“Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement so it’s like the same way that compound interest accrues through finance; the effects of your habits multiply over time and so often these choices that you make they’re these little one percent improvements for you or against you each day and they’re very easy to overlook on a daily basis”
“Habits that are immediately satisfying are more likely to be repeated and so pretty much any behavior produces multiple outcomes across time; like if you eat a donut right now it’s tasty and it should be good but in the long run, you gain weight and so the immediate outcome is favorable but the long-term outcome is unfavorable; with good habits, it’s often the reverse; like you go to the gym right now and it takes effort you sweat you have to work hard to sacrifice your time for Netflix and chill to go train the immediate outcome is unfavorable but the ultimate outcome you’re in shape and in you know a year or month or whatever is favorable”
“The challenge for building good habits and breaking bad ones is often finding a way to pull the long-term consequences of your bad habits into the immediate moment so you feel a little bit of the pain right now and want to avoid it and the long-term rewards of your good habits into the immediate moment so you have a reason to repeat it again in the future”
“The ultimate form of immediate gratification is the reinforcement of your desired identity”
“I think that your habits are the way that you embody an identity; so like each time you make your bed you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized each time you go to the gym you embody the identity of someone who’s fit each time you sit down to write you embody the identity of a writer”
“The power of doing a better habit each day or casting a little vote for that type of person is that now you have evidence to root your belief in”
“The power of doing a better habit each day or casting a little vote for that type of person is that now you have evidence to root your belief in”
“I feel like if I didn’t exercise, I don’t know that I would be an entrepreneur; I don’t know if I could handle the psychological rollercoaster without the physical outlet”
“The ultimate meta habit is reading because if you build a habit of reading you can solve pretty much any other problem”
“When your body is moving it’s very hard for you one to not be active mentally; like if you think about someone who’s shut down mentally what does their body language look like they’re usually closed off their arms like they’re sitting they’re not moving very much try to be closed off mentally and be dancing physically it’s very hard to do if your body is moving that like that it’s really hard for your mind to be shut down”
“My cardinal rule is that I don’t cheat myself on sleep”
“You’ll see articles[…..]like follow this one five minute trick to double your productivity, but the real answer to most of that stuff is like get eight hours of sleep a night, exercise, don’t eat like crap, and then instantly you have this boost of productivity and motivation”
“Often when we set about to change something or to achieve something the first step is almost always setting a goal”
“The winners and losers in a particular domain often have the same goals like every Olympian wants to win a gold medal; sure every job candidate wants to get the job, so if the winners and the losers have the same goal, then the goal cannot be the thing that distinguishes the two and the thing that distinguishes them is the process the SYSTEM behind the goal”
“You have a messy room and you set you get motivated and you set the goal to clean your room well you can do that in an hour and then you have a clean room but if you don’t change the sloppy habits that led to a messy room in the first place then you just end up with a dirty room again”
“If you fix the inputs, the outputs fix themselves automatically”
“If you did something simple like drink a glass of water at lunch each day it would take like three weeks (to build that habit); if you did something more difficult like go for a run after work every day that would be like seven or eight months”
“The honest answer to how long it takes to build a new habit is forever because if you stop, then it’s no longer a habit”
“I think people often look at habits as like a finish line to be crossed, but it’s actually a lifestyle to be lived”
“What actually leads to a habit becoming automatic and becoming learned and ingrained is REPETITION[….]then, your brain starts to automate how that process works”
“I don’t want to be some new age version of an academic who’s in an ivory tower just like theorizing about ideas is different what it looks like to put ideas into practice”
“The first stage of every habit is a cue; the second stage is a craving or some kind of prediction that your brain makes[..]; the third stage is the response and then; the fourth stage is the reward”
“The key if you want to build habits that last if you want to change the way that you interpret cues is to join a group where your desired behavior is the normal behavior”
“The reason social norms influence our behavior so much is because we want to belong to the tribe we want to be friends with those people and so we don’t want to lose the friendship or lose belonging over violating the norms”
“I’ve never consistently seen someone stick to positive habits in a negative environment it’s really hard to fight that day in and day out so the solution I think is to reduce friction; there are a ton of ways you can do this one way is just to scale the habit down make it as easy as possible […] start small small steps”
