فصل 9

Chapter 9

SMALL SIMPLE STEPS

What is the smallest simple step I can take now?

How do we start good habits or end bad ones?

What daily routine will help me become limitless?

You have a reason or purpose to do something. You have the necessary energy to do it. What is missing?

A small simple step (S3). The tiniest action you can take to get you closer to your goal. One that requires minimal effort or energy. Over time, these become habits. That’s the reason I’ve filled this book with the small simple steps called Kwik Starts.

Back in the 1920s, a Russian psychologist, Bluma Zeigarnik, was sitting in a Viennese restaurant when she noticed that the waiters swirling around her in the busy eatery were highly efficient at remembering customer orders while they were in process but tended to forget who had what as soon as the orders were filled.

Intrigued by this, she ran a study where she had people perform simple tasks while they were sometimes interrupted. Afterward, she queried participants about which tasks they remembered and which they did not, finding that those who’d been interrupted were twice as likely to remember the things they’d been doing when they’d been interrupted than the things they’d been able to complete without interruption. She came to the conclusion—subsequently known as the Zeigarnik effect—that uncompleted tasks created a level of tension that keeps that task at the front of our minds until it is completed.

In all likelihood, you’re familiar with this tension from your experience with procrastination. When you have something you know you need to do and you keep putting it off, it weighs on you, even making it more difficult to do anything else well as long as this task goes uncompleted. What you need to do seems hard, or it seems like less fun than the other things you could be doing, or it’s going to be uncomfortable, or you’ve simply convinced yourself that you have plenty of time to get to it later. We still struggle to complete tasks when we are clear on our vision for our lives and know who we want to become. Why is it still so hard to act, even when we have sustained motivation?

One of the most significant reasons that people fail to act is that we feel overwhelmed by what we need to do. A project or a chore might seem so big and time-consuming that you can’t imagine how you’re ever going to get it done. We look at the project in its entirety and immediately feel that the task at hand is too big, so we shut down or put it off. “Incomplete tasks and procrastinating often lead to frequent and unhelpful thought patterns,” says psychologist Hadassah Lipszyc. “These thoughts can impact on sleep, trigger anxiety symptoms, and further impact on a person’s mental and emotional resources.”1

BE KIND TO YOURSELF

If you struggle to get something done with some amount of regularity, there’s a good chance that you feel guilty about this and you beat yourself up over it. It’s likely you give yourself a much harder time about it than is helpful. We already know that unfinished tasks create tension in your brain.

If you layer guilt and shame on top of this, you’re making it even harder to get a task done, and you’re making yourself miserable.

“Feeling guilty when you’re away from work, when you aren’t in a position to do anything about it, is not helpful, and can be painful,” writes Dr. Art Markman, a professor of psychology and marketing at University of Texas, Austin. “It will make you feel worse about your job in general and spoil time that you could be spending with friends, family, or engaging in an enjoyable activity. Shame, though, is a different story. There is evidence that people will explicitly procrastinate to avoid shame. Feeling shame about work you have not completed is likely to make the problem worse, not better, making it an emotion that is almost never helpful.”2

Feeling bad about your lack of progress is likely to make it more difficult for you to stop procrastinating. So, give yourself a break. Beating yourself up isn’t going to improve anything, and, since you’re reading this book now, you’re already taking steps to avoid procrastinating in the future.

In my experience, the best way to deal with this is to find a way to break the task into bite-size pieces, which lead to habits that lead toward success.

Circling back to the Zeigarnik effect, every time you complete one of these smaller tasks, you get to take that weight off your mind. And as each of these subtasks is finished, you’re that much closer to completing the task overall.

TAKE BABY STEPS

Podcast guest Dr. B. J. Fogg, the founder and director of the Behavior Design Lab at Stanford University and the author of Tiny Habits, has been studying human behavior for more than two decades. What he’s learned is that only three things can change a person’s behavior long term. One is to have an epiphany, which very few people can summon on demand. Another is to change your environment, which is possible for nearly everyone, but not necessarily feasible at any given time. The third is to, as Dr. Fogg puts it, “take baby steps.”3

I like the way this story illustrates the principle of small, simple steps: A King was watching a great magician perform his act. The crowd was enthralled and so was the King. At the end, the audience roared with approval. And the King said, “What a gift this man has. A Godgiven talent.”

But a wise counsellor said to the King, “My Lord, genius is made, not born. This magician’s skill is the result of discipline and practice.

These talents have been learned and honed over time with determination and discipline.”

The King was troubled by this message. The counsellor’s challenge had spoiled his pleasure in the magician’s arts. “Limited and spiteful man. How dare you criticize a true genius. As I said, you either have it or you don’t. And you most certainly don’t.”

The King turned to his bodyguard and said, “Throw this man into the deepest dungeon.” And, he added for the counselor’s benefit, “So you won’t be lonely, you can have two of your kind to keep you company. You shall have two piglets as cellmates.”

From the very first day of his imprisonment, the wise counselor practiced running up the steps of his cell to the prison door carrying in each hand a piglet. As the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, the piglets steadily grew into sturdy boars. And with every day of practice the wise counselor increased his power and strength.

One day the King remembered the wise counselor and was curious to see how imprisonment had humbled him. He had the wise counselor summoned.

When the prisoner appeared, he was a man of powerful physique, carrying a boar on each arm. The King exclaimed, “What a gift this man has. A God-given talent.”

The wise counselor replied, “My Lord, genius is made, not born. My skill is the result of discipline and practice. These talents have been learned and honed over time with determination and discipline.”4

One of the only things that is likely to change your behavior is to make incremental progress. You really don’t want to make dinner? Make something simple for your family to snack on while you cook dinner later.

You’re having trouble writing that big speech for next month’s conference?

Just write the keynote to the speech now. You’re overwhelmed by the amount of reading you need to do for your economics class? Set a goal for yourself of reading the first chapter. Like the wise counselor, you must take it one step at a time, one day at a time.

What you’ll notice in all of these scenarios is two things. One is that they present you with something achievable—a win on the way to reaching the championship of getting this job done. The other is that they all put you in a situation where you’re likely to get even more accomplished. You’re already in the kitchen now, so you might as well finish making dinner.

You’ve gotten through the keynote and you’re on a roll, so maybe it makes sense to draft some more pages. The first chapter of your economics text wasn’t nearly as dry as it seemed from the outside, and you already have the book open; you can handle a few more chapters.

By breaking a task that you’re procrastinating about into smaller pieces, the path to getting it done becomes clear.

The best way to deal with the tension between what you want and what you’ve done so far to achieve it is to remember what the Zeigarnik effect teaches us. You’re not going to be able to ease your mind about this task until you complete it, so get yourself moving toward completion. Start somewhere. Anywhere. Even if you don’t have the energy or the motivation to get the entire thing done, get started on getting it done. You’ll be thankful for the relief.

KWIK START

Think about an important task you’ve been putting off. What is it?

How can you break it down into simpler steps that you can do each day?

ON AUTOPILOT

Small simple steps repeated lead to habits. Our habits are a core part of who we are. Various studies have shown that somewhere between 40 and 50 percent of what we do every day is the product of a habit. That means that half of our lives is governed by what scientists term automaticity. This percentage might sound high to you—it certainly did to me the first time I heard it—but consider how many things you do every day without really thinking about them. You brush your teeth without thinking about it. You check your phone at predictable intervals. You drive to the office and don’t particularly recall how you got there. You zip up your jacket, get a glass out of the cupboard, and click on the TV remote automatically.

This, of course, is essential to how we conduct our lives. Could you imagine how overwhelming it would be if you had to think about every single thing you did? If even brushing your teeth required some conscious level of calculation, you’d be exhausted by 10 in the morning.

“Without habit loops, our brains would shut down, overwhelmed by the minutiae of daily life,” writes Charles Duhigg in his best-selling book, The Power of Habit. “People whose basal ganglia are damaged by injury or disease often become mentally paralyzed. They have trouble performing basic activities, such as opening a door or deciding what to eat. They lose the ability to ignore insignificant details—one study, for example, found that patients with basal ganglia injuries couldn’t recognize facial expressions, including fear and disgust, because they were perpetually uncertain about which part of the face to focus on.”5

James Clear, author of the best-selling book Atomic Habits, says, “The habits you repeat (or don’t repeat) every day largely determine your health, wealth, and happiness. Knowing how to change your habits means knowing how to confidently own and manage your days, focus on the behaviors that have the highest impact, and reverse-engineer the life you want.”6

“All habits serve you in some way,” Clear told me. “As you go through life, you face a variety of problems. You need to tie your shoe; your brain is automating the solution to that problem. That’s what a habit is. It’s the solution to a recurring problem that you face throughout life, one that you’ve employed so many times that you can do it without thinking. If the solution doesn’t work anymore, then your brain will update it.”7

Clear identifies the habit loop as having four components: a cue, a craving, a response, and a reward. Using the example of turning on a light when you enter a room, the cue is walking into the room and finding it dark.

The craving is feeling that there would be some value in the room not being dark. The response is flipping on the light switch, and the reward is that the room is no longer dark.8 You can apply this loop to any of your habits, such as getting your mail when you come home from work. The cue is reaching your driveway or front door at the end of the day. The craving is hoping there’s something in the mailbox. The response is going to the mailbox to find out. And the reward is getting the mail out of your mailbox. You probably didn’t think about any of this until you actually had the mail in your hands.

The Habit Loop

Creating habits to automate essential parts of our lives is a fundamental streamlining technique that we do largely unconsciously, often to our benefit. Of course, we also automate all kinds of things that we’d probably be much better off not turning into habits. I’m sure you know some version of this. Perhaps a cue is walking past your kitchen pantry. The craving comes from the knowledge that your favorite chips are in the pantry, and your innate desire to eat them. The response is that you go into the pantry, open the bag of chips, and take out a big handful. And the reward is crunchy, salty, fatty deliciousness . . . that doesn’t benefit your health in any way. Our negative habits operate with the same level of automaticity as our healthy ones. Those chips are in your stomach before you’ve even had the opportunity to register that you were stuffing them in your mouth.

Now, because you’re in the process of becoming limitless, you know that perpetuating negative behaviors is a drain on your superpowers. So, how do you break bad habits and, just as importantly, how do you create new habits that will help you?

GETTING IN THE HABIT

Before we get to this, let’s talk for a moment about how long it takes to form a habit. In a study for University College London, Phillippa Lally, Cornelia H. M. van Jaarsveld, Henry W. W. Potts, and Jane Wardle took participants through the process of developing a new healthy eating,

drinking, or exercise habit, such as drinking water with lunch or jogging before dinner. They were asked to perform this new behavior based on specific situational cues every day for 84 days. “For the majority of participants,” they wrote, “automaticity increased steadily over the days of the study, supporting the assumption that repeating a behavior in a consistent setting increases automaticity.” By the end of the study, they’d found that it took an average of 66 days for the new behavior to become a habit, though it took individual participants as little as 18 days and as many as 254.9

It is also widely assumed that breaking a bad habit isn’t about ending that habit, but rather about replacing it with a different, more constructive, habit.

Dr. Elliot Berkman, director of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory at the University of Oregon, notes, “It’s much easier to start doing something new than to stop doing something habitual without a replacement behavior. That’s one reason why smoking cessation aids such as nicotine gum or inhalers tend to be more effective than the nicotine patch.”10

So, if the process of starting a new habit, such as setting aside time to read every day, is fundamentally the same as the process of ending a negative habit, such as grabbing those chips every time you pass the pantry, how does it work?

As with so many of the things we’ve discussed in this book, motivation plays a key role. Speaking specifically about the effort to break habits, Dr. Thomas G. Plante, adjunct clinical professor of the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, said, “It depends on how much you really want to break the habit. Many people are ambivalent. They want to lose weight, but they like the foods they eat. They want to reduce their alcohol consumption but love their happy hour. They want to stop picking their nails, but it reduces stress for them. So, one important issue is how strongly you really want to break the habit in question. Second, how established is the problem habit? It is easier to break a new habit than an old one. Third, what are the consequences of not breaking the habit? Will a partner leave you? Will you lose a job? Will you get sick? Will something really bad happen if you don’t change?”11

Dr. B. J. Fogg created the Fogg Behavior Model to identify the circumstances that need to be present for behavior change to occur. “For a target behavior to happen,” he notes, “a person must have sufficient motivation, sufficient ability, and an effective prompt. All three factors must be present at the same instant for the behavior to occur.”12 In other words, you need three things in place in order to develop a habit: You need the desire to do it, since it is exceedingly difficult to make habitual anything you really don’t want to do; you need the skills to do it, since it’s nearly impossible to make a habit out of anything you don’t have the capacity to accomplish; and you need something to get the habit loop started (what James Clear and others refer to as “the cue”). Let’s look at each element in turn:

Motivation

We’ve talked about motivation already, but it’s worth revisiting the subject here to see it from Fogg’s perspective. Fogg identifies three key motivators: 1. Pleasure/pain: This is the most immediate motivator. In this case, the behavior has a nearly immediate payoff, positive or negative. “I believe pleasure/pain is a primitive response,” says Fogg, “and it functions adaptively in hunger, sex, and other activities related to selfpreservation and propagation of our genes.”13

1. Hope/fear: Unlike the immediacy of the previous motivator, this one is all about anticipation. When you’re hopeful, you’re anticipating something good happening; when you’re fearful, you’re anticipating the opposite. “This dimension is at times more powerful than pleasure/pain, as is evidenced in everyday behavior,” Fogg notes. “For example, in some situations, people will accept pain (a flu shot) in order to overcome fear (anticipation of getting the flu).14

2. Social acceptance/rejection: Humans have always desired to be accepted by their peers, dating back to the time when being ostracized could mean a death sentence, and this remains an extremely strong motivator. “The power of social motivation is likely hardwired into us and perhaps all other creatures that historically depended on living in groups to survive.”15

Ability

Fogg equates ability with simplicity, noting that when something is simple for us, we are considerably more likely to do it. He defines six categories of simplicity:

1. Time: We only perceive something to be simple if we have the time available to perform the function.

2. Money: Similarly, if something stretches our financial resources, we do not consider it simple.

3. Physical effort: We consider things that are physically easy for us to be simple.

4. Brain cycles: Simple things don’t tax our thinking, and we shy away from things that require us to think too hard.

5. Social deviance: This goes back to the acceptance motivation. A simple act fits into societal norms.

6. Nonroutine: How far something is out of one’s normal routine will define its level of simplicity.

Prompts

Finally, Fogg notes three types of prompts:

1. Spark: A spark is a type of prompt that immediately leads to a form of motivation. For example, if opening your e-mail leads to a level of fear over what you might find there, you’re likely to adopt a habit that will change that fear.

2. Facilitator: This type of prompt works when motivation is high, but ability is low. For example, if you want to use a certain kind of software on your computer but are tech-averse, a tool that makes that software easier for you to use is likely to cause you to adopt this behavior.

3. Signal : In some cases, you’ll have both high motivation and high ability. The only other thing you need to make a behavior a habit is some kind of reminder or signal. If you love making brain smoothies, all you need is to walk into your kitchen in the morning and see the blender to prompt you to make one.

KWIK START

Can you identify the habits you want to break? What is that one habit that’s holding you back from doing other important things in your day? Write it down, then identify the prompts that trigger you to perform that habit.

CREATING A NEW HABIT

The Fogg Behavior Model shows us everything that needs to be in place for a particular behavior to become a habit. We know that making habits of behaviors we consider good for us is important to our growth, and we also know that the key to breaking bad habits is to replace them with more constructive ones. But how do you make something a habit? Just remember WIN:

W is for Want: Make sure you really want it. It’s nearly impossible to turn something into a habit if you don’t want to do that thing. Does one of the motivators in the Fogg Model apply to the habit you’re trying to adopt? If not, is there something close to this habit that might accomplish something similar for you?

I is for Innate: Does the new habit you’re trying to adopt align well with your innate abilities? Remember that you’re unlikely to make something a habit when it is consistently difficult for you to perform.

If the habit you’re trying to adopt is something that you’re good at or you know you can be good at, you’re well on your way.

N is for Now: Create a prompt for yourself that encourages you to perform the new habit now. This can be anything from a reminder on your phone to placing something in your office that makes you remember to set aside time to do what you’re setting out to do.

GROWING YOUR LIFE ONE HABIT AT A TIME

In case you’re still wondering how much of an effect establishing good habits can have on your life, let me share a story about one of our clients.

Xiang suffered from schizophrenia and depression. He often heard voices telling him to hurt himself or others, and he endured several stints in psychiatric wards because of this. After finding the right medication and emerging from his latest round of treatment, he discovered my podcast and learned some of the tactics that I teach in my school. He started listening on a regular basis and participated in the Kwik Challenge, a series of exercises I take people through to introduce novelty to their thinking and therefore keep their brains tuned for learning.

At first, this was hard for Xiang, but he focused on doing just two particular challenges: brushing his teeth with his opposite hand and taking a cold shower every morning. He increased his time under the cold water by one minute each week and, in doing so, discovered that being able to do something hard, like standing under freezing cold water for several minutes each morning, made him realize that there were areas in his life in which he was fighting for his limitations. Building from these Kwik Challenge experiences, he started applying what he was learning about habits and behavior change to other areas.

Xiang’s life improved dramatically. He took his driver’s license test and passed. He changed his diet, cut out sugary drinks, and started taking a fiveminute jog in the park every morning. He started reading books—the first

being Mindset by Carol Dweck—and as he read, he listened to baroque music to pace his reading and distract himself from hallucinations. It took him a month to finish the book, but when he did, he felt a sense of confidence he had never had before. Trips to the library became a regular thing. Xiang has even taken his learning to the next level and enrolled in computer science classes at a local college. And the best part is that he now believes he is a lifelong learner.

You may think that because of all your past failed attempts to change your habits and routines you’re doomed to failure forever. Xiang’s story shows that by changing just one or two small habits in your day, incredible progress can follow. Something as simple as brushing your teeth with the opposite hand can be the start to an entirely new way of life.

ESTABLISHING A MORNING ROUTINE

Why is your morning routine so important? I strongly believe that if you jump-start your day by jump-starting your brain with a series of simple activities, you have a huge advantage. In addition, if you set up winning routines early in the day, you can benefit from what Tony Robbins calls “the science of momentum”: the notion that once you set accomplishment in motion, you can keep it in motion with much less effort than if you were trying to accomplish something from a standing start.

I have a carefully developed morning routine to help me win the day that involves priming my mind. I don’t do every single one of these things every day, especially when I’m traveling, but I always do most of them, and I know for certain that it gets me mentally prepared and poised for performance, productivity, and positivity from the minute I get up.

Let me walk you through a typical morning.

Before I even get out of bed, I spend some time reflecting on my dreams.

Dreams are an expression of the work your subconscious is doing while you’re sleeping, and there’s gold to be mined from them. Many geniuses throughout history have regularly accessed and often gleaned their best ideas and made their greatest discoveries from their dreams. Mary Shelley came up with the idea for Frankenstein in her dreams. A dream was the source of Paul McCartney’s “Yesterday,” and Einstein’s theory of relativity.

So, the first thing I do every morning, even before lifting my head from the pillow, is think back on my dreams to see if there’s an idea or a perception or a new way of looking at something that can be useful to what I’m trying to accomplish. I know that some of you have trouble recalling your dreams, so I’m going to provide you with a quick mnemonic technique designed to help you do so. Just think of the word DREAMS:

D is for Decide: The night before, make a conscious decision that you’re going to recall your dreams. If you set the intention, your chances improve dramatically.

R is for Record: Keep a pen and paper by your bedside, or even have a recording app readily available on your phone. As soon as you wake up, record any lingering remembrance of your dreams.

E is for Eyes: Keep your eyes closed right after you awaken. Dreams can disappear within minutes, and if you keep your eyes closed, this will help you reflect.

A is for Affirm: Before you go to sleep, affirm that you are going to remember your dreams, because affirmation is a critical tool in accomplishment.

M is for Manage: For lots of reasons but specifically here for the sake of remembering your dreams, it’s important to manage your sleep and establish good sleep routines.

S is for Share: Talk about your dreams with others. When you do so, you bring them more and more to the surface, and you develop the routine of tapping into your dreams so you can discuss them later.

The first thing I do after I get out of bed is make the bed. This is a success habit, my first accomplishment of the day. It’s an easy win, and it has the added advantage of making my bedtime more pleasant, because it’s always nicer to return that night to a bed that is made. It’s why, in the military, they train you to make your bed first thing in the morning, because it sets you up to be excellent at everything you do.

After that, I have a tall glass of water. Hydration is so important first thing in the morning because our bodies lose a lot of water while we sleep through the simple act of breathing. Remember: Our brains are approximately 75 percent water, so if we’re going to fire up our brains, we need to be well hydrated. I also have a glass of celery juice, which boosts the immune system, helps flush toxins from the liver, and helps restore the adrenal glands (hat tip to Anthony William, the Medical Medium, for this idea). Right after this, I’ll take my probiotics to make sure my second brain is getting what it needs.

Then I brush my teeth with my opposite hand. I do this to train my brain to do difficult things, because it stimulates a different part of your brain, and because it forces me to be present. I can’t be doing other things in order to do this well.

Then I do a three-minute workout. This is not my full workout, but I want to get my heart rate up first thing in the morning, as it helps with sleep and weight management, and with oxygenation to the brain.

Once I’m finished with that, I take a cold shower. I’m sure some of you will cringe at the idea of starting the day pummeling yourself with cold water, but cold therapies of this type do a great job of resetting the nervous system and have the added benefit of helping manage any inflammation.

When I’m out of the shower, I go through a series of breathing exercises to fully oxygenate my body. Then I do about 20 minutes of meditation to give me a clear mind as I enter the day. The process I use, Ziva Meditation, was developed by my meditation coach, Emily Fletcher, a three-step process that involves mindfulness, meditation, and manifestation. To watch a video of it, go to www.LimitlessBook.com/resources.

Next, I make my “brain tea,” a combination of gotu kola, ginkgo, lion’s mane, MCT oil, and a few other things. Then I’ll sit down to spend some time journaling, getting my first thoughts of the day down on the page. My goal in any given day is to accomplish three things for work and three things personally, and I set this agenda now. I follow this with about a half hour of reading. I set a goal to read a minimum of one book a week and making this a part of my morning routine to keep me on course.

Finally, I drink my “brain smoothie,” a combination of many of the brain foods we discussed earlier in this chapter (no salmon here, in case you were wondering).

Now, admittedly, this routine requires a good deal of time. As I mentioned, I can’t get to all of it every day, and I can appreciate if it seems like more than you can handle, particularly if you need to get others started on their day. But if your goal in reading this book is upgrading your brain, then some variation on a morning routine of this type is an integral part of the process. Here are the keys:

Check in on your dreams before you get out of bed. There’s so much gold to mine here, so I strongly recommend that you not skip this step.

Get yourself hydrated and oxygenated.

Nourish yourself with some of the brain foods mentioned in this chapter.

Set a plan for the day.

If you do at least these four things, you’ll be well on your way to revving up your brain to operate at a high-octane level. Build as many of these things into the start of your day as you can. The most important thing is having a productive morning routine. I can’t stress enough how much of an impact getting your day off to the right start has on how the day goes for you overall.

KWIK START

Create your new morning routine. Remember, it doesn’t have to be a lot. Even a simple three-step routine can help jump-start your morning. What are the three things you will always do when you first wake up to set up your day to win? Write them down.

BEFORE WE MOVE ON

None of us would be able to live without habits, of course, but consciously working to bring constructive new habits into your life and to replace bad habits with better ones will take your superpowers to a new level. Before you move on to the next chapter, here are a few things to do:

Bolster your understanding of the habit loop by thinking about the four components of some of your most common habits, like making your breakfast or taking the dog for a walk. What’s the cue, the craving, the response, and the reward for each of these?

Spend a few minutes thinking about a habit that you’d love to replace with a more constructive one. Using the Fogg Behavioral Model, what new behavior can you adopt that fits neatly into the model?

Walk yourself through the process of starting a valuable new habit using WIN.