How to build habits

And so throughout the rest of this presentation I want to talk about how we can do that. Today I’m going to teach you how to build the habits that you need to get the results that you want.

And in order to do this, I’m going to take you through a framework for building better habits. And I’m also going to share a personal example of how I use this. So my writing habit.

If you don’t know I write at Jamesclear.com, write about how to build better habits, improve performance and generally live better. Over a million people visit the site each month. There’s over 400,000 subscribers on the weekly email newsletter. And it all came out of the simple writing habit.

So for the rest of this talk, there are four stages of habit formation. I’m going to take you through each of those four.

Noticing; Wanting; Doing; and Liking.

You cannot perform a habit or take an action if you do not notice something. I need to see a coffee cup sitting on the side in order to pick it up first. But if it’s not in my realm of knowledge, if I don’t know it exists I can’t do anything about it.

But then I need to want it. I need to want to drink coffee and pick it up. If I don’t desire it or crave it, then I will not take the action.

Then there’s doing. You actually do the habit. And then I need to enjoy the reward. You need to enjoy drinking the coffee to repeat it again.

Let’s talk about each one, and as we do this, I’m going to give you a little bit of research about why it works. I’m going to give you practical action steps, at least one for each that you can use to implement in your life.

NOTICING

So one of my favorite things about noticing, one of my favorite strategies for discussing it, it’s called Implementation Intentions. And there are hundreds of studies on this, over 100 studies on implementation intentions, if you feel like digging out and getting into the research. But if not, I’ll just give you the simple version here.

So one of my favorite studies is about exercise. And they had three cohorts in this study. So they had first cohort, they said I just want you to track how often you workout over the next few weeks, right? So that’s the standard cohort, the control group.

Second group is that we want to track often your exercise, we’re also going to give you a motivational speech, presentation, talk about the benefits of heart health, why habits are good for you, so on. So this is the motivated group, all right.

The third group; they got the same presentation, so they are equally motivated and then they did one thing differently. And that one thing was they filled out this sentence. They said: during the next week, I will for taking all these 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on this day at this time in this place, right?

They specifically stated their intention to implement the behavior. So implementation intention.

Here’s what happened. First group, one out of three of them worked out. Second group: motivation did nothing. As soon as they left the researcher’s facility the next day they were motivated. It’s like reading a book or watching a YouTube or listening to a motivational speaker and then you forget all about it 20 minutes later.

But the third group… the group that has specific plan for how they were going to implement the behavior, nine out of ten of them worked out. So you can increase your odds of success 2x to 3x just by having a specific plan.

And this is the insight: many people think that they lack motivation, when what they really lack is clarity. They think that they need to get more motivated that they need willpower in order to execute on a habit. If I just felt like writing, if I just felt like meditating, if I felt like working out, then I would do it.

But in fact, they don’t have a plan for it, so they wake up each day thinking I wonder if I’ll feel motivated to write today, wonder if I’ll feel motivated to workout today.

But instead you can take the decision-making out of it by explicitly stating when, where, and how you want to implement the habit.

So here’s how I did this with my writing habit. I decided that on November 12, 2012 which was a Monday if you check, that was going to be the first day that I published an article. And I was going to publish every Monday and every Thursday. That was my implementation intention. That was my specific plan.

Didn’t matter how good or how bad it was; it didn’t matter how long or how short it was. It didn’t matter how I felt about it. If all I could do was write three good sentences that day, then that was getting published.

But I did that, and I did it for three years. And that was how the site grew. It was just that core habit that drove the growth.

So you need to give your goals a time and a place to live in the world, right? Give them space on your calendar.

Now it sounds easy to say let’s just start a plan, let’s write down exactly what you should do and then maybe you’ll follow through on it. But of course, we all know that there are challenges that arise. It’s not quite that easy.