Brian Johnson uses a laser-tag game with his son to explain BJ Fogg's insight: when you fail to change behavior, it's usually a design problem, not a character problem. Small friction in your environment beats willpower every time.
Chapters
Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to another Arete plus one degree. This is the fifth micro chapter in my new book Arete activate your heroic potential451 of what I hope are potentially life changing ideas. The best stuff I know organized around seven objectives. We're going through the first 11 micro chapters in the first objective. Then we'll have fun looking at some of my favorites in the days and weeks ahead. Let's get to work. Character versus Design Flaws how to Play the Game of Life now that we've mined some wisdom gems out of my morning with Emerson, how about one more gem from the evening and then we'll carry on for Curious Souls, Emerson wound up having a great day of chess. He won two games and won two more via lessons he learned in a couple of losses to some superior players. We decided to stop at the laser tag place on the way home as a little celebration of the day and as a celebration of a milestone. He hit on Chess.com so we show up at Blazer Tag in Austin excited to have some fun and we just miss getting into the group that's about to start each. The start time for the next group is so late that we won't be able to make it. And the guy running the show says he'll get us in, but we'll be missing part of the briefing in which everyone is told how to play the game. Now Emerson had played earlier that week and he knew how to play. I haven't played laser tag in roughly 40 years. I'm thinking it's laser tag. Can't be that hard. So I say perfect. Thank you. We head into the final part of the briefing. Then we put on the gear. Then we head into the laser tag arena and I'm absolutely terrible. As in I'm really, really really bad. To put it in perspective, earlier in the week Alexandra played with Emerson and she was so bad that she got a -99 score. The guy who runs it said he'd never seen anyone do that bad. We'd laughed about it as a family that night and 10 minutes into the 20 minute game I have a minus 100 score base palm. My mental toughness is eroding quickly. Self talk wow. I'm really bad at this. I think I should just quit playing and find the exit. This is embarrassing. Then I look a little closer at the little stats dashboard on the laser thing and right above my hall of shame worthy minus 100 score I see some data on my ammo. I have 1000 units of laser tag ammo. Now That's a little weird because I'm pretty sure I started with a thousand units of laser tag ammo. And trust me, I've been trying to use those laser tag ammo units. My trigger finger is sore from squeezing that thing so hard. Then somehow as I fiddle with everything, I stumble upon a little button at the end of the laser. I press it while squeezing the trigger and a laser fires. I hear it. A sound has never been so beautiful. Long story slightly shorter now I get to work channeling my inner seal and start having a ton of fun. I end the game with 400 and something points right behind Emerson. And you know what I thought of? I thought of BJ Fogg. As you may know, BJ runs the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University. He's done some of the research that inspired James Clear's Atomic Habits and Charles Duhigg's Power of Habit and he wrote his own book called Tiny Habits. I'm going to walk you through some of the best, most life changing ideas from all those books as we turn you into a habit installing and deleting Ninja. But for now, I want to emphasize the distinction from his book that I was thinking about as I took my laser tag gear off. In short, BJ tells us that if you've struggled with changing your behaviors in the past, you might want to consider the fact that it wasn't a character flaw, but a design flaw. In other words, nothing was wrong with you per se. You simply didn't know how to effectively change your behavior. Laser tag is a lot easier and a lot more fun when you know how to play the game. And so is life. It's time for the how to Play the Game of Life briefing we never got. P.S. alexandra told me that I need to tell you that the week before. She also missed the part of the briefing in which they teach people how to shoot a laser because she was chasing Eleanor at the time, which meant that she had the exact same experience of not knowing how to shoot a laser. Soulmates, I hope you enjoyed that Arete plus one degree from my new book, Arete Activate youe Heroic Potential. The book will be shipped on November 14th right before black Friday in time to make it the perfect holiday gift perhaps. I wanted to let you know that we have some special giveaways if you think you might like to pre order the book, and even more goodies if you think you might want to give the book away this holiday season. Here's the deal. Pre order one copy and get a free advanced reader copy of the ebook today. Pre order three copies and get a free advanced copy of the ebook and the audiobook and a limited edition Arete Coin that we'll send to you. Pre order 10 copies of the book. Bless you and get all of that plus and an autographed advanced hardcover reader copy sent to you immediately inside the fancy Arete VIP box, which is packed with other goodies including this Arete T shirt, a Heroic t shirt and 10 free annual heroic memberships for your gift recipients. You'd be able to give them a book and a year's worth of Heroic for free. If you pre order 25 copies, you'll get all that plus a free ticket to our launch event party in Austin November 10th through 12th and you'll get a personal voice memo thank you and a high five from me if you're feeling inspired to order over 50 copies of the book. We've been blessed to have a lot of CEOs and corporations do that. We'll give you a huge discount. Just let us know all of this. You can learn more about at Heroic Heroic Us Book. Of course you can order the book on Amazon, Barnes and Noble Independent bookstores will be everywhere you can buy a book, Hudson's airport stores, etc. And let us know of course when you've done that and purchased a copy or three or ten or more if you feel inspired to do so at Heroic Us Book. I appreciate you and I hope you love the book. I'm super excited about it, super proud of it, and I hope it helps you and your families transform your lives.
