Topic: Visualize Your Progress and Stay the Course with a Habit Tracker
When it comes to building better habits, a crucial step is to visualize the progress you’re making, and to be able to see yourself move forward. Perhaps the most straightforward way to visualize your progress is with a “habit tracker.”
“Don’t break the chain” is a powerful mantra. Don’t break the chain of stashing money away in your savings account every month and you’ll build wealth and gain peace of mind. Don’t break the chain of meditation and you’ll gain focus and more control over your internal state. Don’t break the chain of reading every day and you will finish 20+ books per year. Don’t break the chain of practicing guitar every day and you’ll gain mastery faster than you’d expect.
“Never miss twice” - The breaking of a habit doesn’t matter if the reclaiming of it is fast. The first mistake is never the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit.
The key insight of this lesson is to visualize the progress you’re making each day. If you have to wait for the number on the scale to change, or for your bank account to increase, or for a sense of calm to wash over your life, then the feedback loop is often too long for you to maintain motivation.
Topic: Create a Reward that Makes Habits Satisfying
“The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change”: What is rewarded gets repeated. What is punished is avoided.
In the beginning, you need a short-term reason to stay on track. This is why immediate rewards are essential. They keep you excited while the delayed rewards accumulate in the background
Create an external reinforcer that aligns with your desired identity
Walk in the woods for retirement savings (identity = freedom and control of time)
Bubble bath for exercise habit (identity = taking care of your body)
Every time you skip going out to dinner, transfer $50 to an account labeled “Trip to Europe”
If you’re not careful, the external reward can become the thing you end up chasing. A student only studies so they can get their allowance, rather than for the sake of learning. An employee only makes sales calls to fulfill a quota, not to serve customers and grow the business. The key is to not lose sight of your desired identity, and whenever possible, to choose an external reward that reinforces the type of person you wish to be. You want to avoid rewards that conflict with your desired identity
If your reward for exercising is eating a bowl of ice cream, then you’re casting votes for conflicting identities, and it ends up being a wash. Instead, maybe your reward should be a weekly massage, which is both a luxury and a vote toward taking care of your body. Now the short-term reward is aligned with your long-term vision of being a healthy person
📌 **SUMMARY: It takes time for the evidence to accumulate and a new identity to emerge. Immediate reinforcement helps maintain motivation in the short term while you’re waiting for the long-term rewards to arrive.**
Topic: Combat Fading Motivation
Rather than having some linear relationship with achievement, habits tend to have more of a compound growth curve. The greatest returns are delayed. This gap between what we expect and what we experience is what I refer to as the “plateau of latent potential.”
Temptation bundling works by linking an action you want to do with an action you need do. You’re more likely to find a behaviour attractive if you get to do one of your favourite things at the same time. Perhaps you want to watch your favourite TV show, but you really need to fold a basket of laundry. Using temptation bundling, you could only watch that show when you are folding laundry.
A commitment device is a choice you make in the present that locks in your actions in the future. For example, some exercise classes enforce a strict policy where you cannot cancel within 10 hours of your class. In this way, the gym creates a commitment device: the act of signing up for the class locks in your future action.
Leave your phone at home when you’re going to an important meeting or going to catch up with a friend or loved one so it can’t distract you.
📌 **SUMMARY: “I will only [HABIT I WANT TO DO] when I [HABIT I NEED TO DO].”**
Topic: Priming The Environment
One way to increase the odds that your habits will be performed is to walk into an environment that is ready for the habit. Whenever you organize a space for its intended purpose, you are priming it to make your future actions easy.
Topic: Make Good Habits Automatic
The less friction associated with a habit, the more likely it is to occur. In other words, as convenience increases, so do the odds that you follow through on your habit.
Habits are easier to build when they fit into the flow of your life. For example, you are more likely to go to the gym if it is on your way to work because stopping doesn’t add much friction to your lifestyle. By comparison, if the gym is off the path of your normal commute—even by just a few blocks—now you’re going “out of your way” to get there.
Imagine you’re holding a garden hose with a kink in the middle. Some water can flow through, but not very much. If you want to increase the rate at which water passes through the hose, you have two options. The first option is to crank up the valve and force more water out. Trying to pump up your motivation to stick with a hard habit and overpower the friction in your environment is like trying to force water through a bent hose. You can do it, but it requires a lot of effort and increases the tension in your life. You can eliminate the points of friction that hold you back. You can simply remove the bend in the hose and let water flow through naturally.
Topic: Design Your Environment for Success
Every habit is initiated by a cue, and we are more likely to notice the cues that stand out. Creating obvious visual cues can draw your attention toward your desired habit.
It’s easy to not do yoga when your yoga mat is hidden away in a box in the basement. It’s easy to not write “thank you” notes when the stationery is stashed away on a seldom-seen shelf.
If you want to remember to read a book instead of looking at your phone every time you’re bored, set your phone’s lock screen photo to be a photo of the book you’re trying to finish.
If you want to make a habit a big part of your life, you need to make the cue a big part of your environment. Make sure the best choice is the most obvious one. In the long-run (and often in the short-run), your willpower will not beat your environment.
Topic: How to Fit New Habits in Your Life
“Implementation intention.” An implementation intention is a plan you make beforehand about when and where to act. That is, how you intend to implement your habit. I will [BEHAVIOR] at [TIME] in [LOCATION]
The crucial step here is finding the right time and location to insert the new habit into your daily routine. You are looking for the decisive moment where your new habit should live.
If you can master the right habit at the right time, everything falls into place. The more tightly bound your new habit is to a specific time and place, the better the odds are that you will notice when the time comes to act.
Topic: The Two-Minute Rule for Building Lasting Habits
When you’re trying to build a new habit, it’s easy to start too big. When you think about the change you want to make, your excitement and motivation can convince you to do too much, too soon. We must break this down; not as “start small” etc, but using the “Two-Minute Rule”
“When you start a new habit, it should take less than two minutes to do.”
Examples:
“Walk 10,000 steps each day” becomes “Put on my running shoes.”
“Keep the house tidy” becomes “put one item of dirty clothing in the laundry.”
“Be a better partner” becomes “make my partner a cup of coffee every morning.”
“Get straight A’s” becomes “set my books out on the desk when I get home.”
The idea is to make your habits as easy as possible to start. The Two-Minute Rule helps counterbalance our tendency to bite off more than we can chew. It also gives you a small way to reinforce your desired identity each day.
You may not be able to automate the whole process, but you can make the first action mindless. You’re trying to build a “gateway habit” for a larger behavior or bigger ambition that you’re ultimately working toward. Make it easy to start and the rest will follow.
Your ultimate ambition might be to learn to play a full song, but your gateway habit is picking up your guitar and sitting down in a quiet place where you can practice.
Wanting to live a healthy life may be your ultimate ambition, but then you can ask “what do I need to live a healthy life” – I need to stay in shape. Then you can ask what do I need to stay in shape – I need to exercise. What do I need to do to exercise? I need to change into my workout clothes. And so on until you get to a behavior that takes two minutes or less – until you discover the first movement.
Strategies like this work for another reason too: they reinforce the identity you want to build. If you show up at the gym five days in a row—even if it’s just for two minutes—you are casting votes for your new identity. You’re casting votes for the type of person who doesn’t miss workouts. You’re taking the smallest action that confirms the type of person you want to be.
📌 **SUMMARY: A habit must be established before it can be improved. You need to master the art of showing up in the first place. Narrow the habit down to just the first Two-Minute task and go from there; the rest will follow.**
Topic: Build “identity-based” habits
Anyone can convince themselves to practice yoga or meditation once or twice, but if you don’t shift the belief behind the behavior, then it becomes hard to stick with long-term changes. Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are.
To a large degree, your identity emerges out of your habits. It’s like a self-improvement feedback loop. The more you repeat a behavior, the more you reinforce the identity associated with that behavior. And the more you reinforce the identity, the more natural it will feel to repeat the behavior.
Think about your desired identity and ask, “Who is the type of person that could get the outcome I want?”
What would a healthy person do? What would a productive person do? What would X do? These questions help reveal the desired identity you should be working toward and the habits that support that identity. This is the way to determine which habit you should focus on.
The focus should always be on becoming that type of person, not getting a particular outcome. In the beginning, it is far more important to cast small votes for your desired identity than to worry about a particular result.
Your habits reshape your identity in a gradual way. It's slow and nearly impossible to see. You can rarely tell a difference between who you were yesterday and who you are today. But with each rep, with each vote cast, your internal story begins to shift.
📌 **SUMMARY: True behaviour change is identity change. Anyone can convince themselves to visit the gym or eat healthy once or twice, but if you don’t shift the belief then it is hard to stick to it in the long-term. Improvements are only temprary until they become part of who you are.**
