The Exchanges

Q So that was one question. What's the other one you had around environment?

A I like, am I creating the conditions required for success? What is this room designed to encourage? Um, and then how can I make this behavior more obvious? And there are, there are a number of ways that you can do that. Like some of it is just, you know, Uh, if you want to go for a run, take your running shoes and your clothes, set them out the night before. I have one, I have one guy who, um, he sleeps in his running shorts, so he just gets up. All he has to do is put his shoes and a shirt on, then he's out the door. You know, he's just trying to make it as frictionless as possible. I found that, uh, to give you like another example, If I buy a six pack of beer and I put it on the, you know, shelf where I can just see it as soon as I open up the door, I'll grab one each night and have one at dinner just cause it's there. But if I tuck it down on the lowest shelf, like put it in the back, I gotta like bend down to see it. Sometimes I'll forget that it's there. It'll be there for like two weeks, you know, and it's just about what is obvious. Um, what is in front of you?

AI assessment note: “am I creating the conditions required for success? What is this room designed to encourage?”

Q Let's explore habits a little. Um, what exactly is a habit?

A The one, one that I like is that a habit is a recurring solution to a recurring problem in your environment. So something comes up again and again, and your brain is trying to solve it. Another way to describe it is that it's like an automatic or a mindless behavior. If we were talking to a researcher or an academic, they would probably say a habit is like brushing your teeth or tying your shoes or biting your nails, you know, something you do really fast and mindlessly, and you don't even really think about it. But if I were to ask you, hey, Shane, what are some habits you're trying to build? Like, you're probably going to say, oh, you know, I'm trying to go to the gym four days a week, or I want to write every day, or I'm trying to meditate for 10 minutes or something like that. And I know what you mean when you say that, you know, you mean you want it to be this regular practice, this ritual. Now, technically, in some kind of academic sense, maybe that's not, you know, a habitual automatic behavior, but in a cultural sense, that's exactly what we mean when we talk about habits, is we want them to be reliable, repeated routines. And then the third way you could define it, and this one I think is quite useful, is that it's a behavior that is tied to a Context in your environment, behavior that's tied to a particular context. So like your habit of watching Netflix at seven PM i…

AI assessment note: “a habit is a recurring solution to a recurring problem in your environment.”

Q I love these little sayings you have. You moodle thunder, you know, work backwards from magic. What other internal sayings do you have that really resonate with you in this moment?

A Um, one of the biggest things I learned from my grandfather was he, his little saying was PMA, positive mental attitude. So in any scenario, you try to have a positive outlook regardless of the current circumstances. And that sounds a little kind of woo wooey sometimes, or, you know, always think positive or whatever, but I have tried to become better at practicing it and teaching my kids how to practice it. So one way that you can do it is when you run up against something that feels kind of difficult or feels like, um, you don't feel confident about it. You try to rehearse it visually and you emphasize the good portions of what could happen. Uh, and this can, this can happen either in retrospect or it can happen, uh, pre visualization before the thing happens. So I'll give you two examples. In retrospect, when I played baseball and I was like 10 or 12 or 14, after each season, we would go sit on the back deck at my parents' house, and my dad and I would talk about the, the year, and we would talk about the good plays from the year. My best plays, my best games, the games that we won. We would, we would try to highlight, I didn't know this at the time, but what he was doing was he was helping me highlight the wins from, you know, small and big from that last season. And Uh, I can remember some of the conversations that we had, like one, I got into high school and I was never t…

AI assessment note: “his little saying was PMA, positive mental attitude.”

Q And then once we've identified a habit that we want to replace or eliminate, what is the mechanism by which we can do that?

A Broadly speaking, I think there are four things that you should do if you want to build a habit. And this is true if you want to, you know, replace an old one and install a new one. So roughly speaking, what you want is your habit to be obvious. So you want it to be easy to see, easy to notice, easy to, um, you know, get your attention. You want it to be attractive. So something that's appealing or fun to you, as we were just saying, um, you want it to be easy, simple, frictionless, you know, easy to apply and, uh, install. And you want it to be satisfying. The more enjoyable or satisfying a habit is, the more likely you are to stick with it in the future. So I call these the four laws of behavior change. Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, make it satisfying. And you don't need all four every single moment of the day or every habit that you build, but the more that you have those four forces working for you, the more likely you are to stick with it. And in fact, we can actually learn something very Compelling about our habits by looking at behaviors that we often call bad or like that we waste time on and you see what do those things have in common? They often are very obvious, attractive, easy, and satisfying. Those are the things that get them to stick. Um, you know, like if you just take scrolling social media, for example, it's obvious cause your phone is on…

AI assessment note: “I call these the four laws of behavior change. Make it obvious, make it attractive”

Q How do you think about the relationship between consistency and intensity?

A Intensity makes for a good story. You know, it's like, oh, I went to a silent meditation retreat for a week, you know, or I, um, I ran a marathon. Um, you know, we launched this product faster than any other had been launched or whatever, you know, intensity makes for a good story, but consistency makes progress. You know, it's not about like, oh, I did a silent meditation for a week. It's not, you know, I have a meditation practice. I do it for five minutes each morning. It's Part of how I start my day. You know, that's when it's kind of part of your identity or, you know, I, I go for a run three days a week. I really love how it makes me feel. Um, you know, that now it's, it's part of your lifestyle. So I think, uh, you can kind of draw this distinction between intensity is often about the story that you get to tell. Consistency is about the lifestyle that you live. And really what matters is how do you want to spend your days? You know, how do you want to show up as a person? What kind of identity do you want to have? And, um, The great thing is that if you do a good job with the consistency, it develops your capacity to manage the intensity or to handle it. You know, I, I like the saying consistency enlarges ability by being more consistent. You enlarge your ability to handle the intense moments, to do the peak performances, to do the more impressive things, but it needs to…

AI assessment note: “if you do a good job with the consistency, it develops your capacity to manage the intensity”

Q Are there any lessons that you took away that you wish you would have known sooner about filtering or selecting opportunities?

A There are lots of things that I think about now strategically for what I want to focus on that I didn't really have a language for at the time. You kind of like follow your gut or you and your intuition, but so I'll give you a couple. Um, not everything that you do can match all the qualities that check all the boxes that I'm about to cover, but I think about each of these boxes and how do they weave together? So like one thing is leverage. How can I get more output out of each unit of effort? And so some things are much higher leverage than others. You know, like writing, let's just take writing as an example. Writing in a journal or a diary is fine. It's very useful for you. It might help you think more clearly, like writing has lots of benefits, but if you choose to take what you write and share it publicly, well, now all of a sudden you have a lot more leverage with that. Other people can find it. It becomes this kind of like honeypot that attracts like-minded people. You know, I like to say that sharing your work publicly is like a magnet and it just draws other people to you who are interested in the same thing. It's probably one of the most useful things you can do for networking. Is it's not actually networking. It's just sharing your knowledge and trying to be useful in public. Um, so leverage is one thing to think about. How can I get more output out of the hours that…

AI assessment note: “So like one thing is leverage. How can I get more output”

Q What's your exact process for learning new subjects as an adult?

A I don't know that I have an exact process. Uh, although now that you say that, so, okay, this is kind of interesting. I don't have an exact process in the sense that I haven't written it down. I don't have, I don't have like some template to give you, but I do have a pattern that I go through very consistently when I'm trying to learn something new. Um, I think some of this is my personality and how it gets expressed, uh, or maybe, maybe like a strength even, um, And some of it is probably applicable to everybody. So I really like living by this little principle of broad funnel, tight filter. And so I try to cast a really wide net when I'm learning something new. I want to read and consume an enormous amount of information. It's very common for me to have like 40 taps open. You know, I just, I'll, I'll do a search. Like here, here's an example from when I was working on Atomic Habits. I, I found Reddit really helpful when I was working on certain sections of the book. So I would search things like, uh, what's the best habit you've ever built? Reddit. Or what's one habit that you struggled with? Reddit. And if you, you search those terms, it'll pull up, you know, 20 or 30 different threads. And so I would open all of those. So I'd have like 50 tabs open on there. And then I would go through and I would read all the comments in each thread. And a lot of it wasn't really that rele…

AI assessment note: “I really like living by this little principle of broad funnel, tight filter.”

Q Is there like a specific framework that you use to evaluate if this habit is serving you or getting in your way and then you should replace it with a different habit?

A I said earlier that habits are the repeated solutions to recurring problems in your environment, right? So let's say that you go to work and it's a long day. You get home, it's like five 30 or six and you're exhausted. That happens again and again, and you feel tired after a long day of work. So that is a recurring problem that's resurfacing and people have different solutions to that problem. You know, one person might play video games for 30 minutes. Somebody else might go for a run. A third person might smoke a cigarette. But you can see some of these, they're all solving the same recurring problem, but some solutions are better than others. And what you find is that like early in your life, a lot of the solutions that you come up with are just things that you either inherited from your parents or saw modeled and started to repeat. And you get to be about 22 or 25 or something like that. And what are the odds that your current solution is the best solution? Just mathematically, it's very unlikely that the way that you're solving the repeated problems in your life right now is the optimal way to do it. So as soon as you have that realization, it becomes your responsibility to try to figure out a better way. And I think one of the best things you can do early on, this is, if I could actually add one thing to atomic habits that wasn't in it, it would probably be this, which is …

AI assessment note: “habits are the repeated solutions to recurring problems in your environment”

Q One of the things that prevents people from doing things is they just don't feel like it. How do we become stronger than our feelings?

A I think it's okay if you don't feel like it. Um, I think sometimes it's a signal, you know, like you should procrastination is not always a bad thing. If you're procrastinating on something, something, sometimes it's a signal that you don't actually want that thing, uh, which is fine. I, for a long time, I, so I, I was good in school. I got good grades. It was like a game for me that I tried to win. You know, I didn't really care about whether I was learning. I cared about, was I getting A's, you know, am I, am I succeeding? Um, which may not be the way that you want to go through school, but that's, you know, that's how I treated it at the time. And, um, so for a long time, if you asked me when I was in college, what are you going to do? I said I was going to go to medical school. Um, it was something that I, I liked. I do think I would like a lot about being a doctor or a surgeon. There's, I think there's a lot about that profession that would, I would align with who I am, but there's also probably 30% or 40% that would not have been a good fit for me. And, um, I kept saying that because it's the type of thing that you can say and never be criticized for, you know, like you go home at Thanksgiving or Christmas and people are like, what are you going to do? And you're like, I'm going to go to medical school and everybody says, that's great. You know? Um, and you know, some peo…

AI assessment note: “I think it's okay if you don't feel like it. sometimes it's a signal”

Q So what does that look like? Like you're reading a book. Are you highlighting? Are you taking that highlight and putting it into like a word document?

A Like if I read a book, that's really good and relevant to what I'm working on at the time. It's very hard for me to make progress on it. I will, it might take me like, seriously, I might spend, I mean, at this point I'm not, I'm not working as much cause we have all these kids, but, um, uh, but I like, it might take me four hours to get through three pages. Like, because there's, I'm reading, I'm at a point in the book where it's just really hitting on what I've been like kind of stewing on and thinking about and it's sparking ideas. So I'll read a sentence or a paragraph and I'm like, I gotta write about this for a second. And then I, you know, I, I may end up writing two pages and then I go back and And I read some more and then I, you know, write some more. Um, when it's not as intense as that, uh, then it'll be more, what I do is I, I prefer to read physical books. I also, audio can also be helpful for me, especially if I'm in the car a lot or something, it's just a, you know, obviously it's a better way to do that, but, um, it can be helpful for me, especially if a book is kind of dense. I find audio is better because it doesn't, if the book is really dense, I will slow myself down too much as I'm reading it in print. But audio just keeps rolling and I still get the idea, but I don't slow myself down through the writing. So I find some authors to be better for me in audio,…

AI assessment note: “I find passages that interest me and I put a parentheses open parentheses”

Q you've distilled all this experience into that. How do you think about when it's okay to have the gist of something versus when you need to deep dive and it's actually important to go into the weeds on things? It seems, I, I'll put this in context, it seems more and more People are refusing to deep dive and we're just sort of like skimming on the surface of knowledge.

A That's absolutely right. Uh, a lot of that is kind of a, is it the medium or the message? The medium is the message sort of thing. We, you get forced into it by the shape of Twitter or the shape of Instagram or whatever. It's not, it's not a place where you can unpack a book length argument or even a 30 minute argument. You know, it's, everything is compressed to a headline or a tweet. So it's hard to It's hard to play that game to be browsing on there for 30 minutes or 60 minutes or an hour and a half a day and, uh, also be nuanced. You know, you need to, you need to play a different game if you want the nuance. Um, but separately thinking about this for me, you're right. That is a big part of what I do is I try to, so I, I, when I was working on Atomic Habits, I had 12 chapters at the time. There ended up being 20, but at the time there were 12. And I wrote the chapter title on an index card for each of them. I laid all 12 out on the floor. And then I went to my bookshelf and I grabbed each book that was relevant to that chapter. And usually there were like four or five or six for each chapter. So I had these little stacks of books by each index card. And then I looked at each of those books and I said, how can I take everything that is genuinely useful from this book? Like when you sit down and you read these 200 pages, what are the Two or three ideas that you actually remem…

AI assessment note: “separately thinking about this for me, you're right. That is a big part of what I do”

Q How do we create an environment that makes behavior change inevitable?

A I think that's one of the best questions. How can I create the conditions for success? You know, how can I, how can I design an environment where my desired change is easy? In a lot of ways, that's one of the driving questions of atomic habits is to say, there's this, I came across this body of research when I was working on the book about willpower and self-control. And a lot of the surface level conversations about habits that people have are about discipline and willpower. You know, people will look at a professional athlete and they'll say, man, if I was just as disciplined as them, but I, you know, I talked to one guy who played for the Philadelphia Eagles and, um, he said, you know, during my career, Everything was designed for us. You know, we went, we would go to the stadium and we have professional trainers and nutritionists. The food is prepared for us. The, you know, all the workouts are designed. Coaches are on us every day to do the right drills in the right order. And to, you know, like everything is, there's this environment where the conditions for success have been fully created. And he's like, after I retired, that was the hardest time for me to stick to it. Like people would look at me as a professional athlete and think, wow, how disciplined are you? But in fact, you know, what I was, I was benefiting from my environment and all of us are like that. And so I…

AI assessment note: “let's try to make it as easy as possible for me to do the things”