The Shortcut to the Long Game
Progress, one kale salad, 20 push-ups, and a couple chapters at a time.
Allow me to take you a couple of million years back in time, where life was simple. Here, you don’t have to worry about what outfit you’re going to wear, weigh out the pros and cons of your potential weekend plans, nor waste time pensively staring at and choosing between the expensive name brand and cheap generic brand of pasta sauce at the grocery store. There is no stressing over what filter to apply to your social media post, who’s swiping where on Tinder, nor which episode of The Office you are going to rewatch for the thousandth time. No, this is the brutal and primal world of hunter-gatherer societies, where all of your choices are conveniently made for you. You see, it’s easy to decide whether or not you, “feel,” like hunting, fighting off predators, or collecting berries when your family’s survival depends upon it. In other words, your behavioral choices become quite simple when they are accompanied by immediate consequences.
Through the perspective of the times when early humans traversed the dangers of the African grasslands, this concept of immediate consequences existed in the form of survival of the fittest; whereas, in today’s world, where largely indulgent and artificial food and media seek to hijack your senses for commercial gains, we refer to these immediate consequences as instant gratification. Now, both of these systems rely upon short-term reinforcement to guide behavior, but they differ in their long-term effects, in that today, our immediate consequences tend to guide us towards short-term rewards but away from long-term progress. For example, the fluffy and delicious doughnut on your counter might benefit you in the short term through rushes of dopamine and serotonin; however, continuing with this indulgence will lead you down a path to negative consequences in the long term. On the contrary, when our ancestors took off to hunt down a pack of gazelles, their actions were driven by the short-term reinforcements of their grumbling stomachs, while also ultimately leading to long-term success for their tribes. So, considering that we share much of our baseline decision-making hardware with our ancestors, what’s creating this gap between us and them? According to James Clear, author of Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones, it is our environment — the people, places, and things we surround ourselves with — that has changed and that influences a majority of our choices in the modern world.
“We have the brains of our ancestors but temptations they never had to face.” - James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, comparing the environments or ancestors endured with the world we live in today.
In Atomic Habits, Clear elaborates on this idea, using examples from business, sports, and everyday interactions to hone in on how our environment impacts our daily habits, and how we can strategize accordingly to achieve better outcomes in both the short and long term. Interestingly, Clear’s framework is built upon the notion that it is not only possible to align the immediate and delayed results of our decisions, but that doing so is actually optimal, in that extensive goals are achieved through the compilation of positive fractional decisions. In other words, similar to how Rome wasn’t built in one day, macro-level accomplishments, like losing 20 lbs, earning a promotion, and completing a degree, are not seized in days or weeks, but in months and years of successful, small decisions. According to Clear, if we organize our environments to promote the, “right,” decisions and discourage the, “wrong,” ones, then we can leverage the deeply ingrained mechanisms that remain from our days of foraging in the wilderness to our advantage. If you are looking for a novel, yet simple and actionable, perspective on how to program your own environment to best suit your goals and lifestyle, then this is the book for you.
“Boiling water will soften a potato but harden an egg. You can’t control whether you’re a potato or an egg, but you can decide to play a game where it’s better to be hard or soft.” - Clear emphasizing the value of tailoring your envronment to suit your strengths and weaknesses.
You can find Clear’s tactics and techniques to optimize and implement your ideal habits in his book, as well as on his website. For now, here are a few of my favorite takeaways and tools from Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits and Break Bad Ones that I started implementing into my daily life.
1. “Make It Obvious.”
In a previous post, I outlined Tim Ferriss’ concept of batching, where you concentrate work on a given topic or activity to avoid losing time and resources to repeated start-up costs. The idea is exemplified well by your laundry schedule, in that you typically don’t do laundry at the end of every day; rather, you wait for a heap of laundry to accumulate, and you complete your laundry in one big batch at the end of the week. This way, you maximize the rewards for one set of start-up costs — in this case, the start-up cost is the laundry detergent and the trip to the laundry room. Clear’s concept of making your habits obvious is based on a similar principle: you are more likely to follow through on a habit if it is readily available. In other words, you are more likely to complete a given task if the start-up cost is low. For example, I have recently been working to improve my speed for memorizing a deck of cards (check out this post and this video if you are interested in this skill), which requires regular practice; however, at first, I always seemed to either push the task off at the end of the day or forget to pull out my deck. This failure changed when, after reading Clear’s book, I moved my deck on top of my desk, making it readily available and impossible to miss. Since then, I have nearly doubled the number of times I practice each week, and I’ve cut my time down to about 2:30. If you’re struggling to follow through on a habit, I recommend taking Clear’s advice and reducing the start-up cost by, “making it obvious.”
2. Habit Stacking
I stumbled upon this next tool, which is based on the idea that one habit can lead to another, years ago during pop-warner football. If you have ever woken up late and missed breakfast, a meeting, or a workout and watched the rest of your day fall apart as a result, then you are familiar with the concept that the structure of your day is like a set of dominoes: if you remove one chip in the chain, the whole thing can lose its momentum. On the other hand, if you line up the pieces appropriately, you can turn one success into another, and another, and another. In Atomic Habits, Clear describes how you can utilize this concept with the technique of Habit Stacking, where you pair a habit you wish to grow with a habit that is already customary in your everyday life. When I was a 6th-grade cornerback, I unknowingly leveraged Habit Stacking by pairing my daily push-ups with my inevitable routine of waking up in the morning and going to bed at night. In this way, I paired irresistible habits — waking up and going to bed — with my desired habit of doing push-ups every day. As Clear emphasizes in the book, you can use any habit that is already solidified into your routine — such as brushing your teeth or taking a lunch break — but the stronger that current habit is, the easier and more consistently you will be able to pair it with your desired habit. If you are looking to keep the ball rolling in your daily habits, try Habit Stacking.
3. “Join a culture where your desired behavior is the normal behavior.”
The classic phrase, “you are who you surround yourself with,” embodies this third and final technique, which centers around the idea that it is easier to complete a habit when the people around you serve as reinforcement for that habit. Whether it be fear of missing out (FOMO) or avoidance of judgment from others, Clear argues that our decisions are heavily impacted by the pack of people that we run with; consequently, he argues that you can depress negative decisions and promote positive ones by engulfing yourself in a culture of people who value goals similar to your own. My recent quest to learn American Sign Language (ASL) is an example of this technique, in that I teamed up with my sisters in the process. Now, not only am I inclined to learn ASL out of personal interest but also in order to stay up to par with my sisters. If you are having trouble sticking to your habits on your own, find some friends to join you and hold you accountable.
“Success is not a goal to reach or a finish line to cross. It is a system to improve, an endless process to refine.” - Clear defining success through both a short and long term perspective.