity:
Save Energy.
Access to food and water.
Find love and breed.
Building relationships with others.
To win social acceptance and acceptance.
Reduce uncertainty.
To gain status and prestige.
craving is only the specific manifestation of the underlying underlying motives. In the process of evolution, the human brain does not have the craving to smoke, go to Instagram or play electric; at a deeper level, you simply want to reduce uncertainty and relax anxiety, to gain social acceptance and acceptance, or to gain status.
Look at the products that make people accustomed, and you'll find that almost every one of them does not create a new motive, but rather a potential motive to capture humanity.
Find love and give birth to children = use of Tinder and some kind of mobile phone dating software.
Relationships with others = Facebook.
= Launched on Instagram State.
Reduce uncertainty = Google query.
Getting status and prestige = electric.
Your habits are a new version of the modern solution of old cravings, old vices, and the underlying motives behind human behaviour remain the same. The specific habits that we have demonstrated vary from time to time.
The strong part comes: there are many different ways to address the same underlying motivations. One person may learn to use smoking to relieve stress, another learn to use running to reduce anxiety. Current habits are not necessarily the best way to solve problems, but the only means you learn to use. Once a solution is linked to the problem you have to solve, you will always turn back on it.
Customs have much to do with thought, which determines our prediction of whether a custom is worth repeating. As discussed in the first law of behavioral change, the human brain is always absorbing information, looking at cues in the environment, and every time you see a hint, the brain begins to simulate, predicting what to do next.
T: You noticed the stove was hot.
Forecast: If I touch the stove, I burn, so I should avoid it.
C: You see the green light.
Prognosis: If I step on the gas, I'll walk through the road safely and closer to my destination, so I should step on the gas.
You see a hint, sort it out on the basis of past experience, and then decide on the appropriate response.
It all happens in an instant, but it's in your habit to play a key role, because there's a prediction before every move. Life feels reactive, actually predictive. All day, you've been speculating about what you've just seen and what you've learned, and you've been predicting what happens in the next moment.
Our behaviour is very dependent on these predictions; in other words, our behaviour depends heavily on our interpretation of what happened, not necessarily on the objective facts of the events themselves. Two people look at the same cigarette, one person may feel the urge to smoke, and the other person may be sick of the smell. Under different projections, the same hint may trigger good habits or bad habits. The cause of custom is, in fact, the prediction before the act occurs.
These predictions give rise to feelings, and that is how we usually describe craving -- a feeling, a craving, an impulse. Feelings and emotions transform the cues we sense and the predictions we make into operational signals. They help explain what we are feeling. For example, whether you realize it or not, you're paying attention to the temperature you feel right now. One drop, you probably won't do anything; but ten drops, you'll feel cold, and then you'll add another dress. The feeling of cold is the signal that inspires you to act. You've been reading tips, but you're only going to take action if you predict that you'll change your condition to make yourself better.
craving is the feeling that something is missing, the craving to change the inner state. When the temperature drops, there is a difference between what the body feels now and what it wants, and the gap between what it does and what it wants provides a reason for action.
craving is the gap between the present and the future. Even the smallest acts have a little incentive to change the current feeling. When you drink hot, smoke or go to social media, what you really want is not potato chips, cigarettes or a few "hots," but a different feeling.
Feelings and emotions tell us to maintain the status quo or make changes to help us find the best course of action. Neurologists find that when feelings and emotions are damaged, we lose our ability to make decisions, because there's no signal to what we're looking for and what we're avoiding. As the neurologist Antonio Damagio explains: "Let you decide whether things are good, bad, or irrelevant, is emotions.".
In conclusion, the particular craving you feel, and the habits you practice, are actually trying to address the underlying underlying motives. When habits successfully address a motive, you create a craving to do it again; finally, you learn to predict that social media can make you feel loved, or that watching YouTube films can make you forget your fears. When linked to positive feelings, habits become attractive -- we can make good use of this insight, not to harm ourselves.
How to reset the brain so that you can enjoy your difficult habits.
As long as difficult habits are linked to positive perceptions, they become more attractive. Sometimes all you need is a little transfer. For example, we often mention everything that has to be done in a day: you have to get up early to work, you have to make a business call for business and you have to prepare dinner for your family.
Now, replace the word “must” with “may”. You get up early, you make a business call for business, you make dinner for your family. To change two words is to make you look at everything in a different way; the behaviour that you see as a burden is now an opportunity.
The point is, both versions are true. You have to do these things, but you can do these things. Whatever mindset we choose, we can find evidence of support.
I've heard the story of a man in a wheelchair. When asked whether it was hard to be confined to a wheelchair, he replied, "I wasn't restricted by a wheelchair -- I was liberated by a wheelchair. Without a wheelchair, I'd be lying in bed and not leaving the house.” This shift in perspective has completely changed the way he lives every day.
Rethink your habits and focus on the good, not the bad. It's a quick and easy way to reset your brain and make habits attractive.
Sport: Many people think of sport as a challenging task, energy-intensive and exhausting. However, you can also see sport as a way to develop skills and strength. Instead of telling myself, "I have to run in the morning." Let's just say, "It's time to develop patience and speed.".
Finance: People tend to think of saving money with sacrifice, but you can think of saving money with freedom if you know a simple fact, not a restriction: the present savings amount to greater financial freedom in the future; the money saved this month increases your purchasing power next month.
Silence: Everyone who has tried to remain silent for more than three seconds knows how frustrating it is when something distracts you suddenly comes into your mind. And when you understand that each disturbance is an opportunity to practice a new focus on breathing, you can turn frustration into joy. Fragmentation is a good thing, because it distracts us to practice silence.
Pre-game stress: Before major briefings or major competitions, many people feel anxious, breathe quickly and their heart beats. If those feelings are interpreted negatively, we will feel the threat and double the tension; if they are interpreted positively, we will be able to deal with them in a smooth and elegant manner. And you can rephrase "I'm so nervous," and say, "I'm so excited, so I have a lot of adrenaline on my body to help me focus.".
These minor changes in mindsets are not magic, but they help to change how you feel about being associated with particular habits or situations.
If you want to go further, you can create a motivational ritual. Just practice connecting habits to something that you enjoy so much, you can use it every time you need a motive. For example, if you play the same song every time you have sex, you start connecting music to this behavior. Every time you want to get into this mood, just press the play button.
The boxer and writer Ed Latimer from Pittsburgh unwittingly benefited from a similar strategy. He wrote, "When I find a strange thing, when I write, just put my headphones on, my focus increases, and I don't even have to play any music." He trained himself unconsciously. At first, he put on headphones, where he played some of his favorite music, and then performed work that required attention; after five, 10, 20 times, wearing headphones automatically became a reminder of high concentration. The craving comes with nature.
The athletes used similar tactics to get themselves into the state. In my baseball career, I developed a specific ritual to stretch and pass the ball before the game. The whole thing was about 10 minutes, and I did the same thing before every game. This ceremony helped me warm up, but more importantly, it put me in the right mental state. I began to link this pre-game ceremony to the feeling of competition and concentration, even if it was not particularly active, and when the whole set of ceremonies was completed, I would enter the “match mode”.
You can adjust this strategy for almost any purpose. Suppose you want to raise the overall level of happiness, then find something that makes you really happy — for example, touching your dog or bathing your bubble — and then create a brief ritual to do it before doing it every time you like it. Maybe take a deep breath three times and smile.
Breathe three times, smile, touch the dog. Repeat.
And finally, you're starting to think of this deep breath and smile ritual as a sign of happiness. Once set, they can be used every time they need to change their emotional state. Work pressure? Take a deep breath three times and smile. Life breaks your heart? Take a deep breath three times and smile. Once established, a reminder can trigger craving, even if it has nothing to do with the original situation.
The key to identifying and addressing the causes of bad habits is to re-formulate what you think about them. This is not easy, but if your predictions can be reset, difficult habits can be transformed into attractive habits.
Overview of this chapter.
The reversal of behaviour to change the second rule is “making habits unattractive”.
Each act has a superficial craving and a deep potential motivation.
Customs are modern solutions to old cravings.
The cause of custom is, in fact, the prediction before the act occurs. Forecasts bring feelings.
Emphasis on the benefits of avoiding a bad habit would make it unattractive.
There is a connection with positive perceptions, and habits are attractive; there is a connection with negative perceptions, and habits are not. Create a motivational ritual: do something you enjoy before it's difficult.
11 Mastery Starts With Repetition, Not Perfection
Planning thinks about the habit; repetition builds it.
Do the shortest useful version today instead of polishing the plan.
On the first day of the course, Professor Jerry Eusmann of the University of Florida divided the students of the film photography class into two groups.
People on the left half of the classroom are placed in “quantitative groups” and the results will depend entirely on the number of works. On the last day of the end of the period, he will count the photographs paid by each student, hand over 100 A, 90 B and 80 C and so on.
Those on the right side of the classroom are placed in a “mass group”, and the achievement will depend entirely on the quality of the work. The student needs only one photo for the whole semester, but if you want an A, it must be almost perfect.
By the end of the school year, he was surprised that the most outstanding photographs came from “quantitative groups”. Throughout the semester, this group of students was busy taking photographs, trying different images and lights, testing all kinds of practices in the dark room and learning from mistakes. In the creation of hundreds of pieces, they have learned their skills. At the same time, the students of the “mass” sit and think perfectly, to the end, with little effort but unproven theory and a mediocre photograph.
Attempts to find the best plans for change tend to tie people to their feet: the fastest weight reduction, the best way to exercise, the perfect idea to start a side business. We were too determined to come up with the best, and in the end we did not even get started. As Voltaire wrote: "The best, the enemy of good.".
I call this situation “the difference between initiation and action”. They sound alike, but they are different. When you start, you plan, develop strategies and learn. These are good things, but they cannot produce results.
Instead, action is the kind of behaviour that can produce results. Twenty ideas were conceived for an article to write, and that was a start; actually sitting down to write an article, that was an action. Searching for a better diet and reading several books about it was a start; actually a healthy meal was an action.
Start-up is sometimes useful, but can never produce results on its own. No matter how many times you talk to your personal fitness coach, your body will never get any better.
If start-up does not produce results, why should we do so? Sometimes it is because we really need to plan or learn more, but often it is just because it is a start that makes us feel better without taking the risk of failure. Most of us are good at avoiding criticism, because failure or public criticism are painful, and we tend to avoid situations where this may happen. That's the biggest reason you've been in a state of activation and never acted: you want to delay and fail.
In a state of activation, it is easy to convince oneself that things are moving forward. You think, "I'm talking to four potential clients, and that's a good thing. We are in the right direction.” Or, "I've got a couple of ideas about the brain of the book that I want to write, and it's coming out of a ditch.".
It makes you feel like you're doing something, but actually, you're just ready to do something. When it becomes a delay, you have to change. You don't just want to plan, you want to implement.
To master a habit, the key is to start again, not perfect. You don't have to list all the features of the new habits, just start to do it. This is the first focus of behavioural change in the third rule: it is right to start repeating it.
It depends on frequency, not time.
In the process of custom formation, an act becomes automated through repeated repetition. The more time a behaviour is repeated, the more the structure of the brain changes in order to perform that behaviour more efficiently. Neurologists refer to this as a “long-term enhancement” meaning that neurons in the brain are connected by recent patterns of behaviour. Each repetition strengthens the transmission of signals between cells, and the nervous connection becomes tight. This phenomenon was first raised by neuropsychologist Donald Heber in 1949, so it is often called the Heber's Law: “The neurons that are simultaneously launched are connected together”.
Repeating a habit can make a difference to the brain. The small brain of musicians, which is vital to the physical movements of dialling guitar strings or fiddle bows, is larger than that of non-musicians. In the lower leaves of mathematicians there is a relatively large amount of gray, which plays a key role in the calculations and calculations, the size of which is directly related to the time spent in this field: The older and more experienced mathematicians, the greater the increase in grey.
Scientists analyzed the brain of London taxi drivers and found that they were much larger than those who were not taxi drivers, the area in which they had control of space memory. More interestingly, when taxi drivers retire, the hippo returns. Just as body muscles react to routine weight training, specific areas of the brain grow when used and shrink when discarded.
Of course, long before neurologists explored, the importance of “repeat” for custom formation was known. In 1860, British philosopher George Henry Lewis wrote: “Teaching to speak a new language, play a musical instrument, or perform an unfamiliar act makes it very difficult, because the conduits through which every feeling passes have not yet been established; however, once one path is opened, the difficulties disappear, and the acts become automated, and can still be carried out as they are, even if they are elsewhere in mind.” Common sense and scientific evidence agree: repetition is a change.
Every time you repeat a behavior, you activate the neuropaths associated with that habit. This means that duplication of implementation alone is one of the key steps in building new habits. That is why a bunch of students who have taken photographs are skilled, but not just those who think of the perfect photo theory. One group is committed to active implementation, one group is engaged in passive learning, one group is active and one group is initiated.
From a time when it takes a lot of effort to move on, to a time when the behaviour is not false, all habits follow a similar trajectory, a process known as “automation”. When unwittingly taken over, an act can be carried out without thinking about each step, which is called automation.
The whole process looks like the following one.
And you'll see on the next page what's going to happen when researchers track the automation of a practical habit, like a 10-minute walk every day. The shape of these curves (i.e. what scientists call a “learning curve”) reveals an important truth about behavioral change: habits depend on frequency, not time.
One of the questions I hear most often is, "How long will it take to build a new habit?" But what you should really ask is, “How many times will it take to build a new habit?” That is, how many times will it take to automate a habit?
With regard to the development of habits, the passage of time has no magical force. Twenty-one, thirty or 300 days are irrelevant, and what matters is the proportion of the act performed. You can do something twice in 30 days or 200 times before the frequency affects the result. Your current habits, if not repeated thousands of times, have been internalized hundreds of times, and new habits require the same degree of frequency. A sufficient number of successful attempts have to be made to ensure that the behaviour is deep-rooted and that then you cross the “customary line”.
In fact, it is not important how long it takes to automate a custom, but it is important that you do take the actions needed to make progress. Whether an act is fully automated is less important.
To develop a habit, practice is necessary; and the most effective way to allow practice to take place is by complying with the act to change the third rule: to make action easier. The following sections provide precise guidance on how to do so.
Overview of this chapter.
The change of conduct to the third rule is “to make action easy”.
The most effective form of learning is implementation, not planning.
Focus on action rather than on start-up.
In the process of custom formation, an act becomes automated through repeated repetition.
The length of implementation of a custom is less important than the number of times it is enforced.
David Bells and Ted Orland wrote a similar story, and I rewrite it with their permission and include it in this book.
12 The Law of Least Effort
People naturally follow the path that takes less energy.
Prepare the tools so starting takes one step.
In the reward-winning masterpiece Guns, Diseases and Steel, anthropologist and biologist Jud Damon pointed to the simple fact that different continents have different shapes. At first glance, this statement seems to be obvious and of little importance, yet it actually has far-reaching implications for human behaviour.
The main axis of the American continent is north-south, meaning that the land blocks of South and North America are thin, not fat. The same applies to Africa. In contrast, this is not the case for the land blocks that make up Europe, Asia and the Middle East, the main axis of which is east-west. According to Damon, this variation in shape has significantly affected agricultural transmission over the centuries.
When agriculture begins to spread globally, it is easier for farmers to expand east-west than North-South, as locations at the same latitude usually have similar climatic, sunlight, rainfall and seasonal variations. These factors have allowed farmers in Europe and Asia to domesticate certain crops, from France to China and across vast lands.
In contrast, climate change is significant from the south to the north. Imagine how much the weather is different from that of Florida, and even the world's greatest farmer can't grow an orange from Florida in Canada's cold winter. Frost cannot replace soil, and if agriculture is to spread along the north-south route, farmers must constantly identify and domesticate new plants as the climate changes.
Thus, the rate of agricultural transmission across Eurasia is two to three times as high as across the Americas. This small difference has had a huge impact over centuries. Increased food production has led to faster population growth, and with more people these cultures can build stronger armies and better equipment to develop new technologies. At first, the changes were small -- the crops spread a little bit more and the population grew a little bit faster -- and as time passed, they became significant differences.
The spread of agriculture at the global scale is evidence of behavioural change in the third law. The traditional view is that motivation is the key to changing habits -- if you really want it, you might actually do it. But in fact, our real motivation is to be lazy and then find something convenient to do. Whatever the latest successful bestseller tells you, it's a smart strategy, not stupid.
Energy is precious, and the brain is set to save as much energy as possible. Human nature is guided by the principle of “minimum effort”: when choosing between two similar options, human beings naturally prefer to choose the one that spends the least effort. As the previous example shows, moving to the north, where the climate is different, is preferable to expanding to the east, where the same crops can be grown. Of all the possible actions, the one that cost the least to produce the highest value will be put into practice. Our motive is to do something easy.
Each operation requires a certain amount of energy, and the more energy it requires, the less likely it will occur. If your goal is to do a 100-down push-up one day, that's a lot of energy! At first, when you're inspired and excited, you may be able to start with power; but a few days later, so much energy is being spent on people who feel tired. In contrast, the habit of keeping up a day as a pushover is hardly a blow, while the less energy a habit requires, the more likely it is to develop.
When you look at most of your daily behavior, you find it almost possible to do it with very low power. The habit of skiing phones, reading e-mails, watching TV and so on steals so much of our time because they hardly need to spend any effort and are convenient.
In a sense, custom is an obstacle to achieving the goal. A diet is an obstacle before getting a good body, a barrier before feeling calm, and a diary before thinking clearly. What you really want is not the habit itself, but the result of it. The greater the obstacles -- the harder the habits -- the more resistance you have between what you want and what you want to end. It is therefore essential that habits be simple enough to be enforced even without will. If you make it easier, you're more likely to implement it.
But how can the seemingly opposite be explained? If human nature is lazy, how can someone do something so difficult, such as raising children, starting a career or climbing Mount Everest?
Of course you can do very difficult things. The problem is that sometimes you want to work hard, sometimes you want to just give up and get as much help as you can in hard times to overcome the challenges that life would have left you out. The less resistance needs to be faced, the more powerful self-empowerment will emerge. The concept behind “make action easy” is not to ask you to do what is easy, but to make it as easy as possible to do what will pay for the long term.
How to achieve more with less power.
Imagine holding a concussed pipe in the middle. Some water flows smoothly, but not much. If you want to increase the amount of water passed, you have two options: to twist the tap more open, to force the water to pass, or to remove the bend of the pipe, and to let the water flow naturally.
Trying to strengthen their motivation to stick to a difficult habit, like forcing water through a bending pipe. You can do this, but it takes a lot of effort and it increases the pressure of life. On the contrary, making habits simple and easy is like debunking pipes. Instead of trying to overcome resistance in life, it should be reduced.
One of the most effective ways to reduce resistance associated with custom is through environmental design. In chapter VI, we say that environmental design can make a hint visible, but you can also make action easier by optimizing the environment. For example, when deciding where to adopt a new custom, it would be preferable to choose where to go on a daily basis, and it would be easier to develop habits that can be integrated into the lifeline. If the gym is on its way to and from work, it's easier to go to the gym, because stopping on its way doesn't add much resistance to the way of life; by contrast, if the gym is not on the commuting route, even a few blocks away, you're going to go to the gym.
It may be more effective to reduce resistance in homes and offices. Too often we try to start a new habit in a highly resistant environment: trying to observe strict dietary rules when going out to dinner with our friends, trying to write a book in a mess of homes, trying to concentrate on using distracted mobile phones. We can remove the resistance that has stood in our way, as Japan's electronic factories have done since the 1970s.
In an article entitled "The New Yorker is ready ", James Sorowick wrote:
“The Japanese company emphasizes so-called `precision production' and relentlessly removes waste during the production process, including by redesigning the work space so that employees do not waste time turning to get tools. As a result, Japanese factories are more efficient than the United States, and Japanese products are more reliable than United States products. In 1974, the number of customer calls for American colour television was five times greater than for Japanese colour television; by 1979, United States workers had organized a television set three times as long as Japanese workers.”.
I like to call this strategy "the multiplier effect of subtraction." Japanese companies identify every small resistance in the production process and then eliminate it; when they reduce wasteful energy, the number of customers and income increases. By the same token, when we remove the resistance that consumes time and energy, we can achieve more with less energy (which is one of the reasons why organizing can be good: Progress has been accompanied by a reduction in the cognitive load imposed on us by the environment).
When looking at the products that are the easiest to get used to, you find that the best of these goods or services is to reduce little resistance or trouble in life: the delivery service reduces the difficulty of purchasing food, the dating software reduces the problem of social communication, the combination of services reduces the trouble of crossing the city and the communication software reduces the trouble of the geese.
As in Japan, where television factories redesign workspaces to avoid wasteful moves, successful companies design products to eliminate, simplify or automate as many steps as possible, such as reducing the columns on each form, reducing the number of mouse hits required to set up an account, making product use instructions easy to understand, or making fewer choices for customers.
When the voice-controlled smartphones, such as Google Home, Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod, came into being, I asked a friend who bought it why he liked it. He felt that it would be easier to say “play country music” than to take out a mobile phone, turn on a music application and choose to play a playlist. Of course, just a few years ago, you could have heard an infinite amount of music from your pocket, and it was really easy, because we had to drive to the record store to buy CDs. Business is the endless pursuit of the same results in a simpler way.
Similar strategies have been effectively employed by the Government. When the British Government wants to raise the tax rate, the form to be filled in for downloading online is replaced by a direct link to the form to be filled in. One step in the process of reducing the filing of forms alone was to increase the response rate from 19.2 per cent to 23.4 per cent. For a large country like the United Kingdom, these percentages represent millions of dollars in taxes.
The core concept is to create an environment that makes the right thing as easy as possible. Most of the key to custom-making is to find ways to reduce resistance to good habits and to increase problems associated with bad habits.
Prepare the environment for the future.
Oswald Narcos, a researcher in the science and technology industry, is well aware of the effectiveness of preparing the environment.
By following a strategy that he described as “reshaping the room”, Nakos has built a good habit of cleaning up. For example, after watching television, he puts the remote control back on the TV shelf, fixes the pillow on the couch and folds the blankets; when he gets off, he takes all the garbage out of the car; before he takes a shower, he wipes the toilet (as he said, “It was the best time to wash the toilet before the shower”. The purpose of reorganizing each room is not only to clean up after the last use, but also to prepare for the next use.
"When I walk into a room, everything takes its place." Nakos wrote, "Because I do it every day in every room, things are always kept very well. People think I'm trying, actually I'm lazy, I'm just lazy in a proactive way. This habit gives you a lot of time.".
When you sort out a space for its intended use, you're ready to make the next use easy. In the case of my wife, she will have a box of cards that will distinguish between functions - birthday, mourning, wedding, graduation, etc. When needed, she grabbed a suitable card and sent it. She never forgets to send a card because she has reduced the resistance to doing so. And I've been a reverse for years. Someone had a baby, and I thought, "Let's send a card and congratulate." But it's too late for me to go to the store for a card. It's not easy.
There are many ways to prepare the environment for ready use. If you wanted to cook a healthy breakfast, you would have put the frying pan on the stove the previous night, put the oil on the fluid table, set the bowls and dishes needed, and then make breakfast easy.
Do you want to draw more? Put all the drawing tools, such as pencils, brushes and drawing books, where they can be obtained at the desk.
How much exercise? We'll have sports uniforms, sneakers, sports bags and water bottles ready in advance.
Want to make your diet healthier? The weekend was used to cut a lot of vegetables and fruits and put them in containers. So you can easily get healthy food ready for consumption during the week.
These simple ways of putting our habits on the path of least resistance.
And you can reverse that principle, making bad habits difficult through environmental design. If you find yourself watching too many TVs, you pull the plug every time you watch it, and you tell yourself to say the name of the show you want to see so that you can put it back. It just happens to provide enough resistance to keep you from watching TV without thinking about it.
If it doesn't work, you can go even further: it takes 10 seconds to turn on the TV every time you watch TV and pull out the plug, so you can get the TV out of the living room every time you watch TV, so you can make sure that you don't use it until you really want to watch something. The greater the resistance, the lower the likelihood of custom formation.
I'll leave my cell phone in another room until lunchtime, as long as the situation permits. I'll use it as soon as I'm close to hand, and I'll use it for no reason, and it'll run out all morning; but if I put it in another room, I hardly think of it. That's just enough resistance to let me walk into another room to get my phone. As a result, every morning I have three to four hours to work without interruption.
If it is not enough to leave a cell phone in another room, friends or family are asked to hide it for hours. Or you can borrow your cell phone in your colleague's drawer and ask each other to wait until lunchtime.
In fact, with little resistance, an unwanted act can be avoided. I drank less when I hid my beer behind the fridge where I couldn't see it; I downloaded the social media app from the phone and I downloaded it again several weeks later. These manoeuvres are unlikely to contain real addictions, but for many, a small resistance may represent a difference between good habits and bad habits. Imagine how much influence dozens of small changes have accumulated in an environment designed to make good habits easy and difficult.
Whether we act as individuals, parents, coaches or leaders, we should ask ourselves, “How can we design a world that makes it easier to do the right thing?” Please redesign your life to make the most important things simple.
Overview of this chapter.
Human behaviour follows the principle of minimum effort, and we are naturally attracted by the least costly options.
Creating an environment where the right things can be implemented as easily as possible.
Reducing resistance to good habits. It's easy to get used to it with little resistance.
Increased resistance to bad habits. With more resistance, it's difficult to develop habits.
Prepare the environment to make future action easier to implement.
1 This is the rationale of physics, known as the “Minimum Effect Method”: if an object has to move from this point to another without any impediment, it always chooses the path that requires the least energy. This simple principle underpins the laws of the universe and can be used to describe the laws of motion and relativity.
2 The term “the multiplier effect of the reduction” is also used in a team or enterprise to describe the removal of redundancy in order to make the team as a whole stronger.
13 Stop Procrastinating With the Two-Minute Rule
Scale the habit down until starting feels almost too easy.
Turn reading a chapter into reading one page.
Traila Sharp is regarded by many as one of the greatest dancers and choreographers of our time. In 1992, she was rewarded the MacArthur reward, commonly known as the Genius reward, and for most of her dance career she was travelling to perform original works worldwide. She attributed her success to simple daily habits.
"I started every day with a ceremony." She wrote, “I got up at 5:30 in the morning, dressed in gymsuits, warm-legged socks, sweatshirts, hats, then walked out of my house in Manhattan, hired a taxi and asked the driver to drive me to the gym at 91st and 1st Avenues, where I was sports for two hours.
“My ritual is not a stretching and training at the gym every morning, but a taxi. Inform the driver of the destination and I'll finish the ceremony.
“It's a simple move, but it's done the same way every morning, making it a habit -- it's easy to repeat, it's easy to do. This reduces the possibility that I skip or do it in a different way, adds a weapon to my conventional arsenal, and leaves me with one thing to think about.”.
The recruitment of taxis every morning may be a modest move, but an excellent example of behavioural change in the third rule.
Researchers estimate that 40 to 50 per cent of what we do every day is out of habit. This is already significant, but the real impact of custom is far greater than these figures can show. Custom is an automated choice that affects subsequent conscious decisions. Yes, a habit can be done in a few seconds, but it can shape a few minutes, even hours later.
It's a habit to be on a road before the freeway, leading you to a route that's too late for you to react. You're moving fast to the next act. It seems easier to continue to do what is being done than to start doing something different. You're sitting there for two hours because it's a bad movie; you're full and you're stuffed with snacks; you're supposed to be looking at a cell phone, and you're staring at the screen 20 minutes later. Often, the habit of not conceiving is in this way affecting the choices you make when you think.
In my life, every evening there is a small moment -- usually around 5:15 -- that will determine the shape of the whole night: After the wife went into the house after work, we either went to the gym with our sports clothes, sat on the couch and ordered Indian food, and watched The Office. Like Trayla Sharp's taxi, my ritual was to get dressed. I knew I'd go to the gym if I put on a jersey, and it would be easy if I took the first step and everything else -- driving to the gym, deciding what to do, standing under the bell.
There are always moments of this kind every day that have a huge impact after. I call these little choices "decisive moments": the moment when I decide to cook dinner or order take-out, the moment when I decide to drive or ride a bicycle, the moment when I decide to start writing homework or pick up a video games pole. These choices are fork in the road.
A decisive moment provides the options available for your future self. For example, entering a restaurant is a decisive moment because it determines what you eat at lunch. Technically, you have control over what you want, but more broadly, you can only order what's on the menu. If it's a steakhouse, you can order a salad or rib-eye steak, but it's impossible to order sushi. Your options are limited to what is available, and they depend on your first choice.
We are limited by the places that we are customarily guided to, so it is important to have control over the decisive moment of the day. Every day consists of many moments, but there are only a few customary choices that really determine your path. These little choices pile up, and each of them sets orbits and determines how you're going to use them for the next time.
The habits are starting, not ending; taxis, not gymnasiums.
Two-Minute Rule.
It's easy to run together even when you know you're going to be small. When you dream of changing, it's hard to avoid getting excited and you try to do too much in too short a time. As far as I know, one of the most effective ways to counter this tendency is to apply the Two-Minute Rule: The beginning of new habits should take less than two minutes.
You'll find that almost every habit can be reduced to a two-minute version:
"Read every night" becomes "Read a page".
"Twenty minutes of yoga" goes to "Take out the yoga pad.".
"Reading through work" becomes "took through notes.".
"Close your laundry" to "convert your socks.".
"Three miles" turned into "shoelaces with running shoes.".
The focus is on making habits as easy as possible to start. Anyone can remain silent for one minute, read a page or fold a dress, which, as we discussed earlier, is a powerful strategy, because it is easier to continue to do the right thing once it begins. New habits should not make you feel like a challenge, and the next move could be challenging, but the first two minutes should be easy. What you need is a “entry habits” that can naturally lead you to a more productive path.
As long as the goal is difficult, from “very easy” to “very difficult”, it is usually possible to find an introductory habit that leads you to the cravingd outcome. For example, it is very difficult to run a marathon, with five kilometres difficult, 10,000 steps difficult, 10 minutes easy, and easy to wear running shoes. Your goal may be to run a marathon, and your entry habits are to wear running shoes, which is how the Two-Minute Rule works.
It is often felt that reading a page, being silent for one minute or calling a business call is not a good thing to be excited, but that the focus is not on doing one thing, but on mastering the habit of “starting up”. In fact, a habit needs to be developed before it can be improved. Less detail is unlikely to be available without learning the basic skills to start. Instead of trying to create perfect habits in the first place, we should do something easy and continue to do it. Standardization is needed to optimize.
When you have the skills to start, those two minutes will be the ceremony before the beginning of a larger practice. This is an ideal way not only to make habits easier, but also to master difficult skills. The more ceremonial the beginning of a process, the more likely it will be to enter the high level of focus required to achieve a major event. The same warm-up exercise each time before the exercise is done makes it easier to get yourself into the state of peak performance; following the same creative ritual makes it easier to create this difficult job; and it is easier to turn off the power supply and go to bed every night at a reasonable time. You may not be able to automate the whole process, but you can make the first move a reality. Let habits begin easily and the rest will proceed naturally.
For some, the Two-Minute Rule may look like a trick. Knowing that the real goal is to continue after two minutes, the Two-Minute Rule seems to be lying to itself. No one really wants to read a page, do a push-up, or open a note. How can you believe it if you know it's a psychological trick?
If you think the Two-Minute Rule is a little far-fetched, try this: just do two minutes and stop. Running out of the house must stop in two minutes; starting quiet, but stopping in two minutes; studying Arabic, but stopping in two minutes. It's no longer a start-up strategy, that's all. Your habits can only last 120 seconds.
One of my readers used this strategy to reduce more than a hundred pounds. At first, he reported to the gym every day, but was required not to stay longer than five minutes: to the gym, to exercise for five minutes and to leave as soon as possible. A few weeks later, he looked around and thought, "Well, anyway, why don't we start staying a little longer?" And a few years later, his weight followed.
Another example is the journal. Almost everyone can benefit by putting ideas in their head into writing, but most people either give up for a few days or avoid it, because writing a diary feels like a hard job. In fact, the secret is to stop before it's too hard. A British leadership adviser, Greg McGión, has developed daily diary habits by writing less deliberately than he wants. He always stopped writing until he found it difficult to write a diary. Hemingway believed that a similar recommendation applied to any writing, and said, “The best way to do so is to get away with it.”.
There's another reason why this kind of strategy works: it strengthens the identity you want to build. If you show up at the gym five days in a row, even if you stay two minutes at a time, you vote for a new identity. You don't care about getting a good body, but you focus on being the kind of person that never misses a physical fitness. You take the smallest action to ensure that you slowly become the person you want to be.
We rarely see change in this way, because everyone cares only about the ultimate goal. However, it was better to do a push up than not to exercise at all, to practice a guitar for a minute than not at all and to read a single minute than never before. It's better than hope than nothing.
To some extent, once habits are built, and there are beginnings every day, you can combine the Two-Minute Rule with a strategy that we call “customary shaping” to upgrade habits towards the ultimate goal. First, to master the first two minutes of the smallest version of the act; then, to move to a moderate step and repeat that process -- to focus on the first two minutes, and then to move on to the next level, after full mastery of the stage. In the end, you have developed a habit of first hope, while still focusing on where it belongs: the first two minutes of the act.
Almost all the larger goals of life can be transformed into two minutes of behaviour:
I want to live long and healthy and I need to have a good body and I need to exercise and I need to get dressed.
I want to have a happy marriage and I need to be a good partner and I should do something to make my life easier for the other half.
Whenever you find it difficult to stick to a certain habit, apply the Two-Minute Rule. This is a simple way to make habits easy.
Overview of this chapter.
It can be done in seconds, but it will continue to affect your behavior in minutes, even hours.
Many habits happen at a decisive moment. The decisive moment is a fork in the road that can set you on a productive day or a day where you will not be able to do anything.
The Two-Minute Rule is that it should take less than two minutes for the new habits to start.
The more ceremonial the beginning of a process, the more likely it will be to enter the high level of focus required to achieve a major event.
Standardization is needed to optimize. You can't improve non-existent habits.
One, to be sure, that night sounds great.
14 Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible
Decide while calm so you do not rely on willpower later.
Create one rule, appointment, or blocker that makes the right action easier.
Victor Hugo faced an impossible deadline in the summer of 1830. Twelve months ago, the French author promised to write a new book, but he did not write well, but did other projects, entertaining guests and delaying the work to be done. The publisher could not stand it, so it set a deadline of six months for the submission of the manuscript. Hugo must complete the book by February 1831.
Hugo came up with a strange tactic in order to fight the evils of delay: he asked his assistant to lock all his clothes in a large cabinet, and he had nothing to wear except a large scarf. Since there were no clothes to wear, he stayed in the library in the autumn and winter of 1830 and wrote crazy. As a result, the Bell Building Monster was published on 14 January 1831, one week before the deadline.
Sometimes the key to success is to make bad habits difficult, in addition to making them easier to implement. This is a reversal of behaviour to change the third rule: making action difficult. If it is found that it has been difficult to implement the plan, it is possible to follow Hugo's example and make bad habits more difficult by creating what psychologists call “commitment mechanisms”.
The commitment mechanism is to control future behaviour with the choice that is made now. It's a way to lock you in, tie you to your habits and keep you away from vices. When Hugo locked his clothes in order to concentrate on writing, he created a mechanism of commitment.
There are many ways to create mechanisms for commitment. You can buy independently packaged food instead of family numbers to reduce the chance of over-eating; you can volunteer to be on the blacklist of casinos and online poker sites to avoid future gambling. I even heard that athletes who had to go out the week before measuring their weight would deliberately leave their wallets in order not to be tempted to buy fast food.
Another example is provided by my good friend Neil Io, who is also a customary expert. He bought a plug-in timer, placed in the middle of the power and router at 10 p.m. each day, which would cut off the router ' s power; when the network was cut off, everyone knew the time for bed.
The mechanism of commitment is useful because it allows you to make good use of good intentions before falling victim to temptation. For example, when I want to reduce the calorie intake, I'll ask the waiter to split the food I ordered before I go to dinner and put it in the dining box; if I wait until the food comes to the table to tell myself that it's not going to work.
The key is to change the mission and make bad habits more expensive than starting them. If you feel there is a motive to change your body, you sign up for yoga courses and pay in advance; if you are interested in starting a business, write an e-mail to your respected entrepreneur and arrange a call time for consultation. The only way to give up, as soon as the time for action is up, is to cancel, which is costly and may cost money.
By making bad habits difficult at the moment, commitment mechanisms increase the likelihood that you will do the right thing in the future. However, we can do better: we can make good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible.
How to automate the habit, and it'll be operational from now on.
John Henry Patterson was born in 1844 in Dayton, Ohio. Throughout his childhood, he worked on his farm at home and in shifts at his father ' s sawmill. After the University of Dartmouth, Paterson returned to Ohio to open a grocery store, targeting the local coal miners.
That seems like a good opportunity. However, it is difficult to earn money despite the fact that it has no rivalry and has a stable customer base. It was only then that Paterson found out about the employees stealing money.
The theft of employees was a common problem in the mid 1800s. Receipts are stored in open drawers and can be easily altered or discarded; there are no cameras to monitor the shop and no software to track transactions. It is very difficult to avoid theft unless you are willing to spend the whole day hanging around an employee or to handle your own accounts.
In reflecting on this dilemma, Paterson saw an advertisement promoting a new invention known as the "Liti cashier". It was the first cash register in the world. The inventor, James Litti, came from Dayton, just like him. After each transaction, the machine automatically locked in cash and receipts for $50, and Paterson bought two.
As a result, the theft of employees at the store disappeared overnight. Over the next six months, Paterson's store went from a deficit to a surplus of $5,000, converted to its present value, exceeding $100,000.
The machine was amazing to Paterson, and he decided to move. He bought a patent for a Litti cash register and started the company Antenna; ten years later, the company had over a thousand employees and was becoming one of the most successful enterprises of our time.
The best way to combat vice is to make its implementation impractical. Increased resistance until this bad habit is not an option at all. The good thing about a cashier is that it automates ethical behaviour by making theft impossible. Instead of trying to change employees, it is making the cravingd behavior automatic.
Some actions, such as the installation of a cash register, are rewarded repeatedly. These one-time options will initially require effort, but their value will increase over time. I was fascinated by the idea that one option could produce returns over and over again, and I surveyed readers to see what one-off actions were most popular with long-term good habits. The table on the following page records some of the popular answers.
I bet ordinary people do half the one-off actions in this form -- even if they don't think more of it -- and most of them find their lives better after a year. These one-off actions are a straightforward application of behaviour changes to the third rule, making it easier to implement well-sleep, to eat healthy, productive, to save money and to lead a better life as a whole.
Of course, there are many ways of automating and eliminating bad habits, which are often associated with good use of technology. Technology can make otherwise difficult, annoying and complex operations easy, painless and simple. This is the surest and most effective way to ensure that the right actions are taken.
This approach is particularly useful if too few behaviours are to become habits. The technology to “remember” these things is particularly helpful here.
Other examples include:
Medical care: The medication on successive prescription notes is automatically available.
Personal finances: Employees can save for retirement by automatically raising a certain percentage of their salary.
Cooking: Food delivery services can also help you purchase food.
Productivity: Websites can be blocked to block social media access.
To automate life as much as possible, you can spend your heart on things that the machine cannot yet do. Every habit of delivering to technology frees up the time and energy that can be invested in the next stage of growth. The mathematician and philosopher Huaikhid once wrote, "Letting more things be implemented without false assumptions is the basis for the progress of civilization.".
Of course, the power of technology can be against us. The crazy chase became a habit because you had to invest more effort than you could keep watching the screen -- you don't have to press a button in the next episode, Netflix or YouTube automatically play for you, you just keep your eyes open.
Technology offers a certain degree of convenience that allows you to satisfy the smallest sudden thoughts and cravings. A little hungry, you can call food to the door, and a little bored, you can get lost in the vast sea of social media. When the effort required to satisfy craving is almost zero, you find yourself unwittingly caught up in any impulse to emerge. The disadvantage of automation is that it may allow us to move from one simple task to another, without allocating time to work that is more difficult but useful in the long term.
I find myself attracted to social media whenever I'm free and bored in milliseconds to pick up my phone. It is easy for us to embellish these little distractions into “suspension”, but to accumulate over time would become a serious problem. One minute's mind has been holding me back and preventing me from doing anything important. (I'm not an exception, but on average, people spend more than two hours a day browsing social media. Think about it. How much can you do?
The year I wrote this book, I tested a new time management strategy: My assistant changed the password of all my social media accounts in a few minutes a week, so I couldn't log in, so I could work without interference throughout the week. She'll send me the new password on Friday, so I can enjoy social media on weekends; by Monday, she will change it again (in the absence of an assistant, find a friend or family to work with and reset each other every week).
One of the most amazing things is the speed at which I adapt. In the first week of not being able to access social media, I found that I did not need to view social media so frequently, absolutely not every day. It's so simple that it's a predefined pattern. Once bad habits become impossible, I find myself motivated to deal with more meaningful tasks. It is easier to eat healthy things when mental candy is removed from the environment.
At your service, automation makes good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. This is the ultimate way of locking in future behaviour, not relying on the power of present will. By using commitment mechanisms, strategic one-off choices, and technology, you can create an environment of inevitability -- a space in which good habits are no longer just what you want, but what you almost guarantee.
Overview of this chapter.
The reversal of behaviour to change the third rule is “making action difficult”.
The commitment mechanism is to lock in the better behaviour of the future with the choice of the present.
The ultimate way to lock out future behaviour is to automate habits.
One-off choices, such as the purchase of better mattresses or the registration of automatic savings schemes, are single behaviours that will automate future habits and increase returns over time.
To ensure that the right actions are taken, the use of technology to automate custom is the most reliable and effective method.
I can't help but notice that this story is very similar to what I've written. Even though my publisher is more comfortable and my closet is always full, I do feel like I have to be confined to my home to finish my book.
This is also known as the “Ulysses Pact” or the “Ulysses Contract”. The hero Ulysses of Script Odyssey ordered his crew to tie him to a mast so that he could hear the sound of a sea demon's enchanting voice, but he could not sail the ship to a sea demon and hit a rock. Ulysses knows to lock in the future while he has the right mind, not to sit and watch where he wants to take you.
15 The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change
What is immediately satisfying is more likely to be repeated.
Give your good habit a visible finish signal.
In the late 1990s, a public defender named Stephen Rupee left his home town of Omaha, Nebraska, and bought a one-way ticket to the first capital of Pakistan, Karachi.
Karachi is one of the cities of the world's first population groups, and by 1998 it had reached more than 9 million people. It is the economic hub and transportation hub of Pakistan, with the busiest airport and port in the region. In the city's commercial zone, you will find standard urban facilities and the streets of the city's centre; however, the city of Kerala is also one of the least inhabited in the world.
More than 60 per cent of the population of Karachi live in slums and illegal settlements. These densely populated areas are filled with ad hoc houses made up of old woodboards, cinders and other waste, no garbage disposal system, no electricity grid and no clean water. When dry, the streets are a gathering place for dust and garbage, and when wet, they become mudslides full of sewage. The mosquitoes breed in a pool of dead water and the children play in the garbage.
Unsanitary conditions lead to widespread disease. Contaminated water sources cause epidemics of diarrhoea, vomiting and abdominal pain, and children living there are nearly one third malnourished. So many people in such a small space, the virus and bacteria are spreading fast. It was such a public-security catastrophe that brought Steven Rupee to Pakistan.
The Rupee and his team realized that in a very poor sanitary environment, the simple habit of washing hands alone could have a significant impact on the health of the population. But they soon found out that many people on the ground knew the importance of washing hands.
However, even though it is known that many residents still wash their hands in a very casual manner. Some people just move their hands under the tap and touch water, some wash only one hand and many forget to wash their hands before preparing food. Everyone said it was important to wash hands, but very few people developed the habit of washing hands. The problem is not knowing, but whether it has actually been implemented.
As a result, the Rupee team, in cooperation with the Boeing Overseas Corporation, provided sham soap to the local population. Soothing soap is more “enjoyed” than general soap.
"In Pakistan, saliva is the best soap." Rupee told me, “The participants in the study often say how much they like the soap.” So much so that the skin is so easy to bubble that people can put soap on their hands and it smells good. In the evening, washing hands became more pleasant.
“I do not see the goal of hand-washing as a change of behaviour, but rather as the adoption of custom.” According to Rupees, “It is much easier for people to adopt products that provide strong positive sensory experience, such as mint toothpaste, than to adopt a habit that does not provide happy sensory feedback, such as the use of dental wires. The treasurers' marketing team stated that the goal was to create positive hand-washing experiences.”.
Within months, researchers have found that the health of children in the region is rapidly changing: The incidence of diarrhoea fell by 52 per cent, the incidence of pneumonia by 48 per cent and the incidence of sepsis (bacterial infection of a skin) by 35 per cent.
The long-term effects are better. Rupees told me: “We came back to Karachi six years later to visit, and 95% of the families who had been given free soap and encouraged to wash their hands had a water table with soap... For more than five years, we have not provided any soap to the labs, but in the previous experiments they were used to washing their hands, so they kept going." This is a strong testimony to behavioural change in the fourth rule: making the reward satisfactory.
When experience is satisfied, we are more likely to repeat an act. That is perfectly logical. The feeling of pleasure, even if it's a little pleasure to wash your hands with fragrance and easily bubbled soap, is a signal to the brain: "It feels good. Next time." The pleasure makes your brain know that something is worth remembering and repeating.
Take the story of gum. Throughout the nineteenth century, gum was sold commercially, but it was not until the arrow gum was put on the market in 1891 that chewing became a global habit. The early gum is made of relatively non-favourable resins -- chewing but not good. The arrow completely overhauled the industry, adding white arrows (green mints) and yellow arrows (juice), making the product delicious and interesting. Then they went further and started to turn gum chewing into a clean mouth, and the ad said that gum would make you “new”.
The taste and fresh breath immediately reinforced the product and made it work satisfactorily. Consumption surged and the arrows became the world ' s largest gum company.
The development trajectory of toothpaste is similar. After adding green mints, mints and cinnamon to the product, producers have been very successful. These tastes do not actually make toothpaste more effective, but rather create a sense of “mouth cleaning” and make the brushing experience more pleasant. My wife stopped using sourated toothpaste because she didn't like the taste left in her mouth and switched to a brand that was more mint, which did make her more satisfied.
Conversely, if an experience is not satisfactory, we have little reason to repeat it. In the course of my research, I met a woman who had a super-narcissistic relative who was always driving her crazy. In order to spend less time with egomaniacs, she makes herself as boring as possible when the relative is present. A few times after the meeting, the relative began to avoid her because she felt bored.
These stories attest to the fundamental principle of behavioural change: rewards are repeated and punitive behaviour is avoided. Based on past experience with rewards (or penalties), we have learned how to do it in the future. Positive emotional development habits, negative emotional destruction of habits.
The first three rules of behaviour change -- to make tips visible, to make habits attractive, and to make actions easier -- increase our chances of carrying out an act this time. The fourth rule of behaviour change -- to make the reward satisfactory -- increases the likelihood that we will repeat it next time. The habit of going back is done.
But there's a trick: it's not good to have any satisfaction, we're looking for immediate satisfaction.
The difference between an immediate reward and a delayed reward.
Imagine that in any day you're an animal on the African steppes -- giraffes, elephants, or lions -- your decision will mostly have an immediate impact. You've been thinking about what to eat, where to sleep, or how to avoid predators, always focusing on the immediate or very near future. You live in what scientists call an "immediate feedback" environment, because your actions will produce immediate and definitive results.
Now, return to your human identity. Living in a modern society, many of the choices you make are not immediately beneficial. With outstanding performance at work, you will receive paychecks in a few weeks; sports today, perhaps not too heavy next year; and savings now, perhaps in decades, enough money for retirement. You live in what scientists call "delayed feedback" because it may take years for your actions to be rewarded.
The human brain has not evolved for delayed feedback. The late intellectuals of 200,000 years ago were the first humans to have a relatively modern human brain, especially the new cortex -- the last part of the brain to evolve, responsible for high-level functions such as language -- similar to the size of modern people, which has remained largely unchanged for 200,000 years. We live in the modern world with the old stone age hard.
It was not until recently — the last 500 years in Yomo — that a society dominated by a delayed feedback environment took shape. The modern world is newer than the age of the brain. For the past 100 years, we have witnessed the emergence of cars, aircraft, television, personal computers, Internet access, smart phones and Beyonce. The world has changed considerably in recent years, and human nature has not changed much.
Like other animals in the African steppes, our ancestors responded to the threat of life or death all day long, ensuring that the next meal is food and trying to find shelter in the wind and rain, so that immediate satisfaction is taken seriously and for granted, and the distant future is much less apprehensive. And after thousands of generations of living in an environment of immediate feedback, our brains have evolved to prefer quick pay to long pay.
Behavioural economists refer to this tendency as “time incoherence”: the brain's assessment of compensation varies over time. You value the moment more than the future. This tendency is usually beneficial to us. The value of what is now determined is generally higher than what may be in the future. However, our preference for immediate satisfaction can sometimes be problematic.
Knowing that smoking increases the risk of lung cancer, why should some people smoke? Knowing that over-eating increases the risk of obesity, why do some people still eat so much? Why do some people still want to do this knowing that unsafe sex can cause themselves to become sexually transmitted? Understanding how the brain prioritizes rewards is clear: the consequences of bad habits are delayed, but the rewards are immediate. Smoking can take your life in 10 years, but it can now reduce your stress and your addiction; over-eating can be harmful in the long run, but it can now satisfy your abdomen's cravings; and sex – safe or unsafe – can provide immediate pleasure, and disease and infection can occur only a few days or weeks or years later.
Over time, each custom produces multiple results, which, unfortunately, are often inconsistent. The immediate results of bad habits are good for people, and the final results are bad for people; the good habits are, on the contrary, less enjoyable for people, and the end results are good for people. The French economist Frederik Basscha gave a clear explanation of the problem: “When the immediate result is desirable, the later result will be catastrophic, and vice versa — almost always —... the sweeter the fruits of a habit, and the bitterer the fruits of the later.”.
In other words, the price of good habits is now, and the price of bad habits is in the future.
Brain preferences mean you can't rely on good intentions. When you make a plan -- weight reduction, writing or learning language -- you're actually making plans for the future. And when you imagine an ideal future life, it is easy to see the value of actions that bring long-term benefits, because we all want to make our lives better for ourselves. However, when the moment of choice comes, immediate satisfaction often becomes the winner. You no longer choose to dream of a “future self” with a better body, richer or happier body, but rather to think of a “now one's” choice with a sense of satisfaction, a craving to be tolerated or a craving to be entertained. Generally speaking, the more immediate pleasure an act gives you, the stronger you should question whether it is consistent with your own long-term objectives.
With a more comprehensive understanding of why the brain repeats or avoids certain behaviours, we update the basic principles of behaviour change: acts that bring immediate rewards are repeated and acts that bring immediate punishment are avoided.
Human preference for immediate satisfaction reveals an important truth about success: Because the brain is set, most people spend all their time pursuing rapid satisfaction, and fewer people choose the path of delayed satisfaction, so if you are willing to wait for a reward, there will be less competition and often greater rewards. Well said, last mile, least crowded.
That's what research shows. The academic standards tests for those who are good at delayed satisfaction are high, drug abuse is less likely, obesity is less likely, stress response is better and social skills are better. We all see examples in life: if you delay watching TV and finish your homework, you usually learn more and get better results; if you don't buy dessert and potato chips in a shop, you tend to eat healthier food when you come home. At some point in time, success in almost every field requires that you ignore immediate rewards for future rewards.
The problem is that most people know that delay is wise, that they want the health, productivity and peace of mind benefits of good habits, but these results are rarely given first priority at the moment of decision-making. Fortunately, it is possible to train themselves to delay satisfaction — but it must be done according to human logic, not in reverse. The best way is to add some immediate pleasure to the long-term beneficial habits and some immediate pain to the long-term unhelpful habits.
How to make immediate satisfaction work for you.
The key focus of maintaining a habit is the perception of “success”, even if small. The sense of success makes you know that the habit is rewarding and that the effort is worth it.
Ideally, the reward for good habits is the habit itself; but the real situation is that, unless good habits offer you something, you don't always feel it's worth it. The initials were sacrifices, several times at the gym, but did not grow stronger, thinner or faster — at least undetectable; it was not until a few months later, when you lost a few pounds, or the lines of your arms began to appear, that it was easier to exercise. At the outset, you need a reason to stay on track, which is why an immediate reward is indispensable. When delayed rewards accumulate in invisible places, these immediate rewards help you to stay high.
When discussing immediate rewards, what we are talking about is actually the end of an act. The end of any experience is important, because we often remember it most clearly than at other stages. Therefore, the end of habits must be satisfactory. The best way is to strengthen, that is, to use immediate rewards to improve the chances that an act will be executed. The customary stack referred to in chapter V is to link habits to immediate reminders so that the timing of implementation is clear; the enhanced law binds habits to immediate rewards and gives you satisfaction at the end.
Immediate reinforcement is particularly useful when dealing with habits that want to be avoided — that is, acts that want to stop. The habit of “don't spend any money” or “no wine for a month” may be challenging, because nothing happens when you skip the price reduction at the bar or don't buy a pair of shoes. It is difficult to be satisfied when there is no action at all. All you do is resist temptation. It's nothing to satisfy.
One solution is to reverse the situation: to make avoidance visible. To open a deposit account and name it after something you want (perhaps a “skin coat”) and to deposit the same amount of money in that account for every thing you skip. No latte for breakfast? Turn five dollars in; don't order Netflix next month? Turn ten dollars in. It's like creating a dividend build-up for yourself. The immediate reward of seeing yourself separated from your coat by saving money makes you feel good, not deprived. You make inaction satisfying.
One of my readers and his wife used a similar strategy. They tried not to eat outside, cooked more at home, opened an account called “Europe Tour” and went in for $50 each time they skip a meal; by the end of the year, they took the money they had saved.
It is worth noting that the short-term rewards chosen must strengthen your identity and cannot contradict it. If you want to lose weight or read more books, you can buy a leather coat; but if you aim to reduce spending and save money, this reward won't work. You can replace yourself with a bubble bath or a free walk, in line with your ultimate goal of greater freedom and financial independence. By the same token, if you use ice cream to reward yourself for the exercise, it is tantamount to voting for conflicting identities, and in the end it is only a right and a wrong; on the other hand, you can choose massage as a reward, both for enjoying and for taking care of your body, so that short-term rewards are consistent with a long-term vision of being a healthy person.
And finally, when you're in a better mood, more energy and lower stress, you're less busy pursuing secondary rewards. Identity itself is a reinforcement, and you do it because you're the kind of person who feels good. The more habit becomes part of your life, the less encouragement you need to carry out. Motivation opens your habits, identity keeps you.
However, the accumulation of evidence and the emergence of new identities take time. When waiting for a long-term reward, immediate reinforcement will help you to keep your motivations in the short term.
In short, a habit must be pleasant to continue. A simple reinforcement – such as nice soap, fresh mint toothpaste, or a 50-dollar increase in the account – provides the immediate pleasure you need to enjoy a habit. And when change makes you happy and enjoy, it's easy to change.
Overview of this chapter.
The fourth rule of behavioural change is “compulsory reward”.
When experience is satisfactory, we are more likely to repeat an act.
Human brain evolution gives priority to immediate rewards rather than deferred rewards.
The basic principle of behavioural change: acts that bring immediate rewards are repeated and acts that bring immediate punishment are avoided.
The key focus of maintaining a habit is the feeling of “success”, even if it is small.
The first three rules of behaviour change -- to make tips visible, to make habits attractive, and to make actions easier -- increase our chances of carrying out an act this time. The fourth rule of behaviour change -- to make the reward satisfactory -- increases the likelihood that we will repeat it next time.
With the emergence of agriculture 10,000 years ago, farmers began to grow crops and expect harvests in a few months ' time, which could allow humans to enter the environment of delayed feedback. However, it was not until the last few centuries that our lives were filled with options for delayed feedback: career drawings, retirement drawings, vacation drawings, and plans to take over our business history.
2 Time inconsistency is also referred to as a “biblical discount”.
This will also derail our decisions. The brain overestimates any seemingly immediate threat, but it is almost impossible, for example, that small turbulence leads to plane crashes, burglar invasions while alone in the home, and that buses are blown up by terrorists. At the same time, the brain underestimates what may seem remote, but it is more likely that threats may occur, such as the steady accumulation of fat from eating junk food, muscle atrophy from office time to time, and the accumulation of incidentals that are not organized.
16 How to Stick With Good Habits Every Day
Tracking makes progress visible and protects the chain.
Miss once if you must, but avoid missing twice in a row.
In 1993, a bank in Abesford, Canada, hired Trent Desmide, a 23-year-old stock broker. Most of the major businesses are in Vancouver, and in the shadow of this nearby city, Abesford is only a small suburbs. Considering the remoteness of the location and the status of Desmide's rookie, no one has much expectations of him. However, because of a simple daily habit, he is moving fast.
Every morning, Desmond puts two jars on the desk, one empty and the other with 120 pins. Every day, as soon as he was ready to start work, he would make a business call; after that, he would move a pin to an empty jar and then repeat the process. He told me, "Every morning, one of the cans contains 120 retweeting needles, and then I'll keep calling until all the retweets are moved to another can.".
In less than 18 months, Desmond earned $5 million for the company; at age 24, he earned $75,000 a year — the equivalent of $125 million today. Shortly thereafter, he found a six-digit job in another company.
I like to call this technique a “tripback strategy”, and over the years I have heard many readers apply it in various ways. A woman who had completed a page would have moved one hair clip from one container to another; a man who had completed a group of pushups would have placed one marble from one box to another.
Progress is satisfactory, and visual measurements, such as moving pins, hair clips or marbles, provide clear evidence of progress. As a result, these things strengthen your behavior and add a little immediate satisfaction to any activity. Visual measurements take many forms, such as food logs, fitness logs, focus cards, progress bars when software is downloaded, or even the page number of a book. However, perhaps the best way to measure progress is through customary trackers.
Getting used to tracking helps you keep it.
The usual tracker is a simple way of measuring whether or not one has implemented it. The most basic form is to find a calendar, which will be ticked on the day whenever there is a routine. For example, if you're on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, there's a hook on those dates. Over time, this calendar has become a record of your practice.
Millions of people are tracking their habits, but perhaps the most famous of them is Benjamin Franklin. Since he was 20 years old, he has been carrying a pamphlet with him to track 13 virtues, including “Don't waste time, stay busy with good things” and “Don't talk in vain”. Before bedtime, Franklin would open a brochure to record his progress.
It is said that Jerry Schmid also uses his customary tracker to keep his jokes going. In the documentary, The King of American Comedy, he said that his goal was simply to “do not interrupt” the continuous record of writing jokes every day. In other words, his focus is not on how good or bad a joke is, nor on whether it is inspired, but on what he has done and on the record of continuous execution.
"Don't break the record" is a powerful spell. If you don't break the continuous record of dialing business calls, you'll build up an impressive list of clients; if you don't break the continuous record of physical fitness, you'll get a better figure than expected; if you don't break the continuous record of creation, you'll get an impressive collection. The power of customary tracing is strong because of several behavioural changes: It also makes an act visible, attractive and satisfying.
Allow me to split up.
It's easy to track the good.
Recording the previous action creates the trigger for the next action. Customary tracing automatically creates a series of visual tips, such as a tick on a calendar or a meal in a food log. When you see your own record on the calendar, you will remember to keep doing it. Research shows that those who record their own progress are more likely to improve than those who do not. A study with more than 1600 testees found that those with food logs lost nearly twice their weight compared to those who did not write down what they had eaten. The tracking of behavior alone can inspire change.
You can be honest with yourself. Most people have a distorted view of their own behaviour and always over-approach their own behaviour. Measurement provides a way for us to overcome our own blindness and to notice what really happens every day. Take a look at the pin in the container and you'll know how much you've done or how much you haven't done. Evidence is more difficult to deceive.
Advantages are attractive.
The most effective incentive is its own progress. Knowing that he was moving forward, he was more motivated to continue on that road. In this way, customary tracing can have an addictive effect, and every small victory feeds your craving.
This is particularly useful in times of ill health. When depressed, it is easy to forget how much progress has been made. The habit of tracking gives you visual proof of your efforts, so cleverly let you know how far you've gone. In addition, every morning when you see spaces that have not yet been ticked, you get the momentum to start, because you don't want to break the record and affect progress.
Advantages three are good for tracking.
This is the most important of all the benefits. Tracking itself can be transformed into a reward, with one thing cut off from the list of to-dos, one set of training done on the fitness log, one tick on the calendar, all of which provide satisfaction. Looking at the growth of results -- the size of the portfolio, the number of pages of manuscripts -- makes people feel good, so the likelihood of continuing is even higher.
It also helps you focus on what you do now: focus on the process, not the outcome. You're not obsessed with six abs, you're just trying to keep the record going, you're the kind of person who never misses the exercise.
In short, habits track: first, create visual cues that remind you to act; secondly, in essence, have an incentive, because when you see your own progress, you try to keep the record; and thirdly, when you write down success stories of implementation, you bring satisfaction. In addition, customary tracing provides visual evidence that you vote for the kind of person you want to be, which is in itself a pleasant and immediate satisfaction.
You might wonder why I'm so late in the day when it's so useful to track?
Despite the many benefits of customary tracing, there is only one simple reason why I am here to discuss it: many people resist the concept of tracing and measurement. It feels like a burden because it forces you to develop two habits: the habits you try to build and the habits of tracing. When the diet is difficult enough to calculate, calorie becomes more troublesome; work is done, and it is more annoying to write down every business call. It's easier to say, "I'll eat less," "I'll try harder" or "I'll remember to do." I've always been told, “I have a decision-making journal, but I rarely use it” or “I've recorded the exercise, but not after a week”, and I've been here and I've made a food log to track calorie intake, and I've only recorded one meal, and I've given up.
Not everyone's a tracker, and you don't have to measure it all your life. However, almost everyone can benefit in some way, even temporarily.
So, what do we do to make tracking easier?
First, measurements should be automated to the extent possible. You might wonder how many things you've been following without knowing: credit cards track your out-of-food frequency, smart sports watches or bracelets like Fitbit, record how many steps you've taken, how long you've slept, how many new places you visit every year. If you know where to get the data, write it down in the calendar and remind yourself to go on a weekly or monthly basis. This is more feasible than daily tracking.
Secondly, manual tracing should be limited to the most important matters. It is better to keep track of a habit than to keep track of 10.
Finally, immediately after the implementation of the custom, it is recorded. The completion of the act is a sign of record, and you can combine customary tracking with the customary stacks mentioned in chapter V.
The formula used to stack and track is:
When I'm done, I'll follow that habit.
After a business call, I'll move a pin.
I'll record it in the gym.
After putting the dishes in the dishwasher, I'll write down the food I just ate.
These strategies make it easier to track. Even if you're not the type of person who likes to record your own behavior, I think a few weeks of measurements alone can bring you a deep understanding. After all, it's interesting to see how you spend your time.
However, any customary record of continuity always ends somewhere. Therefore, it is more important than any single measurement to have a good contingency plan when custom is out of track.
How to respond quickly after the breakdown of habits.
No matter how persistent a habit, life inevitably interferes with you at some point. Perfectity is impossible, and in a short period of time an emergency happens suddenly — sick, having to travel abroad, or your family taking more of your time.
Whenever that happens, I remind myself of the simple principle of not missing twice.
If I miss a day, I'll get back on track as soon as possible. Missing one physical exercise is inevitable, but I won't allow myself to miss it twice in a row; perhaps I'll accidentally eat a whole piece of pizza, but the next meal will be a healthy meal. I can't be perfect, but I can avoid it. When a continuous record ends, I start to create the next one.
Destroying you will never be the first mistake, but the next one after another. One missed was an accident, and two missed was the beginning of another habit.
That's the difference between winners and losers. Each person may have a sub-standard performance, an ecstasy of fitness, or a poor working day, but a successful person will quickly rebound when he or she falls. If we can pick up our habits quickly, the interruption will be fine.
This is too important for me, so I will abide by that principle even if it is not possible to implement it as thoroughly as I wish. Faced with habit, we often end up in a cycle of “no, no, no”. The problem was not to make a mistake, but to think that as long as it was not perfect, it was simply not.
You have no idea what value it is to continue your habits on a day that is in poor condition. Those days that miss habits hurt you more than those that successfully implement habits. If you start with a hundred dollars, 50 percent of the profits will give you 150 dollars, but if you lose 33 percent, you'll lose 100 dollars. In other words, 33 per cent of the losses are avoided and their value equals 50 per cent of the profits. As Charlie Monger put it: “The primary principle of retributive interest: do not need to be interrupted.”.
And that's why "happiness" fitness is often the most important exercise. You've had a hard day and a bad physical condition, and you've been able to keep up with the profits from the good days. Just a few simple sports -- ten deeps, five short-range punches, one push, everything's great. Don't pay the papers. Don't let your losses erode your profits.
Besides, the point is not what happens when you work out, it's what you become. It is easy to exercise when the power is full, but it is important to do it when you do not want to do it — even if it is less than hope. Five minutes in the gym may not help you improve your body, but it strengthens your identity.
The cycle of behaviour change, “no, no” is only one of the traps that may interfere with habits. Another potential danger - especially when tracking habits - is "the wrong thing to measure.".
Find out when a habit should be traced.
Assuming that you're a restaurant operator, you want to know how the cook is doing, one way to measure achievements is to track how many customers spend their meals every day. There will be plenty of guests at the door, and there will be few guests at the door, and there will surely be a mistake.
But this measure -- the daily harvest -- only allows you to see one-sided facts. Paying for food does not mean that people are happy, and even if they are not satisfied, they are less likely to eat the meal. In fact, the quality of the meal may be getting worse if you simply insist on the harvest, while you try to make up for it by selling, discounting or otherwise. On the other hand, it would be more efficient to track the number of guests who finish their meals or leave a significant tip.
The disadvantage of tracking a particular behaviour is that we sometimes pursue data, not the purpose behind it. If your achievements depend on the harvest of each season, you will therefore optimize sales, revenue and accounting figures; if your achievements depend on the weight figures, you will work to reduce the numbers, even if that means the use of rapid weight reduction, fat pills or cold-pressure juice to detoxify them. Whatever the game, the heart wants to win.
This trap is everywhere in life. We focus on long hours of work rather than on meaningful work; we care about 10,000 steps rather than health; we teach students how to achieve high marks in standardized examinations, without emphasizing learning, curiosity and critical thinking. In short, we fight for what we measure. And when we choose the wrong measure, we follow it.
This is sometimes referred to as the Goodhart-specific law, and is famous for the economist Charles Goodhart. The law states: "When the measurement is a target, it is no longer a good way of measuring." Measuring is only useful to you when it guides you, helps you to see the whole picture, and does not consume your mind. Each number is just a feedback from the whole system.
In this data-driven world, we can easily overvalue numbers and underestimate anything that is short, soft and difficult to quantify. The only factor that we think can be measured is the only one that exists. However, the fact that one thing can be measured does not mean that it is the most important thing; equally, it does not measure the same thing, nor does it mean that it does not matter at all.
All of this is to tell us that it is extremely important to place customary tracing in the right place. Tracking habits and record-keeping can be satisfying, but measurement is not the only thing that matters. In addition, there are many ways to measure progress and sometimes to shift the focus to something entirely different.
That is why “non-quantifiable achievements” are effective for weight reduction. The figures on the weight count may be stubborn, and they won't move, so if you focus on them, your power will be wiped out. But you may have noticed that your skin is getting better, getting up early, or your craving for sex is an effective way of tracking progress. If the weight count doesn't give you power, maybe it's time to shift the focus to different measurements -- the way you see your own progress.
No matter how you measure progress, customary tracing provides a simple way to make habits more satisfying. Each measurement provides a small proof that you are moving in the right direction, and brings a brief momentary pleasure that allows you to reward yourself.
Overview of this chapter.
One of the most satisfying is the feeling of progress.
The custom tracker is a simple way to measure whether or not a custom has been implemented -- for example, a tick on the calendar.
By providing clear evidence of progress, customary trackers and other visualized measurements can make habits satisfying.
Don't break the record and try to keep the record of the practice going.
Don't miss twice. If one day is missed, it will be back on track as soon as possible.
To measure something doesn't mean it's the most important thing.
1 See Model 4 at the end of the reference book for interested readers.
17 Why Accountability Partners Matter
Being observed gives a habit more weight.
Send one daily status line to a trusted person: done or not done.
Roger Fisher, a pilot in the Second World War, went to Harvard Law School after the war and spent 34 years studying negotiation and conflict management. He created the Harvard Negotiations Centre to work with multinational leaders on peace resolutions, hostage crises and diplomatic compromises. But it was only in the 1970s and 1980s, when the threat of nuclear war intensified, that Fisher developed his own most interesting ideas.
At that time, Fisher was focusing on devising a strategy to avoid nuclear war, and he noted the disturbing fact that any incumbent president had a nuclear launch code that could kill millions of people in an instant without seeing anyone die for thousands of miles away.
"My proposal is simple," he wrote in 1981, "Put the nuclear launch codes in a capsule and plant the capsule next to a volunteer's heart. The volunteer was accompanied by a butcher knife on the side of the President. If the President wanted to launch nuclear weapons, he would have to kill him first. The President would say, "George, I'm sorry, but tens of millions of people must die. He must look at someone and understand what is dead - what is innocent. Blood will be spilled on the carpet of the White House and real life will be in sight.
“When I told my friends in the Pentagon about this proposal, they said, “My God, it's terrible. It would distort the President's judgment to kill someone with his own hands, and he might never press the launcher.".
In discussing behavioural changes to the fourth rule, we spoke of the importance of having good habits bring immediate satisfaction. Fisher's proposal is a reversal of the fourth rule: the consequences are immediately unsatisfactory.
When the end is satisfactory, we are more likely to repeat that experience; similarly, when the end is painful, we are more likely to avoid that experience. Pain is an effective teacher. When failure is painful, it is amended; on the contrary, when failure is less painful, it is often ignored. The greater the costs of mistakes, the more immediately we can learn from them. The negative threat is that the plumber must do his job well, and the possibility that the customer will never come back to the restaurant again forces the restaurant to bring out good food, and the consequences of the wrong blood vessels have led the surgeon to master human anatomy and to be cautious. With serious consequences, people learn quickly.
The more painful it is, the less likely it will occur. It is an excellent way to reduce the incidence of unhealthy behaviour if it is to avoid it and eradicate it.
We repeat vices because they are useful to us in one way or another, making them difficult to escape. As far as I know, the best way to overcome this dilemma is to speed up the penalties associated with the act. There can be no significant time lag between behaviour and consequences.
If behaviour has immediate consequences, it begins to change. Because of late payment, customers pay their bills on time; because attendance affects achievement, students appear in the classroom. In order to avoid a little immediate pain, we are willing to go to hell.
Of course, there are limits. If punishment is to change behaviour, the force of punishment must be comparable to that of the act. To be productive, the cost of delay must be greater than the cost of action; to improve health, the cost of idleness must be greater than the cost of sport. A fine is imposed for smoking in restaurants or for failing to recover resources, adding consequences to the behaviour. The behaviour will change only if the punishment is sufficiently painful and indeed enforced.
Generally speaking, the more physical, concrete and immediate the consequences are, the more likely they are to have an impact on the conduct of the individual; the more remote, intangible, abstract and delayed the less likely they are to have an impact on the conduct of the individual.
Fortunately, there is a simple way to add an immediate price to any bad habit: create a customary contract.
Customary contracts make breaches of promises public and painful.
On 1 December 1984, the State of New York became the first state in the United States to pass the seat belt code. At that time, only 14 percent of the people in the United States used to wear seat belts – but this will change.
Within five years, seat belts were in place in more than half of the United States; today, 49 of the 50 states of the United States legally require car passengers to wear safety belts. Not only legislation, but also a significant increase in the actual number of people wearing safety belts. In 2016, more than 88 percent of Americans were wearing seat belts as soon as they got in the car. In just over 30 years, millions of people have completely reversed their habits.
Laws and regulations are examples of social contracts used by governments to change our habits. As part of society, we collectively agree to abide by certain rules and to implement them collectively. Every time a new regulation affects behaviour - the seat belt law, the ban on smoking in restaurants, and the mandatory recycling of resources - it is an example of a social contract that shapes people's habits. Groups agree to act in some way, and individuals who fail to comply are punished.
And just as governments use the law to hold citizens accountable, you can create a customary contract to hold yourself accountable. The customary contract is an oral or written consent indicating that you are committed to a particular custom and the punishment that will be imposed if you fail to implement it. Then you need to find one or two people to be your “accountable partner” and sign the contract with you.
Brian Harris, an entrepreneur in Nashville, Tennessee, was the first person to see this strategy put into practice. Soon after his son was born, Harris realized that he wanted to lose a few pounds. Thus, he signed a customary contract with his wife and private coach, the first version of which reads: “Brian's primary goal in the first quarter of 2017 is to start again the implementation of the right diet, so that he can feel better and look better, and achieve the long-term goal of weighing 200 pounds and 10 per cent lipid.
Under this statement, Harris proposes a plan to achieve the cravingd results:
Phase I: Reloading in the first quarter of a rigorous “low carbon water compound diet”.
Phase II: Starting in the second quarter to carefully track key nutrients.
Phase III: Maintenance and improvement of the catering and fitness programme during the third quarter.
Finally, he wrote down every daily habit that would help him to meet the standards, such as: “Recognize the daily food and weigh the weight.”.
He then listed the penalties for failure: “If Brian fails to do both, the following penalties will be imposed: He must wear official clothes on every working day and Sunday morning remaining in the season. Formal clothing is defined as not wearing jeans, T-shirts, hats or shorts. In addition, if one day he forgets to record the food he eats, he must give Joey (his personal coach) $200 as he pleases.”.
At the bottom of the deed, Harris, his wife and his personal coach signed.
My first response was that such a contract seemed to be too formal and unnecessary, especially with regard to the part of the signature, but Harris made me understand that the signature meant serious. He said, "Every time I skip this step of signing, I almost lose my grip.".
Three months later, when Harris completed the first quarter, he upgraded the target and the consequences increased in intensity: if he failed to meet the target of carbohydrates and proteins, he had to give the coach $100; and if he forgot to weigh weight one day, he had to give his wife $500. Perhaps the most painful punishment is that if he forgets to do short-distance sprints, he must work every day in formal clothes, and every day, for the rest of the season, wear the hat of the University of Alabama — the enemy of the Oppen University team he supports.
This strategy worked. With wives and coaches as accountability partners, and the customary contract that clearly illustrates what should be done every day, Harris has succeeded in reducing the weight of 1.
To make bad habits dissatisfied, the best option would be to make them painful at the present time, and customary contracts were the simple thing to be born for.
It would be useful to have an accountability partner alone, even if it did not wish to develop a complete customary contract. The comedian Zhao police Dan writes a joke or a song every day, and she challenges a friend to play this “one-day song”, which holds them both responsible. Knowing that someone is watching will be a powerful force, you will be less likely to delay or give up because there will be immediate costs. If you didn't follow through, they might think you weren't trustworthy or lazy. Suddenly, you didn't just keep your promise to yourself, nor did you keep your promise to others.
You can even automate the process. Thomas Frank, an entrepreneur in Pod City, Colorado, ordered him to get up at 5:55 a.m. every morning, and if he did not, he scheduled an automatic tweet: "It's 6:10, and I haven't gotten up, because I'm lazy! Consider my alarm clock not broken, and respond to this tweet, he can get five dollars through PayPal.".
We always try to show the world the best of ourselves. We comb our hairs, brush our teeth, and dress ourselves, because we know that these habits can be positively responded to; we want to have good grades, graduate from top schools, so that friends, families, future employers or partners can be impressed. We care about the opinions of those around us, because it is useful to get their likings, and that is why an accountability partner or a customary contract is so effective.
Overview of this chapter.
The reversal of behaviour to change the fourth rule is “to make the consequences unsatisfactory”.
We are less likely to repeat the dissatisfied or painful habits.
accountability partners can create immediate costs for “inaction”. We are deeply concerned about how others see themselves and do not want others to judge us less.
Customary contracts can be used to add social costs to any act, making breach of commitments an open and painful matter.
Knowing that someone is watching will be a powerful force.
1 See Model 5 at the end of the book for interested readers.
18 How Genes Influence Habit Building
Choose a habit style that fits your nature instead of fighting yourself forever.
Change the format of a habit you keep failing at.
Michael Phelps is known as one of the greatest athletes in history. Phelps is not only the swimmer who won the most Olympic medals, but also the number of Olympic medals he owns more than athletes in any field.
Hicham El Quiroy is also an outstanding athlete, but less well known. The Moroccan runner has two Olympic gold medals and is one of the best mid-range runners in history. He kept a mile, 1,500 meters, and 2,000 meters of world record for many years, and in the 2004 Athens Olympics, he took gold medals in 1,500 meters and 5,000 meters.
These two athletes are very different in many places (first, one on land and one in water), but the most obvious is the difference in height - Quilley is five feet, nine inches, and Phelps is six feet, four inches. Despite the fact that he was seven inches tall, one figure was the same: two had long legs.
How is that possible? Turns out, in terms of height, Phelps' legs are relatively short, but his torso is very long. Quiroy had super-long legs, shorter upper body, which was the ideal body for long run.
Now, imagine these two world-class athletes exchanging sports. Even with extraordinary motor skills and adequate training, can Phelps become an Olympic runner? Not very likely. At the peak of his physical state, Phelps weighs 194 pounds, 40 per cent more than Quiroy, which is only 138 pounds. Bigger runners are heavy, and in long run, every pound of excess is a curse. If you compete with world class players on the runway, Phelps loses at the starting point.
Similarly, Quiroy is perhaps one of the best runners in history, but as a swimmer, he has little chance of qualifying for the Olympics. Since 1976, the average Olympic gold medallion for a man is 5 feet and 10 inches, while the average Olympic gold medallion for a man is 6 feet and 4 inches. Swimming players are usually very high, with long backs and arms, and can draw water, so Qui Roy was already at a great disadvantage before he jumped into the pool.
The secret to maximizing the chances of success is the choice of battlefields, which applies to sport and commerce as well as to changes in habits. When habits fit your natural preferences and abilities, they are easier to implement and more satisfying to continue. You're gonna want to get into a race for yourself, like Phelps in the pool and Quiroy in the runway.
In order to use this strategy, it is necessary to accept the simple fact that each individual has a different natural capacity. Some people don't like to talk about it. On the surface, your genes are fixed, and it's not funny to talk about things that are out of control; moreover, the term "biodecide" sounds like it's that some people are destined to succeed and some people to fail. However, it is short-sighted to address the effects of genes on behaviour.
The strength of genes is also their weakness. Genes cannot be easily altered, which means that they can provide strong advantages under favourable conditions and can lead to serious disadvantages in an unfavourable environment. If you want a basket, seven feet of height will be useful; if you want to perform a gymnastic routine, seven feet of height will be a big obstacle. The environment determines the suitability of our genes and how our natural abilities work. Environmental change has changed the quality of success.
This refers not only to the characteristics of the body, but also to the psychological characteristics. I'm smart enough to ask me about habits and human behaviour; but I'm dumber when it comes to knitting, rocket propulsion or guitar chords. Personal abilities depend to a large extent on the environment in which they live.
The top players in any competition field are not only well-trained but also highly suited to the task. That is why, in order to achieve true greatness and become “the” people, careful selection of areas of specialization is essential.
In short, it's not your destiny that is determined by the genes, it's where you get the chance. As Dr. Gabe Matt said: “Genetics can predetermine preferences, but not fate.” In areas where birthability is easy to succeed, habits are more likely to satisfy. So the key is to direct your efforts to areas that both exult and match your natural skills, and to align your intentions with your abilities.
And you're obviously going to ask, "How do you know what's good for me? How do you recognize my opportunities and habits? The first step in finding an answer is to understand your personality.
How character affects habits.
Genes operate under the surface of each habit; indeed, they are under the surface of each act. Research has shown that genes affect you from the hours of watching TV, the chances of marriage or divorce, to the addiction to drugs, alcohol or nicotine. How submissive or disobedient you are in the face of authority; how vulnerable or unaffected you are under pressure; how active or passive you are; and even how obsessed or boring you are in sensory experiences like concerts -- in which genes play a key role. As Robert Promin, behavioural geneticist at King's College in London, told me: “At this stage, we no longer look at whether a particular quality contains a genetic component, because there is no genetic impact at all.”.
It's a unique set of genetic traits that combine to give you a preference for specific character. What is called character is a consistent set of characteristics in different contexts. With regard to character, the most scientifically based analysis is called the “five personality traits”, which decompose the character traits into five behavior spectra.
1. Openness of experience: curiosity and creativity on the one hand and prudence and routine on the other.
2. Rigorousness: one end is structured, efficient, and the other end is homogenous.
3. Outwardity: one end is outward, dynamic and the other is remote and conservative (i.e., the most commonly heard outward and inward-looking).
4. Friendlyness: one end is kind, merciful and the other is alienation, habitual questioning.
Nerves: Anxiety, sensitivity on the one hand and self-confidence, calmness and emotional stability on the other.
These five characteristics are biologically based. For example, an infant can detect its outward orientation at birth. In the nursery, scientists make noise aloud, some babies turn to sound and others overplay. Researchers track the lives of these children and find that babies in the direction of noise have a higher chance of becoming outwarders when they grow up, while those who leave their heads behind are more likely to become inwarders when they grow up.
The hormonal hormones, which play an important role in social relations, enhance trust and are natural anti-depressants, are friendly, considerate and warm and usually also have higher oxytocin. It is easy to imagine that people with higher oxytocin tend to develop a habit of writing credit cards or organizing social events.
Take neurons, for example. Everyone has this character, but to different degrees. People with a high level of nerve tend to be more anxious and more worried than others, a characteristic associated with the excessive sensitivity of almonds, which is the part of the brain that detects threats. In other words, those who are more sensitive to negative signs in the environment may be more neurotic.
Custom does not depend entirely on character, but undoubtedly the genes push us in one direction. Deep-rooted preferences make certain behaviour easier for some and more difficult for others. You don't have to apologize or feel guilty for these differences, but you do need to work with them. For example, low-intensity people are less likely to be inherently organized and therefore rely more on environmental design to maintain their habits (by reminding less-critical readers that we discussed this strategy in chapter VI and chapter XII).
The point is, you should make habits with character. You can work like a bodybuilder and work out a clear muscle line, but if you like rock climbing, cycling or rowing, you shape your sport habits according to your interests; if your friend follows the low-carbon water diet, but you find that low-fat diet is better for you, it's good; if you want to read more, don't be ashamed of your taste-oriented love novel, read what you love, read 1. There is no need to develop the habits that everyone asks you to develop, to choose the ones best suited to you, rather than the most popular ones.
Every habit has a version that can bring joy and satisfaction to you. Find it. To be sustainable, habits must be pleasant and enjoyable, which is the core concept behind behavioural change in the fourth law.
It's a good start, but not all. Now, let's focus on finding and designing circumstances that are conducive to our own nature.
How to find a race for yourself.
To maintain motivation and feel successful, learning to play games that benefit you is essential. In theory, you can enjoy almost everything; in fact, you're more likely to enjoy things that are easy for you. Those who have talent in a given field are often better qualified to perform tasks in that field and are then rewarded for doing well. Their dynamism is based on their ability to make sustained progress in areas where others have failed and to be rewarded with better pay and greater opportunities, which not only makes them happier, but also cues them to continue to produce better quality work and to form a virtuous circle.
To choose the right habits, progress is simple; to choose the wrong habits, life is full of struggles and struggles.
How do you choose the right habits? The first step was discussed in the third law of behavioural change: making action easy. Many times, the wrong habits are just too difficult. If habits are easy to implement, you are more likely to succeed; and when you succeed, you are more likely to feel satisfied. However, there is another level that needs to be considered: if it continues to evolve, anything will become challenging in the long run. At some point, you have to be sure you're on the right track for your skills. How can I be sure?
The most common practice is “test error”. Of course, there is a problem with this strategy: life is short. You don't have time to try every profession, to date every single person you like, or to practice every instrument. Fortunately, there is a way to solve this problem -- a good idea called "development and good use trade-offs.".
At the beginning of a new activity, there should be time for development and exploration. In a relationship, it's called dating; in a university, it's called the Boya course; in commerce, it's called the A-B test. The goal is to try a wide range of possibilities, study a wide range of ideas and spread a wide web.
After this initial period of development, shift the focus to the best solution you can find, but do it on an ongoing basis and on an occasional basis. The right balance depends on your winnings. If you are winning, then be good, good, good; and if you are losing, continue to develop, develop, and develop.
In the long run, perhaps the most effective approach is to invest 80 to 90 per cent of the time in strategies that lead to the best results and then continue to develop and explore the remaining 10 to 20 per cent. Google is well known for this: it requires 80 per cent of its staff to work, and 20 per cent of its time to work on a case of their own choice, resulting in popular products such as AdWords and Gmail.
The ideal will also depend on the time you have. If you had a lot of time to develop, like a freshman in society, it would be reasonable, because once you find the right thing, you still have a lot of time to use it. If you have limited time, such as the imminent deadline for the plan, you should implement the best solution found so far and try to produce some results.
In developing and exploring different options, a few questions can be asked to continuously reduce the range of habits and areas that best satisfy themselves.
What's hard for others, but fun for me? Whether or not you want to do something depends not on whether you love it or not, but on whether you can deal with the pain of that task more than most people. When is everyone complaining and you're happy? You feel less pain than others in carrying out the work that you were born to do.
What makes me forget time? A “heartstream” is a psychological state when you focus so much on the work at hand that the rest of the world disappears. This experience of mixing happiness with peak performance is experienced by athletes and performers who “enter the state”. It is almost impossible to experience heart flow unless there is a degree of satisfaction in a job.
What makes me pay more than ordinary people? We are always comparing the results with those around us, and when the results are good for us, behaviour is more likely to be satisfactory. When I started writing on my own website, the number of subscriptions to electronic newspapers increased rapidly. I am not sure how I am doing, but I know that my subscriptions seem to grow faster than some colleagues, which gives me the incentive to continue writing.
What's natural to me? Just for a second, don't mind what people teach you, don't care what society tells you, don't care what others expect of you, ask yourself, "What makes me feel natural? When did I feel alive? When did I feel that I was true?” “There is no inner judgment, and do not please anyone; neither is there anything after this, nor self-criticism, but a sense of commitment and enjoyment.” When you feel innocent, you go in the right direction.
To be honest, some parts of this process are pure luck. Phelps and Quiroy are fortunate to be born with rare capabilities that are highly valued by society and placed in an ideal environment suited to those capacities. Everyone on Earth has limited time, and those of us who are truly distinguished are not only trying, but also fortunate enough to have access to opportunities that benefit them.
But what if you don't want to leave everything to luck?
If you can't find a match that's good for you, create one yourself. Scott Adams, author of the comic book Dibert, says, "Everyone can at least be the top 25 percent in some areas by working hard. In my own case, I paint more than most people, but not as much as an artist; I have less sense of humor than most of the talk show hosts who are not popular, but I am more funny than most. It's a good thing that it's not easy to draw comics and make jokes, and it's only after the two are combined that what I do becomes rare. And finally, plus my business background, suddenly I had a few things that cartoonists could understand.".
When you cannot win by “better”, you can win by “different”. By combining your skills, you lower the level of competition and make yourself more attractive. By rewriting the rules, you can make a shortcut around the need for genetic advantages (or years of practice). A good player struggles to win the game for everyone, and a good player creates a new game that highlights his strengths and conceals his weaknesses.
In college, I designed my major: biomechanical. It's a combination of physics, chemistry, biology and anatomy. I wasn't smart enough to make chickens in physics or biology, so I created my own arena. And, because it's a good thing for me, which I'm only interested in, reading doesn't feel like a hard job. Moreover, it is relatively easy to avoid pitfalls compared to others. After all, no one has the same mix of courses as me. How can one decide who is better or who is worse?
Professionalization is a powerful way of overcoming a genetic “accident”. The more you know a particular skill, the harder it is to compete with you. Many of the bodybuilders are stronger than the average wristsman, but even the most powerful bodywrecks can lose in the wrists race, because the wristwreckers have very specific powers. Even if you are not the most gifted, you can often win by being at the top of a very small category.
Rolling water makes potatoes soft, but it makes eggs hard. You can't control yourself as a potato or an egg, but you can decide whether it's tougher or softer. If a more favourable environment could be found, it would be possible to reverse the conditions that would have worked against you.
How to use your genes.
Genetics do not eliminate the need for efforts, but rather clarify their direction. Gene tells us what to do. Once we understand our strengths, we know where to put our time and energy and what opportunities and challenges to avoid. The more we know our nature, the better our strategies can be.
Biology differences are important, but in spite of that, it's more productive to focus on whether or not you have fulfilled your potential. The fact that you have congenital limitations on any particular ability has nothing to do with whether you have stretched your capabilities to the limit. People are so obsessed with the fact that they have “limits” that they rarely really try to reach them.
Besides, without an effort, genes can't make you succeed. That's right, you might have a better gene than the obvious trainers at the gym, but if you're not trained with the same weight, you can't be sure you got a better or worse card on the gene. Let them not be blamed for their success until they work as hard as those you admire.
In short, one of the best ways to ensure that habits can bring you a sense of satisfaction in the long term is to choose behaviours that fit your personality and abilities. It is right to work on things that are easy for yourself.
Overview of this chapter.
The secret to maximizing the chances of success is to choose the battlefield.
Genes cannot be easily altered, which means that they can provide strong advantages under favourable conditions and can lead to serious disadvantages in an unfavourable environment.
It's easier to get used to it when it suits your natural abilities. Please choose the best of your own habits.
You can choose a field that is good for your strengths. If you can't find it, create it yourself.
Genetics do not eliminate the need for efforts, but rather clarify their direction. The genes tell us to work hard to do what.
One, if that means reading Harry Potter over and over again, I know you.
19 The Goldilocks Rule
Motivation is strongest when the challenge is just beyond your current ability.
Raise one habit by 5%, not 100%.
In 1995, Disneyland just opened in Anahan, California, when a 10-year-old boy walked in to get a job. The labour regulations of the year were not yet stringent, and the boys succeeded in finding a position to sell a 50-cent playground guide.
Less than a year later, he was transferred to a magic store in Disney, where he learned magic from older employees. He tried to make jokes to tourists and perform simple magic. Soon he found himself in love not with magic, but with the performance itself. He wanted to be a comedian.
In adolescence, he began performing at a few clubs in Los Angeles. The audience was small, his performance was short, and he rarely came up for more than five minutes. Most of the viewers were busy drinking and chatting, not paying attention to his performance. One night, he basically performed a talk show at an empty club.
This is not an attractive job, but his progress is beyond question. His first set was only one or two minutes; by the time he went to high school, his subject had been expanded to five minutes; after a few years, the performance had increased to 10 minutes; and at the age of 19, he had come to perform 20 minutes a week. He had to read three poems on stage to fill the show, but his skills did grow.
He spent another 10 years experimenting, adjusting, practicing. He took a job as a television writer and, gradually, he began to get on the talk show. By the mid-1970s, he had been a regular guest for Tonight Show and Saturday Night Live.
Finally, after almost 15 years of effort, that little boy became famous. He travelled to 60 cities in 63 days, then to 72 cities in 80 days and then to 85 cities in 90 days. One time in Ohio, his show attracted 18,695 viewers; for three days in New York, he sold 45,000 tickets. He has peaked in his own field, becoming one of the most successful comedians of our time.
His name is Steve Martin.
Martin's story provides an interesting perspective on how to stick to habits for a long time. Frightened people are not for comedy. It's hard to imagine a scene that's more frightening than that, standing alone on the stage and making jokes, where no one is laughing. However, for 18 years, Steve Martin has faced this fear every week. As he said, “Ten years of learning, four years of excellence, four years of red-tightness”.
Why can some people, such as Martin, stick to their habits — whether they practice jokes, draw comics or play guitars — while most people have difficulty maintaining motivation? How do you design a habit that doesn't disappear, but will always attract us to implement it? Scientists have been studying the issue for many years, although there is much to be known, and the most unanimous finding is that the key to maintaining momentum and reaching the highest levels of craving is to carry out the task of “probably difficult”.
The human brain loves challenges, but the difficulty must be within the ideal range. If you like tennis and try to play a serious game with a four-year-old, you'll soon be bored, because it's too simple, you win every ball; on the contrary, if you're against a pro like Roger Fedler or Little Williams, you'll lose momentum because it's too difficult.
Now, imagine yourself playing tennis with a rival. As the race unfolds, you win a few points and lose a few points. You have a chance to win, but you have to do it. Your concentration increases and your distractions disappear, and you find yourself in the task before you. This is the right challenge and the best example of the “Blonde Girl Principles”.
According to the Blonde Girls principle, the highest degree of motivation is felt when the task performed is at the edge of the present capacity. Not too hard, not too simple, just right.
Martin's comedian career is an excellent example of the principle of blonde girls. Every year, he expands the length of the performance -- but only for one or two minutes. He keeps adding new things, but he keeps some regular laughs that will make the audience laugh. There are just enough achievements to keep him motivated, and there are just enough mistakes to keep him going.
It is important to allow behaviour to be enforced as easily as possible when a new habit is introduced, so that, even if conditions are not ideal, you can continue. In discussing behavioural change in the third law, I elaborated on this concept.
However, once habits are established, it is important to sustain modest progress. These small advances and new challenges can keep you committed, and if you hit the Blonde Girl's Zone, you can get into Heart Flow 1.
The heart flow is an experience of “entry” when engaged in an activity. Scientists try to quantify that feeling. They found that to reach heart flow, tasks must be performed that exceed your current capacity by about 4 per cent. In real life, it is often not possible to quantify the difficulty of an operation in this way, but the core concept of the blonde girl principle remains the same: it seems that it is crucial to maintain momentum to engage in difficult challenges – that is, tasks that are at the edge of your ability.
Progress requires a delicate balance. You must constantly look for the challenge of pushing yourself to the limit, and at the same time you must make enough progress to keep yourself motivated. To maintain appeal and continue to bring satisfaction, behaviour must remain fresh. Without change, we'll be bored, and bored in the march of self-fashion might be the Devil.
How to stay focused when you're bored.
After my baseball career, I started looking for new sports. I joined a weight lifting team, and one day, a great English coach visited our gym. During his long career, he worked with thousands of athletes, including several Olympic athletes. I introduced myself to him, and then we talked about progress.
"What's the difference between top athletes and others?" I asked, “What do those who truly succeed do that most do not?”.
He mentioned several unexpected factors: genes, luck, talent. However, he then threw out an unforeseeable answer: “At some point in time, everything turns to who can handle the boredom of daily training, and again and again, do the same weight lifting.”.
This answer is surprising because it is a different view of work ethics. When it comes to the pursuit of goals, it is always said that it is “hot blood”. Whether it be business, sports or art, you will always hear people say, “The most important is passion” or “You must truly craving”. As a result, when we lose focus or momentum, we feel frustrated, because we think that there is a deep and endless enthusiasm for success. But what the coach meant was that those who actually succeeded would feel as motivated as the average person, the difference being that they managed to continue despite being bored and bored.
It takes practice, but the more you practice, the more you get bored with something. All the advances that scholars had to make had been made, and we could have expected the next thing, and our interest would begin to fade. Sometimes this happens faster. Just a couple of days in a gym or a couple of days to update your blog on time, skipping one day won't make you feel bad. Since things were going well, it seemed more logical to take a day off.
The greatest threat to success is not failure, but boredom. We are tired of habits and boredom because they no longer bring pleasure and the results become predictable. And when habits become ordinary, we turn our backs on progress in search of a fresh sense. Maybe that's why we're in an endless cycle, going from one way to another, from one way to another, from one way to another, from one business to another. As long as we feel a slight decline in motivation, we start looking for new strategies, even if the original ones remain valid. As the father of modern politics, Markivili, pointed out: “Human beings yearn for freshness so much that those who do well and those who do not do well expect change.”.
Perhaps that is why most of the products that make people the most accustomed provide continuous freshness: video games provide visual freshness, junk food provides freshness in taste, adult films provide freshness in sex, and these experiences provide continuous amazing elements.
In psychology, this is called the “change reward”. In the real world, slot-eating tigers are the most frequently cited example. The gamblers won the reward in mid-30s, but the intervals are unpredictable. The pace of rewards has been changing, with dopamine reaching its peak, increasing memory effects and accelerating habits.
Changing rewards do not create aspirations – that is to say, you cannot give them a reward that people are not interested in, at intervals of change, and then hope that the reward will change their mind – but it is very effective in reinforcing what we already had, because the reward can reduce boredom.
The sweet spot of craving appears at a time when the chances of success and failure are half equal. Half the time, you have to do what you wish; the other half, you can't. You need enough "win" to experience satisfaction and enough "want" to feel craving. This is one of the benefits of adhering to the blonde girl principle. If you were interested in a habit, the challenge is to keep things interesting.
Of course, not all habits have the element of a change reward, and you wouldn't want it. If Google only provides useful search results at some point, I will soon switch to its rival; if Uber accepts only half of the call, I don't think I'm going to continue to use the service; if I use the toothlines only to give me a clean mouth at some point, I'm not going to use it.
Whether or not there is a change in reward, no habit can remain interesting forever. On a journey of self-inflictedness, at some point in time, everyone will face the same challenge: you must fall in love with boredom.
We all have goals to achieve, dreams to achieve, but wherever you try to advance, extraordinary results will never be achieved if you work only when it is convenient or exciting.
I can assure you that as long as we begin to implement a habit and try to stay the course, there will always be times when we want to give up. When you start a business, you'll have some days when you don't even want to show up; when you're at the gym, you'll have some training that you don't want to finish; when you write, you'll have some days when you don't want to type. But the difference between professionals and amateurs is that they stand up when they hate, when they suffer, when they are exhausted.
Professionals adhere to the established schedule, and amateurs suffer disruptions in their lives; professionals know what matters most to themselves and move forward with determination, while amateurs pull life emergencies off track.
The writer and silent teacher David Cannes encouraged his students not to become “silent-minded”. Likewise, you don't want to be a mood-oriented sportsman, a mood-based writer, or any role in the mood. When a habit is really important to you, you must be willing to insist on implementation in any mood. Even in the wrong mood, professionals will act – they may not be happy with it, but they will find a way to finish what they have to do.
I've had a lot of training that I don't want to finish, but I never regret gymnastics; I've had a lot of articles that I don't want to write, but I never regret writing on time; I've had a lot of days that I want to relax, but I never regret doing things that matter to me.
To do the exact same thing over and over again, but to feel the joy of endlessly, is to achieve excellence. You must love boredom.
Overview of this chapter.
According to the Blonde Girls principle, the highest degree of motivation is felt when the task performed is at the edge of the present capacity.
The greatest threat to success is not failure, but boredom.
When habits become routine, they become less interesting and less satisfying. We'll be bored.
When power is full, everyone can work hard. This ability is the key to creating differences when work is not exciting.
Professionals adhere to established itineraries, and amateurs are subjected to life interference.
One, about what happens in a heart flow, I have a preference theory. This theory is unproven, just my personal guess. Psychologists often divide brain operation into two models: “system I” and “system II”. The first system is fast and intuitive, and generally the procedures that can be implemented quickly (e.g. custom) are managed by the system; on the other hand, the second system is controlled by a more laborious and slow process of thinking, such as the mathematical problem of difficulty of calculation. When it comes to heart flow, I like to imagine system one and system two as two ends of the spectrum of thinking. When a cognitive process is automated, it slips to the end of the system; the more laborious the task, the more it slides to the end of the system. And I believe that the heart flow is right between system one and system two. You use all the automated and innate knowledge associated with the task, while at the same time trying to face challenges beyond your capabilities. Both modes of brain operation are fully open, with awareness and unconscious cooperation.
2 The change reward was inadvertently discovered. One day at the lab, the famous Harvard psychologist, Skinner, was running out of food pills in the experiment, and it was time-consuming to produce more food pills because he had to put them in the machine. This state of affairs led him to ask himself, "Why do rats have to be strengthened every time they press the pole?" So he decided to give rat food pills intermittently. He was surprised that changes in food supply, instead of reducing the motivation for behaviour, encouraged behaviour.
20 The Downside of Creating Good Habits
Automatic habits are useful, but they still need review and refinement.
Ask weekly: what worked, what failed, and what needs one small adjustment?
Custom creates the basis for proficiency. When playing chess, chess players can focus on higher levels of chess only if the basic chess path is automated. Every piece of information that is remembered opens up the psychological space for thinking that is more demanding. This applies to all skills. When you're familiar with simple actions, to the point where they can be implemented without false assumptions, you can focus on higher-level details. This is how habits become the backbone of the quest for any excellence.
However, the benefits of custom come at a cost. At first, each repetition enhances fluidity, speed and skills; then, when habits become automated, you become less sensitive to feedback and fall into unconscious repetition. At this point, mistakes are easier to take advantage of. When you can do things “good enough” without conceiting, you will not think about what to do “better”.
The advantage of habit is that you can do things without thinking, and the disadvantage is that you get used to doing things in a particular way and you don't notice small mistakes. Experience has been building up, and you think you've been making progress, but you've been strengthening current habits, not improving them. In fact, some studies have shown that, once a technique is mastered, performance declines somewhat over time.
As a rule, this slight decline in performance needs no fear. You don't have to build a system to continuously improve your techniques of brushing your teeth, strapping your shoes or making coffee in the morning, and it's usually good enough to be good. The less energy is spent on trivial matters, the more energy can be spent on really important matters.
However, a more sophisticated approach is needed to maximize potential and pursue superior performance. You can't do the same thing blindly and expect to become prominent. Advantage, habits are necessary, but habits are not enough. What you need is a combination of automated habits and practice.
Custom + practice = mastery.
To move from “A” to “A”, some techniques do need automation. Basketball players must be able to carry the ball without thinking, so that they can continue to try to master the non-usual hand basket; surgeons must repeat the knife a thousand times until they can cut the first knife in their eyes to focus on the hundreds of variables that occurred during the operation. However, after mastering a habit, it is necessary to go back to the hard-working part of the job and start building the next one.
Expertise is a process in which you focus on a small element of success, repeating that skill until it is internalized, then building on this new habit and moving towards the next frontier of personal development. The second time, the old task became easier, but the overall difficulty did not decrease, because now you have to put energy into the next challenge. Each habit unlocks a higher level of performance, an endless cycle.
Even with the power of custom, you must find a way to keep an eye on your performance for the long term, so that you can continue to refine and improve. And just as you began to feel that you were mastered of a skill -- that things were automated, that you were able to cope with it -- you had to be more careful not to enter the trap of complacency.
Solutions? Establish a system of reflection and review.
How to review habits and make adjustments.
The Los Angeles Lakers in 1986 were one of the most talented basketball teams in history, but few remember them as such. In the 1985-86 NBA season, they paid off impressive early seasons: 29 out of five. "Professors say we might be the best team in basketball history." Chief Coach Pat Riley said so after the regular season. Surprisingly, the Lakers failed in the late season of 1986, stopping at the West Sector finals. The so-called “best team in basketball history” does not even qualify for the General Championship.
After this heavy blow, Riley was tired of hearing about how talented he was and how promising his team was. He did not want to see the radiant radiance of his performance decline, and he wanted the Lakers to have their full potential in every night's competition. In the summer of 1986, he designed a programme for this purpose: a programme he called Career Best Effort, called CBE.
Larry explained, "When a player joins the Lakers, we track his basketball data back to high school. I call it "the extraction of numbers." We hope that the ability of a player can be accurately evaluated and then built according to what the team needs, on the basis that he will not only maintain his own average data, but also pursue progress.”.
After determining the baseline for one player's performance, Riley added a key step: he asked each player “to make at least one per cent progress in the season, which, if successful, would be to achieve a CBE, a “best of my career”. Like the British Bicycling Association referred to in chapter I, the Lakers pursue their best performance in a small way every day.
In particular, Larry pointed out that the focus of the CBE was not only on scores or data, but also on “best efforts at the mental level”. The way a player gets a CBE score is to use the body to withstand an attacker's impact in order to cause an offensive offence, to fly to save the ball, to hit basketball with or without a chance, to help out when a teammate has been attacked by an attacker, and to make up for various other “unknown heroes”.
Take the example of the Lakers' starman, Magic Johnson: assuming he won 11 points in a race, took eight baskets, sent out 12 reinforcements, took two raids, and made five mistakes. He also demonstrated the role of a “unnamed hero”, flying on a puck once, so he added a point. In addition, he played 33 minutes in this fictional competition.
The positive figures (11+8+12+2+1) add up to a total of 34. Five further errors (34-5) were then deducted, resulting in 29. Finally, we divide it by 29 by 33 minutes:
29/33=.
The CBE score of Magic Johnson here is.
Each game calculates the CBE score for each player, and Riley asks the players to move up the average CBE score for the whole season by one percent. He compares the current CBE scores with past performance not only of each player, but also of other League players. As Larry said, “We compare the players on the team with the players in the league who play in the same position or role.”.
The sports writer, Jackie McMurran, wrote: “Every week, Larry writes the names of the League's top performers in bold letters on the whiteboard, and measures the players who are in the same position in their ranks. Reliable and stable players usually receive more than 600 points, while star class players jump eight percent. Magic Johnson, who paid $138 in his career, often received more than a thousand points.”.
The Lakers also highlight annual progress by comparing historical CBE data. “We place the November 1986 data next to the November 1985 data so that players know that their performance is better or worse than during the same period of the previous season. Then we'll compare the December 1986 data with November.".
The Lakers began the CBE programme in October 1986 and, eight months later, they became NBA champions; the following year, Larry won again, and the Lakers became the first group to complete the second company in 20 years. Later, he said: “Maintenance efforts are the most important for any cause. The way to succeed is to learn to do things the right way, and then do it the same way every time.”.
CBE is an excellent example of the power of reflection and review. The Lakers are already gifted, and CBE helps them to use what they own and to ensure that their habits advance rather than retreat.
Retrospection and review allow all habits to improve in the long term, because it makes you aware of mistakes and helps you to think about possible ways of improving. Without reflection, we will try to justify ourselves and deceive ourselves. There is thus no process that can help us decide whether our performance is better or worse than yesterday.
Various forms of reflection and review are used by those in all fields, and the process is not necessarily complex. Kenya's long run named Elliot Kipchogay as one of the greatest marathon runners in history and winner of Olympic gold medals. After each exercise, he would still write notes, review his training on the day and look for improvements. Similarly, the gold swimmer Katy Redki records her health in one to ten cents and contains notes on nutritional intake and sleep quality. In addition, she will record the results of other swimmers. At the end of the week, the coach reviews her notes and joins his mind.
It's not just an athlete. The comedian Chris Locke, while preparing the new subject, would go to a small club to perform dozens of times and test hundreds of jokes. He came up with a note, and he took a strong resounding sentence, and where adjustments were needed. A couple of test-tested killer laughs will be the backbone of his new show.
I know that some managers and investors do “decision logs” in which important decisions are taken weekly, the reasons for the decision and the results expected from the output. They will review these options at the end of the month or at the end of the year to see where they are right or wrong.
Improvements are not only about learning habits but also about fine-tuning them. Retrospect and re-examination ensure that you spend your time on the right thing and re-direct yourself when you need it -- just like Riley reoriented the players every night. You don't want to continue with a habit that's out of effect.
There are two models of reflection and review that I myself apply. In December of each year, I will conduct an annual review to reflect on the past year. I scored my habits that year by calculating how many articles I had published, how many exercises I had, how many new places I had visited, and so on. I then reflected on my progress (or lack thereof) by answering three questions:
1. What's going on this year?
What happened this year?
What have I learned?
Six months later, when summer comes, I'm going to do an honest report. Like everyone else, I will make many mistakes, and my honest report makes me understand what went wrong and inspires me to get back on track. I have spent this time revisiting my core values and thinking about whether I have acted in accordance with them. I will think about my identity and see how I should try to be what I want to be.
In my annual honest report, I ask myself three questions:
What are the core values that drive my life and work?
How can I live and work honestly now?
How can higher standards be set in the future?
These two reports do not take too much time — just a few hours a year — but are a crucial period for fine-tuning, avoiding a gradual setback when I am not paying attention. Every year, they remind me to re-examine my identity and think about how habits help me to be the kind of person I want to be. They let me know when habits should escalate, new challenges should be taken up, and efforts should be reduced in intensity and focus on basic things.
Retrospection also brings the right way of observation. Day-to-day habits are strong because of the compound effect, but care too much about every day-to-day choice, just like yourself in the mirror, you see all the small flaws while ignoring the whole thing. Too much feedback. On the other hand, you never look at your habits like you don't look in the mirror, and you don't notice a flaw that can be easily corrected -- stains on your shirt, food residues between your teeth. Too little feedback. Periodical reflection and review, on the other hand, resembles self-image from the appropriate distance to see the important changes that should be made, but not the whole. You want to watch the whole mountain range, not focus on every mountain peak and valley.
Finally, reflection and review provide the ideal time to revisit the most important orientation of behavioural change: identity.
How to break the faith that's holding you back.
At first, it was necessary to repeat habits in order to build up the evidence that you wanted to have an identity; yet, when you grabbed that new identity, the same beliefs would prevent you from entering the next stage of your development. When confronted with you, your identity creates some kind of pride, cues you to deny your weaknesses and prevents you from actually growing up. That's the big bad thing about growing habits.
One concept is more sacred to us — that is, the deeper the connection with identity — and the more we defend it and reject criticism. This situation is evident in all walks of life. Schoolteachers, disregarding innovative pedagogy, adhere to a year-long curriculum; senior managers insist on doing what they do “with their own set”; surgeons snout at the thoughts of young colleagues; and bands don't think long after they make a red record. The harder it is to hold on to an identity, the harder it is to grow up beyond that.
One solution is not to allow any single identity to determine who you are. The package of investment experts, Paul Graham, said, "Let your identity remain small." The more a single faith defines itself, the less able it is to adapt to the challenges of life. If you're a team champion or a partner in a company, you lose your life face, and if you're a vegan, but your health forces you to change your diet, you'll face an identity crisis. If you hold an identity too tight, you're vulnerable. If you lose that thing, you lose yourself.
Half of my childhood, athletes are a major part of my identity; after the end of my baseball career, I struggled to find myself. If you've defined yourself in one way and that identity has disappeared, who are you now?
Veterans and retired entrepreneurs feel the same way. When your identity is summed up as a belief, such as “I am an outstanding soldier”, what happens at the end of my service? For many successful employers, their identities are almost “I'm the CEO” or “I'm the founder”, and how do you feel when you wake up working hard to sell the company?
The key to mitigating the effects of identity loss is to redefine itself. In this way, you can retain the important orientation of your identity when the role changes.
"I'm an athlete" becomes "I'm the kind of person who is strong and loves physical challenges.".
"I'm an outstanding soldier" becomes "I'm the kind of self-disciplined, reliable and good team player.".
“I am the CEO” becomes “I am the kind of person who creates and builds things”.
Effective choice allows identity to be flexible rather than fragile. As with water overflow barriers, your identity can adapt to changing circumstances rather than conflict with them.
The following passage, which is taken from the text of the Ethics, gives a perfect overview of the concept:
Human life is weak and death strong.
And the creation of all things is soft, and their death is in vain.
So the strong ones die, and the weak are the living.
They are the strong ones, and the strong ones,.
Power under, weakness over.
- I'm sorry.
There are countless benefits to habits, but the downside is to lock us into earlier thinking and behaviour patterns, even though the world around us is constantly changing. As everything is fluid and life is changing, it is important to periodically examine whether old habits and beliefs still work for themselves.
Lack of self-awareness is a poison, and reflection and review is a cure.
Overview of this chapter.
The advantage of habit is that we can act without thinking, while the disadvantage is that we can no longer notice small mistakes.
The process of reflection and review is a process of keeping you aware of your own performance for a long time.
The harder it is to hold on to an identity, the harder it is to grow up beyond that.
Chapter 02.
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Atomic habits.
The law of proof that minor changes bring great success.
James Clear.
Translator Bio
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Introduction by the author.
James Clear.
Photo © Nick Fancher 2018.
Writers and lecturers specializing in habits, decision-making and how to make sustainable progress, articles were found in The New York Times, Time magazine and the Journal of Entrepreneurs, as well as on the CBS television programme This Morning. Millions of people visit his website every month, and hundreds of thousands of subscribers to popular electronic newspapers.
University and Fortune 500 companies are often invited to speak about behavioural change and habits, creating habits that form a system that is widely used by NFL, NBA and MLB teams. More than 10,000 leaders, managers, coaches and teachers have been educated through the online course of the “The Habits Academy” he created. For individuals or groups who want to create better habits in their lives and work, the Customary College is the first training platform.
This post is part of our special coverage Syria Protests 2011.
• “Academy of custom” website: habitatsacademy.com.
Cai Se Wai.
Graduated from the Faculty of Foreign Studies, a tutor, a writer, an athlete. I'm Gary Vee and welcome to the family home.
The teaching, writing, translation and exercise are accompanied by efforts to develop habits.
FB: King Wayne Cai Shiwei.
Table of Contents
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[Table].
I'd like to recommend a practical guide to changing habits.
To recommend a sequence that challenges humanity and develops habits that do not rely on the willpower of the world.
The recommendive atom custom is powerful.
Foreword atom habits changed my life.
Why is there a big difference between minor changes in underlying principles?
The amazing power of atomic habits.
The most effective way to change habits is to change identity.
Three or four simple steps to make you feel better.
Rule number 1 makes it obvious.
The process of behavioral change begins with perception.
Five is the best way to start a new habit.
The incentives are overestimated and the environment is often more important.
The secret of self-control.
Rule 2 makes habits attractive.
How do you make habits difficult?
How families and friends shape your habits.
How to identify and address the causes of bad habits.
Rule 3 makes it easy.
Practice begins with repetition, not perfection.
Law of Least Effort.
How to use the Two-Minute Rule to stop delays.
How to make good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible.
Rule 4 makes the reward satisfactory.
Basic principles of behavioural change.
How do you stick with your habits every day?
17 accountability partners play a significant role.
How the progression strategy goes from "A" to "".
How 18 genes affect habits.
19 The Blonde Girls Principle: how to maintain momentum in life and work.
20 to build good habits.
The secret to keeping the results alive.
Appendices are drawn from some of the signs of behavioral change.
Example 1. Customary scorecard.
Example 2.
Example 3.
Example 4.
Example 5. Customary contracts.
Manual on the commercial application of atomic habits.
Handbook on the penitentiary application of atomic habits.
I'd like to recommend a practical guide to changing habits.
Background material. Skim it first, then return if you want context.
Read the main chapters first, then come back for background.
Recommendation sequence.
A practical guide to changing habits, Alvin.
Now, think about it. What made you find this book? The title attracted you? Or is there a pattern, color on the seal, or is it on the shelf that you saw? Or did you send them directly from the Internet because of a book review, a friend's introduction? In any case, these are actions cueed by one cause.
Have you, however, considered how many human actions respond to external needs and how many stem from inherent habits?
When you look at this book, you will find that people often seem to act for some obvious reason, not just for conscious decisions, but for their own habits, which predetermine several options, even before you find out what to do.
I would like to mention in particular, however, that the book goes beyond that, and it also tells you how to develop habits, develop mindsets, adjust from life to make positive changes that affect life.
As more books become available on the market to discuss habits, many have come to know that habits can change a person and why they change a person. But when it comes to using habits to change themselves, many still find no way. I've read a lot of books in the past about “customary”, but most of them focus on the effects of custom on people, talking about more theory than practical application. And the biggest difference in this book is that, besides showing how habits affect you, it's more about how habits change themselves.
The author of this book has been working on it for years, and the articles he writes are widely circulated online, and I'm one of the early readers. As far as I'm concerned, while the author's point of view is not necessarily new, he has provided many new ways to construct helpful habits through long-term practice. Whether you're a doctor or a teacher, a student or a parent, a workman or an entrepreneur, the content of the book should help you.
Let's start by saying why it's good to understand habits. You may have heard that life is a chain of choices, and that sounds reasonable, and I don't deny it. But do you think it means that life is getting better when people are focused on making the right choices? But how many of the “choices” of your life did you really have to look back on the way you walked? It's not a lot, and some people may only meet once or twice in their lives.
In fact, most of the reasons that affect life come from our habits. Because, although habits are formed one by one, the resulting changes do not occur overnight, the effects may be lifetimes.
For example, to observe a person ' s state, if he appears healthier or stronger than most of his age, he must have spent a long time controlling diets and sports. A person is fluent in English and must have spent a lot of time practicing words and writing words. People who manage time efficiently are usually self-regulating at other levels of life.
There are many dreams and goals in life that take a long time to build up, and there are no shortcuts. Most of the time, we do not rely on choice, but on habit.
In other words, nurturing habits is not just an idea, but a weapon of life.
As in the impressive story of the British bike country team, the cumulative compounding effect of fine-tune athletes’ habits is amazing, turning the bike team, in just a few years, from being an international player to a long-term master of sports. Developments are hard to believe, and the results are so convincing.
If you're at a turning point in your life, I hope you also believe that many of the impossible things are not known -- not the way, not the way, not the way, not the effect of custom.
However, one should be reminded that habits are not easy to develop and cannot be immediately felt. If you're looking too forward to results, you want to go so fast, and you set too high a target at a time, it's usually not working well. Rather, it is one step at a time, but one at a time, that goes far and long, and the results will come slowly.
Like the wisdom of running a life, walking slowly and quickly, it is a self-fulfilling marathon, not a centimetre race against others.
(The author of this paper is the best seller of money and inspiration).
To recommend a sequence that challenges humanity and develops habits that do not rely on the willpower of the world.
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Recommendation sequence.
Don't challenge human nature and develop habits that don't depend on the willpower of the world.
We want to lose weight, quit smoking, get up early in the morning, and have set goals such as “three times a week” and “bed at 10 p.m. a day”, but often not the temptation to watch dramas, slipphones, etc. It's time to get used to the plan! We then began to blame ourselves for our lack of will and perseverance, forcing ourselves to re-implement for a few days, and then to return to the endless vicious circle.
The book Atom Customary, from the foundations of science and psychology, teaches you to start with a little bit of behavioral thinking and slowly to stop the plan's goals from failing. Unlike the inspirational book in mind, it is not a book that inspires you to fight hard and to fight hard with your will. There's no need to worry that the book blames you for your failure, because it says that it's all about human nature! This is why this book is so friendly, because it is so close to the nature of the human group that even the strategy of breaking “bad habits” and building “good habits” cannot be overtly tried in a “humanized” way!
The brain is lazy. What should I do?
Reminiscent of my own findings at the scene of primary school: difficult homework (like a headacheed “writing”) is often written better in school than at home. Why is it better than to go home and write for four to five hours, even though only one hour of early self-study and classroom time is available at school? First of all, it's strange that you don't do the task of doing your homework together; secondly, when you're in trouble (not writing), the teacher can respond and guide you immediately; and, above all, when you see your fellow students brushing and writing, you can be inspired and sustained.
I think the key to this phenomenon is the environment. In the classroom, there's no incentive for the brain to be lazy; on the contrary, there's brother-in-law's and sister's noise, television and computer waved to you and it's hard for a child to “refrain from temptation” even if he has it for a longer time!
This phenomenon is constantly emphasized in the certificate: the so-called “self-regulating” is simply good at building a life in which they are not exposed to temptation, without displaying extraordinary will and self-control.
Four strategies to make good and bad habits a big turn.
The strategies referred to in this book are based on a “customary” scientific and psychological background of mind, which is constructed in a way that does not contradict the “human nature”. To put it simply, it is to make the implementation of “bad habits” cumbersome and difficult, to make “good habits” simple and easy, and, finally, in a gradual manner, to make the good habits you want to achieve unwitting things you can do.
For example, good habits are difficult to develop because they are more complex and difficult than watching television or playing video games, so the brain tends to choose easy things. That is why we want the goal to begin with the simplest, easy daily, and then slowly increase in intensity. If your ultimate goal is “three times a week”, you can start with “one-day push-up”, allowing yourself to shape the habits of sport and then slowly increase its intensity.
Recreate your habits and take back the "dominant" of life.
The craving of drug addicts to see a picture of drugs before their conscious discovery makes it difficult for them to stop their habit of using drugs.
If we do not want our lives to be shaped by “intentional” habits, to regain control over ourselves and to improve life and self, the book offers many new and workable strategies that deserve to be tried and explored!
(The author of this paper is a famous writer and founder of the “Teachers' Party” in the largest community of teachers in the country.
The recommendive atom custom is powerful.
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Recommendation sequence.
Atoms are powerful.
In April 2007, I was able to quit 20 years of tobacco addiction and until today, when I saw the book, I realized the power of atomic habits.
The book coincides with my success in quitting smoking:
Tips (invisible): I started not buying cigarettes from supermarkets, and all my cigarettes, lighters, ashtrays were given to my friends.
craving (unattractive): When tobacco addiction comes, it begins to imagine the gruesome face of smokers and their smell.
Response (difficult): after leaving the foreign business world, it is even more difficult to buy cigarettes, far from the opportunity to hold a hand.
Rewards (unsatisfactory): Seeing the streets, the roads, the smokes, and the seemingly non-smoking smell of smoke in public places, it starts to seem unpleasant.
It took me three months to stop smoking, and it's been 12 years.
Good friend Kwok Seung-sung, coach of the Taig-Chang team and also a tri-iron player, was hit by a drunk drive in July 2018 and has been paralysed for nine months. I must tell him the story of the author of this book, hoping to continue his rehabilitation and sports career.
To get used to it, I recommend it.
(The author is a distinguished lecturer, writer, moderator).
Preface: How Atomic Habits Changed My Life
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Foreword.
Atom habits changed my life.
The last day of the second grade, I was hit by a bat. One of the classmates slipped out of his hand and flew straight towards me and hit me between the eyes. I don't remember the moment of impact.
The bat was too strong in the face, my nose twisted into a U font, the soft tissue of the brain slammed into the inside of the skull, and my head was so swollen. In milliseconds, my nose was broken, my skull was fractured and my eyes were broken.
Open your eyes. I saw someone staring at me and running for help. Eyes down, I found red spots on my clothes. One of my classmates took his shirt off and handed it to me, and I blocked the bleeding from my broken nose. I don't know how hurt I am when I'm scared and confused.
The teacher wrapped his arms around my shoulder and we took a long way to the health room: across the field, down the hill, back to school. I don't know whose hand touched my side and held me straight. We walk slowly, and no one knows it's dangerous to waste a second.
At the health office, the nurse asked me questions.
"What year is it now?".
I said, "1998." It's actually 2002.
“Who is the President of the United States?”.
I said, "Bill Clinton." The correct answer is George W. Bush.
"What's your mother's name?".
I hesitated for ten seconds.
"Patty." I'm just saying, it took me 10 seconds to remember my mother's name.
This is the last question I remember. I couldn't bear the rapid swelling of my head, and I lost consciousness before the ambulance arrived. A few minutes later, I was taken from the school to the local hospital.
Shortly after my arrival in the hospital, my body began to turn off and struggled even to breathe or swallow this basic body function. After my first seizure that day, my breath stopped completely. While the doctor came to give me oxygen, he determined that the local hospital was not equipped to deal with my condition and called a helicopter to transport me to a larger hospital.
They pushed me out of the emergency room to take a helicopter across the street. The stretcher bed screeched on the bumpy sidewalk, one nurse pushed the stretcher on my side and another nurse put oxygen into my body with his hand. The mother who arrived at the hospital earlier was with me on the helicopter, and during the flight she held my hand and I was unconscious and unable to breathe.
While my mother was on a helicopter with me, my father went home to report to my brother and sister. With tears he explained to his sister that he could not attend her eighth grade graduation that night. He drove to the hospital to join us when he took her to his family and friends.
When my mother and I landed on the roof of the hospital, about 20 doctors and nurses stormed the helicopter and pushed me into the trauma centre. By that time, the swelling in my head was so severe that post-traumatic seizures continued. My broken bones need to be repaired, but I'm not in a state suitable for surgery. After the third epilepsy on that day, the doctor put me in an artificial coma and installed a respirator for me.
This hospital is not new to my parents. Ten years ago, when three-year-old sisters were diagnosed with haemorrhagic cancer, they also entered the first floor of the same building. My brother was only six months old when I was five. After two and a half years of chemotherapy, vertebrate punctures and bone marrow slices, the sister managed to fight cancer and leave the hospital happily and in good health. Today, after 10 years of normal life, my parents are in this hospital again for another child.
When I was in a coma, the hospital sent priests and social workers to comfort my parents. The night my sister was found sick ten years ago, the same priest.
The night came and several machines kept me alive. My parents lie in bed with no rest in the hospital - the first of them fell asleep because of fatigue, and the next of them woke up out of fear. Then my mother told me, "It was the worst night I've ever had.".
From head to back on the field.
Fortunately, the next morning, my respiratory condition came back to the point where the doctor thought he could get out of artificial coma. When I finally recovered my consciousness, I found myself losing my sense of smell. For testing, the nurse asked me to slit my nose and smell a can of apple juice. My sense of smell came back, but no one thought that the stinging of the nose had caused the air to squeeze my left eye out through the fracture of the eyelid. My eyeball fell out of my eyes, and it was dangerously attached to the eyelids and the optic nerve connecting the eyes to the brain.
The ophthalmologist said my eyeball would slip back slowly as the air came out, but it was difficult to determine how long it would take. The operation is expected to take place one week later, which also gives me some time to recover. I look like the one who got beat up in a boxing match, but I can get out. I came home with a broken nose, six fractured faces and a crumbed eye.
The next few months were very difficult, and it was felt that everything in life had been pressed. For weeks, the images that I see in my eyes overlap, and I can't look at things at all; the eyeball does return to its original position, but it takes a month; it takes me eight months to drive again because of epilepsy and visual problems; and when I practice physical therapy, I practice basic physical activity, such as walking straight lines. I am determined not to be defeated by pain, but on several occasions I have fallen into depression.
A year later, I returned to the baseball field, painfully realizing how far I still had to go. Baseball has been a major part of my life. My father played for the Little League team of the St. Louis Redbirds, and I also dreamed of becoming a bat player one day. After months of rehabilitation, what I'm looking forward to is getting back on the field.
However, the recovery process was not smooth. As the season unfolded, I became the only third-grade player who had been removed from the school team and was decentralized to play with second-year players. I've been playing baseball since I was four years old, and it's a shame for a guy who's been putting so much time and effort in this sport to get rid of the team. I remember that day when I sat in the car crying and kept changing radio channels, eager to find a song that would make me feel better.
After a year of self-doubt, I finally got back to the team, but rarely came. I only played 11 games for the whole high school baseball career, which combined was just a little more than a game.
Even though my high school baseball career is bleak, I still believe I can be a great player. And I also know that if things are going to get better, it's only me who can change. The turning point appeared two years after the wound, when I entered Danison University. It was a new beginning, and it was there that I first discovered the amazing power of a tiny habit.
Atom habits that bring about great change.
One of the best decisions of my life is to go to Danison. I'm on the baseball team, and I'm excited that I'm a freshman. I'm a college athlete.
I couldn't be on the first team in the short term, so I took life seriously. When my peers stay up every night to play electric, I build good sleep habits, sleep early every night; in the world of chaos in the university dormitories, I insist that the room be kept clean. These improvements, although modest, give me a sense of control over life. I began to feel confident again, and that confidence gradually grew and spread to the classroom, improving my learning habits and achieving excellent results in every subject in the first year.
It is a practice or practice that is carried out in a regular manner, and in many cases is not false. As each semester passed, I built up a small but continuous habit that ultimately produced results that I could not imagine at the beginning of implementation. For example, the first time in my life I was trained several times a week, and in the following years, I grew from 170 pounds in plume (about 77 kg) to 200 pounds (about 90 kg) full of muscle.
In the second quarter, I got the first pitcher; in the third year, I was elected captain and first team at the end of the season. However, my sleeping habits, my reading habits and my weight-training habits did not really start flowering until the year of the fourth year.
In the sixth year after being hit in the face by a bat, sent by a helicopter to undergo an artificial coma, I was selected as the best male athlete at Danison University, and as the national star of ESPN – only thirty-three in the United States as a whole. By the time I graduated, I had a history book in eight categories; in the same year, I received the President ' s Medal, the highest academic reward in the school.
If that sounds like a showoff, please forgive me. To be honest, my sportsman's career was no legend or history, and in the end I was not a professional player. But looking back at those years, I believe that I have accomplished a rare thing: I have fully fulfilled my potential. And I believe that the concept in this book will allow you to fully realize your potential.
We all face challenges in our lives. That serious injury was one of my challenges, and that experience taught me a crucial lesson: As long as you are willing to persevere for many years, initially seemingly insignificant changes will eventually be as good as compound gains and will come out of extraordinary results. There are setbacks in the process, but the quality of life often depends on the quality of custom. As habits remain the same, the outcome will not change; and everything will be possible once better habits are in place.
There may be people who can achieve incredible achievements overnight, but I don't know such people, nor do I myself. In my journey from artificial coma to all-American star formation, there was no critical moment, but there were many. This is a gradual evolution, a series of small victories and breakthroughs that have lasted for a long time. The only way to make me progress -- the only choice I make -- is to start with small. A few years later, when I started my own business and wrote the book, I used the same strategy.
From the beginning of this book.
In November 2012, I started publishing articles on my website. Over the years, I have been documenting my own experiments on habits, and I am finally ready to share some of them publicly. The first step is to publish an article on Mondays and Thursdays, a simple writing habit that allows my e-newser to reach 1,000 subscribers within months; by the end of 2013, the number of subscribers had exceeded 30,000.
In 2014, the number of subscribers to my e-newspaper jumped to 100,000, making it one of the fastest-growing online electronic newspapers. When I started writing two years ago, I felt like an impostor, but now I'm becoming known as a “modern expert” — a new label that excites me, but it makes me uncomfortable. I never thought I was the master of the subject. I just experimented with readers.
In 2015, the e-newspaper reached 200,000 subscribers, and I signed a contract with the Penguin Blue Lantern House to start writing the book you're reading. With the increase in readership, career opportunities follow. I am increasingly invited to speak to top-level businesses about the science of custom formation, behavioural change and continuous improvement, and I have begun to speak on a continuous basis at meetings between the United States and Europe.
In 2016, my articles began to appear regularly in such well-known publications as Time, Entrepreneurs and Fulbius. It was incredible that over eight million people had read my article that year. The coaches of the National Football League, the Great League of American Baskets and Sticks started reading my work and sharing it with their teams.
In early 2017, I created the “Customary College”, which is the best training platform for individuals and organizations who want to develop habits in their lives and work. The top 500 companies and growing start-ups of Wealth have begun to register their leaders and train their staff. Overall, there are more than 10,000 leaders, managers, coaches and teachers graduating from the Customary College, and working with them has taught me too much, and I know better how to make habits work in the real world.
In 2018, when I was doing the final trimming for the book, my website had millions of visitors per month, and subscriptions to the e-newsletter were close to half a million people – a number that exceeded what I had expected when I started, and I did not even know what to think about it.
Development of a systematic manual of good practices.
“To write a good book, you must be the book first.” I understand the concepts mentioned in this book because I have to do it physically. I have to rely on small habits to recover from serious injuries, become strong in gymnasiums, perform high standards in baseball fields, become a writer, build a successful career and become a responsible adult. A little habit helps me realize my potential, and now that you have the book, I guess you want to do it.
In the next page, I will take a step to share how to build better habits -- not for days or weeks, but for a lifetime. Although everything I write has a scientific basis, the book is not an academic study, but a practical manual. I will explain the science of building and changing habits in a way that is easy to understand and apply and, most importantly, in the process, you will have the wisdom and practical advice.
The fields I have learned -- biology, neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, etc. -- have been in existence for many years, and I have provided a composite that contains the best concepts that wise people have thought about long ago, as well as the most remarkable scientific findings of recent times. I hope that my contribution will be to identify the most important of these concepts and to integrate them in a highly practical manner. Any wise speech on the page is due to the many experts of the past, and any stupid speech is on my head.
The backbone of this book is what I call the “four-stage model of habit” - a reminder, a craving, a response, a reward - and the “four rules of behaviour change” that evolved from it. Readers with a psychological background may recognize certain terms of operational constraint — the first of which was “stimulation, response, reward” proposed by psychologist and behavioural scientist Skinner in the 1930s — and, more recently, because of Charles Dustig's book, “Why do we live and work like that?” which refers to “tips, inertia, rewards”.
Behavior scientists like Skinner know that providing the right reward or punishment can lead to specific behaviour. However, while Skinner's model clearly illustrates how external incentives affect our habits, there is no good explanation for how our own thoughts, feelings and beliefs influence behaviour. The inner state -- our moods and emotions -- is also important. In recent decades, scientists have begun to decipher the connections between ideas, feelings and behaviours, and I have also put this study in my book.
In general, the framework I offer is a model that integrates cognitive and behavioural sciences. I believe that this model of human behaviour that I am proposing is one of the pioneers who can accurately explain how external stimulation and underlying emotions affect habits, even though certain words sound familiar, and I am confident that the details -- and the application of the four rules of behavioural change -- will allow you to think about your habits from a new perspective.
Human behaviour has been changing -- every situation, every moment, every second. However, the book deals with the immutable part, which is the rationale for human behaviour and the law on which you can rely year after year. You can build a career, a family and a life on these concepts.
There is no one way to build better habits, but the book describes the best way that I know -- an approach that works wherever you start, whatever you want to change. Whether your goal is health, money, productivity, interpersonal relations or all of this, the strategy covered by this book cannot be missed by anyone who wants to improve in a systematic way. This book can guide you as long as it involves human behavior.
Conclusion: The Secret to Results That Last
Reference material for turning the ideas into checklists and templates.
Save one template you can reuse this week.
Concluding remarks.
The secret to keeping results alive.
There's an ancient Greek fable called the “stack paradox” about the effects of a small act repeated enough times. One of the paradox words is: can a coin make people rich? If you give someone ten coins, you can't say he's rich; but if you add one more? What about the other? At some point, you have to admit, a coin does make people rich.
The same applies to atomic habits. Can a little change turn your life upside down? You're unlikely to give a positive answer. But what if you make another little change? What about another? At some point, you have to admit that your life has been subverted by a small change.
The Customary Grail is not a single one-per-cent improvement, but a thousand accumulations. Each is the basic unit of the whole system.
At first, small advances or minor improvements may seem meaningless because they can easily be washed away by the weight of the system. Just as a coin does not enrich people, a positive change, such as a minute of silence or a page of books per day, is unlikely to create noteworthy differences.
However, when small changes persist in layers, the scales of life begin to tilt. Every step of progress or improvement is like putting a grain of sand on the side of the scale, slowly turning things to the side that is in your favor. If you keep going, you'll end up at a turning point. Suddenly, it became easy to stick to good habits. The weight of the system is no longer bad for you, but for you.
In this whole book, we read the stories of dozens of top-notch people: Olympic gold medal winners, reward-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving doctors and comedians, who use the science of small habits to master their own skills and climb to the top of the field. All the individuals, teams and companies mentioned in this book are facing different situations, but eventually they grow in the same way: they are committed to continuing to create little progress or improvement.
Success is not a goal to be achieved, or an end line to be crossed. I said in chapter one: "If you find it hard to change habits, it's not you, it's your system. Misdeeds are recurring, not because you don't want to change, but because your system is not suitable for change.”.
As this book draws to a close, I hope it really is the opposite. By changing the four rules of behaviour, you have a set of tools and strategies that can be used to build better systems and shape better habits. Sometimes it's hard for you to remember a habit and you need to make it clear; sometimes you need to make it attractive because you don't have the motivation to start with; in many cases you may find it too difficult to make it easy to act; and sometimes you need to “pleasure” if you don't want to continue.
It is a continuous process, with no end line and no permanent solution. Every time you want to make progress or improve, you can use behavioral changes to the four rules until you encounter the next bottleneck. Let the reminder be obvious, let habits be attractive, let action be easy, let rewards be satisfied, and then again and again, and keep looking for the next way to get you one percent of progress.
The secret to the sustainability of results is never to stop pursuing progress or improvement.
If we don't stop, we can build something extraordinary.
If we don't stop fighting, we can build something extraordinary.
If we don't stop training, we can build extraordinary bodies.
If you don't stop learning, you can create extraordinary learning.
If savings are not stopped, extraordinary wealth can be created.
If care is not stopped, extraordinary friendship can be forged.
Small habits don't only accumulate, they have a compounding effect.
That is the power of atomic habits: small changes, extraordinary results.
Appendix: Lessons From the Four Laws of Behavior Change
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Appendix.
Some revelation from the Four Laws of Behaviour Change.
In this book, I present four-stage models of human behaviour: tips, cravings, responses, rewards. This architecture not only teaches us how to create new habits, but also reveals some interesting insights into human behaviour.
In the appendix to this module, I collected some small revelations (including some common sense) that fit the model. The purpose of these examples is to make it clear that, in describing human behaviour, the architecture is broad and practical. Once the model is understood, examples are seen everywhere.
Awareness predates craving: it is only when meaning is given as a reminder that craving arises. The brain builds an emotion or a feeling to describe the current situation. This means that only when an opportunity is taken into account will aspirations occur.
Happiness is wantlessness: when you observe a hint but do not produce the craving to change your own state, you are content with the present situation. Happiness is not about pleasure (i.e. pleasure or satisfaction), but about the absence of craving. When you do not have a strong craving to feel differently, happiness comes. Happy is what you get when you don't want to change your own state.
However, happiness is lost, because new cravings will arise. “Happy is a gap between the satisfaction of craving and the formation of a new craving, as Kade Boudris said. In the same vein, suffering is the gap between craving for change and achieving change.
We seek the “concept” of pleasure: we seek the image of pleasure that we have created in our hearts. At the moment of action, we do not know what it would be like to get that image (not even if it would satisfy us) and the sense of satisfaction will only come later. That's what the Austrian neurologist Victor Frank said: "Happy cannot be sought, it follows." cravings are sought, and pleasure follows.
Calm means not turning observations into problems: the first step in any behaviour is observation. You notice a tip, some information, an event, and you feel calm if you do not want to act on it.
craving is to fix it. To observe without craving is to understand that there is no need to correct anything. Your craving is not widespread, and you are not eager to change the status quo. Your mind does not create a problem that needs to be solved, and you just observe and exist.
"Why" is big enough to overcome all the "how": The German philosopher and poet Nietzsche wrote a famous phrase: “Know why you live, and you can live with anything.” This sentence implies an important truth about human behaviour. If there are strong enough motivations and cravings (that is, your “why” operation) you will act even if it is very difficult. Powerful aspirations drive powerful behaviour, however strong resistance may be.
Smarter than curious: having motivation is more useful than being curious because it brings action. Smartness alone will never produce results, because smartness will not allow you to act. Stimulation is craving, not intelligence. As Navar Lavector, an entrepreneur and investor, said: “The key to doing anything is to nurture the craving for that.”.
Emotional driving behaviour: each decision is, to some extent, emotional. Whatever the logical reasons for taking action, only emotions can give you the impulse to take action. In fact, people with damaged brain moods can list a list of reasons for action, but they will not do so because they do not have the emotions to act themselves. That is why there is a craving to respond before it. Feel it first, then act.
Only then can there be reason and logic: the first pattern of the brain is feeling, the second mode is thinking. Our first response -- the fast and unconscious part of the brain -- is dedicated to feeling and prediction, the secondary response -- the slow and conscious part of the brain -- is the part responsible for thinking.
Psychologists refer to it as “system I” (favours and quick judgement) and “system II” (rational analysis). Feels first (system I) before rational intervention (system II). When the two work closely together, they work well; when the two work in conflict, they generate irrational emotional thinking.
Responses tend to follow emotions: our ideas and actions stem from what we find attractive and do not seem logical. Two individuals who took note of the same set of facts may have a completely different response, as they view them through their own unique emotional filters. This is one of the reasons why recourse to emotion is usually more effective than recourse to reason. When an issue fuels our emotions, we are rarely interested in knowing the data behind it. That is why emotions can be a great threat to informed decision-making.
In other words, most people believe that a reasonable response is beneficial to themselves and a response that meets their cravings. Dealing with a situation from a more emotional and neutral perspective allows you to respond on the basis of data rather than emotions.
Pain drives progress: all the sources of suffering are the craving to change the status quo, and this is also the source of all progress. The craving to change your own state is your power to act, to “want” more, to drive humankind to seek improvements, to develop new technologies and to pursue higher levels. With craving, we are not satisfied, but at the same time driven; without craving, we are satisfied, and therefore we lack ambition.
The action reveals how much you want something: if you keep saying something is your first priority and you never do it, then you don't really want it. It's time for an honest conversation with yourself. Your actions reveal your true motives.
The reward is at the other end of the sacrifice: the response (the sacrifice of energy) always comes before the reward (the acquisition of resources). The pleasure of the runner will come only after a hard run. The reward comes only after energy is consumed.
Self-control is difficult because it cannot be satisfied: rewards are the result of meeting your cravings. This makes self-control ineffective, because inhibiting cravings does not usually eliminate them. Resistance to temptation does not satisfy aspirations, but simply ignores them. This creates a space for the yearning to pass. Self-control does not satisfy a craving, but demands that you put it down.
Satisfied decision-making: the gap between craving and reward determines how satisfied we are when we take action. If the inconsistency between expectations and outcomes is positive (and surprising), we are more likely to repeat an act in the future; if that inconsistency is negative (disappointment), the probability of repeating the act in the future is low.
For example, if you expect to get ten dollars, and you get 100 dollars, you'll feel great; if you expect to get 100 dollars, you'll be disappointed. Your expectations will change the extent to which you meet them. The mediocre experience after high expectations is disappointing, and the mediocre experience after low expectations is pleasant. You'll be satisfied when the level of “like” is about the same as the level of “want”.
Satisfied = Like - Want.
Such wisdom led the ancient Roman philosopher Seneca to say that: “Poverty is not less, but more.” When “wants” is greater than “likes”, you will never be satisfied. You'll always care more about the problem than about the solution.
Happiness is relative. It took me three months to get 1,000 subscribers when I started sharing my own writing publicly. As soon as I reached that milestone, I called my parents and my girlfriend to celebrate with them. I feel excited, hot blood boiling. A few years later, I knew that 1,000 new subscribers would be added every day, but I didn't want to tell anyone. My heart is waterless. I'm 90 times as fast as I've ever been, but I've experienced a sense of pleasure that hasn't changed. It took a few days to find out how ridiculous it was for me to not celebrate at all.
The higher the expectations, the greater the pain of failure: when the craving rises, the result is unwelcome and painful. Lack of access to what is not meant to be is more harmful than lack of access to what is cravingd. That's why people say, "Don't expect too much.".
There is a feeling both before and after the act: before the act, there is a feeling that inspires you to act - a craving. After the operation, there will be a feeling of teaching you to repeat it in the future - a reward.
A reminder of craving and a response to reward.
Feels affect behavior, behaviors affect feelings.
craving is responsible for initiating, pleasure is responsible for maintaining: the two factors driving behaviour are “want” and “like”. If something doesn't arouse your craving, you have no reason to do it — craving and craving to initiate behavior. However, if the act is not pleasant and enjoyable, there is no reason for you to repeat it — pleasure and satisfaction maintenance. Motivation makes you act, success makes you repeat.
It is hoped that as experience declines, it will then be accepted as a substitute: when an opportunity first emerges, you will hope for its possibilities. Your expectations (satisfaction) are based solely on “foresight”. For the second time, your expectations are limited by reality, you begin to understand how the whole process works, and the precise prediction and acceptance of possible outcomes gradually replaces hope.
That is one of the reasons why we continue to seek the latest rapid enrichment or weight reduction methods. The new plan offers hope, because there is no experience that can limit our expectations. The new strategy feels more attractive than the old one because it offers endless hope. Aristotle wrote: “Young people are easy to take, because they are easy to hold on to.” Perhaps the phrase could be changed to: “Young people are easy to take on, because they only hold on to hope.” There's no experience to take your expectations to root, so at first, hope is all you have.
Template 1: Habits Scorecard
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Model.
1. Custom scorecards.
You can use the simple method of "customary scorecards" to increase self-awareness and to take note of habits and behaviours that you may ignore. This approach is discussed in detail in chapter IV of Atomic Customary.
If you want to make your own customary scorecard, start with a list of your daily habits. Starting in the morning, write down every habit you perform, like getting up, turning off alarm clocks, making beds, brushing teeth.
The list is long enough to keep you happy, but I find that the longer and more comprehensive, the better.
When the whole column is over, look at every behavior and ask yourself, "Is this a good habit, a bad habit, or a bad habit?".
If it's a good habit, mark the proper sign (+).
In the case of bad habits, mark a negative sign (-).
If bad or bad habits, mark the equivalent (=).
If you think it's difficult to decide whether a habit is good or bad, one of the things I like to say is, "Can this habit help me become the kind of person I want to be?" With regard to my craving for identity, does this habit vote for consent or against?” The habit that strengthens your craving for identity is usually a good habit; in contrast, it is a bad habit (for more details, see chapter IV of Atomic Customary).
When the customary scorecard is produced, no changes are required at the outset. The aim of this exercise is not to change your behavior, even bad habits, but to draw attention to what actually happens.
You can use the following model to create your own customary scorecard.
Template 2: Implementation Intention
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Model.
2. implementation intentionion.
When and where a custom is to be implemented and a precise plan is to be drawn up, the likelihood that you will be able to implement it will increase to twice. With a clear plan of action to clarify exactly what you have to do, you can make that task simpler – which means that less motivation is needed to implement it. So, when you wake up the next morning and you realize that your power is slowly disappearing, you may still have enough momentum to start because the next step is set, simple and clear.
The researchers refer to such an action plan as an “intention to implement” and a specific plan that will be implemented as soon as the time for action comes. In implementing your intention, you choose in advance when and where to act, that is, how you intend to implement a particular custom.
The intention of implementation is broadly as follows:
"When the X situation happens, I will execute the Y response.".
There's a simple structure for you to design your own implementation intentionionions:
I'll do it in [time], in [place].
For example:
I'll be in the kitchen at 7:00 in the morning for a minute.
I'll read Spanish in the bedroom for 20 minutes at 6:00 p.m.
I'll be at the gym for an hour at 5:00 p.m.
Please use the following model to try to design an implementation intentionion.
I'll be there.
Time.
It's.
[place] [conduct].
Template 3: Habit Stacking
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Model.
3. Customs Stack.
One of the best ways to create new habits is to identify their current daily habits and then stack new behaviours; in other words, to make them trigger new habits. Professor B. J. Fogg, Professor at Stanford University, lets the strategy be called a “micro-cooked recipe” and I call it a “crop of habit”. This concept is explained in detail in chapter V of the Atomic Customary Code.
In this document, you will find a model for creating custom stacks and some additional ideas for enforcing custom stacks.
The following are examples not included in several books:
I'll be standing and not sitting when I get on the bus.
Every birthday, I donate money to charity.
After opening the shower tap, I'll do five down Bobby.
I'll think of a good thing that's going on today.
After I get in, I'll take a deep breath three times.
I'll take the violin out of the box and put it on the shelf I can see.
When I see the water bottle half empty, I'll fill it up.
When I close the trunk, I'll check if I have the key in my hand.
I close my eyes and breathe deep five times when I feel stressed or anxious.
When I'm getting ready for an airplane trip, I'll have a healthy mouth.
You can use the following model to fill in your custom stack.
After the current habits,.
I will.
Template 4: Habit Tracker
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Model.
4. Customs Stack.
In chapter 16 of Atomic Customs, I refer to customary trackers:
The usual tracker is a simple way of measuring whether or not one has implemented it. The most basic form is to find a calendar, which will be ticked on the day whenever there is a routine. For example, if you're on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, there's a hook on those dates. Over time, this calendar has become a record of your practice.
It is said that Jerry Schmid also uses his customary tracker to keep his jokes going. In the documentary, The King of American Comedy, he said that his goal was simply to “do not interrupt” the continuous record of writing jokes every day. In other words, his focus is not on how good or bad a joke is, nor on whether it is inspired, but on what he has done and on the record of continuous execution.
"Don't break the record" is a powerful spell. If you don't break the continuous record of dialing business calls, you'll build up an impressive list of clients; if you don't break the continuous record of physical fitness, you'll get a better figure than expected; if you don't break the continuous record of creation, you'll get an impressive collection. The power of customary tracing is strong because of several behavioural changes: It also makes an act visible, attractive and satisfying.
There are many ways to track habits: you can buy a month that's hanging on a wall and you can draw your calendar on paper.
Template 5: Habit Contract
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Model.
5. Customary contracts.
The customary contract is an oral or written consent indicating that you are committed to a particular custom and the punishment that will be imposed if you fail to implement it. Then you need to find one or two people to be your “accountable partner” and sign the contract with you.
The entrepreneur Brian Harris was the first person I saw put this strategy into practice. Soon after his son was born, Harris realized that he wanted to lose a few pounds. As a result, he signed a customary contract with his wife and private coaches.
This strategy worked. With wives and coaches serving as partners in accountability, and with the customary contract that clearly illustrates what should be done every day, Harris has succeeded in reducing weight.
You can see Harris' customary contract on the next few pages.
There is a model at the end of the document that you can use to create your own customary contract.
Brian's first season target.
The deal between Brian Harris and Stacy Harris.
Effective 3 January 2017.
Brian ' s primary goal in the first quarter of 2017 was to start again the implementation of the right diet, so that he could feel better and look better, and achieve a long-term target of 200 pounds and 10 per cent lipid.
Brian wants to get close to the long-term goal through two phases.
• Phase I: the recovery of a strict “low carbon water compound diet” in the first quarter of 2017.
• Phase II: Careful follow-up of key nutrients began in the second quarter of 2017.
Brian believes that it is more likely that the first quarter of the season will be the first season when the basics will be addressed and that the second season will be the first quarter of the year in which the main nutrients will be tracked.
Below are the exact objectives, consequences and accountability mechanisms for the first quarter.
Objective.
Brian's exact objectives for the first season are as follows:
Write down daily foods and weigh daily.
The food log must be completed by 6 a.m. the following day.
Weight can be measured at any time of the day (preferably up early).
If Brian fails to do so, he will be forced to face the following consequences:
Consequences.
The exact consequences of Brian ' s failure to meet the target for the first season are as follows:
• He must wear official clothes for every working day and Sunday morning remaining in the season.
Formal clothing is defined as not wearing jeans, T-shirts, hats or shorts.
Brian must assume the following responsibilities:
Responsibility.
Brian will take responsibility by following the following norms:
• He had to take his weight figures every day, send them to Stacy, and ask Joey to monitor his food log.
• If one day he forgets to record the food he eats, he must also give him $200 for him.
The signatures below represent Brian ' s commitment to these daily goals, and Stacy and Joey ' s commitment to support and oversee Brian.
[Signed] Brian Harris.
[Signed] Stacy Harris.
[Signature of the accountability partners].
Brian's second season target.
Agreement between Brian Harris, Patrick Pahan and Stacy Harris.
Effective 3 April 2017.
Brian ' s primary goal in the second quarter of 2017 is to start taking less than 75 grams of carbohydrates and more than 200 grams of protein on a daily basis, so that he can feel better and look better, and achieve a long-term target of 200 pounds and 10 per cent lipid.
Brian wants to get close to the long-term goal through three stages.
:: Phase III: Maintenance and improvement of the catering and fitness programme in the third quarter of 2017.
Below are the exact objectives, consequences and accountability mechanisms for the second quarter.
Brian's exact objectives for the second season are as follows:
• The daily intake of food cannot exceed 75 grams of carbohydrates and 200 grams of protein. Weight is measured daily (if at home). A short five-minute sprint every week.
The food log must be completed by 8.30 a.m. the following day.
The ideal time for short-range sprinting is Saturday morning, but it is not mandatory.
The exact consequences of Brian's failure to meet the target for the second season are as follows:
• Tracking key nutrients: 100 US dollars (a grace of 6 times) for a day when the food log is missing.
Weight: 500 dollars for Stacy for missing a day.
• Short-range sprints: work every day in official clothes, and wear the uniform of the Alabama team every day for the rest of the season.
• The three objectives must be reflected in the image through GroupMe.
The signatures below represent Brian ' s commitment to these daily goals, as well as Stacy and Patrick ' s commitment to supporting and overseeing Brian.
[Signed] Patrick Pahan.
Brian's third season target.
Effective 14 July 2017.
Brian's primary goal in the third quarter of 2017 is to start high-intensity training of 10 minutes between Tuesday and Thursday through flying wheels, and intermittent diets on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, so that he can feel better and look better, and achieve a long-term target of 200 pounds and 10 per cent lipid.
Brian wants to get close to the long-term goal through four stages.
• Phase IV: Go around naked.
Brian believed that the basics would be addressed in the first quarter, that the primary nutrients would be tracked in a gradual manner to the second quarter, and that improvements would be made in the third quarter, with a higher chance of success (as compared with the direct jump from eating to tracking the main nutrients).
Below are the exact objectives, consequences and accountability mechanisms for the third quarter.
Maintenance.
In the third quarter, Brian will maintain the following projects while adding new targets:
The daily intake of carbohydrates does not exceed 75 grams and the protein is not less than 200 grams.
:: Force training for one hour at a time, three days a week.
Weight is measured daily and fat is measured.
New objective.
In addition to maintaining the above-mentioned project, Brian will begin the following two activities in the third quarter:
On Tuesday and Thursday, high-intensity training of 10 minutes through flying wheels.
• Interruptive diets (on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays) on non-power training days.
The exact consequences of Brian III's failure are as follows:
• Tracking of key nutrients: a day off from the food log is $100 to Patrick (3 times wide).
Measurement of body weight and lipids: 100 US dollars (a 3-wide limit) for Patrick after one day.
• On a flying wheel: every other week you work in official clothes.
• The hunger strike: the rest of the season is to go to work with the University of Alabama hat.
• The five goals must be given a picture through GroupMe.
Customary contracts.
What's your priority?
What are the consequences of failure to comply?
Who will oversee you?
[Your signature] [date].
[Signature of partner] [date].
Atomic Habits for Business
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In the book Atomic Customary, I explained the four steps behind all human behaviour: reminder, craving, response, reward. Once repeated, this nerve feedback path will shape new habits.
If you forget, the figure below is used to going back.
From these steps, I developed four rules for behavioural change:
1. Note: Make it visible.
2. craving: Make it attractive.
Response: make it easy.
4. Incentives: To make them satisfactory.
These four rules make it easier for any act (their inversion makes any act more difficult). At the commercial level, the same rules can be applied to create more efficient products or to help employees develop more efficient habits.
Here, I will offer some examples of how each law can be applied commercially. My explanation is only the beginning, and behavioural change would have provided a flexible structure that is adapted to demand and taste, and I think you will find that there are no boundaries to their application.
Rule 1: Make it visible - product visibility High.
The act changes the first rule and “makes it obvious”. This law is linked to a reminder, the first step of the customary return. The hint is to grab your attention (or the attention of the customer) and indicate what to do next. As can be seen, the more obvious the reminder is, the more likely it is to get people's attention and, consequently, to get people to take action.
This is one of the reasons why advertising is often disturbing. Many of the ads have their teeth and claws, their colours and their visibility, even if they are so popular, to be as visible as possible.
The dozens of notices that light up mobile phones, computer screens, social media and software interfaces are examples of “making it visible” that let users know what to do next. In fact, many companies find that the more they send out notices (sMS, e-mails, alerts, etc.), the more users use their products. Even my dentist sends two newsletters and two e-mails each time I agree to visit.
Many companies realize that each reminder makes the product or service once again visible and that users will remember to use it back (from the point of view of users, this may be super annoying: In order to get your attention, the companies seem to be often in a race to the bottom, and the winners are the ones that bother you most about mobile phone applications.
And vice versa. From a change in the first law of conduct, we can infer that less obvious and less widespread acts occur. The number of advertisements hidden at the lower end of the page is lower than the banner advertising at the top of the page; the products at the lower shelf are relatively unbuyed. Examples are numerous. When an object or act is invisible, it is often forgotten. As a result, software companies always set the “Deletion Account” and “Dick Out” buttons in hard to find, hidden in the deep corner of the set-and-selection page.
In addition, whenever possible, you should let anything that distracts the user from the action you want. It is no wonder that many of the most habitive acts — like eating horn tigers in casinos — are “remains independent”. The players are surrounded by little distractions, with no windows, and surrounded only by a slot-eating machine. They can easily “enter the state” and keep playing, because everything that distracts them is invisible and the cravingd behaviour is obvious.
The first law of behavioural change has many commercial applications. Placing the most profitable commodities in the store ' s most visible position; requiring employees to remove distracted applications from the main picture of the cell phone, rather than light them up; designing the office ' s motion lines to put the most important tasks in the spotlight; and placing instructions on each product to encourage users to place their products in the most visible position in the home or in the main image of electronic devices.
The most obvious cues often get your attention, and the ones that get your attention to start a habit.
Rule 2: Make it attractive - product identity High.
The second rule of behaviour is “making it attractive”. This law is linked to craving, the second step in the habit of going back.
As we have discussed in the law, you want the product to be visible (e.g. at the top of the e-mail box, on the large panel, or in front of the store). And once you're in the most visible place, you have to make the image created in the customer's mind attractive.
Every act is predicted before. From a commercial point of view, this means that every shopping act is preceded by a prediction. That's the key. It's not your product that customers buy, it's the prediction that they make in their minds. They look at the various sodas in the machine, predict that Coke is the best, and then buy it; or, customers who need to build a website will choose to evaluate the best services, because they predict that it will bring the most satisfactory experience.
For many products, “making them attractive” comes together to explain the benefits of the product in a clear and attractive manner. That's why you hear salesmen and graphic designers say, "Text is design" or "Code is design." Selecting the right text makes the message attractive to customers and makes them think your product is “good”.
In many cases, individualizing the message is an effective way for practice to change the second rule, as the product becomes more attractive when the customer feels that a product is closely related to his or her own life. Assuming you're a freelance writer, you read it stronger and stronger than “how to double your income” and “the exact way to double your income”. It's the same thing that sells, but the latter thing makes you think you're made for yourself.
The strategy would be more effective if we could use each other's names. Suppose the above-mentioned freelancer is called Olivia, and imagine that she received an e-mail with the title: “Olyvia, this letter is to tell a freelance writer how you double your income.”.
By the same token, many online retailers create highly personalized advertising -- not to provide products to “managers”, but to change the text on the sales page, depending on the person watching the screen. Depending on the functional title, some see goods for the “finance director”, while others see goods for the “sale manager”, although the goods are the same.
This strategy applies almost anywhere in life. Everyone's selling something, even if it doesn't feel like marketing. Doctors sell healthy lifestyles to patients, coaches sell team spirit to players and parents sell life skills to children. The personalization of the message that you want to send, sometimes by simply saying each other's names, will help you build meaningful links with each other and will be one of the ways to make change more attractive.
This strategy of personalization is applied daily in the Amazon. The company often presents commodities that customers have recently visited, or products similar to those previously purchased by customers. Spending money on Amazon becomes very attractive, because customers always see things about themselves.
Of course, individualization of customers is not always feasible, but companies can often “individualize” on a large scale if products are paired with a strong identity. By way of example, Toyota's success has led to the perception that Prius' owners are very environmentally friendly. If you're very concerned about the environment, buying a Prius is one way to communicate your identity to people. For a particular type of customer, the product becomes more attractive at once, as it feels like an extension of its identity. The power of such a connection is incredible, meaning that it may be useful to emphasize the identity of product representatives.
Another strategy to make products more attractive is to emphasize social normality. People are deeply affected by the crowd. If the customer knew that the product was being used by someone like him -- someone with the same post code, someone from his hometown, someone on the team, etc. -- he would be more likely to be attracted to it.
There is an important concern about the technique of setting the framework: if you think your product requires very rare behavior, you should frame the person who owns it (status acquired): “60 percent of millionaires read a book every day. With our new product, you can do it.".
If you think that the behavior you need to produce is very common, then you're looking at people who don't do it from a negative angle: "In the area where you live, 75 percent of the households pay less than you. Please click here and do not miss the money savings.”.
Finally, you can use the third and fourth rules that are changed by the application of behavior to make any product more attractive in nature. “Easier” behaviour - easy to achieve, low social costs, immediate returns - is attractive. “High” behaviour - difficult to achieve, high social costs, delayed returns - is not attractive. Let us explore in depth how these two laws can serve you.
Rule 3: Make it easy - to exclude resistance to service customers.
By changing the third rule of conduct, it is “making it easy”. This law is related to the response, that is, the act or custom that you actually display. Easier - that is, easier to do - behaviour is more likely to be enforced.
From a commercial point of view, perhaps the most effective way to apply the third rule is to list a chain of actions that customers need to perform when buying your products or using the services you provide, and then to look for any potential to reduce resistance to the task.
Imagine shared services such as Uber or Lyft, which, when introduced, may include a series of actions that customers need to perform when travelling by car: going out, waiting for taxis to pass, getting in, driving through the city, arriving at destination, taking out cash or credit cards, paying for the car, putting credit cards back to their wallets (or the change sought), getting out, etc.
The company can then look at each stage and ask itself how to reduce resistance to the task (or simply delete a step):
How can it be easier to walk out? Why don't you let the user download an app and call a car from a cell phone?
How can it be easier to wait for a ride? Why don't you tell the user how long it's gonna take? They can come out at the right time.
How can it be easier to get in? No way.
How can it be easier to drive across town? Don't rely on the driver's memory alone. We can show the route on the driver's and user's phone. As a result, if users wish to follow a different route, they can make recommendations, and drivers can rely on GPS to obtain recently updated information and chart the route.
How can it be easier to pay for cars? The user's phone already has our app. Why don't you ask them to upload the credit card information? As soon as the user arrives at the destination, he/she gets out of the car and the program automatically pays for the car.
In chapter XII of the Atomic Customary Law, I wrote: “Business is the endless pursuit of the same results in a simpler way.” That is to say, making every stage of the process as convenient as possible.
Look at the history of Amazon transport policy:
1994: Founded in Amazonia.
2002: Free Super Saver Shifting was introduced in Amazonia, which would be exempt from freight if the total amount ordered exceeded $99.
2005: Amazon Prime was introduced in Amazon, all commodities are free of freight and delivered within two working days.
2014: The Amazon introduced the delivery process first reading service, which can be read electronically by the orderer on Kindle before the paper is delivered.
2018: The Amazon introduced a free delivery service for groceries within two hours.
The Amazon has been trying to meet the needs of its customers in an easier, faster and easier way: to deliver goods to the capital; to deliver them free of charge to the capital; to deliver them free of charge within two days; to deliver them free of charge within two hours; and to deliver them free of charge within two days, but immediately during the waiting period.
Good businesses can rule out all the resistance that they can think of and make it as easy as possible to execute what they want their customers to do.
Rule 4: Make it satisfying - create a return of customers.
The behaviour changes the fourth rule and “makes it satisfactory”. The last stage of the customary return is reward, if the act is linked to the reward — that is to say, feeling good and having a happy ending — then we have reason to repeat it in the future.
In chapter 15 of the Atomic Customary, I wrote: “The first three rules of behaviour change — to make a reminder visible, to make habits attractive, to make action easy — increases our chances of performing a certain act this time. The fourth rule of behaviour change -- to make the reward satisfactory -- increases the likelihood that we will repeat it next time. The habit of going back is done.".
At the commercial level, we can say that making the product or service satisfactory enhances the likelihood that the customer will repurchase it next time. This fourth phase completes the circuit and encourages customers to develop habits of using your products or services.
The rate at which rewards arrive is a key factor in behavioral change of the fourth rule. Each time a product or service is used, the customer must immediately feel that the result is satisfactory, even if small. Products must at least be able to solve problems (e.g. their craving to experience law II) and, if possible, they should be accompanied by surprises or pleasures.
To create a satisfactory experience, it is necessary to strike a balance between Rule II, which makes it attractive, and Rule IV, which makes it satisfying, since expectations and expectations directly affect the degree of satisfaction. The danger of drawing pies is that customers can buy them once, but they have no reason to buy them again. It is envisaged that a customer buys something at a large special price, but then does not get a good experience; or that the business team makes a promise that the product team cannot deliver. High expectations may stimulate one-time purchases without creating buying habits.
One of the ways in which behaviour changes the fourth rule is applied is through a mid-point of satisfaction throughout the experience. For example, the plant began to install fake engines for the car so that the owner could hear a satisfactory acceleration when stepping on the gas. You can find other examples in chapter 15 of Atomic Customary, like adding flavor to gum and toothpaste.
Of course, the same principles can be used to help company employees develop better working habits. In the course of your work, you provide little praise and encouragement, which strengthens the behaviour you want your staff to do.
I visited one of the entrepreneurs, and he mentioned that his company had used a simple method to make work more satisfying: “Everyone in our company has a hand-and-hand patch called high-five. And when an employee does something that is more than expected, his piece is put on the wall of the lounge, and everyone sees it. The point is to pay tribute to what you want to do. By the end of the month, we'll pick out a few, read out the names loud, let everyone hear them, and then send out a few cards. Each person comes up and gets a few cards, writes down the praises of certain employees, and then gives the cards to the approved person. We want our employees to have a little sense of victory at all times.".
It's the kind of behavior that makes you feel good — that is, the act that immediately brings satisfaction, praise, encouragement or pleasure — that you want to repeat in the future.
Summary.
And when it comes to addictive products, the classic example is the slot-eating tiger, and you do realize that it uses the four rules of behavior change.
Make it clear that the horny tiger is very profitable, and the casino knows it. So the first thing to do in the casino is to make the horn-eating tiger machine -- almost all the casinos, the number of horn-eating slot-eating machines is 100 times the number of table-eating games.
It makes it attractive: many electron-eating slot machines use the “less than one” effect to create a false reward that allows winning patterns to appear just above or below the payment line. Imagine you press the spin button, watch the wheel turn, see two cherry links -- but the third one is that close. You almost won the grand reward.
That sense of "almost" deceives your brain, allowing it to predict that the reward is now closer than it was before, and it may be possible to get it if you try harder. After almost winning, the reward system in the brain is expected to light up. Many machines are deliberately designed to make the chances of a near-transmission success more likely than random. By making the player feel like he almost won the reward, the programmer made the game more attractive and deceived the user to think that the victory was coming closer and that the chances of winning had never increased.
Make it easy: the whole experience of eating horn tigers is easy to design. The chairs are so comfortable that they can sit together for hours. Most machines do not need players to pull their handles, so they can play the next round by pressing the spin button. It doesn’t matter that money is spent, and casinos make it as convenient as possible – many horn-eating tigers allow players to pay directly from their seats, while ATMs are always not far away; if bank accounts are empty, casinos also have the option of pre-loaning cash and booking.
Make it satisfying: the only dissatisfied part of the whole experience is losing money, and eating horn tigers hide it as much as possible, making it difficult for you to calculate how much you spend in total.
The traditional horn-eating tiger machine has only one handle and a roulette, but the electron-eating slot machine allows players to operate several sets at the same time. Imagine, on the screen, a hundred small sets of wheels are spinning at the same time, and every time you press the spin button, you put a hundred cents -- a hundred cents on the wheel. Assuming that in a given round there are 30 pairs of roulettes that are successful, the machine will emphasize your 30 sets of victories. The festive light flashes and the machine plays the sound of coins falling on the plate. It feels like you won 30 cents, but you lost 70 cents. Eat the horn tiger and win the game.
These four laws add together, the player...
Once the casinos are located in a certain area, the rate of gambling addiction within 50 miles increases; in some cases, the rate is even twice as high. According to one report, “gatherers spend $37 billion a year - more than Americans spend on sports activities ($17.8 billion), films ($10.7 billion) and music ($6.8 billion) add up”.
Use all four rules to change behavior, and you get that effect. When all the pointing points are in the same direction, the likelihood of behaviour going up.
Atomic Habits for Parenting
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In the book Atomic Customary, I explained the four steps behind all human behaviour: reminder, craving, response, reward. Once repeated, this nerve feedback path will shape new habits.
If you forget, the figure below is used to going back.
From these steps, I developed four rules for behavioural change:
1. Note: Make it visible.
2. craving: Make it attractive.
Response: make it easy.
4. Incentives: To make them satisfactory.
These four rules make it easier for any act (their inversion makes any act more difficult). The same rules can be applied to parenting to help children and their families develop more effective habits.
It is worth noting that the concepts mentioned in the book Atomic Customary are useful for both parents and children, but there is a key difference: most people read Atom Customary to improve their habits, but when you consider applying them to children, it is to shape the habits of others. This difference poses an additional challenge, and I am here to provide a precise example of how to use it for parenting.
The concepts I have provided are only the starting point. Every family is different, and you must be willing to experiment with behavioral changes to the four rules to find out how they are connected to your life and environment. If you go back and look at the concepts that I mentioned in Atomic Customary, I think you will find their usefulness almost endless.
Rule 1: Make the hint clear.
The first rule of behavioural change is “to make the hint clear”. This law is linked to a reminder, the first step of the customary return. The hint is to get your attention -- or the attention of the child -- and to indicate what to do next. It is conceivable that the more obvious the reminder is, the greater the opportunity to capture the attention of a person and, consequently, the more likely it is to take action.
One way to use behaviour to change the first rule in child-rearing is to use what Julie Morganstein, a time-management expert, has called “the kindergarten order model”.
Kindergarten classrooms are designed so that children can see clearly where the items should be placed and what they can do. According to Morganstein, kindergarten classrooms have five characteristics:
1. Classrooms are divided into areas reserved for different activities.
2. It is easy to focus on one activity at a time.
3. Items are stored where they are used.
4. It is interesting to place items - everything has its own home.
5. List important items on the list.
For example, a child assigned to a blue reading group would sit next to a blue table and the book would be placed in a blue barrel; in other words, the method would make the event and the place where it took place visible.
You can use colour labels, different convenience stickers or other visible signs to use similar methods in your home. Take, for example, the habit of brushing teeth: "Olyvia takes a green toothbrush and Michael takes a red toothbrush.".
Another option is to help the child create his/her own habits (this is the concept mentioned in chapter V of the Atomic Customary). If a child can't develop a habit of reading or writing, you can use it to stack up to start a better reading practice.
Remember, the formula used to stack is as follows:
“After I'm done with my current habits, I'll implement my new habits.”.
After school, I'll get my homework out of my bag and put it on the table.
I'll take off my dirty slippers and put them in the garage when I'm done with the ball and the ride home.
After dinner, I'll wash my dishes and put them in the dishwasher.
Remember, these habits should be small and easy to enforce. Even if the real goal is for children to spend an hour doing their homework, it is necessary to prepare an environment that will make it easier to do “work” through customary stacking.
Besides, you can use custom stacks to motivate kids to do what you want. For example, after ten minutes of piano practice, I play electric.
The stacking of habits is a simple and effective way of making the time when the new habits should occur visible.
Rule 2: Make habits attractive.
The second rule of behavioural change is “making habits attractive”. This law is linked to craving, the second step in the habit of going back.
It can be assumed that if an act is not attractive to children (i.e. they have no incentive to do it), it is difficult for them to do it.
Interestingly, the best way to motivate children to do something is to lead by example. Human beings are mimics of masters, and as I mentioned in chapter IX of Atomic Customary Law, we are imitating three kinds of people: people close, most people, and powerful people. In the eyes of children, parents are both close and powerful (authority roles), so they often mimic their parents ' habits and routines. This is particularly true of young children, who learn from their parents how to interact with the world and how to solve problems.
So, your habits tend to become those of children. They often follow higher standards.
Of course, with age, children learn habits that are not limited to parents, but also to other people in life. And all the parents of teenagers will tell you that they almost deliberately avoid imitating their parents: you do one thing, and your children will do the opposite. As children grow up, the social influence of parents tends to decline and of peers to rise. The psychologist, Judy Harris, explored this phenomenon in great detail in her book entitled " Cultivation Myths ".
Harris has a key point in his book: Parents can still exert strong influence over the behaviour of their children, except through the “back door”. In the long run, the two greatest effects of parents on children are, first, the genes they pass on to their children and, secondly, the social environment they choose for their children. In other words, children's habits are influenced by peers, but you can influence what kind of peers they are exposed to. You can choose which region you want to live in, which school you send your children to, which extracurricular activities they do, etc., are the conduits for their peers.
In short, if children are to be attracted to certain habits, they should be placed in the environment and in groups where they are shared by peers. Or, as I mentioned in Atomic Customary: let them join a group that sees what you want as normal.
When a child sees a friend, that habit becomes very attractive.
The other thing that is attractive in itself is freedom and autonomy, especially for young children -- when you give them the power to choose, habits become more attractive.
Here is an example from Jenna Lansberg's book "Limitation and Corrections:
Stay calm when he says, "I don't want to wear pajamas.".
"Oh, I see. You don't want to wear pajamas. So what do you want to wear? Or, "What do you want to wear these two pajamas?" or, "I know you don't want to wear them, which is perfectly understandable." But if you don't wear it in five minutes, we won't have time to read the story before bedtime." Or, "Do you want to wear them now, or in five minutes?" It is crucial that he be continuously encouraged to be autonomous and that he be provided with options so that he does not feel ordered. The tone must be soft and free of all threats. In the worst case scenario, he sleeps in his clothes.
It's like being given a book in English class, or choosing which one to read, the same habit can turn from being unattractive to being attractive, depending on who is in charge.
Rule 3: Make action easy.
The change of conduct to the third rule is “to make action easy”. This law is related to the response, that is, the act or custom that you actually display. Easier - that is, easier to do - behaviour is more likely to be enforced.
Before sharing the details of this step, I would like to remind you of the focus of the third law on behavioural change, mentioned in Atom Customary: “The concept behind “Making action easy” is not to ask you to do something that is easy, but to make it as easy as possible to do something that will pay off in the long run.”.
Many parents have made the mistake of making children's lives too easy: helping them write their homework, helping them talk to coaches or teachers about things that they don't know how to talk about, or otherwise interfering with all the challenges or difficulties. This may be “simply easy” in the moment, but it runs counter to the message I shared earlier: that such hand-to-hand guidance cannot make it easy to do things that are good for children in the long run.
What you have to do is not to help the children, but to make it easier for them to do themselves. For example, you can create an excellent writing environment for young children, ensuring that they have a paper-filled and quiet room that is less distracted (see chapters VI and XII of the Atomic Customs for more ideas on environmental design).
The same strategy applies to the social environment. For example, you can teach adolescent children to deal with peer pressure in words that make it easier for them to act when they need it.
The sooner we start to change anything, the better. When I was in high school, I had four brothers from a family. I was surprised when I found out there was no TV at home.
Now in retrospect, I think it's normal for all four of them to be smart, read books and go to great universities. They learn to love when they're young, and when others are playing or watching ESPN, they read.
This environmental design may be too extreme for many people, but you cannot deny the core focus: children (and their parents) are often the product of the environment. If you want a child to become a habit, that habit becomes an easy and convenient option in the environment.
It's easier to get a reading habit when there's no TV around.
Rule 4: Make the reward satisfactory.
The fourth rule of behavioural change is “compulsory reward”. The last stage of the customary return is reward, if the act is linked to the reward — that is to say, feeling good and having a happy ending — then we have reason to repeat it in the future.
The first three rules of behaviour change -- to make tips visible, to make habits attractive, and to make actions easier -- increase our chances of carrying out an act this time. The fourth rule of behaviour change -- to make the reward satisfactory -- increases the likelihood that we will repeat it next time. The habit of going back is done.".
In order for children to adhere to any of these habits, they must feel to some extent satisfied or happy.
Here's the good news for parents: praise is naturally satisfying and parents themselves are in a perfect position to give praise. Every good child wants his parents' praise.
Of course, many parents do the opposite: they tend to criticize what they want their children to do.
When an introverted child finally wants to have dinner with his family, they say, "Wow, look who's here." This kind of statement makes you want children to behave unsatisfied. Don't criticize your happy behavior.
So, I think parents should have this philosophy: hidden and evil.
It doesn't mean ignoring every mistake the child makes, never correcting. For whatever reason, criticism seems to come without permission, and parents often find themselves using the negative sentence: don't climb that, put that thing down, don't touch that, not now, don't go in there, etc., but remind yourself to focus on the good part of the children's behavior and praise them for what you like.
Allow me to quote, once again, the example given in her book by Jenna Lansbeth: how to “invisible” in real life. She recommends “cold treatment”, which is a flat response:
“Cool treatment” is also helpful when children cry, scream, or say the mean things they hear in kindergarten. If we reduce the force of the act by ignoring, which does not mean deliberately ignoring them, children are more likely to forget the harsh words or to stop crying or screaming. Alternatively, there can be a chilling, calm response, such as “so loud” or “so awful, please don't say it”.
The basic concept is that we should use positive rather than negative reinforcements whenever circumstances permit.
I've heard of a very creative way to work with children to build a system of reward tokens or petty money. But the key is to increase the money or petty money only after the child has done good, and not after the child has done bad things.
Parents usually use petty money as a punishment for breaking the rules of the child, but it may be more effective to make the increase in pocket money an incentive for good habits. For example, if a child chooses to read an hour instead of watching television, he/she gets a reward for it. Alternatively, they can earn reward coins by doing household chores, getting good grades or doing other valuable habits.
At the end of the day, the point is to make behaviour satisfactory.
That's it! I hope you like it. If you are interested in knowing more about how to use behavioral change to build better habits (both for children and adults), please refer to the book Atomic Customary.
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Atomic habits.
The law of proof that minor changes bring great success.
Atomic Habibs: An EASY & Proven Way to Build Good Habibs & Break Bad Ones.
Issued electronically.
The first edition of the first edition was released.
By James Clear.
Translator: Cai Shiwei.
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Copyright ~ 2018 by James Clear.
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