13. How to Stop Procrastinating by Using the Two-Minute Rule
Around 40-50% of what we do every day is automatic.
Habits influence you even more than you think, as they can determine what you will do several hours from now.
Eg: check your phone “for just a second” and end up spending 20 minutes, etc.
The few seconds in the habit that will determine the next minutes or hours are called decisive moments.
Walking into McDonald’s is a decisive moment. It will determine that you will eat bad food for the next half-hour.
Habits are your entry point, not the endpoint.
The Two-Minute Rule
Any habit can be scaled down to a two-minute version.
- Run an hour -> change clothes and tie your shoes.
- Study -> open your notebook.
-> once you start doing something, it’s much easier to keep on doing it.
This is what you want: a gateway habit that eases the entire sequence.
If you want to run a marathon, putting on your shoes will be your gateway habit.
The point of the gateway habit is not to do the thing (merely putting on your shoes is ridiculous), it’s to show up. You need to establish the habit before you can improve it.
The purpose of this rule is to avoid feeling like the habit is a chore.
Eg: If you don’t want to train at the gym for one hour, go for two minutes, then leave.
It’s better to do that for a month and establish a good gym habit than not going to the gym at all.
It sounds ridiculous, but the purpose here is not to work out. It is to establish the habit of working out, so you can work out.
A modified version of this is called habit shaping. It’s mastering the first two minutes of any habit before you get fully into it.
Eg: if we take the gym into account:
- Get into workout clothes
- Get out of your house
- Reach the gym
- Workout for five minutes and leave
- Workout for one hour
14. How to Make Good Habits Inevitable and Bad Habits Impossible
If you have a problem with overeating, buy small sizes. If you check your phone too often, put it in another room. The idea is to make it as hard as possible to do what you shouldn’t.
If you struggle to go to the gym, pay a coach in advance.
This is called schedule commitment.
How To Automate A Habit And Never Think About It Again
Use technology to do so: ask your banking app to save money for you, block social media in your browser, etc.
Summary of the 3rd Law
How to create a good habit
- Reduce friction to start the habit.
- Design the environment to make the habit easy.
- Analyze and use the decisive moment.
- Use the Two-Minute Rule.
- Automate the habit.
How to break a bad habit
- Increase friction between the bad habit and you.
- Get committed to your future good habits.
The 4th Law: Make It Satisfying
15. The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change
The fourth law (make it satisfying) increases the odds that a behavior will be repeated.
However, humans don’t want any type of satisfaction. They want instant gratification because this is the environment we evolved in.
Back to cavemen time, no one ever did anything hoping to see results in 5 or 10 years like we do today. People were living day-to-day. They learned to value the present more than the future.
The delayed-gratification society is recent, around 500 years old. This explains why we’re hooked on products offering us instant gratification.
When it comes to gratification, there are two types of habit.
The bad habits: the immediate outcome feels good, the ultimate outcome feels bad (smoking).
The good habits: the immediate outcome feels bad, the ultimate outcome feels good (exercising).
-> The bigger the immediate pleasure something gives you, the more you should question whether it aligns with your long-term goals!!
Since we prefer instant gratification, most people spend their lives chasing immediate hits of satisfaction.
The road less traveled is the road of delayed gratification.
And the most successful people are the ones that delay instant gratification.
Let’s have a look at how you can enjoy delayed gratification.
How To Turn Instant Gratification To Your Advantage
The only way to enjoy habits giving delayed gratification is to make it that they also help you enjoy instant gratification.
Eg: saving money. Instead of buying that shirt, transfer to a saving account the money equivalent to the price of the shirt. This way, you reward instantly the action of not spending money.
Be mindful to assign a logical reward. Don’t reward yourself with ice cream for going to the gym. Get a massage instead.
16. How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day
Get a habit tracker. It can be marking a “V” in your calendar for each workout, ticking a to-do list, or moving paperclip from one jar to another.
The most successful people tracked and recorded their habit to “never break the chain”.
The advantages of habit tracking are:
- It’s obvious: it keeps you honest, and it shows where you stand.
- It’s attractive. Progress is the most effective form of motivation. When you have a bad day, you can see how far you have come.
- It’s satisfying. Ticking the to-do list feels good!
The problem with tracking is that it is itself a chore: tracking a habit is yet another habit to develop.
So here’s how you can make tracking easy:
- Automate
- Keep tracking for your most important habit only
- Record immediately after you practiced
How To Recover Quickly When Your Habits Break Down
Follow this simple rule: never miss twice.
If you miss once on your habit, go back to it as soon as possible.
Missing once is ok. Missing twice becomes a habit – the habit of missing.
Understand that even if you can’t execute flawlessly, what matters is showing up.
Doing something imperfectly > not doing it at all.
Mathematically, going up is higher than going down.
From 100 to 150 is a 50% gain. From 150 to 100 is a 33% loss…
Furthermore, remember identity.
It’s not about working out. It’s about being the type of person that doesn’t miss workouts.
Knowing When (And When Not) To Track A Habit
To quote the author: The dark side of tracking a particular behavior is that we become driven by the number rather than the purpose behind it.
Whether a restaurant is good or not should not be measured by the revenue, but by the percentage of customers that come back.
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
Measurement should guide you, not consume you.
17. How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything
The most effective way to break up a bad habit is to inflict a direct punishment when the habit is practiced.
An accountability partner is great for that.
The idea is very simple: anytime you do a bad habit or miss a good one, your partner punishes you. It may be through giving your partner $100, or having to wear funny clothes the entire day, or anything like that.
Summary of the 4th law
How to create a good habit
- Give yourself a reward for completing a habit.
- Understand the benefit of not practicing a bad habit.
- Use a habit tracker not to break the chain.
- Don’t miss more than once on your habit.
How to break a bad habit
- Find an accountability partner.
Advanced Tactics: How To Go From Being Merely Good To Being Truly Great
18. The Truth About Talent (When Genes Matter and When They Don’t)
The secret to maximizing your chances of success is to choose something you already are naturally good at.
It’s true for everything, job, sports, habits.
Michael Phelps was designed to swim. Usain Bolt was designed to run. Had they chosen swimming instead of running and running instead of swimming, we would have never heard of them.
-> genes determine your area of opportunity.
The areas where you are likely to succeed are where your habits are satisfying.
To find out which ones they are, you need to study your personality.
How Your Personality Influences Your Habits
Your genes influence everything you do. They pre-determine your personality.
Your personality is rated on the OCEAN scale.
- Openness
- Consciousness
- Extroversion
- Agreeableness
- Neuroticism
-> build habits that work for your personality.
How To Find A Game Where The Odds Are In Your Favor
Simply pick up a habit that is easy to pick up.
If you don’t know which one it is, you need to explore.
Once you find one, keep it and invest in it.
Use the following questions to help you get started:
- What feels like fun to me, but work to others?
- What makes me lose track of time and gets me into flow?
- Where do I get greater returns than the average person?
- What comes naturally to me?
Sometimes, it’s the intertwinement of skills that make you really good at something, such as being good for both drawing and telling jokes, like Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert.
If you can’t win in the game of others, create yours. Be different.
Work hard on the skills that come easy.
19. The Goldilocks Rule: How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work
People give up when what they do is boring or too difficult.
This is the Goldilocks principle: this principle states that children enjoy the most challenges that are neither too hard nor too easy. They need to be difficult enough to drive growth, but not overly impossible.
Adults are the same.
The Goldilocks Rule, therefore, is to progress in a way that is neither too hard, nor too easy.
When you are in the Goldilocks zone, you usually hit the flow state.
This is the key to success: do challenges that are hard enough so you grow, but not too hard so you’re stuck; and make enough progress so that you remain motivated and never quit.
How To Stay Focused When You Get Bored Working On Your Goals
Here’s a piece about success few people will ever admit.
The best in their field don’t only work hard, have talent, etc. At some point, they can also endure the boredom of practice again and again and again.
-> successful people also feel demotivated. But they keep going.
The greatest threat to success is not failure, but boredom.
Humans need novelty. This is why as soon as we feel a lack of motivation, we jump on the next workout, diet, etc.
Men desire novelty to such an extent that those who are doing well wish for a change as much as those who are doing badly.
Machiavelli
This is why the most-habit forming products are those providing you with constant novelty.
This principle is called variable reward. It explains why slot machines are so addictive.
The sweet spot is 50/50. The brain loves when it loses as much as it wins (makes sense in regard to the Goldilocks principle).
If you desire to succeed, you will have to fall in love with boredom.
Sticking with it is what makes the difference between a winner and a loser.
To quote the author: The only way to become excellent is to be endlessly fascinated by doing the same thing over and over.
20. The Downside of Creating Good Habits
The downside is that you do no longer pay attention to little errors. In fact, when you have been doing the same thing for a long time, there is a decline in performance.
As a result, if mastery is your purpose, you need to bring mindfulness back into an automatic habit. The equation is as follows:
Habits + Deliberate Practice = Mastery
Mastering the habit is not enough. You should always aim at going to the next level.
It’s when you think you’re good that you often become bad.
How To Review Your Habits And Make Adjustments
You need to define metrics and review the work you have done. Take into account what you did well, what you did wrong, and focus on improving.
The only way to success is continuous improvement.
How To Break The Beliefs That Hold You Back
The problem with habit and identity is that you can get stuck. Eg: the teacher that refuses to apply a new method because they have been using the same one for twenty years.
To avoid this trap, avoid making any part of your identity too big. In fact, avoid making your identity big.
The more a belief defines you, the less you can change it.
Habits can lock you up and prevent you from changing.
Always be reviewing them, and always remain flexible to change.
Conclusion: The Secret to Results That Last
One tiny change won’t change your life. But added on top of each other…they will radically change your life. This takes time and practice.
Habits cannot end. It’s a never-ending process.
The secret to success is to never stop improving.
To quote the author, it’s remarkable what you can build if you don’t stop.
Appendix
The following are lessons stemming from the four-step model of human behavior (cue, craving, response, reward).
Awareness comes before desire: you assign meaning before you crave something.
Happiness is simply the absence of desire: happiness is what you feel when you don’t crave anything.
It is the idea of pleasure that we chase: you actually don’t know how pleasurable fulfilling your desire will be when you are on your way to fulfilling it.
Peace occurs when you don’t turn your observations into problems: craving is the desire to fix a problem. When you stop wanting to fix things, you become at peace.
With a big enough why you can overcome any how: great craving creates great action.
Being curious is better than being smart: curiosity creates action. Intelligence does not.
Emotions drive behavior.
We can only be rational and logical after we have been emotional.
Your response tends to follow your emotions.
Suffering drives progress: craving creates pain which compels you to act.
Your actions reveal how badly you want something: saying it’s a priority VS acting on it.
Reward is on the other side of sacrifice.
Self-control is difficult because it is not satisfying.
Our expectations determine our satisfaction: as we grow, our expectations grow too, so our happiness decreases.
The pain of failure correlates to the height of expectations: if you want something badly, it hurts badly when you fail.
Feelings come both before and after the behavior: the first feeling compels you to act, the second compels you to repeat.
Desire initiates. Pleasure sustains: quite logically.
Hope declines with experience and is replaced by acceptance. Experience teaches you what you can expect., hence, hope decreases.
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Things I Disagree With
Focus on the system: Peter Thiel condemns this system-oriented culture because it assumes no direction. When you focus on systems, you accept it goes slowly. When you focus on a definite purpose, you can find ways to hack it and produce a lot in a short amount of time.
Habit shaping: if you need time to master the first two minutes of the habit because you don’t want to do it…then maybe the habit isn’t for you? In a way, I feel the entire book was written for people that shouldn’t get into specific habits in the first place. If you really can’t do it…then don’t. Habit hacking does not make sense, because you shouldn’t have to hack a habit.
In fact, the author explains readers in the end to choose a habit that is easy to practice, making almost the entire book pointless.
No talk about lifestyle: the truth about habits is that following them hugely depends on your lifestyle. When I was on a strict lion diet and did nothing but working and working out, following any type of hard habit was much easier because I wasn’t craving any dopamine.
As soon as I drank alcohol, watched a movie, fapped, ate sugar, played video games, did not sleep enough, consumed social media, or something alike, following tough habits became much harder. James Clear talks about genes, but genes don’t have such a big impact.
You know what has? Sleep, food, exercise, and social relationships.
Everything you consume and do on a daily basis drives your behavior much more than genes. The equation is simple: garbage in, garbage out. You can’t sustain a gym routine if you watch Netflix and eat McDonald’s. As simple as that.
The myth of personality: Benjamin Hardy has shown quite well that personality is not permanent. James Clear advises the readers to do something that fits their personality, but this is wrong. If you have a personality that suits no habits, you won’t develop any.
Hardy advises the exact opposite of James Clear: you should practice habits that will force you to develop the personality you need to have to become the person you want to be! And the way to do so is by choosing who you want to become.
So James Clear was right at the beginning of the book when he advises readers to decide who they want to be and attach the habits to that person. He’s wrong when he advises people to choose habits based on their personality.
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