The #1 Secret to Getting Things Done | Tony Robbins Podcast  🔗 **Source:** [The #1 Secret to Getting Things Done | Tony Robbins Podcast](https://share.snipd.com/episode/5eecabb3-d100-41fe-8ffb-f90abff6d5a1) ## Highlights - **Why Habits Beat Willpower For Excellence** - Habit, rather than willpower alone, makes excellence sustainable by conditioning the mind, body, and emotions. - Aristotle’s principle captures the mechanism: repeated right actions create virtue and excellence. Transcript: Charles Duhigg Hey, it's Tony Robbins. Welcome to the podcast. Listen, today we're going to talk about a power that most people really don't take full advantage of. In fact, they let it take advantage of them, and that's the power of habit. You know, so often people will talk to me and say, God, you have such incredible willpower, and I believe I do. I believe we all have willpower, but there's a limit to willpower. I always tell people, if you're making decisions, if you're trying to make everything in your life work by willpower alone, you're just going to be exhausted. What you really have to learn is how to condition your mind and body and emotions. You really have to learn how to tap into the power of habits. In fact, you know, one of my favorite quotes says, excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather we have those because we've acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit. That comes from Aristotle more than 2,000 years ago, and it couldn't be more true today. So how do you create the habits that are going to make you successful in life and in business? The habits that are going to make you feel more enjoyment in your life, and the habits that are going to make you financially free? Well, you have to understand the power of habit and put it to work for you. And who better to do it than Charles Duhigg? He's the Pulitzer Prize winning reporter from the New York Times, and he's the author of the New York Times bestselling book, The Power of Habit. He's going to show you how to do it smarter, faster, and better. So here's Anna, and here's your podcast. ([Time 0:01:02](https://share.snipd.com/snip/031d9410-bf35-4ca3-a2b1-07a3feccbfb7)) - **How Febreze Turned Cleaning Into A Ritual** - Febreze failed until marketers added a pleasant scent and repositioned it as a finishing ritual after cleaning. - Sales doubled within two months, eventually producing $230 million in a year. Transcript: Ana Yoerg Why do habits exist? How can they be changed? And how can they transform our lives and our businesses? Consider the marketing team at Procter& Gamble. P&G had developed a colorless, cheap-to liquid that could be sprayed on any stench to make it odorless. They pitched the product to the public as a quick and easy way to eliminate any scent on any surface. Smoke on clothes, rancid pet smells... So dirty cars. But sales flopped. Why? The team went back to the drawing board, relentlessly poring over consumer psychology, employing a Harvard Business School professor to analyze their campaigns. What they eventually discovered was that if they added a perfume to the formula so that instead of merely neutralizing odors, the spray had its own distinct scent, they created a new Incentive for the consumer. And so Febreze, which had originally been conceived as a revolutionary way to destroy odors, became an air freshener used once things were already clean. Within two months of the new marketing model, sales doubled, and a year later, the product brought in 230 million. ([Time 0:02:29](https://share.snipd.com/snip/1fff2d8f-248f-48cd-ad51-da9777ae256c)) - **The Missing Kebab Sellers Who Stopped Riots** - Removing kebab vendors prevented crowds from reaching riot size at Kufa’s Grand Mosque. - Hunger became the cue that dispersed spectators, leaving troublemakers without an audience. Transcript: Charles Duhigg With the Los Angeles Times, and they sent me to Iraq. And it literally, as soon as I got off the plan in Iraq, I pretty much realized that I had just made a terrible, terrible mistake by volunteering to go to Iraq and cover a war zone. And so I was trying to figure out what I could cover in Iraq that would not put me in dangerous situations. And I heard about this army major that was doing an experiment in a city named Kufa, which is about an hour south of Baghdad. And so I went down to Kufa and I met with this army major. And this guy had been sent about nine months earlier to Kufa with the orders of stopping riots from happening. And if you'll remember at this point, this is like 2003, 2004, there's a lot of riots going on because the Americans had just come into Iraq. The whole country is kind of like very chaotic and turbulent. And this major, when he got to the city of CUFA, he went to the mayor of the city and he said, look, I have a whole list of things I'd like you to do to help me stop the riots. Like, can you stop the gun runners and the suicide bombers? And the mayor was like, look, man, if you can tell me how to do that stuff, I will totally do it. But I have no idea how to make that happen. And so at the bottom of the list of the requests that this army major had was, can you take all of the food vendors out of the plazas? And the mayor's like, sure, absolutely. I can take the food vendors out of the plazas. That one we can make happen. So a couple of weeks later, there's a crowd that starts gathering around the Grand Mosque of Kufa, which is this place where a lot of riots had happened previously. And the thing that they never tell you on the news about riots is that it actually takes like five or six hours for a riot to develop. So what happens is that a bunch of troublemakers will show up, and then some spectators will come to watch those troublemakers, and then more spectators, and more spectators, and more Spectators. And eventually the crowd gets to like this certain size that it's riot ready. And if someone throws a bottle at that point, a riot will erupt. But it's all about getting that crowd big enough. So the army major is telling me this story and he pulls out some footage from drones that was shot of this plaza around the Grand Mosque of Kufa where a crowd had started developing. This is a couple of weeks after he had talked to the mayor. And sure enough, you sort of see these troublemakers show up and then some spectators show up to watch the troublemakers and then more spectators show up to watch the spectators. And the crowd gets bigger and bigger and bigger and four or five hours go by. And it's about 5.30 at night. It's exactly the right time of day for – the crowd is exactly at the right size for basically a riot to happen. And it's at 5.30 in the afternoon, which is kind of like getting towards the end of the day. And as you watch the drone footage of this crowd, at the periphery of the crowd, there's all these people, like spectators just at the edges. They all start looking around all of a sudden. And the major was telling me, he was like, look, they're looking for the kebab sellers because it's dinner time and they're hungry. And normally there's these kebab sellers in the plaza, but I had asked the mayor to remove all of the food vendors. So there's no one for them to buy dinner from. So all those people at the periphery of the crowd, they just start like wandering away. And in fact, some of the drones actually followed them to see where they were going. And they actually went home, assumably to have dinner. And then there's another ring of spectators, right? And they're watching these people leave the plaza. And assumably they think to themselves like, oh, there must be a better riot going on someplace else. I'm going to follow those guys and see where they're going. So they leave too. And in 45 minutes, the entire plaza clears out except for the troublemakers. And the troublemakers don't have an audience anymore. So they go home too. And in the nine months since the army major had gotten there, there hadn't been one riot. So I was asking him, like, how did you know this would work? How did you know that removing the food vendors would stop riots? And the guy, the major himself was like, look, I didn't know for certain that was going to work, right? I tried all types of different things. But he said that when he joined the Army, that the number one thing you learn from the military is that the military exists as a I ended up missing about 50% of the votes in the Iowa legislature Speaker 3 This year. I don't know if that matters to Iowans. Liberal politician Josh Turek missed 58% of his votes, hundreds of votes, yet still collected his paycheck. Turek also charged taxpayers 20 grand for reimbursements. I don't know if that matters to Ireland. Liberal politician Josh Turek, he only shows up for himself. Paid for by SLF PAC, not authorized by any candidate or candidates committee. Slfpac.org. Speaker 4 This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling? Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. Charles Duhigg Habit change machine. And in fact, this is true. A lot of what we know about habit formation and the neurology and science of habit formation comes originally from military studies because your natural habit is to run away from someone Shooting at you. But the military has to teach you a habit of shooting back. Or nowadays, if you're in a war zone, you can email your spouse every night. So if they don't teach you good communication habits, you get into a fight over email and then you're distracted when you're on patrol. And so he said that when he joined the military, they taught him to start seeing the world in terms of habits. And in particular, to see the world in terms of cues and routines and rewards, which is how habits work. And that once you start seeing the world in terms of these habits and how they function and the mechanics of them, it's like someone gives you a pair of glasses and suddenly everything Looks different, including a crowd of Iraqis that might riot. ([Time 0:05:53](https://share.snipd.com/snip/c439c9af-9398-48a7-ab8f-b4a7fbca4d0f)) - **The Three-Part Habit Loop** - Habits follow a cue, routine, and reward, with the reward teaching the brain to automate the pattern. - Changing behavior therefore requires redesigning triggers and rewards, not merely suppressing routines. Transcript: Ana Yoerg Yeah. So on that note, you kind of touch upon the habit loop. Can you give our audience a better idea of how that works? Sure. Charles Duhigg Absolutely. And, and this is like the core insight, right? We are living right now through the golden age of understanding the neurology of habit formation. And the single biggest insight is that every single habit, and about 40 to 45% of what we do every day is a habit, right? Studies have shown that many of the things that we think of as choices are actually habits. That for every habit that unfolds in our lives, there's three components. There's a cue, which is like a trigger for an automatic behavior to start. And then there's a routine, which is the behavior itself. And that's the type of thing, and that's the thing that we've become accustomed to thinking of as the habit, right? Like when Oprah talks about changing habits, that's what she's talking about is the routine. But at the end of that routine is a reward. And that reward is how our brain learns to remember that pattern and to make it automatic. And so what we've learned is that if you want to change a habit, if you want to build a new habit, what you need to focus on is you need to focus on these cues and rewards, that what in your environment Is triggering that behavior? And then how are you rewarding yourself at the end of that routine? Because that's what's going to make it easier and easier and easier for that behavior to unfold. That's how your brain is going to make that into this kind of automatic response. ([Time 0:12:19](https://share.snipd.com/snip/9aba09fd-f51f-47e7-bda4-2770ec6e8aa8)) - **How Organizational Silos Magnified A Subway Fire** - At King’s Cross, employees followed siloed rules instead of escalating early signs of fire. - A burning tissue went unreported, and 48 minutes later the disaster killed 31 people. Transcript: Charles Duhigg There's a big, big subway stop in the United Kingdom known as the King's Crossing subway stop. And in 1987, there was a fire there. And the way that this fire started is that there was a burning tissue at the bottom of one of the escalators. And this subway stop had like these magnificent long escalators that were made out of wood. They would go like two or three stories into the ground. And there was this burning tissue and a passenger gets off the escalator and he goes to a ticket taker and he tells the ticket taker, you know, there's this burning tissue. And the ticket taker actually goes to his credit, goes down. He finds the burning tissue. He like stamps it out. And then he goes back to his ticketing station. And he never calls anyone and warns them that, you know, there was a burning tissue. He never wonders why there's the burning tissue at the bottom of an escalator. A couple of minutes later, another passenger tells a policeman that he smelled some smoke in the escalator. And so that policeman actually goes out of the subway station. He calls his dispatcher and he tells his dispatcher, can you call the fire dispatcher and tell them that there might be a fire at the King Crossing subway station? Now, what he should have done is actually just walk down the street to the fire station that was down the street. But much like the ticket taker, there's these unwritten rules in the subway system. There's these silos. And what the silos say is like, if you're a ticket taker, your job is to take tickets, not to investigate fires. If you're a policeman, your job is to talk to the police dispatch, not to talk to the fire dispatch. And there's all these things that happen that lead up to, that suggest that a fire is developing. And this fire eventually sort of explodes and it ends up killing 31 people. And the craziest thing about it is that 48 minutes separated finding that burning tissue and when 31 people were killed by this fire. That's enough time to clear out the entire station. That's enough time to stop the trains running. That's enough time to put out the fire. But the reason why it didn't happen is because the London Underground had these organizational habits, these unwritten rules that were silos that told people, do your job. Don't try and do someone else's job. And they all existed for good reasons, right? Like the ticket taker didn't go investigate fires because a couple of years earlier there had been all these complaints about lines forming in front of the ticketing stations. And so the ticket takers were taken and were told as an unwritten rule, just do your job. Don't try and freelance or come up with something else to do. But this is what happens within organizations is organizational habits emerge because of incentives and rewards to behave a certain way. ([Time 0:16:15](https://share.snipd.com/snip/6b4be427-2568-4c67-90f7-c15c9bf815ac)) - **Diagnose The Rewards Behind Company Habits** - Diagnose organizational habits by identifying the cues and rewards behind conflicting behaviors. - Leaders can create flexibility by making threats visible, as Apple maintains urgency through constant competitive anxiety. Transcript: Ana Yoerg So how do you cope with that? How do you deal with the bad habits that your company has developed over a number of years? You know, I think this is a problem that happens a lot. There's tension between the sales and marketing teams, right? And everybody's kind of doing their job and just not going outside of scope. How do you deal with that? Charles Duhigg Sales and marketing is a great example, right? Because you kind of have these like these sales habits, which is like do whatever you have to to get the sale. And then you have marketing who says like, look, don't give away the product. We have to keep we have to keep our price up. So those are great, great questions. How do you deal with these habits when they kind of emerge without anyone acknowledging them? Speaker 3 And the number one thing I ended up missing about 50 percent of the votes in the Iowa legislature this year. I don't know if that matters to Iowans. Liberal politician Josh Turek missed 58% of his votes, hundreds of votes, yet still collected his paycheck. Turek also charged taxpayers 20 grand for reimbursements. Speaker 4 I don't know if that matters to This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling? Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price. Iowa. Plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. Charles Duhigg To do is to acknowledge them, is to sit down and have a conversation and then diagnose why does this habit exist? What is the cue that causes sales to start giving people deals that might erode our margins? And more importantly, what is the reward? When they do that, do we have an incentive system? Do we have a commission system that's set up that gives them an incentive or a reward for undercutting our pricing discipline? And then you go to marketing and you say to marketing, what is the cue that happens here that makes you guys say, we don't want to give any special deals. We want to keep our pricing really strict because we're being judged on how much we're keeping our pricing strong or how dominant we're seen as in the marketplace? And what are the rewards? Are you being compensated? Is the CEO saying to you, like, you did a great job because I just see our ads everywhere and they all talk about how expensive and how elite we are? Once you sit down with a group and you start saying, let's diagnose the cues and the rewards that are driving this behavior, then you can start to change it. But there's another part of that too, which is, and this is what's critical, this is actually what the lesson of the King's Crossings fire is, is that you also have to look for these moments Of flexibility. And oftentimes, organizations become most flexible when there is the perception of some kind of So one of the interesting things about the King's Crossing subway station is that after This fire, after 31 people die, parliament tries to institute a whole bunch of reforms and none of them work. They try to fire people. They try and reorganize how the underground worked. Literally, none of it worked. They couldn't overcome the organizational inertia of this huge, huge bureaucracy. So they kind of throw up their hands, and they say, like, how do we fix this problem? And they go, and they hire this special investigator. Now, this is a year later that Parliament hires a special investigator. And the special investigator does this kind of interesting thing. You would expect the special investigator to sit down and write some big fancy report and it would just get lost in the shuffle. Instead, what he does is he starts holding these public hearings. He contacts all of the families of the victims and he asks them to come in a year after this tragedy and to tell their story in public in front of TV cameras about what it was like to have their Family member die. And then he starts like whispering to reporters and starts intimating totally untruthfully that there might be like this ever-present risk of another fire happening. That at any moment like a fire could break out that could kill more people. Then he actually goes and he helps the victims of the families start doing these like things where they lay down wreaths and flowers in the King's Crossing subway station. In other words, what he does is he creates the perception of a crisis. Because a year had passed since the fire, all of the passions and emotions had died out around this thing. But he reignites this sense of crisis because he knew that organizational habits become most flexible when a crisis seems to be occurring. And so by creating the perception of a crisis, he's able to push through reforms in the London underground that they couldn't do a year earlier after the fire itself. Now think about how many of the companies that we admire today behave. Take Apple, for instance. Interesting thing about Apple, they just had the most profitable quarter in the history of commerce, right? Not just the most profitable for Apple, the most profitable in history for any company. What does Tim Cook talk about on his conference call? He talks about the fact that they have to stay nimble. They have to stay on top of things because they might get upended by some competitor they don't even know about right now. That they could lose everything tomorrow if they're not like just on top of every aspect of it, if they're not looking for competitors, that competitors can come out of anywhere that A year from now no one could have heard of Apple. He creates the perpetual sense of anxiety, almost the sense of a crisis, because he knows that's how companies stay flexible. ([Time 0:19:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/8886d974-8279-4a31-8793-dfb46d41e342)) - **Replace Bad Habits Without Losing Their Reward** - Find the beneficial reward beneath a harmful habit before trying to replace it. - For deadline procrastination, reduce overload or create artificial deadlines that preserve the motivating pressure safely. Transcript: Charles Duhigg So I think one of the first things to recognize is that all habits, even bad habits, exist because they provide a reward, right? A habit exists, a bad habit exists for a good reason. And only once you recognize what that good reason is, can you go in and can you start influencing and changing how someone behaves. So a good example of this is if you think about, for instance, exercise. All of us want to exercise. We all want to get stuff done. Or procrastination. It's an interesting question. Why do people procrastinate? What's the reward in a procrastination habit? Well, it turns out when people have looked at procrastination, what they found is that there's a reward that comes from getting a task done, right? You sort of like, you feel a sense of satisfaction, you relieve a sense of anxiety. But if you're feeling anxious about a project and you are a little bit scared that maybe it's not going to turn out okay, if you procrastinate, then you get a reward much, much faster. You get a reward that basically tells your brain, okay, you don't have to worry about that project for the next five minutes because instead, you're just going to check Facebook. You're going to be able to escape the tension that this project creates for you. And a fast reward is in many ways more powerful than a slow, bigger reward. So for a small business, if they're having some type of problem, like let's say that a habit has emerged where they're always doing things at the last minute, right? This is pretty typical. If you've started a company, you get more work than you know how to deal with, and you find yourself on this treadmill where you're always doing projects at the last minute. You're always sending things to the client like 10 minutes before the deadline. You're always trying to figure out the answer at the last minute. So the question isn't like, how do I just change everything? Because we know that massive change is hard. The question is, what reward am I getting by waiting until the last minute? Is the reward that I get to sign up for more business and I'm actually over capacity? And so as a result, I can't do things any earlier because I always have something that's due 10 minutes from now? Or is it the reward that I actually feel like I'm more creative when I'm under pressure? That I actually build a situation that makes me feel like I get my best work done because when my back is to the wall, that's when I know my whole team comes together. We really gel. Once you're able to figure out which reward is actually driving that habit, what good thing is causing a bad habit to emerge, that's when you can change it. Because those are two very different rewards. If the issue is that you're at overcapacity, that everything's last minute because you have too much work to do, then the solution there is to come up with new habits, which might mean Taking on less work, only looking for high margin things, or it might mean hiring new people, or it might mean refocusing on certain types of projects. If the reward, on the other hand, is that you actually thrive under pressure, you love that pressure, that's okay too. But that means that you can create pressure in other ways. You can create false deadlines for yourself. You can structure things so that you feel that same sense of pressure that you stress, but that it's not causing you to fall down ever so often. ([Time 0:26:03](https://share.snipd.com/snip/95f13213-316d-4e19-89b5-de2892c377b6)) - **Productivity Now Means Managing Your Brain** - Modern productivity depends less on hours worked and more on managing attention, framing questions, and making intelligent choices. - Knowledge workers gain an advantage by noticing choices others do not perceive. Transcript: Charles Duhigg Absolutely. Absolutely. And this gets into my new book, right? The Smarter, Faster, Better, which is about the science of productivity. And here's what's interesting about productivity right now. So we're living through an economic revolution, right? I think almost every economist, almost every policymaker, they all agree on this now. We are living through a period of economic change as profound as the agrarian revolution and the industrial revolution. And during those periods, when you live through an economic revolution, what's actually happening is that the definition of productivity is changing, right? It used to be productivity was defined by how much land you owned. And then in the industrial revolution, productivity became a question of how many hours you could get employees to do the same job over and over and faster and faster. Now in this age, in the Information Revolution or the Knowledge Revolution or the Digital Revolution, whatever we end up calling this period, now the definition of productivity is Changing. It doesn't have to do with just sheer number of hours and doing the same thing over and over. It tends to do with how intelligently can you address a problem? Can you make sure that you're asking the right question instead of the wrong questions? And in this book, The Smarter, Faster, Better, what it is, is it examines these eight skills that are disproportionately much more important now than they were in the past. Like for instance, your ability to know how to manage your own brain so that you focus on the right things and ignore the things that you should be ignoring. That you're able to motivate yourself much more effortlessly so that you can get work done much faster. So the way that you're able to sort of predict the future and think probabilistically so that you can make better decisions about what's more likely or less likely to occur. These are skills that in the past weren't as important. If you worked on the assembly line in Ford, you didn't have to think probabilistically. But now if you're someone working at a startup, thinking probabilistically is key. And undergirding all of these is this basic issue that in today's economy, the people who are most productive, the people who get the most done and are most successful are the people Who understand that they have the ability to make choices that other people don't even perceive. They have the ability to manage their brain in such a way that they can maintain their focus or they can think probabilistically or they can trigger innovation when they need innovation To occur because they know how to create a creative environment. And that sometimes relies on certain creative tensions that they encourage. That, this builds on kind of this like, this about the power of habit. Because what habit says is, here's all the things that happen in your brain without you even thinking about them. And what Smarter, Faster, Better says is, if you want to be productive, start thinking more about those things. Start recognizing these choices you can make about how you think and how you can control how you think that other people don't even perceive because that's the fundamental advantage. ([Time 0:29:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/ecf1f91f-4080-4ceb-a8a9-0c80048175a1)) - **Google Found The Best Teams Share The Floor** - Google found team composition alone did not explain effectiveness after studying 180 teams for two years. - Psychological safety emerged from equal conversational participation and visible social sensitivity. Transcript: Charles Duhigg Well, one of my favorite, there's actually two that I think are some of my favorite. One of them is about teams. How do you actually make teams work? And it turns out that about five years ago, Google became really curious about this question. Is there a way to figure out the science of teams to build the perfect team? Because a lot of the work that happens at Google is based on teamwork. So they end up spending five years and about $20 million trying to answer this question. And what they first start looking at is like who is on teams? And they have all these hypotheses. Like maybe it's better if a team is entirely based – entirely introverts. Or maybe you want a mixture of introverts and extroverts. Or maybe you want people who like are friends outside of the team, right? Like they all get along and they have common hobbies and interests. Or maybe you want people who actually don't have much in common because that way they all bring different perspectives. And so they spend like two years looking at 180 teams doing thousands of interviews with Google employees and they get all this data and they compile it and they start looking for patterns And they find absolutely nothing. There is no pattern that would suggest five years and, and right. Ana Yoerg Exactly. Charles Duhigg They literally can't find any patterns. And you know, like Google, like what Google does is find patterns, right? They're the best pattern finders on earth. So they're kind of freaking out about this and they start looking through like other research and they find this one, um, this one little pool of research that is about group norms. Now a group norm is, and this isn't totally, I think we all sort of know this word norm. A group norm is like the unwritten rules that a group uses that shapes how they behave. Um, like for instance, there might be a group norm in a particular team that it's okay for people to interrupt each other. But another team might have a completely different group norm where people don't interrupt each other. Instead, you wait patiently for someone to finish their thought. Maybe on another team, there's a group norm that if you go off agenda, someone says like, hey, let's stick to the agenda. Whereas in another team, the group norm is like super, super casual, right? Like people talk about what they did that weekend, they can go off agenda. And so Google starts thinking like, instead of focusing who is on teams, maybe we should start looking at how teams operate. Let's start trying to figure out which group norms are most important. Now, it turns out that one of the, some of the most interesting research about group norms has looked at things like Saturday Night Live, the birth of Saturday Night Live. Why does Saturday Night Live work as a show from its original season when there's so many other comedy shows that completely blew up? Of Saturday Night Live, and I spent a lot of time doing this. You would think that maybe that show came together because they were all really good friends, or they were all really creative people. That's not true. The people who worked on Saturday Night Live, they were creative, but they were not great friends. In fact, many of them hated each other. And they were not people who worked together particularly well, because you're dealing with all these huge personalities and like big egos. The reason why Saturday Night Live was such a success is because Lorne Michaels, the executive producer of the show, he created these very specific group norms almost from the start. One of the things that he would do is that he would have a rule that during meetings, everyone has to talk as much as they want to. So he would actually, at the end of a meeting, go around the table and he would say like, you know, Lisa, like I haven't heard as much from you as I've heard from other people. I just want you to talk for the next three minutes. And so Lisa, who's kind of shy, like has to sit there and talk. The other thing that he would do is that he would force people to react to each other, when they're sending nonverbal cues. So if you're sitting in a meeting with Lorne Michaels and you cross your arms, he'll kind of look at you and he'll say like, hey, I noticed that you crossed your arms. Are you upset with anything? Are you feeling OK about this? He would do these crazy things where like if John Belushi was like obviously upset or having a bad day, he would stop the meeting. And these are like meetings for like a live show, right? There's not a lot of time to like waste. He would stop the meeting and he'd be like, John, it looks like you're having a bad day. Why don't you just tell all of us, why are you having a bad day? This is what Lorne Michaels would do. He would do these two things. He would have equality in conversational turn-taking and he would try and increase the average social sensitivity of the group by obviously picking up on people's nonverbal cues. It turns out that those two norms are what is known as psychological safety. And when Google started looking at all of their teams, they found that the most effective teams did those two things. If you can find, if you're the leader of a team and you force people to take roughly equal amounts of conversational turn-taking, right? Not necessarily in every minute, not necessarily in every meeting, but across, say, a week. If people speak in roughly equal amounts, somehow it makes them feel more empowered. It makes them feel like they have psychological safety within this group. And so as a result, they can bring up their best ideas. Equally, if the leader of that group teaches people to look for nonverbal cues, to be socially sensitive to each other, and to demonstrate that sensitivity, that also has been shown In data after data to make people feel like they can bring up their best ideas in a meeting, that they can contribute to a team. It increases this thing known as psychological safety. And psychological safety is the number one correlate with team effectiveness. So this is one of my favorite chapters because what we've learned is we always think about teams as like, I got to choose all the right people for my team. And choosing people, that's good. That's important. But it turns out you could choose all the right people and if you have the wrong norms, that team will not be effective. You could even choose B team players for your team, second tier people for your team. And as long as you have equality in conversational turn-taking and you have obvious demonstrations of social sensitivity, if there's people who are clearly listening to each other And are sensitive to how each other feels, study after study shows that team will be more effective. You can make B team players into an A plus team by getting the right norms or behaviors in place. ([Time 0:33:16](https://share.snipd.com/snip/3322dc96-fb5c-4422-a787-37ac526ee35e)) - **Use Small Choices To Restore Motivation** - Motivation grows when people experience control, whether by taking initiative in Marine boot camp or choosing food in nursing homes. - Create a small meaningful choice to prove you control the situation and begin moving. Transcript: Charles Duhigg So this is in the chapter on motivation, like the neurology of motivation. Why are some people so much better at self-motivating and motivating others? And other people struggle to motivate to get things done. And one of the most interesting things that I learned about this is that exactly as you pointed out, some of the science behind this is best illustrated by changes that they've made in Boot camp. What they do now is when you get to boot camp, in your first couple of weeks, your drill sergeant or your drill instructor will tell you and your platoon to clean the mess hall. But they won't tell you how. They won't give you any instructions. They won't tell you how much detergent to use in the washing machine, where the ketchup bottles go. They won't tell you anything because what they want to do is they want to force you to take the initiative and start figuring stuff out on your own, to learn how good it feels to be in control. Because once you know how good it feels to be in control, once you taste that sense of self-determination, you start craving it. You start wanting to be in control of yourself. You start learning how to self-motivate because our sense of self-motivation comes from believing that we are in control of our environment. So what does this have to do with nursing home residents? Well, there was this big question about 15 years ago about why some people would go into a nursing home and like their health would decline almost immediately and other people would Go into a nursing home and they would do just great. Because when you think about it, your health should be great in a nursing home. You're surrounded by doctors, you're surrounded by support, you're surrounded by people who could be your friends. But some people check into a nursing home and it's like six months later, they're dead. And other people check into a nursing home and they do fantastic. So researchers associated with the National Institute of Health, they started asking nursing home residents what's going on and surveying them. And what they found was that those nursing home residents who do really well inside a nursing home, they started referring to them as the subversives because they would do all these Things to prove to themselves they're in control of their own life. Like there was this one nursing home, this one researcher who told me that he went and he talked to people in a nursing home and like they would each get their meal, right? Like a tray with their preset meal on it from the kitchen. And then they would all sit at a table and they would start trading all of their food. And one guy in particular, he always traded away his chocolate cake. He would trade it away for like more fruit or another entree. And the researcher asked him, like, they were like, do you not like chocolate cake? And he was like, no, no, I love chocolate cake. But I don't want to eat a meal that someone else forces on me. I would rather have fruit that I have chosen than a chocolate cake that has been forced on me. The people who do really well in nursing homes are people who become subversives. They find ways around the rules. They prove to themselves that they're still in control of their own lives even though they've been put into this old folks home. And that's exactly what works at the Marines, too. The point of boot camp at this point is to teach people, teach these young 18-year who, like, you know, some of whom, like, had trouble graduating from high school. They're totally directionless. They don't know what to do with their lives. It's to teach them to become kind of subversives, to teach them to, like, figure how to take control of a situation. And we think of Marines as these people who are being taught just to follow orders, but that's not right at all. Today, a Marine is someone who's dropped in the middle of Somalia or Haiti or Iraq. They're cut off. We can't tell them exactly what to do. They have to make decisions on their own. So the whole point of boot camp is to teach people to find choices that make themselves feel like they're in control. Because once they start making themselves feel like they're in control, then they can motivate to do anything. And the same is true for all of us. If you're having trouble motivating for something, find some choice that makes you feel in control. If you've got like 20 emails you got to do and you're just dreading them, go through each email and just make like a crazy demand or just type a sentence for each email that just is a demand. Like, hey, Jim, thanks for your note. I'm only going to meet with you on Tuesday. Thanks. Because the more that you prove to yourself that you are in control, the easier it's going to be to motivate for all the things you know you need to do. The more we become subversives in our own life, the more we look for opportunities to prove to ourselves that we choose the rules rather than the rules choosing us, neurologically, ([Time 0:41:50](https://share.snipd.com/snip/571220d6-2bff-4309-9f43-c52c67cb56c7)) - **Imagine Multiple Futures Before Deciding** - Improve decisions by imagining several contradictory futures instead of treating one expected outcome as inevitable. - Comparing possibilities helps the brain estimate probabilities and reduces decision anxiety. Transcript: Charles Duhigg Right. Yeah. No, it's a great, well, there's an FBI kidnapping case that we describe. And also this woman, Annie Duke, who's a professional poker player, who similarly, Annie was like, as you mentioned, was paralyzed by decision-making before she became a poker player. She was actually in a PhD program and just like had real trouble making decisions about her life. And so what she learned to do is she learned to think probabilistically. We kind of mentioned this before. So the key to thinking probabilistically and making better decisions and not having decisions be so anxiety producing or so mentally taxing is to teach yourself to envision multiple Futures. So the way that you and I and most people think about the future is we're like, oh, you know, I'm going to go. Like I hope that I get into that one college or I hope this deal comes through. Or I'm going to show up for work and I'm going to go to that one meeting and like this is what I intend to do. Because we only experience one future, we only experience one life, we've learned to think about the future as just one possibility. People who make great decisions, people who teach themselves to think probabilistically, they almost automatically envision the future as multiple possibilities. Oftentimes, there are multiple contradictory possibilities. And they really think them through. You know, someone like Annie Duke, when she's thinking about a poker hand, she's like, OK, if I get these two cards, like one possibility is that I'm going to bet $10 and that the guy across From me is going to have better cards. Another possibility is I bet $10 and the guy across from me has worse cards than I do, but he's bluffing. Another possibility is that I don't bet at all. I just pass and I see how other people bet. People who think probabilistically, they envision multiple futures. And simply by envisioning multiple futures, we learn, we gain an intuition about which futures are more or less likely to come true. By forcing ourselves to think about contradictory futures, our brain begins almost automatically assigning probabilities to which ones are likely and which ones are less likely. And as a result, not only is it easier to make decisions because we have a more accurate view of what the future might look like, it's actually we get better at making decisions. We make better decisions. Within psychology, this is known as Bayesian psychology. It's our brain's ability to deal with contradictory thoughts and start figuring out which of them are more or less likely. But unless we train ourselves to do it, our brain shies away from that. And so something as simple as just sitting down for five minutes and saying like, what is my day going to be like? What are the possible futures my day might contain that contradict? Your brain will start automatically figuring out which of those are more or less likely and why. ([Time 0:46:44](https://share.snipd.com/snip/daf44635-a836-4363-9fa0-4b44b2674f43))