Building on from Episode 482, where we explored why progress tracking is key to healthy financial habit formation, we’re bringing back an old episode where we uncover...
The 4-step framework from James Clear on how to build good habits and break bad ones – for good!
For those unfamiliar with this best-selling author of Atomic Habits, James applies a unique blend of scientific research and practical life to breaking and building habits. His website receives millions of visitors each month, and he is a regular speaker at Fortune 500 companies.
We’ll explore his distinctive perspective on habit-building, decision-making and continuous improvement from creating environmental design to the “scaling down” strategy.
It’s an episode about creating lasting behaviours, overcoming setbacks and what encompasses true behavioural change. Tune in now!
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Additional Resources
LISTEN TO THE FIRST 20 EPISODES HERE >>
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👉 Web platform: https://www.moorr.com.au/
FREE MASTERCLASS:
- How to Build a Property Portfolio and Retire on $2,000 a week >>
FREE BEST-SELLING BOOKS:
- The Armchair Guide to Property Investing
- Make Money Simple Again
FIND US HERE:
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Building on from Episode 482, where we explored why progress tracking is key to healthy financial habit formation, we’re bringing back an old episode where we uncover...
The 4-step framework from James Clear on how to build good habits and break bad ones – for good!
For those unfamiliar with this best-selling author of Atomic Habits, James applies a unique blend of scientific research and practical life to breaking and building habits. His website receives millions of visitors each month, and he is a regular speaker at Fortune 500 companies.
We’ll explore his distinctive perspective on habit-building, decision-making and continuous improvement from creating environmental design to the “scaling down” strategy.
It’s an episode about creating lasting behaviours, overcoming setbacks and what encompasses true behavioural change. Tune in now!
Free Stuff Mentioned
Additional Resources
LISTEN TO THE FIRST 20 EPISODES HERE >>
MOORR MONEY MANAGEMENT APP:
👉 Apple: https://apple.co/3ioICGW
👉 Google Play: https://bit.ly/3OT86bW
👉 Web platform: https://www.moorr.com.au/
FREE MASTERCLASS:
- How to Build a Property Portfolio and Retire on $2,000 a week >>
FREE BEST-SELLING BOOKS:
- The Armchair Guide to Property Investing
- Make Money Simple Again
FIND US HERE:
- Website
- Instagram
- Facebook
- Youtube
All right, folks, welcome back to the Property Couch podcast, and have we got a little treat for you today? James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, is vastly and widely known, but when Ben and I had a chat with James back in 2019, his book still wasn't out there as much as it is now, and he was so incredibly generous to come onto our podcast and talk to us about all things that make a difference to your habit building and your money management. So we talked about why motivation is overrated and your environment actually matters more. We also talked about how you can start small, consistent habits that will lead to unimaginable results, and we told this one was a ground breaker. Forget about goals. Focus on your systems instead.
Speaker 1:Folks, this is an incredible conversation that Ben and I had back in 2019. So important, in fact, that we wanted you to make sure it got to the top of your playlist here and check it out right now. So let's cut back to the interview that Ben and I had back in 2019 with the author of Atomic Habits, james Clear. All right, folks, welcome back to the Property Couch and Ben, welcome back to you in this very first kickoff of the summer series.
Speaker 2:And I tell you what we kick it off with a bang, a bang. So very good, set it up.
Speaker 1:I've been hinting. My mindset minute theme is each and every week. There's been about 20 weeks this week. I would love to quote this guy, and I think I narrated it down to three, but he has got some really good stuff and the reason I like him is because the rubber meets the road when it comes to knowledges empowering but, only if you act on it, which is the theme of our summer series.
Speaker 1:Folks, just for the avoidance of doubt, we're showcasing people of act on it, but James gives you unbelievable tips and techniques on how you can act on things, mate. So I'm really excited about kicking off the summer series, but last week, before we do last week, just a quick update, obviously, on the reform proposed reforms in Queensland property investing.
Speaker 2:Right, this email address down. It'll be in the show notes. All right, here we go. Rental Reformscomcomau. Sorry about the scratching that comes through the audio there.
Speaker 1:I was writing it down wwwrentalreformscomau. Correct.
Speaker 2:Email the premier about your concerns about some of the proposals inside there. The greater the voice, the more people we get in there. So the real estate Institute of Queensland has put this together. We're supporting it. So get behind it and email the premier in terms of your concerns. Whether you're a property manager, a landlord or owner, investment property owner or even a tenant, you might be worried about higher rents because you know what's going to happen. So get on there and that's all. But I want to get into the summer series.
Speaker 1:Well, I just want to say, ben, I want to underline that, folks, this is serious, it is very serious it is. If you don't think it applies to you because you don't have an investment property in Queensland, it will, it will.
Speaker 2:It's coming around the country. Winter is coming before.
Speaker 1:Winter is coming on the industry if we don't have our voice.
Speaker 2:And no one wins Less supply, higher rents and basically, more compliance costs. No one wins. So we're big in regards to property owners doing the right thing by their tenants. So there's some reforms in there. We go tick Some of the ones where, basically, you can't be in control of your own asset concerning wwwrentalreformscomau.
Speaker 1:Folks, there's the serious side of it. It's important that you get on board. Please go and do that. But, ben summer series, let's cut to the interview that we had recently with James Clear. All the way from New York. It is a beauty, folks, stick around. It is a cracker. All right, ben. Today we're going to have a very special guest.
Speaker 2:International guest.
Speaker 1:International guest, in fact, we're bringing our guest into the future, because here we are recording Thursday morning at 9 o'clock. And in fact our guest is actually Wednesday afternoon At 6 pm over in New York.
Speaker 3:I'm looking forward to it. How is tomorrow going to be for me?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, we're giving you a pretty good start. The weather's growing it actually is today but thanks for joining us on the couch, james Clear, I'm just going to give a quick intro. You're the author of Atomic Habits, the creator of the Habit Academy. You're a weightlifter and a travel photographer in over 30 countries. Your writing is focused on how we can create better habits, make better decisions and live better lives.
Speaker 1:You combine a wide range of disciplines, including biology, neuroscience, psychology, philosophy and more, and this one I love and I've used it extensively with my wife. You believe that you do not rise to the level of your goals, but rather you fall to the level of your systems, which I'd love to dive into throughout our chat today. But first of all, officially welcome to the Property Couch, james. Yeah, thank you so much. It's great to talk to you both. It's a pleasure, hi, to give the listeners a bit of the backstory of it. I went to the Australian Real Estate Conference, eric, as we do every year, close to the most, and after a couple of days, james was the keynote speaker at the end of the second day, which is usually a reasonably tough gig.
Speaker 2:Yeah, closing it out.
Speaker 1:Closing it out, but I must admit it was the most impactful talk because I'm really interested in the topic and I think that our listeners can get huge benefit from what we're going to chat about today. So in that talk, james, you had a really interesting backstory. So for the benefit of our community of listeners, can you fill them in on what that looks like?
Speaker 3:Sure. So before I was born my dad played professional baseball for St Louis Cardinals, a Major League team in the United States, and played in the minor leagues for them. And then during my childhood, sports played a large part of me growing up and kind of, you know, making my way in the world. I played a variety of sports growing up, including baseball, until my sophomore year of high school when I suffered a serious injury when I was hitting the face with a baseball bat and it was an accident. The bat slipped out of my classmates' hands and kind of struck me right between the eyes, broke my nose, broke bone behind my nose, shattered both eye sockets, and the fallout from that injury was significant. So you know, I had to go to the hospital, the local hospital. Very soon I started to struggle with swallowing and breathing and other basic functions. Eventually I had a few seizures that day and was air-cared to a larger facility and the helicopter took me there and we were getting ready to undergo surgery and I had another seizure and the doctors decided that I was too unstable and so they placed me into a medically induced coma and it was really not until the next day that my vital signs had kind of stabilized to the point where they could release me from that and the process of healing sort of began. So I had surgery.
Speaker 3:A week later I went to physical therapy, my first physical therapy session. I was practicing basic motor patterns like walking in a straight line. I had double vision for weeks. I couldn't drive a car for the next nine months, and one of the reasons that I share this story and kick off the book by telling about it in detail is that it was a time in my life when I was forced to start small, like I didn't have a choice right. I couldn't just flip a switch and go back to the normal healthy person I was before. And so once physical therapy was done, this was the first time in my life when I started to train consistently in the gym, at first once or twice a week and then three or four times. I picked up other small little habits, like preparing for class for an hour each day or going to bed at the same time each night, and none of these habits like. They don't really sound significant on their own when you mention them now, but they gave me a sense of control over my life then, something I felt like I had lost in that time and all I really wanted was to get back on the baseball field and to play again.
Speaker 3:But my return to baseball was not smooth. I was the only junior to be cut the next year on the team. I did make the team two years later, but barely got to play. And then when I went to college I went to university. Two years after the injury I was able to make my way onto the team. I came off the bench. My first year I was a starter. My sophomore year, junior year, I was the team captain and then my senior season, I ended up being an academic all American, which is about 30 players around the country or so and so I never played professionally like my dad. But I feel like I was able to maximize my potential despite the challenge of the injury, and that I think was the main lesson I took away from that.
Speaker 3:With regards to habits is that by building small habits you're able to kind of, over the long arc of time, alter the trajectory in a more positive fashion. None of us have control over luck, randomness, misfortune, whatever bad events kind of creep into our lives, and that type of stuff happens to all of us. I don't think there's anything really legendary or unique about my story. We all have something that we deal with. This injury happened to be one of mine, but by altering and adjusting your habits, by understanding how they work, by building small ones that can build and compound on each other, you can start to shape the direction of your life in the long run and let those things start to compound and build and ultimately, hopefully overcome whatever challenges that you have in the face along the way. And so that was kind of the role that the injury played in my own development understanding of habits.
Speaker 1:So what was it in between? So you obviously had to take those baby steps to recover. At what point did you realize, hey, what I was doing at the time, just to get myself back to ground zero, actually is unique and different and actually how I can leverage and platform not only myself going forward, but for others to emulate.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a good question. My first experience of habits and really I would say probably the five years or so five to seven years or so after the injury it was mostly just personal experience, like I was learning things by doing it, but I didn't really have a language for it. If you had come up to me at that time I would never have said, oh, I'm just trying to get one percent better today, or something like that. So I just kind of went through it and learned it as I went along. It was only later. So I had this personal story, this personal entry point to habits, but I also have a more professional entry point to it as well.
Speaker 3:So I studied science and undergrad so mostly chemistry and physics and biology that are like hard sciences. And then I went to graduate school and I went to business school and I decided I wanted to start a company and so once I graduated I tried to start my own thing and the first two years I mostly just like tried ideas but kind of everything was just sort of okay. I was kind of flopping around and not really getting great results, and now I refer to it as the period where I incubated my skill set, but basically there was just a lot of learning going on and I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I. I realized that one of the problems was that I didn't understand how to market anything. I didn't know why somebody would buy a product or why somebody would sign up for an email list, or why do customers take action, and so I started studying consumer psychology to improve the business, and that naturally led me toward behavioral psychology, habit formation and some of these other psychological topics that were related.
Speaker 3:Well, as soon as I started to learn more about it and actually develop a language for how habits work, then suddenly I started to see connections between those personal experiences I was having.
Speaker 3:Earlier. I would read an article and I'd be like, oh, this is a concept that could apply to my weightlifting habit or my writing habit. This is an idea that I used when I used to play on the baseball team and so on. So I gradually started to develop a language for it, and then the combination of those two, I think, is really how I would describe the work that I do now and what I've done over the last five years is that I'm kind of a bridge between the scientific research I want ideas to that are scientifically based and practical application, and so what I'm really most interested in is how can we take an idea that is scientifically grounded and turn it into something that you can use in daily life and work? So I sort of have both of those entry points to the topic, and it's the combination of the two that I think about and use a lot now.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because I think you talk about you don't rise and fall to the level of your goals. You rise and fall to the level of your system. Why is that and how can? That make a big difference to people if they actually cross that concept.
Speaker 3:Well. So usually the process of behavior change and improvement starts with someone says all right, I should pick a goal. I want to lose a certain amount of weight in the next four months, or I want to double my income, or I want to be able to do 25 push-ups in a row, or whatever it is. And I think before I. So. This is first I should say before I criticize goals. This is coming from someone who is very goal oriented. Like I set goals for a ton of areas in my life for many years. I would set goals for the grades I wanted in the school, the weights I wanted to lift in the gym, the revenue numbers I wanted to hit in my business, all kinds of stuff. But over time what I started to realize was that whether or not I set a goal actually had very little to do with whether that goal was accomplished. And you start to see that goals are useful for setting a sense of direction, like they help you determine where should I allocate my effort and intention. They give you a sense of clarity. So in that sense they're positive. But what you start to notice is that in many areas of life, the winners and the losers, so to speak in any given domain, they often have the same goals. Like if you have 100 candidates apply for a job, presumably everybody has the goal of getting the job. Or if you have 30 teams that are competing in a league to win the championship, presumably every team has the goal of winning championship, and so if the winners and the losers have the same goals, the goal cannot be the thing that makes the difference, and so it may be necessary, but it's not sufficient. And what is sufficient is having a system, which I would define as. The goal is your desired outcome. The system is the collection of daily habits that will get you there, and what's interesting is that if there's ever a gap between your goal and your system, if there's ever a gap between your desired outcome and your daily habits, your habits will always win. The outcome will not happen. Whatever the habits are driving you towards the outcome, that will happen.
Speaker 3:So what I'm getting at here is that you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. What that really is saying is that your results in life are often a lagging, are often a lagging measure of your habits. So, in other words, your bank account is a lagging measure of your financial habits. Your knowledge is a lagging measure of your reading and learning habits. Your physical fitness is a lagging measure of your training and eating habits. Even your clutter on your desk or in your bedroom is a lagging measure of your cleaning habits.
Speaker 3:And that broad idea that the results we have in life are a lagging measure of the habits in that particular domain or area, I think you can apply it to pretty much anything and it speaks to why the system is more important than the goal, because ultimately, the system is what delivers whatever result occurs.
Speaker 3:It's what determines whether you achieve any of the goals that you want. And it's kind of strange actually, because so often in life we say that what we want is a different outcome, but actually the outcome is not the thing that needs to change. Like you might say, you walk into your bedroom and it's really dirty and cluttered, messy, and you say I want to have a clean room, I'm going to set a goal of getting a clean room, and you might be motivated and work for an hour or two and clean the room up and you have a clean room for now, but if you don't change the sloppy, messy, pack rat habits that led to a dirty room in the first place. You end up with a dirty room again in a week or two days, or whatever it is. So it's actually not the outcome that needs to change. It's the habits that perceive the outcome. It's not the goal that needs to change. It's the system that leads to the goal, and that's ultimately what I mean when I'm talking about that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we can see that in our own teachings, right, because we've written a book on how to make money simple again, which is effectively getting people to trap more surplus, so that they then got a choice of once they've trapped more surplus, they can then spend it on lifestyle, or it's our encouragement that they spend it on buying income, producing assets. So part of that is for us to help our community develop a habit of a seven-day float, which develops a habit, a daily habit, of making sure that there's no slippage within a rules-based system that allows them to end up getting their financial balance. So what you just described is a very, very articulate way of maybe describing a system that we hope that our community adopts which is a good segue into my next question for you, james around sustained effort.
Speaker 2:So you're right in the sense that forming habits and routinely performing those habits. What are some of the techniques or observations or scientific research that you've found in regards to maintaining a sustained effort? Because history tells us, if we do do something over a period of time on a sustained, regular basis, it does become a habit, and almost an automatic habit, as opposed to something that we have to push ourselves to do.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a great question, so I have a couple things to add here, so let me kind of go through them one at a time. So the first thing is scaling it down. You can imagine every habit as having sort of in chemistry we would call it like an activation energy the amount of energy required for the reaction to start in the first place. It's like you could imagine like striking a match on a matchstick box there's a certain amount of energy that you need to ignite it and start the flame. Well, the same thing is true for a habit, and the size of your habit determines how much energy you need to activate it. So like if you're asking yourself to do 40 pushups a day, or if you're asking yourself to do one, well, those have very different activation energies, and on a day when you feel good, yeah sure, you might be able to do 40 pushups, but on the day when it's hard, you're going to be exhausted or there's other things going on, you don't feel like you have enough time. Whatever, you don't make the time, but one one is so small that you almost can't say no to it. You never really have an excuse. Even at the end of the most exhausting day you could do one and then fall into bed. And so if you want to make a habit, if you want to make a behavior a habit, one of the first steps is scale it down so that it's so easy you can't say no to it, and you can often do this in a way that leads to naturally leads to more behavior.
Speaker 3:So one of the challenges when it comes to building habits is that, particularly for domains like what you all work in, something that requires a little bit of knowledge, work, or it's careful and effortful, or you need to think carefully what am I saying on the sales call? Or how do I analyze these two properties, or whatever the habit is that you're trying to build? You're not just like going through it on autopilot, the way that you are when you're brushing your teeth or tying your shoes right, which is also a very common habit. So what do you do about that? How do you make things that are effortful and require concentration and automatic habit? And I think the answer is to focus on the entry point, not the end point. You make the habit the first move. If you can make the first action automatic and mindless, then you can let the next step kind of follow naturally.
Speaker 3:So as an example, twyla Tharp, famous dance choreographer and instructor, she has an exercise habit where each morning she'll exercise for about two hours, but it's actually not the exercise or the going to the gym, that is the habit she's trying to build. She says her habit is throwing on her clothes, walking down to the curb and hailing the cab, and so that only takes, that's the entry point. Right, it's the cab, not the gym, and it only takes two or three or four minutes. But that's something that's so quick and so easy that she can make it a habit. And then she knows that if she hails the cab, well then the hard decision has been made and the workout can follow naturally. And so I would say, for whatever habits you are thinking about, for your business or for your personal life, think about what is the entry point to that habit. And can I automate that? Can I make that first action mindless, because that'll often make it easier to stick with it in the long run?
Speaker 3:One more thought to add to this idea, because it's a big topic how do we get habits to stick? How do we sustain? So one more thing that I think could be useful to consider is that, ultimately, true behavior change is really identity change, and what I mean by that is that your habits are sort of the way that you embody a particular identity. So, for example, every morning that you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who's clean and organized. Or any time that you write one sentence, you embody the identity of someone who is an author. Or if you do one pushup, you embody the identity of someone who doesn't miss workouts.
Speaker 3:And in the beginning, the crucial thing is to build up evidence of being that kind of person, and I think this is one reason why volume and repetition are very helpful, because by putting in your reps, it's kind of like you're casting a vote for being a new type of person, and I think that this is probably the best summary of the link between habits and beliefs, which is every action you take is like a vote for the type of person you want to become.
Speaker 3:And if you really want something to stick, you need to look at yourself in that way.
Speaker 3:And so you know, like the real goal is not to run a marathon, the goal is to become a runner.
Speaker 3:The goal is not to write a book, the goal is to become a writer, and once you start to look at yourself through that new lens, it becomes easier to stick with the habit in the long run. And so I think the this is one of the reasons why small habits can truly matter so much, because they know, doing one push up does not transform your body overnight, but it does cast a vote, for I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. And no, writing one sentence does not mean your book is finished, but it does cast a vote, for I'm a writer and so, and even those small actions, they reinforce that desired identity and ultimately, once you start to look at yourself in a new way, then it becomes much easier to stick with the habit in the long run. So I think really, if you can get to that identity change and build up evidence of being the kind of person you want to be, then you can really start to latch onto it and it sticks much easier.
Speaker 1:James, what are some of the examples of the people that you work with? Because I know that you're a speaker, you've got your book, you're an author, you've got your academy. But when you're working one on one with people, what are some of the common things that I guess? Goals that you want to chunk down to habits, that you're seeing people and and what you know? Typically people want to be fitter or they want to eat more healthy. What? What are some of the common things that you're seeing where, where you can move the needle pretty quickly?
Speaker 3:Yeah, good question. So Obviously, you know there's a certain answer of like. It depends on where where the person is or what they're working on, but there's certainly are major themes that people tend to gravitate towards. So Health is probably the biggest one. If you look at any list of the top ten habits, or if you look at any like.
Speaker 3:There are a couple different apps that allow you to track your habits, to do things like that, and every now and then one of those apps will publish a blog post of the most popular habits on their, their application or something, and almost always it's things like doing ten push-ups, drinking a glass of water, doing ten air squats, meditating for five minutes, journaling for a minute. So those are. Those are like the really common ones, ones that are either center around physical health or mental health, mental health being the more like journaling, meditation, gratitude type of things, and physical health usually being Getting bed by a certain amount of time, getting bed by a certain time each night, wake up at a certain time each day, do a certain number of push-ups or air squats or sit-ups, drink water, etc. So those tend to be the big categories. Another common category are financial habits, so people wanting to build a budgeting habit or building a habit of reviewing their finances or whatever it is. So those are. Those are certainly common ones too.
Speaker 3:I Think that it can be useful to know what those are, but I think it's also helpful to not like borrow your goals from other people, to actually sit down and think about.
Speaker 3:You can just ask yourself the question what do I do on days when things go really well for me? And if I think about like, yeah, that's one of those when I'm like living a really good day or I'm being very productive, and what you'll realize is that you can probably come up with maybe two or three or five things that sort of tend to pop up on those good days and those are what we could call like a keystone habit. And I would say that if you're gonna pick one area to focus on, choose one of those. You know. Whatever it is, that thing that tends to pull you back to center or tends to get your day started off in the right foot, and if you can only start with one thing, then let's focus on building that and making that a habit, and then, once you build that and integrate that into your daily routine, it feels like the new normal. Then you can move on to, you know, upgrading and expanding and adding a new one.
Speaker 1:Very good in terms of you have a framework on how to change a habit. It's a, it's a four-step framework that you shared in the presentation. I thought was really good. Are you able to share that and then plug an example in, if possible?
Speaker 3:Yeah, of course. So, roughly speaking, we can divide a habit into four different stages, and I think if you understand these four stages then you understand not only how it worked, how a habit works, but you also understand what you can do or where you can intervene to change it. So let me kind of break that into two categories. So first we'll talk about the four steps and then we'll talk about where to intervene. All right, so Four stages are Q craving, response and reward. Q craving, response and reward. So you walk into a kitchen and you see a plate of cookies on the counter. That's a Q, a visual Q that gets your attention and starts the habit of eating a cookie. And so that's the role of the first stage, the Q. It gets your attention. So it could be a visual Q, like the cookies on the counter. You could be driving down the road and you hear an ambulance behind you. It's the siren that starts the habit of pulling to the side of the road. Or you could have your phone buzz in your pocket and that's like a physical or a tactile Q that starts the habit of checking your phone. So the Q gets your attention. The second step is the craving. Now sometimes we say craving, with habits, like I'm craving a donut or I'm craving a cigarette or something like that. But I mean it in an even more broad sense, in the sense of, like, you feel motivated to do it, to take an action, and the craving is determined by what you your prediction. Basically, when it's another word we could use for that stage, we could say that there's a Q and then there's a prediction. So, for example, you see the cookies on the counter Q and then you make a prediction about oh, those will be sweet, sugary, tasty, enjoyable. And it's actually the prediction that the cookie is going to be tasty that motivates you to perform the third step, which is the response. You walk over, you pick it up, you take a bite and then finally there's the fourth stage, which is the reward, and so the cookie is in fact sweet, sugary, tasty, enjoyable. Now, not every experience in life is rewarding, but if an sometimes things are neutral, sometimes there's a consequence or cost to the behavior. But if a behavior is not rewarding, if it's not pleasurable or enjoyable or satisfying in some sense, it's unlikely to become a habit because you don't have a reason to repeat the behavior in the future. So those are the four stages Q craving, response, reward, or Q, some kind of prediction and action, and then an outcome. Now, once you have those four stages so that's the understanding of it now we can talk about where to intervene. So from those four stages, we can come up with what I call the four laws of behavior change. And so there's one for each stage.
Speaker 3:And the rough idea here is that if you want a good habit to stick, if you want to have it to last for a long time, you really need four things to kind of happen, and you don't always have to have all four, but the more of them you have, the more likely it is you're going to stick with it. So the first thing is you want it to be obvious. You want the cues of your good habits to be obvious, available, visible, easy to see. Easier it is to catch your attention, the more likely you are to do it. The second thing is you want to be attractive. The more attractive and appealing a habit is, the more you're going to feel motivated. Yeah, I want to do that thing. It seems appealing to me. The third thing is you want to be easy. The easier, simpler, more convenient, frictionless a habit is, the more likely you are to perform it. And Then the fourth and final one is you want to be satisfying. The more satisfying and enjoyable a habit is, the more likely you are to follow through and repeat it in the future.
Speaker 3:And so those four things make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. They give you kind of a high level view, a framework, a playbook for how to adjust a habit, for where to intervene. I just want to make one more final note on this. So we've kind of covered a lot there with those four stages. But so you've got those four that help you build a good habit. If you want to break a bad habit, then you just invert each of those four. So rather than making it obvious, you want to make the cues invisible, hide them, be less likely to be seen. Rather than making it attractive, make it unattractive. Rather than making it easy, make it difficult, add steps, increase friction. Rather than making it satisfying, make it unsatisfying, add a consequence, have an immediate cost to the behavior. So that's kind of the broad view of those four stages cue craving, responsible award and the four steps, the four laws of how to intervene and where to where to adjust those.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because you mentioned. You mentioned in the talk that, for example, one of the ones that had an impact on me is I know the dentist keeps telling me that I only need to floss the teeth, that I want to keep so, but it's. It's a hard thing to do routinely, right? So you said, well, grad a little bow by the sink and just put the floss in that, so that becomes the cue. And I gotta say that's, that's one that I implemented and it's certainly working. But you use some examples of the guitar in the living room. Once you've made the bed and I'm quoting you here put, put the book on the pillow so that you want to read, and if you want to eat more fruit, make it obvious In the kitchen. So it's. It doesn't have to be super hard. The cute, the cues can be quite straightforward.
Speaker 3:So all of these examples you're giving here are what I would call environment design. So you're basically trying to restructure your environment so that the good habits are the path of least resistance, but they're the most obvious things in the environment. So, yeah, if you want to practice guitar more often, put your guitar on a stand in the middle of the living room so you pass it 30 times a day. If you want to floss your teeth more consistently, don't store it in a drawer in the bathroom where they're hidden out of sight. Put it in a little bowl right there on the counter so that you can see them. And it sounds simple. But the the big takeaway here is that if you want something to be a big part of your life, make it a big part of your environment.
Speaker 3:A lot of the time we say that goals are important to us or that we want to build a new Behavior, but then you look around. It's not part of the office you work in or the kitchen that you eat in or the living room that you sit around in. You look at the spaces that we live and work in. They're designed for certain behaviors. You know, like, if you walk into pretty much any living room. Where do all the couches and chairs face? Right, they all face the TV. So it's like what is this room designed to get you to do? And you know there's a spectrum of choice here. I'm not saying you have to redesign every room that you have, but you can design it for its purpose, right. You can design it for the thing that you want to accomplish there, and the more that you do that, the easier it becomes to stick with habits, because they're going to be the path of least resistance.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's interesting, right? I mean you were talking about financial challenges and I'm looking at those for key. You know laws of, of developing and embedding good habits. This is why it's so challenging for money manager, right? Because it's not obvious, it's it's not a trap, it's not easy to do and and the progressions are very, very slow. I suppose it's a bit like you learning a guitar.
Speaker 2:The reason why a lot of people give it away is because you might practice for a certain time and you just feel like you haven't made any movement at all. That's like money management and building up a deposit for a home or building up wealth over time. Because it's so slow, you can fall off those things. So that probably leads me into questions around derailers. What is it that you've learned around? What are some of the derailers? When you are thinking about these things, james, you are obviously testing these theories on yourself, and you wouldn't have been perfect the first time around. What were some of the derailers for you personally? That you then worked out was a derailer and then you were able to come back and refocus and get through that to deliver what is an amazing framework.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a great question. First, I should say this still happens to me all the time. Just because I write about the concepts, I struggle with the same things everybody else does. I consider my readers and I to be peers. We're working through it together and the only difference is when I learn about something or have an insight, I write about it and share it with everybody publicly.
Speaker 3:But otherwise it's the same process. You bring up a really important point, though, which is that your example was money management and the delayed return. It takes so long to see that you're making progress what we could more broadly define that as is the feedback cycle. If it takes too long to get feedback, then it's very easy to give up because it doesn't feel like you're making progress. This is really one of the challenges when it comes to getting habits to stick in the long run. You can imagine any habit as producing multiple outcomes across time. We could say, broadly speaking, there's maybe an immediate outcome and an ultimate outcome.
Speaker 3:With bad habits, people are often like well, if it's bad for me, why do I stick to it? Why would I keep doing it? The answer is the immediate outcome of a bad habit is often quite favorable. The immediate outcome of eating a doughnut is great, it's sweet, it's sugary, it's tasty. It's only if you keep doing it for three months or six months or a year that it's unfavorable. The same thing is true, but in the reverse, for a good habit. What is the immediate outcome of exercising for a week? Not a whole lot, if anything. Your body soars. You look at the mirror at the end of the night, the scale hasn't changed. It's only two years or five years later that you get the outcome that you want, certainly any kind of entrepreneurship or building a business or money management in general. It's very much a delayed return game. This is the hallmark of any compounding process, which is the greatest returns are delayed.
Speaker 3:The issue, then, is that with many habits, there's a valley of death in the beginning. You're doing it, you're showing up, but you're not getting the results that you want. You hear people say things like this a lot. They're like I've been running for a month, why can't I see a change in my body? Yet I've been working on this book for six months in a row and it's still a mess and an outline doesn't feel like I'm making any progress. I've been saving for retirement. I feel like I'm putting so much effort in the last six months and I can't retire on any of this. I barely have any money in the account.
Speaker 3:It's very easy early on to dismiss the importance of how those things compound. That is true for a wide range of habits. One way to get over that gap, to bridge that valley of death, is you need some kind of feedback. One way to do, that is, with some sort of measurement. Now, you don't want the measurement to be too small or too rapid, because then you're responding to noise, but you also don't want the measurement to be too delayed, because then you have no signal of progress. That, ultimately, is the role that measurement should play in the building of pretty much any habit.
Speaker 3:Whether we're measuring our weight on the scale, or the amount of money in a bank account, or how much progress you've made on whatever creative project you're working on. What you really want measurement to do is just to provide a signal of progress, a reason to show up again because you're making a move forward. As an example, my dad enjoys swimming and anytime that he goes to the pool and he swims, his body looks the same when he gets out. There's no immediate benefit there of the workout, but he comes home and he has this little pocket calendar and he pulls it out and he puts an X on that day. Just by the act of tracking that habit, by putting another X on the calendar, he gets to the end of the month and he counts up all the Xs and he compares that to the month before.
Speaker 3:Even though his body hasn't changed in any visible, meaningful way. He has a signal of progress. He has a signal that I showed up, I did the right thing, I made progress, I tacked on another workout and I reinforced that identity that I was trying to build. If people are struggling with the money management element of it, with the delayed return element of it, then I would encourage you to find some signal of progress that is showing you hey, I am showing up and doing the thing I want to do. One final thought on that we go back to the month we checked on the YNA money management system.
Speaker 2:It's as simple as that. Check in every month and there you go. There's your measurement.
Speaker 3:For sure. There's just one quote that I feel like illustrates this well the San Antonio Spurs NBA basketball team. They've won five championships. They have this quote that's hanging in their locker room, where it says something to the effect of whenever I feel like giving up, I think about the stone cutter who takes his hammer and bangs on the stone a hundred times without it showing a crack. Then, on the hundred and first blow, it splits in two. I know that it wasn't the hundred and first that did it, but all the hundred that came before.
Speaker 3:I think that we can say that about pretty much any other habit. It's not the final check that you deposit in the bank account that allows you to retire. It's all the others that came before. It's not the last sentence that you write in the book that finishes the novel. It's all the others that came before. It's not the last workout you did that shapes your body and gives you the result that you want. It's all the others that came before. The willingness to stick with any of those compounding habits, to build the habit up and let it accumulate over the long span of time that's ultimately what we're looking to do. I think little sayings like that or insights like that help clarify why those days are so important, even if they feel so insignificant in the moment.
Speaker 1:Totally, you say success is the product of daily habits, not once in a lifetime transformations, which reinforces that. This one I love. You say habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.
Speaker 3:The same way that money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them over time. It's kind of like getting 1% better on any given day, which is not I'm not saying that in some true mathematical format in the sense that you have to measure it, but just as a philosophy, an idea of trying to carve out some small advantage each day. If you're willing to do that, then all you really need to do is just let time work for you. If you have good habits, time becomes your ally, but if you have bad habits, time becomes your enemy. Every day that clicks by, you dig the hole a little bit deeper, you put yourself a little bit further behind. In that sense, small habits feel insignificant, but actually they're very significant. They compound, they don't just add up.
Speaker 1:The final one for me, james, before I check with Ben is you say each morning there is a moment that determines the rest of my day. What is it for?
Speaker 3:you. The way that I like to think about this is that habits are like. Sometimes you have these decisions that are like a fork in the road. It's similar to what I mentioned earlier about this idea of twilight tharp hailing the cab rather than thinking about going to the gym.
Speaker 3:I have a moment kind of like that in the morning where I sit down, say it's I don't know 8, 9 am, and I sit down in my office and I open. Either One of two things happened Either I open up Evernote and I start writing the next article I'm going to work on, or I go to ESPN and I check the latest sports news. What happens in the next hour really is determined by what happens in the first 45 seconds, because if I go to ESPN, that hour is pretty much shot. But if I start writing, even if it's just a sentence or two, it's like all right, now I'm into the work and here we go. The key that I'm getting at there is that many habits have some kind of entry point, some sort of fork in the road, that if you can just master that little fork, that decision, the next chunk of time kind of falls into place naturally. So another example it's like 5.15, 5.30, my wife gets home from work and either we change into our workout clothes and we go to the gym, or we sit on the couch and watch reruns of the office and order Indian food and hang up, and both of those are good nights, but they're very different, and it's really changing into our workout clothes that determines the whole thing.
Speaker 3:If we do that, the next two hours are already decided. We'll get in the car, we'll go to the gym, we'll do the workout. It's already done at that point. And so I would say, or encourage anybody listening to this think about when are the habits that are important to you, and then walk back that kind of behavioral chain to the that fork in the road. Can you figure out where is the tip of the spear that starts that habit or determines what happens with the next chunk of time? And if you can figure out that moment, then that is really the thing to focus on. You don't even really need to worry too much about everything that happens afterward, and so if you can just master that decision, then the next chunk of time falls in place and you're off to the races.
Speaker 1:Wow, there's so much wisdom in just that thought. I lied, I lied, I did have one more thing.
Speaker 2:I've got one as well.
Speaker 1:You. For those of the people listening to this, I'd certainly encourage you to go to James's website. We'll have all the details in the show nights, because you do a newsletter that comes out on an avid reader of that, but a lot of it's original content, right. So for you, you've pondered it, you've read and you've observed. So how are you? What is a week, a month? How are you curating that in your mind so that it becomes an output that you provide into, because it's all very congruent with your habits? I guess frameworks, ethos, yeah all of it.
Speaker 1:What does that look like? Because I'm probably self-interested here, but I'm interested in how you curate so much and then sort of synthesize it into what you're doing.
Speaker 3:Yeah, well, thank you. Thanks for subscribing. I'm glad you fronted the newsletter useful and valuable. So I think about it in a couple of different ways. So first, I'm really big on compression. I like the idea of trying to compress wisdom into the fewest words possible or delivering the full potency or power of an idea in the most efficient format. So sometimes that takes me a really long time, like the example of writing atomic habits. So, depending on how you measure it, it took me somewhere between three and five years to write the book, and the first draft was 720 pages. The final version is about 250. And I only cut. I cut one full chapter from the text and then another one that was kind of half-baked, was about half a chapter, but otherwise all of the information remained. I just continued to go through it and edit it 20, 40, 60 times and just reduce the size of each chapter but retain all the potency of the idea. And so that took a very long time, probably a year's worth of editing alone just to get it down.
Speaker 3:But that process which that's the extreme end, that's the longest end it's kind of the same thing that I try to do in the weekly newsletter. So I have this recurring series on the newsletter called 321. And so every Thursday I share three short ideas from me, two quotes from others and then one question to think about throughout the week. And those ideas for me, you're right, they all come from me. They're, all you know, I guess, unique in that sense, although they're all inspired by stuff I read, and you know I'm soaking up stuff constantly.
Speaker 3:So the way that I think about writing now, the way that I think about that content curation or creation process, is it's kind of similar to driving a car. So for a long time I thought I need my writing to be really good, so I should just write all the time. And actually that made it worse, not better, because it's kind of like driving a car but never filling up for gas. So I consider reading to be like filling the car up with gas and writing to be like driving to your next destination. And if ever I don't have enough energy or I'm not coming up with good ideas, what I need to do is read more.
Speaker 3:Now it works on the other side too. The purpose of driving a car or having a car is not to sit at the gas station and fill it up with gas all day, right like you only need to fill it up a little bit and then you got to get gone and go somewhere, and so I think you need a balance of both. But reading is a really crucial part of that process for me and that's where the ideas often come from, and then I just kind of take whatever the main ideas that I come across and I dump it into Evernote or I riff on it and you know I have a note in there and then I'll come back to it again two months or six months or a year later when I come across another idea that I feel like builds on it and so on. So it's kind of this iterative process in that sense.
Speaker 1:Cool, a little life hack there for me.
Speaker 2:So I've got one around disappointment or missing out. So, coming back to your backstory around, you know getting through the challenges but also pushing yourself and being top 30 in terms of college baseball players, but not necessarily or missing out, maybe on going into the majors. How did you? What sort of coping mechanisms did you use? Did you refer back? I mean you draw on that experience or was that? I mean you know, obviously your dad paid major leagues and I'm not sure how much of a burning ambition it was, so that's probably how I need to qualify it. But some people do, they do these habits, they get to the best they do. But we all have disappointment in our life. Have you thought about that? Have you got any approaches around when you do experience disappointment, or you missed that job or whatever that looks like?
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's a great question. I mean, I certainly felt disappointment when my career ended Like I did. I wanted to continue to play. So that was a hard part for me and, honestly, one of the most challenging things about it came back to what we referenced a little bit earlier this idea of identity. For 15 or 20 years, being an athlete was part of my identity. That was something that I like latched onto, and then suddenly one day you wake up and you're not that anymore, and so it's like what am I? And you hear that kind of thing a lot from many different areas, like, for example, when researching the book I came across a lot of military people feel that way.
Speaker 3:They go into the military, their identity is I'm a soldier, and then they leave and then come back and it's like well, I'm not a soldier anymore. I put so much of myself into being that how do I integrate back into regular civilian society at this point? And so I think there are a couple of things that I like to add to this process of failure or missing out or feeling like what you used to be or what you wanted to be isn't what you can be now. One idea is that you can look for the area of your identity that can be reframed to fit your current situation, so you might not be able to say I'm a soldier anymore, but you can take the elements of what it meant to be a good soldier Like I'm a good teammate, I'm reliable, I follow through on my mission, I finish what I started. Those are all elements of your identity that you can apply to a corporate job or starting your own business, or being a good parent or a good spouse or whatever it is, and so you can like look for those aspects of it you know, like in my case, no, I'm not an athlete anymore in that competitive sense, but I am still the kind of person who takes care of my body or who enjoys moving every day or who enjoys a physical challenge, and so that those aspects of my identity remain the same.
Speaker 3:Another thought that came to my mind is you were just asking, or thinking about dealing with failure is an unexamined failure can only remain a failure, but an examined failure can become a success, and so some of it depends on the timeline that you're viewing this on.
Speaker 3:If you only view the failure, is that event, is that point in time, well, okay, that's such a tight boundary that maybe it can't become something else. But if you view it over a broad time scale, then that failure can become examined and it can become a learning point in a lesson, and then now we can transition and turn it into something that actually may eventually be a success. And at that point it kind of it's interesting. If you look at a lot of people it's like well, if you would have had them stop at year two or year four or year twelve, then maybe at any of those points they would have been a failure because it didn't pan out yet. But if they stuck with it till year fifteen, well, now all of a sudden, their success and all those previous points they don't look like failures anymore, they just look like part of the story on the path to success.
Speaker 2:So I think some of it comes from a broadening of your horizon as well and a willingness to reexamine the experiences and failures in your life and turn those into lessons that you can then build upon Brilliant so my last one was just around as an avid reader and where you're getting some of this slow thinking that you're doing and critical thinking that you do to form some of these laws and frameworks that you do. Any shout outs for any books or any Any podcast influences that you would, you know, mentor by all that you admire from a fun. Yeah, I love the idea of getting mentored not only by the people around you but like across time and space.
Speaker 3:So, like Books obviously are the one of the best ways to do this. You know, you can be mentored by someone who lived 200 years ago, for 2000 years ago in case of Mark Seralius. So that's, that's one book I'll add. So let me give you like three or four books and just kind of some ideas around them. So Two really good books from ancient stoic philosophers meditations by Marcus Raleigh us, and then manual for living by epic T. This I actually tend to give manual for living out as a gift. More, it's very short. You can read it in an hour or so. It's incredibly accessible. It's not going to tell you anything you haven't heard before, but it will tell you everything that you need to hear again. So it's really, it's really valuable in that sense.
Speaker 3:There's another great book called the lessons of history. I'm not sure if you're familiar with it, but there's this this husband wife combo named will and Ariel Durant, and they were historians for like 50 or 60 years and they wrote this massive like 12 volume compendium of every major event in history. It was like millions of words is huge thing. And then, after they finished doing that project, they wrote a very tiny book that was about 100 pages called the lessons of history, and it's about the broad themes that repeat themselves across time, about the kind of lessons of human nature that recur again and again throughout history, and for anybody who's interested in habits or how human behavior works it's kind of an interesting read in that sense. So that one's good.
Speaker 3:And then this one's a recent edition for me I just finished it last week but it's called a calendar for wisdom. And so Leo Tolstoy, very famous author, wrote many famous books, but one of his most, his proudest work was actually the last decade of his life. He started to collect a bunch of wisdom, just like from all sorts of areas religious scholars, philosophers, eastern wisdom, buddhism, all sorts of things and he collected the pieces that he liked the most and then he started to put them into themes for each day of the year. And so this book is 365 days and it's got a little bit of wisdom for each day. It's interesting because I some days I didn't get anything out of it and then other days I'd like highlighted every single passage you have on there.
Speaker 3:But but it was interesting to explore. Also, I had no idea how religious Tolstoy was. It has like a very Christian bend, which I was not expecting, but. But in between the like more religious days, there are just passages on wealth and being kind and being a good friend and a bunch of other things, so it's got a wide range of things involved. Brilliant, yes, good tips.
Speaker 1:Haven't heard any of those before.
Speaker 2:So I'll just have a look.
Speaker 1:So we really appreciate that you spent the time with us. I mean, I wanted to finish with what you said. I think it was almost near the end of your presentation, I have. It is not a finish line to be crossed, it's a lifestyle to be lived and I think that, from from what we've just spent the last so far 30 plus minutes chatting about, I think that's you know, it's not that. You know, the classic is not the destination that matters, it's the journey through, and I think you've really broken down what the journey looks like. So if you, if you do good habits along the way, the destination will be so much more fruitful.
Speaker 1:But I personally enjoyed, I love, reading your stuff. Anyone who listens to the podcast knows that that this, the content that you provide, was right at my alley. So the idea that you prepare to come on to a you know our podcast here in Australia Whilst you're there over the states, we certainly appreciate and we think that our community will be the beneficiaries from. I think they should listen to that once and then go back and cut another lap. Solid goal If you implement even half of what you talked about today, that's, that's a, that's a fork in the road moment for me. So well done on your treatments. We're going to put the link to your book in in our show notes because I'm certainly going to encourage everyone of our listeners to read that. And yeah, we appreciate you coming on. Thanks, yeah, thank you so much. I appreciate the opportunity.
Speaker 1:I'm glad you guys enjoyed your time at Cavits and it was fun to come on and chat with you all about it.
Speaker 3:So thanks for your chance.
Speaker 1:All right, good luck for getting through to Thursday. We're already here. Thanks, hey folks. Bryce, here again. I just wanted to catch you real quick before you go.
Speaker 1:If you're new to our community, I want to encourage you to listen to our very first 20 episodes, as the concepts we share in EPS, one through 20, are foundational principles, pillars and frameworks that you need to know you, to get the best value from our content week to week on our show, my little tip is to listen to it at one and a half speed.
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