Do the Opposite #51 - Tiny Habits, Cyborg Insects, Regrets of Wasted Time, Giving Up Unprocessed Food

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Tiny Habits

This week I found this great TED talk by BJ Fogg, a researcher of Behaviour Design at Stanford:

Forget Big Change, Start With a Tiny Habit | BJ Fogg

The talk is a lot of fun to watch so I highly recommend it! There's lots of gold nuggets in it for anyone interested in habit formation. Here are some of them:

Make the habit very small and easy to perform. When we start forming a habit, consistency of it is more important than the results. Attempting to do 50 push-ups a day when you previously did 0 is going to be hard for the mind to consistently do. It's relatively easy for the first couple of days or a week, and then you derail, not doing the habit for a day, and it's all downhill from there. If you decide to do 5 or 10 push-ups a day to start the habit, you are way more likely to succeed long term and not skip a day.

This is what I did for my #100DaysOfMeditation challenge this year (I am on day 48 today): instead of over-committing to 30 or even 20 minutes a day, I made it a bit more flexible. Most days I do 20 minutes of meditation, and the days I don't have much time or I'm tired I do 15.

There is no badge of honour that you receive for over-committing to a heroic amount of the activity you're forming the habit around.

Use another habit you already do as a trigger. The best ones are the ones you've been doing for years that are already a part of your day, not the other recently formed habits (this will help make the new habit's trigger bulletproof) A good example is: "After I wake up I will make my bed" or "I will read for 20 minutes after breakfast".

It's very difficult to create a habit by using alarms and notifications - because chances are you will be doing other things at the time. For example, you've decided to spend an hour at 8pm every day working on your project. Your schedule fluctuates a little day after day, and some days you won't even be home by 8pm. Other days you might come home at 7:30pm and would want to have dinner first, etc etc. That breaks the newly forming habit.

Instead you could say: I will work on my project for an hour after dinner on the days when I eat dinner at home. For most of us, that's most of the days. Now, you have a direct trigger to start the habit (that's the most difficult part) and are on your way to making this change a long-term one.


Articles

1) "What Doesn't Seem Like Work" by Paul Graham
We all have that friend that knew who they wanted to become since age 12. What should we "mere mortals" do then, if we are still not sure what our true calling is? Paul suggests that we should try and look for activities that we like and are good at, that other people don't seem to enjoy. These are like guide posts, leading us to what our life's work might be.

Examples might be: you find finance, stock markets and their intricacies fascinating, while others often think it's boring. You could spend all day painting and not notice how much time has passed. These usually are activities/subjects that you find difficult to talk about to some of your friends (who don't share the interest) because they get annoyed or bored by them, whilst you are at your top level of excitement and could talk about them for hours on end.

2) "How to be More Productive and Eliminate Time Wasting Activities by Using the 'Eisenhower Box' " by James Clear
Turns out that Dwight Eisenhower, 34th President of the USA, was an extremely productive person. He used a simple grid system to make decisions, with the following quadrants in it:
a) Urgent + Important => do immediately
b) Not Urgent + Important => schedule to do later
c) Urgent + Not Important => delegate to someone
d) Not Urgent + Not Important => eliminate

It's definitely a helpful little system that makes sure that you focus on what's important long term, and not on the things that want your attention immediately but don't really make a big difference over time. Focusing on the latter ones is like constantly putting out fires - there is never time to do anything important when there's a fire in your living room.

The way out is to keep increasing the distance between yourself, your having to react to things immediately and the "fires". The space you create in this way can be used to prioritize what's important for you in life and just plain have some breezing room.

3) "Bomb-Sniffing Cyborg Locusts Can Now Successfully Detect Explosives" by Chris Baraniuk
Soo there now exist cyborg insects... A Black-Mirror-esque piece of news I thought was cool. In research done for US Navy, scientists came up with a way to augment locusts senses, giving them ability to detect explosives. While that's very useful, I don't think they will stop there and there is probably going to be a lot more of where these came from, with different purposes and abilities.

Videos

1) Unprocessed ― How I Gave Up Processed Foods (And Why It Matters) | Megan Kimble
What we put in our bodies determines many things in our life: our mood, our health, our relationships with others (through mood + emotional stability or lack thereof) and even our wealth. Megan has gone through a year of unprocessed foods and has a lot to share with us about the impact it had on her as well as the benefits of consuming most (or ideally all) of our nutrients and calories through unprocessed food.

2) Overcoming Regrets of Wasted Time | Jocko Willink
Worrying about wasted time is never productive, but often even knowing that (I am very guilty of this) we still give ourselves a hard time. "Oh, I should have started eating healthy 10 years ago!", "I should've taken Computer Science as my major", "Oh, I wish I was a better son/daughter to my parents"... There are many regrets that we have, some of them comparing us with an idealized version of ourselves, some of them comparing ourselves with others, but it all ends up only hurting us. The key is to remind ourselves that we always live in the present moment, and we can start changing things now. Jocko answers a podcast listener who asks how to overcome the regrets, providing more insight on the subject.

Tweet of the Week

Ethos

Quotes

"The test is not a complex one: when the alarm goes off, do you get up out of bed, or do you lie there in comfort and fall back to sleep? If you have the discipline to get out of bed, you win—you pass the test. If you are mentally weak for that moment and you let that weakness keep you in bed, you fail. Though it seems small, that weakness translates to more significant decisions. But if you exercise discipline, that too translates to more substantial elements of your life."
― Jocko Willink, "Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win"

"Big Brother isn’t watching. He’s singing and dancing. He’s pulling rabbits out of a hat. Big Brother’s busy holding your attention every moment you’re awake. He’s making sure you’re always distracted. He’s making sure you’re fully absorbed. He’s making sure your imagination withers. Until it’s as useful as your appendix."
— Chuck Palahniuk

"No matter how many scars we carry from what we have gone through and suffered in the past, our intrinsic wholeness is still here: what else contains the scars? None of us has to be a helpless victim of what was done to us or what was not done for us in the past, nor do we have to be helpless in the face of what we may be suffering now. We are also what was present before the scarring—our original wholeness, what was born whole. And we can reconnect with that intrinsic wholeness at any time, because its very nature is that it is always present. It is who we truly are."
― Jon Kabat-Zinn, "Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness"

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Keep doing the opposite,
Alex Kallaway
Website: dotheoppo.site
Twitter: twitter.com/ka11away