The bias against things anyone can have at any time, that nobody can make much money from, because they seem too easy, too obvious, too simple, too cheap. The bias against the following solutions because nobody is marketing or can market them to you for very much profit:
Water
Gardening
Walking
Stretching
Meditation
Sitting in the sun
Fresh air
Curiosity
Vegetables
A good night’s sleep
Gratitude
Nature
There are many other ways to change, but this is the one that is my current best/favorite theory.
1. Complete the sentence: “I am an aspiring ______.” Try to find the most succinct identity that represents the difference between who you are now and who you want to be. It doesn’t have to explain why, or how, you will get there. Just put a flag down.
Note: I realize that this first step is not very easy to do. That’s intentional. Step #1 will require some thinking to find the right fit for your “lose 5 pounds”, “eat better”, “quit smoking”, “get in shape” goals. Think about the kind of person you want to become that naturally weighs less, eats well, doesn’t smoke, is in shape, etc. Make sure that you really do want to be that person. Use this identity as the anchor to pull all of the entangled habits and behaviors into yourself (assume here that you’re at the bottom of the ocean and it is difficult to pull things towards you).
2. Update your bios on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and other favorite social networks with the sentence from #1. You don’t have to announce anything about it, but it needs to be somewhere that random people can see it. (This makes it feel real.)
3. Craft another sentence describing a 1-month resolution which strategically gets you closer to #1, and has the following constraints:
Confession. I don’t think habits are tiny things.
I think they’re huge things, convoluted twisting structures in our brains. Traversing all the way from triggers and automatic responses deep in the subconscious, to routines, to circumstances, to goals and values, and all the way up to our sense of selves and our identity in the neocortex.
These structures can’t just be turned with a light switch, by a new app.
They are structures that need to be built over time. They involve real neurons that need to change, grow, reroute, and sink in over time.
Building a new habit is like deciding to buy a new house and put it in your brain. You have to clear away some space. You have to allocate some resources. You either need a lot of money to buy the house outright, or you have to save enough money to put a down payment on a loan and then rearrange your long-term finances to figure out how you’re going to pay a mortgage for 10-30 years. You have to get lucky, the market needs to be right, you need to have a steady income, you might need to move to a new city or to a new part of the city before finding one you can afford.
You can’t buy a house in 21 days.
You can’t buy a house with an app, or a bracelet.
You can’t decide to buy a house today, and move in tomorrow.
Changing a behavior, or starting a new habit, requires perhaps a thousand small, intentional, actions over time. It requires committing to showing up to work for years, putting in the …
A while ago I tweeted:
It keeps re-surfacing in my brain so I thought I’d write about it some more, and release a new level while I’m at it.
If life were a game, the levels might be something like:
Level 1: sugar, fat, salt
Level 2: sex, drugs, rock & roll
Level 3: autonomy, mastery, connection
Level 4: whole-heartedness, acceptance, playfulness
Level 1’s boss is the Lizard Brain, level 2’s boss is Coolness, level 3’s boss is The Self, and level 4’s boss is Meaninglessness. If level 5 exists, I have no idea what it’s like or who the boss is. That’ll have to be added in a later release of this game.
The main point is that this is just what the game of life seems like from the level that I’m currently on, and every level has a version that reflects that level’s own constraints and biases.
What do the levels seem like from your spot in the game?
Photo filters are quite popular these days. They’re cool because they add personality to a photo with minimal work.
It turns out that OUR PERSONALITIES are also the output of a number of personal distorting filters applied to the universe.
Imagine an unbiased, uninterpreted, unsimplified, unprocessed, view of the universe.
Then think about how you view the universe.
How many filters, distortions, and processing are there between you and the unfiltered universe?
To help make the point, think about COLOR. The application of color to the universe is the result of a brain filter. One that translates a small segment of the light spectrum into a map that relates each frequency of light to a color that represents a specific blend of those 3 colors.
Then there are the filters that translate shapes, textures, sounds, smells, movements, depths, etc into similarly simplified, but meaningful, objects that are easier to manipulate in our brains.
Then there are the filters that try to simplify things so that we can survive in a constant overload of information. We create filters designed to pull out the important information so that we can toss the rest. This means that we are always on the look out for NEW information, SHOCKING information, and information that VALIDATES our existing theories about the world.
Then there are the filters that bias our brain to prefer information, ideas, things, people, etc that are close to us and useful to us. A person dying 10,000 miles from us …
There are different modes of “work”. Here are a few of them.
- Introspection. Finding yourself.
- Exploration. Finding everything else.
- Goal-making. Based on values found during introspection.
- Strategy-making. Hypotheses about how to achieve your goals.
- Experimentation. Trying things. Playing. Iterating.
- Finding fit. Person/universe fit.
- Slogging. Executing. Doing the work.
An industry of self-help, productivity gurus, and therapists has sprouted around each of these modes of work. Much to their benefit.
Each of these modes require different parts of our brains. Different brainwave lengths. Different moods. Different states of mind.
Each of us excel at certain modes and suck at others.
Each mode is strongest when the others are also at their strongest. We must develop each of these modes in parallel. It’s all one big positive feedback loop / Catch-22 / bootstrap.
Neglecting one mode will indirectly cause other modes to suffer.
The first six modes are inputs.
The last mode is the only true output.
We’ll be judged in the world by our output. Therefore, some people place a lot of emphasis on the 7th mode (see pg’s schlep post for a masterful articulation). It’s the fruit of your labor. But the labor itself is actually not the slog. 10,000 hours go into preparing for the slog. The slog without preparation is chasing after the wind. The slog with preparation is flow.
You can’t express until you’ve explored. The best way to explore is to begin expressing.
The long slog, the thing that feels like way too much painful effort in the beginning becomes the only reward.
Last September I asked people to call me out whenever I complained. The first person to call me out would get $1. I probably got called out at least 100 times, and appreciate all of the help from everyone who did so.
It was pretty great as a way of crowdsourcing my own mindfulness around how much I complain (which wasn’t much, but definitely more than I had originally thought).
Another interesting side effect of the experience was that I had several good conversations about where the line is between complaining and speaking up about something that was undesirable.
I definitely came away with the conviction that not all complaining is undesirable. Maybe 90% of complaining was the kind I should be doing less of, and then about 10% of the complaining felt “good”, especially after I became better at catching myself in the process of wanting to vocalize a complaint.
Finally, I found that while Chirpify is a great service for giving money to people easily over Twitter, it turned out that most people didn’t actually want the dollar (and never claimed the dollar I sent to them).
I’ll be posting a new experiment soon branching out to more than just complaints, but for now, consider this experiment concluded.
PS. I highly recommend others to try something like this, building off of what I learned (or not). The full benefit of the experiment is probably only really achieved by actually going through with it yourself.
1 3D printer.
1 self-driving mini-car to pick up parts at the store.
1 iPhone with the default Maps app (download Google Maps if you have spare money).
Access to the Internet over free wifi networks.
1 Bitcoin mining account (aka job).
Some solar panels.
1 TaskRabbit to be your assembler (not needed after the first time).
These instructions.
Want to try something fun and different for new year’s resolutions this year?
You’ll forget the rest anyway. Better to do one right than to do a whole bunch wrong.
For example, these are all properly worded:
And these are not properly worded:
it’s really easy to create a resolution that is vague because vague is SAFE. Better than safe is clear. Step out on a ledge a little by being specific and you’ll know for certain when you’re actually on track, and it will feel good.
You can do this on your own if you want. Find a group of motivated friends to keep you accountable.
The point of accountability is that you can’t come up with a million stupid excuses without being called out on it. I’m volunteering myself to call you out on it in 2013.
Join my new Rabbit Rabbit Resolution Accountability Squad. It’ll be a monthly check in to a large group with whether or not you did you resolution in the previous month.
Everyone that checks in, wins. Everyone that doesn’t check in will be called out in an email to the full group. Ooh, scary, right? No money on the line, no embarrassing …
Great straight forward explanation about how habits work from the appendix of Charles Duhigg’s book, The Power of Habit.
It’s simple:
THE FRAMEWORK:
Identify the routine
Experiment with rewards
Isolate the cue
Have a plan
Of course, building a house is also simple, if you have the time and energy and materials.
In my search for the holy grail answer of the question “HOW DO WE CHANGE OURSELVES”, I realize that I’ve been looking in the wrong place.
I was looking for an answer that was about the size of a menu.
But the answer may actually be of the size of a 2-year college education.
I was looking for an answer that was about as difficult as learning how to build a lego house.
But the answer may actually be about as difficult as building a real house.
I was looking for an answer that cost about $100.
But the answer may cost about $10,000.
I was looking for an answer that anyone could do, just like anyone can write a blog post.
But the answer may only require the same amount of dedication, time, and energy as writing a book.
There’s no super secret to it all (after all, Charles Duhigg lays it all out in easy to understand steps). After all…
“Anyone” can get a 2-year college degree, “anyone” can build a house, “anyone” can buy something that costs $10,000, “anyone” can write a book.
“Anything” is possible, but in the real day-to-day where we have to prioritize and budget …
Buster Benson (@buster) is a writer and builder of things. If you're new here, check the about page or see my entire life on a page.
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