← Undo – How history's outliers got stuff done
Undo – How history's outliers got stuff done
How to stick to it when the novelty wears off – Atomic Habits
00:27:33
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- [00:00]
Mark Stedman
Oh hey, if you're seeing this episode again but you've already listened to it, my apologies. I made a technical error today that caused a bunch of episodes to show up twice. So sorry for the inconvenience. If you've heard this episode, feel free to move on. But if you haven't, I hope you like it. Right now we're in such a great era for creators because we're living through the TikTok ification of all social media. You can be the digital marketing expert everyone wants to be Specific, detailed, broken down day by day, week by week plan here' five places to promote your podcast the best way to grow your podcast is with guests. In this video, I'm going to show you how I grew my email newsletter to over 90,000 subscribers. I'm going to show you how you can create a million dollar newsletter business in less than one minute. If you've ever taken a course on how to promote yourself online, whether you're a podcaster, a video blogger, a short form creator, or a newsletter writer, you'll have seen how easy it was for the course creator and that all you need to do is is follow their formula. The problem is, what works for them won't work for you because everyone's constantly on the lookout for advice on how to grow their channel or get more people to come to their gig. So they've already got a head start. The truth is, long term goals like getting 100,000 YouTube subscribers and bagging your first sponsor almost always need you to do one thing. Show up as often as you can. That's really the secret to success outside of accidentally going mega viral. And that's it. That's how you make a long term goal stick, by doing the thing over and over as many times as you can, even on days when you just can't be bothered. So that's your episode for this week. Onto the next one. Unless could it be there's more to it than just showing up and it's alright saying just do it on those days when you can't find the inspiration, but when your brain's pushing against you, is there anything you can do to help keep you on track? I'm Mark Stedman and this is undo, investigating the world's most popular productivity methods, giving them the sniff test and helping you separate the brilliant from the what did you do the last time you were smashed in the face by a baseball bat? For James Clear, the Internet's appointed expert on habits, that cranial pummel mint culminated in a blog a bunch of public speaking gigs, a best selling book, and an app all about habits. Clear formed Healthy Habits to heal himself after a pretty serious injury in high school. This sparked a study in habits that's not now in its second decade. His newsletter goes out to 3 million readers and his book has sold over 20 million copies worldwide and been translated into more than 60 languages. Atomic Habits is really a book about change. But if you're anything like me, you get excited about new stuff. Your new skinnier body or your amazing guitar skills. And then there's a moment. Could be a week from now, could be three months. But it comes for us all. That moment where you go, man, what's the point after all this work and I'm not seeing any results, so why bother? Imagine you've just poured yourself a tall glass of lemonade. As you swirl the ice around in your drink, you notice a single ice cube sitting on the kitchen counter. Whoops. You must have missed that one when scooping up your ice. But now your glass is full, so what do you do? Imagine just watching that ice cube sit on the counter for a bit. As the warmth of the kitchen slowly heats up the molecules in the ice, tiny microscopic changes happen to its makeup. Bit by bit, the molecular structure changes until suddenly the cube shifts from a solid block to a droplet to a puddle. That's the annoying, maddening thing about change. And it's something observed by James Clear in his book about ha. Like trees growing deep roots underground, we don't see the change that's happening until there's some sort of tipping point. And what makes it doubly maddening is we don't know when that tipping point is going to be. We humans hate uncertainty. We're bad at estimating stuff, and we're bad at being patient if we don't know how long something will take. And if you think we're bad, computers are even worse.
- [04:48]
Tom Scott
The most important job of a progress bar is not to give an exact, precise estimate of how long is left. It's great if they can, but the most important job is just to reassure the user that yes, things are happening, progress is being made. Calm down. Don't try to reboot the machine just because you think it's crap.
- [05:02]
Mark Stedman
That's YouTuber Tom Scott explaining why computer progress bars are important, but also why they're often wonky. The trouble we get ourselves in when we think about our own progress is is we often end up measuring the wrong thing. The thing we put at the end of the progress bar, next to the 100% label is usually the outcome, the goal, rather than the sum of the actions it takes to get to that goal. As Clear points out, everyone has goals. But what separates those who achieve their goals from everyone else is not that they wanted it more or they were hungrier, it's that they did the things over and over again. So far, so abstract. So let's make it more real. Let's say you want a million followers on YouTube. You're sensible enough to know it's not a vanity metric, but an indicator that you can monetize your videos and maybe get a passive income stream. But you have absolutely no control over that number, so what's the point in measuring it? It doesn't mean you ignore it completely, but the actions you take can only influence it. So what do you do instead? You measure what you can control. You know what the algorithm likes, so you measure how many times you posted this week. You measure how many interactions you had with other accounts. You measure the time you spent planning your videos versus shooting them or how many different shots you included. The point is that you measure what you can control, not the outcome.
- [06:35]
James Clear
Whatever aspect of your identity that you're trying to reinforce, that's kind of the the story.
- [06:40]
Mark Stedman
This is James Clear talking on the Tim Ferriss podcast.
- [06:43]
James Clear
You can also phrase it as a question. So, for example, rather than saying I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, you could have this question that's related to the identity you want to build and you kind of carry it around with you all day. And like in this example, maybe the question is what would a healthy person do? And so you're just kind of walking around all day asking yourself, you know, what should I get for lunch? Well, what would a healthy person do? Or should I take the an Uber or should I walk to the next meeting? Well, what would a healthy person do? And you just kind of like go around your day and try to make decisions that you feel like support that identity.
- [07:15]
Mark Stedman
I think there's good advice here, but it's not always that easy to follow. First off, how we define health is different for each of us and spans mind, body, and, if you'll forgive me, soul. Less in a religious sense, more in a wow, that jambalaya really hit the spot kind of sense. A healthy person might not have a bunch of messages in their brain telling them they need to eat that fourth donut or finish that entire pizza. Similarly, a successful YouTuber probably has assistants and lighting people and dedicated mic operators and professional editors, but he is onto something here. So I think the nudge it needs is to ask what would Person X do if they were in my shoes? You know, what would a healthy person do for lunch if they only had a fiver to spend? Or what would a YouTuber with a million followers do if they only had an Android phone? And before you get at me in the comments, I don't mean only an Android phone, I just mean only one device as opposed to a suite of equipment. And no, you're being defensive. Okay, so identity is a big part of this, and I think asking questions is a better approach than making statements, at least for me. I don't know about you, but I'm not the sort of person who can stand in front of a mirror and go, I am healthy, I am happy, I am loved because I just see a collection of wrinkles and hair in unsightly places and think not. Not today. Asking a question like what would a healthy person do in this situation? Or if they were in my shoes can offer you a bit of grace and flexibility too. If you'll permit me a quick detour, I was in my local chip shop on Friday to pick up something for my new TikTok cooking show. Yes, I did say those words out loud, and yes, they are all true things that happened on a Friday. The guy being served before me had about £1.50 on him. His meal cost a little over a pound, and he asked if the person serving him wouldn't mind throwing a few extra chips in and some sauce if he gave them the full sum of money he had. The lady behind the counter did so and everyone someone went on about their day. Sometimes the choices you make have to be tempered by your situation. On the days where you're caught out on the high street, it's lunchtime and all you've got to Your name is £1 50. Maybe the healthy person's choice is to buy a Greg sausage roll and see what tomorrow brings. And I know all this talk of chippies and sausage rolls is interminably British, but we have to put up with Americans talking about Conano lately and being captain of the valedictorian Sorority Depot as if those were real things, so I hope you'll let this one slide. According to Claire, there are four key laws of behavior change. Make it obvious, make it attractive, make it easy, and make it satisfying. If you're looking to build a new habit, the best way is to figure out how it fits into your existing routine. I keep forgetting to empty the cat's litter boxes you'd think the smell would be a clue, but as any cat owner will know, you end up just learning to live with a certain background level of poop smell after a while. Anyway, if I want to get into the habit of mucking them out every day, I can attach it to something I already do on instinct. When I get up, the first thing I do is feed the cats. This is so ingrained a habit, I even built it into a text adventure game I made in 2020. But that's a story for another day. I can implement something called habit stacking, where I attach a new habit to an old one. So now, after I've plooped the food into the cat's bowls, I go straight to the litter box, which is in the same room, empty that out, then do the same in the bedroom. The key is that I start with the tray that's already in the living room, because that's where I'm standing at the end of the old routine. If I keep forgetting to take my morning medication, I can stack that on too. So once I've washed my hands in the bathroom after mucking out the cats, I take my pills. These things can roll on one to the next until your morning is essentially on autopilot, which is pretty ideal if you're not a morning person. The second law of habit building is to make it attractive. There's a little mental jujitsu involved in some of this, and I'll be honest, I'm not down for all of it. I'm not a big fan of reframing, as, frankly, my brain's too smart to fall for my own dumb tricks. So telling myself I don't have to empty the litter boxes every day I get to is utter poppycock. That said, reminding myself why I'm doing the thing is pretty useful. I'm not just scooping poop into a bag. I'm freshening up my cat's toilet, making their lives a little bit more comfy, and making my own flat not smell of shit all day long. Building something like a YouTube channel invariably involves doing stuff that isn't the thing you set out to do in the first place. Like with building a business, you can't just spend all your day designing logos. At some point, you have to network or follow up on invoices or navigate complicated notes from clients. But we can pair something we have to do with something we want to do. I'm basically a cloth cap in human form, so I like to put on some vinyl, maybe have a glass of something, and curl up with my iPad before I dive into a boring task like processing a bunch of emails. If you've ever felt guilty about the amount of Netflix you watch, think about something low stakes you can put on while you do your admin. Or, if there's housework to be done and you really can't be asked, jam on your headphones and stick on a playlist of stuff you can dance to like nobody's watching. All of this has worked for me, and I'm 42 and I basically don't want to do anything Next up is the third law we need to make it easy. The classic example of this, which I've talked about before, is standing your guitar up in the living room rather than hiding it away in a case somewhere else. Or the even classical example is laying out your gym clothes the night before. Another way to approach this is to think about what constitutes doing a thing. For our hypothetical YouTuber, the goal might be to post a video every week. That is enough of a goal in itself. Post something every week. It doesn't have to be a fully produced and edited video. It could be a short. The key is to find something small and measurable and almost insultingly easy to accomplish. I've done the couch to 5k program a few times, and the reason it worked for me is that you start by only having to run for a minute at a time. If you want to practice the guitar more, maybe the goal is to just check the tuning every day. So all you have to do to put a tick in the box is to pick up your guitar, check it's tuned, tune it if needed, and that's it. If you decide to play a little, that's a bonus. Clear even suggests you make yourself stop after that moment, until after repetition, you get to the point where you think, well, I'm already here, now I might as well play for a few minutes. Finally, we want to make it satisfying. For me, this partially comes back to measuring the right thing. A million YouTube subscribers isn't made up of 1 million individual people randomly deciding to smash that button fam. It's built from a consistent posting habit. And because that's something you can measure, it's something you can visualize. If there's any kind of goal you want to reach or a lifestyle change you want to implement, make a physical record of it. This works really well if you want to stop doing something too, because the more X's you can see on your wall calendar, the more you'll want to keep that streak going. I've talked before about gamifying your productivity, turning annoying little jobs into point scoring challenges. The difficulty here is making sure the reward is as intrinsic as possible. Rewarding yourself for 60 days of closing your Apple Watch activity rings with a huge slice of cake. I mean, have the cake if you want the cake, but it might go against your identity as a person who makes healthy choices is all I'm saying. I don't know. This stuff is hard, right? And the fact is, we didn't evolve for long term change. Our ancestors didn't have bad habits to break, so we didn't need the circuitry they hunted and gathered in a world where calories were scarce. So we evolved to get food, eat food, survive, repeat. When we try and break bad habits, or build healthy new ones, or even stick with something we want to do when we're not seeing results, when we try and do these things, we're fighting our own neurobiology. It's hard not because you don't have enough willpower, but because you don't have the circuitry. So remember that when you invariably miss a day because you forgot or because the trains were delayed and you spilled coffee on yourself and the hobbit from it demanded you change your password yet again and all you want to do is dive headfirst into a bowl of carbonara on those days, give yourself a bit of grace and remember it's hard not because you're bad, but because you're trying to do something your brain wasn't even built for. And that's really pretty fucking cool. Undo is written and produced by me, Mark Stedman. You can find more links, including to the book Atomic Habits at Undo FM Habits, which is also where you can sign up to support the show on Patreon. Feel free to part with the podcast here or stick around after the break and I'll tell you about some of the bad habits I'm trying to break and the good ones I'm trying to build, and how Atomic Habits is a help and a hindrance. Next week we're heading to 221B Baker street for a meeting with Mr. Sherlock Holmes. That's my impression of the acast ad noise, and I'm glad to let you know that that is the last you'll be hearing of it, at least from this podcast. From now on, the only commercial messages you'll hear will come from my voice, and there won't be like five minutes of them per episode. If you know anyone who was listening to the show and who bailed because the ads got too annoying. Please do let them know that we've righted the ship. As you can gather, writing a TED Talk every week takes its toll. And while I'm never going to guilt you about listening for free, some level of remuneration for the effort is always appreciated. So if you'd like to show your support for the show, you can do so@patreon.com undo podcast. I don't have a team. I don't hand work off to an editor. Everything you hear is made by me in my home studio. So if you can support me via Patreon, that'd be amazing. Well, thank you for sticking around, joining me in the shed. One of the things that came up as I was putting this episode together was sort of the idea of personal rigor. I don't know how much this is going to stick with me, but there's something to the idea that rather than these habits being a cage, something restrictive, something that's telling us that we can't do something, or that it's eating up our time or, you know, getting in the way, instead it's sort of thinking about each time, like thinking about a chain. And each time you perform that particular habit, you're strengthening that chain, strengthening the link in the chain, or building a new link in the chain, and you're casting a vote, as James Clear calls it, for your future identity. It's a big thing that he talks about in the book, is each time you do the thing, you're casting a vote for your future identity. So it's a spin on that thing that I clipped out earlier of the question, what would a healthy person do? Or what would a whatever, you know, productive person do? His thing is every time you decide, I am a person who does X, Y and Z, if each time you do the habit, you're reinforcing that identity. Again, I don't know how much that works for me. I think I've tried it. Perhaps I haven't tried it enough, but I find that action tends to be a little bit more helpful to me than starting with the idea of identity. I'm not someone who can. I think you'll hopefully you'll forgive me on this, but I think that is easier for Americans because I think Americans grow up with a stronger sense of identity and personal identity than potentially other. Other places, certainly in the UK And I think places like Australia and New Zealand who have this whole tall poppy syndrome. Don't get above your station. You know, who are you to. To do certain things? And so the idea that you have this sort of. That you have a personal identity and that you can change it is not something that always comes easy to people. And I think perhaps if you are, if you grew up in a system that has a stronger sense of your, you know, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is kind of an idea that's kind of baked into a society, right? And if that's baked into your thing, then it's maybe a little bit easier for your brain to latch onto the idea of saying, I am someone who does this. Therefore the actions can match the identity. And I don't know if that's the case for everyone. I'd love to know what you think of about that. Is that unfair if you're American? If you're not American, let me know. I know you know, a lot of the undue listenership is from the States, so I'd love your thoughts on that. Hello, Dot FM or hit me up on the Patreon. Another thing that I'm trying to considering anyway, I've bought a bunch of post it notes because I actually thought, especially in the mornings, if I want to get a really good morning routine that sets me up for the day, the way to do that is to put as much of that on autopilot as possible. So I'm sort of thinking about getting a bunch of post it notes and then scribbling like numbers and maybe a little pictogram or something so that I haven't really got to read it. I've just got to sort of see the image and go, right, yes, that's the next thing I have to do rather than remember because I will forget. I will definitely forget. And then that's the chain broken in the habit, right? And it's not because I don't want to do it, it's just I completely forgot, you know, I'm only three days in. It's not cemented as a habit yet. So it's just, it's not there in my brain. You know, there are certain things, like I said, waking up in the morning, you know, partially because Bailey, the, the smaller of the two cats is extraordinarily vocal when she is hungry. And so, you know, of course the first thing I do is get up, maybe go to the toilet, but then, you know, I'm straight to picking up the bowls and doing the stuff. And so it's like the day has begun. And so the idea of maybe having a few post it notes that just as soon as I've done that thing, there's a post it note there that points me to the next thing and the next thing. And actually, it just means that you don't have to think about it. And then over time, it just becomes second nature. And I think there's something potentially useful in that. So, again, love to hear what you think. Also, casting a vote for my future identity. The day that I. So I wrote, I did all my sort of research and planned the episode on a Tuesday. And as I was doing that, I thought, you know what? I am actually going to cast some votes for my future identity. And I deleted Deliveroo and just eat from my phone, and I blocked the. The websites on my computer. I know I can get around it. What I also did, because I know myself, is I. In the case of, I think those two websites, I also did it with Domino's, but I couldn't do this last bit with Domino's because their website's terrible. But with the other two sites, I deleted my accounts. Not because I'm, like, making some grand statement about I'm never gonna use these services again. It wasn't like that. It was just. I know if I put that extra barrier in and I suddenly can't log into my service, it's just that extra little barrier, you know? So I've already done the thing where I've either downloaded the app or I've put the block in place. So whether it's on my phone or on my. My laptop, I've put the block in place. But so, fine, I've got around that particular block because I'm just so desperate for a kebab or whatever, right? And then I get to the website, and then it's like, fill in your details. And then I've. I've got to remember. Oh, God, I've got to put in my whole details again. All my credit card information, my address, the delivery instructions. Oh, do I really want to do that? Or would it be the worst thing in the world if I just cobbled together something from the freezer? Like, would I really have that bad a night if I did that? You know? And, you know, there's other stuff as well, like, you know, trying to make some meals that you can stick in the freezer that are going to be enjoyable and feel, you know, like they're satisfying that itch to have something dirty, you know, whether it is a frozen pizza or whatever, that's not gonna absolutely break the bank. Then for me, you know, these are just these. These little. Little nudges that maybe help. And they're. They're just little casts for I, you know, to, To. To, yeah. Cast something towards our identity, I guess. Yeah. I'd love to know again what we think about that. I'm thinking more and more about the idea of experiments like in my work and in a few of the things of not trying to tie ourselves too much to outcomes. A scientist starts with a hypothesis. I think if I do this, then X will happen. They don't necessarily. I'm sure some do, like, you know, I'm sure some will have, you know, many, many years of study and then find that they. The thing has been disproven and maybe they're extremely upset. But on a smaller scale, the scientific methods, we have an idea, we have a guess, as we have a reckon about something. I reckon that this thing, you know, if we go back to experiments at school, it's basically saying, I reckon that if I put this liquid under a Bunsen burner, it will glow blue, whatever, and we test it and then we find out that's the case or it's not the case, and then we move on. And if we can apply the same kind of idea to the things that we do in life, then I think we can probably give ourselves a much easier time because all we're saying is I reckon that if I did this, I, you know, X thing would happen. And so that's something else that I'm kind of. It's percolating in, in the back of my brain. All right, gonna. I'm gonna let you get on about your week. Thank you very much for spending the last 20 or so minutes with me. If you do want to support the show, you've come, you've made it this far. If you'd like to show your support, then there are two ways you can do that. You can leave a comment wherever you're listening, preferably within Apple Podcasts. Leave a review, I should say, rather than a comment, because you can't leave comments. But you can review the show, give us 5 stars if you feel like we appreciate that we deserve it. And if you've got a minute, it'd be lovely to see a review. They all get published on the website. Undo FM reviews. I publish everything that goes up there. The show is, you know, now a little bit more established. It's a whole 15 weeks old. So any, any. If you have been listening for a while and you. And you haven't reviewed, it would be mega appreciated if you would. But then the other way that you can support us is by throwing the price of a Greg sausage roll or more at us, which you can do@patreon.com undo podcast. That is patreon.com undo podcast. Use the Patreon app if you like. And that will help us as well, because that, you know, makes me more able to justify the time I spend writing and producing episodes, which I will continue to do because I love doing it. But your support just makes it all the more easy. Thank you very much for your time, and I look forward to having a chat with you again next week.