My name is Louis Howes. Thanks so much for being here. I want to remind you about the Summit of Greatness, our annual conference happening this September in Los Angeles. With David Goggins, Dr. Joe Dispenza, and many more incredible speakers and performers, there will be so many live attendees there that you can meet with, you can network with, and you can help transform your life. I can't wait to see you at the Summit of Greatness here in Los Angeles. Welcome back, my friend. This is all about habits, and habits are what set your life up for success. And if you don't develop discipline and strong habits, then you aren't setting up an environment to truly be successful for yourself and in your life. So in this episode, we discuss how to master the art of leadership with Simon Sinek, how to create systems instead of just habits to become successful with James Clear, how to set the right type of goals with Katie Milkman, how to double your learning speed with Jim Kwik, and much more. And if you're inspired by this, make sure to share this with someone that you think would be inspired by this message as well.

Okay, in just a moment, it's time to develop new habits and have the best year ever. In this first section, best selling author of Leaders Eat Last, Simon Sinek shares what it takes to be a strong leader. You're always leading something, whether you realize it or not. And if you're not leading an actual company, you're leading your own business or you're leading your life. And maybe you're leading your family as well. The skill of leadership is so crucial towards success. Let's dive in. So is it one person's responsibility? Is it one leader of a company's responsibility to create a feeling of safeness, a feeling of Something bigger is happening here, a feeling of-Psychological safety and all the rest of it. Or just like, I want to be a part of this brand or this mission because it's something bigger than myself, even though maybe somewhere else has better opportunities for food or whatever, fitness center. Is Is it one person in a business that's responsible? Is it the executive team's responsibility? Is it everyone's responsibility to create that?

It's more efficient when it comes from the top, but it's anyone's responsibility. Leadership is a responsibility to people around us. It's not a rank. You've heard me say this before. I know many people who sit at the highest levels of organizations who are not leaders. They have authority, and we do as they tell us because they have authority over us, but we would not follow them. I know many people, as do you, who sit at lower levels of organizations who have no formal authority in that they've made a choice to look after the person to the left of them and look after the person to the right of them, and we would trust them and follow them anywhere. In other words, leadership can come from anywhere within an organization. Yes, we have the right to demand to have better leaders and better leadership in our companies. But when we don't, quitting is not the only option, nor is simply complaining, but undertaking the task of becoming the leader we wish we had. Anyone at any level can become a student of leadership, and anyone at any level can choose to look after this person and that person and work tirelessly to see that they rise, they become better versions of themselves, and that they show up to work inspired and go home feeling fulfilled and feel safe when they're at work because of us.

And though the organization itself may be dysfunctional, there are pockets, diamonds in the coal mine. And if you get enough of those pockets, the tail can actually wag the dog. So that's the great irony of all of this, which is the power belongs to the people. This is just an anthropological truth. The power always belongs to the people, which is why dictators bus in crowds to give the appearance that they're popular, or they actually have fake elections to give the appearance that they have a mandate. Dictators do that. If the people didn't have the power, dictators wouldn't need rallies and they wouldn't need elections. Dictators fear the people because people have the power in any population in any organization. And what keeps dictators and bad leaders, authorities in power is by keeping the people divided. Because if you can create mistrust amongst neighbors, then the people can never come together and never depose the leader. And so if you look at any dictatorship that ever existed, there are systems. Look at East Germany during the Cold War. We didn't know who was telling on us. Everybody kept to themselves and nobody trusted anybody. Neighbors didn't trust neighbors.

And that allows authoritarian organizations to do as they please. The people, when people come together, it's not Congress that just woke up one day and decided, The Civil Rights Act, that's a pretty good idea. It was thousands and thousands and thousands of people marching in peaceful protest that put unbelievable pressure on a on a system to change. And anything that's ever happened in the world where there's been revolution or revolution happened this way. People always have the power. And this is very true in the business as well. The people have the power. And so if we have mass layoffs on an annualized basis and you create internal competition, what you're doing is you're pitting people against people, especially if you create a system where we're only incentivized based on individual performance. So in a sales organization, for example, if my income literally depends on how many sales I get and you're going to I'm going to keep stuff away.

Why would I help you?

Keep the people divided, you keep the system that we've got. But as soon as the people come together, good things happen. I'm a great believer that those of us who believe that there's a better way to build a corporate environment, those of us who believe that being able to say, I love my job is a right. It's not a privilege. It's not for a lucky few who get to go home at the end of the day and say, I I love my job. It's not some lottery that you win. You go to a dinner party and you ask them, Do you like your job? And they go, I love my job. And we go, Oh, you're so lucky. They didn't win anything.

It's not luck.

We are entitled. It is our God-given right to love going to work.

Why is that?

Because I think human beings are tribal animals, and all of us want to feel inspired. We all want to feel like we're a part of something bigger than ourselves. We We all want to have some physical and psychological safety, whether it's at home or work. We fear war, we fear crime, and we want to feel psychologically safe at home. We want safety. At the end of the day, every human being on the planet wants the feeling that I can provide for myself and my family. There's nobility in work. Handouts don't work, and they destroy the human ego. There's nobility in being able to do a hard day's worth of work and collect I get a paycheck. When I do really well, somebody says, Good job, here's a little extra for you, because you're a valuable member of the tribe, and we want to make sure that we're incentivizing the behavior that you're doing, and the behavior you're doing is you're taking care of something bigger than yourself.

Before there was corporate jobs, what were people doing? Did people feel entitled with... Sorry, not entitled, but they feel like they were all working on their own before then? They were doing their own craft, they were doing stuff in the family, in the tribe, what was happening before?

Scale breaks things. Human beings, Homo sapiens, been on this planet 50,000 years-ish, right? For 40 of those 50,000 years, literally four-fifths of our time on this planet, we lived in populations that were never larger than about 150 people. We didn't all live on top of each other. They were communities. The way we survived in these dangerous times was we took care of each other. We contributed. Some people built things, some people hunted the things, some people Some people made food, some people we took care of the kids, some people made their families, and the wealth was distributed. There's evidence they found in anthropological digs where the best cuts of meat, which you would think would go to all the alphas because I'm the strongest, I get to choose the food first. The best cuts of meat, which they can tell by the bones, are actually distributed amongst the tribe. In other words, the alphas, the leaders, yes, they were entitled to eat first. That's just the way we are. We're hierarchical animals. Nobody has a problem that somebody more senior, nobody has visceral contemp for the idea that somebody more senior in an organization makes more money than me.

We're okay with our alphas getting better treatment. Nobody has a problem with celebrities making more money and getting famous. Getting a table in the restaurant that we have to wait for. We're okay with it. It's one of the reasons we all try and increase our standing in society, by doing good, and hopefully you do it in a good way, not just getting Internet famous, which is getting fame without any contribution to society.Different subject.Right. But it was shared hardship, shared sacrifice for the good of each other. That doesn't mean there wasn't ego and selfishness, of course. But at the end of the day, we needed each other. Then about 10,000 or 12,000 years ago, when we started farming, we didn't need to travel anymore. We could stay put. We could also sustain much larger populations than about 150 because we could amass resources. This also allowed for ruling classes and intelligentsia and things like that. You can have an entire group of people who didn't hunt and didn't gather. They just governed. It's a ruling class. That's what it is. Or they just thought about it.

They began philosophers.

We had the resources for that, and we were okay with it. It's a good thing because look at the advancements in modern society in the past 10,000 years, simply because you didn't have to go toil the field. You could actually go invent something. You could innovate. You could innovate, right? It's a good thing. But scale breaks things for human beings. We were not naturally made for living in large populations. The way it worked best is when we organize into smaller groups, which is why hierarchy matters, which is why leadership training matters. You asked about, Is the top person responsible? No. The top person is responsible for taking care of the people in their direct responsibility and ensuring that they are charged with and incentivized to take care of the people with their direct responsibility, who are charged with and incentivized to take care of the people in their direct responsibility, and the people on the front lines who are actually doing all the work feel taken care of and are happy to contribute. There's a Marine that I know who's a Marine general who says the way he can judge the quality of a lieutenant is he listens to how the troops talk about their lieutenant.

When he's not Is it the lieutenant or is it our lieutenant?

They take possession of their leader. That's our lieutenant. It's always the colonel. It's never our colonel. It's always the colonel because there's no relationship. It's too distant. As soon as we take possession, emotional possession of our leaders, there's a sign of devotion and mutual trust. But that relationship starts with how the leader leads. Yes, we have a responsibility to give back, but we call you leader not because you have the rank. We call you leader because you took the risk to trust first. We call you leader because you took the risk to build the relationship first. You took the risk to create the circle of safety first. You took the risk to go head first towards the vision first. That's why we call you leader, because you undertook an element of risk. You literally lead. You went first. Nothing to do with rank. Into the unknown first.

Into the unknown, whatever it is.

And And then we have a responsibility to go, I'm coming. I support. There's good followership, too. You always do this to me whenever we get together. You get me... The best leaders are actually the best followers.

In what ways? What do you mean?

The best leaders never think that they're the final, that the buck stops with them. They always believe that they're in service to something bigger than themselves. And even if that person in leadership position gets to the tippy top of whatever organization, they still feel that they're subordinate to something even bigger. So the Pope still thinks that he's in service to something bigger than him. A CEO of a visionary organization feels that they are still beholden to and following a vision bigger than them. So the best leader is actually the best followers. Even if they're at the highest levels of the organization, they're still in service.

It may not be to a person, but to a cause, a mission, a God, a mission, a God, a something.

To cause an idea, a vision, whatever it is. There's still some something that they're beholden to and they're devoted to and they're in service to. So followership is a thing. And not to belabor the Marine point, but Marines, when they evaluate their leaders, they're looking for good leadership and good followership. So for example, when you go through OCS, Officer Canada's School, selection, when somebody is for a task, chosen to be the leader of that group for that task, the Marines are watching the others as well. So they're looking to see that everybody's contributing ideas. They're looking to see that that leader takes in those ideas but is decisive. And they're looking to see that the members of the group, if their idea isn't picked, they still give their all to see that the leader's idea is successful And if it fails, give it their all to pick up the pieces and see what they can do, as opposed to going, I told you, should have gone my way. I was right. Or sabotaging because their idea didn't get picked.

So they go all in.

Good followership is as important as good leadership. We respect that when a decision is made, we will give our blood, sweat, and tears to see that the decision our leaders have made will be successful. And if it fails, we will help pick up the pieces because that's the deal.

What if you don't believe in the idea?

You may not believe in the choice, but you better believe in the idea. Got you. You better believe-The greater idea, but the choice of getting there. And that's just part of life. Heck, man, I've disagreed with my own ideas. I've been pig-headed and dogmatic about, This is the way we got to go, and everybody is wonderful and it falls apart.

They're just like, Yeah, I screwed the pooch on that one.

But I take accountability. Or we find in the middle, somebody goes, Hey, if we do this, we can probably be more successful, and we pivot. At the decision-making ranks, there has to be a humility that the ideas don't always have to come from me. Bob Gayler, the fifth Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, has the best definition of humility I've ever heard. He said, Don't confuse humility with meekness. Humility is being open to the ideas of others. It's not about like, Oh, shucks. That's not humility. You and I know some remarkable leaders, people of great power and authority, and they have huge egos. They know they're good, and they don't mind talking about how good they are. But when somebody says, Hey, I got an idea, they lean in like they're little kids. They go, Let's hear it. I'm looking at some of the photographs on your wall, and some of the folks that I know here, they have an insatiable curiosity for ideas. Even though they're unbelievably accomplished, if you have something share with them, they want to talk about it. They want to hear about it. That's humiliating to me. It's not this, it's not me.

Self-confidence is a good thing. Thinking you're better than everyone else, that's unhealthy. That's good. Thinking you're good is healthy. Thinking you're better than others is unhealthy. Humility is not thinking that you're not good.

How do you have...

It's not thinking that you're...

How do you develop self-confidence? We're going off here now, but this is a topic I'm really passionate about right now. I believe self-doubt is one of the biggest killers to anyone's dreams. How does someone develop self-confidence and sustain it with the ever-going changes and stresses and uncertainties that always come up. Once you reach a certain level, there's a new uncertainty.

I think it's ironic that we call it self-confidence because I don't, for one, think it comes from the inside. I think our self-confidence comes from the outside.

You mean that's the wrong way of going about it, or you think that's where it comes from in general?

We are being misdirected by the name. When we say build your self-confidence, the instruction is saying, go inside, look inside one's self. But I think that's a false direction. Children aren't born self-confident. Their confidence is built from their parents and their friends and their teachers, where they're rewarded when they do well and they're pushed when they fail, when they can do better. We know this, that simply telling kids that they're great all the time actually doesn't build self-confidence. It actually does the total opposite. I, for one, I can tell you, in my own experience, my own self-confidence 100% comes from the relationship relationships that I have. It's not some deep internal fortitude. A world famous trapeze artist is not going to try a brand new death-defying act for the first time without a net. So it's the people in my life. It's when I do doubt myself that somebody says, You got this. When somebody says, I believe in you. When somebody says, No No matter what happens, whether it succeeds or fails, I'm going to be by your side. That's when I have the confidence to do difficult things. I don't have some natural battery that just...

That to me is bravado. I don't know that's self-confidence. Being a huge risk taker is not an indication of self-confidence to me. Jump out of a plane and jumping out of a plane with a parachute are two different things. To me, self-confidence is measured, and there should be a degree of doubt. But I think true self-confidence, belief in oneself and belief in one's cause, I could not do the things that I'm doing, and I would not have the strength to have made the sacrifices that I've made or continue to wake up on a daily basis to drive to spread this message if I were alone. And so When we talk about building one's self-confidence, I think the mistake that we make is that we look inside. I think the reality is when we're trying to build our self-confidence, we should be looking to our friends, we should be nursing our relationships. When I'm looking to build my self-confidence, the question is, who around me do I need to take care of? The way we build our self-confidence is by helping somebody else build theirs. We will build our confidence with an act of service. I'll tell you a true story.

I did an experiment. I love doing experiments in my own life. Yeah, me too. I have mad thoughts. I'm like, Well, let's try this one out. I have a very dear friend who has stuck with me through thick and thin, who she is absolutely profoundly one of the reasons that I am who I am today. I have my confidence in large part because of her. She's a small group of people who I look at and say, Yeah, good friend. She was struggling, seriously struggling. Oh, let me take a step back. We decided that we were going to... She was struggling. She was going through some hard things in her life. Career wasn't going the way she wanted. Her personal relationship was struggling.There was a lot of rough.She.

Was lacking confidence.

There was a lot of rough. She was lacking confidence. We would get together on a regular basis, and I would attempt to coach her. She'd It felt great for the hour after she left me, and then it would very quickly go back to normal. We'd get back together and I would coach her, and she felt great for the hour after she left me, and then it would go back to normal. I can't say that there was some profound change being made in her life. So I had her hair brain idea. I went to her and I said, I need your help. I said, I'm struggling. I don't have a coach that I love and trust. You've known me for years. I trust you with everything. I feel unbelievably safe around you. Can you put together a program and can you coach me? I think you're good at it. It wasn't reciprocal. It wasn't, I'll coach you, you coach me. I said, I need your help because I'm struggling. It was legit. It wasn't like I was just making stuff. You were stressed. It was legit. I could do with the help, and I trusted her to help me.

Something profound started to happen. Over the course of just a few weeks, it wasn't even for a few months, but over the course of a few weeks, she started to gain way more confidence. Her career started to really move in a more positive direction. Her relationship firmed up. The more that she was in service to me, the more that she grew herself. I think self-confidence. I wish we didn't call it self-confidence. Because like I said, I think it gives a false direction. The way we build confidence is with. Con means with, doesn't it? Interesting. I have no idea the etymology of confidence. That's interesting. The etymology of confidence.That's interesting.Just making stuff up here. But con means with. To confide. Let's look this up because fidelity is something to do with truth. So confide, right? Yeah, look it up with the etymology of... Look at the etymology of confidence. To confide is to people... Like a conspiracy is a co-whesper. That's what a conspiracy is, it's a co-whesper. So confidence, it's co-fidelity. Let's see if the instinct is matched by the etymology of the word, and which if it isn't, I'm still okay with it. What does it say?

It comes from late middle English, Confident, Translation, Origins, and Meaning. Here we go. Unlight etymology dictionaries. God love it. Where does the word come from? It's about trust or reliance. But what's the actual etymology of the word? Yeah, I'm not going to sit here and waste everybody's time. Yeah, we can look at the. But it comes from comfidre, and fidre means to trust.

To trust yourself or trust other people.

So com, what does com mean? It means with. It means with trust.

Wow.

That could be with trust with yourself.

I think it's been... That's my point. I think it's like a conspiracy. A conspiracy requires two people. You cannot have a conspiracy with one person. It's a co-whispering. You commit the crime of conspiracy when you tell someone something, and you're both in on it. I think confidelity, confidence, is the same thing. I think it's at least two people who undertake the task of trust and reliance.

She was coaching you, and you saw a change with over a few weeks of her confidence.

Her confidence built.And her belief in herself. Her belief in herself grew when she was in service to helping me. It goes back to the root of the question, how do you build your self-confidence?

Or how do you overcome self-doubt?

How do you overcome self-doubts? How do you overcome self-doubts? Help someone else overcome self-doubt. I love that. I love that. You overcome self-doubt by helping. It's not a selfish thing. I'm only helping you so I can. You have to genuinely love and commit to the person. This person that you're helping, you have to genuinely genuinely care about their success and their confidence and their luck in life. Yeah.

In this next section, best-selling author of Atomic Habits, James Clear, talks about how you do not rise to the level of your goals, but you fall to the level of your systems, and how that shift in how you go about your life can make all the difference. You said this. You said, You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. What are the systems you created to be successful beyond those core habits right there?

Yeah, so this is a really good question. I think first, I just want to talk a little bit about that point that you do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. What do I mean by that? So often when we set about to change something or to achieve something, the first step is almost always setting a goal. And this is coming from someone like, I was very goal-oriented for a long time. You're an athlete? Yeah, I was set goals for the things I wanted to do in the goals for the grades I wanted in class, the goals for how much money I wanted to make in my business. And sometimes I would achieve those, but then sometimes I wouldn't. And so I had this question like, Well, clearly, I'm setting goals for both, so that can't be the thing that determines it. And you see this a lot, that the winners and losers in a particular domain often have the same goals. Every Olympian wants to win a gold medal. Sure. Every job candidate wants to get the job. So if the winners and the losers have the same goal, then the goal It will not be the thing that distinguishes the two.

And the thing that distinguishes them is the process, the system behind the goal. And this is also important because achieving a goal often only changes your life for the moment. It's like, say you're... Just take a simple example. Say you have a messy room, and you get motivated and you set the goal to clean your room. Well, you can do that in an hour, and then you have a clean room. But if you don't change the sloppy habits that led to a messy room in the first place, then you just end up with a dirty room again. So it's like treating a without treating the cause. And habits are a better solution in that case, because if you fix the inputs, the outputs fix themselves automatically. You don't have to fight to have a clean room if you have clean habits. And I think that that's true in a in your sense as well. People want outcomes. They want to earn more money or lose weight or be more productive or reduce stress. But the outcome is not the thing that needs to change. It's the system that proceeds it.

So give me what's best the myth of how many days it takes to set a habit because there's 14 days, 28 days, 60 days, a year. If you do something every single day, and maybe it changes for each person, but what's the science or the statistics say about how long it takes to form a positive or negative habit, I guess.

So 21 days is the thing you hear all the time, 30 days, 100 days, whatever. Right now, 66 days is making the rounds.It's the latest time.I saw that in another book. What was that book? Well, there was one study done that found that 66 days was the average for how long it takes. And as a rule of thumb, I don't think it's terrible. You should remind yourself, yeah, this is going to be months of work. It's not just going to be something quick. But even within that study, the range was quite wide. So if you did something simple, like drink a glass of water at lunch each day, it would It's like three weeks. If you did something more difficult, like go for a run after work every day, that would be seven or eight months. But I think actually that question to begin with is there's a broken mentality behind it.The wrong question.Yeah, it is. Because If you ask that question, the implicit assumption is, When do I have to stop working? Or when is this done?

And is it automatic after a certain period of time?

Well, the honest answer to how long it takes to build a new habit is forever. Because if you stop, then it's no longer a habit.

It's a constant choice and a decision, right?

I think people often look at habits as a finish line to be crossed, but it's actually a lifestyle to be lived. And if you look at it as a lifestyle change, then you're saying, Okay, what's something small and sustainable I can stick to? What's something that can actually last over time? It is true that, and you can actually map this through research, that a habit will become more automatic with practice. But this reveals another important point, which is that There's nothing about the amount of time elapsed that leads to habits being built. You could practice something once in 30 days, or you could practice it a thousand times. What actually leads to a habit becoming automatic and becoming learned and ingrained is repetition. So the phrase that I like to use is not 21 days or 30 days, but put in your reps. That's the real thing is you need to practice. And if you put in your reps, then your brain starts to automate how that process works.

What makes you an expert on habits? Oh, man. Based on lots of other people that are talking about habits. Why are you talking about it differently? And what have you discovered that's different than everyone else?

Okay, so two questions there. So the first one is expertise. I think that, and I've said this many times before, I'm just going through this with everybody else. I consider my readers my peers in the sense that we're all just trying things out. The only difference is I write about what I learn and share it each week, but we're all just learning along the way. Early on, I had a feeling like that. I was like, Who am I? I'm just a guy. Who am I to write about this? And I had a friend tell me, The way you develop expertise is by writing about it every week. So I wrote a new article about habits every Monday and Thursday for three years, and that was how I developed the expertise on the topic. It was by writing about it.

You did research. You said, Here's what I found, here's what I tried, here's what worked, what didn't work.

It's a combination of me reading the scientific literature and reading the research, and then trying to distill the practical insights from that, and testing things out in my own life as a weightlifter, a travel photographer, a writer, an entrepreneur, and seeing what that looks like, and then the two together. And I think you need both. I don't want to be some new-age version of an academic who's in an ivory tower just theorizing about ideas. It's different what it looks like to put ideas into practice, right? Imagine you're a peak performance coach and you show up to coach an MBA team. These guys are like, Dude, you need to step on the court if you know what... To see what it's actually like. So you need to have both to have a firm understanding of that.

So you were researching and you were applying it into your life. And what was the second part about it?

The second question, which I think is probably the more interesting one, which is what makes my angle different? Or what makes this different?

Then every other book out there about habits.

So you can broadly put books about habits into two categories. The first book, the first category, is what I'll call motivation models. So motivation models are about what sparks a behavior. How do you get started? How do you get motivated? The second category is what I'll call reinforcement models. So how does the habit stick? How does it last? Why do certain behaviors get reinforced? And sometimes books will touch on one but focus primarily on the other. A lot of the time, they'll just live in separate worlds. That's what I would say is happening in the self-improvement space. Then you have the academic space, so psychology or neuroscience whatever. And a lot of those books are focused on the why, but not the how. They'll tell you why something happens, why a particular neuron fires, why a particular biological process works the way it does. But they don't tell you how to implement it in your daily life. And so what I wanted to do was try to combine the two. Why and how? Yes. A book that is both why and how. Why do habits form the way they do? Why are they important? And then how do they actually work?

And my hope is that Atomic Habits was able to do that largely because of the framework that I put together. So in the book, I lay out these four stages that all habits go through. I felt like we needed a new model because most of the models right now are either a motivation model or a reinforcement model, but not both. And you need to understand what both sparks a habit and what makes a habit stick.Maintains it, yes.Yes. If you want to be able to understand how they work and how to make them last.

And what are those four frameworks?

So the first stage of every habit is a cue. The second stage is a craving or some prediction that your brain makes. I'll give you an example of these in a second. The third stage is the response, and then the fourth stage is the reward. So you walk into a... The question I had that no model I could find could solve in any good way or explain in any good way was, why can the same person respond to the same cue in a different way? So let's say you get into the habit of going to the gym at five o'clock every day. But then sometimes work gets busy and you don't go to the gym at five o'clock. Current models don't explain that very well because it's like, well, the cue is five. You should be going to the gym right now. It says the routine falls automatically after the cue. Or why does And then walk into the kitchen and see a plate of cookies, and then they automatically want to eat it. But you could just as easily imagine that you just got done eating dinner in the other room, and you're stuffed, and you're full, and you walk in, you see a plate of cookies, and you're like, I'm stuffed.

I don't want to eat or anything. So what's going on there? And I think these four stages explain it, which is you see the cue or you experience a cue, and then your craving or your prediction differs based on your current state. So the way that you interpret the cues in your life is contingent upon the current state that you're in. The way you're feeling. Right. And also other things like your beliefs or your identity, the social group that you're part of. If you're in a different group, then maybe you interpret things in a different way. You can imagine one group, they practice In a particular religion. They walk into a butcher's shop and see pork, and they're like, Oh, we can't eat that. Another person walks in and they're like, Oh, yeah, I'll have pork sandwich because it's obvious and easy and right there. So what you choose is contingent upon how you interpret the cues in your life.

Why do we change what we interpret?

Yes, good question. All right, so this is a key point in the book, which is that social norms, society leans heavily on us all. So if you... There are just broad examples of this.

So pressure, religious pressure, media pressure, peer pressure, everything.

Let's say, so just some broad examples. You walk into an elevator and you turn around to face the front. You have a job interview and you wear a suit and tie or a dress or something nice. There's no reason it has to be that way. You could face the back of the elevator. You could wear a swimsuit to a job interview. But you don't do that because it violates the shared norms of the group. It violates the shared expectations of what that society has. But that's true not only in a broad sense that we're part of these tribes, like big tribes, what it means to be a Christian or to be American or to be Australian or whatever. But it's also true in the small tribes that we belong to, what it means to be a neighbor on this street or a member of your local CrossFit gym or to volunteer for a local organization. All of those tribes, all of those groups that you belong to have a set of shared expectations, a set of shared norms. And the key If you want to build habits that last, if you want to change the way that you interpret cues, is to join a group where the desired behavior is the normal behavior, right?

There are plenty of people who they want to work out, but going to the gym feels like a lot to them. It feels hard, it feels like a sacrifice. But there are also people who go to the gym every week, and it's just normal. It doesn't feel like an obligation. That's the desired behavior is the normal behavior.It's their lifestyle.Right. Same thing for musicians. If you want to an instrument, hang out with people who play all the time. If you hang out with a bunch of musicians, it's like, well, yeah. That's what we do all day. Yeah, we play four days a week. We play seven days a week because it just happens. That's what the tribe does. The caveat to this, and the thing that I don't see people mention a lot, is that the reason social norms influence our behavior so much is because we want to belong to the tribe. We want to be friends with those people. And so we don't want to lose the friendship or lose belonging over violating the norms.

You're not going to hang out with a bunch of vegans and have pork. Right. And just be the only one eating that.

You won't hang out with them for very long because you're not going to be friends with them anymore. Exactly. They'll kick you out.

So you want to rise to the standard of that group, of that community.

So the key, I think, is to join a group where your desired behavior is a normal behavior, and you already have something else in common with that group. So Steve Kam is a good example of this. So Steve runs Nerd Fitness, right? And all these people want to get in shape who are coming into this community. But they also love Star Wars or Batman or Spider-Man or all these other things that nerds are into. And if you show up, it can be intimidating to want to get in shape or work out the first time. But if you can connect with the group over your mutual love of Star Wars, then you're like, Oh, I'm friends with these people. And now I also want to pick up those other habits with them because I want to belong with the group because we're already friends. And so I think you can apply that methodology to most new tribes that you join. Don't just join a new tribe because they have the desired behavior. Also, try to find a way that you can overlap with them. Find some shared context. Some other stuff, too, yeah. That you can bond and then it's easier to adopt the habits.

Musicians that like to be healthy. Yeah, right? If you want to do both, right? It's like finding that even subgroup.

It's like, Hey, we love playing music, and then also you're going to start eating better because we all want to eat healthy. Exactly. Yeah.

Interesting. Okay, So that's the second part, the cue and then the desire habits, right?

The craving. Cue, craving, response, reward.

Okay, what's the response?

So this is mostly about making it easy. So this is the habit itself. And the easier a habit is, the less friction there's a associated with the habit, the more likely you're going to be to do it. So the way that I like to describe this, imagine you have a hose, right? And there's a bend in the middle. There's a little bit of water trickling out. If you want to increase the amount of water going through the hose, you have two options. You could either crank up the valve and force more water through, or you could just remove the bend and let it flow through naturally. And a lot of the time, advice is centered on cranking up the valve. It's like you need to try harder, you need grit, you need perseverance, you need motivation, you need to overcome the obstacles in your life. And all those things are fine, but I think they're all short-term solutions. You might be able to do that for a day or a week, but I've never consistently seen someone stick to positive habits in a negative environment. It's really hard to fight that day in and day out.

So the solution, I think, is to reduce friction. There are a ton of ways you can do this. One way is just to scale the habit down, make it as easy as possible. So people have heard things like this before, start small, small steps, whatever. But even when you know you should start small, It's still really easy to start too big. So you want to get in shape and you're like, All right, I want to run a couple of days a week, but I know it should start small, so I'll only run for 15 minutes. But even that is way bigger than what I'm talking about. I mean, it should be so small that you... In the book, I call it the two-minute rule, but you should downscale any habit to fit within two minutes. So it's like, All right, I want to go for a run three days a week. My habit is I put on my running shoes and I step out the door. Anything else that happens after that is just bonus.It's.

A success.

Now, sometimes people resist that because they're like, Well, this sounds like a mental trick, right? I know the real goal isn't just to put my shoes on. I know the real goal is to go for a run. So if you feel that way, my suggestion would be only do the first two minutes for the in a few weeks, because what you need to do is master the art of showing up. I had a reader who ended up losing over 100 pounds. And one of the things that he did was he went to the gym, but he wasn't allowed to stay for longer than five minutes. So he would show up be there, do like half an exercise. Five minutes ago, he'd leave. He did this for like six weeks.Wow.Now, it sounds ridiculous. It sounds silly because it's the opposite. Why don't you just work out for a half hour? Yeah, yeah. But what he was doing was mastering the art of showing up. And a habit must be established before it can be improved. If you don't establish the habit, there's nothing to optimize. If you're not showing up at the gym every day, who cares about what workout you're doing?

You're not even there.

Don't start running an hour a day if you've never run in a long time.

Be the person who shows up and puts their running shoes on every day before you worry about how far you're running and what workout you're doing, and all that type of stuff.Establish.

The art of showing up first before going all in on the desired goal you want.

I think that's right. I mean, you can find examples of people who flip a switch and transform their lives or have an epiphany and do it overnight. But I think that it's rare. I think that the more sustainable strategy, the more reliable strategy, is to scale it down to the first two minutes, focus on that, establish it, Master the art of showing up, and then go from there. So really, you should... Usually, when people think about building better habits, they optimize for the finish line. It's like, How much weight do I need to lose? How much money do I need to make? When can I finish this book? It's all focused on the result. But I think instead, if you optimize for the starting line, make it as easy as possible to start, scale it down, organize your environment so all that stuff is set up. This is another strategy for making it easy, which is that you can prime your environment to make the future action easier. If you If you chop up a bunch of vegetables and fruit on Sunday, it's now easier to have a healthy snack during the week. If you set your workout close to out the night before, it's now easier to get into the workout the next day.

But doing all that stuff to make it easy to show up, that is probably the more important piece early on. There's also all these logistical details for building a habit that nobody thinks about in the beginning. What? Well, take the example of my reader who went to the gym. It's like, okay, what gym are you going to go to? How are you going to Are you going by yourself or are you going to go with a friend? Do you need to-What time are you going to go? Yeah, what time are you going to have your own water bottle or is there a water fountain at the gym? And that stuff sounds silly and small, but when someone's starting, the fact that the gym doesn't have a water fountain, and I always forget to bring my own. That's enough friction for someone to quit. So by focusing on just the first two minutes, you figure all that stuff out. And then once you've got that piece mastered, now you can worry about how long the workout is and what program to do and all that stuff.

So figuring out the logistics first is an important step.

I think that's something that just comes naturally with scaling a habit down. You figure out what's required to show up because you're not worried about the results or the outcome or how long you worked out or judging your sofa running 30 minutes when you should run 45 or whatever. Got it.

Okay, so this is the response still? Right. Okay, and what's the fourth?

The fourth one, and this is crucial for getting a habit to stick, is the reward or the outcome. So every behavior is followed by some It's just the outcome, it's just basic cause and effect. And if the immediate outcome is favorable, is enjoyable, you have a reason to repeat it in the future. It's likeDonuts. Yeah, exactly. It's like that example. If you feel good, if you feel satisfied right after you do something, then it's like this positive emotional signal, and it's like, Yeah, I should do this again. So you can see this, actually, business is a really interesting example with this. There are a lot of products, and some of the most successful products have some a type of immediate satisfaction that is layered into them. So toothpaste is a very common example. There's no reason a toothpaste needs to taste like mint, but it does because the minty flavor and the refreshingness of it, it gives your mouth this clean feel. It's more satisfying, so you have a reason to do it again in the future. I heard an interesting one recently about car manufacturers that some of them are adding a fake guttural roar to the car or the truck when you press the accelerator because it just adds to the actual natural sound of the engine, so it makes it more satisfying to step on the gas and to drive the car.

So there are a variety of examples like this. But if you can add... The key is it needs to be immediate. So in the book, I refer to this as the cardinal rule of behavior change, which is behaviors that are immediately rewarded get repeated. Behaviors that are immediately punished get avoided. And it's really about the speed of how quickly you feel successful. If it feels good, you have a reason to do it again.

Is that why video games do so well?

Video games masters at this. They're masters at it. They're masters actually at a variety of aspects related to habit formation. So one is they're really good at this immediate satisfaction. There are all kinds of things. You're actually constantly getting feedback in a video game. Even if you're just running, you hear the pitter-patter of the steps.It's.

Gratifying.it's gratifying.

The jingles of picking up another power up or seeing a kill or something like that, whatever the game is, you're always getting constant feedback. Sound, things that are on screen. They're really good at dripping out. Watching the score increase in the top corner, that is immediate feedback. So they have all these different ways of making you feel satisfied. And when you see that progress, you have a reason to continue in the future. This is one of the one of the most effective forms of immediate satisfaction is progress. As soon as you feel progress, you have a reason to continue. It feels really good to see that you're making headway.

In this section, best selling author of How to Change, Katie Milkman shares another approach to setting goals so that you can actually keep up your motivation. For me, it's so ingrained in me that if you want to accomplish your goals, you got to schedule these things you got to do on a daily basis and make it like...

Break it down. What's the daily goal? What's the daily thing? When are you going to do it? What's going to cue you to do it? Who's going to watch you do it?

Everything. All that detail. What's that stake for you? What's at stake for other people? What's the higher purpose that if you don't do this, who are you going to be hurting?

And who is literally holding you accountable, right? Absolutely. You've got your coach involved. Those are the kinds of things.

So structure is one of the leading academic, the research that shows which will help you get more results.

Yes. And there's so many pieces of that. And each one of them, we could unpack and talk about studies from Okay, a big one is too often people say, I just have this big goal. I think if I set a big audacious goal, and by the way, that's good. It's good to set stretch goals, but then you got to break it down into the, what are you going to do this week? What are you going to What are those component parts? And people get a lot further. Research by Al Bindura, the late Al Bindura of Stanford, great thinker, did some of the pioneering work on this. We just did a field experiment where we tested with thousands of people who wanted to be volunteering 200 hours a year, and they had committed to that goal. And we found that just sending them reminders not to volunteer 200 hours a year, but to volunteer four hours a week led to value vastly better performance. Just that really simple change, even in the way you communicate about this. When you invite someone to start saving $5 a day instead of $150 a month, you get vastly higher take up.

Interesting. Identical. So just little framing shifts. Where you think about, let's break this down into the bite-size component. Now it's harder to procrastinate on it. You can see how it's doable. It doesn't feel overwhelming.

She's saying, If my goal is to save $105 or invest $105 a month or whatever this is, are you saying it's not the best approach to say, I'm going to invest $105 a month, but I'm going to do $5 a day? Yeah.

I can't remember what this value is. Yeah, it's $150 because it's like 30 days, roughly in a month.

$150. As opposed to saying, I'm going to save or invest $150 a month, trick your brain into saying, I'm going to invest $5 a day. You're saying by doing that, what should happen?

We should have-Many more people raise their hand and say, I can do this.

As opposed to $150 is too big for some people.

It sounds big. You start thinking like, Oh, no, where am I going to have to cut? I'm not going to get to go out to dinner three times that I thought I was going to get to go out to... Am I going to make my rent? So you're focusing on that big category, $150. And this was an experiment that was done led by Hal Hirschfeld at UCLA with a savings app, Acorns. And they just invited people. Either some people get randomly assigned, Do you want to save $5 a day? Or $150 a month? It's literally the identical outcome. They will take $150 out of your account.

Monthly. Monthly? Yeah.

But they framed it differently and you get vastly higher take-up. Something like five times more people are interested. No way. It just feels doable.

Yes. It's like anyone can find $5 on their couch or a car, the change. It's like, I can do this every day. But 150 bucks may be a big stretch.

Right, but it is the same thing. And so that broken down goal is really important.

So it's like if you're working out, as opposed to saying, I'm going to run, I don't know, 50 miles a week, it's like that It might seem like a lot, but I can run... What's that broken down to? 3 miles, 4 miles a day, 5 miles a day. It's more doable than thinking about the big number, right? Yeah. That's interesting. How could you apply that in another area of life, do you I think, in terms of fitness, in terms of finances, and what about relationships? I don't know.

I think you can break down most big goals into its component parts. It might not be as simple as literally redoing the math, but it It might be, I want to have a better relationship and I want us to spend more quality time together. Let's try to spend a lot more quality time together this year. Well, first you can get more concrete than a lot of. And so say you had a monthly goal, it might be like, Okay, I want to make sure that we go on five just us dates a month to have that alone time. You might say that means every Friday plus one Saturday, we're going to do it. And that means once a week plus one week that has two times. Let's Just go map out when they are. It all becomes more bite-size and achievable. And this is, again, you said you're mapping out your schedules. These are the component parts that actually add up to achieving your goals.

I'm going to think of like, Okay, what am I going to do this week? What am I going to schedule this week, not like, I've got all this stuff to do for the next three months. What can I do for the next few days? And what's coming tomorrow? And then, okay, I see the full week and how am I going to manage my time. And at the end of the week, wow, I can look at what I created and I can be proud of and build for the next week. Yeah. So that's really important. Yeah. And time is going to keep passing. And in three months, you're going to look back and say, Oh, look at all the steps I took to get to me where I'm at.

Absolutely.

Winning the LA Marathon. I'm just kidding.

Completing is the goal.

Completing in five hours is my goal. Okay, so that's-So breaking down-Leaning on structure.

Structure. Let me add another super important strategy that I think a lot of high performers use that research supports. And this one, I is vastly underappreciated, too. It relates to what I was poking at earlier, the just do it, Nike, like, No, that's not really right. I think this is really a misconception that's related to that. The idea comes from research by Iolette Fishbach of the University of Chicago and Kaitlyn Woolley of Cornell. And what they showed is that if you ask people when they have a big goal, what approach are they going to take to try to get to it? Most people say, I'm going to look for the most efficient route. It's all about efficiency. What's It's the most effective path to that end goal? That's how I go for it. And a small fraction of people say something different. They say, I try to find a way that I'll enjoy getting to that end destination.

Have fun.

Have fun. So you could think about someone who wants We've been on marathons. Say you're training for a marathon. Somebody who's like, I'm going to just go to the gym and get on the treadmill and grind it out.

It's going to be hard every day. Yeah.

And another person is like, I'm going to go on a run with a running group. We're going to go through the most on the most beautiful trails that I know. We're going to do it together. Maybe I'm even going to download some great reading material, listening material before I go so that I have something fun in my ears. Those are really different paths, right? This one might be more efficient because you don't have to coordinate with other people. You'll do it every day. You're going to know exactly your mileage. It's going to be really controlled. But it turns out if you don't enjoy it, you don't persist. And so they've done experiments where they show that if you just actually encourage to choose the most fun way to pursue an exercise goal or study. They did this with students in math class, giving them fun activities that were going on in the background, you can use markers and play music and have snacks. Versus just grind it out. People achieve more because they persist longer when they find ways to make it fun to do what's good for them. That's crazy. But we misunderstand this.

We don't think we need that. We think like, Oh, that's kid stuff. I'm just going to push through. And we're wrong. We won't, ultimately. And that's because of impulsivity, because we overvalue the present experience relative to the long-term gains. It's just how we're wired. We don't appreciate that about ourselves, so we make these mistakes.

I'm going to probably quit more frequently when it gets harder and harder if there's no daily joy or fun. If you're just like, I got 6 months, 12 months, 2 years until maybe this goal happens. This is exhausting. It's draining. It's pulling me away from having fun in my friendships or these activities. It sounds like if you can make the challenging steps the fun activity in your day-to-day life, then you'll stick with it longer is what I'm hearing you say.

Absolutely. I think it's so underappreciated.

Yeah, that's so true. What else around structure? You said there's a bunch of subcategories within structure and the importance of having structure for high performers.

Yes. Okay. So another really key thing is having if-then plans. I love that. So this is based on research by Peter Golditzer of NYU, who studied the way different people were making plans around goals they wanted to achieve. And he found that some people said, I will eventually do it, or I'll do it once a week. And other people laid out real detail in their plans. And they had If Then statements like, If it is a Thursday at 4:00 PM, then I will go train for my marathon in this location, as opposed to, Some time this week, I'll get around to The more structure, the more clear it was what's the cue that's going to trigger the behavior, the more follow-through he was seeing. And then he started running a series of experiments where he would actually have people basically fill in the blanks, like fill in the, If X happens, then I will do Y sentence instead of just saying, I plan to do Y, and looked at what are the outcomes and saw this really matters. It turns out we've done research showing that if people are prompted to just write down the date and time when they intend to get a flu shot, they're more likely to get a vaccine.

If people People are asked, When will you vote? Where will you vote? How will you get there? On a call, trying to encourage them to go to vote in an election, they're significantly more likely to show up. So these very simple tricks are being used widely in health care now, in voter turnout, because it's so powerful to create those if-then plans instead of just the flimsy ones to get to an end goal. Got you.

Okay. I like the if-then plans.

If-then plans are super important. We haven't talked about tracking or accountability, although we've alluded to them.

Let's do it.

Those are other really important pieces of structure.

Tell me more.

So tracking does seem to be really useful in terms of achieving goals, because if you don't have visibility into whether you're getting anywhere. It's hard to reward yourself and rewarding yourself as part of the loop that makes you keep feeling satisfied and doing something.

For the actual behavioral change to be implemented, right?

Exactly. It's a really simple thing, but this tracking does seem to One of my favorite studies of this shows it actually in water conservation, where people were taking showers that were long, and they were committed to conservation, but their showers were long, so that wasn't totally working out for them. Then they were randomly assigned to two groups, one group getting something they know they're being monitored and someone else can see how much water they're using. The other group gets a visual. They can literally see in real-time how much water are they using.

Three minutes left, two minutes, whatever you have.

Well, it wasn't a countdown. It was just showing total gallons used.Leaders.

Or gallons.Right..

So it's really visible. It's going up.

You're wasting this much every moment. Yeah. Right.

And you can think like, Oh, how much did I use total yesterday? So you could imagine that thing.

It's like gamification.

Yeah, it's related to gamification, although there were no stars and bells and whistles. It's more just, I know where I am, and I know how much I've used.

I'm a horrible human being for wasting this much water. No, I'm just kidding.

Well, yeah, that might be the thought. Hopefully, it wasn't that extreme because then it could come with negative. But it had a big impact on it.Tracking.

Tracking and measuring.

Just having a sense because then you can say, I hit the goal. You can make the goals more concrete that way. I'm going to do 10,000 steps a day. My little Fitbit jiggles, and it makes me happy. That's gamification. That jiggle gives me so much joy. But the tracking gives you visibility into how you're doing it. It's important. Then accountability, which you've mentioned a bunch of times, does absolutely the research supports. When someone else you care about, when they're holding you accountable, it matters because it changes the cost-benefit calculus of achieving your goals.

Is there research around that that proves that or is it-Yes, absolutely.

My favorite work… This is in the category of what's called commitment devices. It's a category that economists have been studying for decades because they find them really weird. Economists get really excited when they hear about commitment devices because they're like, These shouldn't exist. It breaks all our theories. A commitment device is when you create some penalty or constraint on yourself. So we're used to the government doing that thing. They put their speed limits. They find you if you're tempted to speed. And we're like, Yeah, that makes sense. But what if you find yourself or penalize your sofa not achieving your goals? That's crazy. Who would ever do that? And yet lots of us do, and it's effective. And someone who's holding you accountable is like creating a penalty because if it's now visible to someone else, whether you've achieved more, you're going to feel shame if you don't. That's the penalty. If it's invisible how you're doing, now you could say also they're going to see the upside. So maybe it's not only a commitment device It means that there's also an opportunity for pride and so on. But we tend to... Losses tend to loom larger than gains to us.

Accountability tends to, I think, be most potent because of the sense that you don't want to let... You don't want to fall down when someone's watching. Commitment devices are generally extremely effective. The most effective ones are actually when you put money on the line. You can put cash down that you will forfeit if you fail to achieve a goal. I love that. And research shows that helps. That works. It works really well.

Putting money down and saying, Okay, I'm going to pay $1,000 to something I don't believe in if I don't accomplish this goal, or if I don't do the steps, at least, to get there.

By a certain time. Exactly. And it's like, wait. That'll incentivize you. You incentivize yourself, which is very counterintuitive. Why am I finding myself? But it works. My favorite study is on smokers who wanted to quit. Half of them are given your standard suite of stuff. Here's ways to quit. The other half are given all that stuff plus a commitment device. You can put money into this account for six months, and it'll disappear if you fail a nicotine or cotinine test in your urine at the end of six months. 30% It was 100% higher quit rate. The group just had the ability to put that money in there.

Now, someone once told me that you pay attention to what you pay for. And so in the coaching world, when you're investing in a book or you're investing in a coach, usually the more the investment in that book or program or coach, the more you want to pay attention to to getting the result. Would that be similar to this study that's like, Okay, if I put $100 in this thing in six months, if I stop smoking, people are like, $100 doesn't But if I put $100,000 in, I'm going to pay attention because that's a lot more money that I don't want to lose.

You know what's really fascinating is it goes back to the very first thing we talked about, which is sunk costs, and the tendency we have not to ignore them. If you buy a book, it's sunk cost. You can't go return it. Well, maybe you can. But in most cases, if you dog ear it a tiny bit, or you're probably not going to return it. So you should ignore it. It's irrecoverable. It doesn't matter. But we don't. That's not how we're wired. And as a result, as a result of wanting to recover that sunk cost, we do work harder when we feel like, Oh, I've invested so much in this.

More money.

Yeah, exactly. So it's a trick. It's a mistake that we do it, but it works. And so let's hook into that and use it to motivate us to achieve more.

So the more at stake you have of your own, whatever, money or time or energy, the more likely you'll achieve that goal or make that change.

Yeah, you can change the cost-benefit calculus moving forward. You can also, if you've invested in the past, then the sunk costs that we tend not to ignore will feel like they should change that. So there's two ways, prospectively and retrospectively. You can put a bunch of money into something, and then you're going to feel guilty if you don't do it. Or you can use these commitment contracts where you literally put money on the line on, say, a website, one of these stick or be-minder that you'll have to forfeit if you don't achieve your goal in the future. They're both tactics that can work for different reasons.

Why do you feel like so many people... Oh, actually, I was going to ask you about this. With people putting penalties on themselves, even if they don't have accountability or it's not a public commitment or something like that, if we say we're going to do something and then we break our word to ourselves, does that shift our identity or does that keep us in a lower-level identity of less confidence, less belief in selves? But actually, when we keep our word, we increase the level of self-esteem and confidence, whether people know about it or not. How does that affect our belief in ourselves or our confidence?

It's a really interesting question. And specifically, you're saying when we fail and it's visible to others versus when we fail and it's invisible, how does that change our confidence?

It's more like when we say we're going to do something and we don't take those actions. And we constantly, I say I'm going to work out five days a week, but I'm going to do one day. And I keep saying, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do this, and then I keep not doing it. How does that affect our belief in ourselves and our confidence when we continue to break our a long word to our self?

Got it. Yeah. The premise of the question is right. It's not good for our confidence to continually fail. We do have a really amazing, what Dan Gilbert of Harvard has called a psychological immune system, where we figure out ways to still end up satisfied and somewhat happier than maybe we would if we took everything at face value so we can bounce back. And I actually think fresh starts and the fact that the fresh start fact exists may be related to the psychological immune system for all the failure that we constantly fail at our goals. Goals are hard to achieve. Most of them we fail at. We have built these ways to stand up again and say, Okay, but this time it's going to be different. It's probably a good thing by and large, but of course, it's not perfect. The more we fail, the more difficult it is for that psychological immune system to win.

What about the more we keep our word to ourselves, do we build more confidence and self-esteem and momentum towards achieving other goals as well, the other way?

Sure. Yes, absolutely. Especially if we're tracking and we can give ourselves that pat on the back, if it's visible to others, the more things that reinforce what we're achieving, I think the better in terms of giving us that boost and confidence. It's interesting There's some new work that's starting to be done on the power of streaks and visible streaks and seeing...

Like momentum.

Psychological momentum and streaks. They do build and they make us feel like, Okay, I don't want to lose what I've achieved and accomplished, and That's very motivating.

In this final section, brain coach and best-selling author of Limitless, Jim Kwik, shares how you can double your learning speed. One of the biggest mistakes people make as we grow is we no longer learn new things. If you're listening to this podcast, it's clear you're a lifelong learner, but increasing the speed at which you learn and improving your memory can really benefit how much value you can hold on to moving forward. There was a model that you gave that I think we should start with. There's a method that you give or a model for how to become limitless. If we don't follow this model, then something's going to be broken in our life.

Isn't that right? Yeah. This model really is a framework for learning anything faster. For people who are listening and watching and they want to learn a language, they want to learn Mandarin, music, martial arts, management, marketing, math. Anything. Any skill. I think if there's one skill to master in the 21st century, it's our ability to learn faster. If there were If there was a genie, and a genie could grant you any one wish, but only one wish, what would you wish for? If it was only one wish, what would you wish for?

Most people would say money or this or that, but you think learning is the key?I.

Think a lot of people go for it.I.

Think being the matrix, downloading the matrix, it's where I could learn jiu-jitsu in a second.Exactly.If I could learn a language in a second, if I could have this skill.

I think the hack a lot of people would do is if it was any one wish, they would wish for more wishes. It would ask for infinite wishes. The equivalent, if I was your learning genie and I could grant you any one wish to learn any subject or any skill, just become a master at it, what's the equivalent of the answer of asking for infinite wishes? It would be learning how to learn. Because if you could learn how to learn, the world is yours, especially today, because nobody who's listening and watching gets paid for their brute strength. It's their brain strength. It's not your muscle power. It's completely your mind power. The challenge is your brain doesn't come with an owner's manual. It's not user-friendly, and that's the reason why I wrote this book. But the limitless model is an explanatory schema, a framework for learning anything faster. Not only that, but really for accessing our human potential. Because I think if there's one infinite limitless resource on planet Earth, it's human capability. There's no limit on our determination. There's no limit to our imagination. There's no limit to our creativity. Yet we're not shown how to be able to access that.

This framework is a three-part framework. What I would offer everyone to do is I love to turn this into a little master class, make it really engaging. Don't listen passively because we don't learn through. The human brain doesn't learn through consumption. It learns through creation and creativity and getting involved in things. I know a lot of us learn faster when we actually roll up our sleeves and do it. I would encourage everybody as they're working out or cleaning the house or whatever they're doing at the same time to try to get involved in this.

I think as an athlete, I can speak to that because for me in school, it's really hard to remember or learn things because I didn't feel like I was participating in a way that worked for me. But as an athlete playing basketball, when a coach would tell me, Okay, I want you to watch this video and then automatically shoot in a certain way with your hand positioned this way and follow through this way, just by watching a video and not actually implementing and practicing it, he would take me out on the court and we would practice it and do it over and over again, and he would correct me. I would learn through muscle memory as opposed to just watching something and then thinking I can do it without actually practicing. Putting it into practice quickly for me is how I learned sports, and it's how I try to apply it in other areas of my life, as opposed to just, I'm going to learn, and then, okay, I know it. I feel like I need to work in it.I.

Feel you.Get dirty, you know what I mean? I I do. I think a lot of people… This is the thing. It's not how smart you are. It's not literally how smart you are. It's how are you smart? It's not how smart you are, or how smart your kids are, or how smart your business partner is. It's how are they smart, or how are you smart? What's the difference? You are smart through experiential learning. In the book, we talk about-How are you smart? Got you. Exactly. It's not how smart somebody is, like their IQ or their intelligence. It's how are they smart? It's always context-dependent. Some people learn. We talk about learning styles in the book, it's like, have you ever been interested? Just like you were saying, you're interested in a topic, but you're not getting it. Because sometimes the way you prefer to learn is different than the way the teacher prefers to teach. It's like your two ships in the night and you pass each other and you don't even realize. There's no connection. You don't even realize the other one is there, and it feels uncomfortable. If I asked everybody as an exercise to take out a piece of paper, I encourage everyone to take notes because I'm going to drop a lot of practical methods.

If you were to write your name first and last on a piece of paper, actually, you could do it right now, first and last. Everyone encourages you to do this. Or imagine you're writing your name first and last on a piece of paper. Then when you're done, I want you to switch hands. In your opposite hand, write below it, write your first and last name with your opposite hand.

I don't even know if it takes me 10 minutes.

While people are doing it, you'll notice when you're doing it with the opposite hand as we're doing it, that's actually pretty good. That if I was to ask you which one is the Which one was easier, first or second? You would say the first was easier. Which one is more comfortable, first or last?The first one.The first one. So not only was it faster, it was easier. And then which one was higher quality? Let's check that out.The first one. Hopefully, the first one is higher quality also as well. Here's the thing. That means the second time, it took longer. The second time, it also was not as comfortable. The second time also, the quality wasn't quite as It's good. Here's the thing. When I'm saying it's how you learn, some people are trying to learn something with the opposite hand. It takes longer, it feels weird, and the quality is not quite as good as opposed to if you're using your dominant hand.

How do we know how to learn with our dominant hand as opposed to the opposite hand.

Yeah, and that's a metaphor for how we like to take in information. Some people like to learn by reading. Some people, they just cannot get through a book, though. They have to listen to that audio or that podcast. Other people need to-Or watch someone lecturing it talking about it. Exactly. We all have different styles, and it's not right or wrong. Now, we can actually improve our ability to read. We actually can improve our ability to listen and apply. If there are areas where we feel weak, this book is a guidebook to be able to level up those areas. You could be more of a whole brain learner also as well. But really, when it comes to accelerated learning, it's not, again, how smart you are, it's how are you smart? That honors us, and it takes the judgment out. Sometimes in school, it's like the top 10 10% get A's, another 10% get B's, and then 80% were like, you and I. It's like we're failing school as opposed to the way school maybe is failing us because school teaches you what to learn, what to focus on, what to think, what to remember, but not how to learn and how to think.It.

Teaches you how to think and learn in one way.

Exactly. When I talk about in the book, I talk about the four supervillions that are holding you back in your in your schooling, in your life is driven by technology, but one of them is digital deduction, where we're depending on technology to tell us what to think. We're not even using the children right now. They're finding that their reasoning abilities, their ability to analyze critical thinking is not as sharp as where it should be because of technology, because technology is doing the thinking for us. Our mind, I'm going to say this repeatedly, is like a muscle. It's use it or lose it. Just like when you have You want to be a personal trainer to make your muscles stronger, more energized, more flexible, more pliable, you want your mental muscles to be stronger, more energized, more pliable, more flexible. Of course. Many people refer to me as a brain coach because what I do is I train your brain because I think we're in the millennium of the mind. It's really about mental fitness, our ability to adapt, our ability to think, our ability to solve problems. This really is everything. When people see me wearing brain shirts all the time or pointing to my brain, the reason why I do that is because what you see, you take care of.

You see your hair, you take care of your hair. You see your skin, you take care of your skin. You see your clothing, you take care of your clothing. You don't see your brain. Exactly. That controls everything. When I point to the brain or on or with their shirt, it's just like people have their emotions on their sleeve. I have my brain on my chest because I want to put it forefront to remind people to love their brain, to care for their brain. Yeah.

I think that's why a lot of people, doctors or nutritionists, are talking about gut health. It's like we can't see it, but we can start to feel rashes or we can start to feel the effects of it. I think it's also heart health is a big thing right now. It's just like the emotional health, self-care, self-love, mental health, and emotional health tie together.

I love your work because you bring that to everybody, to the world, and it's all connected. I talk about in the book, there's this heart intelligence and also your gut, as you mentioned. A lot of people call it your second brain. It's the second highest concentration of of nerve cells. It's connected, too. Sometimes what you eat affects how you think. We know that because of the guests we've had on our shows and everything else that when you eat junk food, which is not really a thing, there's junk and then there's food.

There's sugar and there's food.

Exactly. What you eat matters, especially for your gray matter. I remember in our previous episode we did years ago, I showed people how to memorize the brain foods and all of the best neuroprotective... It's the area of neuronutrition. It's really fascinating that your brain has different nutritional requirements than the rest of your body. But I'm going back to the limitless model. There are three keys to reaching your goals. This is my distinction here because originally, I remember years ago when you prompted me to write this book, you're like, Jim, it's been over two decades. You got to do something. You put something in this book. Because fundamentally, I'm a reading teacher. Somebody has decades. Why I love reading? If somebody has decades, why I love reading, if somebody has decades of experience and they put it into a book like you, and all of a sudden people could read that book in a few days. They could download decades in a day. Readers are leaders. We know that. Reading is to your mind what exercises your body. It's the best mental fitness. The limitless model as an exercise, what I want everyone to do, so it's not hypothetical, because in part of the book, I demystify the seven lies of learning.

There are seven lies that hold you back to learning, and one of them is knowledge is power. We hear that all the time. I've even said it also as well. But when we think about it, is it really true? Is knowledge just knowing something give you power? No, not unless you act on it, not unless you apply it. So knowledge times action equals power. I would encourage everybody as you're listening to this to take immediate action. There are three questions I want you to ask as you're listening to this episode to make it very valuable. I would encourage you to write these down. Three master questions. We were talking about some of the famous actors that I work on before we started filming. Will Smith did the cover endorsement of the book that says, Jim Kwik, it gets the maximum out of me as a human being. I've learned so much from this man, just being so many around clients What have you learned from Will? One of the things is this idea of... We were in Toronto, and I help actors speedread scripts, help them to memorize their lines faster. I mean, you imagine 30 pages of scripts.

There's a lot of lines. I can't remember a sentence. There's a lot There's a lot. Some of them have their strategies. No matter how great somebody is, you know this because you make your life about studying and researching greatness. They always know there's another level, and they get really good at the fundamentals and the basics. But one of the things when we were there, we spent the day together, and it was wintertime in Toronto. They were filming from 6:00 PM to 6:00 AM, which can you imagine?So hard.At night time? That's very difficult. But during the day, we went through an exercise, and I I believe... In there, I talk about how we have 50,000 to 70,000 thoughts a day. These thoughts are controlling our lives. A lot of those thoughts are questions that we ask ourselves. Thinking is that process of asking and answering questions. If people are asking, Is that true? Notice you had to ask a question to define if it's true or not. There's certain questions we ask more than any other question. What? Here's the thing. I talk about dominant questions that you have one, two, three questions that you ask a lot.

I want everyone to think about what your dominant questions are, including you. I'll give you a couple of examples to get you started. For example, one of my friends, we went through this exercise of meditating and writing journaling down. We found her her dominant question is, How do I get people to like me? How do I get people to like me? Now, she asked that question all the time, and you don't know anything about her. You don't know her age, you don't know her background, you don't know what she does for a living, you don't know what she looks like, you don't know where she lives, you don't know anything about her. But you know a lot about her. If you asked yourself, How do I get people to like me hundreds of times a day? What's her personality? What's her personality going to be like? What's her life going to be?

Well, I guess it could be either side of the spectrum. She could be super outgoing and super adventurous to try to get people to be more attracted to her, or she could be super shy and introverted because she's so worried about what people think about her. That's the first thing I thought of, but I'm not sure if that's true.

It's absolutely true. She actually does both of those things. Really? If you ask yourself, How do I get people to like me? Then what are you doing? You're people-pleasing all the time. You're a sycophant. Just-set yes to everything.

People take advantage of you because you're margaring yourself because they're always trying to…

They're making themselves less than, or their personality is never consistent because their personality changes.

The chameleon, the change for people.

Exactly. You know all that about her, and you only know one question she asks herself, and that's one of her dominant questions. I would offer everybody who's listening to this, what do you think your dominant question is? Because questions are the answer. You know this from the work that you do in high performance and greatness, that the questions you ask determine what you focus on. You have part of your brain called the reticular activating system, RAS for short, and it's your filtering system. At any given time, there's a billion stimuli that we could be paying attention to. Primarily, your brain is a deletion device. It's trying to keep information out. Otherwise, you would go crazy if you paid attention to everything. What gets in? For example, years ago, my little sister started sending me emails and postcards and pictures and a photograph of a very specific dog. It was a pug dog. You know those little dogs?Cute little dogs. Exactly.met and black dog, right? Yes, exactly. Very smushy faces. They're very compliant. You could dress them up as ballerinos, and they don't care. I didn't know why. My question was like, Why is she sending me these pictures all the time?

That became a dominant question of the day. Then I realized her birthday was coming up. She's a smart marketer, right? Planting those seeds. Here's the magic, though. I started seeing pug dogs everywhere. I would go to the grocery store, I'd be checking out, and I swear to you, woman's carrying a pug dog at the register. I would be running and jogging in my neighborhood, and somebody's walking six pug dogs. Now, my question for everybody is, did these pug dogs magically appear all of a sudden in the world? No, they were always there, but I wasn't paying attention to them because they weren't important because I wasn't asking that question. Once you ask a question, you start to pay attention to those things, and that focus determines how you feel, determines your behaviors. Primarily, it's so interesting. It's like social media. There's an algorithm to your mind, like there's an algorithm to Facebook and Instagram, that what you engage with the most, you like and you share, you comment, you start seeing more of those things. Just like your mind, what you start engaging with, if you start watching all this news about fear and all the things that are going on, you start paying attention, and your mind just starts focusing.

Automatically, it becomes a a reflection, a reflex.

You start to attract more of the fear and anxiety or worry that's in the world that's being posted.

Very much so. You start to subscribe to whatever that is to receive more of it.Exactly.That's what you're thinking about. Just like on social media, if you start just liking all the cat stuff and everything else, they'll just start feeding you cat stuff. Same thing with negativity and same thing with opportunity also as well. The questions make a difference. The questions are the answers.

What are the two questions that are dominant in your mind over the last five years the most?

For learning because I grew up with the broken brain. Many people know my story from the last episode. When they see me do these demonstrations at Summit Series or it's...Vent.

You and I have...Remembering a thousand per people's names, 10 minutes, all that stuff.

All of that stuff. I say that I don't do this to impress you. I do this to express to you what's possible because the truth is we could all do that and a whole lot more. We just weren't taught. If anything, we were taught a lie that somehow our intelligence is fixed, like our shoe size. But I do it as a demonstration because I grew up with learning difficulties. I had my brain injury when I was five. I fell, had a very bad fall when I was in kindergarten, rushed to the hospital. Before, I was curious and very energized, my parents would say, but then I became very shut down. My superpower growing up was being invisible. It was shrinking because I didn't want the spotlight. I didn't want to be called on. So literally, physiologically, I was always trying to look smaller to protect myself so teachers wouldn't call on me or I wouldn't be bullied or something like that.

I would do that as well, except if I was just a giant in the class. I was always picked on.

For me, I would actually be sitting behind you, and I would be guaranteed no one would be able to see me. But going back to my question, my question became all the time, first of all, when I was nine years old, I was slowing the class down, and the teacher pointed to me and said, That's the boy with a broken brain. That label became my limit. They think about when you're listening to this, what are the labels that we put on ourselves? It's like we're not born. We're born with a blank slate. But But through experience, through expectations of other people, through our environment, we learned that we are limited. The good news is we can unlear it. That's the point of the book. But because I was in the broken state, I would always ask myself, Why am I broken? Why am I the stupid one? I started getting answers of why I'm so stupid. Every time I did badly on a test, I would be like, Oh, because I have the broken brain. If I was in sports, I'd be like, Oh, because I'm the broken one. That became my self-taught. Adults have to be very careful with their external words because they become a child's internal words.

But later, I started to get so frustrated. I started asking, getting curious. When you're curious, you start to ask different questions. I was like, Why is that person so... Why are they so smart? How come I'm studying three times harder and getting less grades than them? I started getting answers. My primary question started... My dominant question ended up being like, How do I make this better? But the three questions that I focus on, and let me tell you first what Will's is, Will Smith, one of his dominant questions when we went through this exercise is, How do I make this moment even more magical? How do I make this moment even more magical? It used to be-In every moment or an acting moment?This moment.In every moment. Any moment. It shows up in his life because later that night when we're filming, it was 2:00 in the morning, and his family, we're all outside for the superhero movie that many people know of. It was really cold because it was in Toronto and it was wintertime, and we're all just waiting and just waiting and waiting and waiting. Because people think that, and you meet all these people all the time on your show and they think it's so glamorous.

No, it's hard to up and wait. Exactly. I asked him this question because I believe genius leaves clues. I was like, How do you prepare? How do you get ready? When the director, you're just sitting here for hours and then the director calls in you. How do you get ready? He was like, Jim, I don't have to get I stay ready. I'm like, Wow, that's good to be Will Smith.

It's hard to stay ready for six hours away.

Exactly. But that's just who he is because I believe the life you live are the lessons you teach. The life you live are the lessons you teach others. Going back to his dominant question, his family was there also at the same time visiting the set from West Philly, you know the song, and we're all outside and shivering. When he wasn't shooting, he would bring us blankets. He would make hot chocolate it and bring it to us. He would crack jokes. He would live that dominant question because the life he lived, he was like, How do I make this moment even more magical? Now, before, it was like, How do I make this moment magical? Then we played with it like, Even more magical, presuming it is already magical and amazing. These questions we ask are very important. Now, there are three questions when I said there's turning knowledge into power that I want everyone to obsess about. I mean, this will make you a master. If you get it, this is it. Three questions to turn knowledge into power His knowledge alone is potential power. Number one, how can I use this? When you're listening to this podcast moving forward, every time you listen to it, I want you to ask yourself, How can I use this?

Get obsessed about this. Even write it down. This is where your mind can be very creative because in here I teach a power of note-taking because people don't realize this. When you listen to a podcast or you go to a summit or an event or have a great conversation with somebody, within two days, 80% of it is gone. We forget it. They call it the forgetting curve. One of the ways to retain it is by taking notes, exactly what you're doing. Now, I encourage people to take notes a very specific way is to put a line right down the page. On the left side of the page, I want you to take notes, and on the right side, I want you to make notes. On the left side of the page, you're taking notes. You're capturing. So they're going to list the quotes. You're capturing information. You're like, This is how Jim remembers his name. This is how Jim reads a book a day or whatever it is. On the left side, you're capturing, but on the right side, you're creating. Now, that's a subtle difference. On the left side, you're note taking. On the right side, you're note making.

What's the difference? Again, on the left side, you're taking notes. You're writing down the quotes and the strategies, the processes. But on your right side, what you're doing, the right side, creativity, instead of your mind being distracted when you're listening, have it be distracted and focused on, How can I use this? On the right side is where you're writing your impressions of what you're learning. How can I use this? Another great question, second dominant question I would ask is not only how can I use it because you come up with all these answers, just like you start seeing pug dogs everywhere. It's like, Oh, this is how I could use this in my relationship. This is how I could use it in my career. Second question I would ask is, Why must I use this? Why must I use this? We know one of the people that endorsed my book, he's on your show, is Simon Sinek. One of my favorite books, I'm going to mention a lot of books, including your own, his is Star with why. Why must I use this? Once you have all these ideas of how can I use this, why must I use this?

Because if you don't have the reasons, you won't get the results.

You won't care enough about it.

Exactly. Reasons reap results. I'm going to give a lot of people a lot of quickisms here because it goes from your head to your heart to your hands. You could affirm things in your head all day, set goals in your head all day. But if you're not acting with your hands, you're procrastinating, putting things off, check in with your second age, which is your heart, which are the emotions. Because we are not logical, we are biological. Dopamine, oxytocin, serotonin, endorphins. This chemical soup drives us to act. Just like people don't biologically, they don't fall in love, logically, they do these things emotionally. So find your emotions. In this book, we really uncover and I decode motivation. Not motivation getting hyped up and dancing on chairs and then the next day not changing. We figured out this formula of sustainable motivation in this book. But the second question is, go back to, why must I use this? Because if you don't have the why, you won't do the what. Then finally, the third question. First question, how can I use this? Write all the answers down. Think about that. Second question, why must I use it?

It gives you the energy and the fuel and the drive to do it. Finally, When will I use this? When will I use this? Because we know that one of the most important performance productivity tools that we have is our calendar. If If it's not in our calendar, it just doesn't get done. How many people will go? You put doctor's appointments there, you put PTA meetings, you put meetings with your investor there. But are you scheduling your workout? Are you scheduling your meditation time? Are you scheduling your journal or your white space just so you can be a creative thinker. And if we don't write it down, it comes at the end, and then you just never get to it. And so those are the three dominant questions that you want to ask to take knowledge and turn them into power. So as you're going through this, ask those questions, you'll get better answers, and you'll learn it deeper. It'll deepen into your nervous system so much more.

Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.