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Should I get out of bed?
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Should I make this decision? Should I eat this thing? Should I exercise?
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All those questions become much easier because now our goal is well-being.
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Getting out of bed, it's not about whether getting out of bed makes you happy.
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If you don't get out of bed, you're not going to have a relationship with your wife.
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You're not going to earn money.
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You're not going to feel safe.
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Your life doesn't have any meaning.
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Now suddenly the decision to get out of bed is much much easier because you're not chasing pleasure.
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You're chasing well-being.
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Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world.
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Thanks to each and every single one of you that come back every week to listen, learn, and grow.
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Now you know that I'm always on the lookout to go and find the incredible thinkers, thought leaders, authors, writers, storytellers that I believe have inspired my life and can inspire yours as well.
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Now the person I'm going to interview today, I actually read his book back in 2013.
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So it's been quite a while, but his book had such a lasting impact on me.
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And I was just sharing with him that the reason I love On Purpose and our community is I get the excuse to reach out to some of the people that I admire and I feel inspired by so that I can help them share their work and their story and their insights that I know will transform your life.
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Today's guest is none other than Charles Duhigg, journalist and New York Times best-selling author.
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He wrote The Power of Habit and Smarter, Faster, Better, which talk about productivity, habits, and the science behind it.
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He joined the New York Times as a staff writer in 2006 and was part of the team that won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism for the I Economy, a series that examined the global economy through the lens of Apple.
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Now today's session is going to be all about habits, understanding ourselves, improving our productivity and our effectiveness.
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Welcome to On Purpose, Charles Duhigg.
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Charles, thank you so much for doing this. I'm such a fan.
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Your books are incredibly powerful and I'm just really grateful that we get to have this conversation.
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No, thanks for having me, Jay.
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I I I feel very similarly.
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I've loved your book and and loved the the show.
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So, really thank you for having me on. No, absolutely.
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Let's Let's dive straight in.
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You know, what I'm really fascinated to know is not just about the incredible work and research you've done, but how you became fascinated by it.
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You've written a lot about productivity, smarter, better, faster, habits.
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How did you get fascinated with those things in the first place and where was your journey to become attracted to human behavior?
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Well, there is a sort of these two experiences.
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The The first one was that um you know, when I first came up with the idea for The Power of Habit and got interested in it, my wife was about and I were about to have our first kid.
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And and I had this this thing that was going on where I would think to myself like, you know, at that point I was a reporter at The New York Times and felt like I was somewhat successful.
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I'd gone to business school and you know, and and I started a company and and I thought to myself like if I'm so smart, like why is it so hard for me to go running in the morning?
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Cuz I would always say like, I'm going to go jogging tomorrow and then not do it, right?
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And then my son was born and like, you know, after 6 or 7 months, they they start eating this like um like a little bit older, they start eating these like little chicken nuggets and I'd be sitting at the dinner table with him and and like without thinking about it, I just reach over and grab one of his chicken nuggets and eat it.
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Even though I wasn't hungry, right?
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It was just like automatic.
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And so, I was trying to figure out like if I'm so smart, why is it so hard for me to do the things that I want to do?
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Like why is it so hard to form the habits that I think are healthy for me?
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And then I also had this experience, which is I'd been a reporter in Iraq during the during the war, and I met this Army major who who explained to me that the way that the military works, and this is true of all militaries, is that it's basically a giant habit change machine, right?
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Like Like your instinct when you're getting shot at is to run the other direction cuz that's smart.
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But the military teaches you these habits to shoot back.
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Or Or now when you're overseas, you can email or call your spouse every night.
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And so if they don't teach you good habit communication habits, you get distracted.
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And so when you're on patrol, you can't do your job as well, and you're in danger.
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And And he explained to me that the way that they teach habits is very formulaic, that they break a habit into these three components and they teach you how to think about them.
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And as I learned that, I thought to myself like there's a real science here, and I want to understand that science.
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And so I decided to write a book about it in part just because it would help me figure it out.
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One of the things I find that you said that's really fascinating, and I'm so glad I asked you that question, is because when I'm listening to you, I think a lot of people can empathize with that.
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You feel like you're a smart, organized, thoughtful individual, but then you're like, "But why can't I get my life together?
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Why can't I do basic things?"
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And we often Yeah, and we often get really critical of ourselves and judgmental of ourselves and make ourselves feel guilty for not having it together.
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Can you tell me tell us a bit about that because I think one of the easiest things to feel right now when you were saying those things, I'm sure everyone's listening going, "Charles, I do the same thing.
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I I say I'm going to work out tomorrow and I don't.
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I reach over for the carby, you know, fatty, calorie-based food instead of something that I know that's healthy and natural for me, but then we judge ourselves."
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Talk to us a bit about judgment and guilt and criticism.
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It's a great question, right?
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Cuz you're exactly right.
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Our instinct, particularly like America, the UK, all these all these kind of like, you know, what we consider ourselves to be developed nations, we we are masochists.
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We love punishing ourselves, right?
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We have we have lifestyles that are designed to push us to work harder and faster.
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And and to understand why that's damaging, you first of all has to have to understand how habits work.
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So, we think of habits as one thing, but every habit is actually three things, right?
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There's a there's a cue, which is like a trigger for an automatic behavior to start.
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And then, the routine, which is the behavior itself.
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That's what we think of as the habit.
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And then finally, a reward.
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And there's a part of your brain known as the basal ganglia that looks for those rewards and tries to make any pattern into a habit.
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So, it'll take cues, routines, and rewards and put them together in a little chunk.
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Because of that reward, it'll say, "I want to make that behavior easier and easier and easier."
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So, so exercise is a great example, right?
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We know from studies that when people have an obvious cue, like they put their running shoes next to their bed, and so they see them first thing in the morning, or they plan on meeting their friend at the gym every Wednesday night, that they're more likely to to exercise.
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But what really makes that exercise into a habit is if they give themselves a reward afterwards.
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So, do they give themselves like a nice long shower, or do they give themselves like a smoothie?
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Do they just have a calendar that they mark off all the times that they've exercised?
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Are they rewarding themselves somehow?
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If you're rewarding yourself somehow, and you have that cue, then it becomes easier and easier to do the behavior, to exercise, to make the habit become real.
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But you bring up the fact that we always like are blaming ourselves, right?
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We're always feeling guilty.
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So, think about how most people start exercising.
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They they wake up in the morning, they don't have a cue, right?
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They they have to go search through their closet to find their running shoes, and then they go out, and maybe they run, and they feel like they look really dumb, they don't know what they're doing, they're not sure what route they're going to take.
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They they think, "Oh, I'll run seven blocks."
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And after three blocks, they can hardly even breathe, so they give up.
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Then they come home, and now now they're running late, right?
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So, they like jump in the shower as fast as they can.
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They like rush the kids through breakfast.
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They throw the kids in the car.
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They take the kids to school.
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The kids are 2 minutes late for school.
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Then they rush to their desk, and they're already 10 or 15 minutes late for their day, and they sit down and they've got sweat just streaming.
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In other words, all these people who start exercising, they've punished themselves for exercising, right?
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And And your brain, it notices rewards and punishments.
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If If your brain notices that when you go running in the morning, the rest of the day is a nightmare, your brain says, "This is a terrible idea.
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I don't want to make exercise any easier."
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And And so, that's what's important, is that first of all, knowing how our habits work, but second of all, to the point that you raised, when we blame ourselves, when we punish ourselves, when we feel guilty, what we're actually doing is we're making it harder to form habits.
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Because our brain pays attention to that negativity.
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What we need to do is we need to find the rewards.
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We need to allow ourselves to indulge in the rewards, to enjoy those rewards.
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Because that's how your brain will latch onto something and say, "I want to make this easier and easier and easier to do."
8:51
Charles, this is why I love you, and this is why everyone should read your book, because everything you say is just so methodical, relatable, practical.
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Genuinely, I'm I'm I'm loving this conversation already, because I can totally understand that anyone who's listening or watching right now, they're thinking, "Yes, that's exactly what I'm doing.
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That's exactly what I'm going through.
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That's exactly what I'm experiencing."
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I want to take a bit of a quick tangent on this, because I I like that you said that you thought about this before you had kids.
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And what's really fascinating to me, at least, is a lot of people don't really start thinking about their habits until after they have kids.
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Because up until before that, we're just kind of living, and maybe you don't need to be as disciplined, maybe you don't need to be as organized.
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I don't have children yet.
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And so I live a highly disciplined, high performance, productive, effective lifestyle.
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And what my friends will always say to me is, "Jay, wait till you have kids." Right?
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Like I hear that all the time.
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And my take is I don't have kids and so I completely understand that I have no wisdom whatsoever on what it means to be a parent and try to live a mindful lifestyle and I don't claim to know anything about that.
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All I know is that my best right now to use my time really wisely.
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I wanted to hear from you when you started working on your habits before and after how does how does having children affect that and which were habits that you held on to and that have been useful and which were habits that you had to be okay with giving up?
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Because I think sometimes again as parents, I hear a lot of parents judging themselves and saying, "Oh, I'm not doing this. I'm not doing that."
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But then we forget that of course not.
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You have a whole another human or two humans or more to take care of.
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Walk us through that a little bit just as a tangent.
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Well, I I think that there's this axiom which I think is true which is that, you know, if you're a good employee and then you become a parent, you will never ever be a good employee or a good employee at the same time for the rest of your life, right?
10:52
Like part of being a parent is getting at peace with the fact that that you're not going to be able to excel quite as much as you did previously in every aspect of your life.
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And much like you, before I had kids, I just worked nonstop, right? I loved working.
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I loved being a reporter.
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I loved reporting and writing.
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And and then we had kids.
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And it and it actually illustrated something to me that that came up a lot in the research which is important which is if I was to ask you to give up part of your life right now for children, it would seem it would seem at best neutral and probably negative, right?
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Because you don't know the love that you're going to feel to have about having a kid, right?
11:31
You know it intellectually, but you haven't felt it yet.
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You haven't You haven't had that enter your life.
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And one of the things we know is that it is very hard to give up anything, including habits, when the alternative is a vacuum.
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In fact, this is actually known in the psychology literature as the golden rule of habit change, which says you should not try and extinguish habits in your life.
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Because the truth of the matter is you can do it for a while, but those habits exist in your brain.
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There are neural pathways of that cue, that routine, and that reward that are all put together, and it's always going to be there.
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And so, in a moment of stress or a moment of of anxiety, you're going to fall back on that habit.
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What you should do instead is change the habit.
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Find something new to fill that hole in your life. Right?
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Some Some new behavior that corresponds to the old cue, that delivers something similar to the old reward.
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And for me, with kids, what happened was, you know, we had kids, and you're right, suddenly I had to stop working quite so much because, if nothing else, my wife was like, "Where are you? Like, I need your help. You need to come home."
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And And babies are wonderful, but one of the things about them is that they're exhausting and kind of boring sometimes.
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And so, it's hard when you're a new parent.
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It's hard to like give up this old lifestyle you had that you spent years years building towards.
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Now, suddenly you have to, you know, be up at 2:00 in the morning and look terrible and smell terrible and never get to shower.
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And so, one of the things that I realized, that I think other people realize, too, is instead of seeing it as giving something up, you have to see it as opting for something else. Right?
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One of the things that One of the habits that I found I developed once I had kids was the habit of just much more being present with my children.
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Because I knew that, you know, in 6 months or a year or 10 years, I'm never going to have this again.
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I'm never going to have my kids sleeping on my stomach.
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And when they get older, I'm never going to have them showing me the first words that they wrote.
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And then now my kids are 13 and 10, I'm never going to have them, you know, showing me the new clothes that they're wearing and asking me if asking me if I think they look cool.
13:37
And so this this presence this this being present this habit of mindfulness of presence which I think I think you have spent a long time cultivating.
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That's something that's new I think for a lot of people is new for me when I had kids.
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And the reason why I was able to embrace that is because I was giving up other things in order to have something new.
13:59
I I had this change my thinking about abandoning all these habits which I loved which had made me successful for a vacuum and rather saying, "Look, I'm not going to be able to work until 10:00 at night anymore, right?"
14:10
I used to be able to sit down at my desk at 9:00 in the morning and power for 13 hours.
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Now I'm going to go home at 5:30.
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But it's not because I'm giving up this discipline I had before.
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It's because I'm opting for something else.
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And that's really important.
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When people are thinking about changing their own habits, they need to think about not just breaking a bad habit.
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They think they need to think about opting for something new that's better and healthier.
14:36
Yeah, what a brilliant piece of advice.
14:37
In the spiritual literature that I studied, the English translation it was referred to as the higher taste.
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And it was the idea that you can only give up these lower tastes when you have a higher taste.
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And the idea of lower and higher being vibrational and energy based.
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That when you first start meditating, it's boring or it doesn't work or it doesn't make you feel happy.
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But as you develop the higher taste, you start to like the vibration and the energy that you experience as opposed to this lower distraction.
15:09
And the same applies in a practical way.
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I remember when my wife was worried about the amount of sugar I consumed.
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So I grew up in a home and my my community knows this well where I ate four chocolate products a day, a chocolate biscuit, a chocolate bar, a chocolate yogurt, and a chocolate ice cream.
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And I ate that my whole life.
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And then when I was at university, I got through university by having, you know, a bottle of Sprite and a chocolate bar every single day.
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So, I'm so used to consuming high amounts of sugar.
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Now, I married a nutritionist and a dietitian and a Ayurvedic health practitioner.
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So, my wife was highly worried about my concern and I would say not worried, concerned, about my amount of sugar intake.
15:53
And so, she was constantly trying to remove sugar from my life.
15:57
But I would say to her that I was like, but I I I rely on it for maybe energy or I rely on it for boosting my mood or performance or whatever it may be.
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And it took her a while and I said to her, you need to help me find a replacement. I need a replacement.
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And finally, we found it in dates.
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So, dates have become a phenomenal I don't mean dates with her, I mean I mean food dates.
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Uh and and uh cacao nibs.
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So, like cacao, raw cacao or monk fruit.
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Monk fruit sweetened cacao has become a really natural form of sugar uh that gives me the same feeling and the same taste and the same comfort without a lot of the negative effects on my health that sugar has.
16:38
And so, having gone through that very practically in an area where I had somewhat of an addiction, it's really interesting to see how what you're saying is actually played through in my own life as well.
16:50
Well, and I think what one of the important aspects of what you just said is accepting that that sometimes reaching that higher taste is a journey that has steps along the way, right?
17:04
One of the things that we know about habits is that take exercise as a good example again.
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When we first start developing a habit, we often times need external rewards, right?
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So, so we need that smoothie after we go for a run.
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We need the light nice long shower.
17:19
Very similarly, I don't know if this is true for you, but when I started meditating, like I I would meditate for 3 minutes and I had to give myself a reward, right?
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I would I would use one of the the biofeedback bands so that I could hear the birds chirping in the background because without it, it just it felt totally pointless.
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I didn't understand why I was doing this.
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It wasn't fun at all to meditate.
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And then over time what happens is that as your brain learns to appreciate the higher taste.
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As your brain learns to appreciate the higher intrinsic rewards, they begin to crowd out the need for the extrinsic rewards.
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So, again, with exercise, often times when people start exercising, they need to give themselves something.
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In fact, often times the most effective way to start exercising is to give yourself a small piece of chocolate after you exercise.
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And then after a week or two or a month or two, you start to realize like actually, I just feel good when I exercise.
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Those of course are the endorphins and the and the cannabinoids, all these neurotransmitters that are designed to make you feel good.
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And you start saying, "Actually, I'm not even craving the chocolate anymore.
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I just crave that feeling of healthiness I get after a run."
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Or or with meditation, I'm sure at some point you and I, definitely I, stopped needing these extrinsic rewards.
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We didn't start needing someone to tell us you did a good job because you sat still for 10 minutes today.
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Instead, there's a sense of calmness, right?
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The alpha waves that make us feel good.
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And that's important is because often times we think that we should be able to reach enlightenment right?
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We go for a run and instead of giving yourself a small piece of chocolate, we give ourselves a kale shake because we should be happy with this kale shake.
18:54
Nobody likes a kale shake, man.
18:56
That's that's not a reward.
18:59
That's like that's more do-gooderism.
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But the the point is that if we are patient with ourselves, if we recognize that I need to start with extrinsic rewards and move to intrinsic rewards, we're much more likely to change.
19:10
That's That's so brilliant.
19:13
Thank you for the Thank you for that addition and expansion on the idea.
19:15
And as you were saying that, I was thinking about something that I've discovered more recently.
19:22
And it's this idea around memory and experience.
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So, if I've had a really painful start to the day, the one that you explained, you're you're rushing to get that run in, you don't get to reward yourself, you're late for work, you're scared that the you're going to miss the kids' class or you know, an event or recital, and then everything's going wrong, that memory stays very strongly with us.
19:47
Like negative memories kind of grab a hold onto us, and you'll be able to explain this better.
19:54
But when you have a good experience, it's almost like, "Oh, yeah. That was good. That was nice."
19:59
Like we don't we don't hold onto it.
20:01
It's the same with social media.
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When you are scrolling through the comments, you see all these beautifully positive comments, and you just go, "Oh, yeah, great. Great. Great."
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And then you see one negative one, and you amplify it.
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So, even in our memory, we retain a negative experience from working out or eating a healthy meal far stronger than we retain a positive memory.
20:22
Can you tell us a bit about that, Charles?
20:24
That's You're exactly right.
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And study after study shows that's true.
20:27
And from an evolutionary perspective, you you can understand why, right?
20:30
If If I'm a If I'm walking through the forest, and I hear a noise in the underbrush, it's much more important for me to remember that that noise in the underbrush is an animal waiting to attack me, rather than that noise in the underbrush is something beautiful that I want to look at. Right?
20:49
For survive from a survival perspective, the people who remember negative memories better are going to survive longer.
20:56
And so therefore, they're going to have more offspring.
20:59
And that's going to get hardwired in our brain.
21:01
So, that Now, the question is, okay, so that worked great when I was living in the jungle, right?
21:04
When animals might attack me at any given moment. But how do I do it now?
21:08
How do I How do I take it cuz social me I don't have to remember the negative comments on social media, right? It's not healthy.
21:16
It's not going to help me survive.
21:17
So how do I change that calculus in my head given that there's millions of years of evolution pushing me in the other direction?
21:24
Well, the way that you do it is you push back against it by reminding yourself why the positive reward is so great.
21:28
And there's kind of two ways to do this.
21:31
The first is simply come up with the ways to remind yourself to enjoy that positive reward, right?
21:37
That's why I say after you go for a shower, don't just after you go for a run, after you exercise, don't just take a shower, luxuriate in the shower, right? Like let yourself relax.
21:48
Look forward to the shower.
21:50
Use some special, you know, smelly soap that may that makes it feel amazing.
21:55
But the second thing to recognize here is that often times what we're talking about when we talk about rewards that seem very short-lived is they're transactional rewards as opposed to emotional rewards.
22:07
One of the things that we know is that emotional rewards persist longer.
22:11
They have a greater sense of salience within our brains.
22:15
So very frequently you'll say, "Okay, I went for a you know, I I got a I got a big client.
22:21
I'm going to buy myself a new watch."
22:23
The joy you feel from that watch because it's a transactional reward is much much short-lived than the joy of your boss telling you, "Look, man, you're amazing. I'm really proud of you.
22:37
You did an amazing job on that."
22:40
And so in order to hijack that process you're talking about, in order to make positive rewards as powerful as negative rewards, we need to not only train ourselves to remember them, we need to find positive rewards that have an emotional characteristic because that emotion is going to persist in our brain much longer.
22:56
That's also why for instance, when you bring up the negative rewards that you that you are so easy to remember, they're always emotional, right?
23:03
It's someone calling It's not someone saying that your point is a bad point or disagreeing with you logically, it's someone saying that you're an idiot or that you look stupid or making you feel bad.
23:15
So, we got to fight fire with fire.
23:15
Find rewards that aren't just material.
23:17
Find rewards that aren't just transactional.
23:21
Find rewards that are emotional, and most of those emotions, frankly, will come from other people as opposed to things you can buy.
23:29
Yeah, I appreciate you forming that distinction between emotional rewards and transactional rewards because you're so right.
23:35
It's It's so natural to gravitate towards a transactional reward because that's how society has rewarded us, too. You get a medal.
23:44
You get a physical uh depiction of your achievement. You get an award. You get a trophy.
23:50
And so, the watch becomes a trophy or the car becomes a trophy or a house becomes the trophy.
23:56
But as you said, it was the appreciation that you were seeking or the uh the affection or the acknowledgement of what you've done.
24:04
And it's really interesting you say that.
24:06
So, one thing that's really helped me is I discovered that the things that are actually good for me, they're hard before and they're easier afterwards.
24:18
And the things that are generally unhealthy for me feel great before and feel terrible afterwards.
24:23
So, taking your example of going to the gym, when I wake up, it's unlikely that I want to run to the gym.
24:32
I You know, I've become better at it and I I go to the gym four or five times a week, but there still may be a morning when I wake up and say, "I think I need to take it easy today."
24:41
But I push myself to go, and when I leave, I go, "I'm so happy I went."
24:44
And I'll come home and I'll say to my wife, I'll say, "Remind me of this moment that I told you that I'm so glad that I went, and every time I tell you in the morning that I don't want to go to the gym, remind me of this, that when I come home I'm always beaming, I'm full of energy and full of vitality and life.
25:00
Please remind me of this.
25:02
And it's almost like that human reminder from her is all the emotional reward I need to remember that physical, emotional, tangible effect that going to the gym has on me or eating healthy food. Absolutely.
25:17
And And it works the other way around, too, right?
25:18
Like I go to the When I go to dinner with my wife and there's like some creamy pasta dish on the menu and I'm like, "Oh man, I'm starving.
25:26
Like that looks That sounds so good."
25:29
And then I eat it and I tell my wife like, "Next time just remind me.
25:30
I feel terrible after eating this. Like I feel so gross."
25:35
And And you're exactly right that that And in fact, within psychology, there's this there's a really interesting science known as implementation intentions, which basically says, "Look, at the moment when you have to make a decision, oftentimes that's the worst time to make a decision because there's so much going on inside your head that's going to nudge you one way or the other, right?
25:59
If you Everyone knows this.
25:59
If you go grocery shopping when you're hungry, you're going to buy crazy crazy things, right?
26:04
You're going to spend way too much money.
26:05
So, everyone has lunch before they go grocery shopping so they can make wise choices.
26:09
And we can apply that policy throughout life.
26:11
Like if you're going to go out to dinner, don't decide Don't wait till the last minute to decide what you're going to order for dinner cuz you're going to be starving.
26:20
Decide in the afternoon, look up the menu online so that you know so that you can make the decision when you're not hungry.
26:24
And those implementation intentions, saying to yourself, "I'm have an intention to implement a decision at a particular moment.
26:30
I have an intention to try and determine ahead of time when I should make choices and what I should do when I see certain stimuli."
26:40
That is how we gain control over our behavior.
26:43
It's kind of unfair to ask yourself to be a saint all the time, particularly when you're surrounded by temptations.
26:51
It's a lot easier to be a saint and decide to be a saint when the temptations are at a remove because then when the temptations come along, you've already made your choice. Yes. Yes, so well said. So well said.
27:02
I think one of the biggest things that affects a lot of people who may be listening to this are this idea of well, especially because you brought up decision-making, Charles, the idea of procrastination and overthinking and that seems to be a huge challenge in our society today because the level of information, analysis, and overload that we're dealing with is so high.
27:30
I read a study a few years ago that said we experience through the news, social media, we experience more tragedy in 24 hours than we used to in our whole lifetime 25 years ago.
27:41
And when you think about that, you're comparing 24 hours to a 70-year lifetime.
27:51
That is, you know, I mean, the the brain hasn't had enough time to catch up and evolve.
27:55
And so it there's glitches and there's mistakes.
27:58
And so that procrastination and overthinking again is very normal and understandable.
28:01
What have you found to be some of the best techniques if someone's listening right now and saying, "Charles, I agree with you, but I just try and put off decisions completely.
28:10
Like, I just try and make no decision because that's easier for me to not think about it, but then I get more scared because I haven't made one.
28:18
And then I get lost in overthinking in the cycle of procrastination."
28:23
So there's been a bunch of research that's been done on procrastination and overthinking.
28:26
And And some of my favorite research actually comes from Dan Ariely, who's a a behavioral psychologist.
28:33
And so one of the things that Dan's experiments have shown is that when people talk about procrastination, when they talk about overthinking, about avoiding making a decision, what they're really talking about is they're talking about the first step. Right?
28:49
Once you take the first step, it's usually pretty easy.
28:50
And this is true of many, many things, right?
28:52
Once you do Once you're in the gym, it's pretty easy to work out.
28:57
It's the getting to the gym part that you put off again and again and again.
29:01
Once you've decided that you want to, you know, go on that vacation, it's pretty easy to figure out like which flight you're going to take.
29:08
It's the decision of going on the vacation.
29:12
And so, the question isn't how do I do this entire task?
29:15
The question is actually, how do I make it easier for myself to take the first step?
29:19
And there's basically two things that help us with this.
29:23
The first is, make that first step as small as humanly possible. Right?
29:30
If If you're talking about going to the gym, if you're talking about exercising, don't sit down ahead of time and figure out what the next 3 months of workouts are going to be like.
29:39
Instead, make that first step simply to say, "Look, I'm just Like I'm going to have my gym clothes in the car.
29:45
The first step is literally all I have to do is get in the car, turn on the ignition, and get out of the driveway.
29:50
Cuz once I'm out of the driveway, I'm not going to have any place to go except for the gym.
29:55
So, let's make it as easy as possible and as small as possible to get in the car and literally just back out of the driveway.
30:01
Number two is, how do I reward myself for that small step?
30:05
Now, most of the time when we think about going to the gym, we say like, "Oh, I'm going to put off the reward until I've done the whole workout."
30:13
Or if you're really a masochist, you're like, "Look, I'm going to train for a half marathon," which is what I train for half marathons.
30:18
"I'm going to train for a half marathon.
30:20
I'm going to put off the reward until I run the race 12 weeks from now."
30:22
That's not going to work.
30:25
Like what you need to do is you need to get that reward as fast and as early in the process as possible, even if it's just a small reward.
30:31
So, if it's a matter of backing out of the driveway, it can be as small as just feeling good about yourself for backing the the out of the driveway.
30:40
You've You've accomplished what you needed to do today.
30:43
If you get to the gym and you work out for 4 minutes, that's okay because the entire point was just to get to the gym.
30:51
The key The question people should ask themselves is not how do I make procrastination less of a presence in my life?
30:57
It's how do I take a decision that I'm avoiding, make it as small as possible, and then reward myself for that first step?
31:04
Because if you can teach yourself to do that, everything else is going to take care of itself. That's brilliant.
31:09
And And you also talk about positive procrastination, right?
31:12
Like you talk about the idea that sometimes some of our best decisions are made when we create a bit of a distance and allow ourselves to procrastinate and overthink, which I think is such a unique and powerful way to think about it because we've been we've been taught to believe that people who make the decisions quickly and effectively and now are the most smart people.
31:32
And what you're actually saying is, well, no, procrastination can be a really healthy, positive thing.
31:39
And I see that in my life sometimes that there are some decisions that I allow to simmer for a month.
31:46
And there are some decisions that I allow to simmer.
31:49
I just made a decision, a big decision this year.
31:50
I would say I was trying to make that decision for 4 years.
31:55
And the decision I made this year was the best decision I made, but I honestly have been thinking about that decision for 4 years.
32:01
Now, I don't take 4 years to make every decision.
32:03
Like, what am I going to eat tonight or what am I going to eat tomorrow or But But I think some decisions demand that level of thought because the reason why I took 4 years is because that is going to impact more than the next 4 years of my life.
32:20
That's why that decision took that long.
32:24
What was the decision that that you took you 4 years?
32:27
So, the decision that took me 4 years was the There was something I was working on and it was either do I do this myself or do I partner with someone where I can create something really powerful?
32:38
So, it's like do I build it from scratch or do I work with someone who's already advanced in that area and build onto and expand what they've already done?
32:48
Adam Grant writes about this very eloquently, right about positive procrastination.
32:54
And and one of the ways I think about it is actually to ask yourself, is this rational procrastination?
32:58
Because you're right, we have all kinds of pressures that make us want to act quickly, right?
33:04
There's actually something known as the cognitive need for closure, which is it just feels good to make a choice, right?
33:11
It feels good to cross something off your to-do list.
33:12
It good It feels good to put it behind you and say like, I don't got to worry about that anymore.
33:17
But oftentimes, there's a very rational reason not to make that choice.
33:22
Sometimes it's just you need to sit with it for longer to see how you really feel.
33:26
Sometimes it's that you need more information.
33:29
Sometimes it's that actually making the choice right now would screw everything up because because I know that there's going to be other opportunities.
33:37
I know that there's going to be ways to have seen this in this situation in different ways.
33:40
And if I'm locked into one viewpoint, it's going to be hard for me to see other opportunities.
33:47
And so, one of the things that's really important is to sit with yourself and say, "Look, am I hesitating on this because I'm scared of making the choice, cuz I'm scared of doing the work?
33:54
Or am I sitting with this because it just doesn't feel right yet?"
34:01
And that rational procrastination is one of our most powerful instinctual tools for knowing, without knowing it deliberately or consciously, when it's ready when we're ready to make a choice. Mhm.
34:15
That's that's I That That's really really a great extension of of what I was thinking about in my decision-making and and that's clarified a lot for me.
34:24
And one of the things that I've definitely felt is really thinking about how how much of your life is going to be impacted by a decision allows me to know how much rational time to give to it.
34:41
And I think and that's kind of how I've always processed it.
34:43
Like it's like getting married is going to impact your whole life.
34:49
Uh I think this is what we were talking about earlier, having children is a massive life change.
34:55
But what I find fascinating and this is something that I spend a lot of time thinking about in all of these decisions is when you're thinking about choosing to buy a home or move city or town, you think about a lot of things like what schools are we near and like is this a good area and and would this be a good investment and is this a smart choice?
35:19
But sometimes we just get married or have kids just by default.
35:20
Like it's an autopilot move.
35:22
Um and and I think that it's really fascinating when you take life transitions on autopilot.
35:30
Or what I read in psychology was known as sliding versus deciding.
35:35
We slide into decisions rather than actually decide to make them.
35:38
We don't consciously, intentionally process those.
35:43
And when we slide into something, you're now sliding into like a ball pit of like whatever it is, right?
35:49
There's there's no practice.
35:49
Can you speak to that a little bit, Charles? Absolutely.
35:53
Well, and I think the other thing that you're you're picking up on, which I think is really smart, is our environment influences how we make decisions so much in ways that we don't often see, right?
36:04
In fact, what happens is and this is known in psychology as the the um fundamental attribution error, is that there is something in our environment which is influencing us, but we blame ourselves or other people for something, right?
36:18
If I happen to to sit on the same side of the table as someone as opposed to on the other side of the table from them, I'm more likely to agree with them rather than disagree with them.
36:28
And I think that's because either I agree with them or they're agreeable or I'm agreeable, but actually just has to do with where we sat at the table.
36:35
That's that's the thing that we fail to recognize.
36:37
And oftentimes when we're making choices, we're not aware of all the environmental influences around us, right?
36:44
It's not a coincidence that most people get married after three of their other friends have gotten married, right?
36:51
Because all of a sudden like marriage is contagious.
36:53
You see Jim and you see Pam get married and then you're like, "Well, maybe that's okay for me, too." Right?
36:58
Same thing happens with kids.
37:00
And so one big question, and this is kind of the focus of my second book, Smarter Faster Better, one big question is, how do we build the habits that force us to slow down and think more deeply about the choices we're making when thinking deeply is hardest? Right?
37:16
Either because we feel like we're in a panic or we feel like there's a lot of pressure or there's things that are happening around us that are happening very quickly.
37:24
How do we force ourselves to slow down and make more deliberate choices in those moments?
37:31
And the answer is, you just build habits to do it.
37:35
More importantly, you build what are known as cognitive routines.
37:37
You build these these almost like um tripwires in your life that force you to slow down.
37:43
So for some people for instance, this can be as simple as saying, "Before I make any big choice, I always have to call my spouse and talk it through with my spouse."
37:54
Now, if you're making a big choice at work, your spouse doesn't know anything about the pros and the cons, right?
38:01
Your spouse isn't going to actually give you any great advice.
38:03
All your spouse is going to do is listen to you, but that tripwire, saying I don't make any big decisions without talking to my spouse first, that's to help you slow down, help force you to explain the pros and cons to your spouse, force you to make sure that you are seeing everything from every perspective.
38:21
These tripwires that build into our lives, they are the things that let us think more deeply, particularly when thinking is hard.
38:29
And they are ultimately habits. Yes.
38:33
A reminder I like to share with people is that you're not ahead or behind, you're not early or late, you're not forward or backward.
38:43
Like you're in the right place right now where you need to be to slow down and make this decision.
38:50
And when we start making decisions based on I'm missing out, they're doing it, we're so late and behind, now all of a sudden you're completely working against what you just said, which is finding that space and time and silence and stillness to say, where do I want to move and how do we want to move and what decisions do we want to make?
39:13
And I'm so I'm so happy with the way you're explaining them through science because I think we hear these affirmations, we hear these ideas often, but we don't realize that they're actually based in how our brain works. something real. Yes, exactly.
39:31
And And this is what, you know, this this concept of FOMO, right? Fear of missing out. Yes.
39:35
You have to think about how do I How do I protect my environment so that I know that these forces aren't influencing. Right?
39:43
I mentioned before that that we the fundamental attribution error is that we mistake something in our environment for something that's internal to our character.
39:51
Then if we if we take that seriously, we have to think about our environment.
39:53
So, for instance, take social media.
39:54
I I don't check social media during the day.
39:58
I I allow myself to check it once in the morning and then when I get home from work and after dinner, then I check it then.
40:05
But the rest of the day I don't.
40:05
And the reason why is because I don't want that influence impacting my brain.
40:09
Like I find that it distracts me.
40:12
I find that it it it emotionally manipulates me, right?
40:16
I see something about Ukraine, and then suddenly for the next 15 minutes I can't get any work done because I'm obsessing about what happened on a battlefield.
40:23
Where obsessing about it at that moment does not make it better.
40:26
It doesn't change the facts, right?
40:28
In fact, if I put it off to think about it that night, maybe I can make a donation that actually helps.
40:33
But But thinking about our environment, thinking about how we structure our environment so that those influences that we know that we're prone to are not present, that's really important, but it's something that we don't learn how to do as well as we should. Yeah. Yeah, so true.
40:50
So So beautifully and brilliantly explained again.
40:52
I want to talk about your second book a bit uh because I think the idea of productivity is so interesting right now, and productivity gets has a good and a bad reputation in different ways.
41:04
So, productivity, of course, and we'll dive into it and how we can become more productive and how we can become more efficient, effective, but before we do that, I also want to address the idea of a lot of people struggle with productivity today because it became so equated to our value and worth in life.
41:24
So, the reason why some people are questioning whether productivity is a good metric of anything is because they say, "Well, you know, I don't want my value or I don't want my worth to be based on how productive I feel I am."
41:40
So, I I just want to address that before we dive into it.
41:42
Now, the caveat to that is I consider myself a highly productive person.
41:46
I consider myself a high performer.
41:48
I had to make a really interesting decision a few years back.
41:53
And I realized something very clearly when I don't think I had all the best habits that I could potentially have.
42:01
And the question I asked to myself was I either have to slow down if I want to keep doing what I'm doing at a high level, or I have have my health habits.
42:12
Like those were my two choices.
42:12
I was like, "If I want to keep doing this for a long time and I want longevity and I want to serve and I want to make an impact and I want my work for many, many decades to support people and serve people and help people, then I'm going to need to either slow down because otherwise I'll burn out or I need to up my health game."
42:31
And I chose the latter because I was fascinated by, "Well, what can I do to perform at a higher level and maintain but still take breaks and manage?"
42:40
but still take breaks and manage?" And I've definitely found that with the methods I've taken where every year will stretch just a little bit and a little bit more the next year and the next year, you find that your capacity is just I do more today than I've ever done
42:55
in my whole life, but I'm more fulfilled and and it's and it's beautiful and then I still know when to take breaks and and again, I'm not perfect and I haven't figured it all out and I still get tired and I still get exhausted and I still have days where I don't want to do stuff. So, I'm
43:07
So, I'm not perfect by any means and I'm not saying I am.
43:10
I'm just saying that it's been interesting to see how having certain positive habits like sleep, diet, exercise, meditation, like those four simple habits have expanded and extended my productivity.
43:23
Then, my productivity actually feels less and productivity feels harder when those four things were not aligned.
43:29
Again, I don't have kids, so I'm not putting I'm not saying any of this is like advice.
43:35
I'm just saying stuff that I'm thinking about and working on.
43:36
So, talk to me a bit about Charles about this idea of people getting scared about their productivity being how much they feel they're worth and how they value themselves.
43:48
So, I think it's a really, really good point and I think you you just illuminated the distinction here that's really essential, right?
43:53
Which is productivity is bad when it's defined by other people for us. Right?
43:59
If I said to you, "Jay, like you are not productive unless you, you know, make a million dollars this year and you run three marathons and you write two books, that's not productivity, right?
44:14
Like that doesn't feel like productivity to you.
44:18
What productivity really is is knowing your goals and being able to achieve them with less stress and strife, not making yourself miserable along the way.
44:30
So, what's important here is to say, "I'm going to be productive based on the goals that are important to me, not the goals that are important to other people, not the goals that are important to society."
44:42
So, from an outside perspective, I might say, "Look, Jay, if you're sleeping eight hours a night and you're meditating and you're exercising, like that is not productive, man.
44:49
Like you're you you could sleep six hours a night and that meditation, like cut that down to like just five minutes a day and you've got some extra time to get some work done, right?"
44:58
But, what matters is not what I think is productive for you.
45:03
What matters is you being able to think about what's productive for you and being able to achieve that.
45:07
So, you know that a productive day includes meditation. It includes sleep.
45:11
It includes feeling good about yourself.
45:16
So, the first question that we have to do is we have to sit down and say, "What does productivity mean to me based on what I want?"
45:22
And acknowledge that might be different from day to day and place to place.
45:27
A productive Wednesday might be one where I get the kids out the door and I'm at my desk and I'm replying to emails and a productive Friday might be one where I walk the kids to school and we get to talk to each other and I learn what's going on inside their life and I don't do any emails because I spent my time with my kids.
45:45
The point here is that when we look at productivity as something that has a static definition, that's when it becomes negative.
45:51
That's when it becomes bad.
45:54
When we embrace productivity as something that is a way for me to decide what my goals are and try and figure out how to accomplish them and it's based entirely on what I want as opposed to what other people want.
46:06
Then it becomes a tool for helping me decide how I want to how I live the life that I want to live.
46:12
That is is such a fantastic way of defining it and I'm I've actually never heard productivity defined as well as that.
46:18
I I actually just I think that's brilliant because you're so right that the decision I'm making, they make me feel productive.
46:29
And hence I choose them as a priority in my life.
46:31
But you're right, I never thought of that but someone could literally look at my life and be like, "Jay, you waste a lot of time sleeping."
46:37
I do sleep 8 hours a night.
46:39
Uh and and people could look at my life and be like, "Wow, Jay, you waste a lot of time doing no work."
46:43
When actually to me, I'm able to do more work and better work and deeper work because of the time I spend away from work.
46:51
And and as I was saying, I think you know, one thing that's really interesting to me, someone asked me recently what what I thought was the most important skill to develop.
47:00
And I thought about that and I thought about it again and and I really reflected on it.
47:06
And the the closest answer I've developed so far at this stage in my life is the biggest skill that I've learned or I believe that I've had to try and develop and continue to develop is to do things that are good for me even when I don't feel like them.
47:25
And because I think that a lot of what is good for you, you won't always feel like doing it in my experience at least.
47:33
I don't feel like eating healthy all the time.
47:36
I don't feel like exercising all the time.
47:39
I don't feel like meditating all the time.
47:42
I don't feel like doing something but I know that when I do it, it creates great joy, nourishment.
47:47
And me and my friend recently were talking about this idea of what makes you feel good versus what makes you feel nourished.
47:59
And and we were going back and forth about the idea of like feeling good is great.
48:02
There's nothing wrong with it.
48:04
But when you feel nourished, it's wholesome, it's fulfilling, it's so powerful.
48:07
And we were saying that we're trying to make more decisions in our life where we feel we're being nourished more than just feeling good in the moment.
48:14
Because feeling nourished does make you feel good.
48:16
So, I would love to hear your thought process around it because I think what we often look at is people say, "Well, I don't feel motivated to do that."
48:23
Or I don't feel inspired to do that.
48:27
And often I would say I don't feel motivated and inspired to do a lot of the good stuff that I do.
48:31
I I I can't I would be lying if I said I wake up every day motivated and inspired to take, you know, do what I do. I don't.
48:38
I There's plenty of mornings where I wake up and I think, "I don't feel like doing anything today."
48:44
But I know that if I just don't do anything today, I'm probably going to feel the same way tomorrow.
48:50
And the same way tomorrow.
48:53
And that actually getting myself up out of bed and trying to do one thing may actually be better than doing completely nothing.
48:59
So, can you walk us through that a little bit?
49:01
I would love to hear your thoughts and your opinions about it.
49:04
I'm just I'm really just What I love about this conversation, Charles, is the way you think.
49:10
I love the way you think.
49:10
Like it's just I love the way you contextualize and you break things down and the research you've done.
49:15
And so, I'm just throwing at you my thought process and ideas. I really appreciate it.
49:20
And I love hearing how you how you think and and and and how you approach these questions because I think it's really fascinating.
49:26
Um I mean, I think one of one of the dual this duality that you're discussing it it reflects what has been a an oversight in a lot of contemporary society.
49:38
And and and this is just because, you know, because psychology is a relatively new field and it's it's developed.
49:46
We became very focused on happiness, right? As a society, right?
49:48
What is the highest goal?
49:50
To feel happy, to feel to feel joyful.
49:53
But the thing that we've learned is that there is another emotion, another experience beyond happiness, that is actually more meaningful.
50:05
And within psychology they refer to this as a sense of well-being. Right?
50:08
So So if I give you sugar right now, I can make you happy.
50:10
If I If If you're having sex, you will feel happy.
50:17
But we know that just eating sugar, like actually over time, it feels terrible.
50:23
That having empty sex is not as great as having sex with someone you love, right? We know this.
50:27
And so the question is, so if I'm not chasing happiness, what am I actually chasing?
50:31
And And for a long time we built all of our psychology models around about the hedonic individual, right?
50:36
Seeking Seeking this pleasure.
50:40
But a sense of well-being is actually something that's more profound.
50:42
It doesn't necessarily mean that you are happy, that you're feeling pleasure at that particular moment, but it does mean some other things.
50:49
It means that you feel satisfied, it means that you feel safe, it means that you feel loved, and it means that you feel that your life has meaning.
50:59
And if I can give you those four things, what we know is that you actually will feel much better than if you just feel pleasure or if you just feel happy.
51:06
I cannot actually be happy over the long term without a sense of well-being, but I can certainly have a sense of well-being and not feel happy all the time, and that's okay.
51:18
In fact, we know that that's meaningful, right?
51:20
The The most meaningful thing that's happened to me in the last 5 years is that my father passed away.
51:25
That certainly was not happy in any way, but it was deeply meaningful.
51:29
It was deeply contributed to my sense of well-being, to remind myself of my family and my love for him and what he gave me.
51:38
And so if we reorient ourselves away from happiness and towards creating a sense of well-being, then suddenly all those questions you just asked, like should I wake up this morning, should I get out of bed, should I make this decision, should I eat this thing, should I exercise?
51:51
All those questions become much easier because now our goal is well-being, right?
51:55
Made up again of a sense of safety, a sense of meaning, a sense of satisfaction, a sense of a sense of having a community with other people.
52:07
Those become much easier decisions to make because getting out of bed, it's not about whether getting out of bed makes you happy.
52:15
If you don't get out of bed, you're not going to have a relationship with your wife.
52:18
You're not going to earn money.
52:20
You're not going to feel safe.
52:20
You're not going to your life doesn't have any meaning.
52:23
Now suddenly the decision to get out of bed is much much easier because you're not chasing pleasure.
52:28
You're chasing well-being.
52:28
So well reframed, especially with the idea of getting up out of bed.
52:34
If you're seeking pleasure every day, it will feel almost impossible, but that idea of well-being is is so strong.
52:41
And one of the things that we mentioned today, but I want to dive into.
52:47
There's a couple more things.
52:47
One is this idea of we try to have what I call we try to have long-term feelings about something based on short-term experiences.
53:04
So we will say something like, I will never ever miss going to the gym ever again, right?
53:10
I will never ever eat something unhealthy ever again.
53:18
Like we make these really big, broad statements.
53:23
And the truth is, and this happened to me last week.
53:26
So I was having a really healthy week.
53:27
I was I was traveling, and I've been really trying to master the art of living healthy when I travel because it's really easy when I'm back at home, but last week I gave three keynotes in three different states.
53:37
I was on a plane every day, every other day, and I was really trying last week to be conscious because I've been really working on my health.
53:49
And so I was like, "Okay, I need to eat healthy."
53:50
And so I was researching like where I could eat and plan and all this kind of stuff.
53:53
And it went great from Monday to Friday.
53:57
Now, on Friday I my flight was delayed by 2 hours.
54:03
And then when we got on the flight, we're about to take off, but then they brought us back to the gate because they said there was something wrong with the cabin pressure.
54:10
We then waited another 2 hours in the plane.
54:15
And then they said, "All right, we're going to take off again."
54:16
We're about to take off, and then they said, "No, no, no, the cabin pressure's still an issue."
54:20
So we went back to the gate and waited another 2 hours.
54:25
So now it's been 6 hours in total.
54:28
And I'm sitting there, and now we get 2 hours later they take us off the plane because they can't fix it.
54:34
And then it takes another 2 hours for them to onboard us to another flight.
54:38
So it's been around 10 hours at this point.
54:40
I've now missed my next three connecting flights.
54:44
Now, when we got back into the terminal for those 2 hours, I go and buy Sour Patch Kids, a bag of chips, like every single thing at this point that I've been trying to avoid the whole week.
54:58
And I I eat my bag of Sour Patch Kids very happily.
55:00
I eat my like, you know, bag of chips.
55:03
I'm about to go and buy myself a burger and fries as well at at the airport. And and I do. And and I loved it. It was great.
55:12
Like I wasn't I wasn't sad about any of it.
55:14
I was like, "This is great.
55:15
Like this is what I needed to deal with the last 10 12 hours."
55:17
And I feel lucky and and I feel lucky and privileged enough that I could eat, right?
55:21
Like because there's that that was a privilege in and of itself. Now, here's the thing.
55:27
If I had said to myself, "Jay, you can never ever eat Sour Patch Kids ever again in your life."
55:34
And then that happens, I feel like such a failure.
55:38
And I did that to myself for a long time where I made these big, bold statements, and then I felt like a failure again and again and again.
55:48
So, how do we plan for failure because it is actually more inevitable than it is avoidable?
55:56
I don't think there's anyone who's ever set a resolution, set a new plan, set a new schedule that has ever kept to it word for word.
56:04
Yet, we still hope and we pray and we assume that we're going to stick to our plan exactly as it is.
56:12
And I don't I don't even think the most disciplined people in the world do that. No. So, so not, right?
56:22
How do we accept that we will inevitably fail and that's okay and that's part of the journey?
56:28
So, this is another This is another question that comes from how our brain evolved and how it's working in today's world, right?
56:37
We tend to remember things episodically. Right?
56:40
So, so if I ask you, "Jay, who are you?"
56:43
You would answer this by telling me three or four big values that you live your life by.
56:49
If I tell you If I ask you, "Tell me about your wife."
56:53
You're going to tell me what her job is or you're going to tell me about the time you met or you're going to tell me about what your wedding was like.
56:58
We tend to remember things and describe things in terms of stories.
57:03
And because stories always have pivot points, right?
57:09
There's a beginning, a middle, and an end.
57:10
There's where the plot twists, there's a character. And that's That's great.
57:14
That helps us remember things.
57:17
But we don't live stories. We live day-to-day.
57:19
We live waking up and 90% of our time is spent taking a shower and going to the office and doing these things that we don't really remember at all because we don't have to remember them.
57:31
Because again, in a state of nature, when the boar is charging at you, it's a lot more important to remember what the path looks like where the boar lives than to remember all the paths where boars don't live.
57:45
So, as a result, because we think this way, because we think in stories, we need to recognize that.
57:49
We need to say like, my instinct is to say these grand things, to say, I'm never going to eat again. I run half marathons.
58:00
I work out three times a week.
58:03
Because that's a story I can tell myself that helps me remember who I am.
58:07
But the way I actually live is day-to-day and minute-to-minute.
58:10
And sometimes I get off track from that story.
58:13
And that doesn't mean that that story isn't true.
58:15
That doesn't mean that that story doesn't work anymore.
58:17
That doesn't mean that I've changed.
58:19
It just means that the story of my life is much bigger than the story I tell myself and others.
58:28
And once we acknowledge that, once we accept that, it's enormously empowering, right?
58:32
If you go back to Aristotle, Aristotle once said, excellence that that our habits are our lives.
58:38
What we do every day is how we ought to be judged.
58:41
So, excellence then is not an act. Excellence is a habit.
58:48
And this is important because what he was saying is, one moment of bravery, one great decision, that's the thing that we're going to write in the histories.
58:56
That's the thing that we're going to remember.
58:58
But that is not excellence.
59:01
Excellence is more often than not waking up in the morning and doing the right thing.
59:06
And that doesn't mean that you do the right thing every single morning.
59:08
It just means that for 4 days, you resist the Sour Patch Kids.
59:12
And in fact, on the fifth day, you probably would have resisted the Sour Patch Kids until you have to spend 10 hours in an airplane and an airport, at which point it's just fine to have some Sour Patch Kids and not have to say to yourself, by the way, I'm a bad person now.
59:26
My whole My whole story in my head about who I am has just been exploded.
59:31
No, it's just one moment.
59:33
What matters is what we do on average every day.
59:36
That's how we should judge ourselves. Yes.
59:38
Yes, thank you for giving me the permission to eat Sour Patch Kids whenever I like.
59:45
But no, it it's it's so so useful to hear you walk us through that as as an exercise almost in our head.
59:51
And I think a lot of what you've shared with us today is really exercises, reflections, questions.
59:57
I hope everyone's making notes as you're listening and watching.
1:00:00
And if you're not, this is definitely one of those episodes to go back through because you know, I've asked Charles questions not based on, you know, it would have been easy for me to ask Charles how do you create good habits?
1:00:11
And how do you end bad habits?
1:00:13
And I think we've talked about all those things in, hopefully for all of you who are listening and watching, really interesting, personal, practical ways so that you can actually apply it to reality rather than a set of to-dos.
1:00:28
Now, I do want to talk to you about to-do lists, Charles.
1:00:29
Do you believe that to-do lists work?
1:00:30
What's the best way to structure our day to actually feel like we're creating momentum and movement?
1:00:38
And I think that's the difference.
1:00:40
I look at each day and each week not by how much I achieved, but by how much I moved the needle, right?
1:00:46
Like it's how much momentum have I gathered is more interesting to me than how much have I done.
1:00:53
Because I think sometimes sometimes take 4 years to get done.
1:00:56
And sometimes things take 4 months.
1:00:59
And sometimes things take 4 days or 4 hours.
1:01:03
But if every day I ask myself, what did I do today?
1:01:04
Sometimes I can feel So, how do we use to-do lists effectively?
1:01:09
Because we all have things to do.
1:01:09
I love the the metaphor you just brought up about momentum cuz I think it's really important.
1:01:15
One of the ways I think about it is a is a an analogy someone once used with me.
1:01:19
They said like, look, think of your life as a series of pole vaults. Right?
1:01:23
The faster and longer you run, the higher you're going to be able to vault over that pole.
1:01:28
But, if you look at the actual event, that person could be running for 3 minutes before they spend 10 seconds flying into the air.
1:01:40
And so, at any point along there, you could say, "Why the heck are you running so long?
1:01:43
Like, this doesn't seem like it's a good use of time."
1:01:44
But But if you think about your life in terms of these pole vaults.
1:01:48
So So, to-do lists is a great question, and I'm curious how you organize your day.
1:01:51
This is what we know about to-do lists.
1:01:55
We use this word to-do list sometimes incorrectly.
1:01:58
There are things which are memory lists, and those are great, right?
1:02:01
Your brain is a terrible place to try and remember the 30 things that you want to get done in the next 12 months.
1:02:08
You're going to forget some of them.
1:02:10
So, what you should do is you should have a pad of paper, and as soon as you think of something you might want to get done, you should write it down on that list.
1:02:16
But that's a memory list. That's not a to-do list.
1:02:21
That's a memory list to remind you of things that in the past seemed important to you.
1:02:27
A to-do list should be much different.
1:02:27
A to-do list should be something that you write every morning or every night before that you leave work, which is when I do it.
1:02:35
I sit down, and the last thing I do every day is I write on my on an index card what my to-do list is for the next day.
1:02:40
And that to-do list, optimally, should only contain like one thing.
1:02:46
The most important thing that you can get done tomorrow.
1:02:48
The thing that if you do it, it will move that needle.
1:02:50
It will change your life in a better way.
1:02:56
Now, sometimes you can get that thing done.
1:02:57
So, often times what I'll do is I write down three things.
1:02:59
This is kind of crazy, right?
1:03:01
I write down the thing I want to get done tomorrow.
1:03:03
If I get that thing done, the second thing I want to get done, and then I sometimes will guess what ought to be my top priority for the next day.
1:03:12
And sometimes I'm right, and sometimes I'm wrong.
1:03:14
But at most, my to-do list has three things on it.
1:03:17
And what's really clear is I'm not looking at two and three until number one is done.
1:03:23
Now, of course, every day is filled with more than one thing, right?
1:03:25
So, I also have a calendar where I have these meetings I have to go to, and I have these phone calls I have to make, and sometimes the path to getting that one thing done involves 10 or 12 different steps, and I might jot down those steps just to remind me what they are.
1:03:38
But, the point is that whenever I look at that index card, I'm reminding myself there is one thing that if I get it done today, it will change the trajectory.
1:03:49
It will make my life better.
1:03:52
It is so easy to continue putting that thing off, to to put off writing that memo that you're scared of, but once you write it, you're going to know what to do next, to put off having that tough phone call, to put off doing your taxes, to to put off doing something that matters.
1:04:09
And if you put it at the top of the list, and that's your to-do list, not the memory list, but the to-do list, then you're going to do the most important things.
1:04:15
Cuz everyone only has 24 hours, right?
1:04:16
And some people get amazing things done, and some people don't.
1:04:21
The difference is not how many more hours they have, or how many employees they have.
1:04:29
The difference is how much time they spend prioritizing what they're working on.
1:04:34
So, let me ask you, how do you How do you organize your days?
1:04:35
Like, how do you How do you remain focused on what's important and not get distracted?
1:04:38
Yeah, that's it's a great question.
1:04:41
So, a few things that I've used is I read a study that said you can't be effectively creative and logical at the same time, or back-to-back.
1:04:51
So, I avoid scheduling a creative and then a data or numbers meeting back-to-back.
1:04:58
So, I'll try and have creative mornings and data afternoons, or creative days and data days.
1:05:06
And that to me makes it easier for my brain to be in the zone and focused and get absorbed and obsessed with what we're dealing with rather than going back and forth, back and forth and stressing my mind to be be brainstorming, be really creative, and now go off and be really structured.
1:05:20
And I I don't enjoy that.
1:05:22
I found it exhausting, actually, and I used to find that a lot of my fatigue came because I was demanding my brain to be really creative and artistic and then to be really structured and focused.
1:05:33
And those two things are opposite.
1:05:35
When I'm being creative, sometimes I'm not focused at all.
1:05:38
And that's what's good about being creative.
1:05:41
And when I'm trying to be focused, my creative mind is not useful.
1:05:46
I I just want to be able to get something done.
1:05:47
So, I use what I call efficient and effective days, as well.
1:05:51
I'm like, "Okay, this is an efficiency day."
1:05:53
Which means doing lots of meetings, getting lots of stuff checked off.
1:05:56
And then I have an effective day where it's like, "All I need to do is come up with one idea for the next chapter of my book.
1:06:01
All I need to do is come up with a new vision or a new strategy that I want to create for one of our companies."
1:06:07
And so, those are effective days where have to do a lot.
1:06:08
I don't have to achieve a lot.
1:06:11
I just have to do one thing, as you said.
1:06:13
And the efficient days are, "Oh, yeah, I had like seven phone calls.
1:06:17
I I checked that meeting off. I did those reviews."
1:06:19
Like, stuff that just I can do easily and they're back-to-back-to-back.
1:06:23
And so, I've tried as much as I can, by the way, again, not perfect.
1:06:27
We get this wrong all the time.
1:06:29
But that's what I'm pushing towards to is always pivoting my schedule to be creative and logical days, efficiency and effective days.
1:06:36
And And the final one is giving myself a sense of uh you know, I always plan everything from rest to lunch to dinner to breakfast.
1:06:50
So, everything exists in my schedule.
1:06:53
I believe if it's not in my schedule, it won't happen.
1:06:54
So, even lunch is in my schedule every day, and I will try as much as I can to pause and break and actually eat at that time.
1:07:04
Because I found that I used to miss meals, and then I would feel bloated, and then I would feel gas, and then I was feeling flamed, and then I would feel exhausted.
1:07:11
And and then I couldn't do it the next day.
1:07:13
And so, I started realizing that a lot of structure, at least 5 days a week, I would say this is a Monday to Friday thing, was really powerful for me.
1:07:21
And it's stuff that I'm still tinkering with and playing with.
1:07:24
What I love about that is that one of the things I hear you saying is you're deliberate in your goals. Yeah. Right?
1:07:30
And and we know that this is This is a big part of creating that space and those those cognitive routines to allow ourselves to think more deeply, which is to basically to take a step back and ask yourself, what is the goal that I'm pursuing right now? Right?
1:07:46
There's There's very often when we're in a situation, and because we don't understand the goal, we end up feeling frustrated and at a loss.
1:07:53
If I'm with my kids and I'm thinking about work, then I don't know what my goal is.
1:07:58
Is my goal to have a moment with my children and really bond with them, or is my goal to think through a problem that I'm confronting at work?
1:08:05
I end up being terrible at both of them, right?
1:08:07
Because Because I I'm distracted with my kids, but my kids are so distracting that I can't really think about work.
1:08:13
And so, very I think, and you know better than I do, but my understanding is a part of mindfulness is actually just being clear about your goals, being clear about what is my goal at this moment.
1:08:24
How do I be present, aware of what I want to accomplish or experience or feel or what I want to do with my life right now?
1:08:36
And the more we force ourselves to think about our goals, the more we're on that path to doing the deep thinking that makes us more genuinely productive, more genuinely happy, more genuinely a sense of well-being.
1:08:47
Charles, what brings me joy is that this type of conversation is the reason I started On Purpose.
1:08:53
the reason I started On Purpose. Like this this conversation is just been so deeply joyful for me because this is the reason why I started this podcast was to be able to pick someone's brain pick someone like you and pick your
1:09:08
brain and I'm genuinely convinced that everyone who listens to this episode and watches this episode will feel like they can restart and reframe how they view habit formation, habit application, habit failure, and then habit longevity based on what you've said. And of
1:09:28
And of course, I highly recommend everyone go and grab the book, The Power of Habit.
1:09:35
Uh, because it's been such a powerful book in my own personal life for the last you know, 8 years since I read it or well, 9 years now since I read it.
1:09:44
Uh, and anything that Charles does, not just that book, any book he's written, any work that he's done, highly recommend following Charles.
1:09:51
Uh, because as you can see today, you know, you're just a wealth of wisdom.
1:09:55
Uh, phenomenal at breaking ideas down, making sense of things, making things really simple and and easy to apply and understand and retain.
1:10:02
And uh, I couldn't thank you more.
1:10:05
So, Charles, we end every episode of On Purpose with a final five or a fast five where you have to answer each question in one word to one sentence maximum.
1:10:18
So, you have a one word to one sentence, uh, like a 140 character to 80 character limit.
1:10:24
Um, so, Charles, these are your final five. Are you ready? I'm ready. Okay, great. Okay.
1:10:28
What is the best piece of advice you've ever received?
1:10:35
I think the best advice I've ever received is just do the thing that it seems passionate to you. Beautiful. I love that.
1:10:41
Uh, worst piece of advice you've ever received?
1:10:46
Worst piece of advice I've ever received.
1:10:47
My dad told me to go to the University of New Mexico cuz I grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
1:10:52
I'm really glad I didn't. I love that. I love that.
1:10:56
Third question, what's the first thing you do when you wake up in the morning?
1:11:00
The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is I get a glass of water and then I like just like flip through nonsense on my phone to let my brain just settle down.
1:11:11
And it works pretty well for me. Cool.
1:11:12
And question number four, what's the last thing you do before you go to bed?
1:11:17
I read every single night. Nice. read. Anything specific?
1:11:20
Um so I I you know I'm a writer for the New Yorker now, so I I read the New Yorker very often.
1:11:24
Um or I always try to have like some novel that I'm reading. Nice. just fun. I love that.
1:11:30
And fifth and final question, if you had to choose one habit that everyone in the world had to practice every single day, what would that habit be?
1:11:42
Okay, so so I let me caveat this cuz every single day is a hard, right? Some type of exercise.
1:11:47
And and this is this seems cliche, but I will say I've talked to researcher after researcher.
1:11:55
And like one guy said to me, "If you could take what exercise did to your body and put it in a pill, every single person would take it every single day." Right?
1:12:05
And everyone listening knows this.
1:12:07
Like and it doesn't have to be big.
1:12:08
It doesn't have to be running half marathon.
1:12:10
Doesn't even have to be running.
1:12:12
If you do five push-ups, you will feel better.
1:12:16
So that's the habit that I wish I could give people. I love that.
1:12:18
Charles, thank you so much for your time, your energy, for uh you know, being so gracious with it and giving so much incredible thought.
1:12:28
I mean, your energy just flowed through the screen.
1:12:30
I I always love sitting with guests and often I I struggle with interviews that have to be done digitally, but you you brought the best energy.
1:12:38
So thank you so much for being so present. show.
1:12:42
I'm a huge fan of the show and I really do think that like your conversations and your ability to draw out of people insights and the the warmth that you bring to it, it makes it so much fun to listen to, but also so so useful.
1:12:56
So, thank you for for all the stuff you're doing.
1:12:58
Well, no, thank you, Charles, and I'm excited to have you back on.
1:13:01
So, I know you're working on a new book.
1:13:02
We won't say anything about when when when that comes out, we'd love to have you back on and stay in touch.
1:13:08
If you're ever in LA, come and say hello.
1:13:09
I'd love to love to meet you and love to connect and hang out for lunch or dinner or something, but genuinely, thank you so much, Charles.
1:13:15
And for everyone who's been listening and watching, make sure you tag me and Charles on Instagram, on Twitter, on Facebook, TikTok, whatever platform you're using to share with us what resonated with you.
1:13:25
What's a new habit that you're going to work on?
1:13:27
Maybe your New Year's resolutions didn't work out and you're going to use this episode as a reset or a restart as well.
1:13:32
So, please please please do tag us because I'd love to see what connected with you, what resonated with you, and what you're going to put into practice.
1:13:41
Thank you so much for listening.
1:13:43
Make sure you pass this along to a friend or family member who may need it.
1:13:47
And thank you, Charles, for doing this. I appreciate you.
1:13:49
We'll see you again next time on On Purpose.
1:13:54
If you want even more videos just like this one, make sure you subscribe and click on the boxes over here.
1:13:58
I'm also excited to let you know that you can now get my book, Think Like a Monk, from thinklikeamonkbook. com.
1:14:08
Check below in the description to make sure you order today.