Warning: May be Habit Forming
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RailsConf 201710 / 86
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Divergente ReiheAuflösung <Mathematik>Güte der AnpassungGradientenverfahrenZweiErwartungswertStandardabweichungAusnahmebehandlungSicherungskopieWeg <Topologie>Kontextbezogenes SystemBrennen <Datenverarbeitung>NormalvektorMittelwertXML
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Auflösung <Mathematik>Brennen <Datenverarbeitung>MaschinenschreibenPlastikkarteAnnulatorEinfügungsdämpfungMultiplikationsoperatorQuick-SortShape <Informatik>FitnessfunktionAuswahlaxiomLeistung <Physik>Gewicht <Ausgleichsrechnung>PunktGüte der AnpassungDreiecksfreier GraphComputerspielGruppenoperationBitrateUltraviolett-PhotoelektronenspektroskopieMusterspracheWort <Informatik>Stapeldateit-TestPerfekte GruppeRechenschieberCookie <Internet>EinflussgrößeVirtuelle MaschineFamilie <Mathematik>Delisches ProblemVollständiger VerbandGraphMetropolitan area networkAggregatzustandDigitaltechnikProzess <Informatik>Tableau <Logik>MereologieResultanteTwitter <Softwareplattform>BeweistheoriePotenz <Mathematik>Lie-GruppeBitNP-hartes Problem
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Cookie <Internet>IntegralGruppenoperationAuflösung <Mathematik>DifferenteProzess <Informatik>Profil <Aerodynamik>Punktspektrum
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GeradeFigurierte ZahlDiagrammDifferenteCookie <Internet>TaskRationale ZahlSoftwaretestComputeranimation
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MultiplikationsoperatorTermCookie <Internet>EnergiedichteZahlenbereichMittelwertBrennen <Datenverarbeitung>ZweiCoxeter-GruppeComputerspielInverser LimesDreiecksfreier GraphDigital Rights ManagementLeistung <Physik>InternetworkingFramework <Informatik>Elektronische PublikationTaskInformationsüberlastungComputeranimation
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Rechter WinkelGamecontrollerHinterlegungsverfahren <Kryptologie>Gewicht <Ausgleichsrechnung>NP-hartes ProblemStellenringAutomatische HandlungsplanungMessage-PassingPRINCE2Weg <Topologie>ServerGüte der AnpassungComputerspielRechnernetzEnergiedichteEinfügungsdämpfungDreiecksfreier GraphVorzeichen <Mathematik>ProgrammpaketRechenschieberPunktPerfekte GruppeMultiplikationsoperatorMeta-TagSchreib-Lese-KopfComputeranimation
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ComputerspielGreen-FunktionMultiplikationsoperatorOrdnungsreduktionHilfesystemQuick-SortKlasse <Mathematik>
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Prozess <Informatik>Web SiteGreen-FunktionGüte der AnpassungProgrammierungZahlenbereichAutomatische HandlungsplanungVererbungshierarchieLeistung <Physik>MusterspracheMathematikImpulsAdditionE-MailMereologieMailing-ListeInformationsspeicherungMomentenproblemProgrammierumgebungPunktFontGraphfärbungPhysikalische TheorieData MiningDatenstrukturAssemblerBitLesen <Datenverarbeitung>MinimalgradComputerspielCOMComputeranimation
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PerspektiveDatenstrukturRechter WinkelRuhmasseSchreib-Lese-KopfGarbentheorieInformationsspeicherungPrimitive <Informatik>Arithmetisches MittelCodeBitrateMustersprache
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GruppenoperationDiagrammMarketinginformationssystemMultiplikationsoperatorNP-hartes ProblemDämpfungUnrundheitMereologieSchreiben <Datenverarbeitung>PerspektiveMusterspracheBitComputeranimation
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Basis <Mathematik>MustererkennungRechter WinkelTypentheorieVollständiger VerbandCASE <Informatik>EnergiedichteSpannweite <Stochastik>EntscheidungstheorieMultiplikationsoperatorElement <Gruppentheorie>PRINCE2CyberspaceSchnittmengeTermMusterspracheProzess <Informatik>MarketinginformationssystemComputerspielLoopKoroutineComputeranimation
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MusterspracheProgrammierungEllipseVorzeichen <Mathematik>ComputerspielZahlenbereichSchlüsselverwaltungCookie <Internet>ZweiOrdnung <Mathematik>Basis <Mathematik>Rechter WinkelEinsMathematikLesen <Datenverarbeitung>MereologieSchedulingGoogolNP-hartes ProblemResultantePhysikalisches SystemMultiplikationsoperatorLeistung <Physik>Green-FunktionTermGebäude <Mathematik>EnergiedichteSpezielle unitäre GruppeAbstimmung <Frequenz>Arbeit <Physik>Wort <Informatik>SichtenkonzeptComputeranimation
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Physikalisches SystemProzess <Informatik>FokalpunktMathematikQuick-SortWurzel <Mathematik>MultiplikationsoperatorComputerspielBitExtreme programmingPhysikalischer EffektResultanteSchnittmengeAuswahlaxiomFigurierte ZahlBasis <Mathematik>Regulärer GraphLeistung <Physik>Produkt <Mathematik>EntscheidungstheorieKontrollstrukturHinterlegungsverfahren <Kryptologie>FeuchteleitungHalbleiterspeicherZentrische StreckungNP-hartes ProblemSoftwareentwicklerZahlenbereichLesen <Datenverarbeitung>Vorlesung/Konferenz
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Ein-AusgabeZählenGewicht <Ausgleichsrechnung>Dreiecksfreier GraphKette <Mathematik>Gebäude <Mathematik>Bit
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MultiplikationsoperatorProzess <Informatik>ComputerspielGebäude <Mathematik>PunktAutomatische HandlungsplanungLesen <Datenverarbeitung>Physikalisches SystemFitnessfunktionSichtenkonzeptWeg <Topologie>KontrollstrukturMereologieKonzentrizitätMusterspracheKugelkappeMessage-PassingAggregatzustandMetropolitan area networkNeuroinformatikSchreiben <Datenverarbeitung>Geschlecht <Mathematik>KoroutinePunktrechnungGeradeZweiWechselsprungModelltheorieSchnittmengeCode
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Physikalisches SystemLeistung <Physik>MittelwertVarianzComputerspielFitnessfunktionGewicht <Ausgleichsrechnung>MultiplikationsoperatorGebäude <Mathematik>Besprechung/Interview
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ARM <Computerarchitektur>XML
Transkript: English(automatisch erzeugt)
00:13
Good morning, everybody. Thank you all for being here. Uh, so I have a question to start this talk. How many of you made a New Year's resolution this year? Raise your hand. Alright,
00:24
that's about what I'd expect. Keep them up for just a second. So actually you can put them down. I'll have you put them back up in just a minute. Except you, Sam. Keep yours up. So 40% of Americans on average either always or usually make a New Year's resolution. Another 17% do so every once in a while. Okay, so hands back up.
00:45
If you made a New Year's resolution and you're still on track with your resolution, keep your hand up. Otherwise, put it down. So what percentage of people do you think that make resolutions actually follow through with them? Shout out some answers. The answer is eight.
01:06
Eight percent of people who make a New Year's resolution manage to follow through on that New Year's resolution and do what they set out to do. So if you had to put your hands down just now, you're far from alone. That's normal. To give you some context, your odds
01:21
are about the same as taking a deck of cards, shuffling it, and pulling an ace off the top. Those are your odds of hitting your New Year's resolution. You have a 92% chance of failure when you set a New Year's resolution. So let's talk about what we can do to shift those odds in our favor. But first, a disclaimer. I want everybody
01:43
in this room to know that you are a beautiful person just as you are. I'm going to talk a lot about health and fitness in this talk. I'm going to talk about those things because that's my story. That's how I learned all of this stuff. But I'm not telling you that you need to go out and lose weight or get fit or do anything like that.
02:02
That is a very personal choice that only you can make for yourself, and I'll get into why that is here in a minute. But these principles that I'm going to tell you about, despite the fact that I'm talking a lot about health and fitness, apply to anything. You can take what I'm going to tell you about today and apply these principles to anything that you might want to do in your life. Secondly, if you do want to lose weight, if you
02:24
do want to get fit, I am not a doctor. So don't take anything I'm about to tell you as the gospel truth. Don't do it because Nick said to do it. When you're laying on the side of the road with the torn Achilles, I don't want to hear anybody say, but Nick said to go run. So that said, let me tell you a little bit about
02:40
my story. I'm not sure how visible it is on the slide, but that's an asthma inhaler in the background of that title slide. I had asthma as a kid, really bad. My mom, when I was talking to her about this talk, she told me the story of signing me up for soccer as a kid. I went to soccer and did the practice, and at the end of practice,
03:01
when she got there, I was doubled over, breathing as hard as I could, and beat red. Could not breathe. She handed me my asthma inhaler, and slowly but surely my breathing returned to normal. Nowadays, if kids have asthma, there's all sorts of things they can do, all sorts of preventative treatments. Back then, not so much. Asthma treatment consisted
03:23
of here's your rescue inhaler. If you can't breathe, take two puffs. If that doesn't work, go to the emergency room. Good luck to you. And so because of that, I was a very sedentary kid. I sat out of P.E. a lot because of asthma flare-ups, and I was
03:46
picked last for every team that ever was for anything, that sort of thing. But I still had the appetite of a growing boy, so I ate pretty much whatever I wanted, right? And per BMI, which I know is not a perfect measurement, but per BMI, I have been obese
04:01
my entire life. This is me a couple of summers ago. My son was four, and my daughter had just turned one. I don't know how many of you have multiple kids, but the adjustment from one kid to two is not a doubling of effort. It's exponential. And that transition
04:25
was particularly hard for me and my family, trying to balance a very demanding job and raising two kids and being a good husband. And so I basically ate my way through it. I stress ate all the time. And I had very little time for exercise. My weight topped
04:42
out somewhere around 230, and that's about what I am in that picture. I was super out of shape. I struggled to keep up with my son when we were running around kicking a soccer ball around even. But I really, despite all that, wasn't all that interested in losing weight or getting fit. I'd tried and failed so many times in my life that I just basically bought into the idea that I was a big person and there wasn't anything
05:02
that I could do to change my physical fitness or my weight. Every time I tried it, I'd failed. But all of my previous attempts had followed a similar pattern, and I think this will be familiar to everybody in here. Ramit Sethi calls this the cycle of non-finishers. When you decide to do something new, you get super motivated. You're super excited
05:23
about it. You're going to do this thing. You're finally going to lose weight. And so you do the first thing that pops to mind. You start doing stuff. It doesn't matter what. You run out to the gym and you hop on the treadmill for 30 minutes because that's the only piece of equipment in the gym that you recognize. Maybe later when you get brave, you'll try those weight machines out. But for today, man, the treadmill
05:42
is enough. And so over time, going to the gym over and over, hitting the treadmill for 30 minutes, not seeing a lot of results, you start to realize that maybe this is harder than you thought it was. Maybe it's going to take more work than you thought it was going to take. And so you start to lose your motivation. Three trips a week
06:04
to the gym turns into two, turns into one, turns into zero, and you've given up. Now, they say it can't hurt to try, but this is proof that sometimes it can. Because if you do this over and over, you follow this cycle repeatedly, at some point you start
06:23
to believe lies about yourself. You start to believe that you're not the kind of person that finishes things. You start to believe that you don't have any discipline. You know, none of those things are actually true. You've just fallen into the motivation trap.
06:41
Turns out it's really difficult to get anything done if you're relying on motivation or willpower to get it done. We know this because of this man, Dr. Roy Baumeister. I was first introduced to him in Charles Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit, which I'll talk more about in a minute. But in 1998, Dr. Baumeister and his team did an experiment at Western University that's gone on to become our modern understanding of willpower. What they
07:03
did is this. They recruited a group of students to come in ostensibly for a taste perception exercise. They told these students, okay, here's your scheduled time to arrive. I want you to skip the meal immediately prior to your scheduled time and make sure that you've fasted for at least three hours ahead of time. So these people were hungry.
07:24
And to torture them, Baumeister and his team baked a batch of chocolate chip cookies in the experiment room immediately prior to their subject's arrival. Now imagine how these chocolate chip cookies would smell to you if you'd skipped the meal immediately prior to this and you were starving. They must have smelled amazing. So the researcher
07:42
greeted them, sat them down at a table. And on this table, on one side, were the chocolate chip cookies that had just been baked, still a little bit melty. On the other side, everybody's favorite, a bowl of radishes. Now the researchers explained that cookies and radishes had been deliberately chosen because they were opposite ends of
08:02
the flavor spectrum. Chocolate chip cookies are sweet and salty. Radishes are bitter and umami. And they assigned each person in the experiment either to the cookie cohort or the radish cohort. Now if you had the good fortune to be assigned to the cookie cohort, your only work here was to eat three chocolate chip cookies. If you were
08:22
assigned to the radish cohort, your job was to eat three radishes. And the researchers stressed that it was imperative for the integrity of the experiment that you only eat your assigned food. And then they left the room. And so some of the people from the radish cohort would pick up a chocolate chip cookie and look at it so longingly and they would smell
08:43
it. And then they would put it down and with great resignation, they would eat their radish. Nobody actually ate the wrong food, which was pretty remarkable in my mind. But that wasn't the crux of the experiment. After they ate, the researcher returned and told them that they needed to wait 15 or 20 minutes for their flavor profile in
09:02
their mouth to fade before they could move on to the next phase of the experiment. And oh by the way, while you're waiting, would you mind helping us with another experiment? We're working on problem solving approaches, seeing how different people solve problems. And they put a piece of paper with this diagram in front of the research subject.
09:21
They actually gave them a stack of these, as many as they wanted. And their task was to trace every line in this diagram without repeating any segments or lifting their pencil. They told them to try as long as they wanted to. They gave them a bell. So if you get bored of this, just ring the bell. We'll come back in here. No big deal. But try as long as you want to. One problem. You can't do it. It's impossible. You literally
09:45
cannot trace every line in this figure without lifting your pencil or repeating a line. And that's what the researchers on Dr. Baumeister's team wanted to test. They wanted to see if there was any difference in persistence between the people assigned to the cookie cohort and the radish cohort. So here's what they found. The people in the radish cohort
10:04
made an average of 19.4 attempts at working their way through this problem. They spent, on average, eight minutes and 21 seconds. At an impossible problem, that's pretty good persistence. The cookie cohort, on the other hand, did 34.3 attempts on average
10:21
and spent 18 minutes and 54 seconds trying to work their way through the problem. Now that number is actually skewed on the low side because the researchers set a time limit of 30 minutes. They wouldn't let anybody work longer than 30 minutes on this problem. And a number of people in the cookie cohort had that problem. They were still working at 30 minutes when the researcher came in to interrupt them. Nobody in the radish
10:41
cohort had that problem. And so the conclusion that Dr. Baumeister and his team drew from this is that willpower is a lot like a muscle. It's really easy to work your willpower to exhaustion, just like lifting a weight over and over again. Eventually your muscle is going to fatigue and give out. And so if you spend all day at work keeping yourself on task, the odds that you'll have willpower left at night to tackle something
11:03
significant in your life, pretty slim. This was my first big realization. Your willpower will fail you every single time. So you have to plan accordingly. This is what I mean by the motivation trap. When you run out and charge headlong into something, you're
11:20
eventually going to hit the trough where you run out of motivation and you can't keep doing what you were trying to do. You can't grit your way through big accomplishments in life. It just won't work. But if you look at the cycle of non-finishers and you look at these first two items, there's a lot of energy and motivation present in those two steps. We don't want to waste that. So how can we channel that energy more
11:41
productively? What should we do with that motivation? That's where Dr. B.J. Fogg comes in. B.J. Fogg has a term for this. B.J. is a researcher at Stanford and the founder of the Stanford Persuasive Technology Lab. He's done a lot of research around human motivation and he coined the term motivation wave to describe this initial rush of energy and motivation that accompanies every time we decide to do
12:03
something new. So how does this work? Let's say that you want to learn to surf. You're pumped. You're going to do it. You're going to hang ten just like this guy. You can do one of two things. You could, on one hand, head down to your local surf shop, grab the first surfboard that caught your eye, grab a wetsuit, paddle out on the wave
12:23
and start trying to surf. If you've learned to surf, you'll recognize how foolish that would be. On the other hand, you could find a good instructor, book some lessons, rent some equipment, go check it out. If you like it, put lessons on a regular repetition so that you can get good at surfing. Now the first path is just the cycle of non-finishers
12:44
exemplified. That's what we all do when we decide to charge headlong into something. The second path is what Dr. Fogg would encourage us to do, namely, do the important hard to do meta work up front when you have energy and motivation to do it so that following through on the behavior later is easy. Now when I say hard to do important meta work,
13:05
what do I mean by that? Well, there's a few things you should do. First of all, you should look yourself in the mirror. You should look yourself in the mirror and be really
13:22
honest with yourself. Sorry, my slides are running out of control. You should look yourself in the mirror and be really honest with yourself. Thinking through your goal and making a plan to reach it is really hard work. Sorry, my notes are, there we go. Now
13:44
I'm in the right place. Sorry, everybody. You should look yourself in the mirror and be really honest with yourself. It turns out it's really, when somebody asks you to do something, it's a lot easier to say yes than to say no, right? When somebody asks you, even if you don't want to do it, it's always easier to say yes than to say no. Well, it turns out it's easy to do this with yourself as well. When you decide
14:05
to do something, it's easier to tell yourself yes, I'm going to go charge out and do that thing than to say, I don't know that I want to do that. So lots of times we fail because we say yes to something out of obligation. Weight loss is a perfect example of this. Every one of us who has tried to lose weight at some point in their life has said
14:22
yes to weight loss out of societal obligation versus actually desiring to do the hard work ourselves. When you say yes out of obligation, you're way less committed to doing it. And half-hearted commitments become very expensive when these failures start to pile up. So when you start something new, you have to admit to yourself up front that
14:41
it's going to get really hard. And you have to decide if it's really worth pursuing. If you say yes, then you can make a real commitment to it. And if it's not, just let it go. Don't feel guilty about it. So if you do say yes, and you decide to make a commitment to it, what does that look like? You want to pick your goal and make a plan to get there. Thinking through your goal and making a plan to get there
15:03
is really hard work. That's why you should do it when your motivation is high. Having a plan up front keeps you from being the person that goes out and spends a thousand bucks on a surfboard and then lets it collect dust in their garage for years. The interesting thing about all this in my life is that I stumbled into it all sort of backwards.
15:27
My journey to better health began here at Juice Land in Austin. It's a staple for juice and smoothies in Austin. My wife discovered green smoothies here. She would go once a week to get a green smoothie after her yoga class, and she'd been doing that for months, trying to convince me the whole time how wonderful they were and that I should try them. No way, man.
15:45
Something that green couldn't taste good. There's no way. She finally managed to talk me into it, despite my fear of green leafy vegetables and, well, really anything healthy. And I really liked it, much to my surprise. And so for Christmas 2015, my wife and I always decided to buy
16:04
ourselves something together as our big Christmas gift, and for Christmas 2015, our big Christmas gift to each other was a Vitamix. Now, I had always been of the opinion that it would be silly to spend this much money on a blender. Who needs a $400 blender? Nobody. Turns out to have been
16:23
one of the best investments I have ever made, and I'll tell you why. In the course of looking for recipes to make with this giant monument of a blender, I ran across this website called simplegreensmoothies.com. And in December of 2015, targeting all of us who had just gotten a fancy new blender for Christmas,
16:43
they were running a 30-day green smoothie challenge. You signed up for this thing, they'd send you recipes, they'd send you shopping lists, and your only job was to make the smoothie and drink it once a day for 30 days. Well, that sounded easy enough for me, right? I knew I wasn't getting enough fruits and veggies in my diet, and I liked green smoothies a lot.
17:02
Surely I could do that. And so that was my first goal, drink a green smoothie for breakfast every day for one month. Now, I didn't know all of the things that I know. I hadn't done all of the research around habits. So I lucked into a really good goal here, because here we are 16 months after that initial challenge, and this is what I have for breakfast almost every day.
17:23
It really is that color, and it really does taste amazing. So how did it stick? How did I luck into something that stuck for 16 months for me when I really hated healthy eating up to that point? Well, first of all, like I alluded to, the goal is very
17:41
well structured. It's super simple. I just had to make and drink a green smoothie once a day for 30 days. Total commitment? Maybe five minutes. That's lesson number two today. Your initial goal should be so small that you would feel silly not doing it. The reason there's dental floss in the background here is that B.J. Fogg has done,
18:02
has a program called Tiny Habits, where he coaches you through how to set goals and how to hit them. It's a week-long program, super short, and his number one recommended goal for that program has to do with oral hygiene. But it's not floss your teeth. It's floss one tooth. Because if you floss one tooth, I mean, it's a very low commitment.
18:24
Anybody can floss one tooth, but what's going to happen when you floss one tooth? Well, I've already got the floss out. It's already wrapped around my fingers. I might as well just floss. Right? And so setting that tiny goal lets you start building up a pattern of success. It lets your success begin to snowball, and it lets you build momentum that lets you hit
18:41
other more difficult habits. But a good goal was only part of my success. What else was there about this 30-day green smoothie challenge that worked so well for me? Well, number two, they handed me a plan that made it super easy. In my email every week, I got a shopping list. All I had to do was go to the grocery store
19:02
and buy what was on their list in addition to the rest of my grocery shopping for the week. Every day, I'd look at the recipe, grab a couple things out of the freezer, toss them in the blender, turn it on, voila, green smoothie. No thought required on my part at all. So this is what I mean when I say do the work up front to make it easy for yourself
19:23
later when you lose motivation. If I was opening the freezer every day and looking, what fruit do I have in there now, let me make up a recipe, I probably wouldn't have been as successful as I was with this all laid out and easy to follow step by step. But it turns out there's another secret weapon here that really made this stick for me.
19:42
This green smoothie plan had all of the ingredients of a habit. And it's a habit that's held for me for 16 months. So let's talk about why that is. And this is where we bring up Charles Duhigg. I mentioned his book The Power of Habit earlier. In it, Duhigg picks apart the biological and practical aspects of how to build habits. If you want to make big
20:03
changes in your life, this is the book you want. Go out and read this book. I'll start at the same place he does with biology. So this is a coronal section of the human brain. What that means is if somebody took my head and sliced it in half right here, this is what it would look like.
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Duhigg explains it like this. The brain is like an onion. And the outer layers of that onion are the layers that have been most recently added from an evolutionary perspective. This is where complex thought takes place. If you paint a painting or write some code, this is where it's happening in the outer layers of your brain. Deeper in the center of the brain, we're getting into more primitive structures.
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Things that regulate breathing, digestion, your heart rate, things like that. And surrounding the base of your brain stem on either side is a golf ball-sized mass called the basal ganglia. Almost all animals' brains have it. It's a very primitive structure. And one of the things that the basal ganglia does for us is recognize, store, and replay patterns.
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It does that automatically. We know this because of an experiment run by a group of scientists at MIT in the mid-1990s involving rats, mazes, and chocolate. So here's Duhigg's diagram of the experiment from The Power of Habit. They set up a T-shaped maze. They put the rat on one end of it behind a door.
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And on the other end of it, where it branched out, on one side there was chocolate and on the other side there was nothing. Now the chocolate was always in the same place in this maze. They never moved it from one side to the other. They always left it on the left leg from the rat's perspective. And they took these rats and they anesthetized them and they inserted implants in their brains
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so they could measure their brain activity as they were running this maze and trying to navigate this maze. So when they first opened the door, there's a loud click and they could see furious activity in the rat's brain. The rat would sniff and it would scratch the walls and it would try to climb up and eventually it would scamper its way down and it might wander right and look around a little bit and finally it would turn left and find the chocolate.
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After it had done it a few more times, the researchers started to see the activity in their brains decline. They weren't having to think as hard to work this maze. They were learning the pattern. A couple weeks later, after the rats had run this maze hundreds of times, they saw a really interesting pattern.
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As soon as the door clicked open, the rat would immediately run through the maze, turn left, straight to the chocolate. What they saw was an immediate spike in brain activity when the door clicked. Then nothing. The rat's brain essentially went to idle and then another spike in activity at the end when the rat got to the chocolate. The only part of the brain that wasn't quiet during this was the basal ganglia.
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This recognition and automation of behavior is called behavior chunking and it's the basis of what forms habits for us. So how many of you, when you sat down this morning to put your shoes on, had to consciously think about how to tie them? Nobody, right? It just happened. How many of you, when you brushed your teeth this morning, thought about putting toothpaste on your toothbrush?
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Like actually consciously made a decision of, oh, before I brush my teeth, I should really put some toothpaste on this brush. Nobody. You didn't even think about brushing your teeth. That was automated for you. You walked in the bathroom, picked up your toothbrush, and went to town without even thinking about it.
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It's automatic because your basal ganglia has chunked that behavior for you and it replays it automatically on cue. This is what Charles Duhigg refers to as the habit loop. For our friends, the rats, the habit loop looks like this. First, there's the cue. When the door clicks open, the rats associate that click with, oh, I'm going to get some chocolate.
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Let's get after this. And so it triggers their basal ganglia to kick in and replay this pattern. That's the routine. The rat runs down this maze and turns left. And the reason the rat runs down this maze and turns left is because at the end of that routine, there is a reward.
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That reward is what triggered the rat's brain to encode this process in the first place. Because it knew that by consistently following this set of steps, it would be rewarded. And evolutionarily speaking, rats like food. They want to continue living. And so they're going to do this reliably every time that door clicks.
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Turns out our brains are doing this encoding for us all the time. We just don't realize it. Our brains are really lazy. They like to save thought. And the more things that our brains can shove down into the basal ganglia, the more of this critical thinking time our brains can free up for doing more important work. You know, like when you're tying your shoes or brushing your teeth, you're thinking about the day ahead.
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You might be thinking about a meeting that you have. In my case, you were fretting about a talk that you had to give. It frees your brain up to do all of that stuff while automating the simple repetitive elements of your life. But that also means that your brain automates things like, oh, I'm really stressed out. What would help that is a double cheeseburger.
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The exact same mechanism. Significant portions of our lives are automated by habits that we don't recognize or understand. This is why the smoothie thing stuck so easily for me. Every morning when I saw the Vitamix sitting on the cabinet, I went, oh yeah, smoothie challenge.
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The decision to make one was already made for me. No discipline required. I looked at the day's recipe, got the stuff out of the freezer, threw it in the blender, drank my green smoothie, and I was rewarded every day by this explosion of flavor in my mouth that I really like. And that amazing explosion of flavor immediately reinforced that behavior. It taught my body that it wanted to do that because when it did that, when it made a smoothie, it gets something that tastes really good at the end.
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And over time, it learned that it made it feel really good as well. It gave it an energy boost. And so my body became accustomed to that. If you want some hands-on, well, lesson number three is that deliberately building a habit is far more effective than just deciding to make a change.
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If you can build a change you want to make into a habit, get yourself to automate it, making a change doesn't require any willpower on your part. It just happens. If you want some hands-on training in doing this, like I mentioned, you should check out BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits program. Just Google Tiny Habits. It'll be result number one.
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The program lasts a week. He signs up a new cohort literally every week, and he walks you through setting and achieving three very simple goals. If you want to dig deeper, definitely read The Power of Habit. This brings up another one of Charles Duhigg's key concepts, the idea of keystone habits. The idea is that some habits are so powerful that they can trigger other habits in your life.
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And green smoothies turned out to be one of those habits for me. I didn't know it. Duhigg says you're more likely to stumble on one of these keystone habits when you do something that's very scary for you. And for me, and I know this sounds kind of silly, but for me eating healthy has always been scary. I don't like the way healthy things taste. I never have.
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I've always liked richer, fattier, cheesier foods. And so the idea of taking one of my meals every day and devoting it exclusively to something healthy was a little scary for me. And I stumbled onto a keystone habit. I started drinking these smoothies once, sometimes even twice a day. I had more energy, and I conquered my fear, and I was inspired to do more to get fit.
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And so I set a long-term goal of losing 50 pounds and a short-term goal of regularly going to the gym, specifically to spend 30 minutes on the elliptical. The very specific reason that I picked the elliptical, I'll get to that in a second. But the thing about this is the green smoothies are self-reinforcing, right? I get this wonderful blast of flavor at the end. This mind-numbing torture device, not so much.
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So here's how I went about building the habit and making myself do this thing that I really didn't want to do on a regular basis. On Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, I changed into workout clothes before dinner. Then after I got my kids to bed, I already had my gym clothes on, I was already committed, so I went to the gym.
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What about the reward? Well, you have to know yourself to be able to pick an effective reward. This is why I picked the elliptical. One of the things that I love most in life is time to read.
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And as you can imagine, with two kids, I don't get a lot of time to read. Life is a little too crazy for me to sit down and read on a regular basis. But the elliptical happens to be a full-body workout that I can do while I'm still reading a book. And so I can convince myself that it was worth getting on the elliptical for 30 minutes for the sake of reading.
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If that doesn't work for you, you might try eating a piece of candy or even a cookie immediately after your workout. It doesn't even matter that it's counterproductive at first. As long as you're positively reinforcing that behavior that you want to encode in your life, your brain will encode it for you. And eventually you can wean yourself off of that extrinsic reward because your brain will
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start getting hooked on things like the dopamine boost that you get from working out. Or if it's, say, sitting down and concentrating on something for 30 minutes, your brain will get hooked on the feeling of success that comes from doing that. But in order to initially encode the habit, you may have to cheat a little. You may have to eat some chocolate or some cookies or something. Turns out, though, that sometimes it's hard to get a habit right.
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And my elliptical habit failed miserably. Because my schedule was inconsistent. I'd make excuses. I'd have a really hard Tuesday and I'd go, oh, I'll just sit down and watch TV tonight. I can go to the gym tomorrow. I never went tomorrow. Ever. Some weeks I only went to the gym twice, some weeks once, some weeks not at all, and I fell
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back into the same old patterns of beating myself up for not being able to make myself go to the gym. So how do you fix a failing habit? Habits are just simple systems. We're all software developers. We know what to do with systems.
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Sam Carpenter has done a lot of thinking about systems. He's an entrepreneur from Oregon and he's written a couple of books on systems thinking in both business and in your personal life. And the book that I read was this one, The Systems Mindset. It's about taking a systems mindset in your own life.
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Now, before you run out and buy this book, I want to warn you that it's a bit of an eccentric read. And there's some things in it that I definitely don't agree with. But there's one central idea that I want to bring up. And it's this idea that literally everything in life is made up of systems. What does that mean? The takeaway is that we spend our lives running around fighting fires in the form of results.
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For me, I'm not going to the gym three times a week. Come on, self, go to the gym three times a week. This shouldn't be that hard. When instead what we should be doing is realizing that that's a system. There's a whole set of steps and processes that leads up to us successfully going to the gym three times a week.
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And if you're not doing that, ignore the end result. Figure out where your system's breaking. Take a debugging mindset. This is a really powerful shift in thinking, going far beyond practical implications. How many of you have heard of the idea of a blameless post-mortem?
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So this is another example of systems thinking. When your system falls over or something breaks or you have a critical production failure, you set your team down, not to establish blame, not to figure out who's going to get fired, but to figure out what was wrong with your system and what changes you can make to your overall process to prevent that thing from happening again.
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It's a very healthy, very encouraging process focused largely on learning. And if it's done right, everybody walks away feeling whole and nobody walks away feeling beaten up. The same principles apply when you start applying systems mindset to your own life. Not only am I focusing on the root causes of why I'm not going to the gym,
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I'm shifting blame from me, from me being lazy or undisciplined or unable to finish, to my system. It's not that I have a personality flaw. It's that my system's screwed up. No big deal. Let me fix the system. Things like procrastination, lack of discipline become clues, not personal moral failings.
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And when what you're most looking to do is snowball success into other success, that's a really important thing. And so when I looked at my attempted elliptical habit, I found two problems. Number one, I had given myself too much of a choice to make and it was a choice that required me to exercise willpower at the end of the day,
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specifically when I was completely out of willpower. So obviously on a regular basis, I'm going to fail that choice. I'm tired from the day. It's going to be way easier to sit down and watch TV. I'm not going to go to the gym. So how could I take that choice away? Well, for me, the answer was a little extreme. I decided I was going to go work out every day, uncompromisingly.
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So that way there wasn't a decision to make. It was just a thing that I did. It turns out that it's a lot easier to encode a habit when you do something on a very regular rhythm. Now if that didn't work for me, another thing that I could have done is decided that I'm going to go work out Tuesday, Thursday, Sunday, non-negotiable.
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Because if you do something on the same day, same time, even if it's not every day, it's easier for you to encode that into a habit. The thing that prevents you from encoding into a habit is the trap that I had gotten into of negotiating with myself and telling myself that I could always go tomorrow. So I went to the extreme end of the scale. I decided I was going to work out every day.
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But then there was another problem with that when I looked at it from a systems perspective. That was a really unrealistic commitment for me. I had 30 minutes a day to spare. I could get on the elliptical 30 minutes a day. What I couldn't do was drive 15 minutes to the gym, get on the elliptical for 30 minutes, and then drive 15 minutes home. For some reason, psychologically, the need to commit to an hour of time was a huge psychological barrier.
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But I could make the commitment to 30 minutes of time, especially 30 minutes of reading. So what did I do? I went out and I bought an elliptical for my house so that I didn't have to drive to the gym. I made this thing that I wanted to do even easier for myself.
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Now I realize that's sort of an extreme example, but that's why you have to look at yourself in the mirror and decide, is this really something I want to commit to? Because sometimes, if you want to make big changes in your life, as you're debugging these systems, you're going to find out that you have to make some significant investments in making these things happen.
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So, did it work? Yeah, pretty well. So, I bought my elliptical on February the 6th, and that started a 73-day-long streak of me getting 30 minutes of cardio a day. And as you can imagine, I lost a ton of weight in those 73 days.
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Turns out that Apple did something really smart when they implemented this calendar. This is just a glorified Seinfeld calendar. If you're not familiar with the idea of a Seinfeld calendar, it's that if you want to reach a goal, what you should do is put a calendar on the wall and put an X on that calendar for every day that you do the thing you want to do. And eventually you have a chain that you don't want to break.
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When you decide to work out every day to get 30 minutes of cardio every day, this becomes a Seinfeld calendar. And there were definitely days in that stretch that the only reason I got on the elliptical was because I had a 20-day streak in front of me that I didn't want to break. April the 19th, I got a stomach bug, and then work got stressful after that, and I fell off the wagon for a little bit.
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But I got back on pretty quick. Building this success enabled me to tackle one of my biggest fears, running. Now, to understand what a big deal this is for me, you have to understand how much I hated running my whole life.
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I mean really hated. I looked at people who enjoyed running, and in my mind, these people were aliens. I couldn't understand why anybody would want to do that. Why would you want to run when nothing was chasing you, when you weren't in danger of being eaten? But my wife's a runner. She likes to run. I mean, not a regular runner, but she ran track in high school, and she's always enjoyed running.
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So this was a way for me to invest in spending time with my wife to learn how to be a runner. In elementary school, I would beg my mom for a note on the day that we had to do the mile run walk for the President's Physical Fitness Challenge. I would beg her to write me a note excusing me from PE that day so that I didn't have to do it.
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So in September 2016, I started Couch to 5K. I kept my daily cardio routine, but I just subbed in the Couch to 5K runs three days a week. In October, I hit the infamous week five, day three, which if you've done Couch to 5K, you probably know what I'm talking about. It's where your workout ramps up from two eight-minute periods of running with a five-minute walk break in between to a straight-up 20-minute run.
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It's a pretty big jump. It's pretty intimidating, and I had a plan for failure. If I couldn't do it, then I was just going to repeat week five, no big deal. But I did it. I surprised myself. I didn't think that I could do it, and so when I did week five, day three of Couch to 5K, I ran the first mile of my entire life.
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I literally never run a continuous mile until that point. As a 35-year-old, I ran the first mile of my life. I stuck with Couch to 5K until I could run a continuous but slow 5K. And then I signed up for a race, and I underestimated how motivating that was going to be for me.
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So I trained pretty hard for it. I followed an actual training plan. My goal was to get under 30 minutes, and I did. I finished in 28 minutes and 40 seconds, way faster than I expected to. I beat my previous best by about three minutes. This last Sunday, I ran the Cap 10K
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in Austin. It's one of the most famous races in Austin, 21,300 runners in this race. My previous fastest 10K was about an hour and two minutes, so I set an hour as my goal seemed reasonable. It seemed like it was going to be tough on a course this hilly with 21,000 other runners. I ended up finishing in 57 minutes and two seconds. I got the text message on my phone with my official time, and I teared up a little bit.
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It was one of the biggest achievements of my life to be able to run a 10K that fast and to look at the work that had taken me to that point. My runs are now in my favorite parts of the week, and race days are some of my favorite days of the year
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because I get to go be around this amazing tribe of people who are all oriented around fitness and running. It's very reinforcing. So to tie it all up, let's talk about how to hit your big goals. First, take a long-term view. So I mentioned when I set into this whole journey, when I decided I was going to get fit, I set a goal of losing 50 pounds.
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But I didn't tie a date to that. Instead, it was just this nebulous thing out in the future that I wanted to get to. What I did tie dates and things to were things like getting to the gym three days a week, getting on the elliptical seven days a week, working on my fitness that way.
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When you take a long-term view, it smooths out the bumps in the road. It lets you find the joy in the process versus being fixated on sprinting to this goal all the time. Second, set goals along the way that let you snowball success. This is how I became a runner. I did the elliptical thing every day for 73 days, and then I did it again.
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Running was really scary for me, but being on the elliptical had taught my body to seek out endorphins. And so when I took away the extrinsic reward, that 30 minutes of reading, I found that the endorphins were enough for me. I was so hooked on the small endorphin boost from being on the elliptical that the big endorphin boost from the runner's high, oh man, that was immediately reinforcing for me.
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I no longer needed that extrinsic reward. The exercise itself was enough for me. Third, build habits and then optimize them with a systems mindset. This takes the blame off of yourself. It lets you focus on building the habits
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and optimizing them and not focusing on things that you might perceive as personal failures. It takes the responsibility off of you and lets you do what you already know how to do from your job. You already know how to approach and debug a system successfully. Apply that skill to your own life. You've worked too hard at building it.
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You want to get better at writing code? Build habits around reading and deliberate practice. You want to get better at concentrating? Build habits around periods of concentration and slowly build on them. Cal Newport's book, Deep Work, is about exactly that. It's exactly what he talks about in that book, is systematizing and building out patterns of deep thought in your life.
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So today, I weigh 180 pounds, 50 pounds off my peak weight. I'm at my lowest weight of my adult life and by far the best fitness. I drink one to two green smoothies a day. I get 30 minutes of cardio six to seven days a week. I've gone from hating running to running an average of 20 miles a week.
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And all this stuff is driven by systems and habits requiring very little willpower. And if you take nothing else away today, that's what I want you to hear. Anybody can do this. You just have to understand that willpower won't get you there. And learn how to hack your way around willpower.
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Learn how to build systems and habits that will get you to your goals. You can do stuff like this too. I don't have a lot of willpower. I've failed at this so many times in my life before I finally figured it out. And I know you can do it too. Thanks a lot.