My Top 3 HABITS Books of All Time (+ a Life-Changing Idea From Each!) (#2)

You're listening to Optimize with Bryan Johnson. More wisdom in Less time. Hey guys, what's up? This is Bry. Welcome back to the Optimize Philosopher's Notes Top three series. In our last session we hung out with our 500 plus books here, 600 plus philosopher's notes stacked on that desk, and we talked about my three favorite books of all time. Today I promised we would chat about my three favorite books on habits of all time. Basically, Self Mastery 101. How do we get ourselves to do what we know we need to do whether we feel like it or not? As I like to say, we want to use our willpower wisely to install habits that run on autopilot via algorithms. These three books, Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg, Atomic Habits by James Clear and the Compound Effect by Darren Hardy are in my top three all time to help us master the process of mastering ourselves. Of course we have three philosopher's notes for those three books and I've actually got a kind of a top 10 because you know what, it was hard to pick just three books here. So I've got a bunch of other books we'll talk about. And of course we're going to talk about the number one most life changing idea from each of these books. And to remind you, you can go to Optimize Me, get access to notes, all 600 philosopher's notes on each of these different books. Optimize me free trial, two week free trial. It's usually 10 bucks. Get it for free. Try it out. I think you're going to like it. 600 + philosopher's notes, 50/101 master classes and 1000/optimize + ones. You can also go to optimize me top three, get the three all time favorite notes on my three favorite books and you can follow along and see all 30 different domains we're covering where I'm sharing my top three favorite ideas across all those different domains. And of course we've got the Optimize Coach program if you want to go all in. Optimize Me Coach and we've got the lifetime offer, 250 bucks if you're feeling it. We've got a limited time lifetime offer at Optimize Me Lifetime. All right, it's a long enough prelude. Tiny Habits, atomic habits, Compound Effect. What do we got? Tiny Habits, BJ Fogg. If you you may know BJ Fogg is out of Stanford. He is one of the world's leading. He's got a behavior design out there in Atomic Habits. Darren's probably been influenced. Mini Habits certainly has been influenced. Power of Habit influenced by BJ Fogg. This is the guy everybody comes to to learn how to change our behaviors. The small changes that change everything. Of course. We've got a six page PDF philosopher's note on it where we talk about the core model. It's B equals map. Right? B equals map. Behavior equals motivation times ability times prompt. Now in the note, walk us through what that means. Right? And the one that we actually published, we've got a picture that my son Drew, 7 years old, modeling this. Right. And how we can apply it to our lives. Now here's what you need to know in terms of number one life changing idea. Of course tiny behaviors are important, which is why the book is called Tiny Habits. But he basically distills behavior into three variables. Behavior equals motivation, ability and prompt. You want your motivation to be high, of course, but you actually don't want to depend on your motivation. You want to create behavior design such that even if your motivation is low, you can get yourself to take action by making it easy is the trick. And again, check out the notes for a detailed look at this. But basically you need to make it easy by breaking down your 60 minutes, a day of meditation into one minute or even one breath. BJ had a habit of two push ups every time he went pee while working from the home office. Afterwards he would do two push ups. Boom. Easy. Didn't say he had to work out 30 or 60 minutes. You want to make your ability to do it easy, which puts it over here. Then you want to prompt a trigger. That's super obvious. Trip over your running shoes. Trip over your meditation cushion. And then you want to anchor. He's got the B equals math and he's also got the ABCs. Anchor behavior. Celebrate. You want to install habits. Anchor it to something you already do. After I wake up, then I will brush my teeth. Then I will meditate. Awesome. And put your prompt right in the way so you can't miss it. Or I will take my supplements. I put my supplements on top of my OURA ring, right where I look at my data on it. Boom, boom. I don't forget. Then your behavior. You want to make it easy again. And then you celebrate. These are the ABCs. Anchor behavior and celebrate. This is huge too. He tells us you need to celebrate intensely and immediately. Don't wait 30 days until you've done a habit. Rewire your brain one win at a time. That's tiny habits. Again, check out the note for More on that. We base so much of our Optimize Coach program. I don't have it here, but Optimize Me Coach. You can learn more. We spend so much time helping you truly change your behavior so you can change your life. We call IT Self Mastery 101. We have three sessions. A lot of it leans on tiny habits. We help you get a big picture sense. Then we help you install a habit and delete a habit. Number two Atomic Habits. James Clear James is a super popular blogger. This book is fantastic. Incredibly well written. An easy and proven way to build good habits and break bad ones. I don't know how many reviews it has, but it's a lot. Same deal here. We've got the six page PDF. Some of my favorite ideas here. The thing that I love about James, I love a lot about this book and I recommend both of them obviously, or I wouldn't be chatting about them here. But I love the fact that he defines identity. The word identity, etymologically, literally means repeated beingness. And there's this beautiful loop that when you have an identity of being the type of person who shows up in your energy, you're an athlete. Identity wise is how we frame it, right? Have your optimist best self as an identity that drives your behavior. Then you do that repeatedly and you become that version of you. Energy, work and love wise are big. 3. We talk about this a lot in our work together. And it also goes both ways. Your repeated beingness changes your identity. I love the way he frames that. And then I also love the way that he talks about the fact that tiny little changes and again, notice tiny habits, atomic habits, these aren't big things. These are tiny little changes aggregated and compounded make a huge difference. And whether you're going up or down, tiny little changes in your behavior can lead to dramatic differences. Then he also has some great wisdom. He leans a lot on Charles Duhiggs, the Power of habit. We have notes on him as well. Where are you Charles? There you are. The power of habit, right Cue routine reward is called the habit loop. Well, James does a really cool job of saying, look, if you want to install a habit, make your prompt, your trigger, your cue obvious. And if you want to get rid of it, make it invisible. That's actually the fastest way to change your behavior. Work on this variable. The prompt you don't want to drink anymore. Take all the alcohol out. You want to eat healthfully. All nutrition books that we're going to cover soon, we've got dozens of them up There, the first step is always raid your pantry. Get rid of it. Get rid of the prompt. That's atomic habits. Again, we can talk about that for a long time and we should say we do in habits 101, which you can get instant access to along with those 600 notes at optimize Me. As part of the free trial, we talk about all these ideas in more depth. Third book, the Compound Effect, Jumpstart yout Income, you, Life, and you'd Success by Darren Hardy, who's the publisher of Success magazine. Again, of course, we take the best big ideas from that. We put it into this six page PDF to help you change your life today. Big ideas, life changing stuff. So the first idea here is called magic Pennies. Amazing little metaphor comparison here of if you wanted to receive some pennies. Right. I can give you two choices. Would you rather have. Would you rather have a million bucks today or would you rather give. Have me give you a penny today and then double it every day for a month? Which one do you want? Right, The Compound Effect Magic pennies. Which one do you want? Do you want a million dollars today or do you want me to give you a penny but then double it every day? Actually, you know what? He offers you $3 million today. Okay, do you want $3 million today? Just up the offer. Do you want $3 million today or do you want the doubling penny? Well, here you go. If you take that $3 million today, you look pretty smart on day one when your friend gets a penny. You also look pretty smart on day five when your friend gets 16 cents, and on day 10 when he gets $5.12. Now, he may be feeling the guy in this little story I tell who took the pennies might be feeling a little silly at that point, wondering what he did. 20 days later and your friend is only up to $5243. You're feeling pretty good. Then the magic of the compound effect kicks in. Fast Forward to day 31. Your friend gets $10,737,000 and $418.24 to your $3,000,000. Darren says very few things are as amazingly impressive as the magic of compounding pennies. Amazingly, this force is equally powerful in every day of your life. You know what's funny is that if you only had 28 days in that month, you actually would lose the bet. It's the last few days that lead to the real gains. Most people give up too early and they don't see the huge gains in their lives. Oh, I didn't Change my life in two days. So they give up. Then they go take the $3 million or $30 today rather than do the hard work showing up consistently. Boom. Same thing. Takes time to aggregate and compound. Now this book I love for that idea and the focus on the fundamentals, but I also love it because Darren introduces us to bookends. Now this I read years and years ago, but it's bubbled up into one of the cornerstones of my entire work, especially with our coaches. He says, you have an AM bookend and a PM bookend. You have more control over these bookends than the middle of your day. So use it wisely. I've extended this and just go off on it. We'll talk about this in the sleep notes probably. But in our mastery series, I basically have you create a masterpiece day. We call it carpe diem. And I say, look, your day. Am, pm, am, pm. Your day today started the night before. This PM bookend actually created the quality of this day. If you were blowing yourself up all night and you wake up feeling groggy, you wonder what's going on. Then you have a bad day. Start here, have a great PM bookend and you literally can change your life. So that's the three top three habits. Tiny habits, atomic habits, compound effect, and I gotta say, asterisks. That was tough to pick those three. I mean, those are amazing books, no doubt, but Many Habits by Stephen Guise is another really good book. He's kind of like the normal guy who had a tough time motivating himself and then figured out I got to just make him tiny. But he's got a fun, down to earth way, really practical way to describe it. Check out that notes and book. The Power of Habit is a classic book by Charles Duhigg. More theoretical than practical than these books from my experience, which is why it didn't make the top three. But it's amazing. Superhuman by Habitat. This note is packed with big ideas too. He's got some great ideas. Tynan does. Never miss a day. And if you do make your next day doing this habit your number one. We talk about that a lot. Daily rituals is fantastic as well. We could have included. And habits involve willpower as well. As I said, I like to say use your willpower wisely to install habits that run on autopilot via algorithms. There's a lot there, but that's the essence of self mastery. And by the way, we have 101 classes at Optimize Me for Habits 101 Willpower 101 and Algorithms 101. I am so passionate about this subject. In the three best books on willpower. We may do this separately, but just for now. So you know. Willpower by Roy Baumeister, the most cited social psychologist on the planet. This is amazing. He says willpower exemplars use their willpower offensively. They play offense, not defense. They install habits. Then we've got the Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonagall, one of my favorite positive psychologists. And then the marshmallow test. You might have heard of that before. You can have kids come into a lab at like five or six years old, test them. Can they resist not taking a marshmallow and wait for 2? Delayed gratification or not, that simple measure will predict their SAT 10 years later. It's crazy and it's teachable. And we talk you how to. We teach you how to cultivate your willpower and self mastery. Then what else we got? Well, the Slight Edge is another great book. So if I had a top 10, those would probably be in it. But we don't. Right now we have the top three. Tiny habits, atomic habits, compound effect. One more time. Behavior is three variables. Motivation, ability, prompt, ABC's. Anchor your behavior tiny habit to existing behavior. Then celebrate it intensely immediately. Your identity is your repeated beingness. Make your new habit obvious or make it invisible if you want to get rid of it. Remember the pennies and the bookends. That's what we got today. And remember Optimize Me for that free trial. 600 notes, 50 optimally, 101 classes, including those on self mastery, thousand plus ones. We've got the top three at Optimize Me top three. Get three free notes there if you're not ready to go in yet. And then we've got the lifetime. Get it all forever. 250 bucks optimize me lifetime. Then we have the Optimize Me coach. If you really want to go deep. 300 Day program joined 2000 optimizers from over 70 countries around the world. Science says it works. We're honored. We're proud of that. And that is today's show. What are we doing tomorrow? In our next episode we're going to explore. Ooh, ancient wisdom. That's gonna be fun. Then modern science, nutrition, fitness, sleeping, etc. See it all at Optimize Metop 3. We hope you enjoyed this episode of Optimize with Brian Johnson. To find out more, go to Optimize Me. Hi, this is Brian. Hope you enjoyed that. Quick note. If you want to go deeper into Optimize. Check us out at Optimize Me. 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