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
