EXERCISE
1. Scan your life (or business) and ask yourself: Where would a lasting change benefit me most?
2. Choose a behavior that you want to change permanently—it can be a personal behavior, or a behavior in others.
3. Write it down on a piece of paper, and keep it by you as you read through this book.
Although my research has primarily focused on how to change other people’s behaviors in areas like health care, business, and entrepreneurship, it is based on social psychology—or why people act the way they do—and you can therefore apply this science to also change your own behaviors, like getting yourself to exercise more or to learn a new instrument. In fact, the seven forces for lasting change explained in this book will give you the ingredients you need for change in any context.
Science shows that people have a better chance of success by focusing on small steps. Yet even when they know this, people repeatedly fail to make changes last. That’s because they don’t understand just how small those steps need to be and don’t have a model to guide them. As Chapter 2 will explain, small means tiny.
We like to think that we’re unique, that we don’t follow the crowd. Chapter 3 will give you a new understanding of the power of community, and how to harness it to achieve lasting change in yourself and others.
If you want people to stick to a fitness routine or continue to buy your product, that action or behavior has to be important to them. Everyone knows this, right? Just as Chapter 2 redefines “small,” Chapter 4 will teach you ways to redefine important.
People often think they understand easy, but they actually don’t. This chapter will explain how to make things really easy and therefore more likely to stick.
Have you heard the expression “If there’s a will there’s a way”? Or “Change your thoughts and your actions will follow”? That the mind controls behavior is the basis for many top-selling self-help and popular-psychology books. They teach that people can change their behavior by imagining and willing themselves to change. But this is wrong. Most smokers can’t quit just by imagining themselves quitting. People don’t stick to their New Year’s resolutions by telling themselves that this year will be different than other years. Managers can’t get their salespeople to close a deal just by telling them to visualize closing it.
Social psychologists know now that the truth lies in the opposite direction. People need to change their actions and their minds will follow. What you’re doing is “tricking” the brain into realizing that change is possible. In this chapter, I’ll teach you about neurohacks—a set of mental shortcuts to reset your brain so you can make positive lasting changes.
A lot of successful people will tell you their success is not due to intelligence or talent, but because they know how to use their time efficiently. Barack Obama was known for routinizing food and dress so that he could save his time and energy for making important decisions about the country. Mark Zuckerberg said he owns about twenty versions of the same gray shirt to avoid having to decide what to wear every day. Ernest Hemingway was known for having a strict routine of writing only in the morning.12 He’d use the rest of the day to think about and build excitement for the writing he would do the following morning. These individuals created an efficient process to keep them doing what they needed to do. They understood the power of the human brain and applied that science to their lives.
The human brain yearns to be efficient. It is designed so that people use the smallest amount of effort or thought to do things. If you see, hear, or smell something repeatedly (even if you aren’t aware of it), your brain stores this information so you can recognize it quickly and retrieve it again without having to think.13 14 If you do something repeatedly, like taking the same route to work, your brain stores this information so you can go to work each day without having to remember how to get there. It does the same thing with people. If you interact with the same people repeatedly, your brain stores this information so that you’ll automatically feel more comfortable with them.
This process of engraining patterns into the brain explains a large amount of human psychology. It explains why people prefer certain products over others; why they discriminate against people of other races, religions, or with other political views; and why people develop habits.
This chapter will teach you how making something routine—so that it becomes engrained in your brain—will make it easier for you to keep doing it.
How do you make something so captivating that people will keep doing it? One popular approach is to “gamify” it. The notion is that giving people rewards like points, badges, and money will make certain activities—or products—captivating, and get people to keep doing or using them.
But gamification doesn’t always work. When it does, it’s because it makes use of psychological science. This chapter will show you how to make behaviors captivating enough to convince yourself—and others—to keep doing them.