Let's say you walk outside on like Tuesday night,
and you see that your neighbour is mowing their grass or cutting their lawn,
and you're like, "oh, I need to mow the grass too!"
Well, you might stick to that habit for 20 or 30 or 40 years,
however long you live in that house,
you wish you had that level of consistency with some of your other habits.
And why do you do it? Partially, you do it because it feels good to have a clean lawn,
but mostly it feels good to have a clean lawn
because you don't want to be judged by the other people in the neighbourhood
for being the sloppy one.
People who exhibit high willpower
who appear on the surface to have great a great deal of willpower,
the primary thing that is different
between them and people who appear to have low levels of willpower
is that they are in environments where they are tempted less.
So their environment is primed for them to be high willpower.
And I think that alone should inform a lot of your strategy.
Again, how do we stack the deck in your favour?
How do you design an environment
where you don't need to be a superhero just to get something done?
If you're constantly putting yourself in a tough position,
where you're fighting against the friction of the environment you're in,
it's almost like a form of gravity, it sort of pulls you toward it.
So far, we've mostly talked about physical environment,
but the social environment is also crucial.
And I think this is, if I could pick one topic
that I think is even more important than I realised when I wrote the book,
I would probably say it's this. We are all part of multiple tribes.
Some of those tribes are large,
like what it means to be American or what it means to be French.
And some of those tribes are smaller,
like what it means to be a neighbour on your streets,
or a member of the local CrossFit gym,
or a volunteer at the elementary school, or whatever.
But all of those tribes, all those groups that you belong to,
they have a set of shared expectations,
a set of social norms for how you act in that group and the type of habits that you perform.
And like if we take the neighbour on your street example...
Let's say you walk outside on like Tuesday night,
and you see that your neighbour is mowing their grass or cutting their lawn,
and you're like, "oh, I need to mow the grass too!"
Well, you might stick to that habit for 20 or 30 or 40 years,
however long you live in that house,
you wish you had that level of consistency with some of your other habits.
And why do you do it? Partially, you do it because it feels good to have a clean lawn,
but mostly it feels good to have a clean lawn
because you don't want to be judged by the other people in the neighbourhood
for being the sloppy one.
And so it's actually the social expectation of that group,
of that tribe of neighbours on your street,
that it's kind of underlying that habit and the consistency that you have.
And so, the expectations of the group often influence
in a very strong way which habits we find attractive and which ones we find unattractive
and which ones we stick to consistently and which ones we don't.
And I think the practical takeaway here, the punch line is:
you want to join groups where your desired behaviour is the normal behaviour.
Because if you're surrounded by people who are doing that thing on a normal basis,
it's a part of that, that tribe's culture or expectation,
it suddenly becomes much easier for you to stick to that too.
You hear stories about this from entrepreneurs all the time, I have one as well,
which is when I started out as an entrepreneur,
I had nobody around me that was doing that.
I don't have any entrepreneurs in my family,
I didn't have this network of people who had started businesses to tap into.
And so for the first six months, I just sent tons of emails to different people
who were doing what I already wanted to do. I probably sent about 300 emails or so.
Most people didn't get back to me, but maybe 30 or so did.
And I set up calls with them and chatted on Skype.
And then about a month later, I met five or six of them in a conference.
And so now I had a group of people
that were already doing the thing I wanted to do that I actually knew.
That I could go to with questions, that I could look at
and they were doing these things, it wasn't weird for me to do it anymore.
It wasn't weird for me to try to do this business stuff,
because now I had people around me, I had a tribe
where the desired behaviour was the normal behaviour.
And that made a huge difference.