Articles

For part 3 of this series, I have one simple idea to share – the idea that self-control is bullsh*t! Sometimes people say they don’t know how I accomplish certain things and that they could never have the self-control to do the same. The sad truth is I have little self-control! Research shows that self-control is finite and it’s one of the precious resources we rebuild while we sleep. I imagine it as a gas meter - when I wake up for the day it’s at roughly 90-95%. I’ll explain why it’s not 100% in a minute. Many of the most successful people in the world’s top 1% of any field have the same idea about themselves, namely that it’s the habits they’ve built and the way they make “self-control” easy in their lives that makes them successful. The secret to self-control is simple: prepare your environment to limit the need to use self-control. The most successful people don’t have to worry about self-control because they don’t keep temptations around to deplete that gas meter! Here’s an example: You’re in the kitchen about to rush to work and need some breakfast. You know you shouldn’t eat out of the box of cookies for breakfast, but you haven’t made any eggs and you don’t have anything healthy quickly accessible. You have a decision to make now, make the eggs or grab a cookie. You’ve lost some of the gas in your self-control meter just by thinking about the decision and instead of making the eggs you grab a cookie anyway. The only way to avoid this decision and the loss of self-control is to get rid of the cookies and have a healthier option readily available prepped from a day before. Other common examples include keeping alcohol out of sight, your phone out of reach and out of mind, getting your gym clothes and morning ready the night before, and my personal favorite, putting your alarm away from your bed so you have to walk across the room or house to turn it off. Now here’s the “bad news” – you still need to have and use self-control in many of your daily decisions. The goal is to limit these decisions to important ones and avoid the possibility of bad decisions like cookies for breakfast. If your daily habits are sound you won’t have to worry about the little things that compound and make life more difficult. Sleep, diet, hygiene, physical fitness, and even the clothes you wear should be on autopilot as much as possible. You’ll have more self-control in the gas tank every time you can automate the simple things and more gas available for important things like business, financial, moral, and family decisions. Now, why do I start the day with 90-95% of my gas? It takes me a decent amount self-control not to hit snooze. I will literally sleep on the hardwood floor, naked, in the cold if I have the option to. It takes the first bit of self-control not to get back in bed every single day. I’ve always been a late sleeper and I can sleep almost anywhere so it takes the from the night before plus the first bit of my self-control to get the day started. My biggest and first task for every night is, “get up on time.” The good news is that it takes slightly less self-control each morning because I build the habit of getting up and getting more meaningful sh*t done every day. My task for you today is simple: If you’re reading this at night, use the last bit of self-control you have for the day to prepare your morning. Write the first 1-3 tasks you need to accomplish in the morning, prepare your clothes for the gym or work, set your phone and alarm out of reach of your bed, and read 2 pages of a book while you fall asleep. If this is your morning, write out the high-level tasks you have for the rest of the day and make a few small environment changes to limit your need for self-control. Throw away the junk food, fill up your water bottle, organize yourself enough to get to tonight, and prepare even better for tomorrow. Make the habits of self-control part of your habit stacking routine and go crush the day!

Part two of this series will introduce what’s called the Habit Feedback Loop, a secret weapon for learning how to break bad habits and build awesome new ones. The Habit Feedback Loop is simple; our habits, whether good or bad, are structured into 4 main stages. These are: Cue Craving Response Reward Most of our habits are so deeply engrained we don’t even know we have them. Brushing our teeth, biting our nails, or checking our email 47 times a day. All these habits begin with a cue that triggers a craving, motivating a response, and providing a reward. Let’s take a theoretical approach and use eating fast food as an example. It’s 5:30 pm and you’re on the drive home from a draining end of day meeting. You’re stuck in traffic and you catch the big golden arches out of the corner of your eye – the cue. Now you’re hungry (the craving) and you know you have another 30 minutes to get home before you can even start to cook food. Just this once, you pull off the highway and into the drive through to order – the response. You stuff your face, your hunger is satisfied with a quarter pound of beef and salty fries, and your dopamine has gone through the roof – the reward. Now “just this once” may become a slippery slope. Cue Golden Arches Craving Tasty Fast Food Response Order fast food Reward No longer hungry This feedback loop works the same for every habit we have and the great thing about this is that we can define what causes us to follow through with our bad habits while also setting ourselves up for success with good habits. For today we’ll focus on one idea – Define the cue for your habits and make them obvious or invisible. Good Cues should be made obvious and bad cues should be made invisible. Good Cue – Make it obvious. Want to take your vitamins more? Put them right next to your toothbrush so you can’t miss them. Want to continue moving towards your goals relentlessly? Put NVR REST gear all over your home! Bad Cue – Make it invisible. Want to stop eating cookies ever night? Throw away the cookies! Every time you perform a habit you want to get rid of define what the cue was and take note. For new habits, come up with an obvious cue to remind you to act. In the example above, the golden arches cue was incredibly obvious and could be avoided by taking a different route home. This makes that cue invisible. When figuring out how to implement new habits simply make the cue blatantly obvious like putting your vitamins in a high traffic area of yours like next to your toothbrush. If you can’t wait for the rest of this series to be written or if you just want to dive deeper, checkout Atomic Habits or Smarter, Fast, Better on our site. Leave some of your cues, good and bad, in the comments below!  

This article is packed with some really kick-a** high level takeaways on how to make new habits stick (and how to dump bad habits). We’ll cover the following: Stage 2 of the Habit Feedback Loop – Craving Making good Habits Attractive Habit Stacking Stage 3 – The Response The Path of Least Resistance – or Making Habits Easy 2 Minute Rule In the last article we talked about defining cues for good and bad habits. Now were going to talk about the next stage, the craving. This stage of the Habit Feedback Loop is where our mind and body decide we really want something and we’ll do just about anything to get it. The more attractive this craving is the more likely we are to follow through and respond to that craving. We tend to act fast on attractive habits and the more attractive a habit is the easier it is to act on. The idea is to make good habits attractive and bad habits ugly!   How do we make habits more or less attractive? Well, there are 3 main groups that influence our decisions and help decide whether a general behavior is attractive or unattractive in society. The Close Friends and family The Many Culture/ society We imitate desirable habits to be accepted by the tribe The Powerful Those at the top If you’ve ever heard that you’re the average of the 5 closest people in your life the first rule makes sense. We tend to imitate these groups of people because it means we’re a cohesive part of our tribe. Displaying unattractive behavior is a good way to be kicked out of the group. Similarly, “The Many” is a much larger group that could be a handful of people or even the world as a whole. We find behavior like selflessness and giving as attractive, and of course universally punish theft and malice. Finally, The Powerful – those at the top of the world. The rich, famous, and overall successful tend to grab our attention more than any other group, although it’s much more difficult to imitate this group because we don’t interact with the true character of these individuals on a daily basis. Until we become these individuals through first good, then great habits. Make It Attractive This can be difficult at times, but the idea of making good habits attractive and bad habits unattractive is a great place to start. Here are three general rules that I’ll provide some insight to below. To make a habit attractive you can: Use temptation bundling Join groups of people that carry out the habits you find desirable Change your mindset Use Temptation Bundling This is a great way to set your good habits up for success using a small hack – you simply pair your desired habit with a reward. Now, instead of pairing a bad reward with a good habit (like cookies with hitting the gym), you’re pairing a habit you must do with a habit you want to do. It looks like this: After [CURRENT HABIT], I will [HABIT I NEED]. After [HABIT I NEED], I will [HABIT I WANT]. Example: If you want to be more grateful, but want to be on social media After I get my morning coffee, I will write one thing I’m grateful for today (need). After I write one thing I’m grateful for, I will look at Instagram for 5 minutes (want).   Join Groups of People with Desirable Traits This is a great way to stay accountable and grow fast. When we’re around the behavior we want to display or around those who demonstrate success we receive constant reminders and feedback on how to get better. This could be for the intention of doing better in business, fitness, family, faith, and so much more. Groups that are easy to join include churches, class-based gyms, online and in-person business groups, and even podcasts or YouTube channels. The idea is to replace silence with constant positive feedback. So go choose a goal or two and find a group that is already a step or two ahead of where you want to be! Change Your Mindset Mindset is a daily, possibly even hourly, habit in and of itself. If we condition ourselves to be in a positive mindset through good habits we make it easier to be in the mindset to succeed. If we constantly respond in unhealthy manners to negative feelings we’re more likely to have a negative mindset overall. Here’s an example, someone points out a mistake you’ve made in your work. You know it may be true, but instead of taking offense you fram your mindset to always be learning and growing. You take the advice with a smile, and now you’re 1% better. Things like, “I’m nervous,[on stage, before competition, in presentations]” become “I’m excited and am getting an adrenaline rush to help me focus.” Last note: always breath and smile. Make It Easy Now, think back to cues. By making the cue invisible we decrease our craving, and by making the cue obvious we increase the strength of that craving. Unfortunately, making the cue of a bad habit doesn’t mean we’ll get rid of the craving entirely. Take watching tv as an example, a habit millions of us have engrained deep into our being. We could make the cue of the remote invisible by putting it in the closet, but that may not be enough. We have to take larger action and make the habit difficult to act on by doing something drastic – try putting the tv in the closet or even storage. Conversely, we have to make good habits easy to act on. Companies do things like making toothpaste tasty to keep us coming back for more, offering automatic bill pay, and even setting automatic alarms to go to sleep and wake up early. There are a few secrets to doing this in our own lives and they’re simple. Below we’ll cover habit Stacking, the path of least resistance, and the two minute rule! Habit stacking Habit stacking is simply taking our already existing habits and stacking the new desired habit right on top. We make the existing habit part of the cue and make the transition to the new habit easy to perform. The formula is as follows: After I [CURRENT HABIT] I will [NEW HABIT] After I brush my teeth, I will do 25 push-ups. After I make coffee, I will write 1 page. Brush teeth > do 25 push-ups > make coffee > write 1 page Examples of Making It Easy To make the examples above easy you’ll need some prior planning and preparation. The night before, when you’re wide awake and have more will power than you will in the morning you may do something like this: Place your yoga mat in the bathroom and sticky note on the mirror that has a personal note to self “don’t slack on pushups” so that after you brush your teeth you just need to drop down and do your pushups. The next piece is to think about what you’ll write the next day for a moment, jot that topic down on another stick note, and then a place it next to the coffee machine in plain sight. Now you’ve spent the time thinking about where and what you’ll do, you just need to act! Making these habits stick will take time, so keep at it until they’re second nature. As a general rule remember that practice is the best form of learning and it’ll take just as long, or longer, to break the bad habits as it will to make the new habits stick. The 2 Minute Rule Finally, we’ll talk about the two-minute rule. No, it doesn’t have anything to do with your sex life, but it does have to do with making a habit stick. When we have really boring or difficult habits we know we need to implement but just can’t get started with, we use the 2 minute rule. This simply means to start doing the habit for 2 minutes. Folding laundry: Fold two pairs of socks. Learning to code: try 2 minutes. Going to the gym: drive there, walk in, and do something for two minutes. The idea is that once we’ve set ourselves in motion it’s harder to stop than it is to keep going. Just 2 minutes, 2 reps, or even the process of starting in the direction of our goal will keep us going in the right direction. These tips are from James Clear’s Atomic Habits. I highly recommend you grab a copy if you’re interested in leveling up and becoming a better human. If you don’t read and want to start just remember - Make it obvious, make it easy, and start with 2 minutes!