1% Better Every Day - James Clear at ConvertKit Craft Commerce 2017

so let's stand up and welcome James Caird to the stage let me tell you a story so it's a story about a strategy and approach philosophy one that I've been thinking a lot about and it starts with a guy that maybe you haven't heard of his name's Dave Brailsford and to set the stage for this I want to tell you a little bit about British Cycling so about 15 years ago early 2000 British Cycling hires this guy named Dave Brailsford and at that point last like 100 years British Cycling had been incredibly mediocre they had won a single gold medal back in 1908 they had never wanted Tour de France which is the premium race in cycling the premier race and so they they hire this guy named Dave Brailsford to change that and in fact at the time they were so mediocre that when they went to buy a new set of bikes they're getting like 200 from a top manufacturer in Europe they actually weren't even given quotes from the manufacturer because they didn't want other teams to see the British riders using their gear for fair that would it would hurt sale and so they brought Brailsford in and they said what's your plan for changing this he said well I believe in this philosophy that I called the aggregation of marginal gains the way that he described it is the 1% improvement and nearly everything that you do so they started with a bunch of things you would expect the cycling team to start with so for example they put slightly lighter tires on the bike they got a more ergonomic seat for the riders to sit on they had their outdoor riders where indoor racing suits because they were lighter and more aerodynamic they had each rider wear a biofeedback sensor they could see how they would respond to training and then adjust it appropriately for the person but then they did a bunch of things you wouldn't expect a cycling team to do so they split tested different types of massage gels to see which one led to the best type of muscle recovery they thought he tried her how to wash their hands to reduce the risk of infections that wouldn't get a cold after you know it and get sick they also figured out the type of pillow that led to the best night's sleep for each rider and then brought that on the road with them to hotels when they were competing and Brailsford said we can actually do this right if we can execute all these little 1% improvements then I think we can win a Tour de France within 5 years ended up being wrong they won in two years and then they repeat it again the third year with a different writer and then after one year break they won two more so they've won four out of last five now we've got a brooder cyclist but it was at the Olympics in London in 2012 and this kind of strategy really came to fruition they won 70% of the gold medals available and so this idea that small improvements tiny habits little choices are not just a cherry on top of our performance not just like a nice thing to have but actually can be the key that unlocks significant success that's an idea that I want us to carry with us as we go through the rest of this presentation and one way to think about it is just kind of basic math like if you just look at the numbers if you were able to improve by one percent each day for an entire year and those games compound you would end up 37 times better at the end of the year and if you were to get 1% worse you would little yourself almost all the way down to zero and what we what's interesting here is that everybody wants a transformation right everybody wants a radical improvement on rapid success but we fail to realize that small habits and little choices are transforming us every day already that these times when you make a choice is slightly better slightly worse a little mistake or a small air 1% better 1% worse that these things compound over time and habits are the compound interest of self-improvement and so if you can learn to master those then you can make time work for you rather than get against you right good habits make time your ally bad habits make time your enemy and so throughout the rest of this presentation I want to talk about how we can do that today I'm going to teach you how to build the habits that you need to get the results that you want and in order to do this I'm going to take you through a framework for building better habits and I'm also going to share a personal example how I use this so my writing habit if you don't know I write at James clear calm write about how to build better habits improve performance and generally live better over a million people visit the site each month there's over 400,000 subscribers on the weekly email newsletter and it all came out of the simple writing habit so so the rest of this talk there are four stages habit formation I'm going to take you through each of those four all right so the four stages are noticing one thing doing and liking noticing one thing doing and liking you cannot perform a habit or take an action if you do not notice something I need to see a coffee cup sitting on the side in order to pick it up first but it's not in my realm of knowledge I don't know it exists I can't do anything about it but then I need to want it I need to want to drink coffee and pick it up if I don't desire it or crave it then I will not take the action then there's doing you actually do the habit and then I need to enjoy the reward you need to enjoy drinking the coffee to repeat it again so noticing one thing doing and liking let's talk about each one and as we do this I'm going to give you a little bit of research about why it works I'm going to view practical action steps at least one for each that you can use to implement in your life so one of my favorite things about noticing one of my favorite strategies for discussing it it's called implementation intentions and there are hundreds of studies on this over 100 studies on implementation intentions if you feel like geeking out and getting into the research but if not I'll just give you the simple version here so one of my favorite studies about exercise and they had three cohorts in this study so they have first cohort they said I just want you to track how often you workout over the next few weeks right so that's the the standard cohort the control group second group is that we want to track off a new exercise we're also going to give you a motivation motivational speech presentation talk about the benefits of heart health why habits are good for you so on so the motivated group alright the third group they got the same presentation that are equally motivated and then they did one thing differently and that one thing was they filled out this sentence I said during the next week I will for taking all these 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on this day in this at this time in this place right they specifically stated their intention to implement the behavior so implementation intention here's what happened first group one out of three of them worked out second group motivation did nothing as soon as they left the researchers facility the next day they were motivated like reading a book or watching a YouTube or listening to a motivational speaker and then you forget all about it 20 months later but the third group the group that has specific plan for how they were going to implement the behavior nine out of ten of them worked out so you can increase your odds of success two to three X just by having a specific plan and this is the insight many people think that they lack motivation when what they really lack is clarity they think that they need to get more motivated that they need willpower in order to execute on a habit if I just felt like writings I just felt like meditating I felt like working out then I would do it but in fact they don't have a plan for it so they wake up each day thinking I wonder if I'll feel motivated to write today wonder if I'll feel motivated to workout today but instead you can take the decision-making out of it by explicitly stating when where and how you want to implement the habit so here's how I did this with my writing habit I decided that on November 12th 2012 which was a Monday if you check that was going to be the first day that I published an article and I was going to publish every Monday and every Thursday that was my implementation intention that was my specific plan didn't matter how good or how bad it was it didn't matter how long or how short it was it didn't matter how I felt about it if all I could do was write three good sentences that day then that was getting published but I did that and I did it for three years and that was how the site grew it was just that core habit that drove the growth so you need to give your goals a time and a place to live in the world right give them space on your calendar now it sounds easy to say let's just start a plan let's you know write down exactly what you should do and then maybe you'll follow through on it but of course we all know that there are challenges that arise it's not quite that easy so here's a little strategy that I like to use to make sure you can come up with a better plan of action and it's called a failure pre-mortem so the way that it works is you think about the habit the project the goal whatever the most important thing is that you want to work on and I want you to imagine fast forward six months for nine you failed and then tell the story of why you failed what happened what challenges did you encounter what was the took you off course when I do this with businesses sometimes we call to kill the company exercise so everybody sits around thinks about ways to kill the company in the next six months and once you have all that stuff laid out on the table in front of you you can start to make better choices about how to develop a plan you can start to have if-then plans so not only do I want to exercise for 20 minutes on day at 5:00 p. m. but also if I do not exercise because I have to take my kid to practice or whatever then Tuesday morning at 7:00 a.

m. I will go in right you can have ways to adjust for these challenges so core point about noticing is it's hard to change something if you're not aware of it and one way to become more aware of the opportunity to take action is add a specific plan for what is going to happen all right Stage two wanting one of the most overlooked drivers of habits and human behavior is our physical environment so let me tell you a quick story this comes from Harvard so these researchers at Harvard went to Massachusetts General Hospital and add very interesting question they wondered if they could change people's behavior without talking to them at all without giving the main thing to do without trying to motivate them but how can we shift their behavior without asking them to do anything and so they this is a drawing of the cafeteria at the hospital this is drawn to scale so the shaded pink boxes are areas where they're refrigerators that have soda in them the two black boxes on the side are water all right refrigerators water and then all the other tables are food in the cafeteria now they made a few little changes they turned the pink boxes into ones that also had water okay so they just added but these refrigerators still have soda available they just added water to it and then they have a bunch of little rolling carts and they put those around the to capture you to seeing switch back and forth and see they just add a couple things now what happened they didn't talk to anybody didn't do anything but over the next six months people drank 25% more water and 11% less soda and it's interesting because if you went up and talked to anybody sitting there and you asked them why are you drinking this everybody would have a reason they'd say well I felt like drinking soda I felt like drinking water but in fact many of them chose to drink it simply because they were presented with it and this is an interesting insight about our desires your environment often influences them we want things simply simply because they are an option right simply because they are in front of us at the time you walk into any living room in America where - all the couches and chairs face they all look at the TVs like what does that room designed to get you to do we wonder why we sit and watch so much TV it's because our desires are shaped in that way thankfully you don't have to be the victim of your environment you can also be the architect of it you can decide to design something to make your good behaviors easier and your bad behaviors harder so when it comes to habits you want to practice your guitar more frequently put it right in the middle of your living room so you run across below time you want to read more when you make your bed in the morning take the book you want to read put it on top of the pillow when you come back that night pick it up read a few pages go to sleep for me I to buy apples all the time and then I would put them in the crisper at the bottom of the fridge and they would sit there for three weeks and go bad and I finally open it up and see them again you get mad and then eventually I bought a bowl and put it right in the middle of the counter and so then when I buy apples I put them there I see them every day and now I eat them all the time many of our desires are simply shaped because we have an environment that shapes us in that way so the moral of the story is I've never seen someone stick to positive habits in a consistent fashion in a negative environment maybe you can overpower once or twice maybe you can have the willpower to do the right thing on one day but if you're constantly fighting against those forces it's going to be very hard to follow through so don't rely on willpower and self-control it's a lot easier to stick to better habits when you're presented with better options all right so what does this mean for writing so one I leave my phone in the other room which it is in the other room right now because I'd like to show to you that's kind of name but I also on my home screen have no applications so you can't see anything I have to swipe over and then tap into certain folders to get to social media takes at least three clicks for me to get to any social media app it's not that big of a deal but it just prevents me from being mindless and just pulling it up and tapping on Instagram because it's right in front of me and then I also started something this last year which is an early effective my every Monday my assistant will log me out of all social media and reset the passwords and then not give them to me until Friday and then on Friday I get the passwords and get to enjoy social media again also I am going on vacation for the next two weeks so if you see me posting on Tuesday I'd only hear about it because I'm allowed to be on there I'm not locked out to the tweet so so the core idea here is that you want to put more steps between you and the bad behaviors and fewer steps between you and good behaviors and it is far easier to stick to good habits if you are living in an environment that is inclined to push you in that direction all right stage 3 doing so quick story here there's this professor at the University of Florida he's retired now he was a photography professors named Jerry Koosman and at the beginning of the semester he would have this film photography class and he bring the class in and he would split him into two groups he said everybody on this side of the room you're going to be graded on the quantity of work that you do this semester and everybody on this side of the room you're going to be graded on the quality of work that you do the semester and you further explained it by saying that for your film photography you're going to be responsible for having 100 pictures if you do 100 photos over the course of the semester that'll be an A if you do 90 it'll be a B to do 82 BC and so on so it's quantity for this group you only have to produce one photo but it has to be the most perfect photo that you can make the best photo that you can make an interesting an interesting thing happens at the end of the term all the best grades came from the quantity group not from the quality group and what ended up happening was that while people were busy experimenting making mistakes learning how to you know play with composition and so on they would come across a really great photo and while the quality group is disease theorizing about what perfection would look like and how to take the perfect photo and not actually honing their skills they ended up only making something mediocre average and the important insight here especially for habits is that in the beginning the most important thing is just to shut up and put your reps in just make sure that you hone the skill right and you can start to think of it the way that I like to think of it is that any outcome that you wish to achieve is just a point along the spectrum of repetitions so if you have few reps two more reps and you can imagine an easy goal moderate goal hard goal the more reps you put in the more that you more like you you are to achieve that goal so may point a is you know stake fitness squatting a hundred pounds point B is squatting 200 points C is plotting 300 maybe you need to put in a hundred reps or a thousand reps to get to point A maybe it's five thousand to get the point beam it was ten thousand to get the point to see and this is actually very similar to what I saw with my writing habit so after six articles at 100 subscribers after twenty three a thousand after ninety six thirty four thousand one hundred seventy seven hundred thousand two forty three and so on and every rep that I put in every article that I published was something that was moving me closer to the next outcome on that spectrum but you can't get around the fact of the repetitions matter so every outcome is just a point along the spectrum and this brings us to an interesting point which is that if getting your reps in is incredibly important then that means learning how to start is incredibly important because each repetition really any consistency with the habit is just an exercise and getting started each day you can get started over and over again and that's what consistency is so you make it as easy as possible to start I want to give you a little strategy for doing that I like to call it the two-minute rule now this is adapted so David Allen has the two-minute rule for productivity and his rule is that if it takes two minutes just do it now so like throwing in the laundry or washing a dish or calling somebody back it takes two minutes or let's just do it right away don't plan it don't wait just do it now now for many of the habits and behaviors that we want to perform they're going to take longer than two minutes you know if you go to the gym you're not going to work out for just two minutes but any habit can be started in less than two minutes whether it's writing working out meditating anything and so the goal here is that you want to optimize for the beginning of the task you want your habits to act as an entrance ramp to a bigger routine one of my favorite examples this Twyla Tharp great choreographer and dancer she said that she had a two hour workout routine that she did every morning but the habit was not the workout routine the habit was she would wake up walk down to the street and then hail a cab and that was the only thing she'd focus on it as long as she hailed the cab and got in the car she knew that she was going to end up at the gym and then do the rest of the workout so she put all of her energy into starting now what I like to say is you should optimize for the starting line not the finish line right so often when we think about habits goals routines achievements it's all about the milestone we think about how much weight we want to lose money we learn our want to earn how many subscribers want to have it's all fixed on the finish line but instead if you can optimize for the starting line and make it as easy as possibly get started and get your reps in often the outcomes just come as a natural result okay Stage four liking so the only reason that we repeat behaviors is because we enjoy them because we like the reward if we don't enjoy the experience along the way we're unlikely to stick with it and that means that you need to figure out ways to bring a reward into the present moment because good habits have a problem and that problem is that for good habits the immediate consequences there if there's a cost that happens in the moment but the reward is often delayed if I go to the gym now to cost me time and energy and effort but the reward is I'll be fit three months from now or not get sick ten years from now or so on the reward is delayed bad habits are often the reverse if I eat a doughnut right now the benefit is it tastes great and I give a hit of sugar and it's awesome and the consequence is delayed right I get overweight three weeks from now or three months from now or so on so you need to figure out how to bring the reward into the present moment to stick to a good habit and someone else who's going to be speaking here Seth Godin had a very nice little quote about this or it's the best way to change long-term behavior is a short-term feedback and one way to think about that is that long-term behaviors sticking with writing for years on end or going to the gym and so on they they have those delayed consequences so you need a way to enjoy it in the moment all right there are many ways to do this but I'm just going to share one today I like to called the Seinfeld strategy and the story is from Jerry Seinfeld famous comedian early in his career he's speaking at a comedy club he's presenting or you know performing that night and this guy named Brad Isaac is opening for him and backstage Brad Isaac catch a sign tell me said mr.