- Thanks to Brilliant for sponsoring this video
and supporting my channel.
Every year, millions of people try to build new habits.
Some adopt new exercise programs,
others pick up that instrument
they've been meaning to learn,
and still others decide to finally get serious
about reading every day.
And some of these people will succeed
in getting their new habit to stick,
while others well quickly give up and fail.
But all of them will learn the same lesson,
building a new habit is hard.
Whether you wanna chuck it up to laziness,
or our overly busy schedules, or the fact that our phones
tend to suck up a ton of our time,
tempting us in much the same way
that a slot machine temps a gambler,
the conclusion is the same.
If you wanna adopt a new habit,
you better prepare yourself for an uphill battle.
Luckily, one of the things that you can always count on
in our market-driven economy is that when there's a problem,
people will inevitably try to create solutions for it.
Necessity is the mother of all invention
as people like to say.
And our publishing industry is no exception here.
Having pumped out more than a handful of books
aimed at helping you build better habits.
But of all these books,
my absolute favorite one is James Clear's, Atomic Habits.
And that's not just because it mentions
my Twitter wake-up system on page 210 that is pretty cool,
but seriously, more than any other book
that I've read on habits,
I found the ideas in Atomic Habits to be incredibly helpful
for adopting the mindset required
to actually stick to habits over the longterm.
So I would absolutely recommend reading this book
in its entirety if you have the time.
Today, what I wanna do is share three of those key ideas,
starting with the principle
that Clear calls 1% better every day.
This idea has its roots in the compounding effect,
which you'll probably recognize most readily
if we're talking about compound interest.
Albert Einstein once called compound interest
the eighth wonder of the world,
and for a pretty good reason,
given a good amount of time,
the interest on your interest can result in huge returns.
Compound interest is why you can invest $100 a month,
and if we assume a modest 7% return of the stock market,
you'll end up with over $122,000 after 30 years,
even though during that time,
you only contributed $36,000 of your money into that fund.
And it turns out that this compounding effect
also applies to the world
of skill building and habit formation.
If you pick a skill
and you focus on just getting 1% better at it each day,
your cumulative skill growth
and the rewards you read from it
accelerate faster and faster over time.
Atomic Habits illustrates this idea
using a metaphorical graph,
which shows the difference between small daily actions
in both positive and negative directions.
At first, the results are minuscule,
but over time, they ramp up
just like that investment balance.
Now, this all sounds great in theory, but unfortunately,
as you probably well know, the level of consistency required
to maintain this growth over time
is really difficult to maintain, especially in the beginning
when you're just starting to build a habit.
Big dramatic changes, as overwhelming and as unsustainable
as you and I know they could be, are exciting
because they seem to propel us forward really quickly.
And our mammalian brains
really love short-term exciting rewards.
And meanwhile, the much more reasonable 1% role
simply doesn't do a whole lot for us in the short term,
which is what we're often concerned with,
even if we don't like to be.
For example, let's say you wanna learn how to produce music.
And you decide to do that by spending at least some time
every single day learning and practicing and making songs.
If you start this new goal on January 1st,
then by the end of the first month using Clear's model,
your daily 1% gains only result in a 37% gain overall.
And that's progress to be sure, but it's nothing dramatic,
and you're still producing music
that was only barely outside of your grasp before,
and that to the average listener,
it sounds like it was made on like a preschool piano thing
from Walmart.
After six months of effort,
you're now doing a bit more than six times better
than when you started
when you have those numbers seem to line up.
Now, this is actually pretty good progress,
but we are not done yet
because of the company pounding effect
has only just begun to show how powerful it can be.
Keep pushing on and suddenly,
a 1% improvement every day since you started,
gets interesting because at the end of the year,
you've somehow reached a mind bending 37 times better
than when you started.
The first six months gets you to six times better,
but the second six months adds an extra 31 times.
Now, obviously we cannot literally measure out
1% skill changes in most cases,
but the concept still works here and the results still come.
As Clear writes in the book,
"These small improvements or declines compound
and suddenly you find a very big gap
between the people who make slightly better decisions
on a daily basis and those who don't."
Of course, this is all easy to agree with in theory,
but as we mentioned before,
longterm consistency is a lot easier planned
than maintained.
As you well know,
most new year's resolutions don't even make it to February,
so they can't even go through the example
that we put out here.
Just as many people fail to remain disciplined enough
to keep investing for 30 years,
and hence will never see those amazing returns.
Now, part of this might be straight up difficulty,
or life circumstances, or simply boredom,
but even an incredibly simple, easy habit
can be difficult to stick to longterm
if it goes too far against how we view ourselves.
So if we wanna make longterm change,
that change has to become part of who we are.
We'll have to build up sense
of what I'm going to call identity habit harmony.
Picture yourself out for a run,
and imagine that it's really hot outside,
or maybe it's really cold,
or maybe it's a torrential downpour,
whichever of those is the one that you like the least.
And now picture you're only halfway
through a particularly difficult last mile,
and you're now feeling the desperate urge to quit.
In that moment ask yourself, who are you?
Well, if you consider yourself to be a runner,
then this scenario is not a big deal.
The occasional hard mile is part of the territory.
In fact, it only reinforces your strength
and your pride as a runner, as an athlete,
so as a result, you push through.
But on the other hand,
if you see yourself not as an athlete or a runner,
but as more of a homebody
just trying to get in shape because you're supposed to
or because you have this light desire to do it,
then you're gonna start questioning
why you're doing what you're doing
when things get difficult.
You're gonna ask, "Why am I doing this to myself?
This isn't who I am."
And one day, you're gonna decide to quit.
I think this is one of the biggest reasons
why people fail in building habits,
they don't build a harmony between their identity
and the habit they're trying to make stick longterm.
That's one of the biggest ideas in this book.
See, people will go to great lengths
to protect their self image.
It's part of this consistency principle,
which is also talked about
in Robert Cialdini's book, "Influence."
Just try arguing with somebody
about a dearly held belief they have,
and you're gonna find just how hard we all work
to keep our self image intact,
even if it's to our own detriment,
even if we argue against what would be good for us.
And it's because of this,
that Clear suggests we pay closer attention
to what that image is
when we're trying to change something about our lives.
As he says in the book,
"Your behaviors are usually a reflection of your identity.
Whatever you do is an indication
of the type of person you believe that you are,
either consciously or non-consciously."
But there's also a bit of a feedback loop here.
As he says just a bit later on,
"Whatever your identity is right now,
you only believe it because you have proof of it."
In short, longterm habit changes
come more easily with longterm identity changes.
And to get those,
you'll have to give yourself as much evidence as you can
that your new identity is really who you're becoming.
So if you wanna run that 5k someday,
take a second to think about the kind of person
who might do that sort of thing automatically, or naturally,
that person would be a runner or an athlete.
Then whenever an opportunity to reinforce that identity
in yourself comes up, ask yourself,
"What would a runner do in this situation?"
Eventually by acting like a runner, you become one.
And if that identity makes you feel good,
then you won't wanna lose it,
and you'll work that much harder to keep it.
The longer you fight for it, true that identity becomes,
and the harder it is to go back to who you were before.
And I've personally found this whole philosophy
and mindset change to be extremely helpful
for taking side projects more seriously as well.
Let's take guitar, for example.
If I don't think of myself as a musician,
then whenever I get busy with work,
or if I have something stressful pop up
surprisingly in my life,
then I'm gonna tend to let guitar practice
go by the wayside because it's just a hobby, right?
So it's important it gets overshadowed
by whatever urgent thing has come up in my life.
But if being a musician is part of my identity,
then I'm gonna see guitar practice
as something much more important.
I'll be a lot less likely to throw it by the wayside
when something does come up.
In other words, I won't make time for it
because that is what a musician would do.
Of course, this process of assuming a new identity
and taking it seriously isn't always easy.
When you start a new habit,
you often have that novelty factor,
that initial surge of motivation and energy working for you,
but those two things inevitably run out pretty quickly.
And when that happens,
you're probably gonna have to deal with your first failure
some point soon after.
And it can be hard to get over that when it happens,
especially if you tend to have perfectionist tendencies
like I do.
And dealing with just this situation
is where the third big idea from Atomic Habits comes in.
So let's call it the democracy of the self.
See, in an election,
there are almost always going to be votes for both sides.
Given enough people in the voting pool,
it's not plausible for anything, no matter how right,
no matter how obviously superior, to get 100% of the vote,
there is always going to be that troll
that just wants to see the world burn
so they hit the down-vote button.
But luckily, that doesn't matter.
To win an election, you don't need every single vote
to be cast in the exact same way, you just need a majority.
And as Clear helpfully points out,
"Every action you take is a vote
for the type of person you wish to become.
No single instance will transform your beliefs,
but as the votes build up,
so too does the evidence of your new identity."
So maybe today you voted for lazy you,
you didn't go for that run, you didn't practice guitar.
Well, that's okay because tomorrow, you get another vote,
and you can make sure that vote is cast correctly.
If you keep at that,
making sure your successes outnumber your setbacks,
that is how longterm habits are built.
In other words, focus not on never failing,
but on never letting failure become a habit of its own.
Clear actually has a term for this,
he calls it the second mistake.
You wanna avoid making the second mistake.
And if you can do that,
then your first mistake just remains a failing vote,
it remains an outlier.
Now, there's a bit of a hidden insight that I found
in the interplay between identity habit harmony,
and this whole democracy of the self-concept,
which is that if you haven't cast enough votes
for a particular identity,
then you may not know if it's possible
to assume that identity in the first place.
And a lot of people assume that many identities
are simply not for them.
How many people do you know
who think that learning a foreign language is not them,
becoming a musician is not for them,
learning complex math or engineering
is simply not for them.
I remember this was a big problem for me in high school,
especially on that issue
of learning engineering and complex math.
I had a tough time in calculus,
so I naturally assumed I was not cut out for calculus
and not cut out for engineering school.
This is actually one of the big reasons
that I chose to go to business school.
And while I don't really regret
going to business school in general,
I do regret having that belief at first.
And I now know that if I had simply cast enough votes,
if I had simply put in daily effort to learn complex math,
to get a better grade in calculus,
I would have absolutely been able to become an engineer
if I wanted to do that.
So if you ever have these doubts in your head,
if you ever feel like an identity is not for you,
ask yourself, "How many votes have I cast?
Have I started building this habit
or if I simply assumed that this identity is not for me?"
And if the latter is true, then start casting some votes.
Of course, if something like engineering and complex math
is something that you want to learn,
then using better learning resources
is also really gonna help you make progress.
And one of those great learning resources is Brilliant.
Brilliant has over 60 in-depth courses
that can help you master your abilities
in math, science, and computer science.
And they help you learn efficiently
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Instead of just passively going through text
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you're instead thrown into logically sequenced,
bite-sized, yet challenging, interactive problems
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you're using.
And because you're wrangling with the material right away,
you learn more efficiently,
you progress faster, and you also keep your interest up
as you're going through it.
Additionally, because you're solving problems
the entire time,
your universal problem-solving skills improve along the way.
Whenever we apply our skills to a specific challenge,
we often reap more universal benefits.
Now, if you've heard me talk about Brilliant in the past,
you'll know they have a comprehensive math suite,
ranging from the basics of number theory,
going all the way up to very complex topics
like differential equations
and high-level probability and statistics,
along with science courses,
including classical mechanics and gravitational physics
and computer science courses
like their Python programming course.
But recently, they came up with a brand new course,
all about knowledge and uncertainty,
which is all about the math that we use to quantify
and get precise about how uncertain we are
about questions we have,
which is very important in making better decisions.
And I think if you have any interest in math
or probability or statistics,
or maybe investing or simply making better decisions,
this is gonna be a really interesting course to take.
So if you want to take that course
or any of the other courses in their library,
you can go over to brilliant.org/thomasfrank and sign up.
And if you're one of the first 200 people
to use that URL and sign up,
you're gonna get 20% off their annual premium subscription,
which is a pretty great deal.
Thanks as always for watching.
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make sure you hit that subscribe button right there
because later this month,
we are making another video
all about the actual habit-building process
outlined in Atomic Habits.
Again, pick this book up and read it if you have the chance.
It's a great read,
but I hope you also come back to check out that video,
which will be a little bit more in the trenches
and practical, hopefully.
Beyond that,
if you haven't followed me on Instagram @Tomfrankly,
you might wanna do so
as I'm making little Q&A videos every week.
So if you have a question
that might not constitute a huge video here on this channel,
which takes many, many, many hours to make,
ask it to me in the comments below or over on Instagram,
and I might make a little IGTV video for it.
Beyond that, I'm gonna have a playlist right here
of additional videos on this
that can help you build your self discipline.
So if you enjoyed this video,
you might enjoy some of those videos as well.
Otherwise, I'll put my music channel right there.
And if you don't wanna to click any of these things,
don't do that, go drink a gallon of coffee for all I care
because as always, I'm not your dad.