SELFDISCIPLINE
A GUIDE TO TAKING CONTROL
OF YOUR MIND, YOUR TIME,
AND YOUR LIFE
MARK MANSON
MARKMANSON.NET
© 2019
Mark Manson
PART 1: HOW SELF-DISCIPLINE
WORKS
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IF SELF-DISCIPLINE FEELS DIFFICULT, THEN
YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG
When I was in college, there were some people on the internet who
claimed that you could train yourself to sleep as little as two hours per
day. Keep in mind, this was back in the early 2000s when we all still
believed random shit we read on the internet.
Here’s how the story went: There was a hyper-productive sleep
schedule that had been discovered by military scientists. They were
testing the limits of sleep deprivation on soldiers and made this
startling discovery.
Supposedly, great historical figures like Napoleon and Da Vinci and
Tesla followed the same sleep schedule and it’s why they were so
productive and influential in history. Supposedly, anybody (i.e., you
and me) could achieve this state of daily hyper-productivity.
Supposedly, all we needed was enough willpower to barrel through
days of sleep deprivation and “acclimate” to this new superhuman
schedule. Supposedly, this was all true and verified and somehow
made sense.
Supposedly.
The scheme was called “The Uberman Sleep Schedule,” and here’s how
you did it:
● Sleep follows the ​80/20 Rule​—that is, 80% of your recovery
comes from 20% of the time you’re unconscious. Conversely,
80% of the time you’re asleep, you’re a lazy piece of shit.
● This uber-efficient portion of sleep is called REM sleep and only
lasts approximately 15-20 minutes at a time. That means for
every two hours that your body is asleep, really only the last 20
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minutes or so is “useful” sleep. Thus, when you sleep eight hours
during the night, only 80-100 of those minutes are actually
causing you to feel rested and restored.1 People on the internet
decided this was inefficient and needed to be fixed.
● What the military scientists (supposedly) discovered is that if
you’re severely sleep deprived, your body will immediately fall
into REM sleep the second you pass out. It does this in order to
compensate for its lack of rest. People on the internet decided
this was incredibly efficient.
● The idea of the Uberman Sleep Schedule was that if you took
20-minute naps, every four hours, around the clock, for days and
weeks on end, you would “train” your brain to fall into REM
sleep instantly the moment you laid down. Then, once your REM
sleep was over, you would feel rested and restored for the next
3-4 hours.
● As long as you continued to take 20-minute naps every four
hours, you could effectively stay awake forever. Congratulations,
you were now an Uberman. Here, have a gold star.
● But there was a catch: supposedly it took 1-2 weeks of intense
sleep deprivation to properly “adjust” to the Uberman Sleep
Schedule. You had to stay up all night, every night, forcing
yourself to only sleep for 20 minutes at a time, six different times
per day. And if at any point you screwed up and overslept your
nap, all would be undone and you would have to start over.
● PS: Caffeine is not allowed. And alcohol might as well be suicide.
1
Turns out this is bullshit. Who would have thought?
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● Therefore, the Uberman Sleep Schedule became this kind of
decathlon of willpower among internet self-help people—an
ultimate test of one’s self-discipline with the ultimate pay-off: an
extra 20-30% of productive waking hours per day, every day for
the rest for your life. That’s like having an extra two days each
week, or an extra three-and-a-half months per year. That’s
insane! Over the course of one’s life, that’s over a decade of extra
waking hours. Imagine everything you could accomplish with an
extra decade of life, all while everyone else is asleep.
Like an idiot, I tried to do this. Multiple times. For years, I obsessed
with achieving the Uberman Sleep Schedule. And for years, I
continually failed at it.
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You have probably pulled an all-nighter before. Not sleeping for one
night is not that difficult. Especially if there are deadlines and/or
drugs involved.
What’s difficult are the second and third and fourth nights. Extreme
sleep deprivation is a crash course on how fragile our mind actually is.
By day three, you will start falling asleep standing up. You will doze off
while walking down the street in broad daylight. You forget basic facts
like your mother’s name or whether you had eaten that day, or—fuck,
what day is it?
By day four you become delirious, imagining that people are speaking
to you when they’re not, believing that you’re writing an email when
you’re not, and then discovering that you don’t even remember who
you were supposed to be emailing.
I used to walk in circles around my living room for an hour, just to
keep myself awake. When nap time came, I would crash, falling
unconscious instantaneously, and proceed to have intense, fucked up
dreams that seemed like they lasted for five hours.
Then, 20 minutes later, my alarm would wake me up, where I would
spend the next three hours and change desperately lying to myself,
trying to convince myself that I felt rested and couldn’t wait to get
back to—wait, what was I supposed to be doing again?
In the end, I could never make it through the fourth day. Each time I
failed, I felt intense disappointment at my own lack of willpower. I
believed this was something I should be able to do.
It pissed me off that some random people on the internet could
supposedly do this thing that I couldn’t. I felt like it meant there was
something wrong with me. That if I didn’t have the self-discipline to
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sleep deprive myself for weeks on end, then what the fuck, Mark? Get
your shit together!
So I tortured myself. And the more I tortured myself, the more
unrealistic my expectations for myself became.
***
Chances are, at some point in your life, you’ve tried to change your
behavior through sheer willpower. And chances are, you also failed
miserably. Don’t feel bad! This is what happens most of the time.
Most people think of self-discipline in terms of willpower. If we see
someone who wakes up at 5 AM every day, eats an
avocado-chia-fennel-apricot-papaya smoothie each meal, snorts
brussel sprout flakes, and works out for three hours before even
wiping their ass in the morning, we assume they’re achieving this
through straight-up self-abuse—that there is some insatiable inner
demon driving them like a slave to do everything right, no matter
what.
But this isn’t true. Because, if you actually know anybody like this,
you’ll notice something really frightening about them: they actually
enjoy it.2
Seeing self-discipline in terms of pure willpower fails because beating
ourselves up for not trying hard enough doesn’t work. In fact, it
backfires. And, as anyone who has ever tried to go on a diet will tell
you, it usually only makes it worse.
The problem is that willpower works like a muscle, if you work it too
hard, it becomes fatigued and gives out. The first week committing to a
new diet, or a new workout regimen, or a new morning routine, things
2
See: Tom Brady.
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go great. But by the second or third week, you’re back to your old
late-night, cheeto-loving ways.
The same way you can’t just walk into a gym for the first time and lift
500 pounds, you can’t just start waking up at 4 AM on a dime, much
less do something ridiculous like an Uberman sleep schedule. To have
a chance of success, your willpower must be trained steadily over a
long period of time.
But this leaves us in a conundrum: if we view self-discipline in terms
of willpower, it creates a chicken-or-the-egg situation: To build
willpower, we need self-discipline over a long period of time; but to
have self-discipline, we need massive amounts of willpower.
So, which came first? What should we do? How do we start? Or, more
importantly, where the fuck is the Ben and Jerry’s?
Viewing self-discipline in terms of willpower creates a paradox for the
simple reason that it’s not true. As we’ll see, building self-discipline in
your own life is a completely different exercise.
WHY PURE WILLPOWER IS BAD
Our behaviors are not based on logic or ideas. Logic and ideas can
influence our decisions​, but ultimately, our feelings determine what
we do.
We do what feels good and we avoid what feels bad. And the only way
we can ever NOT do what feels good, and do what feels bad instead, is
through a temporary boost of willpower—to deny ourselves our desires
and feelings and instead do what was “right.”
Throughout history, virtue was seen in terms of this sort of self-denial
and self-negation. To be a good person, you had to not only deny
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yourself any pleasure, but you also had to show your willingness to
hurt yourself.
You had monks hitting themselves and locking themselves in rooms
for days and not eating or even speaking for years on end. You had
armies of men throwing themselves into battle for little or no reason.
You had people abstaining from sex until marriage, or even for life.
Shit was not fun.
This classical approach is where our assumption that “willpower =
self-discipline” originally comes from. It operates on the belief that
self-discipline is achieved through denying or rejecting one’s
emotions. You want that taco? BAD MARK! YOU DON’T WANT SHIT!
YOU ARE SHIT! YOU DESERVE TO STARVE YOU INGRATE!
The root of all evil.
The classical approach fused the concept of willpower—i.e., the ability
to deny or reject one’s desires and emotions—with morality. Someone
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who can say no to the taco is a good person. The person who can’t is a
failure of a human being.
THE CLASSICAL APPROACH TO SELF-DISCIPLINE
Self-Discipline = Willpower = Self-Denial = Good Person
This fusion of willpower and morality had good intentions. It
recognized (correctly) that, when left to our own instinctive desires, we
all become narcissistic assholes.
If we could get away with it, we would eat, fuck, or kill pretty much
anything or anyone within a ten-meter vicinity. So the great religious
leaders and philosophers and kings throughout history preached a
concept of virtue that involved suppressing our feelings in favor of
rationality and denying our impulses in favor of developing willpower.
And the classic approach works! …kind of. Well, okay, while it makes a
more stable society, it also totally fucks us up individually.
The classic approach has the paradoxical effect of training us to feel
bad about all the things that make us feel good. It basically seeks to
teach us self-discipline through shaming us—by making us hate
ourselves for simply being who we are. And the idea is that once we
are saddled with a sufficient amount of shame about all the things that
give us pleasure, we’ll be so self-loathing and terrified of our own
desires that we’ll just fall in line and do what we’re told.
IN CASE YOU DIDN’T KNOW: SHAME FUCKS YOU
UP
Disciplining people through shame works for a while, but in the
long-run, it backfires. As an example, let’s use perhaps the most
common source of shame on the planet: sex.
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The brain likes sex. That’s because a) sex feels awesome, and b) we’re
biologically evolved to crave it. Pretty self-explanatory.
Now, if you grew up like most people—and especially if you’re a
woman—there’s a good chance that you were taught that sex was this
evil, lecherous thing that corrupted you and makes you a horrible, icky
person.
You were punished for wanting it, and therefore, you have a lot of
conflicted feelings around sex: it sounds amazing but is also scary; it
feels right but also somehow so, so wrong. As a result, you still want
sex, but you also drag around a lot of guilt and anxiety and doubt
about yourself.
This mixture of feelings generates an unpleasant tension within a
person. And as time goes on, that tension grows. Because the desire
for sex never goes away. And as the desire continues, the shame grows.
Eventually, this tension becomes unbearable and must resolve itself in
one of two ways.
The first option is to overindulge. The tension has become so great
that we feel the only way to resolve it is by going all out in a
spectacular way. Hooker orgies. Compulsive masturbation for days on
end. Rampant infidelity. And, sadly, often sexual violence.
But indulgence doesn’t really resolve the tension. It just kicks the can
down the road. Because after you put the cock rings away and the
hookers have gone home, the shame and guilt come back. And they
come back with a vengeance.
So, if indulgence doesn’t work, what about the other option?
Well, the only other option to escape that internal tension is to numb
it. To distract oneself from the tension by finding some larger, more
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palatable tension. Alcohol is a common one. Partying and drugs, of
course. Watching 14 hours of television each day can be another
option. Or just ​eating yourself half to death​.
Sometimes, people do find productive ways to distract themselves
from their shame. They run ultra-marathons or work 100-hour work
weeks for years on end. These are, ironically, many of the people we
come to admire for having god-like willpower.
But self-denial comes easy when, deep down, you ​fucking hate
yourself​.
Because shame can’t be numbed away. It just changes form. The
person who exercises religiously to escape their self-loathing will
eventually find ways to loathe themselves for their exercise habits. And
soon, what started out as a remarkable work ethic in the gym morphs
into some form of body dysmorphia, like those guys who inject synthol
into their arms to make themselves look like Popeye.
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Similarly, the businessman who transmutes his shame into stellar
work at the office eventually develops shame about his productivity to
the point where he literally can’t go home. He’s terrified to do it. Any
non-productive minute feels like an untenable failure. And while the
rest of his life falls apart around him, he’s only worrying about
spreadsheets and quarterly numbers.
This is why the most hardcore, uncompromising people are usually the
ones who are most compromised. It’s why the most ​fundamentalist
religious leaders​ who rail against the immorality of the world are
always the same leaders who are ordering fuckboys off Craigslist.3 It’s
why the most “spiritually enlightened” gurus are also the ones
blackmailing and extorting their followers. It’s why the politicians
most vocal about party loyalty and patriotism are always the ones
shooting up meth in the airport bathroom. They are running away
from their demons. And one way to do that is to create shinier, more
socially acceptable demons.
Self-discipline based on self-denial cannot be sustained in the
long-run. It only breeds greater dysfunction, and ultimately results in
self-destruction.
THE TRUTH ABOUT THE CLASSICAL APPROACH
Self-Denial = Emotional Dysfunction = Self-Destruction =
-(Self-Discipline)
Here’s the problem with all this—and it’s so obvious once you hear it, I
can’t believe we have to say it. You can will yourself to go to the gym if
you don’t feel like it for a few days. But unless the gym ends up feeling
3
This isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with finding fuckboys on Craigslist. It’s the hypocrisy that is the
problem. I actually respect Craigslist fuckboys way more than any fundamentalist religious leaders.
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good in some way, you will eventually ​lose motivation​, run out of
willpower and stop going.
You can will yourself to stop drinking for a day or a week, but unless
you feel the reward of not drinking, then you will eventually go back to
it.
This is why my polyphasic sleeping nightmare consistently ended in
disaster. Staying up all night and sleep-depriving myself produced no
tangible benefits. It produced no good feelings. It produced nothing
but misery and delirium. It was an exercise in self-abuse. Therefore,
my willpower eventually ran out and my emotions took over, driving
me to pass out for about sixteen hours straight.
Any emotionally healthy approach to self-discipline must ​work with
your emotions​, rather than against them.
Ultimately, self-discipline is not based on willpower or self-denial, but
it’s actually based on the opposite: self-acceptance.
SELF-DISCIPLINE THROUGH SELF-ACCEPTANCE
Let’s say you’re trying to lose weight and your big hang up is that you
run through about three liters of ice cream each week. You’re an ice
cream fiend. You’ve tried stopping by using willpower. You’ve tried
diets with your friends. You’ve told your partner to never ever buy ice
cream again in a desperate attempt to blame them for your own
shortcomings.
But nothing’s worked. Not a day goes by that you don’t down about a
thousand calories of creamy goodness.
And you hate yourself for it.
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And that’s your first problem. Step one to self-discipline is to de-link
your personal failings from moral failings.
You have to accept that you cave to indulgence and that this doesn’t
necessarily make you a horrible person. We all cave to indulgence in
some shape or form. We all harbor shame. We all fail to reign in our
impulses. And we all like a good fucking bowl of ice cream from time
to time.
This sort of acceptance is way more complicated than it sounds. We
don’t even realize all of the ways that we judge ourselves for our
perceived failings. Thoughts are constantly streaming through our
heads and without even realizing it, we’re tacking on “because I’m a
horrible person” to the end of a lot of them.
● “I fucked up that project at work, because I’m a horrible
person…”
● “The whole kitchen is a mess and my parents will be here in 20
minutes, because I’m a horrible person…”
● “Other people are good at this, but I’m not, because I’m a
horrible person…”
● “Everyone probably thinks I’m an idiot, because I’m a horrible
person…”
Hell, you might even be tacking on these self-judgments right now
while reading this! ​Man, I judge myself like this all the time… because
I’m a horrible person.
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Here’s the thing: there’s a sick sort of comfort that comes from these
self-judgments. That’s because they ​relieve us of the responsibility​ for
our own actions. If I decide that I can’t give up ice cream because I’m a
horrible person—that “horrible person-ness” precludes my ability to
change or improve in the future—therefore, it’s technically out of my
hands, isn’t it? It implies that there’s nothing I can do about my
cravings or compulsions, so fuck it, why try?
There’s a kind of fear and anxiety that comes when we relinquish our
belief in our own horribleness. We actually resist accepting ourselves
because the responsibility is scary. Because it suggests that not only
are we capable of change in the future (and change is always scary) but
that we have perhaps wasted much of our past. And that never feels
good either. In fact, another little trap is when people accept that
they’re not a horrible person—but then decide that they are a horrible
person for not realizing that years ago!
But, once we’ve ​de-coupled our emotions​ from our moral
judgments—once we’ve decided that just because something makes us
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feel bad doesn’t mean we are bad—this opens us up to some new
perspectives.
For one, it suggests that ​emotions are merely internal behavioral
mechanisms​ that can be manipulated like anything else. Just like
putting your floss next to your toothbrush reminds you to floss every
morning, once the moral judgments are removed, feeling bad because
you relapsed on the cookies and cream can simply be a reminder or
motivator to address the underlying issue.
We must address the emotional problem the compulsion is trying to
numb or cover up. You compulsively eat tubs of ice cream each week.
Why? Well, eating—especially sugary, unhealthy food—is a form of
numbing. It brings the body comfort. It’s sometimes known as
“emotional eating” and the same way an alcoholic drinks to escape her
demons, the overeater eats to escape his.
So, what are those demons? What is that shame?
Find it. Address it. And most importantly: accept it. Find that deep,
dark ugly part of yourself. Confront it, head on, allowing yourself to
feel all the awful, icky emotions that come with it. Then accept that
this is a part of you and it’s never going away. And that’s fine. You can
work with this, rather than against it.
And here’s where the magic happens. When you stop feeling awful
about yourself, two things happen:
1. There’s nothing to numb anymore. Therefore, suddenly those
tubs of ice cream seem pointless.
2. You see no reason to punish yourself. On the contrary, you like
yourself, so you want to take care of yourself. More importantly,
it feels good to take care of yourself.
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And, incredibly, that tub of ice cream no longer feels good. It’s no
longer scratching some internal itch. Instead, it makes you feel sick
and bloated and gross.
Similarly, exercising no longer feels like this impossible task that you’ll
never be up for. On the contrary, it replenishes and enhances you. And
those good feelings start showing up that make it feel effortless.
***
You don’t necessarily have to do this deep therapeutic work to gain
self-discipline. Simply ​understanding and accepting your emotions​ for
what they are can allow you to work with them rather than against
them.
Here’s one way to do this: call up your best friend and tell them to
come over. Take out your checkbook. Write a check for $2,000 to
them, sign it, and give it to them. Then tell them that if you ever eat ice
cream again, they can cash it.
Done.
Eating ice cream will now cause a much greater emotional problem
than the one it solves. And, as if by magic, refraining from eating ice
cream will begin to feel really fucking good.
Social accountability works in the same way. It’s much easier to
meditate​ for a long time when you’re in a room full of people than it is
to do it by yourself. Why? Because when you’re in a room full of
people, you don’t want to be the lone asshole who gets up and walks
out after three minutes like you do at home! The social pressure makes
it so that not meditating causes a bigger emotional problem than
meditating for the full amount of time.
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You can also do this through positive reinforcement: find ways to
reward yourself for doing the correct behavior. Research shows that
this is actually how new habits are formed: you do the desired
behavior and then reward yourself for it.
RESULT: SELF-DISCIPLINE WITHOUT
WILLPOWER
Once you resolve much of your shame, and once you’ve created
situations to provide greater emotional benefits from doing the
desired behavior than not doing it, what you end up with is the
appearance of airtight self-discipline, without actually putting forth
any effort. You end up with discipline without willpower.
You wake up early because it feels good to wake up early.
You eat kale instead of smoking crack because it feels good to eat the
kale and feels bad to smoke crack.
You stop lying because it feels worse to lie than to say an important
truth.
You exercise because it feels better to exercise than it does to sit
around, covering yourself in a thin layer of Cheeto dust.
It’s not that the pain goes away. No, the pain is still there. It’s just that
the pain now has meaning. It has a purpose. And that makes all the
difference. You work with the pain rather than against it. You pursue it
rather than run from it. And with every pursuit, you get stronger and
healthier and happier.
And eventually, from the outside, it will look as though you’re putting
forth monumental effort, that you have this endless reservoir of
willpower.
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Yet, to you, it will feel like nothing at all.
You do this by creating rock-solid habits.
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PART 2: THE REAL POWER OF
HABITS
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Let’s pretend for a moment that you have decided that you want to
become rich.
Maybe you’re sick of your student loan debt. Maybe you’re sick of
eating frozen waffles for dinner every night. Maybe you recently
became overwhelmingly inspired by your favorite rapper, 50 Cent, and
like him, you also want to ‘Get Rich or Die Trying’ …and then go
bankrupt a few years later.
Whatever the reasoning is, you’ve decided that the new you is going to
be a Rolls-Royce-driving, bikini-pool-party throwing,
Dom-Perignon-chugging motherfucker.
Now, if you approached trying to get rich like most people do, here’s
how you would conceptualize it:
● Start out by making $100.
● OK, great, now let’s try to make $1,000.
● Shit, that was hard, but now let’s try to make it $10,000.
● You eventually get there. But now it’s three years later and the
mere thought of working until you have $100,000 in the bank
makes you want to give up all your possessions and go live in an
ashram.
● You say “fuck it” and buy a 60-inch flat screen TV. Ahh, that feels
better.
● Dreams of a bikini parties on your yacht evaporate. Along with
most of your savings.
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That’s how most people try to do it. And if you haven’t noticed, ​most
people aren’t rich​. In fact, most people are quite the opposite. This is
not a coincidence.
In case you haven’t read a few books on wealth accumulation, this is
how people who actually get rich do it (and not end up in bankruptcy
court like good ol’ Fitty Cent):
● Start out making $100.
● Invest that $100 in skills/training/assets that will eventually net
you $1,000.
● Invest that $1000 in skills/training/assets that will eventually
net you $10,000.
● Invest that $10,000 in skills/training/assets that will eventually
net you $100,000.
● Invest that $100,000 until you’re balling on your yacht like a
Russian mobster.
These are the two mindsets of building wealth. People who stay poor
or middle class see money as something to be spent. People who
become rich see money as something to be invested.
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Get rich or die trying? Looks like you’re going to die trying.
You can call it the “spending mindset” versus the “investing mindset.”
One gets you rich and one keeps you treading water, always fighting to
keep your face above the surface.4
So why am I going over all of this? Because it applies to creating habits
and achieving goals in life as well. In fact, it’s the exact same concept.
GOALS VS HABITS
Let’s examine a common goal people have: “I want to ​lose 20 lbs​ and
look sexy for summer.”
I think almost everyone has had a similar resolution at some point. In
most cases, you recover from your New Year’s Eve binge on January
4
If you want this concept explained to you like you’re five years old, check out the popular book, ​Rich
Dad, Poor Dad​ by Robert Kiyosaki.
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1st, sign up for the gym on January 2nd, force yourself to go 5-6 times
over the ensuing months mostly out of guilt because you spent so
much damn money and you feel like you should use it.
But you have no idea what you’re doing. And my god, look at all of the
skinny sweaty people here. Wow, I feel so lazy just watching them. Can
this treadmill go any slower? I’m tired. I want a burger. Or maybe ice
cream. Or maybe an ice cream burger.
The real reason you go to the gym: so you can eat a burger made out of ice cream.
Aaaaaaaand it’s February 1st and you’re back to body-melding yourself
into the fabric of your sofa, watching awful Maury Povich reruns, and
wondering how is it that all of your clothes seem to be shrinking at the
same time.
Yes. The struggle is real.
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The problems with the conventional pursuit of goals in life (i.e., new
year’s resolutions) are well-documented at this point:
● People tend to rely too much on willpower and eschew forming
useful habits.
● People tend to bite off more than they can chew, so to speak,
setting goals​ that are far above their ability or knowledge level
and then becoming frustrated when they make little to no
progress towards them.
● People are tempted to take “shortcuts” to achieve a goal that may
actually sabotage themselves in the long-run, like starving
yourself to lose weight, or cheating to get a good grade on a test.5
That’s all true. But I’m here to suggest something else: “Lose 20 lbs by
summer”​ is a shitty goal to begin with.
That’s because it’s borne from the same spending mindset that keeps
people broke—or in this case, keeps them overweight. They view life in
the overly-simplistic terms of “Do a lot of X, eventually get Y.”
Just like forcing yourself to work and save for 20 years is unlikely to
get you rich, forcing yourself to go to the gym dozens of times is
unlikely to make you lose much weight and keep it off.
Goals like this require an intense amount of effort, yet they never seem
to “stick.” Eventually, your energy and discipline run out and you fall
right back to the same person you were, except now you feel defeated.
That’s because it’s better to invest your limited focus and energy on
building habits rather than specific goals. Just like you want to take
the money you earn and put it to work for you, you want to take the
5
Ordóñez, L. D., Schweitzer, M. E., Galinsky, A. D., & Bazerman, M. H. (2009). ​Goals Gone Wild: The
Systematic Side Effects of Overprescribing Goal Setting​. The Academy of Management Perspectives,
23(1), 6–16.
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effort you expend in changing yourself and put it to work changing you
as well.
People usually don’t focus on habits because goals sound much sexier
in our minds. They feel more motivating in the moment when we think
about them. There’s a clear image of a certain result in our head and
that gets us excited.
Habits, on the other hand, don’t sound as sexy in our heads. They’re
long-term and repetitive, which makes them seem boring. And there’s
no clear image one can imagine for “going to the gym every morning
for a year” or “only drinking alcohol on weekends.”
You don’t get this rush of inspiration imagining yourself eating salad
for lunch every day. You don’t lay in bed at night fantasizing about
flossing every morning.
Goals are a one-time bargain. They are the spending mindset. “I will
spend X amount of energy to receive Y reward.”
Habits are an investing mindset. Habits require one to invest one’s
efforts for a little while and then take the rewards of that effort and
re-invest them in a greater effort to form even better habits.
This is why so many people who lose weight end up gaining it back
(and then some). They focus on singular goals in life rather than
developing underlying habits. So when their energy and discipline
runs out (and it always does because willpower, as we’ve seen, is
limited) they balloon back to their original selves.
With habits, on the other hand, there’s no single endpoint that must
be reached. The only goal of habits is that the goal is never over, it’s a
simple daily or weekly repetition that one does until muscle memory
and brain chemistry kick in and you’re now performing the desired
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action on autopilot. With goals, every day you go back to the gym feels
harder. With habits, after a while, it feels harder to not go to the gym
than it does to go.
Therefore, it is a better investment of one’s finite energy and discipline
to focus on building habits. It’s fine to still have goals. Hell, I’d like to
lose 20 lbs by summer. But that’s not what my mind will focus on this
year.
Instead, I will look at the habits that underlie that goal, that would
make that goal an inevitability—eating better, walking more often
instead of taking an Uber, developing a workout plan—and then focus
on those. The weight loss then naturally occurs as a side effect.
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HOW HABITS WORK
Habits form when you engage in a behavior repeatedly in the presence
of consistent stimuli.
That last part is important.
Habits are “automatic” responses to familiar environmental cues. You
save mental energy by developing habitual responses to familiar cues,
situations, and even people that you encounter on a regular basis.
In his book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg summarizes a lot of
research on how habits are formed and maintained and how they can
be broken. Countless studies have shown that habits are comprised of
three main parts: an environmental cue, a behavioral response, and a
reward (or the removal of an unpleasant stimulus).
CUE → BEHAVIOR → REWARD
For example, if you’re a smoker, your cravings are typically triggered
by a cue that you associate with smoking. For instance, finishing a big
meal, drinking a beer, or seeing someone smoking a cigarette on TV.
This cue then triggers your desire to perform the habituated behavior.
Then you smoke, and your brain rewards you – you feel more relaxed,
calmer (and of course, the nicotine helps as well).
Habit researchers have found that in order to create new
habits (or break old habits), we should NOT focus on the
behavior but rather focus on the cue.6
We spend so much time and effort on creating or eliminating the
behavior itself, when instead we should really be dedicating our
6
Verplanken, B., & Melkevik, O. (2008). ​Predicting habit: The case of physical exercise​. Psychology of
Sport and Exercise, 9(1), 15–26.
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willpower to consciously create and/or reorganizing the cues in our
environment that trigger those habits.
So, for example, let’s say you want to start working out on a regular
basis. Instead of just focusing on developing the habit of “working
out,” focus on developing a routine around initiating a workout. This
may just seem like a subtle difference, but it’s actually huge.
An easy way to do this is to choose a cue that already occurs regularly
in your daily life, such as getting home from work. Then, during the
early stages of developing your workout habit, focus your effort on
going straight to your room after you get home and changing into your
workout clothes. Then go fill up your water bottle and head straight to
the gym or hit the running trail or whatever.
You want to develop the habit of putting yourself in the position to
work out regularly, which makes it more likely that you’ll work out
regularly.
After a while, you’ll start to notice that when you get home from work
(environmental cue/trigger), it takes little to no effort to go to your
room, throw on your workout clothes, and head to the gym (habitual
response). You’ll even start to look forward to it, and maybe even feel
like something in your life is off when you don’t work out. And that’s
the power of habit.
The “reward” component of the habit equation above is used to
reinforce your target behavior after you’ve successfully completed it.
With our exercise example, you might get done working out and treat
yourself to a (healthy) snack or maybe schedule a post-workout rest
session by watching an episode of your favorite TV show. Some people
derive enough reward from the exercise itself (e.g., “runner’s high”),
which acts as powerful reinforcement for their habit.
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Whatever you do, be sure to incorporate a healthy reward into your
habit routine.
HOW TO MAKE A HABIT STICK
Many people start out with good intentions and a strong desire to
develop healthy habits only to slip back into their old, bad-habit ways.
Studies have identified several factors that contribute to forming and
keeping a lifestyle with healthy habits.
One of those factors is relatively straightforward: just knowing the
basics about how habits are formed and how they work can
significantly increase your chances of forming and keeping healthy
habits (and maybe even get rid of a few bad habits).7
So, educating yourself by reading something like this gives you a leg
up on establishing healthy habits in your life. You’re already on your
way.
Another big factor is how you perceive the habit you want to build. If
the habit seems impossible, then it will feel harder. If it seems easier,
then it will be easier.
That sounds stupid, but it has serious consequences.
For example, if you want to lose weight and you decide that you want
to do it by working out for 90 minutes per day, six days per week, that
is going to feel like a gigantic and daunting task. Because it feels
gigantic and daunting, you’re far more likely to give up. Whereas if you
decide to lose weight by walking for 20 minutes after dinner each
night (note: the dinner is your cue), then it feels very easy to
accomplish, and therefore it is.
7
Lally, P., Chipperfield, A., & Wardle, J. (2008). ​Healthy habits: efficacy of simple advice on weight
control based on a habit-formation model​. International Journal of Obesity, 32(4), 700–707.
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The beautiful thing is that once you’ve adopted the “easy mode”
version of your desired habit, you can always amp it up afterward. For
example, if you walk for 20 minutes after dinner each night for a
month, then it won’t sound so bad when you decide, “Hey, I’ll walk for
45 minutes now.” Then you can try out a little bit of running. Then you
can add calisthenics and plyometrics, and before you know it, you’re
working out for 90 minutes per day, six days per week.
The key is to start small. Set the bar low. Seriously. If you suffer from
chronic low self-efficacy and low self-esteem, you have to start where
you are.
Don’t expect the quantum leap, at least not at first. I know someone
who lost a lot of weight (almost 80 lbs) over a 2-year period. He was
running marathons by the time he was in shape, but you know how he
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started out? Four minutes a day on the exercise bike. That’s all he
could do at first, but he did it every single day and increased his
workout as he lost more weight and gained more confidence.
Once he knew he could do a few minutes on the bike, he figured he
could do a few more, then he figured he could go for a run, then he
believed he could run competitively, then he set a goal to run a
marathon and did it.
He didn’t say, “OK, I’m ridiculously overweight so I should run a
marathon.” He instead started where he was, which was in his
basement on an exercise bike for four minutes a day. This kept him
engaged and he didn’t feel too overwhelmed while he was working to
create a healthier lifestyle.
Another strategy that increases the chances of a making a habit stick is
having a plan for when things go wrong—and they will go wrong at
some point.8
For example, let’s say you’ve decided your diet really sucks and want
to eat healthier. Good for you. Now, if you’re like most people
(including me), you know it’s hard to eat a healthy diet consistently.
We’ve already partly discussed why this is: when your willpower is
drained, you cave to temptation pretty easily.
So you know ahead of time that you will be faced with temptations and
that it’s highly likely you’ll give in to said temptations from time to
time. Simply making a plan ahead of time to head off these
temptations will greatly increase the likelihood that you do just that.
In this case, I’d recommend allowing yourself a “cheat day” for one or
8
Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). ​Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans​. American
Psychologist, 54(7), 493.
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two meals a week where you get to pig out on some not-so-healthy
food.
On your non-cheat days, when you’re tempted with unhealthy food,
make a conscious effort to remind yourself that you’ll get to indulge
yourself soon enough and think about how proud you’ll be of yourself
for practicing a little self-discipline. This strategy has a one-two
punch: you get to regularly replenish your willpower while building
your healthy eating habit (by having a cheat day) and you can more
easily deal with temptation along the way (by having a plan ahead of
time).
You might need to change your strategies as you learn more about the
way you react to various hurdles and temptations that arise. But the
point is to anticipate the problems you’re likely to run into and have a
plan to deal with them ahead of time. You know yourself better than
anyone else, so be honest, set realistic expectations, and find a way
that works for you.
A couple of other things to keep in mind:
● While consistency is key, research has shown that missing one or
a handful of opportunities to practice a desired habit will not
ruin your chances at establishing that habit in the long run. Don’t
beat yourself up if you miss a workout session or you pig out one
night on pizza and ice cream. Acknowledge it as just part of the
process and get back to your routine as soon as you can.
● People don’t develop and acquire habits at the same rate;
everyone is different. There are a lot of products and advice out
there that promise a goal within a definitive time frame: 60 Days
to Rock-Hard Abs; Read 7 Times Faster in 2 Weeks; Retire 6
Months from Today… it’s all bullshit. Set goals for yourself and
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know your limitations and weaknesses; then work to eliminate
them at your own pace.
THE ART OF COMPOUNDING HABITS
Of course, some habits are better than other habits because some
habits, once acquired, make other positive habits much easier to
acquire as well.
For instance, ​quitting smoking​ is hard. But some data suggests that
taking up some form of exercise such as jogging or biking can make it
easier for someone to quit (probably because they’re hacking up a lung
the whole time).
These are sometimes referred to as “keystone habits.”9 They are habits
that, once adopted, will reverberate into other areas of your life, which
makes acquiring other desirable habits more natural and require less
effort.
Unfortunately, researchers haven’t been so great at saying exactly
which habits give the best returns and so you see a lot of moronic
articles out there citing things like “make your bed every day” or “just
have more willpower!” because they, like, heard this guy say it once
and it sounded smart.
I like to think of keystone habits as “compounding habits” because,
much like compounding returns on an investment, over a long enough
period of time, they can increase the ​richness of your life
exponentially. Goals, by themselves, generate linear growth and
change. Habits are capable of generating exponential ​growth and
change​.
9
Duhigg, C. (2012). ​The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business​. Random House
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And in case you were bad at math, here’s a quick example of the
difference between linear gains and exponential gains over the
long-run:
Notice the blue line doesn’t just increase faster, but the rate at which it increases is also
increasing.
To keep the financial analogy going—because fuck you, ​personal
finance is life/death important​—you could say that different habits
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have higher or lower interest rates, therefore making some habits far
better initial investments of your energy and discipline than others.
For example, aside from being fun, getting really good at a computer
game like Starcraft has a really poor rate of return on quality of life per
time and energy spent. Other than maybe developing some basic
problem-solving skills and learning how to verbally abuse anonymous
teenage boys on the internet, the habits gained will fail to translate
over to improving other areas of your life.
In fact, dedicating the time and energy to getting good at Starcraft is
more likely to harm other areas of your life. You’ll be sitting all day,
getting fat and lazy, not to mention it turns your love life into a nuclear
wasteland.10
On the other hand, a habit like lifting weights has an extremely high
rate of return.
Getting stronger will make you more fit, give you more energy,
increase your focus and mental performance, reduce the effects of
aging, raise your metabolism and help your body process food better,
and so on. Ironically, lifting weights would probably make you a better
Starcraft player, whereas the opposite is definitely not true.
That’s because lifting weights is a highly compounding habit. Its
benefits reverberate out across other areas of your life, making many
other positive habits and skills easier to acquire.
Therefore, when setting out to drastically change your life, some form
of exercise like lifting weights is likely to be one of the most efficient
places to start.11
10
11
Trust me, I spent most of my teenage years trying.
That goes for you too ladies. You’ll burn more fat and get far more toned than by doing cardio alone.
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SETTING NEW MONTH’S RESOLUTIONS
Another reason why typical New Year’s Resolutions suck is because of
the time horizon. If I say something like, “I want to write another book
this year,” it becomes that much easier for me to put off starting the
goal until June, July, or whenever, at which point it becomes almost
entirely unfeasible.12
Research shows that habits only need about 30 days of consistent
effort to install themselves into our brains.13 At that point they begin to
become automatic.
So screw New Year’s resolutions. I say adopt new month’s resolutions,
or as they’re more commonly known, 30-day challenges.
Pick a habit you want to adopt and then do it every day for 30 days.
It’s just 30 days. Anybody can do something for 30 days.
Once you do it, it should begin to feel automatic and you can then start
adding more depth or knowledge to work into the habit, or you can
move on to another habit (more on this below).
THE SIX FUNDAMENTAL DAILY HABITS
Hopefully by now, you’re starting to see the matrix. And you’re
starting to understand why you’ve ​failed to achieve so many goals
you’ve set for yourself in the past.
Setting a goal like, “I want to lose 20 lbs for my wedding” or “I want to
get a promotion this year,” and then forcing yourself to just do a bunch
of shit until it happens is akin to saying, “I want a million dollars,” and
12
It’s probably no coincidence that November ​is the designated ‘Write a Novel Month’​.
So apparently this research is up for debate. There are some studies showing that it can take as long as
60 or 80 days to “install” a habit. Either way, the principle is the same. One day at a time. One action at a
time.
13
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then deciding to work 120 hour work weeks until you get there. It is
almost certainly going to ​make you miserable​ and burn you out.
And even if you do get there, like a person who wins the lottery and
immediately spends it all, you’re guaranteed to lose it soon after.
The correct way to make a million dollars, as we discussed, is to start
small and then intelligently re-invest what you’ve earned, so stop
trying to scale linearly and instead scale exponentially.
We’ve also seen that some habits scale more exponentially than
others—i.e., some habits provide higher rates of return because they
provide benefits that then make adopting subsequent habits easier.
Therefore, it makes sense to use your energy to develop habits with the
highest rate of return first, and then move on to other desired habits
later.
So what are the life habits that give you the best bang for your
psychological buck?
After a lot of research and thought, I’ve come up with the six
fundamental habits below. These are the habits I believe to be the
most effective use of your limited time, energy, and discipline when
starting out. Some will probably be obvious to you (we’ve already
discussed one). Some will not. A couple may even surprise you.
1. EXERCISE
Benefits​: If you don’t know the benefits of regular exercise by now,
you must be living under a very large and very old rock.
Aside from making you look super sexy and preventing obesity,
exercise greatly reduces the risk of a bunch of things that can kill you:
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heart disease, stroke, and a smattering of various types of cancer.14 It
also improves your mood, gives you more energy, improves the quality
of your sleep, your sex life, and some evidence indicates it even
improves concentration and learning.15
Uh, I think you’re doing it wrong.
Adoption Strategy​: The crazy thing about exercise is that just about
everyone overestimates the amount of effort required to get results.
They assume that you have to join a fancy gym, spend a ton of money
14
Warburton, D. E. R., Nicol, C. W., & Bredin, S. S. D. (2006). ​Health benefits of physical activity: the
evidence​. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 174(6), 801–809.
15
Guiney, H., & Machado, L. (2013). ​Benefits of regular aerobic exercise for executive functioning in
healthy populations​. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 20(1), 73–86.
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on a fancy pants personal trainer, and do a bunch of fancy exercises
with odd looking rubber balls and mats.
But according to the science, exercise is an ​80/20 deal​—ie., 80% of the
benefits result from 20% of the effort. Something as simple as brisk
walking 30 minutes per day has been shown to give vast health
improvements and trigger weight loss.16 Therefore, if you’re starting an
exercise habit from scratch (and if you’re really out of shape), start
simple. Worry about the reverse piledriver crunches with your ripped
personal trainer named Vlad later.
A good friend of mine is really into bodybuilding and, as you can
imagine, is ripping out of his muscles.
One thing he told me last year that struck me was that one of the best
things he did was deciding to just exercise every day, no matter what.
Obviously, he’d prefer to hit the gym and get a big, structured workout
in.
But on days where he wasn’t feeling well, or when he was traveling for
work, he still made a point to get some basic exercise in. Even if it was
just push-ups on the floor or a quick jog up a flight of stairs a dozen
times. The goal here is to just always show up. Worry about ​perfection
later.
16
Rosenkilde, M. (2012) ​Body fat loss and compensatory mechanisms in response to different doses of
aerobic exercise–a randomized controlled trial in overweight sedentary males​. American Journal of
Physiology.
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So start simple. Challenge yourself to do some really basic exercises
each day. Do it for 30 days. Then after the habit is instilled in you,
worry about constructing a super sexy workout routine. Even if it’s just
walking or doing some body weight exercises in your bedroom. ​Do a
little every day​.
2. COOKING
Benefits​: This may strike you as a weird one to put down as a
fundamental habit. But at this point, I’ve seen the positive effects of
undertaking this habit in too many of my friends’ lives to not take it
seriously.
The benefits aren’t as obvious as exercise because most of the benefits
don’t come from the act of cooking itself, rather they come from the
ability to control exactly what and how much you eat.
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The fact is, most people don’t eat well. Or at least, they develop some
terrible food habits because they’re not capable of controlling what
and when they eat. They either have such little time or little knowledge
that they just settle for whatever is quick and easy, usually junk food.
Eating well, much like exercise, sweeps the board in terms of health
and lifestyle benefits: better energy, better cardiovascular health,
lower risk of obesity, diabetes, various cancers, heart disease and other
bad things that kill you,17 more energy, more focus, better moods
(goodbye sugar highs and crashes), better sleep and sex life.18 The
benefits are even more pronounced in kids.19
You can get the same general life gains from eating well as you would
from exercising, but on top of that, being a bitching cook can open up
cool social opportunities, a greater appreciation for fine food and/or
wine, and saving a lot of money by not eating out all the time.
Adoption Strategy​: This is my Achilles Heel and is my big
habit-building project. To be frank, my relationship with food, for as
long as I can remember, has been shitty and toxic.
I’ve shown my food a lot of love, but the love has been based on
superficial pleasures and compulsion, not on a genuine desire for
building something healthy together.
For most of my life, I was able to compensate for it through a high
metabolism and constant exercise. It was enough to keep me thin and
energetic despite all of my trashy habits.
17
Amine, E., Baba, N., Belhadj, M., Deurenbery-Yap, M., Djazayery, A., Forrester, T., et al. (2002). ​Diet,
nutrition and the prevention of chronic diseases: report of a Joint WHO/FAO Expert Consultation​. World
Health Organization.
18
Rogers, P. J. (2001). ​A healthy body, a healthy mind: long-term impact of diet on mood and cognitive
function​. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 60(01), 135–143.
19
Bellisle, F. (2004). E​ffects of diet on behaviour and cognition in children​. British Journal of Nutrition,
92(S2), S227–S232.
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But as they say, life caught up with me.
Aside from just ​getting older​, a number of major life events hit me all
in succession, only to be followed by a series of minor and unexpected
health problems.
In other words, after what turned out to be a pretty stressful and
tumultuous year, my shitty eating habits reared their ugly head. I soon
found myself sorely out of shape for the first time in years and the
heaviest I’ve ever been in my life.
For someone who has lived on his own for 13 years, it’s kind of
amazing that I still can’t even cook myself an egg. I’ve essentially lived
off of snacks, take-out, and restaurants for the past decade.
The problem with snacks and take-out is an obvious one: you’re
essentially trading in nutrition for expediency. The food is quick, easy,
and tasty, and so if you must give up some of your health for that, so
be it. This strategy works well when you’re ​in your 20s​ and staying up
all night coding websites. But as a lifelong habit, it’s a slow and
gradual death that plays itself out in years and decades.
And restaurants? Well, let’s just say that even the restaurants that
serve healthy food aren’t very healthy. A restaurant’s primary interest
is giving you an enjoyable experience and a sense that you got your
money’s worth, not making sure you don’t die of a heart attack. So
even though you don’t see it there, heaps of salt, sugar, and other crap
are almost always on the menu.
(Oh, and there’s a 2-for-1 dessert! Can’t pass that up.)
Gradually, I came to the inevitable conclusion that the glaring hole in
my lifestyle at the moment is food and my complete inability to control
where and how I get it. I then realized that unless I want to eat at the
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same 1-2 organic restaurants every single day for the next year (and
spend half of what I earn in a year to do so), my only other option is to
learn to cook.
I’ve decided to start by learning a few basics—how to make a couple
salads, how to grill chicken (no, seriously), how to make a couple eggs
for breakfast—then I’ll make it a goal to cook myself at least one meal
a day for 30 days in a row. Once I’ve done that, then I’ll worry about
more complicated recipes and how to prepare more types of foods.
So there are some green leafy things, and these pepper-type things and then some meat-looking stuff
that’s cooked in a thing with heat under it—am I getting this right?
Another focus will be not only finding healthy recipes that I enjoy
eating, but that I enjoy making. My little experience from cooking in
the past has been miserable. Probably because I was trying to cook
stuff I had no business trying to cook and had no idea what I was
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doing. This time, I will start simple, and gradually work my way up in
a way that’s both enjoyable and satisfying.
3. MEDITATION
Benefits​: The benefits of meditation are famous and numerous (I’ve
previously discussed them ​here​). But the short answer is this:
increased focus,20 ​improved self-awareness​,21 reduction of stress and
anxiety,22 improved sleep,23 greater emotional stability​,24 makes you
more empathetic of others,25 and can even be used as a form of therapy
for a variety of ​mental or emotional disorders​.26
Adoption Strategy​: No secret here, start with a daily small practice.
Even as little as one minute per day can show benefits.
I recently discovered ​Headspace​, the app that gently guides people
into a meditation practice if you want to take a stab at learning on your
own. Another good one is ​Calm​.
But truth be told, despite what you would think, it’s incredibly hard to
sit on a pillow and think about nothing for more than a few seconds.
You get bored and fidgety, and if you’re by yourself it’s incredibly hard
to get yourself to stay there for more than a few minutes. Therefore, I
20
Zeidan, F., Johnson, S. K., Diamond, B. J., David, Z., & Goolkasian, P. (2010). ​Mindfulness meditation
improves cognition: Evidence of brief mental training​. Consciousness and Cognition, 19(2), 597–605.
21
Farb, N. A. S., Segal, Z. V., Mayberg, H., Bean, J., McKeon, D., Fatima, Z., & Anderson, A. K. (2007).
Attending to the present: mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference​. Social
Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2(4), 313–322.
22
Morone, N. E., Lynch, C. P., Iii, V. J. L., Liebe, K., & Greco, C. M. (2012). ​Mindfulness to Reduce
Psychosocial Stress​. Mindfulness, 3(1), 22–29.
23
Nagendra, R. P., Maruthai, N., & Kutty, B. M. (2012). ​Meditation and Its Regulatory Role on Sleep​.
Frontiers in Neurology, 3.
24
Chambers, R., Gullone, E., & Allen, N. B. (2009). ​Mindful emotion regulation: An integrative review​.
Clinical Psychology Review, 29(6), 560–572.
25
Mascaro, J. S., Rilling, J. K., Negi, L. T., & Raison, C. L. (2013). ​Compassion meditation enhances
empathic accuracy and related neural activity​. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8(1), 48–55.
26
Chen, K. W., Berger, C. C., Manheimer, E., Forde, D., Magidson, J., Dachman, L., & Lejuez, C. W.
(2012).​ Meditative Therapies for Reducing Anxiety: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of
Randomized Controlled Trials​. Depression and Anxiety, 29(7), 545–562.
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often recommend people find a local group or class. There are often
free ones in major cities. It’s also a nice way to meet people. Then,
once you get the hang of it, try it on your own. Start with one minute
per day and slowly work up. Do it for 30 days until you have a regular
practice going.
4. READING
Benefits​: If you’re still reading this and don’t want to stab a spoon
into your eyes, then that means you probably already enjoy reading.
Which means I probably don’t have to tell you that ​reading is fucking
magical​. It’s the only thing in the world that allows you to come and
live inside my brain for a little while, see what it sees, feel what it feels,
and then leave again.
Some historians believe that the written word, and the ability for
people to read the written word (i.e., literacy) is essentially the basis
for civilization.27 Without the ability to feel and see each other’s
thoughts (or feel and see the thoughts and feelings of people from
generations past), we would have no sense of cultural identity, and far
less empathy.
And many studies suggest that people who read regularly are far more
empathetic. They care about other people more. They ​relate and
respond to others​ better.28 People who read regularly are also just
smarter, better informed, and more knowledgeable about the world.
This is why when Warren Buffett was once asked the best thing for
young people to invest in for their future, he replied with “knowledge.”
He said that money comes and goes, people come and go, but what
27
See Chapter 3 in ​The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined​ by Steven Pinker and
Debt: The First 5,000 Years​ by David Graeber for more discussion on this idea.
28
Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). ​Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind​. Science,
342(6156), 377–380.
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you know never leaves you. He said that even in his 80s, he was
earning returns on knowledge and information he picked up in his
20s.
Adoption Strategy​: The biggest problem I think people have with
developing a reading habit is that they try to read what they think they
should be reading rather than what they actually enjoy reading. If you
like teen murder mysteries even though you’re a 45-year-old single
mother, read teen murder mysteries. If you like books about zombies,
read books about zombies.
When developing a reading habit, start with what seems easy and
exciting to you, then ​slowly branch out​.
Here’s another reading tip: if you aren’t enjoying a book, stop reading
it.
I meet so many people who hate a book they’re reading, yet they
begrudgingly drag themselves back to it over and over again because
they feel bad if they don’t finish. They feel guilty or are afraid it means
they’re stupid. Sometimes they say that because they’ve read this far,
they might as well finish the whole thing.29 This is entirely irrational
and crazy. You wouldn’t keep watching a TV show you don’t like. You
wouldn’t eat an entire plate of food you don’t like. So why the hell are
you trying to read a book you don’t like?
My rule of thumb is when I start reading a book, I force myself to read
either the first 10% or the first chapter (whatever comes first) and if I
don’t like it by the end of that, then I put it down and move on to the
next book.
29
In gambling, this behavior is known as the sunk cost fallacy.
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5. WRITING
Benefits​: Whether it’s emails or journaling or writing fiction or
posting a political rant on ​Facebook​, writing well is fast becoming one
of the most important life skills in the 21st century. So much of your
life today is spent ​in front of a screen​ and through ​social media​, email
and messaging apps, so if you can’t communicate well through writing,
you’re putting yourself at a monstrous disadvantage.
If reading allows you to inhabit other people’s minds for a brief period
of time, learning to write well is like cleaning your house before the
guests come over—it forces you to learn how to structure your
thoughts more coherently, string together rational arguments, and tell
stories in cogent and insightful ways. But not only that, it makes you a
better and more insightful thinker. As Flannery O’Connor said, “I
don’t know what I think until I write it down.”
It’s also therapeutic. In fact, of all of the hokey pokey woo-woo
self-help practices​, journaling and writing out one’s thoughts and
feelings on a regular basis has been shown to have calming and
therapeutic effects.30
Adoption Strategy​: Easiest way here is to start a journal. There are
some cool apps to journal on your computer. Or you can do it the
old-fashioned way, by hand.31
30
Ullrich, P. M., & Lutgendorf, S. K. (2002). ​Journaling about stressful events: Effects of cognitive
processing and emotional expression​. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 24(3), 244–250.
31
There is some evidence that writing things out by hand is better for you and helps you learn quicker. But
that’s so 20th century.
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Hey, remember pen and paper?
The important thing here is to not limit yourself. Use writing as a tool
of ​self-discovery​; write your feelings, ideas, fantasies. And if you feel
like going on a tangent about calculus problems that stumped you, do
that too.
If you get ballsy, you can even ​start a blog​ at a site like ​WordPress​ or
Medium​ and go public with your ideas.
The point here is to develop a consistent habit of 1) uninhibited
self-expression and 2) practice formulating your thoughts in a highly
coherent way so that others may understand them. Start with 30 days.
As usual, don’t ​judge yourself​. At first, make simply showing up the
only requirement for success.
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6. SOCIALIZING
Benefits: I know what you’re thinking, “Seriously, Mark? Socializing?”
I know, I know. It sounds painfully obvious—like one of those space
fillers you see in top 10 lists in bad Huffington Post articles. But
having friends​ is fucking serious, guys. No really, stop laughing. I’m
serious here. Listen up.
I think many of us, if we slow down long enough to take a look at
ourselves, don’t give our ​relationships​ the time or attention necessary
to keep them healthy and happy.
You see, it turns out loneliness is ​kind of a thing​. It’s growing at an
alarming rate in the US, particularly among older people. And new
research is discovering that being alone can be just as bad for your
physical health as obesity or heavy smoking.32
It also makes you miserable and far more susceptible to depression.33
So yeah, in our “hyper-connected” world, more and more people are
finding it harder to take the time to simply be with somebody else for a
while. And that wears on us.
This hit me this past year. After ​living nomadically for many years​, I
returned to the United States to live there for the first time since 2010.
And much to my chagrin, I realized that almost all of my old friends
had either a) fallen out of contact with one another, or b) moved to
completely separate corners of the country.
Throw on top of that being on deadline to ​finish a book​ (which, shall
we say, put a dent in my ability to leave the house) and my social life
32
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). ​Loneliness and Social
Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality A Meta-Analytic Review​. Perspectives on Psychological Science,
10(2), 227–237.
33
Huang, C. (2010). ​Internet Use and Psychological Well-being: A Meta-Analysis​. Cyberpsychology,
Behavior, and Social Networking, 13(3), 241–249.
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took a very real and uncomfortable punch to the gut this past year.
Much like my health issues, it was a problem that I was not
accustomed to dealing with and so it hit me unexpectedly.
Adoption Strategy: Fortunately, I found this much easier to handle. In
the fall, I made a simple decision. I decided that I would start doing
something so simple and obvious that I kind of felt dumb for not
already doing: I would make a point to talk to a different friend every
single day. Whether it be on Facebook or Skype or in person or on the
phone, I’d make a point to chat with someone different every day.
Now, I don’t mean just bullshitty Facebook chatter. I mean genuine,
“Hey man, what’s been going on with you lately? How have things
been?” followed by a couple, “Oh, that’s cool, tell me about that,” and
finally finished off with a, “We should get together soon, what are you
doing next week?” for good measure. It would take maybe 15-20
minutes at most. And it was surprising how easy it was to reconnect
with many people.
Most of the time it was touching base with some friends who I had
kind of lost touch with. Other times it was reaching out and taking a
chance with getting to know someone whom I barely knew. Other
times it was going out and meeting somebody new, maybe at a party or
a conference or being introduced through a friend.
And amazingly, that was enough. That’s really all it took. One person a
day. Like a computer rebooting, my social life whirred back to life. And
I became much happier for it.
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SOME CLOSING THOUGHTS
There seems to be a bias in the human circuitry that underestimates
what it takes to accomplish really big goals in life and overestimates
the effort required to take on a series of small goals.
In my experience, it’s the regular heartbeat of pursuing and nailing
small win after small win that eventually leads to the big ones. In fact,
I’ve often found that becoming so intent on the small simple daily
victories often causes one to not even realize one of the big goals has
occurred until it’s already passed you by. This, too, is a habit. And I
would argue it’s an incredibly compounding one at that.
The six fundamental habits above provide a nice foundation for a
healthy life in all domains: physically, emotionally, psychologically
and socially. They overlap and buttress one another. And amazingly,
they’re all actually quite simple to achieve, requiring far less initial
effort than most people realize.
If you’ve enjoyed this post and would like to learn more about the nuts
and bolts of adopting habits, how to get started and motivate yourself
for change, please consider putting your email in the box below. It’s a
free PDF on Habit building and the science of self-discipline. It can
hopefully help you make this year a great year.
And if you’re really serious about getting your life together, check out
my course on building a better life​.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a salad I need to make.
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