The Goldilocks Rule 👧🏼

Video 9 in our series on James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits.

Transcription

The Goldilocks Rule.

Hi, I’m Brian Pombo. Welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today I’m going to review the final section of Atomic Habits by James Clear, even if you haven’t read the book, this is this isn’t going to ruin anything for you, it’s gonna give you kind of a, it’s a good preview, really, for the book if you haven’t gotten a chance to read it.

If you have, it’s a good review of what was done in this book and the stuff that I thought really stood out.

There’s a lot more to it, a lot more areas that I’d love to discuss at a future time.

But right now, I’m just going to pick on a few things and one of them is this Goldilocks Rule.

I’m gonna get to that in a second, but in the first part of this section of the book, he talks about genetics is not being you know, an absolute thing.

I mean, it’s absolutely there, there are certain things your desires, the things you’re good at the things you aren’t good at even your habits, the things that you have more likely a pull toward as a bad habit or things that could be a good habit, and how you handle habits. All this is a genetic situation.

You can’t really do much about that other than know what you’re dealing with and then move from there. He says in short gene genes do not determine your destiny, they determine your areas of opportunity. As a physician, Gabor Monta noted, “Genes can predispose, but they don’t predetermine.”

So, they can predispose you to certain things. And there are certain things you’ll be interested in, there’s a certain amount of IQ and so forth, that’s genetic. And that’s just the way it is.

I mean, it’s just been, it’s been proven that these things are so many of these things they just kind of come with, with the job of being a human. And you just got to deal with the equipment that you’ve been given.

I like this quote, he says you don’t have to apologize for these differences or feel guilty about them but you do have to work with them.

That’s something we all have to keep in mind, I mean, across the board, but especially when it comes to building habits, you got to realize everyone’s a little bit different.

So you can’t get too caught up with hearing someone who’s had a lot of success in a certain area. And you’re having more difficulty in that area. That’s just, it’s just how we’re built.

The Goldilocks rules in an interesting idea.

The Goldilocks Rule states that humans experience peak motivation when working on tasks that are right on the edge of their current abilities. Not too hard, not too easy, just right, like, you know, Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

So when you’re starting a new habit, it’s important to keep the behavior as easy as possible, so you can stick with it even when conditions aren’t perfect. This idea we covered in detail while discussing the third law of behavior change. So that’s in that section of the book.

Once a habit has been established, however, it’s important to continue to advance in small ways. And the reason is, if you’re able to see this graph, the Goldilocks Rule, it’s it has to do with difficulty and how difficult the task is, if it’s not difficult at all, it’s really easy to be bored with it.

So as you build up a habit, you get to the point where it’s not difficult at all, and you get bored and you try switching it up.

You’ll naturally you may fall away from a habit because you’re bored with the activity itself. But if it can be a little bit, if you can increase difficulty, then you can make it more interesting, as long as you don’t increase it too fast.

If you increase it too fast, it becomes you it pushes you to failure. So it’s a very interesting concept. And one I haven’t heard described this way before. But it’s good stuff.

Boredom is perhaps the greatest villain on the quest for self-improvement. And I can definitely say that as a as an entrepreneur, and I think a lot of a lot of you who are watching, listening are entrepreneurial.

That is a very common thing that you see over and over again, one of the things I see with businesses that I look into partnering up with is, I see a lot of times there is a need or a desire to switch things up, even when things are working really well.

So they may have had a tactic at one point or a strategy that is really growing their business and they switch it up and they and they can’t tell you why they switched it up.

But I know why they’re bored with If they’re bored with the fact that it’s working all the time, and they switch it up to try something new to try, and it’s almost like the gamblers high, and wanting to get a little more, you know, even if you’re on a winning streak if I can just get more than where I was.

It’s a total lie that we tell ourselves, what really should happen if you’re talking in terms of business, for example, is to secure anything that you are doing right in the form of a system, you may, you know, delegate it on to somebody else, or you may create some software that can do it for you.

But you make it to where you don’t stop doing the things that made the gains, you start from there, and then you can move on to somewhere else. But you have to make sure you’re at least doing that minimum activity. It’s so important across the board in both your personal life and it just compounds 10 times over when you’re writing a business. So you just need it.

Here’s another good quote, you just need enough winning to experience satisfaction. And just enough wanting to experience desire, you have to keep that certain level of desire available in your life, otherwise, it really gets crazy.

He also goes through this great section on the downside of creating good habits, that when you can do it good enough on autopilot, you stop thinking about how to do it better.

So and what you need to do is that same idea, you need to challenge yourself, you need to make sure that there’s the next challenge to keep things moving ahead. Talks about the concept of career-best effort and how that was implemented by the Los Angeles Lakers. Really great stuff. Great book, Atomic Habits.

This is the final I believe this is the ninth episode that we’ve done on it. And this is the final one that I’m going to do on it.

I’ll bring it up from time to time because it plays into so many other things that we do when we’re dealing with business.

So I’m a Business investor, I work with different businesses, I partner up with them.

I look for ways to either purchase or help them to sell their business. And so when you’re going through that process, you come into these little idiosyncrasies of life that can affect everybody, like habit building. And there are so many ways that we can make life easier and better for everybody involved, both ourselves, our employees, and our partners. It’s something to always keep in mind.

So I always highly, highly recommend self-improvement books that are useful and this is one that was very useful to me. That’s all I got for today.

Go check out my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. If you’re wanting to find out more about what I recommend for how to make your business competition proof, which is a huge step forward and making your business do what you want it to do.

If you’re constantly in the form in the process of competing, then you’re always 10 steps behind it and you fall behind on what really needs to get done to make your business a good thing in your life.

Go grab a copy, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. And if you want you can always download a free digital copy over at BrianJPombo.com. And you can go to AmazonProofBook.com to go directly to that offer AmazonProofBook.com

That’s all I have for tonight. You have a good one. Get out there and let the magic happen.