How to Trick Your Brain to Like Doing Hard Things – Atomic Habits by J... (3)

worse when i don't work out any better

when i do

now at no point was i trying to build

better nutrition habits

or better focus or better sleep habits

or improved energy

but all those things happen as a side

effect as a result of the one keystone

habit

some other common examples of keystone

habits ceos will often talk about their

daily meditation habit

they get 10 or 20 minutes of meditation

in then the rest of their day flows more

smoothly

artists really being on a daily walk

there are tons of famous artists there's

a great book called daily rituals

that talks about the habits and

behaviors of many famous artists and

scientists

and it's interesting how many of them

had a daily walk as part of their

routine

but these are some examples of if you

just do this one behavior

you can trust that it will ripple into

other areas of your personal and

professional

life

the basic idea here that i want to share

with you is this idea of designing for

laziness

so bj fogg the professor from stanford

university he likes popcorn he enjoys

eating popcorn he just didn't want to

eat that much of it

and so he took the popcorn out of his

kitchen walked down the hallway and into

the storage room into his garage

climbed up on a ladder and put the

popcorn on the highest shelf

in the garage now if he really wants to

eat it

he can just go out and get it it's only

going to take 60 seconds

but if he's designing for his lazy

decision for his default action

he's not going to go get the popcorn and

so the idea is

how can we design the spaces we live in

and the places we work

so that the default action the lazy

behavior is a better choice

the key idea is that i've never seen a

person consistently stick to positive

habits in a negative environment

if you're trying to fight the

environment that you live and work in

all the time

it's going to be very very hard to stick

with the things that are important to

you

jerry seinfeld very famous comedian in

the u.s

he was on tour doing a comedy tour and

there was a young comic

named brad isaac who was opening for

seinfeld on stage that night

and he caught seinfeld backstage before

the show he said mr seinfeld

you know i'm an aspiring comic i'm a

young comic what tips do you have for a

young comic on how to succeed

and seinfeld thought for a minute he

said well the secret to being a better

comic is to write better jokes

and the secret to writing better jokes

is to write every day

so here's what you should do get a wall

calendar

where you can see every day of the month

and the year mapped out

on one page then each day that you stick

to your behavior

of writing for 10 minutes or 15 minutes

writing jokes

i want you to put an x on that day at

the beginning you'll do it every now and

then but eventually at some point you're

gonna get a string going

five six seven eight nine days in a row

you'll have a chain

and at that point your only goal becomes

don't break the chain

it doesn't matter how good or how bad

the behavior is it doesn't matter

whether the writing makes it into the

performance that you do it doesn't

matter how you feel about the jokes

all that matters is that you stick to

the behavior and this idea

that sticking to the things that we want

to measure over a consistent basis

is what makes the biggest difference is

something that i think

ties into the point i tried to make at

the very beginning of this which is that

one percent gains

when aggregated add up to very

significant results in the long run

you