 The months theme has been habits and habit building. We did our own episode toolbox and did lightly discuss power of habit. It was a huge influence on both me and Johnny six years ago. And the first question we have is pretty fun. It's, you know, obviously with the book coming out six years ago, what habits and the science have you used to change those habits in your life personally? Well, I think the biggest thing is, you know, when I was first writing the power of habit, that the idea that habits could be changed was a relatively new idea, right? I mean, I think among many people who are involved in the quantified self movement who are kind of go getters to begin with, they recognize that they could change their habits. But the idea that literally anyone could change any habit in psychology, that was still emerging as a pretty new idea. And since then, in large part because of behavioral economics and the implementations that we've seen of it, it's become much more wide stream, right, much more or much more mainstream. And so now I think that you see a lot of people and a lot of, a lot of products out there and a lot of researchers who kind of accept that we can change any habit. And for me, this has been wonderful. I mean, because in part, I get to hear stories from readers who say, you know, this I struggled with drinking for 12 years. And then I figured out how to understand why and change it. Or I've always wanted to run a half marathon and I didn't understand why I kept on falling down and not actually doing the running until it was explained to me. And similarly, for me, it's been the same thing. My one of my sons was born at about the time I started writing the power of habit and I think getting a chance to be a better parent with him because I understand how to change my own habits. But also I went to, you know, running marathons and feeling like I had more control over my life. And so it's been pretty powerful. That's definitely exciting. I know when we first unlock this whole idea of the habit loop, which we're going to get into in a little bit here, it did have a huge impact on our lives, too. And I think what's so fascinating about the book is obviously it takes the science and personal habit building, but it also talks a lot about these influences on our lives from companies and from marketing that are building these habits that we may be completely unaware of. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And this has been a huge thing, right? I mean, one of the things that we know is that our communities can be incredibly important at changing how we behave, how we habitually behave, right? This is there's a whole chapter in power of habit about alcoholics, anonymous, and there's this kind of interesting question, which is, why does a work, particularly because it was invented by people who didn't have any scientific background and like there's 12 steps to the program because there's 12 apostles in the Bible. This isn't like the the gold standard for scientific research. And yet for a lot of people, it works and it works because they're in this community that helps them and is devoted to habit change. And of course, companies can also take that and use it in less positive ways. A lot of when we look at why social media is so powerful, both for good and for bad, a lot of it draws on this same technique, right? Facebook and Instagram, that when they move to the newsfeed, that's kind of this endless scroll, very deliberately, that was to try and trigger these habits that we have to get us to consume more. And for some people, that's a wonderful thing. If you love Facebook, you find it very rejuvenating. That's a great thing. There's a lot of people who, you know, for Russian provocateurs, it turns out it's pretty good too. But there's a lot of people who feel like it hasn't necessarily been a positive impact on their life. And I think once you make people aware of how these habits work, like how companies can influence or manipulate our habits, it puts you in a position where you can at least make better decisions about who you want to be. In the book, what's so funny to us now, and we're asking that question about six years later is one of the habits you discuss is snacking at work because we're bored and how finding other things to cure that boredom can alleviate the snacking habit. And one of the things you suggest that was actually hopping online for a few minutes. And Johnny, I was laughing before, if you stand by that, you feel that's an effective habit for someone to be building these days. Yeah. So it turns out six years ago, jumping online for a couple of minutes was like a little different than it is today. Right. Now it's like, it's like, if you want to curb your Facebook habit, go have a snack instead of, instead of going online. You know, we were laughing about that. And, you know, I, in all of this, it's not only has Facebook and all the social media companies figured out great ways to have you build habits around their platforms. They have got the research down of how does knock you out of your regular habits to get your attention over to what they're doing, which was amazing to me. Yeah. No, absolutely. I mean, think about all those notifications, right? I just got a brand new computer, right? And so I was setting up my computer and it took me like 10 minutes to go through and turn off all the notification settings so that I'm not getting interrupted in the middle of work. And in fact, we have people whose entire jobs at this point are to interrupt other people in the middle of work, right? And I think that there is an important distinction here because one of the things that's interesting about the modern age is you can spend all day being busy and not necessarily be productive, not necessarily get anything important done. And actually that's a kind of new phenomena. Like if you go back to the 1950s or 1960s, people who could multitask, if you were busy, you were also productive. That's just how the world worked. That's how the economy worked. Starting in the 1980s, that started to shift. And in the last 10 years, it's radically shifted. And so now in the attention economy, if I can somehow convince you to spend all day replying to emails or all day commenting on other people's posts or do something like that, I might make a lot of money off of it, but you are not going to get anything important done. And we're unprepared for that. For myself, I completely understand that. And and saying at the end of the day that I've been busy all day and I'm exhausted, I had to start accepting the fact or list. OK, if you're so beat because you've been so busy today, I'd like to see what you finished. What did you do? And I have a war board that I like to write on. I feel that it's a lot better for me to see these things than to put it in my phone or whatever. And if I don't have things to put on that war board at the end of the day, then that my busyness was for nothing. And and that started changing the basic idea of how I was going to look at the day and and what was important to me if I was going to be busy and what was going to be done. Yeah, no, it's absolutely true. In fact, there's been these really interesting studies about like what is the optimal to do list, right? Because a lot of us, our habits are oftentimes around work, around how we try and structure our lives. And one of the studies found that what you should basically have is most of us use a to do list as like a memory aid, right? We write down like like the 30 things we want to get done because we can't keep them in our brain. It's too much. Turns out that's a terrible way to set up a to do list. It's a great way to have a memory aid, but a bad priority list. What you ought to do is every morning you should look at those 30 things and basically say, what's the one thing I want to get done today? And write that down on your to do list. And then write down like if I happen to get that one thing done, what am I going to do next? And what's my priority for tomorrow? Like the best to do list, according to all these studies, basically only have three things on them. Because what it really ought to be is a tool for prioritization, not a memory aid. But of course, again, we live in this age where you can pick up your phone here. I've got my phone right here. And like you can type something so easily or you can write it on your word board. And it feels like you're going to get it done, right? Just because you happen to write it down, except that we've forgotten that step. And this is the habits of successful people is that they they understand that like the key is not just to come up with a list. It's to force yourself to think about that list to decide what is the most important goal that I keep on backing away from, but that if I get it done today, it's actually going to make things better. Yeah, that decision is the key part of the equation. And I'm thinking about my to do list right now. And I have a bunch of stuff on there that's been on there for months. It's great. It's in my phone memory. Exactly. And it's even worse because there's this thing in psychology known as the need for cognitive closure, which is that if I give you a list of 30 things to do, your brain will actually push you to find the easiest, fastest things on that list, because it feels so good to cross it off, right? Actually, there was a study that was done that showed that 15 percent of people when they make a to do list, they'll actually write down something they have already finished because they love crossing it off so much, which is great for like, you know, mood enhancement. It's not great for getting the right getting stuff done. And so so the more that we understand our brain's natural habits, our natural inclinations, the more we understand how to kind of hack that system and make it work for us instead of pushing us to do the things that don't matter, the more control we have over our lives. So let's dig into the science behind the habit loop because that is really the basis of the whole book. And some of our listeners, I'm sure, have read the book. Some of them are not familiar with this habit loop. And the science was really astounding in the stories you were able to use in the book to illustrate this were really eye opening for both of us. So so so the science behind the habit loop, it actually this first started with a woman named Dr. Anne Graveville, who is a researcher at MIT, and she would do these experiments with rats. She she basically pioneered this way to get sensors into rats craniums. So she could she could measure their neurological activity and she would put rats in this really simple maze. And what she would find is that it would take rats like 20 minutes to solve the maze at first. And she was kind of curious as to why she thought maybe like the rats were lazy, maybe rats are just uniquely dumb. But as she looked at their neurological activity, what she saw is that the rats were actually thinking hard the entire time, right? They were trying to make sense of this new environment they were in. And so she would drop the rats in the maze again and again and again, 150 times per animal. And eventually they got really fast at solving the maze, getting to the chocolate that was at the end of this maze. But what she found that was really interesting is as they got faster at solving the maze, as it became more of a habit, sort of an unthinking activity, they were thinking less and less and less. Their neurological activity would actually go way down, except for these two moments at the beginning of the maze. When there's partition would click, there would be this burst of neurological activity and they would run through the maze to the chocolate and their brain would basically shut off while they were running. And then as soon as they found the chocolate, it was as if their brain had shaken itself awake and started paying attention to what was going on again. And this was the key insight is that every habit has actually three parts, right? There's a cue, which is a trigger for the automatic behavior to start. That was the click of the partition in the maze. And then the routine and that's the behavior itself. That's what we think of as habits. So that's what everyone from Aristotle to Oprah has talked about. And then finally, there's a reward. Every habit has a reward. And it's that reward that makes your brain latch on to that chunk of behavior and do it automatically. And we know from research of a woman named Wendy Wood, who is at USC right now and used to be at Duke, that about 40 to 45% of what we do every day is a habit and every single one of those has a reward. When you back your car out of the driveway, there's some reward for it. When you, when you, you know, you left at home and you're sitting at your desk now and you don't remember exactly how you got from the office, from your home to the office, because you did on autopilot, there was some reward inside your brain, some reward sensation. If you can figure out the cues and the rewards, you can start to change the habits, and that's a big insight because we've kind of known that since Pavlov, right? But the power of these cues and rewards, being able to diagnose them, it gives us control over so many parts of our life that previously just felt like they happened on autopilot. And I think the reward part for a lot of us, you think of the more generic rewards of, oh, I get a piece of chocolate at the end of the maze. Oh, yeah, I want that reward. But a lot of times these rewards are a lot more subtle than that. They're not as overt. They're not this piece of candy. That's exactly right. So take backing your car out of the driveway. What we know from MRI studies is that when people do that, when it becomes a habit, they actually start to anticipate the sense of relief they'll get when they successfully back the car out of the driveway. Now, nobody actually is conscious of that, right? But your brain is, part of your brain, the basal ganglia, which basically exists to make habits, it's like it's craving that sense of relief when you safely back out of the driveway. And as soon as it happens, there's this like moment of euphoria. Like I didn't, I didn't kill myself. I didn't hit the garbage cans. Those little habits, being able to recognize those, those are really, really important because if you can find those little habits that, for instance, make exercise easier, then it's, then it's much simpler to get out of bed and go for a run in the morning. And you had mentioned marathon running was something that you had picked up. What, let's break down your habit loop there. How are you able to accomplish that? So there's a couple of things going on when you want to start, like for instance, an exercise habit. The first is to kind of recognize that you shouldn't try and eat the whole apple in one bite, right? We know from this thing in psychology called the science of small wins that one of the most important steps you can take is to start small and allow yourself to feel some sense of victories with these very kind of baby steps. So when I started running, one of the first things I did is I actually, because a researcher had told me to do this and I felt like I'm more on doing it. He said, look, okay, for the first week, get up, put on your running clothes and then don't go running. And I was like, okay. And I like laid out my running clothes and I woke up in the morning. I like put on my like spandex, like underwear. My and like, I would sit around the house and my wife was like, why are you dressed for running? And I was like, I don't know. The guy told me to just dress up. And like by day three, I was like, this is ridiculous. Like I'm going to go running. Like there's like this is, I feel like I'm like an idiot not going running. And, and he was exactly right. When I talked to him, he was like, I knew that's what was going to happen. Like you need to set up these baby steps, make it small, little victories that you can accomplish. So that's part, that's the first step is to try and break it down into things that you know, you're going to be, you're going to win at. But then the second thing that I did is I chose a reward ahead of time. So I always, I chose an easy cue. I put my running shoes next to my bed, I lay out my running clothes. I'd see them as soon as I woke up. I always ran at the same time of day. And then when I got back from running, even if it was just to run like, you know, around like two or three blocks, I would. Make myself a smoothie and like take a nice long shower. Okay. Some people eat a piece of chocolate, which is totally fine, but I don't like chocolate that much. And like I would actually let myself enjoy that. Now, if you go running for three blocks and you're like, and you're like, now I'm going to take a 10 minute shower and just like a nice smoothie. You've, again, you feel a little bit like an idiot because it wasn't that big an accomplishment. But what that does is it lets your brain starts associating this behavior with a reward, right? You, you begin reinforcing that habit loop that if I do this, I get something pleasant and it got easier and easier every day to run. But now compare that with like what I used to do, right? With what most people do. You say, okay, I'm going to go for a run. You're like, I'm going to look like an idiot. I don't really know how to run. I'm going to look bad. It's going to hurt. You wake up, you manage to get out the door, you go for a run, you come home and now you're like late for work. So you're like rushed through a shower. You're like, you know, you're stuffing food into your face. You get the kids into the car so you can take them to school. You make it to your desk. You're like 15 minutes late. You're all sweaty and anxious. You're punishing yourself for exercising, right? And that's exactly right. And your brain pays attention to those punishments and those rewards or brain, at least the basal ganglia. It's not the smartest part of that organ. And so it looks at these at this punishment and says, I don't want to make running easier. This is a terrible idea. But if you plan it out, if you choose a reward for yourself and then you let yourself actually enjoy the reward to luxuriate in the reward, it's going to make it easier. We've been having a lot of fun going over this topic because for one, we get to revisit your book and we'll also dive into the newer one as well. But, you know, there was so much programming that I had in my youth where my dad, if he was getting up at six in the morning, that meant that he had to go to work and work was a factory. And so he dreaded getting up and it was ingrained in me as a child that sleeping in was a luxury. So of course, the idea as as I got older was a wall, I get to sleep in because I made it because I have nothing to do because and now that I'm 45 and I had to learn to come back to it a completely other way through self development and your book to realize that the more structured my life is, the better I feel, the more productive I am. It's and I had to go the whole way around to come back to that. And there's this this idea that if you have a fish, a goldfish in a bowl and I get sick, you have to change its environment. However, what is the environment that you're going to change as a human being in that environment is that the routines in which you live every day, those are your environment. So in the to be able to change, you have to be able to change those routines and to learn the in the the hard way about it, you know, I guess it's at least I got there. But it's it's so funny how that that impression was made. And and it's it's just for us how much we've really enjoyed becoming more structured to seeing those small wins that you've been talking about and relishing those. We have the reward is is key. It really is. And a lot of us skip over it, skimp on it, don't think about it. And then all of a sudden we are struggling. We run out of that willpower and we can't power through. And last week, we talked about the idea when you start a new habit, you have this honeymoon phase where you're telling everyone I'm a runner, I'm doing this half marathon, everyone's liking you on social media. And you're like, this is awesome. And then you twist your ankle or or one morning you're you're behind your kids kept you up all night and you can't get into that routine. And now there's the fight through phase. And that is really taxing on your willpower. And in your later in your latest books, Smarter, Faster, Better, you discuss the science behind staying motivated. And what are some tricks that our audience can use in those moments to find that motivation when their willpower is drained? Absolutely. It's a great question. And we actually know a lot about how motivation works inside our brains at this point, the neurology of motivation. The most important insight is that if you can somehow turn a chore into a choice, if you feel like you're in control, you're making a decision. For some reason, it triggers a part of our brain that gives us a lot of energy for motivation, what's called an approach behavior. And this is I actually went and I spent some time with the Marines because they've completely redesigned boot camp to sort of reflect this. It used to be you went to boot camp and like they just told you what to do, right? Like do 20 pushups, shave your head. You know, they sort of dehumanize you. And what they discovered was it was exactly the opposite that took some like pimply 18 year old and made them into a Marine is to say, OK, you need to get over that hill, figure out how you're going to do it. Because once you feel like I get to make the choices, all of a sudden you're like jazzed for it, right? It doesn't feel like a burden anymore. You're figuring out a way to do it. And the best example I heard of this is I was talking to this one guy who was a neurologist. Now he's a MD, PhD. He's at Oxford and he works on motivation. And I was like, how do you use this in your own life? And he was like, well, let me tell you, I hate grading students papers. Like it's like the worst. Like I just it's so boring. I hate doing it. I think it was tests, not papers. He likes to but like, you know, just going through and like checking off what's right and wrong. And he was like, so here's what I do. I do two things whenever I have to grade papers. The first thing I do is I decide how I'm going to do it. Like, am I going to start in question two or am I going to start on question five? Because if I feel in control, it's a lot easier to start. And then he goes through this mantra and this gets to the other part of motivation is that we tend to motivate when we can link something to our deepest goals or values or aspirations. So he says, he has this mantra when he starts grading. He says, if I grade these students papers and the university can collect tuition from them. And if they can collect tuition, they can pay for my lab. And if they can pay for my lab, then I'm going to go and find a cure for cancer. So by grading these students papers, I am finding a cure for cancer. Now here's what's interesting. Number one, that is crazy, right? Like, that's not actually true. But number two, this guy has an MD PhD. He is not someone who like is hurting for motivation. And yet he goes through this mantra every single time he starts grading students papers because that's how he knows that he motivates. That's why he has an MD PhD is because he links these small mundane tasks to his biggest goals and aspirations and it makes them seem meaningful. And then he finds a way to make that chore into a choice because it triggers that part of our brain that makes us want to do it. The power of having a Y is so key. And if you don't have a Y behind the new habit, behind what you're doing the task at hand, then of course it seems monotonous. It's the worst thing on the planet. No, it's absolutely true. And it seems simple when we say it, right? But think about how many times we just forget, right? We have to like drive our kids to school in the morning. We have to go file some dumb report. And we just like, we don't make the connection again because when we are in habit thinking, when we are doing half of what we do every day, we tend not to actually think about it. We don't make the connection in our head by bringing my kids to school, which is like the biggest drag on earth for me in the morning because I have to get on the subway and it's cold and they're complaining. By bringing my kids to school, I'm actually being a good dad, right? I'm educating them for the future. I'm not gonna have to support them when they're 26 years old. But just making that connection in my brain, it makes it so much easier to walk out the door in the morning. A lot of people are waiting for that shift in their mind where their body's just doing the routine, the task. It's like when we woke up this morning going to the gym, there was a part of me that still didn't wanna go. Yeah, it's raining, it's cold. It's six in the morning, I don't wanna go. However, that why was of course answered of why I'm going and why I should look forward to this. And of course the reward afterwards of how I'm going to feel and that damn smoothies, damn good. Of course it was much, yes, it was a drag. Yeah, there was part of me that didn't wanna go. And that's not going to turn off. That's just, that is understanding why you're doing what you're doing and on the other side of that, that makes it all worth it. But you have to train your brain to anticipate that reward, right? Like the first two or three weeks you work out, you're kind of surprised by how good you feel afterwards. Like it takes us a long time to recognize the pattern. And so the more that you consciously actually force yourself to see it, the faster the recognition comes and the faster the habit takes hold. One of the key points of the book is this idea that we're not breaking bad habits. And we talked about this a little bit earlier in the show that we're running all these routines that we're not even aware of. Our brain is on autopilot for a large part of the day. We're not actually breaking bad habits, we're replacing, we're interchanging them with something else. That's exactly right. And you have a great text talk about this idea in your own life of changing this habit of cookie eating. So break that down for our audience because it's a really interesting story. No, absolutely. And this is actually known as the golden rule of habit change because we have this expression, I'm gonna break a habit, right? I'm gonna extinguish it. And that's actually the wrong idea because what we know is that once a habit basically exists in your neurology, it's really there forever, right? We've seen this from experiments that you can take someone and put them in an environment they haven't been in for 30 years and like that urge to smoke will come back right away even though they gave up cigarettes 30 years ago. So what the golden rule of habit change says is rather than trying to break a habit, which you can do with willpower but it's gonna be hard and yet at some point you're gonna be stressed and your resolve is gonna fail, instead diagnose what's the cue, what's the reward and find a new pattern, change the habit to say here's something that corresponds to the old cue, here's something that gives me something similar to the old reward. And as you mentioned for me, this was like when I was reporting this book I had this bad habit. I was working in the New York Times and every afternoon I'd go eat a cookie in the cafeteria and I'd actually put like literally a post-it note on my monitor that said no more cookies and like every afternoon I would like somehow ignore the note like you're laughing because you guys do the exact same, oh, we all do this, right? You like just like you managed to become blind to like the one thing on your desk telling you not to have a cookie and so I was talking to all these like fancy neurologists and psychologists and I'd say like, you know I have this friend with a bad cookie habit, can you tell me? And they were like, okay, so the first thing you need to do is you need to diagnose the cue and most cues fall into one of five categories. It's usually a time of day, a particular place, the presence of certain other people, or an emotion, a specific emotion or a proceeding behavior that's become ritualized. And so what they said is, look, whenever you have the urge to go get a cookie, literally write down those five things. What time is it? Who else is around you? What are you doing? How do you feel? And it took like just like literally two days for me to realize, oh, it always hits between 315 and 345 in the afternoon. It was like clockwork, right? It was clearly a time of day was the cue. And so I went and I told the researchers, I was like, here's my cue. And they were like, now you need to figure out the reward. And I was like, oh, well, like clearly the reward is a cookie, right? Like they're really, they're really good chocolate chip cookies, I have to say. Or the oatmeal was really good too. And they were like, no, no, no, you don't understand. Like a cookie is like a bundle of like 13 rewards all in one package. You got to figure out which one is, is the one that's motivating your behavior and driving this habit. Like, is it that you're hungry? In which case eating an apple should work just as well. Or you need a burst of energy and the sugar is giving it to you. In which case you could have a cup of coffee or you just need a break in the afternoon in which case taking a walk around the block would be perfect. And so what I did is I ran these experiments every day. I would go up and I'd try something new, eat an apple, have a cup of coffee. And I realized after about a week, the thing that was driving my habit was that when I went up to the cafeteria, I would see my friends there and I would buy the cookie and then go talk to my friends for like 15 minutes. And we would like gossip about whoever wasn't around at the moment. And it was actually, the social reward was driving this habit. The cookie was like the second hand smoke of the habit. It was the incidental. And so once I figured that out, I could change the habit. So what I did is every afternoon at 3.15, I would stand up for my desk. I actually had an alarm that would go off on my computer. I would stand up for my desk. I would go look for someone to talk to. We would gossip for 15 minutes. I'd go back to my desk and the cookie urge was totally gone. But it was only because I could diagnose the cue and the routine and kind of try and experiment to figure out how to change the habit that I was actually able to make this change in my life. And I think most people need to figure out the exact reason of why they're doing it because I think most people will go to what you have done or what you did there was, yeah, the cookie is gonna be the reward, right? It's always gonna be something sweet, something I'm not allowed to have. But to find it was just that period of time or just needing that break certainly would allege you to that. And of course, you need to be able to think outside the box and be able to find out what that is. That's exactly right. And like what's really valuable when you look at, for instance, smoking because we know a lot about how people stop smoking. You guys are in LA, right? Where like in New York, nobody smokes anymore because it's illegal. But in LA, when I was living out there, there was more smoking. It was like something people would struggle with. And what's interesting is when you actually start diagnosing why people smoke, it turns out people smoke for very different reasons, right? Some people smoke because it's a social experience. Some people smoke because it gives them a break from work. It's how they break up their day. Some people smoke because they really enjoy the nicotine. And what's fascinating is this guy named James Prochaska who's at the University of Rhode Island who's basically pioneered smoking cessation as a field of study. What he found is that the biggest insight is that when people try and quit smoking, they oftentimes only quit on their seventh attempt, right? They fail six times on average before they actually quit for life. I can tell you there's a lot of failure in quitting smoking. Yes, there is. Exactly. So what's interesting is like, what's magical about the seventh time? Well, it turns out what's magical is that, you know, times one, two, three, two and three is you guys might know yourself. Like you give up cigarettes and then like you relapse. You have like a bad day or your mother-in-law comes in town. Something happens. You start smoking again and you're just like, I can't quit. This is too hard. Starting at about time four for most people, they start to realize, oh, no, no, no. When my mother-in-law comes in town, I'm gonna want to smoke. So I need an alternative plan. When I have a bad day at work, the urge to pull out a cigarette or when I go to a club at night, the urge to have a cigarette is gonna be so powerful. I need a plan in advance. Put differently, they plan for failure. And this is really critical. People who manage to change their behavior very effectively are people who anticipate and plan for failure. They know ahead of time, I am not strong enough to just use willpower to do this 100%. I am gonna have a crisis where like, I break down and I start eating Twinkies again. I start smoking again. But if I have a plan ahead of time, if I acknowledge to myself a failure is gonna occur, my recovery is gonna be much faster. And eventually I'm gonna have so many plans in place, I'm just gonna give it up for good. Yeah, those backup plans come into play and you don't have that cigarette in your mouth. That's exactly right. It's exactly right. But I think in American culture in particular, failure is kind of a bad word, right? We don't tell the smoker like, congratulations on giving up. You're gonna fail at this six times and that's okay. But that's actually what we should be saying. And some of us are perfectionists who the thought of failure is terrifying. And we're doing everything we can to avoid that. So to tell someone you're gonna fail plan for it and the science shows to plan for it, it is a little jarring to hear. Yeah, I mean, for ourselves and for our clients, I mean, some of your ideas and certainly in the power of habit, we teach in our classes to help people who change their lives and get a bit more social. And half of it is to get them to accept the idea of failure and that we can, not only is it okay, it's actually quite fun. We can laugh about it and enjoy this process. And if you open yourself up to that, well, then everything becomes so much easier. That's exactly right. And the thing to help people recognize which you guys know is the most successful people are the people who have failed the most, right? Or at least they've anticipated that failure. It's really interesting. Another thing that Projasko did is he looked at, there's this thing called the National Weight Loss Registry, which is a database of people who have lost weight in midlife and kept it off for years. And they found that one of the biggest pitfalls for people is that they'll lose weight and then they'll have a bad day and they'll binge on something. And then they'll continue binging for the next 24 to 36 hours. And they'll eat so many calories during that 24 to 36 hour period that they'll regain the weight that they've lost. So literally if you can just say, look, I'm gonna have a bad day and I'm gonna eat some ice cream but I'm just gonna eat one bowl of ice cream instead of saying like, oh, screw it. I've fallen off the wagon. I'm gonna have a great 24 hours. If you limit yourself to just one bowl of ice cream, then you will actually keep the weight off. That's the critical moment. But we never think about that. One of our challenges this month for our audience was just set your alarm clock an hour earlier and give yourself an hour extra every day to create some space for these new routines that you're focused on. But that just did a lot of us struggle with focus as well. And when we talk about social media, we talk about all these companies competing for our attention. It is a very difficult time for us to stay focused. And again, in your latest book, we talk a lot about the science behind focus and it is a little counterintuitive. Yeah, it's interesting. So Smarter or Faster Better has this whole chapter on focus because I had the same question, which is basically like how, why are some people so like, they're like laser beam, right? They just don't get distracted. Or when they get distracted, they get distracted by the right things. And so what I started learning about was that we actually know a lot about the neurology of focus. And what we particularly know is that people who are really good at focusing, they have this habit of what's known in psychology as building mental models, essentially telling themselves stories about what's going to occur as it occurs. And all of us do this to some degree, right? When you have like a hard conversation coming up, you kind of like obsessively play it over in your head. That's because our brain has this need to build a mental model to prepare us for very tense situations. But you can use that same technique for something that's not tense. There was a study that was done of Fortune 500 executives and they were trying to figure out why some people got promoted faster than others. And they were looking for habits that they had in common. And they found that the only real habit that people had in common is that they tended to visualize their days with half a degree more specificity than everyone else. So most of us were, most of the people would be going into a meeting and they'd be like, okay, it starts at 11, I need to bring this one folder. I need to be out of there by 11 45 for lunch. But the people who tended to get promoted faster, they'd be like, okay, it starts at 11, I need to bring this folder. And it's gonna start with Jim bringing up that dumb idea. And then Susie's gonna like disagree with him because there's like something weird going on there. I don't know what, but I'm gonna let them fight with each other. And then I'm gonna bring up my idea. And I'm gonna bring, I'm gonna win the meeting as a result, right? They would tell themselves this story that's just like half a degree more specific than everyone else. But that seems to prime our brain in a particular parts of our brain that we know are related to focus and attention to be able to anticipate what's gonna happen and to not get distracted quite as easily because we've figured out what our actual goals are. We've told ourselves a story. So every morning I do this with my kids now when I'm taking them to school on the subway, I tell them to tell me a story about how their day is going to go. Like what class are you looking forward to the most? And I do it myself on the subway. After I dropped them off on my way to like my office, I'll actually say like, what's the story of a perfect day? Like what am I gonna get done before noon? Like what, what do I, like how am I gonna spend like 12 o'clock to three o'clock? And it actually works. The thing is that like, I'm not distracted when I sit down because I have this like kind of narrative in the back of my head that's telling me what to do next. I use that exact same technique. My business coach taught me this perfect day. If you can just take some time to design out your perfect day, what would it be? Be thoughtful about it, figure it out. And it's been so powerful in those moments where yes, life is throwing a curveball at me, but I've mapped out in my mind and I can stay steady and stay the course versus instantly get pulled in, distracted and focused on something else that can obviously wipe out a whole day. Totally, totally. And what's interesting is that like, as with many things that we've learned about productivity, taking 10 minutes to visualize the perfect day, that doesn't feel productive, right? That actually feels like a waste of time when you're doing it. You're like, why aren't I emailing someone right now? Why am I like trying to imagine the perfect day? But this is what we know is that the difference between busyness and productivity is finding these habits. What psychologists refer to as cognitive routines that allow us to think more deeply, particularly when thinking is hard, particularly when we're at that moment when it feels like there's pressure, it feels like we don't have enough time. If we have a habit in place that pushes us to think a little bit more deeply to take a couple more minutes, it ends up paying huge dividends even if it doesn't feel at that moment like you're being productive. I love that. And for both of us, we had taken off Facebook off of our phones. And it was funny. He had done it earlier before I had and was mentioning how much it was saving his day and better he felt. And I had made some excuses why I still needed to have it just in case, blah, blah, blah. And they put it, that new thing, that screen time where they show you how much time you spent. The minute I saw the end of the day that I was on for four and a half hours, I was like, well, that's, that's it. But this is the, to go along with what you're saying, when you get to a point where you need to find more time, then you start quantifying everything you're doing, all the routines you're doing, and it's like, what can I cut out? Do I really need to be on Facebook for four and a half hours? That alone has blown up my day, wide open where I feel so, and it's, and I can now, it's like, I'm never gonna. Yeah, disrupting that pattern that I had of just boredom. Okay, first thing when I'm bored is pull out my phone. I made it more difficult for me to be enjoying using my phone. I had to remember this complicated Facebook password. I had to go into Safari on my phone instead of the app. Like I put these barriers. So by the time I actually got to the pleasure I was exhausted, I was like, I don't wanna do this anymore. I found something else to replace the boredom. And that plan of action, spending time on these things, the preparation makes all the difference in the world. And a lot of us are like, oh, how am I supposed to do this? I have no time in the day. I don't know when you're shampooing your hair. Think about your perfect day. Like we're doing these routines that have ample time where our brain, as we talked about earlier, is just going through the routine. That brain activity is not there. We can engage it in something else. Brushing your teeth, showering, driving the car. And I think the other thing that you just said, which is really smart and right, is you started paying attention to whether you actually enjoyed that stuff, right? Like this is the thing about Facebook, is that Facebook feels like this kind of mindless activity. There's actually this thing called simplified habit reversal therapy, where one of the things they ask you to do is just every half hour, write down whether you just enjoyed how you enjoyed, how you spent the last half hour or not. And with things like social media, what they find is when people say, like, did you enjoy being on Facebook for the last half hour? They say, not really, right? Like when they're honest with themselves. Yeah, and even when they're just like telling a researcher who they don't even know. It's like, no, I felt like I just wasted a half hour. I didn't find anything that was really interesting. But that's the thing is that because our brain turns off when we're in the middle of habitual activities, we don't pay attention to whether we enjoy it or not. So forcing ourselves to actually measure, is this a good use of time? Do I enjoy this? It wakes us up, it breaks the habit loop enough to let us say like, either I should do more of this because it actually brings more meaning and pleasure to my life, or this is something I'm doing because like, because the reward is cheap, because it's just fun to flip up and down the phone. Because I'm on Tinder because like I love swiping. I'm waiting for like this hit that might never happen. The more you recognize what's known as reward salience, the more you make it deliberate, the more control you get over actually making decisions that make you happy, as opposed to just doing something habitually because some company knows how to influence you really well. And that's been, I think for us over the last year, especially the most rewarding part of all of this is actually the more control you have, the more freedom you have. You don't realize you're running these patterns and habits that are influenced by forces way outside of your control. You're not deriving pleasure from most of them. You may have a tiny reward or a reward that you could easily swap in a new habit that would have that same reward. But at the same time, a lot of us are like, I don't wanna be that controlling in my life. I don't wanna plan it down to the minute. I don't wanna think that hard about it. It has huge dividends. Yeah, no it's, and you don't have to think every minute, right? You can go to the beach and have a good time with your friends. My favorite sort of the mental model that I use around this question of structure is the artist Chuck Close, right? Who does these amazing, he's a paraplegic, he's in a wheelchair. He does these amazing portraits and the way that he does them is by painting small squares. And his rule is he can do anything he wants inside that square. But the entire canvas is gonna be a series of squares. And because he has this structure, because he has this limitation on his choices, he's incredibly creative. He opens up all these possibilities. His art is magnificent. But it's because he chose a limiting structure that allows him to actually get deeper into what is creative, what is real and what is meaningful. I love that you said that. We were just talking about how a lot of people who view themselves as creatives like to use that card in order to get out of any sort of structure whatsoever. Oh, I'm a creative. I can't be waking up at six o'clock every morning. I need to be free so I can create. It's like, well, at the end of the day, it's like, well, so what did you create? Right, there was no space to create. Right, right. And it's, and like you find, if you look at the most creative people, they seek out structured environments, right? Apple, Apple, I wrote a big series for the New York Times about Apple at one point. And like, you've never seen a company that is so structured because they know that that's how they bring out the best in their people is by giving them a structure that allows them to be free. A lot of our listeners are in a situation where maybe they are unhappy with their current situation at work or in their career and they are lacking some of that structure, but they're not at the management level. And one of the big things that Johnny and I always say is lead from the seat that you're in. You may not be happy with the structure that your manager is putting around you, but you can still lead from the seat that you're in. And obviously in the book, Bigger, Faster, Stronger, you talk a lot about, or sorry, getting a little tongue-tied here. That's okay, it's smarter, I do this. A good lesson is don't name a book when you have trouble remembering the title. I made the same, it's not the best title, Smarter, Faster, Better. It took me a while to actually memorize it. And this idea that if you're unhappy, there are some things in your control and we should start there instead of playing the victim and feeling like all is lost. That's absolutely right. And in fact, there's study after study to show this, that people tend to be as happy as they choose to be, that the people who are most successful are the ones who look for an ability to exert control in the role that they're in. This is known in psychology as the locus of control. Do you have an internal locus of control or an external locus of control? People with an internal locus of control who believe that they control their destiny and look for ways to prove that to themselves, they tend to be much more successful. In fact, there's some really interesting research about how you teach this to kids, that for instance, if your child brings home a report card with A's, what you shouldn't say is you're so smart, right? Because that's not something you have control over. You're either born smarter or you aren't. But if you say things like, you must have worked really, really hard. Like I'm really proud of how much effort you put into this. Then you're teaching them an internal locus of control. And one of my favorite examples of this actually goes back over 100 years to William James, right? William James was like the father of American psychology. There's a building at Harvard named after him. And when he was relatively, like not even that young, he was in his early 30s, he had this real crisis. It actually became suicidal. And he thought that free will didn't exist and that he was miserable and his life wasn't gonna work. And so he was so desperate that at one point he just decided to do an experiment. He said, for the next six months, I am simply going to believe in free will. I have no evidence that it exists, but I'm just gonna decide to believe in it and to see what happens. And that was actually the most important choice he said he ever made. Because everything changed after that, right? It does not matter what seat you are in, in your company. You have power or don't have power based on how you spend this afternoon. There is someone else that you can influence. And you might not be the CEO and your boss might be crapping on you all day long and you might have a job you hate. But the only way out of that is to find the thing you can control and to lean into it. And there is at least one thing you can control. Maybe it's that you're looking for another job. Maybe it's that like you're telling your boss it takes two hours and only takes one hour to do the thing. So you have another hour to go work on your passion project. But there is absolutely something in your life that you can control. And if you lean into that, it gives you a path to success. Every single person who is successful today had a moment when they had a job they hated and they didn't have enough power and they felt like they couldn't get where they wanted to be. And they found something they could control to lean into and it showed them a path to where they wanted to go. I love it. Two great books that our audience thoroughly enjoyed. I know when we mentioned that you were coming on we got a lot of great feedback. What are you up to now? What are you working on currently? So I'm writing articles. So I left The New York Times about a year and a half ago to focus on books and magazine pieces. I have actually a piece coming out next week in The Atlantic about the science of anger and then another piece about Tesla which will be really interesting. And then my wife is an academic and she's on sabbatical and we're moving to Costa Rica for four months so she can do field work. And I'm gonna start working on my next book while I'm there and we'll see what it's about. Hopefully it'll be about something good. Well, we are excited to read it. Thank you so much for joining us. It was a great episode. We really appreciate you. Thanks for having me. No, it's my pleasure. I really appreciate it guys. Take care. Thank you.