Lessons

Lesson Info

The Transformative Power of Habits

My name is Minnie Satay, and today we were talking a lot about willpower and habits. Over time, I've noticed how much willpower and habits affect our lives. And today I want to talk to us, talk to you all about how and why habits matter. So I'm gonna start off with a quote by, um, Aristotle. We are what we repeatedly dio excellence then is not an act but a habit. It's true. The more that you start to focus and look at your daily activities and start to understand the way that habits run our lives and how much time we spend inhabits how much time we spend in an automatic automatic style of living. You realize that you kind of began to just start doing things you start doing. You are who you are. But when you start to change a habit, you continue to do this habit. Over time it becomes who you are. So start off by talking about why habits matter. Habits are really so. 40% of our daily lives are spent completely inhabit 40% our lives. So if you think about when you wake up in the morning a...

nd you and you go and you take a shower. Most of the time a lot of people talk about their deep thoughts are like their best ideas come in the shower. And the reason why is that when they when they get to the shower, when they do, they're doing an action that's completely automatic. They're very usedto to grabbing the soap with the same hand. They do the same action every single time. And what happens from a brain perspective we'll be talking about this is that your brain outsources the work to an automatic structure in the brain. So it's completely autumn ties, which allows your brain to have a little bit more freedom and cognitive load. And that's why you're able to come up with with new thoughts. Now, as I mentioned, 40% of our days are spent inhabit, and if you start to think about the habits that you have, most don't realize that their habits, they just think that there things that they do So when a person comes home from work, for example, if you take two people, one person has the habit of coming home from work, and every day when he gets home he starts to. He starts Teoh, right? Two pages of a novel is working on you. Take a second person who has the habit that as soon as he gets home from work, he is starts to watch an episode of friends. Well, what'll happen. A year later, the first person will have written pages of a novel he's working on, whereas the second person will have watched basically every episode of friends, maybe once. But the interesting part here is that neither person used more willpower than the other. For the first person, it was as hard for him to not right in his book. Then, for the second person to not watch TV, it's just who they are. So what we can do is start to focus on a particularly specific habits that make massive shifts. And if we find those habits and we learn how to build our lives to optimize for those habits, we can make just a few small key changes that starts to make massive shifts over over a lifetime, so power habits are incredibly transformative. I just mentioned about these to to specific types of people, the sort of transformations that we can make over time can become extremely powerful. And one other thing about about the previous slide is that different people need and rely upon different habits. There's some habits that artists require. There's some habits that entrepreneurs require habits that elite athletes required. And today and tomorrow we're gonna and we're gonna be discussing and meeting people who are who are experts in a variety of different avenues, people who have formed habits. We're gonna talk with Chase Jarvis, who is one of the is, was an expert artist and expert photography. When talking with Mark Bell, who is a really strong lift areas over £1000 squat and he trains other elite athletes on. We're gonna be talking about the specific habits that kind of form and help those people transformed who they become before we move on to chat with the students. I wanted to introduce myself. Eso my name is menu satay. I studied psychology and persuasive technology at Stanford University. I'm actually really happy to be back in California because it's been a while, and I just found out after I flew in here that my five year union is this weekend, so it worked out perfectly. Um, for the last five years I've been gone. I've been traveling the world studying, studying different languages and working on different projects in many in many new countries. And Jay Ko mentioned briefly that I realized while traveling that I was starting to fall of task that is very difficult to stay productive, especially while traveling. And travel is a very good example of a pattern interrupter. Uh, it's where it breaks your routine. It's very hard to keep your standard routines every day when you don't know if you're where you're gonna be sleeping that night or if you have a shared shower or a regular shower. Um, and over time I was tracking my productivity. I started to notice what happened with my productivity. I actually measured it with an app called rescue Time, and we'll be talking about different APs and methods of tracking today. But what I noticed is that as I travelled Mawr, my productivity began to drop. In fact, I was averaging about 28 to 30% of my time as productive. That means that 28 to 30% of my time on my computer was spent on productive websites, whereas the majority my time was spent on time wasters like Facebook Or read it. Um and so I started to think about this. This is a huge problem. If I spend 6 to 8 hours of my life on the laptop per day, that and 60 years 70% of time is unproductive. That leads to a large, massive shift over time. You know, if I can if I can change that just a little bit, it can totally revolutionize and transform my life positively. So as I was, I was I was measuring this. I said to myself, Well, what if I decided to do an experiment? What if I began to hire somebody to help me maintain my habits? And what I did was I hired a girl off of Craigslist. I asked her to sit down next to me, and her job was to make sure that I got my work done using any means necessary in particular, if I used Facebook, she was required to slap me in the face. And what I discovered was that my productivity skyrocketed while she was sitting down next to me. My approach if you went from 28% to 98%. 90% of time was spent on productive websites and in, like Microsoft Word, you know, typing out my work because he went to other 2%. As soon as she noticed it was it was it was pain. So I was very easy to start training my habits. And as I wrote an article about this on my website hacked the system and this article exploded, it became viral. It was in 100 different countries, 160 different news sources. There was a lot of fascination with the idea of slap. But there was also a lot of fascination with the fact that new APs like Facebook, your IPhone, I mean, my IPhones vibrating right now in my back pocket, and it's hard to not pull it out of my pull it out of my back pocket. Uh, these new designs of new technologies are all designed to distract us in a way that that humans have never had to experience. Our human brain is not designed to deal with the cognitive load of Of, of corporations, of websites of IPhone of push notifications. It's just too much for us to handle. And the idea of this hiring somebody has slapped me to keep me on task was interesting from that perspective that maybe we need to enact these crazy systems to help us keep ourselves on track. Um, a little bit later, after I real after this article in viral, I said to myself, Well, I lost my I've lost my slapper. She went, Teoh, join the Peace Corps in Cameroon. So it's hard to find a good person to slap in the face. I'll tell you that. And I said to myself, Well, would it be funny if we made ah device that could help us train our behavior? What if we could create something that instead of of a person, it could be a device? So I spent the last couple of years focusing on building a product called Pavlak. It is a wearable device that helps you form good habits and break bad habits using electric shock instead of slap on. And we'll talk a little more about that later. But over the period of but in the process of building out this product, we've begun to build a community of people very, very passionate about Pavlak. I'm sorry about habits, about transformation about, um, about life shifts. And I'm really excited to bring you seven into the community as well. Um, and so I'd love to meet the students today if we could go around. I love to hear everyone's name, and I'd love to hear about your name where you're from, something interesting about you and one habit that you feel like you have one habit. You feel like you'd like to change. Let's start with. Start with you, Mark. All right. My name is Mark Michelle. I'm from Chicago having to be out here for a couple weeks, and, um, one interesting thing, I guess, as I have, I'm right now. I'm homeless, actually, So I'm going around traveling and staying with friends and Airbnb for about a year. I'm gonna try to do this, and one habit that I have that I've been pretty good about is a gratitude practice in the morning, I used ah, Gratitude Journal and have been doing it every day and one having that have not been able to keep ever is a writing habit. And it's one that I really wanted to develop this year. great. My name is Emily Winston. I'm from Alameda, and one habit that I've gotten good at is going to a martial arts class three times a week. Um, in the last few months and something I'd really like to fix is my is productivity and get into a much better productivity. Having night. Also, waste way too much time on Facebook. Great. I am Justin. I'm a student, a real student, including here. Um, I have a number of ban habits that I would like to like to rectify. And, um, I think we're pretty interesting guy. And, uh, let's see here. I check Facebook and ESPN all too often, and I'd like toe force myself to do other things that I think are better uses of my time. My name is Marty. I'm from Fairfield, California. And, um, we see one interesting thing about me is that I'm starting a nonprofit center around making music education free and available for people. And so that's kind of why I want to break my bad habits so I could get that started it. Um, one of my biggest bad habit is that, like when I'm done with my work, Whatever I'm doing where there's my job or just You know, when I finish a task, I just check out and then, like, I just browse online and, like, you know, I think Okay, I was gonna be here for, like, an hour, but, like, like, snap back in, okay, Crap. I just wasted, like, seven hours, you know, online. Just like you know, what do you tend to waste your time on anything like, you know, you start off on Reddit, and then, you know, it's go downhill from there, and then I'll, uh, watch movies all, uh, you know, just find it just stuff to distract me, And it seems like one distracting to another to another. And do you always have a lot of tabs open on your laptop when you Yeah, Yeah, I'm always, like switching between tabs and yeah. Yeah. And what's your music? Education website. What is that? What is that about? It was basically just, uh, you know, um, creative platforms for people to have a way to master different instruments, whatever. Shouldn't they want, um, for free and so is available right now? It's not I mean, you know, we're still working on it. Great. Hi, I'm Marcy. I'm from San Francisco. Um, I consultant do litigation support. And one of my focus is with the neuro psychiatrist, Um, for habits, the one that I've worked on for the last probably five or six months now consistently is meditation. I sort of started with the group through hack the system happened, had the habit. Great. And, um and I've been, um The one that I'd like to change is like tracking things, because I lose track of time. I lose track of you know, what I'm even doing? What do you want to track A lot of It's time for, like, billing so I can sit and work for I can work for eight or nine hours straight, and I'll jump between projects and then trying to recapture. That's been pretty hard when he was Price Morrison. I'm from Virginia originally, and I run user experience in design firm. Actually got my start in the games industry. Used to be a lead game designer and have it that I'm happy to have developed is going to the gym three times a week. That's something that I never really grew up doing, but something that I was able to get into in the last year or so something that I would love to be able to fix is a lot of times late at night, I'll somehow end up on my phone or on my computer or my computer, and it's already time to go to bed. But I just get sucked into Facebook or email or something, and then an hour goes by and it's way past when I wanted to fall asleep. Now I'm gonna wake up way later than I wanted to next day, and I didn't really get anything out of the experience. Doesn't have it? What do you tend to find yourself spending your time on at night? Is it to be Facebook? Yeah, it's It's a lot of times going through Facebook, looking at clicking off on toe articles that are mildly interesting that people have shared or going through bookmarks on delicious or something like that, just reading articles almost like. And I can almost feel my brain like hoping to get one thing that's extremely interesting. Yeah, but most of the time, usually it's just I thought that was really interesting. And then an hour and 1/2 has gone. Yeah, it's sometimes feels like like every time you read a book, you get real value out of a book. It's like a whole condensed thought. And for some reason it's just like there's not a time to read a book when there's so many Facebook status updates toe like, you know, I mean, uh, it's funny how that happens because your brain evolutionary loves thes small jolts of information loves this, you know, shoots a little bit of dopamine or Norton norepinephrine whenever you learn something new, whenever something is exciting, whenever it causes a quick smiler and no cat photo and you can get very much addicted to that, whereas Theo idea of things that really lead toe learning, you know, really require larger quantum's of time, and it's boring before it gets interesting. And the hard part is to be able to allow ourselves that time toe really build something rather than just responding to things. So apart from just waking up from exercising, do tend to wake up around the same time. Uh, typically again that the bad have it kind of interferes with that. Ideally, I would wake up around, say, 7 30 every day, and that's what I do ideally. But sometimes if I get stuck on the phone or looking at something, then I'll end up getting up close to a 38 45. Maybe not great. Thank us. I'm April, um, from Berkeley, California, And see, um I've been pretty good at having a yoga habit. Ah, but meditation is also something I worked on and I've been working on and also writing. I'd like to be able to set it aside time everyday to write. I'm like the example you gave earlier, and I tend to get really distracted if I'm researching something and, you know, kind of go on a tangent and keep going. Um, I noticed, like, stumble upon, for example, was a big time waster for me, and I would be clicking on all these articles that I wanted to read later, but I'd never read. Um, I just like to keep finding new, interesting things. So, um, yeah, I would say writing, setting time every day to write. So I love to go back around in a circle again and just get one particular daily item that people wish that they could do every day. I know you probably body said it, but I want to get it summarized one more time writing, writing every day. Yes, I'm meditating. Reading, Reading. Yeah, I like to read more. What would you like to read? Anything. Novels, fiction. Just things that expand my horizons. I have a list of books that I want to read. I just for some reason never get around to it. Do you have Ah, a list in order of what you want to read or is that I can think about it for days? Yeah, I have actual chronological lists and databases and wonder list. You know, you as the books I want to read and movies I wanna watch and things that I just for some reason, don't do great. We'll talk about probably why you don't do and how you can make yourself do it cool today. Working out next, Great on. Do you have any type of of work out that you would prefer to dio? Um, I think that's a thing because, like I know, like when I stick to something like, I get great results in terms of working out, But like lately, I just can't stick to anything. Do you tend to work out at home, or do you go to a gym? Um, lately, I've been going to a gym, but it just wavers like I'll go three times a week or once. I never stick to it. Okay. Tracking time. Tracking time. So you're you. You were tracking time from a billing perspective. That's the biggest one. And why do you jump around from Project Project? Um, I think some of it isn't all respond to emails, so something will come in, and it seems urgent. So I go to that, Um, sometimes one task leads into a different ones. So I go back and forth. Um, and there's some things that I do that I have to do, like a ton of rating. So I'll break. It opens of parts, and I lose track of what I'm doing that way. And so when you are discussing with your clients or whenever you sending out a billing statement, is it like you're sending them? Just a list of ours. Are you saying like a list of minutes of what you did in each period is going down in tow? Tense of an hour. So hence of an hour Yeah. Okay. And then do you ever, um have you ever just tried toe like, shut off everything and focus on just one thing I've tried doing And I don't do it very well. Yeah. Different brains work in different ways on dumb. And I find this to be interesting. Weaken definite. Discuss this because tracking can be really difficult. If you are forcing yourself to manually track something in your brain, just doesn't like to do things at a time. And there might be more automated systems that do the tracking for you so we can discuss if things like rescue time, which I used to track my productivity might work for you. Um, What will come back to that for sure? I mean, the one place that really comes up is there's times will be like, I'll be editing something and I'll be stuck. And so switch from doing that task, Teoh, Like, totally manual task. You know, like, copy something, I'll scan something. I'll do something like that cause it takes my brain off of it. And when I do that, then I can kind of go deeper into what I was doing. And when I come back, I'm actually in a better place. God, that's what happens to the problems that you don't want to do that and then also hit the off timer right at the same time. Right? And what do you use right now for tracking? Um, I'm trying to use toggle, so Yeah, it says as automated as it can be without being automated, you press a button still or it. Right? Great. And rice? Yes. So if I could do a daily habit, I would love toe, have a morning routine that I could do. Meditation is invention would be part of that. Like wake up, get breakfast, meditate. Figure out what I'm doing that day as opposed toe. What I do most of the time now is reactive where I wake up and I check my email and I'm already in the meeting or a call or something. And I haven't really had time to decide what I wanted to accomplish that day. You have it. I'd love to do so when you wake up in the morning, is it like you wake up and grab your phone and start reading it in bed or Yeah, a lot of it is. Yes, it's kind of scary, actually. Sometimes I'll actually check in before I'm actually woken up to get out of bed. I'll be checking my email or doing some kind of correspondents. A lot of it depends on the time that I had to go back to the bad habit. Depends on the time that I wake up. If it's late in the day, If it's closer to nine o'clock or so, then yeah, I'm much more feel much more pressure to get stuff done. If I could get up earlier than I kind of have a little bit more time to do some things. Yeah. Morning routine is one of the keystone habits. That is one of those things that when you start to form a really good morning routine, it kind of sets the rest of your day in perspective. Um, you mentioned that you do consulting work, is that correct? But And so you're tracking time all the time, right? Right. How do you manage to track your like, billable hours? I use I use the app called a time longer. And so I just track when I'm started working and tracking apps. Stop working. Let's be track other things, too. Like going to the gym or what? I get lunch, everything like that. Do you have? Like I said. So when you are starting track of time, do you ever have situations like Marcy where you have to take a break or move away? Are you good at just being able to start working on a task and then keep working until it's time to move on to the next one I am pretty good about while the timer is going staying focused. But then, if I do have to go take a break or go get lunch or a snack or something, that I usually start my timer and then I come back. And so it's kind of down to the minute. It's good to know, Um, great. In April, he said, writing, Yeah, I would like to set aside time everyday for personal writing. Have you? Ah, have you ever tried toe do a riding habit before? I've had periods of time where I've had a lot of free time, and I've I've, um I worked on it really regularly, but with a full time job I write for my work, but I like to, um, focus more on my personal writing. Also, when I get home, is your writing more about, uh isn't more about a person is like a fiction or fiction. You write fiction. That's cool. That's really cool. Who here meditates, by the way? A few people sort of your trying to Yeah. Um, and you mentioned that you were part of hacked the habit and you had a meditation partner hacked The habit was, ah, Facebook Group that we've been running for. Users of Pavlak and readers of my old website hacked the system where we tried to bring in accountability groups and test out different different methods of really what makes change permanent. In fact, my meditation partner, I talked to this morning from hacked the habit because I needed to keep myself prepared for this and make sure that my brain was working as it should be. Did you notice any differences in your meditation in your inner tracking or in your habits or your capabilities when you meditate versus when you don't meditate? I think I'm just calmer in general when I meditate and I think about things more clearly storm or likely to do it. I think if I don't do it, I start getting into reactive mode, and then everything kind of goes downhill from there. Yeah, meditation is definitely one of those examples of things that really can help you calm your brain and let you focus on the right things. And it's another Keystone habit that we're discussing in the next segment. That's similar morning routine or exercise, that really one of the small changes that can make massive shifts over your entire day coming from online mannish about the habits that from online students that they're sharing red. Scorpio. I think she's in San Diego. Welcome back, She's saying. My worst habit is checking social media way too often than she's saying. Right now. She has way too many tabs open. She's got to Windows open so she can work and watch. Nati Nath Tali, from Mauritius is saying they have a good habit. They write a Gratitude journal every week, but they'd like to get into the good habit of eating well. In addition and then in our chat rooms is saying Andreas, saying money she's already hit, minus distraction, paired with a constant feeling of being overwhelmed and fresh started saying they have a cable news 7 cycle addition. Addiction. I think a lot of people have a swell and nasty sea is saying I'm a social. I've been social media sober now for seven months, but I am trying to create good habits to be proactive in general. And then we had a comment coming online saying, Hey, mannish looking forward to Pavel it very much. And you look very sexy in that suit. Thank you. I just read these things out. Thank you. Who ever said that?