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So last week I did a video
summarizing three of the biggest ideas
in this book right here.
"Atomic Habits" by James Clear.
And that's the only Dr. Seuss's calamity in this video
but I just couldn't help it.
But like I said, in that video,
this is one of the better self development books
that I've ever read,
and when it comes to building habits,
I think this is the best habit building book
that I've ever read.
But while those three big ideas we discussed in that video
do kind of encapsulate the strategic component
of building habits,
they aren't the entire picture
because as anybody who's ever studied business
will tell you to run a successful business,
you need two things, strategy and tactics.
Strategy being the foundational sort of birds eye view,
huge ideas that really form the foundation
of everything you're trying to do.
And tactics being the more in the trenches plans
that allow you to carry out the strategy
on a day to day basis,
in addition to dealing with whatever crap
life happens to throw your way.
And while running a business and building habits
in your everyday life, aren't completely identical goals,
they do have one key component
in which they are very, very alike,
which is that you need both strategy and tactics.
And luckily "Atomic Habits"
also deals with this more tactical question.
In fact clear lays are four different rules
for making habits stick over the longterm
and making sure that you stick with them even when life
inevitably gets in your way.
So in today's video,
we are gonna summarize those four rules,
I'm gonna give you my thoughts on each of them.
So let's get started with rule number one,
which is to make it obvious.
Any habit that you're trying to build,
shouldn't come with question marks on it.
Where am I gonna do it?
How do I do it?
When do I do it?
If you're asking these questions,
you're already getting off on the wrong foot.
One of my favorite quotes from this book
is actually one of my favorite quotes in general
which is that, "You do not rise to the level of your goals,
"You fall to the level of your systems."
And if your system hasn't defined a clear picture
of what a habit is supposed to be,
then you're not really gonna know what to do.
For instance, I will eat more vegetables is unclear.
How do you know on any given day
that you've actually completed that goal?
Is a single baby carrot enough?
Well, if you've set your system in an unclear way
or if you set the bare minimum so low,
then on many days you're gonna find yourself
falling to that bare minimum,
eating a baby carrot and saying, "Hey, I ate vegetables."
And that's the thing, on really busy days,
or days when you're feeling just really, really tired
or unmotivated,
you can bet that you are going to just fall
to the bare minimum requirement that your system has set.
And over time, this can lead to self sabotage
because while you are technically fulfilling
your requirements of the system,
the results you get through that habit,
through that practice are so infinitesimally small
that you don't see real progress over time.
You're basically just kind of stalled out.
But you can easily fix this by making the goal obvious
by setting some specific requirements
that give you a very clear bare minimum,
that's actually gonna get you results.
So going back to our vegetables goal,
instead of saying, "I will eat more vegetables,"
just again, very unclear,
maybe say something like,
"I will eat one full serving of vegetables
"every day at lunch, except for on Sundays
"and fries don't count."
I don't know who thinks fries are a vegetable
but hey, we gotta be specific here, right?
But you can see it's very clear minimum requirement
makes it a lot harder to cheat yourself in the long term.
And it also makes it a lot more obvious
what you're supposed to be doing on a day to day basis.
And if you wanna make this even more obvious,
then it's a good idea to have a written record
of your past accomplishments,
of your past compliance with the habit that you're set out.
In other words, track your habits.
We, human beings have a very fallible memory.
Sometimes it's hard to remember what we did yesterday
let alone two weeks ago.
So if you have an actual concrete record of what you've done
you'll often find it motivating and you'll find it more easy
to keep doing this in the future.
Now when it comes to tracking your habits,
there are a ton of different methods out there.
If you're a fan of pen and paper,
I did a video earlier this year
about something called the Martin System,
which my friend Martin created,
and a lot of people seem to like,
so I'll have a link in description for that video,
but there are also tons of habit tracking apps out there,
Habitica being my favorite one,
because it brings in lots of video game design elements
and video games designers
have had probably about 40 years this point
to study psychology and figure out
what motivates players to keep playing their games.
So you can take those insights,
put them into a habit tracking app,
And at least in my experience,
it makes it a lot more motivating to use.
Of course you could also just mark things off
on the calendar,
mark each day as you do the habit,
which Jerry Seinfeld is very famous
for having done with writing jokes,
and that's why this is often called the Seinfeld Effect.
But whatever you do, calendar, app, Martin System,
whatever it is,
simply tracking your habits
is going to make it more obvious every single day
what you're supposed to be doing,
because you have a record.
Now, this isn't always going to be enough.
Just making a habit obvious
isn't going to ensure that you're going to do it.
So let's talk about the second rule on Claire's list
which is to make it attractive.
The idea here is to pair the habit
that you're trying to build, which is often difficult,
requires self-discipline, requires motivation and willpower
with something that you already like to do.
And this can be especially important
in the early stages of this habits
where again, it's taking mostly willpower for you to do it
because it hasn't yet worn a well-worn neural pathway
that makes it an automatic behavior.
Or I guess in definition, a habit.
Giving an example,
my friend Martin wrote this script for this video,
and like me he doesn't necessarily like writing
especially when it's nonfiction productivity scripts.
But there are two settings in which he can make himself
get into the writing habit and get started
by tweaking his environment
to make it a little bit more enjoyable.
The first one is at home, he'll clean off his desk,
he'll make a fresh cup of tea, since he's a tea drinker,
and he'll light a candle.
So he's making his home environment a bit more attractive
as a writing space.
Alternatively, sometimes he actually goes out in his car
and we'll park somewhere in nature
where he can look at trees
and writes a script on his iPad.
Personally at a knock at the allure of riding in my car,
I think it'll would be very uncomfortable,
but hey, whatever works for him works for him,
and whatever works for you will work for you.
So try to tweak your environment
in a way that makes it more enjoyable
to get into this habit.
You could also create what I like to call Jedi Councils,
which is just my nerdy term for a mastermind group.
I don't really like the term mastermind group
'cause a lot of those fake gurus love to use it.
So I'm gonna go at Jedi Council,
but essentially,
a Jedi Council is just a group of like-minded people
who have similar levels of ambition,
who agreed to get on a call every week or every two weeks
and support each other.
I was on the same Jedi Council call
with the same four people for about four years.
And every couple of weeks we'd get on a call,
and we talk about what we had done
over the past couple of weeks.
Every week, somebody would be in the hot seat,
they would kind of do a deep dive
on the struggles they were having,
what they were trying to do in their business
or in their goals.
We'd all just sort of provide support
and encouragement and accountability.
At the end of that call, everyone would say,
"Here's what I'm going to do in the next two weeks,
"keep me accountable."
One thing I've noticed with friends,
is that often friends are too close to you,
they like it too much to really hold your feet to the fire
with a goal.
Maybe some friends will actually do it,
but a lot of friends will sort of forgive you
when you fall off the horse,
which is not always what you need.
Sometimes you need to somebody who's kind of at arms length,
who cares about you,
but they care about you in a way
in which they're going to really hold your feet to the fire
and ask you,
"Why did you not do what you said you were gonna do?"
You know, they're not gonna take it can excuses from you.
So it can be very, very helpful to form a group like this.
The accountability these people provide you
might not always be enough to help you hurdle
the difficulties involved
in sticking with your habit longterm,
which is why sometimes you need to look for a way
to reduce that difficulty.
In other words, make it easy.
The main thing we're looking to do here
is to remove as much friction as possible
from whatever positive habit that you're trying to build.
So for an example, let's talk about guitar for a second.
It took me all of two seconds to go and grab this guitar
off the stand over there.
Now, when I bought this guitar,
when I bought my first guitar in Colorado,
they always tell me the same thing.
You live in Colorado, which is a very dry environment.
So you need to buy a case
and you need to keep the guitar in the case
as much as possible,
and you also need to buy this humidification device
which you have to fill with distilled water every two days,
Otherwise guitar is gonna crack over time
and become worthless.
And I understand what they're saying and they're not wrong,
but here's the thing,
I did that at first diligently when I bought my first guitar
here in Colorado,
and as a result, I almost never played it,
because it was locked in the case,
it would take me, you know, probably 20, 25 seconds
to go get the case, unlock it, take the stupid humidifier
out of the strings,
and then get myself ready to play.
So now I've said, "You know what?
"I don't care if my guitars crack over time,
"I will buy a new guitar 40 years down the line,
"when my old one has worn itself out."
Because in exchange,
by keeping my guitars out all over the house on stands,
just ready to play, ready to pick up
whenever I have a whim to play, I play much more often.
And as a result, I've seen my skill grows so much faster.
And the funny thing is,
I don't even have to make it obvious for this goal.
I don't have to say, I will practice guitar
and do these scale patterns every single day for 20 minutes.
It's just easy.
I love to play guitar.
It is something that takes work,
but because the guitar is right there
whether I'm upstairs, whether I'm down here in the studio,
whenever I have a spare moment,
I'll often pick it up,
and about half the time I pick it up,
I'll end up making something up
that I really like and wanna record.
So, make it easy.
Remove the friction involved in getting into whatever habit
that you want to do.
Another way to make a habit easy,
is to Start with baby steps,
or in other words, to set the bare minimum
at least at first, at a level that you know
you could accomplish every single day.
Even if something weird and unexpected comes up
and interrupts your day,
even if life gets in your way.
So for example,
and Martin put this in the script,
I think to annoy me,
but if you're trying to meditate,
which I don't like to do,
and you set your goal and immediately at 10 minutes per day,
you might find that your mind is not used
to 10 minutes of meditation.
My mind isn't even used for 30 seconds of meditation.
It's just not for me.
But if you're trying to get into a meditation habit,
it might be more useful to set a two minute goal to start.
Two minutes is something you can absolutely do,
every single day.
You probably meditate for two minutes
while waiting in line at the grocery store.
And if you can get your mind
used to the feeling of stillness for two minutes,
you'll be able to slowly work yourself up to three minutes,
five minutes, 10 minutes, half an hour,
whatever people who meditate like to do.
I also find this works for writing.
When I was writing my book
"10 Steps To Earning Awesome Grades."
I set my bare minimum goal at 500 words per day,
because I knew if I had to,
I could write 500 words sitting on the toilet.
They might not be very good,
but I could do it.
And in some days I find myself pushing past
that 500 word minimum goal.
Some days I would write 3000 words,
but I knew if I set my goal at 3000 words per day,
on a lot of days, I was going to fail.
So set a baby steps goal,
and don't worry about what your results are right now
if you're only sticking to the bare minimum,
as Claire writes in the book,
"You should be far more concerned
"with your current trajectory,
"the direction of which you're going extrapolated
"based on the points of data you already have,
"than with your current results."
In other words, ask yourself, "Where am I headed?"
with the steps that you've been making,
with the incremental bumps you've been making,
where are you gonna be in the future?
Well, if you like how the future looks,
then don't worry about where you are right now,
because where you are right now
represents your training ground.
It's kind of like this episode of "Dragon Ball"
I used to watch when I was a kid,
where Goku had to run around
with this giant a hundred pound turtle shell on his back
and he could run very, very slowly
and could barely jump,
but the moment he takes it off,
he could jump like a hundred feet in the air.
I thought that was real in fifth grade,
and I thought I'd be able to jump a hundred feet in the air,
If I put a turtle shell in my back,
or like carried weights around, that's fake.
But the idea is there, isn't?
So let's move onto the fourth rule in the book,
which is to make it satisfying.
So part of what makes building a habit so difficult
to something that the human brain
kind of hasn't wired itself to fully accept yet.
And that's the concept of delayed gratification.
This is when you forego a present reward,
a short term reward,
in order to get a future and hopefully better reward.
And this comes up a lot in modern day life,
because we love to make big plans.
Plans that right now might cost a lot of effort,
money and time,
but that potentially won't pay off
for a very, very long time.
And I say this happens more often now,
because in the modern day a lot of us
can reliably count on that future existing.
So we go to school,
or we start that scrappy business in our garage,
or we save up for that PS5,
but for most of human history,
we were hunter gatherers
who had to rely on what we can get right now.
And while PS5s are very hard to catch,
so as the saying goes, one PS5 in the hand,
is worth two PS5s in the book.
In other words,
if you don't know that your next meal is coming,
then you learn to prioritize what you can get right now
over future potential, maybe rewards.
Loss aversion becomes a very, very useful
survival mechanism,
when the potential consequence is starvation.
And we've never fully escaped this mindset.
This deep seeded brain wiring takes a long time to change.
Our external environment has changed relatively rapidly.
Seems like it's been thousands of years,
but in terms of brain wiring,
well, that's pretty done quick
and the brain just hasn't had time to catch up.
As Claire points out in the book,
"Because of how we are wired,
"most people will spend all day
"chasing quick hits of satisfaction."
And you can see how this might be a little bit productive
for building strong habits.
Since a lot of habits aren't immediately satisfying
and take a bit of discipline to get you
toward their eventual goal.
So what we need is some metaphorical way
of getting all three PS5s.
We need something that motivates you
to stick with the habit longterm,
but that gives you something satisfying in the moment.
In other words,
we wanna bundle some sort of short term reward
with the longterm rewards gained through the habit.
Now there are really bad ways to set this up,
for example, if you are a runner
and you're trying to go on a run every single day,
maybe giving yourself an unhealthy snack as a reward,
isn't the best idea.
For one, eating as little as three Oreos
could actually counteract the calories burned
in an eight minute mile,
and well, not everyone's gonna care about that.
That is something worth considering,
but number two,
you could actually end up building a bad habit
through rewarding yourself for sticking to a good one.
And that's just not really a good thing to be doing.
So instead, find a way to give yourself a short term reward
that is helpful in and of itself.
For example, if you go for that run,
maybe reward yourself by coming back
and listening to an audio book,
or spending the time when you're cooling down,
reading a fiction book.
That way you also get to reading time in,
but you're also rewarding yourself for going for that run.
Another potential short term reward here
might be just the simple and sweet dopamine release
of checking off a check box.
Personally, I love writing out my daily plan
on my whiteboard,
so I can check off those check boxes as I go.
And I briefly mentioned habit tracking systems earlier,
but another great benefit of marking down your progress
is simply having a record of your success
and deriving satisfaction from being able to look back
on that record.
In any case, finding these short term rewards
or being creative and coming up with your own,
can be especially valuable in the beginning,
because like I said in the last video,
the compounding effect of their skill building journey
really hasn't started to show its power yet.
In the beginning, your daily 1% improvements
still might not add up to all that much,
and you might be feeling a little bit discouraged
about your results.
So if you can pair that with a reward,
at least until the compounding effect
has really started to show,
you're gonna be able to stick it out
through that initial difficult period.
Additionally, it just feels good to see
a long unbroken streak of successes,
but if you do end up failing,
like I said in the last video,
and I feel compelled to reiterate here,
don't beat yourself up about it.
Avoid what Claire calls, the second mistake.
The secondary data point that causes a failure
to transform from an outlier, an anomaly
to something that indicates a trajectory towards failure.
If you can avoid making that second mistake,
if you can avoid starting that trajectory,
then a mistake is just that, it's a mistake.
It remains in the past,
and it doesn't really hurt you all that much.
So typically summarize this summary,
for whatever habit you're trying to build,
consider these four rules,
make it easy
make it obvious,
make it attractive
and make it satisfying.
Implement just one of these rules
into any habit you're building,
and I think you're gonna have a much easier time
sticking to it over the long term.
And if you think about these four rules
a little bit more broadly,
you can probably see that they actually apply
to more than just personal habit building.
And that they're used in a lot of the products and tools
that you use every single day.
For instance, if you're somebody who wants to get better
at math or science or computer science,
a tool like Brilliant, might be a lot more easy to use
on a day to day basis and to stick to,
because the people who build Brilliant
understand these habit building rules.
Which is why when you get into one of their courses,
instead of having a very long piece of text to read,
you're almost immediately thrown
into some sort of bite sized interactive problem
that gets you results right away.
And because you're getting active immediately,
and you're getting the satisfaction
of using the material to solve a problem,
like in the algorithms course,
where you learn to drag different blocks around
to make a correctly formatted algorithm,
you gain the satisfaction required to push through.
They're using that satisfaction principle right away.
They're using that attractive principle right away.
Of course, there are a lot of other reasons
to use Brilliant, besides these rules here.
For instance, they have more than 60 in depth courses
in their library, including a full math suite.
That starts from the basics of number theory,
and it goes all the way up to calculus and probability,
math for quantitative trading and finance,
along with science courses like gravitational physics,
and computer science courses
like their Python programming course
and the Algorithms course that I mentioned earlier.
And if you're one of the first 200 people
to go over to brilliant.org/ThomasFrank and sign up,
you're gonna get 20% off your annual
premium Brilliant subscription.
So check them out and as always,
thank you so much for watching.
Hopefully you found something helpful
and actionable in this video.
Again, I highly recommend reading this book in its entirety.
It is one of the better self development books
that I've read.
So, highly recommend this on link in description
down below.
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And beyond that,
if you don't wanna do any of this,
then I don't know,
go skateboard in an empty pool or something,
because as always, I'm not your dad.