How To MULTIPLY Your Income Without WORKING HARDER | Rory Vaden & Lewis Howes

Automation is to your time what compounding interest is to your money. Just like compounding interest takes money and it turns it into more money. Automation takes time and it turns it into more time. -Right.

I think you gotta have a dream.

-The School of Greatness. -Really?

Yeah.

-Please welcome, Lewis Howes.

-There'S been a lot of anxiety and stress and overwhelm in the last years for people with hustle culture. with needing to grow, needing to have more, needing to accomplish more and achieve more faster comparison of what other people are doing and this desire to create and grow and build. And yet people say, I feel like I don't have enough time. I don't have enough time to do all the things I want to do. It's a very first world problem. I don't have enough time. And today we want to talk about the habits of high performers and how they can increase their productivity and multiply their time. And is there a way with all the tools and all the distractions and all the social media and all the apps and all the responsibilities that we have in our life, is there a way to multiply time and to become more productive?

Yeah, yeah there is. So, I mean, this is what you just described was my life. I mean, this was pretty much like all the things we study. I was not trying so much to solve the problem for the world. I was trying to solve a problem in my own life. Just busy, buried, behind, overwhelmed, stressed, frustrated. No matter how fast you work, you just never feel caught up.

No matter how many hours you didn't sleep, you felt tired and you were working sluggish and trying to get it all done, everything.

Yeah, you just can't. There's this frustration of like, Am I ever gonna have peace? Like, am I ever gonna have margin? Am I ever gonna have space? Just feeling like things are under control. And so we started looking at this and we started profiling people that at the time we called ultra performers, which were the top 1% ers in different industries.

Is this top 1% earners, top 1% accomplishments?

Yeah, I mean, just what it's kind of used that term loosely, but like, you know, if it's church leaders, it's large, you know, large church leaders, if it's athletes, professional athletes. If it's financial advisors, they're probably top earners. So, it's just from different walks of life. And what we found is there is a new type of thinker that has emerged that is, we call them a multiplier. Because most people are trying to manage time. Like you even hear this, you go, I need to be better at managing my time.

Time management.

But you know, what's funny about that is, There is no such thing as time management. There is only self-management. You cannot manage time. There's time ticks on second by second. I can't fast forward time. I can't stop it. I can't pause it. And so what this conversation really about is managing ourselves, managing our decisions, managing our use of time. But even that is kind of a first shift that needs to happen is it's not like I'm this helpless victim that is subject to the world around me who is unfairly blasting me with all this stuff. No, you're in charge. Like you, everything that exists in your life, you either said yes to it in some way. So it is your responsibility and you created the problem, but that also means that you are in charge of fixing it.

Right.

That you have the power to change it. But what we started to realize is that most of what people have learned and think about time management, I went so far in as the opening line in my TED Talk is I said, everything you know about time management is wrong. It's wrong because we have been taught to think about time in a very, you know, linear way and the world today is much more like multi-dimensional.

When you mean linear way, do you mean focusing on our priorities?

Yeah, so a little bit about that. So if we talk, we love to take people on a quick like history of time management theory. Okay, so era one time management thinking was very one-dimensional. We refer to era one thinking as efficiency. So that was the strategy was I got 10 things on my to-do list, How do I crank them out faster? And time management and productivity as a body of work really develops like it comes on in the scene in like 1950s, 60s. So, you know, it's the manufacturing era where it's conveyor belts and engineering and just doing things faster. That also reflected in our mindset was how can I be more efficient? Now, efficiency is good. All things being equal, Doing things faster is great. The problem is that there is a point of diminishing returns to using efficiency as your only strategy for productivity. Which is that no matter how fast we move, the amount of busy work always expands to fill the amount of time available. So, it's more like quicksand. It's just kind of like the faster you go or the more that shows up. doesn't mean you shouldn't be fast. It's just not gonna get you what you're looking for. Then in the late 80s, Dr. Stephen Covey wrote a book that changed the world, 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I'm sure you're familiar with it and sold tens of millions of copies. And Dr. Covey pretty much single-handedly introduced a new era of time management thought that we You know, the world refers to as prioritizing. But we would classify prioritizing as era two thinking, which is still to this day, the predominant strategy that most people use in terms of how they think about time. And so here's what prioritizing is. It's to focus first on what matters most. Super powerful, super relevant. Dr. Covey had this thing called the time management matrix that, you know, he explained of like urgency and importance. and basically he taught us to score our activities so that we could reorder them and say, it's not just about getting these done faster, it's saying, hey, item number seven needs to be pushed to item number one, which is valuable. And so that's super valuable. Prioritizing is as important today as ever before. But what I noticed in my own life, because I was a student of Dr. Covey and Several books on time, I mean, there's no shortage of books on time management. There's no shortage of apps. There's all these tips and tricks and tools and technology that exist to help us with this problem of feeling so busy. And yet, the majority of us are still overwhelmed. Right. So it's like there's something missing. And what we started to notice in these ultra performers that we now refer to as the multipliers, is that they are doing a different type of thinking. It's like evolution, like their thinking has evolved. For almost all of them, it was subconscious.

They weren't even aware of it.

Not even aware of it. It wasn't something that someone taught them to do. They did it instinctively, you know, like instinctually. They figured out and most of them couldn't explain it. They couldn't explain it. to me and they couldn't explain it to most people if they said, why are you so productive? How do you become a billionaire in 10 years when most people work for 40 years and they can barely retire? It's a different type of thinking. And one of the things, this is true in many areas of our life, the next level of results always requires the next level of thinking. So here's what it is. So Era 3 time management is multiplying. It's not efficiency, it's not prioritizing, it's multiplying. And it's all based on what we call the significance calculation. So it's really, it's not, it's adding on like Dr. Covey's work as an example. So he, you know, presents this two-dimensional figure like a square, where the y-axis is importance and the x-axis is urgency. But what multipliers are doing is they're making a third calculation, which we call significance. So it's kind of like if you were doing algebra, it would be the z-axis. It would turn the square into a cube.

Three-dimensional.

Three-dimensional thinking, era three thinking or three-dimensional thinking. And so here's the difference. urgency is how soon does this matter? Most of us live in a world of urgency. It's all about what needs to be done right now. Importance is different. Importance is how much does this matter? But significance is even different still. Significance is how long is this going to matter? So, what is the impact of this activity in the future.

10 years out, 20 years out.

Even 10 days out, yeah. It is breaking free of the paradigm of one day and instead thinking about tomorrow and the next day and the significance calculation changes everything because this is how it's possible to multiply time. So I'll just tell you in one sentence. Okay, so if you say, Rory, How is it possible to multiply time? This is the answer. So you wanna write this part down. You don't wanna miss this. The way you multiply time is by giving yourself the emotional permission to spend time on things today that create more time tomorrow. There's certain things you do right now that create more time in the future. That's the significance calculation. So when I say multiply time, people often think I'm exaggerating or that it's like a marketing hyperbole, right? As I'm like, I'm sensationalizing a concept. When we say this, we're not exaggerating. We mean this literally. Now, it kind of fries your brain because you go, you,'ve been told your whole life, you can't, time is the one thing you can never get back. It's the one thing you can never get more of. And it is true that there's nothing that we can do, there's nothing I can do to give you more time inside of one day. So one day is finite and we're all limited by the same 24 hours, which by the way is 1440 minutes or 86,400 seconds. So I can't teach you to create more, I don't have control over time. Right? There's no such thing as time management. There's only self-management. But that's exactly the problem is most of us think about our activities in the paradigm of one day. We wake up and we say, what's the most important thing I can do today? And it's not that that's a bad question. It's just not the question that multipliers ask. Multipliers don't say, what is the most important thing I can do today? Multipliers ask, what are the things I can do today that create more time tomorrow? What are the things I can do now that make the future better? You're literally breaking free of the urgency paradigm of just what matters right here, right now, and you're introducing the significance paradigm of what is going to have impact over the long haul.

Right. How do you know which actions to focus on urgently that will have impact over the long haul?

Yes.

When you've got everything significant.

Yes. So, well, there's a tool called the Focus Funnel that We developed here to help people apply this. So there's only one big idea in this whole conversation, which is spend time on things today that give you more time tomorrow. That's how you multiply time. And then you go, how do I do that? And there's five core methods, strategies. We call them permissions because there's an emotional side. What we've also learned is that most people treat time management logically, but it's actually an emotional conversation. For most of us, it's not just our calendar and our inbox and our to-do list. It is our underlying feelings of guilt and fear and anxiety and worry, as well as ambition and our drive to be successful and feel valued and important and to make impact in the world. these underlying emotional drivers dictate as much as, dictate how we spend our time and the choices that we make as much as anything on our to-do list.

What do we feel most guilty about? We feel most guilty about not doing something that we want to do, about delaying something, about wasting our time.

I would say that guilt, so guilt corresponds with the first of the five permissions, which is eliminate. Okay. So if you were to picture a funnel, okay, so if I was gonna draw this out, right, like you think of all of the stuff there is to do comes into the top. And then the focus funnel is our attempt to create a visual illustration that codifies the thought process that multipliers go through intuitively in their own brain so that the rest of us can kind of like see it and follow it. So the very first question is, can this be eliminated?

So give me an example of your life or someone's business or career or whatever it might be.

There's tons of things. I mean, in your personal life, I mean, I used, I like the example of TV because it's hilarious how people will, in the same dinner conversation, talk about how they're so busy and married and overwhelmed and then talk about the three series on Netflix that they have binged in like the last month. Right.

Which took 20 hours of their life.

Yeah, and so it's like, okay, And I'm not saying you shouldn't watch TV. By the way, I'm not telling you anything you shouldn't or shouldn't do.

I'm just introducing the framework for you to decide how to spend your time.

But if you're saying you're too busy.

And overwhelmed, check to where you're spending your time the most. That's right. And Nielsen says-- but six hours on Instagram a day and you're not creating something of significance and you're just browsing, or if you're 20 hours a week.

On TV and you're, I'm overwhelmed and tired and exhausted, then just look at where you're spending your time. Yeah, and Nielsen ratings, this is from a few years ago, but they said the average American watches 27 hours a week of television. A week! A week! It's a part-time job!

So... 27 hours a week, how much is that a day?

I mean, so seven, seven times, it's like four hours a day.

Four hours a day of TV?

It's like four hours a day. That's a ton!

That's a lot of time.

I mean, you could build a big side hustle in a couple hours every day.

Even if you just cut half of that down. and you watch two hours a day of TV and you spend two hours on your side hustle or something else, your health, your relationships, imagine the benefits you would have down the line.

So, yeah, there's anything eliminate is the first opportunity to multiply because anything I say no to today creates time in the future. How? It's preventing me from doing something that I would have otherwise been doing had I not given myself the permission to eliminate. Like had I not said no. So basically this is saying no and people really struggle with saying no. In businesses, this happens all the time. People have all these... So, you know, at Brand Builders Group, we do personal brand strategy, right? So we're coaching all these like people on building and monetizing their personal brand. Well, they have like a hundred business models. It's like, oh, I want to have a video course and a membership site and a live event and consulting. I want to do keynote speaking and and I want to get a book deal and, you know, and sponsorships and brand deals and it's like when you have diluted focus, you get diluted results. So you have to, by saying no to some things, you power your ability to focus on the few significant things that will multiply time. So you have to say no, but this is something that people struggle with. I struggle with it.

You know, especially when you get to a certain level of success where there's a lot of opportunities and cool things and exciting things and new shiny objects, we want to do lots of things. High achievers, people that have gotten out of the weeds of their life and they have different problems which are opportunity problems. Again, first world problems. It's how do you focus your time and energy and making the decisions that you want to focus on now for your future. is a challenge in just making decisions. Decision fatigue is a thing for people and learning how to place importance on the things that you want to spend your time on is going to be key for you.

Totally. And a lot of people, the decision fatigue, what happens is they... it does wear on you and so a lot of people don't make conscious decisions. So what happens is...

They make what? Emotional decisions, reactions...

Yes. Their unconscious emotional impulse. pulses, right? And if you're not consciously saying no to the things that don't matter, you end up unconsciously saying no to the things that do matter.

What if everything matters to you?

So, you know, that's what I said, actually. So I, in, in, so we were, you know, this became the procrastinate on purpose book. So this was my second book. When we're profiling all these people, I was doing interviews, and I told one of the multipliers, I said, I don't like this one. I I got to where I am by being a yes man, by like doing a lot of things and doing them well and like saying yes to meetings and meeting people all the time. And they said, Rory, that is the dumbest thing I have ever heard. And I was like, oh, okay. And here's what they said. They said, you,'re trying to go through life without saying no, which is admirable because you're a nice guy. But what you failed to realize is that you are always saying no to something. Anytime you say yes to one thing, you simultaneously are saying no to an infinite number of other things. So even when you think you're saying, yes, everything is important to me. No, nothing is important to you. Wow. Nothing is important enough for you to focus on and you don't have a method for focus and focus is power. So most of us are losing because we're wandering, we're meandering through a bunch of insignificant, trivial tasks feeling productive when really we're just diluted.

Right.

So, that's the first one, eliminate. Now, if you can't eliminate the task, then it drops down to the center of the focus funnel, which is automate, the permission to invest. And this is so powerful because Anything you create a process for today saves you time in the future.

Yes.

Now, if I set up a process for it or a system or if I write code, there's a lot of automation, like actual technologies and things that you can deploy. If I take the time to set it up today, then tomorrow the system or the process is doing the thing instead of me. Multiplying time. Now, here's the challenge, is that most of us are aware that those tools exist. But if you ask someone, Louis, I mean, like if you ask the average business owner, or you know, whatever, you know, achiever, or you know, somebody pursuing greatness, are you aware of tools and systems and processes and technologies that you could implement or deploy or improve inside of your goals that would automate things. They would all say yes. But if you said, why haven't you done it yet? What do you think they'd say?

It takes too much time.

It takes too much time.

It's easier to do it myself right now, just a couple minutes every day as opposed to figuring out the system, figuring out the software, learning it, going through the training, hiring someone, teaching them all the time and energy. I might as well just do it myself.

Bingo, yeah, so it's like, it's so ironic because the two excuses we would use for why we haven't automated things is we would say, either I don't have the time or I don't have the patience. Money.

The money.

The patience. We'll talk about in a second.

I don't have the time or the money.

I don't have the time or the money. And it's wild because those two excuses we would use for not automating something are exactly the opposite of how it is when you make the significance calculation.

If you did automate, you would save time or you would multiply time and you'd earn more money from your time doing something else.

Yeah, so an easy example is bill pay. You know, this is a quick example, right? So if you had two hours open in your day today and I said, Louis, you know, what's the most important thing you could do today? You'd have a list of things that you would do. And if I said, Hey, I think you should consider setting up online bill pay. For most of us, we would be like, No. Like that is not important, that's not significant, that seems totally trivial. But if you look at this the way a multiplier would, you go, okay, if you spend two hours today setting up online bill pay, and it saves you 30 minutes every month from paying your bills in the future, then after four months time, you will have broken even 30-30-30-30, you will have broken even on those initial two hours, and then every month thereafter you'll get something that we call ROTI, Return On Time Invested. Because now the system is doing the thing that you would have otherwise been doing. Another way that we say this, I know this is one of your favorite Roryisms, is that automation is to your time exactly what compounding interest is to your money. Automation is to your time what compounding interest is to your money. Just like compounding interest takes money and it turns it into more money. Automation takes time and it turns it into more time. Just like nobody has extra money to invest. I mean, not nobody. Some people are so rich, it's like that's all they do. But the average person doesn't have an extra 10 grand just laying around to be like, yeah, I'm gonna invest it. Usually you have to sacrifice something in the short term. You don't go on a trip, you don't buy the car, you don't buy the TV, and that is where you create the margin to reinvest into whatever the stock market, mutual funds, real estate, whatever you do. That is also how time is. Nobody has extra time to set up a system. Marketing automation is one of the big things we teach our clients. I know you guys do a lot of it here. We're experts in marketing automation. One of the reasons we became experts in it is we realized, oh my gosh, if I can build a funnel, which is just a sequence, a series of emails and automating trust basically, giving value to people, then that system basically becomes like an employee for me that works 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's always out there. But I don't have time to build it. And yet you only say that in the absence of significance. And that's what happens. In the absence of the significance calculation, we inadvertently overweight the urgency calculation and we doom ourselves to a lifetime sentence of always feeling busy because we're constantly making decisions only about what needs to get done today and never thinking ahead via the significance. of tomorrow.

So how do we know what is most significant today?

Yeah, so that... Do we make a.

List of everything that's on our mind or on our to-do list? Do we step back and actually say, okay, where could I... Do I analyze my time where I'm spending the most of my time every day, every week, every month and say, okay, where can I pull this back and what should I putting it towards? How do we figure out what is significant and Yeah, so good question. Now and next year.

So, significance in some ways is an internal assessment, right? But, you know, when we, the word significant is a little bit tricky because it's got the double entendre of significant meaning like profound, but significant how I'm using it here is not.

Multiplying time.

It's just literal. It's like, what's the impact? So, actually, I think a way to go, to figure this out is to go, how do I figure out what's important? Because significance is a part of the importance calculation, as is urgency. I'm not telling you that you can, nor is it realistic, that you would never do things that are more urgent. But if there's no significance calculation, all you only ever do is what's urgent. Yes. You only fall victim to the fires.

And you feel always busy, overwhelmed, stressed, never having enough time.

Bingo. And that was me, right? And then we did a study and then it was like, oh my gosh, we need to write a book on this, which becomes the book, Procrastinate on Purpose, which then becomes a TED Talk. TED Talk goes viral and it's like, I don't even teach productivity. I teach influence, right? Brand Builders Group, we study the psychology of influence. Now I would say that self-management is influencing yourself. So this does fall in that category. As well as the other stuff we do around self-discipline is kind of influencing self. So before you can influence others, you should influence self so that it does fit the context. But anyways, I say that to say I never set out to write a book about this. It happened as a result of going, oh my gosh, I'm doing this wrong. So to your question, here's an exercise. Simple, you list everything out you have to do. And on one column, it is the urgency column, which is how soon does this need to be done? Rate it one to 10. The next column is the significance column, which is how much is the completion of this task going to matter in the future? If you were just doing it on time-based, you would say scale of one to 10, How much time will this task make me in the future? That's significance. So it's a nat, significance is a natural counterbalancing force to urgency. Then multiply the two numbers together, and that'll give you your importance score. Interesting. And then rearrange the activities in order of importance. So it's kind of, you know, it's building on what Dr. Covey was doing, right? He was teaching us, number one, not all tasks are created equal.

Right.

Number two, you should score the tasks. And number three, you should focus first on what matters most, but what he didn't give us, which there wasn't as much of a need to in 1989. Right. I mean, in 1989-- We didn't have cell phones.

We didn't have technology. We didn't have internet.

Social media.

We didn't have social media. We didn't have these apps. We didn't have all these other tools that the world uses today.

And you didn't have the perpetual communication.

Constant messaging.

When you left work, You left work. You didn't have a way to talk to anybody.

And people had to call you on a landline, you pick it up off the wall, or you just didn't pick it up.

Yeah.

You weren't getting constantly messages vibrated in your thigh of like another distraction, opportunity, friend, whatever. Yeah, so press hit, you know, something.

And here's what I would say, right, is go, you can't solve today's time management challenges using yesterday's time management strategies. But most people are. For most people, importance and urgency, like Dr. Covey's thing, is the predominant method. I mean, it's probably the most stolen or copyright abused technique that there is, and it doesn't make this new calculation of significance. So all you're doing is adding to it, and you're breaking, sounds so cheesy to say a paradigm shift, but you're, you're shifting from a lens of what matters in the next 24 hours to what matters in the future. And it's multiplying. So automation is to your time what compounding interest is to your money. And as you give yourself the permission to invest in building the system, it compounds over time. Now, if you can't automate it, Eliminate, automate. Then that task drops down to the bottom of the funnel, which is delegate. Delegate. Anytime you train somebody else to do something, then in the future, that person is doing it, so it's multiplying time. They're doing it instead of you. Again, it's the same short-term problem. I don't know. have time. Like, so if I asked you, I said, are there things you're doing, Louis, every day that you, somebody could, you could train somebody how to do for you. I know you're pretty good at this, but let's just say like the average entrepreneur.

Yeah.

You know, or executive or even mom, like a mom, like a mom who works at home, there's a bunch of stuff that she's doing and, you know, it's, It's easier to put your three-year-old's shoes on for them than to stop and teach them and make them do it.

Right, right.

But if you teach them to do it, then now.

Every day for the next two years they're doing it.

Right, so, and I say that 'cause I have a four-year-old, AJ and I, we got a four-year-old and a two-year-old, so this is like real talk at the Vaden house right now. Now, your thinking is really good though, because you go, gosh, comments are important to me. So one of the things we've had a lot of our clients do with comments that have lots of followers is, We just write out a series of like the first four responses. And then if someone comments like more than five times, they move it over into the primary inbox so that like me as an example, I will personally reply. Now the first couple responses are standard, but I wrote them. They are what I would say if I were there right in that moment. So the fact that someone else is copying and pasting it, It's like, it is what I would say. You write out a decision tree of how the conversation is going to go. Now, if somebody makes it through that, I never want someone to pretend they are me.

Sure.

And I'm not trying to outsource my personality. But most people, it's like, Hey, how's this? Or they have a quick question and it's like, Great, we're responding faster than even if it was me. And it is the thing I would be doing anyways. So you can do both. When you think this way.

Yes, when you break the paradigm.

Yeah, and you're thinking long term. So to delegate the... That's the third step. Yeah, do we have time for the 30x rule?

Yep, we got time.

So this is big because a lot of people struggle with going, it's just faster for me to do it myself.

And then teaching someone else on how to do this.

Then teaching someone else. And so there's a great rule that we discovered and then we included it, like we wrote it in the book called the 30x 30x rule. And this is what it says. You should spend 30 times the amount of time it takes you to do a task once on training someone else to do a task for you. So let's just say there's a task that takes you five minutes every day. The 30x rule says that you should spend 30 times five, 30x, 30 times five, which is 150 minutes. It says you should be willing to spend 150 minutes training someone to do a task that only takes you five. Which is where some people, we do lose them because they go, Rory, that doesn't make any sense. Like why would I spend 150 minutes? That's like couple two and a half hours training someone to I could just do it in five. And the answer is it never makes sense to trade 150 minutes for five Unless you make the significance calculation.

Yes.

Because you're not doing that task for five minutes. You're doing it five minutes a day, which means it's five minutes the next day, and the next day, and the next day. If you look at this calculation through just one year of significance, which is like 250 working days, it's really five times 250, which is 1,250 minutes. It's not a five-minute task. It's a 1,250-minute task every year. Right. So now the decision is different. The decision is not should I spend 150 minutes to save five, it's should I spend 150 to save 1,250. The answer is just as obvious as it was before, but it's the opposite decision that we would have originally made. And notice the task hasn't changed, the people haven't changed, only one thing has changed. that person's thinking. The only thing that has changed is their thinking. The next level of results always requires the next level of thinking. So when you make the significance calculation, it almost never makes sense for you to do that activity. It's never based on time alone. It's never faster for you to do it. It is faster to do it once Maybe twice. But again, if you look at significance calculation and you think longer term, eventually that person's going to figure it out.

Well, here's what everyone will say. I already know what people are thinking. Well, no one can do this action as good as me. This is my skill or I've done this for years. I know the way I like it. I know the way I want it to be done. I've tried training someone in the past. It took me 5 hours. They still couldn't get it. It was only 70 or 80% as good as me. so I just took it back myself and was resentful of the whole process.

Happens all the time.

So how does someone get over the fact that no one can do it as good as them, potentially in the first six to 12 months?

Extend the horizon. It is frustrating, it is scary. Don't hear what I'm not saying. I'm not saying it's easy. You usually have to go through a couple assistants before you find the right one. You spend a few minutes, but if you do a good job, your assistant that you hire will create a training manual so that the next one picks up where that one left off.

And again, if you want to get to the next level in anything in your life, it's going to require a new level of thinking and a new level of evolving internally.

Yes.

You're going to need to develop a growth mindset. You're going to need to overcome resentments and grudges and frustrations. You're going to have to learn the uncomfortable things that keep you stuck in that place from saying, I'm just gonna do this myself. You gotta start to really evolve as a human in order to get to this next level.

Yeah. And I would say it's personal development, right? It's plugging into this show. It's reading the Procrastinate on Purpose book. Go get it. It's freaking awesome. It's joining coaching groups and surrounding your, it's like getting accountability. And then it is being a, surrounding yourself with like-minded people is a huge part of this.

Yes.

Because What we're talking about on this episode, like this is not for the masses.

Not easy.

Like very few people will ever even entertain, this is pretty high level stuff we're dealing with here. So you've got to find a community of people that you can be around on a regular basis who are going to hold you accountable and push you to go, no, no, no, no. You have to delegate because, you know, to what you said about growth, Is the reason delegate is hard is because for most of us we became leaders by being achievers, by being great, right? Like you got here by being a perfectionist and by doing everything with speed and efficiency.

And pulling all-nighters and... Yeah, whatever it takes.

But what got you here as a performer won't get you there as a leader.

That's true.

If you don't learn to do this, you are giving yourself a lifetime sentence of having to do it all yourself. And one of my other favorite things that came out of one of these interviews was one of the multipliers said, 80% done right by someone else is always better than 100% done right by me. So this is why we call this one the permission of imperfect. Because you have to give yourself the permission of short-term imperfection, which is very hard for chronic overachievers who have been, you know, demanded perfection for themselves, which is one reason why they sometimes great performers don't make great leaders is because they assume everyone else will be like them and they'll get it the first try and they're not, they don't have grace and compassion for like most of humanity are average students. It takes a minute to learn and that doesn't mean they're stupid. It's like it takes a minute and you have to give yourself and them flexibility, some time, some grace, some space to go, yeah, mess it up. It's all right. We'll fix it. You'll figure it out and then you'll learn it and then you'll master it and then you'll teach and then one day you'll teach it to somebody. Andy Stanley has a great, do you know Andy Stanley?

No.

Oh man, he is one of the best communicators in the world. he's actually a pastor of a church. But anyways, he does all this leadership stuff and he has this one quote that I love. He says, Leadership, you have to remember, leadership is not about getting things done right. Leadership's about getting things done through other people. And people are imperfect. We're all imperfect. We're all imperfect. The art is not, how do I just get perfect stuff? It's how do I work through imperfect people like me through imperfect processes to create something beautiful that the world can benefit from. That I didn't have to do all.

Of the work on myself. I didn't have to spend all my time making it solo. That's right.

Because you can't scale your impact. If you have to do everything yourself, you're not going to scale your impact. Right.

So we got eliminate, automate, delegate. Yeah. Okay.

So now we're at the bottom. So if you can't eliminate it, automate it, or delegate it, then that task falls out the bottom of the focus funnel. And there is one key remaining question, which is, must this task be done now or can it wait until later? So if the task must be done now, that is how you know it's significant. You know it's a thing that multiplies your time, it must be done, it must be done by you, and it must be done right now. We call that the permission to protect, which is basically where you you know, you focus in on that thing. In fact, my first book, Take the Stairs, really was more about that. So Procrastinate on Purpose, funny enough, isn't actually a sequel to Take the Stairs. It's more of a prequel. So it's like how to identify what to do and then take the stairs as how to get yourself to do the thing you don't feel like doing, which is where the Take the Stairs metaphor comes from. So that's concentrate. And there's a lot that's been written on it. I know you've had Cal Newport on. He's got good stuff like Deep Work, Greg McHugh and stuff on Essentialism or I think you've had the One Thing. All of those to me really center in around like, okay, now go after it. But to me, what there's been less written on is the other way is you go, okay, if the task must be done and it must be done by you, but then you say, must it be done right now? and the answer is no, then it goes out the other side of the focus funnel. And that is where we're encouraging you not to eliminate, automate, delegate or concentrate, but to procrastinate on purpose, which is where the title of the book came from.

So give me an example of something that you've been procrastinating on purpose in the last year or a couple of years.

Okay, so cleaning out my inbox is a great example. So we're in startup mode right now, so Brandon is, I mean, we're getting out of that mode. We're like three years in. But we also have a four-year-old. I mean, the last four years, it's like we had a baby, sold a company, started a new company, had another baby.

Moved into a new house.

COVID hit, moved into a house. So it was like, yeah, I'm not gonna try to have a zero inbox at this particular moment, like this season of my life. And that's permission. That's the emotional side is people-- To.

Allowing you to say, this isn't done right now. This is messy.

It's messy.

I know I want to get it done, but I'm not going to put it's not the most significant thing right now for me to do this. I've got to be a dad. I got to be I got to take care of kids. We got to earn money. We got to do these things. The inbox is not the most important thing, even though it might be a pattern of the past that we all have done. It's there. Let me just do this for 20 minutes and then that 20 minutes every day is not used for something significant. Just like replying to comments on social media or watching Netflix or whatever it is, procrastinate that thing and wait till later.

Yeah, we call it pop, procrastinate on purpose. So you pop it back to the top of the focus funnel.

Can I eliminate it? Is there a way to automate it?

Yeah, so it goes into that holding pattern.

Exactly. And that's the process.

Yeah, so that's the whole process. And it's meant to be simple because it's meant to be dynamic and fluid. And at the end of the day, all that really matters here is that you're spending time on things today that give you more time tomorrow. And then the last thing I would say on this, Louis, is this is important, is once you have identified your next most significant priority, until you accomplish that thing, Everything else is a distraction.

So if I have a messy room, I shouldn't go clean my room first and then get to my homework.

It depends. It's all relative to the other stuff. I can't, I'm not gonna say that. It's all relative. It's relative. So that's why it's like, I can't tell you what to do in your life. All I can offer you is here is a system of thinking that these people do. And I do wanna, I wanna edify like, this takes time. You have to keep learning this. You have to stay plugged into people who are thinking like this. You got to join groups and be a part of communities where you're surrounded by people who think like this.

Yeah, and this is the keys, this is the habits of high performers in having a productive life, business, and everything. And what you just said right there is it's hard to do anything on your own. It's hard to apply this. It's hard to learn a new skill on your own. It's hard to delegate on your own. you've got to consistently be willing to invest in learning, invest in education, and invest in accountability. For me, I have so many accountability partners in my life that I pay for, that I invest in. Business, health, relationships, therapy, everything. I'm constantly investing in it because there's only so much discipline and motivation I have on my own. I can be one of the hardest workers in the gym one time, maybe five times in a week. But there's gonna be that one day that I'm like, I'd rather just sleep in today. But if I know I'm invested and accountable to a coach that I've paid for and they're gonna be there and show up for me, I'm gonna give a little bit more and I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna be more consistent. This is why we have Greatness Coaching. And I wanted to let people know they can apply for that, lewishouse.com/coaching. If you haven't applied yet, make sure to do it. This is for people that are high achievers. that want to have accountability and a group every month to be supported by with a coach to help you follow through on things like this in your business and in your life. So if you guys haven't applied yet, go to lewishouse.com/coaching and apply for that so you can learn more about greatness coaching. It's a year of accountability and coaching with a lot of other good stuff included in there. If you want to learn more about the Focus Funnel and really how to be more productive and multiply your time, make sure you guys get this book. Game Changer book, Procrastinate on Purpose: 5 Permissions to Multiply youy Time by my friend, Rory Vaden. We're doing a series with Rory about a few different things right now, personal branding and motivation and some other things, confidence as well. So make sure you subscribe, follow Rory on social media, Rory Vaden everywhere, check out Brand Builders Group if you want to learn more about that as well, and get the book. if you want to learn how to multiply time and you can give this to a friend as well. Rory, it's been amazing, man. I'm excited for this series with you. -Yeah. -And we'll talk to you soon. -Love you, brother. -Appreciate it. If you're looking for more greatness in your life, make sure to check out this video right here. You've done so much over the years.

With what you were just saying is science-based research. What else was it again? Science-based research. -Science, evidence-based and highly actionable. It's got to be both of those, right? Like I want science-based ideas but I also want them to be practical and easy to implement. And I mean, either one is useful but if you have them both together, it's a really powerful combination.

And you kind of got started in what? Personal finance and personal development and... Yeah.

Personal finance was never really a big part of my story, although I find it interesting for myself. I wrote about small business marketing and stuff early on. So, and then I transitioned after I learned how to build an email list. I transitioned to jamesclear.com which is what that I've been doing for the last five or six years now. And that's been mostly focused on performance, strength training, productivity, and really like just habits in general and how we can use them to live better lives. What would you say is your core audience?

Is it entrepreneurs? Is it just everyday individuals looking to improve their life?

It started and there were like pockets of people that were really interested. Like I had a pocket of venture capitalists and investors that were really interested in this.

Because you were doing business and marketing maybe?

Well, One of the phrases I use and I have this in the book is that habits are the compound interest of self-improvement. So it's like the same way that compound interest accrues through finance, the effects of your habits multiply over time. And so often these choices that you make, they're these little 1% improvements for you or against you each day, and they're very easy to overlook on a daily basis. What really is the difference between eating a burger and fries or a salad and chicken for lunch? You don't really taste a lot better. Yeah, right. Yeah.

It tastes amazing.

That's actually a crucial point that I cover in the book, which is that habits that are immediately satisfying are more likely to be repeated. And so pretty much any behavior produces multiple outcomes across time, right? Like if you eat a donut right now, it's tasty and sugar. It's very good. But in the long run, you gain weight. And so the immediate outcome is favorable. The long-term outcome is unfavorable. with good habits it's often the reverse. You go to the gym right now and it takes effort, you sweat, you.

Have to work hard. It's to sacrifice your time for Netflix.

And chill to go train. The immediate outcome is unfavorable, but the ultimate outcome, you're in shape and in a year or a month or whatever is favorable. And so the challenge for building good habits and breaking bad ones is often finding a way to pull the long-term consequences of your bad habits into the immediate moment so you feel a little bit of the pain right now and want to avoid it. And the long-term rewards of your good habits into the immediate moment so that.

You have a reason to repeat it again in the future. So, is it kind of like, okay, I'm going to go to the gym and eat donuts at the gym. So, I feel good but also realize.

This is going to help me long-term. So, in the book, I talk about this concept I call identity-based habits. And essentially, what you're the ultimate form of immediate gratification is the reinforcement of of your desired identity. So you go to the gym and you're reinforcing the identity of I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts. Or you show up to write and you're reinforcing the identity of I'm someone who writes every day. And so you get a little bit of immediate satisfaction for being that person and being aligned with your identity, your values, your principles. But you also get the long-term rewards from showing up every day. And so what you don't want is some kind of immediate reinforcement like eating a donut at the gym. where you're casting votes for two different identities, right? It's like I showed up at the gym, I'm casting a vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, the type of person who's healthy, but then I eat a donut, so now I'm casting a vote for being an unhealthy person. So, it's like, the donut washes out, right?

So, you want reinforcements that align with your principles and values.

So, you essentially have to form your identity first. Is that what I'm hearing? So, who you want to be? I think that your habits votes are the way that you embody an identity, right? So like each time you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized. Each time you go to the gym, you embody the identity of someone who is fit. Each time you sit down to write, you embody the identity of a writer. So you can sort of think of it as like each behavior casts a vote for the type of person that you want to become. And if you cast enough votes for that type of identity, you start to believe that about yourself, right? Like if you You go to church for 20 years, you believe that you're religious. You study Spanish every Tuesday for 30 minutes, you believe that you are studious. So in that way, your habits provide evidence of your desired identity and I think that that is probably the ultimate reason that habits are so important. It's true like habits can help you earn more money or be more productive or lose weight and all that stuff is great but in addition to the external results that habits provide, they also shape your your sense of self. They are the engine or the avenue through which you learn to believe things about yourself. Sometimes people will say stuff like, fake it till you make it. But fake it till you make it is asking yourself to believe something without evidence for it. And you can do that for a little while. You could do it for a day or a week. But eventually, I mean, there's a word for beliefs that don't have evidence behind them. It's delusion. And if you're deluding yourself, then eventually.

You give up on that.

But the power of doing a better habit each day or casting a little vote for that type of person is that now you have evidence to root your belief in. Yeah, so now I've done it for six months.

Yeah.

Right?

Like, I mean, now you have a lot of evidence that you're a podcaster or a good interviewer. You know, like you do this over and over again each time you cast a vote for believing that about yourself. And you don't just, you aren't delusionally believing that you're a good interviewer. It's because you've shown up and done it hundreds of times.

Right.

And so I think that that's true for any habit, large or small, that they provide evidence of the desired identity or the type of person that you are.

What are the five non-negotiable habits for you on a daily basis?

Oh, that's a good question. So obviously this is going to depend on your goals. For me specifically, I think there are a few core habits that are going to serve everybody and certainly serve me well. So exercise is a huge one. I don't do it daily, but I exercise train four times a week. And I feel like if I didn't exercise, I don't know that I would be an entrepreneur. Like, I don't know if I could handle the psychological roller coaster without the physical outlet. Yeah, the release, the... You probably feel that as like an athlete too, you know? Like, being an athlete for so many years, I feel like I need to push myself physically in addition to mentally. If it's just mental, it doesn't do it for me. I need to have a physical outlet. So exercise, exercise is one. The other, the ultimate meta habit, is reading. Because if you build a habit of reading, you can solve pretty much any other problem. You know, you want to learn how to be a better podcaster, you can read about that. You want to learn how to meditate, you can read about that. You want to learn how to make more money, you can read about that. And so what you need is to develop a habit of reading and then whatever problem you're facing at the time, you can, you have a method for solving that. Okay. Writing for me is huge. I don't actually know what I think about something until I write about it.

Oh.

I find that if you- Get your.

Ideas that you get it out.

If you ask me something right now that I haven't written about before, what is really happening is I'm just talking my emotions. So, what I mean is that you'll ask me something and I'll get an implicit feeling about what that topic is. I'll have some intuition, a gut feeling about it and I'll say whatever that feeling is driving me to say. But I don't actually know if that's what I really think, what I deeply think, until I have the time to sit down, the research, the information, logically go through it. Because a lot of the time, you know, if you would ask me the same question next week, I might have a different feeling at that time. So, I'm talking different emotions. So, I think I actually need to have time to sit with it a little bit and write it through to learn what I actually think. Writing's third. Exercise, reading, writing.

I don't know.

I would say that those are probably my main three. If I was going to pick five, five and the other two that I would add, going for a daily walk would be a huge one. That's one that I aspire to because I don't do that every day. But anytime I do, it really benefits me.

In what ways?

Well, you see this with a lot of anybody who does creative work in particular, that something about getting outside and walking, I think there's, this is just me spitballing. I don't actually have science behind this idea, but when your body is moving, It's very hard for you, one, to not be active mentally. If you think about someone who's shut down mentally, what does their body language look like? They're usually closed off their arms, they're sitting, they're not moving very much. Try to be closed off mentally and be dancing physically. It's very hard to do. If your body is moving like that, it's really hard for your mind to be shut down. That's one thing that kind of gets the juices flowing. The second thing, and this is where I'm spitballing, I don't know if this is actually true, but I wonder about your non-conscious mind being like a bottleneck sometimes. And so if you're moving, if you're walking, it gives your non-conscious mind something to do. So you're like, it gets out of the way and now you can actually have this stuff arise or think in a different way than if you're sitting. So, I don't know. I think that those are two different things. Yeah, that's cool.

Okay, so that'd be the fourth thing.

Sleep is the fifth one. And this is one that I actually am pretty good about. So my cardinal rule is that I don't cheat myself on sleep. So if I stay up late and work till midnight, I'm gonna sleep till eight or nine. Sleeping in. Yeah. Like I'm not gonna get up early because I don't want to cheat myself on that. But yeah, I think that those are kind of the core things. It's funny, sometimes people ask like, oh, how can I double my productivity or something like that? And you'll see articles like that all the time, like fall this one five-minute trick to double your productivity. But the real answer to most of that stuff is like, get eight hours of sleep a night, exercise, don't eat like crap, and then instantly you have this boost of productivity and motivation. Yeah, the fundamentals are covered 90% of it.

Yeah, exactly. You said this, you said you did not rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. What are the systems you created to be successful beyond those core habits right there?

Yeah.

So this is a really good question. I think first I just want to talk a little bit about that point that you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. What do I mean by that? So often when we set about to change something or to achieve something, the first step is almost always setting a goal. And this is coming from someone like I was very goal-oriented for a long time, right? Like an athlete. Yeah, I was like goals were the things I wanted to do in sports. The goals for growth the grades I wanted in class, the goals for how much money I wanted to make in my business. And sometimes I would achieve those, but then sometimes I wouldn't. And so I had this question like, well, clearly I'm setting goals for both, so like that can't be the thing that determines it. And you see this a lot that the winners and losers in a particular domain often have the same goals. Like every Olympian wants to win a gold medal.

Sure.

Every job candidate wants to get the job. So if the winners and the losers have the same goal, then the goal cannot be the thing that distinguishes the two. And the thing that distinguishes them is the process, the system behind the goal. And this is also important because achieving a goal often only changes your life for the moment. So like, say you're, just take a simple example. Say you have a messy room and you get motivated and you set the goal to clean your room. Well, you can do that in an hour and then you have a clean room. But if you don't change the sloppy habits that led to a messy room in the first place, then you just end up with a dirty room again. So it's like treating a symptom without treating the cause. And habits are a better solution in that case, because if you fix the inputs, the outputs fix themselves automatically. You don't have to fight to have a clean room if you have clean habits. And I think that that's true in a larger sense as well. People want outcomes. They to earn more money or lose weight or be more productive or reduce stress. But the outcome is not the thing that needs to change. It's the system that precedes it.

So give me the, let's bust the myth of how many days it takes to set a habit. Because there's 14 days, 28 days, 60 days a year. If you do something every single day, and maybe it changes for each person, but what's the science or the the statistics say about how long it takes to form a positive or negative habit, I guess?

So, 21 days is the thing you hear all the time, 30 days, 100 days, whatever. Right now, 66 days is making the rounds as the latest- I saw that in another book. What was that book? -Well, there was one study done that found that 66 days was the average for how long it takes. And as a rule of thumb, I don't think it's terrible. Like you should remind yourself, yeah, this is going to be months of work. It's not just going to be something quick. But even within that study, the range was quite wide. So, if you did something simple like drink a glass of water at lunch each day, it would take like three weeks. If you did something more difficult like go for a run after work every day, that would be like seven or eight months. But I think actually that question to begin with is sort of a, there's like a broken mentality.

But the wrong question.

Yeah, it is. Because if you ask that question, the implicit assumption is when do I have to stop working or when is this done?

And is it automatic after a certain period of time?

Well, the honest answer to how long it takes to build a new habit is forever because if you stop, then it's no longer a habit.

It's a constant choice and a decision, right?

I think people often look at habits as like a finish line to be crossed, but it's actually a lifestyle to be lived. And if you look at it as a lifestyle change, then you're saying, okay, what's something small and sustainable, I can stick to, right? What's something that can actually last over time? So it is true that you can actually map this through research, that a habit will become more automatic with practice. But this reveals another important point, which is that there's nothing about the amount of time elapsed that leads to habits being built. You could practice something once in 30 days or you could practice it a thousand times. What actually leads to a habit becoming automatic and becoming learned and ingrained is repetition. So, the phrase that I like to use is not 21 days or 30 days, but put in your reps. I mean, that's the real thing is you need to practice. And if you put in your reps, then your brain starts to automate how that process works.

-Yeah. What makes you an expert on habits? -Oh, man. -Based on lots of other people that are talking about habits.

Why are you talking about it differently and what have you discovered that's different than everyone else? -Okay. So, two questions there. So, the first one is and I think that, and I've said this many times before, I'm just going through this with everybody else. I consider my readers my peers in the sense that we're all just trying things out. The only difference is I write about what I learn and share it each week, but we're all just learning along the way. Early on, I had a feeling like that. I was like, who am I to, you know, I'm just a guy. Who am I to write about this? And I had a friend tell me the way you develop expertise is by writing about it every week. so I wrote a new article about habits every Monday and Thursday for three years. And that was how I developed the expertise on the topic by writing about it.

You did research and you said, here's what I found, here's what I tried.

Here'S what worked, what didn't work. It's a combination of me reading the scientific literature and reading the research and then trying to distill practical insights from that and testing things out in my own life as a weightlifter, a travel photographer, a writer, an entrepreneur, and seeing what looks like and then the two together. I think you need both. Like, I don't want to be some new age version of an academic who's in an ivory tower just like theorizing about ideas. It's different what it looks like to put ideas into practice, right? Like, imagine you're a peak performance coach and you show up to coach like an NBA team. These guys are like, dude, you need to step on the court if you know what, right, to see what it's actually like.

So you need to have both to have a firm understanding of that. So you were researching and you were applying it into your life? And what was the second part of that?

-The second question, which I think is probably the more interesting one, which is what makes my angle different? What makes this different than every other.

Book out there about habits?

-So, you can broadly put books about habits into two categories. The first book, the first category is what I'll call motivation models. So, motivation models are about what sparks a behavior. How do you get get started? How do you get motivated? The second category is what I'll call reinforcement models. So how does a habit stick? How does it last? Why do certain behaviors get reinforced? And sometimes books will touch on one but focus primarily on the other. A lot of the time they'll just kind of live in separate worlds. That's what I would say is happening in like the self-improvement space. Then you have the academic space. So psychology or neuroscience or whatever. And a lot of those books are focused on the why, but not the how. They'll tell you why something happens, why a particular neuron fires, why a particular biological process works the way it does, but they don't tell you how to implement it in your daily life. And so what I wanted to do was try to combine the two.

Why and how.

Yes, a book that is both why and how. Why to Habits the way they do? Why are they important? And then how do they actually work? And my hope is that Atomic Habits was able to do that largely because of the framework that I put together. So, in the book, I lay out these four stages that all habits go through. And I felt like we needed a new model because most of the models right now are either a motivation model or a reinforcement model, but not both. And you need to understand what both sparks a habit. and what makes a habit stick. -Maintains it, yes. If you want to be able to understand how they work and how to make them last.

-And what are those four frameworks?

-So, the first stage of every habit is a cue. The second stage is a craving or some kind of prediction that your brain makes. I'll give you an example of these in a second. The third stage is the response and then the fourth stage is the reward. So, you walk into a... The question I have that no model all I could find could solve in any good way or explain in any good way was why can the same person respond to the same cue in a different way? So let's say you get into the habit of going to the gym at 5 o'clock every day, but then sometimes work gets busy and you don't go to the gym at 5 o'clock. Current models don't explain that very well because it's like, well, the cue is 5, you should be going to the gym right now. It says the routine falls automatically after the cue. why does someone walk into the kitchen and see a plate of cookies and then they automatically want to eat it? But you could just as easily imagine that you just got done eating dinner in the other room and you're stuffed and you're full and you walk in and you see a plate of cookies and you're like, I'm stuffed. I don't want to eat anything. So what's going on there? And I think these four stages explain it, which is you see the cue or you experience a cue and then you're craving or you're prediction differs based on your current state. So, the way that you interpret the cues in your life is contingent upon the current state that you're in.

The way you're feeling.

Right.

And also other things like your beliefs or your identity, the social group that you're part of, right? So, like if you're in a different group, then maybe you interpret things in a different way. You know, you can imagine one group, they practice a particular religion, they walk into a butcher shop and see pork and they're like, oh, we can't eat that. another person walks in and they're like, oh yeah, I'll have a pork sandwich because it's obvious and easy and right there. So what you choose is contingent upon how you interpret the cues in your life.

How do we change what we interpret?

Yes, good question. All right, so this is a key point in the book, which is that social norms, society leans heavily on us all. So if you, there are just broad examples of this.

Salary pressure.

Religious pressure, media pressure, peer pressure, everything. Yes. Let's say, so just some broad examples. You walk into an elevator and you turn around to face the front. You have a job interview and you wear a suit and tie or a dress or something nice. There's no reason it has to be that way, right? Like you could face the back of the elevator, you could wear a swimsuit to a job interview, but you don't do that because it violates the shared norms. of the group, right? It violates the shared expectations of what that society has. But that's true not only in a broad sense that we're part of these tribes, like big tribes, you know, what it means to be a Christian or to be American or to be Australian or whatever. But it's also true in the small tribes that we belong to. What it means to be a neighbor on this street or a member of your local CrossFit gym or to volunteer for a local organization. All of those all of those groups that you belong to have a set of shared expectations, a set of shared norms. And the key, if you want to build habits that last, if you want to change the way that you interpret cues, is to join a group where the desired behavior is the normal behavior. There are plenty of people who they want to work out, but going to the gym feels like a lot to them. It feels hard, feels like a sacrifice. But there are also people who go to the gym every week and it's just normal. It doesn't feel like an obligation. That's the desired behavior is the normal behavior. Their lifestyle. Right. Same thing for musicians. You know, like if you want to learn an instrument, hang out with people who play all the time. You know, like if you hang out with a bunch of musicians, it's like, well, yeah, that's what we do all the time. Yeah, we play four days a week. We play seven days a week because it just happens. That's what the tribe does. The caveat to this and the thing that I don't I see people mention a lot is that the reason social norms influence our behavior so much is because we want to belong to the tribe. We want to be friends with those people. And so we don't want to lose the friendship or lose belonging over violating the norms.

Yeah, you're not going to hang out with a bunch of vegans and have pork.

Right. And just like be the only one eating that. You won't hang out with them for.

Very long because you're not going to be friends with them anymore. Exactly.

They'll kick you out. So, you want to rise to the standard of that group of that community. So, the key, I think is to join a group where your desired behavior is a normal behavior and you already have something else in common with that group. So Steve Kamb is a good example of this. So like Steve runs Nerd Fitness, right? And all these people want to get in shape who are coming into his community, but they also love Star Wars or Batman or Spider-Man or, you know, all these other things that nerds are into. And if you show up, it can be intimidating to want to get in shape or, you know, work out first time. But if you can connect with the group over your mutual love of Star Wars, then you're like, oh, well, I'm friends with these people and now I also want to pick up those other habits with them because I want to belong with the group because we're already friends. And so I think you can apply that methodology to most new tribes that you join. Don't just join a new tribe because they have the desired behavior. Also try to find a way that you can overlap with them. Find some shared context, some other stuff too, yeah.

That you can bond over and then it's easier to habits. Musicians that like to be healthy.

Yeah.

If you want to do both, right? It's sure finding that even subgroup.

It's like, Hey, we love, you know, we love playing music and then also you're going to start eating better because.

We all want to eat healthy. Exactly.

Yeah. Interesting.

Okay.

So, that's the second part, the Q and then the desire habits, right?

The craving.

Q, craving response reward. Okay. What's the response? So, this is mostly about making it easy. So, this is the habit itself and the easier a habit is, the less friction there is associated with a habit, the more likely you're going to be to do it. So the way that I like to describe this, imagine you have like a hose, right, and there's a bend in the middle. There's a little bit of water trickling out. If you want to increase the amount of water going through the hose, you have two options. You could either crank up the valve and force more water through, or you could just remove the bend and let it flow through naturally. And a lot of the time advice this is centered on cranking up the valve. It's like you need to try harder, you need grit, you need perseverance, you need motivation, you need to overcome the obstacles in your life. And all those things are fine, but I think they're all short-term solutions. You might be able to do that for a day or a week, but I've never consistently seen someone stick to positive habits in a negative environment. It's really hard to fight that day in and day out. So the solution, I think, is to reduce friction. There are a ton of ways you can do this. One way is just to scale the habit down, make it as easy as possible. So people have heard things like this before, start small, small steps, whatever. But even when you know you should start small, it's still really easy to start too big. So, you know, say you want to get in shape and you're like, all right, I want to run a couple days a week, but I know it should start small, so I'll only run for 15 minutes. But even that is like way bigger than what I'm talking about. I mean, it should be so small that you In the book, I call it the 2-minute rule but you should downscale any habit to fit within 2 minutes. So it's like, Alright, I want to go for a run 3 days a week. My habit is I put on my running shoes and I step out the door. Anything else that happens after that is just bonus. It's a success. Now, sometimes people resist that because they're like, well, this sounds kind of like a mental trick, right? Like I know the real goal isn't just to put my shoes on. I know the real goal is to go for a run. So, if you feel that way, my suggestion would be only do the first two minutes for the first few weeks. Because what you need to do is master the art of showing up. Like I had a reader who ended up losing over 100 pounds and one of the things that he did was he went to the gym but he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes. So he would show up, be there do like half an exercise, five minutes would go he'd leave. He did this for like six weeks.

Wow.

Now, It sounds ridiculous. It sounds silly because it's the opposite. -You just work out for a half hour. -Yeah, yeah. But what he was doing was mastering the art of showing up. And a habit must be established before it can be improved, right? If you don't establish the habit, there's nothing to optimize.

If you're not showing up at the.

Gym every day, you don't even, who cares about what workout you're doing, you're not even there. -Don't start running an hour a day if you've never run in a long time.

-Be the person who shows up and puts their running shoes on every day.

Before you worry about how far you're running, what kind of workout you're doing, and all that type of stuff.

Establish the art of showing up first before going all in on the desired goal you want.

I think that's right. I mean, you can find examples of people who flip a switch and transform their lives or have an epiphany and do it overnight, but I think that it's rare. I think that the more sustainable strategy, the more reliable strategy, is to scale it down to the first two minutes. focus on that, establish it, master the art of showing up, and then go from there. So really you should like, usually when people think about building better habits, they optimize for the finish line, right? It's like, how much weight do I need to lose? How much money do I need to make? You know, how when can I finish this book? It's all focused on the result. But I think instead if you optimize for the starting line, make it as easy as possible to start, scale it down, organize your environment so all that stuff is set up. set up. This is another strategy for making it easy, which is that you can prime your environment to make the future action easier. If you chop up a bunch of vegetables and fruit on Sunday, it's now easier to have a healthy snack during the week. If you set your workout clothes out the night before, it's now easier to get into the workout the next day. But doing all that stuff to make it easy to show up, that is probably the more important piece early on. There's also all these There are always logistical details for building a habit that nobody thinks about in the beginning.

Like what?

Well, like take the example of my reader who went to the gym. It's like, okay, what gym are you gonna go to? How are you gonna get there? Are you going by yourself or you're gonna go with a friend? Do you need to... What time are you gonna go? Yeah, what time are you gonna have your own water bottle or is there a water fountain at the gym? And that stuff sounds like silly and small, but when you start it's right, yeah. The fact that like, oh, the gym doesn't have a water fountain and I always forget to bring my own. That's enough friction for someone to quit. So by focusing on just the first two minutes, you figure all that stuff out and then once you've got that piece mastered, now you can worry about how long the workout is and what.

Program you're doing and all that stuff.

So figuring out the logistics first is an important step. I think that's something that just comes naturally with scaling a habit down. You figure out what's required to show up. because you're not worried about the result or the outcome or how long you worked out or judging yourself for running 30 minutes when you should have run 45 or whatever. Got it.

Okay, so this is the response still?

Right.

Okay, and what's the fourth? The fourth one, and this is crucial for getting a habit to stick, is the reward or the outcome. So, every behavior is followed by some kind of outcome. This is just basic cause and effect. And if the immediate outcome is favorable is enjoyable, you have a reason to repeat it in the future. It's kind of like... Donuts. Yeah, exactly. It's like that example.

If.

You feel good, if you feel satisfied right after you do something, then it's like this positive emotional signal and it's like, yeah, I should do this again. So, you can see this actually business is a really interesting example with this. There are a lot of products and some of the most successful products have some type of immediate satisfaction that is layered into them. So toothpaste is a very common example. There's no reason a toothpaste needs to taste like mint, but it does because the minty flavor and the refreshingness of it, it makes sure it gives your mouth this clean feel. It's more satisfying so you have a reason to do it again in the future. I heard an interesting one recently about car manufacturers that some of them are adding a fake guttural roar to the car or the truck when you press the accelerator. because it just adds to the actual natural sound of the engine, so it makes it more satisfying to step on the gas and to drive the car. So there are a variety of examples like this, but if you can add, the key is it needs to be immediate. So like this is, in the book I refer to this as the Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change, which is behaviors that are immediately rewarded get repeated, behaviors that are immediately punished get avoided. And it's really about the speed. of how quickly you feel successful. If it feels good, you have a reason to do it again. Is that why video games do so well? Video games are masters at this. They're masters at it. So, they're masters actually at a variety of aspects related to habit formation. So, one is they're really good at this immediate satisfaction. There are all kinds of things. You're actually constantly getting feedback in a video game. Even if you're just running, you hear the pitter patter the steps.

It's gratifying. It's yeah.

The jingles of like picking up another power up or you know seeing a kill or something like that, whatever the game is, you're always getting constant feedback. Sound, things that are on screen, they're really good at dripping now. Watching the score increase in the top corner, that is immediate feedback. So they have all these different ways of making you feel satisfied and when you see that progress, you have a reason to continue the future. This is one of the most effective forms of immediate satisfaction is progress. As soon as you feel progress, you have a reason to continue. Feels really good to see that you're making headway.

Now, why do some people make all this progress? Let's say they lose the weight, they lose 100 pounds but then they gain it back 2 years later.

-Yeah.

-They'Ve got this progress, they achieved the desired goal but then how come it didn't stick?

-It'S a good question. I mean, it's a complicated thing, a hard thing thing. But I'll give a couple potential reasons. So one is it comes back to the social norms that we mentioned before. There's a story that I tell in the book about Vietnamese soldiers, American soldiers during the Vietnam War. So they were over in Vietnam and these two congressmen went over and found out that the heroin usage among the troops was incredibly high. It was like, I think they first thought it was like 10 or 15%, but then they found out it was actually over 20. So, you know, one in five troops is addicted to heroin or trying heroin using it while they're over there. And they were like, this is a huge problem. We need to figure this out. So they created this whole committee to investigate things or whatever. And eventually the war ends and the soldiers come back. And they were shocked by is that 90% of the soldiers that were addicted to heroin in Vietnam were not addicted when they returned. And the main reason, it makes so much sense, but it upended our understanding of addiction at the time. They completely changed the context. In Vietnam, they're in a war zone, they're highly stressed, they're surrounded by other users, heroin is present and easy to get. They come home, they're in a totally new environment. It's not a war zone anymore, they're not surrounded by other users, they don't really know where to get heroin, so they have to figure that out too. You layer all this stuff together and suddenly it becomes much easier to not do that. Whereas previously they thought, oh, it was an addiction. They were doing it for other reasons. This same thing is true, but usually in the reverse. Typically you have an addict who gets hooked on a drug, goes into rehab. This is the equivalent of leaving your environment behind, not having any of those triggers. But then you send them home to the same place they got addicted in in the first place. So now they're surrounded by all their old friends, all the same cues, and it becomes very hard to resist that. And I wonder if when people rebound from habits after they've achieved some level of success, whether it's losing weight or getting clean or whatever, if it's the return of the environment that causes a lot of that.

Do you think that's what it is?

Well, I don't know if it's always that. I don't think I could say it is universally. But I think that it's definitely plays a role.

Because you can be influenced by people's pressure either way.

Like you said, peer pressure can either be positive or negative.

Yeah, the communities we surround ourselves with, we rise to that community. You know, if you're around vegans all day and there's only vegan food available, you're gonna eat probably mostly vegan.

Right.

If that's what you want. Or if you're trying to eat healthier, if you go back home and everyone's eating donuts all day, that temptation is.

Gonna be hard to say no to after months.

You can do it for a little while, but it's just really hard to do it.

So environment is a huge factor, is what I'm hearing. I think both social and physical. We haven't talked that much about physical environment, but that's another key component. So, I'll give you an example of a good habit and a bad habit. So, for good habits, you want the physical environment to make it obvious and easy for you to do the behavior. So, like I have a pull-up bar in your room. Exactly.

Trying to do 100 pull-ups a day.

Right.

Like have it hanging over your door. As opposed to even if you had one, but it was in the closet.

Because you just half the time you wouldn't remember to take it out.

Or it's at the gym upstairs or down the street.

Treat? No.

I have a friend who he wanted to practice guitar more and so he left his guitar in the middle of his living room and just so he'd walk past it a hundred times a day, it becomes much easier. Bad habits are the same way, but in reverse. Instead of making it obvious, you want to make it invisible. Take like, which is just talking about video games, a lot of people feel like they spend too much time watching TV or playing video games or watching a screen. But if you walk into pretty much any living room, where do all the couches and chairs face? They all face the television. So it's like, what is that room designed to get you to do?

Turn it on.

Yeah.

So you can restructure that environment to make it less likely that you'll fall into that habit. And there are a variety of things you could do. You could take the remote control and put it inside like a drawer so you don't see it. You could put the television behind a wall unit or a cabinet so that it's less visible. but you could also increase the friction with the tasks. So you could like unplug your TV after each use and only plug it back in if you can say the name of the show that you want to watch. So you can't like mindlessly pull up Netflix and just find something. Or you could take the batteries out of the remote control so that it's an extra like five to ten seconds to turn on. Maybe that's enough time to be like, do I really want to watch something right now? Or I'm just doing this mindlessly. If you really want to be extreme, don't have a Yes, you could get rid of the TV entirely or take it off the wall and put it in the closet and only take it out when you really want to watch something.

For four years when I lived in Columbus, I removed the TV for four years. I didn't have a TV in my place. Because I was like, I want to earn money. I want to build my business and I have nothing, so I need to work. I need to focus on this to build the habit that I wanted for my business. and it was the best thing for me because I would spend hours just mindlessly watching. And now I was like, okay, if I want to watch something, I'm going to go to the sports bar and watch the game. I'm going to go to a friend's house and watch this specific thing or I'm going to go to the movies and take a break. -Right.

-As opposed to three hours a day of TV. What's brilliant about that and it's a really good example is that we... I think about that a lot with phones as well. So, every day I try to leave my phone in another room outside of my office, at least until lunch, because then I get like a four hour block of time in the morning where I can just work without any distraction. And it's funny how quickly you don't like, if my phone was on me in the morning, I would check it like, you know, every five minutes or whatever. But when it's out of the room, I don't even find myself wanting to, I never walk up the stairs to go check it, even though it's only 30 seconds away. So it's interesting how little we actually want to do these things, but we just do them all the time because they're obvious and easy. And I think the key is to invert that. Take the things that are the bad habits, the distractions, the procrastinations, the unproductive uses of time, and make them more invisible, reduce exposure, and less easy to do. And take the things that are good habits and make it the equivalent of having your phone on you all the time, right? Make it right in front of you, make it obvious, make it easy, make it You know, frictionless.

Yeah. If you're looking to write, do you write with your journal or your computer?

I write on the computer. I write an Evernote. It's gotta be faster.

Yeah.

You have to transfer it later and all these things.

Yeah.

Okay. If you were coaching someone who said, I have no clue what I'm supposed to do with my life. I'm lost. I have all these bad habits. I smoke, I drink, I eat donuts, every day. I have no job. My room is sloppy and I'm just depressed. What would you say to them to get started with changing their life around in the form of better habits?

Well, you just need to pick one thing first of all. I think that I just mentioned a few minutes ago, one of the most powerful forms of motivation is progress. So, seeing some progress... I mean, it could be as simple as make your bed each day, right? Like, but just doing that, embodying the identity of someone who's getting better, who's making progress, just pick one thing and use that as, this is true, I mean, Louis, this is something you've probably seen with a lot of people that you've talked to, but habits are the foundation for mastery. So if you, you know, say, take a, take a sport like basketball, you need to be able to dribble with both hands without thinking, before you can worry about what strategy you're running on offense or what kind of, you know, strategic play you're going to run or what your defensive scheme is or all this other stuff, right? Like you need to automate the fundamentals of the craft before you can worry about the next level of performance. Same thing is true for chess, you know, like you need to know how the chess pieces move automatically without thinking about it before you can get into, alright, what is my strategy going to do? Yeah, I'm going to do this and they're going to do that. And so I think this is true not just at the peak levels of performance that you integrate these habits and use habits as the foundation for the next level of performance, but also true when you're getting started. Just build one small thing, carve out a 1% change, a 1% improvement and use that as a stepping stone to the next level.

What about self-control? Because what if we have this desire for something? What's the other word for self-control and think about it. Willpower. Willpower. Yes.

What about willpower? How much willpower do we have? So, you hear this a lot. I mean, it's very common, especially in self-help, motivation, self-improvement. You need to be motivated. You have to have willpower. Grit and perseverance are huge and important. And it's not that those qualities are not important. It's just that the way to develop them is different than what most people think. So, most people think, I need willpower, so I should just try harder. There's an interesting body of research, I mentioned it in the book, I think it's in chapter seven, on self-control and willpower, which is that the people who appear to have the greatest self-control actually are just tempted the least. So they face temptations less frequently and therefore have the reserves and the resources to resist it when it occasionally comes up. And I think that this is actually like the lever to pull or the pressure point to push on is that the way to get better willpower is to design an environment that tempts you less, not to say, let me just try harder.

Right.

Yeah. Set yourself up to win. And you have a chapter that talks about the power of accountability partners. I talk about accountability and coaches all the time.

I hire coaches for everything because I.

Use sports as my life, my yoga for my life. And I know that I couldn't have gotten to where I wanted to be as an athlete without great coaches and accountability. So how important is accountability towards habits as well?

Yeah, it's huge. So I recently hired a powerlifting coach. He's great. He's worked with like 12 world champions and Columbus has... He's not based in Columbus actually, but Columbus is great for strength culture. It's, you know, I mean, he's the Arnold, but then West side Barbell and a bunch of other stuff. Yeah, it's awesome. But your point about coaches is a crucial one, which is that having a coach forces you to be aware of things that you would otherwise overlook, right? Like as you, this is what I call the downside of building good habits which is you build habits and in the beginning you develop fluency and skill and ability and things become easier. But after a little while, once a habit has been established, the downside of having a habit is that you can do it good enough on autopilot which means that you start to overlook your mistakes and not think about how to get better.

Yeah, yeah.

And so what you need as a coach to keep you on that razor's edge so that you keep building habits but it also forces you to stay aware of what the next level performance is. And that's kind of the challenge of continuous improvement. It's like a cycle. You know, it starts with awareness. If you're not aware of what your habits are or what your behavior is, you don't have a chance to change it. Then from that awareness you go to deliberate practice where you have to effortfully try and work to get better. And eventually the thing that you were deliberately practicing becomes a habit and becomes automatic. But once it becomes automatic, that's not the end. You have to return to awareness and see where you're at now. -Yeah.

-How do you start the cycle again? -Huh. And what about what if you can't afford a coach?

How do you find the right accountability partner? -That's where I think we come back to the social component that we talked about earlier. -Join the group, join the community. -That's probably the best way to do it. And the great thing about the internet and the web is that you can find those people before where you couldn't find them previously. -No, it used to be that you had to hope that the people in your local community or on your sports team or at your, you know, organization were also interested in the same things. And now you can find those people and find them online.

-Search it. -And what's the downside of GoodHabits?

-So, this is what I was mentioning with this fact that like you start to overlook your mistakes. there's an interesting study that was done on surgeons where they found that early on in residency they were getting better and then they continued to improve as they became a surgeon and practiced for a few years and then they hit some kind of peak and then their performance actually declined slightly because they stopped overlooking their mistakes or stopped looking for ways to get better and so you need to be on that edge of paying attention. My favorite example of this is actually a surgeon. himself at Tulganandi. And he hired a coach, a previous surgeon who was retiring, to review the video of his surgeries and to tell him where he could improve and what he could do better. And I think that's a brilliant example of how to have a coach, even if you're not in sports or not, you know, not a competitor or something. We can all benefit from feedback. And the tighter the feedback cycle, the faster you learn.

That's powerful.

I love it, man. This is powerful stuff. I'm going to ask you a couple of final questions.

Yeah, sure.

This one's called the Three Truths. If you could only share three lessons with humanity in the world, and they didn't have access to your writing or your blog or your books, but you only had three lessons you could share, what would those three lessons or three truths be?

Yeah, that's really tough. So, the first one I would say is about reading. I mentioned earlier that reading is sort of like this meta habit that helps you solve all your other problems. So I guess my lesson for reading would be start more books. No, would be yeah, start more books, quit most of them, read the great ones twice. So if you start more books, you'll be exposed to more ideas. If you quit most of them, if you quit the ones that aren't relevant to you or aren't that good or just aren't in a high quality bar, then you'll the chance to start even more. And when you find the great ones, read them twice because the advice is incredible and it's potentially life changing.

Okay.

Alright, so the first one I would say is reading. The second one is something to do with physical movement and strength training. You cannot, every human has a body and every human has a physical presence. So learn to use your body in some way to be more alive and to what that's like to be human. If you just spend all day in your head or all day staring at a screen, you only kind of get half of what it means to be alive. So I would say physical strength is another one. And then the third one has to be something along the lines of community connection, serving others. I don't know what exactly that would be. Personally, I have felt most engaged when I've been working on a shared mission with a group of people face to face, which is interesting coming from someone who, you know, my business is built online, right? I spend most of my time sending emails to, you know, half a million people or whatever, but I think actually I find more satisfaction and more purpose in connecting with people face to face. So, maybe that would be it. Talk to someone face to face every day. -That's cool.

-Well, I gotta acknowledge you, man, for all the work that you're doing to make an impact.

Impact on people.

I think your writing has really helped transform lives, whether you know how impactful it is or not. But half a million people is a lot of people.