The 4th Law: Make It Satisfying
The Cardinal Rule of Behavior Change
We are more likely to repeat a behavior when the experience is satisfying. Conversely, if an experience is not satisfying, we have little reason to repeat it.
What is rewarded is repeated. Positive emotions cultivate habits. Negative emotions destroy them.
In modern society, many of the choices you make today will not benefit you immediately.
The costs of your habits are in the present. The costs of your bad habits are in the future.
Because of how we are wired, most people will spend all day chasing quick hits of satisfying. The road less traveled is the road to delayed gratification. If you’re willing to wait for the rewards, you’ll face less competition and often get a bigger payoff. As the saying goes, the last mile is always the least crowded.
The best way to do this is to add a little bit of immediate pleasure to the habits that pay off in the long-run and a little bit of immediate pain to the ones that don’t.
In a perfect world, the reward for a good habit is the habit itself. In the beginning, you need a reason to say of track. This is why immediate rewards are essesntial. They keep you excited while delayed rewards accumulate in the background.
To get a habit to stick you need to feel immediately successful — even if it’s in a small way.
How to Stick with Good Habits Every Day
One of the most satisfying feelings is the feeling of making progress.
A habit tracker is a simple way to measure whether youy did a habit — like marking an X on calendar.
Habit trackers and other visual forms of measurement can make your habits satisfying by providing clear evidence of your progress.
Don’t break the chain. Try to keep your habit streak alive.
Never miss twice. If you miss one day, try to get back on track as quickly as possible. The first mistake is neve the one that ruins you. It is the spiral of repeated mistakes that follows. Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is teh start of new habit.
Just because you can measure something doesn’t mean it’s the most important thing.
How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything.
The inversion of the 4th Law of Behavior Change is make it unsatisfying.
We are less likely to repeat a bad habit if it is painful or unsatisfying.
An accountability partner can create an immediate cost to inaction. We care deeply about what others think of us, and we do not want others to have a lesser opinion of us.
A habit contract can be used to add a social cost to any behavior. It makes the costs of violating your promises public and painful.
Knowing that someone else is watching you can be a powerful motivator.
How to Go from Being Merely Good to Being Truly Great
The truth About Talent
Genes do not determine your destiny but they determine your area of opportunity. Genes cannot be easily changed, which means they provide a powerful advantage in favourable circumstances and a serious disadvantage in unfavourable circumstances.
Genes do not eliminate the need for hard work. They clarify it. They tell us what to work hard on.
Learning to play a game where the odds are in your favor is critical for maintaining motivation and feeling successful. Work that hurts you less than it hurts others is the work you were made to do.
When you can’t win by being better, you can win by being different. By combining your skills, you reduce the level of competition, which makes it easier to stand out.
Specialization is a powerful way to overcome the “accident” of bad genetics. The more you master a specific skill, the harder it becomes for others to compete with you. Even if you’re not the most naturally gifted, you can often win by being the best in a very narrow category.
The secret to maximizing your odds of success is to choose the right field of competition.
Pick the right habit and progress is easy. Pick the wrong habit and life is a struggle.
How to Stay Motivated in Life and Work
The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard. Not too easy. Just right
A flow state is the experience of being “in the zone” and fully immersed in an activity. To achieve a state of flow, a task must be roughly 4 % beyond your current ability.
Working on challenges of just manageable difficulty — something on the perimeter of your ability — seems crucial for maintaining motivation.
Improvement requires a delicate balance. You need to regularly search for challenges that push you to your edge while continuing to make enough progress to stay motivated. Behaviors need to remain novel in order for them to stay attractive and satisfying. Without variety, we get bored. And boredom is perhaps the greatest villain on the quest for self-improvement.
At some point it comes down to who can handle the boredom of training every day, doing the same lifts over and over and over.
The greatest threat to success is not failure but boredom. We get bored with habits because they stop delighting us. The outcome becomes expected. And as our habits become ordinary, we start derailing our progress to seek novelty.
The variance leads to the greatest spike of dopamine, enhances memory recall, and accelerates habit formation.
The sweet spot of desire occurs at a 50/50 split between success and failure. You need just enough “winning”. If you’re already interested in a habit, working on challenges of just manageable difficulty is a good way to keep things interesting.
At some point, everyone faces the same challenge on the journey of self improvement: you have to fall in love with boredom.
If you only do work when it’s convenient or exciting, then you’ll never be consistent enough to achieve remarkable results.
Stepping up when it’s annoting or painful or draining to do so, that’s what makes the difference between a professional and an amateur.
Professionals stick to the schedule; amateurs let life get in the way. Professionals know what is important to them and work towards it with purpose; amateurs get pulled off course by the urgencies of life.
The only way to become execellent is to be endlessly fascianted by doing the same thing over and over. You have to fall in love with boredom.
The Downside of Creating Good Habits
The upside of habits is that we can do things without thinking. The downside is the we stop paying attention to little errors.
Habts + Deliberate Practice = Mastery
Reflection and review is a process that allows you to remain conscious of your performance over time.
The tighter we cling to an identity, the harder it becomes to grow beyond it.
Conclusion
The holy grail of habit change is not a single 1 percent improvement, but a thousand of them. It’s a bunch of atomic habits stacking up, each one a fundamental unit of the overall system.
As you continue to layer small changes on top of one another, the scales of life start to move.
