Lessons

Lesson Info

Make Failure Impossible

mark did bring up a lot of really cool concepts about exercise and weightlifting and powerlifting, just a quickly summarize 11 main thing. I want people to get out of that about that talk is there's a lot of things you could do with the gym. There's a lot of things that you could do to improve. There's a lot of ways you can eat, and there's a lot of things you could change. Um, it's really good to choose one thing you want to do and stick with it, and that's a really big core concept now, on a big proponent of the compound workouts that we were talking about on demo ing on stage here, I really do believe that there is particular workouts, and three of them were demoed here that if you start to get at least to an intermediate level with everything, your life starts to change. And I mean this from a really large perspective. I've noticed that a lot of my friends and clients and friends often ask me about confidence, often asked me about posture. They say they're lower back hurts. They fe...

el like they can't focus, and a lot of it comes down to really their muscle activity. It's it's when you start to work on squats and lower back workouts on your leg workouts. You tend to stand up straighter, and it has been a lot of studies that show how posture affects how you act and who you are by simply standing up straighter. You tend to have more confidence. You exert a bigger presence in the room and people notice you more and you get better positive feedback. And a lot of it really starts from from your muscles and from your from your exercise. So I don't think that exercise is purely is purely a function of being a meathead or trying to get in shape. I've know that there's, Ah, there are core standards for those five workouts that that there's untrained, novice, intermediate and advanced and elite levels. For all of the five exercise we met, we mentioned the previous work out, and it's my opinion that everyone should at least be a novice level in all five. Those workouts until you're a novice level in those five workouts, you have no right to do any other exercise, and that might sound crazy. But I do believe that those five will really change the way that you look not just a weightlifting and adjusted exercise, but also it how you look at everything. Exercise is a really big core component, and you might as well have a strong core to make sure that it functions well in your day. The problem that most people have when you start focusing on forming and you have it, is that you tend to get started on your motivation, wanes and then you fail. And the question is, How can you make it so you can't fail? How do we make it? So the habit. It's not just about the potential toe what you could. What could happen if you succeeded in making it automatic, but how can you make it so? There's no chance that you can't make it a habit, and we started off by talking about the cue, the routine and the reward. But the end of that was the reward. I had to stop right now saying the word reward to start saying the word reinforcement because I think it's a lot more. It's a lot more indicative of what we're going to be working on right now. The idea of a que routine reward you did a cute routine reinforcement comes down to making a habit stick, making it stick in your brain. We talked briefly about positive reinforcement, positive enforcement. Go to work, get a paycheck. It's used to encourage you to continue performing action. It's really powerful of from incentive perspective to help make sure that you stick through with with the task is going to look forward to. And the potential for award does stimulate your prefrontal cortex. You start to think about it and you're thinking brain, your human brain gets excited by the idea of potentially rewarding itself or something. But as you brought up briefly before today, a lot of the rewards that we offer ourselves or things that we can just accept it any time things like giving yourself a cookie or buying yourself a massage or things you could just got dio. But there is another thing that you could dio, and this is something that we've been working on for a while. A pavlak. It's negative reinforcement. Negative reinforcement is the sort of the opposite of positive reinforcement. Native enforcement about the fear of loss. If I don't do something, something bad will happen. If I dont goto work. The fear of losing my job will motivate me to make sure I get there. The potential to receive a paycheck or the potential to get rewarded by your boss is a positive reinforce, er, but the act of losing your job if you don't go work. That fear of loss motivates your brain from a completely different angle and motivates their basal ganglia. Motivates your ape brained reptile brain. And it's used. Teoh is very powerful for the perspective of getting you to start doing something. What we learned through a lot of tests is that pause, a reinforced, that negative reinforcement. The fear of loss motivates you to start doing a habit. The potential for reward can help make that have it stick. And so here's how it works. Let's choose the habit from the audience. Um, Bryce, what's the habit you're working on right now? Morning routine morning routine. I had a habit of I try to form the habit of a morning routine I briefly went over earlier today was a or 14 point list of where I wanted to wake up. Check my H R V level, uh, when I wanted to row to get out of bed, brush my teeth Flaws, which is crazy. Have never flossed before shower. Uh, cook good breakfast, meditate journal and do my gratitude journal plan my to do list on, then walked to the gym That was like a That was a majority of my 13 14 point list. And what I noticed is that I could get started and probably had roll out of bed and then, ah, whatever happened always happened. Then I ended up going to the work later watching me, watching a TV show or playing video games. But what I did is I first of all, wrote it on a piece of paper. I wrote on a point piece of paper everything I wanted to do that day. And then I set up my negative reinforce er. I told my assistant in the morning that I would do these things, and if I didn't, I would pay 50 bucks each day as a penalty. If I did anything wrong, anything out of order did anything at all before h r v test eso the H. R V test is Ah, it's it's, ah thing that I do every day it's you put on a heart rate monitor and measures your heart rate and also measures the distance between your heart rate. HR V is heart rate variability, and it's actually highly correlated with willpower. Ah, it's measured. Hurry. Variability is a test that elite athletes will do to identify if they're likely to get injured or not. But it's also a very accurate test of how much willpower you're likely tohave throughout the day. And, UM, H R. V is one of the things you got to do in bed. It's best to do it before you even get out of bed. And it was one of those first initial things on my list that I wanted to do that I could easily track if I failed, because if I got out of bed without checking my H R V, that was a failed day. What happened is I waked up. I woke up and I looked at my list, which was right by my bedside and I first thing that says Wake up on hr V. And it said, Don't forget you're about to lose $50 and that fear of losing $50 made me make sure that I did my HIV test. And now I had this list right in front of me. So the next step was clear. Just do the second thing on a list on the third thing on the list. The fourth thing on was all the way down, and suddenly it's like nine AM It's like the time I usually get going or get started. And I've done 13 items and done five actions that I always wanted to form as I had it, but never have been able to maintain. But because number one they were chunked and number two, there was a negative reinforcement bet that I would do these things. I found myself succeeding on a bunch of things all at once with negative reinforcement. Were able to use this power, this fear of loss, to motivate ourselves to get something new completely started. And like I mentioned briefly before, uh, I'm probably not gonna do 10 push ups, even if somebody offers me 10 bucks to do it. But if I had to pay $ if I didn't do 10 push ups, there's a lot higher likelihood of me doing those 10 push ups. The fear of loss will always motivate you much more than the fear of failure. Doesn't make sense to you guys. Yeah. Does anybody Has anybody ever tried anything like this? A bet or a negative reinforcement conversation. Something to make themselves get something started. I did a bet before, with it was used a site called Stick S T I C k K. And it was a bet that I did with my brother to actually get in the habit of having a green smoothie in the morning every day. And it was extremely motivated. Extremely. What was that? The bet was 50 bucks every time. I did not do it every time I drink green every time. I did not have a green smoothie. Yeah, and I did. I did pay it once, but over 30 days, I kept it up 29 times and yeah, I was just that. The fear of losing something just made me so much more motivated to actually complete it. Remember to complete it. Yeah. It's actually very liberating. Once you make the bed. It's almost is very difficult to say. yes or sign a contract or press the commit button. It's hard to do that. But once you do it, the decision has been made. And like you've released you release the decision to the bet you know you're going to do it. There's no chance you're not gonna do it. And if you're not gonna do, you gonna pay a penalty that you probably will pay once, maybe twice. But you rarely will pay three times because you very quickly train yourself to understand. It's just how worth it. I don't want to lose the $50 or whatever your negative reinforce er is talk a little bit right now a little bit today about what negative reinforces our. But before we move on, I want it also bring up the fact that you you stick now stick is a really cool website there, like a like a early revision to padlock. A lot of my a lot of the work that I do on padlock is based on work that's been done and stick Ah, and stick is really, really well known because it has been It's had hundreds of thousands of users who are all able to commit to doing a task. They're able to choose a referee accountability partner, and they're also able to choose a bet and stick that are very interesting study. There's in The New York Times, a summary of it based on 125,000 people who use stick. They discovered that when somebody made a commitment to do something, they just stated that they would do it. There's a 29% chance of them succeeding when they added an accountability partner that rose to 54%. And when they added a bet, it shot up to 80% 80% of people who committed to doing to going to the gym every day and added an accountability partner. They did it every single day, and we've had very similar results. Without hacked the habit group, we started testing out different people, allowing them to choose accountability partners, allowing them to choose Ah, bet that they would put down and the act of having a bet of having an accountability partner of having ah, plan that allows them to have some native reinforce er like skyrockets, the chance of success. In fact, one of my biggest winds was getting myself in the habit of making bets, and I'll be talking about that a few minutes now. One important part of negative reinforcement is that people will cheat, and that's where accountability comes in. It's really easy to slack off in a routine that there's no system in place. There's no one holding you accountable and accountable. Accountability is also a powerful way to make habits stick. When we looked previously at the BJ followed Behavioral Model, we saw the motivation, y axis and motivation. One of the things that can increase motivation is accountability. First of all, just having friends, being part of community, that could be really, really powerful in and of itself. Just because your friends are doing something, and if you don't do it, you feel like you're the odd man out or you feel awkward. That's an accountability mean that accountability is motivational in and of itself. But the second step of of preventing you from cheating is powerful. So with in the past, accountability was very difficult. You might have Onley like What is accountability? Accountability is really is at its core verification. ITT's proving that you've actually done something in the past you might have to make a phone call to someone to tell, to tell them that you went to the exercise or you have to be working on Lee with somebody who you live with. That was the only way that you could find some riel accountability. But these days, with the sensor revolution, with new tech and with with social networks, even there's a law, a lot larger group of people who you can hold to be your accountability partner and a lot of very effective ways to make accountability true. So, for example, if I have a, uh, for example, I had a bet toe to start writing down three things I would do each day and then do them. This was my secret to do list plan, so I might as well tell everyone now how I got myself for the first time in my life. Teoh. Get my to do list. Done. And here's what happened. It was one day I was out, and I realized that I very, very successful. When I make a bet, I almost always succeed when I have a bet down. I usually typically wager $50.50 dollars for every cookie I eat. If I don't want to quit eating cookies because the difference and conversation in my head goes from Come on, man, you can just have one cookie to do you. There's no way you're gonna pay 50 bucks to eat that cookie. That's stupid. So I've noticed that $50 works really, really well for me. I've noticed that. I know that when I have a list of three things that I wanna dio. And then when I do them, I'm very effective, especially when there's a bet down. I made a bet one day and said, I'm not finished these three tests and if I don't do it, I'll pay $50 what happened? I finish those tasks. I finished them at 7 59 I had eight PM Bet date. But I finished them and it was very effective. So I remember one day I said to myself, You know, that was really effective. It was really, really good When I made a bet. I always get it done. You know, I should make a bet every day. I in fact, I should make a bet that I will make a bet every day this month. You know what I'm doing? Right down right now. My calendar. I'm gonna make a bet with that. By the end of this weekend, I'm gonna call my assistant to make a bet to make a bet. So, essentially, I'd make it a bet to make a bet. To make a bed every day is what I had done. It was like in CEFTA bet. But what happened was a massive shift in my productivity that month. I told him one day all I did was call it my assistant, Caleb, who's in the Philippines and told him, Hey, Caleb, I am going to write down on my website base camp, which my to do list. Where I keep it, I'm gonna write down every single day a list of three things I'm going to do. And that list is gonna be complete by 10:30 a.m. If I haven't filled out my list by 10: a.m. I 0 $150. So what's interesting here is that base camp has a time stamp. Can't cheat that If Caleb logs in and it says that I wrote it a 10 51 or 10 31 I lose bucks. There's no choice. It's gone. So I said I would write down three things that will do by 10 a.m. and then by the end of the day, I'll have finished at least two of them. If I don't write down anything, I lose $150. If I write down on Lee, if I write down the list of three things and I finish at least two of them, then I get a reward of $50. If I don't finish at least two of them, I lose 100 bucks. So I created a system where I said, I only have to do two out of three things like I promise to do each day. That's my my my my tangent. I started adding on more tests After that, if I finished three things, I get a special reward, and I discovered that suddenly my brain just had a direction for the first time. My life, it was like it was like a compass. Almost when I got lost in thought, when I started to fail and I didn't know what I was doing, all I had to do was log into base camp because I knew at least those things. Those three things need to be done. And that was an incredible, incredible revelation to myself because as I started doing this outbuilding this out, I realized I could choose anything. If it was a day where I wanted to exercise. I put down exercise, and suddenly I found myself at the gym. When I put down meditation, I found myself meditating. And as I increased those bets and implemented new bets, I could find myself just basically having no chance of failure. I left myself with no chance of failure because I had pre committed to a better beginning the month. And if I stopped logging into base camp for whatever reason I would be losing doesn't like tens of $1000 or thousands of dollars, at least. And so that was a very, very effective revelation in my own life for my own productivity. Suddenly I could just make it happen. So there's one thing that people who want to finish your to do list, if that's what something you're working on, just do an experiment for one day, make a bet for tomorrow tell you, or your wife or husband or a friend that you will go to the gym tomorrow or you will write 100 words. And if you don't, you'll pay a penalty and watch the way that your brain starts to parse that conversation. The next day you will just find yourself working. You'll just get it done. It may be last minute. It might be not the best quality work you've ever done, but it will be done. And that is very, very powerful. That makes sense. Where you guys think about that idea. Does that sound like it might motivate you? Have you ever tried any kind of negative reinforcement? Bad, Justin? No, I haven't. What do you think? What do you think money would motivate? You are money of? Definitely, maybe? Yeah. I mean, it would if losing money would motivate may more than gaining at a like you said. What about you, April? Do you think that money would be an effective motivator for you? Yeah, I think. Definitely. I mean, I don't know. There are some other negative reinforcements like, um, I don't know if social embarrassment, I think with one mentioned earlier, like posting it on Facebook or something that you didn't follow through on your goal or Yeah, actually, there are some interesting gender differences between negative re enforcers. We've noticed that, um I mean, men and women respond differently to different types of reinforces. And I'm glad you said exactly that, because it was worried, based on the money part, that it wasn't gonna fit into the next lie. But fortunately, men are definitely more motivated by loss and a penalty like shame doesn't seem to motivate males as much as possible. It's more about the idea of losing money. Seem to be really powerful. Or like electric shock with With pavalock seems to be quite effective as well, at motivating people of moving males that it seems pretty powerful. Women tended, motivated by accountability and some kind of group reinforcement. So the act of if I don't go to the gym a post on Facebook that I didn't make it to the gym on time can be extremely motivational. Also, one thing that's been surprisingly effective for women has been putting down a piece of clothing. So will often be like if I have to give away my favorite dress if I don't do this this workout or do this goal. And that does not seem to work for males, but it seems to work very powerfully for females. So, um, there are few gender differences, obviously here, both for males and for females. Now we started doing experiments on behalf of the habit group and as I mentioned anybody who's on Pablo dot com for such see out ableto lot to sign up and will give more information about how Teoh how to get into the hack the happy group there. But we've noticed we started doing some really cool experiments. We started allowing people to choose kind of a goal that they wanted to do some kind of habit they wanted to form, and we would find accountability groups and using Facebook. What we would do is have a Facebook message, a group message where we would have one person be a uh like. So, for example, I did a meditation group I believe you were in. The meditation group is, well, Marcie, and what we did was allow 3 to 4 people in a group. We had one coach who every day would ask questions like, Hey, guys. So how to go? Did you do your meditation today? Like, how did it go? Sometimes he will put down money. Sometimes people wouldn't put down money. But what happened was very interesting. We started to know a very particular pattern here. All of the groups that had all the accountability groups that had no females in it failed. They disappeared within a day or two like no one ever responded. But whenever there was at least one female in the group, the group would tend to stay together. And even if the group started to falter and not respond to the message is after a few days at some point three days, five days a week later it would almost always be the woman who came back and message that ever being like, Hey, guys, I decided to get back into it. So how are you all doing? Are we gonna do a digital meditate today? Today I did it. I don't know why or how. I don't want to say anything about gender relations or anything there, but all I can say is kind of the group's work. Really Well, when there's a female in the group That's all I can say based on our debt, our evidence. So when I have tried to find accountability partners, I optimized to make sure there was always a female involved in my accountability partners. Um, I found that's really motivational for me and also adding a negative reinforce or bet really helps me get a habit started. I like toe add rewards over time, and tomorrow we're gonna discussing about how to optimize your routine toe. Add negative reinforcement and positive reinforcement to combine them together with a secret trip trick called micro Habits that makes it's so easy to form habits that it's actually it's like It's like, not even a question anymore. You just find yourself doing what you should and always promised to dio. So I'm gonna talk a little bit right now about tracking habits. But before I do, I was one of those. Any questions coming in from the Twitter audience will not twitter necessarily, but we've got people in the chat room. It's interesting what people are saying. They hold that they have a fear that if they lose the bet that they actually will then be in a worse situation. For examples, almost like they accept the accountability, then they don't deliver, and then they're in a worst space. That's the fear seems to be holding people back. But people really do like the idea of the reward. I wonder if you can almost almost have a negative reward. What if instead of you, maybe you have to do something or you donate money to charity? What do you have to donate it to? Something you really didn't want to be part of? Yeah, that was the example that I gave for the doing. The squats. It was I had to squat £3 or else I would have to donate to the George W. Bush public library. And I'm not. I'm not a big supporter of the George W. Bush Public library in particular. So, um, so that's why it was so effective for me. It was if I had to donate to, you know, a charity that I approved of then I probably wouldn't have motivated me to go to the gym, but this one did, because there's no way I want my name to be searchable in the database or whatever, So it definitely motivated to push me through Um, that's definitely that's absolutely true. This is always the core fear that people have here, and I'm not. We're working on developing the solution to this. Getting people to do something once the bed is in place is easy. It just happens. It's almost like you can't fail, but getting people to accept the penalty to hit the commit button t press t lock themselves into whatever contract. That's the hard part, and we're trying to figure out the solution to it. I think that the solution comes from micro habits. That's where you make the action, that you have to do so easy to do that you can't fail. It's not like you have to walk, but it's not that you have to walk. I only have two flaws. All your teeth. You just to floss one tooth sort of thing. Um, making the bed as easy as possible can can be a very powerful mechanism. Will definitely talking about that a lot tomorrow. But the the truth here is it just works, and you should try it out. Watch the conversation in your brain. That's the interesting thing here. I'm not saying make a 30 day to do list. Bet that's a big step to start off with. But starting off with something small like, I promise that tomorrow I will go to the grocery store and buy salad something small, something you can't fail at something really easy for you to do. Watch what happens after you make that bet, because you'll just find yourself there and your brain will continue to talk that vocalize voice in its head. We'll just continue to talk and say, Don't forget, Don't forget, Get there, get there, Get that salad. Whatever the bed is, it's anybody in the audience having questions. Uh, do you find that it's most effective to do bets around getting a certain result where you may or may not know, like what you have to do to get their result, like like lose some weight or able to get to a certain bench pressing? You're gonna have to kind of figure it out as you go along. Or is it better to make bets around the process and stuff that's completely in your control? It's a great question. The process. The process is absolutely the correct way, focusing on the process that I promise I will, uh, I will do something is much better than the idea of I will hit some goal. So in the case of the £315 squat, that's obviously a gold bet. I promise I would get to that squat level the rial bet should have been. I promise I will go to the G M every day or three days a week or whatever. In this case. Somebody else offered me the bet, and I said Yes, but the and in fact, he failed because of an injury, and that's something he couldn't control. And that's not That's not a reason he should have toe invest in the GWB library. It's but it's not his fault. It's not his fault. He could have probably mitigated it if you checked his H R V every day. That's a whole different conversation that said, focusing on the process, focusing on this on the on what you can do, what you can control that allows you to have the freedom to do something. There's a really cool TV show called Nathan for You and so on Comedy Central, and it's hilarious on its the Sky. If you're all familiar with the dumb Starbucks story about this, this Starbucks that started and in L. A. And they just call themselves Dumb. Starbucks is just another coffee store. And because of the dumb word, it was a parody. So they were allowed to sell dumb lot and dumb caramel macchiato, and they just. But what happened was that it got a tone of press and became one of most traffic stores that guy is done on for the episode. The show called Nathan for You and It's Great show. Check it out on one of the examples of the case studies he did was, he said, I've always found that I'm very motivated by a potential shame. So I always take a photo of myself naked in a hot dog costume and roll over and take a photo than go to a notary and have it addressed to my my great grandma digressive my grandmother. And if I don't turn in a draft of my script by next Friday, she'll mail out that photo to her to do to my grandmother and he she obviously focused on the result, not the process he put on Craigslist. New weight lifting toe new weight loss technique come in if you want to learn how to lose weight. And, like six people came in or so and made different bets about the letters that they would write if they didn't lose £5 a couple weeks later and only one person failed. And it's embarrassing you zero, but you've got to check out the episode. It's it's great. Uh, it was very, very effective for like, the fear shame in this case was motivational. But the fear of loss of fear, shame, the fear of of not getting something just keeps your mind focused on the right activity. And really, it just takes the ability to commit to something. And again, this sounds crazy. Ah, lot of people and it's not. You'll hear motivational speaker after motivational speaker. Talk about positive reinforcement and rewards, and you'll never hear them talk about negative reinforcement. I don't know why I feel there's something in the American psyche that prevents us from approving of pain, approving of penalties, approving of not always winning. I don't know why, but legitimately. A lot of things that we do each day are negative reinforcement. Like if I don't go to work I will get fired. That fear of loss motivates you to go to work. If I don't respond to my girlfriend's text message, she'll yell at me. That is a negative. Reinforcing all of those air negative reinforces. The trick is to use them in an optimal way to really help you craft your daily behavior.