94: Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg

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1. 00:00:00 All right, since we didn't have any action items from the last book that we read, I thought
2. 00:00:05 maybe we could check in with how the bullet journal stuff is going.
3. 00:00:08 Oh, fine.
4. 00:00:09 I like bullet journal stuff.
5. 00:00:11 I have mine right here.
6. 00:00:12 All right, so you're still doing the same method.
7. 00:00:16 Nothing really has changed or evolved.
8. 00:00:18 You made it through the first migration and you're pretty much sticking to the system,
9. 00:00:23 right?
10. 00:00:24 I am, I actually am approaching quickly onto the second migration.
11. 00:00:30 What is it today?
12. 00:00:31 Today is the 25th as we record this.
13. 00:00:35 And that means that in six days, I'll be doing a second migration.
14. 00:00:42 So by the time this episode releases, I'll be in the middle of my second one.
15. 00:00:47 So yeah, no, I think it's going well.
16. 00:00:50 Cool.
17. 00:00:51 Stick to it for now.
18. 00:00:52 Well, I will also stick to it, but not the bullet journal method.
19. 00:00:57 I'm afraid.
20. 00:00:58 I do officially saying you're done with quote unquote bullet journaling and just doing something
21. 00:01:04 on your own.
22. 00:01:05 What are you doing?
23. 00:01:06 I don't know.
24. 00:01:07 I guess I'm hacking my own bullet journal, which is not a bullet journal, but I've still
25. 00:01:12 got my fancy notebook that I am writing in every single day and time blocking and planning
26. 00:01:17 the night before and using as my daily log.
27. 00:01:21 And I've kind of gone through some testing.
28. 00:01:24 What am I going to do with all these things that I capture in here?
29. 00:01:28 And I actually made this great big diagram, which I can actually show you this.
30. 00:01:34 I sat down and I like tried to figure out where all the pieces fit in my work within
31. 00:01:41 the disk setup.
32. 00:01:42 Well, so this is kind of messy at the moment.
33. 00:01:45 It's gotten simpler since then, but basically thinking through like, okay, so I've always
34. 00:01:49 got the bullet journal with me.
35. 00:01:50 Where is that going to go?
36. 00:01:51 What types of things am I going to put in here?
37. 00:01:53 Yadda yadda yadda.
38. 00:01:54 And I think I've landed on the bullet journal is going to be the thing that I'm going to
39. 00:01:58 use to plan my day doing the time blocking, pick a couple of tasks and then log everything.
40. 00:02:05 But then once it gets logged there, it's going to go somewhere else.
41. 00:02:07 And for me, it's not going to be the moving them to the different monthly logs or to the
42. 00:02:14 different collections.
43. 00:02:15 The more I play with room research, that's going to end up being my collections because
44. 00:02:20 stuff just connects.
45. 00:02:21 Sure.
46. 00:02:22 Sure.
47. 00:02:23 Now for inside baseball, Mike and I are doing our first ever recording of this with video
48. 00:02:28 on.
49. 00:02:30 And Mike just showed me a picture of this.
50. 00:02:33 So can you drop a picture of that into the show notes?
51. 00:02:36 Yes, I will drop a picture in the show notes.
52. 00:02:38 I'll try to do over recording here.
53. 00:02:39 But yeah, it's basically just thinking through like the GTD style decision trees, kind of
54. 00:02:44 how it started.
55. 00:02:45 And then I realized as I started drawing this, I've got a bunch of different things, a bunch
56. 00:02:48 of different places.
57. 00:02:49 And it was more complicated than I needed it to be.
58. 00:02:52 I've been kind of neglecting my task manager anyways.
59. 00:02:57 And then I started digging into some of the cool stuff that people are using Rome for.
60. 00:03:02 I remember talking about scrum and wishing we could do something like that inside of
61. 00:03:05 OmniFocus.
62. 00:03:06 Right.
63. 00:03:07 And you hacked together some way to do it.
64. 00:03:09 Well, put like scripts together to force it into place.
65. 00:03:13 Yeah.
66. 00:03:14 So basically with Rome research, you can do like markdown style Kanban boards in the middle
67. 00:03:19 of it.
68. 00:03:20 And then the things that you put on the Kanban board are linked to pages, which could be
69. 00:03:23 your project pages.
70. 00:03:25 And it just, I think this is probably the thing that will work for me in terms of like
71. 00:03:30 the creative stuff, which is primarily what I do.
72. 00:03:33 It's definitely not something if you were trying to work with clients and manage like
73. 00:03:37 the emails that they send you and stuff.
74. 00:03:39 You're not sending those into Rome.
75. 00:03:41 But in terms of connecting ideas and creating stuff, it's pretty cool tool.
76. 00:03:45 I shared a video with you and I also tweeted it, but I can include it in the show notes
77. 00:03:49 also about how I take the, I'm just playing with it still, but basically what I wanted
78. 00:03:55 to build was like a cross reference library of all of the sermon notes that I've taken.
79. 00:04:00 So I took the sketch note that I export as a PDF, put it inside of Rome because it can
80. 00:04:04 handle attachments.
81. 00:04:05 And then I've got this nomenclature that I use, these boxes around the scriptures that
82. 00:04:08 are used.
83. 00:04:09 I create a list of all of those, link those to a specific block, which has that particular
84. 00:04:14 verse on it so that when I look at a page for my sermon notes, hopefully you follow along
85. 00:04:18 here, you click on the verse, it takes you to the verse page and it also shows you because
86. 00:04:22 of the way Rome is built, all of the other pages that have a link to that, or mention
87. 00:04:27 that verse.
88. 00:04:28 So it's basically my own cross reference library as I build this thing out over time.
89. 00:04:34 And I think there's a lot of cool ways to do that, not just with the sermon notes, but
90. 00:04:38 just like the ideas that we read about in these books.
91. 00:04:42 I know we've like one instance that comes to mind is the story of the Polger sisters,
92. 00:04:47 the chess champions.
93. 00:04:48 We've heard that multiple places, right?
94. 00:04:50 So I could just have that in the quick bullet list of the, the mind note file that I upload
95. 00:04:56 to Rome.
96. 00:04:57 So I still have my mind note file.
97. 00:04:58 That's where I'm taking everything.
98. 00:04:59 I've taken all my notes and that ends up being in the club as well.
99. 00:05:03 But then just real quick distilling that when I'm done with a book, five, ten minutes transfer
100. 00:05:06 the important bullets into Rome.
101. 00:05:08 And then I have those pages created where I can see all of the different books that we've
102. 00:05:12 read that have referenced that particular story.
103. 00:05:16 And seeing those connections kind of opens up some interesting doors sometimes.
104. 00:05:22 And I think the more that I build into this, the more valuable those cross connections
105. 00:05:26 are going to become, but still early days.
106. 00:05:29 Sure.
107. 00:05:30 Yeah.
108. 00:05:31 Wait, I still have yet to, can you just go sign up for an account with Rome or do you
109. 00:05:37 have to be approved?
110. 00:05:38 Well, or you get into it.
111. 00:05:40 Thomas Frank created a video on it and it blew up.
112. 00:05:45 He's got a couple million YouTube subscribers.
113. 00:05:47 Sure.
114. 00:05:48 So after that, they shut it down.
115. 00:05:50 But I believe they just led in a bunch of new people.
116. 00:05:52 You have to request access at the moment.
117. 00:05:54 And I'm sure they're going to start charging pretty soon.
118. 00:05:57 It's a pretty solid app.
119. 00:05:58 I mean, it's obviously still in beta and there's some rough edges.
120. 00:06:01 But it's pretty incredible once you get some stuff into it.
121. 00:06:08 And really it's garbage in garbage out though, which is why I think it took me a while to
122. 00:06:14 get on board the Rome train.
123. 00:06:16 As I was just toying with it, you really can't do that with Rome.
124. 00:06:19 You really have to have like a specific use case you're going to solve, which for me was
125. 00:06:23 like the cross reference library, the sermon notes, or be all in with it.
126. 00:06:27 And I kind of like dipped my toes in it for a while and wasn't getting a lot of the benefit.
127. 00:06:31 But I think I see it now.
128. 00:06:34 And the more I think about like the bullet journal, I definitely want to keep this piece.
129. 00:06:38 I know by the way, it's interesting.
130. 00:06:39 Some people have said they've like abandoned their bullet journal in favor of Rome.
131. 00:06:42 And I can see how that can happen.
132. 00:06:43 But I still am 100% behind the analog download of the bullet journal.
133. 00:06:51 So I think that's- We got you hooked.
134. 00:06:54 Yeah, exactly.
135. 00:06:55 So that piece isn't going anywhere.
136. 00:06:57 It's just where do things go from there?
137. 00:06:58 And instead of sending it to multiple places, it makes sense to send it to Rome.
138. 00:07:03 Because I don't have 100 different tasks that I have to do this week.
139. 00:07:07 And I don't have to make sure all those things get done.
140. 00:07:09 I've got a couple projects I've got to finish.
141. 00:07:11 So all those notes can just be with that project.
142. 00:07:14 And Rome makes it very easy then to connect that and manage the progress of that project
143. 00:07:19 via the Kanban board and stuff like that.
144. 00:07:22 It's pretty cool.
145. 00:07:23 Yeah, I was asking about getting into Rome just because I've debated just looking at
146. 00:07:31 it and exploring it.
147. 00:07:33 But at the same time, it's like, okay, the holes that it would fill are very, very small.
148. 00:07:42 Sure.
149. 00:07:43 This is not a thing that I'm looking for something huge to take over and replace.
150. 00:07:50 Because I have a lot of already well-developed note-taking systems that link to other notes
151. 00:07:57 the way I want already.
152. 00:07:59 So I know this is like your mission, Mike, to get me to try it.
153. 00:08:04 But I have a long ways to go at the moment between bullet journaling and I'm an Envy
154. 00:08:10 Ultra slash Envy Alt user.
155. 00:08:13 So that means I end up not understanding a lot of the detail that goes into Rome, like
156. 00:08:21 why people are super excited about it.
157. 00:08:23 But I could probably rant on that for a while.
158. 00:08:28 But won't.
159. 00:08:29 We will not do that.
160. 00:08:30 I can tell you, I mean, if you're just looking for an Evernote type thing, then don't even
161. 00:08:35 waste your time.
162. 00:08:37 Right.
163. 00:08:38 You are interested in trying out a Zetal cast and I think this is the right tool for the
164. 00:08:44 job.
165. 00:08:45 In fact, I think my gap book this time is going to be to go back and read how to take smart
166. 00:08:51 notes again.
167. 00:08:52 What?
168. 00:08:53 Now that there is a tool that I believe can actually accomplish this.
169. 00:08:57 Sure.
170. 00:08:58 Because I remember being skeptical the first time that we read through it like, well,
171. 00:09:03 this sounds too simple.
172. 00:09:04 Right, I'm scanning my bookshelf, which is right above my desk.
173. 00:09:09 And the way that I'm scanning for this is for the inverted spine.
174. 00:09:12 Yep.
175. 00:09:13 Because I remember wrong.
176. 00:09:14 Yep.
177. 00:09:15 Right.
178. 00:09:16 It's like, I located it and it's backwards.
179. 00:09:19 Yep.
180. 00:09:20 Okay.
181. 00:09:21 I can't tell if I'm excited for you or worried going through that one.
182. 00:09:27 Give me a couple of months and then you'll either be on board or send help.
183. 00:09:31 Sure.
184. 00:09:32 Sure.
185. 00:09:33 So bullet journaling, still a thing I'm doing.
186. 00:09:38 You're exploring Rome.
187. 00:09:39 We've talked about that the last couple times, but you've got something new that released
188. 00:09:42 here last Thursday, right?
189. 00:09:45 Yes.
190. 00:09:46 So we are talking about habits today.
191. 00:09:50 And one of the reasons that I picked this book as a gap book a long time ago was that
192. 00:09:56 we have been working on a course for habits for the sweet setup.
193. 00:10:01 So there is now a course called Simple Habits, which is six different videos on the concept
194. 00:10:09 of habits and how to track them, analog and the importance of all that, like the building
195. 00:10:16 blocks of habits, basically.
196. 00:10:17 And then there's a whole bunch of bonus stuff, which is interviews.
197. 00:10:20 Like I've got one in there, Sean's got one in there, Sean McCabe has one in there.
198. 00:10:24 I forget some of their people that haven't been there, but those are actually the cool
199. 00:10:27 part in my opinion is seeing like the ways that other people have hacked their habits
200. 00:10:31 and so there's some step-by-step videos, me talking in front of the camera, kind of walking
201. 00:10:38 through the building blocks.
202. 00:10:39 And then it's like, okay, so now you know what the components are.
203. 00:10:42 You can kind of use these to build your own habits.
204. 00:10:46 And then you get a whole bunch of examples of some really smart folks that are doing that.
205. 00:10:50 So it is at thesweetsetup.com/habits.
206. 00:10:56 And it is a $39 course.
207. 00:11:00 The videos themselves to go through it is probably only a couple of hours tops.
208. 00:11:04 So it's not something that you need to worry about investing a ton of time into.
209. 00:11:08 Sure.
210. 00:11:09 Which is probably good because the people who need to build good habits likely don't have
211. 00:11:13 them.
212. 00:11:14 Yep.
213. 00:11:15 Yep.
214. 00:11:16 Exactly.
215. 00:11:17 It's like, okay.
216. 00:11:18 Yeah.
217. 00:11:19 But like I said, it's not just the information that I think is cool about this.
218. 00:11:22 I think it's the examples of like the ways that people are doing this.
219. 00:11:26 It's like one quick example from the course, which I thought was brilliant and really
220. 00:11:29 got me thinking is this whole idea of habit stacking, right?
221. 00:11:32 We've talked about habit stacking before.
222. 00:11:34 We'll probably talk about it again today.
223. 00:11:36 But Sean's got an example of habit stacking in that course where he takes like every morning
224. 00:11:43 he gets up and he's written about this for the sweet setup, how he writes for an hour
225. 00:11:46 on his iPad before everybody else gets up.
226. 00:11:48 And he turns on the coffee, everything is set out, it's ready to go.
227. 00:11:52 And then he starts writing and he wanted to start taking vitamins.
228. 00:11:56 So he put the vitamins on top of the coffee.
229. 00:11:58 So that he physically has to touch the vitamins to open up the coffee to, you know, and just
230. 00:12:03 that little thing has caused him to take vitamins consistently, which is the exact type of thing
231. 00:12:09 that I've struggled with in the past where it's like, well, I know I should do that, but
232. 00:12:13 ah, it's too much work.
233. 00:12:14 I forget it.
234. 00:12:16 Right.
235. 00:12:18 And so it's those little things that I think that are valuable where you see like, oh,
236. 00:12:22 I could totally see how I could apply this thing that this person did in a different way.
237. 00:12:28 So yeah, that's the, that's the course.
238. 00:12:31 And I am pretty proud of how it turned out.
239. 00:12:34 Weirdly excited about this one, an email are kind of the things that I get excited
240. 00:12:39 because I just want most people are like, oh, no.
241. 00:12:42 Yeah, I feel like we have a thing for habits when I was scanning my shelves for how to take
242. 00:12:50 smart notes.
243. 00:12:51 I was looking at like all the behavior modification type books that we've done for bookworms.
244. 00:12:57 Like how many habits books have we covered like point blank habits or disciplines or
245. 00:13:04 yes, there might be another one.
246. 00:13:08 Yep.
247. 00:13:09 So here's another one today.
248. 00:13:12 Ready set go.
249. 00:13:13 All right.
250. 00:13:15 So yeah, today's book is Tiny Habits by BJ Fogg.
251. 00:13:19 And this was something that I saw in the airport actually when I went to visit you, which seems
252. 00:13:24 like any eternity ago.
253. 00:13:26 It does feel like it was a long time ago.
254. 00:13:28 It wasn't that long though.
255. 00:13:29 It wasn't.
256. 00:13:30 It really wasn't.
257. 00:13:31 No, but yeah.
258. 00:13:33 So I saw it in the airport and my God, it looks like an interesting cover.
259. 00:13:36 And then I dug into it a little bit, realized that BJ Fogg is the person who James Clear credits
260. 00:13:44 with a lot of the research behind atomic habits and is basically the guy behind all of the
261. 00:13:49 habits.
262. 00:13:51 It sounds like he's been doing this for a really long time and he's done behavioral design
263. 00:13:57 with clients for a long time.
264. 00:14:00 But he was kind of pushed to write this book a couple of years ago.
265. 00:14:04 Right.
266. 00:14:05 And he's got some stories beginning in the end that kind of talk about that.
267. 00:14:08 But the interesting part of this book, in my opinion, is not those stories.
268. 00:14:12 It is the actual content, which gets into the mechanics of habits in maybe the best way
269. 00:14:19 that I have ever seen.
270. 00:14:22 What was your initial impression?
271. 00:14:24 This versus power of habit and atomic habits.
272. 00:14:26 How would you rate those three in Europe?
273. 00:14:29 I'm not guessing for like the star ratings, whatever, but like if you were to recommend
274. 00:14:32 one book on habits, is it this one?
275. 00:14:35 Is it James Clear?
276. 00:14:36 Is it power of habit?
277. 00:14:37 Oh, that's a tough one.
278. 00:14:39 Because atomic habits clicked with the way my brain operates.
279. 00:14:44 That's a so that the person you're talking to confesses that they're really excited about
280. 00:14:49 habits and they really want to start building new habits.
281. 00:14:52 And you've got these three books in your hands.
282. 00:14:53 Which one are you handing them?
283. 00:14:55 Personally, I'm probably going to throw them atomic habits.
284. 00:14:58 Really?
285. 00:14:59 Okay.
286. 00:15:00 I think if you want to understand the technical details of it, I think this is the one, tiny
287. 00:15:06 habits is the one to go to.
288. 00:15:08 Sure.
289. 00:15:09 But the general person, I feel like, would get a better overview with atomic habits.
290. 00:15:18 That might be my bent and bias towards James Clear coming out.
291. 00:15:22 Because I followed him for a long time.
292. 00:15:24 Yep.
293. 00:15:25 And I feel like I have a tendency to recommend him and his stuff a lot.
294. 00:15:29 So that might be part of that.
295. 00:15:31 So I purely logical rationale.
296. 00:15:36 This one's probably the one I should share.
297. 00:15:38 But I think my tendency would be towards atomic habits.
298. 00:15:43 But again, even atomic habits, tiny changes, remarkable results.
299. 00:15:48 Like he's even got the homage paid to tiny habits in his subtitle.
300. 00:15:53 So if you follow that, that would mean you probably should look at tiny habits first.
301. 00:15:58 Just my thought.
302. 00:15:59 Yeah.
303. 00:16:00 So what brought that on is I was talking to my dad.
304. 00:16:05 And he saw that I was reading this book and he thought it was interesting.
305. 00:16:12 And he made the comment that atomic habits was too militaristic.
306. 00:16:19 And he said he defined it as the atomic habits assumes that you have the willpower and the
307. 00:16:26 self control to follow through and do the habits.
308. 00:16:31 And I thought that was an interesting point.
309. 00:16:33 So this one kind of talks about all of the factors that are played that produce the behaviors.
310. 00:16:40 And the way that he describes them shows that it's kind of like an equation or a formula
311. 00:16:46 that you can modify.
312. 00:16:48 It's not just a did it work or did it not work and try something else, which is kind
313. 00:16:56 of where I thought atomic habits landed.
314. 00:16:58 For me, the progression is the power of habit looking at that Q routine reward and being
315. 00:17:03 like, that's not right.
316. 00:17:04 There's something else missing there.
317. 00:17:06 James Clear interjecting the fourth step where he calls it the craving, I believe, after
318. 00:17:12 the queue.
319. 00:17:13 So you have the desire to do something and being like, okay, that makes more sense.
320. 00:17:18 And then he gets into like the habit stacking and things like that.
321. 00:17:20 And at that point of that book, I have to admit that I was like, okay, this is getting
322. 00:17:23 a little too complicated.
323. 00:17:27 And then this book, I start reading this and he's got the fog behavior model.
324. 00:17:32 Maybe this is the place to jump into this first chapter here on the elements of behavior.
325. 00:17:37 This fog behavior model where B equals MAP and he's got this graph of motivation and
326. 00:17:43 ability and then this action line.
327. 00:17:45 So behavior basically equals motivation times ability times prompt.
328. 00:17:51 So the prompt is the queue and this was the thing I had against the Charles Duhig version
329. 00:17:57 is the queue doesn't automatically, that prompt doesn't automatically mean that this
330. 00:18:01 routine is going to happen.
331. 00:18:04 And then you've got the motivation and the ability, these are two factors and then the
332. 00:18:07 prompt basically being the thing that, depending on where that is, that can trigger the whole
333. 00:18:11 thing.
334. 00:18:12 And this model, this harkens back to my college economics class in some ways.
335. 00:18:19 And that's why I thought, you know, when I saw this, it's like, oh, I get it now.
336. 00:18:24 But I do confess that when I got done reading this first chapter, I was like, why didn't
337. 00:18:29 anybody ever tell me this before?
338. 00:18:31 Like I feel like I've read all the stuff on this and this feels new.
339. 00:18:35 Yes, yes.
340. 00:18:37 Yeah, I was kind of flipping through, I grabbed the other two books, the Power of Habit and
341. 00:18:43 Atomic Habits and was just kind of flipping through them.
342. 00:18:46 You know, all of these habit books, they want to build these charts with the loop
343. 00:18:51 syndrome and they want to show how like the queue routine reward piece from the Power
344. 00:18:59 of Habit and, you know, James throws in a fourth element to that.
345. 00:19:04 But I guess if you start looking at those using this B equals map formula from BJ Fogg,
346. 00:19:13 like, yes, he has another formula and it does have a cycle to it when he gets later on.
347. 00:19:19 He explains that.
348. 00:19:21 But I think this is probably easier to understand as I'm thinking through those three setups.
349. 00:19:31 This one's probably easiest to understand as far as the different elements that go into
350. 00:19:36 a habit as opposed to the habit itself.
351. 00:19:40 Sure.
352. 00:19:41 You get the difference there.
353. 00:19:44 So, as opposed to like queue routine reward, that's what makes up a habit.
354. 00:19:46 This is more about how to get yourself to do those behaviors which then can become habits.
355. 00:19:52 Exactly.
356. 00:19:53 And that's the thing that was always missing, I think, with the Charles Duhigg thing, which
357. 00:19:57 is why that particular habit loop never felt right to me.
358. 00:20:02 It's like, okay, that habit loop, once you start it, will keep going, but you got to
359. 00:20:07 start it somewhere in the place to obviously start it is the queue.
360. 00:20:10 So your brain naturally, maybe this is just the way I think and it's the fault is mine,
361. 00:20:14 not Charles Duhigg's, but it's like, okay, if you can control the queue, then you're
362. 00:20:18 good.
363. 00:20:19 Or if you can change that one under my thumb, I'll be happy.
364. 00:20:23 Yeah, or you already have the queue or something you can do about it.
365. 00:20:25 So all you gotta do is change the routine.
366. 00:20:27 And then I don't know, just didn't seem that simple.
367. 00:20:30 So when this, when he explained it in this book, I felt like this gave you, this gave
368. 00:20:39 me anyways, when I read it, a lot more hope and a lot, like a greater sense of control
369. 00:20:45 over the process, because there's more factors at play here.
370. 00:20:51 And you can actually tackle any one of these, like this behavior, equaling, motivation,
371. 00:20:57 ability prompt.
372. 00:20:58 Like, if you were to take this graph, and he has a bunch of different examples of this
373. 00:21:02 in the book itself, there's a lot of these visuals, which are really cool.
374. 00:21:06 But if you are having trouble following through and doing an activity that you want to create
375. 00:21:11 or stopping an activity that you want to eliminate, for example, you can locate where
376. 00:21:15 that would be on this two dimensional graph.
377. 00:21:19 And then if the thing is not happening, you realize very quickly, well, you can either
378. 00:21:25 increase your ability to do this thing, or you can increase your motivation to do this
379. 00:21:31 thing to get that onto the right side of that action line.
380. 00:21:36 And there's no one specific thing that is going to make the difference in every single
381. 00:21:41 case, which I think is actually very freeing.
382. 00:21:45 And it could seem like that's more complicated, like that's a bunch more stuff to figure out.
383. 00:21:50 But this whole book is basically about dissecting your current habits and recognizing what's
384. 00:21:55 going on there.
385. 00:21:56 And he's got a bunch of different exercises, the swarm of behaviors, all that type of stuff
386. 00:22:00 that helps you identify, like the things that are creating the result that you're getting
387. 00:22:06 and then I think time will tell, I guess.
388. 00:22:09 But based on the stories that he shares, I feel like those types of things that he outlines
389. 00:22:14 in this book are much more useful than the straight up formulas that you get in the others.
390. 00:22:21 I can't help but think like the his particular behavior model is B equals MAP.
391. 00:22:28 So behavior equals motivation, ability and prompt.
392. 00:22:32 And in my head, I feel like this one's going like this particular formula is likely to
393. 00:22:37 stick longer only because I'm used to looking at bit map images and I can't help but see
394. 00:22:43 B map.
395. 00:22:44 I see bit map in my head every time I see B equals map.
396. 00:22:47 So just that, I don't think that's intentional at all.
397. 00:22:51 But I might actually remember this one better this way.
398. 00:22:54 Yep, yeah, and the way that these work, I mean, it's not rocket science.
399. 00:23:02 This book is probably longer than it would have needed to be.
400. 00:23:07 But I don't think it's too long to be honest.
401. 00:23:09 Like he's attacking the same concepts from different angles.
402. 00:23:13 But it does feel like the different chapters that we're going to cover here, they are appropriate.
403. 00:23:18 But even in this first section, he's talking about the troubleshooting of behavior and how
404. 00:23:23 you shouldn't start with the motivation.
405. 00:23:25 You should check and see if there's a prompt first of all.
406. 00:23:28 And then you should see if you have the ability to do the thing.
407. 00:23:30 And then if those things are present, then you see if the motivation is there.
408. 00:23:36 And that can be troubleshooting a behavior that you want to do that you're not doing,
409. 00:23:40 like starting a journaling habit or whatever, or it could be reverse engineered if it's
410. 00:23:44 a negative habit that you want to break, which he has issues with that word break,
411. 00:23:48 which we'll get into here.
412. 00:23:50 This would be a good spot to actually go into that second chapter on motivation.
413. 00:23:55 And the subtitle here is focus on matching.
414. 00:23:58 You have anything else you want to say about the first chapter?
415. 00:24:00 No, I don't think so.
416. 00:24:01 I keep thinking through things to talk about that revolve going into the next three chapters.
417. 00:24:06 So I'm good with that.
418. 00:24:08 Okay.
419. 00:24:09 So this next chapter then is talking about the motivation part of the, what's the term
420. 00:24:15 for this graph?
421. 00:24:16 I mean, I know it's the behavior model, but there's got to be a better way to describe
422. 00:24:20 it.
423. 00:24:21 I'll just use that for now for the fog behavior model.
424. 00:24:22 So when I'm saying the fog behavior model, I'm talking about motivation, ability, and
425. 00:24:26 then the action line.
426. 00:24:28 And then he's got a million different versions of this to illustrate examples that he's talking
427. 00:24:32 about.
428. 00:24:33 But in this particular one, I thought it was cool where he shows that there are conflicting
429. 00:24:38 motivations.
430. 00:24:39 And later on in the book, he talks about some of these being like hope versus fear.
431. 00:24:45 And recognizing this, I think, is really important.
432. 00:24:47 So in this particular graph, the motivation is on the Y axis.
433. 00:24:52 So the motivation arrows are pushing up from the bottom and down from the top.
434. 00:24:57 And he's got a smiley face.
435. 00:24:59 Well, actually, it's just a face.
436. 00:25:00 He's not smiling and locating that particular point on the graph.
437. 00:25:06 And then it's, it's location as based in relation to the action line determines whether
438. 00:25:11 it's, it's happening.
439. 00:25:12 So obviously the takeaway here is that the motivation can be the trigger between you
440. 00:25:21 following through with the activity or not following through with the activity.
441. 00:25:24 But he also talks about how it's unreliable in this particular section.
442. 00:25:30 I thought it was interesting how he talks about the difference between aspirations, outcomes,
443. 00:25:34 and desires.
444. 00:25:36 I thought this was the best description for why I don't like goals that I've found so
445. 00:25:43 far.
446. 00:25:44 Yes.
447. 00:25:45 He describes.
448. 00:25:46 100%.
449. 00:25:47 He describes goals as aspirations and outcomes, which outcomes are measurable achievements,
450. 00:25:52 aspirations are abstract desires.
451. 00:25:54 But really what matters according to this fog behavior, behavioral model is the behaviors,
452. 00:26:00 which is something that you can do right now or at another point in time.
453. 00:26:05 I feel like understanding that is a key piece going forward.
454. 00:26:08 Yeah.
455. 00:26:09 I was looking at some of my notes for this particular book, which are in my bullet journal.
456. 00:26:16 Happy to say it's page 12, if you want to know.
457. 00:26:21 And I have a note here to start using the term aspirations instead of goals.
458. 00:26:27 So if I have an action item from this particular book at the beginning, because I actually didn't
459. 00:26:32 write any action items down on this, and this is the perfect book for action items, I should
460. 00:26:38 say that.
461. 00:26:40 It's explaining how to do the right action and behavior.
462. 00:26:44 It's just detailing it.
463. 00:26:46 The whole book is about that, and yet I didn't put anything down.
464. 00:26:49 So yes, the term aspirations instead of goals, that just made a lot more sense to me because
465. 00:26:54 I hate the term goals anymore.
466. 00:26:55 So having something that would just be, this is something I want to get to, that made so
467. 00:27:01 much more sense to me.
468. 00:27:02 I like it.
469. 00:27:03 Sure.
470. 00:27:04 Well, regarding action items, I don't have anything specific either, but I will say that
471. 00:27:08 as I was thinking about this yesterday, putting together this outline, I realized that my
472. 00:27:12 action item is simply going to be rethinking my morning and evening routines, which sounds
473. 00:27:19 like a total cop out action item because I've done it before.
474. 00:27:22 But I feel like I am better armed with the information now to really make this stuff stick.
475. 00:27:27 I've got the analog tracking of my habits in the back of my bullet journal, and I'm recognizing
476. 00:27:34 that there are some that I am having some trouble with and things that I want to implement
477. 00:27:39 on a regular basis.
478. 00:27:40 So I'm going to take this approach and he's got the seven steps in the behavior design.
479. 00:27:45 I'm going to basically kind of go through this with my different habits.
480. 00:27:50 And I don't think that next time we'll be able to say, yes, these have been successful.
481. 00:27:54 Maybe I'll be blown away by how easy they are.
482. 00:27:56 Now that I understand the different components and I analyze this stuff under a microscope,
483. 00:28:01 but I don't expect that.
484. 00:28:03 What I do expect is that thinking about these things and just identifying what are the little
485. 00:28:09 behaviors I can do to make these easier to follow through with, that's going to have
486. 00:28:13 a positive effect.
487. 00:28:14 Is there a specific piece of those routines that you've been struggling with you'd be
488. 00:28:18 willing to talk about?
489. 00:28:19 Well, there's a couple things that are just rock solid.
490. 00:28:22 And that is the Bible reading in the morning, the prayer every day, stretching and the ones
491. 00:28:32 that are a little bit more difficult for me are journaling at the end of the day using
492. 00:28:38 the daily reflection template inside a day one.
493. 00:28:39 I've been pretty good with that one, but it's not 100% and I just want to figure out why
494. 00:28:46 that is difficult for me to do.
495. 00:28:48 Like I get the notification from day one.
496. 00:28:50 It's time to journal nine o'clock.
497. 00:28:51 I tap it, goes to the reflection template, but for whatever reason, when I get that notification,
498. 00:28:56 I find myself resisting it and I want to think about why because I confess this is an important
499. 00:29:02 thing for me.
500. 00:29:03 So I have to have to figure that part out.
501. 00:29:05 The other thing I really want to think through, I have an inversion table in my bedroom for
502. 00:29:11 crying out loud, but I can't follow through and use it for a couple of minutes every day.
503. 00:29:17 I do my stretches, no problem, which happened three feet from the inversion table.
504. 00:29:23 But for whatever reason, it's like, okay, I got to start my day and I just completely
505. 00:29:27 skip the stretching with the inversion table, which I know impacts me.
506. 00:29:32 If I skip it a couple days in a row, then I do start to have some neck and some back
507. 00:29:36 pain.
508. 00:29:37 It's not major.
509. 00:29:38 The stretching deals with a lot of the sciatica stuff that I was experiencing every once in
510. 00:29:43 a while, so it just doesn't hurt enough, I guess, for it to stick.
511. 00:29:48 And I want to figure out how I can make that a part of the morning routine.
512. 00:29:53 This is not related to this particular thing, really, but I recently, it was my wife's birthday
513. 00:30:00 this past Friday.
514. 00:30:01 It's partially why we didn't record on Friday.
515. 00:30:05 The main present I gave her was a weighted blanket.
516. 00:30:08 Yes.
517. 00:30:09 She's been using that the last few nights and it's just kind of tentatively seeing what
518. 00:30:14 the results are going to be from that.
519. 00:30:16 It's been kind of an interesting thing for her.
520. 00:30:18 Again, I have no idea how that's related, just a thing I needed to get off my chest.
521. 00:30:21 #ADD.
522. 00:30:23 We also have a weighted blanket on our bed and we absolutely love it.
523. 00:30:29 I think, as we're looking at where am I at on this process?
524. 00:30:35 Again, as I'm looking at this particular aspect, one of the things he talks about in this
525. 00:30:43 section is the motivation monkey and how this monkey has a tendency to convince you that
526. 00:30:53 you can do all the hard things at the beginning, which is true.
527. 00:30:59 Again, #ADD.
528. 00:31:01 I can start new things every day of the week and be just fine.
529. 00:31:04 It does not bother me.
530. 00:31:05 That stresses some people out.
531. 00:31:06 I was like, "Oh, it's just another day for me."
532. 00:31:11 It's very common if you've worked with or around me, you know that that has a tendency
533. 00:31:16 to wane after a short period and then I move on to something else.
534. 00:31:21 One of the things that Joe has to figure out is how to get things to last longer as opposed
535. 00:31:26 to allowing this monkey brain to just jump from thing to thing, which was when I got to
536. 00:31:31 this particular section.
537. 00:31:33 This was one of the pieces that I was fairly excited about reading through, was just giving
538. 00:31:38 terminology for that.
539. 00:31:41 I say that because I haven't always had a good way to say, "I jump from new thing to
540. 00:31:47 new thing, but why?
541. 00:31:50 Why don't I stick to something for a long period?"
542. 00:31:56 If I have any major takeaway here, it would be to try to figure out why I or how I could
543. 00:32:03 eliminate some of that.
544. 00:32:05 I think there's a lot of potential with it, but I also don't know all the answers there.
545. 00:32:10 But I do think this was an interesting piece to work through because I haven't really thought
546. 00:32:16 about it.
547. 00:32:17 The whole peaks and valleys of motivation and should you do something about that?
548. 00:32:24 Should you take advantage of it?
549. 00:32:25 Is it a bad thing?
550. 00:32:26 He actually says it's a good thing in a lot of ways.
551. 00:32:29 It's very good to have that big spike of motivation at the very beginning when you first buy a
552. 00:32:35 house.
553. 00:32:36 That was one of the examples he gave in that case.
554. 00:32:39 But you have to be aware that it is going to trail off and you have to know what to do
555. 00:32:44 about it.
556. 00:32:45 You absolutely need to know what to do about it.
557. 00:32:47 This is, I think, one of the things that was an aha moment for me in this chapter and one
558. 00:32:53 of the things that gives you a little bit of more understanding and therefore a little
559. 00:32:57 bit more hope is this motivation wave that's tied with the motivation monkey that you were
560. 00:33:02 talking about.
561. 00:33:04 Combined with the common trap being that we overestimate our future motivation.
562. 00:33:08 So the motivation wave comes and basically you can convince yourself to do something
563. 00:33:12 once.
564. 00:33:13 And then you wonder why it doesn't stick.
565. 00:33:15 And that's because you had this high point in your motivation.
566. 00:33:18 And then after that it died off and of course if you look at it scientifically according
567. 00:33:23 to this model you aren't able to sustain it.
568. 00:33:26 But you just beat yourself up because like what's wrong with me?
569. 00:33:29 I don't have any self control or willpower.
570. 00:33:34 So the steps in this behavior design process by the way, he only talks about a couple of
571. 00:33:38 them in this particular chapter.
572. 00:33:40 He builds up the rest throughout the book but I jotted down all seven of these.
573. 00:33:44 This is a key part to the book.
574. 00:33:46 Step one is to clarify the aspirations.
575. 00:33:48 Step two is to explore the behavior options.
576. 00:33:50 Step three is to match with specific behaviors.
577. 00:33:53 Step four is to start tiny.
578. 00:33:55 Step five is to find a good prompt.
579. 00:33:56 Step six is to celebrate success.
580. 00:33:58 Step seven is to troubleshoot, iterate and expand.
581. 00:34:01 So I know that's a lot there and probably doesn't even make sense the first time that
582. 00:34:05 you hear this which is why he reveals it piece by piece over the rest of the book.
583. 00:34:10 That part by the way was a little bit annoying because I jotted down these three pieces and
584. 00:34:13 then like a couple of every chapter later and like, "Oh, I got to go back and add one
585. 00:34:16 more there because I want these together."
586. 00:34:19 He's just taking his...
587. 00:34:20 This is why you use paper and you just make a separate list for them and you don't have
588. 00:34:25 to worry about that much.
589. 00:34:26 Well, it's no big deal.
590. 00:34:27 They are in a list but it was annoying to me because he just takes his visual and he
591. 00:34:32 adds another step as he goes.
592. 00:34:35 But having to go back to things over and over again was an interesting mechanic I guess
593. 00:34:40 is the best way to describe it.
594. 00:34:42 We don't typically see when reading these books.
595. 00:34:45 Usually people will say, "Well, here's the whole seven step process or we're going to
596. 00:34:48 talk about all these."
597. 00:34:49 But he just gave you three and just like all the other pictures and models, they look
598. 00:34:54 complete at that point in the book.
599. 00:34:56 So you jot those down and like, "Okay, moving on to the next thing."
600. 00:34:59 He just comes back and he keeps adding to that which I think is actually a pretty effective
601. 00:35:02 way of doing it.
602. 00:35:05 He also has a built-in review because when you add step four, you're also seeing step
603. 00:35:09 one, step two, step three and et cetera as you progress through the book.
604. 00:35:13 So by the end of this, you feel like you've seen this a bunch of times already.
605. 00:35:18 Which is helpful.
606. 00:35:19 The one piece of that whole process that really annoyed me and it was purely in my brain.
607. 00:35:23 It was not his fault at all.
608. 00:35:26 But I couldn't help but seeing one of those PowerPoint presentations where the thing slides
609. 00:35:30 in from the left and then the next one slides in from the left and they read it to you and
610. 00:35:34 then it slides in and they read it to you.
611. 00:35:36 That's what I had going through my head whenever I'd see those.
612. 00:35:38 Which is not what he, it doesn't actually look like that somehow I just connected that.
613. 00:35:43 It drove me nuts.
614. 00:35:44 This is not BJ's fault.
615. 00:35:46 This is totally my fault.
616. 00:35:49 Right.
617. 00:35:50 I couldn't help but see that I kept wanting, I really wanted him to show all of those and
618. 00:35:56 then just highlight the one he's talking about so you can see the whole thing.
619. 00:36:00 Sure.
620. 00:36:01 Like towards the beginning because once I realized he was just adding to it after about the third
621. 00:36:05 one then I just wanted to know what the rest of them were and I did something I haven't
622. 00:36:10 done in a long time.
623. 00:36:11 Mike skipped ahead until I found the last one.
624. 00:36:14 I did the same thing and I read all of the things and then I went back and finished reading
625. 00:36:19 through it.
626. 00:36:20 I'm not somebody who does this but it frustrated me enough that that's what I did in this case.
627. 00:36:25 Yeah after step five I did the same thing.
628. 00:36:27 Step four is like I got to go back to find that spot and then step five is like oh you
629. 00:36:30 got to be good.
630. 00:36:31 Let's get this over with.
631. 00:36:32 I'm just a bit.
632. 00:36:33 Thanks for that.
633. 00:36:34 Thanks for making me feel better.
634. 00:36:36 Yep.
635. 00:36:37 Alright so the next chapter is on ability and this is really where he's talking about the
636. 00:36:43 power of the tiny habits, the small wins and he's got this concept in this ability chapter
637. 00:36:50 of the ability chain which I thought was interesting.
638. 00:36:55 It's basically a diagram of five interlinking chain links and the five factors here are
639. 00:37:02 do you have enough time to do the behavior, do you have enough money to do the behavior,
640. 00:37:05 are you physically capable of doing the behavior, does the behavior require a lot of
641. 00:37:09 creative or mental energy and does the behavior fit into your current routine or does it require
642. 00:37:13 you to make adjustments.
643. 00:37:15 I never thought about this as a chain.
644. 00:37:17 I probably even with those descriptions would not have landed on the analogy of the chain
645. 00:37:24 but I think this is effective because basically if any one of these is broken then the strength
646. 00:37:29 of the chain is gone and the habit fails.
647. 00:37:33 Yeah I like this whole visual of the links because then it makes it, I mean it makes
648. 00:37:38 perfect sense.
649. 00:37:39 If you break any one of those pieces the whole thing falls apart and the behavior doesn't
650. 00:37:45 happen.
651. 00:37:46 Yep.
652. 00:37:47 So you can read that in a couple different ways.
653. 00:37:49 You can take all of these aspects of the ability chain and make sure that you do have
654. 00:37:55 them to make sure that you have the ability to do something or you can take advantage
655. 00:38:00 of this and if you have a bad habit that you're trying to break you can disable one of those.
656. 00:38:06 Yep.
657. 00:38:07 Create a problem in the chain and then in theory you don't do it anymore.
658. 00:38:12 Exactly.
659. 00:38:13 You do do it even though you tried to break it that means you didn't actually break it.
660. 00:38:16 Right which again we'll talk about the concept of breaking a little bit later because he
661. 00:38:20 specifically calls that out in a later chapter.
662. 00:38:24 Yep.
663. 00:38:25 I do like, yeah a lot of this stuff you can tell he really knows this stuff and he talks
664. 00:38:31 about it very intelligently and addresses a lot of common issues, I shouldn't say common,
665. 00:38:39 issues, unresolved issues in my head that I didn't know I had towards the topic of habits
666. 00:38:45 if that makes any sense.
667. 00:38:46 He answered all the questions that I didn't know I had.
668. 00:38:50 Yep.
669. 00:38:51 Yep.
670. 00:38:52 He did a good job of that too.
671. 00:38:54 I think I didn't have anything major with this whole chapter of ability that I feel was
672. 00:39:01 groundbreaking other than just being aware that the option or the talents or the skills
673. 00:39:13 or the opportunity to do a behavior is an important aspect in the process.
674. 00:39:20 Yep.
675. 00:39:21 He does spell out early on in the book that there are no behaviors that fall outside this
676. 00:39:29 formula.
677. 00:39:30 Right.
678. 00:39:31 Just none.
679. 00:39:33 When you start evaluating each and every behavior that you do throughout a day if you
680. 00:39:37 do that, I didn't because it started to scare me after a little while.
681. 00:39:41 But whenever you do that you realize, yeah there are a lot of times when the ability to
682. 00:39:47 do something doesn't exist or it does exist and you didn't realize it and all it takes
683. 00:39:53 is a little, all it takes is a little tiny cue to set that whole behavior off.
684. 00:40:01 Yeah.
685. 00:40:02 The two big things I think for takeaways from this chapter are the two questions that he
686. 00:40:07 poses as the discover question and the breakthrough question.
687. 00:40:11 The discover question is what is making this behavior hard to do and then armed with the
688. 00:40:16 ability chain that he identified, you can go through those different steps and figure
689. 00:40:21 out what is the thing that's making it hard and vice versa.
690. 00:40:24 The breakthrough question is how can I make this behavior easier to do?
691. 00:40:29 This is the type of thing that I want to apply to my morning and evening routines.
692. 00:40:33 I feel like going through this process is going to give me some aha moments but I haven't
693. 00:40:37 done it yet.
694. 00:40:38 Yeah.
695. 00:40:39 I can't say that I've got a lot of behaviors that I'm trying to change right now mostly
696. 00:40:45 because so much of my life is dictated for me that I don't have a lot of the options
697. 00:40:52 to change things.
698. 00:40:54 Thanks coronavirus.
699. 00:40:58 There are some things that I want to do but it's just not, I don't have the ability.
700. 00:41:04 If we use this terminology, the time for it doesn't exist.
701. 00:41:09 I have been able to reserve time for things like bookworm, like what we're doing now and
702. 00:41:16 a couple other small things like running sound for a band and live streams for them.
703. 00:41:20 I've been able to do some nights things but the stuff in the morning that I feel like
704. 00:41:26 I want to do more of just nope.
705. 00:41:30 I have to get two setups for the rest of my day and now that in the state of Minnesota
706. 00:41:38 things are starting to open up so that actually gets worse for me now because all the stuff
707. 00:41:44 I'm doing for live streaming still needs to happen and we're going to bring people to
708. 00:41:50 the building now.
709. 00:41:56 That's the best term I have for that.
710. 00:42:00 That's what's about to happen this week.
711. 00:42:01 So thankfully today is Memorial Day and I don't have to do it today.
712. 00:42:05 We'll start tomorrow.
713. 00:42:07 Alright.
714. 00:42:08 The other thing I'll call out from this section before we move on to the next one is that
715. 00:42:14 if a behavior frustrates you, he says it will not become a habit.
716. 00:42:18 There are behaviors that frustrate me and my lack of consistency when it comes to certain
717. 00:42:26 habits is frustrating to me.
718. 00:42:29 So that's kind of what I'm looking for when I apply this stuff is to how do I kind of reverse
719. 00:42:34 engineer that stuff and hack that stuff because at the beginning he talks about how the behaviors
720. 00:42:40 that you have, that's not really your fault.
721. 00:42:44 You are not your behavior.
722. 00:42:46 You're not a bad person because you have trouble meditating or you have trouble writing a new
723. 00:42:51 journal at the end of the day.
724. 00:42:55 The results that you're getting are because of the systems that are at place in your life
725. 00:42:58 and it's not all tied to the motivation.
726. 00:43:00 He also mentions that at the beginning that most people assume they just don't have the
727. 00:43:03 motivation to do what needs to be done.
728. 00:43:05 And he kind of explains that it's a bigger, bigger issue there, which is why he's talking
729. 00:43:10 about his individual pieces.
730. 00:43:11 But yeah, I would say, yeah, just to piggyback off of that, that's a thing that I think is
731. 00:43:18 important here because it's very easy to shame yourself with all of this.
732. 00:43:24 This is something I do all the time, you know, with my inattention on things.
733. 00:43:29 I forget things all the time and I am behind on things pretty much constantly.
734. 00:43:35 So that means it's common for me to be frustrated with myself because I didn't do something.
735. 00:43:41 That's a normal daily experience in a lot of cases.
736. 00:43:45 So it's okay to miss.
737. 00:43:50 That's important, I think, is you can't continue to beat yourself up if you have missed things.
738. 00:43:57 It's okay, just reevaluate and try again the next time.
739. 00:44:01 Like to me, that's the important part here.
740. 00:44:03 Yeah, and that actually leads perfectly into the next chapter, which chapter four is on
741. 00:44:07 prompts, the power of after.
742. 00:44:10 And he mentions in this chapter that no behavior happens without a prompt.
743. 00:44:15 And if you were to dissect a lot of the things that you would typically get upset at yourself
744. 00:44:22 for failing to do, a lot of it has to do with maybe choosing the wrong type of prompt,
745. 00:44:27 an unreliable prompt, let's say.
746. 00:44:30 He mentions that there's three types of prompts here, person prompts, which are in those are
747. 00:44:35 the ones that are unreliable.
748. 00:44:37 That's seeing a person.
749. 00:44:39 Then there's context prompts, which are anything in your environment that cues you to take action,
750. 00:44:43 like a phone notification.
751. 00:44:45 And then there's action prompts, which is a behavior that you already do that can remind
752. 00:44:49 you about a new habit.
753. 00:44:51 And this is where like the coffee vitamins thing, I think is really powerful.
754. 00:44:55 I think this is the one that has the most potential for me.
755. 00:45:01 I don't do all that great with the context prompts as mentioned by my getting the day
756. 00:45:08 one notification and just dismissing it a lot of times.
757. 00:45:12 Good job, Mike.
758. 00:45:13 Yeah.
759. 00:45:14 So I want to reconsider how I can build in these action prompts, the things that I'm
760. 00:45:20 going to be doing anyways and kind of side tangent here.
761. 00:45:24 This is the thing that concerns me the most about the bullet journal system is, yeah,
762. 00:45:31 you've got a great way to log everything and put it in the right place.
763. 00:45:34 And you look at your, you do all your migrations and your monthly logs get transferred over
764. 00:45:39 to your daily logs, but it just feels like because that relies on me, it's going to fail
765. 00:45:45 at some point.
766. 00:45:47 Like I need some sort of computer in the background telling me the important stuff that I'm forgetting,
767. 00:45:53 but also the notifications don't work.
768. 00:45:56 So what does that, that look like?
769. 00:45:58 Rome has this concept of like these daily pages where you can actually do test management
770. 00:46:02 inside of Rome.
771. 00:46:03 I'm not convinced that that's going to be 100% what I'm going to be doing, but.
772. 00:46:08 Not exactly a brilliant idea.
773. 00:46:09 In terms of the project pages and stuff like that, I think it makes a lot of sense.
774. 00:46:14 But I don't want to, you know, when I opened it up at the beginning of my work day, see
775. 00:46:19 the recurring tasks to take the garbage out at the end of the day.
776. 00:46:23 You know, that's the piece that doesn't really fit right for me.
777. 00:46:27 But I do think that Rome specific that I know we talked about at the beginning, but kind
778. 00:46:31 of the reason I think this might work for me is because of this concept of the action
779. 00:46:35 prompts.
780. 00:46:36 I am always working on my computer.
781. 00:46:39 And so if Rome is open when I am on my computer, why not have everything that I need for the
782. 00:46:44 day right there in front of me, have all the things interconnected.
783. 00:46:47 I can find what I need.
784. 00:46:48 I can get the new ideas when I need them.
785. 00:46:50 You know, that is appealing to me, but it's based on this shift from the context prompts
786. 00:46:58 to the action prompts.
787. 00:47:00 And I don't know 100% know what this looks like in my life right now.
788. 00:47:03 I need to spend some time thinking about this and identifying what are the action prompts
789. 00:47:06 that are already there and then leveraging those to build the new habits and the things
790. 00:47:10 that I want to do.
791. 00:47:12 But that's kind of where the action item comes in.
792. 00:47:15 Sure.
793. 00:47:16 This is interesting to me because as I was going through like people context action prompts,
794. 00:47:23 far and away the most successful prompts I have are context prompts.
795. 00:47:28 Okay.
796. 00:47:29 100%.
797. 00:47:30 Like that's where I land.
798. 00:47:32 And it's I think it's because if it shows up on my phone, like an alert of some kind,
799. 00:47:40 I am much more inclined to either ignore it or just clear it to get it to go away, even
800. 00:47:48 though I didn't actually read it in a lot of cases.
801. 00:47:52 Like I have a tendency to do that, which is bad because it means I miss text messages.
802. 00:47:56 I miss who calls I miss a lot of stuff.
803. 00:47:59 But I will rarely miss making bread when we need it because as soon as we get low on
804. 00:48:10 bread, I take my sourdough starter and set it on the kitchen island the night before
805. 00:48:15 because the first thing I'll see when I go to the kitchen in the morning is that sourdough
806. 00:48:19 starter sitting on the kitchen island, which then like, Oh, I need to do that.
807. 00:48:23 And immediately I'll make, you know, start the process.
808. 00:48:27 But I always leave the thing of bread wherever I need it so that I remember whenever I get
809. 00:48:33 to those spots, I take care of it.
810. 00:48:35 I do that a lot, even with reading my book, you know, in this case reading tiny, tiny
811. 00:48:41 habits, I'll set it on the couch in our living room the night before.
812. 00:48:47 So that way, whenever I come downstairs in the morning, it's the first place I go because
813. 00:48:50 it's where the dog sleeps and I want to go pet the dog in the morning.
814. 00:48:52 So my book is sitting there.
815. 00:48:53 It's like, Oh yeah, I should read this morning.
816. 00:48:56 Wait, how many years have we been reading books?
817. 00:48:58 And I still have to have this silly prompt in the morning to help me make sure that I
818. 00:49:04 follow through on that.
819. 00:49:06 So these, these context prompts are huge for me.
820. 00:49:09 So it's interesting to me that they don't work for you.
821. 00:49:11 It feels to me like that would be the brilliant thing to do.
822. 00:49:13 But well, they do work, but not all context prompts are created equal.
823. 00:49:18 And that's the interesting thing to me.
824. 00:49:20 He's got a tiny habits recipe.
825. 00:49:22 He calls it in this chapter where you've got an anchor moment and that anchor moment,
826. 00:49:28 I think is triggered by one of these prompts, but you have to figure out what are the prompts
827. 00:49:32 that are going to work for you in that specific context or that context refers to a type of
828. 00:49:39 prompt.
829. 00:49:40 So maybe that's a bad word choice there, but given your environment, you have to have the
830. 00:49:44 right prompt to trigger the thing.
831. 00:49:46 And then after the anchor moment, you've got the tiny behavior.
832. 00:49:48 And then after that, you've got a celebration.
833. 00:49:52 So this, another, another concept in this chapter is this behavior sequencing where you're deciding
834. 00:49:57 what action should come after the current one.
835. 00:49:59 And he says that reliable habits are simply coding things in the correct order.
836. 00:50:05 So the visual prompt, visual context prompt of the book, that's going to work in one,
837. 00:50:14 one scenario, but just seeing something and having it be, oh yeah, I've got to do this
838. 00:50:20 and then you follow through and take action on that in a different scenario is probably
839. 00:50:24 not going to work.
840. 00:50:26 So I think this is a little bit more complicated, but this is where I want to spend some time
841. 00:50:31 and identify this stuff.
842. 00:50:32 Apparently my mind is a complex forest that must be what navigated through.
843. 00:50:38 I don't know.
844. 00:50:40 That doesn't happen.
845. 00:50:41 I mean, the more I got into this book, the more I was able to see some of the things that
846. 00:50:48 didn't work that I was relying on.
847. 00:50:51 And that was kind of cool to see because, again, it kind of gave me some hope where like somebody
848. 00:50:57 told me this one time, it sounded really good.
849. 00:51:00 I thought it made sense.
850. 00:51:01 So I tried it.
851. 00:51:02 It doesn't work for me.
852. 00:51:03 What's wrong with me?
853. 00:51:04 You know, and this is kind of like, well, no, it's not that there's anything wrong with
854. 00:51:07 you.
855. 00:51:08 It's just that you tried this particular context prompt.
856. 00:51:11 Maybe you need to try a different action prompt to trigger this behavior or whatever.
857. 00:51:16 And so I want to go through the exercises.
858. 00:51:18 Every single one of these chapters has different exercises at the end of it.
859. 00:51:23 And I want to go through those and rethink all through all the different pieces.
860. 00:51:28 Basically what I did when I and I shared this in the chat for the people who are listening
861. 00:51:33 live, the diagram of like all the different pieces of the productivity system, which again,
862. 00:51:38 like that's an older one.
863. 00:51:39 It's going to be a little bit simpler than that.
864. 00:51:41 But just doing that exercise brought a lot of clarity to me on like how the piece
865. 00:51:46 is connect.
866. 00:51:47 And I feel like I can do the same sort of thing with my habits, but I have to really
867. 00:51:52 dive in there and see what's really there before I can fix it.
868. 00:51:55 Yeah, it makes sense.
869. 00:51:56 I feel like there's a lot of different ways you can take this and a lot of different things
870. 00:52:01 that you can set up.
871. 00:52:04 One of the things I was debating in this process is just, you know, he has a system of sorts
872. 00:52:13 to identify what the behaviors should be given an aspiration that you want to achieve.
873. 00:52:23 You have an aspiration of I want to lose 20 pounds, or in my case, it's probably more
874. 00:52:28 like gain 15 pounds.
875. 00:52:30 But if you have that aspiration, that's not a thing you can just go work towards.
876. 00:52:37 Like one of the examples he gives earlier on is around a, I forget the name of the company,
877. 00:52:44 there was a company that had an initiative to help people save $500.
878. 00:52:49 And they thought that was the action.
879. 00:52:51 Like it was the thing that people needed to do was save $500.
880. 00:52:54 And he made a point and said, okay, all of you right now at this moment in this room,
881. 00:52:59 save $500.
882. 00:53:00 Yeah.
883. 00:53:01 And then they laughed and then they're like, oh, I can't do that right now.
884. 00:53:04 Yeah.
885. 00:53:05 Yeah, exactly.
886. 00:53:06 And it just stopped and saved $500.
887. 00:53:09 So what are the behaviors that you need to do in order to achieve that aspiration since
888. 00:53:14 that's not an actual behavior?
889. 00:53:16 I think when you evaluate things in that way and start determining what the behaviors
890. 00:53:21 are that you need to be performing in order to achieve that aspiration, it becomes more
891. 00:53:29 and more apparent what the current MAP, the motivation, ability and prompt system is that
892. 00:53:37 you need to have in place to actually achieve that.
893. 00:53:41 That whole system of taking the time to evaluate each individual behavior is something I've
894. 00:53:47 never considered.
895. 00:53:48 I don't think I've ever sat down and said, hey, I need to rethink how I'm doing my journaling
896. 00:53:55 process at night or I want to start doing yoga in the morning.
897. 00:53:58 What is going to be my motivator for that?
898. 00:54:01 What is how am I going to make sure I have the ability to do that in the morning and
899. 00:54:04 what am I going to prompt myself to do it in at that time?
900. 00:54:08 All of those things are pieces I just have never really considered.
901. 00:54:12 So going through these three different pieces, I guess I'm kind of summarizing the first four
902. 00:54:16 chapters here, but going through that particular process and just understanding each individual
903. 00:54:21 component of this behavior equals motivation, ability and prompt setup and just going through
904. 00:54:27 that I think was helpful.
905. 00:54:30 I didn't really expect it to be that helpful, but it made a lot of sense.
906. 00:54:34 Yeah, you feel like you should have a handle on this habit stuff because we've read all
907. 00:54:39 the books on it already, right?
908. 00:54:41 Yes.
909. 00:54:42 How many books have we read about stuff like this?
910. 00:54:44 Make time had it in there, Induspectable has it in there.
911. 00:54:47 The three habit books now, there's tons of these that have habit forming stuff in it.
912. 00:54:57 And we still read a book on habits and find it interesting.
913. 00:55:00 Yep, and learn a bunch of stuff from it.
914. 00:55:02 Yes.
915. 00:55:03 Exactly.
916. 00:55:04 Now, the next chapter, number five, emotions create habits.
917. 00:55:09 This kind of breaks away from the fog behavior model in the B equals MAP.
918. 00:55:16 This talks about the emotions behind the habits, which are kind of linked to your motivation
919. 00:55:21 probably.
920. 00:55:23 But this is where it gets into the spectrum of automaticity.
921. 00:55:28 Is that how you say that?
922. 00:55:30 Not quite sure.
923. 00:55:31 Automacity.
924. 00:55:32 Yeah.
925. 00:55:33 Yeah.
926. 00:55:34 Basically.
927. 00:55:35 Automativeness.
928. 00:55:36 How automatic habit becomes.
929. 00:55:38 And the better you feel about it, the more automatic it's going to become.
930. 00:55:43 So this was kind of an aha moment for me here.
931. 00:55:45 And this particular chapter, he talks about by feeling good at the right moment, you can
932. 00:55:49 cause your brain to recognize and encode the sequence of behaviors that you just performed.
933. 00:55:55 Now this doesn't really seem that revolutionary.
934. 00:55:59 If you really think about what is going on when you're trying to build habits, but he
935. 00:56:04 also says in this chapter that habits can form quickly in as little as a couple of days,
936. 00:56:12 which sounds blasphemous when you read the other stuff because we were told long time
937. 00:56:19 ago, habits take, takes 21 days to build a habit.
938. 00:56:24 And then you were told, actually, no, it's probably more like 66.
939. 00:56:26 It actually knows a lot going on here.
940. 00:56:28 It could be as much as 200.
941. 00:56:30 And I think all of that is true.
942. 00:56:33 But I've never heard it the other way where you can basically accelerate the creation of
943. 00:56:38 the habit.
944. 00:56:39 If you have a strong emotion attached to it, although I 100% believe that that has after
945. 00:56:46 he explains it, that does make a lot of sense.
946. 00:56:48 I think it's probably dangerous to assume that you will be able to create a habit in
947. 00:56:53 only a couple of days.
948. 00:56:55 But I think the takeaway here is figure out how you can attach a strong positive emotion
949. 00:57:01 to a habit.
950. 00:57:02 And that will decrease the amount of time it takes in order to make it automatic and
951. 00:57:07 reduce the level of motivation and ability that's required in order to get it to happen.
952. 00:57:15 When you think through habits and what has you operating under those habits, maybe that's
953. 00:57:23 the way to say that.
954. 00:57:25 For example, the morning routine and such that I go through, which is fairly basic at
955. 00:57:30 this point, I'll spend a little bit of time reading in whatever book we're reading for
956. 00:57:34 bookworms since it's the only time I have for reading books, the only books that I have
957. 00:57:39 time for reading.
958. 00:57:41 And following that, I go through my morning bullet journal process and then I'm off to
959. 00:57:48 making breakfast with the girls and breakfast with them.
960. 00:57:51 And that's the sum total of it.
961. 00:57:53 But when you look at those, I feel better about my day if I've had the time to read.
962. 00:58:01 And I feel better about my day if I have it prepared from a task stance via bullet journaling.
963. 00:58:08 So the emotion from that is one more around security and borderline motivation to go do
964. 00:58:16 things for the day.
965. 00:58:19 And again, whenever you start evaluating all of the behaviors that you do, what is the
966. 00:58:25 emotion that drives that?
967. 00:58:27 Usually there's some form of a feeling, a good feeling, maybe a fear of not getting it done.
968. 00:58:34 There's always something that "promps you" to actually follow through on that.
969. 00:58:42 So yes, I feel like emotions are important, but at the same time, I understand that these
970. 00:58:52 are things that come as a result of having done it.
971. 00:58:55 It doesn't really work the other way I don't think.
972. 00:58:59 You're hoping that an emotion comes through, but having an emotion doesn't necessarily,
973. 00:59:04 well, maybe it does.
974. 00:59:05 Maybe I'm going backwards on myself.
975. 00:59:07 Now that I say that, emotions come first or last.
976. 00:59:11 Yes.
977. 00:59:12 So he's...
978. 00:59:13 He talks about the three moments for celebration and they are when you remember to do your new
979. 00:59:17 habit while you're doing it and immediately after doing your new habit.
980. 00:59:22 And I didn't find this entirely helpful because I couldn't think of an example of how I would
981. 00:59:28 want to apply that personally, but I understand those three moments and where you could interject
982. 00:59:38 small celebrations at those different places if you really were having trouble getting a
983. 00:59:43 habit to say, which again, maybe I need to do that.
984. 00:59:46 So I mentioned at the beginning, this is my action item to reconsider my habits and take
985. 00:59:50 a look at the ones I want to create and figure out what I need to do in order to do that.
986. 00:59:53 So maybe this is a piece of that, I don't know, but at the moment that's not something
987. 00:59:56 that I do.
988. 00:59:57 One thing I do a pretty decent job of is celebrate accomplishments, which this isn't exactly habit
989. 01:00:04 related, but he does say at the beginning of this chapter, and I think this is a really
990. 01:00:08 important point, that adults usually have many ways of saying I did a bad job and a few
991. 01:00:12 ways of saying I did a good job.
992. 01:00:15 Now I shared before we hit record, I got a fancy new pen as a celebration for a project
993. 01:00:22 that I completed.
994. 01:00:24 And this is more and more I realize becoming an important part of my creative workflow.
995. 01:00:34 Yes, my fancy fountain pen collection is growing, but it's growing by me buying a pen
996. 01:00:41 to celebrate something that I did.
997. 01:00:43 And every time I pick up that pen to use it, I'm reminded of, oh yeah, I've, I shipped
998. 01:00:47 that thing.
999. 01:00:48 I finished that thing.
1000. 01:00:49 And these, again, this doesn't pertain to habits necessarily because these are bigger
1001. 01:00:53 things that take a month, three months, six months, sometimes even longer than that to
1002. 01:00:59 get, get done.
1003. 01:01:00 I'm not buying a fountain pen every time I remember to go for a run.
1004. 01:01:05 You have a fountain pens, Mike.
1005. 01:01:06 Yeah.
1006. 01:01:07 And that's really what he's talking about in this chapter is those little things where
1007. 01:01:11 like you smile in the mirror, you know, as an example, or you say a specific word or
1008. 01:01:16 phrase out loud, but I do think you could take that concept applied on a larger scale.
1009. 01:01:21 And that's something that I'm already doing and I'm seeing the effects of that.
1010. 01:01:25 So this is something that I realized that I do tend to be my own worst enemy, my biggest
1011. 01:01:30 critic and beat myself up with all the things that I did poorly.
1012. 01:01:34 So I recognize that I do fall into this category that he outlines at the beginning of this
1013. 01:01:38 chapter.
1014. 01:01:39 And I know that I do probably need to figure out additional little ways of telling myself
1015. 01:01:46 that I am doing a good job.
1016. 01:01:48 Because if I'm not careful, then I can find myself putting my mental state into that category
1017. 01:01:55 of like, oh, you, you worthless piece of scum.
1018. 01:01:57 You can't do anything right.
1019. 01:01:59 You know, I think that building these things into your habit routines could be a very effective
1020. 01:02:05 guard against that and maintaining a positive mental state, which has benefits, not just
1021. 01:02:11 your productivity, but it seems easy to say, well, this is, this is important.
1022. 01:02:18 It's going to have an emotional benefit.
1023. 01:02:19 But I think especially where we find ourselves now, like everybody's in the middle of a pretty
1024. 01:02:24 big emotional turmoil going through all of this COVID-19 stuff.
1025. 01:02:30 I mean, even people who haven't really been affected, like I didn't lose my job.
1026. 01:02:36 On the surface, you could say, well, you've got it pretty good.
1027. 01:02:39 You don't really have any reason to be upset by any of this stuff.
1028. 01:02:42 But things are different and just recognizing that things are different.
1029. 01:02:44 There's a bunch of things that are at play there.
1030. 01:02:46 You know, I relish the additional time that we've had with our family, but it can also
1031. 01:02:51 be stressful too.
1032. 01:02:52 My wife and I were talking about that.
1033. 01:02:53 We go to bed exhausted every single night because there is no break.
1034. 01:02:59 I can't get in the car and listen to a podcast while I'm driving to the coworking space
1035. 01:03:03 before I start working.
1036. 01:03:04 You know, as soon as I open that door, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah.
1037. 01:03:09 Which again, it's not something I'm complaining about, but recognizing that that does drain
1038. 01:03:14 you.
1039. 01:03:15 Yeah.
1040. 01:03:16 Maybe we were used to.
1041. 01:03:17 So recognizing that this is a tank that gets depleted a little bit more quickly than it
1042. 01:03:22 did a couple of months ago, that is step one.
1043. 01:03:26 Step two is recognizing what are the things that you can do to help refill that tank.
1044. 01:03:30 And I 100% agree that the miniature celebrations will do that.
1045. 01:03:35 In the members chat tied up mentioned having to remove the pinatic podcast.
1046. 01:03:43 Listening to them causes the purchase of too many pins, Mike.
1047. 01:03:48 Yes.
1048. 01:03:49 Which I think is actually how you got into this.
1049. 01:03:51 You started listening to the binatic podcast and...
1050. 01:03:54 It did.
1051. 01:03:55 Whoops.
1052. 01:03:56 Okay.
1053. 01:03:57 So box moment here for a second.
1054. 01:04:01 Whoops.
1055. 01:04:02 Sorry, folks.
1056. 01:04:04 We mentioned somebody had asked for clarification on how they could join the membership community
1057. 01:04:11 for Bookworm.
1058. 01:04:12 We mentioned this at the beginning and the end of the podcast a lot of times.
1059. 01:04:15 But there is the podcast you can download listen to for free.
1060. 01:04:20 There's the Bookworm Club that Joe created where you can go discuss the books that we're
1061. 01:04:23 reading.
1062. 01:04:24 There is also a paid membership, which is five bucks a month, for people who just want
1063. 01:04:28 to wait to support the show.
1064. 01:04:30 And there's a couple of bonuses that come with that.
1065. 01:04:32 There's the live chat that we've mentioned here.
1066. 01:04:34 The Mind Node files that I create, I upload those to the members area so you can download
1067. 01:04:39 those for yourself for all of the books that we cover, wallpaper, stuff like that.
1068. 01:04:46 But I would guess that the majority of people who join that don't do it because of what
1069. 01:04:52 they get.
1070. 01:04:53 They do it because they want to support the show and support the people who make it.
1071. 01:04:57 Which I think right now is really important.
1072. 01:05:00 And I am officially a paying member of the pan addict.
1073. 01:05:06 I don't even know what the membership is.
1074. 01:05:08 But the five bucks a month.
1075. 01:05:10 It doesn't matter.
1076. 01:05:11 You're paying.
1077. 01:05:12 I get the newsletter just because I want to support Brad and Mike and the whole, like
1078. 01:05:16 Brad's got a whole bunch of people that contribute to the pan addict site.
1079. 01:05:20 And including Jeff Abbott who does some stuff for the sweet setup too.
1080. 01:05:22 So yeah, I'll just throw that out there that now is as good a time as any to support the
1081. 01:05:28 creators that you like.
1082. 01:05:29 Kind of coming back to the book, I am curious about your thoughts on the Maui habit.
1083. 01:05:36 It's one of the things, so the Maui habit, what he talks about is that when you first
1084. 01:05:42 get up in the morning, you look in the mirror, look yourself in the eyes and say today is
1085. 01:05:48 going to be a great day.
1086. 01:05:50 Okay.
1087. 01:05:51 Take that concept.
1088. 01:05:54 In light of a book, we just did a couple rounds ago.
1089. 01:05:58 Maybe it wasn't that many rounds ago.
1090. 01:06:00 The antidote and how positive thinking is not the way.
1091. 01:06:07 It's like, okay.
1092. 01:06:10 So in light of that, one of the things I debated was translating that to, this could be my
1093. 01:06:18 last day.
1094. 01:06:20 That way you still have like the driver towards a productive day and a successful day.
1095. 01:06:27 But at the same time, you're not falling down that trap of positive thinking per se.
1096. 01:06:33 But I was curious about your thoughts on this.
1097. 01:06:35 That was going through my head and I haven't fully figured out all of my thoughts around
1098. 01:06:39 that yet.
1099. 01:06:40 But I'm curious what you think.
1100. 01:06:41 I think that if you're going to pick one side to air on the side of positive, but that's
1101. 01:06:50 me personally because I have no trouble flipping over to the negative.
1102. 01:06:56 That's my default a lot of times.
1103. 01:06:58 That's fair.
1104. 01:06:59 So I could see a scenario where those are flip flopped, but it also makes no sense to me
1105. 01:07:05 why you would choose to dwell on the negative stuff.
1106. 01:07:10 I think that the antidote, the way that book was written, we kind of talked about this
1107. 01:07:17 in that particular episode where it was kind of like a mention of a specific topic like
1108. 01:07:22 stoicism and then a story to support their view, but it felt like not a complete picture
1109. 01:07:30 and not a fair discussion about some of those topics.
1110. 01:07:35 And I still feel that way.
1111. 01:07:37 I feel like if you're in a pick one approach as scientifically correct, you have to side
1112. 01:07:44 with the PhD behavioral designer.
1113. 01:07:49 This just makes so much more sense from an analytical logical point of view, which is
1114. 01:07:55 the way that my brain is wired.
1115. 01:07:57 Now like I said, I can totally see why that wouldn't work for some people, but I have
1116. 01:08:00 no problem embracing the Maui habit and the positive approach to building habits over
1117. 01:08:07 the antidote.
1118. 01:08:09 I don't usually pass a mirror in the morning.
1119. 01:08:13 I don't have the opportunity.
1120. 01:08:15 So the ability is not there, Mike.
1121. 01:08:17 I will say that the Maui habit specifically, I don't think I even wrote that down in my
1122. 01:08:22 outline because it's not something that I have any interest in doing specifically.
1123. 01:08:28 We do have a mirror, but when I heard about that, I was kind of like, yeah, no, I'm not
1124. 01:08:32 going to do that.
1125. 01:08:36 But like I said, I do think that if you're going to pick one of those, then in terms of
1126. 01:08:41 habits specifically, I think you have to focus on the positive if you believe in this fog
1127. 01:08:49 behavioral model because the motivation that could also be, you could also, I think, reframe
1128. 01:08:56 that as a positivity meter, if you will.
1129. 01:09:01 I think it does have examples of negative peer pressure, how that can create motivation
1130. 01:09:06 and kind of be fear driven, but I don't think that's sustainable.
1131. 01:09:10 I think the only sustainable way for this healthy, sustainable way for this to really
1132. 01:09:15 work is to figure out how to apply a positive mindset and emotionally charge these habits
1133. 01:09:22 so that you want to do them.
1134. 01:09:24 He talks about that later on.
1135. 01:09:26 I think I mentioned that earlier, you know, if a behavior frustrates you, it's not going
1136. 01:09:29 to become a habit.
1137. 01:09:30 Well, if it's fear driven, it's going to frustrate you.
1138. 01:09:32 At least it would frustrate me.
1139. 01:09:33 Yeah.
1140. 01:09:34 I wonder how many of my habits are fear driven sometimes.
1141. 01:09:37 Like, I have a lot of cases where I don't want to let someone down.
1142. 01:09:45 Maybe that's a disappointment driver as opposed to fear driver, but I have quite a few things
1143. 01:09:51 I do that float that line, which isn't good, I don't think, but it also helps me get things
1144. 01:10:00 done.
1145. 01:10:01 So I'm not sure how I feel about that.
1146. 01:10:03 Well, that's the perfect spot to go into the next chapter, which is number six, growing
1147. 01:10:07 your habits from tiny to transformative because this is where he talks about the hope versus
1148. 01:10:12 fear being the two vectors that push against each other and the sum being motivation.
1149. 01:10:20 Now he does also mention in this section the examples of like being called out on a dance
1150. 01:10:28 floor and you don't want to disappoint people.
1151. 01:10:30 You follow through and you do it, but that's really like fear driven and even though pushes
1152. 01:10:36 you past the action line, you're feeling anxious and stressful, which I think is kind of what
1153. 01:10:40 you're talking about with maybe some of your habits.
1154. 01:10:44 And I have no doubt that I have habits that are the fall into that category too.
1155. 01:10:49 But like I said, I view that as something that I want to change and make positive.
1156. 01:10:55 And I think he would explain it in this book.
1157. 01:10:58 I don't have a specific instance here, but I think he would basically say like, yeah,
1158. 01:11:01 you have to rewire those and apply some positivity to it in order for it to really become something
1159. 01:11:07 that is sustainable.
1160. 01:11:09 I think I agree with that.
1161. 01:11:11 And I don't know.
1162. 01:11:14 I can't.
1163. 01:11:16 That just sounds like not a very fun way to live.
1164. 01:11:19 So why do that if you don't have to?
1165. 01:11:22 Right.
1166. 01:11:23 Right.
1167. 01:11:24 I get you.
1168. 01:11:25 I think I feel like I've wanted or specifically designed.
1169. 01:11:30 I just think it's kind of where I've landed.
1170. 01:11:32 I don't know if that's I haven't tried to look back in time to see if that's a thing
1171. 01:11:37 that I have done for a long period or if it's something that's more recent.
1172. 01:11:43 Not sure what that is, but it is a thing that currently exists and haven't figured out
1173. 01:11:49 what to do about that yet.
1174. 01:11:51 I feel like it might help if I did my own celebrations, like taking advantage of the
1175. 01:11:58 small rewards thing, but I hesitate going down the positivity route because that has
1176. 01:12:04 bit me in the past because it's given me a bit of a false sense of security in some things.
1177. 01:12:11 So I hesitate to go down that road, but I know that it works for some folks.
1178. 01:12:17 Obviously it works for you.
1179. 01:12:19 So it's not a thing I think I'm going to downplay by any means and say, Hey, you should never
1180. 01:12:25 do this, but it is certainly a thing that I personally hesitate with.
1181. 01:12:32 Now maybe that's because I have bad motivators in a lot of cases and that would be the solution.
1182. 01:12:41 Not discounting that, but it is a thing that makes me wonder.
1183. 01:12:45 And I, again, I haven't figured out what the solution there is, but it was something that
1184. 01:12:49 BJ Fogg was successful in bringing to light.
1185. 01:12:53 So there's that, at least a kudos to Mr. Fogg in that sense.
1186. 01:12:58 Yeah, I think what you're describing can be summed up in the Bible verse that says,
1187. 01:13:03 "Hope deferred makes the heart sick."
1188. 01:13:05 And I think maybe that is what you're describing where you focus on the positive and you get
1189. 01:13:11 disappointed because you don't achieve the positive result that you thought you were
1190. 01:13:14 going to get.
1191. 01:13:15 And I think that's where goals are dangerous, but habits maybe are better.
1192. 01:13:21 And then the whole idea of the tiny habits here being to break it down really, really
1193. 01:13:24 small.
1194. 01:13:25 So success is not, did you achieve an outcome or did you receive a result that you were
1195. 01:13:31 aiming to, but did you do the tiny little activity and then did you celebrate immediately afterwards?
1196. 01:13:39 And I think if you define positivity, positivity is probably not even a word.
1197. 01:13:43 I keep saying it.
1198. 01:13:44 You know what I'm talking about?
1199. 01:13:46 That positive mindset, if you apply it in that sense, I think that that is absolutely
1200. 01:13:52 a positive thing.
1201. 01:13:54 I don't know.
1202. 01:13:55 I think the real trick of this is, and this is not simple, but control what you can control
1203. 01:14:01 and then let the rest of it go.
1204. 01:14:05 And I know that sounds way, way, way, way, way, way too simple.
1205. 01:14:08 I get that.
1206. 01:14:09 I also think that in terms of getting back control over different parts of your life,
1207. 01:14:16 that tiny habits offer some hope where maybe there wasn't some before.
1208. 01:14:22 Some of the stories that he shared in this are pretty crazy.
1209. 01:14:25 One story in particular I'm thinking about, there was a lady who was in not a great relationship,
1210. 01:14:31 but she also wasn't making a lot of money and wasn't in a position to like leave the
1211. 01:14:36 relationship, so she started employing tiny habits and celebrating her successes as she
1212. 01:14:43 built up her own emergency funds so she could leave this toxic relationship.
1213. 01:14:50 And I think that was an interesting example.
1214. 01:14:53 I had issues with that specific example because after she left, it turns out that they were
1215. 01:14:59 able to work through their differences and now their friends and she's like, "I can't
1216. 01:15:02 believe it."
1217. 01:15:03 And I'm like, "Well, of course I can believe it because you were so focused on leaving the
1218. 01:15:05 relationship that you didn't spend any time working on it.
1219. 01:15:08 If you would have worked on building the relationship instead of leaving it, maybe you
1220. 01:15:12 could have saved it."
1221. 01:15:13 You had the wrong aspiration here.
1222. 01:15:16 But I digress.
1223. 01:15:18 Yes.
1224. 01:15:20 So, there are a couple different skills of change which I wanted to run through real
1225. 01:15:25 quickly here.
1226. 01:15:27 Number one is behavior crafting, which is selecting and adjusting the habits that you
1227. 01:15:30 want in your life.
1228. 01:15:31 And this right here I think gets back to the whole positive versus negative thing.
1229. 01:15:35 If you are ascribing to the tiny habits model, you basically can't be negative I think because
1230. 01:15:41 you are designing things that you want.
1231. 01:15:43 So you have to have some bent towards the positive in order to identify those things
1232. 01:15:48 in the first place.
1233. 01:15:50 Otherwise, you're reacting to things.
1234. 01:15:52 Maybe that is that, you tell me, is that unfair?
1235. 01:15:54 No, I think that's perfectly fair.
1236. 01:15:57 Okay.
1237. 01:15:58 And then you've got self-insight which is knowing which new habits will have meaning to you.
1238. 01:16:03 And again, if you are focused on the negative side, you're thinking like, "Well, self-preservation,
1239. 01:16:10 I just got to endure all of the attacks are going to come against me."
1240. 01:16:15 Whereas positive, you're thinking, "Well, these are the things that are going to be
1241. 01:16:20 a part of the life that I want to live."
1242. 01:16:22 Step number three is the process.
1243. 01:16:24 And that is knowing when to push yourself beyond tiny and to ramp up the difficulty of
1244. 01:16:28 the habit.
1245. 01:16:29 You can scale these things or you can multiply these things you talked about.
1246. 01:16:32 Maybe that was the previous chapter.
1247. 01:16:35 Number four is the context which is redesigning your environment to make your habits easier
1248. 01:16:38 to do.
1249. 01:16:39 And then number five is the mindset where you're embracing a new identity.
1250. 01:16:42 I think if you're going to embrace a new identity, why not make it a positive identity?
1251. 01:16:47 Maybe there's a way to embrace a negative identity with this, but I don't understand.
1252. 01:16:52 Yes.
1253. 01:16:54 There's a lot here.
1254. 01:16:57 With this particular piece, to me it made a lot of sense that this is where atomic habits
1255. 01:17:01 jumped off.
1256. 01:17:04 As you go through a lot of these, he's explaining how to develop a specific behavior.
1257. 01:17:13 And he doesn't really spend a ton of time explaining how to make it repetitive because
1258. 01:17:22 the assumption is that once you figure out how to get those three components, motivation,
1259. 01:17:26 ability, and prompt, if you get those three in place and it's successful, it just makes
1260. 01:17:31 it becomes a habit.
1261. 01:17:33 It doesn't have to be a one-time thing.
1262. 01:17:34 He does make the point that you can use this to tackle one-time behaviors.
1263. 01:17:39 But this sixth section here, growing those habits, to me that makes perfect sense that
1264. 01:17:45 that's where atomic habits jumps off because it's a lot more about how do you develop a
1265. 01:17:50 routine?
1266. 01:17:51 How do you set yourself up to do these small things every single day?
1267. 01:17:55 Whereas he doesn't really embrace the routine piece with this entire book.
1268. 01:17:59 Yes, he does mention it, but it's not a core component like it is with atomic habits or
1269. 01:18:06 the power of habit.
1270. 01:18:07 It's not as vital in those specific cases.
1271. 01:18:14 It is interesting that he does spell out these specific skills.
1272. 01:18:18 It is interesting to go through those, but it's also interesting I think that when you
1273. 01:18:22 start comparing and putting these other books and layering them on top of each other, it's
1274. 01:18:27 like, yes, you could use this as your starting point.
1275. 01:18:29 See, you're convincing me that this is the one I should recommend out of the three.
1276. 01:18:34 Good job, Mike.
1277. 01:18:35 If you use this as your jumping off point and then come back over to atomic habits once
1278. 01:18:41 you get through this, put the broader picture of the routine-based pieces in place, I could
1279. 01:18:49 see a pretty powerful setup there.
1280. 01:18:52 Interesting thing is how the power of habit doesn't really fit into that.
1281. 01:18:55 Yep, agreed.
1282. 01:18:57 Although I would say that really the benefit of reading all of these books is that they
1283. 01:19:01 all tie together and they fill in the holes.
1284. 01:19:04 You were mentioning the recurrence of these things, and he doesn't talk about that specifically,
1285. 01:19:12 but there was a story in this section which I thought really exemplified a way that this
1286. 01:19:19 could work as a routine, and that is the whole idea of the super fridge.
1287. 01:19:23 Do you remember this?
1288. 01:19:24 No, I don't know why.
1289. 01:19:26 So this is in the context, but there's a bigger aspect of this than just the context.
1290. 01:19:31 So they wanted to eat healthier.
1291. 01:19:34 So what they did is they relabeled their fridge, super fridge, and once a week they spend time
1292. 01:19:41 prepping and organizing it so that when they want to grab a snack, everything is in the
1293. 01:19:46 little containers and they just grab it from the fridge.
1294. 01:19:48 So basically the food that is stocked there is ready to go, it's convenient because that
1295. 01:19:52 was one of the things that caused them to eat unhealthy was the fact that nothing was ready.
1296. 01:19:58 So they designed a way to show a bunch of healthy eating options whenever they opened
1297. 01:20:03 the fridge.
1298. 01:20:04 And this I think exemplifies one of the strengths of this book is that he's got all these little
1299. 01:20:07 labels for things, and I feel like they're really effective in some of the stories are
1300. 01:20:13 really powerful.
1301. 01:20:14 But if you were to break this down, basically what they are doing is they are reverse engineering
1302. 01:20:20 their, if you were to go back to that cycle from the James Clear, you know, the queue being
1303. 01:20:26 that they're hungry and then the routine.
1304. 01:20:28 So they are, they are using that model.
1305. 01:20:31 Now he uses this story specifically in skill set number four context, but I immediately
1306. 01:20:36 thought of the James Clear model when they were telling this story.
1307. 01:20:40 And basically once you do that, now you have a reliable system in place where you constantly
1308. 01:20:47 have healthy food that that you can eat.
1309. 01:20:50 So I do think they compliment each other.
1310. 01:20:52 Sure.
1311. 01:20:53 No, I think they do.
1312. 01:20:54 You know, and James Clear's book might be the bridge between them, like between the
1313. 01:21:00 power of habit and tiny habits since he's pulling off of Charles Duhigg's pieces in
1314. 01:21:07 order to get to his system.
1315. 01:21:11 But you know, if BJ Fogg's research was a heavily used portion of writing atomic habits, I would
1316. 01:21:18 make a lot of sense.
1317. 01:21:19 It would.
1318. 01:21:20 Yep.
1319. 01:21:21 All the habits.
1320. 01:21:22 All right.
1321. 01:21:23 Let's go to the next chapter here.
1322. 01:21:24 Number seven untangling bad habits.
1323. 01:21:27 And this is where they have, or he breaks down the issue with breaking a bad habit where
1324. 01:21:35 the term breaking a bad habit, he says, that's the wrong expectation.
1325. 01:21:39 And he uses this analogy, which I thought this was brilliant.
1326. 01:21:43 And if this was the only aha moment you got from this book, it was probably still worth
1327. 01:21:48 the time to read it, where your bad habits are essentially a huge tangled knot.
1328. 01:21:57 And what you have to do is you have to pick that all apart, little bit by little bit.
1329. 01:22:03 It's not something that you just cut out immediately, which I think is what a lot of
1330. 01:22:10 people, myself included tend to fall into that mindset when you want to eliminate a behavior
1331. 01:22:17 that you tend to do, whether that be eating junk food or binging Netflix at night, whatever
1332. 01:22:25 it is, everybody's got something that they gravitate towards that they would confess that
1333. 01:22:30 they don't want to do.
1334. 01:22:32 And I feel like this is a helpful analogy in identifying the root causes that are there,
1335. 01:22:36 because it's probably not just one thing.
1336. 01:22:38 Do you have a bad habit you're trying to break?
1337. 01:22:40 Good question.
1338. 01:22:42 Nothing came to mind as I was reading this.
1339. 01:22:44 But like I said, I want to put myself under the microscope for next time.
1340. 01:22:49 So there might be something here.
1341. 01:22:53 I can't think of it at the moment though.
1342. 01:22:56 I have a tendency to use like my breaks.
1343. 01:22:59 I make sure I take breaks throughout morning and afternoon work sessions.
1344. 01:23:05 I haven't gone full-blown Pomodoro, but I'm like on the edge of saying that's a thing
1345. 01:23:10 I should be doing.
1346. 01:23:12 But I have a tendency to take those breaks and just watch a couple YouTube videos when
1347. 01:23:17 I could definitely use that time to read a book or write my thoughts on something out
1348. 01:23:22 or research something that might be helpful later.
1349. 01:23:26 Watching YouTube really doesn't solve that, at least not in the way that I'm doing it.
1350. 01:23:31 It's possible to use YouTube to learn new skills.
1351. 01:23:34 The way I am using it does not.
1352. 01:23:36 Fair enough.
1353. 01:23:40 So yes, that's a thing I feel like I want to break because I understand exactly what
1354. 01:23:44 the prompt is with that and the motivation is quite high to do that.
1355. 01:23:51 So there are things I need to do in order to break it.
1356. 01:23:54 But I haven't.
1357. 01:23:56 I haven't even tried yet, Mike, because frankly I don't want to.
1358. 01:24:02 But I should.
1359. 01:24:03 I know I should.
1360. 01:24:04 Well, that is a larger issue there because just the phrase I should, like why should you?
1361. 01:24:13 If you enjoy YouTube, you don't necessarily, it's not necessarily a matter of you.
1362. 01:24:20 You should stop doing that.
1363. 01:24:21 Maybe you are spending five hours a day watching cat videos on YouTube, in which case.
1364. 01:24:26 Well, it's not cat videos.
1365. 01:24:27 Tech interviews.
1366. 01:24:28 I don't know.
1367. 01:24:31 I'm taking my car obsession.
1368. 01:24:35 My thinking of that, I'm thinking back to Hyper Focus by Chris Bailey.
1369. 01:24:42 And he's got the one graph where it's like useful versus entertaining.
1370. 01:24:52 And maybe the way out of that, if it's really something that you want to change, is not
1371. 01:24:59 to stop it completely, but to replace some of those videos with educational YouTube videos.
1372. 01:25:06 So they're like on the verge of things that you're interested in.
1373. 01:25:09 Like I've got a Thomas Frank Rome research video I could send you.
1374. 01:25:14 Thanks for that.
1375. 01:25:15 I appreciate that.
1376. 01:25:16 Sounds up.
1377. 01:25:17 You're helping a lot.
1378. 01:25:18 Yeah.
1379. 01:25:19 Or a TED talk or something like that.
1380. 01:25:20 I know you mentioned that you used to.
1381. 01:25:22 It used to anyways, watch a bunch of TED talks because every time we would cover a book by
1382. 01:25:25 somebody, hey, did you see the TED talk?
1383. 01:25:27 Nope.
1384. 01:25:28 Yep.
1385. 01:25:29 I used to do a thing where I watched a TED talk every morning.
1386. 01:25:32 Wow.
1387. 01:25:33 So yeah.
1388. 01:25:34 That was a thing for a while.
1389. 01:25:35 And that's the kind of thing that I would envision if you were to take BJ Fogg's approach.
1390. 01:25:41 That would be one of the substitutions that would probably happen there.
1391. 01:25:47 He doesn't really talk about it in this particular section, I don't think.
1392. 01:25:53 But there are these, he does kind of talk about how if you want to change from a negative
1393. 01:26:02 to a positive, then there are different things that you can do to apply that.
1394. 01:26:10 In this particular section, he's really talking about just redesigning things and eliminating
1395. 01:26:16 them.
1396. 01:26:17 So you redesign your ability to stop doing a habit where you make it harder to do or you
1397. 01:26:20 reduce the motivation to stop a habit.
1398. 01:26:23 But I think there is a substitution option that probably would make sense here too.
1399. 01:26:30 And again, it really depends.
1400. 01:26:31 And this is the cool thing about this whole concept to me.
1401. 01:26:34 This is why I find habits so fascinating is that there is no single right answer to any
1402. 01:26:42 of these specific problems.
1403. 01:26:44 If you get joy out of watching the car videos, absolutely go ahead and watch the car videos,
1404. 01:26:50 which is why I continue to listen to the pen addict.
1405. 01:26:54 I continue to do a bunch of other things just because they're fun.
1406. 01:26:59 And I don't think, I think this is something that I'm not trying to counsel you at this
1407. 01:27:03 moment.
1408. 01:27:04 I'm trying to just explain, I guess, to the listeners who have been it.
1409. 01:27:08 There is nothing wrong with that.
1410. 01:27:10 If you decide that this is important to me, you don't have to justify it to anybody.
1411. 01:27:16 Now you can, if you want to, you can say, well, I should be doing something.
1412. 01:27:22 And that word should, I think, is dangerous.
1413. 01:27:25 But if you want to replace a behavior with a different behavior, there are ways to do
1414. 01:27:32 that.
1415. 01:27:33 But don't feel like you necessarily have to.
1416. 01:27:35 Don't let anybody, productivity, shame you into letting go of the things that you simply
1417. 01:27:41 find enjoyable that you don't necessarily get a specific or explicit benefit from those
1418. 01:27:48 things.
1419. 01:27:49 Yeah, I think the easy answer here is to replace the motor driven exploration of cars with
1420. 01:28:00 learning skills.
1421. 01:28:02 Like for example, I've been doing tons and tons of live streaming, which has me on the
1422. 01:28:05 edge of wanting to become a streamer right now and have played around with that concept.
1423. 01:28:11 If you think I should do that, maybe you should let me know.
1424. 01:28:14 Because I'm not a gamer, so it would not be gaming.
1425. 01:28:17 It was just partly why I was asking about how easy it is to get into room research because
1426. 01:28:20 I was debating doing a live stream, just exploring it, trying to figure out if I should use it
1427. 01:28:25 or not.
1428. 01:28:26 I don't know if that's of any interest to anybody, but that's a concept I've played
1429. 01:28:30 with.
1430. 01:28:31 It would be very easy for me to replace this bad habit.
1431. 01:28:33 I'm going to call it a bad habit with that learning habit, which would be better off in
1432. 01:28:38 the long run.
1433. 01:28:39 There are tons and tons of videos to go through to learn things around streaming.
1434. 01:28:44 I know the encoding part and I know how to push a stream out, but creating the engaging
1435. 01:28:50 portion of it is a different game.
1436. 01:28:53 So I've done a lot of video work just not in that way.
1437. 01:28:56 That's the piece that I would be looking at.
1438. 01:28:58 But all of that could come from breaking the bad habit, replacing it with a better one,
1439. 01:29:04 which I think in the long run would be better off.
1440. 01:29:06 But still like cars might.
1441. 01:29:09 Which is fine.
1442. 01:29:10 That kind of gets into the skillset number five, the mindset.
1443. 01:29:13 I'm the kind of person who fill the blank, knows a lot about cars or learns skills.
1444. 01:29:19 I mean, you got to get more specific than that.
1445. 01:29:23 What are you really trying to get from this, I think, in order for that to work?
1446. 01:29:27 If it doesn't work, I would say don't be upset that it's not.
1447. 01:29:31 Yeah.
1448. 01:29:32 All right.
1449. 01:29:33 Let's talk about the last chapter here, which I don't have a lot.
1450. 01:29:36 A lot to say about number eight though, is how we change together.
1451. 01:29:39 And this is really talking about applying the seven steps that he mentions back in chapters
1452. 01:29:46 two through infinity in a group context.
1453. 01:29:50 I did appreciate in this section each of these steps he talks about this from two perspectives
1454. 01:29:57 as the ringleader.
1455. 01:30:00 So this is the person who is in charge of a group.
1456. 01:30:02 And you can set the tone and you can, if you own a business, say this is how we are going
1457. 01:30:08 to do things.
1458. 01:30:09 And this is always one of the things that people push back against the most, I think,
1459. 01:30:13 when it comes to this type of stuff is that a lot of books presume that you have this
1460. 01:30:19 sort of control over the groups that you are involved in.
1461. 01:30:24 And he basically says that if you're not a ringleader, then you are a ninja and you need
1462. 01:30:29 to sneak in behavior change wherever you can stealthily.
1463. 01:30:34 I thought this was genius.
1464. 01:30:36 And then he goes through each of the seven steps and talks about it from a ringleader
1465. 01:30:40 perspective and from a ninja perspective.
1466. 01:30:43 Yeah.
1467. 01:30:44 I think this is interesting because there are times when I'm definitely the ringleader
1468. 01:30:48 and there are definitely times when I'm the ninja.
1469. 01:30:50 But I feel like there's also times when I struggle to figure out where the difference
1470. 01:30:55 is.
1471. 01:30:57 And I say that because at the church, for example, I'm definitely the ringleader when
1472. 01:31:03 it comes to producing our Sunday services right now from a technical stance.
1473. 01:31:09 But from an overall event stance, I am not.
1474. 01:31:16 I'm a big part of it, but I'm not the overarching.
1475. 01:31:19 So even in one role, I feel like you can flip back and forth between those because there
1476. 01:31:26 are definitely some cases where I have without having been through this, have been building
1477. 01:31:33 in habits amongst my tech team to do our Sunday services.
1478. 01:31:38 But in the overarching, you know, having this terminology, I need to be more of a ninja to
1479. 01:31:45 pull that off.
1480. 01:31:46 So I haven't been doing that near as much, even though I've had the opportunity to do
1481. 01:31:52 it a lot.
1482. 01:31:53 Yeah, I think you're right.
1483. 01:31:56 There are going to be a lot of places where you're going back and forth between these
1484. 01:31:59 two and it can be difficult to find the balance there.
1485. 01:32:04 But this is where the maxims that he shared earlier in the book, but he restates them
1486. 01:32:09 here are very helpful, I think.
1487. 01:32:11 These apply no matter whether you are a ringleader or a ninja.
1488. 01:32:15 And that is number one, to help people do what they already want to do and to number
1489. 01:32:18 two, help people feel successful, not be successful, feel successful.
1490. 01:32:24 And I think that's a really important difference there, but also running, going back to like
1491. 01:32:31 the positive versus negative aspect, why like negative doesn't work with this model,
1492. 01:32:37 you can't help people feel successful if they've simply avoided a negative scenario.
1493. 01:32:44 You need to help them think that they have won, even if there is a larger victory to
1494. 01:32:50 be gained, helping them recognize that they have at least won this specific contest, this
1495. 01:32:57 specific thing that's right in front of them, they were able to do this successfully and
1496. 01:33:01 build some momentum.
1497. 01:33:03 That is going to be important.
1498. 01:33:05 I think I'm out of thoughts and I'm through all my notes that I have in bullet journal.
1499. 01:33:10 What else we say about this one?
1500. 01:33:12 I think it's time for action items then, which...
1501. 01:33:15 We didn't write any down, Mike.
1502. 01:33:17 True.
1503. 01:33:18 I did mention that I want to reconsider my evening and morning routines specifically.
1504. 01:33:24 And I mentioned a couple of habits as we recorded this that I want to apply some of
1505. 01:33:30 this stuff to and see if I can't get them to be a little bit more successful.
1506. 01:33:36 So I'll make that an action item, although I won't bore you next time with a rundown
1507. 01:33:41 of my complete morning and evening routines.
1508. 01:33:47 But I think that's really the only action item from this book that you could do is apply
1509. 01:33:54 these principles and these exercises in some way, shape, or form.
1510. 01:34:00 You could pick something specific, I guess.
1511. 01:34:01 I'm reconsidering all of my morning and evening habits, which is only six of them.
1512. 01:34:10 But I want to make sure that the foundation is solid for anything that I would want to
1513. 01:34:15 add in the future.
1514. 01:34:17 There are a couple things that I've kind of toyed with on and off and haven't really
1515. 01:34:21 invested a lot of time into making those things be a part of the routine.
1516. 01:34:27 And I also think that during a global pandemic, maybe not the time to try to establish a bunch
1517. 01:34:32 of new habits.
1518. 01:34:34 Interestingly, I do think that it is important to take a look at what is already there.
1519. 01:34:39 And if you don't have solid habits, start building some positive ones because this has
1520. 01:34:44 kind of been a giant reset period for everybody.
1521. 01:34:48 And so being intentional about the habits that are producing the outcomes that you're
1522. 01:34:53 getting, this is probably a great time to consider that stuff.
1523. 01:34:58 Just based on the title of the book, the way to implement those changes is not to do a
1524. 01:35:02 bunch of big things.
1525. 01:35:04 It is to identify some small things.
1526. 01:35:06 Yeah, I think as far as action items, I mostly just want to be aware.
1527. 01:35:11 This isn't a, this isn't one where I feel like I have specifics.
1528. 01:35:16 This is a, it's good to understand this process.
1529. 01:35:20 And I am likely to use it more for bad habits at the start, but I'm not sure what all that
1530. 01:35:28 would be.
1531. 01:35:29 Save the one we've talked about.
1532. 01:35:31 It is interesting that this made me aware of potentially negative motivators behind a
1533. 01:35:38 lot of behaviors that I have.
1534. 01:35:40 So that particular piece is one that's enlightening and interesting to explore.
1535. 01:35:46 So maybe there's an action around that, but that's more of a, I'm going to ruminate on
1536. 01:35:51 this over time scenario.
1537. 01:35:53 This isn't a, I'm going to sit down and actively work through that.
1538. 01:35:57 So I can't say that that's a thing I'm going to do.
1539. 01:35:59 So I'm going to leave it at that.
1540. 01:36:01 I'm going to just ruminate.
1541. 01:36:03 All right.
1542. 01:36:04 Can I, can I do that?
1543. 01:36:05 Is that allowed?
1544. 01:36:06 You can ruminate.
1545. 01:36:07 I'll allow it.
1546. 01:36:08 All right.
1547. 01:36:09 Style and rating.
1548. 01:36:10 Uh, I go first, correct?
1549. 01:36:12 Yep.
1550. 01:36:13 Your book.
1551. 01:36:14 You go first.
1552. 01:36:15 Okay.
1553. 01:36:16 This is a little bit different than what I expected.
1554. 01:36:20 I did not think it was going to be this entertaining to read.
1555. 01:36:25 I did not expect the stories to be interesting, to be honest.
1556. 01:36:32 And the way that he describes some of these things and the labels, even that he applies
1557. 01:36:37 to some of the stuff is kind of quirky and, and fun in a way that you maybe wouldn't expect
1558. 01:36:45 from a behavioral designer, you know, on the, right on the cover, BJ Fogg, PhD.
1559. 01:36:52 And I found it pretty refreshing actually in order to read it.
1560. 01:36:56 I already mentioned there's a lot of aha moments in here for me right in the first chapter
1561. 01:37:00 that fog behavior model that was kind of interesting and unlocked a lot of things was
1562. 01:37:06 like, oh, so that's why I never really thought that this was greater.
1563. 01:37:11 Uh huh.
1564. 01:37:12 That's why that really clicks, you know, and, and cements this for me.
1565. 01:37:16 I, I really enjoyed this book.
1566. 01:37:18 I think there's a ton visually in here, which makes it easy to read.
1567. 01:37:22 It's, uh, it's not dry at all.
1568. 01:37:26 Even though there is kind of a, the deepest dive into habits that we've probably seen
1569. 01:37:31 yet.
1570. 01:37:32 I feel like this is one of the easiest books to get through too.
1571. 01:37:35 Uh, comparing this to atomic habits is interesting because I feel like towards the end of atomic
1572. 01:37:41 habits, it feels like it feels pretty weighty.
1573. 01:37:46 Like there's a lot of information that you've gone through and you can kind of lose sight
1574. 01:37:49 of how it all ties together.
1575. 01:37:51 Even though he's really just basically attacking all the different angles on like the four
1576. 01:37:55 different points and the four different laws and in that particular book.
1577. 01:37:59 I think that this is an easy five star book.
1578. 01:38:04 I don't think that means that it's better or worse than atomic habits or any of the other
1579. 01:38:09 five star books that we've, we've read.
1580. 01:38:12 But I do think for the right person, which I think is probably the majority of people
1581. 01:38:18 who are interested in building solid habits.
1582. 01:38:22 This is the, the go to book.
1583. 01:38:24 I'm thinking of one person in particular who texted me while I was reading this and they
1584. 01:38:29 mentioned that they're not a runner.
1585. 01:38:32 They want to run a 10 K and so they bought a whole bunch of gear and their plan was just
1586. 01:38:35 to run until they couldn't every day for a period of time.
1587. 01:38:39 And as I was hearing them talk about that, I'm reading through this and I'm like, nope,
1588. 01:38:44 you're doing this, this and that wrong.
1589. 01:38:47 Here's the visual models.
1590. 01:38:50 Yeah, exactly.
1591. 01:38:51 But also it was interesting because I'm not in a position, I don't have the platform basically
1592. 01:38:55 to say like, well, that's not the way that you should, you should do this.
1593. 01:38:58 But I found myself in the middle of reading this wanting to give it away to somebody.
1594. 01:39:03 Because I know that the way BGA fog describes it and the visuals that he applies in this
1595. 01:39:07 book, like they will totally get it.
1596. 01:39:09 So I think this is a great book.
1597. 01:39:13 I really don't think, I can't, I have in trouble thinking of somebody who would not get a lot
1598. 01:39:20 out of this book or who would not enjoy it.
1599. 01:39:24 I guess if you fall into that camp where like the antidote Oliver Berkman, where you're
1600. 01:39:29 just annoyed by the positive stuff, there is a lot of positive stuff in here.
1601. 01:39:33 So maybe if you are like anti that, you know, stay away, but otherwise I think this is a
1602. 01:39:39 great book.
1603. 01:39:40 Sure.
1604. 01:39:41 I will join you at five stars.
1605. 01:39:43 I think it definitely falls into that category.
1606. 01:39:45 But I also think every time we have a habit book, we rate it at five stars.
1607. 01:39:48 So there is that.
1608. 01:39:50 So if we find another habit book, we should probably just rate it at five stars before
1609. 01:39:54 we pick it up to read it.
1610. 01:39:55 So in this case, I think he's, you know, from a style stance, he's an awesome writer, very
1611. 01:40:01 easy to read the way the book is laid out in a formatted, super simple to follow the
1612. 01:40:06 charts and stuff he uses and reuses with tweaks in order to make it a point spot on.
1613. 01:40:13 I was annoyed by the PowerPoint slide thing I mentioned earlier that was purely in my
1614. 01:40:18 head, not his thing at all did not actually exist in the book.
1615. 01:40:21 Just a thing that my brain would not let go of that is not his fault.
1616. 01:40:27 So don't don't get upset over that.
1617. 01:40:29 But the book is laid out really well.
1618. 01:40:31 I liked it and I'm likely to review this one from time to time just because seeing the
1619. 01:40:39 motivation, ability and prompt format and in that formula, it's super helpful.
1620. 01:40:45 So that's one that I think I'm going to continue to fall back to.
1621. 01:40:49 So I am excited that I have had a chance to go through this.
1622. 01:40:53 I'm likely to recommend it in quite a few avenues.
1623. 01:40:57 So thanks for picking it, Mike.
1624. 01:40:59 Good job, sir.
1625. 01:41:00 Absolutely.
1626. 01:41:01 All right.
1627. 01:41:02 So upcoming books, what is next?
1628. 01:41:04 All right.
1629. 01:41:05 So upcoming book is Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday, which is interesting that
1630. 01:41:10 I had picked this ahead of time because given the conversation we just had about how my
1631. 01:41:15 tendency to focus on fear and disappointment stuff as motivators, I have a feeling this
1632. 01:41:20 is going to cover some of that.
1633. 01:41:24 You've read this, right?
1634. 01:41:25 I have.
1635. 01:41:26 Yep.
1636. 01:41:27 This is a good book.
1637. 01:41:28 So I'm excited to talk about this one.
1638. 01:41:29 Yeah.
1639. 01:41:30 I'll leave it there.
1640. 01:41:31 Stillness is the key by Ryan Holiday.
1641. 01:41:34 I'm excited about going through this one, Mike.
1642. 01:41:36 All right.
1643. 01:41:37 And the one after that, I am going to pick because I just can't get enough about habits,
1644. 01:41:42 triggers by Marshall Goldsmith.
1645. 01:41:44 All right.
1646. 01:41:46 So is it a five star?
1647. 01:41:47 Do we need to rate it now?
1648. 01:41:49 I don't think so, but I haven't read it yet.
1649. 01:41:52 I have heard Mike Hurley and CGP Grey talk about it on Cortex because they did it for the
1650. 01:41:59 Cortex book club.
1651. 01:42:00 Oh, interesting.
1652. 01:42:01 I know that.
1653. 01:42:02 That's right.
1654. 01:42:03 They do a book club.
1655. 01:42:04 Sometimes I forget that.
1656. 01:42:05 They do.
1657. 01:42:06 Yeah.
1658. 01:42:07 This is one that I've had for a while.
1659. 01:42:08 And this is, I'm assuming, just looking at the triggers slash prompts part of the habits
1660. 01:42:14 and routines, but also think that there's a lot of changes that could be made there in
1661. 01:42:21 my specific scenario.
1662. 01:42:23 So I was going back and forth between that one and the power of positive thinking, which
1663. 01:42:28 I think we do need to cover at some point because we keep talking about the antidote
1664. 01:42:31 and the benefit of the negative side.
1665. 01:42:34 I want to just adjust the positive side from somebody who really understands it, but at
1666. 01:42:39 some point.
1667. 01:42:40 Yeah.
1668. 01:42:41 Yeah, for sure.
1669. 01:42:42 Any gap books this time?
1670. 01:42:43 Life's been hard.
1671. 01:42:44 It's true.
1672. 01:42:45 I do have some gap books.
1673. 01:42:48 So the number, the first one I want to get through is I want to reread how to take smart
1674. 01:42:51 notes now that I think Rome might be a digital zettel cast and that would actually work
1675. 01:42:57 for me.
1676. 01:42:58 But the other one, which is not very long, and I actually have right here is Charles
1677. 01:43:06 E. Hummel's freedom from the tyranny of the urgent.
1678. 01:43:11 This is a short book, which I am hoping to get to if I get done with how to take smart
1679. 01:43:18 notes.
1680. 01:43:19 But I'm going to at least read that one because stillness is the key I know is going
1681. 01:43:25 to be a quick read for me.
1682. 01:43:26 I've read it already and I really enjoyed it when I read it the first time.
1683. 01:43:30 I know that rereading it is going to be quick.
1684. 01:43:33 Yeah.
1685. 01:43:34 I do not have a gap book.
1686. 01:43:35 Life is nuts.
1687. 01:43:36 I'm still not there.
1688. 01:43:39 Yes.
1689. 01:43:40 How to stay alive.
1690. 01:43:41 Yeah.
1691. 01:43:42 Joby looking.
1692. 01:43:43 Exactly.
1693. 01:43:44 Yep.
1694. 01:43:45 And yet I still explore new ideas mentally, constantly.
1695. 01:43:47 So whoops.
1696. 01:43:48 Here we go.
1697. 01:43:50 All right.
1698. 01:43:51 I mentioned it already, but just real quickly, you can support the show by coming, be becoming
1699. 01:43:58 a member of the premium membership, which you can do at club.bookworm.fm/membership, I
1700. 01:44:06 believe.
1701. 01:44:07 And five bucks a month, we'll get you access to the live recordings, the MyNote files for
1702. 01:44:12 the books that we read.
1703. 01:44:14 Some fancy wallpapers are on dying gratitude and is a great way to support the show.
1704. 01:44:22 So thank you to everybody who is willing to throw some money at allowing Joe and I to
1705. 01:44:27 continue to do this.
1706. 01:44:29 You also get a little bit of inside baseball before and after the actual podcast recording.
1707. 01:44:34 That's true.
1708. 01:44:35 Yep.
1709. 01:44:36 So we have a tendency to talk for a little bit before and after.
1710. 01:44:38 So if you're on the live, you definitely get some of that as well.
1711. 01:44:43 So thank you to everyone who is currently listening to us live and who joins us in the
1712. 01:44:50 future.
1713. 01:44:51 I need to make that easier to find.
1714. 01:44:52 But yes, bookworm.fm/membership.
1715. 01:44:55 And if you are reading along with us and you are joining or picking up the books so that
1716. 01:45:00 you can read with us and actually have the full background as we go through them, the
1717. 01:45:05 next book up is Stillness is the Key by Ryan Holiday.
1718. 01:45:10 And we will go through that one next time.