Business is a never-ending quest to deliver the same result in an easier fashion.
As the psychologist Carl Jung said, “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.
Life feels reactive, but it is actually predictive. All day long, you are making your best guess of how to act given what you’ve just seen and what has worked for you in the past.
Incentives can start a habit. Identity sustains a habit.
The secret to getting results that last is to never stop making improvements.
Prime your environment to make future actions easier.
When you lose track of time, you are either living your best life or wasting it.
The human brain evolved to prioritize immediate rewards over delayed rewards.
As behavioral scientist Jason Hreha writes, “Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment.
In any election, there are going to be votes for both sides. You don’t need a unanimous vote to win an election; you just need a majority. It doesn’t matter if you cast a few votes for a bad behavior or an unproductive habit. Your goal is simply to win the majority of the time.
It’s a hallmark of any compounding process: the most powerful outcomes are delayed.
Goals are good for setting a direction, but systems are best for making progress. A handful of problems arise when you spend too much time thinking about your goals and not enough time designing your systems.
At some point, success in nearly every field requires you to ignore an immediate reward in favor of a delayed reward.
Habits are easier to perform, and more satisfying to stick with, when they align with your natural inclinations and abilities.
The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all.
Once we realize our strengths, we know where to spend our time and energy. We know which types of opportunities to look for and which types of challenges to avoid. The better we understand our nature, the better our strategy can be.
Sometimes motion is useful, but it will never produce an outcome by itself. It doesn’t matter how many times you go talk to the personal trainer, that motion will never get you in shape. Only the action of working out will get the result you’re looking to achieve.
Whenever you face a problem repeatedly, your brain begins to automate the process of solving it. Your habits are just a series of automatic solutions that solve the problems and stresses you face regularly. As behavioral scientist Jason Hreha writes, “Habits are, simply, reliable solutions to recurring problems in our environment.” As habits are created, the level of activity in the brain decreases. You learn to lock in on the cues that predict success and tune out everything else. When.
I know of executives and investors who keep a “decision journal” in which they record the major decisions they make each week, why they made them, and what they expect the outcome to be. They review their choices at the end of each month or year to see where they were correct and where they went wrong.
It’s better to start as a fool and learn from your mistakes than to fake being a genius and ignore your errors.