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OMG, don’t eat that ice cream! Pick something else!
Mmm, I'd love a cold Pepsi right about now…but I shouldn’t.
Those Cheetos are calling my name…but I should have the celery.
Sorry, but you already lost before you entered the kitchen:
The battle isn’t
fought in the kitchen but at the grocery store
. The instant you put this crap in your
shopping cart is the instant you lost the war. Likewise, if you’re spending hours
watching mindless reality television, the battle isn’t on the couch with the remote
control; it’s on the telephone. Pick up the phone and cancel the freaking cable
TV. Wage war on the wrong battlefield and you’ll be armed with sticks and
stones while regression fights with an AR-15.
STEP #8: ATTACK BAD HABITS WITH INCONVENIENCE AND/OR PAIN
Once battlegrounds are identified, you can attack your bad habits. How? By
leveraging your natural human instinct to seek the path of least resistance. Put
the shortcut scam in your corner by turning bad habits into a royal pain in the
ass. Make them invasive. Inconvenient, and with no shortcuts.
In our refrigerator example, if you’ve won the war at the grocery store, you
now have attached inconvenience to the bad habit. If you want ice cream, you’ve
got to hop in your car, drive to the store, troll the grocery aisle, buy it, and drive
home. Not super complicated, but certainly not super convenient. If you’re
trying to stop playing video games, pack up your Xbox console and sell it. Or
throw it in the attic. Now if you want to play, you’ve got to climb a ceiling ladder
and crawl through a dusty attic to unpack it, wire it up, and play.
STEP #9: ACT UNTIL ECHO
A process modality’s final step transforms actions into habit. Whatever your
goal,
act until echo
. Take disciplined action until a feedback loop kicks on. Vow
to work until your first echo occurs and then—and only then—decide your next
step. Do I continue? Adjust? Or stop?
Years ago, my college sweetheart left me for some big-shot ad executive who
wore expensive suits and talked with a slithery tongue. Back then, I was lost and,
let’s just say, she deservedly needed to jump ship. Anyhow, to assuage my grief, I
hit the gym for the first time in my life. The gym medicated my sorrows. While
this distraction started as an action-fake, it later transformed into a process. By
the time I was over the breakup, I experienced my first feedback echoes: I felt
better and my gangly stick arms grew some apples. People commented on my
subtle transformation, and the echo reinforced the activity from a temporary
distraction into a process. Once your effort strikes echoes, it reaffirms your
actions, becoming habit, sometimes addictive, and as automatic as brushing your
teeth.
The point is, whatever the goal, work until you strike your first echo. And
when that happens, notice how you feel. Once you get to that first echo, there’s
usually no going back. Even if it’s marginal results, you empower yourself
forward.
I recently heard a great analogy for this in Gary Keller’s book,
The ONE
Thing
(recommended read). The process-principle and its echoes can be
visualized as a line of dominoes, where each sequential domino gets
progressively larger. When you start, the very first domino knocked over is
incredibly small. When it drops, nothing is felt or heard. However, its velocity is
enough to knock over the next, slightly larger domino. That domino continues
the progression, toppling the next larger one. As the dominoes get bigger and
fall, suddenly you start hearing and feeling them drop. It’s music to your ears,
motivating you forward. The process continues until the last domino tumbles
over, a gigantic domino symbolizing your goal—competing in a fitness
competition, saving a million bucks, getting out of debt—and it started with a
tiny, insignificant domino, which cascaded into incredible change velocity. And
yet, the ascending dominoes perfectly illustrate why event-driven failures fail:
They start at the biggest domino and are powerless to budge it. If they only saw
that
it’s the little things that cause the big things.
CHAPTER 19
BELIEF #2
THE SPECIAL SCAM:
“I’M NOT GOOD AT THAT”
To me, the function and duty of a quality human being is the
sincere and honest development of one’s potential.
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