Mark Moss explains why our brains turn repeated actions into habits: thinking is exhausting. His solution is to make one good decision about something important, then automate it. He uses taxes, investments, and loans as examples of complex tasks that drain mental energy until you set them on autopilot.
How do we turn them into systems? So how do we automate them? And the reason why I want to do that is because it's a lot of energy to think. I think it was Henry Ford said that thinking is such hard work, that's why so few people do it. Now the reality is, is that it consumes an enormous amount of energy to think. And so what our body does is try to preserve our energy and it tries to turn everything into habits. That's why you notice like if you're like brushing your teeth in the morning, you're not even thinking about it. Your brain is just literally on autopilot. And so what we want to do is we want to think once and then put it into habits and autopilot after that. So we take the important things that we should be focusing on, like building wealth systems, for example. It's a lot of work to build wealth, and I got to look at my taxes, and I got to look at my investments, and I got to figure out how we're deploying them and getting loans and all these things. But I don't want to have to think about it every single time. I want to think about it one time and turn it into a system that can automatically run.
