We used to think of willpower as this thing that like,
you either had it or you didn't, and if you had it, you could use it to change your life,
and that's not right at all, willpower that we now know is like a muscle,
the more you use it, the more tired it gets.
Well, so for a long time, that was exactly the advice that people would give,
“change your life”, because we don't want you to get exposed
to any of your old cues that used to cause you, and what would happen is that people
could do that for like a week or two and then it would just all fall apart,
and it's essentially because you're using so much willpower.
We used to think of willpower as this thing that, like,
you either had it or you didn't and if you had it, you could use it to change your life,
and that's not right at all, willpower that we now know is like a muscle,
the more you use it, the more tired it gets, which is why if you spend your
whole day like replying to emails and doing like little boring tasks at work,
when you get home, it's impossible to make yourself go run.
But so the interesting thing about willpower as a muscle
and it gets to losing weight is, a you can strengthen it through practice,
and b, you can sidestep willpower. If you make something into a habit,
if it's an automatic reaction, it doesn't tax your willpower
quite as much, doesn't make that muscle, it doesn't need as much muscle behind it.
For weight loss this is a great example because one of the things that they did and this was
almost by accident they figured this out. They asked, the psychologist asked a whole
bunch of people who are trying
to lose weight to start writing down just once a week what they were eating.
And they were doing this actually just because they wanted,
like snapshots of these people's lives, but the people who are doing it, some of them,
they started writing down everything that they were eating right,
food, journaling, and then they started doing this kind of crazy thing
where they would look at the yesterdays page and they would find these
patterns and come up and, like, write little plans for what to do the next day
where they would write what they were going to eat that night,
so that when they got home and they were tired and they were exhausted,
rather than just ordering takeout, they would just look at their
journal and make a decision that they had made earlier in the day.
And what they found out, what the psychologists found out was that
food journaling is what's known as a keystone habit.
So some habits have more power than others in lives and also within companies,
they seem to unlock all these other changes and set off a chain reaction.
Food journaling is one of them, for some reason, if people start writing down everything
that they're eating, they seem to learn
their own patterns much faster and be able to be able to sidestep tax in their willpower muscle
by making a decision in the morning and kind of programming that
they need to do it that night. The more you habitualize in your life,
the more you have willpower left over for some other task,
because you can only basically, like, use willpower for like
three to four things a day after that, it just taps out.
So people who seem really, really accomplished, and there's a woman named Angela Duckworth,
who's written about this a lot at the University Pennsylvania,
and she wrote this about grit. Is that the people who seem super accomplished,
it's not because they have that much more willpower than everyone else,
it's because they've habitualized a huge amount of their day.
She did this big study on West Point and when she found out is that
the people who succeed at West Point are the people who seem to have this habit,
a gritty habit of finding a community and talking to them
and basically have this social support. That doesn't seem obvious that at West Point,
the people who find some friends they meet with every single morning would succeed,
but grit has to become a habit because otherwise there's just not enough willpower
in the day to get it done. But there is these two special times
that the that the prefrontal cortex is active, the first is during the start of a habit, the cue.
Because it basically looks for something to tell it,
“which habit should I apply right now?” And then at the end, the reward,
because your brain sort of shakes itself awake again and says,
“ok, so I just went through this routine, what did I get out of it?”
And that's why if you influenced the cue and the reward,
if you're going to play with these, you have such power is because
that's the opportunity to change how you're literally thinking about a pattern.
And like take Michael Phelps, Michael Phelps trains seven days a week,
everything that Michael Phelps does is habitual.
In fact, if you talk to his coach, which I did for one of the chapters,
all he talks about is, “if we get the right habits down, Michael Phelps will win”.
So Michael Phelps, most people train six days a week,
Michael Phelps decided to train seven days a week because he wanted to be one seventh
in better shape. So some people can
get to that place where they are hard core. Now, if you talk to Michael Phelps about this,
he cheats in other ways, right? Like his rule is,
after a certain time of day, he's allowed to eat whatever he wants.
And so I think for Tim Ferris's diet, like having one cheat day,
there's got to be some outlet, it's got to be some reward,
yeah the cravings build up, you have to accommodate them.
And the question is, are you going to choose how to accommodate them
or are you just going to let the pressure build until they overwhelm you?
That's why small wins are so powerful, is because it provides us little pieces
of evidence that we're on the right path, it's also like little experiments
that sometimes leads to serendipity. I tried that, it only took a
couple of minutes and it worked, and it turns out there's a great path that way,
but there's other things you have to do for this belief.
Number one, it's most easy to achieve this belief, as we discussed
if you're in a group, you need social support, someone to carry you through
those moments when you when you don't really necessarily
believe that you can do it. But number two, you have to
provide yourself genuine rewards along the way. So the food journals are really interesting
because when they would look at these food journals,
the people who would use them to create new eating habits,
what they would found was that people would have one or two or three days of great eating,
they would write down what they're going to eat, the habit had changed and then on the fourth day,
like everything would fall apart, it would be like a tough day
and that person would eat like ice cream when they got home,
and they would write it down in their food journal.
And what they found was the people who allowed themselves
to have some kind of reward, allowed themselves to lapse,
those people stuck with their diets the longest, and in fact, the habit became more automatic,
because it gets back to the habit loop that you need this reward
somewhere in this habit to cue, the routine, the reward,
sometimes the reward is, “I've had three great days,
I'm going to let myself have a bad day now”.
That's why keystone habits seem to be so powerful is because
it gives us a method for strengthening our sense of willpower
and for strengthening our sense of self, but the third thing is
keystone habits are things that offer opportunities for small wins.
There's this really interesting body of work called, “The Science of Small Wins”,
by Tom Peters and Karl Weick, and what they talk about is,
you need to find things that offer you these small little rewards
during your day or in the week of an organization.
Those become the stepping stones for these massive changes,
which is also why, like food journaling, yeah, you know, you can say, like,
“I had three good days, I don't have to change my entire life
because I'm going to change over the next six months”,
and that's going to last forever. We’re powerless to not have habits in our lives,
but the difference between us and Pavlov's dogs is,
when he started ringing that bell and the dog would start slobbering
it couldn't change that, but for us, particularly with what
we've learned in the last decade, we can mediate the process,
through decision making, we can intermediate whether we respond
habitually and what have it unfolds by choosing our cues and rewards.
There's literally no habit that can't be changed at any time in a person's life.
You just have to understand how it works, and that doesn't mean it's simple or easy,
but it's definitely simpler and easier once you know where to start.