power of habit – @habits

The Power of Volume: when in doubt, just do more

A YouTube video changed my life, and inspired me to write the below. Specifically, the moment starting at 2:08: https://youtu.be/m0qeyFJrHWU?si=J8y9H3h4xFiJouAq&t=128

Now traditionally, we are taught that when you workout, it tears the muscle fibers so you should do maybe 2-3 sets of 6-12 exercises and then you need to rest and recover for 2-3 days so you can get stronger and you can workout again, and that rest is very important. Now if I had to pick one thing I learned from Ido to teach you, the one most important thing, it would be this: I learned that elite athletes, coaches, etc at the highest level, at any competitive sport, they take this rule and they throw it out the window. Volume which can be defined essentially as how much work you’re doing is BY FAR the most important driver of progress for building muscle for building strength for building flexibility for building skill, anything. Anything you want to get good at, a little bit of stimulus is not enough, we need as much volume as possible, often more than your body will recover from at first.

The narrator shares stories of world class athletes who do ABSURD amounts of training volume, despite conventional wisdom advocating for much much less, and demonstrates how important volume is for serious improvement and world-class results.

I’ve come to believe that this lesson applies not just in sports, but in nearly every aspect of life. In sports, in business, in relationships, in life satisfaction.

In fact, it’s hard for me to think of an area where this principle — that doing more leads to more success — does NOT apply.

Basically if you want outsized results, you need to do outsized amounts of work.

It’s the power of volume.

Want to do better at your job? Work more hours.

Want to make greater gains at the gym? Lift more weight, more often.

Want to have a better relationship with your loved ones? Spend more time with them. Pay more attention while you’re with them.

It’s astoundingly simple, yet astoundingly easy to forget.

It’s easy to forget because there are unspoken rules that encourage moderation and setting arbitrary limits.

9-5 workdays encourage you to think that 8 hours of work is enough.

1 hour training sessions (with a coach, or at the gym) encourage you to think that one hour is enough.

Normies scare you off by talking about overtraining, burnout, and diminishing marginal returns.

Yes, those are all risks along the route to success, especially at higher levels. But as John Steinbeck says, the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. If you’re NOT getting injured, or if you’re NOT burning out, then you probably don’t know how much more you can do. In fact, it’s highly likely those limits are much greater than you estimate.

There is another study I remember that illustrates this point in a different manner:

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot – albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Again, the power of volume. Just do more. Quantity itself can lead to quality.

So when you feel like you’ve plateaued in some aspect of your life, but want to keep getting better — whether it’s speaking French, improving your pickleball, or learning to cook — the secret is just to do more.

Volume solves most.

Ten minutes of Duolingo French is good, but an hour is better. Better yet, finish all of Duolingo in a few days, and then spend that same amount of time watching French learning videos on YouTube.

An hour of tennis is good, but two hours is better. Better yet, attend a tennis camp and play every day for 3-4 hours a day. I bet you’ll break whatever plateau you’re on and get good faster.

That’s what kids do, yet we forget this lesson — or create excuses — when we’re adults. Kids become obsessed with things. They spend hours and days and weeks on those things. They go to summer camps dedicated to those things. They talk about those things with their friends and anyone who will listen. For kids, volume is natural. They don’t want to just do more — they want to do as much of that thing as they possibly can. And that’s how kids often get good quick.

Gladwell helped to popularize the 10,000 hour rule, which is a related principle that states, briefly, that approximately 10k hours are necessary to achieve world-class expertise in a topic.

But in the same book, Gladwell mentions that the top performers go far beyond 10k hours. It’s more of a pre-requisite:

Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.

What separates the best from the rest? It’s often just how much they work.

Again, the power of volume, and the lesson of just doing more.

When you study top performers in many fields, you realize they’ve already internalized this rule.

Take Danielle Steele, perhaps the best selling romance novelist of all time. My mom always had a stack of Steele’s glossy paperback novels by her bed:

She works all the time. According to a 2019 Glamour profile, Steel starts writing at 8:30 am and will continue all day and into the night. It’s not unusual for her to spend 20 to 22 hours at her desk. She eats one piece of toast for breakfast and nibbles on bittersweet chocolate bars for lunch. A sign in her office reads: “There are no miracles. There is only discipline.”

There’s Jiro Ono, the legendary sushi chef with the namesake restaurant and Netflix documentary, who spent more than 7 decades dedicating his life to make sushi. Here’s what he had to say:

All I want to do is make better sushi. I do the same thing over and over, improving bit by bit. There is always a yearning to achieve more. I’ll continue to climb, trying to reach the top, but no one knows where the top is. – Jiro

I fell in love with my work, and gave my life to it. Even though I’m 85 years old I don’t feel like retiring. That’s how I feel. – Jiro

There’s the Oracle of Omaha himself, legendary investor and mega bajillionaire Warren Buffett:

You can make magic by going farther than most other people think is reasonable. When Warren was asked, “How’d you do it?” He said, “I read a couple thousand financial statements a year.”

And who can forget Elon Musk, the living embodiment of the power of volume. Routinely working 100 hour weeks, running too many mega successful companies to name, sleeping 6 hours or less — often under his desk, all while being a high profile advisor to President Trump responsible for cutting trillions from the federal budget:

“If other people are putting in 40-hour workweeks, and you’re putting in 100-hour workweeks, you’ll achieve in four months what they do in a year.”

So keep it simple. Just do more. And you can often do much more than you think.

Final thoughts —

1. I want to thank my friend and writer Cedric Chin, whose series of essays on judo and deliberate practice are where I first discovered the above YouTube video, and began to internalize the power of volume

2. There are secondary benefits to the power of volume. To paraphrase Chuck Close, new ideas and inspiration will arise during the process of doing. But you have to be “doing” to receive those benefits

3. The more you do, the easier it becomes to do more — through efficiency, experience, and the building of good habits — thus you begin to effectively compound your volume. The same way that a pro basketball player knows exactly how to prepare for their next game, or a successful author knows how to begin a new novel

4. I wrote this essay for myself, because I believe the best way to understanding something is to write about it, and because this lesson is probably the second most impactful one I’ve learned as an adult — the first being the insane power of habits (a term coined by author Charles Duhigg, whose book I fully recommend)

Below are more anecdotes from top performers in sports, fitness, art, and business:

THE POWER OF VOLUME IN SPORTS:

When asked if he had any regrets about lifting so heavy, after his 13 surgeries, Ronnie Coleman said “YES”, “I regret not lifting more weight for more reps”

I don’t love max weights. I love hard training — Karlos Nasar

Reps, reps, reps. You might think you only do reps in the gym, but repetitions are the key to life. Whether you want to improve at speaking in public or reading books or just eating better, you will need to do reps. Whatever you work at, it becomes easier and less uncomfortable with every rep you do. – Arnold

You practice until you can’t get it wrong, not until you can get it right – Nick Saban

Today Jack plays such sensational golf with such apparent ease that many people who watch him probably gain the impression that his skills are heaven-sent rather than self-developed. That isn’t true. No one ever worked harder at golf than Nicklaus during his teens and early twenties. At the age of ten, in his first year of golf, Jack must have averaged three hundred practice shots and at least eighteen holes of play daily. In later years, he would often hit double that number of practice shots and play thirty-six — even fifty-four — holes of golf a day during the summer. I have seen him practice for hours in rain, violent winds, snow, intense heat — nothing would keep him away from golf. Even a slight case of polio failed to prevent him from turning up for a golf match.

THE POWER OF VOLUME IN ART:

All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case. — Chuck Close

If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all. – John Cage

Picasso lived for a total of 33,403 days. With 26,075 published works that means Picasso averaged 1 new piece of artwork every day of his life from age 20 until his death at 91. He created something new, every day, for 71 years

Kong: [Laughs] It’s true. Back when I was learning the piano, I felt like many of my classmates, such as Xu Zhong, Wang Jian, and Qian Zhou, had more inherent talent. I relied on relentless practice, often putting in 15 to 16 hours a day. Even after becoming a professional pianist, I needed constant practice to keep my confidence up

https://x.com/GRIMES_V1/status/1839818832002855410
How to make a good song:
1) write an entire album
2) delete everything except the best song
3) repeat
4) until you have an album again

—

I should make sure that I’m sufficiently exhausted from working that no one can keep me up at night. That’s really the only thing I can control. – Jensen Huang

Trust your instinct. Don’t think, just do. – Tom Cruise in Top Gun: Maverick

“In the academic field of talent development, there is a mountain of research supporting the conclusion that the volume of accumulated deliberate practice is the single biggest factor responsible for individual differences in performance among elite performers across a wide variety of talent domains”

Dopamine Nation by Anna Lembke – book highlights

dopamine-nation

I finished this book last month. For me, it was similar to the book Breath and The Power of Habit in that it changed my perspective on the world in some fundamental way, and as a result my behavior has changed for the better (at least, for now ;)

Amazon link: https://www.amazon.com/Dopamine-Nation-Finding-Balance-Indulgence-ebook/dp/B08KPKHVXQ

Here are too many interesting highlights from the book, all copied verbatim:

—

one of the most remarkable neuroscientific findings in the past century is that the brain processes pleasure and pain in the same place. Further, pleasure and pain work like opposite sides of a balance.

In short, I became a chain reader of formulaic erotic genre novels. As soon as I finished one e-book, I moved on to the next: reading instead of socializing, reading instead of cooking, reading instead of sleeping, reading instead of paying attention to my husband and my kids. Once, I’m ashamed to admit, I brought my Kindle to work and read between patients.

“After that I start a new ritual,” he said. “Every time I go into hotel room, I place sticky notes all around—on the bathroom mirror, the TV, the remote control—saying, ‘Don’t do it.’ I don’t even last one day.”

Prohibition led to a sharp decrease in the number of Americans consuming and becoming addicted to alcohol. Rates of public drunkenness and alcohol-related liver disease decreased by half during this period in the absence of new remedies to treat addiction.

Our dopamine economy, or what historian David Courtwright has called “limbic capitalism”

Today’s cannabis is five to ten times more potent than the cannabis of the 1960s and is available in cookies, cakes, brownies, gummy bears, blueberries, “pot tarts,” lozenges, oils, aromatics, tinctures, teas . . . the list is endless.

polypharmacy—that is, using multiple drugs simultaneously or in close proximity—has become the norm.

Even acts of kindness toward others are framed as a strategy for personal happiness. Altruism, no longer merely a good in itself, has become a vehicle for our own “well-being.”

“Yes, that’s true,” I said. “Boredom is not just boring. It can also be terrifying. It forces us to come face-to-face with bigger questions of meaning and purpose. But boredom is also an opportunity for discovery and invention. It creates the space necessary for a new thought to form, without which we’re endlessly reacting to stimuli around us, rather than allowing ourselves to be within our lived experience.”

By this accounting, one hit off a meth pipe is equal to ten orgasms.

pleasure and pain are processed in overlapping brain regions and work via an opponent-process mechanism.

I tend to imagine this self-regulating system as little gremlins hopping on the pain side of the balance to counteract the weight on the pleasure side. The gremlins represent the work of homeostasis:

the control group, the pathological gamblers showed a marked increase in dopamine levels when they lost money.

The more they lose, the stronger the urge to continue gambling, and the stronger the rush when they win—a phenomenon described as “loss chasing.”

I was also assuaging my grief at never having another baby, something I wanted and my husband did not, creating a tension in our marriage and in our sex life that hadn’t existed before.

“A week would be good, but in my experience, a month is usually the minimum amount of time it takes to reset the brain’s reward pathway.”

I remember standing in the kitchen in 2001 holding my newborn baby in my arms and experiencing an intrusive image of smashing her head against the refrigerator or the kitchen counter and watching it implode like a soft melon.

Cigarette smokers are more likely than matched controls to discount monetary rewards (that is, they value them less if they have to wait longer for them). The more they smoke, and the more nicotine they consume, the more they discount future rewards. These findings hold true for both hypothetical money and real money.

They found that when participants chose immediate rewards, emotion- and reward-processing parts of the brain lit up. When participants delayed their reward, the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain involved in planning and abstract thinking—became active. The implication here is that we are all now vulnerable to prefrontal cortical atrophy as our reward pathway has become the dominant driver of our lives.

By contrast, the amount of leisure time in the United States today increased by 5.1 hours per week between 1965 and 2003, an additional 270 leisure hours per year. By 2040, the number of leisure hours in a typical day in the United States is projected to be 7.2 hours, with just 3.8 hours of daily work. The numbers for other high-income countries are similar.

“Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men,” “Younger men, ages 21 to 30, exhibited a larger decline in work hours over the last fifteen years than older men or women. Since 2004, time-use data show that younger men distinctly shifted their leisure to video gaming and other recreational computer activities.”

In the spring of 2015, Muhammad committed to abstaining until he passed his qualifying exam, however long it took. For the next year, he abstained from cannabis and worked harder than ever before. His final report was over 100 pages long. “It was,” he told me, “one of the most positive and productive years of my life.”

Mitch was able to use categorical binding to mitigate the risk of relapse to sports betting. There’s something tragic and touching about having to ban yourself.

The well-worn American tradition of dieting—vegetarian, vegan, raw vegan, gluten-free, Atkins, Zone, ketogenic, Paleolithic, grapefruit—is one example of categorical self-binding.

A gluten-free diet, which previously had effectively limited consumption of high-calorie processed foods such as cakes, cookies, crackers, cereal, pastas, and pizzas, now no longer does.

The evolution of the gluten-free diet illustrates how attempts to control consumption are swiftly countered by modern market forces, just one more example of the challenges inherent in our dopamine economy.

Cigarettes became vape pens and ZYN pouches. Heroin became OxyContin. Cannabis became “medical marijuana.” No sooner have we committed to abstinence than our old drug reappears as a nicely packaged, affordable new product saying, Hey! This is okay. I’m good for you now.

She removed all alcohol save one beer, which she left in her refrigerator. She called it her “totemic beer,” which she regarded as the symbol of her choice not to drink, a representation of her will and autonomy. She told herself that she only needed to focus on not drinking that one beer rather than the more daunting task of not drinking any beer from the vast quantity available in the world.

Then he tried opioids for the first time, which was easy to do in Arkansas in 2009, when opioid manufacturers and distributors were pumping millions of opioid pain pills into the state. In that same year, doctors in Arkansas wrote 116 opioid prescriptions per 100 persons living in Arkansas.

Patients with pain who take opioids daily for more than a month are at increased risk not only for opioid addiction but also for worsened pain. As mentioned earlier, this is the process called opioid-induced hyperalgesia, that is, opioids making pain worse with repeated doses.

Worse yet, have psychotropic medications become a means of social control, especially of the poor, unemployed, and disenfranchised? Psychiatric drugs are prescribed more often and in larger amounts to poor people, especially poor children.

“I got into a routine where I immersed myself in ice water for five to ten minutes every morning and again just before bed. I did that every day for the next three years. It was key to my recovery.”

“For the first five to ten seconds, my body is screaming: Stop, you’re killing yourself. It’s that painful.” “I can imagine.” “But I tell myself it’s time limited, and it’s worth it. After the initial shock, my skin goes numb. Right after I get out, I feel high. It’s exactly like a drug . . . like how I remember ecstasy or recreational Vicodin. Incredible. I feel great for hours.”

Using blood samples, the researchers showed that plasma (blood) dopamine concentrations increased 250 percent, and plasma norepinephrine concentrations increased 530 percent as a result of cold-water immersion.

We’ve all experienced some version of pain giving way to pleasure. Perhaps like Socrates, you’ve noticed an improved mood after a period of being ill, or felt a runner’s high after exercise, or took inexplicable pleasure in a scary movie. Just as pain is the price we pay for pleasure, so too is pleasure our reward for pain.

Among Japanese citizens living outside the epicenter of the 1945 nuclear attack, those with low-dose radiation exposure may have shown marginally longer lifespans and decreased rates of cancer compared to un-irradiated individuals.

Exercise has a more profound and sustained positive effect on mood, anxiety, cognition, energy, and sleep than any pill I can prescribe.

He argued that the efficacy of acupuncture is mediated through pain, with needle insertion as the primary mechanism: “The needling, which can injure the tissue, is a noxious stimulation inducing pain . . . inhibiting great pain with little pain!”

adult hippocampal neurogenesis.” This refers to the discovery some decades ago that contrary to previous teaching, humans can generate new neurons in the brain into middle and late adulthood.

Use of the wheel was not limited to wild mice. There were also shrews, rats, snails, slugs, and frogs, most of whom demonstrated intentional and purposeful engagement with the wheel.

A study of skydivers compared to a control group (rowers) found that repeat skydivers were more likely to experience anhedonia, a lack of joy, in the rest of their lives.

By 2002, the top-paid 20 percent were twice as likely to work long hours as the lowest-paid 20 percent, and that trend continues. Economists speculate that this change is due to higher rewards for those at the top of the economic food chain.

“If stimulating the prefrontal cortex causes people to be more honest, is it also possible that being more honest stimulates the prefrontal cortex? Might the practice of telling the truth strengthen activity and excitability in the parts of the brain we use for future planning, emotion regulation, and delayed gratification?” I asked.

But if the therapist can help the patient take responsibility if not for the event itself, then for how they react to it in the here and now, that patient is empowered to move forward with their life. I have been deeply impressed with AA philosophy and teachings on this point. One of the preeminent AA mottos, often printed in bold type on its brochures, is, “I am responsible.”

Shame makes us feel bad about ourselves as people, whereas guilt makes us feel bad about our actions while preserving a positive sense of self. Shame is a maladaptive emotion. Guilt is an adaptive emotion. My problem with the shame-guilt dichotomy is that experientially, shame and guilt are identical.

Once I know a patient’s story—the forces that shaped them to create the person I see before me—animosity evaporates in the warmth of empathy. To truly understand someone is to care for them.

In particular, those behaviors that seem excessive, gratuitous, or even irrational in existing religious institutions, such as wearing certain hairstyles or certain clothing, abstaining from various foods or forms of modern technology, or refusing certain medical treatments, are rational when understood as a cost to the individual to reduce free riding within an organization.

AA and other 12 Step groups have been maligned as “cults” or organizations in which people trade their addiction to alcohol and/or drugs to an addiction to the group. These criticisms fail to appreciate that the strictness of the organization, its cultishness, may be the very source of its effectiveness.

But the lived experience of my patients suggests that prosocial shame can have positive, healthy effects by smoothing some of narcissism’s rougher edges, tying us more closely to our supportive social networks, and curbing our addictive tendencies.

I urge you to find a way to immerse yourself fully in the life that you’ve been given. To stop running from whatever you’re trying to escape, and instead to stop, and turn, and face whatever it is.

Podcast notes – Charles Duhigg (Smarter, Faster, Better) on Jordan Harbinger

Guest Charles Duhigg – business journalist, author of Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better

How to think is more important than What to think

Power of Contemplative routines – habits to give us space to think about right things
eg, on way to work, think about upcoming day

Jerry Robbins (sp?) wrote nightly letters to friends – a habit to think about what happened to him that day

Charles’s own: every evening he tells his wife everything that happened that day, describes those things in detail to her, pushes him to think more deeply
Jordan also does verbalization – explaining his day, his problems – with podcast guests, business partners, romantic partner

Laptop notes vs Longhand notes
Laptop 3x more info from lecture, copy verbatim
But longhand notes score much better on recall test later
“Disfluency” – act of thinking, encodes more deeply

Productive people have checkin systems – eg, Sunday afternoon, review what happened last week, plan for next week

Productive people perceive choices where others see just chores
eg, Marine Corps changed basic training to force recruits to make lots more choices – you figure out where the cleaning supplies are, you determine whether to throw something out or keep it
eg, when going through your emails, look for ways to exhibit agency, make a decision, turn chores into choices
eg, grading papers is a boring task, before doing it, one professor goes through his mental mantra to internalize that grading papers > helps university > funds his research > helps to cure cancer

Brain is a tool we can choose to change and manipulate

Carol Dweck – internal locus of control, growth mindset – instead of complimenting a kid on how smart they are, compliment how hard they worked (effort is a choice, being smart isn’t)

Google’s quest to build a perfect team – the result? They found WHO was on the team didn’t matter as much as HOW the team interacted
Two behaviors always helped
1. equality in conversational turn taking – one person doesn’t consistently dominate, and others aren’t always silent
2. ostentatious listening behavior – show you that I’m listening, mirror back what others say
Creates atmosphere of psychological safety

Google – a tech company completely reliant on computers – has a rule where everyone must close computer before start a meeting – they know this is more effective

Visualize what’s coming in specificity / detail – what we expect to occur, what exactly we’ll do or say – which helps prepare us and mentally primes us for that behavior

Why are some people more creative on a fixed schedule?
It’s a product not of creative individual but a creative process – commit to the process, yielding ideas on a schedule
Disney movie Frozen – was on brink of disaster just months before release – “anyone can be creative if they have the right process” – take your own experiences and frame in new original ways
They held an offsite – took turns to share your favorite cliches / ideas – lots of women on the team – realized key themes were Princess + Sisterhood – sisterhood is complicated, relationships can be nuanced
the breakthru was realizing the movie’s heart was about the sisters’ relationship and helping each other

Most creative people collect ideas and fit them together – “creative brokerage”
Hamilton = Hip hop + Founding fathers

Wrote this book because he wanted to improve his own productivity
At that time, his book Power of Habit was doing better than he expected, he was also writing an award winning series of articles, but he felt miserable, too busy, stressed, felt overwhelmed by minutiae and process
How to find better balance while still accomplishing major goals?

Developed contemplative routines
-each evening, he tells his wife about his day, what he liked and disliked – looks forward to this chance to review with his wife
-on subway in morning, he visualizes how his day will unfold, which better prepares and primes him
–

More change than ever in world, people are anxious about it
Answer is to think more, focus on right goals, build mental models to focus better

3 books that changed my life and I hope they help you, too: Power of Habit, Spark, and Religion for Atheists

3 Books: Power of Habit, Spark, Religion for Atheists

In the last few years, there were 3 books that profoundly influenced me and together pushed me in a whole new direction, with respect to both life philosophy and career interests. As part of writing Habit Driven Life, a series of essays that I might turn into a book, I wanted to share these three life changers with you.

The first was Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit [Amazon aff]. Here’s my cheatsheet for it. Charles’s book taught me that if your life is a house, then habits are its brick and mortar. Brick by brick, layer by layer, habit by habit, you construct the building that is your life. Your creation can be a wobbly shack or it can be a rock walled mansion. It all depends on your habits.

The book was filled with mental lightbulbs. One lightbulb that shined brightest for me was a concept known as keystone habits. Like the keystone which is placed at the top of a stone arch, holding the arch together, keystone habits are behaviors upon which other behaviors rely. For example, in a group of good friends, there is often one person who does all the planning and organizing. Without her there might not be a group, or the group would socialize far less often. Keystone habits work like this. An example of a keystone habit for me is daily exercise. Every day that I can go for a long run, I am happier and more relaxed. I have a better appetite. I sleep better. I can almost feel the mental cobwebs being dusted off and wiped away with each mile.

After reading The Power of Habit, I began to think of a day as just a sequence of habits. If you haven’t programmed your habits, then your habits are programming you. Habits create outcomes, good or bad. If you don’t wake up early and feel refreshed, it’s because you don’t have the habit of going to bed early and sleeping under the right conditions (such as a very dark and quiet room). If you don’t build your favorite side project, it’s because you haven’t created the right routines in your schedule and in your environment to do so. If you want to accomplish your dreams, you absolutely MUST set the right habits.

Some of us are lucky enough to have good habits from childhood, learned from our parents or teachers or coaches. But everyone can improve their habits. And good habits, no matter how sturdy, can break, fall apart, require maintenance. Just like a house.

Building the right habits requires experimentation and patience and, above all, repetition. You simply make your bed each morning, morning after morning. A year later, one random morning, you’ll leave your bedroom and walk into the kitchen. You’ll have a moment where you wonder, wait a minute – did I make my bed? And you’ll walk back to your bedroom to discover that the bed’s already been made.

You, my friend, have got yourself a new habit.

It’s a great feeling.

Here’s aspiring comedian Brad Isaac telling a story about Jerry Seinfeld and the habit that helped him become the world’s richest standup comic:

He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker. He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day.

“After a few days you’ll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You’ll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job is to not break the chain.”

The second book was John Ratey’s Spark [Amazon aff]. Here’s its cheatsheet. Spark convinced me that regular aerobic exercise could alleviate and cure almost everything that began to plague me in my late 20s: growing social anxiety, a sometimes depressive mindset, the heavy lethargy that enveloped me like a fast moving fog on many afternoons. The book provided just the – spark – I needed to get out of the house and run. And as I mentioned above, running has rewired my life.

Spark is the sort of book that’s like a wise grandfather. It tells you what you kinda-sorta-already know, but finally, for the first time, you truly listen. Your heart and soul open, and the book gets into you, and it tweaks and adjusts and cleans things like a mechanic.

The third and final book was Religion for Atheists [Amazon aff]. The author Alain de Botton asks, how can we live better by studying the world’s enduring religions? He submits, in convincing fashion, that religious traditions from Buddhism to Judaism are enduring sources of wisdom and self-help. I’m a big fan of Alain’s work.

As you study organized religions, digging through and within their infinite layers, you see that each tradition is a massive collections of habits. From prayer to sacrament, from weekly sermon to annual pilgrimage, religion-as-institution just might be the most enduring and comprehensive collection of habits we’ve ever assembled. Religion is belief, and religion is ritual. And ritual is a collection of habits, in much the same way a football team is a collection of players.

A devout Muslim prays at five precise times each and every day, in a highly prescribed and structured manner. What actions do I perform five times a day? Only the most fundamental ones: eat, drink, use the restroom, check my email. Talk about power and influence. Hinduism has been around for 4K years. What else but the most essential technologies have lasted this long? The written word? The wheel? Certainly not the oldest American corporation (DuPont, about 200 years old) or even the world’s oldest university (depending on who you ask, about 1000 years old).

Now of course religion can go very wrong. But so can any other set of powerful and lasting beliefs. After all, democracy and capitalism are two pillars upon which America today stands, but it was these same engines that propelled us to take our land, with violence, from the very people who had been living there, while also capturing and importing millions of others to serve as slave labor for centuries. Two enormous tragedies from which we’ve yet to fully recover. Both driven by, and justified by, the ideologies upon which we’re so reliant today.

But I digress.

Upon finishing Religion for Atheists, I downloaded and read the Bhagavad Gita, in awe of its lyric beauty and incomparable scope. I started to attend church, which is a fulfilling but not-yet-regular habit. I deepened my meditation practice. Slowly, most importantly, I began to have faith: not in a powerful, bearded man who sits high above the clouds and renders judgment, but rather in a force that is both far simpler and yet more magical. The simple belief that there is something greater than us in the world. By us, I mean you and I.

The single danger of life in a godless society is that it lacks reminders of the transcendent and therefore leaves us unprepared for disappointment and eventual annihilation. When God is dead, human beings – much to their detriment – are at risk of taking psychological centre stage – Alain de Botton

If Power of Habit gave me understanding and Spark gave me inspiration, Religion for Atheists provided purpose. I felt driven to understand and share religious wisdom, wisdom that has, for the most part, been isolated and kept within silos.

I believe we can and should learn from all of the religious traditions. Whether you’re Catholic or agnostic, Hindu or Wiccan or atheist. Many people are already doing this, even if they don’t see it as such. From yoga to meditation to pilgrimage, from vegetarianism to tithing to universal compassion, religious ideas and rituals are everywhere in modern secular society. And everywhere being rebranded and reinvented for reasons that are as difficult to explain as they are easy to understand.

So these three books: Power of Habit, Spark, and Religion for Atheists. I hope you browse them, I hope you read them, I hope you enjoy them or at least are challenged by them. And I hope you let me know. Thanks!

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!