The philosopher Aristotle once said
that we are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence then is not an act but a habit.
And this reality is reassuring
because it reminds us that achieving our goals
requires lots of little manageable steps over time
rather than one giant Herculean effort.
But it's also stressful
because it means committing to changing our behavior
on a day to day basis
for a long period of time.
And whether you're trying to increase your endurance
or learn to play an instrument,
to read more,
or even do something as simple
as take care of a plant everyday,
you probably know from experience
the process of adding new habits
into your day to day life
is a difficult one.
Now I wanted to know what exactly
makes this process so difficult for different people.
So a couple of days ago,
I asked over on my Instagram
what was the biggest thing that prevents you guys
from adding new positive habits
to your day to day life?
And I got some pretty interesting answers
including some funny ones like pizza,
and evil twin of Jorgen Von Strangle
that hits me with a whip
every time I'm trying to do something useful?
But a lot of the answers seem to be variations
on two key problems.
One, actually remembering to do the habit,
and the other one, which was by far the most common answer,
pure, unadulterated laziness.
So today, I wanna share a little hack
that I've been using for quite a while
which can help with both of these problems.
This is something that can help you
both remember to do those habits
and actually make them easier to do.
And it involves using if-then logic
to bind those habits to things that you already do
every single day.
If-then logic crops up everywhere
from math to computer programming,
to game design, and it's usually implemented
in what are called conditional statements.
So let me briefly explain exactly what these are
and how they work using one of my favorite games
Magic: The Gathering.
In Magic, you have to different types of abilities,
activated abilities and triggered abilities.
Activated abilities are ones
that require you to take action to use them.
So for example, take this card, Birds of Paradise.
This little symbol here is telling me
that I have to tap the card
in order to use the action printed on it.
By contrast, triggered abilities
are ones that automatically happen
when something else happens.
So in the case of a card like Man-o'-War,
the ability on the card
is going to be triggered automatically
when it enters the battlefield.
You don't have to do anything.
It's a conditional statement.
If it enters the battlefield,
then you bounce something back to your opponent's hand.
And then your opponent probably flips the table.
So let's move on from there
and look at how these conditional statements
might be used in a computer program,
say YouTube's recommendation algorithm.
Now, this is an incredibly complicated piece of software
and even YouTube's engineers
don't know exactly how it works.
It's kind of a black box
but one thing we know that it does do
is change up the recommendations you see on your homepage
based on your behavior.
So for example,
if you were to click the like button on this video,
then some code would automatically go into effect
to show you more videos like this one.
And likewise, if you were to click the dislike button,
you would see fewer videos like this.
- [Man] By the way,
that's an invitation to click the like button.
- So here's how all this relates to habit building.
What we wanna do is set the if part of the statement
as something you already do every single day.
Or hopefully multiple times a day.
And then set the then part of the statement
to the habit that you wanna start building.
In an ideal world,
this would mean that you would start
to do your new habits automatically
regardless of what they were.
Going to the gym more often,
actually remembering to oil your cybernetic augmentations,
just meditating every single day,
whatever it is.
There would be absolutely no conscious effort involved.
It would be like that triggered ability
on the Magic card.
But unfortunately, at least in this context,
we aren't automatons.
Our brains don't run on computer code.
And as a result, there's no 100% fool-proof way
to build this triggered ability into our minds.
The best that we can do is try to set things up
so that the habit that we're trying to build
is more like that triggered ability
like that Man-o'-War card
than that activated ability like the Birds of Paradise.
And this actually works out really well
'cause I freaking love jellyfish
and my friend had a parakeet in high school
and I hated that thing.
Anyway, the best way to accomplish this
is through environmental design.
You wanna start looking for ways
that you can set up your living space and your tools
so that the things you do every single day
both remind you to perform your habits
and make it easier to do so.
And with that, it is time for some examples.
I'm gonna start with the thing
that actually gave me the inspiration
for this whole conditional statements idea
in the first place.
Which was putting door frame pull-up bar
in my office doorway.
That way, every single time I walk into my office,
I do five pull-ups
and I get really good at pull-ups as a result.
And I gotta admit,
this is not an original idea.
My dad used to be in the military before I was born
and he once told me that to get into the mess hall
whether they actually ate lunch and dinner
and all those other meals of the day,
breakfast, second breakfast, elevenses, all those things.
You had to do five pull-ups
before you could actually go in there.
And as a result, all the cadets got really good
at doing pull-ups.
And doing pull-ups is something
that I personally wanna get really good at,
hence the door frame pull-up bar to my office.
I also applied this idea back in college
to the task of doing push-ups every single morning
and getting up early on a consistent basis.
And I did this by putting my alarm
underneath the coffee table in my room.
Not only did that require me to get down on my knees
and reach for the phone
to actually turn it off in the morning,
which was more moving around,
more action that would actually wake me up,
but at that point, I was now down on the ground
and I might as well do some push-ups
since I'm down there.
And this example is a great illustration
of how our brains are not like computers.
Because I could easily just get up
and not do the push-ups.
So it's really all about putting yourself in the position
to make doing the habit easier.
It's not about a foolproof method.
Now, so far all I've talked about
are habits that improve your physical well-being.
But what if you wanted to write more often?
What if you wanted to get into a journaling habit?
Or do NaNoWriMo?
Or write the next great Harry Potter fan fiction
that dethrones the current greatest one?
Which is clearly Maya Mortal.
Well, what if you went into your computer Startup settings
and set it to automatically open up
your favorite writing program
every time you turned your computer on?
And you could pair that up
with the application blocking properties
of an app like Freedom
which could lock down your browser and your games,
making writing the obvious choice
whenever you turn your computer on.
Now putting all of these ideas aside,
you could of course use a task manager
or a calendar app to create reminders to do your habits.
But this only solves the reminding half of the problem.
Changing your environment and your tools
to create these little if-then pairings,
to create these conditional statements
actually solves both halves of the problem.
It both reminds you to do the habit
and combats the laziness problem
that so many of you cited
by making it so much easier to do.
Now, there are lots of other methods out there
for building strong habits.
But for me, using conditional logic
was a creative solution
that helped me get even better at doing it.
And it's worth remembering that for any problem,
there is almost always a creative solution out there
that hasn't been found yet.
So instead of sticking to the established methods,
be they online lists or even videos like this one,
it's often better to analyze
the details of the problem yourself
and try to come up with a creative solution.
Doing this is a skill that can benefit you
both in your personal life with things like habit building,
but also in your career.
And if you're wondering
how you can start improving that skill,
one useful tool you should check out is brilliant.org.
At its core, Brilliant is a tool
that can help you learn math, science,
and computer science much more effectively
than with traditional methods.
But along the way,
it can also help you become a more creative
and capable problem solver as well.
All of Brilliant's courses prioritize active learning
and problem solving right from the get go.
So you'll find yourself immediately improving
your analytical and creative capabilities.
Whether you're learning calculus,
figuring out how gravitational physics works,
breaking down sorting algorithms in computer science,
or tackling any of the other courses in their library.
This also means that you won't find yourself bored.
Because unlike traditional lecture-style classes,
you'll be using what you learn right away.
I'm a huge fan of Brilliant's learning philosophy
which prioritizes active learning and curiosity
and allowing for failure.
So if you wanna start improving your problem-solving skills,
I definitely recommend you give them a try.
To start learning for free,
you can head on over to brilliant.org/thomasfrank
which you'll find in the description down below
and if you're among the first 83 people
to click that link and sign up,
you're also gonna get 20% off
your annual premium subscription.
I wanna give a big thanks to Brilliant
for sponsoring this video
and being a huge supporter of this channel in general
and as always guys,
thank you so much for watching this video.
If you enjoyed it,
clicking that like button is appreciated as always
as we talked about that conditional logic
will start to kick in
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