From The New York Times Bestselling Author of Atomic Habits-JAMES CLEAR-How to stay motivated&Break bad habits
Your outcomes in life are often a lagging measure of your habits. We think the thing that needs to change is the bank account, or the test scores, or the number on the scale, but actually, the thing that needs a change is the habits that precede those outcomes, rather than making the goal, the default, the thing that you focus on almost exclusively. Let's make the system, the default, and then only check in on the goal, occasionally to see if before moving in right direction. Achieving a goal only changes your life for the moment. It's actually not the thing that you're looking for, we think the results of the thing that needs to change, but it's actually the process behind the results, like, if you have a messy room, let's say your bedroom is in a mess. And you set a goal to clean that room, you can get motivated and do it for two or three hours. And then you turn around and you have a clean room for now. If you don't change the messy habits that led to a dirty room in the first place, then you turn around two weeks later, and you have a messy room again. And so actually you don't need to clean room, you need better cleaning habits, and then your room will always be clean. You don't need to lose weight. You need better eating habits and then your weight will always be around where you want it to be, you don't need more money, you just need better financial habits. And then you always have enough money to manage the thing that comes up. And I think that's one of the reasons why small habits matter so much, they don't necessarily transform your life overnight. Right, right away, like doing one push up, does not transform your body, but it does cast a vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts or meditating for one minute might got not give you an immediate sense of calm in your life, but it does cast a vote for being a meditator. The real goal is not to run a marathon, the goal’s to become a runner. The goal is not to write a book. The goals is to become a writer. Because once you've adopted that identity, you really not even pursuing behavior change anymore, you're just kind of acting in alignment with the type of person you already see yourself to be. That's kind of like true behavior changes really identity change, because once you've changed that internal story, it's way easier to show up each day. You're not even really motivating yourself that much to do it. You're just like this is who I am now. This sort of this, like yo-yo effect, like someone trains for half marathon, and then they run the race, and that race motivated them to train for the last three or four months. And then the race ends, and they stop and take a week off and returns in two weeks then two months and so on. And then they turn around like four months later, like, man, I haven't ran in months like I need to sign up for a new race or something, because it's all about the goal. As soon as the goal is achieved, you don't have that motivating you anymore, but if instead it's about being a runner, then even when even once you finish the race, you still have a reason to show up again the next week, you're like, well, I just, that's what I do as I run, that's who I am right then. So I think that that's a more in pretty much any domain, true, long term thinking is really godless thinking. It's much more about being that person developing that identity following that system. And then you just happen to realize your potential on the way. So what you come to realize is that your habits reinforce a particular identity, and sometimes this can be positive, and sometimes it can be negative. The story could be things like I'm bad at math, or I'm terrible at remembering people's names, or I'm not good at remembering directions and all of those that's just an internal story that you tell yourself. But each time you have an experience that reinforces that the story gets solidified. And so I think the method, the takeaway here is that every action you take is kind of like a vote for the type of person you want to become. And if you can master the right actions, if you can master the right habits, then you can start to cast votes for this new identity, this desired person that you want to be. Good habits become easy habits when you can learn to find joy in delaying gratification. There's no rush, build for the long term guys. It’s as if they're standing at the foot of a mountain, they can see the summit, they can see the thing, they want to make an impact. But they don't see is the mountain, this large, immovable object, you can go up fast, you go up slow, I don't care, but the still amount what they don't understand is that life, that relationships and career fulfillment are a journey. There's no app for that. I got nothing, you've got to go through the slow plotting, annoying, meandering process called career in life. Everything in my life, when something got hard, I quit. I wasn't great at reading, I wasn't great at writing, so I just quit. I couldn't catch on as fast as you, I had to work harder than you, so I quit. My man, if I could go that distance, the extra mile to just go, just to finish. I want to feel victory. And victory for me wasn't winning, it was a finishing. This is one of the things that's challenging about building better habits is that they're very easy to dismiss on any given day, right, like, what is the difference between eating a burger and fries for lunch or eating a salad. Not a whole lot on any given day, your body looks basically the same in the mirror, the scale hasn't really changed, it's really easy to dismiss it in your mind, and say, oh, this is kind of insignificant, but you know, you turn around two or five or ten years later, and you realize, oh wow, those daily choices really did add up. It's just much harder to see on a granular basis. The cost of your good habits is in the present, and the cost of your bad habits is in the future. And the fact that we prioritize the present over the future, ends up making a lot of habit change difficult for that reason. The ultimate form of intrinsic gratification is a reaffirmation of your desired identity. So if you, if your desired identity is I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, or I'm an athlete every time you're doing a squat, literally, you can be in the middle of the rep, and you're already getting graphical, because you're acting in alignment with the type of person you want to be. It's like, oh, I just did that rep. I didn't miss this workout. That feels good. Now I do think it takes a little while to get to that point, where that actually feels like, you, you know, you can imagine somebody goes the gym for the first week, or the first month. They don't quite identify that way yet, because they haven't spent enough time there. Steven Press Field, I think it's in The War of Art. He has a piece where he talks about a wolf and how the wolf develops a territory, right, but the only way that it develops a territory is by being there, by walking around the terrain every day. And then it starts to feel like this is mine, this is my home. And he talks about writers doing that, by like you make the chair and the computer in the desk in your office, your territory becomes your terrain. And I think that that is true for most habits too, like when you walk into the gym for the first time, you feel very uncertain. It's not your territory, you don't feel like it's your terrain. But once you show up again for a week or a month or a year, at some point, you cross this invisible threshold where it starts to feel like, yeah, this is for me or I belong, and that I think once you've crossed that stage, it becomes more likely that you can get that kind of reaffirmation, your identity and start instantly feel gratified. But there are other things that you can do in the short term to feel more gratified while wearing on this habits. So here's just one little tactic. Let's say that you're either trying to work out or build a habit of meditating or something. And so each time you do your habit of meditation for five minutes, you have this little jar of marbles, and you got like a hundred marbles in there. And ninety are red and ten are blue. And after each instance of your habit, you walk over, and you pull a marble out of the jar. And if you pull out one of the ninety, then nothing happens. It’s just like pound the bag. Good job you’re supposed to, but if you pull out one of the ten, then you get some kind of reward. That's exciting to you. Maybe you get to watch Netflix for an hour and not feel guilty or go for a walk outside or take a bubble bath, or buy yourself a new jacket or whatever it is, like something that feels rewarding. And what you just did was you introduce an element of immediate gratification and of like surprise and delight to the whole process. And so, yeah, that first week, when you're meditating, you still might not identify as a meditator, or you still might not have a sense of calm wash over your life, but you have this other interesting thing that is rewarding right away, that maybe gets you to stick with it while you're waiting for those long term rewards to accumulate. Well, so we do have, and this definitely plays an important role in habits. We do have a bias toward the present, and that makes sense, right, that example I gave about finding a Berry Bush you know, one hundred meters away. Well, you should, in fact, go get the food that's close by and not the food that's on the other side of the mountain, because that just makes logical sense. You'd rather have it now, especially when we were not in modern society, right for ninety nine point nine nine, nine percent of human history. We're just trying to survive like every other animal. And so you should try, you should prioritize immediate food, immediate shelter, immediate water, immediate safety. And in fact, our brains are wired to do that, but modern society is a whole different ballgame, because we have all these things that actually, you should prioritize delayed outcomes. So you go to college now, and then you graduate in four years, you save for retirement today, and then you retire decades from now, you show up at work this week. And then you get a paycheck in a month. And so it's actually like there are all kinds of things we do in modern society that require you to delay gratification, and that runs a little counter to what our wiring is or what our biological preference is. There is a sort of a misalignment of rewards that often happens with habits. So there's an immediate outcome and immediate reward, and then an ultimate reward. And for your bad habits, one reason bad habits stick so readily that they they form so easily is because bad habits, often, the immediate reward is favorable, like, what's the immediate reward of eating a donut? It's kind of great, it's sweet and sugary. It tastes good. It's only the ultimate reward if you repeat that habit for six months or a year or two years that is unfavorable. Meanwhile, good habits are often the exact opposite, the immediate reward of going to the gym or going to the gym for like a week isn't really that great. Your body's probably sore, you don't have much to show for you. Your body looks the same. Weight hasn't really changed, but if you stick to that for six months or a year or two years, then the ultimate reward is favorable.
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