Transcript excerpt from a YouTube conversation describing core habit-design principles: for building good habits use four strategies — make cues obvious, make actions attractive/easy/satisfying (emphasis on obvious, easy, satisfying); for breaking bad habits invert those strategies (make cues invisible, unattractive, difficult, unsatisfying).
Chapters
Let's do a good habit and a bad habit, one I need to build and what I need to break. Building a good habit, you kind of want four things to happen for breaking a bad habit, you kind of want four things to happen for building a good one. You want to make the habit obvious, so you want the cues of your habits to be obvious, available, visible, easy to see. You want to make it easy, so scaling it down, reducing friction, and then you want to make it satisfying, more rewarding or beneficial, the more enjoyable it feels more likely are to repeat it. For breaking a bad habit, you just invert those four so rather than making it obvious, you want to make it invisible. Rather than making it attractive, you want to make it unattractive. Rather than making it easy, you want to make it difficult. And rather than making it satisfying, you want to make it unsatisfying.