Why Habits Matter, and How Habit Formation Works

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We have our vision, our values, our plans, and our systems. Now we need to work the system to execute the plan. It’s time to build our habits.

James Clear says our accomplishments are lagging indicators of our habits. It’s unlikely you’ll stumble into your net worth goals or your health goals, or your skill goals. You get what you repeat.

Unless we translate our ambitions into a set of habits we do consistently, we will lose motivation and abandon our plans.

The systems from Week 4 will certainly help. But we still have to develop the discipline to use those systems. Otherwise they become stale.

We are like athletes. We must “train” ourselves to do the things we know are necessary to move our plans forward.

The Elements of Habit Formation

BJ Fogg runs the Stanford Persuasion Lab and is an expert in behavior change. I’ve found his model for behavior change to be incredibly helpful. He argues there are three steps necessary to facilitate change:

• You have to have the sufficient motivation.
• You have to have sufficient ability.
• You have to have the appropriate triggers at the appropriate time.

And habits function in a loop:

• You receive a trigger, either external or internal
• You take action (assuming sufficient motivation and ability)
• You have a reward

So these are elements we want to optimize for - maximizing motivation and ability, while leveraging triggers and rewards to induce action.

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