Pill here, the other day I was watching an interview with Jeff booth who is a very successful
tech startup entrepreneur and he brought up a very interesting idea that relates to behavior
change and building habits you see a couple of years ago Jeff attended a conference by one of
the world's leading behavior scientists here he learned about how companies are designing their
apps to be as addictive as possible and these scientists laid out a special framework that they
use to mold human behavior it's called the PICNUF framework the pick part of PICNUF are things that
you want to have more of in your app p stands for positive meaning that it must make you feel good
i stands for immediate meaning that this good feeling must come immediately and c stands
for certain meaning that this good feeling must always come it must be certain on the other hand
the enough part of PICNUF are things that you want to have less of N stands for negative meaning
that you should avoid what makes you feel bad U stands for uncertain meaning that you should avoid
uncertainty and F stands for future consequences meaning that you should avoid things that are not
immediate now how does this framework apply in real life well Jeff uses the example of smoking
why do people get hooked on smoking well when you smoke you get a dopamine hit that makes you
feel good so that's the p for positive this good feeling also happens immediately which is the eye
and finally you are sure that you will get this feeling every single time you smoke which is
the C for certain smoking uses the pick part of PICNUF perfectly which is why it's so addictive
now the problem is most people will try to quit smoking by using nuff they'll tell themselves okay
smoking is bad for me it's going to give me cancer and what they're doing here is they're focusing on
the negative side effects of the action there's the n for negative on top of that it's uncertain
whether or not you're even going to get cancer right there's tons of elderly smokers that never
get cancer just because they're lucky so that's the you for uncertain and finally the consequence
of smoking is in the future you're not going to get cancer immediately after you smoke it can
take years and even decades to develop so that's the f for future consequence when you use enough
to try to change your habits it almost never works the behavior scientists discovered that the key is
to focus on just the pick you need to replace the pick with a better pick which basically means you
need to replace your bad habit with a good habit that also fulfills the positive immediate and
certain requirements Jeff gives a good example of this in action with a story about his daughter so
he was trying to get his four-year-old daughter to practice the piano and no matter how hard he tried
he just couldn't get her to build the habit she would half-ass all her lessons and you could tell
that she didn't really enjoy it so after learning about the pikno framework jeff decided to sit down
and ask her to play something she pressed a couple of keys with a bunch of attitude and it sounded
terrible but jeff immediately said wow that was amazing can you show me more of what you've
learned he essentially gave her a compliment which feels good so that's the P in PIC on top
of that this happened immediately after she played her song so that's the eye and jeff continued to
sit with his daughter every day and continue to compliment her every time after she played
so after a while the reward she got for playing became certain she would get a compliment which
made her feel good so that's the c now after a couple of weeks Jeff could tell that his daughter
actually started to enjoy playing the piano her private teacher even said that she learned more in
the past few weeks during her lessons than she had for the entire past year and of course this became
a habit with ease over time that's what happens when you focus on the pick instead of enough
now how does this relate to your life well if you're someone who is trying to change your
habits you should focus on the pick aspect instead of going for the nuff which is what most of us
instinctively do let's say for example you've been trying to shake off your bad habit of jerking off
i feel like most of us approach this using nuff we think to ourselves okay i need to stop doing this
because it's making me weaker which is the end for negative and then we think to ourselves okay if
i'm able to stick to this for a long enough period of time i should be able to improve my social life
and focus at least i hope so right we're uncertain whether or not the benefits will actually come
so that's the you for uncertainty and finally all the benefits that do come come in the distant
future right you usually don't see the benefits for at least a couple of days or even weeks
so that's the f for future consequence instead what you want to do is focus on
the pick for example every time you overcome an urge you could talk to a friend you could tell
them that you just overcame an urge to which they'll probably say good job so that's the p
this good job also comes immediately after telling them that's the i and it's also certain assuming
that they're a good friend that's the seat now i'm not saying that this is going to work for all of
you it's just something that fits in the pick framework so i think has a much higher chance
of working as compared to feeling guilty and trying to logically convince yourself to abstain
from jerking off what you should do in general is ask yourself how can i think about behavior change
through the lens of PIC instead of NUF doing so will allow you to come up with many strategies
that you can experiment with and finally let me leave you with one last example of pick that i've
observed a couple of weeks ago so there's this video that keeps getting recommended to me on
youtube by a guy called james scholes this video is basically about how he was able to study for
12 hours every single day for months now of course this really intrigued me because i've never heard
of anyone being able to do that consistently but if you think about it through the PICNUF framework
it kind of makes sense every time he studies he live streams it this is a positive experience
because people are studying with him posting positive comments this is also an instant and
certain reward because the moment he turns on the stream he gets a couple of viewers that can cheer
him on now i'm not saying that this is the only reason he was able to pull this off he clearly
has a very strong internal desire to succeed and having a strong y like this is extremely important
all i'm saying is that his current live stream setup made it even easier for him to build this
habit because it uses PIC most people who want to study approach it with enough if i don't study
i'll be a failure and my parents will yell at me that's the end even if i study i'm not sure if
i'll do well i'm not sure if i'll be able to succeed that's the you and the benefits from
studying won't come to fruition until the day of the test which is usually days away that's the f
focus on the PIC and not enough so that you can make certain good habits as addictive as possible
just like those apps that these behavior scientists have got us all hooked on this
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on the bus i listened to the cancer code by Dr.Jason Fung which goes over a new way of
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you to check it out if you plan on living a long and healthy life besides that guys stay tuned