SELF-

DISCIPLINE

MARK MANSON
MARKMANSON.NET

© 2022

Mark Manson
 Self-Discipline

Part 1:
How Self-Discipline Works

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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.

Here’s how the story went: There was a hyper-productive sleep

schedule that had been discovered by military scientists. They
were testing the limits of sleep deprivation on soldiers and made
this startling discovery.

Supposedly, great historical figures like Napoleon and Da Vinci and

Tesla followed the same sleep schedule and it’s why they were so
productive and influential in history. Supposedly, anybody (i.e., you
and me) could achieve this state of daily hyper-productivity.
Supposedly, all we needed was enough willpower to barrel
through days of sleep deprivation and “acclimate” to this new
superhuman schedule. Supposedly, this was all true and verified
and somehow made sense.

Supposedly.

The scheme was called “The Uberman Sleep Schedule,” and here’s
how you did it:

● Sleep follows the 80/20 Rule—that is, 80% of your recovery

comes from 20% of the time you’re unconscious. Conversely,
80% of the time you’re asleep, you’re a lazy piece of shit.

● This uber-efficient portion of sleep is called REM sleep and

only lasts approximately 15-20 minutes at a time. That means
for every two hours that your body is asleep, really only the
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last 20 minutes or so is “useful” sleep. Thus, when you sleep

eight hours during the night, only 80-100 of those minutes
are actually causing you to feel rested and restored.1 People
on the internet decided this was inefficient and needed to be
fixed.

● What the military scientists (supposedly) discovered is that if

you’re severely sleep deprived, your body will immediately fall
into REM sleep the second you pass out. It does this in order
to compensate for its lack of rest. People on the internet
decided this was incredibly efficient.

● 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.

● As long as you continued to take 20-minute naps every four

hours, you could effectively stay awake forever.
Congratulations, you were now an Uberman. Here, have a
gold star.

● But there was a catch: supposedly it took 1-2 weeks of

intense sleep deprivation to properly “adjust” to the Uberman
Sleep Schedule. You had to stay up all night, every night,
forcing yourself to only sleep for 20 minutes at a time, six
different times per day. And if at any point you screwed up
and overslept your nap, all would be undone and you would
have to start over.

1
Turns out this is bullshit. Who would have thought?

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● PS: Caffeine is not allowed. And alcohol might as well be

suicide.

● 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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Like an idiot, I tried to do this. Multiple times. For years, I obsessed

with achieving the Uberman Sleep Schedule. And for years, I
continually failed at it.

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.

I used to walk in circles around my living room for an hour, just to

keep myself awake. When nap time came, I would crash, falling
unconscious instantaneously, and proceed to have intense, fucked
up dreams that seemed like they lasted for five hours.

Then, 20 minutes later, my alarm would wake me up, where I

would spend the next three hours and change desperately lying to
myself, trying to convince myself that I felt rested and couldn’t wait
to get back to—wait, what was I supposed to be doing again?

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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.

It pissed me off that some random people on the internet could

supposedly do this thing that I couldn’t. I felt like it meant there
was something wrong with me. That if I didn’t have the
self-discipline to sleep deprive myself for weeks on end, then what
the fuck, Mark? Get your shit together!

So I tortured myself. And the more I tortured myself, the more

unrealistic my expectations for myself became.

***

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.

Most people think of self-discipline in terms of willpower. If we see

someone who wakes up at 5 AM every day, eats an
avocado-chia-fennel-apricot-papaya smoothie each meal, snorts
brussel sprout flakes, and works out for three hours before even
wiping their ass in the morning, we assume they’re achieving this
through straight-up self-abuse—that there is some insatiable inner
demon driving them like a slave to do everything right, no matter
what.

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

2
See: Tom Brady.

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Seeing self-discipline in terms of pure willpower fails because

beating ourselves up for not trying hard enough doesn’t work. In
fact, it backfires. And, as anyone who has ever tried to go on a diet
will tell you, it usually only makes it worse.

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 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.

But this leaves us in a conundrum: if we view self-discipline in

terms of willpower, it creates a chicken-or-the-egg situation: To
build willpower, we need self-discipline over a long period of time;
but to have self-discipline, we need massive amounts of willpower.

So, which came first? What should we do? How do we start? Or,
more importantly, where the fuck is the Ben and Jerry’s?

Viewing self-discipline in terms of willpower creates a paradox for

the simple reason that it’s not true. As we’ll see, building
self-discipline in your own life is a completely different exercise.

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Why Pure Willpower Is Bad

Our behaviors are not based on logic or ideas. Logic and ideas can
influence our decisions, but ultimately, our feelings determine
what we do.

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.”

Throughout history, virtue was seen in terms of this sort of

self-denial and self-negation. To be a good person, you had to not
only deny yourself any pleasure, but you also had to show your
willingness to hurt yourself.

You had monks hitting themselves and locking themselves in

rooms for days and not eating or even speaking for years on end.
You had armies of men throwing themselves into battle for little or
no reason. You had people abstaining from sex until marriage, or
even for life.

Shit was not fun.

This classical approach is where our assumption that “willpower =

self-discipline” originally comes from. It operates on the belief that
self-discipline is achieved through denying or rejecting one’s
emotions. You want that taco? BAD MARK! YOU DON’T WANT SHIT!
YOU ARE SHIT! YOU DESERVE TO STARVE YOU INGRATE!

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The root of all evil.

The classical approach fused the concept of willpower—i.e., the

ability to deny or reject one’s desires and emotions—with morality.
Someone who can say no to the taco is a good person. The person
who can’t is a failure of a human being.

The Classical Approach to Self-Discipline

Self-Discipline = Willpower = Self-Denial = Good Person

This fusion of willpower and morality had good intentions. It

recognized (correctly) that, when left to our own instinctive desires,
we all become narcissistic assholes.

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

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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.

The classic approach has the paradoxical effect of training us to

feel bad about all the things that make us feel good. It basically
seeks to teach us self-discipline through shaming us—by making
us hate ourselves for simply being who we are. And the idea is that
once we are saddled with a sufficient amount of shame about all
the things that give us pleasure, we’ll be so self-loathing and
terrified of our own desires that we’ll just fall in line and do what
we’re told.

In Case You Didn't Know: Shame Fucks You Up

Disciplining people through shame works for a while, but in the
long-run, it backfires. As an example, let’s use perhaps the most
common source of shame on the planet: sex.

The brain likes sex. That’s because a) sex feels awesome, and b)
we’re biologically evolved to crave it. Pretty self-explanatory.

Now, if you grew up like most people—and especially if you’re a

woman—there’s a good chance that you were taught that sex was
this evil, lecherous thing that corrupted you and makes you a
horrible, icky person.

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

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want sex, but you also drag around a lot of guilt and anxiety and
doubt about yourself.

This mixture of feelings generates an unpleasant tension within a

person. And as time goes on, that tension grows. Because the
desire for sex never goes away. And as the desire continues, the
shame grows.

Eventually, this tension becomes unbearable and must resolve

itself in one of two ways.

The first option is to overindulge. The tension has become so great

that we feel the only way to resolve it is by going all out in a
spectacular way. Hooker orgies. Compulsive masturbation for days
on end. Rampant infidelity. And, sadly, often sexual violence.

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.

So, if indulgence doesn’t work, what about the other option?

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 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.

Sometimes, people do find productive ways to distract themselves

from their shame. They run ultra-marathons or work 100-hour
work weeks for years on end. These are, ironically, many of the
people we come to admire for having god-like willpower.

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But self-denial comes easy when, deep down, you fucking hate
yourself.

Because shame can’t be numbed away. It just changes form. The

person who exercises religiously to escape their self-loathing will
eventually find ways to loathe themselves for their exercise habits.
And soon, what started out as a remarkable work ethic in the gym
morphs into some form of body dysmorphia, like those guys who
inject synthol into their arms to make themselves look like Popeye.

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.

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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.

Self-discipline based on self-denial cannot be sustained in the

long-run. It only breeds greater dysfunction, and ultimately results
in self-destruction.

The Truth about the Classical Approach

Self-Denial = Emotional Dysfunction = Self-Destruction =
-(Self-Discipline)

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 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.

This is why my polyphasic sleeping nightmare consistently ended

in disaster. Staying up all night and sleep-depriving myself
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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produced no tangible benefits. It produced no good feelings. It

produced nothing but misery and delirium. It was an exercise in
self-abuse. Therefore, my willpower eventually ran out and my
emotions took over, driving me to pass out for about sixteen hours
straight.

Any emotionally healthy approach to self-discipline must work with

your emotions, rather than against them.

Ultimately, self-discipline is not based on willpower or self-denial,

but it’s actually based on the opposite: self-acceptance.

Self-Discipline through Self-Acceptance

Let’s say you’re trying to lose weight and your big hang up is that
you run through about three liters of ice cream each week. You’re
an ice cream fiend. You’ve tried stopping by using willpower.
You’ve tried diets with your friends. You’ve told your partner to
never ever buy ice cream again in a desperate attempt to blame
them for your own shortcomings.

But nothing’s worked. Not a day goes by that you don’t down
about a thousand calories of creamy goodness.

And you hate yourself for it.

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.

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This sort of acceptance is way more complicated than it sounds.

We don’t even realize all of the ways that we judge ourselves for
our perceived failings. Thoughts are constantly streaming through
our heads and without even realizing it, we’re tacking on “because
I’m a horrible person” to the end of a lot of them.

● “I fucked up that project at work, because I’m a horrible

person…”

● “The whole kitchen is a mess and my parents will be here in

20 minutes, because I’m a horrible person…”

● “Other people are good at this, but I’m not, because I’m a
horrible person…”

● “Everyone probably thinks I’m an idiot, because I’m a horrible

person…”

Hell, you might even be tacking on these self-judgments right now

while reading this! Man, I judge myself like this all the time… 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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But, once we’ve de-coupled our emotions from our moral

judgments—once we’ve decided that just because something
makes us feel bad doesn’t mean we are bad—this opens us up to
some new perspectives.

For one, it suggests that emotions are merely internal behavioral

mechanisms that can be manipulated like anything else. Just like
putting your floss next to your toothbrush reminds you to floss
every morning, once the moral judgments are removed, feeling
bad because you relapsed on the cookies and cream can simply be
a reminder or motivator to address the underlying issue.

We must address the emotional problem the compulsion is trying

to numb or cover up. You compulsively eat tubs of ice cream each
week. Why? Well, eating—especially sugary, unhealthy food—is a
form of numbing. It brings the body comfort. It’s sometimes known
as “emotional eating” and the same way an alcoholic drinks to
escape her demons, the overeater eats to escape his.

So, what are those demons? What is that shame?

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:

1. There’s nothing to numb anymore. Therefore, suddenly those

tubs of ice cream seem pointless.

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2. You see no reason to punish yourself. On the contrary, you

like yourself, so you want to take care of yourself. More
importantly, it feels good to take care of yourself.

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.

***

You don’t necessarily have to do this deep therapeutic work to gain

self-discipline. Simply understanding and accepting your emotions
for what they are can allow you to work with them rather than
against them.

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.

Social accountability works in the same way. It’s much easier to

meditate for a long time when you’re in a room full of people than
it is to do it by yourself. Why? Because when you’re in a room full
of people, you don’t want to be the lone asshole who gets up and
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walks out after three minutes like you do at home! The social
pressure makes it so that not meditating causes a bigger
emotional problem than meditating for the full amount of time.

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.

Result: Self-Discipline Without Willpower

Once you resolve much of your shame, and once you’ve created
situations to provide greater emotional benefits from doing the
desired behavior than not doing it, what you end up with is the
appearance of airtight self-discipline, without actually putting forth
any effort. You end up with discipline without willpower.

You wake up early because it feels good to wake up early.

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.

You exercise because it feels better to exercise than it does to sit

around, covering yourself in a thin layer of Cheeto dust.

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.

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And eventually, from the outside, it will look as though you’re

putting forth monumental effort, that you have this endless
reservoir of willpower.

Yet, to you, it will feel like nothing at all.

You do this by creating rock-solid habits.

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Part 2:
The Real Power of Habits

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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:

● Start out by making $100.

● OK, great, now let’s try to make $1,000.
● Shit, that was hard, but now let’s try to make it $10,000.
● You eventually get there. But now it’s three years later and
the mere thought of working until you have $100,000 in the
bank makes you want to give up all your possessions and go
live in an ashram.

● You say “fuck it” and buy a 60-inch flat screen TV. Ahh, that
feels better.

● Dreams of a bikini parties on your yacht evaporate. Along

with most of your savings.

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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.

In case you haven’t read a few books on wealth accumulation, this

is how people who actually get rich do it (and not end up in
bankruptcy court like good ol’ Fitty Cent):

● Start out making $100.

● Invest that $100 in skills/training/assets that will eventually

net you $1,000.

● Invest that $1000 in skills/training/assets that will eventually

net you $10,000.

● Invest that $10,000 in skills/training/assets that will eventually

net you $100,000.

● Invest that $100,000 until you’re balling on your yacht like a

Russian mobster.

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

So why am I going over all of this? Because it applies to creating

habits and achieving goals in life as well. In fact, it’s the exact same
concept.

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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I think almost everyone has had a similar resolution at some point.

In most cases, you recover from your New Year’s Eve binge on
January 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.

Aaaaaaaand it’s February 1st and you’re back to body-melding

yourself into the fabric of your sofa, watching awful Maury Povich

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reruns, and wondering how is it that all of your clothes seem to be

shrinking at the same time.

Yes. The struggle is real.

The problems with the conventional pursuit of goals in life (i.e.,

new year’s resolutions) are well-documented at this point:

● People tend to rely too much on willpower and eschew

forming useful habits.

● People tend to bite off more than they can chew, so to speak,

setting goals that are far above their ability or knowledge
level and then becoming frustrated when they make little to
no progress towards them.

● People are tempted to take “shortcuts” to achieve a goal that

may actually sabotage themselves in the long-run, like
starving yourself to lose weight, or cheating to get a good
grade on a test.5

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.

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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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 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.”

Habits are an investing mindset. Habits require one to invest one’s

efforts for a little while and then take the rewards of that effort
and re-invest them in a greater effort to form even better habits.

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

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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 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.

Therefore, it is a better investment of one’s finite energy and

discipline to focus on building habits. It’s fine to still have goals.

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Hell, I’d like to lose 20 lbs by summer. But that’s not what my mind
will focus on this year.

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.
How Habits Work

Habits form when you engage in a behavior repeatedly in the

presence of consistent stimuli.

That last part is important.

Habits are “automatic” responses to familiar environmental cues.

You save mental energy by developing habitual responses to
familiar cues, situations, and even people that you encounter on a
regular basis.

In his book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg summarizes a lot

of research on how habits are formed and maintained and how
they can be broken. Countless studies have shown that habits are
comprised of three main parts: an environmental cue, a behavioral
response, and a reward (or the removal of an unpleasant
stimulus).

CUE → BEHAVIOR → REWARD

For example, if you’re a smoker, your cravings are typically

triggered by a cue that you associate with smoking. For instance,
finishing a big meal, drinking a beer, or seeing someone smoking a
cigarette on TV.

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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).

Habit researchers have found that in order to create new

habits (or break old habits), we should NOT focus on the
behavior but rather focus on the cue.6

We spend so much time and effort on creating or eliminating the

behavior itself, when instead we should really be dedicating our
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.

An easy way to do this is to choose a cue that already occurs

regularly in your daily life, such as getting home from work. Then,
during the early stages of developing your workout habit, focus
your effort on going straight to your room after you get home and
changing into your workout clothes. Then go fill up your water
bottle and head straight to the gym or hit the running trail or
whatever.

You want to develop the habit of putting yourself in the position to

work out regularly, which makes it more likely that you’ll work out
regularly.

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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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.

The “reward” component of the habit equation above is used to

reinforce your target behavior after you’ve successfully completed
it. With our exercise example, you might get done working out and
treat yourself to a (healthy) snack or maybe schedule a
post-workout rest session by watching an episode of your favorite
TV show. Some people derive enough reward from the exercise
itself (e.g., “runner’s high”), which acts as powerful reinforcement
for their habit.

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.

One of those factors is relatively straightforward: just knowing the

basics about how habits are formed and how they work can
significantly increase your chances of forming and keeping healthy
habits (and maybe even get rid of a few bad habits).7

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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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.

That sounds stupid, but it has serious consequences.

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.

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.

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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 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.

Once he knew he could do a few minutes on the bike, he figured

he could do a few more, then he figured he could go for a run,
then he believed he could run competitively, then he set a goal to
run a marathon and did it.

He didn’t say, “OK, I’m ridiculously overweight so I should run a

marathon.” He instead started where he was, which was in his

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basement on an exercise bike for four minutes a day. This kept

him engaged and he didn’t feel too overwhelmed while he was
working to create a healthier lifestyle.

Another strategy that increases the chances of a making a habit

stick is having a plan for when things go wrong—and they will go
wrong at some point.8

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 two meals a week where you get to pig out on some
not-so-healthy food.

On your non-cheat days, when you’re tempted with unhealthy

food, make a conscious effort to remind yourself that you’ll get to
indulge yourself soon enough and think about how proud you’ll be
of yourself for practicing a little self-discipline. This strategy has a
one-two punch: you get to regularly replenish your willpower while
building your healthy eating habit (by having a cheat day) and you
can more easily deal with temptation along the way (by having a
plan ahead of time).

8
Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American
Psychologist, 54(7), 493.

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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.

A couple of other things to keep in mind:

● While consistency is key, research has shown that missing

one or a handful of opportunities to practice a desired habit
will not ruin your chances at establishing that habit in the
long run. Don’t beat yourself up if you miss a workout session
or you pig out one night on pizza and ice cream. Acknowledge
it as just part of the process and get back to your routine as
soon as you can.

● People don’t develop and acquire habits at the same rate;

everyone is different. There are a lot of products and advice
out there that promise a goal within a definitive time frame:
60 Days to Rock-Hard Abs; Read 7 Times Faster in 2 Weeks;
Retire 6 Months from Today… it’s all bullshit. Set goals for
yourself and know your limitations and weaknesses; then
work to eliminate them at your own pace.

The Art of Compounding Habits

Of course, some habits are better than other habits because some
habits, once acquired, make other positive habits much easier to
acquire as well.

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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).

These are sometimes referred to as “keystone habits.”9 They are

habits that, once adopted, will reverberate into other areas of your
life, which makes acquiring other desirable habits more natural
and require less effort.

Unfortunately, researchers haven’t been so great at saying exactly

which habits give the best returns and so you see a lot of moronic
articles out there citing things like “make your bed every day” or
“just have more willpower!” because they, like, heard this guy say it
once and it sounded smart.

I like to think of keystone habits as “compounding habits” because,

much like compounding returns on an investment, over a long
enough period of time, they can increase the richness of your life
exponentially. Goals, by themselves, generate linear growth and
change. Habits are capable of generating exponential growth and
change.

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:

9
Duhigg, C. (2012). The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business. Random House

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Notice the blue line doesn’t just increase faster, but the rate at which it increases is also
increasing.

To keep the financial analogy going—because fuck you, personal

finance is life/death important—you could say that different habits
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

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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.

In fact, dedicating the time and energy to getting good at Starcraft

is more likely to harm other areas of your life. You’ll be sitting all
day, getting fat and lazy, not to mention it turns your love life into
a nuclear wasteland.10

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.

That’s because lifting weights is a highly compounding habit. Its

benefits reverberate out across other areas of your life, making
many other positive habits and skills easier to acquire.

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

Research shows that habits only need about 30 days of consistent

effort to install themselves into our brains.13 At that point they
begin to become automatic.

So screw New Year’s resolutions. I say adopt new month’s

resolutions, or as they’re more commonly known, 30-day
challenges.

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).

The Six Fundamental Daily Habits

Hopefully by now, you’re starting to see the matrix. And you’re
starting to understand why you’ve failed to achieve so many goals
you’ve set for yourself in the past.

Setting a goal like, “I want to lose 20 lbs for my wedding” or “I want

to get a promotion this year,” and then forcing yourself to just do a

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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bunch of shit until it happens is akin to saying, “I want a million

dollars,” and 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.

The correct way to make a million dollars, as we discussed, is to

start small and then intelligently re-invest what you’ve earned, so
stop trying to scale linearly and instead scale exponentially.

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.

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1. Exercise

Benefits: If you don’t know the benefits of regular exercise by

now, you must be living under a very large and very old rock.

Aside from making you look super sexy and preventing obesity,
exercise greatly reduces the risk of a bunch of things that can kill
you: 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

Uh, I think you’re doing it wrong.

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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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 on a fancy pants personal trainer, and do a bunch of
fancy exercises with odd looking rubber balls and mats.

But according to the science, exercise is an 80/20 deal—ie., 80% of

the benefits result from 20% of the effort. Something as simple as
brisk walking 30 minutes per day has been shown to give vast
health improvements and trigger weight loss.16 Therefore, if you’re
starting an exercise habit from scratch (and if you’re really out of
shape), start simple. Worry about the reverse piledriver crunches
with your ripped personal trainer named Vlad later.

A good friend of mine is really into bodybuilding and, as you can

imagine, is ripping out of his muscles.

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

Benefits: This may strike you as a weird one to put down as a

fundamental habit. But at this point, I’ve seen the positive effects
of undertaking this habit in too many of my friends’ lives to not
take it seriously.

The benefits aren’t as obvious as exercise because most of the

benefits don’t come from the act of cooking itself, rather they

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come from the ability to control exactly what and how much you
eat.

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.

Adoption Strategy: This is my Achilles Heel and is my big

habit-building project. To be frank, my relationship with food, for
as long as I can remember, has been shitty and toxic.

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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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.

For most of my life, I was able to compensate for it through a high

metabolism and constant exercise. It was enough to keep me thin
and energetic despite all of my trashy habits.

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.

In other words, after what turned out to be a pretty stressful and

tumultuous year, my shitty eating habits reared their ugly head. I
soon found myself sorely out of shape for the first time in years
and the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life.

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.

The problem with snacks and take-out is an obvious one: you’re

essentially trading in nutrition for expediency. The food is quick,
easy, and tasty, and so if you must give up some of your health for
that, so be it. This strategy works well when you’re in your 20s and
staying up all night coding websites. But as a lifelong habit, it’s a
slow and gradual death that plays itself out in years and decades.

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

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attack. So even though you don’t see it there, heaps of salt, sugar,
and other crap are almost always on the menu.

(Oh, and there’s a 2-for-1 dessert! Can’t pass that up.)

Gradually, I came to the inevitable conclusion that the glaring hole

in my lifestyle at the moment is food and my complete inability to
control where and how I get it. I then realized that unless I want to
eat at the 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.

I’ve decided to start by learning a few basics—how to make a

couple salads, how to grill chicken (no, seriously), how to make a
couple eggs for breakfast—then I’ll make it a goal to cook myself at
least one meal a day for 30 days in a row. Once I’ve done that, then
I’ll worry about more complicated recipes and how to prepare
more types of foods.

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 doing. This time, I will start simple, and gradually work my way
up in a way that’s both enjoyable and satisfying.

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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?

3. Meditation

Benefits: The benefits of meditation are famous and numerous

(I’ve previously discussed them here). But the short answer is this:
increased focus,20 improved self-awareness,21 reduction of stress
and anxiety,22 improved sleep,23 greater emotional stability,24

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.

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makes you more empathetic of others,25 and can even be used as

a form of therapy for a variety of mental or emotional disorders.26

Adoption Strategy: No secret here, start with a daily small

practice. Even as little as one minute per day can show benefits.

I recently discovered Headspace, the app that gently guides people

into a meditation practice if you want to take a stab at learning on
your own. Another good one is Calm.

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 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.

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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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 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.

Adoption Strategy: The biggest problem I think people have with

developing a reading habit is that they try to read what they think
they should be reading rather than what they actually enjoy
reading. If you like teen murder mysteries even though you’re a
45-year-old single mother, read teen murder mysteries. If you like
books about zombies, read books about zombies.

When developing a reading habit, start with what seems easy and
exciting to you, then slowly branch out.

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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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?

My rule of thumb is when I start reading a book, I force myself to

read either the first 10% or the first chapter (whatever comes first)
and if I don’t like it by the end of that, then I put it down and move
on to the next book.
5. Writing

Benefits: Whether it’s emails or journaling or writing fiction or

posting a political rant on Facebook, writing well is fast becoming
one of the most important life skills in the 21st century. So much of
your life today is spent in front of a screen and through social
media, email and messaging apps, so if you can’t communicate
well through writing, you’re putting yourself at a monstrous
disadvantage.

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

29
In gambling, this behavior is known as the sunk cost fallacy.

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arguments, and tell stories in cogent and insightful ways. But not
only that, it makes you a better and more insightful thinker. As
Flannery O’Connor said, “I don’t know what I think until I write it
down.”

It’s also therapeutic. In fact, of all of the hokey pokey woo-woo

self-help practices, journaling and writing out one’s thoughts and
feelings on a regular basis has been shown to have calming and
therapeutic effects.30

Hey, remember pen and paper?

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.

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Adoption Strategy: Easiest way here is to start a journal. There

are some cool apps to journal on your computer. Or you can do it
the old-fashioned way, by hand.31

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.

The point here is to develop a consistent habit of 1) uninhibited

self-expression and 2) practice formulating your thoughts in a
highly coherent way so that others may understand them. Start
with 30 days. As usual, don’t judge yourself. At first, make simply
showing up the only requirement for success.
6. Socializing

Benefits: I know what you’re thinking, “Seriously, Mark?

Socializing?”

I know, I know. It sounds painfully obvious—like one of those

space fillers you see in top 10 lists in bad Huffington Post articles.
But having friends is fucking serious, guys. No really, stop laughing.
I’m serious here. Listen up.

I think many of us, if we slow down long enough to take a look at

ourselves, don’t give our relationships the time or attention
necessary to keep them healthy and happy.

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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You see, it turns out loneliness is kind of a thing. It’s growing at an

alarming rate in the US, particularly among older people. And new
research is discovering that being alone can be just as bad for your
physical health as obesity or heavy smoking.32

It also makes you miserable and far more susceptible to

depression.33 So yeah, in our “hyper-connected” world, more and
more people are finding it harder to take the time to simply be
with somebody else for a while. And that wears on us.

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.

Throw on top of that being on deadline to finish a book (which,

shall we say, put a dent in my ability to leave the house) and my
social life 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.

Adoption Strategy: Fortunately, I found this much easier to

handle. In the fall, I made a simple decision. I decided that I would
start doing something so simple and obvious that I kind of felt
dumb for not already doing: I would make a point to talk to a
different friend every single day. Whether it be on Facebook or
Skype or in person or on the phone, I’d make a point to chat with
someone different every day.

32
Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and Social
Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality A Meta-Analytic Review. Perspectives on Psychological Science,
10(2), 227–237.
33
Huang, C. (2010). Internet Use and Psychological Well-being: A Meta-Analysis. Cyberpsychology,
Behavior, and Social Networking, 13(3), 241–249.

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Now, I don’t mean just bullshitty Facebook chatter. I mean

genuine, “Hey man, what’s been going on with you lately? How
have things been?” followed by a couple, “Oh, that’s cool, tell me
about that,” and finally finished off with a, “We should get together
soon, what are you doing next week?” for good measure. It would
take maybe 15-20 minutes at most. And it was surprising how easy
it was to reconnect with many people.

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.

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.

In my experience, it’s the regular heartbeat of pursuing and nailing

small win after small win that eventually leads to the big ones. In
fact, I’ve often found that becoming so intent on the small simple
daily victories often causes one to not even realize one of the big
goals has occurred until it’s already passed you by. This, too, is a
habit. And I would argue it’s an incredibly compounding one at
that.

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The six fundamental habits above provide a nice foundation for a

healthy life in all domains: physically, emotionally, psychologically
and socially. They overlap and buttress one another. And
amazingly, they’re all actually quite simple to achieve, requiring far
less initial effort than most people realize.

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.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a salad I need to make.

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 Self-Discipline

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