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THE 1ST LAW
Make It Obvious
4
The Man Who Didn’t Look Right
THE PSYCHOLOGIST GARY Klein once told me a story about a woman who
attended a family gathering. She had spent years working as a
paramedic and, upon arriving at the event, took one look at her father-
in-law and got very concerned.
“I don’t like the way you look,” she said.
Her father-in-law, who was feeling perfectly fine, jokingly replied,
“Well, I don’t like your looks, either.”
“No,” she insisted. “You need to go to the hospital now.”
A few hours later, the man was undergoing lifesaving surgery after
an examination had revealed that he had a blockage to a major artery
and was at immediate risk of a heart attack. Without his daughter-in-
law’s intuition, he could have died.
What did the paramedic see? How did she predict his impending
heart attack?
When major arteries are obstructed, the body focuses on sending
blood to critical organs and away from peripheral locations near the
surface of the skin. The result is a change in the pattern of distribution
of blood in the face. After many years of working with people with
heart failure, the woman had unknowingly developed the ability to
recognize this pattern on sight. She couldn’t explain what it was that
she noticed in her father-in-law’s face, but she knew something was
wrong.
Similar stories exist in other fields. For example, military analysts
can identify which blip on a radar screen is an enemy missile and
which one is a plane from their own fleet even though they are
traveling at the same speed, flying at the same altitude, and look
identical on radar in nearly every respect. During the Gulf War,
Lieutenant Commander Michael Riley saved an entire battleship when
he ordered a missile shot down—despite the fact that it looked exactly
like the battleship’s own planes on radar. He made the right call, but
even his superior officers couldn’t explain how he did it.
Museum curators have been known to discern the difference
between an authentic piece of art and an expertly produced counterfeit
even though they can’t tell you precisely which details tipped them off.
Experienced radiologists can look at a brain scan and predict the area
where a stroke will develop before any obvious signs are visible to the
untrained eye. I’ve even heard of hairdressers noticing whether a client
is pregnant based only on the feel of her hair.
The human brain is a prediction machine. It is continuously taking
in your surroundings and analyzing the information it comes across.
Whenever you experience something repeatedly—like a paramedic
seeing the face of a heart attack patient or a military analyst seeing a
missile on a radar screen—your brain begins noticing what is
important, sorting through the details and highlighting the relevant
cues, and cataloging that information for future use.
With enough practice, you can pick up on the cues that predict
certain outcomes without consciously thinking about it. Automatically,
your brain encodes the lessons learned through experience. We can’t
always explain what it is we are learning, but learning is happening all
along the way, and your ability to notice the relevant cues in a given
situation is the foundation for every habit you have.
We underestimate how much our brains and bodies can do without
thinking. You do not tell your hair to grow, your heart to pump, your
lungs to breathe, or your stomach to digest. And yet your body handles
all this and more on autopilot. You are much more than your conscious
self.
Consider hunger. How do you know when you’re hungry? You don’t
necessarily have to see a cookie on the counter to realize that it is time
to eat. Appetite and hunger are governed nonconsciously. Your body
has a variety of feedback loops that gradually alert you when it is time
to eat again and that track what is going on around you and within you.
Cravings can arise thanks to hormones and chemicals circulating
through your body. Suddenly, you’re hungry even though you’re not
quite sure what tipped you off.
This is one of the most surprising insights about our habits: you
don’t need to be aware of the cue for a habit to begin. You can notice an
opportunity and take action without dedicating conscious attention to
it. This is what makes habits useful.
It’s also what makes them dangerous. As habits form, your actions
come under the direction of your automatic and nonconscious mind.
You fall into old patterns before you realize what’s happening. Unless
someone points it out, you may not notice that you cover your mouth
with your hand whenever you laugh, that you apologize before asking a
question, or that you have a habit of finishing other people’s sentences.
And the more you repeat these patterns, the less likely you become to
question what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.
I once heard of a retail clerk who was instructed to cut up empty gift
cards after customers had used up the balance on the card. One day,
the clerk cashed out a few customers in a row who purchased with gift
cards. When the next person walked up, the clerk swiped the
customer’s actual credit card, picked up the scissors, and then cut it in
half—entirely on autopilot—before looking up at the stunned customer
and realizing what had just happened.
Another woman I came across in my research was a former
preschool teacher who had switched to a corporate job. Even though
she was now working with adults, her old habits would kick in and she
kept asking coworkers if they had washed their hands after going to the
bathroom. I also found the story of a man who had spent years
working as a lifeguard and would occasionally yell “Walk!” whenever
he saw a child running.
Over time, the cues that spark our habits become so common that
they are essentially invisible: the treats on the kitchen counter, the
remote control next to the couch, the phone in our pocket. Our
responses to these cues are so deeply encoded that it may feel like the
urge to act comes from nowhere. For this reason, we must begin the
process of behavior change with awareness.
Before we can effectively build new habits, we need to get a handle
on our current ones. This can be more challenging than it sounds
because once a habit is firmly rooted in your life, it is mostly
nonconscious and automatic. If a habit remains mindless, you can’t
expect to improve it. As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you
make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will
call it fate.”
THE HABITS SCORECARD
The Japanese railway system is regarded as one of the best in the
world. If you ever find yourself riding a train in Tokyo, you’ll notice
that the conductors have a peculiar habit.
As each operator runs the train, they proceed through a ritual of
pointing at different objects and calling out commands. When the train
approaches a signal, the operator will point at it and say, “Signal is
green.” As the train pulls into and out of each station, the operator will
point at the speedometer and call out the exact speed. When it’s time
to leave, the operator will point at the timetable and state the time. Out
on the platform, other employees are performing similar actions.
Before each train departs, staff members will point along the edge of
the platform and declare, “All clear!” Every detail is identified, pointed
at, and named aloud.*
This process, known as Pointing-and-Calling, is a safety system
designed to reduce mistakes. It seems silly, but it works incredibly
well. Pointing-and-Calling reduces errors by up to 85 percent and cuts
accidents by 30 percent. The MTA subway system in New York City
adopted a modified version that is “point-only,” and “within two years
of implementation, incidents of incorrectly berthed subways fell 57
percent.”
Pointing-and-Calling is so effective because it raises the level of
awareness from a nonconscious habit to a more conscious level.
Because the train operators must use their eyes, hands, mouth, and
ears, they are more likely to notice problems before something goes
wrong.
My wife does something similar. Whenever we are preparing to
walk out the door for a trip, she verbally calls out the most essential
items in her packing list. “I’ve got my keys. I’ve got my wallet. I’ve got
my glasses. I’ve got my husband.”
The more automatic a behavior becomes, the less likely we are to
consciously think about it. And when we’ve done something a
thousand times before, we begin to overlook things. We assume that
the next time will be just like the last. We’re so used to doing what
we’ve always done that we don’t stop to question whether it’s the right
thing to do at all. Many of our failures in performance are largely
attributable to a lack of self-awareness.
One of our greatest challenges in changing habits is maintaining
awareness of what we are actually doing. This helps explain why the
consequences of bad habits can sneak up on us. We need a “point-and-
call” system for our personal lives. That’s the origin of the Habits
Scorecard, which is a simple exercise you can use to become more
aware of your behavior. To create your own, make a list of your daily
habits.
Here’s a sample of where your list might start:
Wake up
Turn off alarm
Check my phone
Go to the bathroom
Weigh myself
Take a shower
Brush my teeth
Floss my teeth
Put on deodorant
Hang up towel to dry
Get dressed
Make a cup of tea
. . . and so on.
Once you have a full list, look at each behavior, and ask yourself, “Is
this a good habit, a bad habit, or a neutral habit?” If it is a good habit,
write “+” next to it. If it is a bad habit, write “–”. If it is a neutral habit,
write “=”.
For example, the list above might look like this:
Wake up =
Turn off alarm =
Check my phone –
Go to the bathroom =
Weigh myself +
Take a shower +
Brush my teeth +
Floss my teeth +
Put on deodorant +
Hang up towel to dry =
Get dressed =
Make a cup of tea +
The marks you give to a particular habit will depend on your
situation and your goals. For someone who is trying to lose weight,
eating a bagel with peanut butter every morning might be a bad habit.
For someone who is trying to bulk up and add muscle, the same
behavior might be a good habit. It all depends on what you’re working
toward.*
Scoring your habits can be a bit more complex for another reason as
well. The labels “good habit” and “bad habit” are slightly inaccurate.
There are no good habits or bad habits. There are only effective habits.
That is, effective at solving problems. All habits serve you in some way
—even the bad ones—which is why you repeat them. For this exercise,
categorize your habits by how they will benefit you in the long run.
Generally speaking, good habits will have net positive outcomes. Bad
habits have net negative outcomes. Smoking a cigarette may reduce
stress right now (that’s how it’s serving you), but it’s not a healthy
long-term behavior.
If you’re still having trouble determining how to rate a particular
habit, here is a question I like to use: “Does this behavior help me
become the type of person I wish to be? Does this habit cast a vote for
or against my desired identity?” Habits that reinforce your desired
identity are usually good. Habits that conflict with your desired
identity are usually bad.
As you create your Habits Scorecard, there is no need to change
anything at first. The goal is to simply notice what is actually going on.
Observe your thoughts and actions without judgment or internal
criticism. Don’t blame yourself for your faults. Don’t praise yourself for
your successes.
If you eat a chocolate bar every morning, acknowledge it, almost as
if you were watching someone else. Oh, how interesting that they
would do such a thing. If you binge-eat, simply notice that you are
eating more calories than you should. If you waste time online, notice
that you are spending your life in a way that you do not want to.
The first step to changing bad habits is to be on the lookout for
them. If you feel like you need extra help, then you can try Pointing-
and-Calling in your own life. Say out loud the action that you are
thinking of taking and what the outcome will be. If you want to cut
back on your junk food habit but notice yourself grabbing another
cookie, say out loud, “I’m about to eat this cookie, but I don’t need it.
Eating it will cause me to gain weight and hurt my health.”
Hearing your bad habits spoken aloud makes the consequences
seem more real. It adds weight to the action rather than letting
yourself mindlessly slip into an old routine. This approach is useful
even if you’re simply trying to remember a task on your to-do list. Just
saying out loud, “Tomorrow, I need to go to the post office after lunch,”
increases the odds that you’ll actually do it. You’re getting yourself to
acknowledge the need for action—and that can make all the difference.
The process of behavior change always starts with awareness.
Strategies like Pointing-and-Calling and the Habits Scorecard are
focused on getting you to recognize your habits and acknowledge the
cues that trigger them, which makes it possible to respond in a way
that benefits you.
Chapter Summary
With enough practice, your brain will pick up on the cues that
predict certain outcomes without consciously thinking about it.
Once our habits become automatic, we stop paying attention to
what we are doing.
The process of behavior change always starts with awareness. You
need to be aware of your habits before you can change them.
Pointing-and-Calling raises your level of awareness from a
nonconscious habit to a more conscious level by verbalizing your
actions.
The Habits Scorecard is a simple exercise you can use to become
more aware of your behavior.
5
The Best Way to Start a New Habit
I
N 2001, RESEARCHERS in Great Britain began working with 248 people
to build better exercise habits over the course of two weeks. The
subjects were divided into three groups.
The first group was the control group. They were simply asked to
track how often they exercised.
The second group was the “motivation” group. They were asked not
only to track their workouts but also to read some material on the
benefits of exercise. The researchers also explained to the group how
exercise could reduce the risk of coronary heart disease and improve
heart health.
Finally, there was the third group. These subjects received the same
presentation as the second group, which ensured that they had equal
levels of motivation. However, they were also asked to formulate a plan
for when and where they would exercise over the following week.
Specifically, each member of the third group completed the following
sentence: “During the next week, I will partake in at least 20 minutes
of vigorous exercise on [DAY] at [TIME] in [PLACE].”
In the first and second groups, 35 to 38 percent of people exercised
at least once per week. (Interestingly, the motivational presentation
given to the second group seemed to have no meaningful impact on
behavior.) But 91 percent of the third group exercised at least once per
week—more than double the normal rate.
The sentence they filled out is what researchers refer to as an
implementation intention, which is a plan you make beforehand about
when and where to act. That is, how you intend to implement a
particular habit.
The cues that can trigger a habit come in a wide range of forms—the
feel of your phone buzzing in your pocket, the smell of chocolate chip
cookies, the sound of ambulance sirens—but the two most common
cues are time and location. Implementation intentions leverage both of
these cues.
Broadly speaking, the format for creating an implementation
intention is:
“When situation X arises, I will perform response Y.”
Hundreds of studies have shown that implementation intentions are
effective for sticking to our goals, whether it’s writing down the exact
time and date of when you will get a flu shot or recording the time of
your colonoscopy appointment. They increase the odds that people will
stick with habits like recycling, studying, going to sleep early, and
stopping smoking.
Researchers have even found that voter turnout increases when
people are forced to create implementation intentions by answering
questions like: “What route are you taking to the polling station? At
what time are you planning to go? What bus will get you there?” Other
successful government programs have prompted citizens to make a
clear plan to send taxes in on time or provided directions on when and
where to pay late traffic bills.
The punch line is clear: people who make a specific plan for when
and where they will perform a new habit are more likely to follow
through. Too many people try to change their habits without these
basic details figured out. We tell ourselves, “I’m going to eat healthier”
or “I’m going to write more,” but we never say when and where these
habits are going to happen. We leave it up to chance and hope that we
will “just remember to do it” or feel motivated at the right time. An
implementation intention sweeps away foggy notions like “I want to
work out more” or “I want to be more productive” or “I should vote”
and transforms them into a concrete plan of action.
Many people think they lack motivation when what they really lack
is clarity. It is not always obvious when and where to take action. Some
people spend their entire lives waiting for the time to be right to make
an improvement.
Once an implementation intention has been set, you don’t have to
wait for inspiration to strike. Do I write a chapter today or not? Do I
meditate this morning or at lunch? When the moment of action
occurs, there is no need to make a decision. Simply follow your
predetermined plan.
The simple way to apply this strategy to your habits is to fill
out this sentence:
I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].
Meditation. I will meditate for one minute at 7 a.m. in my kitchen.
Studying. I will study Spanish for twenty minutes at 6 p.m. in my
bedroom.
Exercise. I will exercise for one hour at 5 p.m. in my local gym.
Marriage. I will make my partner a cup of tea at 8 a.m. in the
kitchen.
If you aren’t sure when to start your habit, try the first day of the
week, month, or year. People are more likely to take action at those
times because hope is usually higher. If we have hope, we have a
reason to take action. A fresh start feels motivating.
There is another benefit to implementation intentions. Being
specific about what you want and how you will achieve it helps you say
no to things that derail progress, distract your attention, and pull you
off course. We often say yes to little requests because we are not clear
enough about what we need to be doing instead. When your dreams
are vague, it’s easy to rationalize little exceptions all day long and never
get around to the specific things you need to do to succeed.
Give your habits a time and a space to live in the world. The goal is
to make the time and location so obvious that, with enough repetition,
you get an urge to do the right thing at the right time, even if you can’t
say why. As the writer Jason Zweig noted, “Obviously you’re never
going to just work out without conscious thought. But like a dog
salivating at a bell, maybe you start to get antsy around the time of day
you normally work out.”
There are many ways to use implementation intentions in your life
and work. My favorite approach is one I learned from Stanford
professor BJ Fogg and it is a strategy I refer to as habit stacking.
HABIT STACKING: A SIMPLE PLAN TO OVERHAUL YOUR
HABITS
The French philosopher Denis Diderot lived nearly his entire life in
poverty, but that all changed one day in 1765.
Diderot’s daughter was about to be married and he could not afford
to pay for the wedding. Despite his lack of wealth, Diderot was well
known for his role as the co-founder and writer of Encyclopédie, one of
the most comprehensive encyclopedias of the time. When Catherine
the Great, the Empress of Russia, heard of Diderot’s financial troubles,
her heart went out to him. She was a book lover and greatly enjoyed his
encyclopedia. She offered to buy Diderot’s personal library for £1,000
—more than $150,000 today.* Suddenly, Diderot had money to spare.
With his new wealth, he not only paid for the wedding but also
acquired a scarlet robe for himself.
Diderot’s scarlet robe was beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that he
immediately noticed how out of place it seemed when surrounded by
his more common possessions. He wrote that there was “no more
coordination, no more unity, no more beauty” between his elegant robe
and the rest of his stuff.
Diderot soon felt the urge to upgrade his possessions. He replaced
his rug with one from Damascus. He decorated his home with
expensive sculptures. He bought a mirror to place above the mantel,
and a better kitchen table. He tossed aside his old straw chair for a
leather one. Like falling dominoes, one purchase led to the next.
Diderot’s behavior is not uncommon. In fact, the tendency for one
purchase to lead to another one has a name: the Diderot Effect. The
Diderot Effect states that obtaining a new possession often creates a
spiral of consumption that leads to additional purchases.
You can spot this pattern everywhere. You buy a dress and have to
get new shoes and earrings to match. You buy a couch and suddenly
question the layout of your entire living room. You buy a toy for your
child and soon find yourself purchasing all of the accessories that go
with it. It’s a chain reaction of purchases.
Many human behaviors follow this cycle. You often decide what to
do next based on what you have just finished doing. Going to the
bathroom leads to washing and drying your hands, which reminds you
that you need to put the dirty towels in the laundry, so you add laundry
detergent to the shopping list, and so on. No behavior happens in
isolation. Each action becomes a cue that triggers the next behavior.
Why is this important?
When it comes to building new habits, you can use the
connectedness of behavior to your advantage. One of the best ways to
build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day
and then stack your new behavior on top. This is called habit stacking.
Habit stacking is a special form of an implementation intention.
Rather than pairing your new habit with a particular time and location,
you pair it with a current habit. This method, which was created by BJ
Fogg as part of his Tiny Habits program, can be used to design an
obvious cue for nearly any habit.*
The habit stacking formula is:
“After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”
For example:
Meditation. After I pour my cup of coffee each morning, I will
meditate for one minute.
Exercise. After I take off my work shoes, I will immediately
change into my workout clothes.
Gratitude. After I sit down to dinner, I will say one thing I’m
grateful for that happened today.
Marriage. After I get into bed at night, I will give my partner a
kiss.
Safety. After I put on my running shoes, I will text a friend or
family member where I am running and how long it will take.
The key is to tie your desired behavior into something you already
do each day. Once you have mastered this basic structure, you can
begin to create larger stacks by chaining small habits together. This
allows you to take advantage of the natural momentum that comes
from one behavior leading into the next—a positive version of the
Diderot Effect.
HABIT STACKING
FIGURE 7: Habit stacking increases the likelihood that you’ll stick with a
habit by stacking your new behavior on top of an old one. This process can
be repeated to chain numerous habits together, each one acting as the cue
for the next.
Your morning routine habit stack might look like this:
1. After I pour my morning cup of coffee, I will meditate for sixty
seconds.
2. After I meditate for sixty seconds, I will write my to-do list for
the day.
3. After I write my to-do list for the day, I will immediately begin
my first task.
Or, consider this habit stack in the evening:
1. After I finish eating dinner, I will put my plate directly into the
dishwasher.
2. After I put my dishes away, I will immediately wipe down the
counter.
3. After I wipe down the counter, I will set out my coffee mug for
tomorrow morning.
You can also insert new behaviors into the middle of your current
routines. For example, you may already have a morning routine that
looks like this: Wake up > Make my bed > Take a shower. Let’s say you
want to develop the habit of reading more each night. You can expand
your habit stack and try something like: Wake up > Make my bed >
Place a book on my pillow > Take a shower. Now, when you climb into
bed each night, a book will be sitting there waiting for you to enjoy.
Overall, habit stacking allows you to create a set of simple rules that
guide your future behavior. It’s like you always have a game plan for
which action should come next. Once you get comfortable with this
approach, you can develop general habit stacks to guide you whenever
the situation is appropriate:
Exercise. When I see a set of stairs, I will take them instead of
using the elevator.
Social skills. When I walk into a party, I will introduce myself to
someone I don’t know yet.
Finances. When I want to buy something over $100, I will wait
twenty-four hours before purchasing.
Healthy eating. When I serve myself a meal, I will always put
veggies on my plate first.
Minimalism. When I buy a new item, I will give something away.
(“One in, one out.”)
Mood. When the phone rings, I will take one deep breath and
smile before answering.
Forgetfulness. When I leave a public place, I will check the table
and chairs to make sure I don’t leave anything behind.
No matter how you use this strategy, the secret to creating a
successful habit stack is selecting the right cue to kick things off.
Unlike an implementation intention, which specifically states the time
and location for a given behavior, habit stacking implicitly has the time
and location built into it. When and where you choose to insert a habit
into your daily routine can make a big difference. If you’re trying to
add meditation into your morning routine but mornings are chaotic
and your kids keep running into the room, then that may be the wrong
place and time. Consider when you are most likely to be successful.
Don’t ask yourself to do a habit when you’re likely to be occupied with
something else.
Your cue should also have the same frequency as your desired habit.
If you want to do a habit every day, but you stack it on top of a habit
that only happens on Mondays, that’s not a good choice.
One way to find the right trigger for your habit stack is by
brainstorming a list of your current habits. You can use your Habits
Scorecard from the last chapter as a starting point. Alternatively, you
can create a list with two columns. In the first column, write down the
habits you do each day without fail.*
For example:
Get out of bed.
Take a shower.
Brush your teeth.
Get dressed.
Brew a cup of coffee.
Eat breakfast.
Take the kids to school.
Start the work day.
Eat lunch.
End the work day.
Change out of work clothes.
Sit down for dinner.
Turn off the lights.
Get into bed.
Your list can be much longer, but you get the idea. In the second
column, write down all of the things that happen to you each day
without fail. For example:
The sun rises.
You get a text message.
The song you are listening to ends.
The sun sets.
Armed with these two lists, you can begin searching for the best
place to layer your new habit into your lifestyle.
Habit stacking works best when the cue is highly specific and
immediately actionable. Many people select cues that are too vague. I
made this mistake myself. When I wanted to start a push-up habit, my
habit stack was “When I take a break for lunch, I will do ten push-ups.”
At first glance, this sounded reasonable. But soon, I realized the trigger
was unclear. Would I do my push-ups before I ate lunch? After I ate
lunch? Where would I do them? After a few inconsistent days, I
changed my habit stack to: “When I close my laptop for lunch, I will do
ten push-ups next to my desk.” Ambiguity gone.
Habits like “read more” or “eat better” are worthy causes, but these
goals do not provide instruction on how and when to act. Be specific
and clear: After I close the door. After I brush my teeth. After I sit
down at the table. The specificity is important. The more tightly bound
your new habit is to a specific cue, the better the odds are that you will
notice when the time comes to act.
The 1st Law of Behavior Change is to make it obvious. Strategies
like implementation intentions and habit stacking are among the most
practical ways to create obvious cues for your habits and design a clear
plan for when and where to take action.
Chapter Summary
The 1st Law of Behavior Change is make it obvious.
The two most common cues are time and location.
Creating an implementation intention is a strategy you can use to
pair a new habit with a specific time and location.
The implementation intention formula is: I will [BEHAVIOR] at
[TIME] in [LOCATION].
Habit stacking is a strategy you can use to pair a new habit with a
current habit.
The habit stacking formula is: After [CURRENT HABIT], I will
[NEW HABIT].
6
Motivation Is Overrated; Environment
Often Matters More
ANNE THORNDIKE, A primary care physician at Massachusetts General
Hospital in Boston, had a crazy idea. She believed she could improve
the eating habits of thousands of hospital staff and visitors without
changing their willpower or motivation in the slightest way. In fact, she
didn’t plan on talking to them at all.
Thorndike and her colleagues designed a six-month study to alter
the “choice architecture” of the hospital cafeteria. They started by
changing how drinks were arranged in the room. Originally, the
refrigerators located next to the cash registers in the cafeteria were
filled with only soda. The researchers added water as an option to each
one. Additionally, they placed baskets of bottled water next to the food
stations throughout the room. Soda was still in the primary
refrigerators, but water was now available at all drink locations.
Over the next three months, the number of soda sales at the hospital
dropped by 11.4 percent. Meanwhile, sales of bottled water increased
by 25.8 percent. They made similar adjustments—and saw similar
results—with the food in the cafeteria. Nobody had said a word to
anyone eating there.
BEFORE AFTER
FIGURE 8: Here is a representation of what the cafeteria looked like before
the environment design changes were made (left) and after (right). The
shaded boxes indicate areas where bottled water was available in each
instance. Because the amount of water in the environment was increased,
behavior shifted naturally and without additional motivation.
People often choose products not because of what they are, but
because of where they are. If I walk into the kitchen and see a plate of
cookies on the counter, I’ll pick up half a dozen and start eating, even if
I hadn’t been thinking about them beforehand and didn’t necessarily
feel hungry. If the communal table at the office is always filled with
doughnuts and bagels, it’s going to be hard not to grab one every now
and then. Your habits change depending on the room you are in and
the cues in front of you.
Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.
Despite our unique personalities, certain behaviors tend to arise again
and again under certain environmental conditions. In church, people
tend to talk in whispers. On a dark street, people act wary and guarded.
In this way, the most common form of change is not internal, but
external: we are changed by the world around us. Every habit is
context dependent.
In 1936, psychologist Kurt Lewin wrote a simple equation that
makes a powerful statement: Behavior is a function of the Person in
their Environment, or B = f (P,E).
It didn’t take long for Lewin’s Equation to be tested in business. In
1952, the economist Hawkins Stern described a phenomenon he called
Suggestion Impulse Buying, which “is triggered when a shopper sees a
product for the first time and visualizes a need for it.” In other words,
customers will occasionally buy products not because they want them
but because of how they are presented to them.
For example, items at eye level tend to be purchased more than
those down near the floor. For this reason, you’ll find expensive brand
names featured in easy-to-reach locations on store shelves because
they drive the most profit, while cheaper alternatives are tucked away
in harder-to-reach spots. The same goes for end caps, which are the
units at the end of aisles. End caps are moneymaking machines for
retailers because they are obvious locations that encounter a lot of foot
traffic. For example, 45 percent of Coca-Cola sales come specifically
from end-of-the-aisle racks.
The more obviously available a product or service is, the more likely
you are to try it. People drink Bud Light because it is in every bar and
visit Starbucks because it is on every corner. We like to think that we
are in control. If we choose water over soda, we assume it is because
we wanted to do so. The truth, however, is that many of the actions we
take each day are shaped not by purposeful drive and choice but by the
most obvious option.
Every living being has its own methods for sensing and
understanding the world. Eagles have remarkable long-distance vision.
Snakes can smell by “tasting the air” with their highly sensitive
tongues. Sharks can detect small amounts of electricity and vibrations
in the water caused by nearby fish. Even bacteria have chemoreceptors
—tiny sensory cells that allow them to detect toxic chemicals in their
environment.
In humans, perception is directed by the sensory nervous system.
We perceive the world through sight, sound, smell, touch, and taste.
But we also have other ways of sensing stimuli. Some are conscious,
but many are nonconscious. For instance, you can “notice” when the
temperature drops before a storm, or when the pain in your gut rises
during a stomachache, or when you fall off balance while walking on
rocky ground. Receptors in your body pick up on a wide range of
internal stimuli, such as the amount of salt in your blood or the need to
drink when thirsty.
The most powerful of all human sensory abilities, however, is vision.
The human body has about eleven million sensory receptors.
Approximately ten million of those are dedicated to sight. Some
experts estimate that half of the brain’s resources are used on vision.
Given that we are more dependent on vision than on any other sense, it
should come as no surprise that visual cues are the greatest catalyst of
our behavior. For this reason, a small change in what you see can lead
to a big shift in what you do. As a result, you can imagine how
important it is to live and work in environments that are filled with
productive cues and devoid of unproductive ones.
Thankfully, there is good news in this respect. You don’t have to be
the victim of your environment. You can also be the architect of it.
HOW TO DESIGN YOUR ENVIRONMENT FOR SUCCESS
During the energy crisis and oil embargo of the 1970s, Dutch
researchers began to pay close attention to the country’s energy usage.
In one suburb near Amsterdam, they found that some homeowners
used 30 percent less energy than their neighbors—despite the homes
being of similar size and getting electricity for the same price.
It turned out the houses in this neighborhood were nearly identical
except for one feature: the location of the electrical meter. Some had
one in the basement. Others had the electrical meter upstairs in the
main hallway. As you may guess, the homes with the meters located in
the main hallway used less electricity. When their energy use was
obvious and easy to track, people changed their behavior.
Every habit is initiated by a cue, and we are more likely to notice
cues that stand out. Unfortunately, the environments where we live
and work often make it easy not to do certain actions because there is
no obvious cue to trigger the behavior. It’s easy not to practice the
guitar when it’s tucked away in the closet. It’s easy not to read a book
when the bookshelf is in the corner of the guest room. It’s easy not to
take your vitamins when they are out of sight in the pantry. When the
cues that spark a habit are subtle or hidden, they are easy to ignore.
By comparison, creating obvious visual cues can draw your
attention toward a desired habit. In the early 1990s, the cleaning staff
at Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam installed a small sticker that looked
like a fly near the center of each urinal. Apparently, when men stepped
up to the urinals, they aimed for what they thought was a bug. The
stickers improved their aim and significantly reduced “spillage” around
the urinals. Further analysis determined that the stickers cut bathroom
cleaning costs by 8 percent per year.
I’ve experienced the power of obvious cues in my own life. I used to
buy apples from the store, put them in the crisper in the bottom of the
refrigerator, and forget all about them. By the time I remembered, the
apples would have gone bad. I never saw them, so I never ate them.
Eventually, I took my own advice and redesigned my environment. I
bought a large display bowl and placed it in the middle of the kitchen
counter. The next time I bought apples, that was where they went—out
in the open where I could see them. Almost like magic, I began eating a
few apples each day simply because they were obvious rather than out
of sight.
Here are a few ways you can redesign your environment and make
the cues for your preferred habits more obvious:
If you want to remember to take your medication each night, put
your pill bottle directly next to the faucet on the bathroom
counter.
If you want to practice guitar more frequently, place your guitar
stand in the middle of the living room.
If you want to remember to send more thank-you notes, keep a
stack of stationery on your desk.
If you want to drink more water, fill up a few water bottles each
morning and place them in common locations around the house.
If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, make the cue a big
part of your environment. The most persistent behaviors usually have
multiple cues. Consider how many different ways a smoker could be
prompted to pull out a cigarette: driving in the car, seeing a friend
smoke, feeling stressed at work, and so on.
The same strategy can be employed for good habits. By sprinkling
triggers throughout your surroundings, you increase the odds that
you’ll think about your habit throughout the day. Make sure the best
choice is the most obvious one. Making a better decision is easy and
natural when the cues for good habits are right in front of you.
Environment design is powerful not only because it influences how
we engage with the world but also because we rarely do it. Most people
live in a world others have created for them. But you can alter the
spaces where you live and work to increase your exposure to positive
cues and reduce your exposure to negative ones. Environment design
allows you to take back control and become the architect of your life.
Be the designer of your world and not merely the consumer of it.
THE CONTEXT IS THE CUE
The cues that trigger a habit can start out very specific, but over time
your habits become associated not with a single trigger but with the
entire context surrounding the behavior.
For example, many people drink more in social situations than they
would ever drink alone. The trigger is rarely a single cue, but rather the
whole situation: watching your friends order drinks, hearing the music
at the bar, seeing the beers on tap.
We mentally assign our habits to the locations in which they occur:
the home, the office, the gym. Each location develops a connection to
certain habits and routines. You establish a particular relationship with
the objects on your desk, the items on your kitchen counter, the things
in your bedroom.
Our behavior is not defined by the objects in the environment but by
our relationship to them. In fact, this is a useful way to think about the
influence of the environment on your behavior. Stop thinking about
your environment as filled with objects. Start thinking about it as filled
with relationships. Think in terms of how you interact with the spaces
around you. For one person, her couch is the place where she reads for
an hour each night. For someone else, the couch is where he watches
television and eats a bowl of ice cream after work. Different people can
have different memories—and thus different habits—associated with
the same place.
The good news? You can train yourself to link a particular habit with
a particular context.
In one study, scientists instructed insomniacs to get into bed only
when they were tired. If they couldn’t fall asleep, they were told to sit
in a different room until they became sleepy. Over time, subjects began
to associate the context of their bed with the action of sleeping, and it
became easier to quickly fall asleep when they climbed in bed. Their
brains learned that sleeping—not browsing on their phones, not
watching television, not staring at the clock—was the only action that
happened in that room.
The power of context also reveals an important strategy: habits can
be easier to change in a new environment. It helps to escape the subtle
triggers and cues that nudge you toward your current habits. Go to a
new place—a different coffee shop, a bench in the park, a corner of
your room you seldom use—and create a new routine there.
It is easier to associate a new habit with a new context than to build
a new habit in the face of competing cues. It can be difficult to go to
bed early if you watch television in your bedroom each night. It can be
hard to study in the living room without getting distracted if that’s
where you always play video games. But when you step outside your
normal environment, you leave your behavioral biases behind. You
aren’t battling old environmental cues, which allows new habits to
form without interruption.
Want to think more creatively? Move to a bigger room, a rooftop
patio, or a building with expansive architecture. Take a break from the
space where you do your daily work, which is also linked to your
current thought patterns.
Trying to eat healthier? It is likely that you shop on autopilot at your
regular supermarket. Try a new grocery store. You may find it easier to
avoid unhealthy food when your brain doesn’t automatically know
where it is located in the store.
When you can’t manage to get to an entirely new environment,
redefine or rearrange your current one. Create a separate space for
work, study, exercise, entertainment, and cooking. The mantra I find
useful is “One space, one use.”
When I started my career as an entrepreneur, I would often work
from my couch or at the kitchen table. In the evenings, I found it very
difficult to stop working. There was no clear division between the end
of work time and the beginning of personal time. Was the kitchen table
my office or the space where I ate meals? Was the couch where I
relaxed or where I sent emails? Everything happened in the same
place.
A few years later, I could finally afford to move to a home with a
separate room for my office. Suddenly, work was something that
happened “in here” and personal life was something that happened
“out there.” It was easier for me to turn off the professional side of my
brain when there was a clear dividing line between work life and home
life. Each room had one primary use. The kitchen was for cooking. The
office was for working.
Whenever possible, avoid mixing the context of one habit with
another. When you start mixing contexts, you’ll start mixing habits—
and the easier ones will usually win out. This is one reason why the
versatility of modern technology is both a strength and a weakness.
You can use your phone for all sorts of tasks, which makes it a
powerful device. But when you can use your phone to do nearly
anything, it becomes hard to associate it with one task. You want to be
productive, but you’re also conditioned to browse social media, check
email, and play video games whenever you open your phone. It’s a
mishmash of cues.
You may be thinking, “You don’t understand. I live in New York
City. My apartment is the size of a smartphone. I need each room to
play multiple roles.” Fair enough. If your space is limited, divide your
room into activity zones: a chair for reading, a desk for writing, a table
for eating. You can do the same with your digital spaces. I know a
writer who uses his computer only for writing, his tablet only for
reading, and his phone only for social media and texting. Every habit
should have a home.
If you can manage to stick with this strategy, each context will
become associated with a particular habit and mode of thought. Habits
thrive under predictable circumstances like these. Focus comes
automatically when you are sitting at your work desk. Relaxation is
easier when you are in a space designed for that purpose. Sleep comes
quickly when it is the only thing that happens in your bedroom. If you
want behaviors that are stable and predictable, you need an
environment that is stable and predictable.
A stable environment where everything has a place and a purpose is
an environment where habits can easily form.
Chapter Summary
Small changes in context can lead to large changes in behavior
over time.
Every habit is initiated by a cue. We are more likely to notice cues
that stand out.
Make the cues of good habits obvious in your environment.
Gradually, your habits become associated not with a single trigger
but with the entire context surrounding the behavior. The context
becomes the cue.
It is easier to build new habits in a new environment because you
are not fighting against old cues.
7
The Secret to Self-Control
I
N 1971, as the Vietnam War was heading into its sixteenth year,
congressmen Robert Steele from Connecticut and Morgan Murphy
from Illinois made a discovery that stunned the American public.
While visiting the troops, they had learned that over 15 percent of U.S.
soldiers stationed there were heroin addicts. Follow-up research
revealed that 35 percent of service members in Vietnam had tried
heroin and as many as 20 percent were addicted—the problem was
even worse than they had initially thought.
The discovery led to a flurry of activity in Washington, including the
creation of the Special Action Office of Drug Abuse Prevention under
President Nixon to promote prevention and rehabilitation and to track
addicted service members when they returned home.
Lee Robins was one of the researchers in charge. In a finding that
completely upended the accepted beliefs about addiction, Robins
found that when soldiers who had been heroin users returned home,
only 5 percent of them became re-addicted within a year, and just 12
percent relapsed within three years. In other words, approximately
nine out of ten soldiers who used heroin in Vietnam eliminated their
addiction nearly overnight.
This finding contradicted the prevailing view at the time, which
considered heroin addiction to be a permanent and irreversible
condition. Instead, Robins revealed that addictions could
spontaneously dissolve if there was a radical change in the
environment. In Vietnam, soldiers spent all day surrounded by cues
triggering heroin use: it was easy to access, they were engulfed by the
constant stress of war, they built friendships with fellow soldiers who
were also heroin users, and they were thousands of miles from home.
Once a soldier returned to the United States, though, he found himself
in an environment devoid of those triggers. When the context changed,
so did the habit.
Compare this situation to that of a typical drug user. Someone
becomes addicted at home or with friends, goes to a clinic to get clean
—which is devoid of all the environmental stimuli that prompt their
habit—then returns to their old neighborhood with all of their previous
cues that caused them to get addicted in the first place. It’s no wonder
that usually you see numbers that are the exact opposite of those in the
Vietnam study. Typically, 90 percent of heroin users become re-
addicted once they return home from rehab.
The Vietnam studies ran counter to many of our cultural beliefs
about bad habits because it challenged the conventional association of
unhealthy behavior as a moral weakness. If you’re overweight, a
smoker, or an addict, you’ve been told your entire life that it is because
you lack self-control—maybe even that you’re a bad person. The idea
that a little bit of discipline would solve all our problems is deeply
embedded in our culture.
Recent research, however, shows something different. When
scientists analyze people who appear to have tremendous self-control,
it turns out those individuals aren’t all that different from those who
are struggling. Instead, “disciplined” people are better at structuring
their lives in a way that does not require heroic willpower and self-
control. In other words, they spend less time in tempting situations.
The people with the best self-control are typically the ones who need
to use it the least. It’s easier to practice self-restraint when you don’t
have to use it very often. So, yes, perseverance, grit, and willpower are
essential to success, but the way to improve these qualities is not by
wishing you were a more disciplined person, but by creating a more
disciplined environment.
This counterintuitive idea makes even more sense once you
understand what happens when a habit is formed in the brain. A habit
that has been encoded in the mind is ready to be used whenever the
relevant situation arises. When Patty Olwell, a therapist from Austin,
Texas, started smoking, she would often light up while riding horses
with a friend. Eventually, she quit smoking and avoided it for years.
She had also stopped riding. Decades later, she hopped on a horse
again and found herself craving a cigarette for the first time in forever.
The cues were still internalized; she just hadn’t been exposed to them
in a long time.
Once a habit has been encoded, the urge to act follows whenever the
environmental cues reappear. This is one reason behavior change
techniques can backfire. Shaming obese people with weight-loss
presentations can make them feel stressed, and as a result many
people return to their favorite coping strategy: overeating. Showing
pictures of blackened lungs to smokers leads to higher levels of
anxiety, which drives many people to reach for a cigarette. If you’re not
careful about cues, you can cause the very behavior you want to stop.
Bad habits are autocatalytic: the process feeds itself. They foster the
feelings they try to numb. You feel bad, so you eat junk food. Because
you eat junk food, you feel bad. Watching television makes you feel
sluggish, so you watch more television because you don’t have the
energy to do anything else. Worrying about your health makes you feel
anxious, which causes you to smoke to ease your anxiety, which makes
your health even worse and soon you’re feeling more anxious. It’s a
downward spiral, a runaway train of bad habits.
Researchers refer to this phenomenon as “cue-induced wanting”: an
external trigger causes a compulsive craving to repeat a bad habit.
Once you notice something, you begin to want it. This process is
happening all the time—often without us realizing it. Scientists have
found that showing addicts a picture of cocaine for just thirty-three
milliseconds stimulates the reward pathway in the brain and sparks
desire. This speed is too fast for the brain to consciously register—the
addicts couldn’t even tell you what they had seen—but they craved the
drug all the same.
Here’s the punch line: You can break a habit, but you’re unlikely to
forget it. Once the mental grooves of habit have been carved into your
brain, they are nearly impossible to remove entirely—even if they go
unused for quite a while. And that means that simply resisting
temptation is an ineffective strategy. It is hard to maintain a Zen
attitude in a life filled with interruptions. It takes too much energy. In
the short-run, you can choose to overpower temptation. In the long-
run, we become a product of the environment that we live in. To put it
bluntly, I have never seen someone consistently stick to positive habits
in a negative environment.
A more reliable approach is to cut bad habits off at the source. One
of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to reduce
exposure to the cue that causes it.
If you can’t seem to get any work done, leave your phone in
another room for a few hours.
If you’re continually feeling like you’re not enough, stop following
social media accounts that trigger jealousy and envy.
If you’re wasting too much time watching television, move the TV
out of the bedroom.
If you’re spending too much money on electronics, quit reading
reviews of the latest tech gear.
If you’re playing too many video games, unplug the console and
put it in a closet after each use.
This practice is an inversion of the 1st Law of Behavior Change.
Rather than make it obvious, you can make it invisible. I’m often
surprised by how effective simple changes like these can be. Remove a
single cue and the entire habit often fades away.
Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one. You may
be able to resist temptation once or twice, but it’s unlikely you can
muster the willpower to override your desires every time. Instead of
summoning a new dose of willpower whenever you want to do the right
thing, your energy would be better spent optimizing your environment.
This is the secret to self-control. Make the cues of your good habits
obvious and the cues of your bad habits invisible.
Chapter Summary
The inversion of the 1st Law of Behavior Change is make it
invisible.
Once a habit is formed, it is unlikely to be forgotten.
People with high self-control tend to spend less time in tempting
situations. It’s easier to avoid temptation than resist it.
One of the most practical ways to eliminate a bad habit is to
reduce exposure to the cue that causes it.
Self-control is a short-term strategy, not a long-term one.
HOW TO CREATE A GOOD HABIT
The 1st Law: Make It Obvious
1.1: Fill out the Habits Scorecard. Write down your current habits to become aware of them.
1.2: Use implementation intentions: “I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION].”
1.3: Use habit stacking: “After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [NEW HABIT].”
1.4: Design your environment. Make the cues of good habits obvious and visible.
The 2nd Law: Make It Attractive
The 3rd Law: Make It Easy
The 4th Law: Make It Satisfying
HOW TO BREAK A BAD HABIT
Inversion of the 1st Law: Make It Invisible
1.5: Reduce exposure. Remove the cues of your bad habits from your environment.
Inversion of the 2nd Law: Make It Unattractive
Inversion of the 3rd Law: Make It Difficult
Inversion of the 4th Law: Make It Unsatisfying
You can download a printable version of this habits cheat sheet at:
atomichabits.com/cheatsheet
THE 2ND LAW
Make It Attractive
8
How to Make a Habit Irresistible
I
N THE 1940S, a Dutch scientist named Niko Tinbergen performed a
series of experiments that transformed our understanding of what
motivates us. Tinbergen—who eventually won a Nobel Prize for his
work—was investigating herring gulls, the gray and white birds often
seen flying along the seashores of North America.
Adult herring gulls have a small red dot on their beak, and
Tinbergen noticed that newly hatched chicks would peck this spot
whenever they wanted food. To begin one experiment, he created a
collection of fake cardboard beaks, just a head without a body. When
the parents had flown away, he went over to the nest and offered these
dummy beaks to the chicks. The beaks were obvious fakes, and he
assumed the baby birds would reject them altogether.
However, when the tiny gulls saw the red spot on the cardboard
beak, they pecked away just as if it were attached to their own mother.
They had a clear preference for those red spots—as if they had been
genetically programmed at birth. Soon Tinbergen discovered that the
bigger the red spot, the faster the chicks pecked. Eventually, he created
a beak with three large red dots on it. When he placed it over the nest,
the baby birds went crazy with delight. They pecked at the little red
patches as if it was the greatest beak they had ever seen.
Tinbergen and his colleagues discovered similar behavior in other
animals. For example, the greylag goose is a ground-nesting bird.
Occasionally, as the mother moves around on the nest, one of the eggs
will roll out and settle on the grass nearby. Whenever this happens, the
goose will waddle over to the egg and use its beak and neck to pull it
back into the nest.
Tinbergen discovered that the goose will pull any nearby round
object, such as a billiard ball or a lightbulb, back into the nest. The
bigger the object, the greater their response. One goose even made a
tremendous effort to roll a volleyball back and sit on top. Like the baby
gulls automatically pecking at red dots, the greylag goose was following
an instinctive rule: When I see a round object nearby, I must roll it
back into the nest. The bigger the round object, the harder I should try
to get it.
It’s like the brain of each animal is preloaded with certain rules for
behavior, and when it comes across an exaggerated version of that rule,
it lights up like a Christmas tree. Scientists refer to these exaggerated
cues as supernormal stimuli. A supernormal stimulus is a heightened
version of reality—like a beak with three red dots or an egg the size of a
volleyball—and it elicits a stronger response than usual.
Humans are also prone to fall for exaggerated versions of reality.
Junk food, for example, drives our reward systems into a frenzy. After
spending hundreds of thousands of years hunting and foraging for
food in the wild, the human brain has evolved to place a high value on
salt, sugar, and fat. Such foods are often calorie-dense and they were
quite rare when our ancient ancestors were roaming the savannah.
When you don’t know where your next meal is coming from, eating as
much as possible is an excellent strategy for survival.
Today, however, we live in a calorie-rich environment. Food is
abundant, but your brain continues to crave it like it is scarce. Placing
a high value on salt, sugar, and fat is no longer advantageous to our
health, but the craving persists because the brain’s reward centers have
not changed for approximately fifty thousand years. The modern food
industry relies on stretching our Paleolithic instincts beyond their
evolutionary purpose.
A primary goal of food science is to create products that are more
attractive to consumers. Nearly every food in a bag, box, or jar has
been enhanced in some way, if only with additional flavoring.
Companies spend millions of dollars to discover the most satisfying
level of crunch in a potato chip or the perfect amount of fizz in a soda.
Entire departments are dedicated to optimizing how a product feels in
your mouth—a quality known as orosensation. French fries, for
example, are a potent combination—golden brown and crunchy on the
outside, light and smooth on the inside.
Other processed foods enhance dynamic contrast, which refers to
items with a combination of sensations, like crunchy and creamy.
Imagine the gooeyness of melted cheese on top of a crispy pizza crust,
or the crunch of an Oreo cookie combined with its smooth center. With
natural, unprocessed foods, you tend to experience the same
sensations over and over—how’s that seventeenth bite of kale taste?
After a few minutes, your brain loses interest and you begin to feel full.
But foods that are high in dynamic contrast keep the experience novel
and interesting, encouraging you to eat more.
Ultimately, such strategies enable food scientists to find the “bliss
point” for each product—the precise combination of salt, sugar, and fat
that excites your brain and keeps you coming back for more. The
result, of course, is that you overeat because hyperpalatable foods are
more attractive to the human brain. As Stephan Guyenet, a
neuroscientist who specializes in eating behavior and obesity, says,
“We’ve gotten too good at pushing our own buttons.”
The modern food industry, and the overeating habits it has
spawned, is just one example of the 2nd Law of Behavior Change:
Make it attractive. The more attractive an opportunity is, the more
likely it is to become habit-forming.
Look around. Society is filled with highly engineered versions of
reality that are more attractive than the world our ancestors evolved in.
Stores feature mannequins with exaggerated hips and breasts to sell
clothes. Social media delivers more “likes” and praise in a few minutes
than we could ever get in the office or at home. Online porn splices
together stimulating scenes at a rate that would be impossible to
replicate in real life. Advertisements are created with a combination of
ideal lighting, professional makeup, and Photoshopped edits—even the
model doesn’t look like the person in the final image. These are the
supernormal stimuli of our modern world. They exaggerate features
that are naturally attractive to us, and our instincts go wild as a result,
driving us into excessive shopping habits, social media habits, porn
habits, eating habits, and many others.
If history serves as a guide, the opportunities of the future will be
more attractive than those of today. The trend is for rewards to become
more concentrated and stimuli to become more enticing. Junk food is a
more concentrated form of calories than natural foods. Hard liquor is a
more concentrated form of alcohol than beer. Video games are a more
concentrated form of play than board games. Compared to nature,
these pleasure-packed experiences are hard to resist. We have the
brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.
If you want to increase the odds that a behavior will occur, then you
need to make it attractive. Throughout our discussion of the 2nd Law,
our goal is to learn how to make our habits irresistible. While it is not
possible to transform every habit into a supernormal stimulus, we can
make any habit more enticing. To do this, we must start by
understanding what a craving is and how it works.
We begin by examining a biological signature that all habits share—
the dopamine spike.
THE DOPAMINE-DRIVEN FEEDBACK LOOP
Scientists can track the precise moment a craving occurs by measuring
a neurotransmitter called dopamine.* The importance of dopamine
became apparent in 1954 when the neuroscientists James Olds and
Peter Milner ran an experiment that revealed the neurological
processes behind craving and desire. By implanting electrodes in the
brains of rats, the researchers blocked the release of dopamine. To the
surprise of the scientists, the rats lost all will to live. They wouldn’t eat.
They wouldn’t have sex. They didn’t crave anything. Within a few days,
the animals died of thirst.
In follow-up studies, other scientists also inhibited the dopamine-
releasing parts of the brain, but this time, they squirted little droplets
of sugar into the mouths of the dopamine-depleted rats. Their little rat
faces lit up with pleasurable grins from the tasty substance. Even
though dopamine was blocked, they liked the sugar just as much as
before; they just didn’t want it anymore. The ability to experience
pleasure remained, but without dopamine, desire died. And without
desire, action stopped.
When other researchers reversed this process and flooded the
reward system of the brain with dopamine, animals performed habits
at breakneck speed. In one study, mice received a powerful hit of
dopamine each time they poked their nose in a box. Within minutes,
the mice developed a craving so strong they began poking their nose
into the box eight hundred times per hour. (Humans are not so
different: the average slot machine player will spin the wheel six
hundred times per hour.)
Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop. Every behavior that is
highly habit-forming—taking drugs, eating junk food, playing video
games, browsing social media—is associated with higher levels of
dopamine. The same can be said for our most basic habitual behaviors
like eating food, drinking water, having sex, and interacting socially.
For years, scientists assumed dopamine was all about pleasure, but
now we know it plays a central role in many neurological processes,
including motivation, learning and memory, punishment and aversion,
and voluntary movement.
When it comes to habits, the key takeaway is this: dopamine is
released not only when you experience pleasure, but also when you
anticipate it. Gambling addicts have a dopamine spike right before
they place a bet, not after they win. Cocaine addicts get a surge of
dopamine when they see the powder, not after they take it. Whenever
you predict that an opportunity will be rewarding, your levels of
dopamine spike in anticipation. And whenever dopamine rises, so does
your motivation to act.
It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that gets
us to take action.
Interestingly, the reward system that is activated in the brain when
you receive a reward is the same system that is activated when you
anticipate a reward. This is one reason the anticipation of an
experience can often feel better than the attainment of it. As a child,
thinking about Christmas morning can be better than opening the
gifts. As an adult, daydreaming about an upcoming vacation can be
more enjoyable than actually being on vacation. Scientists refer to this
as the difference between “wanting” and “liking.”
THE DOPAMINE SPIKE
FIGURE 9: Before a habit is learned (A), dopamine is released when the
reward is experienced for the first time. The next time around (B), dopamine
rises before taking action, immediately after a cue is recognized. This spike
leads to a feeling of desire and a craving to take action whenever the cue is
spotted. Once a habit is learned, dopamine will not rise when a reward is
experienced because you already expect the reward. However, if you see a
cue and expect a reward, but do not get one, then dopamine will drop in
disappointment (C). The sensitivity of the dopamine response can clearly be
seen when a reward is provided late (D). First, the cue is identified and
dopamine rises as a craving builds. Next, a response is taken but the reward
does not come as quickly as expected and dopamine begins to drop. Finally,
when the reward comes a little later than you had hoped, dopamine spikes
again. It is as if the brain is saying, “See! I knew I was right. Don’t forget to
repeat this action next time.”
Your brain has far more neural circuitry allocated for wanting
rewards than for liking them. The wanting centers in the brain are
large: the brain stem, the nucleus accumbens, the ventral tegmental
area, the dorsal striatum, the amygdala, and portions of the prefrontal
cortex. By comparison, the liking centers of the brain are much
smaller. They are often referred to as “hedonic hot spots” and are
distributed like tiny islands throughout the brain. For instance,
researchers have found that 100 percent of the nucleus accumbens is
activated during wanting. Meanwhile, only 10 percent of the structure
is activated during liking.
The fact that the brain allocates so much precious space to the
regions responsible for craving and desire provides further evidence of
the crucial role these processes play. Desire is the engine that drives
behavior. Every action is taken because of the anticipation that
precedes it. It is the craving that leads to the response.
These insights reveal the importance of the 2nd Law of Behavior
Change. We need to make our habits attractive because it is the
expectation of a rewarding experience that motivates us to act in the
first place. This is where a strategy known as temptation bundling
comes into play.
HOW TO USE TEMPTATION BUNDLING TO MAKE YOUR HABITS
MORE ATTRACTIVE
Ronan Byrne, an electrical engineering student in Dublin, Ireland,
enjoyed watching Netflix, but he also knew that he should exercise
more often than he did. Putting his engineering skills to use, Byrne
hacked his stationary bike and connected it to his laptop and
television. Then he wrote a computer program that would allow Netflix
to run only if he was cycling at a certain speed. If he slowed down for
too long, whatever show he was watching would pause until he started
pedaling again. He was, in the words of one fan, “eliminating obesity
one Netflix binge at a time.”
He was also employing temptation bundling to make his exercise
habit more attractive. Temptation bundling works by linking an action
you want to do with an action you need to do. In Byrne’s case, he
bundled watching Netflix (the thing he wanted to do) with riding his
stationary bike (the thing he needed to do).
Businesses are masters at temptation bundling. For instance, when
the American Broadcasting Company, more commonly known as ABC,
launched its Thursday-night television lineup for the 2014–2015
season, they promoted temptation bundling on a massive scale.
Every Thursday, the company would air three shows created by
screenwriter Shonda Rhimes—Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal, and How to
Get Away with Murder. They branded it as “TGIT on ABC” (TGIT
stands for Thank God It’s Thursday). In addition to promoting the
shows, ABC encouraged viewers to make popcorn, drink red wine, and
enjoy the evening.
Andrew Kubitz, head of scheduling for ABC, described the idea
behind the campaign: “We see Thursday night as a viewership
opportunity, with either couples or women by themselves who want to
sit down and escape and have fun and drink their red wine and have
some popcorn.” The brilliance of this strategy is that ABC was
associating the thing they needed viewers to do (watch their shows)
with activities their viewers already wanted to do (relax, drink wine,
and eat popcorn).
Over time, people began to connect watching ABC with feeling
relaxed and entertained. If you drink red wine and eat popcorn at 8
p.m. every Thursday, then eventually “8 p.m. on Thursday” means
relaxation and entertainment. The reward gets associated with the cue,
and the habit of turning on the television becomes more attractive.
You’re more likely to find a behavior attractive if you get to do one
of your favorite things at the same time. Perhaps you want to hear
about the latest celebrity gossip, but you need to get in shape. Using
temptation bundling, you could only read the tabloids and watch
reality shows at the gym. Maybe you want to get a pedicure, but you
need to clean out your email inbox. Solution: only get a pedicure while
processing overdue work emails.
Temptation bundling is one way to apply a psychology theory
known as Premack’s Principle. Named after the work of professor
David Premack, the principle states that “more probable behaviors will
reinforce less probable behaviors.” In other words, even if you don’t
really want to process overdue work emails, you’ll become conditioned
to do it if it means you get to do something you really want to do along
the way.
You can even combine temptation bundling with the habit stacking
strategy we discussed in Chapter 5 to create a set of rules to guide your
behavior.
The habit stacking + temptation bundling formula is:
1. After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [HABIT I NEED].
2. After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT].
If you want to read the news, but you need to express more
gratitude:
1. After I get my morning coffee, I will say one thing I’m grateful
for that happened yesterday (need).
2. After I say one thing I’m grateful for, I will read the news (want).
If you want to watch sports, but you need to make sales calls:
1. After I get back from my lunch break, I will call three potential
clients (need).
2. After I call three potential clients, I will check ESPN (want).
If you want to check Facebook, but you need to exercise more:
1. After I pull out my phone, I will do ten burpees (need).
2. After I do ten burpees, I will check Facebook (want).
The hope is that eventually you’ll look forward to calling three
clients or doing ten burpees because it means you get to read the latest
sports news or check Facebook. Doing the thing you need to do means
you get to do the thing you want to do.
We began this chapter by discussing supernormal stimuli, which are
heightened versions of reality that increase our desire to take action.
Temptation bundling is one way to create a heightened version of any
habit by connecting it with something you already want. Engineering a
truly irresistible habit is a hard task, but this simple strategy can be
employed to make nearly any habit more attractive than it would be
otherwise.
Chapter Summary
The 2nd Law of Behavior Change is make it attractive.
The more attractive an opportunity is, the more likely it is to
become habit-forming.
Habits are a dopamine-driven feedback loop. When dopamine
rises, so does our motivation to act.
It is the anticipation of a reward—not the fulfillment of it—that
gets us to take action. The greater the anticipation, the greater the
dopamine spike.
Temptation bundling is one way to make your habits more
attractive. The strategy is to pair an action you want to do with an
action you need to do.
9
The Role of Family and Friends in Shaping
Your Habits
I
N 1965, a Hungarian man named Laszlo Polgar wrote a series of
strange letters to a woman named Klara.
Laszlo was a firm believer in hard work. In fact, it was all he
believed in: he completely rejected the idea of innate talent. He
claimed that with deliberate practice and the development of good
habits, a child could become a genius in any field. His mantra was “A
genius is not born, but is educated and trained.”
Laszlo believed in this idea so strongly that he wanted to test it with
his own children—and he was writing to Klara because he “needed a
wife willing to jump on board.” Klara was a teacher and, although she
may not have been as adamant as Laszlo, she also believed that with
proper instruction, anyone could advance their skills.
Laszlo decided chess would be a suitable field for the experiment,
and he laid out a plan to raise his children to become chess prodigies.
The kids would be home-schooled, a rarity in Hungary at the time. The
house would be filled with chess books and pictures of famous chess
players. The children would play against each other constantly and
compete in the best tournaments they could find. The family would
keep a meticulous file system of the tournament history of every
competitor the children faced. Their lives would be dedicated to chess.
Laszlo successfully courted Klara, and within a few years, the
Polgars were parents to three young girls: Susan, Sofia, and Judit.
Susan, the oldest, began playing chess when she was four years old.
Within six months, she was defeating adults.
Sofia, the middle child, did even better. By fourteen, she was a world
champion, and a few years later, she became a grandmaster.
Judit, the youngest, was the best of all. By age five, she could beat
her father. At twelve, she was the youngest player ever listed among
the top one hundred chess players in the world. At fifteen years and
four months old, she became the youngest grandmaster of all time—
younger than Bobby Fischer, the previous record holder. For twenty-
seven years, she was the number-one-ranked female chess player in
the world.
The childhood of the Polgar sisters was atypical, to say the least.
And yet, if you ask them about it, they claim their lifestyle was
attractive, even enjoyable. In interviews, the sisters talk about their
childhood as entertaining rather than grueling. They loved playing
chess. They couldn’t get enough of it. Once, Laszlo reportedly found
Sofia playing chess in the bathroom in the middle of the night.
Encouraging her to go back to sleep, he said, “Sofia, leave the pieces
alone!” To which she replied, “Daddy, they won’t leave me alone!”
The Polgar sisters grew up in a culture that prioritized chess above
all else—praised them for it, rewarded them for it. In their world, an
obsession with chess was normal. And as we are about to see, whatever
habits are normal in your culture are among the most attractive
behaviors you’ll find.
THE SEDUCTIVE PULL OF SOCIAL NORMS
Humans are herd animals. We want to fit in, to bond with others, and
to earn the respect and approval of our peers. Such inclinations are
essential to our survival. For most of our evolutionary history, our
ancestors lived in tribes. Becoming separated from the tribe—or worse,
being cast out—was a death sentence. “The lone wolf dies, but the pack
survives.”*
Meanwhile, those who collaborated and bonded with others enjoyed
increased safety, mating opportunities, and access to resources. As
Charles Darwin noted, “In the long history of humankind, those who
learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.”
As a result, one of the deepest human desires is to belong. And this
ancient preference exerts a powerful influence on our modern
behavior.
We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them. We follow the
script handed down by our friends and family, our church or school,
our local community and society at large. Each of these cultures and
groups comes with its own set of expectations and standards—when
and whether to get married, how many children to have, which
holidays to celebrate, how much money to spend on your child’s
birthday party. In many ways, these social norms are the invisible rules
that guide your behavior each day. You’re always keeping them in
mind, even if they are at the not top of your mind. Often, you follow the
habits of your culture without thinking, without questioning, and
sometimes without remembering. As the French philosopher Michel
de Montaigne wrote, “The customs and practices of life in society
sweep us along.”
Most of the time, going along with the group does not feel like a
burden. Everyone wants to belong. If you grow up in a family that
rewards you for your chess skills, playing chess will seem like a very
attractive thing to do. If you work in a job where everyone wears
expensive suits, then you’ll be inclined to splurge on one as well. If all
of your friends are sharing an inside joke or using a new phrase, you’ll
want to do it, too, so they know that you “get it.” Behaviors are
attractive when they help us fit in.
We imitate the habits of three groups in particular:
1. The close.
2. The many.
3. The powerful.
Each group offers an opportunity to leverage the 2nd Law of
Behavior Change and make our habits more attractive.
1. Imitating the Close
Proximity has a powerful effect on our behavior. This is true of the
physical environment, as we discussed in Chapter 6, but it is also true
of the social environment.
We pick up habits from the people around us. We copy the way our
parents handle arguments, the way our peers flirt with one another,
the way our coworkers get results. When your friends smoke pot, you
give it a try, too. When your wife has a habit of double-checking that
the door is locked before going to bed, you pick it up as well.
I find that I often imitate the behavior of those around me without
realizing it. In conversation, I’ll automatically assume the body posture
of the other person. In college, I began to talk like my roommates.
When traveling to other countries, I unconsciously imitate the local
accent despite reminding myself to stop.
As a general rule, the closer we are to someone, the more likely we
are to imitate some of their habits. One groundbreaking study tracked
twelve thousand people for thirty-two years and found that “a person’s
chances of becoming obese increased by 57 percent if he or she had a
friend who became obese.” It works the other way, too. Another study
found that if one person in a relationship lost weight, the other partner
would also slim down about one third of the time. Our friends and
family provide a sort of invisible peer pressure that pulls us in their
direction.
Of course, peer pressure is bad only if you’re surrounded by bad
influences. When astronaut Mike Massimino was a graduate student at
MIT, he took a small robotics class. Of the ten people in the class, four
became astronauts. If your goal was to make it into space, then that
room was about the best culture you could ask for. Similarly, one study
found that the higher your best friend’s IQ at age eleven or twelve, the
higher your IQ would be at age fifteen, even after controlling for
natural levels of intelligence. We soak up the qualities and practices of
those around us.
One of the most effective things you can do to build better habits is
to join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.
New habits seem achievable when you see others doing them every
day. If you are surrounded by fit people, you’re more likely to consider
working out to be a common habit. If you’re surrounded by jazz lovers,
you’re more likely to believe it’s reasonable to play jazz every day. Your
culture sets your expectation for what is “normal.” Surround yourself
with people who have the habits you want to have yourself. You’ll rise
together.
To make your habits even more attractive, you can take this strategy
one step further.
Join a culture where (1) your desired behavior is the normal
behavior and (2) you already have something in common with the
group. Steve Kamb, an entrepreneur in New York City, runs a company
called Nerd Fitness, which “helps nerds, misfits, and mutants lose
weight, get strong, and get healthy.” His clients include video game
lovers, movie fanatics, and average Joes who want to get in shape.
Many people feel out of place the first time they go to the gym or try to
change their diet, but if you are already similar to the other members
of the group in some way—say, your mutual love of Star Wars—change
becomes more appealing because it feels like something people like
you already do.
Nothing sustains motivation better than belonging to the tribe. It
transforms a personal quest into a shared one. Previously, you were on
your own. Your identity was singular. You are a reader. You are a
musician. You are an athlete. When you join a book club or a band or a
cycling group, your identity becomes linked to those around you.
Growth and change is no longer an individual pursuit. We are readers.
We are musicians. We are cyclists. The shared identity begins to
reinforce your personal identity. This is why remaining part of a group
after achieving a goal is crucial to maintaining your habits. It’s
friendship and community that embed a new identity and help
behaviors last over the long run.
2. Imitating the Many
In the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch conducted a series of
experiments that are now taught to legions of undergrads each year. To
begin each experiment, the subject entered the room with a group of
strangers. Unbeknownst to them, the other participants were actors
planted by the researcher and instructed to deliver scripted answers to
certain questions.
The group would be shown one card with a line on it and then a
second card with a series of lines. Each person was asked to select the
line on the second card that was similar in length to the line on the first
card. It was a very simple task. Here is an example of two cards used in
the experiment:
CONFORMING TO SOCIAL NORMS
FIGURE 10: This is a representation of two cards used by Solomon Asch in
his famous social conformity experiments. The length of the line on the first
card (left) is obviously the same as line C, but when a group of actors
claimed it was a different length the research subjects would often change
their minds and go with the crowd rather than believe their own eyes.
The experiment always began the same. First, there would be some
easy trials where everyone agreed on the correct line. After a few
rounds, the participants were shown a test that was just as obvious as
the previous ones, except the actors in the room would select an
intentionally incorrect answer. For example, they would respond “A”
to the comparison shown in Figure 10. Everyone would agree that the
lines were the same even though they were clearly different.
The subject, who was unaware of the ruse, would immediately
become bewildered. Their eyes would open wide. They would laugh
nervously to themselves. They would double-check the reactions of
other participants. Their agitation would grow as one person after
another delivered the same incorrect response. Soon, the subject began
to doubt their own eyes. Eventually, they delivered the answer they
knew in their heart to be incorrect.
Chapter 2: Staying Hungry










What drives you to follow through and finish what you start? How can you remain motivated?

Let’s consider a woman named Sally. Sally is an idealist so she started a charity to benefit impoverished people. What she did not anticipate was the influx of challenges that came along with her endeavor. She did not realize that working in a nonprofit setting still counts as business and that her work would involve far more business than just helping people.

Whenever she encountered a challenge in procuring funding, competing with other charities for donations and grants, and creating marketing to incite interest in her cause, she felt overwhelmed. “Why is it so hard to get people to care about other people!?” she asked herself.

Pretty soon, Sally became completely disinterested in her work—it just carried with it too many negative feelings and associations. She hated writing grant letters and attending charity events. It took only a few months for her to give up on a cause that she cared deeply about. Other people wondered why she stopped working for something that meant so much to her.

A key to Sally’s failure was her inability to anticipate and plan for negative aspects of her foundation. She imagined doing more to help people and working less to procure funding. Because she relied solely on her goals to give her the motivation to follow through, she did not give herself anything to actually help her defeat the negative aspects of the business side of her foundation.

The true problem that Sally had, however, was failing to find a true source of motivation. She needed to have found a true source of motivation to help carry through the discouraging effects of the negatives. By creating a balance between her dream, the positives, and the negatives, the negatives would have been acceptable obstacles in pursuit of her grand goal. She could have also kept her motivation alive by reminding herself of why she undertook this project in the first place and how each thing she did, even the tasks she hated, led to the fulfillment of her idealistic dream.

Sally is a great example of how you can’t just count on your passion for something to lead you to follow through.

Sometimes we just don’t care about what we are doing, and thus we don’t follow through. We lose steam because of disinterest. That’s understandable. But even caring about something is not always the key to following through. Sometimes, even for things we care about, we still can’t follow through because we lack a drive to push us forward.

This lack of drive is caused by a massive disconnect between three important aspects: (1) what the things we care about represent, (2) the positive benefits we receive from our actions, and (3) the negative consequences we can avoid related to our causes. When we lose steam, we aren’t tied closely enough to any of those aspects, which come together to create motivation.

What is motivation? Things that really matter to you and are near and dear to your heart. Things that make you actually want to work toward your goal. Things that not only drive you, but also discourage you from giving up. On top of that, you have to minimize negative consequences involved with your work and simultaneously maximize the positive benefits that you receive.

There are many ways to define the concept of motivation, but an effective framework to view them through is external and internal motivations.

External Motivators

External motivators entail using sources besides yourself as motivation to do something. They are other people or circumstances that drive you to action. You

are doing something to avoid a negative circumstance or earn a positive circumstance from people and things outside of you.

More typically, external motivators are about avoiding negative consequences. For example, you might be trying to avoid disappointing your family by failing, so you are determined to succeed. You might be afraid of getting fired, so you act with aplomb. A majority of these motivators are punishments or negative consequences that you are desperate to avoid. The only positive external motivation is self-bribery.

Still, you can get a lot of mileage out of external motivators if you make them work to your advantage. Driving yourself to avoid a negative consequence can serve as an excellent push to do something. No one wants to suffer. If you know that not following through will result in some sort of suffering, you will do anything to avoid that negative consequence. Therefore, you feel as if you have no choice but to follow through.

Accountability partners. Accountability partners are people who hold you accountable. This is a person that you commit to something with. This person lets you know when you need to do things, and he or she chides you when you want to give up. Then he or she gets on your case for not following through.

Since you want to avoid disappointing this person, you are more likely to act. You rely on this person to give you the external motivation to avoid shame so you become accountable for your actions and your goal to avoid his or her negative feedback. You may also become accountable in order to avoid letting this person down, as he or she counts on you to complete the goal with him or her.

Accountability group. An accountability group can be more effective than a single partner. By having multiple people holding you accountable, you face the possibility of exponential shame—the shame and disappointment of multiple people building on top of each other is a horrible feeling that you will want to avoid. Plus, you will still have people to hold you accountable should one person drop out of the race. It can be hard to rely on a single partner’s commitment, but a group is much steadier in its pressure. Having more people to answer to and to guide you can help you stay on track to avoid shame.

Putting money down. The risk of losing money is another motivator that you can use to your advantage. A good example of this is an expensive gym membership fee that makes you want to go to the gym more often. You don’t want to waste money, so you go to the gym just to make that fee you paid worthwhile.

Another example is paying a lot of money for a course. You want to finish the course because you paid so much for it and you consider it a shame to just waste that fee. By investing in something monetarily upfront and even slightly before you feel ready, you’ll be pushed to follow through to avoid wasting and losing money. The primary operator here is guilt for spending money on something that you never used or did.

You can take monetary investment motivators to the next level by hiring a coach or trainer of some type. This is the next level because paying someone money to hold you accountable combines both monetary investments and accountability partners. Now you have two reasons not to quit or back out of your commitment. You don’t want to waste money or hear about how you have failed from a disappointed accountability partner.

Finally, you can give someone money and then tell them not to give it to you until you complete something. When you give a friend $500 and instruct them not to return it to you until you complete your tasks, you’ll quickly discover just how much your work ethic is worth to you. If $500 is not enough, up the ante next time to make it truly something you’ll work toward.

Self-bribery. A final external motivator is to bribe yourself. This is where you promise yourself a reward if you follow through. Therefore, you let that reward drive you and surmount your difficulties. For example, you might know that you can take your dream beach vacation if you save your money wisely and earn enough to have spare. Keeping the emotions of the beach vacation can be powerful reminders every time you want to spend your money.

External motivations are mostly about avoiding pain, so figure out what pains you are avoiding or can create for yourself. Then let your urge to avoid those pains drive you. Avoiding negative social emotions works well because no one wants to feel shame, guilt, or rejection. Use your fear of negative social emotions

to carry you through a project or commitment to the very end.

Internal Motivators

Internal motivators are about what you want, as opposed to avoiding a negative consequence or punishment.

If you are motivated by avoiding a negative consequence, but you realize at some point that maybe negative consequence won’t actually kill you so you can deal with it, there goes your motivation—you’ll simply deal with the consequences sometimes.

In some cases, relying on external motivators and fear does not work as well as going after the things you love and want. Therefore, internal motivators are often better sources of motivation than external ones. We can view it thusly: if you are driven by fear or face a substantial negative consequence, external motivation is ideal, while internal motivation is more suitable if you know what you want and there is little to fear.

Internal motivators are your “why” for taking action and putting in effort. Think of a donkey walking forward to reach the carrot. Internal motivators are the carrot, while external motivators are the stick. External motivators drive you forward out of fear of something unpleasant, while internal motivators make you feel that reaching your goal is going to give you a big reward and lots of pleasant benefits.

The more internal motivations you can articulate, the more motivated you will be to follow through and finish. Ask the following questions to determine how you will benefit, then let your desire for those benefits drive you forward. Internal motivations tend to be more uniform because they speak to people’s universal desires and needs.

What are you getting out of this? Maybe you are getting money or a sense of happiness and fulfillment in life. You are getting closer to a goal, which can mean a lot in terms of benefits.

How will your life change or benefit? You may be able to get a better home or a

nicer car if you earn more money. Or you may be able to recover from depression and ultimate sadness by attaining a higher sense of fulfillment.

How will your family benefit? Your family means a lot to you, so let them motivate you. Imagine the smiles on their faces as you give them a better life and make them proud. Imagine getting your kids better school clothes, living in a safer neighborhood, and being able to afford private school and college.

What impact will you have on others? Perhaps you will become a role model for some people, which in turn will make you feel important and good about yourself. Perhaps you can donate to charity or gift needy people with clothes and shoes come winter. Perhaps you can donate money to erect new structures in your community that will be named after you.

What positive emotions will you get? Consider the happiness, pride, and self- esteem you will reap from your goal’s ultimate completion. After all, this may be the root of all philanthropic efforts.

How will your actions lead to your long-term and short-term goals? Are you accomplishing steps toward your goals? Think of the things you must do to finish a novel, for example, such as research and actual word count. Then think of the steps you take each day toward those goals.

Using internal motivators in your daily life can really help you follow through with every task you have to complete. Even when the going gets tough and you contemplate giving up, finishing what you start is way easier when you are focused on how your world will benefit. So whenever you have to do something that you hate, think of how it will bring you closer to your goals. Or whenever you find yourself bored or tired while working on your goals, consider how great you will feel when you finish. Every day, review your goals and why you want to complete them. Then let that fill you with motivation to drive you forward toward project completion.

Answer the above questions and consider writing them down somewhere. Review the answers periodically to remind yourself why you want to change or improve your status quo.

Understand Opportunity Cost

Following through and finishing what you start will always call for sacrifice.

You have to spend money, expend effort, and give up time that you could use for doing things you love in order to commit to things you have to complete. Since by definition no one likes sacrifice, sometimes the looming shadow of a sacrifice will overshadow your goals—unless you create motivators powerful enough to overpower your sense of sacrifice and make each sacrifice seem worthwhile.

Everything in life is an opportunity cost, which means that everything you do will call for something from you. Every act takes away time or effort that could be committed to something else. Learning to play the guitar means solitary hours of drilling scales, chords, and dealing with painful calluses on your fingers. Going to college entails getting up early and heading to a boring lecture and spending hours doing homework. Are you ready to make the trade-off?

If the opportunity cost is too expensive for you to want to pay it, then you will not follow through. Therefore, you must find a motivator that drives you to accept the opportunity cost. If you don’t feel motivated enough to pay that cost, then you are guaranteed to lose steam and give up.

Therefore, there are two ways to solve this problem. The first is that your motivation must be even stronger and more salient in order to make you ignore these opportunity costs and the things you are missing out on. The motivation must mean more to you than the things you sacrifice to make you feel that this is all worth it.

The second solution is to make your sacrifices smaller. This means that there is less pain associated with getting things done. In both cases, the cost-benefit analysis must be significantly weighed in favor of the benefit—but the first method manipulates the benefit, while the second method manipulates the cost.

An example of this is giving give up your weekly Friday night out with friends to go to a late-night history class. This class is essential to getting the degree you need to break into your dream career. But you sure do love your night out with friends. To use the first solution, your desire to get into this career and better

your life and feel proud of yourself must outweigh how much you love Friday nights out. You must keep in mind that your life will drastically change for the better if you can resist a few Friday nights. Otherwise, you will find the conflict too great to overcome and you will quit the class in favor of your friends.

Let’s apply the second solution for the same results. Instead of just giving up on your Friday night out, schedule a different night or drum up the energy to go out after class and spend just a little less time with your friends every Friday night. You’re turning a full sacrifice into a compromised sacrifice. The end result is a compromise that makes it possible to keep doing what you want while also working on your goals.

When faced with opportunity cost and potential sacrifice, keep in mind that your life can’t continue 100% as you want it to—but if you focus on increasing the benefit or minimizing the sacrifice, you can continue progress toward your goals while staying motivated and not listless.

Keep Your Motivation on Your Mind

Internal and external motivators are great ways to fuel the productivity and commitment required for following through. But they won’t do anything for you if they are out of sight and out of mind.

According to Psychological Science, people are more inclined to follow through if they are exposed to stimuli that remind them of their motivators. Seeing or hearing their motivators can drive them to maintain motivation. In other words, sometimes the simplest solutions work best: constant reminders will keep you on track because our minds can only fixate on so many things.
Additionally, Katherine Milkman of the University of Pennsylvania developed the hypothesis that reminders through association could aid people in remembering goals and following through with them.
To confirm this hypothesis, she conducted a study whose participants were asked to complete an hour-long computer task. They were promised compensation as well as a dollar donated to the local food bank. They were asked to make sure their donations were made by picking up paperclips when they got their compensation. The control group was told this and then thanked for their time. The test group was told that the paper clips would be waiting by an elephant

statue.
It turned out that 74% of the group told about the elephant statue remembered to get their paper clips at the end of the study. Only 42% of the members of the other group remembered to do this. Having the visual cue of the elephant statue actually made it easier for students to remember to complete the simple task. When students saw the unusual statue, it sparked their memories far more than ordinary-looking notes.
On top of that, Rogers and Milkman discovered that having very noticeable cues worked better than cues that did not stand out. For example, a written reminder did not remind study participants as well as a visual cue such as one of the aliens from Toy Story.
Therefore, the best way to make motivators work for you is to expose yourself to them often. You can use cues to help prompt you to keep your motivation in mind and thus to follow through. However, these cues also need to stand out to you.
For instance, use loud, vivid images that you can’t ignore, or employ other senses and include sounds, textures, and scents. Include a picture on your desk of your child to remind you to keep working toward your dream for a better financial future for your family—but make the picture frame smell of your child’s shampoo or your spouse’s perfume or cologne. To emphasize, we aren’t just talking about visual aids of putting Post-its everywhere—the cues we can use can be spread across our five senses in imaginative and creative ways.
However, be sure to move and change these cues around every few days so that you do not become too accustomed to them and start to ignore them as part of the background noise of your life.
Finally, you can also write your motivators down every few days with different phrasing. Again, be sure to change them up to avoid getting too used to them. The act of creating the cue each repeatedly helps to keep the motivation firm and fresh in your mind.

Takeaways:

	How do we stay hungry and motivated? By delving deep and really asking what internal and external motivators you have at your disposal
—a task that is rarely performed.
	External motivators are when we leverage other people, places, and

things to push us into action. For the most part, these are when we want to avoid negative consequences involving other people, places, and things. These methods include accountability partners and groups, putting money down upfront, and self-bribery.
	Internal motivators are when we look at how we stand to benefit and improve our lives. These are universal needs, drives, and desires that are easy to lose track of. The easy way to find these is to answer a set of questions that directly asks things such as how am I going to benefit from this and how does my life stand to improve from this? It’s only through answering these questions that you realize what you are neglecting.
	Anything we want to accomplish has an associated opportunity cost. We must sacrifice, even if we are sacrificing our ability to lie on the couch and watch television. We can deal with this mental obstacle by playing with the cost-benefit ratio so the cost is minimized or the benefit is maximized.
	Motivation has been shown to work best when we are reminded of it— otherwise, out of sight, out of mind. Thus, you should have cues you’re your motivations all around you—but make sure to keep them distinct and memorable, use all five senses (even taste), and make sure to change and switch them periodically to avoid growing used to them and forgetting them.

Chapter 3: Create a Manifesto










You will face forks in the road where you must deliberate between following through or giving up. Instead of having to make the hard decision and reach deep into your willpower toolbag every single time, having rules for yourself can help you decide which direction to take whenever you reach the fork.

We’ve been told since we were young that we have to follow rules. Well, this time we can choose our own rules that will ultimately help us accomplish exactly what we want.

Rules can generally be called mental models, which can be critical to follow- through. This is because they create a set way that you have to make every decision, no exceptions. With your decisions already made for you by your rules, you thus make decisions automatically and you no longer have room to make the wrong decision based on waning willpower and self-discipline, which is to give up.

Rules hold you accountable so that you are not winging it every day but instead are guided. Use your rules to guide your worldview and your daily actions. Let them make every decision for you.

A good example of a rule is to always complete two tasks on your to-do list for your goal every day. It’s simply unacceptable to not do this—you have to complete the steps no matter what. As a result, you’ll find that you make progress toward your goal, even when you don’t want to. The choice was out of your hands. Deciding to work each day is not your decision to make; it has

already been made for you by your rule, and thus you have no choice but to do it.

Consider an example of when John, a writer, doesn’t use the rule of always completing two steps on his to-do list.

In the morning, he is excited and thinks, “After work, I will go home and start writing my novel! I will write two chapters.” Then he goes to work and grows fatigued and loses his inspiration slowly but surely throughout the day. By the time he gets home, all he wants to do is watch Gossip Girl. So since he does not have this rule in place, he fails to write. He has made zero progress and is far from his goal. The sense of guilt that plagues him is horrible. As he goes to bed, he vows to himself that he will make up for the lost progress by writing four chapters tomorrow.

What do you think will happen then? He comes home tired and defeated again. He lets the fact that work drains him become his excuse for not writing. Moreover, since he faces the monumental task of writing four chapters today, it feels impossible to start on. If he didn’t have energy for two chapters the night before, he certainly won’t have the energy for four chapters tonight. He gets overwhelmed and doesn’t write at all. It seems as if he will never finish this novel because he always finds some excuse to let himself off of the hook from actually writing.

He gave himself too much choice and leeway and thus allowed self-sabotage all too easily.

Now let’s consider if John applied the rule every day, which is black and white and doesn’t care about fatigue. No matter how tired and uninspired he feels, he knows that he has to write two chapters a night after work, no exceptions and no excuses. So when he gets home, he looks at his computer and he feels tempted to just go watch TV and conserve his energy by being lazy. But because he follows a rule in his life, he can’t break it and so he has to write. In fact, he plans for it all day because he knows it’s coming. He sits down and tackles the two chapters and goes to bed exhausted but contented and proud of himself. He has made significant progress on his novel. Pretty soon, he is done with his novel and the feeling of accomplishment is worth the energy he had to spend on the novel

when he was drained after work.

Rules help you follow through because they limit your vision. When you are robbed of your decision-making power—the same power that leads you to fiddle with social media when important tasks need to be done—then your hands are tied and following through is the only choice you have.

This chapter is about creating a set of rules, collectively a manifesto, for you to follow every time you come across a fork in the road. They push and guide you into the right direction and avoid depleting the willpower you do have. Here are a few ideas for you.

Rule 1: Evaluate Yourself

Rule 1 is to ask yourself, “If not for laziness or fear, would I be giving up?” This makes it very clear to yourself that you are not acting out of a lack of ability or talent, but rather you are just taking the easy way out. Is that what you want to admit to yourself? When you face the fact that you are being lazy or fearful head-on, it makes you not want to be that way anymore. It’s the kick in the butt that forces you to call yourself lazy/fearful and then drives you to take action.

Realizing that only fear or laziness stands in your way helps you realize how silly that is so you get over it. So before you give up, make it a rule that you always ask yourself if it is laziness or fear that is holding you back from action.

Let’s say that you have a goal to make a certain amount of money by delivering so many projects to your clients in a month. But the work is hard and you find yourself losing motivation. You want to stop working and take several days off. Ask yourself, “Am I just being lazy?” That kicks your butt into gear and you take action. You do your work and you feel better about yourself knowing that you are doing the best you can.

Rule 2: Three Tasks Maximum

Rule 2 is to focus on three things a day maximum. Only. Tops. Being overwhelmed or disorganized can kill your ability to get things done. Sometimes we can’t follow through on what we want because we don’t plan smartly. We

give ourselves too much to do and we become overwhelmed. But using this rule enables you to plan against that problem by only allowing yourself to focus on three things a day maximum. Plan how to reduce your focus to only three things by deciding on what they are going to be the night before. Prepare to focus only on those things so that you can plan logically and not react emotionally.

One setback you’ll face when you attempt to limit yourself to three main tasks a day is differentiation. Specifically, you will need to learn to differentiate between important things and urgent things. Important things must be done and should make it to your top three, while urgent things are not necessary.

Urgent things will seem important and will cause you stress, but they may not actually be important or take priority. An urgent thing might be making time for a harried client who is rushing you. Meanwhile, getting a project to a client before the deadline is an example of an important task. Everything on your agenda will appear important and urgent so you must determine which is which and plan accordingly.

Similarly, differentiate between useless motion that looks busy but gets nothing done and actual action, which is movement toward what you want. Useless motion is shifting papers around your desk, while actual action is using those papers to get work done and make progress on a project. Make what really matters the priority.

How might you use this rule is to set an agenda for yourself? Suppose you have five tasks to do for your business. Two of the tasks are not really important and only appear to be since they are urgent, so you decide to focus on them later.

You pick three tasks to focus on, and you evaluate which one is most important so that you can focus on that first. The night before, look at those three items on your to-do list and determine what steps you will take in actual action to complete those items, starting with the most important one. The next day, take that actual action for your first task, then your second, then your third. Only complete one task at a time and do not multitask. By the close of the workday, you just completed three major tasks at a realistic pace!

Rule 3: Create Limitations and Requirements

Rule 3 is to make actual rules for yourself. Create an actual code of conduct for you to follow in terms of being more disciplined and following through more. Write your code down in detail and then post it in a visible area. While you may not adhere to all of them every day, you at least stand a better chance of follow- through when you actually take the time to think about your code of conduct and write them down.

The rules should focus on creating either limitations or requirements for what you do each day so that you actually take initiative and get tasks done.

This rule forces you to determine what you really need and want and analyze what you hope to achieve. Basically, you are stopping to check yourself and evaluate how you are progressing toward your ultimate goal. It helps you focus more on your intentions and clarify them, making them an integral part of your work ethic. So when you set out to accomplish something, you have a rule in place to make yourself follow through on the project.

Give yourself five daily limitations and five daily requirements. Make clear statements about what you cannot do and what you must do.

Limitations are relatively easy to understand. They limit distraction and temptation. As for requirements, understand that you are not Superman or Superwoman, so you can’t overload yourself. Instead, work smarter and have five requirements that you can reasonably meet. You may not always adhere to this rule, but you at least have some guidance for yourself. In addition, you gain some clarity about what you have cut out for you each day.

An example is to set a limitation that you will not watch more than one hour of TV a day, you will not spend more than an hour on Facebook, and you will not take longer than a one-hour lunch break. Meanwhile, your requirements are that you must read at least 30 pages a day, you must complete at least four hours of work before lunch, and you must complete eight hours of work total by the time you sign out or clock out of work.

Rule 4: Reaffirm Your Intentions

Rule 4 is quite similar to rule 1. This rule comes into play when you are faced with a fork in the road between deciding to follow through or not. This rule seeks to reaffirm your intentions by reminding yourself what they are and why you want to achieve them.

When you find yourself deliberating between quitting and following through, ask these three questions to yourself. Better yet, have the answers written somewhere so you can look over again.

“I want…” This is where you state your end goal and how you will benefit from it. What is your reason and motivation? Keep reminding yourself of the external or internal motivators that you have on your side. Remind yourself something like, “I want to be rich.”

“I will…” This is where you state how you must reach that end goal and all the work you should be doing to get there. This statement brings your attention back to how necessary it is to complete what you are currently doing and how these tasks tie into the end goal. The journey is a necessary part of the goal. It helps for you to be very specific in this statement to see what actions you really do have to take. For example, tell yourself, “If I want to be rich, I will need to finish this project and work hard on other projects.”

“I won’t…” This is where you state what you shouldn’t do because that action will impede your progress toward your end goal. There are many things detrimental to your progress, including distractions, temptations, lack of discipline, procrastination, and other destructive or wasteful actions. Tell yourself something like, “If I want to be rich, I won’t distract myself with social media and I won’t prioritize social media over my work projects.”

Let’s apply this concept to a potential real-life conundrum that you may encounter. As you work to complete a certification program necessary to get a pay raise at work, you find the volume of work overwhelming and you despise having so little free time on your hands. You contemplate giving up and saying “whatever” to the certification. After all, you have a job, so do you really need to advance yourself anymore?

As you contemplate this, realize that this is the time when you should apply this

rule because you have hit a fork in the road of follow-through. You choose to implement the rule and you state three things to yourself:

“I want to make more money at work and be able to afford a nicer home for myself and a future family.”

“If I want to have more money and move into a better place, I will finish this certification program in order to get a raise at work.”

“If I want to make more money at work and move into a better place, I won’t let myself get discouraged and stop doing the work to complete this program or be thrown off track by simple temptations or laziness.”

You have just stated your intentions from beginning to end. As you may have noticed, a running theme in this book is that repetition helps follow through, and presence of mind is key. We may have the best intentions, but if we simply forget about them, then what good are they? When you face these questions constantly—your end goal and the steps you must take to reach, as well as the steps you must not take to reach it—it all becomes crystal clear.

Rule 5: Think in Terms of 10-10-10

The next time you feel that you’re about to give in to an urge or temptation, stop and ask yourself how you will feel 10 minutes, 10 hours, and 10 days from now. This rule may not seem all that powerful, but it’s effective because it forces you to think about your future self and to see how your actions are going to affect yourself in the future—for better or worse. A lot of times, we may know that we are losing willpower or doing something harmful in the moment, but that’s not enough to stop us from doing it because we don’t have any connection to our future self that will have to deal with the consequences. This rule quickly creates that connection, and that can make the difference between a success or failure of discipline.

Why time intervals of 10 minutes, hours, and days? Because that helps you realize how short-term the pleasure or comfort of a discipline is relative to its long-term consequences. At 10 minutes, you might be feeling good, with perhaps just the initial bit of shame creeping in. After 10 hours, you’ll feel

mostly shame a regret. Ten days later, you might be consumed by regret having realized some of the negative consequences that your decision or action has had on your pursuit of your long-term goals.

On the other hand, you might apply this rule and realize that a lapse in following through now won’t make a difference 10 days into the future. If that’s the case, then you can indulge a bit without guilt or shame.

For example, imagine that you apply this rule when deciding whether or not to skip a workout to go to dinner with coworkers. If you’ve just begun exercising and haven’t built it into a consistent habit yet, your decision to skip a single workout might increase the odds of skipping future workouts or stopping working out altogether.

How will you feel in 10 minutes, hours, and days? Ten minutes—good, with a slight tinge of regret, as you can still taste the lasagna or ice cream. The pleasure is still tangible. Ten hours—almost entirely regret, as the pleasure is gone and fleeting, and your diet has been soundly broken. Ten days—100% regret, because the broken discipline is now completely meaningless and but a faint memory. The lasagna does not have a lasting benefit, but it does have a lasting cost.

On the other hand, if exercising is already a consistent and enjoyable habit for you, then imagining how you’ll feel 10 days from now will quickly show you that one skipped workout isn’t harmful to your long-term discipline or goals.

And when you’re not swayed by this rule or your dilemma of willpower is extra difficult, you can add a final question for yourself. That is, how will breaking willpower now affect you in 10 weeks or even longer-term? You might want to change the parameters to 10 weeks if you’re mostly engaged in longer-term decisions and tasks.

In this process, it’s crucial to be honest with yourself and wary of your own abilities to rationalize and make excuses. For example, you may have tried to quit an addictive habit many times in the past, only to fail and eventually reinforce the harmful behavior. If you have a history of falling into bad habits after a single lapse in discipline, then an honest assessment of how you would

feel after 10 days or 10 weeks will tell you that you simply can’t afford a lapse in discipline now if you’re going to achieve your long-term goals. It wasn’t an exception or justified in that one circumstance—it is a reflection of your character for better or worse.

Without that honesty and ability to see your own rationalizing and excuses for what they are, applying this rule may be a futile exercise.

Rule 6: Just 10 Minutes

The final rule is simple, easy, and powerful.

If you want something negative, harmful, or detrimental to your follow through, wait at least 10 minutes before getting it. It’s simple and leaves no room for debate or excuses. When you feel an urge, force yourself to wait for 10 minutes before giving in to whatever the urge is. If you’re still craving it after 10 minutes, then have it. Or wait 10 more minutes because you’ve already done it and survived just fine. Simply by choosing to wait you remove the “immediate” from immediate gratification—building discipline and improving decision- making.

Similarly, if you want to quit something beneficial, wait just 10 more minutes. It’s the same thought process applied in a different way. Ten minutes is nothing, so you can wait or continue that long easily. Then, if you do it once, it’s easy to repeat, isn’t it? In other words, say to yourself “just 10 minutes more of willpower” each time you reach a fork in the road.

Another benefit of this rule is the purposeful escalation of good habits. If you’ve forced yourself to do something productive for 10 minutes, you might end up doing it for 15 or even 20 minutes more. Next time, your tolerance will build such that you’re more immune to temptation and distraction—the following time you might continue for an extra six or seven minutes.

Every time you feel distracted, just exercise willpower for a few minutes longer, and you’ll steadily follow through better with each escalation. At some iteration of “just 10 minutes more” you’ll reach a point of momentum, and that’s often enough to carry you for hours.

Takeaways:

	A manifesto is nothing more than a set of rules to follow every day. We might hate rules, but rules take the guesswork out of our days and give us guidelines to follow. They make matters black and white, which is helpful to following through because there is simply no other choice.
	Rule 1: Are you acting out of laziness? If so, is this a characterization you want about yourself?
	Rule 2: Three major tasks a day, maximum. Differentiate between important tasks, urgent tasks, and simple wasted motion.
	Rule 3: Create daily limitations and requirements for yourself. These keep you within the bounds of what you know you need to do. These are also the building blocks of good habits.
	Rule 4: Sometimes we lose sight of what we want to accomplish. Thus, reaffirm your intentions by stating “I want,” “I will,” and “I won’t” statements.
	Rule 5: Try to look into the future, 10 minutes, hours, and days at a time. Do you like what you see when you consider not following through? Is it worth the benefit to the current self at the expense of the future self? Probably not.
	Rule 6: It’s just 10 minutes, right? So if you want to quit, it’s just 10 minutes. And if you need to wait, it’s just 10 minutes.

Chapter 4: Follow-Through Mindsets










Follow-through is 100% mental. It takes a cognitive effort to follow through on something, especially when you hit discouraging obstacles. Mindsets help with that.

What is a mindset? A mindset is a set way of visualizing and approaching situations and problems. Certain mindsets are all it takes to find the will and motivation necessary to follow through on something.

Gerald is an example of someone with a mindset that impeded with his progress. Gerald had many aspirations to create his own business. He was determined in spirit and relished the idea of one day being a well-known and rich entrepreneur like Steve Jobs. While he knew that success is not just something easy that anyone can grab, he did not realize how sometimes success calls for uncomfortable situations.

When he actually endeavored to start his own business, he ran into a lot of situations that cause him fear. For example, he had to make a monetary investment and it terrified him to think that he may lose his money and never get it back. This fear made Gerald uncomfortable. Another thing he hated was having to conserve his money and cut expenses and luxuries he didn’t need to devote more money to his start-up. Living without the luxuries he was used to made him quite uncomfortable as well—so much so that he could not handle it.

Instead of adapting to uncomfortable situations and embracing new things that made him feel scared, Gerald freaked out. He decided that the lifestyle of an

entrepreneur was not worth it. He liked the idea but was not prepared for the reality. Finding out that starting up a new business was not all sunshine and rainbows made him give up on it. Instead of starting his dream company and having a shot at becoming the next Steve Jobs, Gerald settled back into the job that he hated simply because it was comfortable to him. He never amounted to much and never reached his dreams as a result.

Gerald’s mindset was negative, to say the least. He refused to deal with discomfort or make sacrifices that were mildly unpleasant for his dream career. He preferred what he knew over the unknown, even though what he knew did not satisfy him as much as his dream would have satisfied him. That mindset made him choose to approach the situation from the vantage point that it was all bad and not worth it. He focused on the negative and the discomfort and he refused to work around it.

Gerald may have succeeded at his goal had he held a different mindset. But his collection of poor and inflexible mental habits caused him to approach problems incorrectly, which left him with no hope for success. He let himself fail by approaching problems in the wrong way and eventually giving up.

Had he decided to become comfortable with discomfort, he never would have given up just because the going got tough at one point. He could have adjusted to the discomfort of making sacrifices and embracing unknown scary situations, which would have made him better able to found his business and become an entrepreneur.

Mindset 1: It’s Worthwhile
Consider what the Chicago Consortium on School Reform (along with many other educational experts) says motivates students to persevere even when things become difficult at school. Three concepts contribute to student success, which are easily transferable to our adult lives.
The first concept is holding the belief that hard work can and will lead to improvement. No matter how hard things get, it is your efforts that will get you the results you desire, nothing else. Everything else is a byproduct of luck—the hard work itself is a prerequisite. Of course, hard work doesn’t overcome everything, but it’s an essential component that cannot be skipped.

The second concept is having the confidence that you, and people like you, belong in school and that school is a place where you can thrive. You can apply this to settings outside of school.
The heart of this concept is that you believe in yourself and that you are just as good as anyone else. Basically, you need to believe in your own abilities and trust in your opportunities. Don’t create self-limiting beliefs that hold you back, such as thinking that you are not as good as everyone else. This belief is illustrated by feeling that you also have valuable input at a business meeting or that you have just as much ability to handle a client as everyone else in the office.
The final concept is holding the belief that what you are doing is valuable and relevant to your goals. Why would you stick with doing something if you don’t see how it benefits you or helps you reach your goals? That would undermine entire chapters of this book.
Understanding why you do something and how it fits into the big picture of what you are trying to accomplish makes it seem more worthwhile. You won’t want to quit an endeavor if you think that it is getting you somewhere. You don’t even have to see instant gratification and goal completion to know that you are on the right track. Assigning value and remembering how each thing you do ties into your main goal is very important because it helps you feel that you are doing well just by working.
There is a point to everything you do, so every action you take is valuable. An example of this concept at work would be when you feel that the classes you are taking for your degree are pointless. Remember that they are not pointless, because they are leading to your graduation, which in turn will lead to your dream job in the field of your interest.
These concepts can help you because they lend value and meaning to your work, and they can make you feel like you are making a difference just by following through and executing.
Mindset 2: Comfort with Discomfort
Another critical mindset is believing that your journey to success will become supremely uncomfortable at times, so you need to get comfortable with discomfort. Following through is never comfortable because it asks you to do things that are unfamiliar and new. To be successful and never give up, you need to minimize negative consequences of uncomfortable situations by getting immunized to the sense of discomfort.

Sometimes, you feel the need to avoid something that will lead to success out of discomfort. Maybe you are avoiding extra work because you are fatigued, or you are avoiding talking to new people because it makes you nervous. You are actively shutting out success because you want to avoid being uncomfortable for a little while.
Therefore, overcoming your instinct to avoid things just because they are uncomfortable for you at first is essential. Change is always uncomfortable, but it is key to doing things differently in order to find that magical formula for success. Try doing new things outside of your comfort zone. Do something new, try to learn new skills, talk to new people, and practice new actions that you are bad at until you are good at them. Expose yourself to new situations and things. The unfamiliarity will feel very uncomfortable, but you will not be able to expand your horizons and achieve success any other way.
The more you do things that make you uncomfortable, the more comfortable you become with discomfort. You will find that discomfort is a temporary emotion that leaves with exposure to the situation. The benefits of being uncomfortable far outweigh the mild and fleeting unpleasantness of the sensation. Your mind will come to stop fearing discomfort so much when it realizes that discomfort does not actually hurt you.
Meanwhile, staying comfortable by only doing what you know is a bad idea. It is the recipe for complacency and for staying static. You will not make any changes if you do what you always do.
Don’t ever give up on things just because they call for some change and discomfort. Discomfort is merely your fear instinct at play and does not actually hurt you, so getting comfortable with it is a good idea.
You can choose to stay home and not meet new people, or you can choose to go out and make valuable connections that will help you reach your goals. You can choose to never learn a new language, or you can choose to learn it and find a wealth of new business opportunities, such as fun jobs overseas or well-paying jobs in translation. By repeatedly going to language classes and talking to new people, you will become conditioned to the sensation of going out of your comfort zone. Thus, you will become comfortable with being uncomfortable. Then you will stop fearing discomfort and you will open yourself up to some positive changes in your life. Just push yourself consistently every day and try new things to expand the edges of your comfort zone and make your life what you dream about.

Mindset 3: Allow Learning
This mindset entails developing the viewpoint that following through and finishing equals learning and evaluating yourself. You are essentially testing and scoring yourself based on your progress. Giving up is an automatic failure.
When you finish something, on the other hand, you ace the test. You get to see how you do and you get to evaluate your performance. You also gain a lot of valuable skills and information that can help form your success and enable you to try again with better success should you ever fail at something.
You only learn certain things if you see them through to the end. You are in a constant state of seeking information and knowledge, which you can only gain when you complete a project in its entirety. Otherwise, you don’t catch the full glimpse of how things work. You get to learn about what it takes to finish something and what you are made of if you follow through. If you don’t follow through, then you don’t learn all that you have to do and you don’t learn anything about yourself except that you are lazy or afraid or a failure.
You can also teach yourself what doesn’t work. If you follow through to the end and still don’t succeed, you can evaluate your work and see where you went wrong. Then you can avoid that issue in the future. You can become more successful in the future as a result. View life as a series of lessons that you can use for future betterment.
Viewing your endeavors as quests for knowledge can make challenges seem less daunting. It takes the fear out of failing because you still gain knowledge. You will be less inclined to just give up when faced with a challenge because you instead want to learn how to work around the challenge. You want to see what happens when you try something to overcome the challenge. You will gain no knowledge if you don’t follow through, so you have to have the mindset to leap over challenges more fearlessly.
One way to adopt this mindset is to ask yourself, “What can I learn from this?” That breeds a thirst for knowledge, which can be infinitely more motivating than any other mindset. You get curious and you want to see what the finish line looks like. You want to gain the experience that your endeavor can give you, so you go after follow-through in order to get that experience.
Mindset 4: De-Stress
Stress affects how much willpower and self-control you have. You may not be consciously aware, but think about how little you can get done if you’re stressed

out or anxious. Even more so if you’re simply tired and fatigued. Your working spirit is more delicate than you might imagine, which is why it’s important to protect it and de-stress.
An Australian study showed that students who were stressed because of their exams neglected healthy habits like maintaining a proper diet, getting enough sleep, and exercising. They also smoked more, consumed more caffeine, struggled with controlling their emotions, and paid less attention to household chores, self-care habits, commitments, and spending.
It’s easy to conclude the following: if you fail to take care of your mental health, your discipline and willpower quickly deteriorate. Prevent this situation by introducing stress-reducing habits in your life. Each day, spend at least 30 minutes doing relaxing activities. Meet with friends. Read a book. Listen to music. Meditate. Exercise. Cuddle. Take a walk in the woods. Whatever works for you to unwind and turn your brain off.
It’s important to relax when you can and overall be aware of your affect—the psychological term for the emotions you are feeling and overall temperament.
Why? Because negative affect is among the most important triggers of self- control failure. For instance, depressed people desire specific things that bring immediate gratification and procrastinate or avoid any activity that involves effort. Emotional distress causes a behavioral shift toward immediate improvements in mood, and so people make poor decisions. This gets even worse when you realize that projection bias occurs every day without our conscious knowledge.

Projection bias is when people falsely project their current feelings onto their future feelings. If you feel depressed, stressed, and tired, you imagine you’ll feel that way next time you want to follow through and finish something. Of course, there’s no correlation, but people routinely fail to see that there is no solid connection between these feelings.

For example, people condemn junk food when they aren’t hungry without realizing how much they want those delicious cookies once they are hungry. When you plan your diet, you are probably calm and in a mood to make drastic changes. You can also see projection bias as overenthusiasm that your current feelings are how you will feel about something forever.

Point being? Don’t underestimate the impact of stress on your ability to follow through.

Takeaways:

	Following through is 100% mental, which means it’s probably a good idea to talk about the mindsets you attempt to embody.
	Mindset 1: It’s all worthwhile. If you feel that your hard work will get you somewhere, you belong and are as good as anyone else, and you feel impact toward your overall goals, execution is easier to stick with.
	Mindset 2: Become comfortable with discomfort. Everything you want to do will have elements of discomfort, unless you just want to watch television all day by yourself. Thus, becoming used to this feeling allows you to tackle what you want without fear.
	Mindset 3: Without following through, there is no learning. Only when you finish something can you evaluate yourself and correct your errors. Embody an information-gathering mindset.
	Mindset 4: The detrimental power of stress and anxiety can’t be overstated. Even being in a poor mood is dangerous to your productivity and follow-through. Be aware and take proactive measures to modulate your stress levels.

Chapter 5: The Science of Smashing Procrastination










Procrastination is a huge problem in following through. How can you approach it effectively?

Madeleine has a big project coming up soon. Her deadline is in a week. She knows that to meet this deadline, she has to complete 15 pages of code a day. But when it comes down to it, she just cannot work. So she puts it off, planning to write 30 the next day to make up for lost progress. Then she can’t write 30 pages so she puts it off and now has to write 45. Now she is right on her deadline with almost no code written.

She pulls an all-nighter and sends in a code that is rife with errors. She ran into many challenges with this code that she did not have time to solve because she was so far behind in work. The client rejects the code and is not happy. Madeleine just earned a bad review and no repeat client.

Michelle works on the same types of projects. Unlike Madeleine, Michelle understands what her challenges may be. She breaks the work into small, manageable parts and writes what she can each day and gives herself rewards for every section she completes. Usually she is able to meet or exceed the 15 pages minimum quota that she has set for herself. At the end of the week, she compiles the code with no errors and sends it to her client. He is very happy to have a working code that runs well and he pays her well. She earns a five-star review and the client is eager to hire her again for future projects.

The difference between these two coders is that Michelle succeeded at her

project by not procrastinating. She used a system called temptation bundling to ensure that she did not put off work. That gave her plenty of time to not only write code but to find and fix bugs. Madeleine did not use this foresight so she produced poor-quality work. You can see how procrastination leads to intense stress, frustration, and sloppy work.

We all know what procrastination is. But why is such a common issue in people trying to meet deadlines and get quality work done? There are some answers regarding this covered by behavioral psychology.

The main component in this self-defeating habit is called time inconsistency. This is where humans value immediate and instant gratification over long-term rewards.

Imagine that you have two selves, a present self and a future self. In this instance, they are completely different people with different desires that do not overlap. When you make goals, you are making plans for your future self. It is easy to plan for what is best for your future self. You can see what you need in the future and you want that so you plan for it. Researchers have found that envisioning your ideal future reality is quite easy.

However, only your present self can actually do anything. To make goals reality, your present self has to take action. Sadly, your present self wants rewards now. It does not want to wait to see the results in the future. So it wants to avoid having to do work for long-term goals, favoring instead tasks that reward you right now. For example, you want to get a big project done to make money, but you really need a nap. You are going to choose the nap over work because that’s an immediate reward for your present self. Meanwhile, you are hurting your future self by napping instead of working.

Your future self wants goals that pay out at some future date after work performed in the present. The present self wants rewards that pay out now, which in turn often hurt your chances to get your future self its long-term rewards.

The best way to counteract time inconsistency is to move future long-term rewards into the present more effectively. That way, your present self sees the

benefit and wants to stick to the long-term program. Waiting for a future reward is often not sufficient to motivate your present self because your present self does not want to wait.

Temptation Bundling

Temptation bundling is an excellent and efficient way to kill procrastination and increase productivity by combining present and future selves and their conflicting needs.

This takes the above concept and introduces the means to reducing temptation to neglect your future self in the present moment. Conceived by behavioral Katy Milkman at the University of Pennsylvania, temptation bundling is a way to blend both future and present self needs by making future rewards more immediate. You give yourself instant gratification in the present while also achieving goals that benefit your future self in the long-term.

It’s simpler than it sounds.

Basically, you make a positive (but difficult) behavior or habit in the long-term feel good at the present moment as well. Think eating Twinkies while working out, working out while watching TV, or doing work while soaking your feet in a salt bath—these are examples of ways to make the long-term feel good at the present moment.

There is no need to suffer in the present to get something done for your future self; if you do suffer, then you will lose all motivation and procrastinate. So find ways to bundle your temptations with your long-term goals. In other words, pair your obligations with instantaneous rewards.

Milkman found that up to 51% of her study participants were willing to exercise with temptation bundling. It is an effective means to correct procrastination habits. You should make a list with two columns, one side being your guilty pleasures or temptations and the other side being things you need to do for your future self. Then figure out creative ways to link the two conflicting columns in harmony.

Suppose you like chocolate, surfing, soccer, and running. But work, homework, and piano lessons stand in your way. How might you combine things to make the unpleasurable more tolerable?

Small, Easy Increments

Another way to mitigate procrastination is to start in small, easy increments. Really, you want to break tasks down into minuscule, microscopic components. This makes your first step seem incredibly easy—and taking that first step is the hardest part with procrastination.

Think of procrastination as an enormous wall you must climb. If you collect enough small pebbles and rocks, you can eventually create a step for yourself high enough to simply walk over the wall. You can collect boulders the size of your torso, and you may get the same result, but it’s a much tougher road.

Just make sure your barriers to starting are extremely low. For example, you can even complete 95% of a task and leave the remaining 5% as a starter task for later, so you can get back in the swing of things easily. Doing this breaks inertia and enables you to gain forward momentum. You gain momentum by working and creating work that you can build off of later as you tackle the harder parts of the project.

Small and easy increments involve two key parts. The first part is to break your tasks into smaller, more manageable steps. Don’t view your task as one huge boulder that you have to get done all at once. Rather, view it as a series of steps to take from Point A to Point B. Your mind will thank you for this as things suddenly seem easier and more doable. An example of this is to view the writing project you have ahead of you as a series of paragraphs only 100 words long.

Maybe you have to write 100 pages, but don’t look at it that way. Look it as taking baby steps with short paragraphs. After you complete so many paragraphs, you have written your 100 pages. Small tasks build up rapidly, especially when you are not procrastinating, so create tiny, mentally palatable steps that you can take to build something monumental and reach your ultimate goal. A book is composed of words, after all.

The second part is to start with the easiest tasks first. This may seem counterintuitive. Why would you leave all the hard stuff for later? Remember that procrastination is about making the first step as easy as possible. You are encouraging yourself and proving to your mind that this task is more than possible with each easy task that you tick off your to-do list. By the time you reach the harder tasks, they will seem more attainable and surmountable to your mind since your mind has already done a lot of work.

Inertia is the force that builds as you are at rest. On the other hand, momentum is the drive to keep moving forward until you get everything done. Your task here is to break inertia and gain momentum. Small and easy increments accomplish that because nothing else will get you moving more quickly.

Back to the writing example: consider how you can do the easy parts, such as the outline and the research notes. Write the parts that take the least effort first. Get the bulk of it done, the easy and simple things that are not hard but that take up a lot of time. Leave the hardest 5% of the writing for last for when you have momentum. You will not feel so frustrated and overwhelmed, and thus you will not consider this writing task a huge sacrifice that taxes your present self. You will accomplish it and not suffer, which offers some pleasure to your present self.

Consider Risks
A final tactic is to consider what may go wrong. Being hypervigilant about what may go wrong is a tactic employed by highly successful and productive people like Bill Gates. Jim Collins explores this tactic in his book Great By Choice. Referring to this as productive paranoia, he discusses how people like Bill Gates were constantly paranoid about what may go wrong. By always planning for the worst and trying to avoid the worst, these people actually ended up working extremely hard. They were always focused on their projects just to avoid the worst possible scenarios. As a result, fear motivated them and kept them from procrastination.
Be paranoid and start to question what could go wrong. Think about making contingency plans and working to avoid certain challenges or problems. Thinking about what can go wrong can serve to make you work to avoid things going wrong. As a result, you become more productive just because you are afraid and hypervigilant at the moment.

Be sure to ask yourself how you might lose out if you delay taking action at this moment. The opportunity may go to someone more proactive. Your opportunity may even simply go away, since many things are time-sensitive. Consider how disastrous it could be to your success. The fear of losing out will motivate you. Sure, fear is not a pleasant motivator. But if it works, why not use it? Knowing that you are in danger of some kind kicks you into overdrive. Procrastination comes from boredom, complacency, and safety, so stripping those feelings away can leave you paranoid and eager to avoid bad consequences.
Of course, fear is not a fun motivator, so only use this tactic in small, safe doses. Doing it too much can really drain you and stress you out. As we all know, stress is damaging to your working spirit. Avoid stress and only use this tactic when you begin to feel an intense temptation to procrastinate.
Our opening example of Madeleine could have used fear to help her detect possible mistakes and thus to motivate herself to write her code each day. Using fear, she would have planned to leave plenty of wiggle room in her schedule so that she could properly compile the code and ensure that there were no errors in her code writing. She would have anticipated possible errors and would have worked each day in order to give herself time to catch and fix these errors.
Takeaways:
	Tackling procrastination is similar to pushing Sisyphus’s stone. You can beat it back for a bit, but it’s so natural that you will never be fully rid of it. The problem is typified by time inconsistency, where we comprise two selves that don’t have overlapping desires—one wants gratification in the future and the other wants it right now.
	Temptation bundling is an effective method to battle procrastination. It consists of combining your unpleasurable tasks with something pleasurable. This mainly works because you are battling time inconsistency and giving both selves what they want simultaneously.
	Start easy and small. Procrastination thrives off inertia. Therefore, you need to make the path to motion and action as easy as possible. Then eventually you can gain momentum—the opposite of inertia.
	Sometimes beating procrastination just requires a kick in the pants. Fear and productive paranoia can do that to you—if you are so fearful of the negative repercussions you will face, then you will certainly be spurred into action. But this is not a method to use very frequently.