How to Use Your Laziness to Achieve Your Most Ambitious Goals
You first make the system and then your system makes you.
Photo by Zhang Kenny on Unsplash
There is a human tendency to take the path of least resistance.
We don’t want to work harder than we need to.
We get the occasional 1% of the population who seem to never tire and have an insatiable work ethic but for the vast majority, we are lazy. And for good reasons.
In evolutionary terms, spending more energy than required meant having to forage for more food and increasing your risk of injury or predation. Beyond sustenance, working hard had diminishing or even negative returns.
While we aren’t all sloths in human skin, we are lazy when it comes to certain domains in life. Never underestimate the power of laziness in determining behavior. Even when the behavior has significant consequences.
Laziness applied to our modern world looks like:
Many people not saving for retirement until it is too late.
Many people not looking after their bodies until they have a chronic health problem.
Many people will tell you that you just need to be more ‘disciplined’ or have more ‘willpower’ to resist bad temptations and do what you know is good for you. There are good reasons why this approach doesn’t work.
Firstly, slapping people over the head with moral arguments only breeds resentment and contempt. I don’t know anyone who has changed after being made to feel guilty or ashamed of themselves. Have you?
Secondly, willpower and discipline are finite and easily exhausted. Unless you’re a monk living in an ashram, dealing with daily life struggles and then having to draw more willpower can be an impossible ask for most people.
So, how do we overcome our inherent laziness?
Answer:
Make good habits easy to do.
Make bad habits hard to do.
Making Good Habits Easy To Do
Automate your good habits.
Making your good habits automatic will take some time to create. But if you do it correctly, you only need to do it once. I call this the set-it-and-forget system.
Creating a system where good habits are the default rather than an option will gently nudge you every day to make positive choices.
The best part about this is that you only have to set this system up once and you can reap the benefits for a long time.
You first make the system and then your system makes you.
Here are some examples:
Finance: Set up an automatic transfer when you get paid in an investment or retirement account. You’ll never notice the money not being there and you’ll adjust your spending to account for it.
Diet: Keep fresh fruit and healthy snacks near your desk and during times when you find yourself snacking. This is usually around 3:00 pm — 4:00 pm. Set up a recurring home delivery order so you won’t be tempted to buy bad food.
Reading more books: Bring a book with you where ever you go. Doctor’s appointments, doing laundry or even meeting up with friends. Sometimes you can find yourself with unexpected dead time you can use to read.
By setting up your environment to cue you for positive behaviors, you can engage with them far more easily. It won’t feel like you’re forcing yourself to do something you don’t want to either.
Over time, your positive habits will compound and become your normal baseline. You won’t even feel like you are sacrificing anything.
Start automating one habit at a time and slowly scale and iterate your system to suit your lifestyle.
I am going to repeat myself again for dramatic effect: do this slowly.
Aim for a 1% improvement in automating good behaviors. This could be as simple as setting up an automated transfer of $5 every paycheque to your retirement account and slowly increasing over time.
Over a year, the compounding effect of a 1% improvement means you will improve your life 37 times. Once you build the momentum you will get excited and motivated to keep going. The hardest part is starting.
Making Bad Habits Hard To Do
Create friction for your bad habits.
Friction can make the difference between a rock rolling down a hill or staying in the same spot. The same is true of your bad habits. Adding steps between you and a bad habit can make all the difference.
Diet: Don’t keep any bad food in the house. If you want that bag of chips, you can have it but you need to get into your car and drive to the local shops.
Binge-Watching TV: Unplug your TV. Put the remote in a drawer. Or better yet, put the TV in the drawer. This inconvenience can be enough to turn you off from watching TV.
Scrolling through social media: I keep my social media apps in a folder that I have to swipe through multiple screens to get to. The time it takes to get there and extra clicks are enough for the better half of my brain to kick in and stop death-scrolling for hours.
Each step you add between your bad habits drastically reduces the odds you’ll engage in that behavior. Increasing the cost of a bad habit reduces its likelihood.
Combined with making your good habits easier, you’re on the way to changing your life for the better without much less resistance.
Summary:
Your habits compound. Both good and bad.
Create a system that gears you towards making your good habits easy to do and your bad habits harder to do. This allows compounding to work in your favor rather than against you.
Over time, your life will change for the better which builds momentum for more positive change to occur. When you eat better, you tend to sleep better. With more energy, the quality of your work also improves.
Whenever you want to make a positive change, ask yourself: how can I make this easy for me to do?
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