PNTV: Atomic Habits by James Clear (#383)

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Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Another Philosopher's Notes. TV Today, another great book, Atomic Habits by James Clear. Atomic Habits Subtitle Tiny changes remarkable results subtitle 2 an easy and proven way to build Good Habits and break Bad ones. I'm a huge fan of the science of building habits. Science of optimizing your life in general, particularly habits. We've got classes on willpower 101, habits 101, optimizing algorithms 101. We've done a ton of notes on Charles Duhigg's Power of Habit, Twyleth Tharp's the Creative Habits, Superhuman by Habit Mini Habits. A bunch of different books on how to create habits. This one in my opinion is the best one. I don't often say that books are must reads. This one comes as close as it's going to get to a must read. Habits are essential to creating an optimized life. And this book is a phenomenal look at the science of what we know in terms of how to create effective habits and how to apply that science to our lives and on a day to day basis. James Clear, very cool guy. He and I connected several months ago. I've been looking forward to this book. A bunch of people have asked me to do one of these episodes and the note on it, it's phenomenal. He's super popular. Millions of people visit jamesclear.com every month. He's got hundreds of thousands of newsletter subscribers. There's a reason why he's a great writer, really enjoyed it, highly recommend it. Philosopher's Note Bunch of my favorite big ideas. We've got five of them we're going to talk about today. We'll start at the top. Tiny equals mighty. Atomic habits. What are atomic habits? Well, think of the building blocks of our bodies, of the world. Atoms make up molecules which make up our existence. We need to go small, but then think about it in terms of a system. And he says that. Well, he kicks the book off with a story on Brailsford and how he turned around the British cycling team, which we've talked about a number of times. Marginal gains, tiny little improvements. And one of the things I loved was he actually quantified what happens when you aggregate and compound 1% gains, tiny little gains. If you get 1% better today, you think you can get 1% better today. I think you can get 1% better Today. Now, if you get 1% better today, then you get 1% better tomorrow. And you do that for three hundred and sixty five days in a row. How much better do you think you are at the end of this year or that year than you are today? Start at 1. How much better would you be at the end of that year? Answer is 37 times better, right? 37 times better. Just by getting 1% better, these tiny little gains wind up having mighty results. Now, I love that because we talk about our plus one, plus one, plus one optimized, plus one. Every day. We send out another plus one to our members. Just get a little bit better today. But I hadn't done the math. I love the fact that that equals 37 times better after one year. And then I said, well, okay, what would happen after 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, 10 years? Because James makes the point that to really see the benefits, you need to stretch an even longer horizon. Five, ten years out, how much better would you be? So I busted open a Google spreadsheet and I ran the math. 1% better. 365. We're at 37 times better. Okay, well, how about another year, you get 1% better for another year after that first year, 37 times better. After one year, how much better are you? After two, you're not twice as great, right? This is compounding we're talking about. So you don't go from 37 to 74 times better. You're 1400 times better. And the end of the second year. So then I do that, and I'm like, that's pretty cool. What if you go out 3 years, 4 years, 5 years? After 5 years of just tiny little 1% gains aggregated and compounded, how much better are you? 5 years over 1500 days, right? You're 76 million times better or something ridiculous like that. Then how about 10 years? How about if you go all the way through to 10 years, 1% better? Stack that up, right? No one's gonna do it perfectly right. You're gonna have some slips. But you don't want to give up your compound gains. By the way, an important point. Ten years out, how much better are you? One percent at a time? You're almost a quadrillion times better. I literally broke the Google spreadsheet. It couldn't calculate the number of zeros by the time we arrived at day number 3650. It's crazy. Tiny equals mighty. Keep that in mind. Another little fun distinction. So if you had a plane, an airplane, here's the arc, by the way, that's you getting better. It takes time. And then you get better. And then it just goes crazy up to the quadrillion, right? But he says you can imagine an airplane, another metaphor to bring the point home. Imagine an airplane in LA lax and it wants to get to the pilots, want to take it to New York City, right? But they, they point the nose just three and a half degrees, 90 inches south, more south than it should be. Now, those 90 inches at the beginning of that trip that's supposed to be from LA to New York City, will wind up taking them to DC, Washington D.C. 90 leads to hundreds of miles. When you give it a sufficient amount of time so you can go up or you can go down, you're making a choice. Day in and day out, moment to moment to moment, you're either going forward or you're going down, right? And again, it's kind of fun to imagine lax. Oh, I wanted to go to New York City. Oops. I wound up in D.C. and it was a tiny little change in the beginning, compounded, led to a big change over an extended period of time. Keep that in mind. Tiny equals mighty. It's a long first big idea. The second one is the plateau of latent potential. This is a really cool idea as well. We're still in the first chapter, by the way. This book is ridiculously packed with big ideas, which makes it very difficult to distill into a 6 minute, 6 page PDF for the Philosopher's note in one of these quick episodes. But he says, okay, look, compound interest is huge in finance and it's the secret sauce in habit creation. But why don't more people do it? And the reason is there's a delay between the time that you start engaging in this behavior and when you see the results. So let's say that your results wind up being just crazy up here, right? Literally the arc goes nuts over time. It will still extend, but it will go like that. Now, you might have expectations that look like that, right? So you want to. It crosses up here, right? So it crosses at some point around here. And there's a delay where you're not seeing. It's in this little slow part here. You're not seeing any gains for quite a while. And in that period of time, use whatever example you want. You change your diet, you don't see results tomorrow or the next day, although you might actually, if you eliminate sugar and some stuff that's not working for you, your energy might actually improve very quickly. But you do a push up today, you're not going to see results tomorrow. You got to give it Some time, right? Most people don't give it enough time. They get disillusioned during that. Plateau of latent potential is what he calls it, which I think is a great phrase. There's latent potential building. And he uses a couple of metaphors to bring the point home. One of them is the stonecutter. So imagine a stonecutter. A stonecutter hits a rock again and again and again and again. Hundred times they hit the rock. Nothing happens. The hundred and first time they hit the rock, what happens? It cracks. Now, what was happening before then, right? All this latent potential was being built and it took all of that effort for that last strike to actually create results. Well, it's the same thing with our habits. We've got to endure that period where we're not seeing the results we want, but know that we're building up this latent potential. Super powerful idea worth keeping in mind. If you've ever bailed on a certain habit before, you've seen results, which we all have, check in. The path of the master is to embrace the plateau and know that these things take time. Third big idea is identity. James presents a really cool integration of a number of different scientific models. And I love his perspective on identity. He says you can create outcome based habits or identity based habits. We don't have the space to go into detail on that. But the basic idea, he says, look, we're not looking to create one big life hacking party. We're looking to become the best version of ourselves we possibly can. So before he talks about the what and the how of habit creation, he says we need to think about the whole. Who do you aspire to be when you imagine yourself at your absolute best in general and specifically in your energy, your work, your love to use the model we talk about in our big three, who are you? We want to let that identity drive our behavior and then let the outcomes be a byproduct of that identity and the processes or the systems or the habits that we build. Right? That's the secret sauce. He talks about Scott Adams and goals vis a vis systems, et cetera. Check out our notes on how to fail at Almost everything and still win big for more on that. But the basic idea is identity. And then he ties it to the Latin etymology, which I thought was amazing. In ancient Latin, the word identity is actually formed. The word identity we use is formed from a couple of different words in Latin basically mean. What does it mean? It means repeated beingness. Repeated beingness is what the word identity literally means. You repeatedly Being a certain version of you creates your identity. Your habits literally create your sense of who you are. If you consistently do one thing, perhaps going this way, you're going to have a pretty good identity in that area. If you consistently do that, you're going to have a not so great identity. Now that's exciting because we can shift our identity and we can shift our habits, and the two work together to create the results we want to see in our lives. So again, who do you aspire to be? Act like that version of you now. Create the habits that a person who is that version of you would engage in on a consistent basis, and voila, you're going to find yourself in experiencing more of the results you want in your life. All of which leads us to the heart of the book, the Four Laws of Behavior Change. This is where James extends Charles Duhigg's ideas. So, four laws. Let's quickly look at them. 1, 2, 3, 4. First, we've got four aspects of the habit loop, as he describes it. 1. Q, 2, craving, 3, response, and then 4, reward. So these are the four areas of creating habits, right? And he says we need to boil these down into four laws of habit creation, which you can use to create habits or get rid of bad habits. Here's the quick look. First, your cue, which kind of kicks off you engaging in a habit needs to be super obvious, right? So if I want to do deep work in the morning, right, My cue is I know exactly what I'm going to do. On my desk, I've got the book I'm going to work on, or the note I'm going to write, or whatever it is I'm going to do. The cue is right there. Boom. I know what I'm going to do. If I want to create a meditation practice. I put my meditation cushion in between my bed in the bathroom. So I know after I go to the bathroom, I'm meditating. You want to work out, put your workout clothes in a very obvious place such that you have the cue that's there. We can talk about that for a while. I'll leave it at that for now. Then the craving needs to be. Your cue needs to be attractive, and the habit needs to be attractive. So you need to think about the benefits that you're going to get from engaging in that activity, the habit that you want to create. He also talks about the fact that this actually might be in the easy section. So I'll go here. The response needs to be easy. So your behavior, what you want to do, needs to be easy to engage in. He's got a bunch of great tips here. If you make it hard to do something, obviously you're less likely to build a habit. He says you got to start small. Kind of like the mini habits idea we talked about. He's got a two minute rule. When you're creating a new habit, you got to be able to do it in two minutes. It can't be hard. So meditation, to use that as an example, again, you're committed to meditating for two minutes. You trip over the obvious cue en route to the bathroom in the morning. Oh yeah, I'm supposed to meditate in the morning. Okay, let me remember why. Yeah, I'm going to have a calm mind. I'm going to get balance, have more equanimity in my life. All the research says it's awesome. I'm going to do it for two minutes. Not 20 minutes or two hours, two minutes. Right. And then you can build on that. But make it easy to get the habit going. That's our third law. The fourth one is you need to make the reward satisfying. You need to feel good after you do it. Right. You got to feel the rewards of doing it such that you want to do it again the next day. He gives a bunch of ideas on that as well. You can feel the calmness and equanimity after seeing sitting in meditation, for example, or after training. You can connect it to another behavior. Perhaps you like tea or coffee in the morning. Awesome. We'll connect your meditation right after you meditate. You get your cup of coffee and tea. You connect it to the to another habit that makes you feel satisfied after you do it. Cue craving response rewards. Law number one, make it obvious, make it attractive is two easy and satisfying, obviously. Longer chat, check out the book, etc. But you can also apply the inverse of those laws to break bad habits. So if you want to break a bad habit, for example, maybe you want to stop eating junk food. Well, okay, don't make it obvious. If you've got junk food laying around your house or your office, that's an obvious cue that's going to lead to behavior you don't want. You want to make it invisible. He says, well, the best way to make junk food invisible is buy your willpower at the store. Scientists say don't buy it, don't bring it in your house. What do you do with food that's obvious? It's sitting on your counter, even in your pantry. You eat it in the moments when you least can afford to or Want to when you're tired and all this stuff, right? So make it invisible. Don't have it in your house. That's a great hack and law to engage to break a bad habit. Now, you need to make your craving unattractive. You need to make a connection between your bad nutritional habits of eating all that sugar and refined junk food and realize that's making me feel a certain way that I don't want to feel. You got to make that craving unattractive after making it invisible. And then you got to make it hard to engage in the behavior. So rather than opening your pantry and getting your junk food, you got to drive to the grocery store and you actually got to go through multiple steps to engage in that behavior. That's a great way to break a bad habit. Then you need to make it unsatisfying again. Make the connection between how you feel the morning after you eat all that junk food or engage in whatever other behavior you don't enjoy and when you do not super oversimplified. Look at his four laws. They're awesome. Again, why I recommend the book. Thoughtful analysis of some complex ideas to make it easy to apply to our lives. Fifth idea for us is the Sorites paradox, which is awesome. This is how he concludes the book. So the Sorites paradox. Greek idea. The Greek paradox. Sorites in Greek means heap or pile, right? And they say, look, if someone has 10 coins, are they wealthy? 10 coins isn't going to make them wealthy. But let's say you give them another coin, are they wealthy then? Well, no, they only have one more coin. But if you give them another coin, are they wealthy Then what about another coin and another coin and another coin? At some point they will accumulate enough coins that they're wealthy. So you have to conclude that a single coin can make them wealthy. Right? There's a little paradox there. One coin doesn't make them wealthy. But yet if you continue to aggregate and compound those coins, yeah, you get wealthy. Well, the same thing with habits. Is one habit going to change your life? On theory, actually could. But is one 1% gain going to change your life in huge, huge dynamic ways? No, that's the whole point of the book is it's not about massive changes. It's about the tiny, tiny atomic habits that you can build. But we're not talking about 1 1% change. We're talking about a thousand 1% changes. When you aggregate and compound those over an extended period of time, you start talking about a quadrillion times increase in who you are. You're a quadrillion times better if you actually run the math out. Which again, is absurd, right? But the point being, you have an infinite potential. The way to get there is via the very, very small atomic habits. The tiny equals mighty. Remember that. Remember our trip from LAX to New York City or dc? A few inches in the beginning leads to hundreds of miles at the end. Our plateau of latent potential. Give it time for your work to show up and give results, demonstrate results that you want to see. Identity, right? What a great etymology. Repeated beingness. Who you are repeatedly is who you are. So be the best version of you. That's like you to do the right thing consistently. Again, longer chat. We'll leave it at that. And then we had our four laws. Cue craving, response, rewards. I obvious, attractive, easy, satisfying. Bake in the habits you want to create, the habits you want to break in that model. And then remember the sorities paradox. Does one coin make you wealthy? Well, you know, yes and no, right? But does one habit change your life? 1% increase. Is that going to do it? Well, no and yes. If you aggregate and compound a thousand of those and you're thinking throughout your day, what marginal gain you can get. How can you get a little bit better today and a little bit better tomorrow? Not giving away those gains gets me fired up to imagine who you can be in that model. Hope you enjoyed. Here's to finding the power in your atomic habits. Make today another awesome day. See you.

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