Category: Habits

List #3: David Brooks and the 4 Commitments that define you: “It’s the things you chain yourself to that set you free”

David Brooks is my favorite big thinker, a more grounded version of Alain de Botton. A longer essay about David Brooks and his work is coming, but for this week’s edition of Nerdy Lists I want to introduce his Four Commitments.

The people we admire most, Brooks says, make FOUR commitments: to family & friends, to a lifelong vocation, to a belief system, and to a local community. These commitments are hard to make and even harder to sustain, but they define us. People who make them are moral exemplars, our modern day heroes who improve the world and inspire everyone around them, both in person and from a distance. People like Atul Gawande and Dorothy Day and Stephen Lerner.

Brooks shared these commitments in his Commencement Address at Dartmouth:

David Brooks’s Four Commitments

“In the realm of emotion they have a web of unconditional love. In the realm of intellect, they have a set, permanent philosophy about how life is. In the realm of action, they have commitments to projects that can’t be completed in a lifetime. In the realm of morality, they have a certain consistency and rigor that’s almost perfect.” – David Brooks in The Atlantic

1. To Spouse and Family

Love humbles you. It is both a gritty commitment (like washing dishes) and transcendent magic. And love is not zero-sum: the more you love, the more you can love.

2. To Career and Vocation

A vocation is something “that summons you”. You feel drawn to it, called towards it, despite pressures and obstacles that would push you away. The most important passions are often found, importantly, not by looking within, but by looking at the world and seeing where there is a void, where people need help.

3. To Faith and Philosophy

4. To Community and Village

I wonder if Brooks would make an exception for strong online communities. It would be interesting to get his take on self organizing groups like Wikipedia and bitcoin and reddit.

And how do you become like these role models?

  • Through habits: fake it til you make it. Organizations like Alcoholics Anonymous are very good at helping you do this
  • Like St. Augustine: continually examine and question yourself
  • By imitation: surround yourself with admirable people and mimic them!

“It’s the things you chain yourself to that set you free”

Thanks for reading! What are your favorite lists? Here’s the collection :)

The habits of tennis great Ivan Lendl

Ivan Lendl's habits

From Derek Sivers’s notes on The Power of Full Engagement:

Ivan Lendl was far from the most physically gifted tennis player of his era, but for five years he was the number-one-ranked player in the world. His edge was in the routines that he built. He followed similar routines in every dimension of his life.

A routine = a bundle of habits. Flossing is a habit. Good dental care is a routine.

Lendl also practiced a series of daily mental-focus exercises to improve his concentration -and regularly introduced new ones to assure that they remained challenging. At tournaments, he gave clear instructions to friends and family not to burden him with issues that might distract him from his mission. Whatever he did, he was either fully engaged or strategically disengaged.

A useful reminder that what you don’t do (eg, don’t enable distractions or invite interruption) is very important and often overlooked.

On the court, during matches, he relied on another set of rituals to keep himself centered and focused, including visualizing entire points before playing them and following the same multiple-step ritual each time he stepped up to the line to serve. It is perfectly logical to assume that Lendl excelled in part because he had extraordinary will and discipline. That probably isn’t so. […] What Lendl understood brilliantly and instinctively was the power of positive rituals – precise, consciously acquired behaviors that become automatic in our lives, fueled by a deep sense of purpose.

Visualization seems to be a common practice among elite athletes (eg, Michael Phelps). I’d like to try. Singing might be easier than writing since it’s more structured and based on technique.

Overall, powerful stuff. I never watched Lendl play but his consistency and grit were legendary. Good habits = good routines = high performance.

List #2: Steve Pavlina’s 11 Personal Assessment Categories

Welcome to the nerdy lists project! Each week I publish a new list about habits and personal growth.

List #2 is Steve Pavlina’s eleven areas of personal assessment. These 11 categories are a mece way to assess your life performance. About once a month (or when I’m lazy, once a quarter), I review each item on the list and give a score between 1-10. Steve recommends that you replace any rating below 9 with a 1, for motivation (this I haven’t done).

The categories are curated from his book, Personal Development for Smart People [link]. His blog is incredible, too, and Derek Sivers has great notes from the book.

Steve Pavlina’s 11 Personal Assessment Categories

Pavlina’s essential question: how do you routinely measure and monitor the important areas of your life?

in each category, I provide an example of a personal benchmark

1. Habits & Daily routine: did I average 7 hours of sleep a night?

2. Career & work: did I focus on one main project instead of several side projects?

3. Money & finances: was I able to invest some money this month?

4. Health & fitness: did I exercise at least 4 days each week?

5. Mental development & education: did I finish at least one book?

6. Social life & relationships: did I hangout with friends every weekend?

7. Home & family: did I call Mom at least once a week?

8. Emotions: did I meditate 10 minutes each day?

9. Character & integrity: did I not gossip? (I hate gossip)

10. Life purpose & contribution: have I published at least once a week to Kevin Habits?

11. Spiritual development: did I go to Church at least once, and/or read the Bible (and other religious texts) regularly?

Since October 2008, I’ve completed this exercise. Some categories have persistently low ratings, and I struggle with improvement. Also, I should analyze my scores and identify trends. I did this, once, and a conclusion I can remember was that calling Mom more often was correlated with higher average scores. Unfortunately, I’ve struggled to maintain that particular habit :)

In general Steve has great essays on habits (my favorite technology for behavior change). Here are some:

  • Why you should add the best and drop the worst habits: Be down to earth and specific. When you choose a specific habit, there will be a clear and sharp dividing line between success and failure. Either you did the action or you didn’t. There’s no gray area in the middle.
  • How to keep up not-quite daily habits: I find that when I occasionally skip habits that are part of a longer daily chain, it’s fairly easy to put them back in again as long as I continue to maintain the first and last links in the chain.

Thanks for reading! What are your favorite lists? Here’s the full index, including what’s to come.

52 tips from The Little Book of Talent, in my words (“think like Buddha, work like Jesus”)

the-little-book-of-talentI forget most of what I read unless the knowledge is shocking or hilarious or about sex or is life altering. Maybe I don’t forget it right away, but time wins in the end. It’s always deleting what I’ve learned. I hate it. Because it wastes time, our most precious resource, and I hate wasted time more than I hate people who are perpetually late, and cafes that are too cool for wifi.

So I’ve developed two methods to retain knowledge, especially the important bits. Method one is good ol’ memorization (using Anki and Evernote). Method two is more complicated but it’s helpful in my quest to become a good writer: to rewrite things, whether quotes or short stories or essays.

When I stumbled upon The Little Book of Talent (thanks Derek!), the 52 tips were perfect for method two. The book is a companion to Daniel Coyle’s other book, The Talent Code, which I also read and summarized.

So, from The Little Book of Talent [Kindle], here is a rewritten version of his 52 tips!

1. VISUALIZE a “future you” who’s mastered your desired skill (like Michael Phelps visualizes each performance down to likely drops of water)
2. REPEAT the best performances of that skill for 15 minutes a day (if you’re a comedian, learn to recite a Louis CK routine, word-for-word and pause-for-pause)
3. STEAL from anyone better than you (this is why musical families produce musical prodigies)
4. RECORD your progress (like a daily journal)
5. BE STUPID, act silly to experiment and expand what’s possible
6. BE POOR: use simple, sparse environments to focus and motivate you (like the founders of Google starting in a garage)
7. HARD OR SOFT? Determine if you’re learning a hard skill (like a tennis forehand) or a soft one (like writing)?
8. For hard skills, be the KARATE KID: wax on and wax off. Be precise, slow, and careful
9. For soft skills, be a SMALL CHILD: experiment, explore, and challenge yourself
10. DO HARD: prioritize hard skills. In the long run, they’re more important
11. FORGET PRODIGIES. Believe you’ll only get there through effort and persistence
12. FIND THE RIGHT COACH: someone who is tough, blunt, active, usually older, and enjoys teaching fundamentals (I am reminded of John Wooden’s reputation)
13. LIVE in the sweet spot, which happens when you’re fully engaged and struggling just enough (what Mikhail C calls flow)
14. MEASURE # of tough reps finished, not # of hours spent
15. CHUNK IT. Reduce each skill into small, coherent chunks
16. MASTER A CHUNK at a time (like a difficult run in a song, or an algorithm in programming)
17. FRUSTRATE yourself. When you’re frustrated, remember: that’s when you’re improving most
18. Practice a little each day, instead of a lot in spurts
19. PLAY: Don’t do drills. Create and play games
20. PRACTICE ALONE
21. Create IMAGES for each chunk to improve your memory
22. Make a mistake? Stop everything. Pay attention. Understand what you did wrong. Then do it right.
23. VISUALIZE your neurons creating connections, getting thicker
24. VISUALIZE your neurons speeding up, getting more efficient
25. PLACE LIMITS and rules on yourself to challenge your skills
26. DO IT SLOW, as slowly as possible
27. CLOSE YOUR EYES and do it. Use your left hand if you’re right handed.
28. MIME IT
29. When you do it right (finally!): notice it. mark it. replay it in your mind
30. Take NAPS
31. EXAGGERATE: make it much bigger, or much smaller
32. SET NEW GOALS just out of reach. Stretch for them
33. WRITE IT DOWN: to learn from a book, write it down, summarize it, organize it
34. With mistakes, use the SANDWICH technique: do it right. do it wrong. then do it right again
35. Practice the 3 x 10 method: do a rep, rest 10 minutes, do a rep, rest 10 minutes, do a rep, rest
36. TEST YOURSELF DAILY
37. Plan your practice using the REPS framework: Reach and Repeat; Engage; Purposeful; Strong, Speedy Feedback
38. STOP WHEN TIRED. Don’t create bad habits
39. Practice immediately after a performance, when the mistakes are fresh (this is my favorite tip)
40. Before sleep, visualize your perfect performance (what Phelps and his coach called “playing the tape”)
41. End each practice with a REWARD (remember the habit loop: trigger, action, reward)
42. How to be a better teacher: connect emotionally, don’t give long speeches, communicate precisely and concretely, make a scorecard, maximize struggling, teach them to learn without you
43. RINSE & REPEAT. Rinse & repeat. Rinse & repeat…
44. Fight the battle anew every day (a frequent message in The War of Art)
45. For every hour of competition or performance, spend FIVE HOURS in practice
46. Instead of fixing bad habits, build good new ones
47. Teach it
48. Give a new skill EIGHT WEEKS to develop
49. When you plateau, change it up!
50. BUILD GRIT and love the grind
51. Keep your goals to yourself
52. Think like Buddha (calm, patient) and work like Jesus (strategic, steady)

That’s the list! Here’s my 1-page summary of The Talent Code.

The Power of Habit: more notes from one of my favorite books

I am reading again The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg [Kindle]. It’s my favorite behavior change book. Here’s a summary.

A reader alerted me to some supplemental content: a reader’s guide to applying the book’s ideas, and a thorough study guide for teachers.

So I read them and took notes:

  • try different rewards until you find one that makes the habit stick
  • for a reward to work properly, it must create a CRAVING over time (the way you might crave an episode of Rick and Morty ;)
  • all cues (aka triggers) fall into 5 categories: location, time, emotional state, other people, action that came immediately before
  • an effective cue should be simple and clear and fall into only a few of the 5 categories. for example, a good cue for exercise could be to hit the gym at 4pm (a time cue), when you return home from work (preceding action cue)
  • an activity becomes a habit only when mental activity decreases over time (so you’re not actively thinking about it)
  • focus on keystone habits, which are habits that influence other habits. for example, a keystone habit in families is to eat dinner together. i find that meditating for 5 minutes is my keystone habit. it simply makes my day better: i am calmer, get more done, less rushed, more focused, etc etc
  • “willpower is the most important keystone habit for success”

See my cheatsheet-summary-review here. If you want to change something annoyingly sticky in your life, read this book!