Welcome to the February edition! If you missed last one, I write about one book I’ve read, one tool I find useful, and one lesson I’ve learnt along my journey.
Aristotle said "we are what we repeat. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." Learning to create and keep habits is important for every person. We are the sum of our habits. Learning to create habits that bring me closer to my long-term goals seemed like a good first step.
Everyone. It's for the ambitious person that wants to learn to create the habits to support his/her goals. It's also for someone wanting to become more calm, healthy, or social.
Small habits may seem minor, but they can lead to big changes over time. Every habit follows a simple 4-step process:
Cue (what you see)
Craving (the feel to do something)
Response (how you react to the feeling)
Reward (what you feel after).
The way to change our habits is to use this process to our advantage:
cue -> make it obvious;
craving -> make it desirable/attractive;
response -> make it easy;
reward -> make it gratifying/satisfying.
From the first law, I'm taking two techniques to make the habit more obvious:
intention of application (e.g. "tomorrow at 5 I will do a programming lesson");
habit stacking: use habits you already have to create new ones. "Tomorrow after making my morning coffee, I will read 20 pages.")
From the third law, making the habit easy, I'm taking two main lessons:
Use my laziness to my favor. We tend to follow the path of least resistance. If I set up my surroundings to make starting tasks easy, I'm more likely to keep up the habit. Remove every possible friction between you and a habit. In my case, the book I'm reading is right by my side.
Use the 2-minute rule. Make the habit as small as possible. "Reading 50 pages" feels more daunting than "read one paragraph." It's not possible to improve a habit that doesn't exist.
From the fourth law, making it satisfying/gratifying, I'm implementing this:
To make a habit stick, make it enjoyable -> I will bring a piece of chocolate for when I do my coding lesson. Coding becomes associated with chocolate.
See immediate results. Using a habit tracker can make habits fun by showing me instant progress. I started using Streaks to keep track of certain habits.
The premise and strategies of the book are sound. Yet, the strategies mentioned in the second and fourth law could backfire or be useless. For instance, pairing a habit with a reward can fail if the reward is more tempting than the habit itself. Habits should be attractive by themselves. Like I wrote in the January edition, we should be able to find the pleasure in the habits themselves.
Life in the 21st century in a big city is not easy. You have limited time but many things to juggle: relationships, work, personal projects. Oh, and let’s not forget to hit the gym 3 times per week (at least) to keep in shape. Managing all this seems impossible. The answer is to have a good system. Your brain is to have ideas and to figure out solutions to complex problems. It is not to store birthdays, reminders, appointments and grocery lists. That’s what the storage in your phone/cloud is for. At the very least, a good digital system has 4 proper tools:
A calendar app: Google/Apple calendar is fine. I have an iPhone so I recommend the stock option. For android, my favorite used to be business cal 2. Every appointment, birthday, dinner party, and zoom meeting should be in there.
A task manager app: if you own an iPhone, do yourself a favor and buy Things 3. Every thought that pops in your head in the form of “oh, I shouldn’t forget to {…}” goes in there. Every thought. Review daily: morning and night.
A notes app: not every thought or information you come across is actionable. It may be in the future, or not at all. For these, you need a place where you can access them. Again, the stock options in iOS and Android are fine. If you are a power user, I recommend Obsidian (it's what I use), or Notion, if you're ok with not having offline access.
A read-it-later app: to save articles or newsletters to read when you have time. Instead of doomscrolling social media, you can turn dead time into reading time.
If you found this list useful, I wrote about my productivity system here.
I want to think about things where I have an advantage over others. I don't want to play a game where people have an advantage over me. I don't play in a game where other people are wise and I am stupid. I look for a game where I am wise, and they are stupid. And believe me, it works better.
— Charlie Munger
The best way I’m aware of to tilt the odds of life in your favor is to play on arenas where you have an advantage. In school, this is “unfair”. In life, it’s “being smart”. I’ve been reading about this topic for a long time. Ken Robinson calls it your “element” in his book with the same title. Naval Ravikant calls it “specific knowledge”. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to it as “flow”, in his book with the same title.
It is a group of abilities that seem more natural to us. They're not like skills that you can learn. This 'specific knowledge' comes more naturally. You have an edge if you use your natural knowledge in activities as much as you can. The best advice I found is from Naval Ravikant: "Do what feels like play to you but looks like work to others." Usually finding this “element” of ours feels difficult because of this. It doesn’t feel like work for us. And since it doesn’t feel like work, it doesn’t feel like a skill. It doesn’t feel like anyone would ever pay for it or it feels impossible to monetise. But not everyone has our abilities and that’s what makes us valuable. My advice would be this: figure out the abilities that seem to be more natural to you than most. Be as generic as possible. Don’t think: “I could be a good writer”. Think: “I am good at telling stories.” Being a writer is a constraint and will limit you. Being good at telling stories opens more doors. A few more examples: instead of thinking “programmer”, think “logical reasoning and research”. Instead of “artist”, think “manual meticulous work”. Then it’s up to you where to apply those natural tendencies and tilt the odds in your favour. One way to win is by being different instead of being the best. Combine skills where you are above average. For example, I may not be in the top 10% Data Scientists, but I have financial knowledge from years of investing. Combining these gives me an edge in this arena: data scientists who know investing.
I hope you have enjoyed this month’s newsletter. I’m still experimenting and open to suggestions. I’m going for ~1000 words (which should take you 4-5 minutes to read). Let me know if you would prefer a longer format (considering it’s a monthly newsletter) or if this is fine. Happy to read your suggestion (just hit reply to this email).
See you next month,
Fábio
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