[Music] I'd like to start with a story, and the story is about Team Sky, which is Great Britain's professional cycling team. Sometime in the mid-2000s, around 2010, they hired a man named Dave Brailsford. At the time, Team Sky had a very middle-of-the-road record when it came to performance on the world stage. They had won about one gold medal in the last 100 years, from 1908 to 2008. They had never won a Tour de France, the premier event in cycling. And when they hired Dave Brailsford, they said, We would like to change this. We'd like to improve our performance. We'd like to reach a higher level of performance. What's your plan to help us do that? And when they hired Brailsford, he said, I have this strategy called the aggregation of marginal gains. And the way that he described it was the one percent improvement in nearly everything that you do. And so they started by looking at a lot of things you would expect a cycling team.

to look at they improved their bike tires made them slightly lighter they put a more ergonomic seat on the bike they had their riders where biofeedback sensors so they could see how each person responded to the training and practice that they did each day they had their outdoor riders wear indoor racing suits because they were lighter and more aerodynamic but then they did a variety of things that you wouldn't expect a cycling team to do they split tested different types of massage gels to see which one led to the best form of recovery they taught their riders how to wash their hands to reduce the risk of infection keep them healthy they even figured out what kind of pillow led to the best night's sleep for each rider and then brought that on the road with them to hotels so brailsford said if we can actually execute on this strategy if we can aggregate all these small changes these little one percent improvements then i think we can win the tour de france in about five years he ended up being wrong they won the

tour de france in three years, and then they repeated again in the fourth year with a different rider, and then just last year, they won for the third time in four years. Brailsford's strategy really came to fruition at the Olympics in London in 2012 when they won 70 of the gold medals available. So what I'd like to start us off with is the idea that small improvements actually can add up to a very significant change in a relatively short period of time. And this is just basic math, all right? If you get one percent better each day over 365 days, you end up 37 times better at the end of the year. If you get one percent worse, you'd take yourself all the way, almost all the way down to zero. Now, you might say, Okay, well, one percent improvements are nice, but clearly no one is going to get one percent better every single day, so is that ever enough to accumulate to anything, considering that we're not going to be perfect all the time? And I would argue, yes, in fact, you can.

get ten times better if you get one percent better five days a week. 46 weeks a year. So, it's about 230 days in total. That gives you six weeks off for holidays, illness, laziness, and just generally not getting things done. But you're still 10 times better at the end of the year. And what I would like to propose is that the way to do this is not by setting better goals for ourselves or at our organizations, but by building better systems and obtaining better habits. In fact, you could say that the goal would never change. They wanted to win the Tour de France each year. They wanted to win Olympic gold medals. It wasn't the goal that made the difference. Instead, it was their system, the way that they applied those improvements on a one percent basis day after day. There was a study done at Yale University on the psychology of aging, and it was a 23-year study. They talked to people, and they basically went into one of two cohorts. The first cohort had positive views of aging.

when they asked them how they felt about aging or what their expectations were for old age, they had relatively good things to say. You know, I would be moving into the prime of my life, or I'll be smarter than I've ever been before. They were very positive about it. The second group was very negative about it. My body's going to wear down, I don't have much to look forward to, everybody gets sick, we'll all die at some point, that type of thing. What they found was that of the 660 adults in the study, the ones with positive views of aging lived on average 7.6 years longer. And that actually is a very significant number. Things like exercise and diet don't account for 7.6 years in life expectancy. So why if your view is positive? The reason is because you'll take healthy actions as a result. And if your view is negative, you'll assume that deterioration of your health is inevitable. If you have a positive view of aging, you'll say something like, Well, I should.

continue to eat healthy and work out because I feel good about moving into old age. I still have a lot to live for. Whereas, if you have a negative view of aging, you'll say something like, What's the point in me exercising? I'm going to get sick anyway. I'm expecting to get old, and so on. The point here is that there's a deeper level of behavior change and habit formation than what we often discuss. The way that I would describe it is this: the outer layer of behavior change are the results that we get, the outcome, the goal. So that's the outside layer. Often we say we need better goals, we need better outcomes, we need better results, we need to hit new sales numbers, and so to do that we take one step in on behavior change when we talk about our actions. Now, the actions and the results are usually where we stop when it comes to habits and behavior change. We say, how can we build better habits, how can we take action on this particular goal, how can we take an action to get a result.

but I would argue, and that Yale study would prove this, that there's a deeper level of behavior change as well, and that level is identity or belief or mindset. You can take your pick of what you'd like to determine, but the identity that we hold drives the actions that we take and the results that we get. So, in the Yale study, the people have a positive identity when it comes to aging. They believe that they should take positive actions and thus they get better results in the long run. We'll take a common example when it comes to personal habits: weight loss. So, losing 20 pounds or 10 kilos over the next six months, that'll be the outer layer, okay, that'll be the result that you're going for. In order to lose those 10 kilos, you need to move into the actions that you take, and so that would be something like working out three times a week or eating healthy. But most people stop there. So, for example, in this case, the identity might be, I want to become the type of person who

doesn't miss workouts. And my argument is, if we focus just on the identity, if you become the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, if you become the type person who exercise it consistently, and only focus on the core of behavior change, it ripples out to the other layers anyway. So, the key idea here is that a shift in mindset leads to a shift in daily choices, and a shift in daily choices leads to significantly better results in the long run. The word priority came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular, it meant the first or very prior thing, and it stayed singular for the next 500 years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralize the term and start talking about priorities. Illogically, we reason that by changing the word, we could bend reality, and somehow we would now have multiple first things. You hear about this a lot in organizations. They'll talk about priority one, priority two, priority three, priority four. Everything is a priority, everything is an urgency, even though it's not possible.

for us to focus on more than one thing at a time, you could also call it ruthless elimination. And when it comes to building better habits and changing behavior in organizations and in our personal lives, we have to be ruthless about the things that we focus on. We actually have some good data on this. There was a study of a parole board judges. There were about a thousand of them, a thousand cases that they looked at in this particular research study. And the parole board judges would have criminals come out, they would sit before the parole board, and then they would vote on whether or not they would be released from prison or would have to go back in. You would think, what you would hope is that in order for a criminal to get released from prison, it should be based on the time they serve, the type of crime that they did, whether or not they had good behavior, all sorts of things built into the criminal justice system. In fact, what they found, the single biggest factor on whether or not someone was released on parole

or whether they had to go back into prison was the time of day that they were seen. So this is a map of the judge's decisions throughout the day. You can see that in the beginning of the day, it starts around 60 likelihood that a criminal would be released on parole. As the morning goes on, the judges get fatigued, their willpower depletes, and the odds of you getting a favorable hearing decreases. That first dotted line is lunch, so they take a break. The judge's decision-making spikes right back up to where it was before, then goes back down. They take another break in the afternoon, and then pretty soon just falls off the cliff and the day ends. Now, this idea is a psychological concept called decision fatigue or ego depletion, and the point here is that the more decisions that we make over the course of a day, the more your willpower and focus gets fatigued. It's kind of like a muscle, right? If I were to pick up that weight and do curls for a little while, I can do

them for a minute or two, but if you catch me 30 minutes from now, I'm not going to have much left. And that's how our willpower works as well. So the key idea here is your brain only has so much capacity to provide. Your willpower is like a muscle, and similar to muscles, it gets fatigued. All right, let me give you some practical ideas on how to do this. It's great to say that we need to simplify, but how do we actually make that happen in the real world? Warren Buffett, one of the most famous investors of our time, he adheres to a concept that I'll call the 25/5 rule. And this story comes from a man named Mike Flint, who was Warren Buffett's private pilot. Mike Flint has flown multiple U.S. presidents. He's also the pilot for Warren Buffett, so he's had a very successful career. And he came to Warren Buffett one day and he said, Warren, I would like to fly.

this particular type of plane. I think whenever we upgrade, we should get this new one. And he said, Mike, you know, if you're working for me in 10 years when we buy a new plane, then I probably have failed you as a boss. So here's what I'd like you to do. And this exercise that I'm about to share, you can do on any level. You can do it for your career, you can do it for the things that you or your team need to get done this month, you can do it for the things you need to work on today or this week. And he said, I'd like you to take the 25 things that you want to achieve in your career and write them down on a list. So Mike Flint goes away, writes down 25 things he gets done, and he says, All right, great. I want you to circle the top five things on that list. So, spend some more time, he circles the top five priorities. He says, All right, tell me what your strategy is at this point. Mike Flynn said, Well, I have my top five.

things so i'm gonna work on those first. And he said great, what about the other things on your list? Uh, he said well, those will be the things I do on nights or weekends, or when I get tired or bored, or you know, a project stalls. I'll work on that. And Warren Buffett said, Mike, you got it all wrong. The things that you have circled are your priorities. The other items on your list, number six through 25, this is your never do under any circumstance list. And the reason is because it's so easy for us to rationalize spending time on things that are good uses of time but not great uses of time. It's items that six through 25 on your list that take up time and space and energy because we can justify why we need to do them. They're on the list for a reason, they just don't happen to be the best uses of our time. [Music] I call this the three R's of habit formation, but the basic idea is that no matter what habit you're working on.

there are three main steps based on the research. The first step is the prompt, or the cue, or the trigger. It's like a reminder, the thing that signals that we should do something. So if my phone buzzes, for example, that's a trigger. The next piece is the routine. This is the behavior itself, the actual habit that you're going to perform. So my phone buzzes, that's the trigger. I answer the phone, that's the routine. The third piece is the reward. So this is the benefit that you get for doing the behavior. And it's important to note that all habits, good or bad, have some kind of benefit or reward associated with them. Take smoking, for example. People will often label smoking as a bad habit. So what's the benefit, what's the reward of it? Well, there's some kind of physiological reward, there's a hit of nicotine that's associated with it, and then there are often social rewards, right? You get to share a smoke with a friend or a colleague, something like that. So regardless of how we label habits or behaviors

the important thing is to note that all of them have some kind of benefit neurologically associated with them. Now, so my phone rings. That's a reminder. I answer the phone. That's the routine. And then I get to satisfy my curiosity or find out who's calling. That's the benefit. And what ends up happening is that if that reward is positive, then it tells your brain, Hey, remember, next time this reminder happens, next time this trigger comes along, we should repeat that pattern. And once you make it through the cycle enough times, it becomes a habit, it becomes ingrained. So how can we leverage the first part of this, the trigger or the reminder? Let's say that I wanted to start meditating. I could say, All right, in the morning, I make a cup of coffee. And so for this new behavior, I could say, When I make my morning cup of coffee, I will meditate for 60 seconds. And so the current behavior, the things that you're already doing, become the trigger for the new behavior that you're trying to build.

and the reason that this is important is that your current behaviors things that are already habits have this neurological network built into your mind. They already have like an on-ramp in your brain. And so you're just kind of tapping into that so you can tag the new behavior and link it to something that's already strongly correlated in your mind. The two-minute rule there is no habit that we're going to work on that takes less than two minutes to do but nearly any habit can be started in under two minutes. So if you take exercise for example you know often people get home from a long day of work and they say i'm too exhausted to go for a run or to try to exercise so i never get around to doing it because i think about oh i have to run five kilometers or whatever some long distance that seems overwhelming to me so rather than focus on the whole thing that you need to do i would encourage you to focus on just the first two minutes. So what's the first two minutes of that

habit. I put my running shoes on, I get out the door, and I lock the door. And if you do just that, it doesn't matter if you take another step. But what you find is that motivation often comes after starting, not before. We often think that motivation is something that we're supposed to have before we do work, but motivation will come as a result of doing some small bit of work. And then we can trust that the rest of the process will flow easily. But the point here is that the motivation needed to complete a habit is at its peak at the beginning of a behavior. The greatest amount of friction for any type of task is that in the beginning, is in the starting. So the key idea is make it so easy that you can't say no. Here's another way to do this. It's a concept called pre-commitment. It's been very well researched, and I call these kind of like instant willpower improvements. They're things that seem very simple, but we often ignore or don't put into

practice, and if we do put them into practice, they result in immediate boosts in willpower. Here's one study: random sample of a business with 3,272 employees. The business wanted their employees to get their annual flu shot. Now, to do this, they sent them a flyer that said, You need to get your flu shot. But then they sent another version, and that other version said, You need to get a flu shot. Your appointment has already been scheduled for April 22nd. Click here, or you know, right, send us a message here to choose the time that you want to attend. And what they found was just by selecting a date, just by picking the day when people would get it, they were 2.4 times more likely to follow through. But then they sent a third version, and they said, You need to get your flu shot. You've already been scheduled for 1pm on April 22nd. If you need to change the time, you can click here and do so. And the people who had the exact time and date scheduled for them were four

times more likely to follow through, simply because they were pre-committed. And we often think, Oh, we should give people more options, we should let them choose whatever they want to do. But if we're trying to incentivize behavior, of trying to make it more likely for people to follow through, pre-commitment is a great device for doing this. Implementation intentions is another method, very similar to pre-commitment but slightly different. And this is the study that I like that shows this. So there was a study that looked at different groups and their motivation and ability to stick with exercise. So there are three groups in this study. The first group, they brought in and they said, We want you to track how often you exercise over the next two weeks. So that's group one. Group two, we want you to track how often you exercise, and we're going to show you this motivational video about the benefits of exercise, why you should do it. So group two was the motivated group. Then there was group three. Group three got the exact same treatment as group

two they were told to track their exercise. They were given the motivational speech. They were equally motivated but they did one thing differently, and that one thing is they filled out this sentence that said, During the next week, I will partake in at least 20 minutes of vigorous exercise on this day, at this time, at this place. And what they found when they looked at all the analysis at the end of the study is this is what happened: Group one, 38 of them worked out over the next two weeks. The control group, no motivation, group two, remember they were the motivated group and the motivation faded almost immediately as soon as they walked out of the research lab, so 35 of them worked out. And group three, it was almost double or even triple the odds that they would work out over the next two weeks. 91 of them stuck to exercise, and the only difference was that they filled out this little sentence. And it seems so basic, but by pre-committing ourselves to things, we make it much more likely that we fall

through implementation intentions which is what this is called. This is an implementation intention. There are over a hundred. There are hundreds of studies on this so it's been proven in a bunch of different contexts. It's very simple and something that actually leads to real results. Now you may be saying, All right, that's great. I should just pick times and places for everything I want to work on. But in fact, we can get really overloaded by the amount of things that we want to improve. There are all sorts of things you may want to improve upon. So how do you decide where to start? Again, I'm big on simplicity. I'm big on eliminating most of the choices that you can focus just on the very best uses of your time. And if you're thinking, How do I decide what to focus on after this presentation? I would say focus on the keystone habit. And a keystone habit is a routine or ritual that ripples into the rest of your life. It creates a cascade of good behavior. So for myself, my keystone habit is

working out. I know that if I work out, I get the benefits of exercise. Sure, but I also tend to focus better. I have this period of like high focus, the post-workout high, for an hour or so afterward. I sleep better that night because I am tired and exhausted and have worked myself physically, which means I wake up the next day with better energy, which means I focus better then. And I also tend to eat better just because I feel like I worked out, so I don't want to waste it. So I actually eat worse when I don't work out, any better when I do. Now at no point was I trying to build better nutrition habits or better focus or better sleep habits or improved energy, but all those things happen as a side effect as a result of the one keystone habit. Some other common examples of keystone habits: CEOs will often talk about their daily meditation habit. They get 10 or 20 minutes of meditation in, then the rest of their day flows more smoothly. Artists really being on a daily walk.

there are tons of famous artists. There's a great book called daily rituals that talks about the habits and behaviors of many famous artists and scientists. And it's interesting how many of them had a daily walk as part of their routine. But these are some examples of if you just do this one behavior, you can trust that it will ripple into other areas of your personal and professional life. The basic idea here that I want to share with you is this idea of designing for laziness. So, BJ Fogg, the professor from Stanford University, he likes popcorn, he enjoys eating popcorn, he just didn't want to eat that much of it. And so, he took the popcorn out of his kitchen, walked down the hallway, and into the storage room, into his garage, climbed up on a ladder, and put the popcorn on the highest shelf in the garage. Now, if he really wants to eat it, he can just go out and get it. It's only going to take 60 seconds. But if he's designing for his lazy decision for his default action.

he's not going to go get the popcorn, and so the idea is how can we design the spaces we live in and the places we work so that the default action, the lazy behavior, is a better choice. The key idea is that I've never seen a person consistently stick to positive habits in a negative environment. If you're trying to fight the environment that you live and work in all the time, it's going to be very, very hard to stick with the things that are important to you. Jerry Seinfeld, a very famous comedian in the U.S., was on tour doing a comedy tour, and there was a young comic named Brad Isaac who was opening for Seinfeld on stage that night. He caught Seinfeld backstage before the show. He said, Mr. Seinfeld, you know, I'm an aspiring comic, I'm a young comic. What tips do you have for a young comic on how to succeed? Seinfeld thought for a minute. He said, Well, the secret to being a better comic is to write better jokes, and the secret to writing better jokes

is to write every day. So here's what you should do: get a wall calendar where you can see every day of the month and the year mapped out on one page. Then, each day that you stick to your behavior of writing for 10 minutes or 15 minutes, writing jokes, I want you to put an x on that day. At the beginning, you'll do it every now and then, but eventually, at some point, you're gonna get a string going: five, six, seven, eight, nine days in a row. You'll have a chain. And at that point, your only goal becomes: don't break the chain. It doesn't matter how good or how bad the behavior is. It doesn't matter whether the writing makes it into the performance that you do. It doesn't matter how you feel about the jokes. All that matters is that you stick to the behavior. And this idea that sticking to the things that we want to measure over a consistent basis is what makes the biggest difference is something that I think ties into the point I tried to make at the very beginning of this, which is that

one percent gains. When aggregated, add up to very significant results in the long run. You

How to Trick Your Brain to Like Doing Hard Things – Atomic Habits by James Clear

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