16-05-2021-043351Limitless-Jim -Kwik

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

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 self-preservation and propagation of our genes.”13

2.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

3.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