Transcription
If you want to get your life together, you have to start with small, boring habits to fix the loops that create 95% of our problems. I was once a homeless teenager, trained as a monk, went to MIT, became a CEO, a board member, and none of that was about dreaming harder. So, forget motivation. In this video, I'll walk you through nine micro habits backed by science that protect the three most important things your life runs on. Your attention, your energy, and your happiness. Let's get into it.
You have big, ambitious, exciting goals. So why are we talking about small, boring little habits? A very dear friend of mine has climbed Mount Everest twice. Now, I haven't seen him lately, so knowing him, it may be three times by now. And I asked him what he remembered from his experience of the actual climb. And he simply said, "You know, when you're climbing Mount Everest, don't look up. If you look up, the mountain can break you."
Because above 8,000 m you enter what climbers call the dead zone where the oxygen pressure is too low for the body to survive. So every step becomes expensive. Your lungs are fighting, your legs are burning, your brain does not have enough oxygen. So your judgment gets weaker. And his advice was once again brutally simple. Keep your eyes down. Take a step. Then pause, gather yourself, then decide to take the next step.
And what he was saying has a lot to do with how big goals feel to us in our brains. You want to train for a marathon. You want to write a book, build a business, fix your finances. From far away, all these goals look daunting and it's like climbing Mount Everest. But what we have to do is to break those goals down into specific steps and then take the first step and then pause and take the second step. This is where habits become so incredibly important because they can stop our brain from pretending that we can climb the entire mountain all at once. So the idea underneath all these habits is to turn your ambition into a small set of actions.
Now, you've probably seen hundreds of habit videos on YouTube, and they're all great, and they have great ideas, like stack your habits or put the phone away in the next room when you're doing deep work. These are very useful ideas. But this video is not about focusing on those habits that you already know cuz you've heard them many times before. We want to focus on the fundamental question. Which habits actually change the architecture of your life?
Let's start with the three attention habits. Our first habit is correct after the click. You know, when we're flying, the pilot puts the airplane on autopilot mode once they reach the cruising altitude. And the plane is almost never exactly on course. Wind pushes it or the path curves and the autopilot is constantly making these small corrections. The plane doesn't fly in a straight line. It flies in a series of recoveries, but it still gets you where you need to go, right?
And our attention is very similar too. Most of us try to catch the bad habit before it happens, right? You tell yourself, I will not pick up my phone during deep work or I will not eat that ice cream, which is my weakness by the way, but then you do it anyway because well, clicking on that app has become a habit. Eating that ice cream has become a habit. It is now a reflex. But the new habit is this correct after the click. The moment you notice the reflex has fired after you've acted on it, attach a good habit, one useful action immediately after. So let's say you clicked on the app, but then instead of using that app, just get up and get a glass of water or do deep breathing. That's the real window of opportunity. In a way, you're interrupting the interruption. Make sure your action is small and easy to do because the last thing you need is another mountain to climb when you've already slipped. So, that's our first habit.
Let's move to the second attention habit, controlling your input. A psychologist named Bluma Zigernik noticed something very strange. Waiters in a cafe could remember a lot of complex unpaid orders perfectly. But the moment the bill was settled, the order vanished from their memory. She tested it and found the same pattern in other professions too. If something is unfinished, your brain keeps reaching for it. Every email you opened but didn't reply to, every meeting that ended without a clear next step, they stay open in your brain in the background. Like an app on your phone you forgot to close and it's draining resources.
So the habit of controlling the input has two steps. First, do your process in batches. When I was a CEO, I had two or three fixed windows a day. 9:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., 4:30 maybe. And that's when I checked emails and Slack. If something was truly urgent, my team knew how to find me. But outside of those batches, I gave myself my time. And second, when you're going through your batch of items, touch each item once and only once. This is a little difficult. And I have a decision framework that I call 4D framework. And it has four options. do it or delegate it or date it or delete it. So, for example, let's say you open an email. Now, you have four options. Finish responding it or forward it to someone in your team or snooze it or get rid of it. Otherwise, that thing will linger on and on forever. Controlling these inputs gives your brain permission to put things down, to finish it. And by the way, if you'd like to read more about such ideas, I write a short newsletter once a week. One useful idea, one tool, and one practice. You can subscribe below. I love writing them, and it's free.
The third attention habit is perhaps the most boring one. Write to think. Jeff Bezos built one of the strongest and strangest meeting cultures in corporate America. At Amazon, senior meetings often did not start with someone presenting a deck. They began in silence because the executives would sit in the meeting room and read a written memo for about 15 minutes. Why do that? Because Bezos believed that PowerPoint can hide sloppy thinking, but a written paragraph has to connect one thought to the next one. Writing a narrative creates more boring work, but it also creates more clarity. And it doesn't matter what you write. If it's journaling or gratitude diary or a business proposal, writing things down by hand is the best way to clarify your thinking. And there is a difference between writing and typing. Researchers from Princeton and UCLA found that students who wrote notes by hand performed better on conceptual questions than students who typed on laptops. Writing isn't just about recording what you think. It helps you find out what you're thinking.
So, here's the small habit. Before a hard conversation, before a big decision, before anything that feels foggy, try writing it down. Write three things. What do I know? What am I assuming? What is the next honest action? In most cases, the fog will lift. You don't need to fill the page. You just have to empty your mind. So, those are the three attention habits.
Now, let's go to our first energy habit. It is the smallest and the most dangerous one. Energy doesn't always flow smoothly like a continuous stream. In 1900, a physicist named Max Plank discovered that energy moves in these tiny discrete packets. He called that packet a quantum. It was so radical an idea that even Planck himself didn't believe the mathematics behind it. But that idea became one of the foundations of quantum mechanics. In fact, years later, the world learned the terrifying version of the same idea. In 1945, the Manhattan Project did something that changed the world forever. They took the smallest thing in the nature, the atom, and split it. And the energy released from that single act destroyed two cities. Oppenheimer the man who led that project watched the first test and quoted from the Indian scripture Bhagavat Gita >> now I am to come death the destroyer of worlds >> the smallest unit in the nature holds the most power that's why that is our first energy habit quantize the action break your habits into small packets because the hardest part of any habit is starting it if you want to write a book. Writing the first line is the hardest. If you want to clean up your kitchen, picking up the first dish is the hardest.
So, here's the action item. It's pretty simple. Quantize your habit. Writing one line. Doing half a push-up. Walking for 1 minute. It's all about reducing the force required to start.
Now, let's go to the second energy habit. Something that even I don't like doing, but it must be done. There was a study done in 2013 that tested the effect of caffeine at three different times before bed, right before sleep, 3 hours before, and 6 hours before. And they found that caffeine that was taken even 6 hours before significantly disrupted your sleep. Because caffeine has a halflife of about 5 or 6 hours. That means if you drink a cup of coffee at 400 p.m., half of that caffeine is still circulating in your system at 9:00 p.m. And who knows, a quarter of it might still be there after midnight. So, you feel like you slept well, but you're not getting the deep rest that you needed. And then you wake up tired and groggy, and what's the solution? You reach for another cup of coffee, and the cycle feeds itself.
So, one habit I have started recently is to cut caffeine at least 6 hours before bedtime because the most productive thing you can do for your career, your clarity, and your relationships is to protect your sleep. I love coffee, but the coffee that can save your afternoon can also sabotage your next morning. So, the small habit is to have a clear cut off time for your caffeine.
And the third energy habit is about riding the waves. Your afternoon crash is not a failure. It's a signal. Your brain is not a machine. A scientist named Nathaniel Clightman was the father of modern sleep research and he discovered that your brain doesn't just cycle at night. It moves in cycles even during the daytime. Clightman found that most of us have an 80 to 120 minutes wave of high and low alertness. He called them ultradian cycles. Peak focus then a dip. Peak then a dip all day long. That's how the brain is built.
Now the problem is our modern work habits refuse to accept that idea. Our work days are still built to reflect the factory era. Go to the office, produce 8 to 10 hours of output non-stop, push through the dip, drink coffee, push again. And then when our brain collapses at 3:30 in the afternoon, we think, "Oh my god, I lack focus. I lack discipline." But it's neither. It's just that our brain works in waves. Every wave of effort needs a trough of recovery. And here's the part most people get wrong. They take a break, but then they fill it with more input and stimulation. A real break has to be a real break. Stand up and walk for 10 minutes. If you meditate, go ahead and do that. If you want to do deep breathing, go ahead and do that.
So, here's the action item for the habit. Pick a focus block, maybe 60 minutes, maybe 90. Then, pick a real recovery block. 10 minutes, 20 minutes with no feed, no inbox, no new input. Just recover. Then ride the next wave.
And now on to the happiness habits. You know, when life gets heavy, I have this small habit that seems completely useless. I go outside at night and I look up. That's my favorite tiny habit because your story and mine is the story of the universe. And it is a story 13.8 billion years in the making. When you look up, you see billions of galaxies, each beaming with billions of stars. Any one of them could hold planets like ours. And here's the strangest part. The sky that you're looking at is not a live telecast. Light takes time to travel. Some of the stars you'll see tonight sent their light hundreds or even thousands of years ago. Some of them may have already died, and we won't know for centuries. We're looking at a memory from the past. The stars above us are ghosts.
Now whether you believe in a religious explanation or a scientific one, the mystery, the miracle and the magic of our existence in this universe is undeniable. So the first habit is to look up and then comes the second move. Look at yourself in the mirror. And I mean really look the same atoms that made those stars above made you and me. We are the same stardust. There is no one like you on this planet. Your DNA, your exact memories, your scars, your voice, your childhood, your private fears, there is only one version of you. By the time I finish speaking this sentence, roughly 30 million cells in your body may have been replaced. I took roughly 8 seconds to say that. So, the math will work out. But it's fascinating that you're changing every second and yet you feel exactly the same.
Okay. So, you're going to say, "Fine, what does this have to do with small habits and happiness?" Well, we just covered two important happiness habits because when you look up, you're reminded that you're surrounded by millions of miracles. And when you look down, you're reminded that you're one of those miracles. Those two habits lead to awe and gratitude, which then leads to the ninth and the final habit, the habit of forgiving yourself when all your habits break because they will break. Your systems will break and your dreams will shatter. All of that is inevitable. But don't get trapped in any spiral of shame. All of us have days and weeks where nothing is going our way. Right? And when every day is a firefight, none of these small habits will survive. But that's okay. That is the point. You don't have to be your best self on your worst day. That kind of self-prosecution is way more exhausting than missing a habit. And that's why our last small habit is self forgiveness. The three small habits awe, gratitude, and self forgiveness are not about pretending that your problems are small. It is reminding that your life is large. The best habits don't keep you from getting lost. They help you find your way home. Thank you and I love