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DISCIPLINE
MARK MANSON
MARKMANSON.NET
© 2019
Mark Manson
markmanson.net 2
IF SELF-DISCIPLINE FEELS DIFFICULT, THEN
YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG
When I was in college, there were some people on the internet who
claimed that you could train yourself to sleep as little as two hours per
day. Keep in mind, this was back in the early 2000s when we all still
believed random shit we read on the internet.
Supposedly.
The scheme was called “The Uberman Sleep Schedule,” and here’s how
you did it:
● The idea of the Uberman Sleep Schedule was that if you took
20-minute naps, every four hours, around the clock, for days and
weeks on end, you would “train” your brain to fall into REM
sleep instantly the moment you laid down. Then, once your REM
sleep was over, you would feel rested and restored for the next
3-4 hours.
1
Turns out this is bullshit. Who would have thought?
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● Therefore, the Uberman Sleep Schedule became this kind of
decathlon of willpower among internet self-help people—an
ultimate test of one’s self-discipline with the ultimate pay-off: an
extra 20-30% of productive waking hours per day, every day for
the rest for your life. That’s like having an extra two days each
week, or an extra three-and-a-half months per year. That’s
insane! Over the course of one’s life, that’s over a decade of extra
waking hours. Imagine everything you could accomplish with an
extra decade of life, all while everyone else is asleep.
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You have probably pulled an all-nighter before. Not sleeping for one
night is not that difficult. Especially if there are deadlines and/or
drugs involved.
What’s difficult are the second and third and fourth nights. Extreme
sleep deprivation is a crash course on how fragile our mind actually is.
By day three, you will start falling asleep standing up. You will doze off
while walking down the street in broad daylight. You forget basic facts
like your mother’s name or whether you had eaten that day, or—fuck,
what day is it?
By day four you become delirious, imagining that people are speaking
to you when they’re not, believing that you’re writing an email when
you’re not, and then discovering that you don’t even remember who
you were supposed to be emailing.
In the end, I could never make it through the fourth day. Each time I
failed, I felt intense disappointment at my own lack of willpower. I
believed this was something I should be able to do.
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sleep deprive myself for weeks on end, then what the fuck, Mark? Get
your shit together!
***
Chances are, at some point in your life, you’ve tried to change your
behavior through sheer willpower. And chances are, you also failed
miserably. Don’t feel bad! This is what happens most of the time.
But this isn’t true. Because, if you actually know anybody like this,
you’ll notice something really frightening about them: they actually
enjoy it.2
The problem is that willpower works like a muscle, if you work it too
hard, it becomes fatigued and gives out. The first week committing to a
new diet, or a new workout regimen, or a new morning routine, things
2
See: Tom Brady.
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go great. But by the second or third week, you’re back to your old
late-night, cheeto-loving ways.
The same way you can’t just walk into a gym for the first time and lift
500 pounds, you can’t just start waking up at 4 AM on a dime, much
less do something ridiculous like an Uberman sleep schedule. To have
a chance of success, your willpower must be trained steadily over a
long period of time.
So, which came first? What should we do? How do we start? Or, more
importantly, where the fuck is the Ben and Jerry’s?
We do what feels good and we avoid what feels bad. And the only way
we can ever NOT do what feels good, and do what feels bad instead, is
through a temporary boost of willpower—to deny ourselves our desires
and feelings and instead do what was “right.”
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yourself any pleasure, but you also had to show your willingness to
hurt yourself.
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who can say no to the taco is a good person. The person who can’t is a
failure of a human being.
If we could get away with it, we would eat, fuck, or kill pretty much
anything or anyone within a ten-meter vicinity. So the great religious
leaders and philosophers and kings throughout history preached a
concept of virtue that involved suppressing our feelings in favor of
rationality and denying our impulses in favor of developing willpower.
And the classic approach works! …kind of. Well, okay, while it makes a
more stable society, it also totally fucks us up individually.
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The brain likes sex. That’s because a) sex feels awesome, and b) we’re
biologically evolved to crave it. Pretty self-explanatory.
You were punished for wanting it, and therefore, you have a lot of
conflicted feelings around sex: it sounds amazing but is also scary; it
feels right but also somehow so, so wrong. As a result, you still want
sex, but you also drag around a lot of guilt and anxiety and doubt
about yourself.
But indulgence doesn’t really resolve the tension. It just kicks the can
down the road. Because after you put the cock rings away and the
hookers have gone home, the shame and guilt come back. And they
come back with a vengeance.
Well, the only other option to escape that internal tension is to numb
it. To distract oneself from the tension by finding some larger, more
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palatable tension. Alcohol is a common one. Partying and drugs, of
course. Watching 14 hours of television each day can be another
option. Or just eating yourself half to death.
But self-denial comes easy when, deep down, you fucking hate
yourself.
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Similarly, the businessman who transmutes his shame into stellar
work at the office eventually develops shame about his productivity to
the point where he literally can’t go home. He’s terrified to do it. Any
non-productive minute feels like an untenable failure. And while the
rest of his life falls apart around him, he’s only worrying about
spreadsheets and quarterly numbers.
This is why the most hardcore, uncompromising people are usually the
ones who are most compromised. It’s why the most fundamentalist
religious leaders who rail against the immorality of the world are
always the same leaders who are ordering fuckboys off Craigslist.3 It’s
why the most “spiritually enlightened” gurus are also the ones
blackmailing and extorting their followers. It’s why the politicians
most vocal about party loyalty and patriotism are always the ones
shooting up meth in the airport bathroom. They are running away
from their demons. And one way to do that is to create shinier, more
socially acceptable demons.
Here’s the problem with all this—and it’s so obvious once you hear it, I
can’t believe we have to say it. You can will yourself to go to the gym if
you don’t feel like it for a few days. But unless the gym ends up feeling
3
This isn’t to say there’s anything wrong with finding fuckboys on Craigslist. It’s the hypocrisy that is the
problem. I actually respect Craigslist fuckboys way more than any fundamentalist religious leaders.
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good in some way, you will eventually lose motivation, run out of
willpower and stop going.
You can will yourself to stop drinking for a day or a week, but unless
you feel the reward of not drinking, then you will eventually go back to
it.
But nothing’s worked. Not a day goes by that you don’t down about a
thousand calories of creamy goodness.
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And that’s your first problem. Step one to self-discipline is to de-link
your personal failings from moral failings.
You have to accept that you cave to indulgence and that this doesn’t
necessarily make you a horrible person. We all cave to indulgence in
some shape or form. We all harbor shame. We all fail to reign in our
impulses. And we all like a good fucking bowl of ice cream from time
to time.
● “Other people are good at this, but I’m not, because I’m a
horrible person…”
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Here’s the thing: there’s a sick sort of comfort that comes from these
self-judgments. That’s because they relieve us of the responsibility for
our own actions. If I decide that I can’t give up ice cream because I’m a
horrible person—that “horrible person-ness” precludes my ability to
change or improve in the future—therefore, it’s technically out of my
hands, isn’t it? It implies that there’s nothing I can do about my
cravings or compulsions, so fuck it, why try?
There’s a kind of fear and anxiety that comes when we relinquish our
belief in our own horribleness. We actually resist accepting ourselves
because the responsibility is scary. Because it suggests that not only
are we capable of change in the future (and change is always scary) but
that we have perhaps wasted much of our past. And that never feels
good either. In fact, another little trap is when people accept that
they’re not a horrible person—but then decide that they are a horrible
person for not realizing that years ago!
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feel bad doesn’t mean we are bad—this opens us up to some new
perspectives.
Find it. Address it. And most importantly: accept it. Find that deep,
dark ugly part of yourself. Confront it, head on, allowing yourself to
feel all the awful, icky emotions that come with it. Then accept that
this is a part of you and it’s never going away. And that’s fine. You can
work with this, rather than against it.
And here’s where the magic happens. When you stop feeling awful
about yourself, two things happen:
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And, incredibly, that tub of ice cream no longer feels good. It’s no
longer scratching some internal itch. Instead, it makes you feel sick
and bloated and gross.
Similarly, exercising no longer feels like this impossible task that you’ll
never be up for. On the contrary, it replenishes and enhances you. And
those good feelings start showing up that make it feel effortless.
***
Here’s one way to do this: call up your best friend and tell them to
come over. Take out your checkbook. Write a check for $2,000 to
them, sign it, and give it to them. Then tell them that if you ever eat ice
cream again, they can cash it.
Done.
Eating ice cream will now cause a much greater emotional problem
than the one it solves. And, as if by magic, refraining from eating ice
cream will begin to feel really fucking good.
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You can also do this through positive reinforcement: find ways to
reward yourself for doing the correct behavior. Research shows that
this is actually how new habits are formed: you do the desired
behavior and then reward yourself for it.
You eat kale instead of smoking crack because it feels good to eat the
kale and feels bad to smoke crack.
You stop lying because it feels worse to lie than to say an important
truth.
It’s not that the pain goes away. No, the pain is still there. It’s just that
the pain now has meaning. It has a purpose. And that makes all the
difference. You work with the pain rather than against it. You pursue it
rather than run from it. And with every pursuit, you get stronger and
healthier and happier.
And eventually, from the outside, it will look as though you’re putting
forth monumental effort, that you have this endless reservoir of
willpower.
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Yet, to you, it will feel like nothing at all.
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Let’s pretend for a moment that you have decided that you want to
become rich.
Maybe you’re sick of your student loan debt. Maybe you’re sick of
eating frozen waffles for dinner every night. Maybe you recently
became overwhelmingly inspired by your favorite rapper, 50 Cent, and
like him, you also want to ‘Get Rich or Die Trying’ …and then go
bankrupt a few years later.
Whatever the reasoning is, you’ve decided that the new you is going to
be a Rolls-Royce-driving, bikini-pool-party throwing,
Dom-Perignon-chugging motherfucker.
Now, if you approached trying to get rich like most people do, here’s
how you would conceptualize it:
● You say “fuck it” and buy a 60-inch flat screen TV. Ahh, that feels
better.
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That’s how most people try to do it. And if you haven’t noticed, most
people aren’t rich. In fact, most people are quite the opposite. This is
not a coincidence.
These are the two mindsets of building wealth. People who stay poor
or middle class see money as something to be spent. People who
become rich see money as something to be invested.
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Get rich or die trying? Looks like you’re going to die trying.
You can call it the “spending mindset” versus the “investing mindset.”
One gets you rich and one keeps you treading water, always fighting to
keep your face above the surface.4
GOALS VS HABITS
Let’s examine a common goal people have: “I want to lose 20 lbs and
look sexy for summer.”
4
If you want this concept explained to you like you’re five years old, check out the popular book, Rich
Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki.
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1st, sign up for the gym on January 2nd, force yourself to go 5-6 times
over the ensuing months mostly out of guilt because you spent so
much damn money and you feel like you should use it.
But you have no idea what you’re doing. And my god, look at all of the
skinny sweaty people here. Wow, I feel so lazy just watching them. Can
this treadmill go any slower? I’m tired. I want a burger. Or maybe ice
cream. Or maybe an ice cream burger.
The real reason you go to the gym: so you can eat a burger made out of ice cream.
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The problems with the conventional pursuit of goals in life (i.e., new
year’s resolutions) are well-documented at this point:
That’s all true. But I’m here to suggest something else: “Lose 20 lbs by
summer” is a shitty goal to begin with.
That’s because it’s borne from the same spending mindset that keeps
people broke—or in this case, keeps them overweight. They view life in
the overly-simplistic terms of “Do a lot of X, eventually get Y.”
Just like forcing yourself to work and save for 20 years is unlikely to
get you rich, forcing yourself to go to the gym dozens of times is
unlikely to make you lose much weight and keep it off.
Goals like this require an intense amount of effort, yet they never seem
to “stick.” Eventually, your energy and discipline run out and you fall
right back to the same person you were, except now you feel defeated.
That’s because it’s better to invest your limited focus and energy on
building habits rather than specific goals. Just like you want to take
the money you earn and put it to work for you, you want to take the
5
Ordóñez, L. D., Schweitzer, M. E., Galinsky, A. D., & Bazerman, M. H. (2009). Goals Gone Wild: The
Systematic Side Effects of Overprescribing Goal Setting. The Academy of Management Perspectives,
23(1), 6–16.
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effort you expend in changing yourself and put it to work changing you
as well.
People usually don’t focus on habits because goals sound much sexier
in our minds. They feel more motivating in the moment when we think
about them. There’s a clear image of a certain result in our head and
that gets us excited.
Habits, on the other hand, don’t sound as sexy in our heads. They’re
long-term and repetitive, which makes them seem boring. And there’s
no clear image one can imagine for “going to the gym every morning
for a year” or “only drinking alcohol on weekends.”
You don’t get this rush of inspiration imagining yourself eating salad
for lunch every day. You don’t lay in bed at night fantasizing about
flossing every morning.
Goals are a one-time bargain. They are the spending mindset. “I will
spend X amount of energy to receive Y reward.”
This is why so many people who lose weight end up gaining it back
(and then some). They focus on singular goals in life rather than
developing underlying habits. So when their energy and discipline
runs out (and it always does because willpower, as we’ve seen, is
limited) they balloon back to their original selves.
With habits, on the other hand, there’s no single endpoint that must
be reached. The only goal of habits is that the goal is never over, it’s a
simple daily or weekly repetition that one does until muscle memory
and brain chemistry kick in and you’re now performing the desired
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action on autopilot. With goals, every day you go back to the gym feels
harder. With habits, after a while, it feels harder to not go to the gym
than it does to go.
Instead, I will look at the habits that underlie that goal, that would
make that goal an inevitability—eating better, walking more often
instead of taking an Uber, developing a workout plan—and then focus
on those. The weight loss then naturally occurs as a side effect.
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HOW HABITS WORK
This cue then triggers your desire to perform the habituated behavior.
Then you smoke, and your brain rewards you – you feel more relaxed,
calmer (and of course, the nicotine helps as well).
6
Verplanken, B., & Melkevik, O. (2008). Predicting habit: The case of physical exercise. Psychology of
Sport and Exercise, 9(1), 15–26.
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willpower to consciously create and/or reorganizing the cues in our
environment that trigger those habits.
So, for example, let’s say you want to start working out on a regular
basis. Instead of just focusing on developing the habit of “working
out,” focus on developing a routine around initiating a workout. This
may just seem like a subtle difference, but it’s actually huge.
After a while, you’ll start to notice that when you get home from work
(environmental cue/trigger), it takes little to no effort to go to your
room, throw on your workout clothes, and head to the gym (habitual
response). You’ll even start to look forward to it, and maybe even feel
like something in your life is off when you don’t work out. And that’s
the power of habit.
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Whatever you do, be sure to incorporate a healthy reward into your
habit routine.
HOW TO MAKE A HABIT STICK
Many people start out with good intentions and a strong desire to
develop healthy habits only to slip back into their old, bad-habit ways.
Studies have identified several factors that contribute to forming and
keeping a lifestyle with healthy habits.
So, educating yourself by reading something like this gives you a leg
up on establishing healthy habits in your life. You’re already on your
way.
Another big factor is how you perceive the habit you want to build. If
the habit seems impossible, then it will feel harder. If it seems easier,
then it will be easier.
For example, if you want to lose weight and you decide that you want
to do it by working out for 90 minutes per day, six days per week, that
is going to feel like a gigantic and daunting task. Because it feels
gigantic and daunting, you’re far more likely to give up. Whereas if you
decide to lose weight by walking for 20 minutes after dinner each
night (note: the dinner is your cue), then it feels very easy to
accomplish, and therefore it is.
7
Lally, P., Chipperfield, A., & Wardle, J. (2008). Healthy habits: efficacy of simple advice on weight
control based on a habit-formation model. International Journal of Obesity, 32(4), 700–707.
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The beautiful thing is that once you’ve adopted the “easy mode”
version of your desired habit, you can always amp it up afterward. For
example, if you walk for 20 minutes after dinner each night for a
month, then it won’t sound so bad when you decide, “Hey, I’ll walk for
45 minutes now.” Then you can try out a little bit of running. Then you
can add calisthenics and plyometrics, and before you know it, you’re
working out for 90 minutes per day, six days per week.
The key is to start small. Set the bar low. Seriously. If you suffer from
chronic low self-efficacy and low self-esteem, you have to start where
you are.
Don’t expect the quantum leap, at least not at first. I know someone
who lost a lot of weight (almost 80 lbs) over a 2-year period. He was
running marathons by the time he was in shape, but you know how he
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started out? Four minutes a day on the exercise bike. That’s all he
could do at first, but he did it every single day and increased his
workout as he lost more weight and gained more confidence.
For example, let’s say you’ve decided your diet really sucks and want
to eat healthier. Good for you. Now, if you’re like most people
(including me), you know it’s hard to eat a healthy diet consistently.
We’ve already partly discussed why this is: when your willpower is
drained, you cave to temptation pretty easily.
So you know ahead of time that you will be faced with temptations and
that it’s highly likely you’ll give in to said temptations from time to
time. Simply making a plan ahead of time to head off these
temptations will greatly increase the likelihood that you do just that.
In this case, I’d recommend allowing yourself a “cheat day” for one or
8
Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American
Psychologist, 54(7), 493.
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two meals a week where you get to pig out on some not-so-healthy
food.
You might need to change your strategies as you learn more about the
way you react to various hurdles and temptations that arise. But the
point is to anticipate the problems you’re likely to run into and have a
plan to deal with them ahead of time. You know yourself better than
anyone else, so be honest, set realistic expectations, and find a way
that works for you.
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know your limitations and weaknesses; then work to eliminate
them at your own pace.
For instance, quitting smoking is hard. But some data suggests that
taking up some form of exercise such as jogging or biking can make it
easier for someone to quit (probably because they’re hacking up a lung
the whole time).
9
Duhigg, C. (2012). The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Random House
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And in case you were bad at math, here’s a quick example of the
difference between linear gains and exponential gains over the
long-run:
Notice the blue line doesn’t just increase faster, but the rate at which it increases is also
increasing.
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have higher or lower interest rates, therefore making some habits far
better initial investments of your energy and discipline than others.
For example, aside from being fun, getting really good at a computer
game like Starcraft has a really poor rate of return on quality of life per
time and energy spent. Other than maybe developing some basic
problem-solving skills and learning how to verbally abuse anonymous
teenage boys on the internet, the habits gained will fail to translate
over to improving other areas of your life.
On the other hand, a habit like lifting weights has an extremely high
rate of return.
Getting stronger will make you more fit, give you more energy,
increase your focus and mental performance, reduce the effects of
aging, raise your metabolism and help your body process food better,
and so on. Ironically, lifting weights would probably make you a better
Starcraft player, whereas the opposite is definitely not true.
Therefore, when setting out to drastically change your life, some form
of exercise like lifting weights is likely to be one of the most efficient
places to start.11
10
Trust me, I spent most of my teenage years trying.
11
That goes for you too ladies. You’ll burn more fat and get far more toned than by doing cardio alone.
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SETTING NEW MONTH’S RESOLUTIONS
Another reason why typical New Year’s Resolutions suck is because of
the time horizon. If I say something like, “I want to write another book
this year,” it becomes that much easier for me to put off starting the
goal until June, July, or whenever, at which point it becomes almost
entirely unfeasible.12
Pick a habit you want to adopt and then do it every day for 30 days.
It’s just 30 days. Anybody can do something for 30 days.
Once you do it, it should begin to feel automatic and you can then start
adding more depth or knowledge to work into the habit, or you can
move on to another habit (more on this below).
12
It’s probably no coincidence that November is the designated ‘Write a Novel Month’.
13
So apparently this research is up for debate. There are some studies showing that it can take as long as
60 or 80 days to “install” a habit. Either way, the principle is the same. One day at a time. One action at a
time.
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then deciding to work 120 hour work weeks until you get there. It is
almost certainly going to make you miserable and burn you out.
And even if you do get there, like a person who wins the lottery and
immediately spends it all, you’re guaranteed to lose it soon after.
We’ve also seen that some habits scale more exponentially than
others—i.e., some habits provide higher rates of return because they
provide benefits that then make adopting subsequent habits easier.
Therefore, it makes sense to use your energy to develop habits with the
highest rate of return first, and then move on to other desired habits
later.
So what are the life habits that give you the best bang for your
psychological buck?
After a lot of research and thought, I’ve come up with the six
fundamental habits below. These are the habits I believe to be the
most effective use of your limited time, energy, and discipline when
starting out. Some will probably be obvious to you (we’ve already
discussed one). Some will not. A couple may even surprise you.
1. EXERCISE
Aside from making you look super sexy and preventing obesity,
exercise greatly reduces the risk of a bunch of things that can kill you:
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heart disease, stroke, and a smattering of various types of cancer.14 It
also improves your mood, gives you more energy, improves the quality
of your sleep, your sex life, and some evidence indicates it even
improves concentration and learning.15
Adoption Strategy: The crazy thing about exercise is that just about
everyone overestimates the amount of effort required to get results.
They assume that you have to join a fancy gym, spend a ton of money
14
Warburton, D. E. R., Nicol, C. W., & Bredin, S. S. D. (2006). Health benefits of physical activity: the
evidence. Canadian Medical Association Journal, 174(6), 801–809.
15
Guiney, H., & Machado, L. (2013). Benefits of regular aerobic exercise for executive functioning in
healthy populations. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 20(1), 73–86.
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on a fancy pants personal trainer, and do a bunch of fancy exercises
with odd looking rubber balls and mats.
One thing he told me last year that struck me was that one of the best
things he did was deciding to just exercise every day, no matter what.
Obviously, he’d prefer to hit the gym and get a big, structured workout
in.
But on days where he wasn’t feeling well, or when he was traveling for
work, he still made a point to get some basic exercise in. Even if it was
just push-ups on the floor or a quick jog up a flight of stairs a dozen
times. The goal here is to just always show up. Worry about perfection
later.
16
Rosenkilde, M. (2012) Body fat loss and compensatory mechanisms in response to different doses of
aerobic exercise–a randomized controlled trial in overweight sedentary males. American Journal of
Physiology.
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So start simple. Challenge yourself to do some really basic exercises
each day. Do it for 30 days. Then after the habit is instilled in you,
worry about constructing a super sexy workout routine. Even if it’s just
walking or doing some body weight exercises in your bedroom. Do a
little every day.
2. COOKING
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The fact is, most people don’t eat well. Or at least, they develop some
terrible food habits because they’re not capable of controlling what
and when they eat. They either have such little time or little knowledge
that they just settle for whatever is quick and easy, usually junk food.
Eating well, much like exercise, sweeps the board in terms of health
and lifestyle benefits: better energy, better cardiovascular health,
lower risk of obesity, diabetes, various cancers, heart disease and other
bad things that kill you,17 more energy, more focus, better moods
(goodbye sugar highs and crashes), better sleep and sex life.18 The
benefits are even more pronounced in kids.19
You can get the same general life gains from eating well as you would
from exercising, but on top of that, being a bitching cook can open up
cool social opportunities, a greater appreciation for fine food and/or
wine, and saving a lot of money by not eating out all the time.
I’ve shown my food a lot of love, but the love has been based on
superficial pleasures and compulsion, not on a genuine desire for
building something healthy together.
17
Amine, E., Baba, N., Belhadj, M., Deurenbery-Yap, M., Djazayery, A., Forrester, T., et al. (2002). Diet,
nutrition and the prevention of chronic diseases: report of a Joint WHO/FAO Expert Consultation. World
Health Organization.
18
Rogers, P. J. (2001). A healthy body, a healthy mind: long-term impact of diet on mood and cognitive
function. Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 60(01), 135–143.
19
Bellisle, F. (2004). Effects of diet on behaviour and cognition in children. British Journal of Nutrition,
92(S2), S227–S232.
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But as they say, life caught up with me.
Aside from just getting older, a number of major life events hit me all
in succession, only to be followed by a series of minor and unexpected
health problems.
For someone who has lived on his own for 13 years, it’s kind of
amazing that I still can’t even cook myself an egg. I’ve essentially lived
off of snacks, take-out, and restaurants for the past decade.
And restaurants? Well, let’s just say that even the restaurants that
serve healthy food aren’t very healthy. A restaurant’s primary interest
is giving you an enjoyable experience and a sense that you got your
money’s worth, not making sure you don’t die of a heart attack. So
even though you don’t see it there, heaps of salt, sugar, and other crap
are almost always on the menu.
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same 1-2 organic restaurants every single day for the next year (and
spend half of what I earn in a year to do so), my only other option is to
learn to cook.
So there are some green leafy things, and these pepper-type things and then some meat-looking stuff
that’s cooked in a thing with heat under it—am I getting this right?
Another focus will be not only finding healthy recipes that I enjoy
eating, but that I enjoy making. My little experience from cooking in
the past has been miserable. Probably because I was trying to cook
stuff I had no business trying to cook and had no idea what I was
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doing. This time, I will start simple, and gradually work my way up in
a way that’s both enjoyable and satisfying.
3. MEDITATION
But truth be told, despite what you would think, it’s incredibly hard to
sit on a pillow and think about nothing for more than a few seconds.
You get bored and fidgety, and if you’re by yourself it’s incredibly hard
to get yourself to stay there for more than a few minutes. Therefore, I
20
Zeidan, F., Johnson, S. K., Diamond, B. J., David, Z., & Goolkasian, P. (2010). Mindfulness meditation
improves cognition: Evidence of brief mental training. Consciousness and Cognition, 19(2), 597–605.
21
Farb, N. A. S., Segal, Z. V., Mayberg, H., Bean, J., McKeon, D., Fatima, Z., & Anderson, A. K. (2007).
Attending to the present: mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference. Social
Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2(4), 313–322.
22
Morone, N. E., Lynch, C. P., Iii, V. J. L., Liebe, K., & Greco, C. M. (2012). Mindfulness to Reduce
Psychosocial Stress. Mindfulness, 3(1), 22–29.
23
Nagendra, R. P., Maruthai, N., & Kutty, B. M. (2012). Meditation and Its Regulatory Role on Sleep.
Frontiers in Neurology, 3.
24
Chambers, R., Gullone, E., & Allen, N. B. (2009). Mindful emotion regulation: An integrative review.
Clinical Psychology Review, 29(6), 560–572.
25
Mascaro, J. S., Rilling, J. K., Negi, L. T., & Raison, C. L. (2013). Compassion meditation enhances
empathic accuracy and related neural activity. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 8(1), 48–55.
26
Chen, K. W., Berger, C. C., Manheimer, E., Forde, D., Magidson, J., Dachman, L., & Lejuez, C. W.
(2012). Meditative Therapies for Reducing Anxiety: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of
Randomized Controlled Trials. Depression and Anxiety, 29(7), 545–562.
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often recommend people find a local group or class. There are often
free ones in major cities. It’s also a nice way to meet people. Then,
once you get the hang of it, try it on your own. Start with one minute
per day and slowly work up. Do it for 30 days until you have a regular
practice going.
4. READING
Benefits: If you’re still reading this and don’t want to stab a spoon
into your eyes, then that means you probably already enjoy reading.
Which means I probably don’t have to tell you that reading is fucking
magical. It’s the only thing in the world that allows you to come and
live inside my brain for a little while, see what it sees, feel what it feels,
and then leave again.
Some historians believe that the written word, and the ability for
people to read the written word (i.e., literacy) is essentially the basis
for civilization.27 Without the ability to feel and see each other’s
thoughts (or feel and see the thoughts and feelings of people from
generations past), we would have no sense of cultural identity, and far
less empathy.
And many studies suggest that people who read regularly are far more
empathetic. They care about other people more. They relate and
respond to others better.28 People who read regularly are also just
smarter, better informed, and more knowledgeable about the world.
This is why when Warren Buffett was once asked the best thing for
young people to invest in for their future, he replied with “knowledge.”
He said that money comes and goes, people come and go, but what
27
See Chapter 3 in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker and
Debt: The First 5,000 Years by David Graeber for more discussion on this idea.
28
Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind. Science,
342(6156), 377–380.
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you know never leaves you. He said that even in his 80s, he was
earning returns on knowledge and information he picked up in his
20s.
When developing a reading habit, start with what seems easy and
exciting to you, then slowly branch out.
Here’s another reading tip: if you aren’t enjoying a book, stop reading
it.
I meet so many people who hate a book they’re reading, yet they
begrudgingly drag themselves back to it over and over again because
they feel bad if they don’t finish. They feel guilty or are afraid it means
they’re stupid. Sometimes they say that because they’ve read this far,
they might as well finish the whole thing.29 This is entirely irrational
and crazy. You wouldn’t keep watching a TV show you don’t like. You
wouldn’t eat an entire plate of food you don’t like. So why the hell are
you trying to read a book you don’t like?
29
In gambling, this behavior is known as the sunk cost fallacy.
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5. WRITING
If reading allows you to inhabit other people’s minds for a brief period
of time, learning to write well is like cleaning your house before the
guests come over—it forces you to learn how to structure your
thoughts more coherently, string together rational arguments, and tell
stories in cogent and insightful ways. But not only that, it makes youa
better and more insightful thinker. As Flannery O’Connor said, “I
don’t know what I think until I write it down.”
30
Ullrich, P. M., & Lutgendorf, S. K. (2002). Journaling about stressful events: Effects of cognitive
processing and emotional expression. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 24(3), 244–250.
31
There is some evidence that writing things out by hand is better for you and helps you learn quicker. But
that’s so 20th century.
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Hey, remember pen and paper?
The important thing here is to not limit yourself. Use writing as a tool
of self-discovery; write your feelings, ideas, fantasies. And if you feel
like going on a tangent about calculus problems that stumped you, do
that too.
If you get ballsy, you can even start a blog at a site like WordPress or
Medium and go public with your ideas.
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6. SOCIALIZING
This hit me this past year. After living nomadically for many years, I
returned to the United States to live there for the first time since 2010.
And much to my chagrin, I realized that almost all of my old friends
had either a) fallen out of contact with one another, or b) moved to
completely separate corners of the country.
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took a very real and uncomfortable punch to the gut this past year.
Much like my health issues, it was a problem that I was not
accustomed to dealing with and so it hit me unexpectedly.
Most of the time it was touching base with some friends who I had
kind of lost touch with. Other times it was reaching out and taking a
chance with getting to know someone whom I barely knew. Other
times it was going out and meeting somebody new, maybe at a party or
a conference or being introduced through a friend.
And amazingly, that was enough. That’s really all it took. One person a
day. Like a computer rebooting, my social life whirred back to life. And
I became much happier for it.
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SOME CLOSING THOUGHTS
There seems to be a bias in the human circuitry that underestimates
what it takes to accomplish really big goals in life and overestimates
the effort required to take on a series of small goals.
If you’ve enjoyed this post and would like to learn more about the nuts
and bolts of adopting habits, how to get started and motivate yourself
for change, please consider putting your email in the box below. It’s a
free PDF on Habit building and the science of self-discipline. It can
hopefully help you make this year a great year.
And if you’re really serious about getting your life together, check out
my course on building a better life.
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