PNTV: Mini Habits by Stephen Guise (#226)

Hi, this is Brian. Welcome back to Philosopher's Notes TV Today, another great little book. Mini Habits. Mini Habits by Stephen Guise. Hundred and something pages, super to the point, really practical look at how to build habits in your life by going stupid small. It kind of reminds me of a blend of the Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod, Superhuman by Habit by Tynan, and then some scientific stuff like Willpower by Baumeister, the Willpower instinct by Kelly McGonigal, and the power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. We'll put links to all those below. We've got a growing willpower and habit building collection, but this one's fantastic. Thank you. I think you'll enjoy it. Philoster's Note. Bunch of big ideas. Let's look at five of them now. So what is a mini habit? Think stupid small. Stupid small is the way that Steven frames it. So imagine you want to do 100 pushups a day. Well, that's a nice goal. But if you wanted to make that goal stupid small, you'd do what Steven did and say, you know what, I'm just going to do one pushup. That'd be a stupid, small, minified version of your 100 pushups a day goal. And the way Steven came up with this whole mini habit thing was one day he was sitting there and he couldn't get himself to do a 30 minute workout. He just had no motivation. Willpower wasn't strong enough to get him to do it. He just was sitting there saying, God, what's going on here? And he finally gave up. And he said, look, I'll just do one pushup. One pushup. So he does this one pushup, then all of a sudden he says, well, that wasn't so bad, I can do another one. He bangs out another one. He does another one and another one and soon enough he's done his whole 30 minute workout. But he didn't do it by trying to do a 30 minute workout. He did one pushup and he had this epiphany that this is a really cool way to build a habit. And he set a goal for himself. Do one pushup a day. Stupid small. And he did it every single day. And he said, look, something's wrong with the typical habit building self development literature. Let's make it easier via Mini Habits. Other mini habits. Check them out. Minihabits.com. he's got a list of them. But things like, say you want to read an hour a day? Well, that's awesome. But what if you just read one page a day? Mini Habits. Stupid small. You want to meditate. Awesome. Rather than say you're going to do 15 or 30 or 60 minutes a day, which is how some people try to start. Do one minute or even one breath. That would be a stupid small meditation. But you can do it. That's the whole idea here. Writing is another example he uses a lot. You can say, I want to write X thousands of words a day. A thousand, two thousand, three thousand. Okay, that's noble. But what if you just wrote 50 words a day? You can do that consistently. So many have it. That's our first big idea. The second one is Newton's first law. So this is really cool. He's got another good line here. Stupid small. He says, too small to fail. Apparently some bakes are too big to fail. But what about habits that are too small to fail? It's easier to do one pushup than to not do it. Your pride comes in and you just bang it out. Or whatever your equivalent mini habit is. Newton's first law. So Newton's first law roughly is an object at rest tends to stay at rest. An object in motion tends to stay in motion. Right. Now, what's exciting about the mini habits application to Newton's first law is the hardest part of the equation is moving from rest to motion, right? So if you're at rest, you tend to stay at rest. If you're in motion, you tend to stay in motion. The trick is, how do you go from here to there? If you're overwhelming yourself with the idea that you have to do a 30 or 45 or 60 minute workout or meditation session or a mini novel in one sitting, you're going to have a really hard time moving from here to here. But if all you have to do is a mini habit, one pushup, one minute of meditation, you've gotten into motion, and then you're more likely to stay in motion. It's a really cool way to catalyze momentum. Then you can do what Steven calls bonus reps. You may only do one that day. That's still a win. Or you may choose to do 5, 10, 15, 20 to get bonus reps, which is pretty cool. Third big idea here. Steven talks a lot about willpower, and we don't want to rely on motivation. He says that comes and goes. Willpower is a much more reliable tool to base our habit building around. Again, we want to use willpower wisely. In our Habits 101 class, we talked about using willpower wisely to install habits that then go on autopilot. But Stephen Describes ego depletion really well. So scientists describe the fact that your willpower is finite. We've talked about it like a cell phone. You start with your green, all the bars, right, you're fully charged. At the end of the day, your cell phone has red bars warning you it's dying, it's running out of juice. Same with your willpower. It's dissipated throughout the day and we want to pay attention to that. Scientists call that ego depletion. Willpower depletion. Ego depletion. And another cool facet of microhabits is, is that it doesn't require you to have a ton of willpower at the end of the day or whenever during your day to do. It doesn't take a lot of willpower to get yourself to do one breath of meditation or a minute of meditation, et cetera, et cetera. And you're not depleting your willpower by getting yourself to do it. Getting yourself to do a 30 minute workout is ego depleting. It's a lot of effort. He talks about all the different facets of ego depletion that we mentioned in the note. But it depletes your willpower more than a simple mini habit. We want to preserve our willpower as much as we can and use it wisely throughout the day. Fourth big idea, self efficacy. We talked about self efficacy in our Confidence 101 class. Self efficacy is again, science speak for essentially self confidence or belief in yourself. Your belief that you can do the things that you set out to do, the things that you've determined are important to you. Your self efficacy measures that. Now, if you've tried to start a bunch of habits and you failed, your self efficacy is probably lower than you'd like. The good thing with microhabits or mini habits rather is the fact that you don't need a ton of self efficacy in order to do it. You don't need to really believe. I mean, what do you need to believe in about yourself that you can do one breath of meditation or a push up? Of course you can. No matter how depressed or kind of down you are, you can do that. And then what's exciting is, he says, it's a self efficacy generating machine. So you don't need a lot to get it going, but once you do the little habits, it builds your self efficacy. That's a really cool equation. Keep that in mind. And then the fifth big idea here is what is your chain? He tells the story of Jerry Seinfeld, who back in the day had a calendar right and in his early days you might have heard this story. Seinfeld wrote a joke every single day. He wanted to master his craft of joke telling as a comedian. And so he'd write a joke every day. When he wrote a joke, he'd say, yeah, had a huge wall calendar, right? Then he'd put a big red X in it. He'd write a joke another day, X x x x X. And Seinfeld was advising this comed. That's a six day week. That's kind of cool. You do that enough times and you don't want to break the chain. You have a streak going that you don't want to break. And Steven jokingly says he was an early mini habits guy. This is a mini habit. Writing one joke a day took Seinfeld anywhere from you can write a simple joke and a minute or two, right? Obviously you can unpack it and edit it, but it's a pretty basic thing to do on a daily basis. So think about that. Create some fun goals, mini goal habits for yourself. Take your big goal that you want, minify it and then create a streak and don't break the chain. That's our fifth big idea. As you do that, you will build your self efficacy, which is a good thing. You will maintain a healthy level of ego strength or willpower or self control. Another good thing. And you'll leverage Newton's first law. You'll find an easy way to move from rest to motion and then to step. Stay in motion and you'll remember stupid small, too small to fail. That's a look at mini habits. Hope you enjoyed. And what's your mini habit? What's the thing you're going to integrate into your life? Have fun with that. Look forward to sharing more. See you.