Habits To Become 40.5 TIMES BETTER At Anything | James Clear EP 288

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show.

0:10I firmly believe that taking charge of your mindset allows you to be in the driver's seat of your life and unlock your potential. And that's why I'm thrilled to share that my new book is out right now. It's called The Greatness Mindset. In it, you'll learn how to build a plan for greatness through powerful exercises and toolkits designed to propel your life forward. This is the book that I wish I had 20 years ago. It's everything I've learned in the last decade with the research and the science to help you unlock your mind. Make sure to go to lewishouse.com slash 2023 mindset to pick up your copy of my book, The Greatness Mindset, today.

0:54Habits that are immediately satisfying are more likely to be repeated. And so pretty much any behavior produces multiple outcomes across time, right? Like if you eat a donut right now, it's tasty and sugary. But in the long run, you gain weight. And so the immediate outcome is favorable. The long-term outcome is unfavorable. With good habits, it's often the reverse, right? Like you go to the gym right now and it takes effort. You sweat, you have to work hard. The immediate outcome is unfavorable, but the ultimate outcome, you're in shape and in a year or a month or whatever, is favorable. And so the challenge for building good habits and breaking bad ones is often finding a way to pull the long-term consequences of your bad habits into the immediate moment, so you feel a little bit of pain right now and want to avoid it, and the long-term rewards of your good habits into the immediate moment, so that you have a reason to repeat it again in the future.

1:41The ultimate form of immediate gratification is the reinforcement of your desired identity. So you go to the gym and you're reinforcing the identity of I'm the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, or you show up to write and you're reinforcing the identity of I'm someone who writes every day. And so you get a little bit of immediate satisfaction from being that person and being aligned with your identity, your values, your principles. But you also get the long-term rewards from showing up every day. And so what you don't want is some kind of immediate reinforcement, like eating a donut at the gym, where you're casting votes for two different identities, right?

2:13It's like, I showed up at the gym, I'm casting a vote for being the type of person who doesn't miss workouts, the type of person who's healthy, but then I eat a donut. So now I'm casting a vote for being an unhealthy person. So it kind of washes out, right? So you want reinforcements that align with your principles and values. You essentially have to form your identity first. Is that what I'm hearing? Who you want to be? I think that your habits are the way that you embody an identity, right? So like each time you make your bed, you embody the identity of someone who is clean and organized. Each time you go to the gym, you embody the identity of someone who's fit.

2:47Each time you sit down to write, you embody the identity of a writer. So you can sort of think of it as like each behavior casts a vote for the type of person that you want to become. And if you cast enough votes for that type of identity, you start to believe that about yourself, right? Like if you go to church for 20 years, you believe that you're religious. You study Spanish every Tuesday for 30 minutes, you believe that you're studious. So in that way, your habits provide evidence of your desired identity. And I think that that is probably the ultimate reason that habits are so important. It's true, like habits can help you earn more money or be more productive or lose weight.

3:21And all that stuff is great. But in addition to the external results that habits provide, they also shape your sense of self. They like are the engine or the avenue through which you learn to believe things about yourself. Like sometimes people will say stuff like fake it till you make it. But fake it till you make it is asking yourself to believe something without evidence for it. And you can do that for a little while. You could do it for a day or a week. But eventually, I mean, there's a word for beliefs that don't have evidence behind them. Delusion, right? And if you're deluding yourself, then eventually you give up on that.

3:53But the power of doing a better habit each day or casting a little vote for that type of person is that now you have evidence to root your belief in. Like, I mean, now you have a lot of evidence that you're a podcaster or a good interviewer. You know, like you do this over and over again each time you cast a vote for believing that about yourself. And you don't just, you aren't delusionally believing that you're a good interviewer. it's because you've shown up and done it hundreds of times. And so I think that that's true for any habit, large or small, that they provide evidence of the desired identity or the type of person that you are.

4:33Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of The Daily Motivation, and I hope you have an amazing rest of your day. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description. That will take you to the full episode of our main podcast on The School of Greatness. And if you are loving The Daily Motivation, please follow us over on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review over on Apple Podcasts right now. And if you want more exclusive content and ad-free listening experience, make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel on Apple Podcast right now. And if you want to get even more inspiration from our world-class guests and learn how to improve your life and take it to the next level, then make sure to sign up for the Greatness newsletter and get it delivered right to your inbox over at greatness.com slash newsletter.

5:29Again, have an amazing day, and I'll see you tomorrow with another episode of the Daily Motivation Show. You