Heroic Interview: Mini Habits with Stephen Guise

You're listening to Mini Habits, an Optimal Living interview with Stephen Gies and Brian Johnson. Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to the Optimal Living Interview series. Today I am so excited to be chatting with Stephen Guise. I think one of our members turned me on to your book, Steven Mini Habits and I just absolutely loved it and thrilled to have you here to chat about some of the big ideas from there. Subtitle to your book is Smaller, Bigger Results. And yeah, just excited to jump in. Appreciate you taking the time.

Thanks so much, Brian. I've actually been following you since I started blogging, which was 2011, so this is pretty cool.

Right on. Yeah, you mentioned that. That's just so fun. Such a small world for it to come full circle. And I mentioned in our chat before, I'm looking forward to reading your next book as well. Tell us, remind me the name of that one.

How to Be an Imperfectionist.

Such a good title, how to Be an Imperfectionist. So yeah, I'll be sharing a lot more on that as well. But what I'd love to do is just to hear you describe for us what mini habits are, why they're so powerful, et cetera. So let's just start from the top. What is a mini habit?

A mini habit is a behavior that you do every day. But unlike most goals you'd set. I call these stupid small because they're so small that you're bound to say, oh that's stupid or you'll laugh at them. And when that's the case, you know, it's a mini habit. So my example, the first mini habit I ever tried was one pushup per day.

Well, tell us the story about that. So you lead the book with, you know, you're, I'll kind of set it up, but had a 30 minute workout. You know, New Year was coming along, you were fired up about it, but you weren't and you couldn't get yourself to do it. And you're sitting there trying to get the motivation, trying to get whatever willpower you can muster to get it done. You couldn't do it. But then tell us what you did and what came out of that.

Yeah, so I was there. I was completely unmotivated. I, I tried all the basic techniques that I'd read about and they just weren't working for me. Now I'm a special breed in that I'm very undisciplined by nature. Probably my years of video game training growing up as a child. So I just had to think of something else and I'd read a book called Thinker Toys by Michael Machalco. And one of the creative problem solving thinker toys he gives is to consider the opposite of what you're currently thinking. So I was currently thinking about this 30 minute workout and of course to me it seemed like Mount Everest, like climbing Mount Everest. And so I thought, what's the opposite of this huge, intimidating workout? And one push up came to mind after I started laughing at myself for even good going down this thought path. I eventually tried it. And once I was down in push up position, I realized that this was the start to a 30 minute workout. It's the same exact process. And so I did one and I did a few more because I was already down there. And that kind of opened my eyes. And that session actually turned into the same 30 minute workout that I had tried to do previously.

That's amazing. You talk about how it just again, you got going. We're going to talk about this a little bit more, but tell us how that evolved into, oh my gosh, I can actually create habits like this. What was the process you went through?

Right, that's really important. So the one pushup story is when I realized the power of small steps. That small step got me started. Then I thought about how to best leverage this power. And the answer is, of course, habits. Habits are, according to a Duke University journal study, about 45% of our total behavior. And they tend to be the core of our day. Our routines really define who we are because it's what we do consistently. And so I started doing one pushup a day and every single day. And I did that for six months. And over time it decreased my resistance to exercising. People think about habits as far as automaticity, where, oh, I brush my teeth every night out of habit. But the other benefit of habits is decreased resistance. So once I had done a push up every day, I got used to the idea of exercise and that's when I started going to the gym, which I still go to several days a week now, which that's a goal I had tried to reach for 10 years prior.

That's so cool. And you used some pretty funny phrases. Too small to fail.

Yeah.

This idea of, come on. I think you said something along the lines of it's harder not to do it than to just do it.

Seriously, just the self esteem hit from failing to do one pushup, you have to do it.

It's so good. I'm doing it with my wife right now. She wanted to listen to, to an audio program which I want to Listen to too, you know? But she's like, okay, well what if we just do 10 minutes a day or 15 minutes a day or whatever. I'm like, no, we got a mini habit this one minute. And she literally thought it was stupid. And I said, perfect, this is great. And now we've done it like seven or eight days in a row. And it's been so good because 10 minutes at times feels like, oh man, I'm Tor's tired. End of the day, put the baby down. Or he's now three, but put the little guy down in 10 minutes would feel like a bit of a pain and more than we want to do. But with the one minute, you can do one minute and it becomes a game. So we've done a couple nights where it was literally a minute and a half, but we won. And then you talk about bonus reps, right? Where when you get more time in, then you get. You start simple, but you can do the bonus reps, which is what we've done a lot too. So tell us about that.

Yeah, bonus reps are a key part of the mini habits philosophy. And that is that setting a small goal doesn't mean that you have to stop there. It's not. The good thing about many habits is there's no ceiling. With my one push up a day goal, I could do 200 push ups a day if I want. As long as I can do one push up the next day. The low bar is just as you said. There are some days where you only did a minute or a minute and a half, and that's success. And that's important because it keeps the streak alive. And we all know how to psychologically difficult it is to continue once you've hit a few days where you haven't actually done anything.

Yeah, that's awesome. Well, tell us about some of the other mini other habits you use another phrase that you've minified. So it's not just the push up. You've applied it to your creativity. Talk to us a little bit about that.

Right. I actually wrote the book using a mini habit, so that's kind of a built in proof of concept. I wrote 50 words a day toward the book, and later I would kind of modify it for editing and things like that. In some cases, I would guesstimate how much editing would be about 50 words a day. Of course, usually I did more than that because once you start the process, good things happen. I also do it with reading. I read two pages a day of a book and I read about. I don't know, 10 times as many books now. Not that I read much before, but that's exactly the point. Reading has been kind of a challenge for me, and this has really helped me to get that going. And my current one is just to clean my area for a minute per day.

That's great. Yeah. So cool. And you humbly say that you're a strange read, but I think most of us tend to default, or a lot of us, anyway, and certainly a lot of people in our community. It's just we don't feel like we're as disciplined as we could be. Whether we're over a certain threshold or not, we know there's always room for improvement. And I think this is such a powerful way, particularly for those areas that we've struggled with. I tend to be a pretty disciplined guy and I can do certain things when I set my mind to it, but it's really cool to notice when there might be some resistance or struggling and to minify it. Like, I just shared the story with my wife. It just makes it so much easier. Let's talk about your application integration of Newton's first law as it relates to creating habits. I thought that was a really, really cool insight.

Yeah, I really like that, too. It's. I believe it's objects. What is. Do you remember the actual.

I think it's something along the lines of. And I've got. I'm cheating because I got my notes in front of me as well. But it's something along the lines of objects at rest tend to stay at rest and objects in motion tend to stay in mot. And the way you connected that to mini habits was awesome. So tell us about that.

Yeah, So I just forgot the exact wording. I didn't want to botch it.

Yeah.

I didn't want that evidence to be out there. So, yeah, the connection to mini habits is I like to imagine it. And I actually did this for the mini habits course. I did a little illustration. Imagine that you're a ball at the top of a flat plane that slopes down. So when you're on top of the plane there and you're not moving, you're going to stay that way. But a mini habit is like a little nudge that pushes you down the slope, and then once you're in motion, you're going to stay in motion, especially with the slope. And. And that's really the power of a mini habit, is it gets you started.

Yeah. Yeah. So cool. And like you said, it reduces resistance. Right. And once you get going, that's always the hardest part is simply, again, if you're at rest, we're going to tend to stay at rest. And the hardest part is getting yourself into motion. But once you get into motion, you read your two minutes. We do. The other night, we did a minute just to go back to that example, and we were a little bit tired, you know, and it was. We were kind of ready to make it quick. And she's like, okay. And I'm like, no, we're good. We're rolling with it now. We've hit the energy over that plane and we now have that momentum where it was easier to continue going than to end it. So I really love that as well. Again, particularly when we have that resistance where we've kind of created a habitual pattern or story that things are harder than. Well, they just are what they are. So to get going is really, really cool. Talk to us about. And you talk about this a lot in the book Ego Depletion and how it relates to your discussion around willpower and motivation, I think is really cool. Talk to us about ego depletion and how it fits in.

Yeah, so ego depletion is a huge part of every person's life. Essentially, it's the counter force of motivation. Another word for ego depletion is willpower depletion. It's probably a more familiar term for a lot of people. So when you're highly motivated to do something, like you have no inhibitions, that's not going to cost you willpower because you already want to do it. When you don't want to do something but you think that you should, so you force it. That's when you're using up willpower and not most studies have found that willpower is a limited resource. So if you resist ice cream today, you might explode at your wife later, just as an example. And this happens on a micro and macro level in our lives. So the idea and the connection with mini habits is that we can't really control our willpower levels as much as we'd like to think we can. Little daily stressors, just various activities that happen throughout our day, a lot, a lot of them will deplete our willpower. For example, making decisions is something that we do constantly and that has been found to deplete our willpower. So the idea behind many habits is that you're not going to try to control your willpower as much as you're going to be prepared if it's at dangerously low levels. And that's why the goals are so small. So that you can't fail even after your dog dies. It's a sad example, but.

Well, I think you described the fact that you don't want to set the goals for when you're most motivated. Right. And most fired up. Yeah, sure, you can go bang out your 60 minute workout, however often. Right. But you need to set the goal so you can hit it or the mini habit target so you can hit it even on your least motivated days. Right?

Yeah. And that's huge. The thing about motivation that maybe some people realize by now is like New Year's resolutions. You start out so motivated to reach your goal. But there's a scientific reason why the two to three week mark is when people tend to drop their habits or rather their resolutions. It's because the behavior. This is a little bit theory, but I think it fits with the science. I think it's because the behavior is starting to become habit. And the thing about habits is they're pretty emotionless. When you think about motivation, it's strongly tied to our emotions, how we feel about doing a behavior. Who gets excited to behave, brush their teeth? Nobody. But it's a habit, you just do it. So I think as the behavior is transitioning to the basal ganglia, you're starting to become less emotional about it and it's becoming routine and at the same time you're thinking, oh, I need to be motivated to do this. So as you're becoming less motivated about the task, it becomes difficult to do it on that basis. So I suggest just start with a many habits willpower based model in the.

First place that requires nominal amounts of willpower that protects you from those days when you've resisted whatever and you're just not feeling like it. And it's cool too because I talk a lot about what does feeling like it have to do with it. You know, just you decided you're going to do it and do it. Which I think is one potential way to arrive at something. But to, to work it in an even more nuanced way of, well, just make it so easy that it just literally is independent of whether you feel like it or not. There's no stress when you think of doing it so good. Well, I love that. And then this ties into another one of my favorite ideas from your book, which is self efficacy and building wins. And you described the mini habits, I think quite appropriately as self efficacy generating machines. Tell us about that and what you mean.

That's right. So self efficacy is essentially your belief in your ability to influence outcomes. So the challenge with people setting goals and such is that a lot of people are starting at a very low amount of self efficacy. They essentially don't believe that they can do what they need to do in order to reach a goal. So a mini habit is a very easy to reach success mark. So you do your one push up and you feel that little bit of success and then day two you do it again. And this is really important for anyone struggling with depression or just low self esteem, things like that, where their self efficacy is really low because it allows them to build from a foundation.

I couldn't agree more. Let's talk about that. So then when you think of those types of people, what types of habits do you find in your community are the most powerful for people to engage in? I know you have a huge list of minified habits. Can you just riff on a few of them?

I'm pretty sure you're big on foundational habits and I would say that exercise is really tough to beat just because it's, it has impacts on emotional, physical, mental levels and they're pretty amazing impacts too. So I would say exercise is a key one to start with just because it changes your entire perspective chemically. And then I think writing is really valuable. As a writer I'm probably biased, but it's a great way to express your emotions and it also has a lot of productivity benefits. And then of course, reading, being a lifelong learner I think is important. Keeps the mind active and sharp.

So cool. And again to get those little wins and especially when you don't feel like you can do anything. And your recent or longer term history has proven that you've tried to create these habits and you haven't been able to do so successfully. So there's that negative narrative going on. Build the self efficacy, build your trust via consistency on such simple, too small to fail goals. And again, it's your plane in the slope. You get the energy going and all of a sudden you have this energy you didn't know was present. And then you talk too about keep it mini, keep it mini and allow for bonus reps rather than allowing your enthusiasm. So say you get the excitement of oh, I don't feel like I can do it. Then you do it for a few days. You're like, oh man, a minute of meditation or five breaths of meditation, I'm going to do 50 minutes, right? And then fall back into the challenging chimes. Tell us about the importance of keeping it simple from your perspective.

You just hit on a really key aspect of many habits and that Is that if you're feeling really motivated one day, you can do extra. And I think people fall into the trap of thinking that they have to, on paper, aim for something in order to reach it. That's just not true. So back to what we said earlier. People start out very motivated to reach their goals when they set the goal. Now, that tends to result in them wanting to set a goal that matches their motivation level. But the thing with many habits is that you don't need to set a goal at the point that you would like to reach. If you feel extra motivation on any given day, you can go as high as you'd like. And that's important to remember. So it's not like you're wasting your ambition by setting a small goal.

That takes a lot of discipline. I mean, this is, I think, a challenge in both of our work as we advocate for optimization and actualization. All that good stuff, is to have the discipline and the focus of a master, to be willing to see it over the long run and the compounding effects and, you know, not trying to do it all at once, trying to solve decades of certain behaviors in the snap of a finger, but rather have the discipline and the wisdom, really, right. To slow down and to give it time. So I think this is a really important thing to highlight. An asterisk, just keep it mellow. And you may play around with different things. And some you'll. I just did a burpee thing where I went from one burpee to two burpees to three burpees, and I did 173 burpees this morning. Now that's fun. And it was, you know, it's been a really fun demonstration of what can happen when you do that. But it's really cool for me to hold that. But also know when the little minis are best. And it's not about trying to build them up, you know, but again, that requires a lot of discipline. Paradoxically, that actually requires the dampening of the proper relationship with the peaking motivation to realize. Let's just keep it simple right now, right?

Yeah, you're right. And it really requires a perspective shift in valuing consistency and recognizing the power of consistency over quantity. I'm writing my next book on weight loss with many habits now. And the example I use in that book is partially borrowed from the Compound Effects written by Darren Hardy. He gives a really fascinating chart where he shows two lines and there's a. So they're. They're both on the zero axis or the. The x axis. And then One goes slightly up and one goes slightly down. And you see them over time, just the gap between them increases dramatically. So if you think about weight loss, one pound a month gain or lost over a year, that's a 24 pound net difference. That's huge. And one pound could be one meal, like a super fast food meal. So if you think about it in that way, consistency and small changes over time just explode. For better or worse.

Yeah. That's so cool. When I sold my first business 15 years ago, I became a personal trainer because I wanted to optimize my energy and just kind of personally just learned the science of it. And the number one thing that stuck out for me was consistency over intensity. Just before you build any intensity, build a base of consistency. And that stuck with me as just a fundamental underlying piece of wisdom. And of course, all great teachers come back to that again and again from Darren and what you're up to and it's just awesome to see. And again, it requires a proper use of motivation. You know, just the realization that, well, how many times have you tried your super ambitious aggro goal before you're willing to try something a little bit different? Right?

Yeah, that. Actually one of my personal favorite quotes from the book is that, and I think it's one of the most important insights is that people tend to blame themselves for their lack of progress, but generally the culprit is their strategy. If you try a strategy five, ten times and it fails you every time, I think you need to look for a new strategy because you are going to be you. I think that we're less dynamic than we think we are and that goes back to willpower. How much control do we really have? But we can certainly control small incremental changes in our lives.

So good. Yeah. And just to get out of that fixed mindset that something's wrong with me and just have the growth orientation of, well, look, what you've been trying clearly isn't working. That's fine. It may or may not mean anything about you, but let's assume it doesn't for the moment and let's just go try a new one, a new style and experiment, experiment, experiment. So I love it. Tell us about. Want to ask one more question about the mini habits and check in with you on what we might have missed and then kind of extend it to what you're up to these days, creatively and otherwise. So you share the story of Jerry Seinfeld's story about breaking the chain. And Steven and I are doing this via video. We're going to share the audio. But in his background, he has a calendar which is the exact same at a glance calendar that I have. So over my shoulder I have the precise same calendar, which I'm pretty sure was the one or one like what Seinfeld used. But tell us about not breaking the streak.

So I have to add a caveat to that story I found on Reddit. Jerry Seinfeld did ask me anything Reddit and someone asked him about that story and he said no, I never said that.

No, that's great.

So that may not be completely true, but it's still a fantastic lesson.

That is awesome. Don't let facts get in the way of a great story.

But yeah, I mean, it's huge to form a chain and to see your string of success just continue. That's the self efficacy generation right there. And that was really key in my early success is just seeing, wow, I've done this consistently for two months, three months. That's pretty impressive. Even if it's a small goal, just to be that consistent.

Yeah, that's so cool. And it literally becomes a game. I mean, a big thing for me in my work is just make it fun, make it a game. This doesn't need to be hard. This doesn't need to be grit your teeth. There'll be moments where a little bit of that is required, but we want to set it up, such as this one big game and we can win it, which is another thing you talk about. So let's actually talk about that. Winning versus losing was another one of the ideas I pulled out. Tell us about your perspective on that and what mini habits does to serve the winning side of things.

In a nutshell, mini habits makes winning easier than losing, which is the main downside of a lot of goals or systems that people try to implement. And that's. It's kind of intuitive. I think that you want to make winning easier than losing, but I think it gets just complicated by various thoughts and ideals. We hold in our mind that, oh, I need to climb Mount Everest before I walk outside today.

Yeah, one step at a time. Right on. Okay, cool. So we just covered a ton. Is there anything that we missed that you think is important in this context?

Yeah, I'd like to say just a little bit about motivation. And this actually wasn't in the book. I added this to the video course, the many Habit Mastery video course. And there are two types of motivation that I think people combine and I think they need to be separated. So the first type of motivation is your Reason for doing something. I am motivated to write books and help others, etc. The second type of motivation is the fickle, fleeting kind of motivation. And that's I don't feel like writing a book right now or I feel like writing right now. It's wild and it varies. So you can get this fickle type of motivation by thinking about your reason for doing something. But that connection doesn't always work for various reasons. Maybe you're tired and you don't even want to be motivated. So I just think that's really important because if you don't make that distinction, you're going to say, oh, but you need motivation to do anything. That's true. You need the first type of motivation to do anything. You don't need the emotional, fleeting kind to do anything.

That's awesome. And again, just breaking down the barriers and making it easy so we can deal with the smallest possible amount of motivation to get it done. Yeah, right on. Well, you touched on it. I like to wrap up these chats with focusing on the fundamentals. You mentioned your belief that I'm into the fundamentals. Absolutely. And I like to ask some of my favorite writers and teachers and authors, what do you do on a daily basis to keep you plugged in and performing at a high level? So if you're open to it, I'd love for you to share kind of some of your personal practices and things that you do that you think have most benefited your life, that you think others may be inspired by.

I do my many habits. Surprise. Right now they are read two pages in a book a day, write 50 words in my book per day. And that's. That's usually whatever project I'm working on, whether it's write 50 words or create a minute of video or whatever. Actually, a minute of video would not be a mini habit because that's a lot of work. But anyway, did I mention clean one minute? And then I also have a full size habit now that grew out of my mini habit to go to the gym regularly. And I don't actually have a specific target for that. I just do it because it's a part of who I am now.

Yeah, that's awesome. I love it. And then have those been going for a certain period of time or do you kind of start them and then pause them or have they been going for a long, long time now?

The reading, writing and gym habits have been going strong for a year and a half, I believe.

It's awesome.

And I just added the cleaning one because I need it.

That's great. Good stuff. Well, the final question I'd like to ask is if you could only share one piece of wisdom with people, which may be part of what we talked about many habits or might just be a broader piece of wisdom, but you can only share one with with people and an individual who's excited to optimize their lives, actualize their potential and service to the world. What would that one piece of wisdom be?

Small steps and consistency are far more valuable than big goals and quantity.

Amen to that. Tell us about your course. You mentioned it a couple times. Where specifically can people find your Mini Habits course?

It's on Udemy u d e m-y.com and you can just search for Mini Habit Mastery.

Perfect. And then where can people find you?

I blog@deepexistence.com okay.

Deepexistence.com we'll put links to that with this interview as well. And then your new book is Tell.

Us Again how to Be an Imperfectionist.

How to Be an Imperfectionist. And I plan on doing a note on that and sharing that via the video and all that good stuff. But again, I've said this a number of times, but I really recommend the book. It's 126 pages. It's super to the point, easy to read, impactful. I think you'll love it and I hope you love it as much as I did. Again, Stephen, thanks so much. I'm thrilled to be connected.

Thanks Brian. It was fun.

We hope you enjoyed this optimal living interview. Please visit BrianJohnson me for more. Sam.