Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, my name is Dmitry. I'm a productivity
enthusiasts consultant and YouTuber and welcome to my Productivity
masterclass and how to build long-lasting habits. Do you find yourself
having difficulty breaking bad habits or building
new gray ones? Then this course is for you. This course is
going to break down for you specific ways that you can intentionally
change your life through the power
of habit formation. This course will
work you through specific step-by-step
processes that will help you build a
long-lasting habits and break ones that have been
crippling you for years. You'll not only learn how
to build out strong habits and get strong streaks
going in your life. But you will also
learn how to get right back on track when you
fall off the train. It's the principles
of this course that have allowed me to be
a world-class runner, have a successful
YouTube career in double my income in my first year
of being in the workforce. If this sounds like something
you'd be interested in, then make sure to join
me in my course as we explore the wonderful
world of habit formation.
2. The 4 Laws of Behavior Change: Welcome, You've made
it to my course. To get started,
we're going to talk about the very
important subject, that is, the four laws
of behavior change. In his award-winning
book, Atomic Habits, James Clear very clearly breaks down the four laws
of behavior change. And we are going to be
utilizing these four laws as a foundation for helping you understand how to build
and break habits. Here are the four laws. One, make it obvious
to make it attractive. Three, make it easy for
make it satisfying. Now the exact same
thing is true from the inverse side for the fall
loss of behaviour change. If you want to break a
habit that you don't like, you have to use the inverse. Here are some examples of how these different things work. First and foremost, an
example of wanting to do a morning workout routine
could look like this. Step one, make it obvious. So in order to make it really obvious that
you want to get a morning workout
routines that you want to do push-ups and of
course circuit, I would say put a yoga mat, reign forever your
bed and possibly even go to bed in workout clothes. What's more obvious
than you waking up and workout clothes and the yoga mat that you would do the workout on being right
in front of your bed. Step to make it attractive. A way that you could
make this easily attracted for yourself
is that you could couple this work with
something that you enjoy. If you put your AirPods
on that yoga mat, you could couple this
morning workout session with something enjoyable like music or podcasts
that you did love to listen to while working out
step three, make it easy. I'm not sure how we can
make this any easier, but you already started your day with the
yoga mat being there. So there's little
friction to make this day start because
you have the yoga mat, you have workout clothes on. And then last but not least, we should really ease
into the workout. So instead of getting started
with really hard stuff like actual push-ups for someone who's trying
to build this habit, I would recommend starting with knee push-ups to
warm yourself up. Put some nice music on, get into Zoom mean push-ups. And the next thing you'll know, you'll actually have been warmed up enough to get
going in the morning. And you can do the
actual workout. You can do some
really easy setups as well rather than
planks to start. And then once you get
into that rhythm, you can do the actual workout. Now step four is making
its satisfying for me and what we're going to
talk about in this course, it's really important to
track your habits because it serves the form
of gamification that really helps the fourth law of behavior change if we make it satisfying by checking it off on our to-do list and or
our habit tracker, we really will be able
to see a level of satisfaction that is unlike anything else we've experienced. And even more so if we
have something like a habit tracker with streaks will feel really
satisfied to be like, ooh, I checked that
off in the morning. I have had seven straight
days of doing this. I'm on my longest streak
ever. This is awesome. And then say you get
a nice pump in from the different pushups that
you did in the morning? I would say maybe
if you're into it, take off your shirt, plucks a
little, look in the mirror. That's pretty satisfying
to see the gains that you've gotten in that
immediate moment. Many of us have had gains that look pretty great when
we initially workout. And I think it's
really nice to dive into that mental sphere where we're really happy
with what we've done. Another example of
adding a new habit would be going to bed early or
falling asleep quickly. For me, I utilize this
on a daily basis. And in order to make it obvious, what I do is I put a Kindle on my pillow that or
a physical book. And the reason I do
that is because reading before bed helps me fall
asleep very easily. So I'll put a Kindle and my AirPods case on
top of my pillow. So when I walk into my
room after the day ends, I end up going up, yep, gotta read, listen
to some soft music. So I put the AirPods in and then go and put that
soft nice music on. And I really enjoy listening to something
on the Calm app that's just a really nice beat that just helps me
get lulled to sleep. So that's what makes
it attractive for me. I think a nice book and
some really nice music. And then step three,
make it easy. I don't know what I could have made more
obvious than this, but it's really
easy to just open something that's already there where you're gonna
be laying down. If I'm laying down in bed, What's more easy than having it right there and ready for me? Extremely low friction, even if I forget to
put it on my pillow. It's right there for me just
to grab from my nightstand. And it could even have the book ready to open from before and be opened at the exact page
that I need to get going to make it as easy as possible,
make it satisfying. Going back to what
I said earlier, I am literally addicted to checking off habits in my
to-do list habit tracker. So when I finish reading and listening to some calm
music and meditating, I'm able to check off two different habits
at the end of my day. And that gives me
a high level of satisfaction and I just get a pretty great dopamine
hit from doing it. Then a third example that I
would like to showcase is from the stopping a bad
habit side of things. So the inverse of this would be, let's not make it obvious, let's make it sort of out
of place and not obvious. I would remove all deserves from my house if
I was someone in this situation because it serves edit to as a
two-pronged approach, it gets step one and step
three covered right away. Because if you remove
all the desserts from your house in order
to stop eating dessert. And it's really not
obvious that you wanted in the first place
if it's not in your house and it's really difficult
to get stuff if you constantly have to go
out to the store and buy it, It's a really difficult
process to eat dessert. So it's gonna be
something that you don't want to do
now from a making it unattractive
standpoint and I'm making it unsatisfying step
point for steps 24, it's less easy to give
an example for these, but if you find a way to replace that bad habit and make a different type of
eating habit attractive. Like say you really enjoy fruit, you can replace the bad habit by having sweet fruit
instead of sweet dessert. Or for me, I actually
found that I really enjoy chocolate protein powder and salad mixed up in a smoothie, which is kind of weird, I know, but I actually
really liked that taste. I like that chocolate he earthy sort of tastes
that I'm getting. I'm finding that to be
very attractive and replacing it with the
sweet side of things and actually acquired a taste
for it that almost makes desert a little bit
unattractive for me from an unsatisfying
standpoint. Say you were tracking
how often that you did in this bad habit in a week. So you get the
marker to three days of desert in a week and
that's your no-go zone. That would be some
sort of way to have an unattractive
side of things. Or you can do the inverse where you make it
really satisfying every day that you check
off not having dessert. The four laws of
behavior change are critical and they've really helped me build a routine or I go to bed at 09:00 PM
and wake up at four. So I would recommend that
you utilize the laws of behavior change as
it will be a constant, recurring theme
throughout this course. Let's jump right into
the next lesson.
3. Finding Your Why: Jumping right into
the third lesson, we're gonna talk
about one of the most cliche things that people try to articulate and
that is finding your why. Now while you at
May 1 be thinking, Dimitri, I know I
need to find my y, but what does that
even really mean? And how you can
understand it is, first and foremost, there is two different types of
motivation that exists. There is extrinsic and
intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation is based
off of other people and finding motivation from
outside occurrences. Whereas intrinsic
motivation is from internal validation and doing things like getting an
award and being like, Oh look at me, I got
a nice award here. And people, generally speaking, will work harder when there's
extrinsic motivation, pulling them, and then
intrinsic motivation in short bursts, pushing them. The difference between push
and pull motivation is that push motivation is like inspiring music to get through a hard workout in
the short-term, you can really
power through with something like push motivation. But in the long-term, It's pole motivation
that gets you going. It's that doughnut That's
screaming at youth through the window at
the bakery telling you, Oh my God, I'm pulling you in. Do you want to eat me? I
want you to eat me and all those different things
like advertisements that pull us in to want
to go buy those things. If we can find something
that pulls us from a motivation standpoint where we do not need to push ourselves, we can really achieve more. So the ways that we can do this, generally speaking, come
from extrinsic motivation. Because when you have a goal that is greater
than yourself, you're going to do more
in order to achieve it. We have pull motivation
from things like community. For example, if
you've ever noticed when you are a part
of an athletic team, you are able to keep up
your work ethic for that much better than you were probably able to do if you
were doing it for yourself. For example, I used to be a track and field and
cross-country athletes. And I now run much less because
I'm not being pulled by that thought of
letting my teammates down anymore on a daily basis. It really reminds me that
as much as I like running, I don't maybe love
it as much as I thought I did because if I did, I'd be pulled towards doing it. So we're going to explore some other forms of pull
motivation later in this lesson. But the key thing to
remember is this. You need to find something that is pulling
you to do something. And then when you are lacking the ability
to get things done, you use different
productivity techniques. You use different push motivations
like music to hype you up or a pat on the back from
a friend to get you going, it's really important
to remember that pushing yourself
is not the key here. It's getting yourself to be pulled to do something
consistently. That is a key of
habit formation. Later in this course, we're gonna talk
about accountability partners and they are a great form of pull motivation as you will not want
to let somebody down. If somebody has consistently
on you saying, Hey, did you do what you needed to regarding this
habit this week, you're going to
be pulled Towards the thought of not
wanting to let them down. When you think about not
completing something like that daily workout that you were supposed
to do for me, my form of pull motivation is wanting to make an
impact on the world. I'm recording this right now
because while I know maybe there will be some
monetary kickback from Skillshare premium minutes. What's really going to happen is I'm making an
impact on somebody. If you finish this course and feel like you learned how
to build habits better, that's my poll motivation. I want a community of people who are building
something for themselves. And for me, that's
what gets me to make all these videos on
Skillshare and YouTube. Now if I was just doing it
for the internal validation, we'd have a rough time because internal validation runs out and arbitrary vanity metrics won't mean the same thing to us as
they previously had meant. And when you have down
swings and performance, you'll not be able to keep up the habits as much as if you were doing it for a greater
reason than your own self. My push motivation set
of things is the fact that I want to spend my
time, how I want to, I want to have a sort of automated side income
that can help me supplements my
day-to-day expenses. And this type of content nowadays is a great
way to do it. So it's a great way to remind me of I can't get through this. Well, this is gonna be somebody that really helps
me down the line. But then it's really that Paul motivation that keeps me going. But in short bursts, it's nice to have push
motivation with music or with these thoughts
of internal validation. So my y is clearly making
an impact on people. But you need to figure
out what it is that makes you have motivation
that is pulling you. There are four different
ways that you can look to find your why in
the work that you do. Number one is enjoy
what you're doing. Number two is focused on
who you're doing it for. Number three is enjoying
how well you do something. And number four is enjoying
how fast you do something. For me. Number four is actually
one of my main things. I really am a firm believer that my unfair advantage is doing a lot of b plus and a minus work in a very
short period of time. So that enjoying how fast, how much you're doing from a quantity perspective
is something that I really sit in because I make a
lot of YouTube videos, I produce a lot of
content in general, and that is something that
not a lot of people can do, but I pride myself on it. So the mixture of enjoy who I am doing it for and how fast flush, how much I'm doing is what
really drives me if I focus on all while look at all those content pieces
that I made this month, I find an eternal
validation from it, but I'm also getting pulled from the idea of who I
am doing it for. I have a multiple
pronged approach towards motivation of habitually
creating content. Now for you, maybe you really
just love working out, but you've had
problems with building it before in the
past because you get too focused on the wrong
things you need to really just enjoy
the fact that you're doing it or you need
to focus on how well you're doing in how
Proper your form is. That might be a form of extra motivation in
order to get you to consistently work out
or say you're trying to build a healthy eating habit. Maybe you can try
to look to see how happy you are with your
cooking capabilities. Either you can figure out, okay, I want to become
the fastest cook in the world or I want
to become the best at making an entire week's worth of meal prep meals in a
short period of time. Or you could want to become the absolute best cook possible. You can want to make
really good food, or you could want to
become a good cook so that you can do it for your kids. You can cook healthy food and have a healthier life
for your children. It's all about
figuring out what your specific wise for the
habit you want to build. If you want to work
out every day, Let's not make it about
things like I want to look better so that I can be more attracted to
the general public. Let's do it for another reason. Let's do it for health
so that you can spend more time with your kids for
a longer period of time. If you're an adult, you'll be
able to play with your kids or to be very good at
what you're doing. Focusing on why's that pull
you instead of pushing you can really help you in
your habit formation journey. Let's jump right into
the next lesson.
4. Creating an Identity: Another important
side around building strong habits is creating
an identity for yourself. If you think back to
previous times in your life, I'm sure you maybe did
a certain sport in high school or in college
that you don't do anymore. And that makes maybe
even the smallest change to your day-to-day activities. I know for me I used to
think of myself as a runner, but now I think of myself more as a productivity
enthusiast. I actually focus more of
my time not on my running, but on getting work done. That little bit of change
in my mental shift, it has taken me from
somebody who ran every single day with
some off days for years. I'm talking from the
time I was 14 to 24. Now, I don't really
run that much, especially when it's
the wintertime. And that's because
my mental state has changed from who I am. And identity can be a
really powerful force in breaking bad habits
and building new ones. I'm the guy who checks
everything off of his to-do list and is a productivity and
Notion enthusiast. That is why I pump
out a lot of content. Mixing this with the other forms of
motivation that we talked about in the previous lesson is really big in habit formation. It is my identity
to get things done. And if you believe
that this doesn't have any impact on your life, I want you to truly reflect and think about the
different times in your life where you associated yourself with being a different
type of person? I was an athlete. Know, you are an athlete if you're trying to build
a workout routine, you need to have
an identity that is associated with your goal. For example, in order for me to stop caring
what people think. I tried to think of myself
as a stoic so that I can keep building that muscle of not caring what other people
think about me in from the side of
things of breaking a bad habit or changing our perspective
to a more positive one. The key thing to do
is start telling yourself the opposite of what you've been
telling yourself. For example, my co-host on
the rise better to podcasts, chance consistently
said for a long time, he was bad with names
and hot take air, but that's probably why
he was bad with names, because he kept telling
himself he was bad with names. He himself has changed this mindset since we've read
the book Atomic Habits last fall and is improved
as ability to remember names just
by virtue of saying, I'm not bad with names. I'm good with names.
Leveraging the power of the mind and what it can do for you on a day-to-day basis is much better than having
it work against you. Why? If you have one of the most
powerful tools in the world, right here on the
top of your head, would you ever consider having
it be used against you? You wouldn't want the full force of anything strong
going against you. Why would you put a boulder
on top of yourself? I would rather have
the boulder helped me roll down the
hill then prevent me from running up at it's
better for you to have positive thoughts about
anything you're trying to do. By believing you're an athlete, by believing that you are
the person you want to be. But at a bare minimum, do not say negative things. If you're going to do anything, at least keep it neutral
because if chance just had no opinion on how
he was with names, at least it would be more
ambiguous to his mind. But by telling
himself continuously, I'm bad with names. It reverberates through the synaptic connections
in your brain. And it's just not a fun time when you're trying to remember someone's name when
subconsciously you believe that you're
really bad with names for me, I've been telling myself for ten years that I bite my nails and I think I maybe need to
start changing that mindset. I need to start telling myself, Hey, I don't bite my nails. I'm not a nail biter. I
don't like nail-biting. And a great way to do
this is by utilizing something that I learned
from and hypnotist, which actually is self-hypnosis. The performance
improvements that I've seen in my life come from my ability to be unwavering
in my day to day. And I'm going to run you through a really quick and easy process that I use to convince myself, The Seneca quote,
it is the power of the mind to be unconquerable. Now, if you heard how I said that it was
almost a little bit automatic and it didn't
really sound that normal. It is the power of the
mind to be unconquerable. I actually have a
few step process where I self hypnotize myself. First, I sit down with a physical journal and
write down the phrase, it is the power of the
mind to be unconquerable. And I write that
over and over again until I feel like not
writing it anymore. And let's say for a few
minutes of entire page or two. And then I will
physically say out loud, it is the power of the mind
to be unconquerable and have a recording device like my phone ready to use now after
that's recorded. But I then can do is
loop it on repeat on my phone and then say
out loud and rate. And here it is the power of
the mind to be unconquerable. Or I'll even get into more of a hypnotic state and stare off into the distance
and focus on one spot. Listen to the recurring
loop of it is the power of the mind
to me unconquerable and say it out loud
at the same time, magically upon doing this and believing my identity
of somebody who does not let his mind be
conquered and actually have the ability to get through
difficult situations easier. I've had a fair amount
of stressful things now that don't
affect me nearly as much as when I
started this habit. I want us to try this
out for the phrase, I am not someone who bites my nails or I am
not a nail biter. I don't bite my nails. All of those different
types of variations in order to convince
myself that I don't want to bite
my analysis now I have seen improvement upon some other utilizations of this habit formation
and breaking principles that you'll
find in this course. But I believe self-hypnosis and creating an identity
that fits what you want based on the
goals in your life is actually a great way to get
started with habit formation.
5. Starting Small: Something key to remember
whenever you're trying to form a new habit is the fact that you do
not need to start big. In fact, I would recommend
that you start small. Let's go back to that analogy of building a daily
push-up routine. You should not try to
do 100 pushups a day at the very start of any new habit formation
that you're trying to do. Unless you're somebody who is
already insanely and shape, which in case I don't think a 100 pushups a day will
do anything for you. You really should not go for something that big or
you should not try to run every single day
or not try to run five miles a day at the start
of a new workout routine. The key here is to
start extremely small because what we're
trying to build is a habit of doing an action, not the habit of doing a lot of inaction in a
short period of time. The compound effect
does not work in a day. It does not work in a week,
it does not work in a month. It takes many months to compound any sort of effort
into an improvement. My YouTube channel from
one month to another looked pretty similar
last summer before. Now I'm seeing the
actual compound growth that can happen from consistently
making quality content. I started doing a
push-up challenge where I did a 100 push-ups every day for 30 days to brute force myself
into a challenge. But that does not work for
everybody because I had the social pressure of not wanting to fail the challenge
for my YouTube audience. Most people are not in that circumstance and that
will not work for everybody. So what I would recommend
if you're trying to start something is to do a
few pushups a day, like ten or 25 because if you do ten push-ups every single day and aren't sore
and always do it. It will have 300 done by
the end of the month. Or if you do 25 a day, you'll have 750 done
in a 30-day month. Now if you end up trying
a 100 pushups a day, what will happen
probably is you only do it for a week. What
do we have there? We have 700 push-ups
versus 750 push-ups, with the infinite possibility of more push-ups being done. Now for me, I found
the exact same thing in a new workout routine
where I go and lift weights on this boat
flux setup that I have and I have worked out
six days a week for months on end because I don't ever push myself
to the point of being overly sore or
actually even sore at all. Because what I'm
doing is making sure that I'm doing the thing and I'm seeing a lot of
compound benefits even though from what I read in here, It's always important
to get yourself to a breaking point when
doing resistance exercise. But the thing is, you
are breaking down your muscle regardless of the level of sourness
that you feel, you don't want to go crazy. If you're able every single
day to do something, then you're going to find that analogy of the
100 pushups a day for a week versus the 25 push-ups a day for a month,
to be accurate. And a lot of things. If you write a paragraph every single day towards your book that you
want to write, you can do great and have the ability to do
that for months. Whereas if you try to write a page or two every
single day for that book, maybe or can have a harder time doing it for a longer
period of time. Sustained effort and
improvement is key. Now once you've gotten
good at writing a single sentence for
your book every day, for 1520 days, then maybe you
can try to move it forward. They say it takes 20 plus
days to build a habit, nearly 30 days to build a habit. So let's try to build the
habit of doing the thing before we try to improve
the quantity of the thing, let's do ten push-ups a day for 30 days and then
move it up to 25. Or we can do ten a day
for a week and then say, okay, that was extremely easy. Let's move it up to 20. That's different. We need to find the
contextual spot for us. But the key thing to
remember here is until you've built that
connection in your brain, in built the almost addictive
like habit formation from the four laws
of behavior change where you make it obvious, attractive, easy,
and satisfying. You're not going to
find that building a higher quantity of a habit is possible because you're
going to make it not easy, because you're
gonna be very sore. Or you can make it unattractive
because you're going to dread the effort that
it's going to take. You need to find ways to improve your capability to
complete any habit of that type before you go for
quantity people who have a New Year's
resolution to work on every day usually fail
because it's too hard. What they really should
end up doing is saying, Okay, every single day, I'm going to run for 20 seconds. No joke. This is a rule that
James Clear talks about in his book,
Atomic Habits. If you get yourself to
run for 20 seconds, they'll probably end up
running for ten minutes. Get your shoes on, you get
the whole situation going. You run for 20 seconds. You're going to at least run
for a little bit of time. And then slowly
but surely you'll build upon that and improve. Don't focus on running
five miles a day. Don't focus on running two
miles a day or one malady. Focus on running for
20 seconds a day. And you'll magically find that you build the
habit of running, which then can grow on itself. It did not run 70 miles a week. When I first started as a
full-time track athlete, I started with more
like 20 miles a week and then I
built it from there. Now I did have that
poll motivation from my teammates and I did exponentially increase my training volume
really quickly, but that was because
I was being pulled and it was a very
specific circumstance. But if we're trying
to build a habit just for ourselves and have those other
forms of motivation around us where it's not a
specific team environment. We need to be smart about this. If you want to eat more
vegetables every day, for example, let's start small. Let's not say I'm having
a salad every day. Let's say I'm
incorporating one cup of vegetables into
my daily routine. This could be even done
with something as easy as vegetable powder that you can put into
different shapes. So say you have a chocolate
protein powder that you enjoy and you have
that vegetable powder, put it together, make it so
that you have a mixed sort of smoothie or shake
that you enjoy. And then it makes it attractive and you have the habit of like, ooh, yeah, I'm getting
my vegetables in. Or say you have a
smoothie situation where it's just chocolate
protein powder, milk and maybe
something like honey. If you have a sweet
tooth from then you can take little parts of that
and slowly progress. You can incorporate a handful of spinach and then two
handfuls of spinach, and then replace the normal milk for hemp milk or
just hemp seeds. And when you blend it up and
ends up becoming hemp milk, slowly but surely progress, but do not go too far too fast when it comes to breaking a bad habit. Sure.
Trying to do it. Cold turkey may be the
most attractive option, but maybe it's not
possible for you. Maybe you need to slowly take the things
away from yourself. Now, it is great to think about the ability to go
cold turkey on something or power through and
get to the other end of a challenge where you build a habit of doing push-ups
everyday like me. But the truth is, you're gonna burn out and unless
it's sustainable, the compound effect will
never come into fruition. And you won't get nearly as
much done as you wanted. It's more important
to do something for a year than it is to do
a lot of it for a month.
6. Gamification and Tracking: Every single day without fail, I use my notion to
have a tracker. Now why is this the case? It's because I am
almost addicted to the single small thing that is checking off that little box
in my Notion, habit tracker. And that is a key thing to think about when we
talk about gamification. Quite literally, I have turned my Notion setup
into a video game. For me, I used to be someone who was very into video games. And I completely understand the thoughts of leveling
up a character and playing that game to make you have a better
virtual character. But what I then realized
when I got out of that world was that if we gamify habits, we can do them more
often because it almost is like leveling up
your real-life character. And honestly, when
you live a life where you feel like you're leveling
up, it's really satisfying, which is obviously one of the
steps in the four laws of behavior change when
I don't complete those habits on
my habit tracker, I quite literally feel a negative emotion because
a streak is snapped. And I think to myself, Dang, I'm not getting as
many experience points on my personal
life of the day. Jerry Seinfeld was once asked
by an up-and-coming comic if he had any tips for him
and how to improve his jokes, Jerry Seinfeld simply put it that in order to
become a better comic, you have to create better jokes. In order to create better jokes you have to write every day. He told the upcoming comic to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hanging on a very prominent
wall in his house. He then told him to get
a big red magic marker and said that every single
day that you write, you need to cross off that day with a big
red X on the calendar. And then after a few days
you'll have a chain. And the goal from then on out
is to not break the chain, just keep at it and the chain
will grow longer every day. You will like seeing that chain, especially when you get a
few weeks under your belt, your only job is to
not break the chain. Now I think this example from Jerry Seinfeld is huge as he is one of the most successful
comics of all time. He had the number one
show on television when he then chose
to cancel Seinfeld. Now this is just one example
of gamifying your habits. It can be putting a big
wall on the calendar. It could be using
Notion like me. It can be using another
tracking application, like done or any of the other ones I'm going to
list later in this video. But the key thing to do is this find a system that allows you to track your habits and then track the streak
associated with it. Trust me, once you've
seen something like almost a year straight of intermittent fasting
like I have, you're not going to
want to break the chain because it's really cool that you can see
that you've done something every single
day for a year. It feels you with a lot
of joy when you know that you have accomplished
a goal that you've set out to do every single day, my recommendation would be to utilize the power of
friction to your advantage. So whatever is the lowest
friction thing that you can do to track your habits would
be my best recommendation. Now for me, I love Notion. I'm just going to make that
habit tracker in there. But for you, maybe you
like physical calendars, use that whatever is the easiest thing for you to do is what you
need to go with. Say you like productivity apps, but wanted to
automatically recur and show the streak
right in front of you. You have some options.
There's done habit tracker, hub Indica, a bit of phi and the habits app on iOS as well. Also, all these habit trackers have the ability to notify you. So at our command, having that notification be set on
your phone around the time that you would like to do that habit to remind you that
you need to get it done? I have no notifications
on my phone, but I would recommend
having notifications for just the important things like
habit formation on yours.
7. The Power of Friction: When most people
think of friction, they think of different things like ice hockey rinks that have low physical friction
or sandpaper which has high
physical friction. But what we're
gonna talk about in this lesson is the power of metaphorical friction and
understanding how you can utilize friction
to your advantage is how you get in
front of failure, especially when it comes
to habit formation. James Clear as a
definition to this, your habits are often a byproduct of friction
and convenience. Humans are wired to seek the
path of least resistance, which means the most
convenient option is often the winning option. Make good choices, more
convenient and bad choices less. So I love this quote from
James Clear because it really articulates how easy and simple it is to think
about friction. If you take away friction from things that you want to
do and add more friction, the things that you
don't want to do, then you're going
to have that goal be realized even more. So, for example, if you want
to build a habit of eating healthier and having a
fruit every single day. What you can do to
make it obvious and easy is put a bowl of fruit
on your kitchen table. And in that same breath, if you don't want to eat poorly, go back to that
example of not having any dessert and get them
all out of your house. So make it extremely obvious to put it right in front of you. Hey, oh my god, there's this
apple that I'm going to eat. I might as well eat it
because I'm hungry. Why would you not do that? Why would you hide
them in the fridge? We're not trying to maximize
their ability to sustain having fruit in our house
for seven days or longer. We're trying to maximize how
many fruits we have a day. So why not every single day have at least a few pieces of fruit and enable on your
kitchen table. You can leave some of
them in the fridge to then pull them out later. But I would honestly
recommend doing whatever makes it easiest for you to have that
fruit and do not convince yourself that it's
by having it in the fridge, which you cannot physically
see when you have the urge to eat unless you magically get the urge to eat when
you open the fridge. If you're somebody who has that specific case power to you, but I don't think that's
probably how that works. The same goes for working out the lowest amount of friction
that you can have if you're going to work out is doing it right when you
wake up because there's less things that are
going to interrupt you in order to improve upon that idea. Why not go to bed
and workout clothes? Are they comfortable enough? Okay. Then you might as
well just where what you are going to when
you wake up to work out. I heard about this in Vanity Fairs Mark
Cuban interview where he talked about
how he spends his days and he mentioned that he
just went to bed and what he was going to work
out in the morning in and I kind of had an
epiphany that that is one of the biggest hacks towards having an easier morning when
it comes to working out. Because for me, if I'm
wearing my pajama clothes, I just kinda want to be comfortable and maybe
I'll stroll downstairs to get my work done at my computer instead of
working out immediately. But when I want to record, I always make sure to have this black t-shirt right
out there and ready to use even though I only have one type of shirt and they
are within my closet, there is a minor significance between my mental
understanding of what my pajama shirt is versus the shirts that I wear out
there on a day-to-day basis. So when I have one
of these laying out on the stand by my bed, at least I know that I'm
going to get a recording and right when I wake
up because it's obvious and it's
extremely low friction. I don't need to
pull it down from the hangar in my
closet that's closed. All I need to do is grab that
off the table and put it on and you can
give more friction to habits you want to break. Say you want to not play
video games anymore or play less of them only do it on the weekends when
you have the time, then stop making it so that your PlayStation five
is always on with the controller right on
your living room table. What I would recommend
is you literally unplugged the PlayStation five, put it into some sort
of storage area, either in a box somewhere or in a different room
with the controller. And then you're going to have a high level of
friction to set it up. You're gonna have to put it
back down by the TV stand, plugging in again,
get the controller, turned it on and go through the entire process before you can start doing
things like that. If I ever want to
play video games now, I have to go get an
external hard drive from my text storage
area in order to plug it in and then get
going on a video game when it's on an easy to
access place on my computer, of course I'm gonna play it more because it's right
there and it's easy and it's pulling me in because it's
something that's fun. Pull motivation comes easy for devices because
they're fun to do. But when it comes to trying to build good habits
and break bad ones, you need to utilize the right side of that
friction to your advantage. Get rid of the deserts
in your house. Put the PlayStation five
and a different room. Put your phone in a different
room when you wake up. And the Vice side of things will always have a high
level of friction. And who wants to
go through all of that effort just
to do something? We're lazy people by nature, we try to sustain our life
force and stay comfortable. That's human nature. Let's remember that
whenever we're trying to build or break new habits. As you finish this lesson,
write down a habit that you want to build
and a habit you want to break and figure out
ways that you can make it easier for yourself or
harder for yourself. Another example would
be if you want to build a habit of running, then it make it so that your running shoes
aren't hidden away in some storage that you
have to always pull out or say you want to
clean every single day, put a Swiffer right next to your desk rather
than in the closet. Make it obvious, make
it easier to grab and Swiffer the desk. I
do this personally. And if you want to break the
habit of biting your nails, maybe make it harder by putting a nail polish on them
that tastes bad. Or if you want to stop
eating at your desk, stop having napkins there that encourage you to eat there. It's all about changing the type of friction
that you have.
8. Using Social Pressure: Do you remember how earlier in this course I mentioned
the difference between push and pull motivation and accountability partners
were a part of that. Pull motivation can be
utilized when it comes to using social pressure in order to get you
to do something. If you have ever thought about it from a
negative perspective, you've probably been
socially pressured into doing a lot of
different negative things. I'm sure people here
have been asked whether they want to smoke or vape or have an
alcoholic beverage before they're legally allowed. All these different things
are examples of vices were social pressure
ended up making us given I'm somebody who
doesn't like to drink often. In fact, I have never
had a drink without being asked whether
I wanted one NMR. Sure. And certain social circumstances I've
wanted to when asked, I think that's a pretty
striking detail when it comes to habits and how we
can build them or break them. Utilizing community
can really help you grow your life and
your habit formation. I utilized that often
when it comes to my YouTube channel and podcast,
as mentioned previously, I built multiple habits through 30-day challenges
due to the fact that my YouTube audience gave me
a sense of social pressure in order to achieve a 30-day
goal without failure. Now for you, I really recommend finding an
accountability partner. And there's a big difference
between something like an accountability
partner and a gym buddy. Both of them serve
their own purposes and can be the same person. But I actually like preferring that to be something separate. For my YouTube. I have accountability
partners in people like OP met
Khan and Sean Holden. We'll often talk about the different things we're
doing for our own channel. And I will project the different
types of goals I have, like my upload schedule or
the fact that I want to create a lot of courses this year and they
will hold me to it. Now. They do not go and record
these things with me, but they will keep
tabs on how I'm doing and what I am recording. The difference between
a gym buddy and an accountability partner is that you do not have any sort of feeling of requirement
for that person to exist while you're doing the task and you
have a gym buddy. Sometimes people overly rely on that other person in order for them to get themselves
to go to the gym. It works in some cases, but at least having those
people separate, in my opinion, helps a lot so that you
can make sure that you're consistently doing the work and then reporting
back to somebody. But when you're at the
gym and almost push motivating yourself
through specific sets that gets you to go through the small things
when it comes to completing a hard set are
running that last mile. I experienced that
often when it came to the running on a daily
basis side of things, I was pulled by the
overall thoughts of the team being let down. But the push
motivation came from running with others on the team, as we were all sort of gym buddies or running
buddies in this case. And then the
accountability partner was the coach who did not
really run with us, but did make sure we
were staying up-to-date with everything we were doing from a training perspective. Now, accountability partners and gym buddies are not
the only example, as I mentioned earlier, you can use the
Internet as a way to get yourself to
do more things. You have a lot of different people that
you do not want to let down for arbitrary
social media reasons. And a perfect example
of this was when YouTuber Thomas
Frank used to have an automated tweet that he would have scheduled
out where if he did not wake up in time
for a tweet to be posted, he would announce to the world that he did not get up on time. It was really funny when
I first heard of this and I have thought about
trying it out before. But luckily I have other
forms of pressure, like announcing to
the world all the time that I am someone who
wakes up early in the morning, I truly feel the social pressure
when it comes to waking up at 430 in the morning This
morning, I got up at 430. And the reason was because I wanted to record this
and have that motivation on that side of things
to get the work done for the audience that I
know will watch this. However, I also thought
about the fact of how much I project to my audience that I wake up early and I
don't want to be a liar. So oftentimes when I feel like snoozing or just not setting
my alarm for that early. I think I'm the guy
that get us up at 430 or four, that's my identity. Also, people would be disappointed if they
found out otherwise. That's why I'm recording
this as really as I am. And that's a way
that you can do it to put it on social media. Tell people in your life, hey, this is this thing I'm gonna do, hold me accountable for it. I really recommend you
utilize social pressure for a positive reason rather
than the other way around. Let's jump right into
the next lesson.
9. Increasing Habit Frequency and Quantity: And now I know you may have been asking yourself
throughout this course, how is it that I can create a higher quantity
of habits and how can I build habits
on top of each other in order to live a
more meaningful life. Now when it comes to
increasing the quantity of different habits
and of the same habit, it's important to utilize a few different hacks that I found worked
really well for me, according James Clear
as per usual in this course when it comes
to building new habits, you can use the connectedness of behavior to your advantage. One of the best ways to
build a new habit is to identify a current habit you already do each day and then stack your new
behavior on top. This is called habit stacking. Habit stacking is a special form of implementation intention. Rather than pairing
your new habit with a particular time and location, you pair it with
a current habits. So while it's great in the
first-place to associate a habit with a time of
day and a location. What you can then do is take more habits and utilize that same system on
top of each other. Do you think to yourself, first, I will do this and then
this and then this. Some great ways you
can do this is by trying to find what
is most obvious to pair with your current habits
or the main habit that you're trying to build
and then the goals associated with it. So say you're trying
to become healthier and build a workout
routine if you've already built a habit of doing push-ups every single day on that yoga
mat in front of your bed. You then can associate
it to a new habit. I'm doing planks. So after I wake up and get
out of my bed in the morning, I'm going to do 15 pushups. Then I'm going to do
15 seconds of planks. And then I'm going
to drink a swag of water and then
repeat four times. Now by utilizing this, your habit stacking on each other and having a habit
of doing push-ups, doing a core exercise,
and hydrating, you're getting three
different habits built on top of each other. But utilizing this
habit stacking, I have had my own
life impacted in a few different positive
ways in order to find some ease and
calmness in the morning. But I like to do is pour a cup of coffee
and then meditate. Now, when I listened to that coffee brewer
in the background, It's a very calming
thing for me. So if I try to get
that morning coffee in that pot in the morning, I go through that
interesting routine if putting the grounds in it and
everything and I press go, I can then sit there and
listen to it and just enjoy the sweet sounds
of brewing coffee. So an example for you might be, first I will wake up, then I will walk downstairs to my coffee maker and press brew because maybe you prep the coffee
the night before. Then I will sit
down and meditate until the coffee has
completed brewing. Once I finished meditating for, let's say three or four minutes, I will then write down my
to-do list for the day. Then you get some
stillness in the day. You get your tasks ahead of
you and you have your coffee. So you'll have a more still
an intentional day right off the bat by habit stacking and getting those things
back-to-back. A key note of this
routine is that we are associating a time and place and more impactfully in
order of the habits we are trying to form by
knowing those three things, you were very easily able
to make things happen. If you don't know when
you're gonna do it, how are you going to do it?
Where you're gonna do it? You're not going to do it. It is important to
have those things realized so that you can utilize the power of
synaptic pruning, as James Claire's
talked about before, the basic idea is
that your brain prunes away connections between neurons that don't get used and builds up connections that
get used more frequently. If you utilize things like
time, place, an order, your brain will associate those things
together more often. And that's a great way
in order for you to keep up with new habits. Now a great way to build habits and build
more habits that you may not exactly like is by doing something called
temptation bundling. My dad used to say
it all the time, but you need to do the
things you don't want to do in order to do the
things you want to do. He's a pretty successful man. So I took this at face
value and I'm very glad I did because essentially
what temptation bundling is, as you can tell yourself, after I do this, I get to
do something that I enjoy. So for example,
after I work out, I get to have that chocolate
protein powder drink that I enjoy because at least you're associating
with something that is good and that almost
makes it attractive, as we talked about in the
four laws of behavior change, making it attractive is a
very important part of it, as well as satisfying if
you're satisfied with the fact that you've
done the workout and you've gotten that drink in, you're going to be more
likely to do it than otherwise if you
finish the workout and you have no habit tracking
in order to make it satisfying or even no attraction to it because you
don't think to yourself, I don't get to have that
tasty drink at the end of it, then maybe you're
not gonna do it if you really don't
like it that much. So do the thing you need to do, followed by something that
you want to do in order for you to try to build new habits that branch you out even more outside of your comfort zone and make you have a larger change
on your day-to-day habits.
10. How to Reboot a Streak: Your habit streaks ended. You couldn't get
those daily pushups or that daily running. You're at a month straight of doing exactly what you
wanted to every day. Where do we go from here? Well, number one, it's
okay that you're streak ended because we're all
human and that happens. And number two, this serves as a really great
opportunity for you. You can get right
back on the saddle. And guess what? Gamify that streak and
think to yourself, oh, I can break
that next streak. Have you ever played a video game and thought to yourself, oh well I got this high score. Or even the game of pinball, It's a common
analogy people use. Let's try to increase that pinball score,
whatever game it is, try to utilize your
habit streaks as a way to one up yourself and have
a competition with yourself. Say you got to that month of every single day you
did 25 push-ups. Let's make it more than that. Let's make it so that you
can get to 60 straight days. That's an accomplishment. Doing something for 60 straight
days is going to help you use the compound
effect and maybe you miss a day or two in there. But the key thing is
you're being consistent. First of all, what you
need to do is not feel bad about when you
break a streak because that's having a
negative association with a habit you're
trying to build and be consistent with in
any negative emotion associated with it could
make it unattractive. So we do not want to do that. It can be really unsatisfying as well to think to yourself, okay, I want to go back
to doing this habit, but I'm gonna just
disappoint myself. No, that's not what
you want to do because when you associate
something negatively, you're going to
do it less often. It increases the mental friction because you associate it
with a negative emotion. Instead associated with
a positive emotion, you have the ability
to start a new streak. You can do it for 60
days instead of 30 days. You can maybe get all
the way up to a year. Who knows? But the key
thing to remember here is I actually recommend
you starting small again. Once you break a big streak, say you actually get sick and
you'd haven't been able to do a habit for two or three
days, maybe even a week. What you want to do is
then say you were at, let's say 50 pushups a day. You want to go back down to at least a half of what
you were doing prior. So say you're running
five miles a day. You want to go out on
your next run when you reboot the streak at half
of what you were prior, because then it makes
it really easy and getting really easy
streaks started again, we'll make that street
last at least a few days, which is kind of the momentum you need for it to get going. If you have 50 pushups a
day that you were doing every day for 30 days and
then you break the streak, have the next day, B25, if you've taken more than
a one or two-day break, a good ratio is for every
day that you missed, you want to get about 10% more away from what you were doing. So if you miss one day, do 10% less than you usually
had on your streaks, if you've missed two days, 20%, and then all the way up to
about 75% if you miss a week, I wouldn't go really more than that because
then we get into the territory of
quite literally not doing anything when
you come back, but then gradually increase at a similar rate, but
a little bit slower. Implement a 5% increase
every day until you get back to the
old street number and then work and figure out what your different needs are for increasing
that streak again, do not associate any sort of
snaps streak as a negative. It is a positive. When you think about
habit formation, you have the ability to
one-up your high score. If you were somebody who
wakes up at five AM every single day and then you
get sick. That's okay. When you start going back into the habit of waking up
early, start at seven, and then creep it
back 15 minutes every day in order to get back to
that 05:00 AM standpoint, overdoing it when it comes to habit formation is the biggest
reason why people fail. They try, they try, they try and then they fail. But the real thing is, habit is not something you
do for a week or a month. Habit is something you
do for a lifetime. Just remember that
losing a streak is an amazing opportunity
that you can get right back on
that saddle and go.
11. Review and Reflection: During my time at university, I had a Jesuit education
and I believe that the reflection piece
of that education has really helped me improve my quality of life in
the past few years now, I have journaled
every single day for about a year and I can tell you that it is probably the
best thing that I do for my mental clarity outside
of habit formation, I believe that it is
actually very therapeutic. And when you go throughout the daily stressors
that anyone has, it's really nice to
delegate the stress to a page because
you can put out all those negative feelings
and frustrations on that page or on that notion
journal injury and get out. A lot of the negative
thoughts you didn't even realize were there. You may stress about needing
to get certain things done. The thought that maybe you
won't accomplish your dreams. But when you delegate
that negative energy to an external space, it really does help
you in order to improve that quality of life. Because for many,
as seneca puts it, we suffer more in
imagination than in reality. The truth of the matter is, life is not nearly as bad as we put the images
of it in our brain. And what I like to
do is often coupled my journaling about negative
emotions with gratitude. I say what I'm grateful for in that journal entry
every single day, it's a part of my
template notion and I think it really
helps me feel positive about the different things
in life that I wouldn't otherwise if it wasn't screaming at me in the face to say, Tell me what you're
grateful for more than just improving how you're
feeling about life. However, I believe journaling actually can really help when it comes to habit formation because of that reflection
side of things. Darren Hardy talks
about this in his book, The Entrepreneurial
Roller Coaster. But essentially, if you don't see the progress that
you're making and you don't actively look
at what you're doing. You often overestimate
the good things that you're doing and underestimate the bad side of things
that you're doing. And when it comes to habit
formation, this is really key. This is why I'm big on tracking. And I think you should track your habits and then
reflect upon it. When you reflect, you
often have a lot of mental clarity on what
has happened to you. If you don't, however, you just have these
thoughts that are in your subconscious that don't get out if you don't let yourself produce and all you're
doing is consuming the same is going to happen for your ideas in four-year
improvement on your life. This is why I'm a
firm believer that my content creation has helped me as a person and
feeling more fulfilled. And even though it helps others, I think that I have
more mental clarity because I produce
more than I consume the commonality nowadays
that most people have brain fog and don't really think for themselves as
much as they could if they produce more
than they consumed. When I point out what
I'm grateful for and what I do not like
on a daily basis, it is more cut and dry than just the overall
feeling that I have. And if I look at these daily journals and
reflect on them, as well as the habits that I
am trying to build or break. I can then see, okay, these are the habits
I'm building. These are the negative
thoughts I'm having. How can I use new
habits to get away from these negative
feelings or get away from these
negative circumstances. Say I don't like the fact
that I haven't ran in awhile. What can I do from a habit
tracking perspective to get myself to run more rather than just thinking on
not running enough. Well, what are you
doing about it? Are you reflecting on this? Are you going to
track that new habit? I'm eating too much dessert. Okay. Put something in your
habit tracker to get you to build a streak so that
you stop eating dessert. I haven't eaten desert
in X number of days. That's a new streak
you can build in a way to gamify your improvement. I think oftentimes the
perceived friction of labeling things out
and reflecting on them is greater than
people realize. I personally think that taking
the little bit of time to gamify something like not
eating dessert or running more, is much more impactful
than watching a random YouTube short
or tiktok video. Take that little bit
of time that you splurge on consuming and start creating in order for
you to figure out what are the different
things that you want to build for your life. Reflect on the different pillars of your life
that you want to grow and pull out the weeds from your life that you
want to get rid of. Utilise habit tracking and reflection in order
to make this happen. And you will often see
that there is a world of possibilities outside of
what you thought possible. I didn't know personally that I wanted to become a
minimalist before. I watched a lot of different content on it
and I reflected on it at first when I saw
him at DIA villas a day in the life of
a minimalist video, I laughed, study was a clown within the first 15
seconds and clicked off. And then it drew me back in. I watched, I reflected
and thought to myself, yeah, I really don't like
how many clothes I have. What can I do in my life to
get rid of it and simplify? I liked the gray shirts, I
like the black shirts and this is what I wear every
single day since then, don't sleep on the power of
reviewing and reflecting.
12. Recap and Outro: Congratulations, you've made it to the end of this course. I wanted to do a thank you as well as a
quick recap on what we've covered in this
in order for you to leave this course feeling like you've
learned something, first and foremost, utilize the four laws of behavior change anytime you're trying to
build or break a habit. Q. Craving, response,
reward, make it obvious, make it attractive,
and make it easy, and make it satisfying. Then remember, whenever
you're trying to build or break habits, don't get too big, too fast, start small, and build the habit, then build the quantity. Utilize the great power
of friction in order to make those habits a reality. Because if you don't, you're going to find that the human nature side of things kicks in and
you're not going to want to do the things that are good for you when
they're really hard to and you're not going to want to stop doing the
things that are bad for you. If they're really easy to, then get an accountability partner, find somebody who you can
confide in and talk with about what your goals are and what they need to
keep you accountable for. Maybe this is your
social media presence and your YouTube following, making sure that you
stay up to date with your 30-day challenges or
you're waking up at 04:00 AM, find what works for you and utilize that as an
accountability partner. Stack habits together that makes sense if you're
going to work out a couple that with a habit of hydrating because that's really important for your
health as well. Maybe follow it up with a
healthy shake afterwards. You get your daily fruits and vegetables and right after your workout, but
it tastes good. So make sure you do that
temptation bundling as well. If you really enjoy something
that you're going to do after you do something
that you don't, it makes it more attractive
and more satisfying to complete the task when you
lose his streak, don't fret. It will help you get to that next streak
where you're going to one up yourself in that
video game we call life. Then lastly, reflect often on
what you can do in order to improve your life and how the habits you're
trying to build and break are changing
you on a daily basis. Without reflection. We don't
really know what we want. So it's worth giving
it the time of day. Thank you guys so much
for watching this course. You want to check on
my YouTube channel, I'd really appreciate it. I hope you all learned
from this course, and I'll see you
in the next one.
Demetri Panici, Productivity and Intentional Living
