How to Trick Your Brain to Like Doing Hard Things – Atomic Habits by J... (1)

[Music]

i'd like to start with a story

and the story is about team sky

which is great britain's professional

cycling team sometime in the mid

2000s around 2010 they hired a man named

dave brailsford

and at the time team sky had a very

middle of the road record when it came

to performance on the world stage

they had won about one gold medal in the

last 100 years

from 1908 to 2008 they had never

won a tour de france the premier event

in cycling

and when they hired dave brailsford they

said we would like to change this we

like to improve our performance we'd

like to reach

a higher level of performance what's

your plan to help us do that

and when they hired brailsford he said i

have this strategy called the

aggregation of marginal gains

and the way that he described it was the

one percent improvement

in nearly everything that you do and so

they started by looking at a lot of

things you would expect a cycling team

to look at

they improved their bike tires made them

slightly lighter

they put a more ergonomic seat on the

bike they had their riders where

biofeedback sensors so they could see

how each person responded to the

training and practice that they did each

day

they had their outdoor riders wear

indoor racing suits because they were

lighter and more aerodynamic

but then they did a variety of things

that you wouldn't expect a cycling team

to do

they split tested different types of

massage gels to see which one led to the

best form of recovery

they taught their riders how to wash

their hands to reduce the risk of

infection

keep them healthy they even figured out

what kind of pillow

led to the best night's sleep for each

rider and then brought that on the road

with them to hotels

so brailsford said if we can actually

execute on this strategy if we can

aggregate all these small changes these

little one percent improvements

then i think we can win the tour de

france in about five years

he ended up being wrong they won the

tour de france in three years

and then they repeated again in the

fourth year with a different rider

and then just last year they won for the

third time in four years

and brailsford's strategy really came to

fruition at the olympics in london in

2012

when they won 70 of the gold medals

available and so

what i'd like to start us off with is

the idea that small improvements

actually can add up to a very

significant

change in a relatively short period of

time and this is just basic math

all right if you get one percent better

each day over 365 days

you end up 37 times better at the end of

the year if you get one percent worse

you'd take yourself all the way almost

all the way down to zero

now you might say okay well one percent

improvements are nice but clearly no one

is going to get one percent better every

single day

so is that ever enough to accumulate to

anything considering that we're not

going to be perfect all the time

and i would argue yes in fact you can

get ten times better

if you get one percent better five days

a week 46 weeks a year so it's about 230

days in total

that gives you six weeks off for

holidays illness

laziness and just generally not getting

things done but you're still 10 times

better at the end of the year

and what i would like to propose is that

the way to do this

is not by setting better goals for

ourselves or at our organizations but by

building better systems and obtaining

better habits

in fact you could say that

the goal would never change they wanted

to win a tour de france each year they

wanted to win olympic gold medals it

wasn't the goal

that made the difference instead it was

their system the way that they applied

those improvements in a one percent

basis day after day

there was a study done at yale

university on the psychology of aging

and it was a 23-year study they talked

to uh people and they basically went

into

one of two cohorts the first cohort had

positive views of aging so

when they asked them how they felt about

aging or what their expectations were

for old age

they had relatively good things to say

you know i would be moving into the

prime of my life or

i'll be smarter than i've ever been

before they were very positive about it

the second group was very negative about

it

my body's going to wear down i don't

have much to look forward to

everybody gets sick we'll all die at

some point that type of thing

what they found was that of the 660

adults in the study

the ones with positive views of aging

lived on average

7.6 years longer and that actually is a

very significant number things like

exercise and diet don't account for 7.6

years in

life expectancy so why if your view is

positive

the reason is because you'll take

healthy actions as a result and if your

view is negative you'll assume that

deterioration of your health is

inevitable

if you have a positive view of aging

you'll say something like well i should

continue to eat healthy and work out

because i feel good about moving into

old age i still have a lot to live for

whereas if you have a negative view of

aging you'll say something like what's

the point in me exercising i'm going to

get sick anyway i'm expecting to get old

and so on

the point here is that there's a deeper

level of behavior change and habit

formation than what we often discuss

the way that i would describe it is this

the outer layer

of behavior change are the results that

we get the outcome the goal

so that's the outside layer often we say

we need better goals

we need better outcomes we need better

results we need to hit new sales numbers

and so to do that we take one step in on

behavior change when we talk about our

actions

now the actions and the results are

usually where we stop

when it comes to habits and behavior

change we say how can we build better

habits how can we

take action on this particular goal how

can we take an action to get a result

but i would argue and that yale study

would prove this

that there's a deeper level of behavior

change as well and that level is

identity

or belief or mindset you can take your

pick of what you'd like to determine

but the identity that we hold drives the

actions that we take and the results

that we get

so in the yale study the people have a

positive identity

when it comes to aging they believe that

they should take positive actions and

thus

they get better results in the long run

we'll take a common example

when it comes to personal habits weight

loss so

losing 20 pounds or 10 kilos over the

next six months

that'll be the outer layer okay that'll

be the result that you're

going for in order to lose those 10

kilos you need to move in

to the actions that you take and so that

would be something like working out

three times a week or eating healthy

but most people stop there so for

example in this case the identity might

be

i want to become the type of person who

doesn't miss workouts

and my argument is if we focus just on

the identity

if you become the type of person who

doesn't miss workouts if you become the

type person who exercise it consistently

and only focus on the core of behavior

change it ripples out to the other

layers anyway

so the key idea here is that a shift in

mindset

leads to a shift in daily choices and a

shift in daily choices leads to

significantly better results in the long

run

the word priority came into the english

language in the 1400s it was singular

it meant the first or very prior thing

and it stayed singular for the next 500

years

only in the 1900s did we pluralize the

term

and start talking about priorities

illogically we reason that by changing

the word we could bend reality and

somehow we would now have multiple first

things you hear about this a lot in

organizations

they'll talk about priority one priority

two priority three priority four

everything is a priority everything is

an urgency even though it's not possible

for us to focus on more than one thing

at a time

you could also call it ruthless

elimination and when it comes to

building better habits and changing

behavior in organizations

and in our personal lives we have to be

ruthless about the things that we focus

on

we actually have some good data on this

there was a study of a parole board

judges

there were about a thousand of them a

thousand cases that they looked at in

this particular research study

and the parole board judges would have

criminals come out

they would sit before the parole board

and then they would vote on whether or

not they would be released from prison

or would have to go back in you would

think

what you would hope is that in order for

a criminal to get released

from prison it should be based on the

time they serve the type of crime that

they did

whether or not they had good behavior

all sorts of things built into the

criminal justice system

in fact what they found the single

biggest factor on whether or not someone

was released on parole

or whether they had to go back into

prison was the time of day

that they were seen so this is a map

of the judge's decisions throughout the

day you can see that in the beginning of

the day it starts around 60

likelihood that a criminal would be

released on parole

as the morning goes on the judges get

fatigued their will power depletes

and the odds of you getting a favorable

hearing decreases

that first dotted line is lunch so they

take a break

the judge's decision making spikes right

back up to where it was before

then goes back down they take another

break in the afternoon and then pretty

soon just falls off the cliff and the

day ends

now this idea is a psychological concept

called decision fatigue or ego depletion

and the point here is that the more

decisions that we make over the course

of a day

the more your willpower and focus gets

fatigued it's kind of like a muscle

right if i were to pick up that weight

and

do curls for a little while i can do

them for a minute or two but if you

catch me 30 minutes from now i'm not

going to have much left

and that's how our willpower works as

well

so the key idea here is your brain only

has so much capacity to provide your

willpower is like a muscle and similar

to muscles it gets fatigued

all right let me give you some practical

ideas on how to do this it's great to

say that we need to simplify but how do

we actually make that happen in the real

world

warren buffett one of the most famous

investors of our time

he adheres to a concept that i'll call

the 25 5

rule and this story comes from a man

named mike flint

who was warren buffett's private pilot

mike flint has flown multiple u.s

presidents he's also the pilot for