Habits 101: How to Create Habits that Can Change Your Life

Hi, this is Brian. I am sitting here working on an article for my friend Brendan Brazier's magazine, Thrive. The article is going to be about, you guessed it, habits 101, how to create habits that can change your life. I did a class on this earlier this year, but I didn't do a video, so I decided to do a video now. 10 tips, big ideas on how two create habits that can change your life. Habits are huge. It was the first class I did in the new year for a reason. Greatness is formed by good habits. So let's look at 10 of my favorite ideas. The first one is to use willpower wisely. So if you're familiar with my work, you know I talk about willpower a lot. Willpower is one of the strongest predictors of everything that we want to have in our lives. Happiness, leadership, meaning mojo, wealth, all that stuff is greatly predicted by our willpower, our self mastery, our discipline. And I like to say that one stat that I find just remarkable is the fact that willpower out predicts IQ for academic performance by a factor of two. So willpower is a greater predictor of academic performance than IQ by a factor of two. That's nuts. And for some reason we don't teach kids and all of us how to develop our willpower. Whole nother conversation. But the interesting thing about willpower is that it's finite. You only have so much. It's kind of like a muscle, right? You can only work out a muscle so long before it fatigues. It's also kind of like your smartphone. You start the day with all green, all bars, you're green. End of the day, you're at red, you've run out of your battery. Same with your willpower. So what we want to do is we use our willpower wisely. The most successful among us use our willpower to create habits that then go on autopilot. So you don't need to negotiate with yourself all day long about whether you're going to work out or eat healthily or whatever. You use your willpower, you install a habit, then you let it rip. Then you use your willpower to install another habit and let it rip. And you can do a ton of stuff without actually having to use a whole lot of willpower. That's our first big idea. The second big idea is to focus on physiological fundies, your physiological fundamentals. The more I study, the more clear it becomes that all great teachers tell us, master your physiology first, your rest, your nutrition, your exercise, etc. When you look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs, roughly represented by this at the base are our most basic physiological needs. At the peak, we're actualizing. But if you don't have a strong base, if you don't have a strong foundation, you're going to have a really hard time actualizing your potential. So when you think about habits you can create, I strongly encourage you to think about physiological fundamentals first. What can you do to improve your rest, your nutrition, your exercise? Huge. That's our second big idea. Third big idea is to identify what researchers call your keystone habit. Keystone habit. So if you look at an arch, an arch has a keystone right there, roughly, yes. That's a wonderful artistic rendering. The keystone is the stone that locks the arch in place. It makes it strong. Same thing with your lives. There is a habit that, if you mastered it, would have the greatest positive impact in your life. Your keystone habit. We want to identify that habit, and it will change the rest of your life, whatever you do to build your willpower. The good news is that builds willpower in other domains. But we want to identify what's the number one thing that you could do that would have the most positive benefit in your life. Think about that. Do that. And then while you think about this, think about the stuff that you may need to stop doing. We all have habits, addictions that aren't positive, that aren't helping us out. Identify those. Remove them. Swap it out. Get rid of one negative habit and replace it with a great positive habit. Your life will unequivocally change for the better. That's our third big idea. The fourth big idea is to know your why. Nietzsche tells us one who has a clear and strong why can endure almost any how. So identify your benefits. How is your life going to change when you install this keystone habit? What's going to be better about your life? Know that. Know your why. You know your why. You're going to be able to endure the how, which will include some pain. We're going to talk about the process and embracing the process. This isn't easy to create new habits. It becomes easier as we master these fundamentals. But you have a lifetime of installed habits. Installing new ones is challenging. Obviously, number five, make a hundred percent commitment, right? So now we know to use our willpower wisely. We're focusing on, hopefully our physiological fundies. We've identified a keystone habit. We have a clear sense of why. Now we need to commit, and we can't commit 90% or 95% or even 99.7%. We need to make it a hundred percent commitment, you've got to get rid of that little whiny voice in your head that's going to negotiate with you, telling you all the reasons why today's the day you should take a day off. Need to make it non negotiable. Done. This is, I would say, the number one tip in all these tips. This is the number one. Make a 100% commitment. When you decide to do something. And not 10 things. We're talking about one habit right now that you're going to install. You can't make a 100% commitment with 100 habits, but you can with one. You can say, I'm never going to miss a day of meditation again or, or I'm going to move every day for the rest of my life or certainly for the next 30 days. Whatever it is, make a 100% commitment. Remove the negotiation from the equation and go do it. That's our fifth big idea. The sixth one is to make it a daily habit. When you're looking to install new habits, you don't want to do Monday, Wednesday, Friday, or weekly or every other day. We want to create momentum, invite Mr. Mo into the house. And that's hard to do in anything other than a daily habit. It's too easy to skip a Wednesday and I'll pick it up on Friday, or it's every other day, but no big deal, I'll do the third day this time. That's how habits fall apart. Pick a daily habit and then go out and do it. And then another idea here. Well, I'll blend this one into the next big idea. Make it easy. Make it easy to win. Too often we go for I want to meditate, so I'm going to meditate. 60 minutes a day, AM and PM. I'm all about it, but guess what? I'm currently doing zero minutes. That's not a wise way to implement a habit. Make it easy. It's much better to do a one minute habit than a 60 minute habit, whether that's exercise or meditation or writing or whatever. Just set it up so you can win, so you can get some momentum and then you can increase the length and duration, intensity, etc. Create a series of wins. And also make it easy to do by allowing yourself to kind of suck. So if you're meditating, don't worry about whether you're in the mood to meditate or not. Just do it. It's much better to suck at doing it than to skip it. Sucking is okay, skipping not okay. So if you're writing and you're just not feeling it. Doesn't matter. Just do it. Check the box. Get back at it the next day. Keep the streak alive. That's number eight, the eighth. Big idea. Never miss a day. So we've got a daily habit. We've made it easy now. We never miss a day, as in ever. We want to create a streak. Create a little calendar. I've got one on my wall up here in my office where I can look at it. And you've heard of Jerry Seinfeld, who decided that he was going to write a joke every day. Early in his career, he wanted to master the art of comedy. So he wrote a joke every day, and he had a big old calendar, and he put an X in the day and another X and another X and another X and another X. And he got this streak going that he didn't want to break. It's exciting to see a little streak, and you don't want to be, oh, no. Broke the streak. So keep track. Know how many days in a row you've done something and rock it. Never miss a day, period. Ninth. Big idea. When you do miss a day, which is inevitable, we are human, and it's going to happen once in a while. Definitely don't miss two days. Tynan, who wrote a great book that we'll talk about called Superhuman by Habit, said that his friend asked him, you know, how do you create a habit? He says, well, you know, da, da, da. And I never miss a day. And his friend says, what happens if you miss a day? And he says, okay, well, if I miss a day, then what I do is I schedule it into my calendar for the next day, and I make that activity the most important thing in my calendar the next day. His friend says, oh, that's cool. What happens if you miss two days? And Tynan says, I don't miss two days, period. You can miss one day and get away with it by making sure you get back on track. But if you miss two days, you might as well start over. You've lost a ton of momentum, and you've made it really easy for you to continue to miss days. So there you go. Make it easy. Never miss a day. Definitely don't miss two days. If you miss one, make doing the habit the most important thing you do the next day. Or today, if you woke up and realized you didn't do it the day before. Now, the 10th big idea is to embrace the process. As I mentioned, you've created a set of habits in your life that took years and decades to get. Guess what? There's going to be a process to install new habits. Hal Elrod, the Miracle Morning has a great frame here. He says, look, habits go through a certain process and there's difference. Research says you can install a habit in as little as 20 days and as long as 250 plus days. Right range is in there depending on the challenge of the habit, etc. Whatever it is, it takes a certain amount of time. Hal says it goes through basically three phases. And if you assume a habit takes about 30 days to install, your first 10 days are unbearable. Phase one, unbearable. Why did I decide to do this? This sucks is basically what you say in the first 10. Want to give up? Don't get to the second phase where it just becomes uncomfortable. Now you're starting to feel a little bit of benefits. You're kind of proud of yourself for crushing it, but it's still not really fun. It's still a little uncomfortable. Then you keep on going. And the second to third phase is when you go from uncomfortable to unstoppable. Now you feel way better, you're eating better and you're starting to feel the benefits. You're exercising, you're feeling the benefits, you're meditating, you're starting to feel some actual benefits from it and you're unstoppable. Now people can't pay you to stop doing it. You're on fire. That's the basic process that we want to embrace and realize it's not going to be particularly fun in the beginning, but get through those first 7, 10, 15, 20 days, whatever it is, it'll be a little bit more uncomfortable and then you will be unstoppable. Remember, 100% commitment. Make it non negotiable, particularly here. Then it becomes easy. I've meditated nearly every day. I missed one day. I didn't keep track. I didn't know what day it was. But I missed day 1500 of meditating. Years ago I woke up and I said ah. And I hopped right back on it and I haven't missed a day since. That was maybe three or four years ago now. Now it's unstoppable. You couldn't pay me to not do it. It's too fun. So embrace the process. Don't miss two days. Try not to miss a day. Make it easy. One minute is much better than 60 minutes. Make it a daily habit. Monday, Wednesday, Friday, weekly. Every other day, not so good. Daily is where it's at. Make a 100% commitment, not 909599 100%. It's paradoxically way easier when it's non negotiable. Know your why Know your benefits? Pick the number one thing that would have the most positive benefit in your life. A keystone habit. Ideally, it's a physiological funding. You're going to get the greatest return from those as you set your foundation up to actualize and then use your willpower wisely. People you admire who get a ton done aren't using a lot of willpower. They've used it to install habits. Remember that it's actually easy for them. It can be easy for you. That's habits 101 how to create habits that can change your life. I hope you enjoyed and I'll put some links to a few books that I think you'll enjoy as well. Superhuman by Habit by Tynan, Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod, and the Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg are all awesome. And then I mentioned the class where I unpacked this over 90 minutes. Maybe it was even two hours. Good stuff. You can sign up and get instant access to that along with confidence 101. Our last class. Getting stuff done 101 this month or next month rather. We're doing meditation 101. The month after that we're doing relationships 101. You get access to that plus all my philosopher's notes. 10 bucks a month. Best deal ever. Hopefully I astonish you with goodness. That's a lightning bolt. And there you go. Let's get our habits on. Hope you enjoyed. What's your number one habit? Go out and rock it and have another awesome day. See ya.