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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.

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Video 8 in our series on James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits.

Transcription

Habit tracking, does it actually work?

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

Today, we’re going back to Atomic Habits, by James Clear, and we’re talking about the fourth section of the book, called the fourth law, to make it satisfying.

This includes multiple chapters but each one goes to that fourth step in building a habit. And so just to review for those of you who may be coming in on this or if you just need a refresher, there are four basic laws, four basic steps that James Clear, discusses in green a habit, the first one is to make it obvious.

The second one is to make it attractive.

The third one is to make it easy. And here’s the fourth one, make it satisfying.

I’ll tell you that there’s a lot of good stuff in here that I highlighted and have gone back to over and over again, in this chapter. But I wanted to talk about one main thing that I think was the most important.

That main thing is habit tracking, what is habit tracking? Okay, so if you’re trying to get a habit going, one of the main things you want to do is start tracking it. This goes back to the concept.

The last couple of times, we were talking about being aware, and how awareness really makes habits work.

You really have to be aware of what’s going on for one thing, it tells you what type of habits to go for. But it also will help you to just automatically if you’re aware of what’s going on, you’re going to get better in any given area.

The same thing is true of habit tracking I’m looking for, you could see me if you’re watching, you see me looking down the book here, I’ve got it right here. And I’m looking I just lost my spot. When it comes to habit tracking.

This is within the second. Let me see here, I believe it’s, it’s within the second chapter in this section called, How to stick with good habits every day.

Yep, here it is, how to keep your habits on track.

This is a big deal. In fact, he goes back to the concept of not breaking the chain, which is what we’ve discussed it here before when we were talking about the book, consistency chain for network marketing is a network marketing-specific book, but the concept is true.

No matter what you’re doing, even if you’re not even doing business, if you understand that habits happen across the board, then you can take this that the idea is if you can build up a habit, consciously, purposefully build up a good habit.

You do it on a daily basis, let’s say it’s an easy way to be able to think about this as if it’s daily. If you’re doing something every single day, then the idea is to not break that chain is that every day, you’re able to put another link in the chain and another link and another link.

As soon as you miss one, you’ve broken the chain, you kind of have to start over with that count the well. And one thing he says here is that it’s going to happen. I mean, you’re going to break the chain at some point that you can’t get around it, life will get end up getting in the way at some point. And that’s no big deal.

He says no matter how consistent you are with your habits, it’s inevitable that life will interrupt you at some point perfection is not possible. Before long an emergency will pop up, you get sick or you have to travel for work or your family needs a little more of your time.

When this happens to me, I try to remind myself of a simple rule, never missed twice. If you miss twice, now you’re building the habit in the opposite direction. But if you can get right back up on the horse and keep going.

That’s the big thing about about tracking, keeping, keeping that there’s also there’s a part of tracking that is extremely satisfying.

So one of the things that I’ve done just recently and one of the habits I’m trying to adapt, I needed it to be an accountability thing.

So I have a team of people that I’m accountable with and those of you watching you know, you know who you are. We have a team of people to that I’m accountable with.

At the same time, I want my family beyond the part of it. I took a calendar, just one of these blank calendars that you can print out your Google blank monthly calendar template or something like that. and you get one that doesn’t have it has the days.

It has, you know, four weeks worth or whatever on there. But it doesn’t have numbers so you can make it whatever month of whatever year you want. And so I just put the latest month and I put the numbers up there and number correctly, and voila, I have a calendar ready to go.

The only point of this calendar is to track on whether I’ve kept the link going for every day. And I have a black sharpie. So this calendar is, is magnetized to my fridge, right?

I’ve got a black sharpie hanging on it, and I pull it off, and I exit out.

That is one of the most satisfying things is rather than doing the habit itself, I look forward to getting home and putting another X on the thing. I don’t know why it still hasn’t lost its effect on me after nearly two weeks of of being on it.

But the little things, the little things that are satisfying if you can make it satisfying. And that’s, that’s what makes it work in the long run. When he says when when successful people fail, they rebound quickly.

The breaking of a habit doesn’t matter if the reclaiming of it is fast. Or Charlie Munger said the first rule of compounding is never interrupted unnecessarily. And habit building is compounding. That’s what we’re looking at doing here.

Let’s see, really great stuff throughout this chapter. There’s another point that he makes in here is that it’s easier to do one thing at a time.

Rather do one thing at a time as perfectly as you can, versus trying to adapt a whole lot of habits at the same time.

Now, some people, if you’re familiar with this process, you may be able to handle adding in a bunch of habits at a time I have a friend that has a list, a little notebook, it’s all graphed out.

He has like about five or six habits that he’s doing at the same time, each one’s a daily habit. And he makes sure he puts an x for every last one.

Now maybe you can get away with that with me, I know I’ve got to start slow. So I’ve got one, one habit I’m hat, I’m adding it in any given time.

Once I feel more secure in that habit, I can one thing grow on, on how large it is that I’m handling everyday but also be able to add another habit, I definitely have some exercise habits and so forth that I want to I want to add on.

So something we’ll be adding to it as we go along.

That’s really the gist of what I got out of this section. There’s a whole bunch of other pieces that we can dig into. But I’m not going to bore you with that.

Go and check out this book, Atomic Habits by James Clear.

I don’t get any kickback from it. In one place, I do get a kickback. From that I like to mention, at least once every time that we get together is my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business.

This is a way for me to get to know people, and also a way for people to get to know me if there’s ever going to be a relationship. If I’m looking to invest in a company or anything else I make sure they they check out and release leaf through my book once so that they have an understanding of where I’m coming from. This is s far as from your perspective.

This can help you this book can help you if you are looking to grow your business and stand out in your industry to the point to where you no longer have really any viable competition.

If you want to end a competition that’s what I call being Amazon-Proof because even amazon.com can’t stop you that you want to go get a copy of this book.

You can purchase it wherever books are sold, or he can get a free digital copy over at my website, AmazonProofBook.com. AmazonProofBook.com.

That’s all I have for tonight. You have a good one. We’ll be back tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

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Video 7 in our series on James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits.

Transcription

Make life better through repeating.

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

I wanted to talk a little bit today again about, Atomic Habits by, James Clear, this is a part three where he’s discussing, you know, in the process of making a habit, making good habits work and bad habits go away, you have to recognize that the third step is to make it easy.

This is deceptively simple but so important. If you look at anything that you do on a regular basis that you would call habitual, you’ll have to say that you have created or something has allowed you to make it extremely easy to do. habits don’t happen if they’re not easy.

So it’s a weird thing, it seems.

On one hand, it seems well, yeah, duh. But on the other hand, it really is true. I mean, what if you could just make a habit difficult if you’re looking to get rid of it.

So that this comes back to a story that the first point that he makes in this in this part, in this section of the book?

I really like in fact, I really enjoy this story. I’m going to read it verbatim for you, I hope you don’t mind. He says this is the beginning of chapter 11, which is titled walk slowly but never backward.

He says on the first day of class, Jerry Oldsman, I don’t know how to say his name, a professor at the University of Florida, divided his film, and photography students, into two groups.

Okay, everyone on the left side of the classroom, he explained would be in the quantity group, they would be graded solely on the amount of work they produced.

On the final day of class, he would tally the number of photos submitted by each student 100 photos would rate and 90 photos a B, add photos a C, and so on.

Meanwhile, everyone on the right side of the room would be in the quality group, they would be graded only on the excellence of their work, they would only need to produce one photo during the semester, but get an A.

In order to get an A that photo had to be nearly perfect. Okay, at the end of the term, he was surprised to find that all the best photos were produced by the quantity group.

During the semester, these students were busy taking photos experimenting with composition and lighting, testing out various methods in the darkroom and learning from their mistakes. In the process of creating hundreds of photos, they honed their skill.

Meanwhile, the quality group sat around speculating about perfection. In the end, they had little to show for their efforts, other than unverified theories, and one mediocre photo.

This is the truth no matter what you’re talking about and it’s something we discuss here. In fact, I have a whole chapter dedicated to it in my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business, all about being consistent.

Being consistent really is more than anything about being persistent. And you be sure and check out my book, when you get a chance, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business, you can go buy yourself a copy, or you can get a free copy, download one at AmazonProofBook.com.

Back, let’s talk about atomic habits here. He says the famous Voltaire quote, the best is the enemy of good when you repeat something, when you have repetition behind it, you will automatically get better.

There’s no way around it and so I discussed this in terms of content marketing. Quite often I’ll talk about how you need to have lots of content marketing, and you got to put it out on a regular basis.

Even if nobody’s watching, listening or reading, it’s important for you to do because that repetition allows you to automatically get better. There’s no way around it you will get better with time.

He says here, that both common sense and scientific evidence agree repetition is a form of change. If you can just repeat something over and over again. You will get better at it.

This is a great way to be able to look at forming a new habit if you can form a new habit very small, grab something very small and do it on a regular basis. You will get better at that thing and better at that thing. It’s not about quality.

It’s about quantity and not quantity all at once. Quantity over time.

That’s how habits are made a lot of people that there’s been too Talk about, Well, how long does it take to form a habit?

And people say, Well, 21 days?

At some point, somebody came up with the number 21. It’s not necessarily true at all. It has to do with the type of habit it is how easy that habit is to do.

Yeah, how how well it fits the four parameters like he lays out in this book, and how often it is done?

Is that a habit that you’re building up once a week or once a month or is it a daily thing?

Or is it multiple times a day, the more often you do it, the quicker it will become?

A habit, the quicker it gets ingrained into your subconscious mind. So that was a great part of this. And it leads into the area of making it easy. And making things easy. Making things remarkably convenient, is the name of the game.

Here’s a great quote that he has a look at any behavior that fills up much of your life. And you’ll see that it can be performed with very low levels of motivation, habits, like scrolling on our phones, checking email, and watching television steal so much of our time, because they can be performed almost without effort.

They are remarkably convenient. This is really the he makes another point businesses and never-ending quest to deliver the same result in an easier fashion.

So this is one thing through business, we both hurt people and help people at the same time, depending on on whether they get caught up with whatever it is that we’re providing.

But in business, we’re always looking to deliver something faster, easier, simpler, and to make people’s lives easier.

This can hurt people in the long run if they get spoiled by having things delivered easily. But you can’t really get around it. Because one way or the other, certain parts of our life do need to get easier.

We just need to watch and make sure that our whole life doesn’t get too easy. Because that’s when you start, you start losing character. Something about life, we can’t have it too easy as humans.

Otherwise, we end up destroying ourselves but that’s a whole nother topic. But you have to realize that that’s the bad habits versus good habits, good habits tend to not be easy right up front.

But the more you can make it easier, the more you can make it a good habit, the more you can make your bad habits, inconvenient and not easy to do, the more you will automatically find yourself doing better things with your life. Which is a really cool idea. And it’s a simple idea.

This is very, very simple.

It’s just most of the time we don’t think of habits being the super convenient thing but they totally are.

That’s the real problem with the bad habit game. Yeah, I can go on and on. Amazing book, but a really an amazing section where he talks about part, the third law.

Tomorrow I’m going to talk about the fourth law. That’s the final law in this book. And I may cover some some other stuff on another day.

But I wanted to kind of finish up giving you a take on atomic habits once again, it’s not something I get paid for.

I haven’t been pushed by anybody to endorse this book. It’s coming purely from me and I think it will improve your life.

If it’s something that you’re interested in.

Go check it out. That’s all I have for tonight. We’ll be back tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen. Hey, it’s easy.

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We continue on with our series about James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits.

Transcription

What is your deepest desire?

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

Today I’m going to be talking about what author James Clear talks about in Atomic Habits, where he discusses your deepest desire and what’s every human’s deepest desire.

I’m going to get into that in a second, I want to cover some other pieces. This is all from the second law section of his book where he talks about making it attractive. So if you’re looking to build good habits, or get rid of old habits, the way to get rid of old habits is to make something unattractive.

The way to get a new habit is to make it attractive, it’s difficult because most new habits, the real problem with it is the attraction we have is down the line, you know, it doesn’t usually start out good usually starts out painful, uncomfortable, whatever, not tasty or what have you.

No matter what a good habit is, it usually starts out undesirable and ends up desirable in the long run, a bad habit goes the opposite direction. So it’s a funny dichotomy. But he talks about making things attractive if you’re wanting to make a good habit. And this is this can be said in both directions.

So we talk a lot on here about business, and the concept surrounding marketing and how to get your word out there, get whatever it is that you’re trying to get people to do. getting it out there. In fact, I wrote a book, 9 Ways to Amazon-proof your business, it’s all about how to stand out, it’s all about how to be out there. By the way, if you want a free copy, you can go to AmazonProofBook.com.

But back to this one. And I don’t get any money for atomic habits, just so you know, I just I’ve really enjoyed the book. So I wanted to go through and give a quick, quick little, little piece review of this. The interesting thing about making things attractive is it ties back into marketing.

So it actually ties back in all forms of marketing. So whether you are trying to sell a country on your political vision, or whether you are trying to encourage a close family member to do something that would be good for them, the same thing is true, you need to be able to make it attractive to them. And you need to be able to hit that second piece of the four-step process of building a habit. That second piece is called craving.

And that’s how you get there by making something attractive a person has to crave what it is. So one of the best parts in this book.

Well, I say that over and over again, it’s not really the best part of the book, one of the best parts in this section that I just happen to be looking at today is he’s talking about the fact that they went through and they started looking at dopamine spikes.

So dopamine is that substance going into your brain, the hormone or what have you. That is a pleasant reward into your brain, right for doing a certain thing. And it happens when you do bad things. And it happens when you do good things. But it happens none nonetheless, you’re always going to have a certain amount of dopamine in your system.

In fact, they found that if you don’t have any dopamine, you won’t have any desire to do anything. And you’ll probably die of starvation because you have no desire to even eat. So that’s an interesting idea.

But that it says that they went through and they started seeing at what point dopamine spikes happen, especially if you’re talking about someone with bad habits, which we would call an addict. So they talked about gambling addicts and says gambling addicts have a dopamine spike, right before they place a bet. Not after they win. You see that they may be the first few times, they get the highest high at the toward the tail end. But it becomes the anticipation of the high that is even more important.

So it says if the anticipation of a reward, and this is for any situation, not just addicts, any situation where you have something that you’re driven to do, if the anticipation of it is the anticipation of a reward, not the fulfillment of it, that gets us to take action.

So the action is taken via anticipation, the dopamine spike, that pleasure feeling actually starts to occur long before the payoff. It happens during the queue in the craving section of your process when you’re doing something over and over again. You get ramped up and excited about it early on.

This is very key to all forms of marketing because if you can tap into that with people, then you can get their attention Shouldn’t and you can get them to take action, which is the most difficult step in anything when you’re trying to do any form of marketing whatsoever.

It’s the whole idea that you’re trying to get someone to do something that they wouldn’t normally do or haven’t done or aren’t doing as often as you want them to. Okay, that’s what marketing is, for good and for bad.

And so that if you look at it from that sense, this is what people are trying to get you to do this, what the commercials are trying to get you to do at the same time, it’s what you’re trying to get other people to do is to take action on something.

It talks about that that habit stacking formula that we talked about before, and how well that works. In this, we move ahead here. This is where the deepest desire really comes in.

Because yeah, you can always have a craving towards something. But what really drives people.

Charles Darwin said in the long history of humankind, those who learn to collaborate and improvise, most effectively have prevailed. And so James clear says as a result, one of the deepest human desires is to belong. And this ancient preference exerts a powerful influence on our modern behavior.

We don’t choose our earliest habits, we imitate them, we, there’s just there’s an instinct to want to want to belong. And we talk about this in the frame of marketing. Nowadays, we call it social proof.

So seeing testimonials, and seeing other people that have gotten a good experience, from the action that the person is trying to get us to take a purchase something to get involved with something when they see other people doing it, they’re automatically drawn toward it.

This is why, if you have a restaurant, one of the best things you could possibly do is pay for people to park their cars there. Even if they’re not eating in the restaurant, you need the perception, at some point that you’re popular in order to become popular. That’s a weird, weird paradox, but it’s absolutely true across the board. And it’s just it’s built into the human condition.

There’s no way around it, that he talks about that we imitate the habits of three groups in particular. And I found this interesting, because I’ve never heard it quite described this way. So we imitate the close.

So people who are close to us in proximity, people who are close to us in relations, people who are, it’s the close the people who were most connected with and around all the time you soak up the qualities and habits of other people, you know, so many of your original habits and the way that you conduct yourself is based on your home life growing up, there’s just no way around it, you’re going to imitate those people, it’s just a very natural thing.

The other thing that we imitate is the mini, imitate the mini so the concept of whoever the majority is, that’s who you’re going to imitate, it doesn’t mean it’s actually the Mini, it’s who you think the Mini is, which is incredible. And then the third one is imitating the powerful, you know, those who we consider powerful, prestigious, those with status.

That’s a lot of who people imitate a lot of who people envy.

Once again, these are extremely subjective frames of mind and can be totally manipulated, you have to be able to see how you’re manipulated by these things throughout all culture. But you also have to be able to see that and you have to realize how you’re communicating with people.

So you don’t get in the way of these things. Not that you necessarily go through to purposefully, purposefully manipulate people, but you can’t ignore the fact that this is how people function. So that was that that was really the most important thing I think, to take from that is the idea of belonging.

That sense of belonging is so key, it’s so central to human beings. And there’s a good side to it a bad side to it. And that’s why we end up having wars and everything else. But that sense of belonging from our fellow countrymen and so forth. It’s very, very interesting how it affects us on a day-to-day basis.

It’s something to keep an eye on. And it’s something to also keep an eye on when it comes to your marketing that you’re not going against that sense of belonging because you’ll be fighting against human nature itself. That’s all I got for today. I’m gonna I’ll be back tomorrow with we’re gonna go through the third law tomorrow. And that’s all I got you. We’ll see you tomorrow.

In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.

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Video 5 in our series on James Clear’s book, Atomic Habits.

Transcription

Awareness, habit stacking, and the secret to self-control.

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

And there you have one of the largest, the longest titles ever had here on the show. I want to fit it all in there. Because I’m covering a bunch of random areas from this book, Atomic Habits by James Clear.

They’re not so random, they’re all within this one section of the book, called The First Law makes it obvious.

So in the last episode, we talked about how there are four different laws, four different steps in the loop in the habit loop when you’re trying to build a habit or trying to break a habit.

These are the same four steps no matter what. And if you can break apart those steps, you can get rid of a bad habit, if you can build those steps from the bottom up, you can create a good habit. And so the first law is to make it obvious.

So he’s got it here make it obvious and he’s got a handful of chapters going into that I just wanted to point out some very simple ideas in these that they’re simple but powerful.

One of the things he talks about is that I’ll just read it to you this is a great, great point, he says this is one of the most surprising insights about our habits, you don’t need to be aware of the cue for a habit to begin.

So the queue, this is an aside, there’s me talking, the queue is that beginning thing, it’s the beginning thing that starts you in the process of going into to doing your habit.

There’s something that that happens during a certain time of day, or it’s or it’s seen something or smelling something that lead you into the process of that habit that you just can’t break.

He says, You don’t need to be aware, you can notice an opportunity and take action without dedicating conscious attention to it.

This is what makes habits useful. And that’s really, it’s really true because it’s the awareness. It’s when you it’s not it’s below your awareness.

It’s almost subconscious, but it’s definitely below your immediate awareness.

That’s when habits are the most powerful good habits and bad habits, bad habits are even worse, where you’re in the middle of that, you know, you’re sitting there smoking, like I don’t even remember lighting up is how did this happen, you know, and I don’t smoke, but I know that’s how it works.

Because it works that way with all habits. And you find yourself in the ER like driving, driving to work, you know, the car kind of gets there on its own.

Sometimes you go and you don’t remember getting in the car, and you don’t remember putting your seatbelt on, you don’t remember doing all these things you do every day.

You’re there and you’re like, wait a second, how do I get here, you know, your mind can be used somewhere else because your body is in the process of the habit. I mean, your brains directing it all. But at the same time.

It’s how habits work and it’s why they’re useful.

It’s also why they can be horribly destructive.

But one of the things you really have to do with is, is he talks about habit scorecard.

So if you can just sit back and watch on a daily basis, all the different habits that you have good and bad. And he says that he says really interesting thing, he says there’s no need to change anything at first, the goal is to simply notice what’s going on.

Observe your thoughts and actions without judgment or internal criticism. Don’t blame yourself for your faults. Don’t praise yourself for your successes.

If you just be aware of your habits and be aware of what’s going on, then he gives you ideas of how to go about labeling them and figuring out which ones are good and which ones are bad. And how to go about building better ones.

As time goes on the process of behavior change, he says, always starts with awareness. And that’s absolutely true. I’ve seen over and over again, awareness is a powerful thing.

That if you do nothing else, if you’re looking to lose weight, I want you to do nothing else. Don’t change your diet, don’t change your exercise, anything else.

You don’t have to do anything else consciously except weigh yourself and write it down. Once a day, every day in the morning, you weigh yourself, you write down the number, weigh yourself and write down the number.

That simple process creates awareness about that number. And that number will go in the direction you want it to do if you’re looking to gain weight, you can gain weight, if you wind to lose weight, you will lose weight without even worrying about it. It will automatically start to occur to some extent.

You’re not obsessing over it. You’re just doing it watching the number.

It’s the awareness that makes it powerful is the awareness paying attention to how when you’re eating paying real really close attention to when you’re eating, all of a sudden, you’ll start making different choices, all of a sudden, you won’t eat as quickly. You won’t eat as much.

The awareness is the key there.

It’s very, very interesting, but absolutely true.

Another thing he talks about his habit stacking, which is one of those things that I’ve done through the years, and he talks about if you have one habit, and you stack another habit on top of a habit that’s already there.

It’s easier to get it into play it like follows along, you end off with one or you start with one and the cue, it leads to the next clue, and it builds on itself.

I found this early on when I was living on my own, and I would forget to shave, or I wouldn’t want to shave, because if I waited too long to shave, and my face was too dry, I’d cut myself, it’s just all there’s a number of things, I had skin issues and everything else when I was younger. And I found that I always got a good shave it hot is right out of the shower.

I said, Well, what if I was in the shower, could I do it then. So I took a little mirror with me in the shower, and I started shaving myself in the shower.

All of a sudden I’d had no issues being shaved. And also I shaved every day because it was connected to the habit of taking the shower every day. And honestly, I started later on, I knew somebody that was brushing their teeth in the shower.

So I started brushing my teeth in the shower, all of a sudden, I never forgot to brush my teeth, I at least brush my teeth once a day because I was doing it in the shower, along with that process of habits that are already there. It’s a habit stacking is a very, very powerful tool. He spent some time talking about that.

The final thing that he he discusses that I think it’s just really great is the is the idea of self control. The idea the concept of discipline and self control. And so many of us get caught up with that idea.

Like I’ve mentioned before, that even the word discipline just kind of It bothers me it’s a, it seems like an over the top word, it seems like you’re forcing something or whatever else. And self control can has been tied to the word discipline on on a lot of levels.

But he says it doesn’t have to require this enormous willpower. He says heroic willpower and self control. In other words, you can spin that discipline people spend time in less tempting situations.

So anything that leads into bad habits, a person who’s called discipline is a person that just stays out of those situations, change your environment is his main key.

Change your environment and you can do away with good habits and encourage, do away with bad habits and encourage good habits.

It’s an environmental situation.

So that’s pretty cool. I really really liked that part.

All about the queue is one of the most important parts this is what starts off every situation when you’re building the habit so it’s a great section of the book. Definitely want to check out atomic habits.

I don’t get paid anything for it. It’s just a fabulous book. So I’m spending some spin in some episodes talking about it. So hopefully you found that enjoyable. You can also check out my book, 9 ways to Amazon proof your business.

I am a business investor. So this is this is my concepts on how to go about making yourself competition proof. You get a free copy at AmazonProofBook.com AmazonProofBook.com

That’s all I have for today. You have a good one. We’ll be back tomorrow. In the meantime, get out there and let the magic happen.