(Continued from Part 1. This concludes the article.)
Altering Your Default Behaviors
If you are not executing your own positive plan you’re a resource to other agents at best and their servant or slave at worst. As Seneca put it to his protégé discussing how people decry things but do not change themselves “they are lingering of their own free will in a situation which they declare they find it hard and wretched to endure. It is so, my dear Lucilius; there are a few men whom slavery holds fast, but there are many more who hold fast to slavery.” Or, as Andrew Ryan put it in the bioshock video game: “a man chooses, a slave obeys”.
Yesterday I wrote about the principles that have shaped your default and will continue to determine what your default is as you attempt to make it better. If we design a default state that prioritizes our goals we will be better prepared. If we know how to adapt that design, then regardless of what happens, what type of emergency, what type of new normal, we will be better off.
Choosing the Rules
What rules will we lay down for ourselves? This is us at our best. This is Jocko Willink’s mantra: Discipline Equals Freedom. The discipline to set good rules and follow them on our own is a foundational virtue. Where we have wise rules we make ourselves better.
Ultimately this part is the most important part and nobody can do it for you. These default habits/behaviors start as rules that you make for yourself. These rules are not going to be enforced by any exterior agent. You are creating the rule that will become the habit and change your default and ultimately you. The rules become part of who you are. It will affect you more deeply then you realize. It can change how you see the world and others it will also change how other see you. I had a friend tell me he didn’t have my self-discipline. That really shook me because I don’t see a lot of self discipline. I see all my failures but the modest habits that I had created changed his perception of me. That’s the nature of the beast. So. Let’s talk about rules.
You by choosing a good rule will make yourself better as you practice the habit. You could make a rule that you eat a cake every day (probably unwise). Or that you exercise daily (probably wise). That you watch TV, that you go to the library, that you throw rocks, that you shoot 3 arrows at a target. You will choose the rule. Choose one that will tend you towards the better. That will help your future selves be where you want to go.
Your goal with your first habit is to be a daily good. Habits that occur with lesser frequency are possible but more challenging. Best tackled after you’ve some experience creating and growing habits.
Before we make it mindless, we best make sure it furthers a goal. Is your goal to be fitter? Wiser? Richer? More skilled? What behaviors would accomplish that? What small things could you do that your future self will be grateful for? Pick something easily done. Something stupidly easily done that will benefit you. Success breeds success, so make this first change easily accomplished but not meaningless.
Repetition is the key. Habits grow in a curve based not on time as much as repetition. The good news is that missing one day isn’t fatal what matters are the total number of repetitions. You’re building a crowd of previous selves that are going the better way. We want repetitions so we choose daily.
Anatomy of Habit: Cue, Behavior, Reinforcement
For this I am indebted to BJ Fogg (author of Tiny Habits). I did a deep dive on habits last year and of all the books I read, his was the best toolbox. I know “atomic habits” is more popular but Tiny Habits is a better manual.
BJ Fogg uses a curved line to represent when we perform the behavior. Ability and Motivation are put as a X and Y axes. And a curved line (an asymptote) is the “action line”. Where Motivation is high and the action isn’t too difficult we perform the action after the cue. Where the action is easy far less motivation will be necessary to move you over the action line. The easier it is to do, the less motivation we need. The more motivated we are, the harder the action can be. Since motivation comes and goes focus on the other end, making the action easy.
Cues can be a wide variety of things but I would say that the cue is the thing that reminds you. It is the thing that precedes the behavior. Walking into a dark room is cue for you to turn on the light. You don’t think, you just reach for the lightswitch. Even if the power is down that’s a habit that will die hard. So whether it’s walking under a pullup bar or seeing your vitamin bottle on the counter, the cue is what reminds you that you want to perform a behavior. For your first cue I highly recommend finding an existing daily behavior (like grabbing your keys, or your daily coffee, or your shower) and add your good behavior to the existing cue. Grab my keys and take the pill right next to it.
Repetitions and reinforcement is what keeps us coming back. Fogg emphasizes taking a moment to feel what he calls “shine” after performing the behavior and offers some physical actions that help you get that feeling. This is really self-reinforcement. It sounds stupid but it’s not. In fact in the book Don’t Shoot The Dog, author Karen Pryor emphasizes how telling yourself “good shot” or “good swing” while training helps you. Again, it sounds stupid but there’s something deeply true in this. A part of your brain needs to be taught that this action was good. And you should feel satisfaction and pride in doing something worth doing. Remembering why this is good rather than unending drudgery will help you continue to do it.
Last Year’s Application: Reading My Bible
My grandfather passed and one of the few things from him that I have is a pocket New Testament (plus Psalms and Proverbs) that he gave me when I was a child. I realized that even though I would grab it on my way out if there was a fire I’d never actually read it cover to cover. If it was so important to me, why had I never read it through? I didn’t have a good answer to that.
I chose reading daily from that truncated Bible as a small and good daily behavior. I started with proverbs because each chapter is fairly small. If I was doing it again I would start at the beginning with the rule of “5 verses”. 5 verses is such a small amount there’s no reason I can’t afford that time.
I chose applying underarm deodorant as my daily cue. I put the testament on top of the deodorant so I have to touch the book to do the daily behavior of underarm deodorant. I am not going to forget to apply underarm deodorant and since I had to already touch the book to get to the underarm deodorant, I might as well crack it and read since the behavior is so easy.
Reinforcement for me was very natural. I was touching something my grandfather gave me and knowing that he would be glad I was using it all these years later even though he was gone. Another reinforcement was watching the bookmark march through the book. Even though it felt like such a little bit of progress you could see the results fairly quickly.
For such a small habit it has helped me a lot. Is it the same as poring over the text with a Greek study guide and multiple translations? No. Of course not. But if truth be told I’m not doing that very often. This small daily habit that I actually do has done far more good than the sparse and sporadic “deep” Bible reading that I had previously done. That’s the point of these small habits, you don’t need to go whole hog in order to get benefit.
Conclusion: Small, Real, and Effective
Establish the habit. When you’ve done that then start looking for the next. Get the low-hanging fruit first. There are a lot of small things that will give you an outsized benefit. 2 minutes of flossing every day can save you thousands of dollars and a lot of pain. 5 minutes touching ancient wisdom or in purposeful prayer can help stabilize you. 5-10 min doing core muscle exercise can avoid hernias. 10-15 min of stretching/mobility can help keep pain at bay and maximize your ability to be a benefit to your family. Do you have all that time right now? No. Not really. Our days are full. But as you add small things your day changes and you will find more. Start small.
You’ll get further than you think. Just start.
“We make our habits and our habits make us.” That is attributed to a bunch of people, it’s complicated.
Use the principles to form/alter habits to make your default useful.
Your Daily Routine
We start with alteration not creation. We need to see what our daily landscape looks like then we can see what we can add to and alter to have an outsized impact. Your day has a natural line of drift. Yours does not look like mine which is why you need to figure out what yours is. Then we apply the principles we know to establish useful habits so that our default routine furthers our larger goal of preparedness.
What do you already do daily?
A lot of our default is so mundane we don’t even think about it but when you do you can see opportunities. There are a ton of potential cues that you can use to add small and useful behaviors regardless of what is happening that day.
Think through this carefully and you may surprise yourself. Some things like eating, or using the bathroom are so much in the background it’s easy to forget them. Until you see someone do something like scrub the toilet while the shower is warming up. It’s such a tiny little efficiency but he picked it up and I didn’t.
What are your daily needs?
Oddly recreation goes here. You cannot leave the afterburner on indefinitely and stress will kill you. Ignoring things like physical fitness, sleep, maintenance, social bonds, and recreation will only make you more productive for a short period. Then you will be worse off. So think about what needs you’re falling behind on and think about addressing them in the daily cues you’ve already identified.
What do you want to do daily?
Things that your ideal self would do but are rarely addressed by your real self. Is it dry fire practice? Writing? Carving? Sewing? Reading? Studying for your ham radio license? Some of these things are things that you don’t actually want to do and realizing that is good. If reading Don Quixote isn’t actually something you want to do (you were just saying that) then realizing that is a good thing. If 20 min of computer gaming for recreation is what you want and not reading an ancient tome, that is not a bad thing. Or vice versa. It’s a matter of keeping your downtime controlled and your on-time productive.
Now put it all together. What would an ideal day look like? Plot it out. I like to use a spreadsheet in 15-minute increments you might prefer lined paper, it doesn’t matter. Plot out your ideal day and your actual day. Then add and alter slowly so that you can get where you need to be.
Start slow. If your day normally starts at 7 don’t decide to get up at 4. That’s a big change that likely won’t be sustainable. Start with 6:30 (or even 6:50) and use that time for whatever would be enjoyable and useful to you. Then you are reinforcing yourself for getting up earlier.
Design Your Default Surroundings
It’s easy to go overboard on this and wind up feeling overwhelmed. It can also lead to the trap of thinking you need to buy something before you can make progress. Don’t fall for the trap. Keep to the principle of small efforts with outsized rewards. Here are a few examples I’ve implemented to give you some ideas.
If there is junk food in the house, then it goes in a cupboard, up high. The fruit on the other hand is on the counter or table in the open. This makes it easy to grab an apple mindlessly but harder to grab a cookie mindlessly.
The splitting maul lives in the house by the door not the garage. It made it easier for me to grab and split a couple logs. It’s not that much easier than going to the garage but it’s enough easier.
I put my exercise clothes in the home exercise area (or pack my gym bag the night before) because it makes it easier to do my exercise. Is it that much easier than going to my bedroom to change? Apparently. Because it made it just enough easier to stick the habit.
The hand-sewn garment I was working on lived by the computer. I could listen to/ watch a podcast and sew a seam. I just wasn’t getting to the sewing machine and setting up and running it. But I would sit down to learn something and make progress on a free pair of exercise shorts at the same time.
I listen to audiobooks whenever I have a drive longer than 15 min. I can get through a book that I would struggle to get through if I was reading it and I feel better than if I was listening to music or radio.
The core here is simple: Make it easier to do the things you want and ought to do. Make it harder to do things you don’t want yourself to do. Continue until they are in proper balance.
Design Your Default Thoughts
Most of us have thoughts that we find repeating in our head periodically. If it’s the same thought it’s not really a thought it’s just a repetitive default. It may be good, it may not be. Sometimes these are called “cognitions” they’re the core of the “cognitive” part of “cognitive behavioral therapy”. The heart of that therapy is answering, modifying, and replacing negative cognitions with useful ones. I’ll suggest two useful default thoughts to add:
- What can I do right now to make life better in the future?
- Something future you or your family will appreciate. As little as washing a plate, taking out the trash, finding a permanent home for one item, putting one unnecessary item to be donated, refilling a soap container. Something tangible and quick that future you would appreciate having done. This is an internal cue that can spur a wide variety of small and us
For all of us, when we see something and say “that’s a good man/woman”, that is us acknowledging there is an ought. Are you becoming it? What can you do to further it? “There is no ought from is” as the philosophical insight goes “but we all wind up there anyway” is my personal continuation. This is to remind me that I’m not perfect and I have miles to go yet. It is a prompt to meditate on what virtue I need to cultivate.
Do you need a reason to do something or a reason not to do something?
This question is the core of what your default is. It applies to darn near everything near as I can tell. Do you need a reason to be polite? To exercise? To carry a weapon? Eat out? Have dessert? Read? Speed? Lie? Tell the truth? Vote?
Lie or Tell the Truth is an important one because it also reminds me that not everyone has the same default. If you deal with the criminal class you will quickly find that lying is their default. They are reading you and telling you the story they think you want to hear. That’s utterly alien to me but it is. I need a reason to lie, they need a reason to tell to the truth. Our defaults are worlds apart.
That same cultural difference applies to so many things. Do you get a soda from a vending machine? At the movies? A piece of candy in line at checkout? These are habits we learned from our parents and our peers. What’s “normal” to you isn’t to others. Their defaults are not yours. For all of us though, we can realize what our default are and change them into the ones that we think they should be.
Reality Check
What you do most often is your default. If theoretically you exercise unless there’s a compelling reason not to but in reality you have averaged one training session a month, then your default is to not exercise. Mentality is great but behavior matters more. If there’s always a reason you don’t do something, you’ve lost this mental battle and the physical one too. Reality matters.
Our default is what we do in the absence of a compelling reason.