Marking Points
Always keep clean & organized your working environment
Small improvements makes a big difference ( Always take a baby steps )
Think: with the same steps you will end up with the same results. but with better habits and routine, anything is possible ( so why not to try new things, if things worked for you adopt it, otherwise drop it )
Break large problems into chunks ( Gradually improve your skills by 1 Percent and after some time you will see a significant increase when you put them all together )
Here we look at how math works out for this principle. if you can get 1 percent better each day for one year, you’ll end up thirty-seven times better by the time you’re done. Conversely, if you get 1 percent worse each day for one year, you’ll decline nearly down to zero. What starts as a small win or a minor setback accumulates into something much more.
# 1% BETTER EVERY DAY 1% worse every day for one year. 0.99 ** 365 = 00.03 1% better every day for one year. 1.01 ** 365 = 37.78Remember: Small improvements are not even notable and noticeable. Ex: Imagine that you have an ice cube sitting on the table in front of you. The room is cold and you can see your breath. It is currently twenty- five degrees. Ever so slowly, the room begins to heat up. Twenty-six degrees. Twenty-seven. Twenty-eight. The ice cube is still sitting on the table in front of you. Twenty-nine degrees. Thirty. Thirty-one. Still, nothing has happened. Then, thirty-two degrees. The ice begins to melt. A one-degree shift, seemingly no different from the temperature increases before it, has unlocked a huge change.
Similarly to the above example: habits often appear to make no difference until you cross a critical threshold and unlock a new level of performance. In the early and middle stages of any quest, there is often a Valley of Disappointment. You expect to make progress in a linear fashion and it’s frustrating how ineffective changes can seem during the first days, weeks, and even months. It doesn’t feel like you are going anywhere. It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed.
Don't Repeat the 1 percent errors ( day after day they will lead you to toxic results )
Massive success ~ Massive Action ( Don't break the chain ).
Always audit your trajectory in some period of time. Your outcomes are a lagging measure of your habits. Ex: Your net worth is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your weight is a lagging measure of your eating habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your learning habits. Your clutter is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits.
Time magnifies the margin between success and failure. It will multiply whatever you feed it. Good habits make time your ally. Bad habits make time your enemy. ( Use your time wisely )
Compounding
Positive compounding
Productivity compounds. Accomplishing one extra task is a small feat on any given day, but it counts for a lot over an entire career. The effect of automating an old task or mastering a new skill can be even greater. The more tasks you can handle without thinking, the more your brain is free to focus on other areas.
Knowledge compounds. Learning one new idea won’t make you a genius, but a commitment to lifelong learning can be transformative. Furthermore, each book you read not only teaches you something new but also opens up different ways of thinking about old ideas. As Warren Buffett says, “That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest.”
Relationships compound. People reflect your behavior back to you. The more you help others, the more others want to help you. Being a little bit nicer in each interaction can result in a network of broad and strong connections over time.
Negative Compounding
Stress compounds. The frustration of a traffic jam. The weight of parenting responsibilities. The worry of making ends meet. The strain of slightly high blood pressure. By themselves, these common causes of stress are manageable. But when they persist for years, little stresses compound into serious health issues.
Negative thoughts compound. The more you think of yourself as worthless, stupid, or ugly, the more you condition yourself to interpret life that way. You get trapped in a thought loop. The same is true for how you think about others. Once you fall into the habit of seeing people as angry, unjust, or selfish, you see those kind of people everywhere.
Outrage compounds. Riots, protests, and mass movements are rarely the result of a single event. Instead, a long series of microaggressions and daily aggravations slowly multiply until one event tips the scales and outrage spreads like wildfire.
Plateau of Latent Potential: If you are facing too many problems in the middle of the journey. you are in a Plateau of Latent Potential. A single solution to this problem is to wait to cross/pass ( Stick to the habit ) your Plateau.
Forget about the goals, focus on the systsem instead
Goals are about the results you want to achieve.
Systems are about the processes that lead to those results.
Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress. So don't spend too much time thinking about your goals put the time in designing your systems. ( because winners and losers both have the same goal, if you put your focus on the system you will become a winner & also remember one thing achieving a goal is only a momentary change (Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves. ))
Focus on taking action, not being in motion.
When you’re in motion, you’re planning and strategizing and learning. Those are all good things, but they don’t produce a result. Action, on the other hand, is the type of behavior that will deliver an outcome. If I outline twenty ideas for articles I want to write, that’s motion. If I actually sit down and write an article, that’s action. If I search for a better diet plan and read a few books on the topic, that’s motion. If I actually eat a healthy meal, that’s action.
Repetition builds greater results. if we take an example to understand this once when scientists analyzed the brains of taxi drivers in London, they found that the hippocampus—a region of the brain involved in spatial memory—was significantly larger in their subjects than in non–taxi drivers. Even more fascinating, the hippocampus decreased in size when a driver retired. Like the muscles of the body responding to regular weight training, particular regions of the brain adapt as they are used and atrophy as they are abandoned.
Each time you repeat an action, you are activating a particular neural circuit associated with that habit. This means that simply putting in your reps is one of the most critical steps you can take to encoding a new habit.
All habits follow a similar trajectory from effortful practice to automatic behavior, a process known as automaticity. Automaticity is the ability to perform a behavior without thinking about each step, which occurs when the nonconscious mind takes over
We’ll see what it looks like when researchers track the level of automaticity for an actual habit like walking for ten minutes each day. The shape of these charts, which scientists call learning curves, reveals an important truth about behavior change: habits form based on frequency, not time.
The most common question regarding this is "How long does it take to build a new habit??": There is nothing magical about time passing with regard to habit formation. It doesn’t matter if it’s been twenty-one days or thirty days or three hundred days. What matters is the rate at which you perform the behavior. You could do something twice in thirty days, or two hundred times. It’s the frequency that makes the difference. Your current habits have been internalized over the course of hundreds, if not thousands, of repetitions. New habits require the same level of frequency. You need to string together enough successful attempts until the behavior is firmly embedded in your mind and you cross the Habit Line.
The Two Minute Rule
Even when you know you should start small, it’s easy to start too big. When you dream about making a change, excitement inevitably takes over and you end up trying to do too much too soon. The most effective way I know to counteract this tendency is to use the Two-Minute Rule, which states, “When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.” Ex: “Read before bed each night” becomes “Read one page.” The idea is to make your habits as easy as possible to start. Anyone can meditate for one minute, read one page.
For two minute rule create a gateway habit. Your goal might be to run a marathon, but your gateway habit is to put on your running shoes. That’s how you follow the Two-Minute Rule.
Journaling provides another example. Nearly everyone can benefit from getting their thoughts out of their head and onto paper, but most people give up after a few days or avoid it entirely because journaling feels like a chore. The secret is to always stay below the point where it feels like work. Greg McKeown, a leadership consultant from the United Kingdom, built a daily journaling habit by specifically writing less than he felt like. He always stopped journaling before it seemed like a hassle. Ernest Hemingway believed in similar advice for any kind of writing. “The best way is to always stop when you are going good”.
Remember: Standardize before you optimize. You can’t improve a habit that doesn’t exist.
Habit Tracking: Habit tracking is powerful because it leverages multiple Laws of Behavior Change. It simultaneously makes a behavior obvious, attractive, and satisfying
Habit Tracking is obvious: Recording your last action creates a trigger that can initiate your next one. Habit tracking naturally builds a series of visual cues like the streak of X’s on your calendar or the list of meals in your food log. When you look at the calendar and see your streak, you’ll be reminded to act again
- Research has shown that people who track their progress on goals like losing weight, quitting smoking, and lowering blood pressure are all more likely to improve than those who don’t. One study of more than sixteen hundred people found that those who kept a daily food log lost twice as much weight as those who did not. The mere act of tracking a behavior can spark the urge to change it.
Habit Tracking is Attractive: The most effective form of motivation is progress. When we get a signal that we are moving forward, we become more motivated to continue down that path. In this way, habit tracking can have an additive effect on motivation. Each small win feeds your desire
- This can be particularly powerful on a bad day. When you’re feeling down, it’s easy to forget about all the progress you have already made. Habit tracking provides visual proof of your hard work—a subtle reminder of how far you’ve come. Plus, the empty square you see each morning can motivate you to get started because you don’t want to lose your progress by breaking the streak
Habit Tracking is Satisfying: This is the most crucial benefit of all. Tracking can become its own form of reward. It is satisfying to cross an item off your to-do list, to complete an entry in your workout log, or to mark an X on the calendar. It feels good to watch your results grow—the size of your investment portfolio, the length of your book manuscript—and if it feels good, then you’re more likely to endure.
Some people resist the idea of tracking and measuring. It can feel like a burden because it forces you into two habits: the habit you’re trying to build and the habit of tracking it. Tracking isn’t for everyone, and there is no need to measure your entire life. But nearly anyone can benefit from it in some form—even if it’s only temporary.
Habit Tracking Formula:
After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [TRACK MY HABIT]. Ex: After I hang up the phone from a sales call, I will move one paperclip over.
How to recover quickly when your habits break down: No matter how consistent you are with your habits, it is inevitable that life will interrupt you at some point. Perfection is not possible. Before long, an emergency will pop up—you get sick or you have to travel for work or your family needs a little more of your time.
Mantra is "Never Miss Twice"
If I miss one day, I try to get back into it as quickly as possible. Missing one workout happens, but I’m not going to miss two in a row. Maybe I’ll eat an entire pizza, but I’ll follow it up with a healthy meal. I can’t be perfect, but I can avoid a second lapse. As soon as one streak ends, I get started on the next one. The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
Another ex: You don’t realize how valuable it is to just show up on your bad (or busy) days. Lost days hurt you more than successful days help you. If you start with $100, then a 50 percent gain will take you to $150. But you only need a 33 percent loss to take you back to $100. In other words, avoiding a 33 percent loss is just as valuable as achieving a 50 percent gain.
Knowing when to track habit: Say you’re running a restaurant and you want to know if your chef is doing a good job. One way to measure success is to track how many customers pay for a meal each day. If more customers come in, the food must be good. If fewer customers come in, something must be wrong. However, this one measurement—daily revenue—only gives a limited picture of what’s really going on. Just because someone pays for a meal doesn’t mean they enjoy the meal. Even dissatisfied customers are unlikely to dine and dash. In fact, if you’re only measuring revenue, the food might be getting worse but you’re making up for it with marketing or discounts or some other method. Instead, it may be more effective to track how many customers finish their meal or perhaps the percentage of customers who leave a generous tip.
Refer a Quote: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Measurement is only useful when it guides you and adds context to a larger picture, not when it consumes you. Each number is simply one piece of feedback in the overall system.
Remember: Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s the most important thing & And just because you can’t measure something doesn’t mean it’s not important at all.
The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition.
- This is just as true with habit change as it is with sports and business. Habits are easier to perform and more satisfying to stick with when they align with your natural inclinations and abilities. Eg: If you want to dunk a basketball, being seven feet tall is very useful. If you want to perform a gymnastics routine, being seven feet tall is a great hindrance.
Pick the right habit and progress is easy. Pick the wrong habit and life is a struggle.
Play a game that favors your strengths. If you can’t find a game that favors you, create one.
To pick a right habit most common approach is trail/error but life is short we don't have time to try everything so we need to put some question to decide what is right or wrong with something.
What feels like fun to me, but work to others?
- The mark of whether you are made for a task is not whether you love it but whether you can handle the pain of the task easier than most people. When are you enjoying yourself while other people are complaining? The work that hurts you less than it hurts others is the work you were made to do.
What makes me lose track of time?
- Flow is the mental state you enter when you are so focused on the task at hand that the rest of the world fades away. This blend of happiness and peak performance is what athletes and performers experience when they are “in the zone.” It is nearly impossible to experience a flow state and not find the task satisfying at least to some degree.
Where do I get greater returns than the average person?
- We are continually comparing ourselves to those around us, and behavior is more likely to be satisfying when the comparison is in our favor. When I started writing at jamesclear.com, my email list grew very quickly. I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing well, but I knew that results seemed to be coming faster for me than for some of my colleagues, which motivated me to keep writing.
What comes naturally to me?
- For just a moment, ignore what you have been taught. Ignore what society has told you. Ignore what others expect of you. Look inside yourself and ask, “What feels natural to me? When have I felt alive? When have I felt like the real me?” No internal judgments or people-pleasing. No second-guessing or self-criticism. Just feelings of engagement and enjoyment. Whenever you feel authentic and genuine, you are headed in the right direction.
The Goldilocks Rule: The human brain loves a challenge, but only if it is within an optimal zone of difficulty.
- The core idea of the Goldilocks Rule remains: working on challenges of just manageable difficulty—something on the perimeter of your ability— seems crucial for maintaining motivation.
- Improvement requires a delicate balance. You need to regularly search for challenges that push you to your edge while continuing to make enough progress to stay motivated. Behaviors need to remain novel in order for them to stay attractive and satisfying. Without variety, we get bored. And boredom is perhaps the greatest villain on the quest for self-improvement.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom.
As habits become routine, they become less interesting and less satisfying. We get bored.
Anyone can work hard when they feel motivated. It’s the ability to keep going when work isn’t exciting that makes the difference.
Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way.
Journey to the Mastery
The upside of habits is that we can do things without thinking.
The downside of habits is that you get used to doing things a certain way and stop paying attention to little errors.
Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery
Mastery is the process of narrowing your focus to a tiny element of success, repeating it until you have internalized the skill, and then using this new habit as the foundation to advance to the next frontier of your development. Old tasks become easier the second time around, but it doesn’t get easier overall because now you’re pouring your energy into the next challenge. Each habit unlocks the next level of performance. It’s an endless cycle.
- At the moment when you begin to feel like you have mastered a skill—right when things are starting to feel automatic and you are becoming comfortable—that you must avoid slipping into the trap of complacency.
Break the beliefs that hold you back
In the beginning, repeating a habit is essential to build up evidence of your desired identity. As you latch on to that new identity, however, those same beliefs can hold you back from the next level of growth. When working against you, your identity creates a kind of “pride” that encourages you to deny your weak spots and prevents you from truly growing. This is one of the greatest downsides of building habits.
Ex: The schoolteacher who ignores innovative teaching methods and sticks with her tried-and-true lesson plans.
Solution: Avoid making any single aspect of your identity an overwhelming portion of who you are.
Redefine yourself: “I’m the CEO” translates to “I’m the type of person who builds and creates things.”
The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it.
Pickup Quotes
Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement
To write a great book, you must first become the book
Success is a product of daily habits
You get what you repeat
Habits are a double-edged sword. Bad habits can cut you down just as easily as good habits can build you up ( avoid dangerous half of the blade )
Your behaviors are usually a reflection of your identity
The process of building habits is actually the process of becoming yourself.
If nothing changes, nothing is going to change.
Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment.
Habits are mental shortcuts learned from experience.
A genius is not born, but is educated and trained.
Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive.
The best is the enemy of the good.
The most effective form of learning is practice, not planning.
The best way is to always stop when you are going good.
To be productive, the cost of procrastination must be greater than the cost of action.
Three layers of behaviour change
Layer 1: The first layer is changing your outcomes. This level is concerned with changing your results: losing weight, publishing a book, winning a championship. Most of the goals you set are associated with this level of change.
Layer 2: The second layer is changing your process. This level is concerned with changing your habits and systems: implementing a new routine at the gym, decluttering your desk for better workflow, developing a meditation practice. Most of the habits you build are associated with this level.
Layer 3: The third and deepest layer are changing your identity. This level is concerned with changing your beliefs: your worldview, your self-image, your judgments about yourself and others. Most of the beliefs, assumptions, and biases you hold are associated with this level.
Let's understand both Outcome-based habits and Identity-based habits: Imagine two people resisting a cigarette. When offered a smoke, the
firstperson says, “No thanks. I’m trying to quit.” It sounds like a reasonable response, but this person still believes they are a smoker who is trying to be something else. They are hoping their behavior will change while carrying around the same beliefs. Thesecondperson declines by saying, “No thanks. I’m not a smoker.” It’s a small difference, but this statement signals a shift in identity. Smoking was part of their former life, not their current one. They no longer identify as someone who smokes.Most people don’t even consider identity change when they set out to improve. They just think, “I want to be skinny (outcome) and if I stick to this diet, then I’ll be skinny (process).” They set goals and determine the actions they should take to achieve those goals without considering the beliefs that drive their actions. They never shift the way they look at themselves, and they don’t realize that their old identity can sabotage their new plans for change.
True behavior change is identity change. You might start a habit because of motivation, but the only reason you’ll stick with one is that it becomes part of your identity. Anyone can convince themselves to visit the gym or eat healthy once or twice, but if you don’t shift the belief behind the behavior, then it is hard to stick with long-term changes. Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are. Ex: The goal is not to read a book, the goal is to become a reader.
Understand the identity change can be a curse through the example. Many people walk through life in a cognitive slumber, blindly following the norms attached to their identity. Like if someone says - “I’m not a morning person." When you have repeated a story to yourself for years, it is easy to slide into these mental grooves and accept them as a fact. Ex: If you go to church every Sunday for twenty years, you have evidence that you are religious. In time, you begin to resist certain actions because “that’s not who I am.” There is internal pressure to maintain your self-image and behave in a way that is consistent with your beliefs. You find whatever way you can to avoid contradicting yourself. It is very difficult to change because this is tied to identity.
Becoming the best version of yourself requires you to continuously edit your beliefs, and to upgrade and expand youridentity.
The more you repeat a behavior, the more you reinforce the identityassociated with that behavior.
Two-step process to change the identitiy
Decide the type of person you want to be.
- First, decide who you want to be. This holds at any level—as an individual, as a team, as a community, as a nation. What do you want to stand for? What are your principles and values? Who do you wish to become?
Prove it to yourself with small wins.
The real reason habits matter is not because they can get you better results (although they can do that), but because they can change your beliefs about yourself.
Why Brain Build Habits
A habit is a behavior that has been repeated enough times to become automatic. The process of habit formation begins with trial and error. Whenever you encounter a new situation in life, your brain has to make a decision. How do I respond to this? The first time you come across a problem, you’re not sure how to solve it.
Neurological activity in the brain is high during this period. You are carefully analyzing the situation and making conscious decisions about how to act. You’re taking in tons of new information and trying to make sense of it all. The brain is busy learning the most effective course of action.
Ex: You’re mentally exhausted from a long day of work, and you learn that playing video games relaxes you. You’re exploring, exploring, exploring, and then—BAM—a reward. This is the feedback loop behind all human behavior: try, fail, learn, try differently. With practice, the useless movements fade away and the useful actions get reinforced. That’s habit-forming.
As habits are created, the level of activity in the brain decreases. You learn to lock in on the cues that predict success and tune out everything else. When a similar situation arises in the future, you know exactly what to look for. There is no longer a need to analyze every angle of a situation. Your brain skips the process of trial and error and creates a mental rule: if this, then that. These cognitive scripts can be followed automatically whenever the situation is appropriate. Now, whenever you feel stressed, you get the itch to run. As soon as you walk In the door from work, you grab the video game controller. A choice that once required effort is now automatic. A habit has been created.
Habit formation is incredibly useful because the conscious mind is the bottleneck of the brain. It can only pay attention to one problem at a time.
Build Better Habits in 4 Steps
Cue: The cue triggers your brain to initiate a behavior. It is a bit of information that predicts a reward. Our prehistoric ancestors were paying attention to cues that signaled the location of primary rewards like food, water, and sex. Today, we spend most of our time learning cues that predict secondary rewards like money and fame, power and status, praise and approval, love and friendship, or a sense of personal satisfaction. Your mind is continuously analyzing your internal and external environment for hints of where rewards are located. Because the cue is the first indication that we’re close to a reward, it naturally leads to a craving.
Cravings: are the motivational force behind every habit. Without some level of motivation or desire—without craving a change—we have no reason to act. What you crave is not the habit itself but the change in state it delivers. You do not crave smoking a cigarette, you crave the feeling of relief it provides. You are not motivated by brushing your teeth but rather by the feeling of a clean mouth. You do not want to turn on the television, you want to be entertained. Every craving is linked to a desire to change your internal state.
Response: The response is the actual habit you perform, which can take the form of a thought or an action. Whether a response occurs depends on how motivated you are and how much friction is associated with the behavior. If a particular action requires more physical or mental effort than you are willing to expend, then you won’t do it. Your response also depends on your ability. It sounds simple, but a habit can occur only if you are capable of doing it. If you want to dunk a basketball but can’t jump high enough to reach the hoop, well, you’re out of luck.
Reward: Rewards are the end goal of every habit. The cue is about noticing the reward. The craving is about wanting the reward. The response is about obtaining the reward.
We chase rewards because they serve two purposes:
Satisfy the Cravings: rewards provide benefits on their own. Food and water deliver the energy you need to survive. Getting a promotion brings more money and respect. Getting in shape improves your health and your dating prospects. But the more immediate benefit is that rewards satisfy your craving to eat or to gain status or to win approval. At least for a moment, rewards deliver contentment and relief from craving.
Teach us: rewards teach us which actions are worth remembering in the future. Your brain is a reward detector. As you go about your life, your sensory nervous system is continuously monitoring which actions satisfy your desires and deliver pleasure. Feelings of pleasure and disappointment are part of the feedback mechanism that helps your brain distinguish useful actions from useless ones. Rewards close the feedback loop and complete the habit cycle.
Note: If behavior is insufficient in any of the four stages, it will not become a habit. Eliminate the cue and your habit will never start. Reduce the craving and you won’t experience enough motivation to act. Make the behavior difficult and you won’t be able to do it. And if the reward fails to satisfy your desire, then you’ll have no reason to do it again in the future. Without the first three steps, the behavior will not occur. Without all four, a behavior will not be repeated.
The ultimate purpose of habits is to solve the problems of life with as little energy and effort as possible.
The Four Laws of Create a Good Habit
Cue: Make it Obvious
Make it Planned: People who make a specific plan for when and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow through. ( Clarity is important )
Once an implementation intention has been set, you don’t have to wait for inspiration to strike. When the moment of the action occurs, there is no need to make a decision. Simply follow your predetermined plan.
The two most common cues are time and location.
The simple way to apply this strategy to your habits is to fill out this sentence:
I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION]. Ex: Meditation. I will meditate for one minute at 7 a.m. in my kitchen. being specific about what you want and how you will achieve it helps you say no to things that derail progress, distract your attention, and pull you off course.Habit stacking is a strategy you can use to pair a new habit with a current habit.
Habit Stacking: One of the best ways to build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking. the secret to creating a successful habit stack is selecting the right cue to kick things off. Formula:
After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT]. Ex: Meditation. After I pour my morning cup of coffee, I will meditate for sixty seconds. After I meditate for sixty seconds, I will write my to-do list for the day.One way to find the right trigger for your habit stack is by brainstorming a list of your current habits. You can use your Habits Scorecard from the last chapter as a starting point. Alternatively, you can create a list with two columns. In the first column, write down the habits you do each day without fail.
Habit stacking works best when the cue is highly specific and immediately actionable.
Craving: Make it Attractive
Scientists can track the precise moment a craving occurs by measuring a neurotransmitter called dopamine. The importance of dopamine became apparent in 1954 when the neuroscientists James Olds and Peter Milner ran an experiment that revealed the neurological processes behind craving and desire.
The fact that the brain allocates so much precious space to the regions responsible for craving and desire provides further evidence of the crucial role these processes play. Desire is the engine that drives behavior. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response.
We need to make our habits attractive because it is the expectation of a rewarding experience that motivates us to act in the first place. This is where a strategy known as temptation bundling comes into play.
To best use your temptation you need to bundle with some habits to make habits more attractive. like we understand this by an example, Ronan Byrne, an electrical engineering student in Dublin, Ireland, enjoyed watching Netflix, but he also knew that he should exercise more often than he did. Putting his engineering skills to use, Byrne hacked his stationary bike and connected it to his laptop and television. Then he wrote a computer program that would allow Netflix to run only if he was cycling at a certain speed. If he slowed down for too long, whatever show he was watching would pause until he started pedaling again. He was, in the words of one fan, “eliminating obesity one Netflix binge at a time.” He was also employing temptation bundling to make his exercise habit more attractive. Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
The formula for habit stacking + temptation bundling is
After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [HABIT I NEED]. and After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT]. For Ex: After I pull out my phone, I will do ten burpees (need). After I do ten burpees, I will check Facebook (want).You can also understand this by how companies do often to their clients like the primary goal of food science is to create products that are more attractive to consumers. French fries, for example, are a potent combination—golden brown and crunchy on the outside, light and smooth on the inside. Other processed foods enhance dynamic contrast, which refers to items with a combination of sensations, like crunchy and creamy.
Another option to make your habits attractive you need a create a favorable culture around you. Because we pick habits from our surroundings and closely related persons. So, Surround yourself with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You’ll rise together. Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior and you already have something in common with the group.
We tend to imitate the habits of three social groups: the close (family and friends), the many (the tribe), and the powerful (those with status and prestige). family and friends are already discussed in the above point. as per tribe option, we pick our desires as per our society/tribe does but there is one big problem there The normal behavior of the tribe often overpowers the desired behavior of the individual. Most days, we’d rather be wrong with the crowd than be right by ourselves. If a behavior can get us approval, respect, and praise, we find it attractive.
Response: Make it Easy
Law of Least Effort: It is human nature to follow the Law of Least Effort, which states that when deciding between two similar options, people will naturally gravitate toward the option that requires the least amount of work.
Every action requires a certain amount of energy. The more energy required, the less likely it is to occur. If your goal is to do a hundred push-ups per day, that’s a lot of energy! In the beginning, when you’re motivated and excited, you can muster the strength to get started. But after a few days, such a massive effort feels exhausting. Meanwhile, sticking to the habit of doing one push-up per day requires almost no energy to get started. And the less energy a habit requires, the more likely it is to occur.
Look at any behavior that fills up much of your life and you’ll see that it can be performed with very low levels of motivation. Habits like scrolling on our phones, checking email, and watching television steal so much of our time because they can be performed almost without effort. They are remarkably convenient.
Every habit is just an obstacle to getting what you really want. Dieting is an obstacle to getting fit. The greater the obstacle—that is, the more difficult the habit—the more friction there is between you and your desired end state. This is why it is crucial to make your habits so easy that you’ll do them even when you don’t feel like it. If you can make your good habits more convenient, you’ll be more likely to follow through on them.
The idea behind makes it easy is not to only do easy things. The idea is to make it as easy as possible at the moment to do things that pay off in the long run.
One of the most effective ways to reduce the friction associated with your habits is to practice environment design ( Repetition ).
Remove the points of friction that sap your time and energy.
Prime the environment for future use ( so it’s ready for immediate use ). Want to draw more? Put your pencils, pens, notebooks, and drawing tools on top of your desk, within easy reach. ( Create an environment where doing the right thing is as easy as possible. )
If any of the above doesn't work for you. you can take it to step further. like understand with this example: Unplug the television and take the batteries out of the remote after each use, so it takes an extra ten seconds to turn it back on. And if you’re really hard-core, move the television out of the living room and into a closet after each use. You can be sure you’ll only take it out when you really want to watch something. The greater the friction, the less likely the habit.
Reward: Make it satisfying
Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is rewarded is repeated. What is punished is avoided.
Ex: Toothpaste: Manufacturers enjoyed great success when they added flavors like spearmint, peppermint, and cinnamon to their products. These flavors don’t improve the effectiveness of the toothpaste. They simply create a “clean mouth” feel and make the experience of brushing your teeth more pleasurable. Some people make habits because it proved to be more satisfying.
The first three laws of behavior change—make it obvious, make it attractive, and make it easy—increase the odds that a behavior will be performed this time. The fourth law of behavior change—make it satisfying—increases the odds that a behavior will be repeated next time. It completes the habit loop.
Immediate v/s Delayed Rewards
Immediate-return Environment: Imagine you’re an animal roaming the plains of Africa—a giraffe or an elephant or a lion. On any given day, most of your decisions have an immediate impact. You are always thinking about what to eat or where to sleep or how to avoid a predator. You are constantly focused on the present or the very near future. You live in what scientists call an immediate-return environment because your actions instantly deliver clear and immediate outcomes.
Delayed-return Environment: In modern society, many of the choices you make today will not benefit you immediately. If you do a good job at work, you’ll get a paycheck in a few weeks. If you exercise today, perhaps you won’t be overweight next year. If you save money now, maybe you’ll have enough for retirement decades from now. You live in what scientists call a delayed-return environment because you can work for years before your actions deliver the intended payoff.
The costs of your good habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.
let’s update the Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change: What is immediately rewarded is repeated. What is immediately punished is avoided.
Here's the problem: most people know that delaying gratification is the wise approach. They want the benefits of good habits: to be healthy, productive, at peace. But these outcomes are seldom top-of-mind at the decisive moment. Thankfully, it’s possible to train yourself to delay gratification—but you need to work with the grain of human nature, not against it. The best way to do this is to add a little bit of immediate pleasure to the habits that pay off in the long-run and a little bit of immediate pain to ones that don’t.
How to turn instant gratification to your life: The best approach is to use reinforcement, which refers to the process of using an immediate reward to increase the rate of behavior. Habit stacking ties your habit to an immediate cue, which makes it obvious when to start. Reinforcement ties your habit to an immediate reward, which makes it satisfying when you finish.
Immediate reinforcement can be especially helpful when dealing with habits of avoidance, which are behaviors you want to stop doing. It can be challenging to stick with habits like “no frivolous purchases” or “no alcohol this month” because nothing happens when you skip happy hour drinks or don’t buy that pair of shoes.
It can be hard to feel satisfied when there is no action in the first place. All you’re doing is resisting temptation, and it isn’t much satisfying about that. One solution is to turn the situation on its head. You want to make avoidance visible. Open a savings account and label it for something you want—maybe “Leather Jacket.” Whenever you pass on a purchase, but the same amount of money in the account. Skip your morning latte? Transfer $5. Pass on another month of Netflix? Move $10 over. It’s like creating a loyalty program for yourself. The immediate reward of seeing yourself save money toward the leather jacket feels a lot better than being deprived. You are making it satisfying to do nothing.
Making progress is satisfying, and visual measures—like moving paper clips or hairpins or marbles—provide clear evidence of your progress. As a result, they reinforce your behavior and add a little bit of immediate satisfaction to any activity.
The Four Laws of Break a Bad Habit
Cue: Make it Invisible
Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself. They foster the feelings they try to numb. You feel bad, so you eat junk food. Because you eat junk food, Worrying about your health makes you feel anxious, which causes you to smoke to ease your anxiety, which makes your health even worse, and soon you’re feeling more anxious. Researchers refer to this phenomenon as “cue-induced wanting”: an external trigger causes a compulsive craving to repeat a bad habit. Once you notice something, you begin to want it. This process is happening all the time—often without us realizing it. Scientists have found that showing addicts a picture of cocaine for just thirty-three milliseconds stimulates the reward pathway in the brain and sparks a desire
To eliminate a bad habit is to reduce exposure to the cue that causes it. Ex: If you can’t seem to get any work done, leave your phone in another room for a few hours.
This practice is an inversion of the 1st Law of Behavior Change. Rather than make it obvious, you can make it invisible.
Some researches say that "disciplined” people are better at structuring their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-control. So, yes, perseverance, grit, and willpower are essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more disciplined environment.
To create a disciplined environment remove all the distraction based things like if you distract with your phone all the time put your phone in the next room. Make the cues of good habits obvious in your environment. Gradually, your habits become associated not with a single trigger but with the entire context surrounding the behavior. The context becomes the cue. It is easier to build new habits in a new environment because you are not fighting against old cues.
Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one. You may be able to resist temptation once or twice, but it’s unlikely you can muster the willpower to override your desires every time. Instead of summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the right thing, your energy would be better spent optimizing your environment. This is the secret to self-control. Make the cues of your good habits obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.
Cravings: Make it Unattractive
One solution to this problem is reframing your habits to highlight their benefits rather than their drawbacks is a fast and lightweight way to reprogram your mind and make a habit seem more attractive. like I once heard a story about a man who uses a wheelchair. When asked if it was difficult being confined, he responded, “I’m not confined to my wheelchair—I am liberated by it. If it wasn’t for my wheelchair, I would be bed-bound and never able to leave my house.” This shift in perspective completely transformed how he lived each day.
Another example above solution is Meditation: Anyone who has tried meditation for more than three seconds knows how frustrating it can be when the next distraction inevitably pops into your mind. You can transform frustration into delight when you realize that each interruption gives you a chance to practice returning to your breath. Distraction is a good thing because you need distractions to practice meditation.
These little mindset shifts aren’t magic, but they can help change the feelings you associate with a particular habit or situation. This will Highlight the benefits of avoiding a bad habit to make it seem unattractive.
Habits are attractive when we associate them with positive feelings and unattractive when we associate them with negative feelings. Create a motivation ritual by doing something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit.
Response: Make it Difficult
Sometimes success is less about making good habits easy and more about making bad habits hard.
Your main focus should be to make good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. The best way to break a bad habit is to make it impractical to do. Increase the friction until you don’t even have the option to act.
To break the wrong routine, you need to take serious action against it. make a situation difficult or time-consuming to yourself to get out of these habits. For example, Expert Nir Eyal purchased an outlet timer, which is an adapter that he plugged in between his internet router and the power outlet. At 10 p.m. each night, the outlet timer cuts off the power to the router. When the internet goes off, everyone knows it is time to go to bed.
Using technology to automate your habits is the most reliable and effective way to guarantee the right behavior.
Reward: Make it Unsatisfying
If you want to prevent bad habits and eliminate unhealthy behaviors, then adding an instant cost to the action is a great way to reduce their odds. We repeat bad habits because they serve us in some way, and that makes them hard to abandon. The best way I know to overcome this predicament is to increase the speed of the punishment associated with the behavior. There can’t be a gap between the action and the consequences.
The more local, tangible, concrete, and immediate the consequence, the more likely it is to influence individual behavior. The more global, intangible, vague, and delayed the consequence, the less likely it is to influence individual behavior.
Habit Contract: you can create a habit contract to hold yourself accountable. A habit contract is a verbal or written agreement in which you state your commitment to a particular habit and the punishment that will occur if you don’t follow through. Then you find one or two people to act as your accountability partners and sign off on the contract with you.
Ex: Bryan Harris: He wrote up a habit contract between himself, his wife, and his personal trainer. The first version read, “Bryan’s #1 objective for Q1 of 2017 is to start eating correctly again so he feels better, looks better, and is able to hit his long-term goal of 200 pounds at 10% body fat.” Below that statement, Harris laid out a road map for achieving his ideal outcome:
Phase #1: Get back to a strict “slow-carb” diet in Q1.
Phase #2: Start a strict macronutrient tracking program in Q2.
Phase #3: Refine and maintain the details of his diet and workout program in Q3.
Finally, he wrote out each of the daily habits that would get him to his goal. For example, “Write down all food that he consumes each day and weigh himself each day. And then he listed the punishment if he failed: “If Bryan doesn’t do these two items then the following consequence will be enforced: He will have to dress up each workday and each Sunday morning for the rest of the quarter. Dress up is defined as not wearing jeans, t-shirts, hoodies, or shorts. He will also give Joey (his trainer) $200 to use as he sees fit if he misses one day of logging food.” At the bottom of the page, Harris, his wife, and his trainer all signed the contract.
My initial reaction was that a contract like this seemed overly formal and unnecessary, especially the signatures. But Harris convinced me that signing the contract was an indication of seriousness. “Anytime I skip this part,” he said, “I start slacking almost immediately.”
Three months later, after hitting his targets for Q1, Harris upgraded his goals. The consequences escalated, too. If he missed his carbohydrate and protein targets, he had to pay his trainer $100. And if he failed to weigh himself, he had to give his wife $500 to use as she saw fit. Perhaps most painfully, if he forgot to run sprints, he had to dress up for work every day and wear an Alabama hat the rest of the quarter—the bitter rival of his beloved Auburn team.
The strategy worked. With his wife and trainer acting as accountability partners and with the habit contract clarifying exactly what to do each day, Harris lost the weight. To make bad habits unsatisfying, your best option is to make them painful at the moment.
Checklist
Create a Good Habit
First Law: Make it Obvious
- [ ] Fill out the Habits Scorecard. Write down your current habits to become aware of them.
- [ ] Use implementation intentions: “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].”
- [ ] Use habit stacking: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”
- [ ] Design your environment. Make the cues of good habits obvious and visible.
Second Law: Make it Attractive
- [ ] Use temptation bundling. Pair an action you want to do with an action you need to do.
- [ ] Join a culture where your desired behavior is normal behavior.
- [ ] Create a motivation ritual. Do something you enjoy immediately before a difficult habit.
Third Law: Make it Easy
- [ ] Reduce friction. Decrease the number of steps between you and your good habits.
- [ ] Prime the environment. Prepare your environment to make future actions easier.
- [ ] Master the decisive moment. Optimize the small choices that deliver outsized impact.
- [ ] Use the Two-Minute Rule. Downscale your habits until they can be done in two minutes or less.
- [ ] Automate your habits. Invest in technology and onetime purchases that lock in future behavior.
Fourth Law: Make it Satisfying
- [ ] Use reinforcement. Give yourself an immediate reward when you complete your habit.
- [ ] Make “doing nothing” enjoyable. When avoiding a bad habit, design a way to see the benefits.
- [ ] Use a habit tracker. Keep track of your habit streak and “don’t break the chain.”
- [ ] Never miss twice. When you forget to do a habit, make sure you get back on track immediately.
Break a Bad Habit
First Law: Make it Invisible
- [ ] Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment.
Second Law: Make it Unattractive
- [ ] Reframe your mindset. Highlight the benefits of avoiding your bad habits.
Third Law: Make it Difficult
- [ ] Increase friction. Increase the number of steps between you and your bad habits.
- [ ] Use a commitment device. Restrict your future choices to the ones that benefit you.
Fourth Law: Make it Unsatisfying
[ ] Get an accountability partner. Ask someone to watch your behavior.
[ ] Create a habit contract. Make the costs of your bad habits public and painful.