Confession time: I’m not all that smart.
Not that I can’t write a complete sentence or solve an algebra problem (after all…I did start a test prep company wayyy back when.)
What I mean is that to get where I’m going, I often copy the work of others. In fact, one of the BEST ways to accelerate your progress in life is to befriend successful, interesting people — then leverage those friendships to meet more amazing people.
Now all you have to do is figure out what makes them so great, and do that. Pretty simple.
It’s like copy-pasting awesome.
(I even wrote a super detailed guide explaining exactly how this process works. The benefits are IMMENSE.) But what happens once you have those friendships with ultra-cool, successful people? What do you think you’re going to learn? Many of us seem to think that people with lots of money or success have some sort of magic fairy dust that they go around sprinkling on every project they start. Perhaps they also wear tights and little fairy wings while doing this. Who knows. I know I used to think that, anyway. I remember asking my new friends simple questions like:
“Hey, how’d you start that XYZ business? It’s doing $6 million a year now. That’s incredible. What’s your secret?”
I’d get out my notebook, ready to reap the secret knowledge. I was excited! I wanted to learn the magic formula and copy their work so that I’d have the same success. Then, they’d let me down with the boring-est answer I’d ever heard. It usually went something along the lines of:
“Oh, you know. Just worked on it day after day.”
UGH!!! So infuriating. Here I was, expecting to hear something ground breaking, and I was always disappointed. I wondered…
- Were they holding back? Maybe they were actually HOARDING the secrets for themselves.
- Perhaps they were just more motivated than me, and better at hiding all the work they were actually doing
- Or maybe they didn’t really know what they were doing, and their success was just luck.
So I started paying very close attention to people around me who were having massive success — and lo and behold — I started to connect the dots. This wasn’t about secrets, willpower, or luck. The successful person’s superpower is habit creation. People at the top of their game recognize the importance of creating systems in their life that automate success without depending on “willpower” or motivation. Why don’t more of us do this?
How To Create Habits — With Maneesh Sethi
We’ve talked about habit formation on Rich20Something before with the Seinfeld Solution. In fact, it’s one my most widely-read articles of all time. If you haven’t read that, it’s an excellent primer on how little habits, strung together over the course of days, weeks and months, can create seismic change. But today, I wanted to go much, much deeper. I wanted to teach you not only WHAT good habits can do for you — but EXACTLY how to change those habits, and make them stick. I had to bring in my friend, Maneesh Sethi. Maneesh is the founder of Hack the System — and recently, he’s created a brand new company called Pavlok — which is the first wearable device to not only track your habits and behaviors — but also help you change them. In order to do this, Pavlok’s advanced technology employs both push-pull psychological triggers and classical Pavlovian conditioning (thus the name.) Oh yeah. One more thing: It can even shock you with real electricity. I’ll let him go into that in more detail, but I’m PUMPED (or should I say “amped”) to show you this live interview I did with him via my partnership with The Lip TV. We cover a lot of ground, including:
- (1:01) How your brain changes when you do something consistently
- (2:50) The first system Maneesh constructed to hack his own habits
- (8:19) The most common habits that people want to change — and how to change them
- (10:40) Why it’s harder to break a bad habit than form a good one
- (19:10) How to find a core habit, then automate it
- (22:12) How the cutting edge technology behind Pavlok works
BONUS at 24:29: Watch me ~SHOCK~ Maneesh using the Pavlok wristband.
What’s one habit you’d like to change?
Did you like the interview? After learning more about habit creation/formation, what’s one habit that you’d like to create or change — and what’s the FIRST tiny step you’ll take to start the process? Let me know in the comments! [optin-monster-shortcode id=”vz9butq8px-post”]
