Here is today’s Game and what’s going on.
Here is what I discovered today in our Dadly Daily Declaration readings from Chapter 17 of Atomic Habits by James Clear. The title of this chapter is “How an Accountability Partner Can Change Everything.”
Today’s readings bring the Fourth Law of Behavior Change to a close. Here are a few highlights from today’s readings:
- The more immediate the pain, the less likely the behavior. If you want to prevent bad habits and eliminate unhealthy behaviors, then adding an instant cost to the action is a great way to reduce their odds.
- We repeat bad habits because they serve us in some way, and that makes them hard to abandon. The best way to overcome this predicament is to increase the speed of the punishment associated with the behavior. There can’t be a gap between the action and the consequences.
- As soon as actions incur and immediate consequence, behavior begins to change. We’ll jump through a lot of hoops to avoid a little bit of immediate pain.
- There is a limit to this, of course. If you’re going to rely on punishment to change behavior, then the strength of the punishment must match the relative strength of the behavior it is trying to correct.
- To be productive, the cost of procrastination must be greater than the cost of action.
- To be healthy, the cost of laziness must be greater than the cost of exercise.
- Behavior only shifts if the punishment is painful enough and reliably enforced.
- There is a straightforward way to add an immediate cost to any bad habit: create a habit contract.
- A habit contract is a verbal or written agreement in which you state your commitment to particular habit and the punishment that will occur if you don’t follow through. Then you find one or two people to act as your accountability partners and sign off on the contract with you.
- To make bad habits unsatisfying, your best option is to make them painful in the moment. Creating a habit contract is a straightforward way to do exactly that.
- Even if you don’t want to create a full-blown habit contract, simply having an accountability partner is useful.
- Knowing that someone is watching can be a powerful motivator. You are less likely to procrastinate or give up because there is an immediate cost. If you don’t follow through, perhaps they’ll see you as untrustworthy or lazy. Suddenly, you are not only failing to uphold your promises to yourself, but also failing to uphold your promises to others.
Those gems lead us to today’s Dadly Daily Declaration:
Just as we are more likely to repeat an experience when the ending is satisfying, we are also more likely to avoid an experience when the ending is painful. Pain is an effective teacher.
If a failure is painful, it gets fixed. If a failure is relatively painless, it gets ignored.
The more immediate and more costly a mistake is, the faster you will learn from it. When the consequence are severe, people learn quickly.
